King and Goddess (52 page)

“If he is indeed as clever as you insist, he’ll know he’s
been sent into a kind of exile, given a sop to his pride while he’s kept out of
the way. He might even,” she said, “begin to suspect that his plotting is
known, and be driven to do something desperate.”

“If you are on guard,” Nehsi said, “anything that he does,
you can counter. And you’ll be safe from his machinations in Thebes.”

“That is if he is as clever as you think,” she said.

He heard her in a kind of despair. She who saw so clearly in
all things, could not see Thutmose at all. She never had; she never would.

“I shall ponder what you have said,” she said, coldly formal
again, though she had been warming a little. “It would be well to find a wife
for him—even as backward as he has been, he is long past the age when a man
should marry and beget sons. Look you to the young women of Egypt; and look
well to the children of Nefertari, for one who may rule as queen while her
husband plays at soldiers on the borders of Libya.”

Nehsi sighed, but he bowed and let himself be dismissed. It
was a poor concession that he had gained from her, but it was better than
nothing. She would think on his words; she would consider what to do with
Thutmose. She might even act swiftly enough to prevent him from moving against
her. His deliberation, his long habit of waiting upon the moment, might serve
her now as it had served her since he was a child.

Or it might not. There was no telling. He could only wait
and pray, and stand such guard as he could, and hope that it would be enough.

Hapuseneb the priest died at the end of a poor flood, as
poor as those before it had been rich. The rising of the river had ceased
early. The king had been forced to hasten to Memphis for the festival, nearly
coming too late. In so doing, she was not in Thebes when the Prophet of Amon
slipped into the long sleep.

He died without pain, which was a blessing. His heart simply
stopped, his breast ceased to rise and fall.

She came home from Memphis to officiate at his funeral. She
did not weep. Her wailing was as formal as the chanting of a priest, her
beating of thighs all ritual, no passion in it; no great outpouring of grief.
All of that she had spent when she buried Senenmut.

Nehsi began to think thoughts that would once have been
unthinkable. Not of her death; not that. But of her fading from the splendor of
her youth. She was not the ruler that she had been. Her judgments, once
tempered with mercy, grew harsh and cold. People no longer cried out for love
of her. They feared her; wondered at her; worshipped at her feet. But the
warmth that they had had for her was gone.

It well might be time for a younger king—or a queen, a Great
Royal Wife. The difficulty of finding a lady of the proper lineage, age, and
fertility, who would be as acceptable to Thutmose as to Hatshepsut, was
enormous and perhaps insurmountable.

Nehsi did what he could. Though it galled him to leave her,
he did so: abandoned her for this brief time in order to protect her more
completely thereafter. He traveled the length of Egypt, guesting with this lord
or that, making himself amiable to princes, searching in the temples for a
singer or a dancer of the line of Nefertari.

The rumor of his venture ran ahead of him. Men began to
fling their daughters and sisters and even lesser wives at him—or to conceal
them where they hoped he could not find them.

All the while he did that, he made certain that Hatshepsut
was guarded. His son Seti, in command of her bodyguard, was under orders to
guard her with his life, or answer for it to Nehsi himself. It was not enough
for Nehsi’s peace of mind, but it was the best that he could do.

Of Thutmose he heard nothing. The younger king might, it was
said, be given a command at last; but no one knew where or when. The strongest
rumor had it that he would amass a great army, the largest that had ever been
seen in Egypt, to put down the rebellion in Asia. Not only Kadesh had risen,
Nehsi heard, but Syria and the coast of Palestine. Even Mitanni, that great
empire to the north and east, was said to look with interest on the rising
against Egypt.

But Hatshepsut made no move against it. She ruled in Thebes
as she had since she was young, received embassies, sent out trading ventures,
saw to the affairs of the Two Lands. At the festival of the harvest, such as
that was, she thrust aside those who muttered that the failure of the flood and
the smallness of its fruits was an omen. She proclaimed as always her names and
her titles, her power in the Two Lands; and she said, as Nehsi heard it proclaimed
in the city of Asyut where he was determining that the nomarch had no
marriageable daughters: “I rule in peace; with peace the gods have blessed me.
Under my hand the Two Lands have grown strong.”

“Peace,” people muttered in Nehsi’s hearing, not knowing or
perhaps not caring who he was. “We’ll all have peace when we’re dead. What’s
the use in it now? We haven’t had a good war since the first Thutmose was
king.”

“Do us good,” someone said in the marketplace of Bubastis.
“Give the young bloods something to do. Get the army off its backside and into
something useful. Bring in loot to make us all rich.”

It might be, Nehsi thought, that people’s thinking had
changed; that the poor flood and the thin harvest turned their hearts away from
the king whom they had loved for so long. And it well might be that Thutmose
had played a part in it. Those were his words spoken among the market-stalls
and bandied in the taverns; his eagerness for bloodshed in the mouths of those
who had never, any more than he, faced an enemy in battle.

“She’s a woman, after all,” they said. “What do women know
of fighting? Of course she wants to keep the boys at home. Women never want us
to go out and have a nice hot battle. No wonder we’re going hungry this year,
and the beer’s piss-thin and the king away in Kadesh is calling us a pack of
pretty boys. We’ve got a woman for a king.”

Time was when that was a great boast: that they were the
servants of Maatkare Hatshepsut. Now they turned their backs on her, and
remembered that there had been another king before her, whose place and titles
she had taken.

At that, although he had found no woman of suitable rank or
lineage, Nehsi abandoned his journey, cursing its futility, its waste of his
time and substance, and turned back toward Thebes. He traveled so swiftly that
he outran the king’s couriers. But not the murmur of discontent that was in
Egypt. It grew greater toward the Delta, lessened as he drew near to Thebes,
but everywhere he heard the sound of it.

His daughter Tama met him at the quay of his own city,
standing with the air of one who has been waiting since the world was young.
Such conspicuous patience was as characteristic of her as the wild tumble of
her hair under the wig that she discarded more often than not; but there was an
edge to it that brought Nehsi leaping from his boat even as it slid toward the
shore.

He might be growing old, but he could still spring like a
panther. He landed lightly enough beside his daughter.

Her belly was swelling, he noticed. She had married before he
left, having made a surprising choice of husband: a tall, quiet, scholarly
person from the House of Life, who happened to be notably older than she. He
was also a lord of a house of princes, not too distant kin to the king, and as
wealthy as any father could wish. He placed no obstacle in the way of his
wife’s freedom, which had the peculiar effect of keeping her for once at home.

That, Nehsi thought, might have something to do with his own
fears for the king. She embraced him, fierce and brief, and said the thing that
he had dreaded most to hear. “The king is ill. She’s asking for you.”

~~~

Hatshepsut who had never been ill a day in her life, who
had bypassed the fevers and rheums that laid others low, who was blessed by the
god her father with health and strength beyond the lot of most women in this
age of the world, was ill indeed. No one dared whisper it, but she might be
dying.

It had struck fast and hard, her physician said to Nehsi: a
fierce cramping in the belly, a great resistance to aught that was fed her, and
a flux that went on and on, and would not yield to any physic.

“Poison,” Nehsi said.

The man pursed his thin lips. “Possibly. But there are other
indications, suggestions that it might be something in her own body. Such can
befall a woman in particular as she ages; and her majesty has been much vexed
with the ending of her womanly courses.”

Nehsi regarded him narrow-eyed. He had been a loyal man from
his youth, but who was to tell now who was loyal and who was not? When a king
grew old and took sick, and a young king waited with taut-strung eagerness to
take the throne, a wise man shifted his allegiances as quickly as he might.

Nehsi could not be wise. He was Hatshepsut’s man. So he
would remain until he died.

He left the physician standing there, and went in to the
king.

As young as he had been when the first Thutmose died, he
remembered the air of that sickroom. Vividly: for now it was the same. The
crowding courtiers, priests and healer-priests, physicians, servants and
hangers-on. The shifting of glances, the slow stirring of bodies now toward one
another and now away. Even in the king’s own chamber, allegiances were
changing, minds turning toward the world that would go on after the king was
dead.

She could recover. She had been strong, and might be still.
But her age, the nature of her sickness, the young king whose face Nehsi did
not see among those here, turned this waiting into a deathwatch.

She lay in the midst of them, a small and shrunken figure
under the coverlet of purple from Tyre, with her head propped on a headrest of
chalcedony. She wore no wig, but her face was painted. It seemed all enormous
black-rimmed eyes, a living amulet, a doubled eye of Horus set in the deathmask
of a king.

There were amulets in truth on her breast, a clattering mass
of them, and the workings of spells scattered all about her. Nehsi caught the
unmistakable scent of the dung that was reckoned essential in healing magic. It
might, he thought, be meant to mask the loosing of the bowels in death.

She was not dead yet. She saw him coming through the
crowding faces. The light in her eyes nearly broke him. He had not seen it in
months—years. She was glad to see him, as she had used to be; smiling as he
bowed over her, catching his hand in both of hers. They were bone-thin, and
cold; as cold as her eyes were warm. “Nehsi,” she said. Her voice was a husk of
itself.

He knelt beside the bed, in part for homage, in part for
ease of speaking to her. People craned. He noted distantly how suddenly they
were gone, driven back to the room’s edges. The one who had driven them, no
less than Tama herself, mounted guard over the king and her father, and held
off even the most indignant courtier with a hard and implacable stare.

Nehsi, safe in what was almost solitude, said softly in her
ear, “Tell me what you ate, that did this to you. Did he bribe your taster?
Corrupt the wine?”

She shook her head, still smiling, though with an edge of
pain. “Not poison after all. Women’s trouble, the doctors say.”

“The doctors have to stay alive after you’re gone,” Nehsi
said.

“He wouldn’t do it,” she said, as stubborn as ever. “He’s
not brave enough. It’s the gods, Nehsi. The god my father. Two sevens of years
he gave me under the Two Crowns: more than woman has had in time out of mind.
Now the rest of the gods demand their own back. They want a man again over
Egypt. The flood is their sign. Fourteen years it rose high and splendid. This
year it hardly rose at all. There would be famine in the Two Kingdoms, if we
had not been wise and gathered the excess of the harvests.”

“You don’t honestly believe that,” Nehsi said. “It’s much
too convenient.”

“The gods like convenience,” she said. “Sometimes. They find
it amusing.”

She was not going to listen to him or believe him, no matter
how obvious it was that if a god had killed her, it was the living Horus who so
feared and hated her. She could not have done such a thing. No more could she
conceive of another who would do it.

“You were always the wisest of women,” Nehsi said to her,
“but when it comes to that one, you are a perfect fool.”

“Someone said that to me once,” she said, “about my husband.
It’s a curse, I suppose. Every king should have a curse. I’m fortunate that
this has done so little harm.”

“It has done great harm. It has killed you.”

“Hush,” she said, though he had not raised his voice. “Hush,
dear friend. It’s grief that makes you wild. I know. I was . . .
so . . . wild after he died: my beloved whom we buried in the
place that you know. He was at me constantly, too, over that stumbling boy.”

“He was a wise man,” Nehsi said, “and foresighted.”

“He’s waiting for me,” she said. She sounded lighthearted,
untainted by fear. “Hapuseneb, too. And my father. They’ll all roar at me, I’m
sure. I’m going to laugh and tell them to be sensible. Everyone dies. How many
women can say that they died and became Osiris—king over the dead as Horus is
king over the living?”

“One or two,” Nehsi said, “long ago.” And when she frowned:
“But none as glorious as you.”

“I should hope not,” she said with some asperity. She raised
a hand that trembled with weakness, and patted his cheek. “Go away now. Greet
your wife, bellow at your pack of children. Come back to me when the sun sinks
low. Yonder jackals slink off then to their lairs. We’ll have a little peace.”

Nehsi did not think that the jackals would retreat tonight.
The translucence of her face, the light in her eyes, told him that he had done
well to arrive so quickly. She might not see another morning.