Pillar of Fire

by Judith Tarr

Johanan grinned back, though Nofret noticed that he kept his eyes fixed carefully above the woman’s chin. Apiru modesty was a peculiar thing.

  Not all the people grinding grain were women. There were a few men, slaves too dull-witted or unskilled to work the ovens or the brewing vats, or boys of the village who were apprenticed to the trade. Among them knelt one with an Egyptian’s shaved head and face but an Apiru’s robe, deeply intent on his task, not even aware of the two who stood to watch him.

  It dawned on Nofret slowly where she had seen that long skull before, and those long fingers. She was sunstruck and still slightly feverish, or she might have been quicker to understand.

  Or maybe not. It was simply too preposterous.

  She sank wobbling to one knee, peering at the face that bent so diligently to the task. Long eyes, long nose, long chin. A certain habit of imperiousness that stamped it even in this impossible place.

  The Great House of Egypt, the Lord of the Two Lands, the voice and servant of the Aten in the city that he had built, was grinding barley for bread and beer in the village of his slaves.

  “But how could he—”

  He did not seem to hear Nofret’s voice. Johanan spoke quietly but without stealth, answering her. “He comes in most mornings, not long after sunup, and stays till noon. He never speaks. He grinds a great deal of flour, they say, enough for a day. Then he goes back . . . wherever he goes.”

  Nofret rounded on Johanan. “You know who he is!”

  He pulled her with him away from the grinders of flour, toward the street. There was not much of anyone there: an old blind man snoring in the sun, a dog worrying a bone, a child gnawing with impunity on the dog’s tail.

  Nofret got hold of Johanan’s coat and shook it as hard as she could. It barely stirred the body inside. “How long has this been going on? How in the gods’ name does anybody keep from knowing what he is?”

  “Oh,” he said, “everyone knows. One just doesn’t ask. Do you see? The high ones do what they will do. It’s not for us to wonder why.”

  “That’s nonsense!” snapped Nofret. “Or you would never have dragged me out here when I should be dying in peace.”

  “You aren’t dying,” he said. “And you had to see. He’s been coming here for a while—since Lady Tadukhipa took sick. He doesn’t do any harm. No one bothers him. Maybe he thinks it’s peaceful.”

  “Maybe he’s lost his mind.” Nofret turned back toward the place of the bakers. The king was easy to see once one knew what to look for: bald head and brown robe were unmistakable. “I can’t believe no one’s missed him.”

  “Why? If he’s wanted for something kingly, everyone must suppose he’s somewhere else. By the time they start to worry, there he is, praying in his temple or sitting on his throne or whatever he does when he goes away from here.”

  “Mostly,” said Nofret, “he prays in the temple. Lying in the sun of his sunrise court, or lying in front of the altar, praying away Amon’s curse.”

  “Maybe that’s what he’s doing here,” said Johanan. “Praying.”

  Nofret would have hit him if she had heard any mockery, but there was none. Johanan the Apiru did not see anything odd at all about a king who might choose to pray while grinding flour for his servants’ bread.

  Apiru were strange beyond her comprehension.

  She went back slowly along the line of men and women grinding flour. In front of the king she stopped and knelt again, sitting on her heels. He leaned on the grinding-stone, grinding steadily, back and forth, mute, utterly absorbed. Sweat ran down his face, but he kept it from staining the flour. She wondered why he did not simply shed the hot wool robe and go naked like the others.

  More of his madness. And yet strangely he looked more sane in this than he ever did while he sat on his throne. His expression was calm, intent. His eyes fixed on his hands, and on the stone beneath him. He was not aware of anything else that she could see. Certainly not of her.

  She glanced at the sun. It was some time yet to noon.

  She settled to wait. Johanan hovered for a while outside, then came in and squatted beside her. He handed her the waterskin, now rather lighter than it had been when he bought it.

  She drank gratefully. The water was warm and tasted of leather, but it was wet. She took a little of it in her hand and laved her face.

  A boy with a water-pail and a dipper went up and down among the workers. They paused at his coming to stretch, rest, chatter among themselves. Strangers’ presence did not seem to constrain them. And why should it? Nofret was as much a slave as they. So was Johanan, for the matter of that, stiff pride and all. And the king, who could not be there, therefore was not.

  He accepted water, but without raising his eyes and without pausing longer than was necessary before returning to his work. He scooped handfuls of barley from the basket beside him, spread them on the stone, ground them with as much concentration as before.

  Just as the sun touched the zenith, he finished the last bit of barley and swept the flour into the bowl that waited for it. He had done his day’s allotment in half a day—a feat worthy of a king. He rose stiffly, straightening each separate part of him, and turned his face to the sun. He smiled the smile of a man who has done well, and who knows it. Contentedly, still smiling, he left the place of the bakers.

  Nofret followed him, with Johanan trailing after. He walked quickly but not in haste, his stride long and sure, as it never was when he was being king. He minced then in his tight kilt and his heavy, kingly adornments, balancing the lofty weight of the Two Crowns. Out here, bareheaded, stripped of everything but the raw self, he moved like a man who knew his way, and who was glad of it.

  Nofret had to scramble to keep pace. To her astonishment, not to mention dismay, he glanced at her and said, “Blessings of the Aten on you, servant of my daughter.”

  Her tongue answered for her. “And on you, my lord of Egypt.”

  “Oh,” he said, and she realized with a start that he had not stammered even once, “here I’m no such eminence. I’m only a servant among servants, except that they serve the king, and I serve the god who is above the king.”

  “You are quite mad,” said Nofret.

  “No doubt,” said the king. “You do know, I suppose, that I’m cursed, or so everyone says. False Amon has damned me and all my blood, and killed as much of it as he could reach. But how can he do that if he is false? The Aten, who is true, says nothing. He only bids me come here and serve him as you saw, as a servant must who does his master’s will.”

  “Then your god is mad,” Nofret said. “No god makes his king labor like a slave.”

  “A god might,” said the king, “if that king has displeased him. I failed, you see. I abandoned Thebes to Amon. I surrendered to the will of venal men, men who call themselves priests. But they are false, and their god is a lie.”

  “So you abase yourself by becoming a slave to slaves.” Nofret shook her head in disgust. “No wonder your god wins no worshippers but you. Who will serve a god who makes his king a slave?”

  “My god is like no gods that ever were,” said the king. “I have much to learn, much to do, to serve him as he wills. And much . . . much to suffer.” His whole body drooped, his face giving way to a wash of grief. The contentment that had been on him, that had seemed to be all of him, showed itself for the mask it was, like the mask of a king. He spread his arms wide to the blind glare of the sun. “O my god! So much sorrow. So many dead, so young, so beloved . . .”

  If he wept in the road, she would do nothing to console him. But he was stronger than that, or madder. He clenched his hands into fists and shook them at the sky. “I will not give way! I will not fall! Do you hear me, O my god? Even if you take my life, I remain your servant.”

  “He won’t take you,” said Nofret bitterly. “He’ll take everything that belongs to you, but you he’ll let live because he loves you.”

  The king shot her a glance so clear and so piercing that she threw up a hand as if against
a blow. “Do you think he loves me? Do you call that love? All my ladies, all my children—all of them, he takes. Those that he leaves, he teaches to despise me, as he has taught my kingdom and all my people.” He laughed, a terrible sound in that desert place. “You think I don’t know or care. You think I’m too much a fool to understand. They hate me. I taste their hate when I sit above them: bitter on my tongue, like gall. I smell it when they bow before me. I see it, hear it, feel it on my skin. Oh, how they hate me! They pray their gods that I will die, and dying, set them free.”

  “Someday you’ll do that,” said Nofret. “They won’t speed you on your way. You don’t have to be afraid of that.”

  “I never was,” he said. “The king is the king. No man in the Two Lands will touch him. No matter how grim a horror he may be.”

  “You aren’t a horror.” Nofret had to be honest; had to say that. “You just aren’t . . . what they want in a king.”

  “They want a meek servant of their gods,” he said. His voice held less venom than the words might have warranted. “They want what they have had since the Two Lands took form in the mind of the Aten. They fear what is different, what will change all that they were, and all that they will be. They dread the truth: that all their gods are lies, shapes of their wanting, dreams, shadows of the One who made them.”

  “Adonai Elohenu,” said Johanan behind them. “The Lord who is One. Did your mother teach you of him? He rules as lord in the desert where my people were born.”

  “No one taught me,” the king said. “I knew him before I knew words to call him. He was in me from the womb.”

  “Yes,” said Johanan. “That’s how it is.”

  “For you,” the king said. “For your people. So fortunate, to know him clear, to hear him in the silence of the desert. No such gift is given us. The clamor of a thousand gods deafens us, dulls our senses, shuts us off from the truth that is One.”

  “But not you,” Johanan said. “You heard him.”

  “He drowned out all the others,” said the king. “I hear them sometimes even yet. Amon howls like a jackal under the moon, casting ill on those I love.”

  “But if he is false,” Nofret said, “then how can he—”

  Neither of them was listening. She had never seen Johanan look like that: stiff, erect, dark eyes burning with the same madness that was in the king’s.

  Her skin shivered. That was the desert in him, and the god of the desert, like sun on the sand, like fire in the dark.

  “You know,” said this stranger-Johanan to the king, “what he’s bidding you to do.”

  “No,” said the king. It was not ignorance. It was refusal. “No.”

  “Then you are weak,” said Johanan, “and a coward.”

  “I am king!” cried the king with sudden fury. “I was born to be king.”

  “You were born as we are all born, to be slave to the god. Your father was a king. Your mother was a queen. They too were born for the god’s pleasure.”

  “It pleases the god that I be king in the Two Lands. I can be nothing else.”

  “So you say,” said Johanan, turning on his heel.

  They both gaped after him: the king astonished, furious, and Nofret empty of any emotion at all. She did not know which she should choose of the many that roiled in her. Rage was the least of them. Loss—that was strong, but not as strong as some of the others. Some did not even have a name.

  It was the king who came to himself first, who took her arm as if he were a simple man and she a simple woman, and said with weary practicality, “Come. We’ll be late.”

  Late for what? she might have asked. But there was no voice in her. She let him lead her back to the city.

  Twenty-Four

  The king’s absences could not remain forever unnoticed. Inevitably, one day, servant would turn to servant and courtier to courtier, and the truth come clear: that the Lord of the Two Lands was nowhere in his palace, nor could he be found in the temple of his god.

  Where he went, in Nofret’s mind, was his secret. She only shared it with the one person who might reasonably be entitled to it.

  Ankhesenpaaten knew no great grief when her daughter, after lingering for nearly a month, died quietly in her nurse’s arms. Nofret did not think that any of it had been quite real to her, either pregnancy or birth, only a nightmare of sickness. Maybe she had been ill for longer than anyone knew, ill in the spirit.

  Now, in the month after her daughter died, she was still fragile, but her eyes were clearer with each morning’s waking. There was no more shadow in them than had been there since the first and more terrible of the plagues, a shadow that maybe would never go away. She could get up now, bathe and dress and put on the ornaments of a queen, and do the duties that were left to her by Kiya’s death and Meritaten’s persistent refusal to be anything but her young king’s plaything.

  “She has her evasions,” Ankhesenpaaten said of her. “I have mine.”

  “Yours are a good deal more useful,” Nofret said acidly.

  Ankhesenpaaten only shrugged.

  This was another day of many, with an audience to attend, and rites in the temple—more than one, since this was a festival day of the god—and court to hold. Meritaten and Smenkhkare were not in the city: they had gone up the river with a fleet of boats to hunt ducks in the reeds.

  Everyone knew what hunting ducks meant. There had been a great deal of grinning and nudging when the boatsful of near-naked young men and gauzily gowned young women pushed off from the quay in the early morning.

  Ankhesenpaaten would not have known what to do if she had gone on such an expedition. She was still an innocent in the ways of women, though she had been a wife and borne a daughter. She was only beginning to look at some of Smenkhkare’s handsomer princelings as if they were something more than annoyances.

  Nofret, who had had a woman’s eye for a man for a fair count of years, sometimes thought her lady was to be envied. A child’s eye could be a great deal calmer and more dispassionate. A child never wanted to blush because some pretty boy had smiled at her.

  Most of the court would have been astonished to know that Nofret thought such things of the elder king’s queen. Ankhesenpaaten in crown and wig, robe and jewels and scepter, was universally acknowledged to be the image of her mother who was gone. She was even coming to that lady’s height, tall for an Egyptian and willowy graceful. She was aware of her own beauty, as she could not help but be, but it mattered no more to her now than it ever had.

  The person inside of that queenly image was still more child than woman. She was like spring in the mountains of Hatti, that could be as warm as summer in the morning, and by evening the snows had closed in again.

  Nofret was growing sentimental in her old age. She shook off the shadow of regret for a country that she had barely known before she was shuffled off to Mitanni, and busied herself with the pleating of her lady’s gown. It must be hung just so or it looked untidy: and that, in a queen, would never do.

  The other maids were chattering and giggling as they saw to their lady’s jewels. Nofret ignored them. She had never troubled to learn more of them than their names. Silly things, brought from everywhere in the world to wait on the queen of Egypt, and all they could think of was their next meal or their latest round of bed-play.

  The queen was patient under Nofret’s hands, letting herself be dressed like the image of a goddess in a temple. Nofret did not know what made her sit on her heels, look up at that mask of a face, and say, “I don’t suppose you know where your father goes every day from full light till noon.”

  Maybe she said it to wake a response in her lady’s eyes. Maybe she simply lacked discretion. Wherever the fault lay, she got what she wanted: her lady looked at her, actually looked, and seemed awake and aware. “He’s always in the temple,” she said.

  “He’s not,” said Nofret.

  “Of course he is,” her lady said. “He stays there till the sun is high, and then he comes in and has his bath and puts
on the crowns, and does what a king should do.”

  He did not do that, either—his queen did it. But Nofret forbore to start that argument. She said, “He lets people think he’s praying in the temple. He’s somewhere else altogether. He goes to the village by the tombs, and does the work of a common laborer.”

  For the first time in much too long, the queen showed an honest emotion. It was a mingling of shock and scorn, and did her little credit, but Nofret decided to be glad of it. “You are raving. The Lord of the Two Lands would never—”

  “This Lord of the Two Lands does. Every day. My friend Johanan—you remember him? He came and fetched me, and I saw. I talked to the man who grinds flour in the house of the bakers, and it was your father. There was no mistaking it.”

  “You must be mistaken,” said the queen. “He is king and god. He would not do such a thing.”

  “He might if he’d lost what wits he had.”

  The queen moved so swiftly that Nofret, whose eye was famously quick, was caught flat-footed. The blow swept her off her feet.

  She crouched with ringing ears and thudding heart, too astonished for anger.

  “My father,” said the queen, remote and icy cold, “is not to be judged by the likes of a slave.”

  Wisdom would have had Nofret crawl away, tongue between her teeth, the image of abject contrition. But Nofret was neither wise nor servile. She drew herself up. “If you don’t believe me, come and see.”

  She knew as she spoke that her lady would strike her again. But the queen was more restrained than that. She turned her back on Nofret. The maids scrambled into their ranks to escort their lady to the hall of audience.

  Nofret stayed where she was. She was too angry to be afraid. “You won’t come, will you?” she called to the retreating back. “You’re afraid. You don’t want to see what’s true.”

  The queen did not reply. Nofret had not expected her to. Therefore, she told herself, she was not disappointed. No. Not in the least.

  oOo

  Ankhesenpaaten did not speak to Nofret for a whole hand of days, not even to bid her do this or that. Nofret was shut out. Silence walled her. The other maids, whom she had never had much use for, were delighted to take their mistress’ lead.