King and Goddess (23 page)

Her brows rose; then lowered and drew together. “No. Don’t
think of it. Don’t say it. Such things solve nothing. Her only crime is that
she provokes me into fits.”

“And she teaches her son to hate and fear you.”

She barely paused. “I shall put an end to that. Watch and
see how I teach him to love me.”

When the days of the embalming were over, the king was
laid in his tomb far away in the bleak hills of the west, out of sight or scent
of the Black Land. Then those who mourned him came back to the green and living
places, to Thebes that had turned from grief to gladness. So it had been since
the world was young, and so it would be for thousands and thousands of years.
One king died. A new king was raised in his place: took the crowns and the
crook and the flail, the throne and the titles, the name and power of a god.

Menkheperre Thutmose was raised up in the Temple of Amon,
and then before the people, on a day that was a rarity. Many reckoned it a
portent. It rained, a storm out of a turbulent heaven, lashing the people who
thronged the processional way. It drenched those who marched in the procession,
draggled the feathers of the great fans that should have cooled and shaded the
king; it buffeted the little king riding high in the great state chair, and
threatened the balance of his bearers, who were hard put not to slip and
stumble on paving stones gone suddenly treacherous.

He seemed unafraid. The tall crowns, White within Red, had
been cut to his measure and bound securely to his head. The false beard, which
looked truly absurd on that soft young chin, had gone somewhat limp, but he did
not try to remove it. That was a relief: Senenmut had labored long with the
boy’s own tutor to persuade him that he must wear it.

Senenmut should have been trudging in the king’s following,
cradling a dripping feather of honor as did the rest of the notables nearest to
the new young majesty; but he had escaped when the rain began, and slipped and
wriggled along the crowd’s edge till he could see the procession as one apart
from it.

It was an antic impulse, a child of the storm. He did not
often yield to such things. It was the rain: it was all out of nature. It
pummeled his head even through the wig, deafened his ears and fuddled his wits—or
perhaps cleared them as they had not been since the last king died.

The crowd’s roar drowned all sound, but he could see how the
king bent his head back to catch the rain in his mouth, and laughed. He seemed
oblivious to the throngs about him, or the weight of his crowns, or the burden
that would fall on him when he set foot again in the palace.

Neferure rode in a chair beside his. He was her husband now.
They had stood together in the temple, and would stand again in the palace, to
swear the vows and affirm the contract between husband and wife, between the
king and his queen. He had spoken the words as he was taught, though how much
he understood, Senenmut could not be certain. Neferure had understood them all.
Her voice had trembled ever so slightly, but she had not refused; she had not
turned coward and fled.

Brave child. She had years to wait before she must fulfill
the whole of vow and contract. She would be a woman grown and well ready, when
at last Thutmose was old enough to do what a man does with a woman.

She admitted to no regret that she was bound to a child so
much younger than she. “At least I like him,” she had said to Senenmut before
she went out to her wedding. “Not as a woman likes a man, I don’t think—but I
can talk to him. I’m not grieved that he must be my husband.”

“Do you wish he were older?” Senenmut had asked.

She thought about it for rather a long while before she
answered. “No,” she said. “No, I don’t. I’m not old enough yet, either. We’ll
both wait. And when we’re ready . . .”

A dozen years, thought Senenmut, or precious little less,
before Thutmose was of age to be a proper husband to his bride. She might not
find the waiting so easy when she was a young woman and he was still a child.

But it was done. There was no undoing it. They rocked and
swayed through the rain, gleaming in gold, a small erect boychild and a
girlchild who was not so far from being a woman. King and queen of Egypt, Great
House and Great Royal Wife, bound and sealed before the face of Amon.

And Amon had hidden that face, veiled it in rain. Water from
the sky: a blessing, one might suppose, a promise of prosperity for the Two
Lands.

The procession made its slow way past Senenmut’s vantage.
His place was open, just: a gap in the ranks of higher functionaries, behind
the nomarchs and the princes and the lords of lesser rank. He slid back into
it. He was hemmed in again, surrounded by men in their best finery, able to see
no more before or behind than bewigged and befeathered personages.

~~~

On this of all days, the queen regent effaced herself with
great and exacting care. The king must be seen to be king, and his queen beside
him.

“Time enough later,” Hatshepsut said, “to remind the Two
Lands that there is still a firm hand on the steering-oar.”

Senenmut had come to her tonight, against his better
judgment—if they were caught now, no matter that her husband was dead and she
was nominally free to choose her bedmate; that choice was narrow, and did not
encompass a tradesman’s son. But she had looked so worn at the king’s first
high court, so thin and drawn, that he could not leave her to face sleep alone.

Nor had she cast him out when he slipped through the hidden
door into her bed. She wrapped arms and legs about him and clung, face buried
in his breast. It was a long while before she eased enough to do more than lie against
him; longer yet before she could speak.

He had thought she would not say anything at all: would love
him into exhaustion, and then sleep. But the heat of body and body seemed to
warm her spirit. She lay cradled in his arms, tracing twisting patterns on his
chest, murmuring more to herself than to him. “The world needs the appearance
of order. Order is a male fundament upon the throne, no matter how young or how
incapable it may be.”

“I wouldn’t call him incapable,” Senenmut said. “Only very
young.”

“Is there a difference?” She laid her hand on his lips. “No,
don’t answer that. When I consider his parentage, I wonder what the gods were
thinking. If he were a stud colt, I’d pray he took after his grandsire.”

“I think he does,” said Senenmut, kissing her fingers as she
drew them away.

“It will be years before we can know for certain,” she said.
“Sometimes a young one fails of his promise. He grows up as his father did. As
a fool.”

Senenmut had not known the elder Thutmose before he was
king. But that his son was more than he had been— Senenmut was certain of it.
Such children as the younger Thutmose were rare; and they did not grow into
fools.

He held his tongue. She sighed against him. Her body
softened slowly. Her breathing eased and deepened.

She slept in his arms, while he lay awake, counting the slow
passage of hours toward the dawn.

Very near to first light, when he should rise and slip away
or be betrayed, she stirred. Her eyes opened. They were dark with sleep, but a
brightness hid in the heart of them. She looked into his face as if she had not
seen it before: not a hostile stare, nor fearful. Simply intent.

Then she smiled. It was a slow smile, almost unbearably
sweet. He yearned to kiss her, but he dared not.

“I dreamed,” she said drowsily. “Such a dream . . .
oh, my friend! Such a dream as I dreamed—you would never guess—”

He bit his tongue. She never saw. She laughed against him
and clasped him tight. And yet, he thought, there was a tension in her, a
tautness that mingled strangely with her laughter.

Out of that tension she said, “No, don’t guess. Don’t think.
Forget.”

That, he could not. But he could keep silence. He could even
conceal the resentment, the irrational stab of jealousy. Jealous of a dream—and
how did he know she had been dreaming of a lover? He was all she had, that he
had ever known. He had thought he was all she wanted.

He berated himself for a fool. Whatever she had dreamed, it
was nothing merely mortal. Some god had walked in her. He saw the marks: the
brightness, the brittle mirth, the arms that bound him and would not let him
go.

He had to put them aside, and rise though his heart
protested. “I’ll come back,” he said, “through the front door, with proper
servility. Wait for me.”

Once he had freed himself, she did not try to recapture him.
She lay as he had left her, eyes drifting past him to peer into the dark. He
saw how her mind drifted with them.

Fear made him pause. But morning was coming: a greater fear,
and a far worse scandal than if she woke strange-eyed from a god’s visitation.
A god would have been reckoned a worthy lover for a queen. A scribe, never.

He must trust in her guards and in her own good sense, and
hope that morning came quickly once he was gone.

He kissed her brow. It was chill, like smooth-carved stone.
She did not stir under his touch. “Father,” she said, half as if she called to
him, half as if she prayed. “Father Amon.”

The god did not answer. He was gone. Senenmut followed him
by much more earthly ways, in much more earthly wise.

Ineni the architect and Hapuseneb the priest of Amon and
Senenmut, whose titles had multiplied until he could hardly keep count of them
all, crouched together in one of the courts of Senenmut’s house. They must have
seemed like aged boys bent over some game of surpassing interest: a fortress
made of sand, or a war of pebble soldiers.

The thing that absorbed them had no such clarity of form:
scraps of wood and papyrus, a table of sand smoothed and smoothed again as they
argued the shape and substance of a dream of the queen’s. She would build a
temple, she had told him, sacred to Hathor of Thebes, the beautiful goddess,
watcher over the dead in the desert west of the city.

Ineni had built the greatest temple in the world, the temple
of Amon at Kamak. Hapuseneb was a priest therein, when he was not waiting on
the queen or building her tomb deep in the bleak valley of the tombs of queens.
Senenmut was a simple fool with a peculiarity of eye that let him see a shape
in stone where others saw only air.

He had always been able to look at a house or a temple or a
palace and see it both in its parts and in the whole. People baffled him who
could attach a stable or a garden or a harem to a house, and not consider the
purity of its line or the harmony of its proportions. It was so simple, so very
obvious, where everything should go. There was nothing more or less to it than
to ordering glyphs properly on a page, each in the place that the gods and the
mind of the maker had ordained for it.

The others understood, in their fashion. He could not admit
his disappointment. They should see as clearly as he did, not in clouded
images, blurred markings in the dampened sand, a structure of twigs and papyrus
that bore no resemblance to the vision of his mind.

“No,” he said with barely bridled impatience. “No, and no,
and no! Here is the land as the gods made it: not so level now, maybe, but
strong backs and clever hands will take care of that. And here is the rise of
the cliff, as sheer as makes no matter, sharp-edged against the vault of
heaven. Look behind your eyes and see."

“We do try,” Hapuseneb said mildly. “Maybe if we went out
there, saw the land itself, felt it underfoot . . .”

Ineni was less conciliatory. He was a proud man, haughty for
a fact, lord mayor of Thebes and builder of the great temple and the tombs of
kings. He did not sneer at the queen’s parvenu, her scribe whom she persisted
in elevating to a ridiculous number of offices, but he did not suffer
Senenmut’s impatience, either. “Even if a mere queen were worthy to raise such
a monument—and not even a Great Royal Wife, either, but regent for a king who
is fast coming to man’s years—what possesses you to imagine that you can build
it?”

“She ordered me to try,” Senenmut replied, reining in the
snap that was his first impulse. He needed Ineni: he needed the skill that the
man had, the builders he knew and could command, and the long years’ mastery of
an art that Senenmut had only dabbled in. He had doubled the compass of his
house outside the city, made it beautiful as he thought, and it was celebrated
in the court for its size and splendor; he had overseen the building of his own
tomb, as every nobleman should do. But he had never ventured anything as great
as this.

It might never grow beyond this set of scratchings in the
sand. It was not the monument of a queen, who should efface herself in the name
of the king through whom she ruled. She had bidden him conceive a temple such
as had never been seen before, a monument to her name that would stand for
everlasting.

Why she had asked it of him and not of Ineni, or even of
Hapuseneb, was a matter of no little resentment, at least on Ineni’s part. “You
have the eye,” she had said when they were alone together. “You see what no one
else can see. Do you remember how you looked at the old court in my palace, and
saw that it could be beautiful? It was a barren place, unblessed by any god.
You set a fountain in it, taught the water to fall so that it catches the light
of sun or moon, planted trees about it and raised a colonnade round the rim,
and now it seems made not of stone but of light.”

“Light,” he said now in his own courtyard, to the man who
was his friend and the man who was too proud for friendship. “And shadow. What
is a rank of pillars but an image of the sun’s rays? What are the spaces
between them but images of the shade that grants respite from the sun?”