Batiret saw the pleasure sparkling in her mistress’s eye.
“Ah, Great Lady. As you wish.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
The morning after the Feast of the Tail dawned too bright and sharp for Thutmose’s aching head. He had managed to conduct himself with seemly restraint throughout Hatshepsut’s rites in the circuit, and had kept himself in check for most of the feast. But when the throne of the Great Royal Wife remained empty beside him and he realized at last that Neferure would not present herself at the festival she opposed, Thutmose had sunk sullenly into his cups.
The girl disturbed him when he recalled with a pang of impotent fear the way she had calmly set upon Hatshepsut’s servant with that copper knife. He did not know quite what to do with her. He couldn’t keep her indefinitely in her confinement cell, only drawing her out to set on display when festival or court made it necessary. Had he not accused Hatshepsut of the very same misdeed? And yet he could not keep her as wife, either. He knew now that he despised Neferure, her unfeeling coldness, her abnormal preoccupation with the divine. He could never again bring himself to lie with her, and so she was useless as a Great Royal Wife. But to set her aside, and leave her free to marry? She would be snapped up by a noble house faster than any former harem girl, and his and Hatshepsut’s fears for their security would be redoubled. He might expose the secret of her parentage to the court, but only at great cost to Hatshepsut, the only mother he had ever known.
Thutmose shifted the problem of Neferure this way and that inside his heart while the Feast of the Tail went on raucously around him, a seething crowd of revelers, acrobats, dancers, servants, laughing and shrieking in the expanse of the Great Hall. And Hatshepsut had sat triumphant and glowing upon her throne, accepting the happy acclaim of her court with a confidence she had not shown in years. She was renewed in truth. Thutmose could not deny it.
Before he had realized just how many cups of wine he’d consumed, Thutmose was well and truly drunk. He barely remembered Hesyre leading him back to his chambers, giving quiet orders to the soldier who guided Thutmose on his strong arm. Now, in the stark light of morning, Neferure returned to his thoughts to plague him like the ache in his head.
He gave himself a long time to collect and order this thoughts, soaking in a warm bath, breathing deep of the bracing, invigorating oils Hesyre selected for his massage, allowing the pleasure of one of a servant woman’s kneading hands to soak into his bones. At last, as prepared as he could be, Thutmose slid the Nemes crown onto his brow and stood eying his own reflection in his dressing-room mirror.
“We must go to her – Hatshepsut and I,” he said to his own image. “We must decide her fate, and do it today.”
And so he met with his co-Pharaoh late in the morning, accompanied as she always was by Nehesi and her new steward Kynebu. Thutmose nodded a silent greeting to her in the courtyard that lay between their two separate apartments. He did not fail to note the somber expression on her face, braced and accepting. She knew, too: the time to sort the tangle of Neferure had come at last.
They walked without word to the confinement chamber, a small, isolated affair set in a wing of the palace mostly filled with the locked doors of storage rooms and disused servants’ quarters. Thutmose had been inside a time or two, hoping to pry some explanation from his sister, some remorse, some affection. It was a small room with an even smaller privy and a cold, unadorned bath. A narrow, hard bed stood against one wall, and opposite, a small table with a single stool where Neferure took her meals. The remainder of that wall was dominated by the platform of her Hathor shrine, where seven carved and painted figures stood, each representing one of the Lady’s aspects, each staring at Thutmose with hard black eyes. Above the shrine, the wall and ceiling were dark with the residue of countless offerings of incense and charred meat, for Neferure prayed almost constantly. A single door gave admittance to a very confined and none too cheery garden. Thutmose had ordered the single scraggly tree in the garden cut down, the vines cleared from the stones so that Neferure might have no opportunity for climbing. A guard stood atop the roof above her chamber day and night, watching for any sign that the Great Royal Wife might attempt to scale the slick stone of the garden wall, ready to call for reinforcement should she make any bid for freedom.
But Neferure seemed accepting of her captivity. She made no complaints, only made occasional requests via the one woman who tended to her needs for more incense, and oil for her baths.
Thutmose and Hatshepsut drew up outside Neferure’s door; Thutmose accepted the salute of the guard on duty with a distracted grunt.
“Well,” Hatshepsut said quietly.
“Open the door,” was Thutmose’s command.
He knew something was amiss the moment the door swung wide. It took him a few heartbeats, hesitating on the threshold, to discern why. The smell of incense was stale and old. Neferure had burned no recent offerings to her seven-faced goddess. Clutched by sudden dread, Thutmose rushed into the room, Hatshepsut and her men on his heels. A tray of half-eaten food lay on the neatly made bed. In the doorless bath, the recessed tub, tiled in old, cracked faience, stood overfull, the water puddling on the floor. He pressed on through the doorway and out into the garden. The light stabbed into his head.
“Gods,” Hatshepsut swore. “Where is the girl?”
The garden was a flat expanse of half-dried grass, ringed by weedy flower beds. There was not so much as a bush where Neferure might conceal herself. Thutmose raised his eyes to the roof, caught the salute of the guard on duty there, turned away with a growl.
“She’s nowhere – gone!”
“How…?”
Thutmose flashed a sharp eye toward Nehesi; the man at once apprehended the guard on the door, and called down the man on the roof. Both men groveled at the feet of the Pharaohs, clearly as shocked by the disappearance of the Great Royal Wife as the kings. After careful questioning, Thutmose had no choice but to let the men go, dismissing them from service.
Thutmose at last turned to Hatshepsut, his palms up in a show of weak desperation, a gesture he hated and cursed within his heart even as he made it.
“She’ll go straight for Iunet,” Hatshepsut said. “For the Temple of Hathor.”
“Right.”
“Nehesi, summon your best men – the men you trust the most. And Kynebu, go – use my seal to secure the fastest boats available; I don’t care who owns them; they are mine now. Get to Iunet with all haste. She will be there.”
The men sprinted from Neferure’s chamber to do Hatshepsut’s bidding, and Thutmose turned away from her eyes. In the small room there was nowhere to rest his own gaze but on his wife’s shrine. The bronze offering bowl was greasy and black with char on the inner surface, but its outer side was smooth and clean, well-worn from Neferure’s near-constant handling. It surface reflected his own image back at him, bent, distorted by the curve of the bowl, a blur that could hardly be said to resemble a man. Around the reflection, the seven Hathors stood tall and perfectly formed, a pretty mockery of his weakness.
**
The Iteru overspilled its banks, yielding to the endless cycle of time, filling the fields with muddy water and the life-giving silt that would blacken the earth anew when the river receded. There was no hesitation to the flood, not so much as a day’s delay: nothing to indicate that the gods were displeased. The reassurance of the flood, its familiar wet odor hanging heavy on the air, should have bolstered Hatshepsut’s kas. But weeks had passed without word of Neferure. There was no hint of her whereabouts. Messengers from Iunet and further afield streamed constantly into the palace, as Hatshepsut had commanded, but all of them carried the same news. The Great Royal Wife had not been found.
Other messengers, though, did bring novel word. It was word she would rather not have heard. At the remote borders of the northeastern reach of the kingdom, the Heqa-Khasewet were raiding, sweeping down upon Egyptian outposts and villages, burning and pillaging, making captives of children, raping.
The number of Heqa-Khasewet offenses increased with each breathless messenger who fell on his knees before the throne. It was a clear bid for war.
“They must be stopped,” she said wearily when she was alone with Kynebu and Nehesi, trying to concentrate on her supper. But Hatshepsut knew she had no stomach left for battle. She was not the youth she once was, and as time had diminished the strength of her body, her worry over Neferure diminished what little taste she may have mustered for bloodshed.
“May I suggest, Majesty,” Kynebu said carefully, “that you send the young Pharaoh to deal with the Heqa-Khasewet? Menkheperre is spoiling for action. He is as troubled as you are, I think, over the loss of the Great Royal Wife. Perhaps even more so. A young man sunk so deep in his troubles often finds relief on the battlefield.”
And so Hatshepsut summoned Thutmose to her chambers that very night to put the proposition to him directly. For whatever Kynebu evidently thought, Hatshepsut no longer held the absolute authority of months gone by. She no longer could send Thutmose anywhere the king did not wish to go.
Thutmose stood in her doorway, his broad shoulders nearly filling it. He had grown so heavily muscled that she could no longer recall the image of him as a fat, giggling baby, could barely feel the weight of him sitting on her knee as a little boy, still naked and wearing his side-lock. He watched her, wordless, casually attentive for her leave to enter her private rooms, her invitation to sit and drink her wine. She allowed him to stand a moment longer, feeling protective of this territory, the senior king’s apartments, the only place where her rule was still absolute.
Thutmose cracked the knuckles of one hand. He seemed content to wait forever, if she should decide to make it so. He was still a youth, brimming with strength and rage. She was a woman falling ever faster toward the middle of her life, and after that….
She jerked her head, her braids swinging across her shoulders, admitting him. Thutmose stepped inside and nodded a dry greeting.
“You have heard of the raids in the northeast,” she said.
“Ah, of course.”
“We have already proven, you and I, that we can keep this country sailing straight on its keel with one of us on the throne and the other away.”
Thutmose, lounging against the backrest of Hatshepsut’s couch, sat suddenly forward, his eyes keen. Kynebu had the right of it.
“If you think it wise,” she said carefully, loathing the deference that prudence forced into her voice, “if you agree, I suggest that you lead the army against the Heqa-Khasewet, while I remain here, overseeing the court.”
The air of resentment dissipated from him. He nearly smiled, and his eyes flashed with eagerness. “It is a good plan,” he said, his voice low, deep. It had never been high and childlike, surely – she had never heard him call to her across the garden, Mawat, I’ve made a palace out of mud, come and see!
“Good,” she said, and her throat constricted unexpectedly on the word. She opened her mouth to say more, then closed it. There was nothing more to say.
Thutmose gazed down at the floor a moment, a furrow appearing between his dark brows. “Neferure...”
“Will be found. I will keep up the search. She is out there somewhere, and I will bring her back.”
“I only meant,” Thutmose said, stammering a little, suddenly uncertain. The unexpected waver in his manly façade clutched at Hatshepsut’s kas, piqued her as a leopard is made keen by the scent of blood. She watched him with pursed lips and said nothing, waiting.
“I only meant, what of the marriage – our marriage? My marriage to Neferure?”
That damned marriage. Had she been a leopard, or the seshep her soldiers had once thought her to be, Hatshepsut would have flexed her claws. The boy had undone her work – he and Ahmose together – removed her heir, loosened Hatshepsut’s grip on her own throne. Thutmose saw the stark anger on her face. He glowered, and the return of his petulance only heated her rage all the more.
“Your marriage was no marriage at all,” she spat, her weeks of resentment over the issue boiling out of her carefully tended pot all at once, before she could think to stir the heat away.
“It was. It is – we said the words before the Priests of Amun.”
“She was my heir first – part of my plans. You had no right to undo what I did, and well do you know it.”
Her arrow struck true. Thutmose blanched; she drove her point home.
“Now you have endangered us all, Thutmose, and left me to clean up the mess you made. What a child you can be, for all your man’s strength.”
With careful dignity, his emotions under cold control, Thutmose stood, smoothed the folds of his kilt. “It is not I who have endangered our house. It is not I who conceived a child in sin, and set her in the temple as God’s Wife to offend Amun – even set her on the throne as heir.”
Hatshepsut did not reply, but stared at him darkly until he turned away with the smallest smile of triumph.
“Get out of my sight, boy,” Hatshepsut said, her words as low as a leopard’s call. “You have a war to win. Do not come back to Waset without victory.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Senenmut stood on the lower terrace of Djeser-Djeseru in the blue shadow of a seshep. He watched a white sail furl as the king’s ship rounded the bend of the canal. The eye of Horus painted on the sail crumpled, sagged, fell toward the deck. Dozens of oars ran out from the red hull, their caps flashing with electrum in the afternoon sunlight, and the great barque backed against its own momentum, slowing, turning, pointing its nose toward the quay beside the temple road. Along that road the myrrh trees they had fetched from Punt were thriving. They stretched away beneath Senenmut’s vantage, an orderly row, tidy, well maintained, even and neat as nothing else in this life was. The ship drew nearer, playing the shadow of its bulk across the line of trees. Senenmut watched the leaves dancing, darkening as the king’s barque passed, brightening again in the steady sun. Then he turned and walked from the terrace, deep into the heart of the temple he had made for her, so he would not be seen by any of his lady’s servants.
Inside, he dropped his bag of scrolls and tools – the disguise he wore, his excuse for coming to this place. He waited in the appointed location, a private sanctuary not far from the main door. He struck oil alight in a small brazier. The walls came to life around him. They were scenes of Hatshepsut in worship, carrying a shrine before Amun and his holy family, the mother, the father, the child. His lady wore a placid smile, a look of contentment Senenmut had not seen on her face for months – not since Punt – before Punt, in truth. She had been troubled by her own power for many years. The poor girl. He recalled her as she had been, flushed, sure of herself, grinning her gap-toothed grin, a woman barely more than a child in her garden, bright beads around her neck. Where had that Hatshepsut gone? And had this Hatshepsut – the one of the carvings, striding bold and unafraid – ever been? Senenmut was sure she had. She must have been.
Behind the image of Hatshepsut making her offering, the straight, perfectly proper figure of Neferure stood, stretching forth her hands in a display of worship that was all too familiar. Senenmut ached for his child. He knew – Kynebu had told him – that there had been no word of her whereabouts.
The distant sound of shouts reached him through the temple door, an airy drift of voices rising, falling away, no louder than a gnat’s hum. The sailors were casting on their lines. His lady would be here soon.
They had made it their habit to meet at Djeser-Djeseru as often as court would allow. Senenmut stayed well away from Waset, as Hatshepsut had ordered him, keeping to the fine estate he had not seen in years. But Djeser-Djeseru was no part of Waset, and Senenmut had responded eagerly, with pounding heart and singing ka, to the summons Kynebu brought him the night of the Feast of the Tail. He had risked much by returning for her Sed festival. But he could not countenance missing it. It had been worth the danger to see her renewed, dancing with the black bull, goading it, running beside it like the dream of
a god, strong, lean, her body brown as the earth, glistening and golden. It had been worth the risk, to watch her lap the four pillars, sweating, her face rigid with concentration, the crowd cheering her – cheering his lady, his king, the sister of his heart. And when their eyes had met in the flight of her passing, Senenmut’s blood had burned as hot as it ever had before when he had held her, feeling the urgency of her movements, tasting the sweat of her skin.
Each time they met at Djeser-Djeseru it was the same: the declaration of their passion, each tripping over the words of the other, the urgency of their kisses, Hatshepsut’s tears at the necessity of separation, Senenmut’s pain at parting.
Now he heard the familiar tread of her sandals on the stone ramp, a soft scuff, a whisper like an indrawn breath. His arms tingled with the desire to hold her. But his heart tightened with the pain of Neferure’s loss, and he could not go to his lady eagerly and sweep her up in his arms. He waited for her to come to him instead.
“Senenmut,” she said when she found him, her voice a sad melody.
“Great Lady.”
They kissed. The feel of her lips was so familiar. It was a thing he had always felt – a thing his ka had felt before his body was even made.
“You are so quiet,” she said. “So melancholy.”
“It’s Neferure. I have heard – there is still no word of her.”
“I’m sorry.” She took his hand in both of her own, squeezed him gently. “I worry for her, too.”
“Do you?” he whispered.
Outside the temple a flock of geese passed overhead, drawn to the bright water of the canal. Their wings beat the air like horses’ hooves in the sand. Senenmut recalled how Hatshepsut had climbed into her chariot, there beside the canal that cut the valley below them, lifted the myrrh branch above her head and declared victory. He remembered the scent of the sap on her palm. Is this what their victory came to? Senenmut banished, their only child disappeared, Hatshepsut a pale, frightened shadow of the king she had been?
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