by Judith Tarr
Seti bowed his head. “I still have to live under him,” he said. “Have you given any thought to how all of us will do that?”
“As we can,” said Nehsi. “If we live in quiet for a while, show ourselves no threat, in the end I think he’ll have the sense to use us as we may best be used. If not—if he has in mind to destroy all who were loyal to her—then we’ll do what we can do. I have kin in Nubia, and your mother has kin in Punt. We’ve no lack of places to go, if Egypt closes itself to us.”
“I don’t want to leave Egypt,” Seti said.
“Nor I,” said Nehsi through tightening throat. “Pray the gods we never have need of it.”
“But you,” Seti said, “may not want to live in Egypt without her.”
“Oh, no,” said Nehsi. “This land is full of the memory of her. I’ll guard it while I live; and after I am dead, if I must, I’ll continue.”
“But she may not die,” Seti said. “The gods may preserve her.”
Nehsi said nothing to that; and Seti looked away, ashamed as well he should have been, of his fit of happy folly.
56
Slowly at first, then with terrible swiftness, the sun rose to its zenith over Thebes of the kings, and sank toward the western cliffs. Its light spread long over them, red as blood. The sky filled with fire.
Beyond that fire, on the other side of the horizon, lay the land of the dead: the land to which the king was going, and swiftly now, without either fear or regret.
Nehsi returned to her then as she had commanded. Her pack of jackals lingered, but Nehsi had taken thought for that. Eager though they might be to be present at the moment of her death, their bodies knew both hunger and thirst. He saw to it that a banquet was spread for them in one of the greater halls. They fell upon it with greedy delight. He left them so, and sought his lady’s chamber.
Only a few of the physicians lingered, and a handful of priests, and her maids still huddled in a corner, too stark with grief and fear to join the others in the feast. They were nothing and no one.
Hatshepsut was awake. She fought off sleep, he suspected, lest she miss any moment of the life that was left to her. When he knelt beside her, she took his hand in her two thin cold ones. “You look so grim,” she said. “Don’t grieve for me. I go to be Osiris.”
“I grieve that you leave untimely,” he said.
“It is not untimely,” she said, “when the gods allow it to be.”
He stared at her. “Where did you learn such resignation? The lady I know would have been raging against her murderer, seeing to it that he was punished.”
“He has been punished,” she said serenely. “He stood aside while I ruled for years as king. Usurper he may think me, terrible creature, a female who dared to wear the crowns and bear the titles that only a male should claim; but not even he can deny that I ruled well. I brought peace to Egypt, and prosperity beyond any that it has known before. No one can say that these two kingdoms fared ill because their king was a woman.”
“Ah, lady,” said Nehsi. “You were always wiser than I.”
“Of course,” she said. “I am your king.”
He wept then, without warning, unable to slow or stop it. She held him till he was done. It should have felt like presumption, and yet it did not.
When he lifted his head, she smiled at him. “Better?” she asked, sounding for all the world like Bastet when one of the children had taken a tumble.
“Better,” he said roughly. His throat was sore. “Oh, gods. Everything is so dark, with your light gone out of it.”
Her smile warmed and deepened. “I’ll be with you as I can. Listen for my wings. Look for my eyes in the dimness. Bless my name then, and remember me.”
“Do you think that I could ever forget?”
She shrugged, the barest lifting of a shoulder. “The living go on living. The dead fade and are forgotten.”
“Never,” he said fiercely. “Never!”
“I do hope not,” she said. Her voice was hardly more than a whisper, a murmur in shadow. “I meant to be remembered forever and ever. All that I did, I did for that. And for Egypt. Always for Egypt. Remember my name. Remember me.”
He named her as he must always do, so that he might strengthen her memory. “Maatkare,” he said. “Hatshepsut.”
She smiled. “Remember,” she said again. “Remember me.”
He saw the life slip out of her: the dimming of light in her eyes, the passing of breath, even—or so he imagined—the shape of the ka that was the shadowy image of her. It paused in its going, and met his stare with eyes that shone lambent in the gloom. He bowed low and low. “Fare you well and forever,” he said, “my lady and king.”
Epilogue
Thutmose III, 42
Menkheperre Thutmose stood in the great pillared court of Djeser-Djeseru. Men labored feverishly about him, yet he stood quiet, smiling a faint, almost languid smile. He smiled so when one of his ladies had pleased him well, or when he saw the heads and hands and private members of his enemies heaped at his feet; for he was a great warrior, the greatest that the Two Lands had ever seen.
They called him Thutmose the Great, the mighty one, the scourge of Asia. He was not as young as he had been, but he was strong. He intended to live for many years yet, and to spend much of that life on the battlefield where he was most vividly alive. The rest of it he would spend ruling in Egypt, being the king that for a score of years he had been forbidden to be.
Her face was all about him, her name carved on every wall and pillar and statue. In this place of all places in Egypt, there was no escaping the name or the memory of that one whom he had both hated and—yes—guiltily, tremblingly adored, Maatkare Hatshepsut.
His mother had held him back for long years. But Isis was dead. They were all dead, all those loyal ministers, Thuty the Treasurer, Ineni the builder, Nehsi the Nubian whose presence had loomed huge and shadow-dark; for whom even in death Thutmose knew a shiver of apprehension.
He thrust it down and set his foot on it. Nehsi was dead. So too was Isis, that shy and gentle creature with her surprising core of stubbornness. Only the day before he had laid her lovingly in her tomb, opened her senses to the life beyond living, and sealed her against the depredations of thieves. Now he made certain that her soul would be as safe beyond the horizon as her body was in the valley of the dead.
His smile widened as the workman nearest him, wielding hammer and chisel, put out the eyes of a sphinx that wore Hatshepsut’s face. Her name was gone already from its plinth. Men beyond toppled statues with a splendid roaring and crashing. Others advanced through the temple like an army across a field of battle, cutting out her name and the name of her cursed arrogant fool of a lover wherever they might find it.
A runner halted panting in front of him and flung himself down. “Great king! Foreman bids you, if it pleases you, come with me.”
Thutmose wasted no words on him, but followed where he led. Through the temple first, but out of it thereafter, up toward the loom of the cliff. As they went they passed throngs of laborers, ringing of hammers, shattering of stone.
It was scarcely less quiet under the sky, but as they went on, the clamor muted. When it was almost gone, Thutmose heard it raised anew, just ahead of him. They clambered up a last steep slope and came to a halt.
There stood the foreman of a division of his workmen, trembling with either fear or eagerness. There was no mistaking what he pointed to: the shaft of a tomb.
Men had hacked open the door already, but waited for Thutmose before they ventured within. They had the look that men of the daylight always had when they came face to face with the dead: white, shocked, afraid. Thutmose shook his head at their frailty. “Open it,” he said.
They flung themselves flat in obeisance, then did as he bade.
It was a splendid tomb, as one might expect; laden with golden treasure that Thutmose could well and properly use. Great queens had been buried in less opulence than this commoner who had shared the bed of
a king. He who should at most have been buried among princes on the other side of the cliff, had presumed so far as to set himself within sight of Djeser-Djeseru. From the angle and length of the shaft, his body might well rest beneath it. Thutmose could feel the bulk of the temple overhead; fancied that he heard a distant and muffled crash as yet another statue fell in shards.
He turned his mind from that, and even from the gold that gleamed in the light of the foreman’s torch. A sarcophagus stood in the center of the tomb-chamber, sealed as was proper, overlaid with words of guard and protection.
Thutmose, living Horus, king and god, had no care for the feeble magic of the dead. At his command, his men set lever to the massive lid, and thrust it up and away. The wooden coffin lay bared within.
One enterprising fellow with an axe hacked away at it. Splinters flew, rich with gilding. Then at last the wrapped body lay before them, sheathed and heaped in amulets, with a crown of withered flowers laid upon its breast.
A kind of madness flared up in Thutmose. He took up the dead thing in his own arms, lifted it high, and flung it down.
It broke like a bundle of reeds. He caught his breath; someone cried out, curse or mere astonishment, he never knew.
It had weighed as light as dried reeds, and shattered as reeds shatter. For reeds it was, bound and shaped into the image of a man. No dry dead bones crumbled inside of it. In the jars of the vitals were mockeries: dates preserved in honey, a handful of stones, the mummified body of a cat, a bag of barley flour.
Thutmose stared at them. The rage that had possessed him heretofore had been cold, clear, and very practical. He would preserve his mother’s safety among the dead by destroying her enemy; and he would destroy that memory among the living, so that he and he alone would be remembered as king and god. It had been, and would still be, a beautiful revenge.
That had been cold anger, cherished for forty years, until at last he could let it loose. This was a white heat. Senenmut the arrogant, Senenmut the accursed, had dared even beyond death to mock a king.
And yet Thutmose laughed. “Oh, you reckoned yourself clever,” he said to the face that was painted on the wall beyond the sarcophagus: deep-lined hook-nosed unlovely face with its long wry mouth. “But I have won the war. I have slain her among the living and among the dead. She shall be utterly forgotten. None hereafter shall remember her.”
The painted face went on smiling, mocking him, even as a workman scoured it from the wall. You may try, it said. You may even think you succeed. But you will never find my body where it is buried; and you will never destroy her utterly. I have seen to that: I, Senenmut, who was born a tradesman’s son in Thebes.
“Air,” Thutmose said, “and empty wind. You are dead. So too is she. Dead for everlasting.”
Even through the clamor of workmen, the hacking, the chipping, the shattering of stone, he heard a flutter as of wings, a flicker of laughter. So you dream, it said, O king of vaunts and battles. So you well may dream. And all about that dry dead voice, the murmur of her name, the name that Thutmose would have caused to vanish from the earth. Maatkare, it whispered. Hatshepsut.
Author's Note
Maatkare Hatshepsut was not the first or the only female king of Egypt, but she is the most famous, and certainly the most notorious. Her story, its events and characters, needs little embellishment in order to “work” in modern narrative terms. I have had to invent almost nothing, nor was it necessary to enliven the story with invented protagonists. Senenmut and his family, Nehsi the Nubian, Hapuseneb the priest, the two Thutmoses, Isis the concubine, all are historical figures. Even Senenmut’s little red mare was a real horse; her mummy was found in the “public” tomb of her master, along with the mummies of his parents and his brothers and his brother’s wife. Of all the characters in this novel, only Nehsi’s wife and children, and the occasional spear-carrier, are fictitious.
I did choose to invent the third tomb of Senenmut, in addition to the two that are known, and the deception of his “official” burial. Likewise there is no evidence that the concubine Isis, mother of Thutmose III, was ever a servant of Hatshepsut or had anything to do with the then-queen; and the princess Neferure is in no way known to have died in childbirth. Nor is it known for certain that Thutmose had anything to do with the death of Hatshepsut, although this has been proposed by more than one scholar.
No one knows, either, why it took Thutmose twenty years after Hatshepsut’s death to wreak his terrible vengeance on her memory. He was a master of biding his time, but that seems rather excessive. Two decades seem time enough for certain powerful and perhaps intimidating friends of the female king to have grown old and died; perhaps Thutmose did swear an oath or make a promise, which he could not break until after the death of the one to whom it was sworn. Whatever the reason, it is one of the great oddities of history that a man of such genius, perhaps the greatest of all the warrior Pharaohs of Egypt, lived the first twenty-odd years of his life in near-total obscurity, completely overshadowed by the power and personality of the woman who dared to be king—then, a full twenty years and more after her death, turned suddenly and viciously against her.
~~~
In spite of Hatshepsut’s fame, few books have actually been devoted to her life and history. General histories of Egypt, of course, never fail to mention her. Accounts of the great trading voyage to Punt are frequent and detailed, as are descriptions of her mortuary temple at Deir al-Bahri: the temple which she herself called Djeser-Djeseru. There is a very good if rather opinionated summary in Barbara Mertz, Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs (New York, 1978)—readers may know this popular Egyptologist more readily under her pseudonyms of Elizabeth Peters and Barbara Michaels. Mertz is one of those who postulates that Thutmose III had a hand in Hatshepsut’s demise.
As for the peculiar beauty of this great queen and Pharaoh, the dedicated museum-goer need only visit the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, a whole room of which is dedicated to the works and images of Hatshepsut. Her face once seen is difficult to forget. The resemblance to portraits of her co-king, her nephew and stepson, is striking. There can be no doubt that they were of the same family. They seem to have shared a similar personality as well, though hers turned conspicuously to the arts of peace, and his, perhaps in rebellion, to those of war. Her achievements alone would have rendered her remarkable, but even more striking is the degree of dominance she exercised for so long over her brilliant and bellicose fellow king.
A novelist, like a scholar, can only guess the reasons why. Unlike the scholar, however, the novelist is privileged to choose among the possibilities and to elect the one that seems most suited to the requirements of her narrative. In the case of Hatshepsut, that process of selection proved in the end quite simple, and needed almost no invention. The history itself is almost pure story.
Addendum
In the New Millennium
Since this book was written, Egyptian archaeology (even through the upheavals of revolution) has entered a new golden age. The mummy of Hatshepsut seems to have been found, and much new scholarship has been undertaken. The most famous of the women kings of Egypt (who may have been considerably more numerous than previously suspected) has indeed been remembered, and studied, and celebrated by new generations of historians and scholars.
If I were writing this book now, I would write it rather differently. I would definitely rethink Thutmose and his obscurity, reevaluate the reasons for the obliteration of Hatshepsut’s name, and reconsider the question of whether she was poisoned. It appears that she may have been correct after all, and Nehsi, in his grief, may have been looking for conspiracies where, for once, there were none.
But that would be another book. This one stands as it is, in remembrance of the woman who was king.
Tucson, Arizona, April 2015
Copyright & Credits
King and Goddess
Judith Tarr
Book View Café 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61138-530-4
Co
pyright © 1996 Judith Tarr
First published: Forge, 1996
Cover illustration © 2015 by Neilneil | Dreamstime.com
Production Team:
Cover Design: Pati Nagle
Proofreader: Sheila Gilluly
Formatter: Vonda N. McIntyre
This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Digital edition: 20150721vnm
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About the Author
Judith Tarr’s first fantasy novel, The Isle of Glass, appeared in 1985, and went on to win the Crawford Award. Her space opera, Forgotten Suns, has just been published by Book View Café. In between, she has written historicals and historical fantasies—including World Fantasy Award nominee Lord of the Two Lands—and epic fantasies, some of which have been reborn as ebooks from Book View Café. A short story, “Fool’s Errand,” a prequel to Forgotten Suns, appeared in the January/February 2015 issue of Analog. She lives in Arizona with three cats, two dogs, and a herd of Lipizzan horses.
Other Titles by Judith Tarr
The Epona Sequence
White Mare’s Daughter
Lady of Horses
Daughter of Lir
The Shepherd Kings
Avaryan Rising Series
The Hall of the Mountain King
The Lady of Han-Gilen
A Fall of Princes
Avaryan Resplendent Series
