by Judith Tarr
“A very young master,” said the man who seemed made of leather and dried sinew, bald by nature and not by the razor’s art, with a lean and ageless face. Clearly he did not mean youth of the body.
“But,” said Senenmut, “that must mean—”
It was probably unpardonably rude, but he could not help himself. He left the servants—his servants—and ran in the one direction that he had not yet taken. It led out of the kitchen and through a kitchen garden ripe with the scents of a midden, into a perfect miniature of the king’s stables.
This could hold perhaps a dozen horses and half a dozen chariots, with all their fodder and accouterments. There was a single chariot in it, and the mares who had brought him here, the Moon and the Star, matched beauties pacing nervously in strange stalls. He comforted them with strokings and a handful each of barley. They ate in snatches, watchful, wary of this new place.
He had not thought that he might be watched, but of course he was. The stablemaster stood near the doorway. The Nubian bulked in it, leaning against the post, arms folded.
Senenmut addressed the latter, a shade too eagerly perhaps, but he was beginning to understand what the queen had done. “She’s done it. Hasn’t she? She’s made me a lord:”
“It would hardly be appropriate if she had not,” the Nubian said. “Since you are the guardian of the Princess Neferure, and the queen’s particular scribe and servant.”
“Am I that?” Senenmut sounded like a fool. He knew it; but he could not help it. His mother had the truth of it. He had never thought past his service to the queen, nor reflected on what it could signify.
And he had thought himself a man of ambition. The queen had shown him what an innocent he was.
Why, he thought, she was even a match for his mother.
Maybe.
13
Senenmut grew to love his faded unfashionable house. Other and newer noble houses were larger, more brightly painted, more imposingly adorned. But his house near the palace, with its garden wall that at the height of Inundation was a quay upon the river, seemed to him much warmer in its heart.
He did not live alone there. His mother made a show of insisting that the family stay in his father’s house; but he had room and to spare for them all, even the ancient and doddering woman who had been his mother’s nurse.
The baby, who was not so small any longer, had a nursery. Ahotep had a room of his own. Senenmut would have given up the master’s rooms to his father, but Hat-Nufer would not hear of that.
“Don’t be an idiot,” she said. “You earned it. You keep it. We’ll take the rooms over by the river garden. They’re bigger than the whole of our old house.”
So they were. Rahotep and Hat-Nufer settled into them with the aunts and the maid and a servant or two. Hat-Nufer made herself lady of the house. Rahotep went his vague benevolent way from market to temple to tavern, remembering to come home when his wife sent a boy after him. They were happy, as far as Senenmut could tell.
Hat-Nufer took credit for it all, though it was clear to Senenmut that the queen had set it in train well before his mother came to compel her. It was like Hatshepsut to subject Senenmut to humiliation, and never say a word in his defense.
The queen and the tradesman’s wife got on wondrous well. They were the same kind of woman. Hard, Senenmut thought. Ruthless. Stronger-willed than any man he knew. What each wanted, she took, nor asked a man’s leave.
He was cursed with such women; surrounded by them. Even tiny Neferure had an imperious way about her, demanding her nurse’s breast.
~~~
The king came back as the Inundation of the Nile shrank and dwindled into the dry season, the green and thriving winter of Egypt. The black earth that the river had left grew tall with emmer wheat and barley, onions and lentils and lettuces, fruits of tree and vine and earth, a rich harvest to feed the people of Egypt.
The king returned victorious at the head of his army. They brought with them the spoils of Asia, gold and captives, a whole great train of them behind the king’s chariot.
“It’s not enough,” the queen said.
She had met her husband at the gate of the city, with her daughter in her arms. Neferure had grown out of early infancy into bright-eyed babyhood, alert to everything that passed, and afraid of nothing.
She regarded the glittering figure of her father with utter fascination. He swept her up and carried her in his chariot, small naked child with her necklace of blue beads, crowing as she clasped the false beard that was strapped to his chin.
He evinced no disappointment that this, his first child of the queen’s body, was a daughter. He was still holding her in Hatshepsut’s chambers, dandling her on his knee, trying to teach her to laugh. She was too young for that; but she could smile, and did, to his manifest delight.
The queen was much less easily distracted. “Your war cost far more than it gained us. Have you given a moment’s thought to how we’re to manage the rest?”
“We’ll raise taxes,” he said, and not as if it mattered. He cooed at his daughter, who cooed back obligingly. “Look! She’s smitten with me.”
“She’s smitten with everyone,” Hatshepsut said. “Listen to me. You can’t raise taxes. The people won’t stand for it.”
“The people will stand for whatever I tell them to stand for,” the king said as if to his daughter. “Yes, little one. I am king and god. They exist to serve me.”
“They can’t serve you if they’re dying of starvation,” the queen snapped.
“So,” he said. “They can trade their harvest, you said. Let them live on that.”
“How can they, if you’re taxing it out of existence?”
He hissed in frustration. “I am not taxing them into destitution. The Great House takes much less than a half-share of all that grows and thrives in the Two Lands, as tribute to the king’s majesty. The rest is theirs to do with as they please. Even to sell it to the barbarians in Asia—who, my dear lady, are far less haughty than they were before my war swept over them.”
“And through your war and the destruction it brought, you compel them to purchase our grain, which feeds our people whom you have taxed in order to pursue your war.”
Hatshepsut tossed her head as if to clear it. Senenmut, quiet in the shadow of her Nubian shadow, noticed how careful she was, instinctively so, not to disarrange her wig and her tall crown. “My lord, that is very tidy, if somewhat convoluted, but it does not remove the essential fact. Your war was an extravagance.”
“Then what would you have me do?” he flared in sudden temper. “A king fights to defend his kingdom. He wins new lands for it, new peoples to pay him tribute. Would you have us retreat to the smallest compass, even to this city and its walls? The wages of conquest built this palace, lady, and won the gold that adorns your neck.”
“This is gold of the mine,” she said.
“Mined by captives,” he shot back. “No, lady. I was always slower of wit than you, but this I know. You would be content if I never left this palace at all—and it would please you best if I never left my throne. If I were bound there, condemned to sit in it day and night without respite, I would go thoroughly mad.”
“The gods made you a living god,” the queen said. “I would that they had also given you sense.”
“And what is sense? To sit here like a spider in her web, with all her husbands neatly wrapped in her larder?” He was on his feet, bulking over her. “Madam, you will remember that I am Horus in the land of the living.”
“I never forget it,” she said. Sweetly. Fearlessly. Calculated to a nicety, to madden him until surely he must strike her for her presumption.
But she had calculated also that he would not go so far. He turned on his heel and stalked out. Her eyes gleamed as she watched him go.
But when he was well gone, when the baby, howling, had been removed by her nurse, Hatshepsut lowered her head into her hands. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, gods. He tempts me so—one day I’ll destroy myse
lf.”
“I doubt that,” the Nubian said dryly. He was free of his tongue when the queen was at ease.
He was not a mere guardsman, Senenmut had come to know. He had a house in the city, and a household of imposing size, larger than Senenmut’s own. He had titles, offices, occupations that he pursued, it must be, when other men were asleep; for he seemed to spend every waking moment standing guard over the queen. That was his chief duty and evidently his pleasure.
He maintained his position behind his lady, proper in every respect, save in the words he spoke. “I doubt it’s ever you who will be destroyed. You’re too canny. You got rid of him, which was exactly what you intended.”
“But,” she said, “he left angry. That was poorly done. I should have sent him away smiling. I have yet to give him a son, you see. Until I do, I have no choice. I must suffer his presence.” She looked up at him, her face torn, as if she could not choose whether to laugh or to weep. “But I can’t, Nehsi. I can’t stand him.”
Even he had nothing to say to that. And what must it have cost her, Senenmut thought, to go to her husband’s bed night after night, to speak softly to him, indulge his whims, refrain from quarreling—and she had gained Neferure, but it was a son she had prayed for. Now she had it all to do again, and from the look of her, her gorge rose at the thought.
“I have failed of my duty,” she said. “I let myself be ruled by a mere human dislike. But I don’t . . . think . . . I can be reasonable. If he were an evil man, or terribly ugly, or riddled by some ghastly disease—but there is nothing wrong with him. I simply can’t like him.”
“You might,” Senenmut ventured to suggest, “go to him as your duty commands, but dream of another while he does what a man must do with a woman.”
She rounded on him in such flat astonishment that he wondered if she had forgotten he was there. Then, and that was cruel, she laughed. “Dream? Dream of whom, scribe? You?”
Her mockery stung him into wit. “Why not, if it passes the time?”
“Then I shall,” she said, still laughing. She sobered, however, as the bent of her thoughts shifted. “But first I have to mend what I’ve broken.” She closed her eyes as if in pain. “Gods! I do know better. I do.”
~~~
The king was terribly angry, but the queen exerted herself to the utmost to be pleasing to him. She went to him in her own person, attended only by a pair of maids, dressed with the greatest care, so that she might seem at once irresistibly beautiful and alluringly humble.
Senenmut heard from the maids a little of what she had said: words that in another woman would have been groveling abasement, but as the maid Mayet said, “She makes even abjection seem queenly.” The king turned his face away from her, but she persisted, going so far as to kneel at his feet and clasp his knees, though she could not manage a flood of tears.
He would not have been a man if he had continued in his resistance. And the king, living god though he was, was flesh and blood. He let her beg for a while longer, but the battle was won. The queen had returned to favor.
The cost to her seemed less high than she had professed. Servants of the king’s bedchamber whispered that he was a rather dull lover, doing his duty with dispatch and falling asleep directly after. He never wanted to talk, and he was seldom in a mood to listen. Once he was asleep, his queen was free to return to her own chambers, where she would bathe, always, before she went to her bed.
Meritre, the second of the maids whom she favored, observed in Senenmut’s hearing that the baths were ritual cleansing. “Pity, too,” she said, “that her majesty doesn’t have a greater appreciation of the honor his majesty does her. He is the king, after all. Every night she holds the living Horus in her arms.”
Senenmut found the irony somewhat over-rich, but Mayet, who was a charming innocent like the kitten she was named for, said seriously, “The living Horus is a bore.”
“Exactly,” said Meritre.
14
When the queen conceived again, her household knew a profound relief. In steeling herself to be pleasant to her husband, she had grown more than a little unreasonable in small things: a razor that cut too close, a jar of unguent that fell from a table and shattered, a gown that had been washed but was not dry at the precise moment when she needed it. Her maids took to keeping their distance. Her guards and attendants, and her scribe, walked soft in her presence.
But once it was certain that she would bear another child, she returned to her older self: haughty, imperious, but sensible enough as royalty went. The king, denied her favors, sought comfort elsewhere. There was no war in the offing, and for once he was not agitating for one.
“He’s calmed down,” Senenmut observed to Hapuseneb one morning as they waited for the queen to be done with her toilet. It was an unusually elaborate one: there was a grand audience, a gathering of the great lords of the Two Lands, who must offer each his domain’s taxes and its tribute, and be recorded in the rolls of the House of Life.
Senenmut was wearing his best kilt and a pectoral that the queen had given him. The collar was heavy, for it was made of gold among the beads of lapis and carnelian and turquoise and faience. He fancied that it weighed as armor did on the shoulders of a prince.
Reflection on princely burdens led him to judge the king’s conduct of late, and to find it none so baffling. “Horses are like that,” he said, “especially stallions. As they grow older, most of them grow calmer. Maybe the king fought himself out in that last campaign.”
“Or maybe,” said Hapuseneb, “his calm has a face, and a remarkably pretty one at that.”
Senenmut was barely interested. “What, another concubine?”
“Another several,” said Hapuseneb with a glint of wickedness, “but one in particular, who exerts herself strenuously to please him—and claims to do it in the queen’s name, too.”
“Isis?” Senenmut had had to grope for the name. “She was here yesterday. She has friends among the queen’s maids.”
“That one has friends everywhere,” Hapuseneb said. “And hasn’t she grown up lovely, too?”
“I hadn’t particularly noticed,” Senenmut said.
That was not the truth, not exactly, but close enough. Isis had grown from a lovely child into a breathtakingly beautiful woman. But in front of the queen she shrank to insignificance. The queen, whose beauty had more to do with voice and movement and manner than with perfection of feature, had only to stir or to speak, and one forgot that there could be other or greater beauty.
Hapuseneb was grinning at him. “Ah,” he said. “You were distracted. Such distraction! Some are calling Isis the most beautiful woman in Egypt.”
“Maybe she is,” Senenmut said. “I’m not as enthralled with her as everyone else seems to be. She and the king are well matched, I suppose. Neither of them has any conversation.”
Hapuseneb laughed so heartily that the queen, coming forth from her inner chambers in a blaze of golden splendor, stopped in amazement. He bowed extravagantly. “But you, O living Isis, unlike certain others who may claim that name, have both beauty and conversation. We salute you, queen and goddess. We worship at your most erudite feet.”
She, long accustomed to his absurdities, managed a smile in the mask of her face. She did indeed look like a goddess, but one carved in ivory, too stiffly perfect to be living flesh.
This child was not treating her even as kindly as Neferure had. She was ill daylong; her duties had become an ordeal. But she would not forsake or even curtail them. Nor would she speak of what she must be fearing: that she would again be forced to take to her bed for the child’s sake.
She was, it seemed, the kind of woman who conceived easily enough but bore poorly. That was a pity. A queen more than any other woman lived by and for the children she bore to her king. She was the line’s hope and its continuance. Through her and through her daughters came the right to the Two Crowns.
Hapuseneb’s laughter must have eased the knot of anxiety that Senenmut could s
ense in her. Its close kin clenched in his middle.
He had not feared for her while she was carrying Neferure. He had not known enough then, nor cared. Now he was afraid. When her maids had not worked their magic of brush and paint, she was haggard, her cheeks hollowed, her face pale.
A woman in pregnancy should grow round and rich with it. She grew lean as the child waxed within her, as if it sucked the life and blood from her, and gave nothing back.
Her lack of curiosity as to the cause of Hapuseneb’s laughter alarmed Senenmut unduly. She should have been demanding an explanation. Instead she only smiled, and that faded as she turned her face toward the door. Her attendants fell into place about and behind her. Was she walking a trifle stiffly?
Of course she would, in those robes. They were of linen starched to rigidity and weighted with gold: golden collar, golden armlets and bracelets, golden girdle above the swell of her middle. Gold crowned her, the tall plumed crown of the queen, that demanded a high head and a taut line of neck. It was to her great credit that she could move with any grace at all.
She walked to the great hall as was her custom, refusing a chair for so little a distance. When the lords and rulers of Egypt were admitted, the king and queen would be seated in royal state, immovable as the images that marched in carven ranks down the hall.
Senenmut could not avoid the tedium of that long audience, even if he had been minded to let the queen out of his sight. He was one of the scribes who recorded the tally of gifts and tribute. They did turn and turn about as the lords and ladies passed in procession. He had time to sit in a shadow where he preferred to be, watching the queen.
She was gracious as always, inclining her head to each of those who bowed at her feet. She remembered names, as her husband did not. He had learned years since to maintain a hieratic silence, and to let her speak where words were required.
She spoke less than was her wont, nor did she indulge those who were minded to linger. That was only good sense, Senenmut told himself. There were twenty-two nomes in Upper Egypt, twenty in Lower Egypt. Forty-two in the Two Lands together, each with its nomarch and his wife and family and his lesser lords and chamberlains and servants. They passed in procession with their trains of gifts and taxes, from the nomarch of the farthest south with his Nubian face and his high Egyptian manners, to the lord of the farthest north whose nome looked upon the sea.
