King and Goddess (14 page)

Senenmut was barely interested. “What, another concubine?”

“Another several,” said Hapuseneb with a glint of
wickedness, “but one in particular, who exerts herself strenuously to please
him—and claims to do it in the queen’s name, too.”

“Isis?” Senenmut had had to grope for the name. “She was
here yesterday. She has friends among the queen’s maids.”

“That one has friends everywhere,” Hapuseneb said. “And
hasn’t she grown up lovely, too?”

“I hadn’t particularly noticed,” Senenmut said.

That was not the truth, not exactly, but close enough. Isis
had grown from a lovely child into a breathtakingly beautiful woman. But in
front of the queen she shrank to insignificance. The queen, whose beauty had
more to do with voice and movement and manner than with perfection of feature,
had only to stir or to speak, and one forgot that there could be other or
greater beauty.

Hapuseneb was grinning at him. “Ah,” he said. “You were
distracted. Such distraction! Some are calling Isis the most beautiful woman in
Egypt.”

“Maybe she is,” Senenmut said. “I’m not as enthralled with
her as everyone else seems to be. She and the king are well matched, I suppose.
Neither of them has any conversation.”

Hapuseneb laughed so heartily that the queen, coming forth
from her inner chambers in a blaze of golden splendor, stopped in amazement. He
bowed extravagantly. “But you, O living Isis, unlike certain others who may
claim that name, have both beauty and conversation. We salute you, queen and
goddess. We worship at your most erudite feet.”

She, long accustomed to his absurdities, managed a smile in
the mask of her face. She did indeed look like a goddess, but one carved in
ivory, too stiffly perfect to be living flesh.

This child was not treating her even as kindly as Neferure
had. She was ill daylong; her duties had become an ordeal. But she would not
forsake or even curtail them. Nor would she speak of what she must be fearing:
that she would again be forced to take to her bed for the child’s sake.

She was, it seemed, the kind of woman who conceived easily
enough but bore poorly. That was a pity. A queen more than any other woman
lived by and for the children she bore to her king. She was the line’s hope and
its continuance. Through her and through her daughters came the right to the
Two Crowns.

Hapuseneb’s laughter must have eased the knot of anxiety
that Senenmut could sense in her. Its close kin clenched in his middle.

He had not feared for her while she was carrying Neferure.
He had not known enough then, nor cared. Now he was afraid. When her maids had
not worked their magic of brush and paint, she was haggard, her cheeks
hollowed, her face pale.

A woman in pregnancy should grow round and rich with it. She
grew lean as the child waxed within her, as if it sucked the life and blood
from her, and gave nothing back.

Her lack of curiosity as to the cause of Hapuseneb’s
laughter alarmed Senenmut unduly. She should have been demanding an
explanation. Instead she only smiled, and that faded as she turned her face
toward the door. Her attendants fell into place about and behind her. Was she
walking a trifle stiffly?

Of course she would, in those robes. They were of linen
starched to rigidity and weighted with gold: golden collar, golden armlets and
bracelets, golden girdle above the swell of her middle. Gold crowned her, the
tall plumed crown of the queen, that demanded a high head and a taut line of
neck. It was to her great credit that she could move with any grace at all.

She walked to the great hall as was her custom, refusing a
chair for so little a distance. When the lords and rulers of Egypt were
admitted, the king and queen would be seated in royal state, immovable as the
images that marched in carven ranks down the hall.

Senenmut could not avoid the tedium of that long audience,
even if he had been minded to let the queen out of his sight. He was one of the
scribes who recorded the tally of gifts and tribute. They did turn and turn
about as the lords and ladies passed in procession. He had time to sit in a
shadow where he preferred to be, watching the queen.

She was gracious as always, inclining her head to each of
those who bowed at her feet. She remembered names, as her husband did not. He
had learned years since to maintain a hieratic silence, and to let her speak
where words were required.

She spoke less than was her wont, nor did she indulge those
who were minded to linger. That was only good sense, Senenmut told himself.
There were twenty-two nomes in Upper Egypt, twenty in Lower Egypt. Forty-two in
the Two Lands together, each with its nomarch and his wife and family and his
lesser lords and chamberlains and servants. They passed in procession with
their trains of gifts and taxes, from the nomarch of the farthest south with
his Nubian face and his high Egyptian manners, to the lord of the farthest
north whose nome looked upon the sea.

They began in the morning. They ended near sunset. The lords
who had passed were suffered to depart if they pleased, until they were called
to the feast that would complete their day of homage. The queen and the king
must remain unmoving, unresting save for brief intervals, from the first to the
last; and then they were given little respite, but must sit in state in the
hall of feasting as they had sat in the hall of audience, living images of the
gods’ presence in the Two Lands.

Ancient custom and long habit compelled the lords to be
civil on this of all days, though they would go back in the morning to their
endless squabbles. That was well, Senenmut thought. His lady was steady on her
throne, but she ate nothing and drank little. She did not snap at the maid who
pressed her to take at least a sop of bread in broth from the stewed goose. She
ignored her, in what might have been contrariness, or it might have been
exhaustion. He feared that it was the latter.

Because the procession had ended so late, the feast began
late and went into the deep hours of the night. The queen could have excused
herself once the carvers had departed with the remains of the whole ox, but she
did not rise, did not take her leave.

She had been toying with her untouched cup of wine. She
ceased even that, and sat still. The arms of her chair were concealed beneath
the table. Only those who stood closest to her could see that her hands were
clenched till the knuckles whitened.

Senenmut met Nehsi’s glance. He had not intended to stand so
prominently, but worry had set him at her left hand as Nehsi stood at her
right. The Nubian’s brows were drawn together: as much expression as Senenmut
had ever seen in him in a public place.

And how, short of lifting her and carrying her, could they
persuade her to rest? She would not hear Senenmut’s murmur in her ear—perhaps
she could not. She seemed enspelled, motionless and voiceless, while the
princes of Egypt waxed riotous with wine.

When she sighed and crumpled, both of them were there, the
Nubian’s strong arms and Senenmut’s fierce urgency, bearing her out of the
hall. They were quick, and so quiet that no one called after them or pursued
them.

While Nehsi bore the queen in his arms, striding long and
smooth and swift, Senenmut mustered the scatter of servants. One he sent to
fetch the chief physician; another, with a prayer that it might not be
necessary, he bade seek out the midwife. He had chosen as carefully as he
could; his messengers ran with all speed.

~~~

It was a fever she had, and great pain in her throat. Her
body burned as if with fire. She could eat nothing, nor would she have drunk
the physician’s potions or even water cooled in earthen jars, had he not
persisted until she surrendered. He wrapped her in cloths steeped in water that
he had blessed and scented with herbs and made strong with healer’s magic. He
labored long over her, administering his medicines and chanting his
invocations.

The midwife stood aside and scowled. “Fever’s bad,” she said
to Senenmut. “It gets too hot, it burns the baby. Maims it; kills it.”

Senenmut prayed that it would not be so. The queen tossed in
delirium. Her lips moved. Her eyes wandered.

When they fell on him, they burned hotter even than her
fever. She stretched out her hands.

He could not refuse her. He took her hands in his, bone-thin
and burning hot as they were. With strength that astonished him, she pulled him
down till he half sat, half knelt on the bed beside her. She eased her grip
just as it became excruciating, but she would not let him go.

He settled as comfortably as he could. That, as it happened,
was in the scribe’s posture, cross-legged on the bed beside the queen, with her
hands in his. Her fever was like a living thing, a creature of fire. It
conquered her will and her heart’s resistance. It made her see visions.

He saw them reflected in her eyes. The physician’s
ministrations blurred them, softened their edges, but they were strange still,
like dreams of the dead. She walked in the dry land beyond the western horizon,
where the sun shone by night and the day was black and beset with demons. Only
his hands held her to the world of the living. She clung to them with all her
strength.

Such thoughts as he had, dim and scattered, wondered why she
came to him. Why not to her Nubian, whom she clearly cherished, and who loved
her? It could not be that he had conversation, or that he could write a clear
hand. It was certainly not because he had any beauty. Nehsi was the beautiful
one. Senenmut with his beaky unlovely face and his narrow shoulders was
massively ordinary.

He would never understand this woman. She, beauty and queen,
with her army of servants, might have chosen to cling to any or all of them.
But when she walked the borders of the dry land, she turned to Senenmut.

Perhaps it was only that he was a scribe; he had the power
of words, and through them the spells that guided a soul through the hall of
judgment and into the Field of Reeds.

He was not comforted. If anything his fear had grown
greater.

She could die. He knew it with clarity that seers must know,
a deep and rooted certainty. If she died, inevitably he must go on living. And
he could not endure the thought of it.

Not because he was her servant, and all that he had was by
her favor. He would manage well enough; he could seek employment wherever there
was need of a scribe, or if that did not please him, he could go back to the
Temple of Amon. He had no great fear for himself. But to live in a world
without this woman in it . . .

Dear gods. He did not even like her. She was sharp-tongued,
quick-tempered, and mightily arrogant. She vexed him endlessly, demanded the
impossible, and when he accomplished it, rarely rewarded him with so much as a
smile. Gratitude was beneath her.

And for all of that, as she clung to his hands as to life
itself, he knew perfectly calmly and perfectly inevitably that he could not
live without her. She was the breath in his lungs. She was the heart in his
breast. As much of life as he had to give, he gave her, counting nothing of the
cost.

She would never thank him. Nor did he want her gratitude,
with all the burdens that rode on it. This was enough: to be the one she
sought. To be granted the right to give her what he had.

He almost laughed. Seti-Nakht would have been mightily
amused. So much for arrogance, he would say if he ever knew of this. All that
pride, all that cockiness, and Senenmut had fallen as headlong as any yokel.

Ah, well, he thought. He was mortal flesh. She was queen and
goddess. Who was he, then, to resist her?

The queen walking living out of the dry land. But she left
her child behind: a tiny handful that would have been her son, the king who
would rule when the king her husband was dead. He was not well grown enough to
go to the house of the embalmers, or to be given space in his father’s tomb. In
the life beyond death as in this world of the living, he had no presence, no
name, no souls. He was a might-have-been, no more.

She mourned him as one mourns a might-have-been, in grief
that somehow lacked a heart. She had never loved him, never known him. But he
would have been king. For that she could honestly weep.

And for herself, too, that she had failed a second time to
provide her husband with an heir. “I can’t do it again,” she said. “Dear gods,
I can’t.”

Senenmut held his tongue while she wept on his shoulder. She
had not let him out of her sight since she came to herself and found the child
gone, taken away, and her body much weakened with fever. There were others who
could comfort her—Hapuseneb and her Nubian not least—but Senenmut seemed to
have become her bulwark.

It was nothing improper, he told himself. There were
servants about, always, and guards, and priests and physicians. Not her
husband; but that was explained away. The king dared not risk her fever. He was
much preoccupied, it was said, in ruling the Two Kingdoms alone, without his
queen to aid him.

She wanted nothing of her scribe but his strength. He wanted
nothing of her that was not proper. She was the queen. He was her servant.

He was let go at last because she reckoned herself fit to
put on her state robes and lift up the weight of the crown and appear before
the court. She managed it by sheer strength of will. The court received her
with what, for courtiers, was joy. The king embraced and kissed her, which was
a great concession in the face of royal dignity. Senenmut saw how she gained life
and vigor in the light of her people’s welcome.

She collapsed after, but it was a sleep of honest
exhaustion, with no sickness in it. She dismissed him before it overwhelmed
her, sent him home to rest. He was so astonished that he obeyed.

~~~

He rested indeed, though in that house, with two young
children and his mother and a crowd of servants that seemed to swell with every
sunrise, he found nothing resembling peace. Exhaustion dulled his ears and shut
his mind to the clamor about him. He walked straight through it without a word,
fell into his bed and dropped into sleep as into deep water.