by Judith Tarr
Almost he could not see her, she was so small and shrunken. Without her wig and her paint and her kohl she was a tiny, withered thing, her hair all grey, the skin of her face drawn close to the skull.
She was not dead, not yet, but he knew the scent of it, heard the flutter of wings in the shadows. Her voice was hardly louder than those, if no gentler than it had ever been. “I told that silly girl to keep you out. What do you want?”
“To see you, Mother,” Senenmut said. He was master of voice and face at least, calm, matter-of-fact, betraying none of his shock.
She saw it regardless. “Yes, I look hideous. What do you expect? I’m dying. I’d hoped you wouldn’t notice for yet a while.”
“Until you were dead? Until then, Mother?”
“If possible,” she said, “yes.” She paused to breathe, and perhaps to compose herself. Not for grief or compassion; for anger. This weakness must vex her sorely. “I don’t want you dripping tears in my face. Or hating me, either. I’m tired. I’ll be glad enough to go.”
“But,” he said. “Mother, you aren’t old enough to die.”
“How old is old enough? I’ve buried a husband and two grown sons and a daughter-in-law. All that’s left is you, and you have her.” She did not need to say the name. They both knew whom she meant. “You’ll miss me, I suppose. You’ll need to get in someone who can keep the servants in line. Make sure it’s someone sensible, who doesn’t think you’ll marry her just because you’ve put her in charge of the house.”
Senenmut opened his mouth to protest that no one would look after his house unless it was Hat-Nufer, but that was foolish and he knew it. He said instead, “I’ll see if there’s a man who’ll do it. Apuhotep, who’s been managing the horses—he has a pack of sons. One of them might be looking to raise himself in the world.”
“Apuhotep’s not too incompetent,” Hat-Nufer conceded. “His wife is a sensible woman. If there’s not a son who can do it, see if he has a daughter. A woman is always better for managing a household. She’s tougher. She sees more and tolerates less.”
“But,” said Senenmut, “she might think she has hopes of better things.”
“Not if she has any sense,” Hat-Nufer said.
“I’ll send to Apuhotep in the morning,” Senenmut said, “and ask if he has a suitable prospect.”
She nodded. Once it would have been brisk. Now it was weary, and her face was paler than it had been when he came in. “Good. You’re not trying to tell me I can do it all. Have you come late to sense, or are you just in a hurry?”
Senenmut realized that he had been standing, looming over her. He drew a stool to the side of her bed and sat on it. “I have all the time you need.”
“Well,” she said, hardly more than a sigh. “That’s not much. Don’t let the king work you too hard. She trusts you, which is good, and makes good use of you, but she forgets to allow for the little luxuries: food, sleep, time to yourself.”
“I don’t forget,” Senenmut said.
Hat-Nufer snorted. “You have the worst memory in the world for such things. Left to yourself, you’d starve to death. Maybe you do need to find yourself a wife, if only to keep you fed and make sure you sleep.”
“I think not,” Senenmut said gently.
“I didn’t think so, either,” Hat-Nufer said. She sighed and closed her eyes.
As simply as that, as easily and as quietly, she slipped out of the body. He felt her let go, as if she had been holding her souls bound until she said all that she had to say; and having said it, without pause or farewell, she left him.
He looked down at the husk of her as it lay in her bed. It was empty. No life burned in it. No breath stirred.
“I expected you to linger,” he said. “I should have known.”
Her body returned no answer. Nor did her spirit upbraid him from the shadows. He set a kiss on her brow that was already growing cold, and went to summon the embalmers.
~~~
He would not feel empty; could not indulge himself in grief. He had too much to do. All his kin were dead. Only he was left. He, and his king.
He did not close up his house in Thebes. His rank and his titles required that he keep it. But he was in it seldom, except for appearance’s sake. It was too empty of living presence; too full of memories. His days he spent in building tomb or temple. His nights he slept in the palace, in his lady’s arms.
She grieved for Hat-Nufer as he could not seem to do: wept at the news of her death, and mourned at her funeral. Senenmut did not know that there had been liking between them, but respect there certainly had been. Hat-Nufer would have been pleased to be seen to her tomb by a king, though she would never have admitted it.
And when she was truly gone, Senenmut shut and sealed the door of his tomb. He would not lie there. His place was elsewhere, within reach of the queen’s temple.
It grew in beauty, shining under heaven. Its walls and its colonnades were all complete. Only the smaller things were left: the carving of an inner chamber, the painting of a wall or two, the planting of the king’s myrrh-trees in their sunlit garden. The scent of them as they were set at last in their places, their roots uncovered gently and then covered over again, their branches spread in homage to the sun, was so strong that it perfumed the whole of the temple. The priests hardly needed to burn incense; the living fragrance wrapped them all about.
So it was in the whole land of Punt, if the embassy’s tales were true. Senenmut had had that journey carved in the temple, drawn from the young scribe’s scribblings on the backs of the ship’s accounts. There was the city in the water; the men with their plaited and kingly beards; the women with their great rumps; the king in his beauty and the queen in her monumental ugliness, marching in procession before the strangers from Egypt.
Senenmut was not a jealous man, nor enduringly petty. He could make Nehsi’s expedition immortal by carving it in stone, for the glory of their king and the remembrance of those who had traveled so far to bring back such riches.
~~~
The completion of Djeser-Djeseru, the beautiful temple, sacred to Hathor and to Hatshepsut the king, was a festival to rival the return of the voyagers from Punt. The king herself dedicated the temple to Amon and to Hathor and to Anubis the guide, jackal-god, guardian of the dead. Her face stared back from every wall and every image therein. Her name was carved everywhere that a name could be carved. Let Egypt try to forget her: this temple would remember, from outermost colonnade to innermost shrine, and even to the tomb that lay hidden and secret beneath, with its sky of stars and its images of Senenmut who loved the king, the golden one, the Horus, Maatkare Hatshepsut.
45
At an age when most women began to grow old, Hatshepsut seemed to have entered her prime. She had reached her fortieth year. She was King of Upper and Lower Egypt, secure on her throne, blessed by the gods, beloved of Amon.
On a morning not long after she celebrated her natal day, she held audience as always. It was a propitious day according to the calendar, excellent for those who came seeking justice. She had decided a contention between the lords of two nomes. She listened now to a woman and the man who was her husband.
“But I left him,” the woman said, “because he took the daughter that I bore him and sold her.”
“I told you,” the man broke in, “that if the next one was a son, you could keep him.”
“And the next one was a daughter,” the woman said, “and you fed her to the crocodiles.”
“I did not!” the husband said. “While you napped instead of looking after her, she wandered down to the river.”
“And you pushed her in.”
“She fell in. I tried to catch her.”
“You didn’t try very hard.”
"You were asleep and snoring!”
“Your pardon,” the king said mildly. Her voice was light and not particularly loud, but it penetrated the wall of their quarrel. They seemed to remember where they were, and who she was: smallish slende
r woman sitting above them, wearing the tall crowns. They fell on their faces.
“Oh, please,” she said, “do get up. Madam, you wish what? To be divorced from this man?”
“No,” the woman said; and hastily, as an afterthought, “majesty. I want him to let me keep the next baby, no matter if it’s another daughter.”
“You want to remain married to this man?” Hatshepsut asked.
The woman shrugged. “He’s all right. He doesn’t beat me often. When he does, I usually deserve it. He just won’t let me keep my babies.”
“Do you beat him?” the king asked.
“Sometimes,” the woman said, “when he deserves it.”
“So then,” said the king. She turned the force of her gaze on the husband. “Why did you take her children away from her?”
“It was only the first one,” he said. “We had a good harvest, but locusts came and ate it. We had no stores: we sold them to buy a team of oxen, and the oxen took sick and died. The baby was pretty. The headman from the next village down the river, his wife was barren and pining for want of a child. They paid us a whole year’s worth of barley, grain and seed both, for the baby. She grows up a headman’s daughter, maybe gets lucky, marries a scribe. Her daughter maybe marries a lord. And our blood goes up in the world. Instead of staying on a no-ox farm that barely gets flooded except in a good year.”
“Did you have such foresight when you did it,” Hatshepsut asked, “or did it come to you after?”
He flushed under the sun-darkened skin. He was not as old a man as he seemed, Senenmut realized, watching from behind the throne. Sun and famine and hard labor had toughened him to leather. He was probably no more than twenty years old. In his sudden shyness, his stammer as he spoke to her, for a moment he looked like the youth he was. “I—great lady, great king, I did what I had to do. We had to eat; and there was another baby coming.”
“Your daughter? Does she prosper?”
“I hear she does,” he said.
“You haven’t seen her?”
“Lady,” he said, “I work a no-ox farm. She’s a headman’s daughter. Her like doesn’t look at the likes of me.”
“I saw her,” the wife said. “She was as plump as a little river-horse. She has a nurse, as if she were a princess, and a whole box of toys to play with.”
“Then you concede that she is well served by what your husband did to her?”
The woman nodded. But she said, “I want to keep my children. They’re mine.”
“So they are,” Hatshepsut said. She beckoned to Senenmut. “Here, see it written. Two oxen for this man who speaks so honestly, and a farm’s worth of barley seed, and the blessing of Min on his fields. For this woman, all children that she can bear and raise, as long as she and her husband can feed them.”
“And if they cannot?”
“They do what they must,” said Hatshepsut. She took up crook and flail and crossed them over her breast. “The Great House has spoken. So let it be done.”
~~~
“Your name is blessed in the hovels of the poor tonight,” Senenmut said as they lay together. There had been no passion tonight; simply the warmth of shared presence, and the comfort of conversation.
She shifted in his arms, sat up and clasped her knees, looking as young as she had been when they first were lovers. Her body was softer, but only a little, and only a little less slender; the breasts were high still, her face unlined. The years had been kind to her. She had not hardened as a woman could who ruled over men. She was as beautiful as ever, and fully as beloved.
She frowned, pensive. “They may curse me,” she said, “when famine takes them again, and the oxen get sick and die, and he has to sell another baby to keep the family fed.”
“You expect that?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “But it will probably happen. Ill luck likes a familiar face. Meanwhile they praise me and bless me and worship at my feet.”
“That’s as it should be,” said Senenmut.
Her eyes flashed on him. “Don’t you start flattering me! I get enough of that from my courtiers.”
“Of whom I am one,” he reminded her.
“Yes, and you carve my name everywhere, and call me king and goddess, more beautiful than anything in the world. That’s policy, my love. A king has to do it in order to continue as king.”
“People believe what they’re told to believe,” Senenmut granted her. “But you are king. You are goddess. You have done well by your people. Egypt is prospering. Neither flood nor harvest has failed since you took the throne—that poor man and his bad luck notwithstanding.”
“Sometimes I wonder,” she said, “how long it will go on. Seven years of prosperity, we’ve had. Won’t there be seven years of want thereafter, to preserve the balance of the world?”
“Only if you fail to please the gods,” said Senenmut. “And that, I don’t foresee. They’d have struck you down seven years since, if they disapproved of what you’ve done.”
“Gods’ time is not as ours,” she said. “It may have taken them this long to notice.”
A shiver ran down his spine. It was only a breath of air through the room, chilling him in his nakedness. “The gods have noticed,” he said with as much confidence as he could muster. “They’ve blessed you with riches. They’ve smiled on your judgments.”
“I hope so,” she said. Her frown did not lighten. “In the sunlight I know that it is so. In the dark, when the shadows crowd upon me, I wonder. My father, the man who loved my mother, who raised me—what would he say if he saw me as I was this morning? How angry would he be?”
“He called you his little king,” said Senenmut. “I think he knew.”
“I do try to propitiate his shade. I give him offerings. I built a new tomb and set him in it, to lie beside me when my time comes. He’ll roar at me, Senenmut. He always roared when he was angry.”
“Has he been roaring at you in dreams?”
“Sometimes,” she said. “I’ll be my small self then, committing some infraction or other—eluding my nurse to play with the horses; hiding behind a pillar in the hall where he holds council. And he’ll roar, and call me scapegrace and worse. And then,” she said, “he’ll sweep me up and hug me tight, and say I should have been a boy; I’ve got gall.”
“There, you see,” said Senenmut. “He approves. He finds it outrageous, as what dead king would not, but he’s no more able to deny you than any living man.”
“That’s how I do it, you know,” she said. “I don’t let myself think that I’ll be denied. And I’m not. But every time I do it, every time I push the limits—I wonder. Will it end now? Have I gone, at last, too far?”
He slid closer to her, wrapped arms about her. She was cold and much too still. Her back was rigid. “Then why do you push?” he asked. “Why do you do it?”
“Because I can’t do otherwise. You used to tell me I was mad. I am, you know. The god makes me so. He’s a fire in me. He wants so much of me, dreams so much through me . . . sometimes I think there must be nothing left, that I’ve burned to ash.”
“There is everything left of you,” Senenmut said; meaning it, too. “You’re stronger now than you ever were. Stronger, wiser, more beautiful.”
“More flattery,” she said, but she was warming, softening to his embrace. “I shall have to invoke him again, remember him in the Two Lands, bind my name with his so tightly that no one can divide us. He shores up my strength. In him, as in Amon who begot me, I find my kingship’s heart.”
~~~
She slept after that, which surprised Senenmut somewhat. He lay awake. Was it that after all she grew old? Or was her fire growing cold? It had never been like her to worry that she was not strong enough.
Maybe she always had; but she had never had the courage to say so. It took strength to confess one’s weakness. She loved him, trusted him, but she told no one everything that was in her heart. She must always be king, always goddess; the mortal woman was allowed the p
leasures of the flesh, but doubts and fears . . . those she had never admitted.
Not until now. She was strong, and she was king. If there was any whisper of rebellion, Senenmut had not heard it. Those few who had protested her crowning, who defended the young king against the one they called usurper, were long gone. Mutterers in corners had fallen silent, or had succumbed to her will.
She must be on watch constantly. He was part of that, he and the people who served him. But every king lived so, on guard against ill-wishers and worse. They were disposed of. The king was protected. So the world went, whether the king was safely male or most unsafely a woman.
He mounted guard over her sleeping body. If he could have guarded her dreams, he would have done that. He loved her beyond measure, lived for her, even endured this kingship, because she believed that it was Amon’s will. The tale of her mortal father was built on air and half-formed remembrance, but that she was Amon’s daughter, she believed implicitly.
It was not his place to doubt it. Such light and fire as were in her did not come from any earthly source. Amon had begotten it; or close enough.
“Father Amon,” Senenmut said softly, lest she wake and be troubled. “Watch over her. Defend her. Protect her from harm.”
46
“My father Amon,” said the king, “has set in me a longing; a yearning to do a great thing.”
Her counsellors regarded her in varying degrees of wonderment. They knew her too well to be astonished, but when she spoke as she did now, they had learned to expect the unexpected.
As always, she gave it to them. “I shall embellish his temple,” she said: “his great house that you, my lord Ineni, have made. Look you, how a king raises a shaft up to heaven, inscribed with his names and the names of the god and the king’s reverence and his deeds for the god’s glory. I shall do just such a thing—but since I am I, and there is no one like me, I shall raise the highest that has ever been.
“An obelisk that reaches clear up to heaven,” she said. “A pillar of the sky. I shall cast it in electrum, in gold and silver mingled, as precious together as either alone.”
