by Judith Tarr
Now it was Nehsi’s turn to stare at her in flat astonishment. She seemed unaware of it. She was watching Tama and the monkey, both of whom seemed perfectly oblivious to the conversation that went on above their heads.
“You were so beautiful,” she said. “The most beautiful man I’d ever seen. I couldn’t speak. What could I say, that wouldn’t make me sound like a fool?”
“You never sounded like a fool to me,” Nehsi said.
She seemed not to hear him. “And I was remembering who I was, what rank I had to claim. And you a great prince, the king’s most faithful servant. You’d never look at me. I wouldn’t, if I were as beautiful as you, and as noble, and as great in respect. And of course I’m so young. An infant, really. Nothing worth your attention.”
“So,” he said. “Was that why you took on Tama? To get my attention?”
Her eyes flashed on him, caught all off guard, as furious as he could ever have wished. “Of course not! That was a thing that needed doing—and patently no one else was going to do it.”
He grinned, startling her straight out of her temper. “Of course not indeed. I’ve thought many of the same things. You are beautiful, you know; and will be breathtaking when you’re older. Were you a homely child?”
“Horrible,” she said. “Gawky and gangly. Bones everywhere.”
“So was I,” Nehsi said.
She glowered at him. “You’re indulging me. You think I’m just a child.”
“I think you may find me old and tedious, once you’ve opened your eyes to other and younger men.”
“Never,” said Bastet with perfect certainty. “Yes, I’ll marry you. On one condition.”
Nehsi raised his brows.
“No other wives. Only me.”
His brows rose higher. “What, are you so jealous as that?”
“More,” said Bastet. “I know how many women you have here, how many you’ve had—and how many mothers have borne you children. There’ll be no more of that while I’m your wife. If you’re to have a new crop of children, it’s I who’ll bear them for you.”
“Now it is very odd,” he said, musing half to himself, “but I was in Punt for a year, and never lay with a woman. I don’t believe I’ve gone so long without since I was a boy.”
“Maybe,” she said, “you’ve lost the art.”
He growled. She showed him her teeth. “Witch!” he said. “You laid a spell on me.”
“Not a one,” said Bastet.
“Your face is spell enough.” He took it in his hands. Such big hands, such a little face, big-eyed and pointed-chinned like a cat’s. He meant the kiss to be the lightest touch, a brush of lips on lips; but she was of another mind altogether. She was fierce, and hungry enough to startle him.
Yet they did not embrace, did not fling one another down right in front of Tama and the monkey, and eat one another alive. It was a simple kiss, if such passion was simplicity.
He had hunted waterfowl as they said in Egypt, with many a courtesan, and many a lady who put the courtesans to shame. This was a child clearly, a maiden, artless and untaught. Yet she was not shy at all, or afraid, or in awe of him for his size or his age or his rank. She had known him for a year, with no more between them than friendship, and never less.
Somewhere between kiss and kiss, she said, “Do you remember the storm on the sea, that raged for three days, and we were all certain that we would drown?”
He nodded. “Who could forget?”
“That’s not what I remember,” she said. “I remember when it was over, you went out of your cabin and went to help the sailors. Your kilt was wet—everything was wet. You let it drop and went naked. The way you dropped it, the way you walked away, the pure and simple splendor of you . . . I thought that I would die.”
“I thought,” Nehsi said after a pause, “that you were asleep.”
“No,” she said.
“And I thought,” he said, “that you never saw me at all, except as someone who was pleasant to talk to.”
“I made sure you thought that,” said Bastet.
“Clever,” he said. “Wise, I suppose.”
“I did try to be wise,” she said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have.”
“I like a woman who is wise,” said Nehsi. “I’ve always wanted one for my wife.”
“Yes, but do I have to be wise always? May I be silly now and then? For variety?”
“Certainly,” said Nehsi.
“Good,” said Bastet, and kissed him again, almost chastely, but such fire that he gasped. He, the prince, the great lover of women. “But you still haven’t promised,” she said when it was done. “No other wives or women or lovers. Only me.”
“You drive a hard bargain,” he said.
“I have to,” said Bastet. “I’m very jealous. If you had another woman, I think that I would kill her.”
He could believe that. Cats were small and delicate and sleekly graceful, but they were hunters. They killed; and what they killed, they ate.
Well. He had been called lion and panther, and both of those were no more than outsize cats. “Very well,” he said. “Only you.”
“Then I’ll marry you,” said Bastet.
43
The wedding of Nehsi the Nubian was a splendid affair, and a mighty shock to the women of the Two Lands. The men were mildly startled, too, but less so than their wives and daughters. Anyone who had seen the young woman from Bubastis could well understand how she had captured the Lion of Nubia. And after a year in Punt, too, with her on his very ship—they nodded wisely, and looked at their own wives, some of them, and sighed. Of course a man who looked like that would marry a beauty.
They married in a festival that put to shame the king’s welcome of the travelers, and settled down to producing sons and daughters as handsome as themselves. Those, with Nehsi’s elder offspring, made a noble tribe, an army born and bred to serve the King Maatkare.
Senenmut, childless by his own choice and the gods’ will, and wifeless, too, looked on them and sighed. He had been ferociously jealous of Nehsi for winning the prize of the expedition to Punt, but while Nehsi was gone, Senenmut had bent himself to a great and glorious labor. He built the temple that the king had dreamed of, Djeser-Djeseru the beautiful, at the gate of the Red Land, with its face to the rising sun.
He chose the beauty of simplicity, but simplicity transmuted into art. There was a temple already in the place that the king had chosen, tomb of a king who had died half a thousand years ago. Senenmut set his own king’s temple beside it, in harmony with it, because the land desired it. He built a causeway, a long ramp rising up to the height on which he built the temple.
There on that height he raised up a forest of pillars, each a simple fluted column, plain to starkness in itself, but beautiful as it marched in ranks with all the rest. He built his temple of light and shadow, and within it, in the two great courts, he set yet more colonnades, and avenues of sphinxes, each of them bearing Hatshepsut’s face.
The temple was full of her. She was everywhere, carved in kingly majesty among the marching pillars, painted and limned upon the walls, circled within the beauty of her names and her royal titles. If she must be king, then she would be king and king again, for as long as her temple endured.
The Horus, powerful of souls, the Two Ladies, rejuvenated of years, Horus of gold, divine of appearances, King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Maatkare, son of Re, Hatshepsut who joins with Amon.
In the shrine of Hathor beyond the courts of the sun, the goddess’ image wore her face, her peculiar beauty that to Senenmut was the only beauty there need ever be. In the shrine of Anubis the guide of the dead, she was remembered over and over. Even in the storerooms, the priests’ houses, the secret corners and crannies, he carved her name.
And he carved his own, and his likeness with it, even in the shrine of Amon, in the niches where the priests would keep the sacred vessels; everywhere that a name or a face could be carved. It was beyond presumption. Yet he had to do it,
for her sake. She must not be forgotten. In forgetfulness was death, death of the spirit.
He knew what Egypt did to kings who defied tradition. It let their bodies die in the natural order of things. Then it killed them in memory: effaced their names, rendered them as nothing, forgot them utterly. So it had done with the foreign kings who had ruled not so long ago, but whose names were all forgotten—banished, destroyed by the vengeance of those who came after.
Egypt would not kill Hatshepsut. She would live while her name lived, and while her temple stood—and he would live with her. If there was a word for a commoner who believed himself worthy of remembrance even as was a king, then it was not written or spoken in Egyptian; but it must exist in some language, somewhere.
He explained to the gods why he did it, lest they be angry. Amon in particular, her father to whom she prayed every hour of every day, heard him out, or at least did not strike him dead where he stood. “I love her, you see,” he said. “I want to live as she lives, and protect her, even beyond the gates of death. She will never look after herself as I can, in carving our names everywhere, and our faces, so that we never die.”
It was not an explanation that any priest would accept. Senenmut, Steward of Amon in the Two Lands, knew that very well. A god, however, might be more supple of mind.
Certainly Senenmut was not prevented, even when he built his secret place, the tomb of his body with its passage that ran beneath the very temple of his king. He had another in the valley where princes were laid to rest, and that one tenanted already by his father and his old nurse—and, great grief in this time that should be triumphant, both of his brothers.
Amonhotep, the young, the beautiful, died of a fever that he had caught while boating on the river. He stayed out too late; night-demons caught him and carried him off in a great wailing of women. He had been going to marry a wellborn girl. She wept over his coffin, and had to be carried from the tomb by maids with fans and fainting-potions. Not half a season later she was married to a princeling from the south, and happy in it as far as Senenmut ever heard.
So much for fidelity, he paused to think.
That was grief. But when Ahotep died, Senenmut came near to dying with him.
It was even less fair and just than Amonhotep’s fever. Ahotep went with a company of the king’s soldiers to preserve order in Asia. He should have remained in Thebes, but the wife whom he had married in such joy had soured into a termagant. A child might have softened her, but the gods were never so kind. She screeched in his ear till she deafened it; and then he had won himself a captaincy and gone to Canaan.
He died there, not even in battle. He was drilling troops under the sun that was never so strong as that of Egypt, and he fell down dead, as if struck by the arrow of a god. He had done nothing to offend any divinity; his general had taken great care that Senenmut should know that. He was simply and irrevocably gone, laid in the tomb that Senenmut had built for himself. Senenmut laid him there with his own hands, opened the senses of his body, limned his name with stark simplicity: Ahotep, whom he loved.
Tall, strong, handsome Ahotep who was all that Senenmut was not. Senenmut remembered him so, in the pride of his manhood; but in youth, too, gawky and exuberant, and in noisy, uproarious childhood. All that he kept in memory, in his house that echoed empty, with his mother Hat-Nufer wandering grey and lost and old, and Ahotep’s wife gone silent. His death had done what his living self had never sufficed to do: it had quelled her.
Senenmut had meant to cast her out, but in sight of her wan quenched face he could not bring himself to say the words. Thus she stayed; and when she faded, as she did with grievous swiftness, she too was laid in the tomb by her husband’s side.
It was full, that tomb, overburdened with grief. But the one where he meant to rest, his great tomb, great enough for a king or for a king’s beloved, was his deepest secret. The men whom he hired to build it were sworn with great oaths to betray the truth to no one. He bound them in the name and the power of Amon himself, secured by the names of Anubis and the judges of the dead. Warded in terror, oathbound to silence, they made him a tomb worthy of a king. In its deep chamber he painted with his own hand a sky full of stars, so that he might remember even in death the march of the seasons and the wheel of the sky over the land of the living.
He did it for her. He told himself that, and the gods, too. He would be her guardian spirit. Had he not sworn that he would die and go before her?
He did not tell her everything that he did. She would understand, he did not doubt it, but what she did not know, she could not be guilty of. Nor did he confess his fears for her. Those she would scoff at, and not gently. “Amon defends me,” she would say as she often had before. “He will see that I live forever.”
Senenmut would see that Amon kept that promise. That power was given him by the queen’s will and the god’s gift.
~~~
She was grown great in her kingship; but she was still Hatshepsut. Senenmut had heard someone whisper that she took her vitality from the king whose regent she had been.
He still lived, and grew from boy to youth to man in silence that might have passed for meekness. Hatshepsut endeavored not to repeat the mistake that she had made with her daughter Neferure. She gave him somewhat to do. She left him his weapons and his soldiers. And she made him a priest of Amon, one of those who offered incense before the god—incense from her own trees that her embassy had brought from Punt. It was a minor office, but necessary; for it was the scent of myrrh that nourished the god and sustained his presence.
Thutmose endured. Senenmut could find no other word for it. When it was required by tradition or by policy that both kings show themselves before the people, he put on the crowns and lifted crook and flail and sat enthroned beside the elder king. Otherwise he went quietly about his ways, interfering in nothing, saying nothing.
Being a cipher like his father, Hatshepsut observed in scorn that had abated not at all since he was a child and she his regent. Biding his time, Senenmut was inclined to think.
“Then why does he do it?” Hatshepsut demanded when Senenmut was unwise enough to voice his thought.
They were in her temple then, inspecting the completion of Hathor’s shrine with its many images of the king. Hatshepsut, the living Hathor, as she was Horus and Isis and own daughter of Amon, stood before the goddess, but her thoughts were on her lesser king. “Why does he bow his head and suffer me, if he is not the mooncalf he seems?”
Senenmut noted with part of his mind that her voice echoed oddly in the newly completed space. He would need to alter it a little, soften the echo, transform it into a whisper of sacred mystery.
The rest of him focused on what she had said. “Maybe,” he said, “he can see as clearly as any other man in Egypt. He recognizes the light of Amon in you.”
“A light in which he is singularly lacking.” She paced the paving of the floor, stroking her foot along it, taking note of its smoothness. “We should do the shrine of Anubis in black granite, don’t you think? It would be striking.”
“Indeed,” said Senenmut, who had other intentions for the chapel of the jackal-headed god.
She knew what that particular blandness of tone meant: her glance was swift and rather wry. “You will of course do as you think best,” she said, “for glory and for remembrance.”
“Indeed,” Senenmut said again, but warmly this time; a warmth that made her smile before she turned away, intrigued by the carving about the base of the goddess’ statue.
44
With the deaths of her two younger sons, each so close upon the other, Hat-Nufer began to fade perceptibly. When her husband died she had kept her strength. He had always been so vague, so gentle a presence; his absence diminished her but little. But her sons had been the world to her.
She who had seemed indomitably ageless grew gaunt and grey. Her voice was seldom lifted in its old strong outcry against shiftless servants. She kept more and more to her chamber, too weary, her ma
ids said, to get up or dress, though she would be bathed and clean even in extremity.
Senenmut, eldest and last alive of her sons, gave her what joy he could. It was difficult. He was busy; caught up in the queen’s temple, her tomb, her recent and powerful conviction that she must be buried with her earthly father, which meant opening old Thutmose’s tomb and shifting his grave-goods and seeing a new coffin made for him, inscribed with his daughter’s name and her reverence. Senenmut was as full of Hatshepsut as her temple was, and there was little left of him for his house or his servants or even his mother.
He tried to visit Hat-Nufer every day, usually in the evening after the day’s work was done. She was always dressed for him, a wig on her head, her face painted and a golden collar about her neck. He could not fail to see how thin she was, or how transparent the skin of the arms that reached to embrace him.
He told himself that she would rally. She was Hat-Nufer, the lady of the house. His brothers’ deaths came nigh to breaking them all, but Senenmut had recovered. She was older, that was all. He, so much younger and with so much to engross his mind, had to come out of grief or fail in his queen’s service. She had no such escape. But time would heal her, and exasperation with the servants’ slackness.
He did what he could. He visited her each evening; he saw to it that the servants came to her for their orders; he tempted her with this dainty or that from the king’s table, with the king’s complicity. Hat-Nufer was never gracious; that weakness was not in her. But she ate what he brought, or tried, and she dealt with the servants. His house continued in reasonable order.
Nevertheless she was fading. Part of her had gone into the tomb with each of her men who died. There was not enough left to keep her strong.
One evening she was not in her chair in her wig and her gown, waiting for him to come and pay his respects. Her maid tried to tell Senenmut that the lady was resting; he could come back tomorrow. He set her aside still chattering, and strode into his mother’s bedchamber.
