King and Goddess (24 page)

“Pillars hold up the roof,” Ineni said as if to a child.
“One makes them as vast as one can, to overawe the man who dares approach them.
One shapes them as one can, like the trunk of a palm-tree or a bundle of
papyrus. But all they do is keep the roof from falling down.”

Senenmut opened his mouth, but closed it again. He would
make a bitter enemy if he voiced his thought. How in all the world had a mind
so pedestrian conceived of a temple as monstrously imposing as that of Amon?

Perhaps he had had help. There were priests in Amon’s temple
whose eyes saw past the simple matter of separating a roof from a floor, and
who knew more of beauty than the correct angulation of a tomb-shaft. As for the
size of the temple, what did that signify but itself? It was huge. It was not
graceful. It did not celebrate the sun, or the shadow that defined the sun’s
splendor.

Senenmut had been dreaming the queen’s dream. That stretch
of Red Land on the west bank of the river, up against the cliff that was too
stark for beauty, cried out for the touch of man’s hand—or woman’s. Beauty
should shine forth there as it did from the queen’s palace and her throne.

A queen did not build herself a temple, that she be
remembered when she was dead. That was the province of a king.

But she could dream, and her servants could dream with her.
It did no harm, except to his patience. How could these others fail to see what
he saw?

“It is so simple,” he said. “In the Black Land, lines are
soft; the light falls through greenery, and the stark face of the earth is
blurred, made gentle. In the Red Land the earth stands bare. Sun beats down on
it. Shadows are sharp-edged as if cut with a blade. If one were to build a
temple, one should build it of shadow and light. Stark lines, like the lines of
the land about it; but clean, with the harmony of notes on a lute, each flowing
from the one before. See, one builds with pillars, because pillars hold up the
roof—but one shapes and angles them so that they seem made of light.”

“Dreamers dream,” Ineni muttered. “Builders build. You
dream, scribe; but of building you know nothing.”

“But you,” said Senenmut, “know all that I do not.”

Ineni sniffed audibly. “Do you imagine that I would give you
any part of the knowledge that I labored so long and so hard to acquire?”

“Certainly not,” Senenmut said. “Not to me. To the queen.”

“A queen regent has no authority to command such a monument
in her name. In the name of the king, perhaps. But—”

“It’s only a dream,” Hapuseneb said. “She honors us by
asking us to dream it with her.”

Ineni forbore to sneer. He loved the queen as they all did,
because she was beautiful, and because she had a way of knowing what would touch
the heart of every man who served her. It should be less difficult, Senenmut
thought, for Ineni to resist this fancy of hers.

“I will dream,” Ineni said, “in my own bed, without
assistance from her royal highness. This”—he flicked a hand at the sand-table
and its poor attempt at a drawing—“is a waste of effort. The site might not do
badly for a temple, but not in the name of a queen: even such a queen as ours.
If the king takes it into his mind to set a structure there . . .”

“The only structure the king will set is a siege-engine
outside of some Asiatic city.” Senenmut did not mean to sound bitter, let alone
contemptuous. He feared that he did both. “Besides, he’s too young. He’s only
eight years old. It will be years before he takes thought for his tomb and
temple.”

“No man is too young to remember that he is mortal,” Ineni
said grimly. “Nor is any woman so old that she can claim a temple worthy of a
king. People might think that she has ambitions in that direction.”

“And if she did,” asked Hapuseneb, “what could she do about
it?”

“Order her servants to imagine what they would build if it
were possible,” Senenmut answered promptly. “I would create beauty in the
king’s name, if my queen asked it of me. Probably she will. She’s sensible
enough when she’s not dreaming dreams.”

“Does she ever stop dreaming?” Hapuseneb met Senenmut’s
stare. “Don’t tell me you believe what you’re saying. Whatever she does for our
master, the living Horus, the Lord of the Two Lands, it will not be to set his
name above hers in any monument that she bids us build. She’ll build it for
herself. I do love her, my friend, but I’m not blind. I can see how she revels
in the exercise of power.”

“She does what she has to do,” Senenmut said tightly. This
was an argument he had had before, but not with Hapuseneb. The priest, he had
thought, had more sense.

“Necessity may drive her,” said Hapuseneb, “but what it
drives her to is rather more than might be proper. I see how she forgets to
mention that she rules in the king’s name. She issues decrees and establishes
laws as she pleases, without consulting him.”

“The king is eight years old,” Senenmut said. “He’s a child.
His judgment is still unformed; his sense of justice lacks complexity. He’s
consulted where he’s needed, in matters that he can understand. In the rest,
she acts for him. She stands well within the compass of her powers as regent.”

Hapuseneb tilted his head toward the sand-table. “That’s not
a regent’s dream, old friend. That’s the dream of one who will rule.”

Senenmut narrowed his eyes. He had too much intelligence,
sometimes. He saw so much that he failed to see what dangled from the end of
his nose. “What are you saying?” he asked the priest. “Is this something that
comes from Amon’s temple? Or are you carrying tales from the court?”

“Neither,” said Hapuseneb, “though temple and court aren’t
blind. They see what’s clear to see. We have a queen regent who would prefer to
rule as king.”

“And if she would?” Senenmut demanded. “What difference does
it make? She’s a woman. You said so yourself. She’s risen as high as she can.
When the king is old enough, she’ll step down. She’ll be given no choice in the
matter.”

“She might try,” Hapuseneb said.

Senenmut shook his head. Not because he disbelieved. Because
his heart knew that none of them should say such things. It was a great pity
that Hatshepsut had been born a woman. She ruled as well as any king—better in
fact than most. But she must rule through a man, even if that man were no more
than a boy, a solemn-faced compact child who never said more than he must.

The gods had made the world so. Even she, as strong and
self-willed as she was, could do nothing to change it. She could only dream,
and envision a temple like an edifice of light.

Truth was a stark thing. A queen regent who would step aside
when her king was a man. A royal lady who would lie in a tomb among the rest of
the royal ladies, apart from the kings, with great treasure, but not as great
as the treasure of a king.

So must it be. He sighed, thinking of it. Ineni who had never
dreamed a dream in his life, Hapuseneb who saw too clearly for sense, went away
hardly aware they had been got rid of. He lingered, staring at the sand-table
but seeing no such poor thing as was laid out in it. His mind’s eye saw beauty;
saw splendor. Saw her glory in stone, raised to endure till the earth grew old.

All glory passed, that was the truth which all men living
knew, or should know. Life was brief; death, once begun, knew no ending. For
most it was oblivion: their names forgotten, their bodies lost in the dust of
ages.

For kings and for the children of kings, and in these later
years for any who amassed wealth to any notable degree, death could be as life.
It required mighty effort, the labor of years to build a tomb, equip it, ward
it with spells of guard and guidance. When the tomb was built, if the gods were
kind its master might live for years in the surety of his life-after-death; so
that when he died, and the seventy days of embalming were over and he was laid
in the tomb, he was prepared for the journey. He had his servants, his
banquets, his house in the otherworld; his kin if he loved them, his animals,
his children. All that had been his in life would be his in death, so that he
might have joy there as in the land of the living.

Senenmut had been granted a rare and precious privilege: a
tomb near the tombs of kings and near the place that his queen had chosen, if
only in her heart, for her marvelous temple. He had dug it deep and hidden it
well lest the robbers have too easy a time of it, and adorned it himself,
through such hours as he had amid his many duties.

It was not his tomb alone. A lord expected his family to
share the life-after-death. Those whom he loved would dwell with him as in
life, no doubt in the same prickly amity.

In the fourth year of the reign of Menkheperre Thutmose,
Senenmut’s father had wandered vaguely into death as he had wandered through
life. One morning he had simply failed to wake. He had died in his sleep,
peacefully, of no sickness that anyone could see. The gods had taken him, and
shown him mercy: for all anyone knew, he never even realized that he was dead.

He lay now in the tomb that his son had built, in the awful
calm of death. For companion he had his wife’s old nurse who had died not long
after the tomb was finished. In time the rest would join them—long time, they
could hope.

That was the year of grief, but also the year of joy: the
year Ahotep took a wife.

Ahotep had grown well from unpromising beginnings. He was
prettier than Senenmut, handsome indeed in the livery of the king’s guard. His
wife was a captain’s daughter, sweet-faced if not remarkably sweet-tempered,
with a talent for keeping her husband in hand. Since he remained irrepressible
even in manhood, that was a welcome gift.

They lived in Senenmut’s house. It seemed absurd for them to
live anywhere else. When Ahotep journeyed with the king on royal progresses
from city to city of the Two Lands, Iuty contested with Hat-Nufer for mastery
of the house. Their battles drove Senenmut into retreat more often than not, to
palace or temple or his own chambers, but he never quite mustered the bravado
to put a stop to them. He was lazy, he supposed, and certainly a fool.

Still there was a little wisdom in it. After a mighty war
that had gone on for days, for what cause Senenmut never understood, when at
last the women had declared a barbed and muttering truce, he said to his
mother, “Now do you see why I never brought home a wife?”

Hat-Nufer sniffed audibly. “Your wife would have had the
sense not to argue with me. What is a daughter-in-law if not a woman’s loyal
servant? She’ll be lady and mistress of the house when I am dead. The least she
can do is submit to me while I’m alive.”

Iuty’s sniff was just as loud and just as indignant when she
trapped Senenmut in the sanctuary of his reading-room, in the long light of
evening. “I’ll be as good a daughter-in-law as I can be,” she said, “but before
the gods, brother, she can be impossible.”

Senenmut could hardly deny that, nor could he deny his
mother’s contention that Iuty lacked somewhat of submission. “You are,” he
ventured to Iuty, “remarkably alike.”

He had known better than to say such a thing to his mother.
His brother’s wife bridled. “I am
not
impossible!”

“Well,” Senenmut admitted, “not yet.”

If a look could flay, he would have been stripped to the
bone. She spun on her heel and departed in high dudgeon.

He was not a wise man. He laughed long and well. His younger
brother caught him at it: young Amonhotep who had some time since discovered
the beauties of women, but refrained yet from asking any of them to wife. He
dropped his lanky elegance into Senenmut’s own favorite chair, propped his feet
on the winetable, and said, “Don’t tell me. The ladies are at it again.”

“What, you haven’t been here for the past hand of days?”
Senenmut tipped him out of the chair and settled himself in it. “It’s been open
war.”

Amonhotep picked himself up without resentment and found
another chair, over which he draped himself, the image of languid ease. Except
for his eyes: those were wickedly bright. “I’ve been off hunting waterfowl at
Ptahmose’s villa. Hadn’t you noticed I was gone?”

“Not really,” Senenmut said. “Waterfowl, yes? The kind with
feathers, or the kind with a soft skin and sweet lips and willing arms?”

Amonhotep grinned. “Why, both! You should have come. You’d
have had a little peace of mind.”

“It wasn’t so terrible,” said Senenmut. “I managed to escape
all day; then during the worst of it I borrowed a room in the palace.”

“You work too hard,” Amonhotep said with sudden seriousness.
“Don’t you ever rest?”

“Often,” said Senenmut. “I have a villa, too, you know. And
the horses.”

“Certainly. A villa you visit maybe once in a season, and
horses who are as much work as anything else you do. Do you know what they say
of you? That you’d play the stablehand if you could.”

“Why not? It’s a cleaner task than some.” Senenmut laughed
at his brother’s expression. “Look at you! Anyone would think you were born in
a palace.”

Amonhotep sat up, stung to the quick. “If you refuse to conduct
yourself with proper decorum, then someone surely must. Why not I? I have no
rank or wealth except by your bestowing. I claim nothing that is my own; no
office, no duty, no service. What is there for me to do but try to be worthy of
you?”

There was deep injury there, but not deep enough. “Oh, stop
that,” Senenmut said. “You didn’t want to join the guard as Ahotep did. You’ve
no aptitude for the House of Life. What else shall I find for you to do? I
thought it bored you immeasurably to look after my estate.”

“It did bore me,” Amonhotep said. “But that was years ago. I
need something to do, brother, besides hunt waterfowl on other men’s estates.”

“Well then,” Senenmut said. “What do you want to do?”

Amonhotep shrugged. Senenmut could remember being seventeen
years old. It was not so very long ago. Had he been so bored, so perfectly
without focus?