by Judith Tarr
A faint flush stained her cheeks, but that might have been anger. “If need be, yes.”
“I don’t think we need to go that far,” Hapuseneb said as if to soothe them both. It was a lovers’ quarrel; a blind man could have seen it. “There are variations on the royal robe that would be more suited to a woman’s body than a kilt. As for the beard . . .” He sighed. “Well. Maybe we’re doomed to that. It is so much a part of the regalia, and so very ancient.”
“So is a man’s body,” Senenmut said nastily. “Will she find a way to put that on, too?”
“If I could,” she snapped, “I would.”
“Then why don’t you?”
“Now,” said Hapuseneb. “There now. Stop it. You,” he said to Senenmut, “sit down. You, lady, if you will, listen to me. What you propose may be the god’s will, but the Two Kingdoms will never accept it. They live by tradition. Tradition commands that a man be king.”
“I will change it,” she said inflexibly. “Haven’t you heard me? I’ve considered every argument. The god has countered every one. It will be as it must be.”
“It can’t,” Senenmut said, though Hapuseneb moved to hush him.
“I say it can,” she said. “Remember who I am. Is there anyone who can deny me?”
“Certainly,” he said. “The king. And the king’s mother.”
She laughed aloud. “They, you say? The king, who cannot put together a coherent sentence in front of me? The king’s mother, who hasn’t shown her face outside her apartments since the gods know when? What friends have they? What allies can they claim? Have you ever seen the court follow them as it follows me?”
“The court has followed you,” said Nehsi, again speaking unlooked for, “because you uphold the kingship. If you claim the title yourself, you may discover that your allies have fled.”
“I think not,” she said. She was growing more determined rather than less, the more they resisted her. “My friends, I lay you a wager. I’ll win the Two Lands into my hand, even if I call myself king.”
“A wager?” Hapuseneb could not seem to help himself: his eyes gleamed at the prospect. “What are the stakes, my lady?”
Senenmut hissed at him, but she took no notice. “All our lives, I would say, but since we are practical people . . . shall we wager something more tangible? When I’m crowned as king, you shall provide the wine for my coronation feast.”
He blanched. He was a wealthy man, and Amon the wealthiest god in Egypt, but a king’s coronation feast required the wealth of a kingdom to do it justice.
Still he loved a gamble, and he could not be thinking that he would lose. “When I win,” he said to Hatshepsut, “you shall grant me whatever I ask.”
“Oh, no,” she said, as hot for this wager as he. “You must tell me what you expect me to pay. Although of course,” she said, “I’ll never need to pay it.”
“It will be nothing too terribly unreasonable,” he said. “Something within your power to grant, even as queen regent.”
“Not the regency,” she said quickly.
He grinned. “Oh, I should ask for that! But no; I’m not a fool. Make me chief prophet of Amon—the great god’s high priest. That should be stakes enough to match a king’s wealth of wine.”
“Oh,” she said. “Indeed. To persuade the temple; to win over the king . . . yes. That will be difficult enough to be worth the hazard.”
“Then it’s done,” said Hapuseneb.
“Not,” Senenmut interceded, “until the rest of this madness is played out. Lady, will you insist on it?”
“Not I,” she said. “The god.”
He pressed his lips together and conspicuously refused to say another word.
Nehsi said it for him. “You grieve for the Lady Neferure; your anger is strong, and your sense of betrayal. Will you challenge the gods now? Is that why you do this?”
“No!” she cried in a fever of impatience. “Have you heard no word I’ve said? The god challenges me—and with me the whole of Egypt. Maybe he does it to punish me; to make me suffer as my daughter suffered, because I gave her too little to do.”
“You could tell him,” said Senenmut, “that saving his grace, what he asks of you is impossible.”
“One does not say such things to a god.” Her voice was chill. Oh, the lovers were quarrelling, and no mistake.
“You would say such things,” said Senenmut, “and escape unharmed. Even from a god. But you will not. You want it, O lady who would be king. You want it with all your heart.”
“Maybe I do,” she said. “Maybe I’m glad. Maybe I’ll shock you all, and not only take the Two Crowns but hold them, and be such a king as these kingdoms have not seen in many a year.”
“Now that,” said Senenmut acidly, “is true enough.”
34
In all their years of prickly friendship, Senenmut had never quarreled so with Hatshepsut. Lovers they had been, but they had never been excessively tender in it, nor inclined to spare one another.
Still this went far beyond plain speaking or hard words. That she could rule as well as any king, Senenmut did not for a moment doubt. But that she should be king . . .
No. He could not accept it. A woman in those crowns, claiming that title, made mockery of all that they were.
And if he could not accept it, who loved her, how would the rest of Egypt be? He feared for her. He dreaded what this world of theirs would do to a woman who insisted that she would be king.
She would not speak to him. When he applied for admittance to her chambers, the guards were apologetic, but they would not yield. “She said,” they said, all but shuffling their feet, “she won’t see you.”
The door that he had used for so long, the secret way, was locked and barred. He came near to beating on it in frustration; but that would have betrayed them both. He did not care greatly for his own skin, but her he loved, even as he quarreled bitterly with her.
Desperation drove him to come to her in public audience, when she would refuse no one, from the least to the greatest. He had no petition to offer. He simply wished her to see his face—and himself to see hers. What good it could do, he did not know. She was not sane then, not in any way that he could name.
Perhaps after all it was a god who drove her. She was set on it; immovable, implacable.
She had sworn her counsellors to silence. When the time had ripened, she would speak to the rest of Egypt. All of it, lords and commons both. On that she was determined.
She prepared them. Senenmut had been too blind to notice before, how little by little the king shrank from public scrutiny. He appeared less and less in hall of audience or court of justice. He was indisposed, it was said; or occupied among his soldiers; or engrossed in prayer to the gods. He had become very devout.
For all Senenmut knew, that was the truth. Children had odd enthusiasms, and this child was odder than most. He might well have turned to the gods in defense against the terror of his regent.
She continued to act in his name. She was careful of that, meticulous in her reverence. “The king’s majesty is sacred,” she said—and if those who heard only knew, how well they would understand why she so guarded the rights and privileges of the king.
She could charm a crocodile away from its dinner, as people said. A smile, a tilt of the head, a word exactly chosen to make her victim preen, and she had an ally, a man whom she had flattered into taking her part in whatever it was she intended.
She never lied. She might stretch the truth, but never to breaking. That was her boast and her pride.
It was pain to see her winning Egypt to her cause, and Egypt never knew what it was. Senenmut saw one day how she entertained a gaggle of princelings from the nomes of Upper Egypt, vain and purse-proud men who reckoned it only their due that the queen regent should regale them with a gazelle-hunt in the desert beyond the city, and then a feast in the palace, with such pleasures laid on as those provincial princes had hardly dared to dream of. A pretty maid for each, well trai
ned in the arts of pleasing a man, and devoted each to her allotted princeling.
Senenmut had been spared the task of finding and preparing the women, but he happened on the room where they all waited, a round two dozen naked and begauded beauties, gossiping among themselves until they should be summoned to the hall. He had only been passing by on his way somewhere onerous. The sound of their voices and the scent of their perfumes in a room that heretofore had always been deserted, brought him to a halt in the doorway.
They saw him, but forbore to shriek or scatter. He did admire a woman who kept her composure in the face of the unexpected.
They reminded him rather forcibly of Hatshepsut. And indeed, while he stood there gaping like a bee in a field of flowers, she herself appeared in the inner door. She who had come in from the hunt windblown and sheened with dust had bathed and dressed and adorned herself as befit a queen.
Her chosen ladies bowed low before her. She raised them with a word, looked them over as a general inspects his armies, nodded crisply and said, “You’ll do. Remember what I told you. This is war—as fierce as any battle, and rather more dangerous to the unwary. See that your man is well pleased, his every need met, his whims indulged.”
“And if he gets unreasonable?” one of them wanted to know.
“Yes,” said someone else. “Sometimes they want things they shouldn’t have: things with whips, or games of pain.”
“No whips,” Hatshepsut said. “No pain. My word on that. This is simple seduction: wine, perfume, flowers. If your lord takes a particular liking to you, be aware that you’ll be given to him as a gift.”
They all exchanged glances. One said, “No one ever thought to tell us this before.”
“That’s foolish,” Hatshepsut said. “Doesn’t everyone serve better if she understands the stakes?”
“But no one asks,” the maidservant said. She paused, as if in thought. Then she said, “I hope I like the lord you’ve allotted me. If I do, may I have him?”
Hatshepsut laughed. “Why, certainly. Win his heart, or his body at least, and persuade him to ask for you. Then he’s yours, and my word on it.”
She was a warmer presence here than she ever was among princes, a woman among women, teaching these servants of hers to love her. When only a little while thereafter she had entered the hall of feasting with pomp and fanfare, and received the lords’ homage as a queen should, she was never the woman who had spoken face to face with servants; she was all royal, haughty and subtly terrible.
And these men loved her for that. So should royalty be, remote and set apart, but watchful as a god, intent upon their welfare. The hunt, the feast, the pleasures promised by each smiling, scented maidservant, said all that she need say, without the vulgarity of words.
Then when they were done, drowned deep in wine and in their servants’ arms, she slipped away to receive an embassy from somewhere far in Asia. They never knew she was gone; would swear, come morning, that she had been with them till nightfall, when the last of them dropped insensible to the floor.
Hatshepsut seduced them as adeptly as her servants. She made herself more beautiful than they, and more alluring: far too high for any of them, thus he must content himself with a lesser woman; but he could dream of her, and perhaps he did, while he lay with the woman whom she had given him.
Senenmut, relegated to the shadows, denied her touch or her glance, watched and knew how it was to be a spirit of the dead, all eyes, strengthless and powerless. If he told them why she did this, they would turn, not on her, but on him. She had laid a spell on them, the same spell that she meant to lay on the whole of Egypt.
~~~
Egypt, ancient and weary and wise, succumbed to her as had the lords of its nomes, blind to the truth till she spoke it where every one must hear. She chose a great festival for it, the day the river rose to its highest. There was a measuring-stick in every town and city, marker of the flood and proof of its strength or weakness; but the great marker, the measure of all the rest, was in Memphis at the gate of the Delta.
She went down to the city in advance of the crest, sailing on the swollen river over inundated fields. The Black Land was at its narrowest, all its people crowded up against the Red Land, but in joy and celebration, for there had not been such a flood in living memory. It was the highest since the foreign kings were driven out; what it signified was splendid, a broader spread of rich black earth, and from it a greater harvest, sufficient not only for the year ahead but for a year and more beyond. Even if the flood failed utterly in its next rising, there would be no famine. Egypt’s prosperity was safe.
It was given to the king to sanctify the festival. But the king was left behind in Thebes, where he nursed a sniffle and played with his soldiers.
The sniffle was his regent’s excuse. Small sickness could become greater, too deadly swift to turn aside. For his protection therefore, she said, he would remain in his gods-guarded palace, closely watched by his physicians, while his regent performed the rite for him in the heart of royal Memphis.
Thutmose might have no choice but to be left behind, but Senenmut was made of sterner stuff. He simply assumed that he was going. He had his own boat; in Memphis he had a house, a pretty place that he had bought on a whim, when it seemed that one of his brothers might wish to seek his fortune in Lower Egypt. As it happened, Ahotep and Amonhotep were content to dwell in Thebes, but he kept the house. It was most useful now, when he would not rely upon the queen regent’s charity.
Their quarrel was stretching longer than either of them could have expected. She would not yield, of course not. She was Hatshepsut.
No more would Senenmut give way to this madness of hers. Queen and regent he would serve till his last breath. Queen become king was a freak of nature, a thing that should never be. A woman belonged in a woman’s place, beside a man, equal to him in most things, superior even, if she were royal born and he a commoner. But the king was a man. He could not be a woman.
She called it utter unreason. He called it tradition. If women had been meant to be kings, the gods would have made them so.
He loved her no less because she was both mad and obsessed. He went to Memphis therefore, following in his boat with his own flock of servants, and settled in his house that stood within sight of the White Palace.
They arrived some days in advance of the day that the priests had foretold would see the flood to its height. Already it had risen as high as it ever had. And still it rose. Those whose houses stood close to the river at its widest heretofore, found themselves with water lapping at their doorsteps. Senenmut’s own estate near Thebes had shrunk to a few man-lengths of ground before the villa’s walls. The servants there had been instructed to move everything of value to the roof and cover it well, lest the river break down the gate.
It was glorious, but it was terrifying. The river was the life of Egypt. Its flood wrought the Black Land—but when it flooded as mightily as now, it could be deadly.
In Memphis people kept festival, singing praises to Hapi who was god of the river, but beseeching him too. He might well have chosen, this year of all years, to cover the whole of Egypt, to conquer all of the Black Land that had ever been, even to the palaces of the kings.
The coming of the queen regent comforted them in no small degree. “It would have been better,” Senenmut heard a man opine in the street, “if we had a king here, but she’s royal. She’ll do.”
“Isn’t she Amon’s child?” his companion reminded him. “Aren’t they all, who are descended from Queen Nefertari?”
“Well,” said the first man, “that’s true enough. But what does a sun-god have to do with the river flooding?”
“Sun dries water,” his friend said. “Makes the barley grow, ripens it in the ear.”
“So you think she can rule the river, do you?”
“Why not? She’s a goddess born. She can do anything.” And that, thought Senenmut, for most who were of common blood and kind, was that. Royalty was divine—yes,
even a queen.
He had stopped being a commoner a long while since. It had crept up on him: first familiarity with palaces, then comfort therein, and at length an inability to be altogether content anywhere else. He could not have gone back to the house in which he was born. It would have shrunk about him, dragged him down with its smallness.
~~~
Every day the city drifted toward the tall post of the river-measure. Every day the priests gathered there, invoking Ptah of Memphis and Hapi of the river and all the gods of Egypt. Once the queen regent was in Memphis, she too went with the rest, borne in her golden chair, wearing a tall plumed crown and carrying a scepter.
Senenmut’s heart came near to breaking at the sight of her. She was more beautiful than anything he knew, and more intransigent. He, unregarded in the crowds about her, saw how she sat, how perfectly, royally still. When she moved, it was with a dancer’s grace, performing the rite each day as had been prescribed from the dawn of the world. She invoked the gods as the priests had, made obeisance to each quarter of the horizon, bowed last and low to the river that swelled and surged nearly at her feet.
It was as wide as the sea that Senenmut had never seen, but he had heard of it, how it stretched from edge to edge of the world, as if there were no end to it. So it was with the river.
When its waters lapped nigh to the top of the measure, the priests began to be afraid. But the next day it was a little lower. Then they sighed with relief, and their prayers of thanksgiving were heartfelt.
Hatshepsut prayed after them as she had each day since she came to Memphis. She had come this day as every other, in no greater state and in no less, except that she had brought more guards and servants than heretofore. They surrounded the platform on which she stood with the priests, bobbed in boats beyond, and spread along the water’s edge. Everyone near her, Senenmut could not fail to notice, was loyal to her, except the priests themselves.
They were few enough, unarmed, apparently unwary. Only those who had come from Thebes, perhaps, knew that the queen intended something other than a simple celebration of the river’s rise and descent.
