The She-King: The Complete Saga

by L. M. Ironside

  Nehesi barked an order. His men dashed to surround the God's Wife and the new king. Hatshepsut pulled Tut against her chest, cupping his head with one protective hand. She glowered in confusion. He saw her mouth moving, shouting a demand. But over the cries of Thutmose! Thutmose the Third! Senenmut could hear nothing of her voice.

  He stared past the mummy into the cold black mouth of the tomb, where Nebseny the leopard stood waiting. Below the leopard's downpointed muzzle the mouth of the priest curved in a mocking smile.

  The threat was never here – not from Nebseny himself, not from anyone in this crowd. The palace, then – it must be the palace.

  There was nothing Senenmut could do that Nehesi could not – not when it came to strength or to blades. Reluctantly, Senenmut reconciled himself to leaving her in the Medjay's hands. He would better serve his lady as he always had done: with quick and careful thought.

  The boats returned to the eastern bank, Hatshepsut still ringed tightly by her guards. At Ipet-Isut, Senenmut lost himself among the crowd, deliberately this time, letting the flow of priests carry him back toward the Temple of Amun. He peered around for Nebseny, and saw to his right the yellow of a leopard's pelt moving between two priests, darting like an ibis among the reeds. He dodged to follow. Always Nebseny evaded him, peeling further from the crowd, making his way into a secluded corner of the city of temples. Senenmut wondered where the High Priest's path led, who he was hurrying to meet. His assassins, no doubt; the ones who would do his work for him so that his hands stayed clean.

  Senenmut halted in the shaded forecourt of a small royal shrine. Afternoon was advancing. Long shadows lay across the courtyard, converging in disorienting angles. He had lost sight of Nebseny. He held his breath and listened for some voice, some betraying scuffle, but here at the outer edge of the complex Ipet-Isut was eerily still. He moved uncertainly toward the shrine. It was a modest building as shrines went, walled in white granite. Two small pillars framed the entryway, above which the name of some nigh-forgotten prince was carved. Senenmut took one step toward the shrine, hesitated, took another. A wind moved through Ipet-Isut; it rattled the distant leaves of the myrrh trees before Amun's gate; a few dry leaves scuttled past Senenmut's feet. He moved toward the shrine more boldly. As he passed the pillars, a blow fell on him from behind. He grunted, stumbled, fell to his knees in the dark entryway. Senenmut clapped a hand to the back of his head, feeling for blood, and turned to see Nebseny standing over him with his fist still raised.

  Senenmut lurched, half-crouched, launching himself into Nebseny's gut. The priest sprawled backward into the courtyard; Senenmut followed, rolling. Nebseny was on him again in a moment. He raised a fist high but Senenmut threw himself aside; Nebseny's knuckles cracked against paving stones. He choked back a gurgling scream and rolled away from Senenmut. His breath hissed between his teeth as he fought against the pain.

  Senenmut staggered to his feet. A streak of blood glowed darkly on the paving stones between his feet.

  “So,” Senenmut panted.

  Nebseny clambered upright, clutching the bleeding hand against his leopard skin. The glaring mask hung from a cord around his neck. It watched the blood drip from the priest's hand with an expression of implacable hunger.

  “If not at the tomb, then at the palace. You have sent killers to my lady. But they will not reach her. Nehesi and his men....”

  “You fool. Can a guardsman stop a god? Can a dozen, a hundred? The will of the gods shall be done this very night.”

  “No one will come near her. No blade will have a chance.”

  “Confine her to her chambers until she is a withered old woman if you like.” Nebseny smiled. “She must eat and drink eventually.”

  Senenmut's heart thrashed, reared like a panicked horse. Gods damn me, why didn't I see it?

  “If I had a knife I would kill you right now, Master Senenmut, favorite of the Great Royal Wife.” His words were thick with mockery. “But even knowing what you know, you cannot stop it. No man can stop the will of Amun. Once she is buried beside her husband, I will find you and kill you myself. I promise you that.”

  Senenmut lunged, intending to strike Nebseny in the face, but the High Priest danced backward. His fingers closed on the leopard mask. He tore at it savagely; Nebseny shouted in pain as the cord snapped, welting the skin of his neck.

  Then the High Priest laughed. His grinning mouth seemed poised to rend. “Run, Chief Steward! Your lady needs you.”

  He did run. He pelted from Ipet-Isut's towering gate, sprinted toward Waset. In the sky above the city he seemed to see a faded echo of the hanging fire. His thighs and his lungs burned, but he never stopped, never slowed. Long before he gained the road to the palace he feared his heart might burst and drop him in the dust. He implored Amun to carry him, to lend him enough strength, at least, to reach his lady before it was too late, and then he could die, choking for breath, his legs consumed by flames. The sound of celebration rose from Waset, improbable in the face of his desperation. His ears roared with the clamor of drums. The gateway. The guards shouting his name, waving him on. The courtyard, the porticoes...he flashed past them, thanks be to Amun, only let it not be too late! The hall that led to her door. The mask hard and cold in his hand. The door thrown open, a sickly light spilling into the pillared hall, the moving shadow of guards.

  And above the roaring in his ears, the sound of a woman's agonized screams.

  He fell against her doorway, legs collapsing, useless from the effort, breath a torment of red fire and sand in his throat, his chest.

  Hatshepsut crouched on the floor of her antechamber, bent over a still, pale form. She rocked under the blow of her grief, threw back her head and keened again. She cradled Iset's head in her lap. The girl's lips were blue. Her eyes were open, shallow and cold and dead.

  The leopard mask fell from Senenmut's hand.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  “IT WAS MEANT FOR ME.”

  Guards had come to remove Iset's body. They had been obliged to pry her from Hatshepsut's arms, while a pair of insistent hands pulled at her shoulders, took her away from the woman she loved. They were Senenmut's hands. She allowed him to wrap his arms about her, shield her eyes against his chest. His skin was hot from some great exertion, slick with sweat and with her own tears.

  Senenmut led her to her bedchamber. She fell onto her great bed and curled there, sobbing and beating her hands against the mattress. When she had exhausted herself she lay calm, wondering with a blank, fuzzy curiosity whether the suffocating pressure in her chest would stop her breathing.

  “It was meant for me – the poisoned wine.”

  Senenmut said nothing. He sat at her feet, his shadowed, sad eyes tracing patterns in the tile floor.

  “It was the wine. I saw a trace of it on her lips.” It did no good to announce these things, the few small pieces of the broken puzzle which she had fitted into place. None of it would not make Iset live again. But she kept talking, as though by reasoning it out she might build some wall of protection around herself. “He could not have known that Iset was so familiar with me that she would be in my rooms when I was not there, that she would think nothing of helping herself to my wine.”

  “He?”

  “The one who wishes me dead.” The words were cold and hard in her mouth.

  Senenmut took something from the knot of his kilt. At first she thought it was a plate or an offering bowl. He turned it in his hand, and the leopard's face scowled at her.

  “Nebseny,” she said. “I thought I had secured him. I thought Ankhhor...”

  “Ankhhor – his brother. So his was the other voice I heard.” And Senenmut told her of his visit to the Temple, the conversation he had heard through the windcatcher, his struggle to warn her or her men during the procession. He told her how he'd fought with Nebseny in the shadows of Ipet-Isut. It was only then that she noticed the bruises beginning to ripen on his face, his arms.

  “You are right enough,” she said
dully. “It must have been Ankhhor. I was a fool – a child – to think I had brought him under my control. Nehesi saw it true: I should have killed him in his own home. It was for Iset's sake I spared him, and now she is dead. Oh, gods, she is dead.” She wept again for some long time, until Senenmut lowered himself to lie beside her. “Her father used her as a pawn, Senenmut. And I did, too. She loved me. I took her affections greedily. I was alone, but that is no excuse. I wielded her like a knife against my enemies. I came to love her, too, for she was sweeter than honey to me. And yet I never told her. She died not knowing.”

  They lay in silence until Hatshepsut's weeping once more passed. A fierce resolve came over her. Fear, too, but greater than her fear, the conviction that no one should be in a position to take anything from her again. Not her station, not her lover, not her power. She sat up slowly. Her head throbbed. “Go and fetch Nehesi,” she said. “The three of us are going to the Temple.”

  The priests fell back before her, bowing, trembling at the ferocity of her glare. Dark tracks of kohl trailed from her eyes, stained her face. She stalked through the avenues of Ipet-Isut, speaking to no one. Senenmut and Nehesi girded her to either side, attuned to her rage, filling themselves with the overflow of her awakened power. She caught a boy by the arm as he tried to scuttle from her path – an apprentice, no more than fourteen. He shrank from her, gulping, but when she held out the mask of the High Priest he took her meaning at once, and stammered, “In the shrine of Amun, Great Lady.” When she freed him from her grip he sprinted into the dormitories with a quavering whimper.

  The guards on the shrine doors fell away from her approach. And how not? Was she not the God's Wife, the very hand that pleased Amun, that spilled Amun's righteousness upon the land? She did not wait for Nehesi or Senenmut to swing wide the heavy, smoke-blackened doors. She opened the way herself, and strode into the darkness.

  A remnant of starlight, faint and gray, fell into the shrine. It limned with a pale sheen the edge of a white linen kilt, a bare shoulder; it set a dusky halo upon the tips of a leopardskin mantle. Nebseny crouched, bowing, before the god. He turned sharply at her entrance, a rebuke ready on his lips – and froze at the sight of her. His eyes flicked to Senenmut, then back once more to the fire that burned on Hatshepsut's face.

  “Your poisoner killed Iset.” All her kas shivered at the words, the impossibility of loss. But her voice did not shake.

  Disbelief lengthened his face. He drew in a rattling breath. In the dull shimmer of starlight Hatshepsut saw all of Nebseny's self-possession, all his arrogant assurance drain away like water from a cracked jar. “How?”

  Hatshepsut clenched her teeth. She would not tell him. He did not deserve to hear of any sweet or good thing. She would never tell him of her love for his niece, how she had opened her life to the girl, had shared with her everything that was hers – even the dangers of power, it seemed. Even the wine in its jar, cool and dark and bitter.

  Nebseny turned his back on the three of them, faced the god. Amun's golden skin glinted in the starlight. “I was sure,” he muttered. “My god, how could I have misread thee? Thy will was explicit...”

  “You saw me proclaim myself on the steps of this very temple years ago. And you barred my way. You kept me from my god; you kept me from my father. Amun's will was explicit then, and yet you did not listen.”

  He whirled to face her; the clawed feet of his mantle lifted and seemed to reach for her as he spun. “I am the High Priest of Amun. It is given to me, to hear the god, to understand.”

  “You served your brother, never the god. You served your family's name. Ah, I know how you suffered for the privilege, how you caught rats until Ankhhor raised you up, paid your way to the power you now hold. And for what purpose? To maneuver his daughter into the temple and onto the throne. To place Ankhhor's hands upon the crook and flail. And now she is dead, by your own doing. See how the god defies your will. Amun knows your iniquities, High Priest. His wrath is greater than Ankhhor's, Nebseny, I promise you. His wrath is greater even than mine.”

  “My devotion to the god is beyond question,” he said, but doubt tinged his words.

  “For all your devotion, you never could see the truth. I am not merely the God's Wife. I am the son of the god, and the throne is mine.”

  Nebseny's ragged breathing filled the chamber.

  “Where is Ankhhor?” she demanded.

  “I do not know.” The response was simple, flat. Hatshepsut saw at once that he told the truth. “I assume he took his lady wife and sailed for Ka-Khem when the funerary barge returned to the eastern shore. He – he will not know of Iset until he returns to his estate.”

  “I will find him later, and put an end to him, as I should have done when I had him under my heel in his own bedchamber.” She jerked her head toward Nehesi; the great bull of a man drew his sword.

  Nebseny scuttled backward until he collided with Amun's legs. “No! Great Lady, do not profane the shrine by killing in Amun's sight.”

  She tilted her head. “I wonder, is that Amun's will, or your brother's? You seem unable to tell the difference. You shall not set foot from this temple. I swear that on Iset's tomb. You shall die in the presence of the god you claim to serve. His son decrees it; his son will make it so.”

  Nehesi swung his arm; a wet crunch rang out, the sickening, jolting sound of sharp bronze cleaving flesh and bone. A black rain fell across Amun's visage, spattered hot onto Hatshepsut's face. It ran in trickles down the god's body; a thick black river pooled at his feet. The high-pitched, bubbling cry of Nebseny's fleeing ka echoed, bleak and already damned, from the unseen walls of the chamber. The god drank the blood, but it was his son who was quenched. Her belly was sated with vengeance; her mouth tingled with the taste of maat.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  HATSHEPSUT SAT POISED UPON HER throne. Her hands gripped the arms, steadying herself. A queer dizziness had settled upon her, a swimming of her vision if she turned her head too fast. She reasoned with herself calmly that she could not have been poisoned. It was simply impossible. She had sent Senenmut to dip a jar full of water with his own hands, from a well deep in the city, not within the palace grounds. Sitre-In was sent to gather fruit and eggs from the market at dawn. Her nurse boiled the eggs herself, brought them to Hatshepsut still in the shell. She was not hungry; her stomach protested at the thought of food, so wracked was she with grief. But she knew she must eat something before her day's work began. Fruit in the rind and egg in the shell: she could think of no safer food, though even the sweet melon choked her with bitterness.

  No, there was no possibility of poison. Not this morning, at least. It was exhaustion that made her head swim and her body tremble. Below her, the great hall clamored with the shouts of angry men, nobles and stewards, senior priests and politicians. She had summoned them, and they had come at once: all the great men of Waset, and some from nearby sepats, too, who had not yet returned home after yesterday's funeral. Judging by their red eyes and disheveled garb, none had slept any more than she had. Word spread quickly throughout the city. Faster than a gazelle. Before he set foot into the great hall, every man knew that an attempt had been made on Hatshepsut's life. Every man knew that the King's Mother was dead.

  “Who is responsible?” one man shouted. “Who is the coward that murders with poison?”

  Hatshepsut raised her hand; Senenmut, seated on the floor beside her throne cross-legged like a scribe, placed the leopard mask in it. “The High Priest, Nebseny.” At the sound of her voice, all shouting died away. A few men recalled themselves and bowed, but she was past caring for such proprieties. She threw the mask from the dais. The men gathered at its foot drew back as if she had tossed a scorpion into their midst. The mask clanged upon the floor, rolled along its rim, shivered as it settled with a rising metallic reverberation.

  “We must find him. This insult to the gods will not stand.”

  “He has been found.” Hatshepsut said. “I spilled his blood myself.
It's his cats-paws I want now: the scum inside my own palace who would dare to harm me.”

  The Overseer of Kitchens crept forward, bowing. “Great Lady, two of the poisoner's accomplices have been found already. I was most hasty in rooting them out when I heard of the death of our good King's Mother.”

  Hatshepsut glanced at Senenmut. He nodded fractionally. She saw her own thoughts confirmed in the dark glint of his eyes: Hold the two who were taken. Question them. And detain the Overseer of Kitchens for questioning, too. No amount of caution was excessive. Senenmut would see to it without being told.

  “I am pleased, Overseer. But this is not enough. Nebseny did not act of his own accord. He moved under the direction of his brother Ankhhor, the tjati of Ka-Khem. Where is that man?”

  Heads came together to confer; the assembly buzzed, but none stepped forward with an answer. She cut off the murmurs with a raised hand. “Find him. I do not care where he is, where he flees to. He will be found. I am prepared to give a great reward to the man who brings me Ankhhor's hand. Scribes, make it so.” The line of scribes bent over their lap-desks, brushing her words into writ. Within the hour, Ankhhor's sentence would go out to the people of Waset, and beyond, up river and down, until every man in Egypt sharpened his blade on Ankhhor's name.

  A man with the bare head of a priest raised his palm, moved through the crowd until he stood before the throne. Hatshepsut knew him: Hapuseneb, a senior priest of Amun, intelligent, quiet, and devout. He was a friend to her priestesses, she knew. She gestured for him to speak.

  “In the living memory of Egypt, there has never been an attempt to murder one of the blood royal. It is an act audacious beyond belief; it flies in the face of the gods!” He opened his arms, addressing the whole of the great hall. “The Pharaoh and his family are the very conduits between heaven and earth, my good men. And the God's Wife – she is sacred to Amun! The Great Lady says Nebseny and Ankhhor are to blame, and I believe her word. But we must consider carefully what this means to Egypt. Is it enough merely to bring these men to justice? What does their act itself speak to? Is Egypt now a place where divinity means nothing, where a High Priest may spit into the eye of the very god he serves?”