by Judith Tarr
~~~
After a month and more of doing her wifely duty to the king, Hatshepsut woke one morning looking green and ill. Nehsi, who saw her, watched carefully. And the next morning she was ill again, and the morning after that.
Even a man could hardly mistake it; and Nehsi was not as some men were, willfully ignorant. The queen, young as she was, might well have failed to understand, but her maids were wise in the ways of women. “Wait,” they bade her, “and count the days. If your courses are late . . .”
“They will be,” the queen said. She spoke as one who knows for a certainty, with relief that she did not try overly hard to hide. “I will bear the king a son, and he shall be king.”
“Gods grant,” murmured the more pious of the maids.
~~~
As the count of days stretched, and no sign of her woman’s courses, the queen went less often to the king’s bed. Then one evening as she took her ease with a book and a flute-player, his messenger came to bid her attend her husband.
“May my royal lord forgive me,” said Hatshepsut; and humble though the words were, her tone had never known humility: “but my majesty is indisposed.”
The messenger was taken aback. “Lady! You cannot—”
“The queen’s majesty,” she said, sweetly precise, “is indisposed.”
He must leave or be ejected. He bowed and retreated.
“When he comes back,” the queen said, “my door is closed.”
~~~
She could not, however, keep out the king. It took him a handful of nights and a dozen summonings through messengers who were not permitted to pass the door. Nehsi would have expected him to drown his sorrows with one of his concubines—Isis might have rejoiced in the victory—but if he had done that, it had not removed the shame of his royal wife’s refusal.
The queen received him perforce, in as little state as she might. She lay in her bed, wrapped in a robe, with only her eyes painted, and no wig, only the plait of her own hair. Nehsi thought her quite fetching, like the girlchild she so seldom permitted herself to be.
There was no telling what the king thought. He was in a temper, with a high flush under the bronzing of wind and sun on his cheeks. The scent of wine swept in with him. “Lady!” he said brusquely, not troubling with a greeting. “Are you ill? No one has seen you for a good hand of days.”
“I am not ill,” she said. “I am indisposed.”
“And what of your royal duties?”
Her eyes flashed up at that. He grinned without humor. She smiled back, with an edge of cold mockery. “I have done what must be done,” she said, “from these chambers, with the aid of servants and chamberlains.”
That rather lowered his crest; but he was in too high a dudgeon to come down all at once. “Well, then. You are ill. That doesn’t give you leave to refuse my messengers.”
She lay back as if suddenly too weary to face him. “Your messengers are tedious. I thought I told the first two or three that they were not welcome.”
“They were my messengers,” the king said.
“So they were,” said the queen without a flicker of guilt.
He glared at her. He was not, Nehsi must remember, an unintelligent man; simply one who used sparingly the wits the gods had given him. He could see perfectly well what his wife was telling him.
She regarded him calmly. “I am carrying your child, who will be your heir. My duty to you is done until that child is born.”
He understood her. Nehsi saw how his body stiffened as if at a blow. “Then,” he said in a tone that perhaps no one had heard from him before, “all the words you said . . . all the sweetness you showered on me, the promises, the kisses . . . those were only duty.”
“Did I not do it well?” she inquired.
He drew a sharp breath. “You did it most well.”
She nodded, cool as ever. “Then I am content. I shall appear tomorrow in the hall of audience as befits your queen and consort. You will see no further failing in my public duty, not at least until the child demands it.”
“And . . . your private duty?”
“That is done,” she said. “I wish you goodnight, my lord. May the gods grant you dreams of honor and prosperity.”
He heard the dismissal; he moved slightly as if to indicate that he would go. But not quite yet. “Lady,” he said, “you are cold: cold and too perfectly the queen. I could have loved you.”
“The gods commanded that we be mated to one another,” she said. “Therefore it was done. I give you the heir you require.”
“And no more,” he said. He straightened. “Well. I should have known how you would be. Your father was the same.”
“He was your father also,” she said.
“No,” said the king. “I was always the lesser, the son of a woman who was not the queen. You were his child in heart and soul.”
She did not gainsay that. “Goodnight, my lord,” she said.
This time he went as she bade him. Nehsi could not see that she watched him go, or that she cared how she had stung him.
She could have had a lover, a husband who cherished her. Instead she might well have made an enemy.
It was not Nehsi’s place, no more than it had ever been, to remind the queen that she was fortunate. She had not been beaten or visibly harmed. Her husband had been entranced with her, had been wounded deeply when she cast him off. She was a fool to have done it, and no matter how awkward he might have been, or how little pleasure he might have given her.
He kept his tongue between his teeth. She slept, to all appearances, with a clear conscience. She woke greensick but triumphant, because it was proof. She had done as she intended, as her duty bade her. She was free of the nightly battle—for so she must think of it.
“When my son is born,” she said to the silent and, he hoped, unreadable Nehsi, “he’ll forgive me anything. You’ll see. He’s not half the hardened soldier he pretends to be.”
“Then why,” Nehsi made bold to ask, “can you not love him?”
She was in the mood for once to answer. “Because I can’t,” she said. “He grates on me like a sour note on a flute. He ruts like a bull, grunting and straining. He smells like a goat. He could bathe in oil of myrrh and still reek of the byre.”
“Many women seem to find him irresistible,” Nehsi observed.
“His title is irresistible,” said the queen. “I don’t like him, Nehsi. I never have. When did the gods ever say that I should fall in love with the man they bound me to?”
“Love,” said Nehsi, “is hardly required. But liking, respect, consideration—those might be worth a moment’s thought.”
She turned her shoulder to him, ostensibly to oblige the maid who was arranging her pectoral.
He started to speak again, sighed, held his peace. Not for him would she see sense. Her father might have enforced it on her, but her father was years dead.
A queen, like a king, could do much as she pleased. If that was to drive her king away and teach him to hate her, then no mere servant could deter her.
~~~
It would have been fair enough if the king had declared war against his wife. He chose however to declare war in Asia. He gathered his armies with fierce and single-minded speed, swept them with him, led them away just as the river began to rise in its yearly flood.
The queen remained behind as was proper, ruled as regent in his place, suffered with exemplary patience the slow days and months until she was brought to bed of the king’s heir.
Well might she be patient. She had no husband there to vex her. She greeted news of victories with what seemed to be honest joy, and sent felicitations as a queen should, and with them such gold and provisions and reinforcements as he asked for. She was a very perfect queenly queen.
She could afford to be generous. He had not taken Isis with him to the war, though she had begged and schemed and done everything in her power to persuade him. She had even—the little fool—tried to enlist the queen’s aid. Hats
hepsut declined, smiling as demurely as Isis herself, murmuring, “War is no place for a woman—he himself has said it.”
And maybe she took care to remind the king of that. Certainly, when he rode away, Isis stood with the rest of his servants and his concubines, and watched him go. It was ill luck to weep for a man who went off to war; but her great eyes swam with unshed tears.
He could not have seen. He had forgotten even the favorite of his concubines, the greatest solace against the queen’s cold heart. All of his mind was focused on the war, and on the road that he must travel before he came to it.
11
In the days of the queen’s gravidity, Senenmut came to know her perhaps better than he had any right to. She did not settle into the bovine calm that he had heard was the way of bearing women; but she was less sharp-tongued than she had been. She had more patience for the exactitudes of the priestly script, more willingness to accept correction if there was need.
He admired her for that. It was not an easy pregnancy, nor did it grow easier as it went on. Her doctors hovered. They would have confined her to her bed, but she would have none of that. Shorter public audiences, longer private gatherings in which she could recline on a couch with little sacrifice of dignity: to those she would concede.
She had two kingdoms to rule, and a husband spending the wealth of both in his war in Asia. War was noble; war was the proper pursuit of kings. That, Senenmut had been taught. But he saw war as a queen must see it: lengthy, expensive, taxing her lessened strength.
She had scribes and clerks in dozens and hundreds, but she took to expecting that Senenmut be present while she conferred with embassies and heard the counsels of high lords of the Two Lands. He recorded what was said, which was a scribe’s task; but after, she would keep him with her, often with no other attendants but a guardsman and a maid or two. Then she would ask what he thought of the things that had been said.
At first he did not think. He had no time. He was an instrument, a pen and a strip of papyrus, recording without judgment. But she challenged him. She demanded that he listen as well as write. She never cared how difficult it was. She asked it; she expected that he do it.
He had learned in the Temple of Amon that it did no good to hate one’s master for demanding the impossible. Either one did it or one suffered. Because he had been well taught, and because he had his pride, he taught himself to drive two horses at once, to both record and think. It was hard; it sent him home night after night with a splitting headache. But he persevered.
And he learned. The queen granted him neither thanks nor admiration; but from asking him on occasion she advanced to asking him every day after audience, what he would have done or thought in her place.
It dawned on him after an embarrassingly long while that she was teaching herself even as she compelled him to learn. He was the youngest of those she trusted, the closest to her in age and experience.
Even the trust was a revelation: she trusted almost no one. Her Nubian. A maid or two. Hapuseneb the priest of Amon. Senenmut Perhaps one or two of the courtiers and counsellors, but with those she was always on guard, saying nothing that was not carefully judged.
There grew by degrees a custom. After the public and private audiences, the queen would withdraw to rest and refresh herself before the tables were laid for the evening banquet. With her she would take a few companions: Senenmut, the priest, the Nubian who was her shadow. Maids would attend her for propriety’s sake, but always the same few. There was wine; there were little cakes, and dates for Senenmut, and such other fruits as were in season.
They sat at ease, conversing in comfort that had grown over the days and months. The queen, swelling into immobility with the child, clung fiercely to her mind’s acuity.
That one particular day, Senenmut remembered after, she had seen an embassy from Libya, and conversed with the leader of a caravan of traders that had ventured into the fabled country of Punt He had brought her gifts, most of which had gone to the storehouses; but she had kept a branch from the myrrh-tree, dried and sere but heavy with scent.
She loved the scent of myrrh, would drink it in when no one else could bear the strength of it. If she could, she would bathe in it; but her maids kept her sensible, and urged on her less potent unguents. Senenmut did not mind it terribly, but the other two, he noticed, were holding their breaths.
She was oblivious as she usually was to others’ inconvenience. The caravan-master had enchanted her with his tales. “Imagine!” she said. “Whole forests of myrrh, and fields of spices. What a country that must be! And its people—black, like Nubians, but smaller-statured, in robes of leopardskins.”
Nehsi, who was rumored to sleep wrapped in the skin of a leopard that he had killed, looked more disdainful than usual. “They are only savages,” he said.
Hapuseneb laughed between cups of wine. “So says one who would know! And you, sir: in what den of lions were you born?”
“In Thebes of the kings,” he answered with dignity, “among the king’s Nubians. I am a civilized man.”
It was impossible to chasten Hapuseneb. He grinned. “So may the people of Punt be civilized, by their own lights. I wonder what their wine is like, if they have wine.”
“We must call the trader back again,” the queen said, “and ask him all our questions.”
“Surely!” said Hapuseneb. “And you, sir scribe: have you nothing to ask?”
Senenmut had been sliding into a doze. He was short on sleep, and not for any reason that he could explain to these of all people. His brother’s nightlong spate of sickness had kept him awake perforce. Better they should all believe his nights held hostage to a woman.
He roused hastily. “What’s to ask? We should send someone to see.”
The queen clapped her hands. “Yes!” But then her face fell. It hurt, almost, to see so much animation turned dour. “Yes. Someday. Maybe. When this war is paid for.”
“Wars are paid for in the booty the warriors bring back,” Nehsi said.
“Not always,” she said. “Not even often. I hate wars, I think. They’re wasteful.”
“Never tell a man that,” Hapuseneb said, cheerful as ever.
“Ah,” she said, a snort of disgust. “Men.”
She shifted on her couch, settling her ungainly weight as best she might. Her maids were quick to help, offering cushions, a footrest, the cooling breeze of a fan. She waved them all away. She was irritable suddenly, more than usual.
Senenmut was not so fogged with sleep that he could not see the obvious. The others seemed blind. But maybe they did not have a mother who bore a child a year all through their youth, and had miscarried of the last only this year past. He knew the signs.
When she stiffened and tried to hide it, he was certain. He clapped his hands as imperiously as the queen ever had. “Fetch the physicians!” he commanded the startled maids.
They stared at him as if he had been a dog that suddenly sat up and spoke. He had never played the lord before.
He armed his glare and fixed it on them. One broke and ran, he hoped in the proper direction.
The queen’s eyes were closed. Her face was pale. Her voice was thin, a little breathless. “It hurts,” she said, “rather more than I was told.”
“Women forget,” said Hapuseneb. “It’s a mercy, Taweret’s gift.”
He had forsaken his wonted levity. It had taken him some little time, but now he saw what Senenmut had seen: that the baby was coming. Even the Nubian seemed to have comprehended, late and last, why his lady was so abruptly indisposed.
Senenmut was closest and therefore most convenient. She seized his hand. He started, and winced: her grip was bruisingly strong. She did not see his pain for the immensity of her own.
She would not let him go, even when the physicians came, pondered, and ordered that she be brought into her bedchamber. When he tried to work his hand free, she caught it in both of hers and held fast. She dragged him with her perforce, and kept him there.
Childbirth was seldom either easy or quick. A child bearing a child, young and small as she was, needed long hours and great pain.
Senenmut, young and male and never a father, had no place there; but she had fixed on him. Gods knew why. Her Nubian, now, or even the priest, would have made more sense. Or even better, some woman who knew what to say and how to say it.
Senenmut knew nothing to say or do but babble at her while the hours stretched. He said whatever came into his head: stories, snatches of song, memories of his mother’s descents into Taweret’s arms. The goddess was here as she was at every child’s birth, a memory and a shadow, grotesque but oddly beautiful, like the woman who labored and suffered on the childbirth-stool. He held her up when she grew weary, cradling her against him, an impropriety that should have sent the maids and chamberlains into hysterics.
But it was the chief of physicians who commanded it, and the shriveled harridan of a midwife who slapped him into place. “Here, you,” she snapped, “make yourself useful. Hold her up. No, not like a sack of meal. Like a queen who will be mother to a king.”
He had dreamed often enough of holding a woman in his arms. He had never dreamed as high as a queen, nor ever imagined himself as he was now, helping her to bear another man’s child. She was fever-warm, slick with sweat, swollen and shapeless and struggling. There was no beauty left in her, and no dignity.
There were moments of quiet, pauses between battles, when she lay and simply breathed. She seemed grateful then to lean against him, to let her body go slack, to use his strength in place of her own. She never asked his leave.
He dared not laugh, but his belly tightened with it. There was trust—or insult too deep for words. He was a thing, a wall to lean against, nothing more.
But the wall was living flesh, and it knew that it upheld a woman. There was no talking sense to it.
Senenmut gritted his teeth and endured. She would never know what it cost him, nor if she knew would she care. He could not even resent her for it. She was the queen. She knew no other way to be.
