Pillar of Fire

by Judith Tarr

  Nofret supposed that that was as close as an Egyptian princess could come to friendship. Kiya, princess of Mitanni that she was, did not seem disconcerted by the coolness of the sentiment. She bowed her head. “I will not shame the bond,” she said.

  “Nor I,” said Ankhesenpaaten.

  Fourteen

  Ankhesenpaaten’s alliance with Kiya was well considered, but it reckoned without the king. Even as the princess rose to leave Kiya, a flurry at the door brought her about.

  The king was wide awake and only slightly vague about the eyes. He greeted his daughter with no surprise at all, and his favorite with a murmured politeness that was like a caress. Nofret had the peculiar urge to withdraw discreetly from what was clearly a private thing, but she could hardly do that while her mistress lingered.

  He sat on the couch with the air of one who has done it often before and is comfortable, and looked from Kiya to his daughter. “Do I understand,” he inquired, “that you are disposing of kingdoms in my absence?”

  Kiya paled just visibly. Ankhesenpaaten maintained her composure, saying levelly, “You know very well, Father, that the god keeps you too busy for anything else.”

  “So I’ve been told,” he said mildly. “And what are you going to do, my ladies?”

  Ankhesenpaaten glanced at Kiya. Kiya pressed her lips together. Ankhesenpaaten said, “A coregency, Father, with Prince Smenkhkare. He’s old enough, and he’ll do until you have a son of your own.”

  “Which may be never,” he said. “Are you intending to offer him your hand in marriage? That would be required, since no man in himself carries the king-right.”

  “There’s no one else,” said Ankhesenpaaten.

  “There is Meritaten,” he said.

  “But—”

  He reached for her hands and took them, and held them. “Meritaten is the eldest. The king-right is hers first.”

  “But she is already—”

  His eyes had their wild look again, their look of dreamer and prophet. “The god tells me that she has given me all that is in her to give. Smenkhkare is young, he is beautiful, he has the art of making a woman smile. I should like to see our Mayet smile again. She’s been so sad.”

  “You’ll give her up?” The princess’ voice was thin with strain. “Father, that’s generous beyond belief.”

  “It’s the god’s bidding,” he said. “And not so generous. Mother meant you to be queen, to rule as she ruled, with her strength and, as you grow, her wisdom. You’ll do well on the throne at my side.”

  Nofret was not hearing this. No, she was not. Her lady was safe. She would marry the beautiful prince whose lack of intelligence would leave her free to rule as she saw fit. Meritaten would continue, weak queen to a weak king. It was ridiculous, it was folly to pass her to Smenkhkare like an outworn sandal. The two of them together had no more capacity to rule than a pair of kittens.

  The king could not see it at all. His god blinded him as always with the light of his own selfishness.

  The princess could not say a word. Kiya, who could have spoken, chose not to. She was as useless as the princess for beating sense into the king’s head.

  But then no one had ever succeeded in that, not even Nefertiti or Tiye. The king was the king. His ladies might rule while he occupied himself with the god, but when he spoke, none of them could do anything but listen.

  There was something wrong with that. An Egyptian maybe could not see it. Nofret, foreigner that she was, could not fail to see. But there was nothing she could say. She was a servant, a slave. She had no power to speak in the king’s presence, except by the king’s leave.

  Even so, she opened her mouth to say what she thought. But her lady spoke first. “If the god wills, then we all must yield.”

  oOo

  “You can see your father as the useless layabout he is, and you can still fall flat on your face when he lifts a finger?”

  Nofret was beside himself. She had held it all in till they were in the princesses’ room, now her lady’s alone, with only the one bed in it, and a whisper of echoes that recalled the sisters who were dead. There were lamps lit about the bed, as many as Nofret could find oil for, to keep the dark away.

  The princess stood like an image of herself, waiting for Nofret to ready her for bed. She barely seemed to see her maid at all. “The god wills,” she murmured, hardly louder than the spirits in the shadows.

  “Your father wills!” Nofret made a ripe sound of disgust. “We’ve had this argument before. Can’t you see what he’s doing? He’s completely off his head. He killed Meketaten with his desperate urge to get a son. Meritaten has little enough will at the best of times, and now she has none. You were the strong one. How can you let him make you his slave?”

  “What choice do I have?” The princess swayed gently with exhaustion, but shook off Nofret’s hands. “I have to marry someone. The line has to go on.”

  “You could insist that he give you to Smenkhkare.”

  “What, your Hittite conscience objects to a father but not to a father’s brother? Aren’t they sons of the same mother? Does it matter which of them calls me his wife?”

  “Yes!” cried Nofret. “He’ll kill you, too. That’s what he wants. To see you all dead and himself alone, king over nothing.”

  “Stop it,” said the princess, soft and tired but stone- hard beneath. “It is not your place to judge the Lord of the Two Lands. Nor have you the right or authority to tell me what I should do. I would prefer Smenkhkare if I am to have anyone. But Father is king and god and servant of the god, and Father commands me to do this. I have no choice but to obey.”

  “You could run away,” said Nofret.

  “No,” said the princess. “That’s the coward’s way.”

  “But this is wrong,” Nofret persisted. She did not know why she bothered. It was a griping in her middle, a buzzing in her ears: a horror that ran to the bone, and no reason in it. She was too foreign. She could not live here, among these people.

  Once before, she had run away. She had found sanctuary of a sort with the Apiru. It would be there now if she sought it out.

  But what then of her lady? She would be all alone.

  She had Kiya. She had her father, madman that he was. She could find another maid and other servants—she would have to once she was queen, for the honor of her rank. She did not need Nofret.

  Nofret found herself folding back the coverlets, sprinkling the rose petals from the jar, straightening the headrest that Egyptians used instead of a pillow. It was a simple thing, carved of cypress wood with a gilded foot. It was cool and smooth under her hands.

  Her lady lay down with a sigh that held all the weariness in the world. She was so small, so thin, so fragile to bear such burdens as had been laid on her. She was only a child, not even yet a woman.

  Not quite yet, but soon. Her breasts were budding. A faint soft shadow of down darkened her loins. Her father had seen it, or his god had, and claimed her for his own.

  Nofret lay on her mat at the bed’s foot. She would go. She swore it to herself. But not now. Not till her lady had other servants to look after her.

  oOo

  Ankhesenpaaten woke from the heavy sleep of exhaustion to the stain of blood on her thighs. Her dismay turned to laughter, and briefly to tears. “He knew,” she said. “The god knew.”

  Nofret helped her to bathe and tend herself. The princess cut her own sidelock, chose a gown from the chest, and a wig that had been made for one of her elder sisters. She put them all on like armor, and went out to rule as Tiye had taught her.

  She summoned every servant who was yet alive or in the palace, and set each one to work restoring the palace to its former order. Some she sent to find their fellows who had fled but who might linger in the city, and to bring them back without fear of punishment. “The work they’ve left undone,” she said, “will be punishment enough.”

  Once that was done, she had the captain of guards brought to her. The one who came was no oth
er than General Horemheb. The princess, sitting on the chair that had been Tiye’s, attended by as many guards and servants as she could spare, received him with no visible tremor. “Lord general,” she said, “we thank you for your aid in this terrible time. It was most generous of you to take on duties so far beneath your rank and station.”

  Horemheb did not look on the princess with mockery. He well might have, child that she was, robed and seated like a queen. But his words and his expression held only rough respect. “Someone had to do it, highness, and I was here and knew what to do. I was a captain of guards before I was a general of armies.”

  “You’ve done well,” she said levelly, “in the circumstances. I summoned you to ask if you could do better. Everything that we can restore to its old place and use, we must. The sickness may go on, but so does the kingdom.”

  Horemheb bowed. “That’s good sense, highness. Better, if I may say so, then your grandmother had.”

  “My grandmother set first things first,” the princess said stiffly. “The kingdom sustains itself through her doing. All I do here is finish what she begun.”

  “Yes, she did tie the steering oar and turn the bow into the waves, didn’t she? I’m glad to see you steering again, and into a safe harbor, too.”

  The princess set her chin. She was angry enough to show it, which was very angry indeed. “I am glad that our actions meet with your approval. Can you see your way, perhaps, to returning all guards to their duties, and bringing in new guards to replace those who were lost to the plague?”

  Horemheb was impervious to irony. He bowed again. “As you wish, highness. May I have your leave to summon men of my own from the Delta? They’re trained men, and will serve more readily than new recruits.”

  “Ah,” said Ankhesenpaaten with sweet reason, “but the Delta was devastated by the plague, was it not? It needs every man who can stand. Send to Thebes, lord general, where the plague was less terrible than it was here, and much less so than in the Delta.”

  “As your highness wishes,” said Horemheb. If he was dismayed to find this child princess so clearly able to see through him, he did not show it. Nor did he press to bring his own men, loyal to him, to a city that chafed under a lunatic king. There would be time for that, his manner said.

  oOo

  “That man is dangerous,” Nofret said when she could.

  Her lady, resting in the little room behind the hall of audience and sipping barley water, closed her eyes and sighed. “Why, because he wants to be king? He can’t be. He’s a commoner.”

  “He could seize a royal bride and dispose of the king and claim the throne by force of arms,” said Nofret.

  “In Great Hatti he could,” said the princess. “Not here.”

  “Which is exactly why he could do it. No one would believe it till it was done. Most of Egypt would even help him.”

  “It would not.”

  “It would,” said Nofret. “They want their gods back.”

  “Servants’ gossip,” said the princess. She set down her cup still half-full of barley water, and lay back on the couch that had been Tiye’s. “I think I should move into the queen’s palace today, and not wait till after I’m married. It would be simpler, don’t you think? We can close these rooms and save the servants the effort of looking after them.”

  “Which rooms will you take?” Nofret asked. This was a blatant change of subject, but she was as tired as her lady. She lacked the strength to argue.

  “I had thought,” the princess said, “to take the rooms that were Mother’s.” Her breath caught slightly, but she went on with determined placidity. “The others that are left are small, and not suitable for my station. I can’t ask Meritaten to give up hers, nor Lady Kiya. Mother’s rooms are lying empty. I’ll have new furniture brought in. I might even have the walls repainted. I never did like the temple scenes. What would you think of something different, a hunt for birds by the river, maybe, or something with horses and chariots?”

  “That would be very Hittite,” said Nofret. “All that hunting and galloping.”

  The princess smiled. It was faint, but it was genuine. “Well then, maybe not. Maybe just birds, or people dancing.”

  “Whatever you like,” Nofret said. “Should I tell the king’s painter you want to see him?”

  “Maybe,” said the princess drowsily. “Tomorrow. I need to think on it. And get the rooms ready.” She yawned. “Oh, I could sleep till Osiris lives again.”

  “Sleep for an hour,” Nofret said. “No one needs you more desperately than that.”

  “No,” the princess said. “I should go—the embassy from Lagash—”

  “Their excellencies can wait,” said Nofret firmly. “I’ll have them fed and plied with wine. By the time you’re awake, they’ll be ready to give you anything you ask.”

  The princess sighed and did not answer, did not even smile at Nofret’s attempt at wit. She had fallen asleep.

  oOo

  Nofret did as she had promised, saw that the ambassadors were kept well content in a lesser banqueting hall, and had the steward put off further audiences until the morrow. She did not think till afterward that she was commanding grave and august persons much older than she—that, after all and without even noticing it, she was what she had meant to be on that first day in Akhetaten: chief servant to a queen.

  Well, and the queen was not a queen yet, only a very tired, very young princess whose royal father was no use at all for anything but praying in the temple and fathering daughters. She was only doing what she had to do, since no one else would do it. So too was Nofret.

  Many of Queen Nefertiti’s servitors were dead, but some were still alive and still in the palace. Without orders to the contrary, they kept to the queen’s rooms and did no more there than they must. Nofret roused them in her lady’s name.

  The chief of them, a eunuch of middling age and massive girth, ventured to curl his lip at her. She set hands on hips and showed him her teeth in what was only by remotest courtesy a smile. “Ah, Setnef. I’d wondered where you were keeping yourself. Her highness has sore need of assistance, and I’m both young and inexperienced. If you could advise . . .”

  He was not going to give way to such blatant flattery, not that veteran of the court, but he softened to it. Just a little. Just enough to take command of the queen’s rooms, to order their refurbishing and send for the king’s painter. Nofret, he made clear, was in his way.

  She went away well satisfied. Giving orders, she was discovering, was a heady pleasure. But it was even sweeter to convince people that they were somehow winning the fight by doing what she wanted. It took a little more time, a little more effort to begin, but much less of both thereafter.

  Kings could study that art, she thought. Not that they needed it much. A king commanded and was obeyed. A slave had to be more circumspect.

  Fifteen

  Prince Smenkhkare sailed down the river from Thebes in a golden boat, in such state as if he were already king and god. He came ostensibly to fetch his mother’s body to her tomb. But by then everyone knew that while he was in Akhetaten he would be married to the princess Meritaten and crowned king beside the elder king in the Two Lands.

  His bride waited for him on the river’s bank. When her father and her sister came to tell her what had been decided for her, she had bowed her head and murmured, “The god’s will be done.” But Nofret had caught the gleam of eyes under the painted lids. Meritaten was not sorry to be forsaking her father-husband for her uncle.

  Smenkhkare was as beautiful as ever, and as vain of his looks, sitting in his flawlessly pleated kilt on the deck of his ship, surrounded by attendants carefully chosen to be almost, but not quite, as beautiful as he. He wore the Nubian wig that he, like Nefertiti, had always favored. His jewels were gold and lapis and turquoise of Sinai, his pectoral an image of the protector of the south, Nekhbet the vulture-goddess with her wings spread from shoulder to shoulder. The width of those shoulders was much to be admired, and
the narrowness of waist and hips, and the perfection of each calf and ankle and foot. He made certain that he sat in order to show them all to best advantage.

  Nofret did not know when or how she had become so weary of the world. Maybe in the plague, when so many died and she did not even take sick. Somehow, imperceptibly, she had fallen out of love with the beautiful prince. He was too sleek, too untouched by grief, even though his mother was dead. All he could see was the crown that waited for him and maybe, a little, the bride who was his right to it.

  Meritaten did not appear to have Nofret’s cursed clarity of vision. She watched the prince coming toward her over the water, and blinked as if dazzled. The sun was strong and the gilding of the boat shone blinding bright, but her eyes were fixed on Smenkhkare.

  Why, thought Nofret, she was besotted with him. She and half the ladies of the court. He was unutterably pretty, as pretty as Meritaten herself.

  Ankhesenpaaten stood behind her sister. She had been very quiet since this choice was made, a quiet that Nofret had stopped trying to break. If she was dazzled by her uncle’s splendor, she did not show it. Her eyes were narrowed against the glare of sunlight, that was all.

  Her father drove forward in his chariot sheathed in electrum, a vision of splendor to rival the one that approached on the water. He wore the Two Crowns, and his ornaments were all pure gold.

  He had no head for the myriad duties of kingship, but spectacle he loved. He descended from his chariot at the end of the quay, left his horses to the princely groom who ran forward to tend them, and set himself at the foot of the boarding-plank just as it came to rest.

  Prince Smenkhkare could not in courtesy linger on his boat for the crowds to admire. He had to rise, make his way from the boat, and bow low before the man who was still, and until the burials of queen and queen mother and princesses, king over him.

  “Well met in both joy and sorrow, brother,” said the king, hardly stumbling over the words.