Pillar of Fire

by Judith Tarr

  Leah had not changed as the Lord Ay had. She had always seemed ancient to Nofret, but strong, like a gnarled and venerable tree. Her skin was still soft, still barely wrinkled. Her back was straight, her eyes bright, resting on Nofret with the familiar welcome.

  Nofret’s eyes filled, astonishing her. She had given up weeping on the day she was captured and taken to Mitanni.

  She sat where she had always sat, on a heap of rugs facing Leah, and poured date wine from the jar, a cup for each, and for Johanan too as he came in behind her. “We only need Aharon,” she said, “to make the gathering complete.”

  She had meant it lightly, but it came out somber.

  Neither of the Apiru smiled. Leah nodded. “Aharon would be welcome,” she said. “We’re going back to him, to the place he’s made among the people of Sinai.”

  Nofret had expected it. There was no safe place for them in Egypt. “But if you go,” she said, “I’ll never see you again.”

  “Unless you go with us.”

  It was Leah who said it. Not Johanan, who had never in any way intimated that she should accompany him anywhere.

  Through the anger that had no reasonable cause, Nofret forced herself to think, to say what was best to say. “You know I can’t leave my lady. Now least of all.”

  “Why?” asked Leah.

  Nofret stared at her, narrow-eyed. She stared back without flinching.

  “If you can see truth,” said Nofret, “or even hear what everyone in Egypt is saying, you know that she’s not loved and in many places is much hated.”

  “Because she did a thing that no queen should do.” Leah nodded. “Yes, I’ve heard what everyone says. How much of it is true?”

  “You can’t see?”

  “Tell me,” said Leah.

  “That she sent for a Hittite prince,” Nofret said after a pause, “that is true. So is it true that she refused to marry any man of hers in Egypt, till she was compelled by the death of the prince who had been sent to her. Then she took what she had to take. She ventured her grandfather’s life against the one who she believes has killed two kings already and is prepared to kill a third.”

  “And will that one do it?”

  “I . . . think not.” Nofret stopped, considered altering what she had said, left it as it was. “He knows his time is near. Lord Ay is old. Time and the gods will dispose of him before his rival grows too greatly impatient. And meanwhile there’s Hatti to engross him. It can hardly have submitted meekly to the murder of its prince.”

  “That it has not,” said Leah. “But all wars end, and soldiers come home. Is that what your lady fears?”

  “My lady is beyond fear,” Nofret said. It was almost like peace to be able to say so; to go on, and to say what she had said to no one else, not even the Lord Ay. “She’s as mad as her father ever was, but without a god to give her grace. She thinks that if she could just find a son, any son, from anywhere, she will be safe.”

  “You know that can’t be,” Johanan said, “unless she finds a man grown, and one honed in war, too. Like that Hittite prince. It’s a pity he was killed. Egypt would have hated him, but from all I know of his kin, he would have stood rather well against his lady’s enemy.”

  “He wouldn’t have lasted long,” said Nofret. “She needs an Egyptian, and young, and strong enough for her purpose. She’s found none. All the ones suitable are dead or far away. They’ve been disposed of one by one, year by year. And no one saw but my lady. My poor lady, whose mind has broken.”

  “Has it?” Leah asked. “Or is she seeing clear, and that clarity terrifies her, and she runs away from it? She saw the enemy before anyone else did. What if she sees more than that? What if she knows what is to come?”

  “She never has seen that clear before,” Nofret said.

  “Grief can open the eyes of the heart,” said Leah, “and she has had more grief in her brief years than most women know in a lifetime.”

  “And yet,” said Nofret, “she’s not herself. She wanders the riverbank looking, she says, for a child in a basket. She tells tales to herself of the sons of slaves and servants, of seizing one and commanding that all the rest be put to death lest he contest the right of the one to be king. She tells wild stories, flights of fancy such as no sane woman would indulge in.”

  “And yet she continues to rule, and that not badly, or people would be remarking on it.”

  “No one needs to remark on it. She sent to Hatti for a husband. That’s madness enough for all the rest.”

  Leah shook her head. “I think you underestimate her. She’s in great danger, and well she knows it.”

  “Then why,” Nofret demanded with sudden heat, “does she ride about in her chariot as if she were immortal, and wander by the river, taunting the crocodiles?”

  “Maybe she wants her enemies to believe her less than she is.”

  “She feigns it too well,” Nofret said. “She wants to die. She says so, and she’s speaking the truth.”

  There was a silence. Nofret realized that she was gripping her cup of date wine as if she would crush it. She unlocked her fingers, moved to sip, set the cup down again untouched. Its sweetness would have gagged her.

  Slowly, after what seemed a long while, Johanan said, “He said that we would speak of this. That when the god willed it, she would become as you say she is: weak in spirit, frail, and in great danger. He said that she would die; that when the enemy had what he wanted, he would dispose of her and take a wife more tractable, who had not been raised to be a queen.”

  “Who said that? Who told you such a thing?” But Nofret knew. She shook the knowledge out of her head. “Was it the dead man? Does he still babble of everything and nothing? Was he in Thebes, then? You left Sinai years ago!”

  “He knew,” said Johanan. “He’s always known. His god shows him everything. It would break the mind of a lesser man.”

  “But his mind is already broken.” Nofret spat, deliberately vulgar. “So he foresaw this. What did he say we should do about it? Kill her before her so-loyal general does it for us?”

  “She will die,” said Leah, “if she remains here. She has no friends, no one who will protect her once her husband is dead. She has no son; and if she bore one now he would be easy prey for the enemy. Children die so easily, and she has never borne one who lived past infancy. She has no defense and little enough hope. Her lord will die and the other will take her. No prince from afar will come to defend her.”

  “He won’t kill her,” Nofret said. “He’s ruthless, yes, but he wants her for herself as much as for the kingship that she carries.” She was echoing Lord Ay, and why not? He was a wise man.

  “She carries kingship, but no son for a king. Once he has the Two Crowns he’ll look for a woman who can give him an heir.”

  “The gods might be kind,” said Nofret. “Or he can take a concubine. Sons of lesser queens have taken the kingship before now.”

  “All that might happen,” Leah conceded. “Or it might happen as she foresees it. She sees only death. If she had not sent to Hatti . . . maybe. Or maybe Egypt would remember her father, and what he did to its gods.”

  “Egypt is restless,” Johanan said. “It’s learned that kings can die of other means than war or age or sickness. That people can grow weary of them and dispose of them, and set up kings who suit them better. Now it sees itself subjected to an aged king, a man too feeble to beget a living son, and a queen whose children have all died. The king and the queen are the life and spirit of the kingdom. If they are frail, then what of the land they rule? How long can it go on before it totters and falls? And when it falls, to whom can it fall but the nation to which its queen sent for a king, the foreign nation, the nation that would be its conqueror?”

  Nofret clapped her hands over her ears, but his voice went on, quiet, relentless, speaking the truth in all its merciless clarity. When it stopped, she lowered her hands. He was bent over his own, rocking as he used to do when he was young and in some trouble of the spir
it, some slight thing that was all the world to a boy.

  Now he was a man, and she could almost believe that he grieved as much as she. “Then we have no hope,” she said. “No choice but to play it out.”

  “Her father didn’t think so,” Johanan said.

  Nofret opened her mouth, shut it again. “Are you saying . . .”

  “He said to me,” said Johanan, “that when the time came, when I was no longer welcome in Thebes, when Egypt lay under the rule of an old man and a woman who had sought a king from another kingdom, then I was to carry hope to the queen of Egypt. I was to set her free.”

  “To kill her?”

  Johanan tossed his head, as impatient as he had ever been in youth, and scornful, too. “Are you blind, or are you only afraid to see what’s as plain as your face?”

  “She can’t do what her father did,” Nofret said. “Only luck and his god kept him from being discovered. We can’t be sure that we can do it again.”

  “And it does lack a certain imagination,” said Leah. She met both their stares with equanimity. “She won’t want to go, either. Her father belonged only to his god. She belongs always and forever to Egypt. She’ll never leave of her own will.”

  “She’ll die here,” said Nofret. “She wants to. She insists on it.”

  “And you’re going to let her?” Johanan flung up his hands. “Grandmother, you were the one who made us come here! Now you tell me it’s useless.”

  “Did I say that?” Leah was maddeningly composed. “I didn’t say you should kill her, either, or let her be killed.”

  “Then how—” said Nofret and Johanan together. They stopped, disconcerted alike, furious alike.

  Leah laughed, sweet as a girl. “Oh, you children! Open your eyes and see. The queen will die if she stays. She won’t go, because she is queen, and she knows no other thing to be. She has no god to guide her. Her father would do it if he could, but his time is not yet come. He’s far away in Sinai, where his god has bid him stay. You heard the god, Johanan. He called you out of Thebes. He brought you into Memphis.”

  “You brought me into Memphis,” said Johanan, not a little sullen.

  “You followed where I led, where you knew the god was.”

  Nofret looked from one to the other. She had never seen a great likeness between them. Johanan favored his father, and Aharon the long-dead father before him, she had always thought. And yet they were alike after all. They had the same eyes.

  The same light in them, too, full day in Leah’s, a slow and reluctant dawn in Johanan’s. “You didn’t mean—for us to—”

  “It is outrageous,” said Leah. “It may even be mad.”

  “As mad as she pretends to be.” Johanan glanced at Nofret, then back at his grandmother. “Is she, then? What will she do if—”

  “You know she won’t ever go of her own will,” Leah said, “no matter how much you may have hoped for it.”

  He shook his head. “No. No, we can’t do it. Not if she resists us. She’ll betray us at the first guardpost, condemn us to death with a word.”

  “I think not,” said Leah.

  “Then how are we to do it? Drug her and carry her like baggage?”

  Nofret listened in growing incredulity. She had not understood at first, then not wanted to understand. They were speaking of abducting the queen of Egypt. Of seizing her and carrying her away into the desert, where no doubt her father was waiting, with his god beside him.

  “You can’t do that,” she said. “The wrath of all the gods will follow you. Egypt’s armies will hunt you down and destroy you—you and the woman you think to snatch away. The one who wants the throne so badly will have all the cause he could ever wish for, to hunt her to her death.”

  “Not while she carries the king-right,” said Johanan.

  “She’s not the only one,” Nofret said. “Everyone thinks so, because the Lord Ay has been so careful to protect his own. But he has a daughter, a sister of Nefertiti, younger than she, young enough still to bear a child. She’s never married. She lives in seclusion, or in Amon’s temple in Thebes, where she is a singer. She’ll be remembered, you can be sure of that. She’ll do more than well for what that man needs of her.”

  “You see,” Johanan said, “that your lady has no hope here.”

  Nofret rounded on him. “Whose side are you taking? You've been arguing against this!”

  “I don’t have to like what I see,” he said. “And for a fact I hate it. It’s perfect insanity.”

  “There is nothing else to do,” said Leah. “Not if she’s to live. Egypt is close to destroying her. She knew it when she sent to Hatti. That sending made it a surety.”

  “I don’t think,” said Nofret, “that anything she did could have been the right thing. But how in the name of all the gods can we abduct a queen and carry her all the way to Sinai, and not be caught and killed?”

  “The god knows,” Leah said. “Open your eyes and see.”

  “I see nothing but death,” said Nofret.

  “Then you are blind.” Leah leaned forward and stretched out her hands. They were warm on Nofret’s face, dry and thin, an old woman’s hands. But there was tremendous vitality in them, tremendous strength of spirit. Nofret recoiled by instinct, but they followed. She could not get away from them.

  “Open your eyes and see,” said Leah.

  Nofret squeezed them shut, but the light would not go out of them. Light like a burning brand, like a column of fire in the night. Light such as had filled the king who was gone, the dead man who yet lived, who was a prophet in Sinai.

  She set her teeth. “I don’t want to know this god.”

  “It’s not a matter of wanting,” Leah said. “Open. See.”

  “No,” said Nofret.

  “See,” Leah commanded her, no gentleness now, no yielding. “Open and see.”

  Forty-Seven

  Nofret never really saw anything but hopelessness, a queen whose mind was broken and whose people had come to hate her. She might be strong enough to overcome it all, even the man who would have her, the strong man, the soldier who was never so weak as to succumb to mercy. Everyone knew that when Ay was dead, Horemheb would be king. It was as certain as the river’s flood.

  He was still in Memphis. He came often to the hour of audience, to stand in the place allotted the General of the Armies, to show his strength by the simple fact of his presence. The queen conducted herself as if he had not been there at all. The king acknowledged him when it was proper. He had not laid claim yet to the name of heir. But no one else contested him for it, nor would. Everyone in Egypt was afraid of Horemheb.

  He did not look so terrible, if one knew nothing of him but his face. He was a handsome man, no longer in first youth but far from old. He carried himself as a soldier will, erect, poised, alert for any danger. The men who accompanied him in court, the guards who strode behind him when he traveled in palace or city, were warriors bred and born. They were beautiful and dangerous, like hunting cats, but so were warriors in Hatti. They might not mean harm to Nofret’s lady. Their lord might even, against all hope, be the husband that she needed to restore her to herself.

  Nofret had difficulty, watching him in court and about the palace, in remembering that he was her lady’s enemy. He had brought Prince Zennanza’s head and hands in a casket, certainly, but that was the old Egyptian way when a man had destroyed an enemy.

  By his own lights Horemheb had done nothing but good for the Two Lands, had prevented the ascent of a foreigner to the throne, and protected a queen from her own folly. He could hardly be faulted for the fact that Egypt had learned of what she did, and loathed her for it. Even if he had taken advantage of it to gain power over the queen’s life and fate—who could blame him, after all? He only did what any strong man would.

  Egypt needed a strong king. Ay had said it, who was too old and worn to be as strong as Egypt needed. He would not dispose of the man who meant to be his heir. He was too wise a man, too devoted to Egypt. />
  Sometimes Nofret was sure that she was going as mad as the queen. There were Leah and Johanan in the city, waiting for her to do what they had agreed on in that room in the travelers’ lodging—what they had imposed on her by sheer force of will. There was the queen, wandering distracted by the river, driving her chariot headlong in and about the city, sitting in court like a painted image, and never a moment’s true thought in her.

  And there was Nofret, doubting everything, knowing nothing, and too much the coward to move. She could refuse her part in the Apiru plot—for plot it was, and high treason, and if it were known, she would die, and not either slowly or easily. She could trust that her lady’s fears after all were false, and she was in no danger; she would mourn the Lord Ay when he died, accept his heir as her king, and be queen as she had been for so long, whole and sane and freed at last from grief.

  Nofret could hope for such a thing, but Leah had seen otherwise. Leah was the seeress of her people. She had seen a soldier without mercy, who lived only for the power that he could gain; who would take a poor distracted queen, and use her, even treat her kindly since it served his purpose, but in the end, when she failed to present him with an heir, he would dispose of her and take a wife who would do what she could not. He might even love her in his fashion, but love to such a man was as nothing beside his yearning to be king.

  Nofret had seen what he was. She had heard him in Amon’s temple so long ago, and seen his face when he came bearing Prince Zennanza’s head and hands. That was the man unmasked. No other was the truth.

  Yet even if she held herself to that, there was still the enormity of what she proposed to do. Ankhesenamon would never consent to be anything but queen. She had lived so, and so she would die. She would never take the road that her father had taken. It was not in her.