King and Goddess

by Judith Tarr

  KING AND GODDESS

  Judith Tarr

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Book View Café Edition

  July 21, 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-530-4

  Copyright © 1996 Judith Tarr

  To the people who helped to make this book possible:

  Joanne and Steve, for help with research and development,

  and John, for the means to do it.

  Part One: Great Royal Wife

  Thutmose II, Years 3-15

  1

  The boat of the sun sailed slowly over the horizon. All night long it had drifted through the land of the dead, pouring its light upon the dry land. Now it drove the stars away. It ruled all alone in the blue vault of heaven, with no attendance but a lone circling falcon whose eye bent piercing keen upon the land of the living.

  Senenmut stirred and groaned and started awake. He was stifling. He could not breathe. He was trapped in the tomb, bound to the body, with no spells or magic to guide him out of the dark and into the Field of Reeds where the blessed dead go.

  He gasped. The weight on his face began to purr. The warm solidity that trapped him against the cold wall muttered sleepily till he kicked it; then it yelped. “Ai! You’re killing me! Mama! Help, Mama!”

  He clapped a hand over his brother’s mouth. Ahotep’s bright black eyes laughed at him. If he lifted it, the brat would shriek till their mother came running, and in no kind mood toward Senenmut. Then Ahotep would laugh and skip off to his breakfast, while Hat-Nufer, who cherished her title of Lady of the House, drowned her eldest in the wine of correction.

  Senenmut heaved his brother up, hand still clapped to his mouth, and carried him out into the bustle and clatter of morning in his father’s house.

  He dropped Ahotep squawking into the tub that they all bathed in, and bathed himself around him. Ahotep splashed in the water while Senenmut dried himself and put on a clean white kilt. Senenmut tossed another at his brother. Ahotep grimaced at it. He was a scant season removed from naked and insouciant childhood; he was not greatly reconciled to the servitude of clothes.

  Senenmut left him to find his own way into the kilt. The house had quieted as it did every morning just before sunrise. Everyone—his mother, the aunts, baby Amonhotep with his nurse, the two servants—had gathered in front of the shrine. His father bowed before the image that had resided in the niche for time out of mind, and poured out a drop or two of beer, and offered a bit from the new loaf of barley bread.

  Senenmut bowed to the god from force of habit. It was a graceless thing, a grinning, leering dwarf with luck in his stumpy hands and blessing on his head. Bes, dwarf-god, luck-god, presided over the house of Ramose as he did many another middling prosperous house in Thebes.

  But in his mind’s eyes Senenmut saw another god. A great god, a noble and straight-backed god, a god who was a king: Amon-Re of Thebes, who ruled above such lesser gods as Bes.

  At this very moment, in his tall palace set apart in walls from the rest of Thebes, the king offered wine in a golden cup and fruits of the earth on golden platters, as many as all his servants could carry, to the image of Amon in his ancestral shrine. By his offering the sun was persuaded to rise. By the strength of his devotion the Two Lands of Egypt measured their prosperity.

  It was a noble thing, to bring the sun back to the sky. Senenmut had never seen the rite, only heard of it. He had seen the king, of course, going by in procession for this reason or that: riding to war, returning in victory, celebrating the festival of a god.

  Senenmut was a commoner, a tradesman’s son. The king stood as high above him as the moon. But he could dream. Someday he would stand beside the king. Someday he would be a power in the world, a voice in the king’s ear, a sharer in his counsels.

  “Senenmut!” His mother’s voice was sharp, pitched to pierce the veil of fog about her eldest son. “Are you going to break your fast today? We have dates, fresh from the tree.”

  There was nothing tender about Hat-Nufer. Still she looked after her children well enough, and she knew how Senenmut loved dates. She thrust the bowl at him and said not a word as he gorged himself—at least until Ahotep appeared in a damp and drooping kilt, to lay vociferous claim to the few that were left.

  There were more wrapped in a cloth with the bread and cheese and the jar of beer that would sustain him till evening. He grinned and kissed his mother, who slapped him for his presumption, and saluted the aunts, and offered due respect to his father. Ramose, intent on coaxing the baby with a sop of bread in goat’s milk, acknowledged him absently.

  The memory followed him: the small inelegant room, the noisy inelegant people, even the servants joining in some altercation or other with Hat-Nufer and Ahotep.

  “They are so unbearably common,” Senenmut said as he shut the door and paused in the street, blinking against the dazzle of sunlight. “Father—gods, father is in trade. How much more common can you be?”

  He thrust himself away from the door. He was going to rise in the world.

  He knew precisely where he was going to begin, if not exactly how. His mother, clear-eyed ungentle creature that she was, had seen to that when he was no older than Ahotep. She had taken the whole profit of a season from Ramose’s trading of pots and jars for the brewing and storing and drinking of beer, and delivered it to the temple of Amon, and not the little temple that stood at the head of the street, either, but the great one, the temple in which the king himself had been known to set foot. In return she had demanded schooling for her son, and only the best of that.

  The priests had reckoned the payment sufficient, after some discussion with Hat-Nufer. Senenmut even then could have told them what use it was to haggle with his mother. She had never lost a battle.

  He had grown from child to man in the temple of Amon. Every morning after sunrise he went there, to the lofty halls and gilded pillars and the murmur of cultivated voices in every tongue that was spoken in the courts of Egypt. Every evening he returned home to his mother’s fierce interrogation and his father’s vague beneficence, Ahotep’s boisterousness and the baby’s wailing.

  Someday he would be rich. He would live in a high house and dine on a gilded table and never—no, never—share a bed with anyone not of his choosing.

  Thebes roared and surged about him. He rode it as a boat rides a cataract, skimming above the eddies, veering in the cross-currents. It was the greatest city in the world, and one of the most ancient, a city of kings beside the river that was the lifeblood of Egypt.

  He threaded the narrow ways with the ease of the Theban born, taking no great notice of their squalor, but aware of it nonetheless. Lords and princes never saw the warren of streets hidden behind the temples and the palaces, nor soiled their gilded sandals with the dust of common feet. They rode in chairs on the backs of burly bearers, or in chariots drawn by snorting, dancing horses. And they traveled on the wider roads, the processional ways that ran from end to end of the city, past the splendor of temples and palaces. They did not ever, he was convinced, run barefoot through a clutter of market-stalls, ducking the spray from a hurled chamberpot, making haste to the Temple of Amon before the master of scribes grew impatient with waiting.

  ~~~

  The temple was enormous, tall as a mountain reaching up to heaven. The air within the shrine was fogged with incense, trembling with awe. The god’s wisdom breathed from the walls.

  Senenmut had entered that great gate nearly every day since he was seven years old. He had long since learned to pass by the temple proper and slip through a smaller door guarded by one of the priests, into a world of clear and uncompromising daylight. There were no shadowy recesses here, no clouds of incense. In a colonnade off a sunlit courtyard, row on row of boys and young men sat
each in the place he had won for himself, clean-shaved head bent, kilt tight-stretched across his knees, papyrus or potsherd resting there while he wrote to his master’s dictation.

  There was a new gaggle of children in the corner that was warmest at midday, learning to mix the inks and hold the brush and draw painstakingly the first lines of the first glyph that the master was minded to teach them. He had a long rod in his hand, which he whipped out like a serpent’s strike, lashing the knuckles of a child who dared to draw a stick-man with an enormous hooked nose instead of the feather of Maat. The boy sniffled, but he already knew better than to cry in front of old Ranefer.

  As Senenmut strode past them, they looked up. Their awe made him swallow a smile. He must have seemed enormously tall to them, enormously haughty, making his way with lordly confidence to the inner wall of the colonnade. There the school gave way to the House of Life, the scribes’ hall where those who had passed into the mysteries of the craft sat all day with palette and pen and papyrus, recording the affairs of the Two Lands.

  Senenmut was not a scribe yet. But soon. He bowed to the master of masters, Seti-Nakht. Seti-Nakht frowned nearsightedly at him. “You dallied,” he said. “Consider yourself properly flogged.”

  Senenmut bit back a grin. He was never early enough for Seti-Nakht. Even when one day he came in the dark of dawn, before any other student stumbled yawning into the temple, Seti-Nakht had been sitting there already, roll of papyrus on knees, reading by the light of a lamp.

  While Seti-Nakht waited in conspicuous patience, Senenmut retrieved his brushes and inks and palette from the chest where he was privileged to keep them, and sought his place up against the wall of the scribes’ hall, carefully out of reach of Seti-Nakht’s rod. As he crossed his ankles and prepared to sink down, Seti-Nakht said, “Stop. Be still.”

  Senenmut had obeyed before he thought. He looked down at the plump little shining-pated man who was the most feared of the masters in Amon’s temple.

  Seti-Nakht ran his rod through his fingers. Senenmut did not honestly fear that it would strike him, but his back tightened nonetheless.

  Seti-Nakht looked him up and down. “Well,” he said. “You’re no beauty, if beauty matters. You’re arrogant enough for six. Do you think you’re good enough yet to take a place in there?” He tilted the end of the rod toward the scribes’ hall.

  Senenmut’s heart leaped. “Are you—am I—”

  “Be silent,” said Seti-Nakht.

  Senenmut bit his tongue.

  Seti-Nakht saw it: his brow drifted upward. “Your arrogance,” he said, “is a matter of note. Not, mind you, that it’s an ill thing for a man to know his own worth. But you reckon yours well above your station.”

  Senenmut’s face was hot. “I am a scribe. My station is whatever my merits make it.”

  “You are an apprentice in the temple of Amon,” said Seti-Nakht, “and not yet of any rank at all. You know, I presume, what your fellows call you when you strut past with that nose of yours in the air. ‘His lordship,’ they say. ‘Mighty in papyrus, beloved of Amon, the great prince Senenmut.’”

  The flush crawled out of Senenmut’s cheeks and down his neck. “And have I done anything, Master, to earn this reprimand?”

  “Was I reprimanding you?” Seti-Nakht tapped his rod lightly against his palm. “I think that you might consider the virtue of reticence, if modesty is beyond you. Pride is an ornament in a prince, but it sits ill on a tradesman’s son.”

  “Even if that tradesman’s son is reckoned the most brilliant of the apprentices?”

  Seti-Nakht’s rod caught Senenmut across the shins. The blow was precisely calculated to sting but to leave no lasting mark. Senenmut’s breath hissed between his teeth.

  “You are rather extraordinary,” Seti-Nakht said mildly, “but the judgment .of brilliance is hardly yours to make. It takes more than cleverness to make a great lord. It needs something less common. Intelligence; tact. The art of graciousness toward one’s inferiors.”

  None of which Senenmut had ever noticed in the lords’ sons who studied among the scribes, but he was no such fool as to say so. What he understood of this lesson was simple. A lordling who carried himself high was tolerated, because he had been born to do just that. A tradesman’s son was expected to conduct himself with greater circumspection.

  Even—especially—when he knew that he had no equal among the apprentices. No one else was so quick with the pen or so adept in the learning of languages. No one else wrote so clearly and with such elegance.

  “Quick wits are a gift of the gods,” said Seti-Nakht. “The ability to use them is more seldom bestowed. You are clever. No task is too difficult for you; most are too easy. It would do you little good, I think, to keep you among the apprentices. Boredom, like any other ill, can teach as well as vex the spirit; but you were never of a mind to find lessons in adversity.”

  And what, Senenmut wondered fiercely, was this? With every word he sank lower, and at the same time grew angrier. “What have I done,” he demanded, “but excel in the tasks you set me? Should I have pretended to be less capable?”

  “You could,” said Seti-Nakht, “have been less careful to let every scribe and master and apprentice know that you excelled in the tasks you were set.”

  Senenmut threw himself at the master’s feet. “I yield! By the gods, I yield! I am unworthy!”

  Seti-Nakht’s rod did not come whistling down upon his back. It slipped beneath instead, and levered him up, holding him lightly across the throat.

  He looked into Seti-Nakht’s face. The master of scribes stared calmly back. “Until you become a courtier, take this to heart. Never lie to any man who is better armed than you.”

  “And when I am a courtier?”

  “Then make sure that your attendants are most well armed.” Seti-Nakht shook his head, and to Senenmut’s astonishment he smiled.

  Senenmut had never seen him smile before. There was nothing reassuring in it.

  Seti-Nakht lowered the rod from Senenmut’s throat. “I am not admitting you to the House of Life,” he said. “Your talents lie elsewhere.”

  Senenmut staggered. All of this ordeal, he had thought, was to prepare him for the passage from apprentice to scribe. Not to cast him out. Not the most brilliant of the apprentices, the one who was most often given real scribes’ work to do, and not simply endless repetitive copying of old poems.

  It came out of him in a cry. “But I was the best of them!”

  “You were the most clever,” Seti-Nakht said. “The House of Life is no place for the easily bored.”

  “Then where am I to go? What am I to do? I can’t be a seller of pots and jars.”

  “Why not? Your father is.”

  Senenmut’s fingers clawed. Only a last remnant of prudence kept them from the old man’s throat. “I’ll die,” he said, flat and hurting-hard.

  “Contrary to all the tales,” said Seti-Nakht, “no one has ever died of frustrated ambition.”

  This time Senenmut could not stop himself from throttling Seti-Nakht where he sat. Not unless he backed away, whirled, and ran.

  The rod caught him as he spun, whirled him back. “Stop that,” said Seti-Nakht. “Even more than arrogance, you have a besetting flaw. You listen only as far as it pleases you, and no further. I have decided that you will not enter the House of Life. This I judge best. But,” he said as Senenmut came near to erupting yet again, “I find it difficult to imagine you in your father’s profession. You have no talent for it. What you do have . . .” He paused. He drew a breath, as if he needed to think; as if it were not thought of thrice and thrice over, since long before Senenmut came to stand before him. He said, “Go to the palace. Tell the chamberlain that Seti-Nakht sends this gift to be used as it may best be used.”

  Senenmut rocked on his feet; and yet he nearly laughed. No wonder indeed that everyone was terrified of Seti-Nakht. Even his gifts he gave with sting of rod or tongue. He had cast Senenmut into the depths of despair—and t
hen he had set him free. He had sent him to the palace. And in the palace was the king.

  “Go,” said Seti-Nakht. “Out of my sight. Get!”

  Was there a glimmer of something in his eye—sorrow, perhaps? Pride clothed in regret?

  Not likely, Senenmut thought. The old horror was glad to be rid of him.

  He turned quickly enough, he hoped, that Seti-Nakht could not see the gleam of tears. He had what he wanted, at last, at last. But it was not as effortless as he had dreamed, to depart from the Temple of Amon. Nor was it easy at all to leave Seti-Nakht. The bitter tongue, the merciless rod—gods; what would he do without them?

  With the sting of that last blow still clear in his body’s memory, Senenmut walked away from the House of Life, toward the palace and the king’s service.

  2

  Senenmut entered the palace with thudding heart and trembling knees. He would have died before he admitted to either.

  He was passed from guard to servant to chamberlain, each time repeating the name of Seti-Nakht, which was his password and his surety. He was too proud—arrogant, his master would have said—to gawp like a yokel, but his eyes darted, taking in splendors. Gold and jewel-colors, painted images, wall after wall limned from vaulted ceiling to stone-tiled floor with prayer or poetry or princely puffery. There were halls as high as the sky, forested with pillars; gardens sweet-scented with rarities, flowers and trees that grew nowhere else in Egypt; even the roar and the pungent reek of a menagerie that seemed filled mostly with enormous cats. And everywhere there were princes, images of elegance drifting or strolling or striding past in clouds of attendants.

  None of them took any notice of a weedy young man in a scribe’s kilt, clutching palette and ink and brushes as he followed the latest of several guides through a maze of passages. There was no clear order here, no coherence, only the whim of this king or that. One built a wing flying off the palace proper. Another made it greater. A third added a colonnade and closed it in with a garden. And so it went, more like a living thing than the work of any one man’s hands.