The Crook and Flail

by L. M. Ironside

  Ahmose stepped into the somber, musing pause. “You all know that I am god-chosen. Your wives came to me before I was regent, that I might read their dreams. I ask you to be sensible. Who knows the desires of the gods better than the god-chosen, unless it is the High Priests?”

  “And where is our ancient High Priest of Amun?” Nebseny said. “No doubt huddled over his chamber pot with a flux. He is old and failing, but I grant you, his opinion on the matter would as good as decide us.”

  “Would it truly?” Ahmose countered. “I wonder. You will not listen to the words of a god-chosen queen who has led Egypt wisely and fairly all these years, and now you mock your own High Priest...”

  “Mm,” Mutnofret interjected. “I doubt very much whether all would agree that you have been a wise ruler, Ahmose. None of us has forgotten that the floods failed for two years running when you were raised to Great Royal Wife. What did you do, I wonder, to anger the gods? And what greater anger could we expect if we put your daughter on the Horus Throne? The gods will not be mocked. One needn't be god-chosen to know that much. Not only is she female, but Hatshepsut is unpredictable and rash. Yesterday's display on the temple steps showed us all that much. Why, we are lucky the gods have not inflicted us already. Imagine, a girl making a mockery of the circumcision rites, at Amun's sacred doorstep.”

  Hatshepsut glanced at her mother – at her clenched jaw, her tense eyes – and kept her mouth shut.

  “She does mock us,” one of Mutnofret's priests said. “She even wears the garb of a boy, and shaves her head. She is unnatural. The gods will not suffer her insolence.”

  “Do you presume to speak for the High Priest?” Ahmose snapped.

  “Never, Great Lady. My voice is my own. I am a man of Egypt as surely as I am a priest. Does Egypt's voice mean so little to the throne?”

  They argued on, late into the morning, while Hatshepsut grew more miserable and uncertain. Fifteen to seven, the High Priest declining to show, and one of her supporters invoking a child's bed-time story as evidence for her claim. She stared in desperation at the painting of her father, standing proud before Amun who poured the blessings of the ankh over his head. My father breathed the breath of life from Amun's own hand, but I am withered and winded. Faced with Mutnofret's erudite, cool-tempered contingent, she was ashamed of her rashness at the temple. She should have listened to Ahmose, should have waited until the time was right, until the High Priest could be moved, until some sign, some miracle arrived from Amun that would leave no one in doubt. Have I failed you, father, or did you fail me? She half expected Thutmose's image to turn its face toward her, to speak to her from the bricks of the chamber. The dead king said nothing, and the voices of Egypt clamored back and forth, back and forth, growing more fierce, more insistent, more sharply divided with each word.

  I was wrong. I was wrong to think I knew Amun's will. I was wrong about Waser-hat's history. The king did proclaim my brother his heir, and undid my own proclamation. What else is maat, but a male heir, a prince in body and in ka?

  The assembly had escalated to a shouting match. Ahmose and Mutnofret discarded their regal bearings; they raised their voices along with the men.

  “And what of the Heqa-Khasewet?” one man cried. “They have not forgotten that they held Egypt for their own, make no mistake! It was not so long ago. They wait for our weakness. They thirst for our blood. They will be back to impose their blasphemies on our land and our people the moment we waver from the gods' will. Have you forgotten how Egypt suffered under their lash, Lady Regent?”

  Ahmose stood, and the shouting subsided. “It was my own grandfather who routed the Heqa-Khasewet from the Two Lands. Maat flows in my very blood. I forget nothing. But I tell you truthfully: I will not defy the gods in this. I would sooner tear Egypt apart with my own hands and give it to the Heqa-Khasewet brick by brick than see the false heir on the throne.”

  Mutnofret pounded her table, shrieking. “You see how little she cares for our land!” Her men roared along with her.

  Ahmose trembled.

  It's my fault she's so worn down, Hatshepsut told herself. She feared for me after I cut myself, and now we are all paying for my folly.

  The priest Nakht rose from his table, gesturing for silence.&nbsfono thp; It was long in coming, but at last the room settled. “We are all greatly taxed in our hearts. The morning has been long. My friends, we are making no progress, shouting like a lot of sailors at their oars. Let us adjourn for an hour. We will all benefit by taking fresh air.”

  “A sensible suggestion.” Ahmose, too, rose. “We meet again in an hour. Hatshepsut, come.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Senenmut squatted on his heels several paces from the chamber's door. The man Nehesi loitered beside him, leaning one great, muscular shoulder against a the finely painted palace wall. The guards on the door narrowed their eyes at Nehesi's casual presumption, but the Medjay guardsman only lifted his chin and leaned harder, his arms folded below his scarred chest. Senenmut could not quite decide whether he liked Nehesi or despised him. The man was coarse in manner and mind, lacking in courtly refinement as soldiers often are. But he seemed eminently pleased with the favor the princess had bestowed upon him, and his regard for the safety of her person could not be questioned. Nehesi had held the crowd at the Temple of Amun at bay, and Senenmut had witnessed how tenderly Nehesi carried Hatshepsut to her bed in the House of Women, how he'd laid her pale form down and stood over her until the physicians arrived with their copper needles and their salves, watchful as a father over his sleeping daughter. Whatever faults Senenmut may find in a man who made his living with the sword, he could not fault Nehesi in loyalty to his lady.

  They had waited outside the audience chamber for at least three hours, first standing at attention, then pacing, finally falling to idle talk while Senenmut slumped on the floor. He was about to make some half-hearted attempt to raise a conversation again when he became aware of a strange, muted buzz coming from the chamber doors. It rose in pitch, and he scrambled to his feet, recognizing the collective thrum of many angry voices. His knees protested as he straightened; he shook each leg in turn, and heard Nehesi grunt as he levered himself away from the wall.

  The door opened; the guards started, snapped more fully to attention, pointing their spears exactly upright. Hatshepsut was among the first to emerge, following close behind Lady Regent Ahmose. The girl caught Senenmut's eye, and something like relief filled her narrow, harsh features. He tried a tentative smile, but she shook her head, the braided side-lock swinging. Senenmut bowed low as the princess and the regent approached.

  “An adjournment only,” Hatshepsut told him quietly as men streamed from the audience hall. “No one has been swayed to my side yet. To tell the truth, we may have lost some of the few we brought into that chamber with us.”

  The frown on Ahmose's face deepened, darkened. “Good men, accompany my daughter into the garden. She and I both need time to collect our thoughts, and I must be alone to pray.” She turned and swept down the hallway, raising and turning her shoulders to avoid brushing against any of Mutnofret's men. She did not move in the direction of her royal apartments, but heading for the garden, no doubt t's uzz cwepo seek the comfort of the shade trees or the raised edge of the great rectangular lake.

  “Shall we go?” Nehesi said.

  “No.” Hatshepsut gazed after her mother with a curious, detached sadness. Senenmut held himself very still, and watched in her eyes an intricate play of remorse, anger, guilt, resolution. “Come with me.”

  She led them through halls he did not know, past open courtyards where men and women, dressed in bright finery, gathered to entertain emissaries of far-off lands, past the doors to humble offices where scribes worked endlessly, recording the words and works of the regent, composing letters to foreign kings, tallying the wealth of Egypt. As tutor to the king's daughter, his services had seldom been required at the palace; most of his work was confined to the House of Women. It took him some
time to realize where Hatshepsut led them, but once he knew, he reached out to touch her wrist, trying to restrain her. She shook off his touch with a peremptory twitch.

  Two guards, dressed in the blue-and-white kilts of royal protectors, stood attentive before Lady Regent Ahmose's private rooms. Hatshepsut halted a little way down the hall, evidently struck by sudden uncertainty. Senenmut felt a wash of relief; the guards would not allow even the king's daughter inside without Ahmose's permission.

  Nehesi saw the dilemma and, ducking his head in a brief, apologetic bow, stepped ahead of Hatshepsut.

  “Good day, my brothers.”

  The two men eyed him, murmured a tentative greeting.

  “Have you heard the news from the barracks? Our new bows have arrived from Mehu.”

  One guard glanced at the other, his eyebrows raised.

  “I've heard they can shoot from here to the Delta,” Nehesi said.

  The second guard looked back at his mate, paused, and at last shrugged. “Who's to take over?” he asked of Nehesi.

  “I am. Be gone quick; I haven’t anything else for you. You will need to find out the rest when you get back to the barracks.”

  “Right.” The men trotted away, their striped kilts rippling.

  Hatshepsut took Senenmut by the hand and pulled him toward the queen's chamber. Somehow the gesture soothed his heart after the way she had shaken him off moments before. He had not even realized her avoidance of his touch had wounded him. And how silly that it should. You are her tutor, man, and she is still a girl. His heart, his thoughts were like the ruffled feathers of a bird, disorganized and rattling, obscuring all shape and form and sense. He tried to sort through these disorienting emotions as Hatshepsut dragged him across the queen's threshold. He could see but one idea clearly: that something in his young lady's manner, something in the very air today, spoke of sudden change – catastrophic, perhaps, but definitely momentous. It made him wild te idth="1emo cling to the here-and-now, and he stared at Hatshepsut desperately, as if he had only moments to memorize her face, her manners, before a god or a demon spirited her far away forever.

  Inside the chamber, Hatshepsut barred the door, then beamed at Nehesi. “Good man! Those were secret words you spoke, weren’t they?”

  “New bows, Mehu, the Delta. The three together tell any man in the royal guard, ‘Disregard your previous order. A new one has been given.’” He paused, rolled his lower lip into his mouth. “I took a risk, Great Lady, for you. I can never go back to the guard. I have falsified an order from a commander. It could mean my death.”

  “Say no more. You entered this chamber a palace guard, but you will leave my personal servant. I claim you for my own. No one will question the king's daughter in this matter.”

  Senenmut sucked in a cold breath, but she forestalled his protest with one quick, brown hand. “Now there is no time to waste. Help me, both of you.”

  Despite his fear and his strange sense of floating detachment, Senenmut could not help but gape at the luxury of Ahmose's apartments. She lived in great resplendence, from the sweep of her tiled floor – bright faience pieces forming an image of the goddess Mut that stretched the whole long span of the room – to the tall electrum mirror framed by a pair of carved ebony-wood goddesses, to the senet board perched on her little game-table, its squares and pawns fashioned from precious stones and polished to a deep, rich luster. Windcatchers near the ceiling let in a rising mid-day breeze that smelled of high water and sweet herbs; the breeze stirred tapestries of the lightest, finest linen so that the goddesses painted upon them swayed in a languid dance.

  Hatshepsut surely had visited her mother here before. Indeed, she had spent most of her earliest days in these apartments, until she reached the age of six and was sent off to the harem to be educated. She led the men confidently across the expanse of the anteroom, past a finely made table where Ahmose received her visitors, past a gold-ribbed harp, its strings sparkling in a column of sunbeams admitted past the windcatcher’s bars. She took them directly to a great door carved with the image of the sun-scarab and into Ahmose’s own bed chamber.

  The chamber was a stunning work of architecture. Through his dizzy rush, Senenmut checked and stared at the wonder of the room. The wall opposite the door was not solid, but a series of flat, rectangular columns, with spaces between perhaps two hands wide, so that one saw straight out into Ahmose’s private garden as if peeking through fingers held over the eyes, or through a grove of saplings. The columns stretched from floor to ceiling, the entire soaring height of the palace, and high up where the smoke from the queen’s night-braziers had darkened the sandstone, huge, heavy bolts of woolen fabric hung rolled, ready to be loosed to cover the miraculous wall against winter’s chill and damp. In the center of the wall, dividing the widest of the columns, a door afforded access to the walled garden.

  The whole place was lit up with an intense, bright white light, the brilliance of the sun at its zenith. It fell across Ahmose’s bed, a huge and opulent thing piled with bright linens, crowned by a cuoset urved ivory headrest. The light fell, too, on a bank of wardrobes and jewelry boxes. Hatshepsut crossed to one of these, a chest so large Nehesi could have stood inside of it comfortably. It smelled strongly of oiled wood, and faintly of sweet myrrh and lavender. Hatshepsut tugged open its doors. The sweet scent intensified, overwhelming the room. Hatshepsut paused, suddenly shaken in her strange, headlong determination. Senenmut said tentatively, “Great Lady?”

  “My mother's favorite perfume,” she said. Her eyes were locked on nothing, on some memory playing out before her own private heart. She shuddered and squeezed her eyes shut, drew in a breath as if savoring Ahmose's scent, as if this would be the last time she would ever breathe it in.

  She reached into the wardrobe and pulled out a gown, thin-woven red linen so fine Senenmut could see her hands through it; a veil, little more. She handed it to him, sorted through her mother’s belts and sashes, settled on one particularly fine belt of lapis scarabs rolling golden balls, linked one after the other. In another chest she located fine sandals, braided and wrapped with cool golden wire, beaded with turquoise. “My feet are larger than Ahmose’s, but I need not wear these for long.”

  She tugged the knot of her boy’s kilt loose. Senenmut and Nehesi both turned away from her nakedness, but she said, “Don’t be fools. We have no time for modesty. Help me into the gown.”

  “Great Lady,” Senenmut turned back at her command and looked away, looked anywhere but at her bare flesh. She had often undressed before him; the fact of it had never flustered him before. Now he felt out of his depth, swimming against a hot current of desire and regret and fear. He stammered, “I don’t know how to dress a woman.”

  “I can’t tie these knots myself.” She snatched the gown from his hands and threw it over her shoulder, fussed with its drape about her waist.

  “Sake of Sobek,” Nehesi hissed at Senenmut. “I can do it. The gods know I’ve helped enough women back into their frocks before their husbands came home. You’ve led a boring life, tutor.” Hatshepsut raised her eyebrows, gave her guard a sharp stare. “Begging your pardon, Great Lady.”

  “Only tie this thing so it stays on me, and I will pardon you anything.”

  Nehesi bent over her shoulder, knotting the delicate fabric with fingers surprisingly deft for their thickness. She fastened the belt herself, then sent Nehesi to choose the finest jewels from Ahmose’s casks.

  She settled onto the stool at Ahmose’s mirror-table. She stared at herself sternly in the round, bright mirror. “The razor, Senenmut.”

  He moved toward her on reluctant, numb feet, as slowly as a man entranced. He took up the regent’s delicate copper razor; it was ivory-handled, cleverly curved. Then he stopped, uncertain. “Er – Lady?”

  “Shave off my lock.”

  Senenmut held her eye in the mirror. He knew now what she intended. “Lady, you have not begun to bleed.” His voice was hardly more than a whisper. He would not shame
her in front of Nehesi. “You cannot do this thing. Not until….”

  “I will do it all the same. Surely you two heard the council from the palace halls. If I do not do something now then Egypt will rip itself in two, starting with my mother and Mutnofret. Do you believe strife will stop with them? Of course it will not. It will spread like a disease until the whole land is broken. I will not allow that, Senenmut. It is not maat, this fighting. Shave off my lock.”

  He hesitated only a moment longer. This was where his regret came from. A grown woman has no need of a tutor. This was the last he would ever serve her. The knowledge, now named, now identified, filled him with a poignant sorrow. He gripped the handle of the razor until the skin of his his knuckles stung.

  There was no time to whip salt and oil together into a soothing froth. He shaved her head dry, scraping carefully at the root of her side-lock until the last vestige of her childhood hung by a few dark hairs, pulling at her tender skin so that she screwed her face up in a girlish wince. Senenmut made one more pass, and the side-lock parted from her head with the razor’s faint hiss. The braid fell onto the ground, still as a dead snake, its loose end raveled. Hatshepsut looked down at it, lying so frank and dark against the shining floor tiles. Then she straightened and pointed to one of Ahmose’s wigs, waiting with its sisters on their ornate stands. Senenmut retrieved it, laid the linen padding on Hatshepsut’s scalp, and set the heavy wig in place. It was worked in hundreds of small braids that brushed past her shoulders. Each braid was banded with gold and weighted with cinnabar beads like droplets of blood. The beads clattered as she turned her head this way and that, assessing. Finally she nodded. It would do.

  Nehesi laid a collar of mother-of-pearl about her shoulders. He had chosen wisely. The collar was worked in the shape of two great vulture’s wings: the wings of the goddess Nekhbet, the patroness of Egypt’s Great Royal Wives. The tips of the wings came together in a point above Hatshepsut’s small breasts, and from them hung a bright blue scarab cradling a golden sun-disc in its forelegs. The collar was heavy; she shifted her shoulders as if the skin beneath its weight itched, but the effect was stunning.