The She-King: The Complete Saga

by L. M. Ironside

  Happily, a brazier had been lit earlier in the evening. The oil in the bronze dish was low, a dark and shallow pool of honey-colored light, burned nearly away while the feast went on and on. The flame sputtered. A fire box waited floor, full of twigs, striking stones, and a jug of oil. She dismissed the guards back to their post and lifted the jug herself, trickled new oil carefully into the charred bowl, watched as the flame resurrected. The growing light revealed another brazier further along the wall. She filled it, then carried a burning twig to it, lit the oil; its pool of light reached yet another brazier. When the third was burning, the red-orange glow showed her an empty cavern of a room. All of Meritamun’s fine things were gone, moved to a large estate to the south, which she would now share with Nefertari. The gallery of the chamber murmured with the same deep echoes that woke in temples when the priests had left their duties and only the lone worshiper remained.

  The floor was exquisitely tiled in bits of faience; an image of Mut with her perfect white wings outstretched spanned the length of the room, more than twice as long as Ahmose was tall. Several doors were set into the walls around her. She gazed at the bare walls a moment, helpless, paralyzed with exhaustion. One door must lead to her bed chamber. She chose one and headed toward it with hesitant steps. The sound of her sandals on the tiles rang too loud in her ears. When these apartments had been Meritamun’s and full of rich, ornate things, Ahmose had never noticed how large and grand the room itself was. It took an eternity just to walk across Mut’s figure to the line of doors.

  Ahmose was lucky. The first door she tried revealed the bed chamber, nearly as large as the anteroom from which she had come. To her delighted pleasure, there was no need for a brazier here. The rear wall was cleverly made, a series of flat-faced pillars, soaring rectangular columns divided by spaces the width of two hands. The gaps reached from floor to ceiling; ample light from moon and stars poured into the room, turning the great bed – its only furnishing – to dull, beaten silver. In the center of one pillar, the largest, a doorway opened like a friend’s palm onto a private garden. Ahmose sighed in deep relief at the sight of the garden. So she would have a refuge, a place of peace. The knowledge comforted her in the midst of her bewilderment.

  The pillared wall meant that the chamber would stay cool during the warmest months, and during the chill of the sowing season rugs could be hung over the wall’s gaps to keep out the wind. Patterns of black and silver reached toward her across the floor, shadow and pale light playing through the miraculous wall. She stumbled toward the bed, shedding sandals, jewelry, and gown. She removed her wig. The braids were soaked in the fragrant oils of the festive wax cone she had worn, melted down now to a sticky white stub. She tossed wig and wax alike carelessly on the floor. There was nowhere to set them anyhow – no stand, no table. And if the braids stuck in the wax, she could get another wig. She was the Great Royal Wife.

  The bed was double the size of the one she had used in the House of Women. It was piled with clean linen sheets, strewn with cushions of cool-sided silk. An aged ivory headrest, padded with a blue bolster, stood at the top of the bed’s gentle slope. She ignored the headrest. Naked, she crawled atop the bed and huddled into the cushions, pulled a thin sheet over her exhausted body, and watched the bars of moonlight creep across the chamber floor.

  She imagined she was a gazelle fawn, fragile and fearful, cowering in a thicket. The hunter would come for her soon with his bloody spear. She shivered, recalling the physician Wahibra’s words. The mother was just too small, too young. Ahmose did not know how old or how large a woman must be to survive bearing a child, but her hands crossed defensively over her narrow hips, shielded her small, high breasts, and she knew she was too young. Like Aiya.

  She lay paralyzed in the striped shadows of her bed chamber for hours before sleep took mercy on the Great Royal Wife. She fled into her dreams, bounding and kicking, gasping, a gazelle before a lion.

  Late morning sun lanced into the courtyard, filtered through the climbing vines of a plant with huge, flat leaves. The vine grew over the columns on Ahmose’s side of the yard and provided a pleasant, sweet-smelling shade. She had ordered her servants to set up her breakfast in the yard this morning, for troops of servants filled her chambers, moving the fine new ebony furniture she had claimed into her rooms; she could not eat there, with so much bustling and scraping.

  She had slept late, waking to the morning sun full in her face, shining insistently through her columned wall. A good night’s sleep had done her well – that, and the fact that Thutmose had not come to take her. She felt calm and determined now, ready to face her new life head on, like a barque under full sail.

  Ahmose had asked for two chairs at her breakfast table, intending to invite Renenet to join her. But her cousin was still abed, sleeping off the previous night's wine. Instead, Ahmose imagined Aiya’s ka for company, silvery as moonlight, with the perfect, soft belly of a virgin, holding her son on her knee. In her thoughts Ahmose chatted with Aiya about the wedding feast, gossiping over the singers, the dancers, the scandal of the High Priest kissing Iryet in the back corner. Ka-Aiya laughed and smiled, cradled her baby boy, told Ahmose how pleasant the life beyond was; though of course Aiya was not there yet in truth, could not be there until she had been properly entombed – and that would not happen for two months yet. Still, the fantasy was a pleasant diversion from the noise of the servants struggling with ebony couches and chests to hold Ahmose's gowns.

  “Good morning, sister. Did you sleep well?” Mutnofret padded across the courtyard. Evidently her own new apartments were not far from Ahmose’s. She wore a more modest gown than last night’s spectacle, simple white linen with no adornments. Understated.

  “I did, thank you,” Ahmose said tersely. She bit into a melon and looked pointed away from Mutnofret.

  Her sister seated herself in the other chair. Ka-Aiya vanished. “I did not sleep this much.” She snapped her fingers to show how little. “I hope you enjoyed the wedding night as much as I did.”

  Ahmose flushed. So Tut had been with Mutnofret all night. Her relief at avoiding the pain was replaced in an instant by anger. As Great Royal Wife, he should have visited her bed before any other. But she could not show her feelings to Mutnofret. She crossed one knee over the other, leaned back in her chair, and flipped her sandal repeatedly against her foot – flap-flap-flap – a display of nonchalance.

  Mutnofret tried a different approach. “What did you think of my dress last night?”

  “I thought the oldest and fattest nobles would poke their eyes out on your nipples, they stared at them so.”

  Mutnofret burst into perfect laughter. “Oh, Ahmose. You are always so clever. I think our husband liked it, though. He wasted no time in coming to see me. I barely had time to bathe. I think I kept him happy. I might have worn him out.” She dipped her finger into the jar of honey and sucked it.

  Ahmose made a disgusted noise. “What if the servants see you sticking your fingers into the honey?”

  “Let them see. I’m the king's wife. Second wife, at any rate.”

  Ahmose’s sandal flap-flap-flapped. “About that dress. You told me you planned to look understated.”

  “Oh, I intended to at first, but I changed my mind.” She gazed across the table at Ahmose for a moment, all wide eyes and innocence. Then her mouth opened in shock. “You can’t think – but Ahmose, I would never mislead you! Oh, by Hathor, I didn’t even remember I’d told you how to dress. Don't I just feel a perfect goose. I should have told you the plan had changed, shouldn’t I? Anyway, it is all for the best. You did not want our husband and all the whole world besides to see that you still have a girl’s body, did you?”

  Flap-flap-flap.

  “Well, regardless of the dresses,” Mutnofret went on, helping herself to Ahmose’s pitcher of juice, “you looked perfectly lovely. Really. Like a Great Lady.”

  Ahmose rolled her eyes. She could not have looked less like a Great Lady if she had rolled in mud and
wheat chaff before the feast. How to get rid of this buzzing fly?

  Mutnofret propped her elbows on the table. “So, did he…?”

  “Did he what?”

  “Did he…visit you?”

  Ahmose considered lying, but no doubt the second wife would just ask Thutmose about the matter the very next time she saw him. “No. He did not. I fell asleep early anyhow.”

  “Oh, that is a shame. He really is wonderful, you know.” Her eyes shifted about the courtyard. “I mean, up until the pain and the bleeding starts. Did you know he is going off on a campaign soon? Oh, of course you didn’t know; you were asleep last night. He told me all about it while we bathed. He is going south, all the way to Buhen, to check on the fortress and the outposts. He said there might be a battle with the Kushites. I expect he will be gone for weeks. I am going to try to conceive a son before he leaves. Wouldn’t that be a wonderful surprise for our husband when he returns home from battle? An heir already on the way.”

  While they bathed? Together? Ahmose lifted a honey cake to her mouth so Mutnofret could not see how she seethed.

  “How soon is he leaving? He cannot go anywhere until the Opening of the Mouth.” Thutmose would not truly be the Pharaoh until he had performed the ritual to raise his predecessor from death. And Amunhotep’s embalming was still not complete. Ahmose guessed her dead father’s body had rested no more than twelve days beneath the salt. There was nearly another month to wait until Thutmose could usher the old Pharaoh into the afterlife.

  “Just after that, I expect. It should leave me barely enough time to conceive. If we lay together every night between now and then, a baby is as good as certain.”

  “You had best pray to Hathor for fertility. And Hathor doesn’t like liars.”

  Mutnofret sighed. “Ahmoset, darling, I did not lie to you. It was a very simple mistake.”

  “Whatever it was, you made me look like a fool.” She was proud that her voice did not shake. She was cool as night wind.

  “Never! Thutmose adores you. I have heard how he calls you Ahmoset. Remember that day on the barge...”

  “And the nobles, and the priests? Have you heard them call me Ahmoset as well? There is more to being the Great Royal Wife than being loved by the king.”

  “Do you think I don’t know that? I, who was raised to be the Great Royal Wife?”

  Ahmose stood and clapped for her servants. “Clear this away,” she said, waving toward breakfast and Mutnofret without looking at either.

  “Where are you going?” Mutnofret asked, standing and stepping aside from the servants’ work as if she had ordered it herself, as if Ahmose had not spoken a word.

  “To pray for your fertility. Perhaps Hathor will listen to me.”

  She did not pray to Hathor, of course. Instead she found the cool, shadowed corridor that led out to the palace lake and made her way to its shore, aching for the solace of privacy. Mutnofret’s deception weighed on her heart, dragged at her ka as a quarryman’s sledge drags through deep, black mud. Between the Heqa-Khasewet and the Kushites, Egypt’s freedom was at stake. Could Mutnofret not see? Did nothing matter to her but whether the throne she sat upon had more or less gilding than her sister's? More than anything else, could Mutnofret not see how this whole sorry arrangement pained Ahmose?

  On the stone-lipped shore of the lake, Ahmose picked pebbles from the cracks in the wall and tossed them into the water, watching the ripples spread, breaking and reflecting the day’s light, converging and merging and shattering like the shifting flash-and-dim dance of the river. The sweep of each ring of waves soothed her; she followed one ripple, then the next with her eyes; they sailed smooth as barques, pushing outward, growing, at last flattening into nothing but an echo of a wave. She threw two pebbles together; then one out of each hand, plunk-plunk, noting the different patterns they made, the way their ripples shivered together and rebounded away to chase each other across the face of the lake. Finally she gathered a whole handful of stone chips and sent them flying. They pattered into the water all haphazard, a splash like a fisherman’s cast net. The water’s surface scattered in disarray. As the ripples began to calm, settling into their familiar spread and rebound, the turquoise and lapis of sky’s light and water’s shade were replaced with an ever-shifting tumult of brown, black, linen-white. The lake grew calm. A man’s shape beside her own broke and reformed, broke and reformed.

  Thutmose.

  She turned to face him. Her face was hot with shame. To be caught at such a child-like game...!

  He did not say a word, but smiled at her, then searched through the stone chips at the base of the retaining wall. He found one he liked, tossed it a few times in his hand as if weighing its merits, then whipped it hard out over the lake. It sailed the length of six men’s bodies, then hep-hep-hep, jumped across the water’s surface. Ahmose, wide-eyed, stared at her husband.

  “Not bad, eh?”

  She shook her head, smiling.

  “Do you know how it’s done?”

  “No, I’ve never.”

  “Let me show you.” He found the right kind of rock and guided it into her hand, set it along her curled fingers, just so. With words and gestures, he told her how to make the rock jump. She pulled her arm back, hesitated, then threw. The rock plunked into the water with a single disappointing splash.

  “It takes some practice, that’s all, like anything else.” Thutmose laughed lightly. He sat upon the lake’s stone wall. Ahmose sat, too.

  “I heard you are going to Buhen soon,” she said, disguising the bitterness in her voice by scuffing up half-buried pebbles with the toe of her sandal. Puffs of yellow dust rose around her feet to glitter in the sunlight.

  “I am leaving just after the Opening of the Mouth. Whenever a new Pharaoh comes to the throne, Egypt’s enemies like to test her borders. I pray that word of Amunhotep’s death will not reach Kush until after I arrive in Buhen. I must move quickly if I'm to prevent a major raid on the southern sepats.”

  Ahmose nodded, unwilling to say the words that gnawed at her heart.

  “I will leave good stewards in charge here,” he went on. “You likely will not have to do anything but sit on your throne during court and try not to fall asleep while the nobles bicker. I will instruct the stewards to filter out all but the most serious petitions so you are not taxed by holding court.”

  “I can do it fine,” Ahmose said. She cringed inside at how young she sounded, like a child protesting that she could climb any tree the bigger children could climb.

  “I have no doubt of it. You are a strong girl, and very clever.”

  “I’m a woman.”

  Thutmose cleared his throat. “Mutnofret can help you, I suppose, if you need help with court.”

  “I have no need of her help.” Ahmose filled her voice with as much scorn as she could muster.

  It was perhaps too much scorn; Thutmose’s eyebrows rose and he glanced at her from the tail of his eye. “Trouble?”

  The sorrow inside Ahmose rose trembling to the surface. She could keep it bridled no longer. “You spent all night with her. You didn’t come to me once.”

  “Oh,” he breathed, looking down, then away; anywhere but at his Great Royal Wife. “Ahmose, you must believe me. I meant no offense. But you are still so young, and I thought….”

  “I’ve had my blood. Many times!”

  Thutmose pulled off his wig and scratched at his scalp with both hands, as if the gesture might buy him some time in answering.

  “Do you have lice?” Ahmose said.

  “Of course not.”

  “Then don’t take your wig off where servants can see! What will they think of you? You’re supposed to be the king.”

  Thutmose grinned, laughed. His wig went back onto his head. “This is why I like you so, Ahmoset. You keep me in line. What a fine Great Lady you are; the gods have truly blessed me.”

  “Then why didn’t you come to my bed?”

  Thutmose lowered his voice, as if he wished
to spare her some kind of embarrassment, though not even servants were near enough hear. “Ahmoset, do you even know what men do with women in their beds?”

  “Of course I do! I am the Great Royal Wife, not an ignorant child. I know what men and women do together. I know what you were doing with Mutnofret last night.”

  Thutmose nodded. “Forgive me. I misjudged you.”

  He had misjudged her because of her childlike body. And how could she expect any man to appraise her as womanly, when compared to Mutnofret’s ripe femininity? It is not his fault. He is only a man, after all, she told herself firmly, to stop the sting of tears in her eyes.

  He laid a rough hand on her knee. “Do you want me to come to your bed, Ahmose? Tonight?”

  Ahmose’s breath caught. She heard Mutnofret’s words about pain and blood; she saw Aiya’s belly cut open. She shoved these things away, hard. She was the Great Lady. It was not right that her husband should desire Mutnofret alone.

  “Yes,” she said, with finality.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE DAY CREPT BY. AHMOSE had excused herself from the lakeshore, begging some errand or other. When she was out of Tut’s sight she ran through the corridors because her ka was too light, too fiery, to do anything else. Her body thrummed with a brew of tension: triumph, longing, fear. Her feet had wings, and she didn’t care if the servants saw her running and gossiped about it later. When she approached the courtyard she shared with Mutnofret, she slowed and caught her breath in the shadow of a lotus column. Mutnofret was nowhere to be seen. Ahmose crossed the yard without haste, head up, steps steady.

  Once in her apartments, though, she had no idea what to do. She pushed her new furniture here and there, rearranging it. Boxes of her belongings from the House of Women were stacked against one wall. Her servants had not yet unpacked everything. She found her collection of god statues, though, and set them on one dressing table, arranging them in a little shrine. At the center of the grouping, she placed Tut’s gift, the carving of Mut.