King and Goddess (43 page)

He still lived, and grew from boy to youth to man in silence
that might have passed for meekness. Hatshepsut endeavored not to repeat the
mistake that she had made with her daughter Neferure. She gave him somewhat to
do. She left him his weapons and his soldiers. And she made him a priest of
Amon, one of those who offered incense before the god—incense from her own
trees that her embassy had brought from Punt. It was a minor office, but
necessary; for it was the scent of myrrh that nourished the god and sustained
his presence.

Thutmose endured. Senenmut could find no other word for it.
When it was required by tradition or by policy that both kings show themselves
before the people, he put on the crowns and lifted crook and flail and sat
enthroned beside the elder king. Otherwise he went quietly about his ways,
interfering in nothing, saying nothing.

Being a cipher like his father, Hatshepsut observed in scorn
that had abated not at all since he was a child and she his regent. Biding his
time, Senenmut was inclined to think.

“Then why does he do it?” Hatshepsut demanded when Senenmut
was unwise enough to voice his thought.

They were in her temple then, inspecting the completion of
Hathor’s shrine with its many images of the king. Hatshepsut, the living
Hathor, as she was Horus and Isis and own daughter of Amon, stood before the
goddess, but her thoughts were on her lesser king. “Why does he bow his head
and suffer me, if he is not the mooncalf he seems?”

Senenmut noted with part of his mind that her voice echoed
oddly in the newly completed space. He would need to alter it a little, soften
the echo, transform it into a whisper of sacred mystery.

The rest of him focused on what she had said. “Maybe,” he
said, “he can see as clearly as any other man in Egypt. He recognizes the light
of Amon in you.”

“A light in which he is singularly lacking.” She paced the
paving of the floor, stroking her foot along it, taking note of its smoothness.
“We should do the shrine of Anubis in black granite, don’t you think? It would
be striking.”

“Indeed,” said Senenmut, who had other intentions for the
chapel of the jackal-headed god.

She knew what that particular blandness of tone meant: her
glance was swift and rather wry. “You will of course do as you think best,” she
said, “for glory and for remembrance.”

“Indeed,” Senenmut said again, but warmly this time; a
warmth that made her smile before she turned away, intrigued by the carving
about the base of the goddess’ statue.

With the deaths of her two younger sons, each so close
upon the other, Hat-Nufer began to fade perceptibly. When her husband died she
had kept her strength. He had always been so vague, so gentle a presence; his
absence diminished her but little. But her sons had been the world to her.

She who had seemed indomitably ageless grew gaunt and grey.
Her voice was seldom lifted in its old strong outcry against shiftless
servants. She kept more and more to her chamber, too weary, her maids said, to
get up or dress, though she would be bathed and clean even in extremity.

Senenmut, eldest and last alive of her sons, gave her what
joy he could. It was difficult. He was busy; caught up in the queen’s temple,
her tomb, her recent and powerful conviction that she must be buried with her
earthly father, which meant opening old Thutmose’s tomb and shifting his grave-goods
and seeing a new coffin made for him, inscribed with his daughter’s name and
her reverence. Senenmut was as full of Hatshepsut as her temple was, and there
was little left of him for his house or his servants or even his mother.

He tried to visit Hat-Nufer every day, usually in the
evening after the day’s work was done. She was always dressed for him, a wig on
her head, her face painted and a golden collar about her neck. He could not
fail to see how thin she was, or how transparent the skin of the arms that
reached to embrace him.

He told himself that she would rally. She was Hat-Nufer, the
lady of the house. His brothers’ deaths came nigh to breaking them all, but
Senenmut had recovered. She was older, that was all. He, so much younger and
with so much to engross his mind, had to come out of grief or fail in his
queen’s service. She had no such escape. But time would heal her, and
exasperation with the servants’ slackness.

He did what he could. He visited her each evening; he saw to
it that the servants came to her for their orders; he tempted her with this
dainty or that from the king’s table, with the king’s complicity. Hat-Nufer was
never gracious; that weakness was not in her. But she ate what he brought, or
tried, and she dealt with the servants. His house continued in reasonable
order.

Nevertheless she was fading. Part of her had gone into the
tomb with each of her men who died. There was not enough left to keep her
strong.

One evening she was not in her chair in her wig and her
gown, waiting for him to come and pay his respects. Her maid tried to tell
Senenmut that the lady was resting; he could come back tomorrow. He set her
aside still chattering, and strode into his mother’s bedchamber.

Almost he could not see her, she was so small and shrunken.
Without her wig and her paint and her kohl she was a tiny, withered thing, her
hair all grey, the skin of her face drawn close to the skull.

She was not dead, not yet, but he knew the scent of it,
heard the flutter of wings in the shadows. Her voice was hardly louder than
those, if no gentler than it had ever been. “I told that silly girl to keep you
out. What do you want?”

“To see you, Mother,” Senenmut said. He was master of voice
and face at least, calm, matter-of-fact, betraying none of his shock.

She saw it regardless. “Yes, I look hideous. What do you
expect? I’m dying. I’d hoped you wouldn’t notice for yet a while.”

“Until you were dead? Until then, Mother?”

“If possible,” she said, “yes.” She paused to breathe, and
perhaps to compose herself. Not for grief or compassion; for anger. This
weakness must vex her sorely. “I don’t want you dripping tears in my face. Or
hating me, either. I’m tired. I’ll be glad enough to go.”

“But,” he said. “Mother, you aren’t old enough to die.”

“How old is old enough? I’ve buried a husband and two grown
sons and a daughter-in-law. All that’s left is you, and you have her.” She did
not need to say the name. They both knew whom she meant. “You’ll miss me, I
suppose. You’ll need to get in someone who can keep the servants in line. Make
sure it’s someone sensible, who doesn’t think you’ll marry her just because
you’ve put her in charge of the house.”

Senenmut opened his mouth to protest that no one would look
after his house unless it was Hat-Nufer, but that was foolish and he knew it.
He said instead, “I’ll see if there’s a man who’ll do it. Apuhotep, who’s been
managing the horses—he has a pack of sons. One of them might be looking to
raise himself in the world.”

“Apuhotep’s not too incompetent,” Hat-Nufer conceded. “His
wife is a sensible woman. If there’s not a son who can do it, see if he has a
daughter. A woman is always better for managing a household. She’s tougher. She
sees more and tolerates less.”

“But,” said Senenmut, “she might think she has hopes of
better things.”

“Not if she has any sense,” Hat-Nufer said.

“I’ll send to Apuhotep in the morning,” Senenmut said, “and ask
if he has a suitable prospect.”

She nodded. Once it would have been brisk. Now it was weary,
and her face was paler than it had been when he came in. “Good. You’re not
trying to tell me I can do it all. Have you come late to sense, or are you just
in a hurry?”

Senenmut realized that he had been standing, looming over
her. He drew a stool to the side of her bed and sat on it. “I have all the time
you need.”

“Well,” she said, hardly more than a sigh. “That’s not much.
Don’t let the king work you too hard. She trusts you, which is good, and makes
good use of you, but she forgets to allow for the little luxuries: food, sleep,
time to yourself.”

“I don’t forget,” Senenmut said.

Hat-Nufer snorted. “You have the worst memory in the world
for such things. Left to yourself, you’d starve to death. Maybe you do need to
find yourself a wife, if only to keep you fed and make sure you sleep.”

“I think not,” Senenmut said gently.

“I didn’t think so, either,” Hat-Nufer said. She sighed and
closed her eyes.

As simply as that, as easily and as quietly, she slipped out
of the body. He felt her let go, as if she had been holding her souls bound
until she said all that she had to say; and having said it, without pause or
farewell, she left him.

He looked down at the husk of her as it lay in her bed. It
was empty. No life burned in it. No breath stirred.

“I expected you to linger,” he said. “I should have known.”

Her body returned no answer. Nor did her spirit upbraid him
from the shadows. He set a kiss on her brow that was already growing cold, and
went to summon the embalmers.

~~~

He would not feel empty; could not indulge himself in
grief. He had too much to do. All his kin were dead. Only he was left. He, and
his king.

He did not close up his house in Thebes. His rank and his
titles required that he keep it. But he was in it seldom, except for
appearance’s sake. It was too empty of living presence; too full of memories.
His days he spent in building tomb or temple. His nights he slept in the
palace, in his lady’s arms.

She grieved for Hat-Nufer as he could not seem to do: wept
at the news of her death, and mourned at her funeral. Senenmut did not know
that there had been liking between them, but respect there certainly had been.
Hat-Nufer would have been pleased to be seen to her tomb by a king, though she
would never have admitted it.

And when she was truly gone, Senenmut shut and sealed the
door of his tomb. He would not lie there. His place was elsewhere, within reach
of the queen’s temple.

It grew in beauty, shining under heaven. Its walls and its
colonnades were all complete. Only the smaller things were left: the carving of
an inner chamber, the painting of a wall or two, the planting of the king’s
myrrh-trees in their sunlit garden. The scent of them as they were set at last
in their places, their roots uncovered gently and then covered over again,
their branches spread in homage to the sun, was so strong that it perfumed the
whole of the temple. The priests hardly needed to burn incense; the living
fragrance wrapped them all about.

So it was in the whole land of Punt, if the embassy’s tales
were true. Senenmut had had that journey carved in the temple, drawn from the
young scribe’s scribblings on the backs of the ship’s accounts. There was the
city in the water; the men with their plaited and kingly beards; the women with
their great rumps; the king in his beauty and the queen in her monumental
ugliness, marching in procession before the strangers from Egypt.

Senenmut was not a jealous man, nor enduringly petty. He
could make Nehsi’s expedition immortal by carving it in stone, for the glory of
their king and the remembrance of those who had traveled so far to bring back
such riches.

~~~

The completion of Djeser-Djeseru, the beautiful temple,
sacred to Hathor and to Hatshepsut the king, was a festival to rival the return
of the voyagers from Punt. The king herself dedicated the temple to Amon and to
Hathor and to Anubis the guide, jackal-god, guardian of the dead. Her face
stared back from every wall and every image therein. Her name was carved
everywhere that a name could be carved. Let Egypt try to forget her: this
temple would remember, from outermost colonnade to innermost shrine, and even
to the tomb that lay hidden and secret beneath, with its sky of stars and its
images of Senenmut who loved the king, the golden one, the Horus, Maatkare
Hatshepsut.

At an age when most women began to grow old, Hatshepsut
seemed to have entered her prime. She had reached her fortieth year. She was
King of Upper and Lower Egypt, secure on her throne, blessed by the gods,
beloved of Amon.

On a morning not long after she celebrated her natal day,
she held audience as always. It was a propitious day according to the calendar,
excellent for those who came seeking justice. She had decided a contention
between the lords of two nomes. She listened now to a woman and the man who was
her husband.

“But I left him,” the woman said, “because he took the
daughter that I bore him and sold her.”

“I told you,” the man broke in, “that if the next one was a
son, you could keep him.”

“And the next one was a daughter,” the woman said, “and you
fed her to the crocodiles.”

“I did not!” the husband said. “While you napped instead of
looking after her, she wandered down to the river.”

“And you pushed her in.”

“She fell in. I tried to catch her.”

“You didn’t try very hard.”

"You were asleep and snoring!”

“Your pardon,” the king said mildly. Her voice was light and
not particularly loud, but it penetrated the wall of their quarrel. They seemed
to remember where they were, and who she was: smallish slender woman sitting
above them, wearing the tall crowns. They fell on their faces.

“Oh, please,” she said, “do get up. Madam, you wish what? To
be divorced from this man?”

“No,” the woman said; and hastily, as an afterthought,
“majesty. I want him to let me keep the next baby, no matter if it’s another
daughter.”

“You want to remain married to this man?” Hatshepsut asked.

The woman shrugged. “He’s all right. He doesn’t beat me
often. When he does, I usually deserve it. He just won’t let me keep my
babies.”

“Do you beat him?” the king asked.

“Sometimes,” the woman said, “when he deserves it.”

“So then,” said the king. She turned the force of her gaze
on the husband. “Why did you take her children away from her?”