King and Goddess (17 page)

He caught his breath. He was no slave to superstition, but
she tempted the gods with her irreverence.

She laughed at his expression. He seldom heard such laughter
from her, light and free, unconstrained by the bonds of her royalty. “My
beloved,” she repeated. “You do love me.”

“Of course I love you,” he snapped. “No man could avoid it.
But for you to look at the likes of me . . .”

“Your arrogance is a sham,” she said. “Your heart is a shy
and modest thing, too tender to show itself bare. You see? I see the whole of
you.”

“You don’t—”

Her hand stopped his mouth. It was warm. It lay lightly on
his lips, but it shook him like a blow. He gasped and staggered.

She caught him, held him up. He remembered the shape and
feel of her body—oh, vividly; every night he dreamed it. Her breasts were
fuller than his memory had made them, her skin softer, her scent sweeter. Her
lips tasted of honey and wine.

He stiffened to pull away. “We can’t—the king—the gods—”

Her eyes caught him, held him. “I am queen and goddess,” she
said with the calm of perfect surety.

“But I—”

“The gods have given you to me. You are their gift and their
consolation.”

“But why now?”

He could never take her off guard, never catch her
unprepared. She smiled a sweet slow smile. “Why not now?”

“Because,” he said, though it burned his throat, “your
husband’s concubine is with child as you are unable to be, and you fear that
she will give him the son who will be king when he is dead. I am your defiance.
You cast me in his face.”

“Yes,” she said, serene as ever. “And I love you, and no
danger will ever come to you. That is my vow and my promise. I loved you before
I learned to hate him. When he is dead and his concubine’s son is king, we will
endure. We will walk together even in the Field of Reeds, where no power of his
will sunder us. I dream, you see. And what I dream, I dream true.”

He should do battle with her relentless, illogical logic. He
should break away, flee, escape while he still could.

But he did not move. He did not wish to. She was queen and
goddess; but she was woman, too, and beautiful, and warm in his arms. His
dreams had taught him how she loved to be embraced: tenderly, without haste,
till urgency woke in her.

He was awkward, even with dreams to guide him. If she had
laughed he would have shriveled, but she was sweetly intent, gentle as he had
never seen her, even with her horses. It was strange to be all new to it, and
yet to find it utterly familiar. He could believe then what she had told him:
that the gods willed it. Why, to what end, he did not know. It might be his
death.

Glorious death, if that were so: wrapped in his lady’s arms.

“So be it,” he said into the fragrance of her hair. “As the
gods will: so let it be.”

Nehsi knew nigh as soon as they did, that his queen and
his queen’s scribe had become more than lady and servant. It only surprised him
that it had taken them so long. He had seen it when Neferure was born, how she
sought that waspish unlovely man as the wild goose seeks its mate. Between them
then had stretched a bond like a shining cord, never dimmed, never weakened,
however far apart their bodies were.

Others had no such eyes as he had, or willed not to see. The
king, by the gods’ mercy, was one of them. He had never been a jealous husband,
but he had had no need to be. And now he had his concubine, whom he doted on
and fussed over as if he had been an old grandmother. One would have thought
that he had never sired a brat before.

Isis, sly creature that she was, encouraged him in his
fretting. She carried well and easily, unlike the queen, but every ache, every
flutter of heart or stomach, threw her into prostration that was only to be
relieved by the king’s presence. When the child roused and began to move, she
kept the king by her by day as well as by night, leashed like a dog, and no
will in him to protest.

The queen bore perforce the burden of the Two Kingdoms. That
of course was nothing new. “I like to rule by myself,” she said. “No fool of a
man interfering with my decisions. No royal whim to disrupt the course of my
judgments.”

Her heart might be given to a scribe, but her friendship
remained securely in Nehsi’s hands. He continued to play the guardsman, though
less often than before: for the comfort of it, the pleasure of a task so
familiar that it seemed bred in the bone. When she took an hour’s grace in her
garden, he still stood watch over her solitude. No duty could prevent him, no
task interfere.

“Sometimes,” she said on that particular day, not long
before Isis came to her time, “I wonder what it would be like to yield to no
man—to be what the king is.”

The earth did not shake at the enormity of the thought, nor
did the Horus-falcon stoop out of the sun to rend her. Nehsi, born in Thebes
but a foreigner by blood and breeding, paused to consider what an Egyptian
would think of a woman who said such a thing. Senenmut, perhaps—

No. Senenmut worshipped her as queen and goddess, loved her
as a woman, spoke as freely to her as Nehsi ever had, and quarreled with her,
too. He must know what was in her heart. If he did not, he was a blinder man
than Nehsi had given him credit for.

She lay on the rim of the fountain, letting the light wind
blow its spray across her body. Her hair was free, her gown a shimmer of gauze.

He regarded her dispassionately and was glad of the woman
who would warm his bed tonight. The twins, in the way of women, had turned
their affections elsewhere in the Nubian Guard, finding greater sport in a man
for each, to share and share alike. He had dallied for a while with the queen’s
sharp-tongued maid, Meritre, but she was a strong dose for a weary man.

Of late he had found a kind of contentment with a lady of
the queen’s wardrobe, half a Nubian, warm and soft-bodied and quiet. Memory of
her soothed him now: her rich brown skin, her densely curling hair, her heavy
breasts with their great nipples full of milk for the girlchild that she had
borne to one of the king’s bodyguard. The child was nigh weaned, and toddled
about while its mother lay with Nehsi: a quiet child, almost unnaturally so,
but very like gentle Kamut.

Half-dreaming though he was, he heard his queen clearly. “I
never wish to be a man, but to have what a man has—to claim the power that he
claims by the simple fact of his sex—for that I would give much.”

“Most men,” he said, “would be overjoyed to answer to one
man, and one man only.”

Her glance was sharp, meant to wound. He raised armor of
imperturbability. That piqued her. She said, “I would answer to none. The gods
shaped and fashioned me to rule, in all things but one. By accident or
oversight, they made me a woman.”

“Woman and queen,” he said. “No woman stands higher; and
only one man.”

“One shallow fool,” she said. “One man who would have done
better to be born a petty lordling of a small domain, with nothing to do but
fight and hunt and sire sons.”

“I’ve heard the priests say,” said Nehsi, “that the gods set
each man where they will, for their own purpose.”

The sound she made was pure disgust, vulgar enough for a
guardsman. He snorted at it. She closed her eyes, affronted, and would not
speak to him again while she lingered in the garden.

He did not trouble himself over her ill humor. Real, true
and deep wrath was rare in her. These fits of temper were of no more moment
than a fine mare’s flattened ears and snapping teeth at the touch of a
stranger’s hand. They warned a man to move with care, but they set him in no
danger.

And perhaps, he thought, her sharpness with him would
preserve decorum when she faced the king. She must not offend him, or give him
reason to curtail her power. Courtiers muttered that it was too great already;
that she governed too much by her own will, nor consulted the king in whose
name she ruled.

Courtiers were always muttering. A wise chamberlain listened
and kept his own counsel. Amid the dross, sometimes, one found gold; or poison.

~~~

Senenmut was a wealthy man. It had crept up on him: a gift
here, a reward there, a bribe that he would have refused, but the queen laughed
and bade him take it. It amused her to let him enrich himself with the treasure
of fools. He might do as he was bribed to do; or not. She left him to choose
for himself.

Since that was mostly to present a case to the queen, more
often than not he did it, in no expectation that she would favor the petitioner.
Sometimes she did; sometimes she refused. He never tried to coax her; and for
that she professed to find him refreshing. “Which of course is why I love you,”
she said. “You never lie to me, nor soften the truth.”

He was a dreadful liar. He had learned with difficulty to be
silent when he could not be truthful. Even at that, his face too often betrayed
him.

But petitioners seeking the queen’s favor did not want lies,
only a voice on their behalf. He never promised to gain them what they asked.
They persevered in spite of it.

And he had become amazingly rich. Rich enough to refurbish
his beloved, faded house; to pay his brother Ahotep’s way into a company of the
king’s guard, and to equip his youngest brother Amonhotep with a tutor worthy
of a prince. There was no need any longer for his father to peddle pots in the
market.

Rahotep, whom age had only made the more vague, seemed to
feel no lack. He continued to spend his days in the tavern where he had amused
himself with friends since he was a young man. The same men downed the same
jars of beer as they always had, told the same weary jests, sang the same
songs. As far as Senenmut could see, they were happy; and his father was
content.

His mother took a fierce delight in the office of lady of
his household. She never ceased her efforts to see him married off, though that
would set a wife in her place. “Mothers are not logical,” she said. “I want
grandchildren. It’s your duty to give them to me.”

It was not likely he ever would. The queen was barren. He had
no more doubt of it than he did of her love for him—however unworthy he was. It
was grief, but it was relief, too; that she would bear no embarrassment to her
baseborn lover.

Though if she had, or could . . .

No. No son of Senenmut would sit the throne of the Two
Lands. It was enough for the gods’ humor that he lay with the woman whose body
belonged to the king alone; who had been born to suffer the embrace of no
lesser man.

She was discreet. She called him to her only when there was
no fear of discovery: deep in the night, or when she had taken a holiday in her
barge upon the river, or when they rode in chariots from Black Land into Red
Land, and found secret places where no hunt could find them.

When the king was away she slept alone and decorous. Then a
spy might look to see who warmed her bed; but she was wiser than that.

She gave her lover great gifts, heaped him with titles,
weighted him with duties. He was not loved in the court, commoner that he was,
with no inheritance but cleverness: and so clearly one of the queen’s great
favorites, one of the few whom she kept closest. But he remained alive and
unpoisoned through a simple expedient. He groveled to no courtier, but neither
did he play the prince. He was a scribe who had proved himself in the queen’s
service. Wealthy though he was, he claimed lordship of no domain, nor ruled
anywhere but in the queen’s palace.

For that, barely, they suffered him. He suffered them in
turn, idiots that most of them were. Lordly scions with any grain of
intelligence sought the priesthoods, particularly that of Amon, or went for
scribes in the House of Life; or, if they were bloody-minded, sought the king’s
army and rose to high places in it. Those who loitered about the court were the
idlers, the witlessly fashionable, the players at intrigue.

But they were lords of the Two Kingdoms. The queen depended
on their goodwill for the execution of her commands. The army was the king’s.
The lords and courtiers, the nomarchs and their servants, could choose to
ignore her, to heed only such commands as the king himself chose to utter.

“Even a king,” she said once, “rules by his people’s
sufferance. He commands; they must choose to obey—even if that choice is laid
on them by force. Though rule by force is the resort of a weakling. A strong
king rules by the will and the love of his subjects. My father taught me that.
He was a strong king, was my father; and a great warrior, too. His son, my
half-brother, my husband, is but a shadow of him.”

Whereas she, thought Senenmut, was the image of her father’s
strength. Except in war. She had no love for it, and no inclination—no talent,
either, perhaps. The battles she chose were all fought in the hall of audience
or in the courts of the kingdoms’ justice.

~~~

Senenmut was a wealthy man; but of leisure he had little.
Such of it as he was granted, he took grudgingly.

He had not known how weary he was, or how short his temper,
until what he had thought a civil reply to some question of the queen’s made
her lips tighten and her eyes glitter. She dismissed him out of hand, bade him
go away and not come back until he had taken a full day’s holiday.

“But,” he protested, “the princess—the palace—the court—”

“Go!” she commanded him, with a glance at her guards. They
closed in with purpose that he could not mistake. He would go on his own feet
or in their hands.

He left with such dignity as he could muster. He was too
shocked to be angry; and too startled by the leap of his heart. Free.
Unwillingly, cast out of duties that would multiply tenfold before he came back
to them—but free.

He had not known such liberty since he was a boy, when a
festival freed the scribes’ pupils to do as they pleased. He had wandered at
loose ends till he found himself a corner to sit in and practice his letters.
Idleness had never been an art that he could master.