King and Goddess (30 page)

Certainly the flock of them would know the kiss of the lash
when this was over.

Senenmut composed his face before he bent over Neferure. She
had doubled up with pain, but as he approached she unfolded slowly. Her
expression was half tearful, half terrified. When she spoke her voice was
determinedly light. “Well, old friend. I don’t suppose you’ll be weeping over
this. It’s convenient, isn’t it?”

“Child,” Senenmut said with such vehemence that he startled
himself, “never say that I would fail to mourn any child of yours. But you
haven’t lost it yet. Some women know such false pangs; they have to rest well
and take great care, but their children are born alive.”

She shook her head. Her hair had slipped from its plait,
tangling on her shoulders. He reached to smooth it. She was fiery hot under his
hand, yet she shivered as with cold.

“No. No, it’s dead. I felt it die. Deep in the night, when
the heart’s river runs lowest, and the shadows whisper, and one sees eyes where
no eyes should be . . . I felt its life slip out of me.”

“Oh, my child,” Senenmut said. “And you never called anyone?
You never summoned a priest or a sorcerer, or at the very least a physician?”

“How could I?” she demanded with a flare of sudden heat. “This
is my scandal, my secret.”

“You could have called for me,” he said.

Her eyes on him were steady, burning. “What, and betray you,
too?”

“I was not—” But that would have been a lie. He bent his
head. “My poor child. However well this may resolve your dilemma, it grieves me
still.”

Her eyes closed. A spasm racked her. He reached as he had
with her mother on the day that Neferure was born, and took her hands in his,
and held them as he had her mother’s. It was anguish to remember that other
face, so like this one.

He had never been one to run away from heart’s pain. He held
her until the physician came, a dour man with a thin slot of a mouth and gentle
hands. He took in what there was to see; frowned—perhaps at the gravity of the
case, perhaps at his own failure before this to comprehend the nature of his
queen’s indisposition—and set to work.

It was midwife’s work, but the midwife was too well known in
the palace. Her coming would be noted, and her going; and people would know the
queen’s secret. Neferure must live though her child did not, and rule, and be a
wife to the king when he was old enough. She could not be tainted with the
rumor of this.

With the physician’s assent, Senenmut let one or two of the
maids ran abroad with news of the queen’s sudden, fierce fever. If they
whispered of ill-doing, he did not choose to prevent them. No more did he know
for certain that this had come about at the gods’ hands. Men—or a woman—might
have taken part in it.

That was not a thought he cared to think, but it niggled at
him till he could not help but think it. Hatshepsut was the beloved of his
heart. She was also queen and goddess. She might well have judged it necessary
to be rid of this child; to be certain that it would not live to challenge any
trueborn daughter of her daughter.

If she had done that, then she had not considered the cost
to Neferure—and that, he thought, was unlike her. He took what comfort he could
in it.

That was little enough. It did not go well. Neferure was young,
she was strong, she was built to carry a child. She should have suffered less,
even miscarrying, than she so clearly did.

She had not cried much even as an infant, nor did she now,
but when her eyes squeezed shut, the tears ran out of them, tracking down her
cheeks into her sweat-sodden hair. The physician gave her a stick of wood to
bite on, to focus the pain. She bit it through.

It went ill, and it went on too long. Senenmut did not
remember so much blood when she was born, nor even when Hatshepsut lost the
second child, the son who closed the gates of her womb behind him. It was a
river of blood, a river in spate.

The physician muttered to himself. The maids had all fled.
Senenmut could not follow, to make certain that none of them chattered untimely.
He could only hope, and trust in their loyalty.

There were only the two men, and the woman straining between
them. And in time a fourth, a pair of strong hands bracing Senenmut’s, and
clear eyes over them, too stark for grief.

Those were not the eyes of a woman who had moved to slay a
child, or to cause its mother so much pain. Senenmut had not known how taut his
back was, until the tension had gone and he nearly fell.

Hatshepsut held him up. Neferure tossed in her bed. The
sheets were scarlet. Senenmut and the physician had changed them twice; must do
it again, and see them all burned, for the secret’s sake.

Yes, even if she was dying. Her name’s honor must continue,
nor be besmirched.

He saw death creep over her face. Nothing that he did, no
rite or magic of the physician, not even her mother’s will could stop or even
slow it. This child conceived untimely, this unwanted burden, slipped out of
her with her life’s blood.

When the last of the stillbirth was ended, she drew a
breath, hardly more than a sigh. No more came after.

Neferure was dead. She had been the anchor of Senenmut’s
life since she was born, as her mother was its center. Without her he drifted
astray, too shocked to weep.

It was only evening. It had been a long day of suffering,
and yet too devastatingly brief. The sun’s rays slanted through the high
windows. Their light poured like blood upon the floor.

“May Amon-Re protect her,” Hatshepsut said, soft and steady,
“and guide her on the dark ways. May Anubis speak for her in the Hall of
Judgment; may the feather of Maat be as light as a breath in the balance, and
her heart as heavy as worlds. May she walk in the Field of Reeds, and know
contentment everlasting.”

~~~

The king did not weep at the death of his sister-wife. He
mourned, Senenmut thought and his tutor insisted, but Thutmose had grown from a
silent and self-contained infant into a silent and secretive boy. He spoke as
seldom as ever, and then mostly of war and warriors.

He had, perhaps, loved his wife, as a brother loves his
sister or a friend loves a friend. She had been able to coax him out of his
silence, to trick him into laughter. Without her there was no one possessed of
such power.

It was Hatshepsut who told him that Neferure was dead. She
went herself, which was a great concession, with an escort of trusted servants:
Senenmut, Nehsi, the priest Hapuseneb, and her two most favored maids.

Thutmose had been, as usual, in the courts of the soldiers,
learning the arts of sword and spear, bow and chariot. Now that it was evening
and nearly full dark, he had come in to be bathed and fed and put to bed.

He was still enough of a child that his nurse hovered,
fretting over him, but he was enough of a man to be embarrassed. He dismissed
her summarily, rather too much so perhaps. He had not yet learned the precise
balance of discipline between master and servant.

Perhaps he had learned it very well, but nervousness caused
him to forget it. He was always so around Hatshepsut: more awkward than usual,
clumsy, seeming younger than he was. If he could drop a scepter or stumble over
a footstool, he would do it in front of his queen regent.

Tonight he failed of courtesy: he did not offer her wine or
refreshment. He received her in his bedchamber, since she had refused to wait
until he could compose himself in a more dignified place. A hastily fetched
chair served as a throne; another, offered to Hatshepsut, was refused.

Hatshepsut had been very quiet since she left Neferure’s
body to the wailing crowds of maids. The embalmers would have come and gone before
she returned.

She wanted that, perhaps. Senenmut remembered from his
father’s death, how they came with their hard dry hands and their sharp reek of
natron; how they lifted the corpse with little ceremony, and carried it off as
if it had been a sack of barley.

The royal embalmers would be more respectful, perhaps.
Perhaps not. Dead was dead, as Senenmut had heard one of them observe. They
lived with death. It had not lost its terror; not in the least. To mask their
fear they learned to laugh in its face, and to deal casually with its leavings.

And so Hatshepsut was her own messenger to the king, and
Neferure was taken away in her absence. She was cold and still in front of him,
her face locked shut. She must have been terrifying to one who did not know
her.

The king never spoke to her if he could avoid it. When he
did, he stammered. Therefore he was silent now, and waited for her to speak.

She did so without adornment and without preliminary. “Your
queen is dead,” she said.

Thutmose regarded her as if he could not understand the
words. He still did not say anything.

“Neferure has died,” said Hatshepsut when it was clear that
the king was not going to speak. She was impatient as she always and only was
with him, intolerant of his hesitations. “She had a fever. It seized her and
consumed her.”

Thutmose shook his head very slowly. Disbelieving, denying,
there was no telling. He seemed to have gone mute.

“The embalmers by now have taken her,” the queen said, brisk
and seeming cold. His silence did that to her, Senenmut was sure. “You will
mourn her as is proper. My chancellor here will instruct you.”

“I know how to mourn,” Thutmose muttered, so low that
Senenmut barely heard him.

The queen’s ears were keen. She heard: she frowned. “You
will inform your mother. She will be so kind as to join in the mourning. This
after all was the queen.”

Thutmose’s jaw set. Perhaps Hatshepsut did not see: his head
was lowered, his nemer-headdress slipping forward, hiding most of his face. But
Senenmut saw. Thutmose bowed low, lower than a king should.

“Well,” said Hatshepsut. His silence offered nothing, asked
nothing. It was a dead thing, as dead as Neferure in her bloodied sheets.

Which the physician would have had the wits to change before
the embalmers came. Senenmut’s mind was chipping and shattering. He had never
been so, not for anything that had befallen him. Even tears were more than he
could muster.

His eyes were independent of his faltering mind, his ears
recording what the queen said to the king.

“Well,” she said. “See that you do as you’re told. Nehsi
will instruct you.”

Thutmose nodded, head still bowed. He was a brave child, but
Nehsi terrified him almost as much as Hatshepsut herself did. It was the man’s
size, Senenmut supposed, and his quiet that put even Thutmose’s to shame.
Nothing dismayed Nehsi, nor did he fear anything. To a child whose fears were
many, he must have seemed as incalculable as one of the gods.

It was not well that the king should so fear his regent and
her servant. Senenmut could not see what to do about it, not now. Neferure was
dead. He had offices, rank, honors enough; but without her they meant nothing.

He had never believed that a man could die of heartbreak.
Nor had he known how much Neferure mattered, how much of his heart she filled,
until she was gone. He was as much a fool as ever. And unlike Thutmose, he was
not sure that he knew how to mourn.

Mourning was an art. One could study it for years, decades,
all of one’s life; but in the end one simply did it. It was a greyness of the
soul, an emptiness in the heart. Wailing and beating of thighs made it a little
less, perhaps, but never enough.

Senenmut mourned. He cried aloud; he beat fists on thighs
till bruises heaped on bruises. None of it brought her back.

He knew then, in the deeps of a night as empty of sleep as
his heart was of the one who had died, that if Hatshepsut died before him, he
would not be able to bear it. He prayed aloud in his chamber, invoking the god
who walked so often in her dreams: “Amon-Re, great god, beloved of my lady,
listen to me. Let me die first. Let me never know the absence of her as I know
that of her daughter.”

The god gave no sign. Yet he heard. Senenmut’s heart felt
it. Whether the god would grant the prayer, there was no telling. But he had
heard it.

~~~

They mourned for the full seventy days of Neferure’s
embalming. Then they laid her in her tomb among the queens of the Two Lands,
far to the west in the valley of the dead, dug well and deep to thwart the
thieves that flocked as thick as vultures round the tombs.

It was not the king who performed the great magic, the rite
that would open her senses to the world of the dead: the opening of the mouth
as it was called. Hatshepsut did it. She spoke the words and performed the
gestures, calling the gods to witness that her daughter went whole and blessed
upon her journey.

In this she slighted the king, but he ventured no objection.
He had been friend and brother to his wife, but never husband, never in truth.

No more did he know why she had died. She had fallen to
fever. That, everyone believed, and Senenmut repeated until he almost believed
it himself. Better a demon of sickness than the truth: the sheets taken and
burned; the red and bloodied scrap that had killed her, the son who had never
waked to look on the world, disposed of in secret.

Nehsi had done that. He had laid magics on it too, perhaps,
lest its fragment of a spirit rouse and walk, hunting the self that had never
had time to grow.

Whether the Nubian had taken such precautions or no,
Senenmut never felt the child’s presence. Neferure he sensed often, a flutter
of winged spirit, a whisper of longing in the breeze that played through her
chambers.

Once her body was buried and her spirit-self set upon its
journey, her presence shrank to memory. He still fancied that he could see her,
hear her voice calling him, feel her hand on his when he worked among the
queen’s scribes. But she was gone; he had only remembrance.