Pillar of Fire

by Judith Tarr

  Nofret dropped to her knees. The queen did not resist as she slipped a hand beneath the king’s head. It was sticky-wet.

  Blood meant little to her who was a warrior’s child. Worse by far was the thing that her fingers felt, the narrow sliver of stone broken from the greater one, that pierced his skull as an arrow might, and dealt just such a wound, to just such deadly purpose.

  Others were coming, the ones behind still whooping and cheering but the ones in front aware, if much too late, that the king had fallen. There was none whom Nofret wanted to see, no physician or priest, only useless silly fools, princes with nothing in their heads but wine and the hunt. She rose to drive them back, as if she alone, afoot, could do any such thing to a mob of lordlings in chariots. She stumbled on something soft that yowled.

  Blindly she gathered up the lion-cub in its wrapping of linen. By some jest of the gods, it was still securely bound. She was safe from its claws, and if she took care, from its infant teeth. She held it because she could think of nothing else to do.

  Ankhesenamon sat on her heels, stroking her lord’s face over and over. He was greyer than he had been. Tremors ran through his body. His kilt was stained: he had soiled himself.

  “Maybe,” said Nofret, stammering it. “Maybe—maybe he’s only in shock. So hard a fall—so fast—”

  “He is dead,” said Ankhesenamon.

  The bare bald words made no sense to Nofret. “Of course he isn’t. He’s hurt, and badly. He needs a surgeon. But he’s moving, see. He’s alive.”

  Ankhesenamon shook her head. “He is dead,” she said again. “His spirit is flown. The body clings to life, but no soul dwells in it.”

  “No,” said Nofret. Not to deny any kind of truth, but because Ankhesenamon saw so cruelly clear. Not for her the blessedness of oblivion, however brief. She knew exactly what she saw and what it signified.

  The first of his princes plunged to a halt nearly on top of him. He was still alive in the body, whatever had become of the souls. There were tremors in it still, a likeness of life.

  Ankhesenamon’s terrible clarity of mind was not to be blurred by any idiocy of prince or courtier. She saw her lord lifted and carried slowly on foot back to the place where they had camped.

  There were still few who believed that he was dead. They thought him simply unconscious, and carried him so, without the wailing of grief that might have broken the queen’s composure.

  They would do what they could to bring him back to life. One or two had servants who were of some use, who could tend him while he lingered, unable quite to give himself up to death. But he was dead. Ankhesenamon had seen it, nor would she refuse it.

  Nofret followed the procession back to the camp, leading the queen’s horses. She had laid the cloak-wrapped cub in the chariot. She did not know what she would do with it. It could be said to have killed the king, since he broke his head defending it from harm. But she could not leave a young thing to starve, as this cub surely would, for it was too young to hunt on its own.

  She had been empty of spirit when she went on this hunt. She was no less so now. But her mind was working, and it kept careful watch on the queen. Ankhesenamon had seen so much death, and held fast through all of it. She had proved her strength over and over, and never more so than now, when she kept order in hunt and camp and saw that there was no panic, no outburst of grief on the king’s behalf.

  She was too strong. Strange that it could seem so, but Nofret’s bones knew what they knew.

  Nofret tended the lion-cub as she might, found a leash for it and a maid to nurse it with milk from a she-goat that someone had bought in a village and brought to provide balm for a delicate stomach. The cub needed it more than milord Rahotep did. Nofret left maid and goat and cub to their preoccupation and went to tend her lady.

  Thirty-Nine

  The king died indeed, and not only to his queen’s perception, long before he came back to Memphis. He lingered for a handful of days, bleak days all, tempting the ignorant with false hope. But by the time he returned to his city, Egypt knew that its king was dead. It was a funeral procession that came to the city, however roughly formed, however hasty. Egypt mourned its king, and that mourning, as far as Nofret could see, was heartfelt.

  She grieved for him, too. She had known him since he was a young child, all bright eyes and questions. She had been fond of him then, and no less so as he grew older: a charming youth, a sweet-spoken and often sweet-tempered man, no great model of kingship but ample for the purpose. And he had loved his queen.

  Ankhesenamon was as brittle as an image carved in wood, painted and gilded to seem a living woman. She oversaw the embalming of the body and the transformation of the royal progress into a funeral cortege.

  “There’s no help for it,” she said. “We have to go to Thebes. Kings of our line are buried there. He wanted it; he shall have it.”

  “But his tomb,” said Lord Ay: “he was so young; he had no time. It’s barely begun.”

  “Then we shall make do,” she said.

  He could not deny the necessity of that, but he could say, “If need be, he can be buried here in the old house of everlasting and taken to Thebes when his tomb is ready.”

  “No,” said Ankhesenamon.

  Nor would she be moved. The king would be buried in Thebes. His tomb would be a hasty thing, ill-made perhaps and without distinction, but his body would reside with the rest of his line, all but his elder brother, who slept forever in the hills beyond Akhetaten. Even Smenkhkare was in Thebes: he had been brought there with the rest of the dead after the Horizon of the Aten was abandoned. Tutankhamon had insisted on it. Akhenaten he would not move, but the second of the brothers would go where the rest of the kings of their line had always gone.

  Ay surrendered to the queen’s will, though he found himself in a position that perhaps he had never looked to hold. He was the heir of Tutankhamon. There was no one else. When the king was laid in his tomb, Ay would open the mouth of the dead and take the Two Crowns and be king in Egypt.

  What was not spoken of, not yet, not in the queen’s silence, was that his lady wife might bear the king-right by her kinship to the line of Nefertari, but the chief bearer of it was the queen herself. The father of Nefertiti, to be properly king in Egypt, must be wedded to Nefertiti’s daughter.

  Nofret found no horror in it as she had when Akhenaten sought heirs in desperation and wedded daughter after daughter, begetting daughters on daughters, till the gods rebelled. Lord Ay was a gentle man for all his soldier sternness. He understood what he did and why, and why he must. He would do nothing to harm his beloved young queen.

  She was in great haste to come to Thebes, such haste that she would not leave the body of her king in the house of embalmers in Memphis. Once the preparations had been made, when the king could be laid in his bed of natron, she had a house of purification built on a barge that could be rowed up the river, attended by priests well versed in the rite. They would accompany him to Thebes and complete the ceremonial there, then surrender him to the priests of the tomb.

  No one but Ay dared to contest the queen’s will. Even the embalmer priests gave way to her, a thing unheard of. But Ankhesenamon, for all her delicacy and her seeming gentleness, had a core of forged bronze. She was queen and goddess. She would have what she would have.

  oOo

  “And why?” Nofret was not arguing. She wanted to know. Everything was ready; they would leave Memphis in the morning.

  Tonight the queen had gone early to her chambers, performed the rituals of the evening but not lain down on her bed. She had not slept since the king died. Most nights, as now, she prepared to spend in reading from the books that the scribes had copied for her, or in listening to musicians who would do turn and turn about as the night spun into dawn.

  The players on harp and flute, drum and sistrum, had not yet come. Ankhesenamon held the book in her lap but did not read from it. It was a book of spells, she had told Nofret once, and prayers to guide the dea
d through the ordeals of the netherworld.

  Some of it she had read to Nofret on other nights, but tonight she did not seem inclined to. Nofret was glad. Her lady said that spells only had efficacy if they were spoken in the proper time and place, with the proper intonation, but spells were spells, in Nofret’s mind. They were best not spoken or even left open for strangers’ eyes to see, lest they escape and do untold harm.

  Nofret spoke in part to keep Ankhesenamon from reading the book. “Why so much haste?” she asked. “Why can’t he stay in Memphis till his tomb is all built and the tomb-furnishings ready?”

  “Because,” said Ankhesenamon, rather to Nofret’s surprise: she had not looked disposed to answer. “I want him safe in his house of everlasting, and all the prayers said, and the priests on guard.”

  “But why?” Nofret persisted. “He wasn’t hated. Egypt doesn’t want to gnaw his bones.”

  “Egypt,” said Ankhesenamon, “no.”

  Nofret frowned. “Who else is there?”

  “The one who killed him.”

  There was a silence. Nofret could think of nothing to fill it, except the painfully obvious. “He wasn’t killed. His chariot hit a stone.”

  “His chariot broke its axle on a stone that should hardly have nicked the wheel-rim.”

  “Chariots,” said Nofret, “are rickety things, even the best of them. And he was racing over rough country, with no regard for life or limb.”

  “His axle broke,” Ankhesenamon said. “It should never have broken. Someone saw to it that the wood was weak; that it would crack and then shatter when he could do nothing to defend himself.”

  Nofret bit her tongue. Here then was Ankhesenamon’s necessary madness, the break in her composure. She could not believe that her king had died of ill luck and his own folly. He must, like Smenkhkare, have been murdered.

  “The one who would kill him,” said Ankhesenamon, “would stop at nothing. If he’s buried, his tomb well hidden, all his house of eternity made safe—”

  “From whom?” Nofret demanded.

  Ankhesenamon looked sane enough, except for the hands knotted in her lap on top of the rolled book. “This I know,” she said. “I know it in my bones. One wanted my father’s death, and saw that Smenkhkare died, and my sister, too. And when they were gone, there was my king still, to bar the way to the throne.”

  Nofret’s eyes widened. “Lord Ay? He would never—”

  “No,” said Ankhesenamon. “The general. Horemheb.”

  Nofret went stiff. But that was years ago, and the kings whom Horemheb wanted dead had been Akhenaten and his brother, Smenkhkare who had styled himself the Beloved of Akhenaten: no less than the title that Nefertiti had held before him. Vain folly, like the man himself, and sore temptation to those who hated him. Nofret remembered as clearly as if there had been no years between, the temple of Amon in Thebes, and Horemheb face to face with its priest, speaking of the death of kings.

  Tutankhamon had given Amon all that he could wish for and more. There had been no cause to cut short his life.

  Unless Horemheb truly meant what he had hinted then, that he fancied himself as Lord of the Two Lands.

  “It can’t happen,” Nofret said. “He’d have to marry you, and you won’t have him.”

  “No more will I,” said Ankhesenamon with grim purpose. “Maybe I’m a fool. Maybe he’s my loyal servant. My bones can lie, or fear too much. But I want my lord in his tomb where no one can touch him, before Horemheb comes back from Asia.”

  “If he comes,” Nofret said. “You can command him to stay. He’s needed there, with Egypt robbed of its king, and its enemies too likely to take advantage of its weakness.”

  “He won’t stay,” said Ankhesenamon. “He’ll make sure my messengers never reach him. Do you understand? I must carry my king to Thebes, and take my king’s heir as husband in Amon’s own house, so that Amon may defend me. If I fail—if he moves too swift and catches me—”

  Nofret did not believe it, nor did she want to. Horemheb would not force matters. He was too practical a man. Ay was strong but he was old, and he well might die soon. Then Ankhesenamon would be ripe for any man’s taking.

  But Ankhesenamon was quite beyond reason. Something—god, demon, plain blind grief—had fixed itself on Horemheb and named him enemy. She would defend herself and her king as best she might, even if it meant that his mansion of eternity was a gilded hovel in the cliffs to the west of Thebes.

  Forty

  The king’s boat of eternity floated up the river under oar and sail. The people bade it farewell as it went, wailing their grief, singing songs of his youth and his beauty and his untimely death.

  The queen could not hasten any of that, nor alter the river’s current, nor grant limitless strength to the rowers. The embalmer-priests would not suffer more haste, either, than the queen had already forced upon them. It was not seemly, they said, in the passage of the dead.

  Nofret did not think that Ankhesenamon would fear to be haunted by the king’s spirit. If he visited her in dreams she welcomed him gladly, and wept when she woke, because he had departed.

  The priests’ threat of his anger left her unmoved. But they could resist and did, and slowed the king’s passage to a more fitting pace.

  She had learned in a hard school that it did a queen no good to grow wild with impatience. She paced the cabin of her boat at night, or the floor of her chamber if they had paused in a city. By day she preserved a hieratic stillness, set upon her throne in her queenly finery, making her slow way toward Thebes.

  oOo

  The city of Amon waited for her and for her king. The viceroy of the Upper Kingdom stood on the quay in a great crowd of lords and ministers, servants and lesser folk, and the rabble of the city come to gape at their sad young queen. They could not have been much satisfied: she was as royally remote as ever, no sign of emotion in the mask of her face.

  She was stony still. Nofret saw why as her eyes ran over the officials gathered to welcome the queen. There were a large number of soldiers, more than she remembered seeing before. And among the princes, close by the governor, one who must have stilled Ankhesenamon’s heart in horror.

  It was not impossible that Horemheb could have come from Asia to Thebes while the queen made the much shorter journey up from Memphis. Horemheb could move at soldier-speed. The queen had had to advance as a funeral cortege must, even the most urgent. Of course he was here to greet her, to add his words of condolence to the rest, to bow low and offer all goodly aid to a queen bereft of her king.

  She could not bring herself to feast among the court of the Upper Kingdom. That was forgiven her, Nofret could see, for her youth and her grief and the many things that she had endured since she was a child. Men knew great pity for a lady so lovely and so sad.

  oOo

  She was not sad. She was furious. “He came to claim me,” she said, fiercely quiet, when she was alone in her chamber with Nofret, and all the rest of the servants banished. “He thinks that until Ay is crowned, the field is open; he can ride in and seize the prize.”

  “Lady,” Nofret said, not wisely maybe, but she was tired, “why would he possibly want to defy the Lord Ay? What can he gain?”

  Ankhesenamon rounded on her. “What can he gain, you ask? Are you blind? Witless? There’s all of Egypt. He wants it. I know he wants it. I can see it in his eyes.”

  “Maybe he only wants you,” said Nofret.

  That was even less wise than what she had said before. Ankhesenamon turned from her in white rage and ran from the room.

  She could not go very far. There were the outer rooms, or the baths or the gardens.

  The last were most inviting to a queen in a temper. It was early still, an hour at least till sunset. No one wandered the carefully tended paths, nor did a gardener vex the queen’s solitude.

  Nofret chose wisdom, rather too late perhaps, and waited by the garden gate. It was quiet there and almost cool. Unless someone came over the wall, her lady wa
s safe.

  Ankhesenamon remained in the garden till full dark. Just as Nofret was about to go in search of her, torch in hand, she came walking slowly out of the twilight. She was calm, her anger quieted. It was not gone: Nofret saw flickers of it still in her eyes. But she had made her peace with it.

  Well enough for her that she had won that battle. For when she came to her outer chamber, Horemheb was sitting in it with a cup of wine at his elbow and an air of considerable ease.

  Ankhesenamon stopped in the doorway. Nofret, behind her, heard the catch of her breath, saw how her shoulders stiffened. He would not have marked it, maybe. It was very subtle.

  When she walked forward she was calm, composed, royally polite. “My lord general,” she said in her low sweet voice. “To what do I owe the honor?”

  “Lady,” he said, rising and bowing.

  Ankhesenamon sat in the chair that he had vacated. There were others in the room, but none that he had claimed for his own.

  He could not but comprehend the gesture. He accepted it to all appearances as right and proper. He did not venture to sit, since she did not invite him, but knelt on one knee before her.

  Nofret, unregarded in the doorway, observed that he was not as old as she persisted in thinking him. His stern expression made him seem older than he was. He was still more young than old, a man in his prime, strong, honed in war. A fine figure of a man, a Hittite would say.

  Ankhesenamon had chosen to blame him for all her sorrow. It was a pity, rather. A strong man, young but not too young, would do well for Egypt.

  If the queen had known what Nofret was thinking, she would have called Nofret traitor. Nofret kept her tongue between her teeth. She was there only on sufferance. If she moved or spoke, she might be dismissed.

  Or she might not. If Ankhesenamon truly feared Horemheb, she would want another there, a witness, perhaps a defender—though what Nofret could do against a man trained in battle, she did not know.

  Horemheb was speaking while Nofret’s wits wandered, something of sorrow, and of offering his aid however the queen might choose to accept it. The queen said nothing at all. She stared past him, stone-faced.