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  Hattusa-ziti pondered for a while in Ankhesenamon’s tight-drawn silence. So many silences, Nofret thought, and every one of them different.

  “It could still be said,” he said at last, “that Egypt, having killed two kings of its own, thinks to take one from Hatti and kill him too, and prove to Hatti that its princes are no safer than anyone else’s. It would be a fine and subtle vengeance.”

  “We aren’t that subtle,” said Ankhesenamon. “Not outside of our own people. I tell you truly, I would rather a Hittite consort than an Egyptian, because if he dies, it’s no kin or friend of mine, but a stranger who was an enemy. But if he lives—and I wager my life and honor that he does—I have myself a strong king from a strong people, and one who can stand fast against the malice of that one Egyptian and his allies.”

  “That Egyptian,” said Hattusa-ziti. “He wouldn’t be a soldier, would he? Or a common man who’s risen high and hopes to rise higher?”

  “He might,” said Ankhesenamon.

  “Ah,” said Hattusa-ziti as if she had just explained everything. “Ah, indeed. Yes, I see that you have reason to be afraid. And no sons, either—or are you bearing any—?”

  Ankhesenamon’s hand went to her belly. Her voice was remote again. “The gods have not favored me.”

  “They well may, if one of our young stallions comes to be your consort,” said Hattusa-ziti.

  “So I should hope,” she said. “I gamble on it. There’s no other heir whose life I would venture, and none who’s strong enough to face . . . that one.”

  Hattusa-ziti nodded abruptly, rose, knelt in homage that looked heartfelt. “Lady, by your leave I’ll linger a bit, to look unsuspicious. Then I’ll go back to Hatti.”

  “And?”

  “And,” he said, “I’ll tell my king that if he’s minded, and if he has a son with a taste for adventure, he could do worse than be father to the king of Egypt.”

  Forty-Three

  It was well the queen had had long training in patience. The Hittites lingered, it seemed, endlessly. They could not go back to Hatti in the height of winter, when the snows could close the roads for months on end, and the winds were bitter beyond the belief of homebound Egyptian. In Egypt winter was growing time, sowing and harvest time.

  The Hittites did not linger the whole while in Memphis. They traveled about, hunting and sightseeing, visiting this temple and that ancient city. Some said they were spying. Had anyone known what they had truly come for, that suspicion would have been certainty, and the embassy might have been set upon with stones and clots of dung or worse.

  When at last they left, it was harvest time in Egypt and spring in Hatti. They would travel as quickly as they might. Hattusa-ziti promised this. By Nile’s flood, or not long after, the queen might look for a Hittite prince to come to Memphis, if the king was well minded. Hattusa-ziti thought that he might be.

  Ankhesenamon determined to make sure of it. She sent a letter with him, and a messenger with the letter, a man named Hani. He was one of her advisors, one whom Nofret did not know well, but Ankhesenamon trusted him, perhaps because he was besotted with her. He could never say no to her, even when the rest of the council resisted to a man.

  His one virtue was that he knew how to keep his counsel. He would not betray his queen, Nofret did not think.

  The messenger was soft-spoken and much enamored of his lady. The letter was considerably blunter. “Why do you not believe me?” she ordered her scribe to write. “Why do you say that I deceive you? If I had a son, do you think that I would have betrayed to a foreigner my shame and the shame of Egypt? How dare you disbelieve me? My husband is dead. I have no son. I shall never take one of my servants and make him my husband. No other king has had such word from me, only you. They say you have many sons. Give me one of them. He will be my husband, and king in Egypt.”

  With that missive, and with Lord Hani traveling discreetly in the middle of his escort, Hattusa-ziti led his embassy out of Memphis. The queen waited as she had waited since her king died, in tight-drawn patience.

  Her council and messengers from the council in Thebes had begun to weary of their own waiting. They requested, ever so politely, that she consider ending her time of mourning and accepting a new king. It was understood that that king would be the Lord Ay.

  When pressed too hard, she invoked the presence of the Lady Tey. “It grieves me to displace her,” she said.

  “She understands the needs of kingdoms,” they responded with growing impatience. “And these two kingdoms need a king. They cannot prosper until they have one.”

  She did not fail to point out that Egypt prospered as well as it had since she was queen. The harvest was rich, and the river’s flood looked to be a strong one, with a great wealth of water and a greater one of black earth left behind for the next year’s harvest. But that could be a false promise, her advisors insisted: the gods’ jest before they laid the kingdom low for failing to provide it with a king. The kingdom could not prosper when ruled by a queen alone. Even the woman-king whose name was no longer spoken had ruled as regent for a prince who became himself a great king.

  There was no defying the gods, as all believed. Ankhesenamon knew that. She did not tell them that she was going to give Egypt a king, but one of her choosing, and one whom they would never have expected. She had sanity enough left to keep her counsel till the man himself was there and inarguable and well fit to rule at her side.

  oOo

  For Nofret too it was a waiting time. Ankhesenamon waited for the world to be bright again, for a strong man to sit the throne beside her and defend her against the demon of her own mind that she had given the name and the face of Horemheb. Nofret waited for the storm to break.

  She went about her days’ duties as she always had, day blurring into day. One day it rained: a rarity, and everyone was out in it, dancing, laughing, getting gloriously wet. They all took it as an omen, a promise of joy. She hoped that it was that, and not a warning of storms to come.

  The last of the harvest was taken in and stored. The river rose. Land that had been fertile cropland gave way to creeping water. Egypt retreated to the edges and to a well-earned idleness, growing fat on the riches of its harvest.

  There was a strange comfort in this ancient round of the year. No other country lived so bound to its river, dependent on it for its very existence. Without the river Egypt would be all barren Red Land and no Black Land. Without the river’s floods there would be no sowing, and never any fruits of the sowing.

  Ankhesenamon’s own planting brought its harvest in the second month of the flood. A messenger came to her in secret—that same one whom she had sent into Hatti with her letter that begged the king for one of his sons. Lord Hani was on his way, the man said, and with him a prince of the Hittites.

  For the first time in many months, Ankhesenamon’s face was a living woman’s face and not an ivory mask. She could not be said to be eager, but her voice held something of animation. “What is his name? What is he like?”

  The messenger was pleased to answer. “Lady, his name is Zennanza. He looks much like his father. A big man, but then Hittites are, and of course he has the Hittite face: the eagle’s profile that no one can mistake. His skin is fair. His hair is red like your maid’s, lady, but not as dark. His eyes are the color of the river in flood, neither brown nor green but something of both.”

  “Is he a handsome man?” she asked.

  “Women seem to think so,” the messenger said, “and in Hatti they call him that. He’s his father’s favorite, which honors you greatly. And young—he is that. He can’t be more than nineteen summers.”

  “Young,” said Ankhesenamon, “is all to the good. Is he strong? Does he fight well in battle?”

  “Exceedingly well,” the messenger answered, “and as for strength, he’s the champion of Hattusas in wrestling hand to hand, as his father was in his own youth.”

  “A favorite son,” Ankhesenamon mused. “But not the eldest. Not the heir.”<
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  “A king would hardly send the prince-heir to a foreign country, to be king there and not in his own place.”

  Ankhesenamon shook her head. “No. No, that’s very well. A royal heir might think to be king of both kingdoms, and make of them an empire. A younger son is much more to my taste. He need have no ambitions beyond the throne that I can give him.”

  She sent the messenger away to well-deserved rest, with a rich payment in gold for his trouble. For a long while after he had gone, she sat in her privy chamber, chin in hand. Her expression was one she had not had before. Dreaming; smiling; not content, she could not be that until the Hittite prince arrived in Memphis, but well pleased with her vision of him.

  He probably was as lovely as the messenger had said. Suppiluliumas was a splendid figure of a man by all accounts, and his sons were said to be the image of him. Nofret had not heard of Zennanza—he would have been a toddling child when she was taken out of Hatti. She wondered what he was thinking, how he hoped to get on in Egypt, which was so different from anything he could have known.

  She had managed it. He would, too, and with far more help than she had had. He would learn Egyptian, of course, if he had not already, much though it might prick his princely arrogance to have to speak any other language than his own.

  There: she was dreaming, too, if considerably less sweetly than her lady. A Hittite prince in Memphis, crowned with the Two Crowns. Improbable dream. Preposterous, she would have said, if she had not seen and heard it for herself.

  Ankhesenamon shook herself awake. A smile lingered about the corners of her mouth, but the rest of her was itself again, queenly somber. “By the full of the moon,” she said to no one in particular, “there will be a king in Egypt.”

  oOo

  A hand of days before the full of the moon, General Horemheb came to Memphis. He had been at his post on the border between Egypt and Asia, and safely so, the queen had thought. He came so boldly that she was much angered, marching in with a company of soldiers, and himself in a new and magnificent chariot drawn by horses that were not the light-boned beauties of the Two Lands. These were larger beasts, heavier and stronger. Such animals drew war-chariots in Asia, and in Great Hatti.

  Horemheb requested—it might even be said demanded—an audience with the Lady of the Two Lands. She did not wish to grant him one. She sent word through her chamberlain that she was indisposed.

  His messenger came back almost at once. “My lord says,” he said, “that the Lady of the Two Lands would perhaps be less indisposed if she knew what service my lord has done her.”

  “He has done me no service,” said Ankhesenamon, and sent the man away again.

  That was before the sun came to noon. Near its setting, when Horemheb had established himself in the palace, nor had anyone seen fit to object, his messenger returned yet again. He found the queen new come from her bath, conferring with the goldsmith regarding the design and fitting of a pectoral. She would not receive the interloper, no more than she had before: it was Nofret who ran the messages back and forth.

  Nofret had not been easy since Horemheb appeared in the city. This latest of his messages disturbed her unduly. She did not know why. It was mild and seeming harmless. It said simply, “My lady may do as she pleases, but it would please her well to speak with my lord.”

  Ankhesenamon returned no answer. She went to her bed at the same hour as always, rose and did as she did every morning, broke her fast, was dressed and wigged and anointed, painted her face and her eyes, prepared herself for the duties of the day. First were the rites of the gods: Amon as always, and Mother Isis, and Horus to whom she prayed for a strong husband well able to protect both his queen and his kingdom.

  Horemheb was waiting in the temple of Horus. He said nothing, nor moved, but stood where she could not help but see him. And when she returned to the palace for the morning audience, his messenger was there, waiting.

  She could outwait him, and meant to. But the messenger said, “My lord bids me tell you, O queen, that the word he bears for your ears alone were best not cried aloud in the nomes of the Two Lands.”

  That was a threat, and barely veiled. Ankhesenamon stiffened at it. Her pride might have been stung, but she could not fail to remember as Nofret did, where Horemheb had been. Prince Zennanza would have had to cross the borders that he guarded.

  He had come, or would come, in the company of a lord of Egypt, with the queen’s own safe-conduct and the promise of her countenance. Horemheb might have detained him, then, and come to Memphis to vex the queen with it.

  But why come himself, Nofret wondered, and not send a messenger?

  Perhaps he meant to claim the queen before the Hittite prince could do so. Perhaps he intended to face her himself, knowing that she would receive no emissary of his, but that his living and persistent presence might be more than she could withstand.

  It was not Nofret’s place, and in everything else she had learned to keep silence. But she bent and said in the queen’s ear, “That’s a threat, my lady. He knows—if not everything, then enough. You should see him.”

  The queen did not move, did not even glance at her. But she said to the messenger, “We will speak with him in the hour before sunset. Let him come to us in the lesser hall of audience.”

  The messenger bowed. It was not sufficient, his manner said, but it would have to do.

  oOo

  Ankhesenamon, having granted an hour of audience, seemed to forget it and its cause completely.

  A queen could do that. A queen’s servant must remember, and must be certain that the lesser hall was prepared as the queen would wish. It would be a coldly formal audience, with few in attendance: a handful of the maids, a larger handful of guards, and of her counsellors only the oldest, the deafest, and the most easily lulled to sleep. They must gather a good hour and more before the queen appeared, so that they would be well advanced in boredom and little inclined to heed anything that the queen said to the general of her armies in Asia.

  The queen herself arrived late and at her leisure. Horemheb cooled his heels in an antechamber. He could not but be sensible of the insult, but he betrayed no sign of it.

  She was not reasonable, but with Horemheb she never had been. A queen could do such things. Whether he forgave her, Nofret did not know. She doubted it. Horemheb was not a forgiving man, even of beautiful women who were queens and the daughters of queens.

  When Ankhesenamon was well ready, and only then, she had the general brought before her. She sat her lesser throne with her maids behind her and her guards along the wall, and her troops of ancient counselors drowsing in their places. Her expression granted nothing. She was queen and goddess. He, mere mortal, must worship at her feet.

  He was pleased, or amused, to do so. One of the men behind him, Nofret noticed, carried a casket of bronze as if it were a gift or an article of tribute.

  When the words of greeting were spoken, words that were as hollow as the death-mask of a king, the queen fell into a silence that she had used before. She would give nothing, the silence said. Let the petitioner speak and have done. It was not her task to ease his burden or to aid him in the laying down of it.

  Horemheb took his time in speaking. During it he studied her, amused still, an amusement that undertook conspicuously to avoid anger. He indulged her, his expression said, because she was queen, and because he found her beautiful, and yes, desirable.

  At length, through the rasp of the counselors’ snoring, he said, “Lady, we bring you a gift.” He nodded to the man with the casket. The man, expressionless, set his burden at the queen’s feet and lifted the lid.

  The odor that rose from within was potent and sickly familiar. It was the odor of the house of purification, of natron underlaid with the stink of death. One or two of the maids shrieked. One fainted.

  The queen herself did not move. She could see into the casket, as could Nofret if she craned a little. The objects laid within on what seemed a dark, folded cloth were more nond
escript than alarming: something roughly globular and two shriveled shapeless objects of no color in particular and no great distinction—until the eye met the mind and knew them for what they were. The head and hands of a man. And the cloth on which they seemed to rest was a plaited coil of hair, ruddy brown, thick and shining.

  There would be little mistaking the man, even without the peculiar color of the hair. The nose in the dried dead face was as noble as any in Hatti, and more princely than most.

  “This man,” said Horemheb, “rode past the border of Egypt with the fair beginnings of an army, with footsoldiers and chariotry, and every weapon honed and gleaming. His heralds told a preposterous tale, a lie that only a barbarian and an enemy would dare. He was, they declared, a prince of princes of the Hittites, and he came at Egypt’s urging, to take the throne of Egypt and the hand of its queen.”

  Horemheb paused. The silence was enormous. Ankhesenamon said nothing, nor moved.

  He shook his head as if in disbelief. “Lady, can you credit that? Hatti saw a kingdom without a king, and sent one of its own to claim it—for all the world as if the Two Lands were a barbarian fief, and their queen, their goddess on earth, a prize to be taken and given to the highest bidder. Only a barbarian would offer you such insult.

  “Why, lady,” he said, “he insisted that you yourself had begged him to come, had beseeched his father for a son of royal Hatti to be your king, because you would have no man in Egypt. Was there ever such presumption? I gave him what he deserved. I fell on him and destroyed him, and took his head and hands for a gift to you. It’s a poor enough payment for the dishonor he did you, staining your name with treason.”

  Ankhesenamon could not seem to take her eyes from the casket. Her face was stark white under its paint. She breathed too light, too fast: Nofret heard the catch and release of breath in her throat.

  She must have feared this, foreseen it, dreaded it—else why be in such fear of Horemheb? Now all her fears were proved true.