Pillar of Fire Read online

  If Leah and Johanan had their way, Nofret would force it on her. Nofret had insisted that she have time to speak to her lady, to persuade her if she could, to lead her away of her own will. But looking at Ankhesenamon in court, crowned with plumes of gold, cradling the scepter, she could see nothing else, not even the woman who roamed the riverbanks in search of a thing that could not be.

  When Ankhesenamon transformed herself from queen to distracted woman, Nofret could say nothing to her that she would hear. It was the chariot today, careening through the city with reckless disregard for anyone who got in her way, then out into the Red Land, the desert shimmering under the pitiless sun. Nofret had the parasol, clutching it against the wind of their speed, and was nearly flung out of the chariot for it. The guards were well behind, their horses laboring to catch the queen’s swift mares. Even those were taxed by the pace she set: their coats were sodden with sweat, silver-white darkened to the blue-black of the skin beneath.

  Ankhesenamon had some remnant of sense left: she slowed the horses as a charioteer does, little by little, letting them come down to a walk. They trod lightly still, but their sides were heaving, dripping with sweat and foam. The queen turned them slowly. They walked back to the city, meeting the guards on the way, with their blown and stumbling horses. They were walking, leading the beasts, to spare them the weight of armored men in the chariots.

  Ankhesenamon did not even glance at them. Her eyes were fixed on the city’s walls, on the gate that was open, waiting for her to ride in. Nofret wondered how it seemed to her: welcoming or threatening or simply there, without significance except as a barrier to be passed.

  There was no telling what she thought. Once Nofret would have known or been able to guess. She was blind now to her lady’s heart as to everything else—everything but the Apiru’s god, the god that she would not worship, because he was no god of hers. He reared behind her eyes like a pillar of fire. He willed her to do what every grain of wit and sense cried out against, because it was mad; because it was death if she failed. And even if she did not . . .

  She was a coward. She had never thought she would welcome the name. She could not do it. She could not snatch her lady away and carry her off into Sinai, where her father waited, and his god with him, and the people that he had made his own.

  Ankhesenamon handed her chariot and her horses to those who could best tend both, and went to the bath to scour away the dust and sweat of her wild ride. There was blood on her cheek: stone flung up by the wheels or stone flung by someone in the city, Nofret did not know and could not remember. She cleansed it carefully while Ankhesenamon sat unresisting, not caring even for her vanity, nor asking if the cut was deep, or if it would scar. In fact it was slight, a scratch only; but a woman with all her wits about her, a woman who was beautiful and knew it, would at least have asked.

  She wandered away almost before her bath was done. There was court still to come, but she refused the court dress, indicating instead a simple linen gown, little better than a servant’s. “I must look,” she said. “The river—I must—”

  Now, if Nofret was to do it, she must move. But she could not bring herself to follow. She did something that she had not done before: she sent a guard in the queen’s wake, with orders to let her be but to protect her if she should fall into danger.

  That was a refusal, as complete as could be, of everything that Leah had wished on her. And yet she felt as if she had done nothing but what was sensible—too sensible. Nothing was done that could not be undone. There was time still. Years, if foresight was true, before Ay went into his tomb.

  Could Leah wait that long? Could Johanan, with his Apiru face and his scarred back, who might even now be hunted down and killed for escaping the tomb-building in Thebes?

  They would leave. Nofret would be in peace. Ankhesenamon would live as she could. Nofret would guard her. Horemheb would be no danger to her while Nofret lived.

  oOo

  Ankhesenamon came back from the river with mud on her feet.

  “She tried to wade in,” the guard said. “She said she saw a boat.”

  “Not a boat,” said Ankhesenamon, startling them both. “A basket. I saw a basket.”

  Nofret caught the guard’s eye. “A duck had a nest in the reeds,” he said.

  “It was a basket,” said Ankhesenamon, “woven of rushes from the riverbank and caught in the reeds. I tried to fetch it. He stopped me. You will have him whipped.”

  His eye rolled white. Nofret shook her head at him. He did not look greatly comforted. She waved him out. He fled without shame, escaping to the safety of his guardroom.

  As Nofret had expected, Ankhesenamon forgot him as soon as he was gone. She fretted over the basket that she had lost, but she made no move to go back for it.

  Nofret coaxed her into yet another bath and yet another linen gown—it was too late by far for her to grace the court with her presence. There was still the day’s feast, but Nofret chose not to remember it. She had food fetched from the kitchens, dainties to tempt a delicate appetite, some of which Ankhesenamon even nibbled on.

  The wine was heavily spiced and dosed with a potion that would calm her and help her to sleep. It was not the strong drug that Leah had given Nofret to give the queen. That was hidden among Nofret’s belongings, wrapped and wrapped again in the scraps of linen that she used to stanch the blood of her courses.

  Tonight and every night till she brought the queen to him drugged and compliant, Johanan would be waiting with a boat to take them away down the river. If he was caught he would be killed. A renegade had no life worth mentioning, nor any hope, once he was discovered.

  Nofret watched her lady slip into a drowse. It was a rare peace for her, a rare moment of rest. She did not fight it. She seemed barely aware of it. Her mind was still fixed on the basket that she fancied she had seen in the reeds.

  “It had a baby in it,” she murmured. “It did. I saw him move. He babbled like water running, no fear in him at all. He’ll make a king, that bold child. He’ll make a king indeed.”

  “Yes,” said Nofret to soothe her. “Yes, lady.”

  Ankhesenamon sighed and closed her eyes. Her breathing steadied and deepened. She had fallen asleep.

  Nofret watched her for a while. She did not move or wake. There were guards on the door, and maids in their gaggle outside.

  Nofret left them with some reluctance. But tonight was her night to bathe, and she needed it badly after her ride in the queen’s chariot. She could trust so many guards and servants, surely, to look after one small sleep-sodden woman.

  oOo

  Nofret lingered in the bath, in the quiet and the deep pleasure of warm water on her skin. She even washed her hair, then with the help of a little Nubian maid she combed out all its tangles.

  The maid was enthralled with it: it fell to her hips, and it was thick, and its color was the darkest of reds. Nubians never grew such manes; their hair was like fleece or like black smoke, and they cropped it short or else grew it only long enough to plait with beads and feathers.

  Sunset had come and gone before Nofret returned to her post. Her hair, still damp, was demurely plaited. She had put on a new linen gown. She felt cool and clean and almost content.

  When she came to her lady’s chamber, the bed was empty. The maids were asleep or playing at hounds and jackals in one of the lesser rooms. Nofret asked them nothing. There would be no answer, no more than there would be from the guards. The queen was gone, and no one had seen her go.

  Johanan had come, or Leah. They had taken her without Nofret’s aid, knowing that Nofret would prove a faintheart.

  She should go to her room and sleep and pretend that she had seen as little as the maids or the guards. And then when morning came and there was no lady to wake and prepare for the ceremonies of the sunrise, Nofret would be as innocent as anyone else.

  What if it had not been the Apiru? What if Horemheb had had his own plot to be rid of the queen who hated him, who did her best t
o stand in the way of his rise to power? And if it was not Horemheb, what of any number of other people in Egypt, high and low, who called her traitor and worse for what she had done with the king of Hatti?

  Nofret went out quietly. Every bone and muscle screamed at her to run, but that would have attracted suspicion. Until she knew who had taken the queen, she would tell no one. She would discover it for herself, and then choose whether to raise the alarm or pretend that she knew nothing. If Ay or Horemheb resorted to torture of the servants . . .

  She would not think of that until she must. She walked as slowly as she could bear to. The river first, in case it was Ankhesenamon who had taken herself away, and gone back to hunt for the imagined child in his duck’s-nest basket. She would think of crocodiles no more than she thought of the torments that Egypt could inflict on a servant who had failed to guard her mistress.

  oOo

  There was no moon tonight. The stars were hazed with the river’s moisture, swimming as through water. They shed no light worth the name. Nofret groped as best she could out of the palace and through the gate in the wall to the open lands along the river. She dared not bring a torch from one of the guard-posts; that would be a beacon to draw the guards to her.

  Luckily she knew the way. Her eyes, growing accustomed to the dark, were able to pick out the paler glimmer of the path through the shadow that was the growth of reeds along the riverbank. The water itself gleamed faintly in the starlight. She heard the whisper of it as it lapped its expanded bank. In winter there was a whole great elaborate garden running down to the diminished river, but now, in the full of the flood, the garden was a narrow stunted thing and the river as great as a sea under the stars.

  Once or twice she glanced back. The white walls of Memphis loomed behind. There was nothing ahead but river.

  No living thing moved. No night bird called, nor did a jackal cry in the place of tombs away to the west, on the other side of the city. There was only the sound of water and the whisper of wind in the reeds.

  The queen had not come here, or if she had, she was long gone. Nofret wavered, turned to go back, but paused. Down along the river’s edge, something rustled. A shadow stirred within shadow. Faint, so faint it was all but invisible, she saw a glimmer of paleness. It might be a spirit wandering lost, but spirits did not rattle the reeds, or stumble and utter a soft cry. Nofret heard distinctly the sound of a body falling.

  She had never moved so fast or with such surety in the dark. She nearly fell over the crumpled shape. It was a good body-length yet from the water, half in and half out of a bed of reeds. She hauled it back with desperate urgency, away from the gods knew what danger in the water.

  It was Ankhesenamon. She was alive, breathing deep, but unconscious. Nofret, groping along the length of her, found her hand. There was a bottle in it, loosely stoppered. The scent that rose from it made her gasp. “How in the world—”

  The scent of Leah’s potion was on Ankhesenamon’s lips, too. Her fingers were locked about the bottle. However she had found it, whatever had led her to it, she had brought it down to the river and drunk from it, as if she thought it poison and meant to drink it till she died, there by the river that was the life of Egypt.

  She had drunk most of it, unless some had spilled when she fell. Leah had assured Nofret that the drug would do no harm, but she had also urged that it be given to the queen in wine, and a few drops only, not the whole drunk undiluted from the bottle.

  She was slack, as if her bones had turned to water. Nofret gathered her up, slight weight as she was, but awkward. The palace—she should go back there, call for the physicians. But what if they were not to be trusted? What if one of them had somehow discovered the bottle and coaxed the queen to drink from it?

  So many questions. And no answers but this: a nearly empty bottle, a woman collapsed from the power of the drug, night and the river and death by drowning or in a crocodile’s jaws had she fallen a body-length closer to the water. Nofret began to walk, but not toward the palace.

  She walked down the river, north as the water ran, between the wall and the water. Maybe a god guided her feet. She wore Sobek’s amulet with Amon’s: Sobek, crocodile god, protector of travelers along the river. He might well have chosen to direct her on the right path and to make light the burden she bore, the dreaming body of her lady. But the god she went to was none of Egypt.

  She could turn still, go back to the palace, trust that her fears were false and blind chance had caused the queen to search Nofret’s belongings for a vial of what well might be poison.

  She could not trust so far. All that she trusted, either she carried in her arms or she expected to be waiting in the place that had been agreed. It was not too far to carry a drugged and dreaming woman, but far enough in the dark, on uneven ground, with fear riding her shoulder: that she was followed, that it was a trap, that what would be waiting was not a big black-bearded man in a boat but a company of soldiers.

  The quiet of the night was profound. Nofret could not ever remember such a silence. Even the water’s murmur was muted. The wind had died. The only sound was the pad of her feet on the path, and the whisper of reeds when she brushed them.

  If anyone pursued her, he did it in perfect silence. She could have heard him breathing, so still was the night. But she heard nothing. Nothing at all.

  This must be what it was to be in a god’s hand, surrounded by his protection. Perfect; absolute. Terrifying. The conviction grew in her that if she turned back, Memphis would be gone. There would be no city, no palace; only the dry land, the abode of the dead.

  She could only go forward. All doubt was gone, and irresolution with it. The palace was lost to her. The choice was made, and by no will of hers. The queen herself had made it.

  Half lost in a dream, Nofret nearly passed the place of meeting before she remembered what it was. It was a pier built on the flood, little more than a raft of reeds, a place to tie a boat to for a moment or an hour. Fishermen used it, and people who hunted birds along the river, to pause before they ventured the city’s greater harborages, or else to conceal the best of their catch from officials who might demand tribute. At night it was deserted, or so Johanan had assured her.

  It was deserted now, except for a single boat. It was small, nondescript, such a boat as a common man in Egypt might use to move about on the river: narrow prow and stern, tented deck in the middle, one long oar in the rear to steer and guide it. Nofret could not see if it was painted or ornamented. She suspected not. It must be perfectly anonymous.

  Though how anonymous it could be with such a boatman as rose up in it, she could not imagine. Big broadshouldered bearded men in desert robes were seldom seen in Egyptian boats.

  He had put off the robes and put on a scrap of loincloth. The rest—

  She gasped, loud as a shout in the silence. “Johanan! What do you do to your beard?”

  “Hush,” he said, far softer than she. He held out his arms. “Give her here. Careful now. Don’t rock us till we sink.”

  Nofret surrendered her burden as blindly as she had brought it here. Only when she was relieved of it did she think to resist. Johanan, his shorn face a dim blur in the gloom, carried the queen back to the tent and vanished beneath it. Nofret stumbled after, rocking as the boat rocked, clumsy on the water as she had not been since she was a very young tribute-maid in Egypt.

  He emerged so suddenly that she nearly cried out, caught her arm and steadied her, and eased her gently but firmly to the deck-planking. “Stay there,” he commanded her, soft as a lion’s purr.

  There was a spell on her: a spell of obedience. She sat where she was set. He moved back lightly along the boat’s length, cast off its mooring, took up the steering oar and swung into motion. She was numbly surprised to see how well he managed it. There seemed to be little that he could not do, even sail a boat on the river of Egypt.

  The boat might seem a small and common thing, but it was light on the water and remarkably swift. It caught the curre
nt with marvelous smoothness and rode it as lightly as a falcon rides the wind.

  Nofret wavered between the deck-tent and the man in the stern. Both, then, but the man first. She was steadier now, more her seamanlike self, moving back toward him where he stood at the oar.

  He loomed above her, broad shoulders and proud head crowned with stars. His beard was shaven but he had kept his hair: all of it, braided and wound like a helmet over the pale oval of his face. “Vain,” she murmured, looking up at him, “after all.”

  “Practical,” he shot back. “And short of time. There were soldiers roving the city today. Looking for nothing in particular, people said. But searching faces, and pausing when they found a man from the desert.”

  “Someone knows,” Nofret said, “or suspects.” She paused. It seemed foolish to keep whispering so far out on the wide expanse of the river, but they were still in Memphis, with far to go before they were away from it. And sound carries over water. “Johanan, I didn’t drug her and bring her out here. I found her already by the river, with the bottle in her hand.”

  “Did you tell her, then? As you were threatening to do?”

  “No.” She almost said it aloud. She reined her voice back in and went on as softly as she could. “I was a coward. I didn’t do anything. But somehow she knew. Somehow she found the bottle, and knew where to go. If this is a trap—”

  “God guard and defend us,” breathed Johanan.

  “I think we should make all the speed we can,” Nofret said. “In case—if someone heard us somehow, spied on us, and told—someone—”

  “Anyone in Egypt,” he said, “would call us traitors and kill us on sight.” He paused, head up as if testing the air. “It’s dead calm. We can’t rig a sail.”

  “We’ll row,” she said. “We can take turn and turn.”

  “I think . . .” He broke off. “Go. Talk to Grandmother.”

  “She’s here?” Nofret’s heart thudded. Leah had insisted that she would not go with them; she would only slow them. She would stay in Memphis, she had said, with some of the tomb-workers who were Apiru or their kin. Later, when it was safe, she would take some of them for guides and venture the desert.