King and Goddess (19 page)

Both the queen and the Nubian started. He had been standing
between them, buffeted by the force of their contention, but they had seen
through him as through air and shadows. His return to solidity took them aback.

“I don’t think,” he said, “that this comes from the king.
He’s not a subtle man, and he’s not afraid of you, either. He didn’t try to
keep you out while his concubine was carrying the child, when he might well
have feared some poison or some curse that would cause her to miscarry. This
shutting of his door now that the baby’s born—that’s another mind at work. Isis
is feeling her triumph, I think. She’s trying to play the queen.”

“Then she can play it properly,” Hatshepsut snapped, “and
instruct the guards to speak in her name and not in my husband’s. That’s
weakness, if the little idiot only knew it. I can demand a guard’s obedience,
and get it.”

Senenmut allowed himself the relief of a sigh. She was still
in a fury, but she was thinking. She was arguing sensibly, as far as this whole
affair had any sense in it.

He was glad to see her returned to herself again; but he was
mildly wary still. She had fallen silent, chin propped on fist, frowning at the
air. She was plotting something. But what it was, she was not about to confess.

She rose abruptly. “Nehsi. Fetch my maids. I’ll bathe, I
think, and rest. Senenmut: read to me while I bathe.”

Both men bowed. They did not exchange glances. Nehsi,
thought Senenmut, was as watchful as he was, and as mistrustful of her sudden
change of mood. It would hardly be like her to send an assassin to the little
prince’s chamber; but when she was at this pitch of temper, there was no
telling what she would do.

What the queen did, as far as anyone could tell, was nothing.
She went about her duties as before. She did not approach the king or his
chambers, or ask to look on his son. She had sunk into a kind of quiet that
alarmed Nehsi the more, the longer it lasted.

When the king’s son was presented to the people, given his
name and lifted up to the sun that was the eye of Horus and the protector of
kings, the queen could not be prevented from attending. Nor was she. She came no
nearer to the child however than a spear’s length, the half-width of the circle
of guards that stood about her.

There was no open insult in that: the queen was often so
guarded, and the king too, a guard of honor to her majesty. But she was a
prisoner, however subtle the prison. And she knew it.

Nehsi, who had taken command of the guards rather than
suffer the king to set a man of his own over them, saw how the king favored his
concubine. She need not walk in procession to Amon’s temple; she was given a chair
like a great lady, and set in it in the gown and ornaments of a queen, though
never—and that was well indeed, thought Nehsi—a queen’s crown. Her elaborate
plaited wig and her golden circlet were such as any lady of rank might claim.

And rank she had now, by virtue of the bundle she carried.
The child had a nurse; one could hardly expect her to ruin her beautiful round
breasts with giving suck to her son. But this she would surrender to no other
woman: the great joy and honor of standing up before the Two Lands with the
king’s son in her arms.

She looked, as ever, like a cat in cream. She was careful
not to stare boldly at the queen. She would not gloat openly; she was no such
fool. But the glances she slid at Hatshepsut were wickedly bright.
See how I triumph,
they said:
I, the serving-girl, the morsel you sent to
be the lion’s dinner.

Hatshepsut’s face was still and her eyes quiet, betraying no
outrage, offering no insult. Isis was disconcerted, perhaps. Her glances were
more frequent as the day went on, procession and rite in the temple,
presentation before the people, feast in the court from which the child, sound
asleep with his nurse’s teat in his mouth, was taken softly away. She had to
eat what was set in front of her; a taster was not suitable and would have been
a cry to war, but she was careful to touch nothing that the queen had not also
eaten.

“Idiot,” the queen said when it was over, safe in the
sanctuary of her own chambers, with her trusted people about her. “I’d never
have poisoned her; only the baby. And seen to it that she conceived no more.”

Since that was manifestly true, no one took issue with it.
Isis, who might have done so, was locked within the walls of the king’s palace,
well away from the queen’s influence, guarded so scrupulously that she could
hardly visit the privy-pot without its being watched and recorded. The queen
was a freer woman than she: free of the sky if she chose, and of the palace
certainly, all but the rooms in which the king’s son grew from a plump quiet
infant into a plump quiet boychild.

~~~

Thutmose, son of Thutmose, son of Thutmose, was hardly a
guardsman’s son as people sometimes whispered. Even as a young child he had the
unmistakable stamp of the king’s family: the short compact body, the small
square hands, the nose that in the king was a jut like a ship’s prow, and in
the queen a haughty arch. His half-sister Neferure had it, too, but like her
mother she was fortunate; hers was elegant rather than imposing.

She was a lively child. She spoke her first word early, and
followed it quickly with a hundred more. She read, wrote, sang and played harp
and lute, mastered the arts of a lady as well as the arts of a queen—even to
the bow and the chariot—while her brother was still dreaming at his nurse’s
breast.

He was much quieter than she, by all accounts. Contrary to
the wisdom of nurses and tutors, that boys are invariably more boisterous than
girls, he never cried, never misbehaved. He was so quiet that people whispered.
He was mute, they said, or simple. Or, murmured a few bold spirits, afflicted
with a curse.

~~~

In point of fact, as Senenmut undertook to discover, the
boy had a voice and seemed to have a fair sampling of wits. He simply preferred
to keep his own counsel. He was a remarkably self-contained baby, content to
lie for hours in his cradle, watching the play of sun and shadow on the wall;
or to play by himself in the walled garden that adjoined his mother’s chambers.
His first plaything, so Senenmut was told, was a wooden horse with a wooden
chariot. He would gallop the horse through the garden, and cause the rider in
the chariot to do battle with enemies made of reeds and woven grass.

When he had passed his third year, he went from his mother’s
care to that of a tutor. Isis did not give him up easily, but although the king
was still besotted with her, willing to yield to her every whim, in this he was
adamant. His son would be raised as befit a man and a king.

Therefore the prince came out from among the women and into
rooms of his own, with his own servants, his own guardsmen, his own tutor and
preceptor.

That was a man whom Senenmut happened to know, if not well.
Nebsen as he was called—his proper name and titles were much longer and more
dignified—had been a handful of years ahead of Senenmut in the Temple of Amon.
He had won a name for easy camaraderie and willingness to please. His skills
with the pen were less remarkable, but as Seti-Nakht had been heard to observe,
a man did not need to be a great scribe to attract and keep a king’s notice.

Nebsen had completed his studies and entered the king’s
service, assisted by noble connections and a remote claim to kinship with the
royal line. His affable ways must have endeared him to the king; as for how he
had won the prize, the care of the king’s son, he would tilt his head and smile
and say as coyly as a woman, “Let us keep our secrets, shall we?”

He did not seem to share Isis’ fear of the queen, nor did he
trouble to shun the princess’ tutor. They shared a jar of beer on occasion,
exchanging tales of royal offspring. And in short order Senenmut won what he
had been hoping for: an invitation to visit Nebsen in the little prince’s
chambers.

A wiser or less trusting man would have been careful to
avoid just that, letting the queen’s favorite so close to the king’s son. But
Nebsen had never seen any harm in Senenmut, nor in much of anyone else, either.

Senenmut came to the prince’s chambers as a guest, and
carefully not as a spy for the queen. He had been engaged in teaching his own
charge the intricacies of poetic meter; he brought with him a gift for the
prince, a scrap of papyrus rolled and tied with a ribbon. On it was a poem that
Neferure had written, charmingly artless but by no means clumsy, addressed to
her brother and admonishing him to be both beautiful and wise. She had insisted
that Senenmut bring it, and that he present it to the prince with her
greetings.

She had never met her brother, no more than her mother had.
When Senenmut was younger he would have sighed with envy, particularly after a
night of sharing a bed with a fractious Ahotep. Now that he was older and had a
bed to himself, he knew a moment’s pity for a sister who was denied all the
pleasures and pains of a younger brother.

Why, he thought, should it go on so? These were more than
brother and sister. They would be king and queen in their time, wedded as their
father and her mother were. Senenmut could hope that they got on better than
the two before them.

He would know when he saw Thutmose. If anything could be
done to bring these children together, he would do it.

~~~

The prince’s chambers were guarded as all royal chambers
were, by men whose service and whose loyalty were to the prince. They offered
no objection as Senenmut approached, nor stood in his way. He was known to
belong to the queen, but it seemed he was reckoned harmless.

Isis might not agree. But Isis was not in these rooms, nor
likely to appear there: she had gone with the king on a several days’ hunt,
leaving the prince behind under heavy and, she seemed to think, sufficient guard.
That was precisely as Senenmut wished it. He entered with a firm step, turning
where the guard directed, through an antechamber and into a wide airy room.

Its walls were painted with images of war. The king loomed
in his chariot, wearing the Two Crowns, wielding a bow while his horses
trampled a horde of enemies. His soldiers marched behind him, rank on rank
around the room: footsoldiers in their companies, lords and princes in their
chariots.

Senenmut had seen such images in his few brief forays into
the king’s chamber. These were new, the paint fresh and vivid. They overwhelmed
the two who sat in the room’s center.

Nebsen rose with a glad cry. “Senenmut! Welcome!”

Senenmut murmured a greeting, but eyes and mind were fixed
on the other, the small compact figure sitting on a cushion. The prince was
naked as all young children were, his head shaved but for the plaited lock of a
child and a royal heir, which he would wear even into manhood if his father
lived long. He was much as Senenmut remembered from more distant views of him:
small for his age but sturdy and strong, with a gift that was vastly rare in a
child so young: to sit still.

He was not feeble of wit. His eyes were quiet, but there was
intelligence in them: a calm intelligence, as of one who knows well how to
wait; but Senenmut sensed a fierce intensity beneath.

Senenmut bowed before him and greeted him as a servant
should greet a prince. He inclined his head but said nothing.

“He talks,” Nebsen said, perhaps a little quickly. “Just not
often. But when he does, he does it extraordinarily well.”

The prince seemed accustomed to being spoken of as if he had
not been there. He regarded Senenmut with that enormous and changeless calm, as
if he measured this stranger and pondered his judgment.

“It was quite strange,” Nebsen went on—rattling, it might
seem, but Nebsen’s chatter usually had a point concealed somewhere within it.
“He never spoke a word till this past Inundation. Not one; hardly even
baby-babble. Then one day shortly after he was given into my care, he said to
me, ‘Nebsen, take me down to the river. I want to watch Father’s soldiers
practice their marching.’” Nebsen laughed and shook his head. “Oh, he took me
fair aback, he did. Spoke as clear as you or I, not a lisp or a stammer; and
such words as you would hardly expect a baby to know.”

Either of Senenmut’s brothers at Thutmose’s age would have
maintained loudly and continually that he was not a baby. The prince did not
trouble himself. Having received the guest as was polite, he returned to what
he must have been doing before Senenmut came there: playing on the floor with a
wooden army.

Senenmut, watching him, observed a little wryly, “I see he
is his father’s son.”

“Oh, no doubt of it,” said Nebsen. “Day and night, indoors
and out, that’s all he thinks about: soldiers and chariots, horses and weapons.
He insists that I read to him from accounts of old wars, such as you would
think would put him to sleep, but he listens to every word. If I didn’t keep
him close as his mother commands me, he’d be among the soldiers from dawn till
dark.”

“And what does his mother think of that?” Senenmut inquired.

Nebsen rolled his eyes. “Ah, his mother! So beautiful a
lady, so charming, so perfectly obliging to her husband. Still, she is a woman.
Women, Senenmut, are incalculable. Why, my wife . . .”

While Nebsen rambled through a long and crashingly dull
tale, Senenmut watched the prince. Thutmose had lined up his troops in orderly
rows, foot in front, chariots behind. The enemy were less precise, a scatter of
foot and chariots, each appearing to be a lord and his retinue or a barbarian
chief and his warband; though that would be very sophisticated for a child as
young as he was.

Nebsen ended his story with a sigh and a flourish. Senenmut
looked appropriately sympathetic. “Ah well,” said Nebsen. “You’ve never married.
Wise of you, to keep yourself free of that bondage.”