King and Goddess (41 page)

“Truly,” he said to its queen over the feast, “the sun-god
blesses this land with his presence.”

She raised her brows. “Ah; so he’s spoken to you, then.”

“I’m not worthy of a god’s notice,” Nehsi said, “but I feel
him here. It’s the incense-trees, I’m certain. He loves their scent above all
others. It’s meat and drink to him.”

“Indeed,” said the queen of Punt, indulgent as a mother
whose child, albeit slow-witted, comes round in time to a proper understanding.
She embraced Tama, who was still in her lap, and kissed her. “This child could
be raised under the god’s eye.”

There; at last. Nehsi let his breath out slowly. “So she
shall be,” he said with care to betray none of his tension, “in the courts of
Egypt, where the god’s child is king.”

“Egypt is mighty,” the queen said, “and beautiful, and
blessed by the god. But here is his heart and his home.”

“She has been greatly blessed, to sojourn for a while in the
god’s own country.”

“She might be blessed beyond measure, were she to be
fostered here, under the god’s eye.”

“That is a great honor,” Nehsi said, “and a generous offer.
But she is Egyptian. She will grow to womanhood in Egypt where she was born.”

The queen ran a finger down Tama’s dusk-dark cheek.
“Egyptian, O man whose name means simply ‘Nubian’?”

“Her mother is a lady of Egypt,” Nehsi said levelly, “and I
was born in Thebes. My blood and face are of Nubia. My heart is wholly
Egyptian.”

“Tell me, little one,” the queen said, looking into Tama’s
wide-eyed face. “Are you Egyptian?”

Tama nodded.

“Would you like to stay with me?”

Nehsi held his breath. Every instinct of outraged fatherhood
cried to him to snatch his daughter away. But he was his king’s voice in Punt,
and this was the queen of that country. If he offended her, he destroyed
everything that he had wrought.

But he could not give up his daughter. She was the one of
all his children who looked and, gods help her, acted and thought like her
father. He loved her. He could not give her away.

Tama looked from the queen to her father. She did not seem
perturbed, nor in any way confused. She said clearly and without evidence of
doubt, “I like you very much. You learn Egyptian very well. But I can’t stay if
my papa goes. He’s my papa.”

The queen regarded her with an expression that Nehsi, who
had always prided himself in his ability to read faces, could not comprehend at
all. “Fathers send their daughters to fosterage often, even in Egypt. It’s
useful. It helps them to win alliances and to become rich.”

“Papa is already rich,” Tama said. “I do like you, lady
dear. I want to come back and teach you again. But I have to go home. Nurse
will be upset if I don’t, and Papa will miss me.”

“I could make you stay,” the queen said.

“I’d run away,” said Tama. She slipped from the queen’s lap,
neatly eluding the hands that reached to catch her, and climbed into Nehsi’s
arms. From there she looked gravely at the queen of Punt. “I’m going wherever
Papa goes.”

Nehsi braced himself. If there was to be a rising of armed
men, his people were unarmed. Even the king’s soldiers had left their weapons
on the ships, all but the small knives they used for cutting meat.

They would fight as they could, and escape in such order as
they might. The ships were ready. It was ill luck to sail at night, but if they
must, they must.

The queen did not rise, did not denounce him, did not
command her men to fall on his and destroy them. She remained where she was.
Her broad unlovely face with its beautiful eyes was empty of expression. It was
unlikely that she had ever been denied anything that she wanted: such was not
the common lot of queens.

At last she spoke, heavily, wearily, with sadness that might
have tugged at Nehsi’s heart, had he had any choice but to be the cause of it.
“It is clear to see whom she loves best. That’s well, I suppose. A daughter
should love her father. The god blesses her for it.”

“You are generous,” Nehsi said, “and wise.”

She shook her head. “I am practical. I know that I could
have you seized and killed, but she would only hate me for it. And you would
never suffer me to take her and keep her.”

“That is wisdom,” Nehsi said, “as befits a queen.”

The queen shrugged. “One does what one must. Promise me at
least, that if she can, she will come back.”

“If she can,” said Nehsi, “she will.”

It was not much of a promise, but it was all she asked for.
He would be sorry to see the last of her. Her body was grotesque, even hideous,
but her heart weighed heavy as gold on the scales of justice.

They left the land of Punt in the heavy warmth of the morning,
riding a fair wind northward on the breast of the sea. Tama, clinging to the
lookout post on the stern of Nehsi’s ship, wept to leave her friend.

The queen of Punt sat long on the strand, mounted on her
absurdly pretty little donkey. Her figure shrank slowly behind them, nor ever
moved, even to raise a hand in farewell.

~~~

It was a long voyage home, heavy as their ships were,
laden with splendors. They sailed as far from land as they might, on guard
against raiders; when they had to put in to shore for water or provisions, the
king’s soldiers at last earned their bread and beer. Word had flown northward
that the king of Egypt’s ships returned from the incense-country, and that they
were rich beyond the dreams of a simple tribesman.

Strong arms and keen bronze and Amon’s blessing protected
them. They lost a man to an arrow on the stony shores not far north of Punt, wrapped
him tight in linen and perfumed him with myrrh and brought him home with the
king’s trees, but no one else took harm. Nor did any storm vex them, though the
wind blew strong enough to fret Nehsi for the welfare of the trees he carried
so carefully.

Day by day they sailed closer to Egypt. When they came at
last to the mouth of the king’s channel and found it open still and running
strong with the flood, Nehsi stood on the deck of his ship and cried thanks to
Amon and to the river-god. He flooded high yet again in the king’s honor and
for the passage of her heavily laden ships into the Bitter Lakes, and past them
to the river of Egypt.

In their own country they eased at last. Even the sailors,
heavily taxed by the labor of rowing and sailing against the current with the
river at flood, sang for joy. Red Land and Black Land opened arms to embrace
them. The river spread broad before them.

A full year they had been away from Egypt, and yet it might
have been but a moment. It was all the same. Cities of mudbrick and brilliantly
painted and gilded temples, white blaze of light from the pyramids on the
western shores of Memphis, rich black fields growing green as the river receded
from its flood.

They sailed the length of Egypt, all the way up to Thebes.
There at last Nehsi saw the change that a year had wrought. On the western
bank, where had been a stretch of barren desert and sudden crag looming above
the temple of an old king, something new and splendid had taken shape.

The king was building her temple at last, the one that she
had dreamed of while she was the queen regent. It would honor her while she
lived and remember her when she was dead, and sing the praises of the gods in
stone.

When Nehsi left it had been a stretch of newly leveled earth
and little else. Now it spread wide against the loom of the cliff, opening its
arms about a great ramp that led upward to a broad colonnade. Already pillars
rose against the fierce blue of the sky, only a few now, but a promise of the
many that would come.

He with his one-and-thirty myrrh-trees, his gold and ivory and
ebony, monkeys, hunting-dogs, lionskins and panther-skins, shrank small indeed
beside that great work of the king’s mind. Her mind, and the hand of her
beloved, her man of many titles, the brilliant and gods-gifted Senenmut.

They were waiting for him on the quay of Thebes, the king
and all her ministers in their finest array, with music and dancing and songs
of welcome that were almost audible over the roar of the crowd. Of all of them,
Nehsi saw only the one: the small straight figure beneath the Two Crowns. She
was more beautiful than he remembered, and more splendid; he had forgotten the
light of her eyes.

He bowed down at her feet. She raised him up, great honor
and hardly unexpected, but the touch of her hand made him tremble. Her smile
was kingly restrained, and yet his heart knew that, had she been even a little
less royal, it would have been a broad and joyous grin. “Nehsi,” she said. Only
his name; but he needed no more than that.

~~~

His gifts delighted her to no end. The myrrh-trees in
particular: she welcomed them as if they had been princes, addressed them one
by one, promised that she would set them in the garden of her temple, as the
god her father willed. “You will worship him in joy and gladness,” she said to
them, “and send your savor up to heaven.”

She feasted him, of course: three days it lasted, and his
companions were made as rich as princes. The prince of Punt with his three
wives and his lords and attendants were made most welcome, given a house to
live in while it pleased them, and made free of the Two Lands of Egypt.

It was all grand and glorious. But when it was ended, when
Nehsi looked again at becoming the queen’s chancellor and her servant, the
ships and their captains and crews went back to their roving and trading, the
scribes to their places in the House of Life, and the lesser ambassadors to the
daily round of the court.

And Bastet the interpreter, Tama’s erstwhile nurse and
companion, prepared to return to her father’s house near Bubastis. She had
grown silent again as they sailed deeper into Egypt. He had not seen her at the
feast. She was living somewhere, surely, but he did not know where. He would
have thought that she had gone home to her father, but a niggle at his heart
told him that she was still in Thebes.

He did not know why he should trust such a thing. He was not
the kind of man to whom gods spoke, nor did he have the gift of knowing things,
as Bastet did. But this he knew. She was still in Thebes.

It need not have mattered. She had done her duty, and done
it well. The king had rewarded her richly. She could go home, share the wealth
of the king’s gift with her father, and still have dowry enough to entice a
prince. He was pleased for her. She was his friend, after all.

Not that they had ever admitted to friendship. Dinners
shared, and adventures with his imp of a daughter, and long hours of trading
and treating with the people and princes of Punt, all made the word itself
unnecessary. It simply and purely was.

A friend would not leave Thebes without bidding farewell to
her friend. Her silence troubled him, her absence from the celebrations, her
retreat into nothing so much as sullenness. He understood it, or thought he
did. Her year of glory was over. Now she must be plain unembellished Bastet
again, daughter of a minor lord in Bubastis.

If he felt bound in chains, albeit chains that he had
chosen, how tightly constricted she must feel, who was a woman, and young, and
nobly if not royally born. It had been an ill thing, maybe, to set her free for
so long. No person of rank in Egypt was free: of duty, of obligation, of
service to the king.

Thinking on all these things, rising from his bed in the
morning after the third day of feasting, Nehsi soothed his pounding head with
good plain Egyptian beer, and called for his bodyservant. He would bathe, he
thought, and dress plainly, and go hunting for Bastet.

~~~

It was not so very long a hunt. He found her in his own
house, sitting in the garden, watching Tama play with the monkey that she had
brought back from Punt. Her expression was oddly fierce. When she turned her
eyes on Nehsi, they were furious.

He refused to recoil from anger that he had done nothing to
earn. He sat on a bench near her under an arbor of roses from Asia, and took
time to breathe the sweet intoxicating scent. Tama was teaching the monkey to
set pebbles in orderly rows, for what purpose Nehsi could not discern; but it
seemed high and serious.

Bastet, having seared him with her glance, went back to
glaring at the child and the monkey. Nehsi allowed the silence to stretch. It
was peaceful, in its way. His own house about him, Egypt’s sky overhead,
Egypt’s earth underfoot: he was happy, even in Bastet’s manifest unhappiness.

When she spoke she startled him. Her voice was sharp, as
angry as the rest of her. “I have to leave tomorrow. I don’t want to.”

“Then why do you leave?”

“What else can I do?”

“Marry me.”

Nehsi had not meant to say that at all. He had never even
thought of it. But there was his tongue, running on ahead of him, and she
staring at him as if he had turned into the queen of Punt.

He refused to swallow the words. He let them hang in the air
till she must answer or go.

She did not answer, precisely. She said, “That is an
interesting notion.”

“Preposterous, I’m sure,” he said.

“Rather.” She frowned at her feet in their gilded sandals.
New, he noticed. She must have been enjoying the fruits of her new wealth. “I
don’t suppose it’s my dowry you’re after.”

“I am not,” he said, “the sort of man who can never have
enough of riches.”

“I hadn’t thought so.”

She was not angry, either. He had half expected her to be
furious; to rail at him; to call him every kind of fool. Instead she sat
quietly, not too far from him, watching Tama play with the monkey.

“Is it,” she asked after a while, “because you need someone
to rein in your daughter?”

“I honestly never thought of it,” he said.

“I’m good at it,” said Bastet. “Except when I’m busy being
your voice-in-the-air with foreign queens.”