Pillar of Fire Read online

  They pretended that all was well, but they moved in a cloud of whispers. The queen in her wedding procession, as brief as that had been because of her frail health, had been carried in a chair outside of her palace so that the people might see her. They saw her indeed, and a rash few hurled stones that by good fortune flew wide. Those less rash settled for mutters in much the same words wherever they were: “I’ll wager she wishes that was a nice big Hittite buck and not an Egyptian up there beside her.”

  “Ay’s half a foreigner himself,” someone recalled in Nofret’s hearing. “We’re slipping back, I say: back to the Shepherd Kings.”

  The snarl at that raised her hackles. Egypt had cast out a nation of invaders whose name they never spoke, but whose memory they cherished in infamy. It was their only shame in their thousands of years, the only foreigners who had ever laid claim to the throne of the Two Kingdoms.

  And Ankhesenamon had tried to give Egypt a foreign king—had, too many insisted, done so indeed, though Ay was half Egyptian by breeding and all Egyptian in speech and in spirit. Some even muttered that the queen herself was Ay’s grandchild, and not full Egyptian either.

  It was an ugly thing, that river of rumor. It swelled with time and feeding. Maybe Horemheb had nothing to do with it: maybe he did not need to. The simple truth with which it had begun, Ankhesenamon’s letter to the Hittite king, was enormity enough.

  They had hated Akhenaten for robbing them of their gods. They remembered that, too, and cast all their resentment on his daughter’s head—his daughter who had told a foreign king that she would have no Egyptian for a husband.

  She could hardly be oblivious to flung stones, to hissing when she went to one or another of the temples to pray and to bless them with the royal presence, to backs turned and even, once, an arrow that flew over her head while she stepped out of her chair in front of Hathor’s temple. A moment earlier and it would have pierced her eye.

  She neither wept nor flew into a panic. She went in calmly while her guards hunted down the archer and disposed of him. She was praying ostensibly for a son, an heir at last for the dying royal house. Nofret believed it more likely that she prayed to any god who would listen, to take Horemheb and devour him before he seized the throne.

  As she emerged from the temple, the captain of her guard brought word that the archer had been found dead on a rooftop with a dagger—evidently his own—in his throat. She accepted the news without expression, thanked the captain for his services, mounted her palanquin and rode back silently to the palace. No stones flew from among the people, and for once no one said anything. The arrow had been eloquent enough.

  oOo

  Ankhesenamon let slip her composure only when she was safe in her own rooms, with the daymeal long past and her maids dismissed to their beds. Ay had not come to do his husbandly duty, even in seeming, nor was he expected. The queen was as solitary as she could be. Nofret of course was no one, or near enough: the queen’s shadow, too long familiar to be noticed.

  Ankhesenamon sank to a chair that she favored, where sometimes she read of an evening or listened to a player on harp or flute. She lowered her face into her hands and sat so for a long while, not moving, not seeming to weep.

  When she spoke, she took Nofret by surprise. Her voice was clear and calm. “I think,” she said, “that I would like to die.”

  Nofret held herself still, sitting on her heels near the chair, the servant’s position that with use had grown comfortable. She did not speak. She made herself even more invisible than before.

  “After all,” Ankhesenamon said as if there had been a response, “what more is there for me? Ay can only protect me for a little while. The gods will give me no son of his begetting. Our line ends with us; there can be no more.”

  “You can’t know that,” said Nofret, forsaking invisibility almost as soon as she had assumed it. “For that matter, if Ay’s seed is dried and barren, what’s to keep you from finding someone younger to father Ay’s son and heir? It won’t be the first time, I shouldn’t think. There are some who say your mother did the same, because your father could never raise his shaft, let alone beget so many daughters.”

  Ankhesenamon favored Nofret with a long, dark stare. “My father’s weaponry was small and not excessively keen, but it was sufficient for the purpose. He needed no one else to father his daughters.”

  “But a son,” said Nofret, “since the need is so great . . .”

  “Perhaps I should raid the slaves’ quarters,” Ankhesenamon said, “and find me a strong and lusty boy-baby. An Apiru, maybe, of my own kin. I could pretend to be with child, and go into confinement. Or I could seem to find a royal infant in a basket in the river-reeds, a gift of the gods, with the gods’ seal on his brow.”

  “You are quite mad,” said Nofret.

  “I rather think I may be,” Ankhesenamon said. “My foresight failed me, you see. I knew—I knew—that I would have a son, and that my beloved, my king and god, would be his father. I saw us growing old together. I never knew that he would die so young and give me no more than two poor tiny twisted girl-babies who could never have lived past infancy. I didn’t see, till it was far too late, that someone else wanted to be king, and would do anything to make sure of it. Maybe the gods themselves didn’t know.”

  “The gods know. The gods know everything.” Nofret shivered. The night air was always full of whispers, but tonight it seemed to be clamoring on the edge of hearing, as if the spirits of the dead and the unborn had gone to war.

  Ankhesenamon spoke through them. “I do think I want to die. Unless I can find a boychild in the reeds. Should I hunt for him? Would it matter at all?”

  “You should sleep,” said Nofret for lack of anything better to say.

  Ankhesenamon sighed. “Oh, I can sleep. I can dream. I see him there. The one who died—the other one. The prince who came to be my savior. Would he have been gentle, do you think, or would he have been hard-handed and cruel?”

  “I think he would have been in awe of you,” Nofret said. She did not want to close her eyes. The Hittite prince’s face was there, too, as it must be for her lady. It was not a thing one could ever forget.

  “Awe can be cruel, particularly if it’s in a man and it makes him afraid. I wasn’t wise to send for him. But I wonder . . . if . . .”

  Her voice drifted off. The whispers in the air seemed to fade into it.

  She had fallen asleep sitting up in her chair. Nofret eased her into her arms. She was a light weight, no heavier than a child, murmuring as a child will, frowning and curling into herself when Nofret had laid her in her bed.

  Nofret snuffed the lamps, all but the one that burned nightlong, and sought her own pallet in her cell of a room. She had thought not to sleep, but sleep was waiting, lying in ambush as Horemheb’s men had done to the prince from Hatti. Dreams were in it, nightmares, memories that were best forgotten. Morning was a blessing, even with the rumbling in it, the thunder that was like Akhetaten before the old king went away from it.

  oOo

  The queen was quietly out of her mind. She did her duties as she always had, as she had been trained to from a child. But as her father had done before her, when she was not needed to be queen, she vanished from her chambers.

  Sometimes Nofret found her in the garden by the lotus pool where she had idled so often with her young king. More frequently she was not to be found, not anywhere that a queen should be. Nofret trailed her down to the river and the beds of rushes, where the servants did not go for fear of crocodiles. The queen had wits enough not to trail hands or feet in the water, but she wandered often far down the stream, searching, one would think, for a basket with a baby in it.

  There never was one. Nofret doubted that she had expected it. It was a dream she had, a haunting of the spirit. She wandered away from herself, from all that she was, searching for what she could never find. A Hittite prince had only been the beginning of it.

  Maybe most of all she was seeking what her father h
ad found. Death that was not death. Escape from an office that had become intolerable.

  She might find death in truth if she kept wandering so close to the water. Nofret watched from concealment, braced to leap if she stumbled or fell. Or if—and this was dangerously likely—someone tripped her and flung her in.

  Horemheb was a patient man, and he wanted Ankhesenamon alive, with the king-right she carried. Others might not be as willing to let her be.

  When Ankhesenamon grew tired of walking along the river, she took to commanding that her horses be harnessed to her chariot, and driving out wherever her whim took her. Guards rode behind, unnoticed and unforbidden, as was Nofret herself in the queen’s chariot. Nofret carried a knife, and no matter what some might say of slaves and deadly weapons.

  She might have done better to carry a bow and a full quiver, but archery was not an art she had ever studied. The guards in the chariots behind carried spears, little use as those would be if an arrow flew to strike the queen.

  Stones did fly, and more than once, out of a faceless crowd. None struck home, though one or two dented the chariot’s rim, and once one clipped the rump of the left-hand mare. She shied and sprang forward, dragging the right-hand mare with her. But Ankhesenamon, for all her slenderness, was a strong charioteer, and skilled. She gentled the frightened mare and brought both horses back to their former courtly gait.

  Ankhesenamon would not hear of keeping to the palace, not even with such threats as stoning. “My father faced worse before he fled Thebes,” she said. “These don’t mean to kill me, only to make me afraid. Him they wanted dead.”

  “You might wonder why they want to frighten you,” said Ay. He still dreamed of swaying her with reason, though she was as far beyond that as her father had ever been.

  She did not hear him, of course. She said placidly, “They are angry because I tried to set a Hittite over them. That is ended, with thanks to General Horemheb. You rule, and you they can endure.”

  “And when I die? Will you send for another Hittite?”

  She regarded him with wide eyes, so wide they seemed blind. Certainly she saw him no more clearly than she heard him. “I’ll die before you,” she said.

  Forty-Six

  Nofret rested little in those days. At night she slept as best she could on the floor of her lady’s chamber. Mostly she lay awake, missing her own bed. She had lost the art of sleeping wherever she could.

  Her only peace of mind came when the queen was in court with the king beside her. Ay was old and had lost the strength of his arm, but his presence was potent and his guards were many, and they were fiercely loyal. It would take more rashness than Nofret thought any Egyptian had to menace the queen there.

  While Ankhesenamon heard petitioners and received embassies and saw to the rule of the Two Kingdoms, Nofret could snatch a little sleep, or simply rest. She would take refuge in one of the gardens, or put on her plainest gown and plait her hair behind her and walk in the city, and maybe she would go to the seller of beer and buy a jar and sit for a while.

  She did not always drink the whole jar. Many times she fed the remnants to the beer-seller’s dog. It was a fat, sleek, tipsy animal, much like its mistress, and it lived chiefly on beer and on leavings from the butcher down the way.

  She was feeding most of a jar of beer to the dog, one day of Egyptian summer, when the river was full in flood but just beginning to slacken. The air was thick with the river’s presence, thick enough almost to drink, and the flies were swarming. The beer-seller had a curtain of gauze to keep the worst of them out, which darkened the little cell of a place to a twilight gloom but little relieved by a lamp hanging from a rafter.

  At this hour Nofret was the only person there, Nofret and the dog. The beer-seller was outside hawking her wares to passersby. Nofret heard her singing the song she sang, a song of beer and of the joys it brought. People laughed at some of the verses, and bought a jar or two on the strength of them.

  One man who paused had a glorious deep voice, and towered over the rest of the people in the street. He was a foreigner, a robed and bearded tribesman, wide in the shoulders, with an eagle’s arch of nose: like a Hittite and yet unlike.

  Nofret’s mind lagged far behind her eyes. It did not even catch up when, having conferred with the seller of beer, he ducked through the curtain and loomed in front of her. The room could hold a dozen and more without crowding, but he filled it. He went on doing that even when he hooked a stool with his foot and sat facing her, jar of beer in hand. “Share with me?” he asked.

  “Johanan.” Nofret did not know why she should be so angry. He had done nothing that she knew of to offend her.

  That was precisely why she was angry. Because he had done nothing. She had heard no word from him since he passed through Memphis on his way to visit his grandmother, while Tutankhamon was alive. When she was in Thebes he had made no effort to seek her out. She had thought him gone. Maybe he had been. Maybe he had gone back to Sinai, and now returned to Egypt. Maybe . . .

  She took the jar of beer because he was thrusting it at her, and drank deeper than perhaps she should. It was a strong brew as Egyptian beer went, strong enough to dizzy her a little. Johanan’s face wavered in front of her. He looked thinner than she remembered, and darker, burned black with the sun. His hands that took the jar back were roughened as if he had been at hard labor.

  He saw her eyes on them. “Stonecutting,” he said without shame, “carving tombs in Thebes.”

  “You never had much skill in that,” she said. “I thought your greater gift was for commanding men.”

  He shrugged and drank less deep of the beer than she had, but with more apparent relish. When he had wiped the foam from his beard with the edge of his sleeve he said, “I did what work was to be had. Thebes isn’t as Akhetaten was. The men in command are Egyptians. They aren’t fond of foreigners. Particularly foreigners who once enjoyed the patronage of the fallen one of Akhetaten.”

  “Is that what they call him in Thebes? He’s never mentioned at all in Memphis.”

  “Thebes will be the last to forget him,” said Johanan, “though it’s already undertaken to forget his name. They had me carving it out of inscriptions. It amused them, I think, to make me undo what my people did so much of, not so long ago.”

  He did not sound bitter. Nor was he resigned, not as a man is who has given up his pride and his will.

  “You didn’t see me while I was in Thebes,” Nofret said.

  “The slaves of the tombs aren’t given leave to visit servants in the palace.”

  That, now, was bitter. Subtly so, but clear to her ear. Her throat tightened. “Leah. Is she—”

  “She lives,” he said. “She’s here. I left her in the lodging, to rest from the journey. She’s much as she ever was, but traveling has never been easy for her.”

  Nofret stared at him. “You weren’t let go, were you? You escaped.”

  “We never considered ourselves slaves. We were kin of the king. But the king is dead and his kin are not loved.”

  “And you ran away. The rest of your people—are they—”

  “They wouldn’t go. It’s not so bad, they say. They have to work harder and the hours are longer, but they’re still paid their bread and beer. No one’s taking their wives and daughters or threatening them with anything worse than a touch of the lash now and then, when there’s an example to be set.”

  The way he said that made her leap to her feet. The jar would have gone flying if he had not caught it. She seized his robe and tugged hard.

  It was good wool, well woven but much worn and faded. It gave way with a sigh, baring his shoulders. They were as dark nearly as his face, what she could see of them.

  There were scars on scars, and half-healed wounds on top of those. Her hand dropped as if burned.

  He shrugged his robe back into place as much as he could. His face was calm, even amused. His eyes were too dark to read. “I take direction badly,” he said. “I’m much better at gi
ving it. That’s not an advantage in a slave.”

  “They were going to kill you,” she said.

  “So my grandmother said,” said Johanan. He did not seem to care, still less to be afraid. “She wanted to leave. She said it would only get worse, and we would bear the brunt of it, since I can never hold my tongue. I was in the desert too long. I’ve forgotten how to speak soft to a haughty master.”

  “You should never have come here,” said Nofret. “You shouldn’t have come back to Egypt at all. If word is out that you’ve fled—if anyone is looking for you—”

  “Grandmother says not,” he said. “We went into the desert, and we seemed to go south. They won’t look for us in the north.”

  “They will unless they’re perfect fools. They know what you are.”

  “They haven’t followed me.” He would not hear more of it: there was a set to his mouth that said so. “We kept to the desert while we could, but Grandmother said we had to stop here. Will you come and speak to her?”

  Nofret drew a breath. She was going to refuse, to plead that she must return to the palace, that it was late, that if she did not go back, her queen might wander without her and be hurt or killed. But she heard herself say, “Where is she? Take me there.”

  oOo

  He led her to a travelers’ lodging deep in the city, where the faces were more foreign than Egyptian. People there spoke every language that the world knew. Nofret heard Hittite, and the singsong strangeness of the sea-rovers from the north of the great sea, and Nubian and Libyan and the dialects of Mitanni and Canaan and Ashur, and yes, Apiru, too, both the raiders of the desert and the tribesmen of Sinai who were kin to the kings of Egypt.

  Leah was resting in a dim rear chamber of the lodging. It was so much like the room that she had so often waited in in the workmen’s village of Akhetaten, that Nofret felt herself taken back there. The walls, of plain mudbrick like all poor dwellings in this country, were hidden behind draperies that transformed the place into a tent in the desert. There were no chairs, but rugs and cushions in plenty, and a bronze ewer for water, and a jar of date wine and little cups, and a bowl of dates steeped in honey.