“Now you see: I am made like any other woman.”
“What is that scar, Great Lady?”
“A reminder that I must never act rashly. See how well I heed it! Here I am, naked before a harem woman.”
“It was wicked of me to taunt you. And it is not right that the Great Royal Wife should be at a disadvantage before a mere concubine, even one unused by the Pharaoh as I am.” Iset stood, and with graceful hands she removed the straps at her shoulders. The beaded band slipped down her body; her breasts settled; clad only in the silver bangles, she faced Hatshepsut, her skin like polished ivory in the lamplight, pale, smooth, inviting a soft touch.
A roaring filled Hatshepsut's ears. She stood rooted to the spot. Every warning Senenmut had ever given her to think before she acted sounded all at once in her heart, a stern clamor from which she could draw no sense.
“You think me too bold, I am sure,” Iset said, and at once Senenmut's voice fell silent. “But I was sent to Waset as a gift to the throne.”
You were sent to Waset as your father's tool. You were sent to Waset to usurp me. You don't even know it, do you, Iset?
“I only wish to do my duty, Great Lady. You may think that because I am young, and only a dancer, that I do not see. But I see.” Iset stepped toward her. Hatshepsut could not take her eyes from Iset's breasts, from the golden sun-discs of her nipples. She longed to press her palms against them, to feel their warmth. “Thutmose is a boy. He has a boy's mind. He is not the power of Egypt; it is not he who commands from the throne.”
“No,” Hatshepsut admitted, hoarse. And oh, the gratification she felt, to hear that truth spoken aloud! Her knees trembled from the force of it.
“My duty is to be pleasing to the one who commands from the throne.” Iset drew so near that the warmth of her body raised the minute hairs of Hatshepsut's skin. Iset's arms wrapped about her; her hands moved slowly up Hatshepsut's back, and woke a shivering fire deep in her middle. It throbbed downward, past her scar, pulsing hot and insistent deep between her thighs. “Let me do my duty, Great Lady. I only wish...”
Hatshepsut cut her words short, swallowed them when her mouth fell upon Iset's. The kiss was sweeter than any she had stolen from Senenmut, for Iset's lips opened to welcome her tongue, and her teeth teased at Hatshepsut's lower lip until her breath came in short, desperate rasps. Their feet tangled in their fallen clothing; they staggered toward the bed. Iset giggled and tossed her wig to the floor, pulled Hatshepsut's own aside and ran her palms across the stubble of her scalp until hot shivers wracked her body.
Hatshepsut clutched Iset's breasts with both hands; the girl gasped, arched backward, and Hatshepsut kissed her there, pulled each nipple into her mouth, felt Iset's moan shiver through her own body. She returned to Iset's mouth, kissed her; when she pulled away she smiled at the golden paint smeared across Iset's lips. She had kissed the girl's breasts clean.
Iset dragged her thumb across Hatshepsut's own lips. Hatshepsut caught it and sucked; Iset's eyelids dropped, heavy with ecstasy; her surrendering sigh whispered in Hatshepsut's ear.
“I am yours. Gladly, Great Lady. Yours.”
Hours later, Hatshepsut woke to find Iset murmuring in her sleep. Her fine, pale limbs lay angled across the bed linens. Her face turned toward the moonlight falling through the columned wall, and her lips, still smudged with gold dust, moved on half-formed, barely heard words. The tangle of silver chains about her neck returned a faint reflection of moonlight.
Hatshepsut wondered whether she dreamed of Ka-Khem, of her father's palace, the night song of the marshes. She pressed her face against Iset's bare shoulder, shuddered as a sob moved through her, silent but sharp, quelled deep in her belly. Her joy at touching and being touched, at the closeness of another body, was overwhelming in its strength. And her relief, too – an end to a loneliness so vast, so all-encompassing, that it could not be comprehended while she dwelt beneath its shadow. She could only see how isolated and miserable she had been before now that Iset's love shone upon her like a band of stars in a black sky.
And I must use her as my tool, the same way her father and uncle would use her. This sweet girl, dutiful and kind – he relief, the joy – the knowledge that even as she found her joy, she must keep herself aloof from it, must remain Great Royal Wife, God's Wife, the hand upon Egypt's reins – these were all too much to bear. She cried silently, her tears dampening Iset's skin. I cannot even cry where she can see me. It is as Ahmose told me years ago when Father died. Iset has brought me love, this most precious gift, and yet with her I must still wear my mask. Even with her.
Her hand drifted to her belly, and lower still. She traced the scar across her loins. She had a job to do with this girl. No matter how sweet Iset's company may be, she could not let herself forget.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
HATSHEPSUT BACKED THROUGH THE DENSE blackness of Amun's shrine. As she withdrew, the cool golden skin of the god vanished beneath her outstretched fingertips. She knew the distance to the shrine's door. Once there had been a time when she had groped in fear along the walls, certain the door had vanished through some unknowable mystery of Amun-Re, certain she would dwell in darkness forever, an unwitting sacrifice to her god. But she had been God's Wife now for well over a year, and she moved with practiced confidence through the chamber, four, five, six steps backward and turn, and reach out with a palm, and – there! Her hand rested on the door's familiar carvings. She swung it wide; the light of day forced her eyes shut.
“God's Wife.” She started at the sound of Nebseny's voice. With a hand above her eyes as sun-shade, she squinted in the direction of his voice. The sun at his back cast him with a brilliant halo. It had been two months since her journey to Ka-Khem. She had waited for Ankhhor to keep his word, to send his instructions to his brother. The High Priest bowed low to her, lower than he had ever bowed before. “I would beg an audience with you, Great Lady.”
She followed him to his private chamber, a large room for a priest's dwelling, appointed with a standing chest that was nearly as large as the one where she kept her own gowns and shawls, six chairs carved as fine as thrones, and a scattering of tables inlaid with fine stone. Nebseny offered her a cup of wine, but she shook her head. In truth, her throat was parched from her chanting, but her sudden apprehension would have prevented her from swallowing. She did not wish to choke and sputter before the High Priest's eyes.
“I have been instructed,” Nebseny said with a careful emphasis on the word, “to tell you that I am your man to command. I am faithful to you, and deliver myself into your hands.”
She held his gaze. Nebseny's stare was as flat and inscrutable as his brother's. At last she gathered herself. “I thank you for your loyalty. I reward those who are loyal to me. I keep my promises.”
“My house waits to hear of its reward. I am sure you realize, Great Lady, that a powerful man cannot remain patient forever.”
Hatshepsut narrowed her eyes. “A wise man remains patient as long as he must.”
“Powerful men are not always wise.”
“Then let me enlighten you, Nebseny. The Pharaoh is but a child. The day he shows a man's interest in his harem, I shall keep my promise to your house. Until then, I must counsel you and your family to patience, and to heed the pledge you have made to me.”
Nebseny gave a single, abrupt nod. It was the most his stiff neck would ever bend, she knew.
“As you are my man, it would please me to see you leave off your habit of courting Thutmose's favor.”
“I am the High Priest. It is maat that the Pharaoh should seek my advice.”
She stepped around his protestations as surely as she moved through the darkness of Amun's shrine. “Then advise him in the presence of others, at court or at feasts. I will not have you closeted alone with him.”
Nebseny's mouth tightened. But at last he agreed. “Very well. It shall be as you say.”
“I thank you,” she said, “for your loyalty. May Amun smile on yo
u, High Priest.”
A year passed, and Thutmose remained detached, preferring the deck of a ship to the seat of his throne, and in matters of the harem he remained a child. On her visits to the House of Women, Hatshepsut heard tales of his pinches, his lewd remarks, but no woman could yet say that she carried the Pharaoh's child. Hatshepsut sent frequent dispatches to Ka-Khem, reporting with all honesty that the Pharaoh had not yet come to appreciate the charms of his own concubines, and that Iset's womb remained empty. By the time the new year celebrations commenced, Hatshepsut found herself fretting. How long could she keep Ankhhor and Nebseny acquiescent?
At least her efforts in the south had borne sweet fruit. Ineni reported back frequently on the progress he had made. The old fortress at the fourth cataract had been completely rebuilt with walls twice their previous height; it was now spacious enough to house four times the previous capacity of men and horses. Kush already showed a marked reluctance to raid the southern sepats; the mere sight of the new fortress looming near the river seemed to deter their aggressions.
Hatshepsut's confidence waxed bright and full in the face of her successes. She sent for Iset more frequently, and often as not she started her days with her lover's spicy scent clinging to her fingers and lips. She did not fear angering the gods, for even had she a woman's blood, with Iset there was no chance she might carry a child who was not the Pharaoh's own. This, she reasoned, would keep the gods complicit.
But Sitre-In saw reason for concern. One hot day in Shemu, when the shimmer of flies in the garden made Hatshepsut feel languid and lonely and she had sent Tem to the House of Women for Iset, Sitre-In leaned close to her ear.
“Make that girl a servant, or the House of Women will positively burst from the burden of keeping your secret.”
“Do you think they suspect?”
Sitre-In leveled such a look at Hatshepsut that she flushed at the obvious idiocy of the question.
“But I cannot force her out of the harem,” she protested weakly. “It is her right to remain, to bear the king's heir if she can.”
“The girl will jump at the opportunity to be nearer you. She is besotted with you; anyone can see it. Take that foolish grin off your face, Great Lady. You should not have lured her heart the way you did. Now she will be nothing but a body servant.”
“Better than Thutmose's bed girl. I will give her the choice. Let Iset decide where she wishes to remain; I will not appoint her against her will.”
She had hoped, for the sake of her secret purpose, that Iset would choose the harem, where Thutmose might eventually discover her beauty. But as Sitre-In predicted, Iset leapt upon the chance to serve as Hatshepsut's fan-bearer, her face alight with gratitude. The servant's room she would occupy was small and much meaner than her room in the harem, but Iset seemed not to care. She was near to Hatshepsut, and attended her daily: that fact alone was a fair trade for luxury, in Iset's reckoning. Hatshepsut worried over how she might now engineer the pregnancy she had promised to Ankhhor. But as more favorable reports of her fortress's progress reached her, as Nebseny continued to bow low to her whenever she attended the Temple of Amun, surety in her own might grew stronger. She forgot her concerns and spent nearly every night submerged in a deep ecstasy of Iset's body, Iset's hands, Iset's mouth.
She was jolted from her reverie in the season of Peret, at the Feast of the Emergence, as she visited the harem's celebration with her beautiful and eager fan-bearer in tow. Her half-sister Opet stole Hatshepsut away to a secluded corner of the House of Women. In the feasting hall the women had begun to clap and chant; a drinking game of some sort had captured their attention.
“I'm afraid,” Opet said, coy and sly, “that the time we have long feared has come at last.”
“Thutmose?”
“And I did not even have time to let my breasts sag, nor to grow any warts.”
“Who?”
“Hentumire, Tabiry, and the girl you call Nefer – the Hittite princess.”
Hatshepsut's limbs felt suddenly cold.
“Oh! What is it, sister? You are so pale.”
She forced a laugh. “Only the pallor of fear. Now none of us are safe. Are any of the women with child?”
“It is too soon to tell. We all pray that Pharaoh will give us healthy sons, of course.”
“Of course.”
She found Iset clapping in a ring of women, stamping her lovely small feet and shouting. Inside the ring, two women linked arms and balanced cups of wine on their heads, bobbing and stepping in time to the chant. The cup toppled from one woman's head; the circle erupted in a jeer, and she snatched the cup from her partner's wig, raised it high, and drained it in one draft.
“Iset.” Hatshepsut tugged at the girl's arm.
“What? Oh!” Iset's eyes were heavy with wine. She had apparently lost a few rounds of the game herself.
“We must get back to the palace.” The House of Women seemed a forbidding place to her now, full of women praying for healthy sons, and all of them ripe to be visited by the king.
“Oh, must we, Great Lady? Come, go into the ring. It's an easy game. I will show you how.” Iset draped her arm across Hatshepsut's shoulder, a too-familiar gesture. Hatshepsut stepped away from her abruptly, and Iset's eyes widened. Her mouth quivered on the verge of tears. “Hatet,” she wailed.
The women nearest them turned tactfully away.
“Stop it,” Hatshepsut hissed. Her hand itched to slap the girl; she knotted her fingers behind her back to keep herself still. “Where is my fan? Go get it. We are leaving now.”
Iset wept bitterly in their litter. The return trip to the palace seemed to stretch on into a mortifying, fearful eternity. Thutmose might even now be passing in his own litter, making his way to the House of Women to sow his seed in half a dozen parched and eager fields. She parted the litter's curtains and peered out into the night. The road was empty, save for Hatshepsut's litter and the soldiers who guarded her.
“Get hold of yourself,” Hatshepsut said when they were finally set down in the palace courtyard. “I won't have you sniveling all through the halls.”
Iset pulled herself together enough to walk with quiet dignity past darkened hallways and porticoes, past servants drifting through the night-blue palace on their small errands. When they reached Hatshepsut's room she threw her fan down on the floor and stormed into the bed chamber.
Sitre-In's raised brows and pursed lips only angered Hatshepsut all the more. She went after the girl and found her face down on the bed, sobbing.
“What has come over you? Wine has never taken you so badly before. Talk to me; don't just lie there wailing.”
“It is not the wine,” Iset said, lifting a corner of Hatshepsut's fine blanket. She rubbed the ruined kohl from her face.
“Clearly not.”
“Don't tease! It's cruel.”
She sighed, lay down beside Iset, curled her body against her lover's. “All right. I will not tease. Tell me why you weep.”
“Hentumire thinks she may be pregnant.” Iset dissolved into choking, moaning sobs. Hatshepsut rubbed her shoulders, soothed her neck until Iset caught her breath and went on: “Oh, Hatet, I want a child – I want a baby! I want to hold a little one in my arms, and hear him call me Mawat. It's not fair. It's not fair!”
“Not fair?”
“I gave it all up,” Iset said, suddenly quiet and rational. “Oh, I love you, Great Lady, but with you I can never be a mother. Since my father sent me to the harem, Thutmose became my only hope for a child. And I gave up all hope of a son...or a daughter...for love. Now I am only your fan-bearer, and I can never lie with the Pharaoh. What other man is there for me? My father intended me for the Pharaoh's harem; I cannot be married off to some soldier like a servant woman! Father would never allow me to see my mother or my sisters again. Oh, my heart will tear itself in two!” She buried her face in a cushion and wailed again.
“You want a child?”
“Oh – more than anything!”
She rolled onto her side. She held Hatshepsut's gaze for a long moment, her dark, soft eyes all the more compelling and sweet for their shine of tears. “Because I love you, Hatet. Because you are the sister of my heart. I want both. I want a child, and I want your heart.” She huffed a sad little laugh, turned her face away again. “I acted like a foolish child. I never considered what I was losing, in gaining you.”
“No. You are not foolish.” She kissed Iset's shoulder. “Nothing would make me happier, Iset. You know I have never bled. The gods have cursed me with barrenness – I do not know why; it doesn't matter, for the gods have given me you.”
Iset lay still. She breathed deep, two, three times, calming herself.
Hatshepsut went on: “Let us have a child together, Iset. You are my woman, and no longer a member of his harem. But I may do with my servants as I please. Let me send you to Thutmose's bed in my place.”
“It would be a disgrace. The Pharaoh has his concubines, the most beautiful and well-bred women in all Egypt. He has no reason to bed a servant.”
“There is no woman in all Egypt more beautiful than you, servant or no. He will not think it a disgrace. And I will send you to represent the Great Royal Wife, to do what I cannot do. In this, you will be honored above any concubine; you will be nearly as honored as I.”
“And the baby...”
“He will be ours. Yours and mine. We will care for him together, raise him together. We will be his mawats, the two of us, and he will be Thutmose's heir. Do it for me, Iset. Say you will give me this gift.”
In the garden, a little owl called crick-crick-cree into the night. The air was sweet with the odor of night-blooming flowers, and above that smell, the faint salt of Iset's tears. Hatshepsut held her breath, waiting for Iset's answer, in an agony of hopeful anxiety.
The She-King: The Complete Saga Page 46
