King and Goddess (13 page)

“A very young master,” said the man who seemed made of
leather and dried sinew, bald by nature and not by the razor’s art, with a lean
and ageless face. Clearly he did not mean youth of the body.

“But,” said Senenmut, “that must mean—”

It was probably unpardonably rude, but he could not help
himself. He left the servants—his servants—and ran in the one direction that he
had not yet taken. It led out of the kitchen and through a kitchen garden ripe
with the scents of a midden, into a perfect miniature of the king’s stables.

This could hold perhaps a dozen horses and half a dozen
chariots, with all their fodder and accouterments. There was a single chariot
in it, and the mares who had brought him here, the Moon and the Star, matched
beauties pacing nervously in strange stalls. He comforted them with strokings
and a handful each of barley. They ate in snatches, watchful, wary of this new
place.

He had not thought that he might be watched, but of course
he was. The stablemaster stood near the doorway. The Nubian bulked in it,
leaning against the post, arms folded.

Senenmut addressed the latter, a shade too eagerly perhaps,
but he was beginning to understand what the queen had done. “She’s done it.
Hasn’t she? She’s made me a lord:”

“It would hardly be appropriate if she had not,” the Nubian
said. “Since you are the guardian of the Princess Neferure, and the queen’s
particular scribe and servant.”

“Am I that?” Senenmut sounded like a fool. He knew it; but
he could not help it. His mother had the truth of it. He had never thought past
his service to the queen, nor reflected on what it could signify.

And he had thought himself a man of ambition. The queen had
shown him what an innocent he was.

Why, he thought, she was even a match for his mother.

Maybe.

Senenmut grew to love his faded unfashionable house. Other
and newer noble houses were larger, more brightly painted, more imposingly
adorned. But his house near the palace, with its garden wall that at the height
of Inundation was a quay upon the river, seemed to him much warmer in its
heart.

He did not live alone there. His mother made a show of
insisting that the family stay in his father’s house; but he had room and to spare
for them all, even the ancient and doddering woman who had been his mother’s
nurse.

The baby, who was not so small any longer, had a nursery.
Ahotep had a room of his own. Senenmut would have given up the master’s rooms
to his father, but Hat-Nufer would not hear of that.

“Don’t be an idiot,” she said. “You earned it. You keep it.
We’ll take the rooms over by the river garden. They’re bigger than the whole of
our old house.”

So they were. Rahotep and Hat-Nufer settled into them with
the aunts and the maid and a servant or two. Hat-Nufer made herself lady of the
house. Rahotep went his vague benevolent way from market to temple to tavern,
remembering to come home when his wife sent a boy after him. They were happy,
as far as Senenmut could tell.

Hat-Nufer took credit for it all, though it was clear to
Senenmut that the queen had set it in train well before his mother came to
compel her. It was like Hatshepsut to subject Senenmut to humiliation, and
never say a word in his defense.

The queen and the tradesman’s wife got on wondrous well.
They were the same kind of woman. Hard, Senenmut thought. Ruthless.
Stronger-willed than any man he knew. What each wanted, she took, nor asked a
man’s leave.

He was cursed with such women; surrounded by them. Even tiny
Neferure had an imperious way about her, demanding her nurse’s breast.

~~~

The king came back as the Inundation of the Nile shrank
and dwindled into the dry season, the green and thriving winter of Egypt. The
black earth that the river had left grew tall with emmer wheat and barley,
onions and lentils and lettuces, fruits of tree and vine and earth, a rich
harvest to feed the people of Egypt.

The king returned victorious at the head of his army. They
brought with them the spoils of Asia, gold and captives, a whole great train of
them behind the king’s chariot.

“It’s not enough,” the queen said.

She had met her husband at the gate of the city, with her
daughter in her arms. Neferure had grown out of early infancy into bright-eyed
babyhood, alert to everything that passed, and afraid of nothing.

She regarded the glittering figure of her father with utter
fascination. He swept her up and carried her in his chariot, small naked child
with her necklace of blue beads, crowing as she clasped the false beard that
was strapped to his chin.

He evinced no disappointment that this, his first child of
the queen’s body, was a daughter. He was still holding her in Hatshepsut’s
chambers, dandling her on his knee, trying to teach her to laugh. She was too
young for that; but she could smile, and did, to his manifest delight.

The queen was much less easily distracted. “Your war cost
far more than it gained us. Have you given a moment’s thought to how we’re to
manage the rest?”

“We’ll raise taxes,” he said, and not as if it mattered. He
cooed at his daughter, who cooed back obligingly. “Look! She’s smitten with
me.”

“She’s smitten with everyone,” Hatshepsut said. “Listen to
me. You can’t raise taxes. The people won’t stand for it.”

“The people will stand for whatever I tell them to stand
for,” the king said as if to his daughter. “Yes, little one. I am king and god.
They exist to serve me.”

“They can’t serve you if they’re dying of starvation,” the
queen snapped.

“So,” he said. “They can trade their harvest, you said. Let
them live on that.”

“How can they, if you’re taxing it out of existence?”

He hissed in frustration. “I am not taxing them into
destitution. The Great House takes much less than a half-share of all that
grows and thrives in the Two Lands, as tribute to the king’s majesty. The rest
is theirs to do with as they please. Even to sell it to the barbarians in
Asia—who, my dear lady, are far less haughty than they were before my war swept
over them.”

“And through your war and the destruction it brought, you
compel them to purchase our grain, which feeds our people whom you have taxed
in order to pursue your war.”

Hatshepsut tossed her head as if to clear it. Senenmut,
quiet in the shadow of her Nubian shadow, noticed how careful she was,
instinctively so, not to disarrange her wig and her tall crown. “My lord, that
is very tidy, if somewhat convoluted, but it does not remove the essential
fact. Your war was an extravagance.”

“Then what would you have me do?” he flared in sudden
temper. “A king fights to defend his kingdom. He wins new lands for it, new
peoples to pay him tribute. Would you have us retreat to the smallest compass,
even to this city and its walls? The wages of conquest built this palace, lady,
and won the gold that adorns your neck.”

“This is gold of the mine,” she said.

“Mined by captives,” he shot back. “No, lady. I was always
slower of wit than you, but this I know. You would be content if I never left
this palace at all—and it would please you best if I never left my throne. If I
were bound there, condemned to sit in it day and night without respite, I would
go thoroughly mad.”

“The gods made you a living god,” the queen said. “I would
that they had also given you sense.”

“And what is sense? To sit here like a spider in her web,
with all her husbands neatly wrapped in her larder?” He was on his feet,
bulking over her. “Madam, you will remember that I am Horus in the land of the
living.”

“I never forget it,” she said. Sweetly. Fearlessly.
Calculated to a nicety, to madden him until surely he must strike her for her
presumption.

But she had calculated also that he would not go so far. He
turned on his heel and stalked out. Her eyes gleamed as she watched him go.

But when he was well gone, when the baby, howling, had been
removed by her nurse, Hatshepsut lowered her head into her hands. “Oh,” she
said. “Oh, gods. He tempts me so—one day I’ll destroy myself.”

“I doubt that,” the Nubian said dryly. He was free of his
tongue when the queen was at ease.

He was not a mere guardsman, Senenmut had come to know. He
had a house in the city, and a household of imposing size, larger than
Senenmut’s own. He had titles, offices, occupations that he pursued, it must
be, when other men were asleep; for he seemed to spend every waking moment standing
guard over the queen. That was his chief duty and evidently his pleasure.

He maintained his position behind his lady, proper in every
respect, save in the words he spoke. “I doubt it’s ever you who will be
destroyed. You’re too canny. You got rid of him, which was exactly what you
intended.”

“But,” she said, “he left angry. That was poorly done. I
should have sent him away smiling. I have yet to give him a son, you see. Until
I do, I have no choice. I must suffer his presence.” She looked up at him, her
face torn, as if she could not choose whether to laugh or to weep. “But I
can’t, Nehsi. I can’t stand him.”

Even he had nothing to say to that. And what must it have
cost her, Senenmut thought, to go to her husband’s bed night after night, to
speak softly to him, indulge his whims, refrain from quarreling—and she had
gained Neferure, but it was a son she had prayed for. Now she had it all to do
again, and from the look of her, her gorge rose at the thought.

“I have failed of my duty,” she said. “I let myself be ruled
by a mere human dislike. But I don’t . . . think . . .
I can be reasonable. If he were an evil man, or terribly ugly, or riddled by
some ghastly disease—but there is nothing wrong with him. I simply can’t like
him.”

“You might,” Senenmut ventured to suggest, “go to him as
your duty commands, but dream of another while he does what a man must do with
a woman.”

She rounded on him in such flat astonishment that he
wondered if she had forgotten he was there. Then, and that was cruel, she
laughed. “Dream? Dream of whom, scribe? You?”

Her mockery stung him into wit. “Why not, if it passes the
time?”

“Then I shall,” she said, still laughing. She sobered,
however, as the bent of her thoughts shifted. “But first I have to mend what
I’ve broken.” She closed her eyes as if in pain. “Gods! I do know better. I
do.”

~~~

The king was terribly angry, but the queen exerted herself
to the utmost to be pleasing to him. She went to him in her own person,
attended only by a pair of maids, dressed with the greatest care, so that she
might seem at once irresistibly beautiful and alluringly humble.

Senenmut heard from the maids a little of what she had said:
words that in another woman would have been groveling abasement, but as the
maid Mayet said, “She makes even abjection seem queenly.” The king turned his
face away from her, but she persisted, going so far as to kneel at his feet and
clasp his knees, though she could not manage a flood of tears.

He would not have been a man if he had continued in his
resistance. And the king, living god though he was, was flesh and blood. He let
her beg for a while longer, but the battle was won. The queen had returned to
favor.

The cost to her seemed less high than she had professed.
Servants of the king’s bedchamber whispered that he was a rather dull lover,
doing his duty with dispatch and falling asleep directly after. He never wanted
to talk, and he was seldom in a mood to listen. Once he was asleep, his queen
was free to return to her own chambers, where she would bathe, always, before
she went to her bed.

Meritre, the second of the maids whom she favored, observed
in Senenmut’s hearing that the baths were ritual cleansing. “Pity, too,” she
said, “that her majesty doesn’t have a greater appreciation of the honor his
majesty does her. He is the king, after all. Every night she holds the living
Horus in her arms.”

Senenmut found the irony somewhat over-rich, but Mayet, who
was a charming innocent like the kitten she was named for, said seriously, “The
living Horus is a bore.”

“Exactly,” said Meritre.

When the queen conceived again, her household knew a
profound relief. In steeling herself to be pleasant to her husband, she had
grown more than a little unreasonable in small things: a razor that cut too
close, a jar of unguent that fell from a table and shattered, a gown that had
been washed but was not dry at the precise moment when she needed it. Her maids
took to keeping their distance. Her guards and attendants, and her scribe,
walked soft in her presence.

But once it was certain that she would bear another child,
she returned to her older self: haughty, imperious, but sensible enough as
royalty went. The king, denied her favors, sought comfort elsewhere. There was
no war in the offing, and for once he was not agitating for one.

“He’s calmed down,” Senenmut observed to Hapuseneb one
morning as they waited for the queen to be done with her toilet. It was an
unusually elaborate one: there was a grand audience, a gathering of the great
lords of the Two Lands, who must offer each his domain’s taxes and its tribute,
and be recorded in the rolls of the House of Life.

Senenmut was wearing his best kilt and a pectoral that the
queen had given him. The collar was heavy, for it was made of gold among the
beads of lapis and carnelian and turquoise and faience. He fancied that it weighed
as armor did on the shoulders of a prince.

Reflection on princely burdens led him to judge the king’s
conduct of late, and to find it none so baffling. “Horses are like that,” he
said, “especially stallions. As they grow older, most of them grow calmer.
Maybe the king fought himself out in that last campaign.”

“Or maybe,” said Hapuseneb, “his calm has a face, and a
remarkably pretty one at that.”