Pillar of Fire

by Judith Tarr

  Queen Mother Tiye came down the river from Thebes to be with her children in their sorrow. She brought the princes with her, Smenkhkare more beautiful than ever, Tutankhaten now old enough to wait on the god in the temple, and very proud of it, too. The palace was livelier for their presence, the blackness of grief a little lighter, at least in Nofret’s mind.

  Nofret had not noticed till Tiye came, how muddled the palace had become. Nor had she known till it was gone, how light but firm a rein the queen had kept on the servants and on the workings of the king’s household. When Meketaten died, Nefertiti simply, quietly stopped noticing anything or anyone but her daughter who was dead and her daughters who were alive. She did not even, as far as Nofret knew, notice her husband.

  The king was going to Lady Kiya every night, or so it was said among the servants. Some had a wager on whether, with Nefertiti so distracted, Kiya would conceive at last, and give the king a son.

  Tiye’s coming did not remove the Lady Kiya from the king’s bed—Tiye in fact was heard to observe that he was well served to take such fruitful consolation—but it kept the servants too busy to gossip overmuch. Queen Nefertiti had ruled with the soft relentlessness of water. Queen Mother Tiye was iron and stone: hard, unsparing, but fair enough in her judgments.

  Nofret did her best to keep her head down, to do her duties, to escape the queen mother’s notice. She thought she was succeeding, until she came back from a morning of running about the city with Johanan and found her lady being hurried into a gown by one of the younger princesses’ nurses. “You,” said Ankhesenpaaten as soon as Nofret crossed the threshold, “come with me.”

  Nofret was not even given time to make herself presentable. Sweating, street-dusty, still clutching the bit of scarf that she had found and coveted in the market, she trotted in her princess’ wake. She managed as she went to twist the scarf into a fillet and bind it about her brows. It looked rakish, no doubt, and detestably foreign, but her lady did not say anything.

  Tiye had set up court in the queen’s house, in the hall that the queen favored for audiences within the household. She sat small and very erect in Nefertiti’s gilded chair, the one with legs like columns of papyrus, and the back carved and gilded and inlaid with ivory. Nefertiti had needed no footstool although she affected one shaped like a cluster of lilies. Tiye’s delicate sandaled feet just rested on it. She was crowned with golden plumes, but her wig was of a style that Nofret had not seen before: loose curling locks that were not black but a wonderful deep red.

  Nofret realized that the queen mother was not wearing a wig; that the hair was her own, thick and beautiful. She was at ease, then, Nofret thought, in privacy such as queens knew, with attendants crowding about and courtiers clustering at the door.

  Nofret was not unduly comforted. The eyes that examined her and her princess impartially and with minute attention were grey like iron, and like iron they were cold, with a deadly edge. The warmth that glimmered in them as they rested on her granddaughter was a thin and transitory thing, like the sheen of sunset on the river.

  Ankhesenpaaten rose from her knees to sit at the queen mother’s feet. The queen mother rested a hand on her head, stroking the child’s shaved skull, the glossy thickness of the sidelock. The princess sighed and leaned against her grandmother’s knee.

  “Has it been so terrible, then?” Tiye asked her.

  She shook her head. But she said, “It will never be the same again.”

  “That is the way of time and the gods,” Tiye said. “All things change and pass.”

  “But not so soon!” the princess cried. “Not like this!”

  “This of all ways that the gods may choose,” said Tiye. “The gods are cruel, child.”

  “The gods are false. All but the Aten. Father says so.”

  “The Aten is a god,” Tiye said.

  The princess shook her head and buried her face in her grandmother’s knees. Tiye petted her as if she had been a cat. She shivered and clung tighter.

  Nofret, kneeling, sitting on her heels, invisible as a servant should be, kept her eyes down as best she could. But they were always the least servile of her body’s possessions. They kept wanting to look about, to see who was there. Not Prince Smenkhkare; he would be in the king’s house as a young man should. Prince Tutankhaten was there, with a nurse to make sure of it—he looked as if he would have liked to leap into the princess’ lap.

  His nurse let her guard slip; or, Nofret thought nastily, saw a convenient way to escape her duty. Tutankhaten slipped free and flung himself on Nofret.

  She was braced for him, and prepared for his young strength, too. His baby softness was all but gone; he was a limber child, light-boned as his brother’s daughters were, but sturdy and wiry and strong.

  He was as imperious as ever, too. “Take me to visit the horses,” he said.

  Away from his mother’s eye Nofret would have slapped him lightly to get his attention. Here she could only say, “Not now. Hasn’t anybody taught you to be polite when your mother has guests?”

  “You aren’t guests,” he said. “You’re family.”

  “I am not,” said Nofret.

  “You are too,” he said. “When will you take me to see the horses?”

  “Young Reed-in-the-River,” said Tiye with tenderness that she did not spare for her grandchildren, “hush your rattling. You will see the horses when I give you leave.”

  “I want to see them now,” said Tutankhaten.

  The princess raised her head. “I will take you for a ride in my chariot,” she said. “Tomorrow. Just as the sun comes up. Can you be ready that early?”

  “I can be ready all night,” said Tutankhaten. “Why can’t I go now?”

  “Because I’m not going now,” the princess said.

  “But why—”

  “He is now,” said his mother, “wishing to know the why of everything. He has a tutor whose sole duty is to answer his questions. To tell him why. You may,” she said to her son, “go and ask Ptahmose. Now, if it pleases you.”

  “Ptahmose is asleep,” said Tutankhaten. “I want to stay with Nofret. And Lotus Blossom,” he said, with a glance at the princess. “I’ll be quiet. I promise.”

  Nofret bit her lip. How like this race of kings to find a cure for the young child’s siege of whys: to give him a servant who could answer, or feign to, until he wearied of the game. She wondered if the king had had such a servitor. And if he had, had he gained his notions of godhead from some answer meant simply to shut him up?

  If she was not careful she would begin to giggle. And once she started she would not be able to stop.

  She made herself look at Tiye. That strong beautiful face sobered her admirably, and stilled her like a mouse under an owl’s eye.

  When Tiye spoke, it was to her granddaughter, but Nofret wondered if some of it was meant for her. “You have to be strong,” she said. “As terrible as these days are, as little as your mother and father can bear them, someone is needed who can go on, who can think and plan and rule even in grief.”

  “I’m not old enough,” the princess said.

  “That is whining,” said her grandmother. “You are old enough to be angry that your sister is dead, and old enough to be troubled that your mother is taking it so badly.”

  “Mother didn’t want Father to marry Meketaten,” the princess said. “She gave in because it was the god’s will. Now the god has taken Meketaten. Mother won’t forgive him for that.”

  “Nor will you,” said Tiye, “and maybe that is as it should be. But you cannot afford to break, simply because your mother has chosen to.”

  “Meritaten can be strong,” said the princess. “She’s older than I am.”

  “She never had the strength that you have,” Tiye said, “and she has her own fears and her own pain, and the baby to look after. No, child. You can’t evade this duty. No more than I can.”

  “I’ll never be as strong as you,” said the princess.

  Tiye bent towar
d her and lowered her voice. “I tell you a secret, child. I’m not strong, either. But someone has to keep her wits about her, and no one else seems likely to.”

  The princess frowned. Nofret could see her mind coming to itself.

  So, Nofret judged, could Tiye. Tiye wisely did not press her, but let her do her own thinking.

  Tutankhaten began to wriggle in Nofret’s grip. Nofret shook him to make him stop. For a wonder he obeyed.

  At length, slowly, the princess said, “I can’t be strong for me, but I can help you, and be as strong as you need me to be. Unless you want me to forgive the Aten for taking Meketaten.”

  “I would rather you forgave your father for it,” Tiye said.

  “Father only did what the Aten made him do,” said the princess.

  “Yes,” said Tiye, but distantly, as if she believed it no more than Nofret did.

  The princess did not hear, or if she heard, did not heed. She drew herself up and firmed her chin. “Majesty. What would you have me do?”

  Tiye’s approval was a subtle thing: a warming of the eyes, an inclination of the head. “First,” she said, “see that your younger sisters are properly looked after. Then come to me in the hall of audience. It’s time you knew what exactly it is that a queen does.”

  The princess knew long since, of course. She had sat or stood beside her mother’s throne since she was old enough to stand on her own. But this time she would not be allowed to idle about, drowsing or playing with a monkey or a gazelle, while her mother said and did things that she barely took notice of. She would listen and maybe even respond as a queen should, as Tiye clearly meant to teach her.

  Nofret wondered if she knew what that meant. Tiye was instructing her in the art of being a ruling queen—as her mother had never precisely done. Ankhesenpaaten had been the third princess, the one who would come late if at all to queenship. Now she was second, and her elder sister might prove as frail as Meketaten had. Then the princess would have to be queen in truth, and swiftly, however potent her grief.

  oOo

  Often in that year after Meketaten died, Nofret wondered if Tiye had a gift of foresight. She was not a prophet as Leah was, not that Nofret ever saw, but she saw clearly and she saw true—and everything she saw that year was ill.

  Meketaten and the daughter that she had borne were buried after the threescore days and ten of the embalming, laid in the king’s tomb in its remote and desolate valley. The king had a carving made for her in the tomb, showing himself and his queen and the rest of his daughters mourning their dead. She would see that for all the days of her death, and know that she was loved.

  Nofret would have preferred her to know it while she lived, or even in the hour when she died. But no one was asking Nofret. No one but Johanan, and Leah who always asked the hard questions.

  “You always ask,” Nofret said to her one evening after Meketaten’s burial, “but you never answer. Except when you speak in riddles.”

  “I make perfect sense to myself,” Leah said.

  Nofret laughed in spite of herself.

  “There,” said Leah. “You see. There’s laughter in you still.”

  “It hurts,” Nofret said. “Like a muscle I haven’t used in years.”

  “You should train in laughter as a soldier trains in war,” said Leah. “For when it gets too dark to see, when you most need light.”

  Nofret did not see how that could be. All at once she was empty of mirth, cold and scared—and for no reason that she could name. “Something’s coming, isn’t it? Something horrible. Queen Mother Tiye sees it, too. She’s training my princess to be a queen.”

  “Queen Mother Tiye has been living in Thebes, where Amon once was sole lord and god. She knows what Egypt thinks of her so-eccentric son. She prepares for whatever comes—however dreadful that may be.”

  “Queens,” said Nofret, “or kings, and prophets. They’re much the same. Aren’t they?”

  “I suppose,” said Leah. “I can’t see myself in a crown or sitting on a throne, all in gold and jewels. I’m too plain a creature for that.”

  Nofret looked at her with her head crowned with silver braids under the plain black veil, sitting in the chair that no one else ever presumed to claim, and discovered that she did, after all, remember how to laugh.

  oOo

  That was the night, though Nofret did not know it till long after, when the plague came to Akhetaten. It struck first in the poorer quarter, riding in on a boat from the Delta or brought by a traveler from the north who fell ill in his lodging and died before his landlord could cast him into the street. It was slow to begin, creeping insidiously from house to house, taking a sickly child, an old man, a woman weakened in childbirth.

  The weak always died. Even the palace knew that, as it mourned even yet for Meketaten. But this new sickness was not content to fell only the feeble. It tasted the blood and living spirit of the strong, and found them good, and settled to the feast.

  The queen mother had been intending to return to Thebes after Meketaten’s funeral. The weakness that she found in the king’s palace and in the queen’s will had kept her in Akhetaten; the plague bound her there.

  Thebes, south of Akhetaten, was not yet beset. Memphis in the north suffered terribly: hundreds dead, the messengers said; thousands, rumor declared, and more every hour. The houses of the embalmers, even in refusing to take any who could not pay and pay high, were filled to overflowing. They were scanting the rite, people said, dipping the dead in natron for a day or two and thrusting them aside till they could be wrapped in haste and buried with meager ceremony.

  Some of those people were highborn, passing swiftly through Akhetaten on their way south to what they fancied was safety. Some were already ill: already fevered, already coughing, blaming the sun and the desert dryness. They urged the king to flee with them.

  But the king was convinced that the Aten would protect him. He said so with unwearying patience, smiling his dreamer’s smile, which his daughters’ death had done little to dim. Lady Kiya, rumor had it among the servants, was ill in the mornings of late. She had sworn her maids to silence, but her bath-servants were under no such stricture.

  Nofret hoped that she concealed her condition successfully till it was too late for even a queen’s magic to harm the child. A son, Nofret prayed to any god who would hear. A son to keep the king away from Nofret’s princess.

  If the gods heard, they were too busy to answer. Little Sotepenre had a restless night, fretting and whining as she had not done since she was very small. Her nurse, deep asleep, paid no attention. Nofret got up at last, speeded on her way by her lady’s sleepy irritation, and stepped over the soddenly sleeping nurse to shake the child into quiet.

  Even as she took hold of Sotepenre’s shoulders, she went cold and still inside. Not only the nightlamp’s glow made the child seem flushed. She was burning hot, and yet she shivered.

  It could be a simple fever, Nofret told herself. It did not need to be the plague.

  That was foolish, and she knew it. The nurse was drunk on barley beer: a trick to keep sickness at bay. Maybe for her it succeeded.

  The other young princesses were not ill. Not yet, Nofret thought. Her lady was awake and minded to be thoroughly unreasonable. “Can’t you shut her up?”

  “Be quiet” said Nofret, so sharp and short that the princess obeyed out of sheer indignation. Nofret lowered her voice. “Your sister is sick. If it pleases your royal highness, would you deign to send for a physician?”

  The princess was out of bed, braced to confront Nofret, but a long look at Sotepenre brought her fully to her senses. The other children’s nurses were awake and blinking sleepily, all but the woman who was supposed to be tending Sotepenre.

  Carefully, calmly, Ankhesenpaaten said, “Take the children to the queens’ house. They can sleep in one of the ladies’ rooms for tonight. You, Nofret, fetch someone to look after my sister. Preferably not someone who will shriek and run from a bit of fever.”

&
nbsp; Nofret had not intended to be sent out, but there was no denying the need. The plague had entered the palace. It would not leave till it had fed.

  Twelve

  The plague had come to the palace. Sotepenre was only the first to fall ill of it. The servants succumbed one by one to the fever. So too the princesses. And the queen. And the queen mother.

  But not the king. Nor, as far as it could matter, Nofret. The queen mother sent her younger sons away to Thebes as soon as she knew that Sotepenre was ill. Her eldest son would not move, nor would he cease to repeat, “The god protects me.”

  “Only you,” said Tiye with rare bitterness. She was barely ill yet, holding everything in those small and deceptively delicate hands. The king spent all his hours in the temple, lying by day in the sun till he burned as brown as a farmer in the fields, sleeping at night before the altar of the Aten, making his every moment a prayer. That left him no time to be king; so Tiye was king in his name.

  She kept Ankhesenpaaten by her. The rest of the princesses, and Queen Nefertiti already swaying with fever, had gone into the temple with the king. He would have had them lie in the sun to be made strong as he was strong, but the healer-priests forbade. They lay in the courts of the sun under canopies wetted often with water, bathed and soothed and plied with healing draughts by priests whose art was the cooling of fever.

  The priests themselves fell ill as so many others had, but pressed on, waging war against the plague. So did everyone who could stand. One tended the sick or one buried the dead, or one did what one could to keep the living alive with food, drink, rest.

  Rest was most difficult of all. No one servant could be spared for a single princess, not with so many sick or dying or dead. Nofret did whatever she was bidden to do, which was most often the queen mother’s will; or else she did what needed doing, as she saw the need.

  Her lady caught the fever, but lightly. Maybe the force of stubborn will was enough to hold it at bay. But if that had been so, then Queen Mother Tiye would not have taken sick at all.