King and Goddess (45 page)

“By what?” he asked, honestly curious.

“They aren’t specific,” she said. She sighed a little, and
though the room was open and anyone passing by could look in, kissed him softly
on the lips. There was no passion in it. It was simply love, and worry that
surprised him.

“Oh, come,” he said. “You’ve shown me a task that’s worthy
of me. I’m delighted with it.”

“Djeser-Djeseru wasn’t worthy of you?”

“But that’s done,” he said. “It rises in beauty; it gladdens
my heart. I could fiddle with it, I suppose, and work on the tombs, and pass
the time in small things. This, now—this is a great work, a grand challenge. To
quarry the stone, carve it, sheathe it in bright metal, raise it in your
father’s temple, and all within a year, is a feat that men will remember for a
thousand years.”

“You have a year to quarry the stone,” she said. “That was
my boast.”

“And mine was half a year,” he said.

She shook her head at him. “You’ll have all that you need,”
she said. “Whatever it is, ask, and it shall be given you. My treasurers have
their orders, and my masters of works. What I wish to inscribe on the stones—”

“I know,” he said. “It will all be done. Do stop fretting
over me. I’m happy. I’m always like this when I’m happy.”

“Are you glad,” she asked, “that you will be gone from
Thebes for half a year, and away from me? Do I bind you too tightly? Do you
need to be free?”

He stared at her. His mind, which had been running on
through the reckoning of men, wages, and materials, stumbled unwillingly to a
halt. “What ever makes you think that?”

“When I sent Nehsi to Punt,” she said, “you sulked for
months. You wanted to go. I wondered then if it was the glory you longed for,
or the respite from me. Now you leap into this undertaking with grand glee.
What else am I to think but that you need to be apart from me?”

He suppressed a sigh. “Oh, lady. Oh, beloved. You understand
what it is to want glory, to want it so badly that you’ll sacrifice anything
for it—even tradition so hallowed with years that no one dreamed it could be
broken. This I do for you, for the splendor of your name; but for myself, too.
I want it. I need it.”

“So,” she said, a little wearily, a little wryly. “You are a
man after all, and I am a woman. You yearn for great things. I yearn for you,
and dread the parting.”

“I’ll come to Thebes as I can,” he said, “if I can. And when
it’s over I’ll come back to you. That I promise you.”

She nodded slowly. “I surprise myself,” she said. “I don’t
want you to go.”

“You could,” he said, “send someone else. Ineni, Hapuseneb—”

“No,” she said. “You’d hate me for it.”

Since that was true, he did not answer.

She embraced him with sudden fierceness. “Look after
yourself. Remember to eat and sleep. Don’t wear yourself away. A year is more
than soon enough.”

“Half a year,” he said, set on it, determined to do it.

~~~

With the full power of the king’s name and a free hand in
her treasury, Senenmut gathered a force of laborers several thousand strong,
with all that they needed for the work ahead of them. The king sent great logs
of cedar and sycamore; boats and barges for the men and their tools and
provisions; smaller luxuries: tents, blankets, even a lovely young thing with a
lute and a smile, who said that his name was Harmose. He had a sweet voice, and
he seemed to know every song that had ever been sung in Egypt. Senenmut called
him guard and nursemaid, dog and servant, spy for the king. Harmose only smiled
and tuned his lute, and sang a song of a dog and a monkey and a tree of fruit.

Harmose was not the only king’s man who followed Senenmut to
Aswan. Thuty the treasurer came too, to keep the accounts. Amonhotep, an older
man than Senenmut’s brother of that name who had died, who had been Senenmut’s
right hand in much that he did since Hatshepsut took the Two Crowns, was
Senenmut’s second yet again, and capably so.

And Nehsi came, the king’s chancellor, bringing his wife but
leaving all but one of his tribe of offspring behind, the dark beauty who was
his daughter Tama. They were escaping, and rather gleefully, too. Senenmut was
ready to begrudge the Nubian’s presence—he had not been allowed to sit in
Nehsi’s shadow when Nehsi went to Punt—save that Nehsi came to him not long
before they left Thebes.

It was not uncommon for the king’s chancellor to visit the
king’s master of works on this errand or that. But Nehsi had not come to Senenmut’s
house except on the king’s errands, nor had Senenmut invited him. They served
the king together as they might; they respected one another. They were not,
however, friends.

On this morning Nehsi came not as the king’s man but as
himself. Senenmut received him over breakfast, which, because he was courteous,
he offered to share with Nehsi.

The Nubian declined to eat, but did accept a cup of beer,
which he drank with evident enjoyment. “It’s good,” he said.

“Yes,” said Senenmut. “It’s made on my estate. The brewery’s
nearly as illustrious as the horses.”

“I had heard of it,” Nehsi granted him. “Its reputation is
deserved.”

Senenmut nodded. He spread a round of bread with softened
cheese, and ate it not because he was hungry but because the king would ask her
Nubian if Senenmut had eaten, and Senenmut did not want to vex her with yet
more fretting for his welfare.

Nehsi drained his cup of beer, declined a second. Senenmut
ate his bread and cheese. When the silence had grown almost intolerable, Nehsi
said, “I don’t suppose you’re delighted that I’m coming to Aswan.”

“I can’t say I am,” Senenmut said.

“You know she worries,” said Nehsi. “She was going to send
Hapuseneb, but he told her to send me—and ordered me to bring Bastet. She’s an
excellent lady of the household. She’s offered to oversee your house, and to
take over such duties as you may find tedious, with as much as you have to do.”

“That is generous of her,” Senenmut said.

“She is fond of you,” said Nehsi.

“One wonders why,” said Senenmut.

Nehsi shrugged. “Who can fathom the mind of a woman? I’ll
tell you true, it wasn’t my doing that I was given this duty. They conspired
between them, my wife and the king. They think you’ll be well served if I do
whatever needs doing, under your command of course, and completely at your
disposal.”

“And you? Does that gall you?”

“No,” Nehsi said. “I think you may be mad to think you can
do this as quickly as you promise—but I’ll do my best to help you.”

“Why?”

“Because,” said Nehsi, “the king loves you. She’s afraid for
you. She thinks this will be too much for you.”

“Everyone does,” Senenmut said with an edge of irritation.
“Do believe me: it isn’t.”

“She believes you,” Nehsi said, “or she would never have let
you do it.”

“And she sends you with me, to make sure my nose is wiped
and my kilts are clean.”

“That’s Bastet,” said Nehsi with the glimmer of a smile.
“I’m to keep the workers in order, and oversee the overseers.”

“Leaving what for me to do? Sit on a hill and watch?”

“I’ve never been a builder,” Nehsi said, “nor a carver of
stone. Men I know. Stone, wood, the shaping and building of monuments—no. That
I leave to you.”

“That’s fair enough, I suppose,” Senenmut conceded after a
while. “She frets too much, and gods know why; but I confess, I could use you.
We’ll need every good man we can get, to do what we have to do in the time
we’re given for it.”

Nehsi inclined his head. “I thank you. You are generous.”

“Don’t cherish any illusions. I’m practical. Tell your wife
that I thank her for her offer, and I’ll take it; provided that she promises
not to fuss over me. I hate to be fussed over.”

“So do I,” said Nehsi. “I’ll make her promise.”

“You do that,” said Senenmut.

When Nehsi had gone and Senenmut should be going himself, he
lingered for a while. That was not a friend, he thought; but neither was it an
enemy. Fellow servant, that was it; and the king trusted him.

So did Senenmut. Liking was no part of it, nor needed to be.
Nehsi would do well by his king, and therefore by Senenmut. Senenmut was not
sorry, after all, to have him.

The sun beat down like a hammer on bronze. The air shimmered
with heat. Men shouted; hammers rang. The shapes of the two obelisks were drawn
in the red stone of the quarry; the lines of men followed them, entering the
mountain as they called it, hewing the great shafts out of the living rock.

Senenmut, seated on a hill under a canopy with the scribe
Tetemre and the singer whom the king had sent to nursemaid him, watched with
tight-drawn intensity the hewing of the nearer obelisk. Harmose plucked soft
notes on the lute, each one like a drop of water falling in a pool. The sound
of them was somehow comforting, a remembrance of coolness in that bleak and
burning place.

Nothing green grew here. There was only the red stone and
the blue vastness of the sky, and the river beyond, the roar of its cataract
almost drowned out by the clamor of the quarry.

There was a town just north of this place, a city as it was
reckoned in these parts, hard upon the borders of Nubia. Its people mostly had
Nubian faces; Nehsi for once looked almost ordinary, though no one that
Senenmut had seen was as beautiful as that. Here most of the workmen were from
farther north, but some had been brought in by the good offices of the governor
of Aswan, who looked to share a little of the glory.

It was a sweaty undertaking, daylong, nightlong by
torchlight. Senenmut had lost the memory of sleep. The men labored by turn and
turn, day and night. The night laborers had nothing to fear from ill spirits:
Senenmut had seen to it that a company of priests walked the quarries each
night at sunset and midnight and in the dark before dawn, blessing them in the
gods’ name and casting out any demons that might be lurking.

They had begun one obelisk before the other, tracing the
shape of it in the stone and setting two long lines of men to hewing it out. It
was the tallest that had ever been, two dozen manlengths and somewhat more from
base to tip. The raising of it would be an awesome thing. It would tower up to
heaven, taller than the cedars of the Lebanon, taller than any other work of
men’s hands.

Senenmut confessed them to no one, but he had his doubts of
this thing. It was too tall; it would break of its own weight. He should
shorten it by a manlength, two, four, perhaps one more than that.

But he had begun it, and it was taking shape in the quarry
below him. It was nearly freed of its surrounding stone. The men who had hewn
it out had gone to begin the second shaft. Stonemasons were in the trench now,
carving out the four sides. When it was lifted up and carried out to the river
and thence into Thebes, it would be smoothed and polished, its sides carved
with words as the king directed, its tip sheathed in electrum.

The crews were waiting with the rollers, the huge logs that
the king had given, the sledges on which the shaft would ride down to the
river. The barge that would carry it was tethered there, enormous beyond the
belief of the boatmen who had flocked about it all the way up the river from
Thebes. It dwarfed them. Its length was thrice the height of the obelisk; it
rose towering from hull to upper deck.

Nothing like it had ever sailed the river of Egypt; nor,
Senenmut suspected, ever would again. It was built of precious sycamore, great
beams gathered from the whole of the Two Lands of Egypt, sent here by the king
to build the ship that would bear her obelisks to her city.

It was vast, enormous, huge beyond believing. It was purely
Egyptian, and absolutely royal.

Down in the quarry, the chief of overseers, none other than
Nehsi the Nubian in a kilt that shone in the sun, stark against the gleaming
darkness of his skin, raised an arm in the signal that they had agreed on. The
shaft was ready to raise from its bed. Senenmut sprang to his feet and leaped
down from his eminence, with the scribe and the singer trailing behind.

Nehsi seemed in his element. He grinned wide and white as
Senenmut halted panting at his side. It was hideously hot down here, like the
breath of a furnace. He passed Senenmut a jar that proved to be half-full of
beer—excellent beer, too. Bastet had lured Senenmut’s brewer away from the
villa, and brought him to this desert place to practice his art among the
workers and their overseers.

He was content, Senenmut gathered. Men who worked hard and
long under the burning sun were marvelously appreciative of good beer.

Senenmut drank deep and passed the jar to Harmose who
happened to be behind him—in his shadow as usual. It rather amazed him that he
had stopped minding that perpetual presence. The sweet voice and the fine touch
upon the lute had a great deal to do with it; and the boy’s temper was as sweet
as his voice. There was no guile in him that Senenmut could discern. He was
simply and completely as he seemed: the queen’s servant, given to Senenmut to
keep him well and in comfort in this terrible place.

Harmose left a few swallows for the scribe, handed him the
jar and wandered a little way down along the rim of the cutting. The carvers
had drawn back. Strong men labored now to lift the shaft. The overseers’ whips
cracked. Men shouted, fierce, rhythmic: "Heave and roll! Heave and ho!”

Up out of the earth. Up, oiled by the sweat of a thousand
men, lifted on ropes, balanced, hanging in the air, sinking down with awesome
slowness onto the sledge that waited for it.

In the moment of its pausing, the cry of the workers paused
likewise. And Senenmut heard it. A soft sound, hardly louder than the hiss of
breath through his teeth. The cracking of stone.

He shut his eyes, but his ears could not stop listening. He
heard the groan, the long exhalation of breath as the workmen saw what he had
seen.