The Crook and Flail

by L. M. Ironside

  ***

  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 /p>&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.&n itwbsp; 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?”

  “I know Ankhhor to be a devotee of the Aten,” Hatshepsut said. “Indeed Amun's divinity means nothing to him, nor any other god's. He cares only for the physical aspect of the sun: that which he can see, a soulless fire without will or intent. His family – his daughter, his brother – they were pawns to him, tools of his will, and he intended their use to glorify not only himself, but his god, who is bereft of all good things, even of life.

  “I take your meaning, Hapuseneb. My husband was a child under Nebseny's influence, and had Ankhhor succeeded in killing me, Iset would now be Great Royal Wife, and God's Wife, too. It would all have gone to Ankhhor, and to the Aten.

  “The throne of Egypt must never again be so easily manipulated. Amun must not be so threatened. I will not see maat come under a godless man's assault, not so long as I draw breath.”

  She stood. Her head spun with the effort, but she held herself proukilрd and straight. “My father was crowned Pharaoh though he was not a king's son. Why? Because the Heqa-Khasewet champed at our borders, waiting for a king to fall, waiting for a weakened Egypt to topple into their grasp. Instead, Thutmose the First fell upon them, and slaughtered them like dogs. He taught them the truth of Egypt's strength. Now, it seems, another enemy clamors for Egypt's weakness. But neither Ankhhor nor any other ambitious man shall sink his claws into the throne and claim it for his own self.

  “My son Thutmose is an infant. He will grow into a great man; by the gods, I swear it. But now he hardly walks two steps under his own power. When I see Ankhhor's hand laid at my feet, which man will rise up next to try to seize the throne of Thutmose the Third?”

  “Begging your pardon, Great Lady,” said Sikhepri, old and fat, but deft in his politics, “you must marry again. Take a new man as king, and young Thutmose may be his heir, to rule when your new husband goes to the Field of Reeds. A grown man on the throne, sure of himself, formidable – that would put an end to schemers such as Ankhhor.”

  “I performed the funerary rites in Thutmose's name,” she said. “I opened his father's mouth, and my hand was my son's. No; by law – by the will of the gods – Thutmose the Third is already your king, and no man's heir. That shall not change. But the Pharaoh needs a co-regent.”

  “You, of course, Great Lady,” Hapuseneb said. “You are the wife of his dead father, and you have accounted yourself well as queen.”

  She inclined her head in acceptance of the praise, but she said, “No. Put Egypt in the hands of a queen regent, and Egypt still has only a child for Pharaoh. A child will be a target for any man of Ankhhor's stripe: a temptation too great to ignore. As Sikhepri said, it is a formidable man Thutmose needs beside him: another Pharaoh. A joint kingship: that is what I propose. A leader who will guide him as he grows, and share the throne equally when he is of age. Not a queen whom every man in Egypt knows will be retired to some estate the moment the Pharaoh is strong enough to draw a bow.”

  “You will marry, then, Great Lady?” someone ventured. A few noblemen glanced doubtfully at Senenmut where he sat upon the floor.

  She lifted her chin, gazed down the length of the great hall, and met no man's eye. “In my blood is the right to the throne. In three days' time I shall present to you – shall present to all of Waset – my son's co-regent, your new king.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Dawn had not yet come. The promise of it hung in the air, a shimmer of expectation. Hatshepsut parted the draperies that hid from her the great railed balcony known as the Window of Appearances. From that balcony she would look down from the palace's height, through the sun's morning rays onto a&nbр0 T crowd of waiting citizens. But the plaza was empty yet, still grayed by the memory of the retreating night. The darkness lessened to the east, but the sky was still colorless. She wondered, what hue would this morning's sunrise be? Red and pink and gold, like any other, no doubt. The thought soothed her somewhat, but still her belly was a knot of tension.

  She turned back to her women. In this unfamiliar room, situated at the palace's highest point, they fumbled here and there, tripping over the chests they had brought up from her chambers. A guard clapped outside. She nodded to Tem; the woman demanded to know who sought entry to the presence of the God's Wife. There was a time when she trusted any guard, and would have ordered the doors opened at once. Never again.

  Tem swung the doors wide to admit Senenmut, then shut them quickly again. Her Chief Steward bore the outline of a long, flat box across his forearms, concealed by a drape of linen. She plucked the cloth aside. The box was very fine, leafed in gold, lined along its edges in brilliant cabochons of carnelian and turquoise. The lid was carved with the image of the winged scarab bearing the sun-disk upon its outstretched forelegs. Her eyes rose from the lid of the box to meet Senenmut's. They shared a conspiratorial smile.

  “Dress me,” she commanded her women. They took her gown from her, the simple linen traveling dress she had worn on that fateful journey south. The pre-dawn air raised a chill on her skin, and all at once she ached for the feel of Iset's warmth beneath her bed-linens. But she turned, faced Senenmut, her limbs trembling. He did not avert her eyes from her nakedness.

  Ita and Tem bent over the chests. They withdrew a man's long kilt, folded and pleated. She held out her arms as they wound it about her hips, secured it with an intricate knot. Ita lifted from the chest a golden belt, and fastened it, too, around Hatshepsut's waist. It featured a long apron beaded with the image of the cobra goddess, Wadjet, the protector of the king. They painted her eyes simply, lining them in kohl, forgoing the bright colors and intricate wings of a courtly lady. Her chest they left bare, except to blow a sheen of golden dust upon her nipples.

  Another clap at the door. Senenmut turned to give the challenge, and Hatshepsut's eyes watered when Ahmose's voice answered.

  “Admit her.”

  Ahmose stepped into the chamber behind the Window of Appearances with the quick movements of trepidation. But when she looked upon her daughter, a smile chased the worry from her face.

  Tem opened a second chest. Her hands hung suspended over its contents, fearing to touch.

  “Dress me,” Hatshepsut said again. With trembling awe, the woman withdrew the blue-and-white banded cloth of the Nemes crown, the symbol of the Pharaoh's power. It had taken some doing to procure it. The men whose duty it was to guard the sacred vestments of the Pharaoh did not take their work lightly. She had been obliged to send for a scribe and put into writing her proclamation that Senenmut was now the Steward of the Diadem,earဆ outranking the guards. They had given way quick enough when they saw the scroll, marked with the symbol of the king: for did she not speak in Thutmose's name, and enact all of his desires? “He desires nothing bu
t his nurse's breast,” Senenmut had muttered. “Ah, well, you have already given me more titles than I can count. What is one more?”

  Tem affixed the cobra circlet to Hatshepsut's brow, and reverently tied the crown into place, folding and draping its long arms over her shoulders, gathering it with golden bands at her nape.

  “Yes,” Ahmose said. It was a word weighted with the fulfillment of a lifetime's longing.

  Hatshepsut considered her mother for a long moment. Her eyes rested on the lines of Ahmose's brow.

  “Leave us, all except Nehesi,” she said to her servants. They departed; even Senenmut. When she was alone with her mother, she allowed her lips, her chin to tremble with the force of her doubt. “Will this work, Mawat?”

  Ahmose took her hand. “You know it is the will of Amun. You feel it in your heart.”

  Hatshepsut nodded, though all she felt in her heart was the terrible ache for Iset, the same pain that had plagued her these three days past. It would never leave her, she knew.

  “Besides,” Ahmose said, smiling, “your steward has worked hard, I think, to ensure that it will.”

  Hatshepsut laughed, looked away, abashed. Senenmut had hardly slept for the span of those three days. He had formed up a contingent of loyal men, and in the name of the Great Lady they had gone from house to house, blessing each with vouchers for bread and beer, with baubles confiscated from the High Priest's own storehouse. “If this does not bring the people to your cause,” Senenmut had said, “not even an act of the gods could do it.” “I only need to buy their loyalty until they grow used to the idea.” “One good flood will convince them. And if it does not, I will think of something else.”