“Yes,” Thutmose said. “She is the ideal match. But Hatshepsut has already proclaimed her. What a Pharaoh says cannot be unsaid.”
Ahmose tasted the wine in her cup. Its initial sweetness was undercut by a powerful bitter, musky note, not at all unpleasant. But the echo of it on her tongue slowed her reply, and she had to swallow several times before the words would come. “Perhaps the only person who can unsay a king’s words is another king.”
“Perhaps,” said Thutmose. His fingers twisted into a knot in his lap.
CHAPTER TWENTY
IT TOOK ALL OF NEFERURE’S considerable discipline to remain still and silent in her litter. Her heart leapt and sang within her breast, straining against her flesh and bones, striving to fly free, a bird on a joyous wind. The city of Iunet was alive with the din of merchants crying their wares, of women gossiping at wells, of children laughing as they dashed across the road, crossing the path of Neferure’s litter-bearers. She watched the city through the gauze of her curtains, beaming at the people she passed, although they could not see her face.
Thutmose had sent her to Iunet – Thutmose and Ahmose. A few days after Hatshepsut set out on her great expedition, the Pharaoh and Lady Ahmose had come to Neferure’s palace, and with a knowing smile Thutmose had instructed her to take a great offering of gifts to the Lady of the West, beloved Hathor, the goddess who was all goddesses in one. She would spend two weeks in Iunet, he had explained, measuring out the wealth he had designated for the Hathor temple and its staff, acting in the name of the Pharaoh, as he was too busy himself to attend in person. Neferure had been hard-pressed to keep herself from squealing like a girl. She embraced her brother, clung tightly around his neck until he was obliged to disentangle her arms with a timid smile.
From the moment she boarded her ship at Waset’s quay, Neferure had felt the swell of triumph rising in her ka. Iunet lay nearly a day’s sail upriver, and the closer she drew to its shore the more rapturous she became. She would spend two weeks with Hathor – two precious weeks in the glow of the goddess’s love. Neferure could not recall a time when she had been so filled with joy. She trembled with it, and the smile never left her face.
The procession of treasure wound its way through Iunet’s dusty streets, with Neferure, the best and brightest gem of Thutmose’s offering, at its head. Beyond the final homes and store-houses of the city, the road, raised on an earthen causeway, cut across a field knee-high with emmer. Through her curtains, she could see how the late afternoon light danced on the backs of the small birds that dove down among the wheat heads to snap up their supper of flies and gnats. The emmer itself glowed, each seed-bearing tuft of each plant alight with the sun’s warmth. The goddess had set the world to sparkling, just for Neferure.
At last they reached the temple itself. Perched on its small hill, it rose above the fields with a stately grace, backlit by the vermillion glow of the setting sun. Neferure’s throat let out a tiny squeak of anticipation as her litter sank to the ground. She controlled herself, closed her eyes, breathed in the deep, calming breaths Senenmut had taught her, and when her ka was as still as it ever would be, she parted her curtains and stepped from the litter with precise dignity. The afternoon was cool, and the sun well on its way to its nightly journey through the underworld. No sun-shade was needed, but her women appeared quickly with their white-plumed fans to stir the gnats away from Neferure’s skin. Takhat appeared at her elbow, bowing slightly. “Are you ready, mistress?”
For answer, Neferure strode up the stone ramp toward the temple at the hill’s crown.
She paused at the ramp’s apex, overcome with the force of the goddess’s presence. A forest of pillars greeted her, arranged in neat ranks to either side of an avenue worn smooth by generations of priestesses and worshippers. Where the avenue ran, the temple remained unroofed, open to the blood-red sky. As Neferure gazed up through the pillars, a flight of geese traversed the narrow patch of sky, sudden and black, their wings speaking loud in the still air. The speed of their movement set her vision to spinning. She reached out to steady herself with one hand against a pillar, and when her flesh touched the sacred stone a fierce warmth flowed into her, as startling as the passage of the geese.
“Welcome, God’s Wife.”
Neferure looked round. Two women approached down the avenue, moving with the quiet pride of priestesses. She felt the sudden urge to bow to them, to prostrate herself on the stone floor like a slave. But she recalled her position, and with an effort she stood firm.
When the women halted in front of her, it was they who bowed, proffering their palms the way courtiers and rekhet bowed to the two Pharaohs. Neferure dropped her eyes so they could not read her startlement.
“We have waited long for you,” said one priestess. “Longer than was maat.”
“I have also waited long,” Neferure said. Her voice seemed to murmur back at her from amidst the pillars.
“No matter, Great Lady. The Pharaoh has sent the promised gift. We will not dwell on its delay. Come.”
They led her through a set of pylons, across a courtyard, dimmed by the encroaching twilight. The door to the temple itself stood before her, suffused with a steadily growing light as inside, amidst the soft chanting of many voices, lamps kindled to life. The warmth of the temple tugged at Neferure; she forgot herself and her steps quickened, carried her past the priestesses who guided her. She heard one of them laugh with pleasure and satisfaction as she brushed past.
Inside, a melody of color met her eyes. The righteousness of Hathor so overflowed that it spilled down the walls in the form of bright paint, of images of the goddess in all her several forms, intense and vibrant, leaping from the stone walls into bright and present life. Neferure spun in a circle, her feet dancing over the great red sun-disk set into the floor, and the colors whirled. Song rose up to soar amidst the smoke of incense and lamp-oil high above her head.
O Mistress of jubilation,
Lady of the dance,
Mistress of music,
Lady of the harp,
Lady of song,
Lady of the wreaths,
O Mistress of joy
Without end!
“Mistress of joy without end,” Neferure whispered.
“The goddess delights in you, as you delight in her.”
The two priestesses were at her side now. Full of gratitude, Neferure looked upon their faces for the first time. The one who spoke was thin and wiry, and had the confident posture of one who had been appealingly slender and womanish in her youth. She was a youth no longer, though; her face had begun to show its years, the pale brow crossed with fine lines, and deeper lines edged her nose and mouth. But she was as full of confidence as she must have been in her younger days. She smiled benevolently at Neferure, and Neferure could not help grinning back.
The other was more arresting. Shorter and broader than her companion, her face was curiously broad, the eyes wide-spaced, and while one was as black as any Egyptian’s, the other glimmered a sharp, intense blue. The braids surrounding her face were no wig, but the woman’s natural hair, and at her brow the braids glowed bone-white in the lamplight. Her appearance was so startling that Neferure nearly took a step backward. If not for the open delight of the other priestess, Neferure may have fled from the strangeness of her companion.
The odd-eyed priestess gestured elegantly, and the other spoke. “Do not be afraid. She is Imer, chosen of the Mistress. The goddess has brought you here, Lady Neferure, most fortunate and blessed of women.”
Imer moved her hands again, and again her companion’s voice filled the silence. Neferure realized that Imer could not speak with her tongue; her fellow priestess understood her signs and spoke in her place. “The goddess has a great work for you. Open your heart and receive her.”
“I try,” Neferure said. To her horror, tears stung her eyes. Weeping, in the very seat of the Mistress of Joy. It’s shameful. But she could not stop herself. Tears broke to spill down her cheeks. She wiped
frantically at her kohl with her fingers. “I try, but the Mistress never enters my heart. Not she, nor any other god.”
Imer smiled broadly, and pulled from her red sash a square of linen. She dabbed at Neferure’s cheeks with the gentleness of a nurse.
“It is no matter,” said the thin priestess. “Imer will teach you.”
The days bled one into another with the sweet, lazy slowness of honey dripping from a knife. Neferure meted out Thutmose’s treasure as he had instructed, but that task cost her hardly a day. For the first time in her life she was freed from duty, imbued with a sense of liberation that tingled along her spine. Never before had she chosen for herself how she would spend her time. And she knew that if she had been fortunate enough to have been born something lesser than a King’s Daughter, she would have chosen no other life than this.
Each morning she rose early to the high-pitched song of an apprentice, no doubt one of the many girls Hatshepsut had conscripted into Hathor’s service. The girl stood on a stone platform in the center of a small, sparsely planted courtyard behind the temple itself, her voice rising and falling as the sun made its way inevitably up the great blue vault of the sky. Her hymn was sweet. Neferure never tired of hearing it, though it brought her out of too few hours’ sleep on a rather hard and unfriendly bed.
With the other apprentices, Neferure tended the shrines, parceling out the offerings that best pleased each of Hathor’s faces: sweet cakes to the face of love; plain, honest wheat bread to the face of judgment. Strong beer to the Mistress of Dance, she who loved inebriation; milk to the mother; blood to grinning lion-face of She Who Scratches.
She joined in the dances, giving her ka over to the trance of movement, until, spinning and stamping, she was transported into another realm, where her thoughts swam dizzily and her breathing grew sluggish on the thickness of incense.
By night, she joined Imer on the rooftop sanctuary. They sat deep in conversation, bathed in silver starlight, discussing each facet of Hathor’s sevenfold self for hours. These were the best times. The sounds of night insects drifted up from the fields surrounding the temple, an endless chant to the goddess’s greatness. At first, Neferure had needed the assistance of Imer’s thin companion to understand the great priestess’s words. But with diligent practice, she came to grasp most of Imer’s signs for herself, and could even respond with her own clumsy form of the gestures. Imer’s wisdom was boundless. She unlocked mysteries like long-forgotten chests, and the gems contained within dazzled Neferure’s ka.
It was nearly her final night at the Temple of Hathor. Neferure’s feet dragged with the knowledge that she must soon return to Waset and the roles fate had laid out for her, but she climbed the stairway to the rooftop sanctuary in spite of the cold fist of sorrow clutching her heart. The stars were especially bright tonight, each one shining with such an individual intensity that she thought she might reach out and pluck a handful from the black sky. If they had been discs of electrum strung on a belt, they would have chimed in the gentle night wind.
Imer sat in her accustomed place, her back against one of the many pillars that stood on the rooftop, holding up nothing but the vibrant night sky. Her little reed mat was below her as always, and some servant had laid out a clay platter of melon slices and a jug of water. Neferure approached, full of melancholy. When Imer saw her, she bowed low over her own lap, as an apprentice bows to a High Priestess.
“Sit,” Imer said with her hands, her gestures clear in the ample glow of starlight. She offered Neferure a little mat of her own; Neferure took it with a nod of thanks.
“You are sad tonight,” Imer signed.
“I will miss the temple, and the Mistress.”
“You can let her inside now.”
Neferure hoped it was true. Certainly, under Imer’s tutelage she had allowed some presence into her heart more fully than ever before. Her face warmed to recall it, the insistent throbbing that filled her middle, the hot thrumming along her limbs. She assumed the presence to be Hathor. Who else could it have been, here in this place? She demurred with a gesture, and Imer went on:
“Something else troubles you.”
“Many things.”
“Tell me.”
Neferure sighed. Her hands failed her; she could not seem to recall all the signs she needed to express herself, and at any rate, mere hand-signs seemed insufficient to express the weight of duty that dragged at her, pulling at her ka as a crocodile pulls at its prey.
“Speak, if you will not sign. I will watch.” Imer tapped her own lips.
She drew a deep breath, and the scroll of her sorrows unrolled. She spoke of the way Amun spurned her, turned his back on her entirely, so that in his presence she felt only a great, uncaring distance, a coldness of abandonment, though she danced for him as passionately as she danced for Hathor, and burned myrrh until the smell of it singed her nostrils, and poured oil over his visage until the floor of his dark sanctuary was slick with it. She spoke of the way all gods drew back from her, retreating from her worship, though there was no one in the Two Lands as devoted or as earnest as she. She spoke the word heir with loathing, said it was not maat, not her fate, but she was chained to it like a bull is chained to a temple wall.
“What can I do, Imer? I am god-chosen – everyone says it, and I can feel the gods so close to me. Yet they do not come in. Why? All I wish is to be here, in Hathor’s temple, serving the Mistress of the West. Oh, can’t I stay? Can’t you find some way to make my mother release me from my duties?”
Imer sat unmoving for a long while, her blue eye gleaming in the starlight. Neferure grew uncomfortable under her scrutiny. She fidgeted on her mat, embarrassed of the way she had poured out her fears and insecurities. Finally, though, Imer lifted her hands.
“You must return to Waset.”
Neferure’s ka fell.
“You have duties yet to be done, child.”
Always duties. Always more to be done. Neferure felt tears rising, but squeezed her eyes tightly shut to drive them away. I will not weep again in the House of Joy. I will not so offend the goddess.
She steadied herself, then said with her hands, “Very well. What duties?”
“You will learn that for yourself.”
Neferure sucked at her lower lip, waiting for the priestess to say more.
“The goddess will make it plain. Sit in the shrine of your choice from starlight to starlight. Take only one jar of water, but no food. The goddess will fill you, child, I swear it.”
Neferure had her doubts, but she also had her instructions. Ever obedient, she rolled her mat and bowed to Imer. She turned her back on the blessing of starlight and descended the stairs into the heart of Hathor’s temple.
With her belly clutched by fear and the anticipation of failure, Neferure did not pause to consider which shrine she entered. She staggered through the darkness of the unlit temple, one hand on the wall so she would not lose her way entirely. Her sandals slid easily along the slick faience floor-tiles. Beneath her blind fingers, she felt the carven scenes of Hathor’s presence flicker and shift about her. At last her hands found a door, and she pushed it open, stepped into a darkness that was denser still.
“Lady,” she whispered in the cool blackness of the shrine, “have mercy on me at last, and fill me.”
Neferure sank to the floor, folded her legs beneath her, and waited.
She waited for hours, until her legs seared with cramps. She stretched them out on the floor and shook them, but she did not rise. She waited until the thin sound of the morning song came through the shrine’s walls as pale and distant as a waning moon. Morning had come, but the shrine she had chosen remained closed, and she remained enveloped in darkness. She waited as hunger seized her belly, an insistent gnawing at first, then, as the darkness whirled through her senses, intensifying with a ferocity that rent her from within.
“Neferure.” The voice was sharp, shrill. Her mother’s voice. It rebounded off the unseen stone walls, echoing, revers
ing upon itself as a ring of ripples rebounds when a stone is dropped into a pool. “Neferure, Neferure, Neferure, Neferurerurerurerure.”
The voice quieted, became melodic and soft. “Neferure.”
She felt an unseen presence bend over her, a warmth tipping across her body, the warmth of a nurse raising her from a cradle and holding her close against a bare, male chest.
“Who is there?” she said, and her words came out slowly. Her tongue, addled by hunger, did not know how to speak.
“Mistress of jubilation,” said the soft voice, “Lady of the dance.”
“Lady?” Neferure turned her head, quivering with eagerness. She tried to do as Imer had taught her, as Ahmose had taught her, letting her ka fall open like a blossom in the sun.
“Mistress of the harp, Lady of joy without end.”
“Yes,” Neferure sobbed. The blackness drew in close about her, touched her with eager, rough hands, and she fell open, a blossom wilting in the sun. “Lady, come in!”
There was a pressure against her chest, a rushing sensation as a chariot in the wind, a gasp, a chill rising through her body, a warmth pulsing deep inside. O, gods, her ka cried, overwhelmed at their sudden presence, the undeniable force of them, all clamoring at once within her heart. She would burst – she could not contain them all.
And then she saw, with pale, trembling disbelief, that she did not need to contain them. She was becoming them, becoming one of them, by the grace of Hathor, whom she had served selflessly for so many years as she had served the thronw, patiently awaiting her reward.
“How?” she cried out, reaching for the divinity that was her birthright, not knowing how to grasp it.
She stretched her hand into the darkness, and beneath her fingers she felt once more the dry, dusty hair of the bull of Min, its hot, trembling strength beneath her fingers, its breath on her thighs. She had looked up from the bull, gazed through the settling dust, and it was Thutmose she saw, staring back at her, his eyes full of fear, of awe, of worship.
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