by Judith Tarr
Senenmut laughed with honest mirth. “Oh, Mother! Of course not. What makes you think that?”
“You have no woman,” she answered. Her voice was almost flat. “You take no lover. You haven’t even tumbled one of the servants. What am I to think? That you’re incapable? Or that you incline toward something else?”
It was almost a relief to see how honestly she worried. He laid his arm about her shoulders and shook her lightly. “There, Mother. There. I’m a perfectly ordinary and capable man. It’s just . . . there never seems to be time.”
“A young man always has time for women,” his mother said.
He shook his head. “No, Mother. Not if he serves in the palace.”
“Well then,” she said. “Have you ever even wanted it?”
His body flushed so suddenly that it took him by surprise. He had been going to deny it. But the memory of a certain woman in his arms, or clinging to his hand, or commanding him with queenly hauteur . . .
Hat-Nufer let out the breath she must have been holding. “Ah. So you aren’t altogether backward. There may be hope for you yet.”
“Mother,” he said rather desperately, “I am backward. Yes. It comes sometimes with intelligence. The body lags behind the mind. I know I’m not ready to marry.”
“No man is ever ready to marry,” Hat-Nufer said. “And the younger he is, the less ready he professes to be. Readiness is much simpler than you children will admit. You have eyes. They look at a woman. A certain other part of you rises to salute her. That’s as ready as a man ever needs to be.”
“I do not,” he said through clenched teeth, “salute Amonmose. She has a voice like the scrape of a nail on slate.”
“She spoke sweetly enough to me,” said Hat-Nufer. “You’re remembering her as she used to be. She’s a woman now, child. She’s ripe for a husband.”
“Then let her find one who didn’t know her when she was the worst breaker of heads in the potters’ quarter.”
“I think not,” his mother said with terrible calm. “Her father is rather surprisingly wealthy: he’s been doing well with his line of cookpots. They have feet, you see, like men or lions or dogs; and the lids are the heads of whatever beast the feet belong to. They’re ridiculous, but people can’t seem to resist them. He could afford a house at least as handsome as this one, but it suits his whim to live in the potters’ quarter as he always has.”
“And his wife and daughter have nobler ambitions,” Senenmut said. “Why don’t they simply set themselves to trap a lordling’s youngest son?”
“Because,” Hat-Nufer said reasonably, “there’s no need. You are precisely what they’re looking for. You grew up in the city. You speak as they speak, though you’ve taken to affecting a noble accent. You serve the queen, who is well pleased with you. You’re a catch, child, homely face and all.”
Senenmut narrowed his eyes. “Am I? Am I, then? Then these aren’t the first who’ve come sniffing. Are they?”
“We have interviewed a number of prospects,” she said, and no shame in her, either, that he could see. “This seems the best of them. She brings with her a substantial settlement. If, gods forbid, you ever fall from the queen’s favor, or if the queen—and gods prevent it—should be taken from the world of the living, you’ll still be well taken care of.”
“That,” said Senenmut, “is the most venal nonsense I’ve ever heard. I will not marry for money. If I can help it, I’ll not marry at all. I don’t want a wife.”
“But I,” said Hat-Nufer, “want grandsons.”
“You have two other sons,” Senenmut said. “Do you forget that?”
Her face had gone hard and cold—but no harder or colder than his heart. “I remember well that I have three sons. Two of whom are children still, and neither has been gifted by the gods as you have been.”
“Well then,” he said. “Surely one of them will do for a stud-bull.” He rose and bowed as he would to a lady of the court. “I have duties in the palace, which I am neglecting. Good day, Mother.” And with that, headlong and willfully oblivious to the cost, he left her.
~~~
He fully expected her to call him back. But she did not.
He escaped from the house altogether and fled to the palace. His duties there were onerous enough, and his fear for the queen had abated only slightly since her fever broke; but they were all outside of himself. They had nothing to do with the reality of a commoner raised to royal favor: the eyes of a greedy child slipping past him to drink in his wealth and his proximity to the queen.
“I will never marry,” he said when he could, when there was no one about to listen or to demand explanations. “No, never; not without respect at least, and affection. I’ll never take a wife who cares nothing for me, only for the riches I can give her.”
The words sounded weak in his own ears, the brave and foolish speech of a child. And where in the world would he find such a woman? Not in the palace, certainly—noble ladies would not look at him, and servants were beneath him. And not in the city, either, where they were all like Amonmose and her mother.
His brothers would marry when their time came. Ahotep was a handsome imp, and Amonhotep too—they favored their father for looks. Even the greediest girlchild might find herself charmed by their smooth profiles and their big dark eyes.
They would do well enough. He would go on as he had begun, unbound to any common woman. He did not need the thing that all the young men did, and the young women, too: sweaty, panting, noisy thing, good for nothing but getting children. And what that did to a woman, he had too clearly seen. He had held Hatshepsut in his arms while she delivered herself of a daughter; he had seen how she almost died in failing to deliver a son.
He would not do that to any woman. He would remain as he was, solitary and content, trusted servant of a queen.
16
Hat-Nufer did not surrender easily, nor admit that her cause was hopeless. But Senenmut was at least her equal for stubbornness, and he had an advantage: he could escape into the palace, even remain there in a guest-chamber if he were minded. If he had reason to suspect that his mother had invited another eligible young woman to meet her son, he arranged to be elsewhere until the danger was past.
Days spun into years. The procession of prospective wives seemed to be growing younger. Some looked but little older than Neferure.
She weaned herself with a show of self-will that vividly recalled her mother. Likewise she insisted, at the noble age of four years, that Senenmut—and only Senenmut—teach her to read. “I want to know what the birds and the people mean,” she said in her sweet lisping voice. “And the bits of people. Hands and arms and legs and—”
Senenmut reined her in before she galloped away on her spate of words. He had a scrap of worn papyrus for her, and an ink-block and a pen. He sat her down, there in her chamber while her nurse snored in a corner, and set the pen in her fist, and guided it to draw the glyph that he had learned first, before all others.
“This is the feather of Maat,” he said, “the feather of justice, that balances the heart of the dead man when he goes to judgment.”
Neferure knew of death and judgment. She was young but she was well taught, as a princess should be—and most of all one who would be queen. She gripped the pen as he had taught her, striving not to clutch it too tightly, and drew a wobbling image of the glyph. She inspected it and frowned. “Another one!” she said imperiously.
“First learn this one,” he said, “and make it perfect. Then I’ll give you another.”
“This is too slow,” she said. “Here, read to me. Show me the words when you read them.”
“First,” he said sweetly but firmly, “draw me a perfect feather.”
She set her tongue between her teeth, held the pen exactly as he had shown her, and carefully, painstakingly, drew a feather that was almost straight, almost perfect.
“Again,” he said.
And again; until she had it, or near enough for one so young. Another
child might have given up, but she would not. And when she had done it, she said, “Read to me. Show me.”
Senenmut bowed. “As your highness wishes.”
~~~
The queen had grown, it seemed, nigh as much as her daughter. She was a woman now, her girlhood left behind, her prettiness transmuted into beauty. She had borne no child after the son whom she had miscarried. The physicians whispered that the fever had burned too deep, and charred the seeds that would have sprouted and bloomed into her children.
They whispered only. It was as much as a man’s life was worth to confess his fears that the queen was barren. She would have him killed if her husband did not; and if her husband knew, and despaired of an heir, then she too would suffer, and sorely.
She had not gone to the king’s bed in a year and more. Fool that Senenmut was, he kept a reckoning—for his heart’s ease, he told himself; for if she conceived again, then surely she would cling to him as she had before. He did not know whether he contemplated it in hope or terror. She offered no intimacy of the body, not even the touch of a hand; she preserved a royal distance.
He dreamed of her. In his dreams she was sweeter by far than she was in life, a willing and tender lover, and in their loving no shame or fear. There was no king to stand in their way, no kingdoms to rock with the scandal. Only the two of them in a river of reeds, rocking gently on a river-swell, borne up in a golden boat. Flocks of water-birds swirled above them. River-horses roared in the thickets. They lay body to body in joyful abandon.
He had come to welcome this dream, to seek his bed willingly, plunging into sleep with a prayer that tonight, again, he would lie with his lady whom he loved. The gods could not fault him, surely, while his waking conduct was beyond reproach. Perhaps they suffered a part of her to come to him, her ka-spirit wandering afar in the night, coming to his arms.
Dreams. In the fierce light of day they shrank to the shadows they were. He attended the queen, he stood guardian to the princess; he performed the duties that he had been given—more of those, and more onerous, the longer he dwelt in her service. She was merciless with those whom she trusted, but never more so than she was with herself.
~~~
She was not always in Thebes. Her husband had turned from war to royal hunts and processionals to lighten the burdens of his office. Hunts and processions were costly, but not, she took care to observe, as costly as war. She was expected to accompany him; she in her turn expected her servants to follow.
Senenmut had been born and raised in Thebes, in the great city of the Upper Kingdom. In those days he saw for the first time the rest of Egypt, from the borders of Nubia to the green and humid marshes of the Delta. They were all dimmed by the light of her presence.
The king had his own household and attendants. Among them as always was the concubine called Isis. Lovely as she had been in her girlhood, now that she had grown to a woman she was breathtaking. Wherever she walked she was trailed by an army of men, all moist eyes and panting tongues like dogs.
None of them ventured to touch her. Few were bold enough to approach her. They simply followed her, helpless as moths in pursuit of a flame.
She still had no conversation. The innocence of her youthful beauty had given way to the splendor of the court lady, a perfection of paint and dress and hair that ladies of the court struggled to imitate. But her mind was no quicker than it had ever been, nor was she any more witty or learned.
~~~
On a night of moonlit chill during the dry season of Egypt, when the river was shrunk to its winter banks and the fields were green with the harvest, the king had taken it into his head to camp under the stars. On the morrow he would hunt lions in the desert beyond Memphis. Tonight he feasted on the river’s bounty, drinking deep of the wine that had been a gift to him from the governor of the Lower Kingdom.
It was a great occasion, a night of rejoicing. Isis his concubine had conceived a child. The king was certain that it was a son.
“And how does he know?” his queen demanded in the privacy of her tent, from beside the welcome warmth of a brazier. She had left the feast early as she always did, though later than usual. She could not possibly let the king see what was so bitterly clear to Senenmut: that the news had struck her to the heart.
“He is not a virile man,” she said. “Of all the women who have given him comfort, none has produced a child. Now that this simpering idiot swells below the girdle, he trumpets to the world that she must be carrying his son.”
“It’s said,” said Nehsi, “that he has no children because a certain great lady has taken care to make sure of it.”
She fixed him with a black and glittering stare. “How? Poison? Incantations?” She shook her head so fiercely that the beads in her wig clicked together. “If I had done any such thing, you can be certain that this child would never have lived long enough to make its presence known.”
“I’m sure,” the Nubian said. Voice and face were bland as always.
He was no longer a guardsman except by his free choice. She had made him her chamberlain, the master of her palace. Senenmut might have been jealous, except that he was the chief of her scribes, the tutor and guardian of her daughter, overseer of her affairs. They were great princes, Senenmut and Nehsi, the commoner and the foreigner.
Nehsi was given leave to sit in the queen’s presence, if she were private and inclined to indulge him. He draped his long panther-body over a gilded frippery of a chair, balancing with insouciant grace. “So,” he said. “Why did you let her get with child?”
“I didn’t—” She broke off. “Oh,” she said. “Oh! May your manly member be infested with boils! I did not let that simpleton do anything. She did it all of herself. Who’s to know that she didn’t find an obliging soldier or guardsman to assist her?”
“Why, did you?”
He had driven her beyond anger. Senenmut, watching, struggling not to be amused, suffered the full force of her glare. “You! Do you think the same?”
“Of course not,” he said in perfect honesty. “I think the king had a shaft or two in his quiver. She was clever enough to catch it. It’s not entirely her fault, after all. If you had so much as crooked a finger, he would have been in your bed and glad of it.”
“Or at least,” said Nehsi, “not too terribly disgruntled at the prospect.” He swung his foot idly, regarding her under lowered lids. “It could still be arranged. An accident to the little mother. His majesty seeking solace in your arms.”
“But no son,” she said. “No child of my body.” She met both their stares. “What, you didn’t think I knew? Who could hide it from me? It’s as obvious as a solid year in that man’s bed, and nothing to show for it but the shudder when I think of doing it again. I won’t, even to pretend. The gods have emptied my womb.”
“Therefore,” Nehsi said, “you allowed them to fill the concubine’s.”
“The gods do as they will,” said the queen.
~~~
Nehsi went out soon after. He had duties, to assure that the queen was well guarded and protected against the spirits of the night.
Senenmut should have gone with the Nubian. But he was comfortable in the brazier’s warmth, cross-legged on a cushion, and she had not dismissed him.
He started slightly. They were alone. They had never been so, never that he could remember. There were always others with them. Maids. Attendants. Guards.
Now there were only the two of them, and the tent striped in gold and blue like the nemes-headdress that the king might wear, and the sounds of the camp gone soft and dim as the night came down. The brazier glowed. A tree of lamps cast light across a richness of carpets. She sat atop a heap of them, cross-legged as he was, but untrained to it.
She rose and stretched, arching her back, yawning like a cat. Her gown was thin, ill suited to the chill of the outer air, but ample for the tent’s warmth. The mantle that she had worn over it was abandoned on the carpets. She took off her wig and shook out the crushed plaits of
her hair.
“I always wonder,” Senenmut heard himself say, “why custom constrains us to the sweaty weight of a wig. For me it keeps off the sun. But you . . . your hair is beautiful. It’s a pity it must be hidden.”
She unbound the plaits, running her fingers through them, waking them to the life that was in them. Her hair, freed, fanned on her shoulders. She might have been oblivious to him, but his heart knew better. She knew well that he was there.
Beyond that, he dared not think. Nor dared he think of what she was doing. He had served her with perfect propriety since he was little more than a child. His heart had grown accustomed to the constraints of that propriety. The dreams had come more often as he grew older, and every night of late, but he had never ventured to believe that they were prophecy.
She was not enamored of him. How could she be? He was a commoner, no more divine than the earth underfoot, no beauty of face, no grace of body, nothing to recommend him but the quickness of his wits.
Even that had deserted him. She sank down on the carpets and beckoned. “Come here,” she said.
A wise man would have retreated rapidly, babbling an excuse. Senenmut was clever but he had never been wise. He obeyed her.
When he was within her reach, she caught his hands and pulled him down. Kneeling, he was taller than she, awkward and fumbling, blushing like the untried boy he was.
He could have been no more appealing than the king at his worst, but she did not recoil from him. Her eyes searched his face. Beautiful eyes, long and dark. He felt as transparent to them as water, as insubstantial as air.
“I dreamed,” she said, “that you—and I—”
“The river? The reeds?” He had not willed to speak, but his tongue was living a life of its own, apart from any wit or wisdom.
“The river,” she said, nodding. “The reeds. The golden boat.”
His heart had begun to beat hard. “We can’t be dreaming—the same—”
“If the gods wish it,” she said, “we can.”
