by Judith Tarr
“You can strip a country bare,” the languid one said, “and leave nothing for the next year’s tribute.”
“That’s not wise warfare,” Thutmose said, “or good husbandry. Neither is it wise to leave a nation alone, to let it grow strong until it casts off the yoke. Do you let the ox run wild in the field, or do you keep it hitched to the plow, tilling the land for the harvest of Egypt?”
“What are you saying?” the languid one asked; not so languid any longer, beginning to grow interested.
“Amon has great estates in Asia,” Thutmose said, “and wealth unimaginable in every part of the world. That wealth can hardly be safe if Asia succeeds in revolt. If Amon stands behind me while I go to war, Amon will not only defend its interests; it will share in the spoil.”
“How great a share?”
“That,” said Thutmose, “is a matter for discussion.”
Glances flickered round the circle. The one who had been speaking shifted until Nehsi could see his face. It was vaguely familiar, as belonging to someone whom he had seen among Hapuseneb’s attendants.
For all Nehsi knew, this was the one who had betrayed the gathering to Hapuseneb, and caused the elder king’s Nubian to be brought where he could hear and see it. If so, the man played the game extraordinarily well. “All of this is purely speculative,” he said, “in the absence of any real power on your part.”
“With Amon behind me,” Thutmose said, “I have all the power in the world.”
The priest reflected on that. His brows went up. “Indeed,” he said. “If Amon’s daughter finds herself at odds with Amon’s priesthood . . . what a difficulty that will be.”
“I too am descended from the god,” Thutmose reminded him.
“But she is his own daughter,” the priest said. “That would weigh heavily with the more devout among us.”
“She will not always be the living Horus,” Thutmose said. “When she becomes Osiris, will you stand with me?”
“When she becomes Osiris,” said the priest, “Amon’s temple will bow before Amon’s son as it has done from the beginning of the Two Lands.”
“That will suffice,” Thutmose said.
53
“None of that proves anything,” Nehsi said to Hapuseneb, “except that the younger king makes sure of his position once the elder king is gone.”
“Did it occur to you to wonder,” Hapuseneb asked, “why he should be doing it now of all times, with Asia on the edge of revolt? He knows he’ll never get his way while he remains subservient to the King Maatkare.”
“You think,” Nehsi said, “that he may not be intending such subservience for much longer. But he’ll never break free unless she dies.”
“Yes,” said Hapuseneb.
Nehsi frowned. “You think he’ll try something.”
“I think,” said Hapuseneb, “that once I’m safely dead, he’ll reckon himself strong enough in his alliance with Amon that he can do whatever he judges necessary.”
“Even that?”
“Do you doubt that he’s capable of it?”
Nehsi shook his head. “I’ve seen the way he walks. Stallions walk so when they’re bitted too strongly, just before they break free and bolt.”
“Trampling whoever held them, and killing that one if they can.” Hapuseneb drew a breath that rattled, and closed his eyes. He looked dead then, a grey-faced corpse. “Watch her carefully, old friend. It won’t be something obvious—don’t expect that of him, warrior though he may be. He’s a dark and secret creature. He’ll do it in such a way that no one can ever charge him with it, or be certain that she died of anything but the gods’ will and her own mortality.”
“All kings die and become Osiris,” Nehsi said, reciting the ancient words as if their meaning had only now come clear. “And she, as he said, is no longer young.”
He flexed his hands. They ached sometimes of late: he was not a young man, either—in fact he was older than she. The stubble that grew on his shaven skull glinted more silver than black, these days.
He was still strong, and so was she—in the body at least. “Gods,” he said. “When did we begin to grow old?”
“Yesterday,” said Hapuseneb. “Youth will always conquer, unless it’s disposed of by wary age.”
“And that, she will never do. I could curse her honor, and her reverence for the sanctity of the king. I fear very much that he has no such scruples.”
“He doesn’t need them,” Hapuseneb said. “He can call her usurper and dispose of her as Ahmose did with the foreign kings.”
“You think he will,” said Nehsi.
“I think,” said Hapuseneb, “that a man with a strong stomach and no dread of the gods’ wrath might well choose to remove this threat to our lady.”
“I am not that man,” Nehsi said with deep regret. “I can’t do it, no more than she can. Even to protect her. I’ve failed her, Hapuseneb. At the last, when she needs me most, I can’t act as I know I should act.”
“I don’t know about that,” Hapuseneb said. “You can’t kill him, no more than I could: I’m godbound too, and constrained by the sanctity of kingship. But you can guard her, protect her against him, see that she lives as long as the gods have willed for her.”
“And then?” Nehsi asked. “What then?’
“Then, my friend,” said Hapuseneb, “the gods must provide.”
~~~
Nehsi pondered long on what he had heard and seen. He increased the guard on the elder king, not so much as to be obvious, but she was watched always.
She gave him no thanks for it. She had withdrawn into herself, become a cold husk of kingship. Even the affection with which she had regarded her people was gone. Friends she had none. Her allies and her ministers loved her as they always had, as they always would; but she had shut them away. She received their worship as if she had been the image of a goddess wrought in ivory and gems and gold: upright and still, with beautiful blind eyes, and no living warmth.
There was nothing that Nehsi could do to make her human again. The one who could have done it was years dead. When he tried regardless, she ignored him or sent him away.
He came to her at last in a passion of frustration, faced her of an evening as she prepared to sleep. Her gowns and her jewels were laid aside, and she was clothed in a linen shift. Her maids had just finished cleansing the paint from her face and were anointing it for the night with sweet oils.
Nehsi was admitted because he had command of the guard. She saw him: her eyes flickered as he passed the door. She did not greet him, but neither, he noticed, did she dismiss him. He took heart from that.
It came to him with a small shock that he had never seen her beauty bare. Always since she was a child she had presented herself to him with her face painted, her eyes drawn long with kohl and malachite. Tonight the mask was taken away. Beneath it he saw the aging woman, tired and faintly haggard, the corners of her mouth drawn down by the weight of years and cares and kingship. The cap of curls that she had allowed to grow beneath wig and crowns was shot with grey.
And yet she was still beautiful. The face that in Thutmose was too odd for handsomeness, in her was drawn fine, its royal arch of nose imperious rather than overwhelming.
Her maids finished the last of her toilet, bowed, glanced uncertainly at the man who stood by the door. He must have bulked huge, shadowed and silent. Perhaps his anger showed on his face.
“Go,” she said to them.
They wavered, hesitating, but in the end they went.
And Nehsi had what he wanted, what he had not dared to hope for. He was alone with his king.
He had been going to shout at her if he must, shake her, dare her wrath and even the shame of the lash if he could only catch and hold her attention. Instead he stood mute, as Thutmose so often did, unable to explain why he was in such awe of this lone small woman with her tired eyes.
Then she lifted those eyes, and he knew. Because she was Hatshepsut.
That, strangely, str
engthened him. He said without pause or preliminary, “Thutmose will kill you if he can.”
She raised her brows. Stripped of paint, they were strong still, plucked into a perfect arch. “Have you proof of this?” she asked, remote as she always was now; distant and cool.
“I have seen him in Amon’s temple,” Nehsi said, “driving bargains with the priests who will rule when Hapuseneb is dead. He offers them the spoils of Asia in return for alliance, and for a blind eye turned upon him if you die untimely.”
“Indeed?” She seemed neither surprised nor alarmed. “What would you have me do about it? Put him to death for sedition?”
“That,” said Nehsi, “you would never do. Nor could I; and believe me, majesty, I thought of it. An arrow in the dark, a poison in the cup, and you would be safe forever.”
“Safe, and without an heir.”
“And condemned by the gods for allowing a king to be destroyed.” He shook his head. “Lady, you know me better than that; or you did once. I would ask you to ponder the danger, and to consider what to do about this young king who begins at last to strain the bonds you set on him.”
“Bonds that he never resisted, nor saw fit to question.” In that he heard her old, almost welcome exasperation. “If he had ever proved that he was worthy to take up the burdens of a king, I would have laid them upon him.”
“Would you?” Nehsi asked her. “Truly, lady: would you? How do you reconcile this contempt for him with the truth, that when you die he will rule in your stead? Do you care so little for the welfare of Egypt?”
In her eyes he saw no love for him, not any longer; but she had not driven him out. In that he took what comfort he could. “Every breath I draw is drawn for Egypt,” she said. “It troubles me, yes, that I leave no better heir. I shall see him married, I think: find him a woman who is strong enough to rule as I ruled when his father was king—and who can bear him the heir that he requires. Would that content you, O great lord?”
She mocked him, addressing him as if he had been as royal as she. He refused to bristle at it. “That would be useful,” he conceded. “It has also come to my mind that while you find and train the lady, he might be well distracted if he were given what he yearns for. A command in the army, lady. Nothing of great moment—not the command of Asia, lest he make himself strong there, then come back and destroy you; but something sufficient, a garrison in Nubia perhaps, or one of the outposts of Libya.”
“If he is indeed as clever as you insist, he’ll know he’s been sent into a kind of exile, given a sop to his pride while he’s kept out of the way. He might even,” she said, “begin to suspect that his plotting is known, and be driven to do something desperate.”
“If you are on guard,” Nehsi said, “anything that he does, you can counter. And you’ll be safe from his machinations in Thebes.”
“That is if he is as clever as you think,” she said.
He heard her in a kind of despair. She who saw so clearly in all things, could not see Thutmose at all. She never had; she never would.
“I shall ponder what you have said,” she said, coldly formal again, though she had been warming a little. “It would be well to find a wife for him—even as backward as he has been, he is long past the age when a man should marry and beget sons. Look you to the young women of Egypt; and look well to the children of Nefertari, for one who may rule as queen while her husband plays at soldiers on the borders of Libya.”
Nehsi sighed, but he bowed and let himself be dismissed. It was a poor concession that he had gained from her, but it was better than nothing. She would think on his words; she would consider what to do with Thutmose. She might even act swiftly enough to prevent him from moving against her. His deliberation, his long habit of waiting upon the moment, might serve her now as it had served her since he was a child.
Or it might not. There was no telling. He could only wait and pray, and stand such guard as he could, and hope that it would be enough.
54
Hapuseneb the priest died at the end of a poor flood, as poor as those before it had been rich. The rising of the river had ceased early. The king had been forced to hasten to Memphis for the festival, nearly coming too late. In so doing, she was not in Thebes when the Prophet of Amon slipped into the long sleep.
He died without pain, which was a blessing. His heart simply stopped, his breast ceased to rise and fall.
She came home from Memphis to officiate at his funeral. She did not weep. Her wailing was as formal as the chanting of a priest, her beating of thighs all ritual, no passion in it; no great outpouring of grief. All of that she had spent when she buried Senenmut.
Nehsi began to think thoughts that would once have been unthinkable. Not of her death; not that. But of her fading from the splendor of her youth. She was not the ruler that she had been. Her judgments, once tempered with mercy, grew harsh and cold. People no longer cried out for love of her. They feared her; wondered at her; worshipped at her feet. But the warmth that they had had for her was gone.
It well might be time for a younger king—or a queen, a Great Royal Wife. The difficulty of finding a lady of the proper lineage, age, and fertility, who would be as acceptable to Thutmose as to Hatshepsut, was enormous and perhaps insurmountable.
Nehsi did what he could. Though it galled him to leave her, he did so: abandoned her for this brief time in order to protect her more completely thereafter. He traveled the length of Egypt, guesting with this lord or that, making himself amiable to princes, searching in the temples for a singer or a dancer of the line of Nefertari.
The rumor of his venture ran ahead of him. Men began to fling their daughters and sisters and even lesser wives at him—or to conceal them where they hoped he could not find them.
All the while he did that, he made certain that Hatshepsut was guarded. His son Seti, in command of her bodyguard, was under orders to guard her with his life, or answer for it to Nehsi himself. It was not enough for Nehsi’s peace of mind, but it was the best that he could do.
Of Thutmose he heard nothing. The younger king might, it was said, be given a command at last; but no one knew where or when. The strongest rumor had it that he would amass a great army, the largest that had ever been seen in Egypt, to put down the rebellion in Asia. Not only Kadesh had risen, Nehsi heard, but Syria and the coast of Palestine. Even Mitanni, that great empire to the north and east, was said to look with interest on the rising against Egypt.
But Hatshepsut made no move against it. She ruled in Thebes as she had since she was young, received embassies, sent out trading ventures, saw to the affairs of the Two Lands. At the festival of the harvest, such as that was, she thrust aside those who muttered that the failure of the flood and the smallness of its fruits was an omen. She proclaimed as always her names and her titles, her power in the Two Lands; and she said, as Nehsi heard it proclaimed in the city of Asyut where he was determining that the nomarch had no marriageable daughters: “I rule in peace; with peace the gods have blessed me. Under my hand the Two Lands have grown strong.”
“Peace,” people muttered in Nehsi’s hearing, not knowing or perhaps not caring who he was. “We’ll all have peace when we’re dead. What’s the use in it now? We haven’t had a good war since the first Thutmose was king.”
“Do us good,” someone said in the marketplace of Bubastis. “Give the young bloods something to do. Get the army off its backside and into something useful. Bring in loot to make us all rich.”
It might be, Nehsi thought, that people’s thinking had changed; that the poor flood and the thin harvest turned their hearts away from the king whom they had loved for so long. And it well might be that Thutmose had played a part in it. Those were his words spoken among the market-stalls and bandied in the taverns; his eagerness for bloodshed in the mouths of those who had never, any more than he, faced an enemy in battle.
“She’s a woman, after all,” they said. “What do women know of fighting? Of course she wants to keep the boys at home. Women neve
r want us to go out and have a nice hot battle. No wonder we’re going hungry this year, and the beer’s piss-thin and the king away in Kadesh is calling us a pack of pretty boys. We’ve got a woman for a king.”
Time was when that was a great boast: that they were the servants of Maatkare Hatshepsut. Now they turned their backs on her, and remembered that there had been another king before her, whose place and titles she had taken.
At that, although he had found no woman of suitable rank or lineage, Nehsi abandoned his journey, cursing its futility, its waste of his time and substance, and turned back toward Thebes. He traveled so swiftly that he outran the king’s couriers. But not the murmur of discontent that was in Egypt. It grew greater toward the Delta, lessened as he drew near to Thebes, but everywhere he heard the sound of it.
His daughter Tama met him at the quay of his own city, standing with the air of one who has been waiting since the world was young. Such conspicuous patience was as characteristic of her as the wild tumble of her hair under the wig that she discarded more often than not; but there was an edge to it that brought Nehsi leaping from his boat even as it slid toward the shore.
He might be growing old, but he could still spring like a panther. He landed lightly enough beside his daughter.
Her belly was swelling, he noticed. She had married before he left, having made a surprising choice of husband: a tall, quiet, scholarly person from the House of Life, who happened to be notably older than she. He was also a lord of a house of princes, not too distant kin to the king, and as wealthy as any father could wish. He placed no obstacle in the way of his wife’s freedom, which had the peculiar effect of keeping her for once at home.
That, Nehsi thought, might have something to do with his own fears for the king. She embraced him, fierce and brief, and said the thing that he had dreaded most to hear. “The king is ill. She’s asking for you.”
~~~
Hatshepsut who had never been ill a day in her life, who had bypassed the fevers and rheums that laid others low, who was blessed by the god her father with health and strength beyond the lot of most women in this age of the world, was ill indeed. No one dared whisper it, but she might be dying.
