Pillar of Fire

by Judith Tarr

  “You’re not a god,” the princess said, “or a god’s child. You don’t understand.”

  “I don’t want to.” Nofret worked in ointment with her fingers, hard enough that the princess flinched. Nofret lightened her touch but not the force of her voice. “I know kings are always desperate to have sons. They need them, after all. But there’s no need for this king to commit an abomination. He has a whole harem full of princesses from anywhere he pleases. He can take one every night, and pray as hard as his god could ever want, and get himself a whole army of sons.”

  “No,” said Ankhesenpaaten. “They are common blood. The heir must be the god’s own.”

  “Gods bed with mortals. Often. Every day. They even have children by them. Amon himself and Queen Nefertari—”

  “He was her father,” said Ankhesenpaaten, “and her lover.”

  “I thought he was a false god,” Nofret said with vicious precision, “and all his teachings were lies.”

  “They are,” said Ankhesenpaaten.

  “And yet the throne-right comes from him, through the queen whose sire and lover he was. If he existed.”

  “It’s a mystery,” said Ankhesenpaaten. “It’s for gods to understand.”

  Nofret could not tell if she was piercing the armor at all. It was not canny that a child so young should be so completely able to mask herself—so evidently, uncompromisingly convinced that her father was a god, and therefore incontestable.

  The princesses slept, each in her bed, with her maid snoring at her feet. All the maids but Nofret, who lay in the nightlamp’s light, remembering how the queen had stared into the dark. The air was warm as it always was in Egypt, but Nofret was cold. Cold inside, and to the bone.

  Five

  The king was the king, and could do as he pleased. Even to take his daughter to wife, to wed her with ceremony before the altar of the Aten, and bed her as a husband must if he wishes to get sons. She did not supplant the queen nor rule as queen. She was the god’s servant, the vessel of his will.

  She was a woman now completely. Her bed was taken out of the princesses’ chamber and set in a room of the harem near Queen Nefertiti’s. Tama went with her, keeping close by her side.

  The evenings were hardly empty of music: they could all sing, some even well, and the princesses could play on harp and tambour and sistrum. But Tama’s rich voice, her touch on the harp that had anchored them, was gone.

  Nofret went looking for her one afternoon while the princesses slept in the day’s heat. The princesses’ chambers—sleeping room and robing room and chapel and bath—were on one side of a garden court, the queens’ rooms on the other. The garden was empty of either gardeners or basking ladies. Everyone drowsed who could, even servants if their masters would allow.

  So might Nofret if she were minded. But she wanted to visit Tama.

  She had been in the queens’ house before, waiting on her lady or running errands for her. She knew her way about. The scents of perfume were richer here than in the princesses’ chambers. The rooms were the province of queens, or of the king’s most royal or most favored ladies.

  Queen Nefertiti had the largest suite, of course, and the richest. Princess Meritaten’s was nearly as large. She had many more servants than Tama now, maids and guards and ladies in waiting. Her bed was in a room of its own, and she had her own morning room and her own reception hall, even her own throne on a low dais.

  Nofret had known how many the rooms would be, and how large: she had seen the queen’s, after all. But she had not thought to understand that, like the queen, the princess would be surrounded by servants, walled in them. Lovely Meritaten who had claimed the best corner of the princesses’ sleeping room was now a queen, and a lofty one at that.

  She was lying on a couch in the room that was coolest at this time of day, listening while Tama played on the harp. She looked as Nofret remembered, as all the princesses did, delicate bones and lovely pointed face and long eyes painted longer with kohl. There was no burden of guilt on her, no shadow of misery that Nofret could see. If anything she looked exalted, as the bride of a god should look.

  Nofret was going to wait till Tama was done, then lure her away. She meant to do it. She poised to wait, to listen to the song as the rest of the maids and attendants were doing.

  She found herself turning and walking, striding away, faster and faster, till she was running.

  People called out. She had a vague memory of a guard’s spear dropped to bar her way. She leaped over it and ran blindly on.

  Time was when she could have run for half the day and still had strength to dance with the warriors at evening. But she had become a tamed creature, an ornament for a palace. Pain stabbed her side before she was well out of the queens’ house. She slowed to a walk, but a swift one, breathing as runners learned to do, deep and consciously slow.

  She should go back to her own princess. She kept walking, straight out of the palace and into the city and out past the walls of the city proper, toward the cliffs and the tombs.

  The desert was bleak, but it was clean. There were no kings claiming godhood here, no princesses submitting to the will of the god. Only sand, stone, things that grew sparse and tough and had thorns to stab the awkward or the unwary. The sun beat down on it, slanting long across the roofs and walls of the city. Beyond the first glance, she did not look back.

  She was thirsty. Her feet hurt. She kept walking, because if she stopped she would fall.

  The workmen’s village had never seemed so far before, or so well hidden in the broken land. Just as she wondered if she had mistaken the way, she saw it in front of her, bare of green thing or rich thing, bleak and barren and yet somehow blessed—maybe because it was not in Akhetaten, nor cared aught for the city.

  As she stood wavering in the road, she heard a clatter of hooves. They were too small, too quick for a horse, much too quick for an ox. Her wits were so scattered that she did not even guess what came till it hurtled toward her, horns lowered, running as blindly as she had, but maybe with better heart.

  Just before it was too late, she stumbled out of its way. Something lashed her leg. She struck at it, caught hold of what felt like—was—a rope, wheeled and fell sprawling. Idiot that she was, she kept her grip on the rope. The he-goat lunged against it. Nofret clung for grim obstinacy, her light weight against the goat’s wicked strength.

  Arms locked about her middle. A second, slightly less inconsiderable weight added itself to hers. It was light but wiry strong, cursing in a boy’s voice, consigning the goat and all its ancestors and all its descendants to the pits of the netherworld.

  Between the two of them they hauled the goat in hand over hand, the goat snorting and tossing its horns but yielding to the rope about its neck. The boy—Johanan, Nofret remembered, that was his name—caught it as it came in reach, dodging a last, rebellious slash of horns. Once it was caught and closely held, the goat followed docilely enough, as if its whole pleasure had been in the chase, and now it was ready to rest.

  Nofret walked with them. Her sides and buttocks stung where the goat had dragged her. The rope had burned her palms. She was, for all of that, almost lighthearted.

  “You should build his wall higher,” she said.

  “He’d climb it,” Johanan muttered. He was still breathless with running. There was dust on his striped coat, and sand in his wild curly hair.

  “Kill him and eat him for dinner!” a woman called from a doorway.

  “I’d break my teeth on him!” Johanan shot back. Others’ advice was less practical and more fanciful. Johanan’s glower broke into laughter. The goat trotted beside him, meek as if it had never defied a human soul. But its eyes were as wicked as they had ever been.

  Everyone knew the goat, as one might expect. Its escapes were a game of sorts. There was more laughter than cursing along its path, people emerging into safety, dogs creeping out from hiding to snap boldly at the conquered enemy. The goat’s horns caught one that ventured too close, and s
ent it yelping back into its lair.

  “They aren’t angry at all,” Nofret said, surprised.

  “What, the dogs?” Johanan flashed a grin at her glare. “No more they aren’t. This blasted goat will be sacrificed yet. I’ll wear its skin for a coat.”

  “Why haven’t you already?”

  Johanan shrugged. “We haven’t. That’s all.”

  Nofret thought of pressing him, but it was easy enough to see what the answer was. One did not slaughter family, even on the altar of one’s god.

  As they approached his house, she began to hang back. He spared a hand from leading the goat to seize her wrist and pull her along with him. She tried to dig in her heels, to protest. He took no notice. “You’re bleeding,” he said.

  “Scratches,” said Nofret. “I really should—”

  “No,” said Johanan.

  It took both of them to get the goat through the gate in the wall and secure him on his tether. The rope was much knotted and mended, Nofret noticed. “You could use a chain,” she said.

  “We could,” said Johanan. Now that the goat was tied again, with a heap of fodder in front of it and its ladies watching in mild-eyed interest, he took Nofret’s hand and dragged her, will she, nill she, into the house.

  oOo

  It was tiny after the palace, large as houses went in this village. The front of it was goat-pen and storehouse. The back, through a heavy wall of curtains, was a dwelling place for human people.

  They had made it like a tent in the desert, the floor deep-piled and the walls hung thick with rugs, and rolls of rugs to sit on or recline against, and a low table here and there. A chest against a wall must hold treasure: it was made of wood, rare and precious in the desert, carved with a procession of gazelles and ibexes and bound with bronze. A bronze ewer stood on its lid, and bronze cups, and a basin.

  At first Nofret thought the room was empty. It was dim, no lamp lit, the only light slanting wan through a narrow window. Under the window, what at first seemed another, larger roll of carpets raised a veiled head. It was the old woman whom Nofret had seen before, old but strong, with eyes as dark and clear as a girl’s.

  Johanan bent his knee in front of her as if she had been a queen. “Grandmother,” he said. “We brought the goat back.”

  The old woman nodded. “This too,” she said in a soft sweet voice, in pure and unaccented Egyptian, “you bring back. Is it ours? Will you keep it?”

  Johanan laughed and shook his head. “This calls herself Nofret, but her true name is something else. She belongs to one of the princesses.”

  “The queen,” said the old woman.

  “No, Grandmother,” Johanan said. “A princess. The one with the name that goes on and on.”

  “Ankhesenpaaten,” said Nofret, tired of being spoken of as if she were not there. “The third princess. The one who is—still—”

  “She will be,” the old woman said. “He’s cursed them, you know: the king. He’s done the thing that no right-minded man does, not even in Egypt. There will be payment for that.”

  Nofret shuddered so hard that she nearly fell. Johanan propped her up.

  “Grandmother,” he said, not quite in reproof. “She’s taken wounds of honor in capturing the goat. She needs to be tended.”

  “Bathed, too,” the old woman said. “The water is hot, the basin filled. See that she uses it first.”

  “Of course, Grandmother,” said Johanan.

  There was a servant, Nofret discovered, or a woman who carried herself sufficiently like one, mute and meek. She must have brought the water that filled the great basin set in the back of the house, and heated it over the kitchen fire and poured it in. None of which needed the services of an oracle, either: anyone with wits would have expected that Johanan had come back needing a bath.

  Nofret had it first, by the old woman’s order. She had never had a bath first before, or had clean water to herself. It was wonderful, though it stung fiercely in her cuts and scratches—more of those than she had known, and more painful. She was actually bleeding in a place or two.

  The servant had light hands, and a salve that cooled the scratches. The worst of them she bound up in soft cloths, with Nofret twisting to peer, and getting in the way. She brought out a robe, too, and insisted that Nofret put it on.

  Nofret might not have obliged, but something about the old woman made her want to be covered. Armor, she thought, and a shield: a robe of plain white linen, embroidered along the hem.

  These people were not as poor as she might have expected. They had vessels of bronze, good linen and finely dyed wool. The beer in the jar was as good as the palace had. The bread was fresh and well baked.

  Nofret was given both, and in courtesy she had to accept them. It was not difficult. She was hungry and thirsty. With the bread was cheese made from goats’ milk, and a bit of honeycomb.

  The grandmother did not share the feast, but Johanan ate everything that Nofret would let him have, and looked about for more. He was one of those whipcord youths who could eat till a lesser man would burst, and still be hungry.

  While Johanan investigated the bottom of the jar in hopes that there would somehow, by some miracle, be another drop for him to drink, a man came through the curtain from the outer room. He was vastly tall, richly bearded, dressed in a striped coat like Johanan’s but filling his as Johanan barely began to. He was warrior-powerful, and warrior-graceful, too. And yet he could not be anything more noble than a layer of brick or a cutter of stone.

  He regarded Nofret without hostility, if without cordiality, either. She wondered if she should rise and do him reverence. But she had not done it for the grandmother, whose age made her worthy of it; she did not see that she should do it for this man, Johanan’s father or uncle or whatever he was.

  She kept on sitting at the low table, propped against a roll of carpet, comfortable as a cat and nearly as insouciant.

  “Father,” said Johanan, proving her first surmise correct, “this is Nofret. Nofret, this is my father. His name is Aharon.”

  Nofret could think of nothing better to do than incline her head in greeting. As soon as she had done it, she went hot with shame. She was acting like a queen, as if she had any right to it.

  Aharon did not seem to mind. He smiled, bowed as the desert people did, and said, “Well met, my lady.”

  “I’m not a lady,” Nofret said sharply. “I’m a princess’ maid.”

  There. She was rude. She could not help herself.

  “It’s courtesy,” he said unruffled, “and no more. Will you please to indulge it?”

  She flushed hotter than ever. He had a beautiful voice, rich and deep, and a way with words that would have done justice to a courtier.

  It was much of a piece with the rest of this surprising place. These were the king’s kin, she knew that: the tribe that had come into Egypt with the king’s maternal grandfather. But Nofret had not expected them to speak Egyptian as well as princes ever did, or to show court manners in the middle of the laborers’ village. That would be their pride, to be always princely even in exile, even as little better than slaves.

  Somewhere between the bath and the beer, the sun had gone down. The silent maid lit the lamps and effaced herself, making an island of light in the dusk. Good smells wafted in from the kitchen, savory smells, meat roasting, cakes baking. What Nofret had thought to be a fair feast now showed itself for beginning only, appeasement of hungry stomachs till dinner itself was ready.

  “You eat like princes,” she said when Aharon had gone to bathe.

  Johanan lay back on the carpets, sighing in anticipation of roast kid and honey sweets. “Sometimes we do. This is a festival for us: the return of the goat to the fold.”

  “And the arrival of a guest,” his grandmother said in her gentle voice.

  “But,” said Nofret, “you couldn’t have known—”

  The old woman smiled.

  Nofret shivered. It was sweet, that smile, and kind, and perfectly terrifyi
ng.

  “Grandmother always knows,” Johanan said.

  “She has the eyes that see,” said Aharon, coming damp and fresh from the bath. His beard was curling with wet; with the stone dust washed out of it, it was glossily black, no grey to be seen. He was wearing a handsomer robe than he had before, fine crimson wool with an embroidered belt. It made him look more princely than ever.

  “You are very strange people,” Nofret said.

  “We are our god’s people,” said Aharon. “He has given my mother the gift that is rarest of all, to see all that is to be seen, and to know what it signifies.”

  “A prophet,” said Nofret, fixing her eyes anywhere but on the old woman. “An oracle.”

  “A voice for the god,” Aharon said.

  “By which token,” said the old woman, “I’m no more than wind. There’s no need to be afraid of me. What I see, I never tell, unless I’m given leave.”

  “You won’t see me,” Nofret said with sudden fierceness. “I don’t know your god. I don’t believe in him.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” the old woman said. “He guided you to us. Didn’t you feel him steadying your steps?”

  “I felt nothing but that I must be away from—from my duties.”

  “From your duties,” the old woman said. “Yes.”

  She could see even that: when Nofret shifted course from what she had begun to say, to something that was the truth but not all the truth. Nofret tensed to bolt. But she had run away already, as a coward will, and found herself here. There was nowhere else to run, unless she fled into the desert—and that way was death. She was neither brave enough nor craven enough for that.

  “The king is not loved,” the old woman said.

  Nofret began to wonder what her name was. Whether she had one.

  “My name is Leah,” she said, driving Nofret into silence of mind and body both. She smiled a little sadly. “It was in your face, child. Nothing more arcane than that.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Nofret muttered.

  “No,” said Leah. “The truth can be difficult. As any king knows.”