Pillar of Fire Read online

  Nofret’s sides ached with laughter. She lay on the rock under the stump of tree and took a deep breath, and held it against an attack of hiccoughs.

  A shadow darkened the sun. She squinted. After a moment the shape came clear: long bony body, wild mane of hair, fierce scowl over the vast arch of nose. “You saw him go,” the boy accused her.

  His Egyptian was notably better than hers. There was nothing, in fact, to distinguish it from the Lord Ay’s own, except perhaps a certain vicious brevity.

  Nofret yawned. It was deliberate and very rude. It also stopped the hiccoughs—except for one last persistent catch of breath.

  The boy set hands on hips and glared. “You watched our goat get out. Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I didn’t know I was your servant,” Nofret said.

  The boy made a disgusted noise. “You must belong to Pharaoh. Nobody’s as arrogant as his servants are. Even Pharaoh himself.”

  No doubt he thought he was being clever. Nofret took pleasure in saying sweetly, “I belong to Pharaoh’s daughter. Who do you belong to? The goat?”

  “I belong to no one but my god,” the boy said haughtily.

  “I fall down in awe,” said Nofret with a curl of the lip. “You belong to the king. All the laborers here do. I’ll wager you’ve never seen him face to face.”

  “Of course I have,” said the boy. “He’s my cousin, and the husband of my cousin. And who are you beside that?”

  “A warrior’s daughter from Great Hatti,” she said, “which is better than a king’s slave in Egypt—whether he be kin or no.”

  He had the full measure of his people’s pride. She wondered if he would try to climb up on the rock and hit her. But he only glared so fiercely that she felt scorched where she sat.

  But then he laughed. It was honest laughter, and it went on for quite a long time.

  By the time he stopped, she was sure that he was mad. What he said next did little to dissuade her. “Did you see how everybody ran after the goat? Wasn’t it splendid?”

  “Well,” Nofret said after a pause, “yes.”

  He came up on the rock in a flurry of bare brown legs and striped coat. Nofret schooled herself not to flinch. She would cast him off if she must.

  He did not threaten her. He sat cross-legged in what shade her presence left him, and grinned at her. He did not look like a madman, only a boy in an antic humor, regarding her with lively interest. “You’re wonderfully rude,” he said. “What are you really?”

  “I told you the truth,” said Nofret. “I’m the third princess’ servant. She calls me Nofret.”

  “That’s not a Hittite name,” he said.

  “No,” said Nofret.

  There was a silence. Before it could stretch too thin he said, “My name is Johanan.”

  Nofret looked at him unblinking.

  “You hide your true name,” he said. “Are you afraid of magic?”

  “No!” Nofret snapped.

  “You are,” he said. “You don’t want anybody to know who you are, so that no one has power over you.”

  “I’m not afraid of magic,” said Nofret, “no matter what it can do to me. My name is still my own.”

  “There’s no such thing as magic, you know,” he said. “It’s only superstition. Only the god has such power, and he doesn’t waste it on such as you. Only the god is real.”

  “Which god?” Nofret demanded. “The king’s Aten?”

  “The god,” said Johanan. “Our god. The one who led us here, and will lead us home again.”

  “Why? Did you forget the way?”

  “Never,” he said. “But we’re bound to Pharaoh. We serve him as our fathers did, to pay the debt from the famine.”

  “That debt’s long paid, I should think,” said Nofret.

  “You aren’t one of us,” he said. “You don’t understand. We have long memories. We pay well for whatever we’re given—good or bad.”

  “You are strange,” she said.

  “We’re our god’s people,” he said, as if that was all that needed to be said.

  Four

  The king’s kin in the laborers’ village and the king in his palace were very much alike. They were both convinced that their god was the only right one. And they were both extraordinarily odd.

  The king had no sons. He had daughters—six of them, all born of his queen. His concubines had never conceived. It was rumored that they could not; that the queen made sure of it, for fear of a son who must be the king’s heir. She would bear him that son, or no woman would.

  It was beginning to seem that there would be no son at all, then, because the queen bore only daughters.

  “Six of them,” said the princess Meritaten’s maid, fitting new strings to her harp in a corner of the princesses’ sleeping room. The princesses were in the temple with their mother, giving the morning offering to the Aten. Servants were airing the beds and folding linen into presses and sweeping the floor.

  Nofret had been going to take her freedom in the city, but Tama wanted to gossip. Tama was a Nubian, as tall as a man in great Hatti and broad with it, but beautifully delicate with the strings of her gilded harp. She loved to chatter, and she did not approve of Nofret’s expeditions. They were not fitting, she said.

  She was keeping Nofret from one now, and deliberately, too. Nofret indulged her out of caution, because the princesses, except for Nofret’s own, did not know what Nofret did when she went away, and Nofret did not want them to know. Meritaten, like her maid, would reckon it not fitting.

  So Nofret lingered, mending a necklace that her princess had broken. It was exacting work, stringing the beads in precise order, making sure that none was lost or forgotten. Tama’s voice ran on like water.

  “He has six daughters,” she said, “and no interest in any woman but the queen.”

  “He’s fond of Lady Kiya,” said Nofret.

  She was not being loyal. She was remembering how that lady had sat beside the king at dinner, feeding him morsels from her plate, when the queen was not there—indisposed, the servants knew, because she had failed to conceive again and was ill with her courses.

  The king seemed much pleased with Kiya. He smiled at her, a slow dreamer’s smile that yet had a spark in it. He had left not long after she did, with intent that everyone could see.

  Tama remembered, too. But she said, “He’s under a bewitchment. He’s only potent with the queen. Even Kiya—she may try, but she can’t raise his shaft for anything she does. Kisses and fondlings are all she gets from him.”

  Nofret pursued a bead of lapis across the bowl in her lap. When she had caught it and strung it beside its brothers, she said, “People whisper that the king can’t do anything with his queen, either. That the daughters are all hers and none of his.”

  “That’s slander,” said Tama. “Who do they say fathered them? Lord Ay?”

  “Lord Ay is her brother,” Nofret said.

  “That’s no difference to these princes. They keep the futtering in the family.”

  “I don’t believe it,” said Nofret. “There’s probably a groom somewhere who could tell tales if he would. Or one of the princes who nurses a long passion for the queen.”

  Tama snorted. “Nonsense. The queen has great arts. She manages with her husband, and well enough for daughters if not for sons. Even she can’t make his seed strong enough for that. Nor will, my bones tell me.”

  Tama did not mean the bones in the big meaty arm that moved so daintily to tighten a harpstring. She had a handful of polished sheep’s knuckles in a pouch, that she brought out when the spirit moved her, and cast into patterns that she read as if they meant something.

  Sometimes her oracles even made sense. Nofret had never noticed that her prophecies came true any sooner or more exactly than Nofret’s own blind guesses.

  But Tama was a seer of sorts, and it did not do to offend one who claimed the power. Nofret widened her eyes as she had seen her princess do, and asked ingenuously, “Y
our bones speak to you? What do they tell?”

  “That he’ll have no sons,” said Tama.

  “But does it really matter?” Nofret asked. “The right to be king comes from the princesses—from the daughters of the daughters of Queen Nefertari, who was a god’s child. He could find a good man willing to marry a princess and be king. Any hundred men both good and bad would leap at the chance.”

  “That’s not how the king thinks,” Tama said as if she could know. “Any other king, yes. This king is bound to his god, and his god tells him that he is a god. He has to have a son of his own blood and loins, or the god’s line fails.”

  “That’s difficult,” said Nofret.

  “Oh, for a fact it is,” Tama said. “He’ll have to do something if he’s to do what he thinks his god wants.”

  oOo

  The king did indeed do something. He summoned his daughters to him in the evening, long after the festival of his coronation was over. The throngs had left the city, the queen mother returned with her younger children to Thebes, the foreigners left, all but those who had been given as tribute to the king.

  Akhetaten was not a quiet city, with all the people who lived in it for the king’s service, and all the builders raising new houses, and the king’s messengers coming and going at the gallop or the run. But in the evening it grew quieter. Laborers left their labors and trudged toward home. Princes abandoned the court for one another’s houses, to sleep or to drink the night away. People in the palace prepared for sleep, except the young bloods, who would dance till dawn in a haze of wine.

  oOo

  The princesses were accustomed to sit together in their big airy chamber, with lamps lit and shadows in the corners, telling stories or gossiping or hearing Tama sing and play her harp till it was time to sleep. That evening Tama was singing a love song from Nubia, mournfully passionate and rather beyond the princesses’ comprehension, but they called it pretty. The king’s messenger waited courteously till the song was done. When it was, he bowed low and summoned them all into the king’s presence.

  Nofret took that to mean the maids, too. She affixed herself to her lady’s shadow and followed in silence, and no one stopped her.

  She had not been to the king’s palace before. The ladies and the queens and the princesses lived in the palace proper, but the king had a house apart, bound to the rest by a bridge over the grand processional way that was the spine of Akhetaten. Mere mortals walked below if they were allowed so far at all. Royalty walked aloft into the king’s own house.

  Royalty, and Nofret. The other maids had not come, even endlessly curious Tama. None of them was bold enough to do as Nofret had done.

  The king waited in a room that must be a reception room. Its lamps were lit, softening the hard bright colors of the painted walls. There were woven mats on the floor, and rugs over them.

  He sat with his queen on a couch with crimson cushions. Its arms and back were carved and painted with images of the king and his family. Its legs were the bodies of lions, and they had the unmistakable deep sheen of solid gold.

  The king and queen were not robed and crowned here as Nofret had always seen them. The queen wore a linen gown and a pectoral like the wings of the Horus falcon, gold and lapis and chalcedony, and the short-cropped curls of the Nubian wig. The king wore a kilt, and a pectoral the near kin of his queen’s, and a striped headdress that Nofret thought must be notably cooler and more comfortable than a wig.

  He looked almost human here, odd though his long face was, and his body with its narrow shoulders and soft belly. His eyes actually seemed to see what was in front of him, and to take note of it, and to care that it was there. He was at ease, or undertaking to seem so, with his arm about the queen’s shoulders, close and familiar as long-married Egyptians so often seemed to be.

  Even the queen did not seem so coldly perfect as she did on the throne or in the temple. Nofret could see the living flesh beneath the mask that was her beauty. It seemed tired, drawn, no longer in the first of youth: there were faint, fine lines at the corners of the wonderful eyes and about the lovely mouth. This was a woman who had borne six daughters alive, whose breasts and belly were richly fruitful—but not of sons.

  The princesses made reverence one by one, kissed each parent and were kissed in turn, and settled in the royal laps or at the royal feet. It was a pretty picture, the image of familial affection. The king smiled at all his daughters, then beckoned to Meritaten and said, “Here. Sit between us.”

  The king’s eldest daughter looked as if she might ask why, but she smiled instead and nestled between the two of them, not without a glance of triumph at her sisters. They were always contesting for their parents’ favor. Meketaten, the second princess, made a face at her sister under cover of a feather fan.

  The king laid his arm about Meritaten’s shoulders as, a little before, he had done with his queen. Meritaten leaned against him, conspicuously content.

  “Your mother and I have been taking counsel with one another,” he said. His voice was thin and rather high, and he stammered. He rarely spoke in public, people had told Nofret, and never since she had come to Akhetaten.

  He went on in that unprepossessing voice, “I have no son, my daughters. No prince to take the Two Crowns after me. No one to rule beside me till the Aten takes me to himself.”

  The princesses listened without speaking. The queen stared straight ahead. Her mask was on again, no more yielding than stone.

  “Your mother will bear me no more children,” he said. “The god has said it, and her heart agrees.”

  “Then,” said the third princess, rashly intervening, “is the Lady Kiya going to be allowed to have a baby? She wants one badly, you know.”

  The queen’s glance was quelling. Ankhesenpaaten flushed faintly and became very interested in her bare brown toes.

  The king seemed not to have heard. He had his dreamer’s look again, as if nothing mattered, and no one except the god who spoke in his heart. When he spoke again his voice was different. Stronger. Less hesitant. “The god tells me that I must have a son, that there must be a god of his lineage to continue when I have been taken into his embrace. There must be a son. There must be an heir.”

  No one said anything. The princesses must not like to hear that they were insufficient—that six of them could not begin to equal a single puling manchild.

  The king stroked a hand down Meritaten’s cheek, along the curve of her neck to her budding breasts. She shivered lightly, pleasurably: her nipples were erect, her eyes soft, almost as dream-ridden as the king’s. Meritaten was devout. She heard the god sometimes, or so she said. It was her right, she also said, as the eldest princess, from whom the next king would take his right to rule.

  She regarded her father with calm too pure for arrogance. “If I were to marry,” she said, “I could pray the god to give me a son. I’m old enough now. My courses have begun. I can carry a child.”

  “Ah,” said the king, “but whom can you marry, who would keep the god’s line pure? It must be a son of mine who inherits. My son, of my loins. The god has told me this.”

  The god was an idiot, in Nofret’s estimation. Otherwise he would know that his beloved and peculiar offspring was not likely to get a son on anyone if he had not done it already.

  Nofret did not say so. She was air and shadow, ears and eyes and teeth-gritted silence.

  “It must be so,” said the king as if to himself. “Do you understand? It must be so.”

  “I understand,” the queen said. They were the first words she had spoken. Her voice was nigh as deep as the king’s, and much more beautiful.

  “For the Aten,” he said. “For the world that he will make. A son.”

  “If the Aten wills it,” the queen said, “then so be it.”

  She sounded cold and lost, and tired beyond bearing. The king did not notice. His smile was loving and completely oblivious. He bent it on Meritaten, who blinked in the radiance of it. “I will marry you,” he said. “
You will bear a son to the god, and the god will heap his blessings on you.”

  The only sound was the beating of Nofret’s heart in her ears. She had stopped breathing, because if she did not, she would cry aloud, and that cry would win her a flaying.

  The princesses were mute. The youngest were too young to know what was happening. The elder ones stared at their father, and at their sister. Meritaten seemed dazzled by the god’s light.

  “There must be a son,” the king said. “The blood must not be weakened and scattered. Only our line is worthy. Only you.”

  Meritaten blinked. She was coming to herself, surely. She was stiffening in horror. Father to wed daughter, to beget a child on her . . .

  She smiled. “Yes,” she said. “Yes. Only we are worthy.”

  The king returned her smile. The queen sat like a carven image. The princesses watched like hangers-on at a festival, taking no part in it.

  The king bent to kiss his daughter. It was not the kiss of a bridegroom. It was warm but not hot; chaste, without passion.

  oOo

  “It is mad,” Nofret cried, but softly, because she was not alone with her princess. “He is mad. How can he do that? How can he even think it?”

  “The god wills,” said Ankhesenpaaten. She was coolly serene. Uncomprehending, Nofret would have thought, but her lady understood a great deal. She knew what was between men and women. She knew what was natural, and what was not.

  “The lion will beget young on its own young,” she said. “The stallion mounts his daughter when she comes into her season. The god knows. He asks it of us because no one else is fit. Only a god may wed a god.”

  “You’re as mad as he is,” gritted Nofret. She went on rubbing sweet ointment into her lady’s skin, the ritual of each evening, meant to keep her beautiful as her mother was, even when she began to grow old. The other princesses were asleep in their beds or being tended by their own maids or nurses. None was listening to Nofret.