King and Goddess (49 page)

She did not shriek or burst into tears as a lesser woman
would have done. She found the cloth where it always was, near his hand, and
did what was necessary.

After the spasm had passed, he lay unmoving. His eyes had
gone dark. His body had no power to stir itself. His souls struggled within it,
the bird-winged
ba
and the shadowy
ka
, held captive still by the struggling
breath; but the bonds had grown feeble.

Not long now, he thought dimly, unvexed by fear. His only
dread was for her, that she must watch him die. He would have spared them both
that if he could; had known it was futile, even in the trying.

He heard the wail rise up in her. She thought him dead
already. He gathered all of his strength that was left, reached for her hand,
held it for a moment before his fingers went slack and fell away. “Listen,” he
said to her. “Listen to me.”

“Don’t!” she cried. “Don’t talk. You need to rest.”

“No,” he said. “Listen. Tomb—I built tomb. Two of them. One
for kin. One for me. Secret place, near your temple. Not secret enough. There
is another place. Another— Listen!” for she was trying to stop him again, and
she must not. He saw the Guide, the dark one standing there, a shadow more
distinct by far than the living shape of her face. Jackal’s head, sulfur-eyes,
broad man-shoulders, hand outstretched, beckoning, bidding him be quick.

“Listen,” said Senenmut with a resurgence of strength: Anubis’
gift, and he was grateful for it. “I had a third tomb made, a truly secret
place. The men who made it, I bound to silence; several with blood. See me
buried there. Hapuseneb, your Nubian—I trust them. Let them do it. Pretend that
my body goes in the second tomb, make a mummy of reeds, wrap it and strew it with
amulets and perform over it all the rites. But let my body itself lie where
none but you three know. There I shall guard you, your name and your living
essence, for all the thousands of years.” He was nearly done. He mustered the
last few words. “In the casket in my chamber, under the collar of gold. It’s
written there, where I must lie.”

“Nehsi?” she asked, the fool, taking refuge in distraction.
“You want him to do this? You never liked him.”

“Trusted,” he said, “always. Liking never mattered. Tell him.
And Hapuseneb.”

“You won’t die,” she said. “You can’t. I won’t let you.”

He sighed, though it caught, tearing him with coughing. He
thrust the words through it. “Beloved. King and goddess. Even you are not more
powerful than death.”

“But what will I do? How will I live in the world, knowing
that you are not in it?”

It was not a great pleasure to take this memory into the
dark: his king, his beloved, gone weak at last, clutching at him like any
common woman.

She read this thoughts in his eyes. He saw how she drew
herself together, how her chin set, her eyes went hard, even through the tears.

His heart, poor staggering thing, swelled till it must
surely burst. Ah, gods, how he loved her. How glorious she was, how strong; how
splendid a king.

“I will live,” she said, and her voice barely broke. “I give
you my word. I will live without you. But never—never shall I forget you.”

He smiled. The Guide was waiting, growing faintly impatient.
The hand was still outstretched, strong beautiful deep-tanned man’s hand.

But there was one more thing that he must do, one more thing
that he had to say. It was simple but utterly necessary. In a voice as clear as
if he had never been ill—the god’s gift again, doubly and trebly blessed—he
spoke her name. “Maatkare,” he said. “Hatshepsut.”

Nehsi the Nubian and Hapuseneb the priest of Amon met in a
dark place in the deeps of the night. Neither had any great fears, nor did
Nehsi’s sons; but it was an eerie place nonetheless, the house of the embalmers
in the city of the dead. Jackals prowled in the dark; nightbirds hooted;
spirits of the dead fluttered and whispered.

They were not to go into that dark house. The embalmer whom
the king’s gold had persuaded would bring the body out, wrapped tightly and
sealed, redolent of natron and spices. They had a coffin for it, borne in a
litter on the shoulders of Nehsi’s six strong sons.

No one offered commentary on this thing that they did. The
king commanded it. It had been the dead man’s last wish, she had told Nehsi. He
would not have done it for that, but for her, so quiet as she had been, so
still and so quenched, he would happily have died himself.

He had the map, drawn in Senenmut’s hand, tucked into his
belt but limned in his memory. Hapuseneb had seen it, too, and the king. They
had all taken note of the place, and gasped at the audacity of it; but
Hapuseneb, laughing suddenly, had spoken for them all. “Clever, clever man!
Yes, that will do; it will do indeed.”

Nehsi, remembering, smiling to himself, scratched at the
postern gate to the house of the embalmers. For a long while nothing stirred.
Just as he moved to scratch again, the door creaked open.

A shaft of light pierced the darkness: a lamp, quickly
shielded. Nehsi recognized the face that he had been told to look for.
Something dark lay on the floor behind it, wrapped like a bundle of sticks, and
weighing no more than that, either. The jars of its vitals stood beside it,
each crowned by its attendant divinity.

Nehsi’s son Seti, eldest and boldest, advanced to take the
body in his arms. Nothing was left in it of quick-tongued, quick-witted,
heedlessly arrogant Senenmut. It was a husk, a dry dead thing. But the king had
loved it.

While Hapuseneb doled out the gold that the king had
promised, Nehsi saw the body settled in the litter and the jars laid beside it.
It hardly needed the strength of all six strapping boys, but for passing
through the city in the guise of a lord and his attendants, it had been a
useful ruse.

Hapuseneb counted out the last of the gold into the waiting
hands. It vanished into a purse. The embalmer vanished with it, taking the
light with him. The door snicked shut. Nehsi heard the slide of a bar.

They were alone in the dark again with the jackals and the
nightwalkers, the dead souls and the mummy in its wrappings, laid in a litter
like a lord too prostrate with drink to walk. Senenmut would have appreciated
the jest, Nehsi thought as they picked their way through the city of the dead.

They had a long way to go, out of the necropolis and down
along the river to the moonlit gleam of Djeser-Djeseru. It was deserted, its
priests long since gone to their beds. The great courts were empty, the chapels
silent, dark but for the flicker of the nightlamps.

Nehsi, whose nerves in most things were as steady as a man’s
could be, was as twitchy as a cat. If anyone found them here or discovered what
they carried, all the king’s care would be for naught.

In the morning the temple would be full of people. The time
of embalming was over. The thing of reeds and deception that bore the name of
Senenmut for the world to know would be brought past this place to the tomb
that he had built, and laid to rest in the lesser of his secret places—the one
that he had feared was not secret enough. The king would perform the rites over
the false body and sanctify it with her presence.

Tonight he went truly to his tomb, to the most secret of
secret places, the shaft dug deep beneath an innocent storeroom. Nehsi found
the king there, attended only by his daughter Tama. They looked as strange as he
felt, the king pale and still, Tama unwontedly quiet.

After everything that Hatshepsut had done, even to taking
the name and the titles of king, one would have thought that this would be as
nothing. And yet it was no light thing to tamper with the dead—even if the dead
had commanded it.

Nehsi was shamefully grateful to surrender command of the
enterprise to his king. She took it as her right, set foot on the stone that
seemed no different than any other in that smoothly fitted paving, and stood
back as that portion of the floor slid away. A shaft opened, and a stair
descending in it.

They could not carry the litter down this narrow passage. The
body in its coffin was unwieldy enough. The boys were quiet, gods be thanked;
even sullen Minhotep refrained from cursing the dark and the steepness and the
difficulty of the passage. They were all overawed by it, however unwillingly.

It was like many another shaft running down to a tomb. No
time or effort had been spent in adorning it. Its walls were hewn from the stone
of the cliff, smoothed but unpainted.

The chamber at the end of it was mildly startling. One
expected it in a tomb, but in this place so secret that no one living knew of
it save those who stood in it now, it might have been more likely to find
nothing but the hewn stone.

Senenmut must have done the painting himself. As in the tomb
in which his false body would lie, the ceiling was a sky full of stars, ordered
and named in their mystical ranks, but enfolded here within the body of Nut,
sky-goddess, night-goddess, whose arching form stretched from floor to ceiling
to floor again. Across the walls that were empty of her marched a procession of
judges of the dead, led on each side by jackal-headed Anubis, and bowing before
Osiris in judgment.

The god of the dead had Hatshepsut’s face. And Nut also; she
was the king, subtle yet unmistakable.

Nehsi glanced at Hatshepsut, to see how she responded. Her
face was expressionless. She was staring at the sarcophagus in the chamber’s
center, a huge block of black granite, carved over and over with Senenmut’s
name and hers, her face and his, and at intervals the lost and lovely face of
the princess Neferure.

The sarcophagus was open, waiting. Inside it lay a rolled
papyrus. Nehsi recognized the glyphs on its case. It was as he had expected,
the Book of Coming Forth by Day, the ancient gathering of spells and magics and
simple wisdom that guided a soul through the land of the dead.

There was nothing else in this chamber. No wealth of
grave-goods. No food or drink, no carved and painted servants, no promise of
life and prosperity in death. Only the book, the stone, the painted walls.
Senenmut had looked for no life beyond life, no joy and no repose, only this
ceaseless guardianship in the temple of his king.

Nehsi could not call him a fool, or condemn him for
sacrificing his life after life. No man could ever have loved a woman as this
man loved Hatshepsut. And yet no singer sang of it; no story hallowed it. They
had loved in secret, nor betrayed themselves save to those who knew them both
well, and could see how the air sang between them when they were together.

Hatshepsut, left alone, gone silent in her solitude, saw
Senenmut laid in the sarcophagus and the jars arrayed to north and east, west
and south. There could be no formal rite of the dead here. All that would be
done in the morning with his false body. But she opened the gates of his senses
for him, spoke the ancient words and chanted the blessings, with Hapuseneb
echoing her, strengthening her with his strong sweet voice.

Nehsi sensed no change in the air, no greater awareness once
the prayers and the magic had sunk into silence. The dead remained dead. The
lid of the sarcophagus ground into place over the body, drawn by the sweat and
the labor of Nehsi’s sons. When Senenmut was sealed within but his souls set
free, one hoped, to do as they and the gods willed, the king paused over the
sarcophagus.

Now, Nehsi thought, at last she would break. But she did
not. She stood erect and still. Her hand rested on the stone where his heart
should have been, had it not been in the jar that lay at her feet. She had not
wept since he died, that Nehsi knew of. Her grief was too deep, too strong for
tears.

She turned abruptly, nearly oversetting Tama who stood
behind her. She never saw or took heed. She walked blindly out, back through
the passage, up the stair, into the temple that her mind had conceived and
Senenmut had built.

~~~

That was Senenmut’s true funeral. The false one, the one
that the world knew of, went on in royal splendor, with wailing and keening of
women, processions of princes, an astonishing number of commoners come to pay
their respects to the commoner who had become a great lord of Egypt. No word
was spoken, then as ever, of his long sojourn in the king’s bed. It was as if
the cruelty of crowds was suspended and their rumormongering quenched, gone
quiet before the king.

And when it was over, when the tomb that was known to
workmen and certain princes was sealed, and the one that held his kin and, now,
his little red mare, was likewise shut up for everlasting, then the world went
on without him. He had been a great presence in Egypt, a lord of many titles,
loved or hated as his merits deserved. There were empty places now where he had
been. His house was shut up, his servants sent away or sold, his villa closed
and his horses dispersed.

Hatshepsut would not give either house or estate to another
man. They were allowed to fall into dust and silence. She never spoke of them,
or of the man who had dwelt in them.

It was not forgetfulness. Far from it. It was grief so
complete and so perfect that it could accept no other in his place, nor
conceive of a world without him in it.

Yet she went on. She gave up nothing that was hers as king.
If anything she took on more: more powers, more offices, more duties and
obligations. She buried herself in the cares of kingship, made herself so
purely and completely king that nothing of the woman remained.

Nehsi grieved for that more than he could ever have grieved
for Senenmut. That arrogant, irritable man with his caustic wit and his
irresistible brilliance had taught her to preserve her humanity. Now there was
no one to do it.

Nehsi might have once; but time and duty had taken him apart
from her, given him a wife and children, separated his life from hers. When he
looked to bring them together again, the gulf was too wide. He was on one side
of it, lord and prince, servant of his king; she on the other, king and
goddess, loving him, he never doubted that, but as a king loves her most loyal
servant. Not as a woman loves a man.