by Judith Tarr
In one such respite, Senenmut prevailed on his servants to set him in a litter and carry him to Amon’s temple. He had always hated to travel so, hot and stifling behind curtains, but in this extremity it was a useful thing. No one could see him or move to prevent him.
The obelisks were nearly finished. One was tipped already with gleaming electrum. They were sheathing the other as he came, doling out the precious alloy with scrupulous care, covering the tip and no more. All below it was beautiful with carving, with the names of the kings, their titles, and Hatshepsut’s own words wrought forever in stone.
He laid his hand on the base of the first, completed obelisk. It was enormous, seen so close: its thickness half again his height, its length a dozen times that. It seemed impossible that a thing so massive would be raised to pierce the sky.
They were already preparing it, readying the ropes and the scaffolding. The pillar was ready on which it would rest. They must take great care: even as wide as that hall was and open to the sky, it was forested with pillars. A false move, the slip of a line, and the great shaft could come crashing down, taking with it half the hall.
Men of genius though his engineers were, they fretted appallingly over his presence there. Everyone seemed to think that if he took to his bed and forgot everything that he had ever been or done, he would somehow, miraculously, be well again. No use to tell them that they were fools. They could not help but know it; and yet they persisted.
As did he. Weak though he was, he was more stubborn than they, with excellent authority over his servants. Each day they brought him to the temple. He lay in his litter in a shaded corner and watched the king’s obelisks grow beautiful. Then with much shouting and straining, echoing in the holy place, they raised first one and then the other, and set them upright where they had been meant to go.
It was as the king had envisioned. The sun rose between them. The light of them shone brilliant far up and down the river, marking the site of Thebes with doubled splendor.
She herself came to see them raised, stood motionless and exalted as they reared up within the roofless hall. She did not see Senenmut then, which was entirely as he wished it. This moment should be unmarred by fretting over mortal things.
~~~
But when her obelisks were raised, when she had celebrated the feast, the culmination of her Myriad of Years, and when the Two Lands were quiet again, returned to their round of days, she came to Senenmut.
He had not attended any of the celebrations. He would have wished to appear, to give her honor, but his body would not allow it. He could not rise or walk; could only lie in his bed, which he had his servants carry out of his dim and stuffy chamber by day and lay in the garden in which he had planted a myrrh tree, scion of those that grew in the garden of Djeser-Djeseru. He had never loved that scent, finding it too cloying for his taste, but now it seemed to lessen his sickness. He could breathe easier for it. When he coughed, the pain seemed a fraction less.
When she came into the garden, he was lying in the shade in the half-drowse that was all the sleep he could have now. He did not mind greatly. Soon enough he would sleep and never wake.
He was propped in cushions so that he could breathe, and draped in a linen coverlet. Like Hat-Nufer before she died, he insisted that he be clean, bathed and shaved and made presentable, so that he did not shame his servants.
He was glad of that insistence now, though it taxed him sorely. The horror in his king’s eyes was for his thinness, his terrible weakness, and not for that he was squalid and stinking of sickness.
She swept toward him in a waft of perfume, so beautiful that he nearly wept. Her gown was embroidered with gold, her wig crowned with the Two Ladies, Wadjit and Nekhbet, serpent-goddess, vulture-goddess, protectors of Egypt. She must have come from some kingly duty: she had never visited him so before, in the daylight, as king and goddess.
She knelt beside him, heedless of her gown on the raked sand of the path. For a moment he thought that she would lift him and shake him. “I heard,” she said, soft and furious. “At much too long last, someone had the courage to tell me why you slighted my festival. I had thought you merely obsessed, unwilling to leave your labors.”
“I was,” he said. His voice was barely there, but she heard him clearly enough.
“They kept me away from you,” she said. “When I would have summoned you, they distracted me with sudden duties, or pretended that you could not be found. They lied to me. I’ll flay them for it. I’ll feed them to the crocodiles.”
“Don’t,” said Senenmut. “I made them do it.”
“Even Hapuseneb? Even that prince who is greater than you?”
“Hapuseneb is a sensible man. He knows when it’s best to do as I ask.”
She tossed her head like an angry mare. “You conspired against me. I could put you to death for that.”
He laughed helplessly, though it racked him with coughing. He had to stop: she was terrified, and when the blood came she gasped.
She did not shriek or burst into tears as a lesser woman would have done. She found the cloth where it always was, near his hand, and did what was necessary.
After the spasm had passed, he lay unmoving. His eyes had gone dark. His body had no power to stir itself. His souls struggled within it, the bird-winged ba and the shadowy ka, held captive still by the struggling breath; but the bonds had grown feeble.
Not long now, he thought dimly, unvexed by fear. His only dread was for her, that she must watch him die. He would have spared them both that if he could; had known it was futile, even in the trying.
He heard the wail rise up in her. She thought him dead already. He gathered all of his strength that was left, reached for her hand, held it for a moment before his fingers went slack and fell away. “Listen,” he said to her. “Listen to me.”
“Don’t!” she cried. “Don’t talk. You need to rest.”
“No,” he said. “Listen. Tomb—I built tomb. Two of them. One for kin. One for me. Secret place, near your temple. Not secret enough. There is another place. Another— Listen!” for she was trying to stop him again, and she must not. He saw the Guide, the dark one standing there, a shadow more distinct by far than the living shape of her face. Jackal’s head, sulfur-eyes, broad man-shoulders, hand outstretched, beckoning, bidding him be quick.
“Listen,” said Senenmut with a resurgence of strength: Anubis’ gift, and he was grateful for it. “I had a third tomb made, a truly secret place. The men who made it, I bound to silence; several with blood. See me buried there. Hapuseneb, your Nubian—I trust them. Let them do it. Pretend that my body goes in the second tomb, make a mummy of reeds, wrap it and strew it with amulets and perform over it all the rites. But let my body itself lie where none but you three know. There I shall guard you, your name and your living essence, for all the thousands of years.” He was nearly done. He mustered the last few words. “In the casket in my chamber, under the collar of gold. It’s written there, where I must lie.”
“Nehsi?” she asked, the fool, taking refuge in distraction. “You want him to do this? You never liked him.”
“Trusted,” he said, “always. Liking never mattered. Tell him. And Hapuseneb.”
“You won’t die,” she said. “You can’t. I won’t let you.”
He sighed, though it caught, tearing him with coughing. He thrust the words through it. “Beloved. King and goddess. Even you are not more powerful than death.”
“But what will I do? How will I live in the world, knowing that you are not in it?”
It was not a great pleasure to take this memory into the dark: his king, his beloved, gone weak at last, clutching at him like any common woman.
She read this thoughts in his eyes. He saw how she drew herself together, how her chin set, her eyes went hard, even through the tears.
His heart, poor staggering thing, swelled till it must surely burst. Ah, gods, how he loved her. How glorious she was, how strong; how splendid a king.
“I wi
ll live,” she said, and her voice barely broke. “I give you my word. I will live without you. But never—never shall I forget you.”
He smiled. The Guide was waiting, growing faintly impatient. The hand was still outstretched, strong beautiful deep-tanned man’s hand.
But there was one more thing that he must do, one more thing that he had to say. It was simple but utterly necessary. In a voice as clear as if he had never been ill—the god’s gift again, doubly and trebly blessed—he spoke her name. “Maatkare,” he said. “Hatshepsut.”
51
Nehsi the Nubian and Hapuseneb the priest of Amon met in a dark place in the deeps of the night. Neither had any great fears, nor did Nehsi’s sons; but it was an eerie place nonetheless, the house of the embalmers in the city of the dead. Jackals prowled in the dark; nightbirds hooted; spirits of the dead fluttered and whispered.
They were not to go into that dark house. The embalmer whom the king’s gold had persuaded would bring the body out, wrapped tightly and sealed, redolent of natron and spices. They had a coffin for it, borne in a litter on the shoulders of Nehsi’s six strong sons.
No one offered commentary on this thing that they did. The king commanded it. It had been the dead man’s last wish, she had told Nehsi. He would not have done it for that, but for her, so quiet as she had been, so still and so quenched, he would happily have died himself.
He had the map, drawn in Senenmut’s hand, tucked into his belt but limned in his memory. Hapuseneb had seen it, too, and the king. They had all taken note of the place, and gasped at the audacity of it; but Hapuseneb, laughing suddenly, had spoken for them all. “Clever, clever man! Yes, that will do; it will do indeed.”
Nehsi, remembering, smiling to himself, scratched at the postern gate to the house of the embalmers. For a long while nothing stirred. Just as he moved to scratch again, the door creaked open.
A shaft of light pierced the darkness: a lamp, quickly shielded. Nehsi recognized the face that he had been told to look for. Something dark lay on the floor behind it, wrapped like a bundle of sticks, and weighing no more than that, either. The jars of its vitals stood beside it, each crowned by its attendant divinity.
Nehsi’s son Seti, eldest and boldest, advanced to take the body in his arms. Nothing was left in it of quick-tongued, quick-witted, heedlessly arrogant Senenmut. It was a husk, a dry dead thing. But the king had loved it.
While Hapuseneb doled out the gold that the king had promised, Nehsi saw the body settled in the litter and the jars laid beside it. It hardly needed the strength of all six strapping boys, but for passing through the city in the guise of a lord and his attendants, it had been a useful ruse.
Hapuseneb counted out the last of the gold into the waiting hands. It vanished into a purse. The embalmer vanished with it, taking the light with him. The door snicked shut. Nehsi heard the slide of a bar.
They were alone in the dark again with the jackals and the nightwalkers, the dead souls and the mummy in its wrappings, laid in a litter like a lord too prostrate with drink to walk. Senenmut would have appreciated the jest, Nehsi thought as they picked their way through the city of the dead.
They had a long way to go, out of the necropolis and down along the river to the moonlit gleam of Djeser-Djeseru. It was deserted, its priests long since gone to their beds. The great courts were empty, the chapels silent, dark but for the flicker of the nightlamps.
Nehsi, whose nerves in most things were as steady as a man’s could be, was as twitchy as a cat. If anyone found them here or discovered what they carried, all the king’s care would be for naught.
In the morning the temple would be full of people. The time of embalming was over. The thing of reeds and deception that bore the name of Senenmut for the world to know would be brought past this place to the tomb that he had built, and laid to rest in the lesser of his secret places—the one that he had feared was not secret enough. The king would perform the rites over the false body and sanctify it with her presence.
Tonight he went truly to his tomb, to the most secret of secret places, the shaft dug deep beneath an innocent storeroom. Nehsi found the king there, attended only by his daughter Tama. They looked as strange as he felt, the king pale and still, Tama unwontedly quiet.
After everything that Hatshepsut had done, even to taking the name and the titles of king, one would have thought that this would be as nothing. And yet it was no light thing to tamper with the dead—even if the dead had commanded it.
Nehsi was shamefully grateful to surrender command of the enterprise to his king. She took it as her right, set foot on the stone that seemed no different than any other in that smoothly fitted paving, and stood back as that portion of the floor slid away. A shaft opened, and a stair descending in it.
They could not carry the litter down this narrow passage. The body in its coffin was unwieldy enough. The boys were quiet, gods be thanked; even sullen Minhotep refrained from cursing the dark and the steepness and the difficulty of the passage. They were all overawed by it, however unwillingly.
It was like many another shaft running down to a tomb. No time or effort had been spent in adorning it. Its walls were hewn from the stone of the cliff, smoothed but unpainted.
The chamber at the end of it was mildly startling. One expected it in a tomb, but in this place so secret that no one living knew of it save those who stood in it now, it might have been more likely to find nothing but the hewn stone.
Senenmut must have done the painting himself. As in the tomb in which his false body would lie, the ceiling was a sky full of stars, ordered and named in their mystical ranks, but enfolded here within the body of Nut, sky-goddess, night-goddess, whose arching form stretched from floor to ceiling to floor again. Across the walls that were empty of her marched a procession of judges of the dead, led on each side by jackal-headed Anubis, and bowing before Osiris in judgment.
The god of the dead had Hatshepsut’s face. And Nut also; she was the king, subtle yet unmistakable.
Nehsi glanced at Hatshepsut, to see how she responded. Her face was expressionless. She was staring at the sarcophagus in the chamber’s center, a huge block of black granite, carved over and over with Senenmut’s name and hers, her face and his, and at intervals the lost and lovely face of the princess Neferure.
The sarcophagus was open, waiting. Inside it lay a rolled papyrus. Nehsi recognized the glyphs on its case. It was as he had expected, the Book of Coming Forth by Day, the ancient gathering of spells and magics and simple wisdom that guided a soul through the land of the dead.
There was nothing else in this chamber. No wealth of grave-goods. No food or drink, no carved and painted servants, no promise of life and prosperity in death. Only the book, the stone, the painted walls. Senenmut had looked for no life beyond life, no joy and no repose, only this ceaseless guardianship in the temple of his king.
Nehsi could not call him a fool, or condemn him for sacrificing his life after life. No man could ever have loved a woman as this man loved Hatshepsut. And yet no singer sang of it; no story hallowed it. They had loved in secret, nor betrayed themselves save to those who knew them both well, and could see how the air sang between them when they were together.
Hatshepsut, left alone, gone silent in her solitude, saw Senenmut laid in the sarcophagus and the jars arrayed to north and east, west and south. There could be no formal rite of the dead here. All that would be done in the morning with his false body. But she opened the gates of his senses for him, spoke the ancient words and chanted the blessings, with Hapuseneb echoing her, strengthening her with his strong sweet voice.
Nehsi sensed no change in the air, no greater awareness once the prayers and the magic had sunk into silence. The dead remained dead. The lid of the sarcophagus ground into place over the body, drawn by the sweat and the labor of Nehsi’s sons. When Senenmut was sealed within but his souls set free, one hoped, to do as they and the gods willed, the king paused over the sarcophagus.
Now, Nehsi thought, at
last she would break. But she did not. She stood erect and still. Her hand rested on the stone where his heart should have been, had it not been in the jar that lay at her feet. She had not wept since he died, that Nehsi knew of. Her grief was too deep, too strong for tears.
She turned abruptly, nearly oversetting Tama who stood behind her. She never saw or took heed. She walked blindly out, back through the passage, up the stair, into the temple that her mind had conceived and Senenmut had built.
~~~
That was Senenmut’s true funeral. The false one, the one that the world knew of, went on in royal splendor, with wailing and keening of women, processions of princes, an astonishing number of commoners come to pay their respects to the commoner who had become a great lord of Egypt. No word was spoken, then as ever, of his long sojourn in the king’s bed. It was as if the cruelty of crowds was suspended and their rumormongering quenched, gone quiet before the king.
And when it was over, when the tomb that was known to workmen and certain princes was sealed, and the one that held his kin and, now, his little red mare, was likewise shut up for everlasting, then the world went on without him. He had been a great presence in Egypt, a lord of many titles, loved or hated as his merits deserved. There were empty places now where he had been. His house was shut up, his servants sent away or sold, his villa closed and his horses dispersed.
Hatshepsut would not give either house or estate to another man. They were allowed to fall into dust and silence. She never spoke of them, or of the man who had dwelt in them.
It was not forgetfulness. Far from it. It was grief so complete and so perfect that it could accept no other in his place, nor conceive of a world without him in it.
Yet she went on. She gave up nothing that was hers as king. If anything she took on more: more powers, more offices, more duties and obligations. She buried herself in the cares of kingship, made herself so purely and completely king that nothing of the woman remained.
