by Judith Tarr
In the moment of its pausing, the cry of the workers paused likewise. And Senenmut heard it. A soft sound, hardly louder than the hiss of breath through his teeth. The cracking of stone.
He shut his eyes, but his ears could not stop listening. He heard the groan, the long exhalation of breath as the workmen saw what he had seen.
The obelisk had cracked. Its base was flawed. It sank back down into its bed, lowered by no command but by one common will.
Someone, somewhere amid the lines of men, uttered a brief and thoroughly heartfelt curse. He spoke for them all. So long a labor, so grueling in the sun—and all for nothing.
Senenmut sprang to the edge of the cutting. He had not known he had so much voice in him until it roared through the burning air. “Up! Up, go on, to work! We’ve two more to cut, and time’s flying!”
~~~
“You’re obsessed,” Bastet observed. It had taken Nehsi and Harmose and Thuty and both scribes, Minmose as well as Tetemre, to drag Senenmut back to the house that had been given him in Aswan. He would never have left the working, but for them.
It was cool in the house, sweet with the scent of blossoms from the garden. Harmose played his lute while the high ones dined. There was wine, sweetened with honey and chilled in the river. All the men had bathed and dressed in clean garments, put on their ornaments, made a festival, though there was nothing to celebrate but the failure of their effort.
“We’ll do it,” Senenmut said to them, ignoring Bastet. “We’ll have to double up shifts, that’s all, and be more careful in raising the shafts from their beds. Though it could have been a flaw in the stone. We’ll have to look, to see. If there’s time.”
“If you please,” Bastet said, clearly and distinctly and in such a tone that even Senenmut could not shut his ears to her. “Tonight we are not digging stone in the quarry. We are enjoying a civilized dinner in a half-civilized place. Let us babble of trivialities. Let us sing; let us play on the lute. Let us be, for this brief hour, something other than workmen for the king.”
“But—” said Senenmut.
“Be quiet,” Nehsi said amiably but with inflexible will. “We’ll be frivolous till the night is old. Then we will sleep. And in the morning we’ll rise rested and go back to our labors.”
Senenmut did not want to do that, but he was sorely outnumbered. He had to eat, drink, watch them be merry. Then he suffered their putting him to bed, all but sitting on him to be sure that he stayed there.
They left Harmose to watch over him. Poor Harmose: his eyes were black-circled even without the kohl that made them beautiful. More than once Senenmut saw him swallow a yawn. But he stayed grimly awake. Senenmut would sleep, his manner said, or Harmose would die making sure of it.
“Oh, do go to bed,” Senenmut growled at last. “I won’t get up before dawn. I promise.”
“I don’t believe you,” Harmose said.
“What, do you take me for a liar?”
“No,” said the singer. “I take you for a man who doesn’t know when to stop. You’re making yourself ill, trying to do it all at once.”
“I am not ill,” Senenmut said.
“Aren’t you? You’re skin and bone. I hear you coughing when you think no one notices. You coughed up blood yesterday. I saw it.”
Senenmut shut his eyes. “Gods. Am I safe from nothing and no one?”
“Not if you kill yourself,” said Harmose.
Senenmut covered his face with his hands. It was true. He had been coughing a great deal since he came to the quarry. It was the stone dust. It got into everything, especially a man’s lungs. “That was dust,” he said, “not blood. The stone is red here. So is its dust.”
“I know the color of blood,” said Harmose, innocent and obstinate. “You have the lung-sickness. I know all the faces of it. It killed my mother and my father and both of my sisters. Go to sleep now. In the morning I’m calling in a physician.”
“You are not,” Senenmut said firmly. “I am not ill. I’ve breathed too much dust, that’s all. I’ll wear my mantle over my face after this. Will that content you?”
“No,” said Harmose. He spoke the word as eloquently as Hatshepsut herself did, and with as little yielding in it.
Senenmut sighed deeply. It caught on the bottom of his lungs. That was much higher than it should have been, and paved with knives.
He tried to swallow the fit of coughing, but it was mightier than he. It rose up. It conquered him wholly.
Harmose held him while he tried to cough up his lungs. Those arms were slender but they were strong. They were nothing like a woman’s. He did not know why he should trouble to think that, except that the part of him that was thinking was very far away from the part of him that was coughing.
Mostly he was angry. Of all times to fall sick. He had months of work left to do, and the first of his obelisks had failed of its promise. He had no time to rest or to indulge infirmity.
“Don’t,” he struggled to say. “Don’t tell her. She’ll fret even worse.”
The king, he meant. Harmose understood. “I have to,” he said. “She made me promise.”
“Then wait.” That came easier. The fit was passing. It always did; he told himself it always would. Stone dust and a little catarrh. That was all it was. “Wait,” he said. “Hover if you will, make me eat and sleep. But don’t tell the king I’m sick. She’ll half die of worry.”
“The king needs to know,” Harmose said stubbornly.
“When we come to Thebes is soon enough. She’ll see for herself then, if there’s anything to see. Now let me be. I’ll sleep, I give you my word.”
Harmose did not want to do as Senenmut commanded, but Senenmut set his jaw and his will and closed his eyes.
After rather too long a while, Harmose left him. The footsteps went only as far as the door. He would sleep across the threshold, the fool.
Senenmut let him do it. It was more effort than it was worth, to begin the argument all over again.
48
The second obelisk rose cleanly from its bed, borne up by the will and the effort of the men who had carved it out. No crack marred it; it was perfect, though rough still, a raw shape of stone that would find shape and beauty when it was brought to Thebes. Its mate, the third that they had carved in this place, proved likewise unflawed. The one of them that had failed they left where it lay, a monument to their labor and a testimony to the magnitude of it.
Those that would go to Thebes, the gods willing, rode on sledges and rollers from their bed in the quarry to the river’s side. That was much closer than it had been when they began the labor, almost half a year before. It was flood time, swelling time; necessary for the huge barge that would carry the stones down the river.
As long as it had taken them to carve the stones out of the earth, it was still more than a day or two or three before they were dragged and rollered to the barge. Then they must be lifted up the vast sides into the places prepared for them—without snapping of ropes or crushing of men or collapse of the ship beneath that massive and doubled weight.
The first was a breathless undertaking. The second nigh killed them all with apprehension. No one such stone had ever been cut or carried; and here were two, on a ship of such size that the mariners muttered of unbalancing from its height or of sinking from its burdened weight. Senenmut himself climbed up on the lofty deck, far above the water, and from that dizzy height did what he could to direct the moving and placing of the stones.
They must be placed just so, balanced with utmost delicacy, end to end along that vast length of barge. A hand’s breadth too far to either side, and the barge overturned, and the river had a sacrifice of all their labor, their sweat and blood.
He prayed as the stones rose each from its sledge, swaying in the light wind, borne up by the strength of every man who could grasp a rope. He begged every god he knew to uphold the stone, to strengthen the lines, to sustain the ship as it rocked perilously under the massive weight.
T
he groan of tortured beams was clearly audible above the chanting of his laborers and the droning of priests who prayed as devoutly as he. He felt the shift of the barge underfoot, the precarious moment when it could, oh so easily, have tipped on its side and cast them all into the water.
It held. The stone rose. It poised on its enormous supports, swung ponderously, sank down into the barge. “Farther back!” Senenmut cried. “Back, I say! Back!”
Guided by his shouts and the bellowing of the foremen, the crews settled the stones one by one into their cradles on the barge. It rode low beneath the weight of them, wallowing in the water. But—all the gods be thanked—it did not sink to the bottom. It had no grace, no lightness. But it was, it seemed, seaworthy.
~~~
There was festival in Aswan that night, round about the bank and the barge, by torchlight on the strand and by lamplight in the workmen’s tents. Senenmut honored them for a while with his presence. They expected it; they would have been distressed if he had refused.
In the morning they would begin the journey to Thebes. The house in which he had been living was stripped bare, everything packed and laden on a lesser boat that would follow the great one. He would travel with the stones, of course. They were bound up in his essence. Sometimes he fancied that they were the measure of his life, nigh on forty man-lengths, a scant handful less than the count of his years.
One thing was left to do before he mounted the barge—before he could even sleep. The stonecarver waited in the quarry by light of torches. Senenmut had marked the place. With brush and paint he drew on the stone what the carver should carve: himself as he wished best to be, bowing low before his king. Under it he wrote in passion that seemed somehow fitting in this of all places, under the cold stare of the stars. He named her, gave her her beautiful titles.
Then he named himself. It was pride beyond pride, perhaps; the same pride that had caused him to carve his face and his name everywhere in Djeser-Djeseru. Her dear companion, he wrote, much beloved, steward of her daughter Neferure, pleasing to the heart of the Lady of the Two Lands. All that I did, I did for her glory.
When he had written it all, the carver came in with his chisels and began, meticulously, to cut and carve and limn. Senenmut lingered as long as he might. But the night was speeding, and dawn was not far away. He must be on the barge when the sun rose.
He felt light, as if he had wings. Earlier, before he came to this place, he had coughed a great deal. But standing here, inscribing his feat and his love on the everlasting stone, he knew no infirmity, no frailty of the flesh. He was all whole, young and strong, and his great work ready now to be finished in Thebes.
~~~
They made the passage slowly, their fleet of boats circling round the ponderous weight of the barge. Two-and-thirty boats drew it, and in each three nines of oarsmen. Skilled mariners and engineers, with priests and workers of magic giving such aid as they could, saw it through the swollen waters, the reefs of stones, the beds of reeds that reached to choke its advance. Senenmut on his perch oversaw them all, though there was little for him to do but watch.
Runners went every morning in relays to Thebes. The king was eager, waiting in her city. She had built the pedestals on which the stones would stand, prepared the temple for their coming, set in train the festival of their arrival. She had made of it a grand celebration, a royal jubilee. The Myriad of Years, it was called: the great affirmation of the king’s power, the feast of its renewal, a beginning made again before the whole of the Two Lands.
The barge could not be hurried. Too much haste, the engineers insisted, and it would sink. It was shipping water at a rate that did not unduly alarm them, though it looked horrendous from below. It would come to Thebes, they promised, and its cargo with it. But not if it was pressed harder than its fabric could bear.
He endeavored not to fret. They crawled down the river. People came to see the king’s barge go by, to stare at the stones it carried and to exclaim over the size of them.
And then at last, with the suddenness of all things that seem too long awaited, they came in sight of Thebes. Its walls rose up out of the Black Land, beyond the river’s flood. Senenmut’s own beautiful temple, Djeser-Djeseru of the western shore, shone before him. He sat poised as it were between his two great works, filled with a gladness that was almost too much to bear.
She was waiting for him: she and all the rest of her city, her armies, her navies, every strong man in Egypt, brought here to aid his laborers in the moving of the obelisks from river to temple. Those gleaming creatures, those beautiful young men in their soldiers’ kilts, were so alien to his eyes after his naked or loinclothed, sinewy and unlovely but indomitable workmen, that he almost forgot her for staring at the massed ranks of them.
But she stirred, glittering under her golden canopy, and he ceased to be aware of anything else. The barge wallowing toward the quay, the mariners in their boats, the engineers calling out commands, the priests raising their chants and their incense, all faded and vanished before the light of her face.
She was more beautiful than he remembered. Here she was king and goddess, and nothing of the woman in her. But the eyes in the stillness of her face—those were vividly alive, fixing on him, drinking him in.
He could not tell if she was shocked. He had lost flesh, he knew, gone all leathery and brown; and several of his teeth had chosen these months to bid him farewell. He could hardly be a sight to gladden the eyes of such beauty.
And yet it seemed that he did. She did not smile; that was not a kingly thing to do. But her eyes were splendid with joy.
~~~
The work of lifting the stones from the barge and conveying them to the temple was nigh as great as that of bringing them down from the quarry. But where Senenmut had had only his crews of workmen, here he had the whole army and the navy, the men of Thebes, princes and commoners, priests and courtiers and idlers of the street. They were all caught up in the glory of it, leaping to offer a hand, to draw the king’s obelisks to Amon’s temple.
So many hands, so much eagerness, almost defeated itself. Senenmut and Nehsi between them, and such of the engineers as could fight their way through the crowds, made order of the tumult, saw the new workers and the old arrayed in ranks, and set them to the labor. Commanders of the army and captains of the navy helped as they could. In short enough order it was a useful working-party that had been shaping for an unruly mob.
The king could not in propriety set hand to rope and pull with the rest, but she could lead them, and encourage the women and the children to dance and sing, escorting them with rejoicing to her father’s temple.
Joy, it was all joy. Singing, shouting, throwing the full weight of body and souls against the massive resistance of the stones. So compelled, inevitably they yielded. They rode up from the river. They slid through the gates into the vast pillared hall, the greatest in the world, huge almost beyond comprehension; but they were not dwarfed by it.
There, for that time, they rested. The people departed in gladness: high ones to the palace, commons to the streets and market-squares of Thebes, where the king’s bounty had laid a feast.
For Senenmut it was all splendid, all glorious; and never mind that there was a great deal of labor still to come, what with polishing and carving the roughness of the stones, and sheathing them in electrum made from Thuty the Treasurer’s doled-out baskets of gold and silver, and raising them in the court of the temple. For this day he could let himself be glad, because he had come home again, and she was here, and happy as he had never seen her, even at the building of Djeser-Djeseru.
~~~
“Did I do well?” he asked her.
They were alone at last, if not in each other’s arms. That would come later. Now they had snatched a moment between feast and feast, run away like children to the wall that happened to look toward the temple of Amon, and stood hand in hand, concealed by the parapet, and gazed on the loom of the temple.
Nothing from here betraye
d the marvels that lay within. Later, when the obelisks were gilded and raised, they would shine from far away, like towers of light.
“You did very well,” Hatshepsut said to Senenmut. She laughed as freely as the girl she had never been allowed to be. “Oh, you were glorious, riding in atop that great monster of a barge, with my stones at your feet.”
“I did it in half a year, too,” he said: “and well for us I did. Even with the flood, it was hard going through some of those channels. I never saw such a draught on a ship before, and neither has anyone else.”
“No one has ever done what you did,” she said.
“What you dreamed,” he said. “I was only the hands. Yours were the mind and the will. I did it for you, my beloved. Always and only for you.”
“And for your own glory,” she said. She leaned against him. With her royal emblems laid aside, she could have been any noble lady come to keep her lover company on the palace wall. Her eyes were on the temple. “I can see them now. The sun will rise between them, and send rays of light up to heaven.”
He nodded. “Every morning they will remember you. Every evening they will catch the last light of the setting sun. They will stand for a thousand years.”
“And a thousand more,” she said, “and yet a thousand.” She turned still clasping his hand, and looked into his face. A little of the light had left her. She saw him now, rather too clearly. “Have you been ill?” she asked, direct as the thrust of a spear.
He shrugged. He thought of denying it. He had never lied to her; he could not begin now. “A little,” he said. “Stone dust is hard on the lungs. I’ll recover, now I’ve come home.”
“You had better,” she said. “You have a great task to finish. Then when that’s done, I’ll see that you rest.”
“I do intend to,” he said.
49
They carved the great obelisks in the court of the temple, much vexed by wanderers-in and gogglers-at until the king detailed a company of her guards to keep the crowds of the curious away from the workers. They shaped and polished and made them beautiful, and set on them the names of four kings: all three of the Thutmoses, none of whom could be slighted, and at the summit, sealed in electrum, the name and titles of Maatkare Hatshepsut.
