King and Goddess (20 page)

Senenmut shrugged, mustered a smile. It was probably
crooked. He could not help that.

Nebsen did not take offense. “So you see, her gracious highness
would prefer that her son be less warlike in his inclinations. To which his
majesty the king replies that one might as easily command the lion to eat grass
with the ox. His majesty is delighted with my young lord.”

“I can imagine,” Senenmut said. He bent toward the prince.
“Is that a particular battle, my lord?”

The prince looked up. His glance was quick, startling in
that placid face. “Yes,” he said. “That is the battle in which Ahmose defeated
the foreign kings. He could have fought it so many ways, you see. I want to
know which one was best.”

Indeed, thought Senenmut, he could speak as clearly as a
much older child. Senenmut regarded him with respect, but no shock or awe. He
too had been precocious; he had had his fill then of astonished exclamations.
“Do you always think of battles?” Senenmut asked.

“I like battles,” said the prince. “And soldiers, and
marching in ranks. A king should always be so, Father says. He has a world to
conquer, so that he may rule as the gods meant.”

Senenmut raised a brow. “Do you care for nothing else?”

“I like horses,” Thutmose said.

“Ah,” said Senenmut. “Do you? I came to them much later than
you, but I love them dearly. I have a filly—we’re training her to the yoke. She
has to wait to be a team, for her sister who is a year younger than she,
because no one else is swift enough to match her. She was born on the day that
you were born, and her sister was born the next year to the day. We call them
our two queens.”

“I like stallions better,” Thutmose said.

“But,” said Senenmut, “mares are faster. And quieter. And
more sensible in battle.”

“Have you ever been in a battle?” asked that astonishing
child.

“Oh, not I,” Senenmut said. “I’m a scribe, not a soldier.
But I can drive a chariot and train a horse.” He paused. “If your highness
wishes and your guardians allow, you may make the acquaintance of my two
queens.”

For the first time Thutmose smiled. It was a sweet smile,
with a touch of wickedness—like, Senenmut thought, Hatshepsut’s.

This could—indeed should—have been her son. He looked like
her, talked like her. To be sure, he loved war as much as she hated it; but he
was a manchild. Menchildren could be terribly bloody-minded.

Suddenly and quite unexpectedly, Senenmut burned with anger.
Such pure white rage in him was rare. Temper he had, and no little share of it.
But genuine anger almost never beset him.

He was angry now. Hatshepsut should have known this child.
Should have held him in her arms; should have shared in the teaching of him, in
the pleasure of his wits that were so much like her own. But while Isis ruled
in the king’s bedchamber, Hatshepsut would not be suffered to approach Isis’
son.

Senenmut struggled to keep his anger out of his face.
Thutmose smiled, so like his father’s Great Wife, and said, “It would please me
greatly to meet your horses. Even,” he added, “if they are only mares.”

“Then you shall meet them,” Senenmut said. “And you will
learn that no mare—or woman either—is only a mare.”

“I’ll always like stallions better,” said Thutmose. “But I
will be very respectful toward your mares.”

“That will do,” Senenmut conceded, “until you meet them.”

Once Senenmut had won the prince’s consent, he made haste
before the king and, more to the point, his concubine should return from their
several days’ hunt. On the morning after he made the prince’s acquaintance, he
had his fillies, his Dawn Wind and his Storm-in-the-Desert, brought to the
palace. They were as like as two birds from the same nest, red-golden beauties
marked on the brow with a crescent moon. The Dawn Wind bore no other marking. Storm-in-the-Desert
had a ring of white above her right hind hoof.

They had not been in the palace before. He had bought a
country house for them outside of the city, that when the river was low, looked
down on broad green fields to the water. When the river was high, as it was
now, the house stood on an island at the end of a causeway, and his horses
dwelt in his stable in the city. They were restive with confinement after their
long season of freedom, dancing on their leads, snorting and flagging their
tails and calling to the stallions.

“I thought you said mares were quiet,” Thutmose said. He had
been waiting in the stable court, Senenmut suspected, for much longer than his
guards had liked. Nebsen, easygoing soul that he was, had settled in the shade
of the colonnade with a cushion and a jar of beer. He had drunk it well down,
as Senenmut could see.

Thutmose stood in front of the younger filly, Storm-in-the-Desert.
She eyed him with a wicked glint, and reared up over his head, striking
playfully with her forefeet.

Senenmut had never moved as fast as he moved then; or
stopped so neck-snappingly short. Thutmose had somehow, in the flurry of hooves,
caught the filly’s neck and whirled with her, and ended on her back.

She had never carried a rider. She had not even drawn a
chariot. It would be a year and more before she began.

And yet she stood still under the weight of the child,
nostrils flared and ears flicking nervously back. He stroked her neck and
smiled. No one dared move lest the filly erupt. Senenmut was not even
breathing. If the king’s son died under the hooves of one of Senenmut’s horses,
not only Senenmut would suffer for it. Senenmut was the queen’s servant, one of
her favorites. No one would ever doubt that she had had a part in it.

Easily, smoothly, and completely fearlessly, Thutmose slid
from the filly’s back and stood beside her, still with his hand on her neck.
“Do be calm,” he said. “I’ll never hurt you.”

She snorted in disbelief, but then she lowered her head and
sniffed lightly at his palm. When she found no sweetmeat in it, she nipped the
air above it and nudged him with her nose. He laughed and wrapped arms about
her neck, but gods be thanked, he did not swing himself astride again.

“That was very foolish,” said a voice from the colonnade,
“but very brave.”

Even Nebsen started. The person who had spoken came past him
into the light. Senenmut’s back both eased and tightened: eased, because he had
expected Neferure before this, and tightened because this thing that he had
wrought might be more dangerous even than Storm-in-the-Desert’s hooves striking
above Thutmose’s head.

Thutmose regarded his sister with interest. He did not seem
to mind that she had called him a fool. “You look like Father,” he said. “And
like
her
.”

There was no doubt of whom he meant. Senenmut had heard that
precise tone from Isis when she spoke of the queen. Half fear; half resentment.

“Yes, I look like my mother,” said Neferure. “So do you.
It’s all in the family, you know.”

“My mother says that you can’t be trusted,” Thutmose said.
“I think she’s afraid. You look trustworthy to me.”

“Oh, do I?” said Neferure from the grand pinnacle of her
nine years—almost ten, as she would insist. “I suppose she tells you not to
trust your eyes, either.”

“My mother is afraid,” Thutmose said, as if that explained
everything. And perhaps it did.

Neferure took the Dawn Wind’s lead from the stablehand. The
older filly was Senenmut’s heart’s darling as he was hers; but she adored
Neferure. The princess always had a sweetmeat for her, a bit of cake or a date
or a handful of barley. It was a honeycake today, and a second one for
Storm-in-the-Desert—“Not,” said Neferure severely, “that you honestly deserve
it.”

Storm-in-the-Desert devoured her cake and pawed for more.
The stablehand, belatedly possessed of sense, pulled her away and set her to
running round him on a long line, far out in the court where she could trample
no one.

Her sister, having coaxed another cake out of Neferure,
turned from the princess to thrust her nose into Senenmut’s hand. When he
declined to give tribute, she nipped him sharply in reprimand and laid her head
on his shoulder.

He smoothed the mane on her neck. It was slightly paler than
her coat, more gold than red, thick and long. The neck on which it lay was
beautiful; she was all beautiful even in her awkward youth, with her delicate
strength and the lightness of her stride. She reminded him piercingly of the
queen who had given her to him.

For that, and because she was herself, he loved her. He
rested for a while in the calm of her presence.

But the world went on about him, nor waited for him to take
notice of it. Nebsen had drained his jar of beer and fallen asleep. His snores
rasped beneath the thud of Storm-in-the-Desert’s hooves on sand, the Dawn
Wind’s soft whicker in his ear, the voices of the two children as they withdrew
to a patch of shade.

They crouched on their haunches like peasants in the market,
even haughty Neferure, and watched the filly dance and curvet at the end of her
line. Shoulder to shoulder, companionable, comfortable in each other’s
presence, they conversed as if they had known one another for far more than
these few moments.

It was not so much what they said—questions about one
another; commentary on the horses; idle ramblings such as children could wander
into—as that they said it at all, and with such ease. Senenmut doubted that
their father and Neferure’s mother had ever conversed so. They would always
quarrel, no matter how innocuous its beginning. They rasped on one another like
mismatched halves of a door, meeting only to thrust one another apart.

Neferure was wise for her years. Some found her frightening;
Senenmut was only glad that he need not suffer the frustration of contending
with ordinary childish stupidity. Her brother, for all his extreme youth, was
as quick-witted as she. He understood a great deal; and when he did not
understand, he was never too proud to say so.

“I think you must be our grandfather all over again,”
Neferure said. “He was clever, too, and wise, and he loved to play the soldier.
You aren’t anything like your mother; and you’re much brighter than our father
ever was.”

“You shouldn’t say that,” Thutmose said. “They’ll hate you
if they find out.”

Neferure was unperturbed. “Do you?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Oh, no. They don’t think very fast. They
worry too much; they’re afraid all the time.”

“That’s because my mother makes them afraid,” Neferure said.
“She never intends to, but she does. You must, too. You think so much faster
than they do.”

“I pretend,” said Thutmose. “I make believe I’m still a
baby.” He lightened his voice to a shrill child-whine, and mustered a
remarkably convincing lisp. “Oh, mama, I’m hungwy, mama. Give me a honeycake,
mama.”

Neferure roared with laughter. He gaped at her. Senenmut
almost laughed himself, though he knew that laugh of hers, astonishingly deep
and infectious to come from so delicate-seeming a girlchild. “O my brother!”
she said, still laughing. “Oh, how they must simper over you.”

He grimaced. “Just the ladies, and Mama. Father tells me to
stand up straight and talk like a man. But I can’t do that. He’d be afraid.” He
paused. “I’ll be glad when I’m big enough to stop pretending.”

“Then you’ll have to start pretending something else,”
Neferure said, somber of a sudden, and pensive. She nibbled on her finger as
she did when she thought hard on a thing that did not please her. “I scare
people, too. But not Mother, and not Senenmut. I tried to pretend to be
ordinary once: giggling over nothing, shrieking at the boys, worrying about my
hair and my eyepaint and my dress. Mother told me to stop the foolishness, and
Senenmut set me a lesson so hard I had to do it perfectly or die of shame.”

“They scared people when they were little,” Thutmose said.
“I know. Father said, about her—about your mother. She was terrifying.
Unnat—unnatural.”

“So are we,” said Neferure.

He looked at her, long and level, as serious as only a small
child can be. “I’m afraid,” he said. “If I stopped pretending, Mama would hate
me. She hates your mother, she hates you. She’ll hate me, too.”

“That’s not why she hates us,” Neferure said. Her tone was
not particularly soothing, but he seemed to take comfort from it. “She hates us
because my mother gave her to your father, and in a way gave you to them both;
and she’s going to have to pay for it someday. She thinks the price will be
your life. So she protects you, and wraps you in worry, tight as a mummy in a
tomb; and she tells you stories about my mother, to make you hate her, too.”

“Mama says,” said Thutmose, “that she will kill me because
she wants her own son to be the prince.”

“My mother doesn’t have a son,” Neferure said, “and she
won’t. She means you no harm at all. She doesn’t even hate your mother, though
you must think that’s impossible. She feels sorry for her.”

“I do, too,” Thutmose said. “I’m still afraid of your
mother. Father says she wants to be king.”

“Well, she can’t be,” Neferure said briskly. “So there’s
nothing to be afraid of. You’ll be king when our father dies and becomes Osiris,
and I’ll be queen because that’s how it’s done.”

His eyes widened. “You will? You’ll be queen?”

“What, nobody told you?”

He shook his head.

Neferure tossed her own in disgust. “What idiots! Telling
you wild stories about my terrible mother, but never letting you know the
important thing. It’s not she who will be queen when our father is dead—if she
lives that long. I will. You can’t be king without me.”

He drew himself up, affronted. “I will be king! I’m Father’s
son.”

“No man is king,” Neferure said, “unless he marries the
woman who carries the king-right. That’s the daughter of a ruling queen,
brother; a descendant of Queen Nefertari.”