King and Goddess

by Judith Tarr

  He did not seriously consider confronting the lovers in the queen’s own chamber. It was not a scandal he wanted. A quiet meeting among the brothers, a measure of persuasion—a thump or two if the boy needed it. That would do. It would have to.

  28

  Amonhotep did not return home in the morning. He had, Senenmut discovered, gone to the villa. It was the season for the stallions to be put to the mares—apt enough, if one stopped to think.

  Senenmut could not ride in pursuit. He had too many duties, too many obligations in Thebes; and the queen regent was considering another royal progress into Lower Egypt. Senenmut would be expected to assist in preparations, and to accompany her.

  The queen and the young king would go. It was their progress, their faces whom the people should see. Which, Senenmut, thought, might resolve the dilemma of Neferure and Amonhotep. Amonhotep was bound to his brother’s estate till breeding season was done. If he had hoped to slip back at intervals, creep into the palace by night and leave before morning, then he would be disappointed.

  It was well, thought Senenmut. He allowed himself to cease fretting. Except for the doubled guard on Neferure’s chambers, with instructions to admit no one through any door or passage, secret or otherwise, he did nothing, nor confronted his brother among the herds of horses.

  He continued to visit Hatshepsut: an irony that he could well appreciate. He had said nothing to her of her daughter’s indiscretion. She did not need to know it, nor would it serve any of them if she did.

  ~~~

  As royal progresses went, this one was brief: down to Memphis in barges on the river, then up again to Thebes. Hatshepsut wished to secure the people’s loyalty by showing them their king and his beautiful young queen. The king accepted his duty as he did all else: quietly, meekly as befit a child-ruler under his regent’s guidance.

  His mother accompanied him as she always did. She was constrained to silence, to say or do nothing that would persuade the queen regent to dispose of her. She had settled into it with a kind of contentment: like a hound accustomed to its chain, or a bird to its cage.

  It was all very quiet, very calm, very civilized. The tension beneath was barely perceptible. Often Senenmut wondered if it was there at all—if he deceived himself with night fears and useless frettings. The king accepted his lot. He would rule in the end; there could be no doubt of it. In this his minority, while he was still so young as to require a regent, he demanded no more power than Hatshepsut would give him, nor seemed to feel any lack.

  In front of her he was utterly still, as if quenched. The brightness that Senenmut had seen in him so often when he was in others’ company was sunk to an ember. It was as if the fire that burned in her had turned his own all cold.

  “He has hardly a word to say for himself,” Hatshepsut said as she lay with Senenmut in the palace of Memphis. The secret ways there were many and intricate, more than enough to be lost in, if he had not had a gods-given memory for any place that he had seen more than once.

  They had to be circumspect here. The servants of this palace knew little of the queen regent and less of her scribe and servant. There was a certain slither to them, a remembrance of ancient rivalries. Memphis had shrunk since it was the chief city of the Two Lands; since it was taken captive by foreign kings, and freed by kings out of Thebes.

  Sometimes Senenmut thought that he could smell the foreign kings still: a hint of incense, a ghost of outland unguents. They had brought horses into Egypt, their one great gift and their downfall, because Egypt embraced the new creatures and with them a new art of war.

  Their spirits watched and whispered while the queen regent lay with her common-born lover, embracing him with urgency that had faded but little since they were young together. In the quiet after, she shook her head over the king in whose name she ruled. “For all that I see of him, he could be a simpleton,” she said. “He hardly says a word. He sits the throne, wears the crown and grips the crook and flail as if he were a carven king. Does he have a thought in his head, do you think?”

  “I know he has many,” Senenmut said. “He’s afraid of you. You are so strong, and you rule so well; and he’s so young.”

  “And with such a mother as he has . . .” She hissed a little as she always did when she spoke of Isis, in exasperation. “It’s a wonder he can walk without her hand to hold him up.”

  “You could be rid of her,” Senenmut pointed out.

  She shook her head. “No. Too many people love her. They’d cause me far more trouble than they prevented.”

  “And maybe you need her,” he said. “To prove that you were chosen wisely; that no one else is as well fit to hold the office of regent.”

  “Certainly no other woman,” Hatshepsut said, “and what man would dare?”

  She was beautiful in her arrogance. He could not help himself: he kissed her. She responded with passion enough, but it was all of the body. Her mind was elsewhere. “I do worry. What if the king is as great a fool as he seems? You say he has intelligence. But what is that worth, if he’s too weak-willed to use it?”

  “He’s very young,” said Senenmut.

  “Some children never grow up. He was a slow child, you know that. Slow to walk, slow to talk, slow to show himself apart from his mother. We may find ourselves afflicted with an idiot king.”

  Senenmut set his lips together. Thutmose was anything but an idiot. It was Hatshepsut who made of him a useless thing, a mute and passive creature who could only go where he was led. Sometimes Senenmut thought the child must be in love; or so deep in hate and fear that he could not see for the force of it.

  Hatshepsut did not need to hear any of that. “We’ve years yet,” he said, “before you’ll need to fear.”

  She pulled free of his grasp. “You think I want that. You think I’ll be glad to hold a regency my life long.”

  “I think you’ll do ill in retirement,” he said: “forbidden the heights of rule, forced to see your daughter and her husband in the place of power, and you outside of it.”

  She shivered. It was not anything she willed: he saw how she glowered, and shook herself with a sharp, fierce movement. “As you say. It will be years before I need to fear that. Love me now. Help me drive away the dark.”

  “Always,” he said, “my lady and queen.”

  They returned to Thebes in a kind of triumph, with the Two Lands well secured behind them, and the king’s face known as well as could be expected. To most he would be no more than a glitter in the distance, the height of the Two Crowns and the weapons of his guards. The people loved a king who was young; if he was too young to rule, if others ruled for him, they doted on him as on a favored child.

  Hatshepsut professed herself content. Her night fears faded with the sunlight. In Thebes she was altogether herself. If anything she was stronger than she had been before she began that brief and successful progress.

  ~~~

  Neferure was not strengthened by her journey through the Two Lands. She pined for her lover, Senenmut thought. He had taken steps to assure that when she returned to Thebes, Amonhotep would have gone up to Abydos, administering Senenmut’s affairs there.

  They had not passed on the way. Amonhotep traveled by land, Neferure on the river. If either suspected the ruse, Senenmut did not know of it.

  In any event, Neferure was unwell. She had caught a bit of fever in the marshes of the Delta. It passed, but her malaise lingered. She withdrew to her chambers, curtailed her duties, hid herself behind a wall of maids and guards.

  “The queen is indisposed,” one of those guards said to Senenmut as he approached the door.

  “I am aware of that,” Senenmut said with studied calm. “I’ll not keep the queen’s majesty any longer than I must.”

  The guard frowned, but he, like all his fellows, knew better than to gainsay the queen’s tutor. She was grown and a woman now, and had no need of his presence every day; but Senenmut had been remiss in failing to attend her since she returned from her jour
ney.

  How remiss, he had just now discovered. Rumor had it that Neferure was not merely indisposed; that she was honestly ill, but would suffer no physician to examine her, nor permit a priest to invoke the gods in her name.

  He found her just come from the bath, wrapped in soft cloths like a mantle, with her hair spread wet on her shoulders and a maid combing sweet unguent into it. She did not look ill. She looked in the splendid peak of health.

  “Senenmut!” she said in surprise and, he hoped, honest welcome. “I hadn’t expected you. Is something wrong?”

  He took his time in replying. He sat in the chair that he often favored, accepted a cup of what proved to be wine cooled in an earthen jar and made sweet with spices, sipped till his head had cleared and his heart stopped thudding.

  Nothing that he saw eased his fears. She sat opposite him and did not touch her own cup, wrapped in her mantle despite the day’s warmth. Her eyes were vivid and clear—too much so, perhaps. He saw in them a challenge, though she would never voice it.

  At length he said, “I am pleased that, rumors to the contrary, you are anything but deathly ill.”

  She smiled a bright, brittle smile. “Oh, I am well. Quite well. Just a little indisposed.”

  “Ah,” he said. He paused. “A temporary indisposition, I trust?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Temporary.”

  “Of about, perhaps, nine months’ duration?” he inquired.

  She started. She caught herself, but not before he saw. Her cheeks flushed, and then paled. She looked truly indisposed then, nigh as white as her linen wrappings.

  He spoke carefully, as one often did with queens. “Lady, did you think you could hide it for as long as it’s wont to take? You have, what, five months left? Four?”

  “Four,” she said. It was like her not to deny it once there was no purpose in it. He saw how she braced, expecting the next and inevitable question.

  Which he had no need to ask. “Such a secret is near impossible to keep. Servants talk. Rumors fly. And a queen must appear at least intermittently, and her garments conceal very little. You must envy the queens of Asia, who live forever in seclusion, and clothe themselves in great wraps and swathings, and never show more of their bodies than they must.”

  He had caught her off balance, but she recovered quickly. “I envy no one. I have no shame, either.”

  “I’m sure,” Senenmut said mildly.

  She leaned forward. He could, if he peered, see the gentle rounding of her middle, the betrayal that would be unmistakable in only a little while. “You understand,” she said. “I was so afraid you wouldn’t. But Am—he said—he said you—”

  Senenmut shook his head once, sharply, and frowned: a signal that they had devised long ago, which she did not now mistake. Her eyes flicked to the maids who stood about, the servants who came and went on errands of the bath.

  Her hands smote together like a whipcrack. “Out!” she cried. “All of you, out! Out or feel my rod on your backs!”

  They scurried to obey. She raised her voice seldom, nor threatened aught but what she meant to do.

  When they were well gone, Senenmut walked the edges of the room, prodding at the hangings, opening doors swiftly and setting a firm kick in the backside of the maid he found crouching behind one. Only when all the doors were clear, with no one on the other side, and all the walls and crannies empty, would he return to his seat.

  Neferure waited like a student facing the master’s rod, too proud to droop or beg. Her shoulders were set as if against a blow.

  “Child,” Senenmut said with all the love in his heart, and all the grief, and no little exasperation, either. “Oh, child, what are we going to do?”

  Her hand sought her middle. Her chin lifted. “I won’t kill the baby. Tuyu says I should, and says she knows how. But I won’t.”

  “Nor is it safe now,” he said. “Though if you had agreed to it when you first knew . . .”

  “I wouldn’t,” she said. “I won’t. I love this baby. It lives, Senenmut. It moves; it kicks me.” She grimaced. “Sometimes it hurts.”

  “Indeed,” said Senenmut. “Alas for you that your king is still a child. You could have played out the deception else, brought him to your bed and borne him an eight-months’ child. It’s too late for that, and too early for him. The world will know that you warmed your bed with a man who was not the king.”

  Neferure shook her head. Her hair, drying into curls, swirled in her face. “I’ve been thinking, truly I have. I’ll be ill, ill in spirit—so ill I need the gods’ help. I’ll go on a pilgrimage. I’ll seek out temples. I’ll pray to every god who is powerful in Egypt. I’ll make it a new progress, but only for myself, and in the gods’ name. I can travel the length of the river, and do it slowly. If I’m wise and the gods love me, I’ll deliver the baby somewhere round about the City of the Sun, all the way to the Delta.”

  “Clever,” Senenmut said. “But have you thought that a woman with child is rather obvious about it, and many people will see you—the whole of the Two Lands will know?”

  “No, they won’t,” she said with sublime assurance. “I’ll travel in my litter, hidden from the eyes of men, because my soul-sickness wishes it and the gods command it. My women will speak for me to the priests and people. I’ll do my devotions in the inner shrines, pray to each god before his living face. I’m granted that, because I’m queen.”

  “And so you will conceal a commoner’s child from the knowledge of Egypt.” Senenmut sighed. “And when it’s born? What then? Will you drown it in the Nile? Feed it to a crocodile?”

  She stiffened, furious. “I will not! I will send it away. Some kind soul will foster it.”

  “If it is female, it may, all unknowing, carry the right to the throne of Egypt.”

  “It won’t know,” said Neferure. “I won’t kill it, Senenmut. If you so much as lay a hand on it, I’ll kill you.”

  She was fiercer than he had ever seen her, dangerous as a lioness protecting her cubs. He trod softly, spoke gently. “I will threaten no child of yours. But, my dear, your plan is so elaborate; it trusts in so much, and walks so close to the edge of betrayal.”

  “What else can I do?” she demanded. “I can’t wish it away. I tried that. All it gave me was a headache.”

  “Does the father know?”

  That at last was a question she had expected: unexpected now, and sudden. She drew a sharp breath. “No. No, I haven’t told him.”

  “That’s probably well,” said Senenmut.

  “I think so,” she said, if somewhat uncertainly. “You know who it is.”

  He nodded.

  “Then you do understand. You won’t kill him.”

  “No,” he said, “though I might break every bone in his body.”

  “Oh, don’t!” she cried. “It was my fault. He would have been too shy, if I hadn’t pressed him. I had to press hard. Even then he almost refused me.”

  “I almost believe you,” Senenmut said. “And now you pay as every woman pays, unless the gods have either blessed or cursed her. A pilgrimage won’t save you, infant.”

  “Then what will? I can’t stay here, with all the servants whispering, and the court catching wind of it.”

  “No,” said Senenmut. His thoughts rattled in his mind, somewhere aft of his liver. None of them served any useful purpose. He had never been so utterly at a loss before; so perfectly without the solace of wit.

  Her mother would have to know. That would not be a pleasant meeting. His brother, her daughter: well they might argue that they did nothing that Senenmut and Hatshepsut had not done before them. But Hatshepsut had given her king a daughter and lost a son, and with him her hope of bearing another, before she sought comfort in a commoner’s arms.

  And yet she must know, and soon. Her wrath would be terrible; and worse, the later she discovered the truth.

  There were no easy choices; no simple evasions. And no resolution that he could see, not anywhere.

 
Neferure flung up her hands. “You see? You have no arguments, and no recourse, either. I’ll have my pilgrimage. The Two Lands will lose me for a while, and my weak spirit with me. Then I’ll come back all strong and sure.”

  “And succumb again to temptation, because your husband is too young to give you pleasure?”

  “No,” she said, not even in anger. “No, I won’t—I can’t—”

  “Oh, you won’t,” Senenmut said grimly, “and if you do, I’ll make sure it’s not with that particular comforter of lorn wives.”

  29

  The queen regent was not merely angry. She was in a fair rage. And she could indulge the barest fraction of it.

  “This will be kept quiet,” she said through clenched teeth. “And you, O my scribe, will stand surety for it.”

  Senenmut bowed low. There was nothing of the lover in her now, and no remembrance of their nights together. She was queen wholly, and queen in wrath.

  What she said to Neferure he did not know. They spoke alone together in a chamber bare of listening places, with Nehsi on guard at the door. They spoke long; and when Neferure came out she was white and shaken, too shocked for tears.

  There would be no pilgrimage. But this far Hatshepsut granted the wisdom of Neferure’s stratagem: she allowed the queen to announce that, in sickness of the spirit, she would retreat for a time to the temple of Isis in Abydos. It was far enough from Thebes to be out of the court’s sphere, high and holy enough to suit a queen, and well enough guarded that Neferure’s secret might be safe there. There was no surety; but of this both Hatshepsut and Senenmut were certain. If Neferure remained in the palace at Thebes, there would be a magnificent scandal.

  Neferure prepared with care. She began to summon priests and soothsayers, prophets and sorcerers, wisewomen and physicians. All of them found her lying languid in her bed, well and discreetly covered, professing no interest in rising to face the sun. They performed their rites and sacrifices, raised their reeks, even danced around her bed while she lay limp, arm flung over her eyes to conceal the helpless laughter.