Sovereign of Stars

by Lavender Ironside

  But he did not live. Nor did Iset, lolling on her bed, sparkling in chains and cuffs of silver, more beautiful than any woman had ever been. Nor did Ahmose, leaning over Hatshepsut in her bed, scowling at the wound across her groin. Neferure did not live. Neferure, still wet with her birth water, held close in Senenmut’s arms. Her brother Thutmose, riding with her in the Feast of Opet. Her father, holding her upon the rail of a ship while the pyramids slid by, dark in a red, red sky.

  Senenmut did not live. Senenmut, holding her up against the wall of the sanctuary as he entered her, his face earnest and guilty with passion. Holding the black braid in his palm in the darkness of a starlit garden. We catch falcons.

  Hathor had won – had exacted a payment from Hatshepsut too weighty to bear. Hathor had punished her for her pride, her singular focus on the throne. And Amun – Amun had spurned her, leaving her to grope in doubt.

  Why, Father? she demanded of Amun, one last flicker of pride giving her strength to ask, a dying ember in her heart. She stared about her, searching for an answer, stared out into the terrace where the sunlight was impossibly bright. When she closed her eyes tight, crumpling under the blow of Amun’s silence, the terrace light echoed against her lids as green as resurrection fire.

  Her ladies drew close about her, bending to offer their comfort, their voices, their hands.

  She shrank against the temple wall, clinging to it, clawing it, knowing it was the only afterlife she would have. For her kas would be damned when she went to the Field of Reeds. Damned for her pride, and damned for her love.

  And so Hatshepsut pressed herself against the stone, until her skin burned with its rough grit, until it scraped her raw and she bled. She pressed, seeking in vain to push herself into the blocks themselves, where she might find Senenmut dwelling, moving like water in the tracks of his carvings, waiting in the stone of his creation.

  Truly my heart turns this way and that, when I consider what the rekhet will think and say - people who will see my monument years later, who will speak of what I have made. … As long as my father Amun refreshes me with the breath of life, it must be said that I have worn the white crown, and I shine in the red crown. I have ruled the Two Lands like Horus. I am strong like the son of Nut. Re sets in the boat of night and rises in the boat of morning. As long as the sky is there and Re’s work is steady, I shall be forever like the star that does not end. I shall reign in the afterlife, bright as Aten.

  -Inscription from the obelisk at Ipet-Isut by Hatshepsut, fifth king of the Eighteenth Dynasty

  THE END

  Of

  SOVEREIGN OF STARS

  The She-King: Book Three

  THE BULL OF MIN

  The She-King: Book Four

  The final volume of this series

  Coming in the winter of 2014

  If you enjoyed this book, please take a moment to write a review on the site where you purchased it.

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  Please read on for historical notes and more commentary from L. M. Ironside.

  MORE BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR

  The She-King Series:

  The Sekhmet Bed: Book One

  The Crook and Flail: Book Two

  The Bull of Min: Book Four (winter of 2014)

  Tidewater: A Novel of Pocahontas and the Jamestown Colony (spring of 2014)

  Revelator: A Novel of Joseph Smith (fall of 2014)

  Writing as Libbie Hawker:

  Baptism for the Dead

  A Light in the Merced River (short story)

  Schrodinger’s Kitty: A Short and Uncertain Story

  Finnegan’s Pig: Or, How Saskatoon Got Bacon for Seven Years (short story)

  Sugar House (2014)

  Tin Moan (2015)

  HISTORICAL NOTES

  I write this note with more than a little trepidation.

  For both The Sekhmet Bed and The Crook and Flail, I’ve received lovely feedback from readers praising my accurate working of real history into these fictional portrayals of the Thutmoside Dynasty. Well, as I worked on Sovereign of Stars, let us just say that “my heart turned this way and that” nearly as much as good old Hatshepsut’s. I’m afraid I played much faster and looser with history in this book than I am used to doing, and I feel I must make amends for it here by setting the record straight.

  I confess to freely reorganizing events in Hatshepsut’s reign to suit the particulars of my story. The golden-crowned obelisks were not commissioned until the fifteenth year of Hatshepsut’s kingship, and finished in the sixteenth. This is clearly indicated on the obelisks themselves, so I plead no contest to messing with reality here. I moved the event forward in Hatshepsut’s reign to about the seventh year, simply because it was just the thing I needed to shape the characters’ development, to set them up for the denouement of the novel. As Hatshepsut’s approximately twenty-two years on the Horus Throne were characterized by a wealth of monuments, temples, and restoration projects on a scale unseen in the reigns of most other Pharaohs before and after, I figured she was likely to have built something interesting and grand in her seventh year. It just wasn’t anything fancy enough to replace the less impressive pylon gates of her half-brother Thutmose II.

  (If you are wondering, by the way, whether it gives an author of historical fiction a certain thrill to rejigger actual events from world history in order to suit her own creation, well, I plead no contest on that count, too.)

  I also changed the date and circumstances of the expedition to Punt, moving it forward in time by about four years. It actually occurred around her tenth year on the throne, and while it was considered a momentous enough achievement to become one of the featured stories depicted on the walls of Djeser-Djeseru, Hatshepsut almost certainly did not visit Punt herself. She sent her representatives, Nehesi, Ineni, and Senenmut. However, I wanted my fictional Hatshepsut to experience Punt for herself, and particularly to meet the strange and mysterious Queen Ati, and so I contrived an excuse to send her there. I think the real Hatshepsut would have wished to go, to see the fabled God’s Land for herself. Why not?

  The exact location of Punt remains a total mystery, but that it was a real place, visited now and then by the ancient Egyptians for purposes of trade, is not in dispute. In fact, the expedition scene in Hatshepsut’s temple is one of the key pieces of evidence for Punt’s factuality. The carvings of the exotic fish in the water below her expedition’s boats are so specific and so accurate that scientists have been able to identify them down to the species name – and have used this information to place Punt somewhere along the Red Sea, or at least accessible via the Red Sea. That is about all that’s known of its location, though, and less is known of its culture. Most of what we do know – the type of housing, the fashions, the trade goods – comes again from Hatshepsut’s temple.

  And let us discuss for a moment poor Neferure. It’s here I feel I have the most special pleading to do, waving my artistic license frantically in the air.

  Hatshepsut’s daughter – her only child, depending on which Egyptologist you ask – is another mystery of the 18th Dynasty. Not much is known about her roles or her fate. She appeared very prominently in inscriptions and art throughout Hatshepsut’s reign, up until approximately year 17. At that point, she disappeared entirely from the record. It was never clear whether she was married to Thutmose III or not, and there is much speculation amongst professional and armchair Egyptologists whether she was Hatshepsut’s heir, and whether Hatshepsut intended the throne to pass from herself down a new line of female Pharaohs. We will never know the truth of it. The only clear certainty about Neferure’s place in the historical record is that she served as God’s Wife of Amun, that, like all God’s Wives, she played a prominent role in religious ceremony, and that she disappeared when she was still very young – presumably dying in her late teens, though ev
en that is uncertain, as her tomb has never been found, nor has any inscription that seems to reference either her death or her continued life amongst Hatshepsut’s or Thutmose III’s court. She simply vanishes without further mention, though later in Thutmose III’s reign some monuments show where Neferure’s name has been carved over with the name of one of his confirmed wives, Satiah.

  It has been popular in Egyptian fiction to portray Hatshepsut as the usurper of Thutmose III’s rightful throne, and Thutmose III as a wronged man biding his time until he could rescue his kingdom from the clutches of his wicked stepmother. It’s a dramatic tale, but has been known not to be the truth for a long time. Hatshepsut and Thutmose III ruled jointly for about twenty-two years, until Hatshepsut’s death from natural causes. The pair evidently worked well together and were mutually content to share power. Otherwise, one would have killed the other early on and had done with it. Rather than going with the popular depiction of Hatsheput as usurper and Thutmose as vengeful victim, I did my best to tell a story that was nearer to historical fact – in this respect, if in no other. I think the reality of the two Pharaohs’ peaceful co-rule provides a much richer opportunity for drama and poignancy than the familiar myth of the quintessential wicked stepmother.

  I hope you agree.

  -L. M. Ironside

  Seattle, WA, 2013

  NOTES ON THE LANGUAGE USED

  This novel is set in historical Egypt, about 1500 years before the Common Era and roughly 1200 years before Alexander the Great conquered the Nile. With the dawning of the Greek period, a shift in the old Egyptian language began. Proper nouns (and, we can assume, other parts of the language) took on a decidedly Greek bent, which today most historians use when referring to ancient Egyptians and their world.

  This presents a bit of a tangle for a historical novelist like myself. Culturally, we are familiar with Greek-influenced names like Thebes, Rameses, and Isis. In fact, even the name Egypt is not Egyptian; it has a long chain of derivations through Greek, Latin, and French. However, the historic people in my novel would have scratched their heads over such foreign words for their various places, people, and gods. And linguistically, the modern English-speaking reader will probably have a difficult time wrapping her head and tongue around such tricky names as Djhtms – an authentic and very common man's name for the time and place where Sovereign of Stars is set (rather the equivalent of a Mike or Tom or Jim).

  On the balance, cultural authenticity is important to me, and so I've reverted to ancient Egyptian versions of various proper nouns and other words in the majority of cases. A glossary of ancient Egyptian words used in this book, and their more familiar Greco-English translations, follows.

  In some cases, to avoid headaches and to preserve (I hope) the flow of the narrative, I have kept modernized versions of certain words in spite of their inauthentic nature. Notably, I use Egypt rather than the authentic Kmet. It is a word that instantly evokes the reader's own romantic perceptions of the land and time, whatever those may be, and its presence in the story can only aid my own attempts at world-building. I have opted for the fairly Greeky, English-friendly name Thutmose in place of Djhtms, which is simply a tongue-twister; and the word Pharaoh, which is French in origin (the French have always been enthusiastic Egyptologists) rather than the Egyptian pra'a, simply because Pharaoh is such a familiar word in the mind of a contemporary reader. Wherever possible, I have used “Pharaoh” sparingly, only to avoid repetitiveness, and have instead opted for the simple translation of “king.” I've also decided, after much flip-flopping, to use the familiar Greek name Horus for the falcon-headed god, rather than the authentic name Horu. The two are close, but in every case reading Horu in my sentences interrupted the flow and tripped me up. Horus flies more smoothly on his falcon wings; ditto for Hathor, who should properly be called Hawet-Hor, but seems to prefer her modernized name.

  As always, I hope the reader appreciates these concessions to historical accuracy and to comfort.

  GLOSSARY

  ankh – the breath of life; the animating spirit that makes humans live

  Ankh-Tawy – Memphis

  Anupu – Anubis

  deby – hippopotamus

  Djeser-Djeseru – “Holiest of Holies,” the name of Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple, known today as Dier-el Bahri.

  Hapi-Ankh – Apis, the bull god worshiped in Ankh-Tawy (Memphis).

  Heqa-Khasewet – Hyksos

  Ipet-Isut – “Holy House”; the temple complex at Karnak

  Iset – Isis

  Iteru – Nile

  Iunet – Dendera

  ka – not quite in line with the Western concept of a “soul” or “spirit,” a ka was an individual's vital essence, that which made him or her live.

  Kush – Nubia

  maat – A concept difficult for modern Westerners to accurately define: something like righteousness, something like divine order, something like justice. It is to a sense of “God is in His Heaven and all is right with the world” as the native Hawai'ian word aloha is to an overall feeling of affection, pleasure, well-being, and joyful anticipation. It is also the name of the goddess of the concept – the goddess of “what is right.”

  mawat – mother; also used to refer to mother-figures such as nurses

  Medjay – An Egyptian citizen of Nubian descent

  rekhet – people of the common class; peasants

  sepat – nome, or district

  seshep – sphinx

  sesheshet – sistrum; ceremonial rattle

  tjati – vizier; governor of a sepat or district

  Waser – Osiris, god of the afterlife, the underworld, and the dead. Also used as a prefix when referring to a deceased king.

  Waset – Thebes

  A MESSAGE FOR THE READER

  2013 was an amazing, crazy, fantastical year for me. In response to reader enthusiasm for The Sekhmet Bed – enthusiasm I honestly never expected to find for a self-published novel – I wrote and published The Crook and Flail and watched, still rather stunned and astonished, while my books took off. Paul and I tied the knot in a beautiful ceremony in Arches National Park – a trip made possible by sales of my books. And I wrote and published the book you have just finished reading, Sovereign of Stars, and will finish The Bull of Min by the end of the year – or will come close to finishing it, anyway. I’ve also gathered reams of notes and made outlines for two future historical novels: Tidewater, which will be about Pocahontas, and Revelator, a character study of the founder of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith, to be told from the points of view of several people who were close to him, and whose opinions of him varied.

  To say I am excited about everything I’ve accomplished in 2013, and excited about 2014 and the years to come, would be a ridiculous understatement. I’m thrilled, amazed, shocked, giddy, wild with delight, and, to use my late grandpa’s favorite term, tickled. And I am incredibly, indescribably grateful to the readers who have made it possible – who have made my dream come true.

  I have wanted to do nothing but write full-time since I was eight years old. It’s been my only concrete goal and the only way I’ve envisioned my future for nearly all my life. As I grew up and tried the publishing waters, I learned how infuriating and depressing the process is, going through a corporate publisher – which, until just a couple of years ago, was the ONLY way to achieve publication. It’s been disheartening, to realize that the thing I’ve wanted most since childhood relied on – there is no other word for it – exploitation by some company or other.

  The explosion of ebooks and the independent literature movement has been nothing short of miraculous to many writers just like me, who formerly stared bleakly at two terrible options: give up on the lifelong dream forever, or allow yourself to be taken advantage of, underpaid, and mistreated by contracts.

  Oh, Reader, if only I could tell you how liberated and happy I feel, how hopeful and confident, how lucky I am to be a writer living and working right now, when finally, after decades of
being sat on, the writers – the ones who actually create the stories and characters you love – have power and control. So many incredible and wonderful things have happened in 2013 to turn the tide of the industry in the favor of writers, and the changes were badly needed.

  But it’s not only writers who get to enjoy the benefits of a thriving and powerful indie literature community. Readers may, in fact, benefit the most. I won’t bore you with details; suffice it to say that indie authors who have earned the support of readers are able to offer their readers more of what they want, and have an increasingly harder time finding through any mainstream publisher: unique content, innovation, exploration, and, in the case of historical fiction especially, variety of setting and subject, and authenticity of historical voice.

  By supporting independent authors like me, you are making a very real and lasting contribution to the publishing industry as a whole. You are voting with your dollars and with your reviews, deciding which books and authors succeed and exactly how far their success will go. You now have as much control and power over the world of books as authors do, and I firmly believe that this is exactly the way it ought to be. Books are a dialog between writer and reader. A book cannot exist without a reader’s imagination to make it live, any more than it can exist without a writer to create it. Neither you nor I any longer face a future where we either take what the big guys offer us or stop dreaming. We’re in this together, and I hope you’re as tickled by that fact as I am.