King and Goddess (34 page)

Senenmut’s heart came near to breaking at the sight of her.
She was more beautiful than anything he knew, and more intransigent. He,
unregarded in the crowds about her, saw how she sat, how perfectly, royally
still. When she moved, it was with a dancer’s grace, performing the rite each
day as had been prescribed from the dawn of the world. She invoked the gods as
the priests had, made obeisance to each quarter of the horizon, bowed last and
low to the river that swelled and surged nearly at her feet.

It was as wide as the sea that Senenmut had never seen, but
he had heard of it, how it stretched from edge to edge of the world, as if
there were no end to it. So it was with the river.

When its waters lapped nigh to the top of the measure, the
priests began to be afraid. But the next day it was a little lower. Then they
sighed with relief, and their prayers of thanksgiving were heartfelt.

Hatshepsut prayed after them as she had each day since she
came to Memphis. She had come this day as every other, in no greater state and
in no less, except that she had brought more guards and servants than
heretofore. They surrounded the platform on which she stood with the priests,
bobbed in boats beyond, and spread along the water’s edge. Everyone near her,
Senenmut could not fail to notice, was loyal to her, except the priests
themselves.

They were few enough, unarmed, apparently unwary. Only those
who had come from Thebes, perhaps, knew that the queen intended something other
than a simple celebration of the river’s rise and descent.

Hapuseneb was nearest her, familiar shaven-headed shape.
Senenmut, far back in the flock of her attendants, strained and craned to see
if they spoke together. They did not seem to. But when she had finished her
prayers, when she should have bowed to the gods and returned to her chair, to
be carried back to the palace, instead she paused and stood straighter.

She beckoned to her herald. He came forward.

Senenmut’s heart twisted. Even that fool of a man with his
splendid voice—even he had known. And Senenmut who had been her lover, Senenmut
whom she had loved, had been kept in ignorance like the least of the crowds who
flocked along the river.

Through the pain of anger and jealousy and plain fear, he
heard clearly enough the words that she spoke and the herald echoed. “O my
people! Dwellers in Memphis, that next to Thebes is greatest in Egypt. This day
the river has begun the descent from its fullest flood. Such an inundation no
one has ever seen. The gods have blessed us beyond measure, have granted us
such wealth of Black Land as these two kingdoms have never yet known.

“This is an omen, my people. It blesses us. It promises us a
glorious harvest. All the world shall come to us, bow low before us, beg us to
bless it with the fruits of our rich black earth.”

People near Senenmut settled in to listen. Speeches they
knew, though kings seldom made them, and queens almost never. This was a
novelty, a rare entertainment.

She gave them much more than they could have been looking
for. “I too have been blessed,” she said, “I who am descended from Queen
Nefertari, who was the daughter of a god. Great Amon came to me, my people,
while I slept; came walking in my dream.”

And she told them what she had told Senenmut, and what she
had recounted to her counsellors, the dream of Amon and Queen Ahmose. It was a
splendid story. The queen in her beauty, the god smitten till he must love her
or know no peace. She told it as well as any spinner of tales in the
marketplace. She spun it out, made it grand and glorious, swept them up to the
inevitable conclusion.

“And when I woke,” she said, “I knew what the god my father
had ordained for me. It was a grand thing, a terrible thing, a thing most
worthy of a god. He wrought me, my people; begot me of his own seed and set me
in the womb of a queen, so that I might rise above all men who were before me.
He told me what I must do; what I must be.

“This rising of the river is the omen, O my people. Egypt
prospers by the will of Amon. Hapi consents to broaden the Black Land, to make
it rich beyond conceiving. This they do, my people, for the honor of my name,
and through me for the glory of Amon my father.

“Amon has spoken, O my people,” she said. “He has laid his
hand upon me. He has willed that I take the Two Crowns, that I lift up the
crook and the flail. Amon has willed that I should rise to the Great House. He
has made me king, lord in truth of the Two Lands.”

The people of Egypt, to Senenmut’s astonishment, were far
more accommodating than the lords and princes. Faced with a queen who informed
them that she would be king, they stood for an endless moment in shocked
silence. Then, raggedly at first but with waxing fervor, they raised up their
voices. It sounded like the roar of a lion—but there was no mistaking it. They
were crying her name. Cheering her on. Calling her lord, king, Great House of
Egypt.

~~~

“She paid them,” Senenmut said to Hapuseneb, late in the
evening when they should both have been abed; but there was no sleeping while
Egypt woke to knowledge of Hatshepsut’s insanity.

“She paid them,” he said again. “She showered them with
bread and beer in return for their show of adulation.”

“Probably she did sow a seed or two,” Hapuseneb admitted.
“But it would never have grown so ripe so fast unless it fell on fertile
ground. The people are wild for her.”

“The people have lost their wits.” Senenmut stalked the
edges of the small reception-room in his house. The walls closed in on him, but
he could not bring himself to escape. Just so was it with Hatshepsut: he could
not come near her, but neither could he stay away. His heart was bound to her
whether he would or no.

“I do think the god wills it,” Hapuseneb said. Senenmut had
never heard him so nearly somber. “Else why did she escape not only unharmed
but with the people cheering her on? Preposterous as it seems, they love the
thought of a woman who is king.”

“They’ll turn on her in a moment,” said Senenmut, “when the
god’s fire leaves them.”

“Then we’ll have to trust the god, won’t we, to protect her
while she lives.”

Senenmut nearly struck him. No man should be as wearily wise
as that—or so reckless with a woman’s life and soul.

A woman who was insisting that she was king. Hapuseneb met
his bitter state with one both wry and calm. “You’re angry,” he said, “because
she won’t do what you want her to do. She goes her own way. She always has.”

“But if that way is to her death—”

“I think not,” Hapuseneb said. “She is Amon’s child, old
friend. The people know it; they love her for it.”

“And when they tire of her, they’ll kill her.”

“Not while Amon protects her.”

Senenmut set his lips tight. Hapuseneb was lost, too,
besotted; god-maddened, and no doubt of it. “When she first spoke of what she
would do,” Senenmut said, “you were as much against her as I. What of your
wager, priest? Have you lost all will to win it?”

“I am Amon’s servant,” Hapuseneb said. He shrugged, sighed.
“I am also a practical man. She won’t be stopped, my friend. That’s as clear to
me as the sun at noon. She is the god’s child. If that loses me a wager . . .
ai, I’ll be a poor man, but I’ll be alive and in her service.”

“You are a weak man,” Senenmut said, “a leaf in every wind
that blows.”

Hapuseneb did not rise up in anger, but neither did he come
back to Senenmut’s way of thinking. He left as amiably as always, oblivious as
it seemed to Senenmut’s taut and furious silence.

~~~

The whole of Egypt had gone mad. Sunstruck, conquered by
the will of a god, till it bowed to the will of a woman.

She, indomitable, took ship from Memphis as the river’s
flood began its slow ebb. Its extent was her proof and her omen. In the year
that she made herself king, the Black Land stretched farther than it ever had.
Its harvest was not the richest that had been recorded—there were a few that
had been richer—but it was splendid enough for the purpose.

The court was in shock. There had been rumor of something
new, something enormous, but none of them could have been prepared for the
truth. That shock preserved her against assault. She moved swiftly in it,
sweeping up from Memphis into Thebes. The roar of the people followed her.

She had not yet taken the Two Crowns. That she would do in
Thebes, before the face of Amon her father. But in Memphis she was given the
crook of a shepherd and the flail of a master of servants, and those she laid
beside her as she sailed southward. They glittered on the cushion, eager, it
seemed, for her hands to take them up.

So she would do when she came to Thebes. She sailed as
swiftly as she might, but not so swiftly that the people failed to acclaim her
from the river’s banks, gathering in every village and town and running far in
pursuit of her, crying her name.

She seemed to grow greater in the heat of their worship,
gleaming like the sun upon her golden barge. Thebes itself received her with a
roar that shattered the sky. Amon was this city’s own god, father and king. He
possessed its people. He struck them blind to aught but the glory of his
daughter.

There was no stopping her. Amon’s own priesthood met her at
the quay, bowed low before her, crowned her with the Two Crowns in a coronation
that was like nothing that had been before, just as she herself was.

~~~

That first fierce heat of passion faded as it inevitably
must. But she had foreseen it. Once she was settled in her own city, she
commanded that she be crowned in full and proper form, as kings had been
crowned in Thebes since before there were Two Lands of Egypt.

She was no fool, was Hatshepsut. There were not a few who
noticed that the chief priest of Amon, the god’s First Prophet, had not been
among those who met her by the river. He had expired quietly of a fever while
she was in Memphis. It was convenient; as convenient as the people’s blind
worship and the lesser priests’ acceptance of her lunacy. Some was the god’s
doing. Some was clearly that of the god’s servants.

The new First Prophet of Amon was Hatshepsut’s old friend
and ally, that supple-minded man, Hapuseneb. He ruled the priesthood and its vast
possessions in the kind of comfort that Senenmut, whose ease in the balancing
of so many offices was a matter of great care and concentration, could have
envied had he been less bleakly angry.

No; he was not angry, not any longer. Merely bleak. He had
not been deprived of his offices. They were still his, all the burdens as well
as the blessings.

He should be glad that Egypt accepted her; that Amon’s
temple stood behind her; that the court lacked the courage to resist her. One
lone woman had bowed the whole of the Two Lands to her will, had done it simply
and completely. She said that it would be, and so it was.

Only Senenmut seemed to stand apart from the crowds that
flocked about her. There were others, there must be: men too stubborn or too
set in tradition to accept her. But he saw and heard none of them.

The king himself was brought out like an image of a god,
decked in gold and crowned with the crowns that were his by right of birth and
sex. He was not to be deposed. They were to be kings together, he and she, but
she, as the elder, child of two who were the children of a king, was to be the
great king. He, who was a child still, son of a concubine, was the lesser, the
king-heir, set beside but slightly behind her in the order of rank and
precedence.

For that she was greatly praised. A usurper—for that she
was; she could be nothing else—could well have disposed of the rightful king and
raised up another, more malleable heir.

But she not only suffered Thutmose to live, she permitted
him to continue as king. He had no power worth the name, but then he never had.
His allies were few, their influence negligible. His mother could do nothing.

She had been wise enough at the time to choose seclusion
over an open and public wielding of her power as mother to the king. But now
that Hatshepsut was king over the younger king, Isis found herself a prisoner,
confined to her chambers and to a narrow round of courts and gardens. She was
not prevented from seeing or speaking to her son. She could entertain guests,
even appear in court. But she could do nothing that the new king was not aware
of, nor act but by the king’s will.

~~~

Hatshepsut held Egypt in her strong small hand. On the day
that she was crowned as befit a king in Thebes, the river ran still high though
it was late in the season of inundation.

She was by then proclaiming that not only was she the god’s
daughter; her own putative father, the first Thutmose, had named her his heir
upon his deathbed, and foretold that she would rule as he ruled, as king and
god. And perhaps he had called her his little king, his god-begotten; who was
to say that he had not? Fathers of strong-willed daughters were known to do
such things.

Amon’s daughter, heir of the last great king: of course she
would be king. If any denied her, that one found himself sent far away to serve
on an embassy in Asia, or became lord of a field or two and a pair of oxen on
the borders of Nubia.

When she came to her crowning, she came as any king did,
with the people’s blessing. There was none who dared protest. Not even
Senenmut.

She came in splendor, clothed all in gold. Her wits or the
cleverness of her maids had found her a royal garment that flattered her
woman’s body. It was a linen robe of many pleats, gathered at the middle, with
a mantle over it, embroidered with gold. A great golden collar glittered on her
breast. Her girdle was of gold, and her armlets, and her sandals. She had had
them wrought for this her coronation in the image of divine Re, the
scarab-beetle that rolled the sun across the sky, enfolded in the falcon-wings
of Horus. Her brow was crowned with the Two Ladies, the vulture-goddess of the
south, the rearing serpent of the north. Her wig was plaited with gold and
precious stones, the colors of sun and sky.