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  By the time she came to the village, it was dusk. Her bundle had grown heavy on her head, but she forgot it in the light of lamps and torches, in the wholly unlooked-for splendor of that squalid little place in the dimness.

  If sunset had made Akhetaten more beautiful, night made the laborers’ village almost lovely. The square in the middle, by day a market and a gathering place, was full of light. A canopy was set at one end of it like a king’s pavilion. Tables were raised on the other, weighed down with bowls and platters and jars. Women brought more as Nofret came in: bread, cheese, cakes, meat, fruits of the garden and the orchard. It was a rougher wealth than a king’s banquet, but richer than one might ever expect of such a place.

  Nofret’s mouth was watering. The bread was freshly baked and richly fragrant, and somewhere a lamb was roasting: its scent coiled about her, drawing her in through a crowd of shadowy people.

  “Nofret!”

  That was Johanan, calling her name. He appeared out of the confusion of shadow and light, grinning all over his beaky face, and half pulled her off her feet. By the time she knew where she was going, she was most of the way there.

  “You have to put something on,” he was saying. She had to strain to hear him. People were singing. There were drums, timbrels, what sounded like a shepherd’s pipe, all making a shocking clamor.

  Just at the door of his house she dug in her heels. “I have something. If you would let me go, I could put it on.”

  “What, in the street?” He laughed when she scowled, damnably like her lady, and pulled her inside.

  As swift as he made her move, she still dreaded meeting his grandmother. But there was no one in the house. Johanan showed her a room behind a curtain, a place where she could dress in modesty—absurd since he had never seen her in more than a string about her middle, but she was not in a mood to quarrel.

  It was harder to get into the gown and jewels by herself than it had been with the princess to help, but Nofret managed. She hoped that her hair was not too badly disarrayed. Still smoothing the disconcerting tightness of the skirt, she slipped through the curtain, nearly into Johanan’s arms.

  His blush was worth every bit of the rest. After the first astonished glance, he patently did not know where to look.

  Now she could laugh at this boy who saw her naked without a moment’s discomfort, and yet one glimpse of her in clothes and he was struck speechless. “What,” she said, “you didn’t think I could be as civilized as this?”

  “I didn’t think—” he said thickly. “I didn’t know—I didn’t—”

  “What, am I hideous?”

  “No!” He had startled himself: he shut his mouth with a snap. But then, finding at last his wits and his courage, he said, “You are beautiful. I never expected that.”

  “You’re blind,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “You are.” He held out his hand. “Come, we’ll be late.”

  His fingers were wiry thin and surprisingly strong. They were cold, too: he was not as calm as he pretended. But neither was she. “I’m only Nofret,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Johanan. Whatever he meant by that.

  oOo

  Now this, thought Nofret, was a wedding. Not that sad strange rite in the king’s house. This, with dancing and laughter, flowers and torches, bride blushing and laughing and being now kept apart, now driven into the arms of her bridegroom. He was a handsome man, as Egyptian as the bride was of the Apiru: slender, graceful, quick on his feet. She was a little taller than he, a little broader, but he swung her up easily in the most energetic of the dances, whirling her about him till her long hair flew free of its pins and veils. He crowned her with flowers and worshipped her with kisses—such passion as no prince ever let himself show before his people.

  The bride’s eyes grew smoky, looking at him. People laughed and shouted encouragement. She was blushing still, but not as one who intended to give way to it. Her arms linked about her bridegroom’s neck. She swayed toward him.

  Someone lurched forward, it seemed to pull them apart Someone else stopped him. People were dancing, singing, feasting, but where those two were was quiet. This was the wedding. This was the rite of which the king’s marriages were pale shadows.

  “So should it always be,” said Leah the prophetess.

  Nofret had not seen her till now. She was standing beside Nofret, she and her grandson hemming Nofret in.

  And yet somehow there was nothing fearful in it, no sense that she was trapped. She was safe, rather. Protected as in walls.

  Leah smiled, mostly at the lovers but somewhat at Nofret. “This you should have,” she said, “and will, if the god is kind. The king does what he does because he can see no other way. We who were never kings, nor wished to be . . . we’re the ones who are fortunate.”

  “Is this my lesson? Am I to learn such things as a priestess does, as mysteries?” Nofret meant to mock, but it was harder than she expected. Leah seemed harmless, only an elderly woman of the desert people, and yet she was so powerful, and saw so much.

  “Every woman is a priestess,” said Leah. “Every maiden, every bride, every mother. Yes, even the grandmother who should keep her place but who never quite knows how.”

  “Her place is to be the one who sees,” Johanan said. “That’s a woman’s mystery, but I know it well enough.”

  “You know too much,” Nofret muttered.

  Leah laughed, startlingly sweet. “Doesn’t he? Boys do. Men learn to be properly ignorant.” She took Nofret by the hand. “Come, child. It’s time to dance for the bride.”

  And dance they did, all the women, the girls down to the smallest who clung to their mothers’ hands, the mothers big-bellied with child, the grandmothers long since grown past childbearing. They all danced around the bridegroom and his bride.

  The dance was the binding. Maybe the men thought the words had done that, the priest uttering blessings over them, the lamb sacrificed on the altar that faced the morning sun. The women knew better—even Nofret the foreigner, the princess’ slave. Words were only words. The dance bound soul to soul and life to life.

  The women who were fruitful, who were bearing or giving suck to children, gave of their strength. The women who had not yet borne fruit, or who would bear it no longer, offered what had been and what was to come. They set none of it in words. Words would break the spell. The music was drumbeat, heartbeat, and the pounding of feet on the earth’s breast.

  They made magic in their god’s name, the first true magic that Nofret had seen in Egypt. And it was not even Egyptian magic. It was the magic of the desert, of earth and blood and living flesh.

  It was clean, as the desert was. It was wonderful. It was all the palace was not, nor now could ever be.

  And yet Nofret went back to the palace. It was not fear of punishment. It was duty, and what Leah called necessity: the god calling her where she must go.

  As she had walked away from the setting sun, now she walked away from the sunrise. Her bundle was on her head, her steps light for all her weariness, marking the pattern of the dance in the road’s dust. A little of the magic lingered in her, or so she fancied. It carried her into the city and through the palace gate and into her lady’s presence.

  The princess barely saw her, except as a shadow in her shadow. “Meritaten is brought to bed,” she said. “It’s early—too early, no one dares to say. Pray to what gods you know. Pray she doesn’t die.”

  Nine

  Nofret had not yet come to Akhetaten when Queen Nefertiti bore the sixth of the king’s daughters. She wondered if it had been the same then and whenever the queen came to childbed—if the palace went about its business, but with a distracted air, an ear cocked toward the room from which came now and then the sound of a woman’s cry, but not yet a baby’s.

  She was not supposed to notice or to admit that she noticed. She waited on her princess. Her princess had rites in the temple to assist in, duties to perform, lessons in dancing and singing and in the reading
of the sacred writing, but her mind was not on any of them. When she made complete nonsense of a passage from the Tale of the Doomed Prince, had the prince giving birth to a crocodile instead of being menaced by one, the scribe who was her tutor sent her away to do something less taxing to mind and wits.

  The princess had her chariot made ready and ordered Nofret into it. This was not something she had done before, but she had never been forbidden, either, that Nofret knew of. Certainly she did not act as if she expected anyone to stop her.

  Just as Nofret settled herself behind her lady, as the princess took up the reins to drive out of the stableyard, a broad figure set itself in front of the horses. The horses, trusting creatures that they were, lowered their heads to search the obstacle’s hands for bits of honey-sweet.

  He rubbed their noses absently, but his eyes were on the princess. “Would you go out all alone, highness?” he asked. His voice was rough and sweet at once, a soldier’s voice but with a hint of the courtier.

  The princess lifted her chin. “General Horemheb,” she said, “you are in my way.”

  “You are unattended, highness,” he said.

  She did not glance at Nofret. That, Nofret knew, would have been an admission of weakness. One did not do such a thing with such a man. “I am as I wish to be.”

  General Horemheb took each horse by the bridle, lightly, not to threaten, but quite enough to keep them from going forward. “I’ll accompany you, highness. Come, my horses are ready and standing in the outer court.”

  So they were: a pair of stallions, much more restless and eager than the princess’ gentle mares, with a look to them that spoke of a long morning’s run already. But they were more than willing to go out again, tossing their heads and snorting and nigh pulling off his feet the groom who held them.

  Horemheb took whip and reins and sprang into the chariot in one swift graceful movement. The groom leaped out of the way. Horemheb had the stallions in hand: they champed and fretted but held still. He bowed with no irony that Nofret could detect. “After you, highness.”

  Haughty as the queen and fully as cold, the princess urged her mares forward. They trotted out willingly, disdainful of the fretting, pawing stallions.

  Where the princess would have gone without escort, Nofret did not know. Maybe to the king’s tomb. Maybe even farther out into the desert, away from any human thing, though not from human fear.

  As it was, the princess ventured no such escape. She drove sedately down the processional way, keeping a pace far slower than she would have done if left to herself—slow enough that the general was much beset to hold his stallions in.

  Ankhesenpaaten seemed oblivious. People stopped to stare as she drove by. Those who were Egyptian dropped down in homage. Those who were not, once apprised of who she was, bowed each in the fashion of his country. It was a little like wind in a field of barley, all those heads bent and bodies lowered for the princess’ passing.

  She drove from one end of the great road to the other, from gate to gate and back again. Then, still at that maddening, leisurely pace, she drove back into the palace. Her mares were not even warm. Horemheb’s stallions were sodden with sweat, white-flecked with foam. He himself was grim about the mouth, and yet his eyes were laughing.

  When both chariots stood in the stable court, the mares calmly standing, the stallions close to rearing with frustration, Horemheb bowed over the rail of his chariot. “A fair match, highness,” he said, “and a fair victory.”

  The princess raised her brows. “It was a game? I had no idea.” She stepped down from the chariot, turned her back on her would-be guardian, and walked away.

  oOo

  Once they were safe in the princesses’ house again, she let the mask fall. She wheeled on Nofret, half in laughter, half in rage. “Oh, that man! How dared he?”

  “I don’t know,” said Nofret. “What did he dare? To protect you? That was wise, I thought.”

  “Oh,” said her lady, disgusted. “Protection. From what? This is my father’s own city. No one would dare touch me here.”

  “You don’t know that. Nor does he.”

  “I do know it,” the princess said sharply. “I know I’m safe. How dared he imply that I’m not?”

  “Maybe,” said Nofret, “because he knows something you don’t.”

  The princess was notably smaller than Nofret, but she could loom as tall as any warrior. It was sheer royal arrogance, and refusal to be cowed by anything so insignificant as size or strength or length of arm. She stood loftily upright and fixed Nofret with a fierce black stare. “What does he know that the king’s own spies don’t?”

  “Very little, probably,” said Nofret. “But they’re not telling your father everything, and he’s telling you even less. He has enemies. Many of them. They aren’t always going to let this city be. Not when most of the people in it still secretly worship other gods than his.”

  The princess drew a slow breath. “You shouldn’t have told me that. Not if I’m not to be trusted.”

  “I trust you,” Nofret said. “Besides, what will the king do? Massacre everybody who still says a prayer to Bes or Hathor or even Amon when there’s need of a god’s ear? He closed temples, struck out the names of the gods—but he hasn’t had anyone killed.”

  “Except the gods,” said the princess. She sighed. She seemed to shrink, to become the delicate-boned child again, the king’s third and still unwedded daughter. “It’s not that he did it. You should understand that. It’s that he did it.”

  “You don’t like General Horemheb,” said Nofret.

  “It has nothing to do with liking or disliking,” the princess said. “The man is a commoner. He has his eye on higher things—and he means to get them.”

  “Higher things?” Nofret asked. “Such as a princess for a wife?”

  “That will not happen,” the princess said.

  She was sure of that and of herself. Nofret hoped she would not be disappointed. Kings—even, possibly, a king who married his own daughters to keep the king-right in the family—were slaves to expedience. And it might be expedient to give a daughter to a strong fighting man, a general of armies who might, once bound, assure that those armies did not muster in support of other gods than the king’s.

  It could be coming to that. Nofret did not know, could only guess: nor had she seen the temples that were closed, or heard the cries of the priests. But what she had heard was clear enough. The people in Akhetaten were not well content with their king. If they were less than pleased, who had the benefit of his living and constant presence, than the rest of Egypt must be unhappy indeed.

  “If the general has his eye on you,” Nofret said, “then you could do worse than to indulge his fancy. There’s no need to say you’ll marry him, or even indicate that you know he’s thinking of it. But you can let him think he has some hope someday, when you’re old enough to contemplate such things. He’s a strong man. He’ll keep anyone else from troubling you.”

  “What, I should lead him on?” The princess looked ready to slap Nofret, but it seemed that she thought better of it. “He’s a dreadful man. He’s old. He smells of horses.”

  “Horses smell lovely,” said Nofret.

  “Old horses,” the princess said. “Filthy, sweaty horses. Horses that haven’t been washed since they were foaled.”

  “That’s still better than some priest with bloody hands from the sacrifice. Or,” said Nofret, “the king.”

  That was ill judged. The princess, who had been hovering on the edge between child and queen, became again all royal. “The king is king and god. And,” she said, “he is always clean.”

  “But what he does isn’t—” Nofret stopped herself. Her lady was Egyptian, and royal Egyptian at that. She had never understood, and never would, how deep a revulsion was in Nofret. That much she and all her kin had made clear. Her fear was the child-bride’s fear of being brought to womanhood too soon, not the fear of any god’s curse.

  Nofret’s stomach was
knotting again. She cursed it wearily and said, “You won’t marry him as long as the king lives—you can be sure of that. Your father would never allow it, even if you wanted it. But he doesn’t have to know that. He’s strong, he has soldiers, he can guard you against anyone who thinks to threaten you. Isn’t that worth a little inconvenience?”

  “There is nothing to protect me against,” said Ankhesenpaaten, calmly and royally stubborn.

  oOo

  There was nothing more to be said—not, at least, just then. Nofret did not intend to give up the fight. But she could withdraw for a while, and wait.

  It was a calmer waiting than the vigil over the princess Meritaten. This baby had been in a fever of haste to begin its arrival, but now that its mother had taken to her bed, it decided to take its time. Nor did it help that she was young and small. When she was a grown woman she would have her mother’s wonderful wide hips and bountiful breasts. But she was hardly more than a child.

  Ankhesenpaaten, thwarted of her escape from the city, went to sleep instead. Nofret envied her that facility. She herself, as always, was wide awake and fretting. She did not love the princess Meritaten or even greatly like her. But Meritaten was in pain and fear, as strong as smoke in the air.

  Nofret thought of running away as she had before. Her lady had tried it and failed. Nofret, who might have better luck, found herself unable to move so far, but unable to rest.

  There was nothing she could do for Meritaten. She could not even go as far as the princess’ door. There were guards at the gates of the queens’ house, and no one went in who did not have clear and present purpose.

  Nofret, as the third princess’ maid, belonged with that princess and not, the guards made it very clear, with the princess within. She did not even know why she pressed for admittance. She knew a little of midwifery, but Meritaten had whole companies of physicians and midwives to attend her. Nofret would only have been an encumbrance.