Pillar of Fire Page 9

  Still she hung about. The garden court was hot as the sun bent toward the west, the air still, with that flavor of dust and dung which was distinctly Egypt. Even the heavy scent of flowers could not quite obscure it.

  Through the humming of bees, she thought she heard a sound. A gardener, probably, venturing the day’s heat to perform some mystery of his trade. Everyone else who could be was asleep or resting.

  The sound came again. It was like a catch of breath. It could be one of the monkeys. Or a cat. Or, thought Nofret as she moved toward it, a child trying to cry quietly.

  She trod softly down the line of fruit-trees, past the pool with fish in it, to the rose garden. Inside that prickly wall, under an arch of blossoms, huddled the child who had been weeping.

  And yet, in the king’s mind, this was no child at all. This was his second daughter, his second child-queen, Meketaten. She was robed, jeweled, wigged as a queen, but the face that turned upward at Nofret’s approach was that of a young girl, a child, eleven years old. The eyepaint that even children wore, the paint of cheeks and lips, had all run and smeared.

  Nofret had never been adept at soothing crying children. Practicality suited her better. She looked about for something to wipe Meketaten’s face clean, found nothing more useful than the princess’ own gauzy shawl. Meketaten sat mute while Nofret scrubbed away the paint, not wincing though the linen was inclined to scratch.

  Once the paint was gone, or mostly, her face was starkly pale. Her body looked odd, misshapen, like the image of her father carved or painted on every wall. She was protecting her middle, Nofret realized, with her odd huddled posture, half sitting, half lying among the roses.

  “Let me guess,” Nofret said, deliberately rough, to startle Meketaten awake. “Nobody’s paying any attention to you, they’re all caught up with Meritaten, and you hurt, and you’re scared. Is the baby coming?”

  Meketaten’s face did not change, but her body stiffened. “You have no elegance of expression,” she said.

  “Gods forbid I ever should,” said Nofret. She laid hands on the bulge of belly. Meketaten uncoiled like a cobra, striking hard and viciously fast.

  But Nofret was a warrior’s daughter, and she had had brothers who meant to be warriors. She was faster, and stronger, too. And she had a gift that her father called the warrior’s gift, to see slow and clear even in the heat of action. She saw what Meketaten maybe wished least for her to see.

  There was blood on the fine white gown, blood that could only come from something very wrong with the child that Meketaten carried. Nofret did not pause to think, even to recover from the force of Meketaten’s attack. As Meketaten sank with a gasp—pain, shock, something of both—Nofret caught her and lifted her. She was a light weight for Nofret’s sturdiness, all bones and skin like a bird.

  Once Nofret had her in hand, she stopped struggling and lay breathing hard, with a catch in it that Nofret did not like. When she shut her eyes and let her head fall back, Nofret nearly dropped her. She looked like a dead thing.

  But she was still breathing, still conscious. She said in a thread of a voice, “Let me lie in the sun. The sun will make me strong. The sun will—stop—”

  “You don’t need a sunbath,” Nofret said. “You need a midwife. And quickly.”

  “No,” said Meketaten. “This is the king’s son. He will be born when his proper time comes. He won’t be born now.”

  “I don’t think he’s listening to you,” Nofret said, striding away from the roses toward the queens’ house.

  oOo

  This time the guards let her pass. Meketaten was her surety. A glance at the princess’ face persuaded the chief of the guards to send a man at the run for a midwife or at the very least a healer-priest. Nofret did not waste time in thanking him for having eyes in his head. She walked straight through the guards, who at the last instant had the wits to open the door before she ran into it, and made what speed she could to a room with a bed in it.

  The bed probably belonged to someone other than Meketaten: it was smaller and much plainer than a princess would insist on. It was big enough for the purpose. Anyone who came to remonstrate, Nofret put to work opening shutters, wielding fans, fetching necessities.

  One servant had the wits to bring wine still cool from its jar, thinned with good water. Nofret saw her at first only as a shadow, a hand with a cup in it, holding the cup to Meketaten’s lips. Then, abruptly, she came into focus.

  “Tama!” said Nofret, startled. “Why aren’t you—”

  “They don’t need me,” said Princess Meritaten’s maid, “nor want to hear what anyone knows, that she’s killing herself to give the king another daughter.”

  “I am not,” said Meketaten, startling them both. Nofret at least had thought her too racked with pain to hear.

  “Not you, highness,” said Tama. “Your sister.”

  “Not I,” said Meketaten. “I won’t die. I’ll have a son.” Someone small, wiry, and preoccupied thrust Nofret aside. Nofret noticed the amulet of Taweret, whose province was childbirth. No one else seemed to, or would admit it.

  She was being crowded away from the bed. There were more midwives than the one. And blood. There was always blood in a birthing, but should there be so much?

  Tama, larger and better placed, held her ground at the princess’ side. Nofret pressed against the wall. Tama’s dark face was clear in a shaft of light, intent, almost rapt. Slowly Nofret understood its expression. It was grief.

  The first wail brought Nofret bolt upright. It was like no infant’s she had ever heard. Tama’s head was thrown back. She was keening as mourners did before the dead.

  “No,” said Nofret. “No, she’s not. She hasn’t even made a sound.”

  No one heard her. The midwives worked feverishly. One chanted what must have been a spell. It made no sense otherwise. They had knives. They would cut—were cutting—

  Not only Tama was keening. Other servants, silly sheep, were yowling, too. None of them was doing anything useful.

  Nofret leaped on them, slapping, thrusting, cursing, driving them out. They went like the fools they were, weeping and caterwauling. “Princess Meketaten!” they wailed. “Princess Meketaten is dead!”

  Ten

  Princess Meketaten was dead. Her child, the daughter whom she never saw, tiny and perfectly formed, turned its face to the light of the lamps and died, too young and small to live beyond the womb.

  In a room much richer, by the light of many more lamps, Princess Meritaten delivered herself of a daughter. The child was small, but never as small as Meketaten’s, and frail; but she lived and breathed, and she bore without flinching the prayers and magic of the priests. For all anyone knew, they succeeded in making her stronger.

  Her father named her, taking her up in his hands: “Meritaten,” he said. “Meritaten as her mother is, Meritaten-ta-Sherit.”

  What joy anyone had in her, another daughter born in the hour of sister-aunt and cousin-sister’s death, Nofret could not imagine. The shrieking and wailing below seemed not to have impinged on anyone in Meritaten’s presence until after the child was born and named. Then someone troubled to listen, or someone else dared to approach the king with news that he could not have looked for.

  No one had feared for Meketaten. No one had taken great notice of her, except to sacrifice her to her father’s craving for a son. Now that she was dead, she was a stronger presence than she had ever been in life.

  Nefertiti came first to the room where Meketaten was lying, walking with grace as she always did, but carrying herself as if she would shatter. People who had come to stare, to shriek, to fling themselves to their knees and beat their thighs in grief, fell back before the queen’s coming. For all the notice she took of them, she might have been alone.

  She bent over the small shrunken figure in the bed, the even smaller and more shrunken one laid beside it. One long delicate finger brushed first one cheek, then the other. The beautiful eyes closed.

  Nofret half-
stepped forward, ready to catch the queen if she fainted. But she was stronger than that. Her face was stark white under its paint. Her body swayed, but she kept her feet.

  She did not speak. That was for the king, coming soon after her. He had run as she had been too dignified to do, straight from the living daughters to the two who were dead.

  He dropped to his knees beside the bed, took Meketaten’s hand as gently as if she had been alive, and said, “My child. Oh, my child. Could you not have waited for the god to come for you?”

  And what else had the god done, Nofret wondered, but that?

  She bit her tongue till it bled, before she said something that would see her flayed alive. Soon enough she had sufficient to do: her lady came trailing servants and sisters. Their wailing rang within those narrow walls. It tried to seize Nofret, to sweep her away with it, but she was too solidly stubborn.

  The princess was purely out of her head. Every fear that had ever beset her, every anxiety she had had from the moment her father made her sisters his wives, was gathered in this one place. If Nofret had not caught and held her, she would have rent her cheeks and her breast, then flung herself—at her sister who was dead, at her father whose folly had killed her, Nofret did not know and did not greatly care. She fought blindly and with dismaying strength, but Nofret was stronger.

  If the queen saw, she gave no sign of it. She seemed to see only the dead. The king knelt and rocked from side to side, a silent, senseless dance of grief.

  One would think, Nofret thought, that no royal child had ever died before. Had the king thought that by building his city all new and giving it a new god, he could keep death from touching him?

  Ankhesenpaaten might have thought it, if the king had not. She sagged in Nofret’s arms, weeping helplessly. Nofret’s own eyes were dry, but her throat ached with the tears that refused to be shed.

  Someone was going to have to turn practical very soon. It was night now, and cool as nights were in the desert, even in high summer. But the sun would rise, and with it the heat.

  Even as Nofret thought of that and wondered who would have the sense to send for the embalmers, someone spoke. He did not speak loudly, and yet his voice cut through the wailing, muting it. “You there, fetch the embalmers. You—see that the bodies are washed and readied. You, tend the queen; you, the king. Where are the children’s nurses? Fetch them.” And when obedience was not instant: “Move!”

  That bellow had been honed to pierce the clamor of a battlefield. Here in the palace it shook the walls, cut off the wailing, and put most of the crowding people to flight.

  Nofret found that she was clinging to her lady nigh as tightly as her lady clung to her. Her ears were ringing.

  General Horemheb surveyed the remnants of the field with a grim eye. Nofret could almost hear him wondering what anyone would do if he had not been there to rouse them. Soft pampered feckless fools. No warrior would be as weak as they were.

  And yet, whatever he might be thinking, to the king he was softly polite, easing him away as the embalmers came with their bier. The king was docile, surprisingly so. Nofret might have expected him to fight, to cling to his daughter’s body. But he yielded without a struggle. He was weeping unashamedly.

  Nofret took Horemheb for an example and half-carried, half-dragged her own princess away. Ankhesenpaaten was notably less willing than her father. Nofret set her teeth and firmed her grip and kept on.

  oOo

  She got as far as the princesses’ chambers before Ankhesenpaaten broke free and bolted. Nofret sped after her, but she was lighter, faster, and more agile. It was all Nofret could do to keep her in sight.

  She did not run, as Nofret had expected, toward the queens’ rooms. For all her blindness of grief, she was aware of what she did: she darted round guards and servants, eluded any who snatched at her.

  She seemed to have a purpose. She ran straight and swift, out of the palace, into the vast chain of courts and shrines that was the Great Temple of the Aten. It was deep night there, but the priests were getting ready for the dawn. Already many were awake and in the shrines, mourning the death of the king’s child-wife.

  The princess turned not toward the great altar with its heaps of offerings and its lamps that burned from dark to dawn, but toward one of the lesser shrines. It was little more than a pavilion in a courtyard, such as a prince might set up beside the pool in which he bathed; but instead of water, the bather bathed in light.

  There was no light now, except that of a lamp beside the pavilion. The princess flung herself on the couch there, drew into a knot and lay breathing hard but otherwise still.

  Nofret stood swaying, half furious, half afraid, but her lady did not move or speak. Slowly Nofret sank to the pavement beside the couch. If the princess got up, she would have to step over Nofret to escape. But she seemed to have come where she meant to come, and to be content to lie there. Even, after a while, to sleep.

  Nofret slid in and out of a drowse. Each time she started awake, Ankhesenpaaten lay as before, coiled about her middle, asleep or skillfully feigning it.

  No one came to disturb her. The night passed with dragging slowness. The stars faded. Little by little the sky lightened: Egypt’s endless sky, pure empty vault, not even a cloud to mar it. Nofret was forgetting how the sky could be in Hatti and Mitanni, forgetting the touch of rain, the memory of cold and snow and the knife-edge of wind in the uplands of Hatti. Only Egypt was real, the river and the sand, the rain that fell so seldom as to be a marvel when it came.

  This that she lay in was a sunrise pavilion, a place of worship and of drawing in strength from the sun’s first rays. As the sun came at last, reaching long fingers over the temple’s wall, the princess stirred and uncoiled.

  Nofret tensed. But the princess only lay on her back after so long on her side, and stretched out her arms as if to embrace the sun. It washed her in light.

  She lay for a long while, so long that Nofret almost drowsed again. But some instinct kept Nofret awake, held her on watch.

  The princess convulsed. Nofret sprang. She sat upright, rigid in Nofret’s hands, oblivious to them. When after a long moment she made no other move, Nofret drew back, but slowly.

  The princess was not aware of her maid at all. She stared straight into the sun, strong as it was even so close to the horizon. “Father Aten,” she said. “Father Aten, you lied. You gave my sisters no sons. You took Meketaten. You lied.”

  “Your father lied,” said Nofret, “or heard what he wanted to hear, what the god never meant to say.”

  “The Aten lied,” said the princess. “He killed my sister.”

  “Your father—” Nofret began, but she stopped. Ankhesenpaaten was not listening. She did not want to listen. Idiot. It was not her god who was at fault, but her fool of a father.

  “Maybe,” said the princess, “there is no Aten. Maybe there is nothing more than Amon-Re, and Amon-Re is angry with my father. So he gives him lies.”

  Since Nofret had never been a devotee of the Aten, she could hardly defend him to her lady. She held her tongue.

  “Lies,” said the princess. “The god lies. What if he lies to me? What if I can’t tell? What if he kills me?”

  “Not if I can help it,” said Nofret grimly.

  The princess turned to stare. Nofret was startled. She had been thinking herself unregarded, but those eyes with their bruise-dark shadows were piercingly keen and very much aware of her. “What can you do?” the princess demanded.

  “Whatever I can,” Nofret said.

  “Why? You don’t love me. If I died you could escape.”

  “Where would I go? Back to Hatti on foot, naked and alone?”

  “You don’t love me at all,” said the princess.

  “Does that matter?” asked Nofret. “As long as I look after you, do you care what I think of you?”

  “Yes,” said the princess. “I want you not to hate me.”

  “I never hated you,” Nofret said.

  “You h
ate us all. I see how you look at us, how you run away to be with your Apiru. Are they more to your taste than we are, with their beards and their robes and their reek of goats?”

  That was grief, Nofret told herself. Grief and anger, striking at the one target that could not properly strike back.

  “I don’t hate you,” Nofret said carefully. “I don’t— admire—your father for what he’s done, and yes, I’ve run away from that, but I came back.”

  “Because you had nowhere else to go.”

  “Princess,” said Nofret. “Highness. Do you want a screaming argument? Do you think that would bring Meketaten back?”

  For a moment Nofret was sure that her lady would leap on her. The princess did not move, did not look at Nofret but glared into the fierce glare of the sun. “I wish I had died instead of Meketaten.”

  “You do not,” said Nofret. “You wish Meketaten had never died at all.”

  “I wish—” The princess closed her eyes. Tears ran from beneath the lids. “I wish no one ever died! Why did she have to? We were all busy worrying about Meritaten. Nobody saw that Meketaten wasn’t well. Why didn’t we see? Why didn’t someone say something?”

  Nofret had tried, but no one had listened. She did not say so. There was no use in it.

  Her lady wept sitting up with her eyes shut, rocking slightly, back and forth, back and forth. Her father had done the same thing on his knees by Meketaten’s body. She did not seem any more aware of it than he had been.

  Nofret crouched where she had been for so long, saying nothing, powerless to offer anything but her presence. Maybe that was enough. Maybe it did not matter at all.

  Eleven

  Meritaten’s daughter lived and seemed to thrive, and Meritaten herself recovered her strength, if slowly. Much of that slowness, surely, was grief.

  The six daughters of Akhenaten and Nefertiti had been the six pillars on which the world of Akhetaten rested—so the songs said. Now one was broken and the rest tottered, unable to stand.