by Judith Tarr
~~~
When the queen of Punt gave a gift, she did not give it by halves. A handful of days after she had announced the giving of the gift, as Nehsi went down to his ships from the camp that they had made on the strand near the town, he found them in uproar. On the shore stood a very fleet of carts, each drawn by a team of donkeys; and in each cart, wrapped with as great care as the mummy of a king, lay a shape of root and bole and branch, redolent of temples.
Thirty-one myrrh-trees. Thirty for the king’s pleasure, and one because, as its tender declared, it would pine for its grovemate else. They were wrapped in spells and in the goodwill of the people of Punt, sustained by their own earth packed carefully about the roots. Nehsi himself saw them laden in his ships, a few for each, and each with its attendant, to look after it and cherish it until it came to Egypt.
He had lingered because there was so much to do, and because the queen had grown so fond of Tama. But the season advanced, and he yearned for his own country again; and even more than that, the face of his king.
Once the yearning began, it sharpened to pain. A poor explorer, he; he traveled so long and so far, and in the end he fell ill of homesickness.
He thought he concealed it well. He even spun out his departure in proper and courtly fashion. The most difficult part of it, the return of Tama from the queen’s house, he left till nearly last. But time ran on, and he had to go. His ships were ready, their cargo laden and stowed, even to the trees that stood up like strange masts. All that was left was to gather his people, and to bid the people of Punt farewell.
There was a feast, the night before they would depart. The king and the queen of Punt spread tables in the Egyptian fashion, but as always, in their own way: under the same pavilion in which they had first received Nehsi’s embassy, its walls rolled up so that it lay open to the breezes. The tables were strewn with flowers, the serving-maids clad in them and in precious little else. There was a whole ox roasted for their pleasure, and a whole sheep, and a procession of other and stranger beasts and birds, fruits, greens and roots that grew in the earth.
Nehsi sat beside the queen of Punt. Tama was in the queen’s enormous lap, being fed dainties and spoiled horribly. There had been no discussion as yet of her departure. Cowardice on Nehsi’s part, perhaps. If there must be a battle, he preferred that it be brief.
It was a grand feast. His people had got on well with the people of Punt; there were friendships made, alliances confirmed, and not a few women who would weep when the ships set sail. One or two sailors had come to him begging for leave to bring a wife on the voyage home. Nehsi, who had not been born a fool, sent them to their captain.
As he had expected, they slunk away, heads hanging. Sailors loved and left women wherever they went. A woman of Punt, abandoned in Memphis or Thebes, might well have cause to curse the man whose love ran cold as soon as he set eyes again on the women of Egypt.
Not that the ships would be empty of people from Punt. The trees had their attendants; and the king had asked that one of his sons be permitted to join the voyage with his wives and his servants and a prince or six, to come as envoy before the king of Egypt. That, Nehsi could hardly refuse. His ships would be laden to the limit, and would sail the slower for it, but it would be a triumphant return, gods willing, to the quays of the Two Lands.
Tonight, his last night in the God’s Land, he knew the stabbing of regret. He would not be sorry to leave the heavy heat, the perpetual strangeness, the people whose language he had never properly learned to speak. And yet he had grown fond of this strange country. It was like a living temple of Amon.
“Truly,” he said to its queen over the feast, “the sun-god blesses this land with his presence.”
She raised her brows. “Ah; so he’s spoken to you, then.”
“I’m not worthy of a god’s notice,” Nehsi said, “but I feel him here. It’s the incense-trees, I’m certain. He loves their scent above all others. It’s meat and drink to him.”
“Indeed,” said the queen of Punt, indulgent as a mother whose child, albeit slow-witted, comes round in time to a proper understanding. She embraced Tama, who was still in her lap, and kissed her. “This child could be raised under the god’s eye.”
There; at last. Nehsi let his breath out slowly. “So she shall be,” he said with care to betray none of his tension, “in the courts of Egypt, where the god’s child is king.”
“Egypt is mighty,” the queen said, “and beautiful, and blessed by the god. But here is his heart and his home.”
“She has been greatly blessed, to sojourn for a while in the god’s own country.”
“She might be blessed beyond measure, were she to be fostered here, under the god’s eye.”
“That is a great honor,” Nehsi said, “and a generous offer. But she is Egyptian. She will grow to womanhood in Egypt where she was born.”
The queen ran a finger down Tama’s dusk-dark cheek. “Egyptian, O man whose name means simply ‘Nubian’?”
“Her mother is a lady of Egypt,” Nehsi said levelly, “and I was born in Thebes. My blood and face are of Nubia. My heart is wholly Egyptian.”
“Tell me, little one,” the queen said, looking into Tama’s wide-eyed face. “Are you Egyptian?”
Tama nodded.
“Would you like to stay with me?”
Nehsi held his breath. Every instinct of outraged fatherhood cried to him to snatch his daughter away. But he was his king’s voice in Punt, and this was the queen of that country. If he offended her, he destroyed everything that he had wrought.
But he could not give up his daughter. She was the one of all his children who looked and, gods help her, acted and thought like her father. He loved her. He could not give her away.
Tama looked from the queen to her father. She did not seem perturbed, nor in any way confused. She said clearly and without evidence of doubt, “I like you very much. You learn Egyptian very well. But I can’t stay if my papa goes. He’s my papa.”
The queen regarded her with an expression that Nehsi, who had always prided himself in his ability to read faces, could not comprehend at all. “Fathers send their daughters to fosterage often, even in Egypt. It’s useful. It helps them to win alliances and to become rich.”
“Papa is already rich,” Tama said. “I do like you, lady dear. I want to come back and teach you again. But I have to go home. Nurse will be upset if I don’t, and Papa will miss me.”
“I could make you stay,” the queen said.
“I’d run away,” said Tama. She slipped from the queen’s lap, neatly eluding the hands that reached to catch her, and climbed into Nehsi’s arms. From there she looked gravely at the queen of Punt. “I’m going wherever Papa goes.”
Nehsi braced himself. If there was to be a rising of armed men, his people were unarmed. Even the king’s soldiers had left their weapons on the ships, all but the small knives they used for cutting meat.
They would fight as they could, and escape in such order as they might. The ships were ready. It was ill luck to sail at night, but if they must, they must.
The queen did not rise, did not denounce him, did not command her men to fall on his and destroy them. She remained where she was. Her broad unlovely face with its beautiful eyes was empty of expression. It was unlikely that she had ever been denied anything that she wanted: such was not the common lot of queens.
At last she spoke, heavily, wearily, with sadness that might have tugged at Nehsi’s heart, had he had any choice but to be the cause of it. “It is clear to see whom she loves best. That’s well, I suppose. A daughter should love her father. The god blesses her for it.”
“You are generous,” Nehsi said, “and wise.”
She shook her head. “I am practical. I know that I could have you seized and killed, but she would only hate me for it. And you would never suffer me to take her and keep her.”
“That is wisdom,” Nehsi said, “as befits a queen.”
The queen shrugged. “One
does what one must. Promise me at least, that if she can, she will come back.”
“If she can,” said Nehsi, “she will.”
It was not much of a promise, but it was all she asked for. He would be sorry to see the last of her. Her body was grotesque, even hideous, but her heart weighed heavy as gold on the scales of justice.
42
They left the land of Punt in the heavy warmth of the morning, riding a fair wind northward on the breast of the sea. Tama, clinging to the lookout post on the stern of Nehsi’s ship, wept to leave her friend.
The queen of Punt sat long on the strand, mounted on her absurdly pretty little donkey. Her figure shrank slowly behind them, nor ever moved, even to raise a hand in farewell.
~~~
It was a long voyage home, heavy as their ships were, laden with splendors. They sailed as far from land as they might, on guard against raiders; when they had to put in to shore for water or provisions, the king’s soldiers at last earned their bread and beer. Word had flown northward that the king of Egypt’s ships returned from the incense-country, and that they were rich beyond the dreams of a simple tribesman.
Strong arms and keen bronze and Amon’s blessing protected them. They lost a man to an arrow on the stony shores not far north of Punt, wrapped him tight in linen and perfumed him with myrrh and brought him home with the king’s trees, but no one else took harm. Nor did any storm vex them, though the wind blew strong enough to fret Nehsi for the welfare of the trees he carried so carefully.
Day by day they sailed closer to Egypt. When they came at last to the mouth of the king’s channel and found it open still and running strong with the flood, Nehsi stood on the deck of his ship and cried thanks to Amon and to the river-god. He flooded high yet again in the king’s honor and for the passage of her heavily laden ships into the Bitter Lakes, and past them to the river of Egypt.
In their own country they eased at last. Even the sailors, heavily taxed by the labor of rowing and sailing against the current with the river at flood, sang for joy. Red Land and Black Land opened arms to embrace them. The river spread broad before them.
A full year they had been away from Egypt, and yet it might have been but a moment. It was all the same. Cities of mudbrick and brilliantly painted and gilded temples, white blaze of light from the pyramids on the western shores of Memphis, rich black fields growing green as the river receded from its flood.
They sailed the length of Egypt, all the way up to Thebes. There at last Nehsi saw the change that a year had wrought. On the western bank, where had been a stretch of barren desert and sudden crag looming above the temple of an old king, something new and splendid had taken shape.
The king was building her temple at last, the one that she had dreamed of while she was the queen regent. It would honor her while she lived and remember her when she was dead, and sing the praises of the gods in stone.
When Nehsi left it had been a stretch of newly leveled earth and little else. Now it spread wide against the loom of the cliff, opening its arms about a great ramp that led upward to a broad colonnade. Already pillars rose against the fierce blue of the sky, only a few now, but a promise of the many that would come.
He with his one-and-thirty myrrh-trees, his gold and ivory and ebony, monkeys, hunting-dogs, lionskins and panther-skins, shrank small indeed beside that great work of the king’s mind. Her mind, and the hand of her beloved, her man of many titles, the brilliant and gods-gifted Senenmut.
They were waiting for him on the quay of Thebes, the king and all her ministers in their finest array, with music and dancing and songs of welcome that were almost audible over the roar of the crowd. Of all of them, Nehsi saw only the one: the small straight figure beneath the Two Crowns. She was more beautiful than he remembered, and more splendid; he had forgotten the light of her eyes.
He bowed down at her feet. She raised him up, great honor and hardly unexpected, but the touch of her hand made him tremble. Her smile was kingly restrained, and yet his heart knew that, had she been even a little less royal, it would have been a broad and joyous grin. “Nehsi,” she said. Only his name; but he needed no more than that.
~~~
His gifts delighted her to no end. The myrrh-trees in particular: she welcomed them as if they had been princes, addressed them one by one, promised that she would set them in the garden of her temple, as the god her father willed. “You will worship him in joy and gladness,” she said to them, “and send your savor up to heaven.”
She feasted him, of course: three days it lasted, and his companions were made as rich as princes. The prince of Punt with his three wives and his lords and attendants were made most welcome, given a house to live in while it pleased them, and made free of the Two Lands of Egypt.
It was all grand and glorious. But when it was ended, when Nehsi looked again at becoming the queen’s chancellor and her servant, the ships and their captains and crews went back to their roving and trading, the scribes to their places in the House of Life, and the lesser ambassadors to the daily round of the court.
And Bastet the interpreter, Tama’s erstwhile nurse and companion, prepared to return to her father’s house near Bubastis. She had grown silent again as they sailed deeper into Egypt. He had not seen her at the feast. She was living somewhere, surely, but he did not know where. He would have thought that she had gone home to her father, but a niggle at his heart told him that she was still in Thebes.
He did not know why he should trust such a thing. He was not the kind of man to whom gods spoke, nor did he have the gift of knowing things, as Bastet did. But this he knew. She was still in Thebes.
It need not have mattered. She had done her duty, and done it well. The king had rewarded her richly. She could go home, share the wealth of the king’s gift with her father, and still have dowry enough to entice a prince. He was pleased for her. She was his friend, after all.
Not that they had ever admitted to friendship. Dinners shared, and adventures with his imp of a daughter, and long hours of trading and treating with the people and princes of Punt, all made the word itself unnecessary. It simply and purely was.
A friend would not leave Thebes without bidding farewell to her friend. Her silence troubled him, her absence from the celebrations, her retreat into nothing so much as sullenness. He understood it, or thought he did. Her year of glory was over. Now she must be plain unembellished Bastet again, daughter of a minor lord in Bubastis.
If he felt bound in chains, albeit chains that he had chosen, how tightly constricted she must feel, who was a woman, and young, and nobly if not royally born. It had been an ill thing, maybe, to set her free for so long. No person of rank in Egypt was free: of duty, of obligation, of service to the king.
Thinking on all these things, rising from his bed in the morning after the third day of feasting, Nehsi soothed his pounding head with good plain Egyptian beer, and called for his bodyservant. He would bathe, he thought, and dress plainly, and go hunting for Bastet.
~~~
It was not so very long a hunt. He found her in his own house, sitting in the garden, watching Tama play with the monkey that she had brought back from Punt. Her expression was oddly fierce. When she turned her eyes on Nehsi, they were furious.
He refused to recoil from anger that he had done nothing to earn. He sat on a bench near her under an arbor of roses from Asia, and took time to breathe the sweet intoxicating scent. Tama was teaching the monkey to set pebbles in orderly rows, for what purpose Nehsi could not discern; but it seemed high and serious.
Bastet, having seared him with her glance, went back to glaring at the child and the monkey. Nehsi allowed the silence to stretch. It was peaceful, in its way. His own house about him, Egypt’s sky overhead, Egypt’s earth underfoot: he was happy, even in Bastet’s manifest unhappiness.
When she spoke she startled him. Her voice was sharp, as angry as the rest of her. “I have to leave tomorrow. I don’t want to.”
“Then why do you leave?”
>
“What else can I do?”
“Marry me.”
Nehsi had not meant to say that at all. He had never even thought of it. But there was his tongue, running on ahead of him, and she staring at him as if he had turned into the queen of Punt.
He refused to swallow the words. He let them hang in the air till she must answer or go.
She did not answer, precisely. She said, “That is an interesting notion.”
“Preposterous, I’m sure,” he said.
“Rather.” She frowned at her feet in their gilded sandals. New, he noticed. She must have been enjoying the fruits of her new wealth. “I don’t suppose it’s my dowry you’re after.”
“I am not,” he said, “the sort of man who can never have enough of riches.”
“I hadn’t thought so.”
She was not angry, either. He had half expected her to be furious; to rail at him; to call him every kind of fool. Instead she sat quietly, not too far from him, watching Tama play with the monkey.
“Is it,” she asked after a while, “because you need someone to rein in your daughter?”
“I honestly never thought of it,” he said.
“I’m good at it,” said Bastet. “Except when I’m busy being your voice-in-the-air with foreign queens.”
“That is so,” Nehsi agreed with careful blandness. Careful because for all her studied calm, she thrummed with tension. He could not tell whether it was because she wanted him, or because she loathed the idea and could not bring herself to say so.
Though it was unlike Bastet not to say exactly what she thought.
She asked him, “Do you remember when I first met you, how I was then?”
“Vividly,” Nehsi said. And he did. Her silence; her refusal to utter a word. Tama had coaxed her into speech, just by being Tama.
“I was thinking,” Bastet said. “It takes me a while to think, sometimes. What I was thinking was that, sooner or later, I was going to marry you.”
