“How, then, do we solve this? How do we make them choose to remain in the House of Women of their own will?”
Senenmut furrowed his brow, deep in thought. But after a long moment he said nothing, and in despair Hatshepsut sagged down upon his chest. Tears burned her eyes; she blinked rapidly, furiously, and they vanished without falling. How had she inherited such an impossible tangle? Was there any way to put it to rights without cutting threads?
Amun, there must be.
She bolted upright, elbowing Senenmut in the stomach; he let out a grunt and clutched himself.
“Amun,” Hatshepsut blurted. “The god is our solution.”
“The god?”
“No, not the god. The God's Wife.”
“Neferure?” A defensive edge rose up in Senenmut's voice.
“I will not send her to Iunet after all. She must remain in the House of Women. She is god-chosen; we will have her read dreams for the harem, as my mother once did. She will be a constant presence there. You know how pious she is, how she talks endlessly of the gods.”
“Hatshepsut...”
“With Neferure always in their midst, preaching to them as she does, the women will be reminded of my own divinity, and none will dare to marry away. Is not the favor of a god's daughter worth much more than a fat old man in a fine kilt?”
“You cannot do this to her.”
“Do? What do I do that is so terrible? She will be given the best rooms – no; build her a little palace adjacent; her own complex. Yes, that is fitting.”
“She wanted so badly to go to Iunet, to become a Hathor priestess.”
“We can build Neferure her own Hathor temple if she wishes it, right there on the grounds of the House of Women.”
“It is not the same.”
“You said yourself she shouldn't allow her hopes to run away with her heart. I made her no vows. I said it depended on the gods.”
“This is your will, not a god's.”
“I am the Pharaoh. Amun himself sired me. He will not allow me to choose wrongly. He would stop me, if he did not approve. The girl will do as I say.”
Senenmut held himself perfectly still, his eyes and mouth betraying nothing. Hatshepsut knew that blank look, the silence. He would agree to do her bidding because it was his duty, but not because he believed she was right. Anger boiled up inside her; she drew well away from him, sat rigidly apart on the couch.
He sat, too, his shoulders stooping. “It will be...” Senenmut began, but she cut him off, rounding on him.
“As the Great Lady commands? Of course it will be. I am your king; I know what is best.”
Senenmut's eyes were dark, shadowed by sorrow.
“What?” She almost shouted the word.
“It burns me, to think what this will do to Neferure. She is so young, Hatshepsut. She understands little of politics. She is just a girl, with a girl's heart.”
“She is the King's Daughter, and God's Wife of Amun. She has her roles, her duties.”
“She understands little of those, too.”
“You are her tutor; make her understand.”
He huffed, looked away from her sharply, as if he could not bear to meet her eyes.
“Can you think of any other way? What other means do I have? Only give me another option, Senenmut – one that will work half as well – and I will take it. I birthed the girl, and the women of the harem know that I am more than any Pharaoh before me: I am the son of Amun. Neferure will be my presence when I cannot be present. Short of moving into the harem myself, what better choice have we until Thutmose comes of age and sires his own sons?”
Senenmut hung his head, pressed and smoothed his wig with trembling hands. At last he raised his eyes to hers, and the look he gave her was so forceful, so direct, that she drew back in shock. No one had glared at her since Thutmose the Second was living.
“She is your daughter,” he said, his voice ringing with a sternness she had never before heard, not even as a child, as his student. “You are her mother. She must be more to you than a pawn on a senet board. You must be more to one another.” Suddenly he softened, nearly pleading. “You said yourself, Hatet, that her joy is maat. I feel that, too. You know I do. I only want her happiness; her smile makes me live. Why does that girl's heart matter so little to you?”
Tears shone in his eyes, and blurred her own, too. She wanted to fall into his arms and weep for his forgiveness, wanted to retreat to the sanctuary of his body, her home – but she was surrounded by the king's chambers, by the histories of all the kings who had come before, graven into the very walls. Their faces stared down at her with expectation. She could not retreat from her own duty and rank. Neither, she knew, could her daughter.
“Senenmut, you are cruel.”
“I mean no cruelty. But I cannot be disloyal to her. She is my....” He choked off the word. It hung in the air between them, as forceful in the silence as if he had shouted it.
“When I left Kush,” Hatshepsut said quietly, her voice barely more than a whisper, “I stood at the rail of my ship with Nehesi, and watched a group of boys sporting on the riverbank. They were so young, Senenmut, and yet they had come all the long way from their homes like soldiers, lived amongst the army, seen the hands of our dead enemies piled up and rotting in the sun. They were just lads. I remember how they played. I remember what I told Nehesi: that I wanted my own children to be so carefree, to play and be...be children.”
Senenmut reached for her hand, squeezed it gently. She laced her fingers with his. Her hand was so cold that her skin burned against his warmth.
“Do you know what he told me? He said, 'They are the Pharaoh's children. Can you ever expect them to be carefree?' He was right, Senenmut. Neferure's blood is royal. Hers is the blood of a god. Her smile is maat to me – hers and Thutmose's, too. And yet even I am not free to protect their happiness.”
“You are the Pharaoh. Your word is the command of all the people.”
Hatshepsut rose, turned away from him so he would not see the tears break from their dam, streak down her cheeks to stain her face with kohl.
“Do you truly believe that? Is the greatest architect in the land such a fool? Tell it to the man who whispered in Opet's ear. Tell it to Nebseny's ka. Tell it to Ankhhor's tomb.”
Senenmut said nothing. Hatshepsut wiped the kohl from her face with the hem of her kilt, and turned back to face her steward. “There is only one way more to secure my bloodline against the ambition of my subjects. And that is to make Neferure my heir.”
Senenmut’s hands fell limp onto the couch. “Your heir?”
“Why not? She is my first-born child.”
“But she is not…” Senenmut smiled ruefully, despite his distress, and Hatshepsut knew what words had died on his tongue. Not a son.
“Can you think of a more powerful token to secure my position? Our position, Senenmut, for if I fall, so will you. Blood of a god, god-chosen, and heir to the throne, living amongst my women, ministering to them as a priestess. What greater security have we than Neferure?”
His eyes left hers, wandered forlornly about the room, as if he searched for an alternate path – any path that would spare his charge a career of politicking and grant her the life she yearned for. But at last he met her eyes again, and said reluctantly, “None.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Even with the curtains of the litter drawn, the day was unbearably hot. Neferure reached from her chair to flick one length of cloth open, hoping she might allow a breeze inside. But the heat was intense, demanding in its stillness. There was not a breath of air in all of Egypt. Had there been, the gods surely would have sent it to cool their favorite daughter's skin.
“That is the fifth time you've opened the curtains since we left the ship,” Thutmose said. He waved a stiff fan of crimped and painted papyrus before his face. Sweat glistened along his upper lip. “It doesn't make us any cooler. All you do is allow dust inside.”
With a disgusted grunt, Neferur
e let the curtain fall. The half-sheer weave of linen did little to block the white intensity of the midday sun, but Thutmose was right, after all. The stifling interior of the litter was at least less dusty with the curtains drawn.
What madness was this, to travel across the river and into the bleak, dry valley on the western bank during the hottest part of the day? Neferure missed the comfort of her little palace, the house of a dozen small but beautiful rooms Senenmut had built for her on the grounds of the Pharaoh's harem. Her rooms were full of rich, dark ebony furnishings, soft couches upholstered with cool silk, hundreds of bright linen cloths painted with goddesses, with scenes of priestesses in worship. Senenmut had been wise in designing the wind-catchers, and in positioning them, too. They cupped the smallest breeze from the river in clever hands, and poured the coolness and perfume of moving water down upon Neferure and her servants.
Her home was the best and most comfortable in all the harem, and never lacked for visitors because of it. When she returned from her morning duties at the Temple of Amun, she settled into the business of reading dreams for the Pharaoh's women – or trying to, at any rate. It was often a frustrating proposition. The meaning of a dream never seemed quite clear to Neferure, and more often than not, she was left wondering whether the interpretations she offered the women were from the gods, or from her own hazy and bewildered heart. She reasoned her doubts away by reminding herself that the gods would not allow her to speak an interpretation they did not approve. Such thoughts were good enough for her, and, it seemed, good enough for the women.
When evening fell, she would retreat to her rooftop. There stood her own shrine to Hathor, roofless so that she might sit in the midst of her seven statues of the goddess and watch as the stars emerged. It was only by their soft silvery light that she felt at peace. As the spray of Hathor's nurturing milk spilled across the dense black sky, twinkling like the rattle of sesheshet, singing to her heart, Neferure could forget the heat and heaviness of her days, the weight of duty and expectation.
She could even forget that Senenmut's pretty little palace was nothing but a cage, commissioned by her mother the king as a sop for taking Hathor away from her. It had been two long years since Hatshepsut had rescinded her promise to send Neferure to Iunet. The palace was a sop, and the title, too. They called her now not only God's Wife, but Divine Adoratrix, as if to emphasize her love for the gods. A cruel thing, for the only god she was allowed to adore was Amun, and he cared little for her. Sense told Neferure that time would lessen the sting of that loss, and the shame of Amun's denial. But two years had only caused her heart's wound to fester.
What festered more was the other title – the one she tried never to think on. Heir. It was a sacrilege, she knew without know how she knew it. Something about the arrangement was not maat, but it frightened her to think on it, frightened her to acknowledge it. And so she let it alone, and let the title wash over her indifferent shoulders whenever the heralds cried it, whenever her mother demanded it.
Thutmose jerked forward in his chair, causing the litter bearers to sway and mutter. He dropped his fan atop his sandals in his excitement. “Look, sister! There it is!”
This time he did not object when Neferure parted the curtains to clear their view. Ahead, Hatshepsut's own solitary litter progressed down a barren flatness the color of old, brittle papyrus. The white broken bones of long-dead myrrh trees stood at regular intervals, demarcating the remains of an ancient road. Beyond the king's litter, the face of a great cliff, yellow as burnished gold, rose high into the glaring sky. At its base stood the pale new facade of Hatshepsut's mortuary temple, and the wall that surrounded it.
Despite her resolve to be unmoved by the latest of her mother's several ostentatious monuments, Neferure could not suppress a tremble of admiration. They passed beneath the pylon of the outer wall, and she saw that the temple's base was wide and sturdy, sprawling along the base of the cliff. Dozens of new-quarried pillars glimmered in the sun, the shadows between a violet-black so intense that they burned their image upon Neferure's eyes. As she took in the sight, the number of pillars seemed to multiply, to dance before her eyes, to expand the already considerable dimensions of the temple. A shining ramp lifted from the road to a broad terrace high above, and beyond, another ramp rose above yet another row of pillars to the uppermost shrine. Higher still, the yellow rock of the cliff face gathered itself into an imposing natural spire, tall and bright as a beam of Re's holy light. Neferure had the immediate impression of looking upon a body in the throes of worship, arms wide-spread below a face up-tilted, a face raised in awe to take in the blessings of the gods.
“By Amun,” Thutmose said, nearly laughing.
She gave him a sharp look to quell his unseemly enthusiasm. He was twelve years old now, and preoccupied, as were all boys of his age, with tall monuments and other such displays of royal power.
Their litter drew closer to the temple's first ramp. As it grew in her sight, slow and inevitable as the Iteru's flood, Neferure's awe gave way to unease. She let the curtain fall.
“I want to see it,” Thutmose protested.
But Neferure did not respond; she sat back in her gilded chair, watching through the weave of the linen as the dark slashes of shadow between pillars lengthened and towered overhead.
At last their guard called out a halt. The litter sank to the dry, bare earth. Thutmose could restrain himself no more; he sprang from his seat, his arms tangling in the curtains as he staggered out into the dust. Neferure followed more sedately, taking care with her gown's pleats, stepping from the litter with quiet dignity.
Hatshepsut, too, rose calmly from her litter and stood gazing up at her monument. The fan-bearer Batiret emerged from nowhere Neferure could discern, carrying, as ever, her great half-circle of ostrich plumes on its familiar long pole. The shade closed over the king's face just as she turned to smile in Neferure's direction. The sudden sight of Hatshepsut's bared teeth in the deep darkness of shadow made her shiver. Then her own fan-bearer appeared, and the relief of shade was so sudden, so protective, that Neferure nearly gasped.
“What do you think?” Hatshepsut said, turning away again to stare up the great, bright length of the walls.
Thutmose answered. “Astounding!”
“Both Pharaohs approve,” said Senenmut quietly. He stepped beneath Neferure's fan, and she slipped her hand into his, grateful for his presence. “But I would know what the God's Wife thinks.”
“Does it matter what the God's Wife thinks?”
“It matters very much to me.”
In spite of the heat and the strange unrest tingling along her skin, she smiled at Senenmut's words. “It is beautiful,” she said, because she knew his heart longed to hear it.
“Shall we go inside?”
Hatshepsut led them up the ramp. Neferure's vision swam from the height. By the time they gained the first terrace, a broad expanse of perfectly smooth stone, laid so well the eye could hardly pick out the joins between blocks, the guardsmen and their litters looked like a child's discarded toys in the valley below. She noted two small pools in the courtyard. The spikes of new papyrus shoots cast deep blue shadows upon the water.
The straight line of the ramp continued across the width of the terrace via two rows of seshep. They crouched in pairs, staring challenge into one another's eyes, so proud and fierce she thought she might hear the scratch of their claws digging into their granite plinths. Each lion's body wore the head of Hatshepsut, and each head wore a different head-dress, though all wore identical, knowing, almost mocking smiles.
The second ramp took them still higher. The air was hotter here, for the sun reflected off the cliff's face and struck mercilessly at Neferure's skin if she allowed herself to out-stride her fan-bearer. They reached the upper row of pillars, stepped through a pair of doorways, and the blessed coolness of shade closed like healing water over their heads. Before them lay a final courtyard, small and intimate, ringed by a depth of pillars yet to be painted a
nd carved. Across the courtyard, the door of a sanctuary for Amun's holy person stood closed so that the darkness the god favored would not be disturbed. Neferure's stomach quivered at the sight of the sanctuary. She felt at the same time attracted and repelled, and, unsure whether to approach or flee, she stood rooted near a pillar while her family and their servants moved across the courtyard, inspecting, chattering, Hatshepsut and Senenmut pointing out this feature or that to Thutmose, who ran here and there like a child hunting frogs in the reeds.
At length they retreated down the highest ramp, and Hatshepsut led them into another hall where artisans had already set to work. A depiction of Hatshepsut's campaign into Kush, enacted when Neferure was a suckling babe, spread over the nearest wall. The carvings were fine and sharp, beautifully detailed. Fine grit from the artists' labors lay heaped where the walls met the floor. A set of chisels and picks had been left behind. Thutmose inspected them, then lifted one and mimed carving until Hatshepsut chased him away.
“Don't dare ruin it! If you do, I'll have to march on Kush all over again.”
“It was a mighty war,” Thutmose recited, his eyes gleaming in their black rings of kohl. “The Good God Maatkare swept through the ravines and into Kush's weak and trembling territory...”
“And took them unaware, falling upon them from her chariot,” Hatshepsut finished, crowing.
Neferure sighed. She and Thutmose had heard the tale of the conquest of Kush uncountable times from their nurses and tutors. Thutmose never tired of it, while Neferure would be well pleased if she never had to suffer through its recitation again. She paced the length of the carved wall. The too-familiar tale unfolded before her. Hatshepsut led her men into battle; Hatshepsut brought the Kushites low; Hatshepsut accepted their surrender, the bound captives in rows, trembling and bowing before the Pharaoh's majesty.
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