by Judith Tarr
Hapuseneb was nearest her, familiar shaven-headed shape. Senenmut, far back in the flock of her attendants, strained and craned to see if they spoke together. They did not seem to. But when she had finished her prayers, when she should have bowed to the gods and returned to her chair, to be carried back to the palace, instead she paused and stood straighter.
She beckoned to her herald. He came forward.
Senenmut’s heart twisted. Even that fool of a man with his splendid voice—even he had known. And Senenmut who had been her lover, Senenmut whom she had loved, had been kept in ignorance like the least of the crowds who flocked along the river.
Through the pain of anger and jealousy and plain fear, he heard clearly enough the words that she spoke and the herald echoed. “O my people! Dwellers in Memphis, that next to Thebes is greatest in Egypt. This day the river has begun the descent from its fullest flood. Such an inundation no one has ever seen. The gods have blessed us beyond measure, have granted us such wealth of Black Land as these two kingdoms have never yet known.
“This is an omen, my people. It blesses us. It promises us a glorious harvest. All the world shall come to us, bow low before us, beg us to bless it with the fruits of our rich black earth.”
People near Senenmut settled in to listen. Speeches they knew, though kings seldom made them, and queens almost never. This was a novelty, a rare entertainment.
She gave them much more than they could have been looking for. “I too have been blessed,” she said, “I who am descended from Queen Nefertari, who was the daughter of a god. Great Amon came to me, my people, while I slept; came walking in my dream.”
And she told them what she had told Senenmut, and what she had recounted to her counsellors, the dream of Amon and Queen Ahmose. It was a splendid story. The queen in her beauty, the god smitten till he must love her or know no peace. She told it as well as any spinner of tales in the marketplace. She spun it out, made it grand and glorious, swept them up to the inevitable conclusion.
“And when I woke,” she said, “I knew what the god my father had ordained for me. It was a grand thing, a terrible thing, a thing most worthy of a god. He wrought me, my people; begot me of his own seed and set me in the womb of a queen, so that I might rise above all men who were before me. He told me what I must do; what I must be.
“This rising of the river is the omen, O my people. Egypt prospers by the will of Amon. Hapi consents to broaden the Black Land, to make it rich beyond conceiving. This they do, my people, for the honor of my name, and through me for the glory of Amon my father.
“Amon has spoken, O my people,” she said. “He has laid his hand upon me. He has willed that I take the Two Crowns, that I lift up the crook and the flail. Amon has willed that I should rise to the Great House. He has made me king, lord in truth of the Two Lands.”
35
The people of Egypt, to Senenmut’s astonishment, were far more accommodating than the lords and princes. Faced with a queen who informed them that she would be king, they stood for an endless moment in shocked silence. Then, raggedly at first but with waxing fervor, they raised up their voices. It sounded like the roar of a lion—but there was no mistaking it. They were crying her name. Cheering her on. Calling her lord, king, Great House of Egypt.
~~~
“She paid them,” Senenmut said to Hapuseneb, late in the evening when they should both have been abed; but there was no sleeping while Egypt woke to knowledge of Hatshepsut’s insanity.
“She paid them,” he said again. “She showered them with bread and beer in return for their show of adulation.”
“Probably she did sow a seed or two,” Hapuseneb admitted. “But it would never have grown so ripe so fast unless it fell on fertile ground. The people are wild for her.”
“The people have lost their wits.” Senenmut stalked the edges of the small reception-room in his house. The walls closed in on him, but he could not bring himself to escape. Just so was it with Hatshepsut: he could not come near her, but neither could he stay away. His heart was bound to her whether he would or no.
“I do think the god wills it,” Hapuseneb said. Senenmut had never heard him so nearly somber. “Else why did she escape not only unharmed but with the people cheering her on? Preposterous as it seems, they love the thought of a woman who is king.”
“They’ll turn on her in a moment,” said Senenmut, “when the god’s fire leaves them.”
“Then we’ll have to trust the god, won’t we, to protect her while she lives.”
Senenmut nearly struck him. No man should be as wearily wise as that—or so reckless with a woman’s life and soul.
A woman who was insisting that she was king. Hapuseneb met his bitter state with one both wry and calm. “You’re angry,” he said, “because she won’t do what you want her to do. She goes her own way. She always has.”
“But if that way is to her death—”
“I think not,” Hapuseneb said. “She is Amon’s child, old friend. The people know it; they love her for it.”
“And when they tire of her, they’ll kill her.”
“Not while Amon protects her.”
Senenmut set his lips tight. Hapuseneb was lost, too, besotted; god-maddened, and no doubt of it. “When she first spoke of what she would do,” Senenmut said, “you were as much against her as I. What of your wager, priest? Have you lost all will to win it?”
“I am Amon’s servant,” Hapuseneb said. He shrugged, sighed. “I am also a practical man. She won’t be stopped, my friend. That’s as clear to me as the sun at noon. She is the god’s child. If that loses me a wager . . . ai, I’ll be a poor man, but I’ll be alive and in her service.”
“You are a weak man,” Senenmut said, “a leaf in every wind that blows.”
Hapuseneb did not rise up in anger, but neither did he come back to Senenmut’s way of thinking. He left as amiably as always, oblivious as it seemed to Senenmut’s taut and furious silence.
~~~
The whole of Egypt had gone mad. Sunstruck, conquered by the will of a god, till it bowed to the will of a woman.
She, indomitable, took ship from Memphis as the river’s flood began its slow ebb. Its extent was her proof and her omen. In the year that she made herself king, the Black Land stretched farther than it ever had. Its harvest was not the richest that had been recorded—there were a few that had been richer—but it was splendid enough for the purpose.
The court was in shock. There had been rumor of something new, something enormous, but none of them could have been prepared for the truth. That shock preserved her against assault. She moved swiftly in it, sweeping up from Memphis into Thebes. The roar of the people followed her.
She had not yet taken the Two Crowns. That she would do in Thebes, before the face of Amon her father. But in Memphis she was given the crook of a shepherd and the flail of a master of servants, and those she laid beside her as she sailed southward. They glittered on the cushion, eager, it seemed, for her hands to take them up.
So she would do when she came to Thebes. She sailed as swiftly as she might, but not so swiftly that the people failed to acclaim her from the river’s banks, gathering in every village and town and running far in pursuit of her, crying her name.
She seemed to grow greater in the heat of their worship, gleaming like the sun upon her golden barge. Thebes itself received her with a roar that shattered the sky. Amon was this city’s own god, father and king. He possessed its people. He struck them blind to aught but the glory of his daughter.
There was no stopping her. Amon’s own priesthood met her at the quay, bowed low before her, crowned her with the Two Crowns in a coronation that was like nothing that had been before, just as she herself was.
~~~
That first fierce heat of passion faded as it inevitably must. But she had foreseen it. Once she was settled in her own city, she commanded that she be crowned in full and proper form, as kings had been crowned in Thebes since before there were Two Lands of Eg
ypt.
She was no fool, was Hatshepsut. There were not a few who noticed that the chief priest of Amon, the god’s First Prophet, had not been among those who met her by the river. He had expired quietly of a fever while she was in Memphis. It was convenient; as convenient as the people’s blind worship and the lesser priests’ acceptance of her lunacy. Some was the god’s doing. Some was clearly that of the god’s servants.
The new First Prophet of Amon was Hatshepsut’s old friend and ally, that supple-minded man, Hapuseneb. He ruled the priesthood and its vast possessions in the kind of comfort that Senenmut, whose ease in the balancing of so many offices was a matter of great care and concentration, could have envied had he been less bleakly angry.
No; he was not angry, not any longer. Merely bleak. He had not been deprived of his offices. They were still his, all the burdens as well as the blessings.
He should be glad that Egypt accepted her; that Amon’s temple stood behind her; that the court lacked the courage to resist her. One lone woman had bowed the whole of the Two Lands to her will, had done it simply and completely. She said that it would be, and so it was.
Only Senenmut seemed to stand apart from the crowds that flocked about her. There were others, there must be: men too stubborn or too set in tradition to accept her. But he saw and heard none of them.
The king himself was brought out like an image of a god, decked in gold and crowned with the crowns that were his by right of birth and sex. He was not to be deposed. They were to be kings together, he and she, but she, as the elder, child of two who were the children of a king, was to be the great king. He, who was a child still, son of a concubine, was the lesser, the king-heir, set beside but slightly behind her in the order of rank and precedence.
For that she was greatly praised. A usurper—for that she was; she could be nothing else—could well have disposed of the rightful king and raised up another, more malleable heir.
But she not only suffered Thutmose to live, she permitted him to continue as king. He had no power worth the name, but then he never had. His allies were few, their influence negligible. His mother could do nothing.
She had been wise enough at the time to choose seclusion over an open and public wielding of her power as mother to the king. But now that Hatshepsut was king over the younger king, Isis found herself a prisoner, confined to her chambers and to a narrow round of courts and gardens. She was not prevented from seeing or speaking to her son. She could entertain guests, even appear in court. But she could do nothing that the new king was not aware of, nor act but by the king’s will.
~~~
Hatshepsut held Egypt in her strong small hand. On the day that she was crowned as befit a king in Thebes, the river ran still high though it was late in the season of inundation.
She was by then proclaiming that not only was she the god’s daughter; her own putative father, the first Thutmose, had named her his heir upon his deathbed, and foretold that she would rule as he ruled, as king and god. And perhaps he had called her his little king, his god-begotten; who was to say that he had not? Fathers of strong-willed daughters were known to do such things.
Amon’s daughter, heir of the last great king: of course she would be king. If any denied her, that one found himself sent far away to serve on an embassy in Asia, or became lord of a field or two and a pair of oxen on the borders of Nubia.
When she came to her crowning, she came as any king did, with the people’s blessing. There was none who dared protest. Not even Senenmut.
She came in splendor, clothed all in gold. Her wits or the cleverness of her maids had found her a royal garment that flattered her woman’s body. It was a linen robe of many pleats, gathered at the middle, with a mantle over it, embroidered with gold. A great golden collar glittered on her breast. Her girdle was of gold, and her armlets, and her sandals. She had had them wrought for this her coronation in the image of divine Re, the scarab-beetle that rolled the sun across the sky, enfolded in the falcon-wings of Horus. Her brow was crowned with the Two Ladies, the vulture-goddess of the south, the rearing serpent of the north. Her wig was plaited with gold and precious stones, the colors of sun and sky.
She came in procession, attended by all the priesthoods, by the royal guard, by the soldiery of the Two Kingdoms, and by the whole massed rank of the court, lords and ladies, their children, their servants, all who attended upon them. The song of trumpets preceded them, and priests chanting the names and titles of the king. She had named herself Maatkare, the Truth of Re—an irony, thought Senenmut, if one ever doubted the rightness of what she did. Therefore she was Maatkare Hatshepsut.
As many as marched in that procession, one would have thought there would be no one to line the processional way from the palace to the temple of Min where every king went to perform sacrifice and to receive the crowns; but all of Egypt seemed to have gathered in Thebes to see this woman crowned king.
It was Min who sanctified her, and not Amon her father, because Min blessed every king with life and fertility, and through him the land of Egypt. Min’s priests met her, bearing the image of the god and leading his great white bull; and behind the god came the crowns and the crook and the flail, all that would be given to her in token of her office. A place was made for them between palace and temple, a high dais to which they all went up, priests and king and the king’s closest attendants.
Of whom Senenmut was not one. He stood below with the rest of the court, unregarded and surely forgotten. She rose above him, a small figure but very erect, and seeming somehow to tower over them all.
The god was in her. Even he could see it. Her face was as splendid as the sun. She was beautiful beyond bearing.
She bowed before the god as even a king must do. When she stood straight again, one of the priests let fly four geese to the four corners of heaven, bearing word to all men and gods that a king ruled in the Two Lands. And as they flew, Min’s own high priest blessed and consecrated the crowns.
Her servant, the dark man, Nehsi the Nubian, slipped off the wig that she wore. Senenmut’s breath escaped in a sigh. She had shorn all her beautiful hair, the better to wear the crowns. She looked no less purely a woman for it.
The crowns, White nested within Red, came down slowly in the priest’s hands. He was one of those priests who performed every act as a matter of mighty moment; who had never known the meaning of haste, nor seen the virtue in sparing suspense. It seemed an endless while before the crowns touched her brow. She held her head high, steady, though she must have been trembling within.
Or perhaps she was not. She was no mortal man, to live in fear of gods or men. The god was in her, possessing her. Her eyes were full of him.
The crowns came to rest in supernatural stillness. No one spoke; not one man moved. The only sound was the murmur of wind in the canopy over her head, and the honking of the geese that flew still to west and north and east and south, and the vast soft sigh that was the breath of thousands of people, released at once as she stood up under the two tall crowns.
She took the crook and the flail then, with the priest speaking words that no one heard: for a roar had gone up, sudden and immense, rocking the earth underfoot and thundering to the sky.
36
My sweet daughter, my chosen one, King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Maatkare Hatshepsut.
That was carved in every stone of the Two Lands in the circle that was the king’s own, the cartouche as it was called, bearer and emblem of his name—or hers. It was as Senenmut had predicted: the scribes were beside themselves, and the artists and limners too, fitting the needs and uses of their art to the prodigy of a king who was a woman.
Some carved or painted her as a woman, but wearing the false beard and the Two Crowns. Others surrendered to tradition and gave her a man’s body but her own face. And in the annals and accountings of the House of Life, she was the lord, she who rules in the Two Lands, her majesty the king.
~~~
The feast of her coronation went on for seven
days without ceasing in the palace and in the city and throughout the Two Kingdoms. Hapuseneb did not after all go bankrupt providing wine for it: she considered it sufficient that he should endow the court with the finest vintage for the banquet on her coronation day. He forbore to object. She was wealthier far than he: the whole treasure of Egypt was hers, to do with as she would.
Senenmut attended as few of the festivities as he could properly do. He had duties, some of which did not vanish simply because a king had been crowned and set upon the throne. He escaped into them.
On the night of the seventh day, when he had retreated to his house and barred the door, and contemplated departure to his villa in the morning—and no matter that its lands were still no more than a few sodden fields and a vast expanse of muddy river—he sat late awake while the lamp burned down. Sleep held no allure, nor had for nights out of count. Sometimes he succumbed to it; he was mortal, he could not help it. But most nights he sat till dawn, reading if he could, or simply watching the shadows dance upon the wall.
He was doing precisely that, taking a kind of dim pleasure in it, when someone scratched at the door. He thought at first that it was one of the aunts’ cats. The creatures made free of the house, and objected strenuously if anyone barred a door to them.
But this was too large to be a cat, and scratching too high. Man-high. He ignored it for a while, but it persisted. At length, with a sigh that was half a groan, he unfolded himself stiffly from his chair and went to unbar the door.
The snap of rebuke died before it passed his tongue. His mind did not want to know this person at all, but his eyes saw too clearly, even in the dim lamplight.
“You should not be here,” he heard himself say—stupidly enough, even in the circumstances.
Hatshepsut slipped past him in a fragrance of myrrh. She was gowned in simple linen, with a mantle over it against the night, and a plain wig. No guardian shadow followed her. She seemed to be utterly alone.
