King and Goddess (21 page)

“That’s you,” Thutmose said. His eyes were wide still. “They
didn’t tell me. Tell me why they didn’t tell me.”

“I think you know,” Neferure said; but she did not tease him
with it. “Because they didn’t want you to know. They don’t want you to know me,
either, or talk to me. Maybe they’re planning to get rid of me somehow, or to
convince the priests to change the law. Then they can marry you to someone they
choose, who has nothing to do with me or with my mother.”

That was perhaps too complicated for him; but perhaps not.
He said, “I don’t mind if I marry you. You won’t make me pretend. And you
aren’t afraid of me.”

“But if you marry me,” Neferure pointed out, “you’ll have to
know my mother.”

“I won’t be afraid of her if I see her,” he said. “I’m
afraid of things in the dark. Things that hide. Not things I can see.”

She tilted her head, puzzling out the logic, maybe, or simply
studying her brother. “Mother always stands in the bright sun. It’s you who’ve
been kept in the shadows.”

“Mama is afraid,” Thutmose said with the hint of a sigh.
Storm-in-the-Desert had come to a snorting, foaming halt, still full of
herself, but a little more willing to greet him calmly as he came to her. He
seemed to take comfort from the lowering of her nose into his cupped palms, the
warm hot horse-smell of her, the brightness of her red-golden coat in the
sunlight.

Neferure sighed, too, and said to the air, or perhaps to
Senenmut, “I wish people wouldn’t quarrel. Wouldn’t it be so much better if
everybody just admitted that the gods made me to be queen and him to be king,
and let us grow up decently together?”

She was not asking for an answer. She went to drown her own
sorrows with the Dawn Wind, sent her out to run on the line as
Storm-in-the-Desert had done just now. The task absorbed her, perhaps
completely; perhaps not. Senenmut forbore to ask. So young, and so much a woman
already—and so very like her mother.

Deception, Senenmut had discovered long ago, was the meat
and drink of courts. No one told the truth if he could help it; and no one ever
walked a straight path. A web of lies bound the royal court together, so
intricate that even the most skillful courtier could not distinguish the truth
beneath the weaving.

Senenmut was no more innocent of deception than any other
courtier. From the time he first shared the queen’s bed, he came to it in
subtle and devious ways. If he happened to be attending her toward evening, he
departed as a proper servant should, but later he came back. There were
passages where no one walked, even servants; chambers that no one saw, and
doors concealed in cleverly carved or painted walls. The last of them opened behind
the queen’s bed, disguised subtly as itself: a door framed in papyrus pillars.

It was proof, if he ever needed it, that his queen was not
the first of her line to seek the arms of a man other than the king. “It’s
inevitable, I suppose,” he said to her, “when even the muddiest fieldhand can
marry to suit himself, but the queen is given no choice in the matter. She’s
bound to the man who will be king when her father is dead, who as often as not
is her cousin or her uncle or her brother—since the kingship should properly
stay in the family. And if she detests him—if she can’t abide the sight of
him—what grace is she given but to suffer in silence?”

“Or to take a lover,” she said. They lay together in her
great bed under its canopy of netting, he tangled in her hair, she in his arms.
No maid spied on them. The guards were all without.

It was known that the queen preferred to sleep in solitude.
Every night a priest set wards of magic and of incense about her bed, and the
guards retreated, and the maids went to their own beds, more often in company
than not. Nothing and no one could come near the queen, living or dead or
spirit of ill.

Nothing and no one but Senenmut, who knew the secret of the
hidden door. He was all the guard and ward she professed to need. He came in
the quiet hours of the night, and left in the dark before dawn. Sleep was
nothing he needed a great deal of, and that was fortunate; or he would have
succumbed to exhaustion long ago.

Tonight he was in a reflective mood, and she was pensive.
They were as comfortable as years could make them. Their bodies were grown
familiar, woven together like two strands in a carpet. He knew the exact curve
of her shoulder, the precise softness of her breast. She knew exactly how his
head sat on his neck, and how his little fingers were crooked, and that he
preferred slow and gentle loving to swift and fierce.

The fear of discovery had sunk to a murmur. No one had ever
caught them. “The gods guard us, I suppose,” Senenmut said.

“One god,” said Hatshepsut. “There’s one who guards me above
all. I feel him all about me, burning but never consuming.”

He stared at her. She was never one to invoke the gods with
every breath she took. She mentioned them seldom except in their place: in
rites in the temples, in invocations in the court.

On this night like so many other nights, no more or less
magical than any that had gone before, she seemed to have fallen into a strange
half-dream. Her voice was soft, slurred a little as if with sleep.

“Amon,” she said, or sighed. “Father Amon. He loves me. He
protects me. He even suffers you. You love me, you see. You honor me. You would
never betray me.”

“And the king’s right to you? His honor and his reputation?”

She arched her back, curving away from him. Her hair
streamed down on either side of his face. He saw hers above him, white and
fierce. “What honor is there in lying like a fish while he pumps me full of his
seed? What joy is there in listening to him boast of all the heads that he has
broken, the booty he has won in battle? He hears nothing that I tell him; cares
nothing for me, except that he wears the Two Crowns through his marriage to
me.”

He had seldom heard her so bitter, or with so little
apparent cause. The king was back from his long hunt, somewhat indisposed with
a fever that he had caught in the marshes. She had had to hold audience alone
today, and fend off those fools who would speak only to the king. That should
have troubled her not at all. She was most content when she could rule alone,
unfettered by her husband’s presence.

She should be all sweetness, all warm and smiling, delighted
to have had a day free of the king. Senenmut coaxed her down, smoothed her
tangled hair, kissed her till she stopped frowning quite so terribly.

She stilled in his grasp, looking hard at him. “Stop trying
so hard not to ask. No, there’s nothing troubling me. I don’t know why my mood
is so black tonight.”

“Not black,” Senenmut said. “God-ridden. It’s that, isn’t
it?”

Warm as the night was, she shivered. Her fists clenched and
unclenched. She said in a voice that might have seemed light if one had not
known her, “When I was small, I saw gods everywhere. I saw Amon in the sun;
Hathor in every cow with horns like the young moon; Sobek in the crocodile that
sunned itself on the riverbank. I dreamed that the gods hovered about me as I
slept. I heard their voices; I knew what was to be.

“But I grew older,” she said, “and the dreams faded. The sun
was only the sun, a fire in the sky. An ox was an ox, a crocodile a simple
beast, all belly and teeth. I forgot what they had been before.”

“And now you remember,” Senenmut said.

She peered narrow-eyed into the dark beyond the nightlamp’s
glimmer. “I don’t know why it came back. Nothing is different. There have been
no signs, no portents. The world is quiet.”

“My mother has always said,” Senenmut said, half somber,
half wry, “that when the house is quiet, then she’s most certain one of her
sons is about to afflict her with a scandal.”

“You will not,” said the queen with a return of her royal
manner, “tell your mother where you spend your nights.”

His lips twitched. So did his body at the thought of Hat-Nufer’s
merciless eye on this of all improprieties. “The gods witness it,” he said: “if
she ever learns, it will not be from me.”

“See that she never learns at all.”

“I can try,” he said, “your majesty.”

She did hate it when he laughed at her; but the darkness was
in her again, blinding her to his mockery. She faced it wordlessly, cold and
still beside him, unwarmed by his warmth. Even when he wrapped himself about
her, she was chill, unmoving. The gods had claimed her, he thought a little
wildly. They left nothing for any mortal man.

In the morning the queen was utterly herself. He, heavy-eyed
and woolly-minded, was hard put to make sense of anything. He performed his
duties somehow, handed Neferure into the care of a lute-master and then of a
master of the bow, slid past her babble about her brother. She had the sense
not to burst out with it until she was alone with her tutor; but he had nearly
forgotten the whole of the day before, lost it in the queen’s night fancies. He
baffled Neferure, he could see, but he had no comfort to offer.

It was as if the dark had slipped from the queen with the
coming of dawn, and hidden inside of Senenmut. In her it had unfolded itself in
dreams and visions. In him who was neither king nor god, was only darkness.

The king was still indisposed. Marsh-fevers could be
tenacious; and the king was nursed by the chief of his concubines, whose
fretting could turn a touch of fever into deadly sickness. None but she would
have fetched priests and physicians together and set them to curing the king of
what needed but time and rest and a cool bath or two.

Rumors of the to-do in the king’s chambers made their way
even as far as the queen’s ears. Senenmut, his mind still fogged, reckoned the
tale nonsense. He wondered dimly if Isis was sliding into a madness of her own.
She seemed to see fear everywhere, threats to her son or her husband, terrible
things that to other eyes were no more than shadows.

He left earlier than was his wont, declined to eat, sought
his bed in his own house for, he thought, a few moments’ rest. Then he would go
back to the palace through the secret ways. Perhaps not the same as he had been
using. Perhaps another that he had found. And perhaps he was as mad as Isis,
seeing threats in empty air.

~~~

He woke with a start. It was black dark and very still.
For a moment he did not know where he was. Not with the queen; the air’s scent
was wrong, the bed under him harder, the linens less princely fine.

He was at home in the bed he so seldom slept in nightlong.
If a lamp had been burning, it had long since emptied of oil, guttered and gone
out.

Slowly his eyes discerned shapes in the dark. Bed; chests; a
chair. Walls, and the dark shape of a door. A window through which glimmered a
wan ray of moonlight.

Something chittered in the roof. It could have been a bat,
or a bird, or a spirit: dead soul or wandering magician, lingering in his
rafters. Except for that, he was alone. He, like the queen, was known to
cherish solitude in the nights. None who noted the likeness seemed to see what
it signified.

And maybe a god did protect the queen, and therefore her
lover. Senenmut was sure of nothing, here in the dark; not even that he was
truly alive. He might be dead, and this might all be nightmare, a taste of
torment before his soul went to the hall of judgment.

He was breathing hard. His skin prickled with apprehension.
What he was afraid of, he did not know. The dark itself, maybe. Maybe something
worse.

He rose, stumbling, catching himself against the bed-frame.
The silence was immense. He heard no voice in the house, no sound of snoring,
not even Amonhotep’s pet monkey chittering in its cage.

He had to go to the palace. It struck him with a snap of
urgency that had nothing to do with reason. He must go— he must be there. He
knew no more than that.

~~~

Senenmut was not the only fool stumbling about in the
dark, warding off night-demons with a bit of torch and a borrowed cat. Aunt
Teti’s cat shrieked at the loom of shadow out of shadow near the palace gate,
raked Senenmut’s shoulder, and bolted into the night.

He stood with stinging, bleeding shoulder, glaring half blind
at the figure that bobbed under a torch of its own. The light gleamed on a
shaven skull and a pair of bright black eyes. “Why, good morning,” said
Hapuseneb.

Senenmut’s nose twitched. Yes, he could smell the morning
coming, though the night seemed as black as ever. Soon enough it would be dawn,
and then the sun would rise, and all his night fancies would vanish with the
demons that had spawned them.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Hapuseneb said, though Senenmut had
no memory of speaking aloud. “We’ve all had dreams and sendings. The temple is
like an anthill stirred with a stick.”

“But,” said Senenmut, “it’s quiet. There’s nothing to make
us think—”

“Dreams aren’t enough?” Hapuseneb grasped his arm and pulled
him toward the gate. The guard was surly and sleepy, but for the priest of Amon
and the queen’s scribe he agreed grudgingly to open the gate.

Senenmut had nothing to do with it. Hapuseneb was a priest;
gods must vex him endlessly, clamoring for his notice. He was as cheerful as
ever, and as difficult to resist. He even coaxed the guard into a twist of the
lip that might have been a snarl, or might have been a smile.

Whether in exasperation or in respect for the queen’s
servants, the guard let them into the palace. They found all quiet, as it
should be at this ungodly hour. The first bread of the day’s baking sent forth
its fragrance from the ovens near the king’s palace. Apart from the bakers, no
one else seemed yet awake.

But as Hapuseneb dragged Senenmut past the queen’s palace
and into that which could only belong to the king, a murmur rose, as it seemed,
out of the stones of wall and paving. Someone deep within was shouting or
weeping or praying. The guards on the door had a pale, haunted look. Like dead
men in a dream, Senenmut thought.