King and Goddess (44 page)

“It was only the first one,” he said. “We had a good
harvest, but locusts came and ate it. We had no stores: we sold them to buy a
team of oxen, and the oxen took sick and died. The baby was pretty. The headman
from the next village down the river, his wife was barren and pining for want
of a child. They paid us a whole year’s worth of barley, grain and seed both,
for the baby. She grows up a headman’s daughter, maybe gets lucky, marries a
scribe. Her daughter maybe marries a lord. And our blood goes up in the world.
Instead of staying on a no-ox farm that barely gets flooded except in a good
year.”

“Did you have such foresight when you did it,” Hatshepsut
asked, “or did it come to you after?”

He flushed under the sun-darkened skin. He was not as old a
man as he seemed, Senenmut realized, watching from behind the throne. Sun and
famine and hard labor had toughened him to leather. He was probably no more
than twenty years old. In his sudden shyness, his stammer as he spoke to her,
for a moment he looked like the youth he was. “I—great lady, great king, I did
what I had to do. We had to eat; and there was another baby coming.”

“Your daughter? Does she prosper?”

“I hear she does,” he said.

“You haven’t seen her?”

“Lady,” he said, “I work a no-ox farm. She’s a headman’s
daughter. Her like doesn’t look at the likes of me.”

“I saw her,” the wife said. “She was as plump as a little
river-horse. She has a nurse, as if she were a princess, and a whole box of
toys to play with.”

“Then you concede that she is well served by what your husband
did to her?”

The woman nodded. But she said, “I want to keep my children.
They’re mine.”

“So they are,” Hatshepsut said. She beckoned to Senenmut.
“Here, see it written. Two oxen for this man who speaks so honestly, and a
farm’s worth of barley seed, and the blessing of Min on his fields. For this
woman, all children that she can bear and raise, as long as she and her husband
can feed them.”

“And if they cannot?”

“They do what they must,” said Hatshepsut. She took up crook
and flail and crossed them over her breast. “The Great House has spoken. So let
it be done.”

~~~

“Your name is blessed in the hovels of the poor tonight,”
Senenmut said as they lay together. There had been no passion tonight; simply
the warmth of shared presence, and the comfort of conversation.

She shifted in his arms, sat up and clasped her knees,
looking as young as she had been when they first were lovers. Her body was
softer, but only a little, and only a little less slender; the breasts were
high still, her face unlined. The years had been kind to her. She had not
hardened as a woman could who ruled over men. She was as beautiful as ever, and
fully as beloved.

She frowned, pensive. “They may curse me,” she said, “when
famine takes them again, and the oxen get sick and die, and he has to sell
another baby to keep the family fed.”

“You expect that?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “But it will probably happen. Ill luck likes
a familiar face. Meanwhile they praise me and bless me and worship at my feet.”

“That’s as it should be,” said Senenmut.

Her eyes flashed on him. “Don’t you start flattering me! I
get enough of that from my courtiers.”

“Of whom I am one,” he reminded her.

“Yes, and you carve my name everywhere, and call me king and
goddess, more beautiful than anything in the world. That’s policy, my love. A
king has to do it in order to continue as king.”

“People believe what they’re told to believe,” Senenmut
granted her. “But you are king. You are goddess. You have done well by your
people. Egypt is prospering. Neither flood nor harvest has failed since you
took the throne—that poor man and his bad luck notwithstanding.”

“Sometimes I wonder,” she said, “how long it will go on.
Seven years of prosperity, we’ve had. Won’t there be seven years of want
thereafter, to preserve the balance of the world?”

“Only if you fail to please the gods,” said Senenmut. “And
that, I don’t foresee. They’d have struck you down seven years since, if they
disapproved of what you’ve done.”

“Gods’ time is not as ours,” she said. “It may have taken
them this long to notice.”

A shiver ran down his spine. It was only a breath of air
through the room, chilling him in his nakedness. “The gods have noticed,” he
said with as much confidence as he could muster. “They’ve blessed you with
riches. They’ve smiled on your judgments.”

“I hope so,” she said. Her frown did not lighten. “In the
sunlight I know that it is so. In the dark, when the shadows crowd upon me, I
wonder. My father, the man who loved my mother, who raised me—what would he say
if he saw me as I was this morning? How angry would he be?”

“He called you his little king,” said Senenmut. “I think he
knew.”

“I do try to propitiate his shade. I give him offerings. I
built a new tomb and set him in it, to lie beside me when my time comes. He’ll
roar at me, Senenmut. He always roared when he was angry.”

“Has he been roaring at you in dreams?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “I’ll be my small self then,
committing some infraction or other—eluding my nurse to play with the horses;
hiding behind a pillar in the hall where he holds council. And he’ll roar, and
call me scapegrace and worse. And then,” she said, “he’ll sweep me up and hug
me tight, and say I should have been a boy; I’ve got gall.”

“There, you see,” said Senenmut. “He approves. He finds it
outrageous, as what dead king would not, but he’s no more able to deny you than
any living man.”

“That’s how I do it, you know,” she said. “I don’t let
myself think that I’ll be denied. And I’m not. But every time I do it, every
time I push the limits—I wonder. Will it end now? Have I gone, at last, too
far?”

He slid closer to her, wrapped arms about her. She was cold
and much too still. Her back was rigid. “Then why do you push?” he asked. “Why
do you do it?”

“Because I can’t do otherwise. You used to tell me I was
mad. I am, you know. The god makes me so. He’s a fire in me. He wants so much
of me, dreams so much through me . . . sometimes I think there
must be nothing left, that I’ve burned to ash.”

“There is everything left of you,” Senenmut said; meaning
it, too. “You’re stronger now than you ever were. Stronger, wiser, more
beautiful.”

“More flattery,” she said, but she was warming, softening to
his embrace. “I shall have to invoke him again, remember him in the Two Lands,
bind my name with his so tightly that no one can divide us. He shores up my
strength. In him, as in Amon who begot me, I find my kingship’s heart.”

~~~

She slept after that, which surprised Senenmut somewhat.
He lay awake. Was it that after all she grew old? Or was her fire growing cold?
It had never been like her to worry that she was not strong enough.

Maybe she always had; but she had never had the courage to
say so. It took strength to confess one’s weakness. She loved him, trusted him,
but she told no one everything that was in her heart. She must always be king,
always goddess; the mortal woman was allowed the pleasures of the flesh, but
doubts and fears . . . those she had never admitted.

Not until now. She was strong, and she was king. If there
was any whisper of rebellion, Senenmut had not heard it. Those few who had
protested her crowning, who defended the young king against the one they called
usurper, were long gone. Mutterers in corners had fallen silent, or had
succumbed to her will.

She must be on watch constantly. He was part of that, he and
the people who served him. But every king lived so, on guard against
ill-wishers and worse. They were disposed of. The king was protected. So the
world went, whether the king was safely male or most unsafely a woman.

He mounted guard over her sleeping body. If he could have
guarded her dreams, he would have done that. He loved her beyond measure, lived
for her, even endured this kingship, because she believed that it was Amon’s
will. The tale of her mortal father was built on air and half-formed
remembrance, but that she was Amon’s daughter, she believed implicitly.

It was not his place to doubt it. Such light and fire as
were in her did not come from any earthly source. Amon had begotten it; or
close enough.

“Father Amon,” Senenmut said softly, lest she wake and be
troubled. “Watch over her. Defend her. Protect her from harm.”

“My father Amon,” said the king, “has set in me a longing;
a yearning to do a great thing.”

Her counsellors regarded her in varying degrees of
wonderment. They knew her too well to be astonished, but when she spoke as she
did now, they had learned to expect the unexpected.

As always, she gave it to them. “I shall embellish his
temple,” she said: “his great house that you, my lord Ineni, have made. Look
you, how a king raises a shaft up to heaven, inscribed with his names and the
names of the god and the king’s reverence and his deeds for the god’s glory. I
shall do just such a thing—but since I am I, and there is no one like me, I
shall raise the highest that has ever been.

“An obelisk that reaches clear up to heaven,” she said. “A
pillar of the sky. I shall cast it in electrum, in gold and silver mingled, as
precious together as either alone.”

Her treasurer, Thuty the endlessly precise, made a strangled
sound. She arched her brows at him. A lesser man might have quailed before the
utter blandness of her expression, but he said without hesitation, “No.”

“No?” She had reared like the cobra in her headdress, golden
hood flared, deadly and beautiful. “No? Am I not the richest king in the
world?”

“You are not rich enough,” said Thuty, “to cast an obelisk
in electrum. You might have enough gold for it, mind you, if you make it
smaller than the ordinary; but you’ll have nothing left to pay the workers, and
as for keeping the kingdoms in funds . . .”

“You are a petty-minded counter of barley-grains,” she
informed him. “For my father’s glory, should I not do what no one else has done
before?”

“You could,” said Senenmut, evolving the thought as he
uttered it, “build it of stone and sheathe it in electrum.”

She pondered that, eyes narrowed, painted brows knit.
“Stone, you say? From where?”

“Aswan, I think,” he answered. “The good red granite, that
can be cut whole from the living rock, and carried on barges into Thebes.”

“Yes,” she said, still musing on it. Her eyes brightened.
“Yes. Yes, that could be done. And more than that. Two of them. Two pillars of
heaven. Since gold is so scarce, says my treasurer, and stone so plentiful.”

“If you do two,” Thuty said, “there’s not enough gold and
silver to sheathe them both. Tips only. Twelve baskets’ worth. That’s all.”

It was great vexation to a king to be so constrained by the
niggling of her treasurer; but Hatshepsut could not have forgotten that it was
she who had objected to the trouble and expense of her husband’s wars. She
bowed, if not with grace, then with resignation. “Very well. We’ll do what we
can. We’ll do it quickly. A year, no more, for the honor of my father’s name.”

“Why?” Ineni the builder demanded in Thuty’s ringing
silence. “Why so brief a time?”

“Because,” she answered promptly, “if it were too easy or
too slow, it would never be as great a sacrifice.”

“A year,” said Hapuseneb, shaking his head. “And two of the
things. I don’t envy the man who has to do it for you.”

“I won’t,” Ineni said. “I’m not a madman. I won’t work
myself to death, either.”

“I will,” Senenmut said—heard himself say it, as if he had
nothing to do with it. He was not thinking at all. He was seeing in his mind’s
eye the temple of Amon at Kamak, that vast and arrogant place, terrible in its
beauty. She would add to it; would proclaim her kingship in the most virile way
of all, with a twofold monument.

As if her temple, her Djeser-Djeseru, were not enough. This
was pure vaunt, bravado bare.

“I’ll do it,” he said. “A year? I’ll give it to you in half
of that. Only give me men, and time to prepare. A month—I’ll have it all ready
and set to begin.”

“You are as great a fool as she is,” said Ineni with a curl
of the lip.

“Probably,” Senenmut agreed, amiable as he always was with
Ineni, because it drove that prince of builders to distraction. “Djeser-Djeseru
is finished. I need something else to engage my mind.”

Ineni sniffed loudly. He had not been asked to build the
king’s temple. That was her dream, and Senenmut’s. He had dug her tomb instead,
and set her father’s body in it.

He grew old; he was not often now in Thebes, but in his
mansion near Abydos, resting, fishing, hunting waterfowl. “A man needs rest,”
he said. “You’ll get none if you carry out your boast.”

“Oh, I’ll rest,” said Senenmut. “When I’m done, when the
king’s obelisks stand in the temple, I’ll rest as I never have, not even when I
was young.”

~~~

“Don’t kill yourself,” the king said to Senenmut. He had
spent the day and half the night drawing the plans for the undertaking, and
spread a blanket in a corner of his workroom, and roused at dawn to begin
again. By the time she found him, someone—he never remembered who—had persuaded
him to bathe and shave and change his kilt. He was presentable, if hollow-eyed.

At first when she came in he did not know her. She was a
stranger, a lady of the court in wig and golden headdress; her face in its mask
of paint could have been anyone’s.

But her voice he knew, and her hands tugging him away from
his worktable, pushing him into a chair, holding a cup to his lips till he
drank. Braced for wine or beer, he nearly spat out the cool clean water that
was in the cup.

“I’ve never seen you like this,” she said. “Your assistants
are saying that you’re possessed.”