by Judith Tarr
“Why not? It’s a cleaner task than some.” Senenmut laughed at his brother’s expression. “Look at you! Anyone would think you were born in a palace.”
Amonhotep sat up, stung to the quick. “If you refuse to conduct yourself with proper decorum, then someone surely must. Why not I? I have no rank or wealth except by your bestowing. I claim nothing that is my own; no office, no duty, no service. What is there for me to do but try to be worthy of you?”
There was deep injury there, but not deep enough. “Oh, stop that,” Senenmut said. “You didn’t want to join the guard as Ahotep did. You’ve no aptitude for the House of Life. What else shall I find for you to do? I thought it bored you immeasurably to look after my estate.”
“It did bore me,” Amonhotep said. “But that was years ago. I need something to do, brother, besides hunt waterfowl on other men’s estates.”
“Well then,” Senenmut said. “What do you want to do?”
Amonhotep shrugged. Senenmut could remember being seventeen years old. It was not so very long ago. Had he been so bored, so perfectly without focus?
He rather doubted it. He had by then been some years in the queen’s service. He stood guardian already to the princess Neferure, and held a handful of offices besides. Idleness had never vexed him; as for boredom, he barely knew the meaning of the word.
And here was the youngest of Hat-Nufer’s sons, a man in years but never in responsibility. He lacked the petulance of most petty lordlings, but he certainly had the air of ennui.
“Suppose,” Senenmut said, “that I make you steward of my estate. Would that be too dull a duty?”
Amonhotep did not leap up in eagerness, but neither did he recoil as if in insult. “I could learn to like it,” he said. “May I have hunting parties?”
“Not too often,” Senenmut said, “and not too extravagant. You’ll have an allowance, paid at each new moon. If you exceed it, I’ll give you no more till the next new moon. If you fall into debt, I’ll not lift you out.”
“You won’t need to,” said Amonhotep with the confidence of the young. “I can cipher—I was good at that, though you’ll not likely remember. I’ll keep a good reckoning of your accounts.”
“I do remember,” Senenmut said, “though the shock of your expulsion from the Temple of Amon rather obscured the pleasure of it.”
Amonhotep neither blushed nor avoided Senenmut’s stare. “Ah. Well. I couldn’t sit still. It was so dull—except for the numbers.”
“Setting fire to the store of papyrus was hardly a proper means of alleviating boredom,” Senenmut observed dryly.
“It was only the scrap-heap,” Amonhotep said, “as you know very well. And they put it out directly. It never threatened the best stock, nor would I have let it.”
“Which,” said Senenmut, “is why you were merely expelled and not whipped till you bled.” He sighed. “Ah well. That’s years past, and you say you’ve grown wiser. I’ll trust you to keep a good accounting of my estate.”
Amonhotep regarded him narrowly. “You will send a man or two along to assist me. Won’t you? To make sure.”
“Would you respect me if I didn’t?”
“No,” Amonhotep said. He bounded to his feet. “When do I begin?”
“In the morning,” Senenmut said.
The gods knew this for certain: he had never been as lively as that, even when he was young. His brother grinned, saluted him, and trod lightly out into the evening, no doubt to while it away in wine and song and a woman or two.
Senenmut had a slight leaning toward wine. Song he loved, but not tonight. Women . . .
He sighed again, deeper this time, with more of resignation than of regret. The queen had indicated that she would rest tonight. Tomorrow was a festival day, with rites in the temples, processions, feasts and high audiences, all of which she must adorn with her presence. It was not that she could not sleep in his arms; it was what else she would want to do, that could run far into the night.
No doubt of it, he thought as he poured wine into his best silver cup, the one that had come from far away in Asia, with a herd of horses running one by one around the rim. They were no longer as young as they had been, he and she. Not old, no, not yet; but he was past thirty, and she was near it.
He sipped the strong sweet wine, resting for a moment in the memory of her face. How swiftly time flew, yet how slowly it could pass, bearing them all to the sanctuary of their tombs.
His mood was strange tonight, not dark, but not light, either. He had no inclination toward his bed. When he sought his garden, the last light was fading from the sky.
It was the season that in Asia they called winter, cold to his thin southern blood. He wrapped a lionskin about him, his brother Ahotep’s gift, that that bold soldier had caught and killed on some campaign or other. It was warm, and smelled still, a little, of lion.
One of the servants set a lamp in the niche by the door. He sat on the edge of its light, watching the stars come out. It was astonishingly quiet. The bustle and hum of his house under the sun had died to a murmur. Now that the women’s war was ended, no one rent the night with contention. Amonhotep had gone out; Ahotep was on night-duty in the palace—as he had arranged to do every night since the war began.
Senenmut was as nearly alone as he could ever be. He thought briefly of going to the stable to visit the Dawn Wind and perhaps offer her a sweet; but he was too lazy to move.
Perhaps Amonhotep had the right of it. Perhaps he did rest too seldom. But there was so much to do. All that he did, the queen did and more; how could he retreat, when she knew even less peace than he?
“There’s rest enough in the tomb,” he said, “if I want it even then.”
The night breathed about him. The stars stared coldly down. The moon, the blind eye of Horus, rose slowly over the roof of his house. It was waxing but not yet full. He paid it reverence as a wise man should.
He should go in. Nightwalkers and demons of the dark could walk even within walls, with the moon to guide them. Still he lingered. If he had been unwise to trust Amonhotep with the management of his estate, and hence of his horses, he would learn it quickly, and perhaps to his grief. But he could hardly call back the gift, now that it was given.
He shook his head at himself. The moon invited him to rest in its quiet, but he could not stop the yapping and circling of his mind. Best go in, pour another cup of wine, sleep if he could. The morning came early, and the festival in which he had a notable part. He had a new office: Steward of Amon. He managed the estates of the god much as he had given Amonhotep leave to manage Senenmut’s own.
In the court they called him Mighty of Offices, not seeming to know that he heard, or to care. He had chosen to take the title as a compliment. The envy in it could not diminish him. Only in the night, under the moon, did he stop to wonder when the weight of all his offices would bow him down.
“Not yet,” he said abruptly, briskly, rising and gathering his lionskin about him. “By the gods’ mercy, not ever. They made me to serve my queen. No one serves her better.”
Which no doubt made him a braggart; but it was no less true for that. Grinning at himself, clutching his lionskin, he went in to the light and the warmth and the sweet headiness of the wine.
26
Somehow, while no one was looking, the child Neferure had become a woman. She was if anything more beautiful than her mother, and willful with it, without her mother’s firm good sense.
In that she reminded Senenmut of Amonhotep. Like him she had no such burden of duties as had weighed down her mother. She was queen, and must rule to some degree, but under her mother’s regency she had little to do but be beautiful, tyrannize her servants, and try to evade Senenmut’s quelling hand.
She was, like Amonhotep, enormously and dangerously bored. The duties of a queen did not greatly interest her. She lacked her mother’s tolerance for tedium; nor did she seem to love the Two Lands as Hatshepsut did.
“You take too much for gran
ted,” Senenmut was driven to snap at her, one day when she was particularly obstreperous. She had agreed to attend an audience with an embassy from Lagash, but had sat through it speechless and sullen while her mother exerted herself to be charming. She would have left before it properly ended, had not Senenmut all but sat on her.
When at last he did allow her to leave, it was to herd her into her workroom and stand over her while she sulked through an hour of reading and ciphering.
“Truly,” he said at last in pure exasperation, “you know neither gratitude nor sense. You are Great Royal Wife in the Great House of Egypt. You have duties and obligations. You were born for them. The gods made you a goddess, but no such gift is without price.”
She sneered at him. “Oh, please! I’ve heard it a thousand times before. Can’t you think of something else to beat me about the head with? If I’m the queen, then where is the king? Why does he get to play with his little wooden soldiers while I have to sit through days of crashing boredom?”
“The king,” Senenmut said through gritted teeth, “is learning the arts of a man.”
“It isn’t manly to sit in audience while bearded foreigners babble on and on about nothing?”
“When you were eight years old,” Senenmut said, “you enjoyed a child’s freedom, too. You are a woman now. You should learn to think and act as one.”
“Oh, don’t I?” She arched her back and tilted her chin and sleeked at him like a cat, as women did in the market when they would drive the young men wild. “Am I a woman, really? Do I look like one? Am I beautiful? Do you love me?”
Senenmut dared not laugh. Pride was so fragile when one was young; and this was a queen, than whom nothing could be prouder. “Of course you are a woman,” he said, “and of course I love you. I’ve known you since you were born.”
She hissed and flounced and abandoned her wanton posing—and not before time, either. “Oh, you are so dull! Everyone is dull. The king is dullest of all. He’s such a child. Will he never be a man?”
Ah, thought Senenmut. He could remind her that she had known since she married a child barely weaned, that she must wait long years until he could love her as a man loves a woman. But young womanhood did not want to hear what it had agreed to while it was still a child. The blood was hot; boredom was fierce, made worse by resentment that she must be queen while her king indulged himself in the pleasures of youth.
Best cut that off before it grew and flowered into hatred. “Here,” said Senenmut. “Since you clearly have no mind for anything useful, shall we do something outrageous?”
She brightened at once, though she was wary still. She knew him too well to expect that such pleasure could come without a price. “What? The chariot again?”
“Actually,” he said, “no. I was thinking of something truly different. Have you ever seen a house that was not a palace?”
“I went to Lord Hapu’s villa once,” she said.
“That’s nearly as big as the White Hall in Memphis,” Senenmut said, “and somewhat more imposing. No: I mean a real house. Mine.”
There. He had caught her. She looked herself again, the Neferure whom he had loved so long, bright-eyed and laughing, clapping her hands. “Your house? Oh, can we? We never have.” She darkened abruptly. “There will be a reason why I can’t go. Someone will stop me.”
“I don’t think so,” Senenmut said.
“Then why did you never invite me before?” she asked with devastating logic.
He looked her in the eye and told her the truth. “I never thought of it. You have this palace, the palace in Memphis, the palace in Abydos, the hunting lodge in—”
“They are all so dull,” she said: her old refrain, begun anew.
“So,” he said. “My house is dull, too, but it’s a different kind of dull. For one thing, my mother is in it.”
That made her smile again. “I do like your mother. She’s never flustered when she talks to me.”
“Nothing flusters my mother,” Senenmut said. “Here, will you come? We’ll take one maid—Tuyu, I think. She can hold her tongue when she’s told to.”
“And my monkey,” said Neferure. “He’ll come, too. Tuyu can hold him.”
Senenmut drew breath to refuse, but thought better of it. One dog-nosed monkey and one discreet little maid would not encumber them unduly. They were fetched quickly enough, the monkey clinging to Tuyu’s neck and chittering nervously at Senenmut.
“There,” he said to it, “stop that. You’re going exploring.”
The monkey grimaced at him, baring formidable fangs. Senenmut grinned back. Senenmut had excellent teeth for his age: not too badly blunted, nor too yellow, and missing only one or two. The monkey subsided, startled, muttering to itself.
~~~
They were careful as they went abroad, to attract no notice. Neferure was only a little more elegantly clad than her maid; her ornaments were almost plain, and her wig was such as any wellborn woman might wear.
She advanced with an air of grand adventure, taking the way that Senenmut walked every day. Her presence transformed it from daily ordinariness to a kind of well-worn splendor.
Neferure had forgotten her sulks and her ennui. She would have pressed ahead if Senenmut had not stretched his stride. The monkey had left the maid’s shoulder to cling to its mistress’ neck, peering through the plaits of her wig and chittering at people who passed.
It was remarkable how few people spared them a glance. Senenmut was noticed: he was expected; it was known that he passed every day on foot from his house to the palace, commanding a chair only when he was ill or indisposed. His companions were nigh invisible in the company of his escort, his guards and the servants whose number and quality proclaimed the loftiness of his estate. That they hung about idle while he labored in his queen’s service was an irony that he could, in wry moments, appreciate.
The whole gaudy procession amused Neferure to no end. She was accustomed to far greater, but she had never walked among the servants, nor been jostled when she lagged, and hissed at for a sluggard. The maid Tuyu bristled, but Neferure’s glare restrained her when she would have spoken.
Senenmut might not have seen, had he not been inclined to wander a bit himself, leaving the servants to maintain the dignity of his rank. Tall portly Ptahotep with his air of mighty consequence and his complete lack of measurable wits made a fine semblance of a personage; he hardly needed to be persuaded to stride just behind the four toplofty guardsmen, nose in the air, condescending to notice nothing and no one.
Neferure had this much of a queen’s training: she did not burst out laughing in the middle of the processional way. She had no parasol, either, to protect her soft ivory skin; but Tuyu was far more alarmed by that than she.
In peculiar state, behind a servant who carried himself like a prince, they made their way to Senenmut’s house.
It was the same that he had had since he became Neferure’s tutor. He could have demanded one higher and prouder and newer, but that he chose not to do. It was an eccentricity; a simple and unadorned preference for that small, faded, undistinguished house in sight of the palace. It had been the queen’s first gift to him, and cherished the more for that.
He had brightened it a little, to be sure. There was a new garden, a stable much enlarged, the women’s quarters built all anew since Ahotep took a wife. But the outer wall was the same, and his own chambers, and the court into which he led his young queen.
She looked about with interest and no perceptible disappointment. This after all was hardly a laborer’s hut. It had been a noble mansion in its day. But it was no palace nor had ever been; and its chattering flock of servants kept no dignity even in their lord’s presence. They judged it enough to do so everywhere else; here they fell into an ease that would have appalled the masters of servants in the palace.
It was, like the refusal of chair or chariot, an eccentricity in which Senenmut took a peculiar pleasure. He was the queen’s commoner, the nobleman whom she had made
from a tradesman’s son. He could command servants as sternly as any king; and so he did in all his ranks and offices. But in this house that was his refuge, he chose to be indulgent.
He could afford the luxury. As lenient as he allowed himself to be, when Hat-Nufer appeared in the courtyard, every one of that unruly throng snapped to attention. Idle they might be daylong, but in this house they worked for their bread and barley beer. She drove them as a general drives his troops, with rough justice and no mercy.
Nor did she spare her son, though he hung well back in the ranks. “You! Hiding with the fan-bearers again. What use is rank if you don’t flaunt it?”
“But, Mother,” he said sweetly, “everybody is so vulgar about it. Don’t you think Ptahotep makes a wonderful personage?”
“That idiot,” said Hat-Nufer. “If you had any self-respect—”
Neferure had labored nobly to conceal her laughter; but at that she whooped. It was completely unexpected, and completely without restraint. Hat-Nufer rounded on her, glaring formidably.
She had a keen eye. She knew that face, though no crown adorned it. She did not flinch, not by the slightest fraction. “Great Mother Isis! You, too?”
Neferure could not be said to creep from behind the shelter of her maid. She was proud and she was queen. But she lowered her head a very little, and said in something close to meekness, “I was bored.”
“Bored?” Hat-Nufer fairly spat the word. “No one is bored who has anything useful to do.”
“But I don’t,” said Neferure.
Hat-Nufer shook her head. “Oh, you children. Fools, all of you. Stop gawping and come here.”
Neferure had not been gawping, not that Senenmut could see, but she did as she was told. No one but Hat-Nufer had ever been able to address her so, nor would anyone else have dared. She must have found it refreshing.
Senenmut was enjoying himself. The small cold knot in the center of his stomach had begun to unravel. This was not entirely wise, nor was it as carefully judged as it might have been. He had acted on impulse. He might well learn to regret it.
