King and Goddess (11 page)

He admired her for that. It was not an easy pregnancy, nor
did it grow easier as it went on. Her doctors hovered. They would have confined
her to her bed, but she would have none of that. Shorter public audiences,
longer private gatherings in which she could recline on a couch with little
sacrifice of dignity: to those she would concede.

She had two kingdoms to rule, and a husband spending the
wealth of both in his war in Asia. War was noble; war was the proper pursuit of
kings. That, Senenmut had been taught. But he saw war as a queen must see it:
lengthy, expensive, taxing her lessened strength.

She had scribes and clerks in dozens and hundreds, but she
took to expecting that Senenmut be present while she conferred with embassies
and heard the counsels of high lords of the Two Lands. He recorded what was
said, which was a scribe’s task; but after, she would keep him with her, often
with no other attendants but a guardsman and a maid or two. Then she would ask
what he thought of the things that had been said.

At first he did not think. He had no time. He was an
instrument, a pen and a strip of papyrus, recording without judgment. But she
challenged him. She demanded that he listen as well as write. She never cared
how difficult it was. She asked it; she expected that he do it.

He had learned in the Temple of Amon that it did no good to
hate one’s master for demanding the impossible. Either one did it or one
suffered. Because he had been well taught, and because he had his pride, he
taught himself to drive two horses at once, to both record and think. It was
hard; it sent him home night after night with a splitting headache. But he
persevered.

And he learned. The queen granted him neither thanks nor
admiration; but from asking him on occasion she advanced to asking him every
day after audience, what he would have done or thought in her place.

It dawned on him after an embarrassingly long while that she
was teaching herself even as she compelled him to learn. He was the youngest of
those she trusted, the closest to her in age and experience.

Even the trust was a revelation: she trusted almost no one.
Her Nubian. A maid or two. Hapuseneb the priest of Amon. Senenmut Perhaps one
or two of the courtiers and counsellors, but with those she was always on
guard, saying nothing that was not carefully judged.

There grew by degrees a custom. After the public and private
audiences, the queen would withdraw to rest and refresh herself before the
tables were laid for the evening banquet. With her she would take a few
companions: Senenmut, the priest, the Nubian who was her shadow. Maids would
attend her for propriety’s sake, but always the same few. There was wine; there
were little cakes, and dates for Senenmut, and such other fruits as were in
season.

They sat at ease, conversing in comfort that had grown over
the days and months. The queen, swelling into immobility with the child, clung
fiercely to her mind’s acuity.

That one particular day, Senenmut remembered after, she had
seen an embassy from Libya, and conversed with the leader of a caravan of
traders that had ventured into the fabled country of Punt He had brought her
gifts, most of which had gone to the storehouses; but she had kept a branch
from the myrrh-tree, dried and sere but heavy with scent.

She loved the scent of myrrh, would drink it in when no one
else could bear the strength of it. If she could, she would bathe in it; but
her maids kept her sensible, and urged on her less potent unguents. Senenmut
did not mind it terribly, but the other two, he noticed, were holding their
breaths.

She was oblivious as she usually was to others’
inconvenience. The caravan-master had enchanted her with his tales. “Imagine!”
she said. “Whole forests of myrrh, and fields of spices. What a country that
must be! And its people—black, like Nubians, but smaller-statured, in robes of
leopardskins.”

Nehsi, who was rumored to sleep wrapped in the skin of a
leopard that he had killed, looked more disdainful than usual. “They are only
savages,” he said.

Hapuseneb laughed between cups of wine. “So says one who
would know! And you, sir: in what den of lions were you born?”

“In Thebes of the kings,” he answered with dignity, “among
the king’s Nubians. I am a civilized man.”

It was impossible to chasten Hapuseneb. He grinned. “So may
the people of Punt be civilized, by their own lights. I wonder what their wine
is like, if they have wine.”

“We must call the trader back again,” the queen said, “and
ask him all our questions.”

“Surely!” said Hapuseneb. “And you, sir scribe: have you
nothing to ask?”

Senenmut had been sliding into a doze. He was short on
sleep, and not for any reason that he could explain to these of all people. His
brother’s nightlong spate of sickness had kept him awake perforce. Better they
should all believe his nights held hostage to a woman.

He roused hastily. “What’s to ask? We should send someone to
see.”

The queen clapped her hands. “Yes!” But then her face fell.
It hurt, almost, to see so much animation turned dour. “Yes. Someday. Maybe.
When this war is paid for.”

“Wars are paid for in the booty the warriors bring back,”
Nehsi said.

“Not always,” she said. “Not even often. I hate wars, I think.
They’re wasteful.”

“Never tell a man that,” Hapuseneb said, cheerful as ever.

“Ah,” she said, a snort of disgust. “Men.”

She shifted on her couch, settling her ungainly weight as
best she might. Her maids were quick to help, offering cushions, a footrest,
the cooling breeze of a fan. She waved them all away. She was irritable
suddenly, more than usual.

Senenmut was not so fogged with sleep that he could not see
the obvious. The others seemed blind. But maybe they did not have a mother who
bore a child a year all through their youth, and had miscarried of the last
only this year past. He knew the signs.

When she stiffened and tried to hide it, he was certain. He
clapped his hands as imperiously as the queen ever had. “Fetch the physicians!”
he commanded the startled maids.

They stared at him as if he had been a dog that suddenly sat
up and spoke. He had never played the lord before.

He armed his glare and fixed it on them. One broke and ran,
he hoped in the proper direction.

The queen’s eyes were closed. Her face was pale. Her voice
was thin, a little breathless. “It hurts,” she said, “rather more than I was
told.”

“Women forget,” said Hapuseneb. “It’s a mercy, Taweret’s
gift.”

He had forsaken his wonted levity. It had taken him some
little time, but now he saw what Senenmut had seen: that the baby was coming.
Even the Nubian seemed to have comprehended, late and last, why his lady was so
abruptly indisposed.

Senenmut was closest and therefore most convenient. She
seized his hand. He started, and winced: her grip was bruisingly strong. She
did not see his pain for the immensity of her own.

She would not let him go, even when the physicians came,
pondered, and ordered that she be brought into her bedchamber. When he tried to
work his hand free, she caught it in both of hers and held fast. She dragged
him with her perforce, and kept him there.

Childbirth was seldom either easy or quick. A child bearing
a child, young and small as she was, needed long hours and great pain.

Senenmut, young and male and never a father, had no place
there; but she had fixed on him. Gods knew why. Her Nubian, now, or even the
priest, would have made more sense. Or even better, some woman who knew what to
say and how to say it.

Senenmut knew nothing to say or do but babble at her while the
hours stretched. He said whatever came into his head: stories, snatches of
song, memories of his mother’s descents into Taweret’s arms. The goddess was
here as she was at every child’s birth, a memory and a shadow, grotesque but
oddly beautiful, like the woman who labored and suffered on the
childbirth-stool. He held her up when she grew weary, cradling her against him,
an impropriety that should have sent the maids and chamberlains into hysterics.

But it was the chief of physicians who commanded it, and the
shriveled harridan of a midwife who slapped him into place. “Here, you,” she
snapped, “make yourself useful. Hold her up. No, not like a sack of meal. Like
a queen who will be mother to a king.”

He had dreamed often enough of holding a woman in his arms.
He had never dreamed as high as a queen, nor ever imagined himself as he was
now, helping her to bear another man’s child. She was fever-warm, slick with
sweat, swollen and shapeless and struggling. There was no beauty left in her,
and no dignity.

There were moments of quiet, pauses between battles, when
she lay and simply breathed. She seemed grateful then to lean against him, to
let her body go slack, to use his strength in place of her own. She never asked
his leave.

He dared not laugh, but his belly tightened with it. There
was trust—or insult too deep for words. He was a thing, a wall to lean against,
nothing more.

But the wall was living flesh, and it knew that it upheld a
woman. There was no talking sense to it.

Senenmut gritted his teeth and endured. She would never know
what it cost him, nor if she knew would she care. He could not even resent her
for it. She was the queen. She knew no other way to be.

In the dark before dawn, in the hour when the night wind
dies and the dead walk, a child was born to the living Horus and to his Great
Royal Wife. The midwife raised it in bloodied hands, offering it up to the
gods’ sight and to the sight of its mother.

Hatshepsut looked once, long enough to be certain, then
turned her face away.

“A daughter,” said the chief of physicians. “A strong
daughter for the Great House.”

The queen’s voice came too low almost to catch, yet bitterly
distinct. “It was supposed to be a son.”

None of the flock of attendants had the wits to speak. The
midwife, who might have said what needed saying, was engrossed in the child,
cutting and tying up the cord, bathing her, crooning to her in an astonishingly
sweet voice.

There was only Senenmut, still serving as throne and
birthing-chair, to shake her till she stiffened against him, but turned her
head at least and glared.

He glared back. “This is your child,” he said. “Your
daughter, lady and queen: a princess royal, just as you were. She proves your
fertility. She carries the right to kingship, that is given to no man except
through a woman of your line. Why do you turn your face away from her?”

“Because,” Hatshepsut cried out, nearly spitting the words,
“if it had been a son, I’d not have it all to go through again!”

“Hush,” the physicians chided her. “Be still, lady. You’ll
injure yourself.”

“I don’t care!” But she subsided, though she was rigid in
Senenmut’s arms. “It should have been a son.”

“This child is exactly what the gods wish her to be,”
Senenmut said sternly. “She is beautiful. Look at her.”

The queen would not. “She is hideous. All babies are.”

“She will be beautiful,” Senenmut persisted. He was
stubborn—not perhaps as stubborn as the queen, but quite enough to go on with.

“I wanted a son,” the queen said yet again. But the hard
edge had softened. She sounded almost weary, almost sad: a child balked of her
desire, rather than a queen in her wrath.

“You’ll have a son,” Senenmut said. “Next time.”

“I wanted him now,” she said.

“What you have now,” he shot back with a resurgence of
temper, “should delight you to no end. She’s whole, healthy, and lively enough
for any two children. There are women who would sell one of their souls to be
so blessed.”

She met temper with temper, even in her exhaustion. “You
love her so much, you raise her. I’ll not trouble myself with her.”

“You will,” he said, reckless of rank or respect.

“Make me.”

She sounded exactly like Ahotep. Senenmut could not clip her
ear as he would his brother’s: and that was a great pity. He had to settle for
the lash of words. “Very well; since your majesty commands it. I’ll take the
challenge.”

“And the baby.”

“Oh, no,” he said, backing away from the maid who held the
child. “I’m no wetnurse.”

“She won’t be a nurseling forever,” the queen said. “I give
her to you.”

“You can’t do that,” said Senenmut. “You shouldn’t. You’re
exhausted; your mind is fogged. When you come to yourself—”

“I am perfectly and completely myself,” she said with chilly
precision. “I have spoken. You have all witnessed it. Now go away and let me
be.”

“Lady—” Senenmut began.

“Go,” she said.

He went—not because she ordered him, but because he was too
angry to linger. He paused once, to bid farewell to the newborn princess. And
if that convinced her bitch of a mother that he was besotted, then so be it. He
had seen her born nearly in his lap. How could he fail to marvel at her?

~~~

They named the child Neferure, the Beauty of Re. Senenmut
was given a title: Tutor of the King’s Daughter, first servant of Neferure. He
found himself lord and master of the entire suite of a princess, from the
wetnurse to the girlchild who washed the princess’ bed-linens.

He also found himself in a most embarrassing position.
Hat-Nufer was grimly proud of her son. But not too proud to inform him, when he
brought home his new title and the bafflement of his new duties, that he was a
blathering fool. “Never mind the honor,” she said. “What are you supposed to
eat and dress and live on while you’re dancing attendance on a suckling baby?”

He had begun to outgrow the gawkiness of his youth, but the
edge of his mother’s tongue flayed away all pretense of maturity. He was a
clumsy child again, gifted with the pen but with little else, ducking his head
and mumbling a weak defense.