King and Goddess Page 6

  Nehsi bowed. “Lady,” he said.

  And now maybe she would let him go back to his too brief, too often interrupted rest.

  He should have known better. “Stay with me,” she said, “till she comes back or you go after her. I’ve no sleep in me. Where’s the board? We’ll play at Hounds and Jackals till the sun comes up.”

  Nehsi swallowed a sigh, and the yawn that went with it. The board was where she had left it the last time she challenged him to a match, on a table in her sitting-room. He fetched it and set it before her, slipping the tall counters from their place inside the golden board: ivory hounds, ebon jackals like images of Anubis who watches over the dead. It was her humor to choose the jackals and leave him the hounds, ebony hand on ivory counters as they pursued one another round the board.

  He was direly short on sleep and growing short on temper, which made him a deadly player of Hounds and Jackals. He was not in the least minded to let her win, even if she would have suffered it. And win he did, thrice over, and the fourth time she won by a jackal’s whisker. And after that the sun came up, and still no Isis bowing at her lady’s feet, telling in her soft sweet voice of her night’s lessoning of the king.

  ~~~

  Nehsi had never been a coward, but the thought of approaching the king’s chambers and demanding to see the king’s new concubine gave him more than a moment’s pause. Still he had his orders, and he was an obedient servant.

  The gods favored him, though perhaps they mocked the queen. Just as Nehsi girded himself to venture the king’s portion of the inner palace, the queen’s door-guard let in Isis herself. Nehsi, whom fortune had placed at the door as she entered it, could see her unguarded face, the face he doubted very much that she would show the queen. It had the look of a cat in cream: sleek and richly sated.

  Before the queen she was properly demure, keeping her head down lest her eyes betray her. The queen, still in her kilt but with maids fluttering about, trying to coax her toward the baths and the day’s toilet, stood over her like an image of a conquering king. “Well?” she demanded.

  “Lady,” Isis said, soft and seeming shy, “by your leave I did well. He said that he was pleased. He asked me to come back tonight.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes, lady, I—I tried to do what you said, lady. I made him take a bath first, and anoint himself, not too heavily. He was angry, lady, but it only made him the more eager. He said that I was insolent. Beauty, he said, excuses much, but I should remember who he is. I told him that I never forget.”

  Hatshepsut frowned, but she was nodding: reluctant but accepting the girl’s skill. If of course she told the truth; but what profit could she see in a lie? The slant of her glance was not honest, but it was not false, either. She was telling less than she might but inventing nothing, in Nehsi’s judgment.

  “Did you rein him in,” the queen asked, “and insist that he learn the virtues of gentleness?”

  “I tried, lady,” Isis said. “He was clumsy, if I may say it, but not cruel. No one ever told him what to do before. He didn’t like it at first, but I taught him to think better of it.”

  “Did you?” Hatshepsut studied her. She did not look up, continued to fix her eyes on the floor, with glances aside: at Nehsi, at the maids, at the glitter of a golden necklace on the queen’s table.

  She coveted that, Nehsi thought. The king had not sent her away empty-handed: there was something plaited into the thick masses of her hair, something that let slip a gleam of brightness.

  The queen, who could be very quick of eye when she chose, saw the direction of Isis’ glance. She beckoned to the chief of her maidservants. “Mayet, my lesser jewel-box, if you please.”

  When Mayet had brought it, the queen plucked from it a pretty thing, a necklace of blue beads and golden blossoms. Isis received it with open pleasure. “Wear it and prosper,” Hatshepsut said, “and remember always why you do this. Now go. The king will want you near him; see that he has his desire.”

  Isis bowed to the floor, slipped the necklace about her neck and backed away. When she came to her feet past the door, still just within Nehsi’s sight, she was stroking the necklace and smiling a sly cat-smile.

  8

  Senenmut had dreamed when he was very young of a royal hunt in all its glory. The king, Senenmut imagined, went out in his golden boat with his court and his princes and all their servants and hangers-on. He sat at ease on his throne with the Two Crowns on his head, arranged in the impossible contortion of his painted images, bending a golden bow and bringing down his quarry with an arrow tipped with gold.

  Senenmut’s dream was not so very far from the truth. Gold of course was too soft to keep either edge or point, but the shafts of the king’s arrows were certainly gilded, and likewise the bow. He did not keep to his throne however; he preferred to stand in the prow, face to the wind, while his beaters sent up clamoring flocks for him to shoot. When he signaled by lowering his bow that he had had enough, the rest of his companions could take what quarry was left: always enough, for the beds of reeds were rich in waterfowl.

  Senenmut could not see the city from here, though they were not remarkably far from it. They might have been all alone in a wilderness of reeds and river, bounded by the bleak cliffs of the Red Land, the desert that held the Black Land of Egypt in its hard dry hands.

  He had not expected to enjoy himself. And yet he was almost happy, sitting at the queen’s feet with a book across his knees, dictating to her while she wrote on a bit of papyrus and her husband engrossed himself in his hunt.

  A canopy shielded them both from the sun; there was a breeze playing over the water, a breath of coolness. The shouts of men, the cries of birds alarmed or wounded, mingled with the lapping of waves and the rustle of reeds and the sound of his own voice reciting a hymn to Amon. He even heard, faintly, the scritch of her pen on papyrus, and the soft snores of Hapuseneb the priest, who, like Senenmut, had obeyed the queen’s command to accompany her on this hunt.

  She was not as content as Senenmut was. However dazzled by sun and honor and royal splendor he might be, he could not fail to see the shadows under her eyes. Paint obscured but did not altogether conceal them.

  Her Nubian was not with her, he noticed. Another guardsman stood closest to her, a silent and expressionless Egyptian.

  She was attentive enough to Senenmut’s teaching, focused on it perhaps as a refuge against tedium. Hunting clearly did not delight her as it did the king. She hardly glanced up when a whoop marked a particularly shrewd shot; she grimaced slightly as a goose, pierced to the heart, fell broken-winged nearly at her feet.

  The king seemed oblivious to his queen’s lack of enthusiasm. Nothing could free him entirely from the bonds of his kingship, but here, away from the city and the press of the court, he showed himself a different man. He was lighter of heart, quicker, more eager; he laughed at a sally, and cast one back in kind.

  None of it was particularly witty. It was soldier’s humor, more crude than elegant.

  How he must love to ride on campaign, Senenmut thought, watching him as he received the news that a herd of river-horses had been found just ahead. He had come prepared to hunt water-birds, but the larger prey brought a gleam to his eye. He barely hesitated before he leaped into one of the smaller boats. His weapons-bearer scrambled after, and as many of his guards as the boat could carry.

  The barge could not follow where he went. The thickets of reeds were too dense, the channels too narrow. It moored where the bank was almost clear of reeds, where might have been a village once but was no longer: a stand of date-palms, a mound or two that might have been the remnants of a mudbrick house. The desert had encroached on it, but nearest the river it was green still.

  The queen and her attendants, undismayed to be left behind, settled to their various pursuits: reading, sleeping, playing on the harp or singing to it. She alone seemed restless. She was thinking, Senenmut guessed, of the duties she had left behind by her husband’s order, the petitione
rs gathering in the empty audience-hall, the scribes and clerks waiting to inundate her with papyrus. He knew enough of her by now to know that she felt the dereliction of her duty. What else she felt for it, he could not tell.

  Some people were cursed to be perpetually dutiful. Senenmut, who shared the curse, found himself closer to liking the queen than he had been before. She did not know how to dally about, either, nor what to do with herself when she was not engaged in something useful.

  Her face mastered itself, maintained its expression of royal blandness, but she could not seem to govern her glances. He watched defiance grow in her eyes. The noise of the hunt had faded up the river; the wind that blew from the north carried the last of it away.

  It was remarkably easy to read her. One only needed to watch the eyes; and the slight movements of the hands, clenching and unclenching on the arms of her throne. Yesterday she had done all as his majesty desired. Ignored once she was trapped on the throne beside his, unregarded except as mute companion to his splendor, she had whiled the day in deadly tedium.

  Today, with her scribe to instruct her and her musicians to play for her and Hapuseneb the priest for amusement, she was all the less willing to be counted among the furnishings of the king’s barge. Hapuseneb rattled on at her, some charming nonsense about a monkey and a baboon and the god Thoth. Senenmut barely listened; so, he suspected, did she.

  He watched her resolve harden. She silenced the priest with a gesture, beckoned to the steersman. “Return us to the city,” she said.

  The steersman stared at her. The others were mute.

  Not all were hers. Some were the king’s, too many for the smaller boat, or too languid to contest for a place in it.

  She faced the steersman with all the arrogance of her blood and breeding. “Do as I say,” she commanded him.

  For a moment Senenmut thought that the man would resist. But he was only startled. At length he fumbled a bow. “Yes, lady. Yes—yes, lady. At once, lady.”

  Someone sucked in a breath, perhaps in outrage. No one spoke. She was, after all, the queen. The king was not there to countermand her. He would perforce return home in lesser state than was strictly fitting, but the queen was in no mood to care for that.

  Rowing against the freshening wind, taking what aid the current could offer, the royal barge made surprisingly good speed back to Thebes. Senenmut was a little sorry to see the city’s walls ahead. He had conceived a fondness, perhaps even a passion, for the freedom of the river.

  Still he was as duty-bound as the queen, and there was work to do: two kingdoms’ worth. Someday, he swore to himself, he would be rich enough to have not only a boat for the river but a house beside it, an estate worthy of a prince, where he could take his rest from the vexations of power.

  ~~~

  The king was as angry as Hatshepsut had expected; as Nehsi had known he would be. He came back late, as the sun was setting, with a king of river-horses dead and flyblown in the boat behind him. There would be no feast tonight, although the cooks took the river-horse to prepare it for the morrow.

  The queen had taken her dinner in her garden by the lotus-pool, where she liked to dine if she was alone. The king found her there. He came with few attendants, in little state, wearing the lapis-and-gold striped linen of the nemes-headdress and the simplicity of a soldier’s kilt.

  He stood over her as she sat by the pool with the remains of her dinner. He was not tall, none of his line were, but he was taller than she, even if she had stood; and he was using every finger-length of it. “You left me out there,” he said.

  She looked up slowly, taking her time about it, as if she had no fear in the world. In anyone else it would have been insolence. She said in a sweet soft voice that she never used with anyone she liked or trusted, “You had your hunt and your guards and your fleet. I had duties that called me till I had no choice but to answer. Did you know that there’s a cattle plague in the Delta? Or that the fourth and fifth nomes are quarrelling again, and their nomarchs would go to war if they could? Or that the priests of Amon and the priests of Ptah are contesting precedence even into the halls of audience? Are you aware of any of that?”

  He might have struck her, but her eyes were too steady. She had never been afraid of anything but the dark. He settled for a slash of the hand that was more petulant than royally disdainful, and a curl of the lip as he said, “I am aware of it. Must I concern myself with it every moment of every day? May not even a god enjoy a respite?”

  “Certainly,” she said. “But not two days running, and not in such haste that it looks like the whim of a child. You left lords and princes dangling while you indulged yourself. One of us at least had to repair the insult.”

  “Nothing is an insult if a god wills it,” the king said haughtily.

  “You,” she said, “are such a child. Go play with your wooden soldiers, and leave the rest of us to tend your kingdom.”

  He drew himself rigidly erect. Whatever words might have flooded out of him, he was able or willing to utter none of them. He turned on his heel and stalked out, precisely like the child she had called him.

  ~~~

  Nehsi remembered at last to breathe. The queen’s eyes were fixed on the place where her husband had stood. If a glance could be a sword, his blood would have poured out on the earth.

  It was a long while before she spoke. When she did, it was so quietly, so calmly, that one could almost miss the white heat of passion in it. “Why? Why was it all given to him, and only the dregs to me? What is so splendid, so wonderful, so all-powerful about a man, that even a puling child can be king, but a woman cannot even dream of it?”

  There were answers to that. Priests had them in plenty, and kings, and soldiers too. Nehsi kept his tongue between his teeth. If he knew every answer a man could imagine, then his lady knew it, too.

  Hatshepsut held up her hands. They were small hands, oval, long-fingered but broad in the palm, more strong than delicate. For all the struggles of her maids to keep them white and soft, they were more like a boy’s than a woman’s. “These can bend a bow,” she said, “hold the reins of a chariot-team, clasp a scepter. What can his do that these cannot? Bend a bigger bow? I can bend a bigger one than my scribe can, I’ll wager you that. Master a team of half-broken stallions? I’ve done that, and done it well. Wield the scepter in the hall of audience? What else did I do today while my great royal husband, my lord of the Two Lands, my living Horus, amused himself hunting river-horses in the reeds?”

  She rose and began to pace. She looked remarkably like the king in one of his own fits of restlessness: a likeness she would not have been pleased to acknowledge. “He is older than I,” she said. “But I am the daughter of the royal wife. He is the child of a concubine. He holds kingship only through me. And does he thank me for it? Does he even notice that I exist?” She tossed her head in scorn. “Oh, certainly! When I get in the way of his pleasure—then he remembers me.”

  Nehsi considered for some time before venturing to speak. She paced, prowling around the garden. She plucked a blossom, drew in its scent, let it fall into the lotus pool.

  “Lady,” he said, “the gods have made him king. There must be gentler ways to remind him of it.”

  She rounded upon him. “What? Do you mean that girl, that Isis? As if she could be anything more than a goddess’ plaything. Would you have her flatter him into doing his duty?”

  “She might beguile his nights sufficiently that he can endure the days of drudgery.”

  “It is not drudgery. It is the price the gods exact for making him one of them. It’s a great thing, a noble thing, a thing of beauty and splendor, to wear the Two Crowns; to be king of Egypt. And he,” she said, “has no faintest conception of the honor. Only of the burden—which he far too often evades.”

  “It’s no burden to you, either?” asked Nehsi. He honestly wanted to know.

  “Of course it is a burden,” she said impatiently. “I won’t run away from it for that.”

&nb
sp; “Do you want to be king?”

  She stared at him as if she had never seen him before. He wondered briefly if she ever had. High ones, he had noticed, often treated their servants as they did their animals and their furnishings: took them for granted, and never truly looked at them, nor cared to know what thoughts lay behind the familiar faces.

  True enough, most servants were content with that. But Nehsi was a fool. Nehsi wanted to be seen for himself.

  It was a surprising discomfort to be visible. He worried suddenly that his kilt was crooked, his belt ill fastened, his cheeks too roughly shaven.

  He was impeccable as he always strove to be. She could not see the flush on his cheeks, either, or—he hoped—read his expression.

  At much too long last she answered the question he had asked. “What does it matter whether I want to be king? I never can be. The least of the laborers in the fields is more likely than I to wear the Two Crowns. He has only to marry me and to claim the throne, and it is his. I who am a woman—I can never be more than the king’s wife.”

  “That is not so little,” Nehsi said.

  “But is it enough?” she demanded. “Is it, Nehsi? Is it?” He could not answer her. She did it for him.

  “It must be, mustn’t it? Since the gods have ordained that he be king, and I be his queen.”

  The words hinted at resignation, but her voice was sharp still with rebellion. She went on pacing, silent now, ignoring him. He was invisible again: a chair she had no mind to sit in, an image in ebony of a forgotten king.

  It was better than being seen, pierced to the heart by those big dark eyes.

  Oh, yes. He was in love with his headstrong young queen. It would never be more than it was now, nor did he wish it to be. She trusted him. She told him things that no one else could know. Even this: that she could have worn the Two Crowns with far more grace than her husband ever had.