King and Goddess (46 page)

The obelisk had cracked. Its base was flawed. It sank back
down into its bed, lowered by no command but by one common will.

Someone, somewhere amid the lines of men, uttered a brief
and thoroughly heartfelt curse. He spoke for them all. So long a labor, so
grueling in the sun—and all for nothing.

Senenmut sprang to the edge of the cutting. He had not known
he had so much voice in him until it roared through the burning air. “
Up
! Up, go on, to work! We’ve two more
to cut, and time’s flying!”

~~~

“You’re obsessed,” Bastet observed. It had taken Nehsi and
Harmose and Thuty and both scribes, Minmose as well as Tetemre, to drag
Senenmut back to the house that had been given him in Aswan. He would never
have left the working, but for them.

It was cool in the house, sweet with the scent of blossoms
from the garden. Harmose played his lute while the high ones dined. There was
wine, sweetened with honey and chilled in the river. All the men had bathed and
dressed in clean garments, put on their ornaments, made a festival, though
there was nothing to celebrate but the failure of their effort.

“We’ll do it,” Senenmut said to them, ignoring Bastet.
“We’ll have to double up shifts, that’s all, and be more careful in raising the
shafts from their beds. Though it could have been a flaw in the stone. We’ll
have to look, to see. If there’s time.”

“If you please,” Bastet said, clearly and distinctly and in
such a tone that even Senenmut could not shut his ears to her. “Tonight we are
not digging stone in the quarry. We are enjoying a civilized dinner in a
half-civilized place. Let us babble of trivialities. Let us sing; let us play
on the lute. Let us be, for this brief hour, something other than workmen for
the king.”

“But—” said Senenmut.

“Be quiet,” Nehsi said amiably but with inflexible will.
“We’ll be frivolous till the night is old. Then we will sleep. And in the
morning we’ll rise rested and go back to our labors.”

Senenmut did not want to do that, but he was sorely
outnumbered. He had to eat, drink, watch them be merry. Then he suffered their
putting him to bed, all but sitting on him to be sure that he stayed there.

They left Harmose to watch over him. Poor Harmose: his eyes
were black-circled even without the kohl that made them beautiful. More than
once Senenmut saw him swallow a yawn. But he stayed grimly awake. Senenmut
would sleep, his manner said, or Harmose would die making sure of it.

“Oh, do go to bed,” Senenmut growled at last. “I won’t get
up before dawn. I promise.”

“I don’t believe you,” Harmose said.

“What, do you take me for a liar?”

“No,” said the singer. “I take you for a man who doesn’t
know when to stop. You’re making yourself ill, trying to do it all at once.”

“I am not ill,” Senenmut said.

“Aren’t you? You’re skin and bone. I hear you coughing when
you think no one notices. You coughed up blood yesterday. I saw it.”

Senenmut shut his eyes. “Gods. Am I safe from nothing and no
one?”

“Not if you kill yourself,” said Harmose.

Senenmut covered his face with his hands. It was true. He
had been coughing a great deal since he came to the quarry. It was the stone
dust. It got into everything, especially a man’s lungs. “That was dust,” he
said, “not blood. The stone is red here. So is its dust.”

“I know the color of blood,” said Harmose, innocent and
obstinate. “You have the lung-sickness. I know all the faces of it. It killed
my mother and my father and both of my sisters. Go to sleep now. In the morning
I’m calling in a physician.”

“You are not,” Senenmut said firmly. “I am not ill. I’ve
breathed too much dust, that’s all. I’ll wear my mantle over my face after
this. Will that content you?”

“No,” said Harmose. He spoke the word as eloquently as
Hatshepsut herself did, and with as little yielding in it.

Senenmut sighed deeply. It caught on the bottom of his lungs.
That was much higher than it should have been, and paved with knives.

He tried to swallow the fit of coughing, but it was mightier
than he. It rose up. It conquered him wholly.

Harmose held him while he tried to cough up his lungs. Those
arms were slender but they were strong. They were nothing like a woman’s. He
did not know why he should trouble to think that, except that the part of him
that was thinking was very far away from the part of him that was coughing.

Mostly he was angry. Of all times to fall sick. He had
months of work left to do, and the first of his obelisks had failed of its
promise. He had no time to rest or to indulge infirmity.

“Don’t,” he struggled to say. “Don’t tell her. She’ll fret
even worse.”

The king, he meant. Harmose understood. “I have to,” he
said. “She made me promise.”

“Then wait.” That came easier. The fit was passing. It
always did; he told himself it always would. Stone dust and a little catarrh.
That was all it was. “Wait,” he said. “Hover if you will, make me eat and
sleep. But don’t tell the king I’m sick. She’ll half die of worry.”

“The king needs to know,” Harmose said stubbornly.

“When we come to Thebes is soon enough. She’ll see for
herself then, if there’s anything to see. Now let me be. I’ll sleep, I give you
my word.”

Harmose did not want to do as Senenmut commanded, but
Senenmut set his jaw and his will and closed his eyes.

After rather too long a while, Harmose left him. The
footsteps went only as far as the door. He would sleep across the threshold,
the fool.

Senenmut let him do it. It was more effort than it was
worth, to begin the argument all over again.

The second obelisk rose cleanly from its bed, borne up by
the will and the effort of the men who had carved it out. No crack marred it;
it was perfect, though rough still, a raw shape of stone that would find shape
and beauty when it was brought to Thebes. Its mate, the third that they had
carved in this place, proved likewise unflawed. The one of them that had failed
they left where it lay, a monument to their labor and a testimony to the
magnitude of it.

Those that would go to Thebes, the gods willing, rode on
sledges and rollers from their bed in the quarry to the river’s side. That was
much closer than it had been when they began the labor, almost half a year
before. It was flood time, swelling time; necessary for the huge barge that
would carry the stones down the river.

As long as it had taken them to carve the stones out of the
earth, it was still more than a day or two or three before they were dragged
and rollered to the barge. Then they must be lifted up the vast sides into the
places prepared for them—without snapping of ropes or crushing of men or
collapse of the ship beneath that massive and doubled weight.

The first was a breathless undertaking. The second nigh
killed them all with apprehension. No one such stone had ever been cut or
carried; and here were two, on a ship of such size that the mariners muttered
of unbalancing from its height or of sinking from its burdened weight. Senenmut
himself climbed up on the lofty deck, far above the water, and from that dizzy
height did what he could to direct the moving and placing of the stones.

They must be placed just so, balanced with utmost delicacy,
end to end along that vast length of barge. A hand’s breadth too far to either
side, and the barge overturned, and the river had a sacrifice of all their
labor, their sweat and blood.

He prayed as the stones rose each from its sledge, swaying
in the light wind, borne up by the strength of every man who could grasp a
rope. He begged every god he knew to uphold the stone, to strengthen the lines,
to sustain the ship as it rocked perilously under the massive weight.

The groan of tortured beams was clearly audible above the
chanting of his laborers and the droning of priests who prayed as devoutly as
he. He felt the shift of the barge underfoot, the precarious moment when it
could, oh so easily, have tipped on its side and cast them all into the water.

It held. The stone rose. It poised on its enormous supports,
swung ponderously, sank down into the barge. “Farther back!” Senenmut cried.
“Back, I say!
Back
!”

Guided by his shouts and the bellowing of the foremen, the
crews settled the stones one by one into their cradles on the barge. It rode
low beneath the weight of them, wallowing in the water. But—all the gods be
thanked—it did not sink to the bottom. It had no grace, no lightness. But it
was, it seemed, seaworthy.

~~~

There was festival in Aswan that night, round about the
bank and the barge, by torchlight on the strand and by lamplight in the
workmen’s tents. Senenmut honored them for a while with his presence. They
expected it; they would have been distressed if he had refused.

In the morning they would begin the journey to Thebes. The
house in which he had been living was stripped bare, everything packed and
laden on a lesser boat that would follow the great one. He would travel with
the stones, of course. They were bound up in his essence. Sometimes he fancied
that they were the measure of his life, nigh on forty man-lengths, a scant
handful less than the count of his years.

One thing was left to do before he mounted the barge—before
he could even sleep. The stonecarver waited in the quarry by light of torches.
Senenmut had marked the place. With brush and paint he drew on the stone what
the carver should carve: himself as he wished best to be, bowing low before his
king. Under it he wrote in passion that seemed somehow fitting in this of all
places, under the cold stare of the stars. He named her, gave her her beautiful
titles.

Then he named himself. It was pride beyond pride, perhaps;
the same pride that had caused him to carve his face and his name everywhere in
Djeser-Djeseru.
Her dear companion,
he wrote,
much beloved, steward of her
daughter Neferure, pleasing to the heart of the Lady of the Two Lands. All that
I did, I did for her glory.

When he had written it all, the carver came in with his
chisels and began, meticulously, to cut and carve and limn. Senenmut lingered
as long as he might. But the night was speeding, and dawn was not far away. He
must be on the barge when the sun rose.

He felt light, as if he had wings. Earlier, before he came
to this place, he had coughed a great deal. But standing here, inscribing his
feat and his love on the everlasting stone, he knew no infirmity, no frailty of
the flesh. He was all whole, young and strong, and his great work ready now to
be finished in Thebes.

~~~

They made the passage slowly, their fleet of boats
circling round the ponderous weight of the barge. Two-and-thirty boats drew it,
and in each three nines of oarsmen. Skilled mariners and engineers, with
priests and workers of magic giving such aid as they could, saw it through the
swollen waters, the reefs of stones, the beds of reeds that reached to choke
its advance. Senenmut on his perch oversaw them all, though there was little
for him to do but watch.

Runners went every morning in relays to Thebes. The king was
eager, waiting in her city. She had built the pedestals on which the stones
would stand, prepared the temple for their coming, set in train the festival of
their arrival. She had made of it a grand celebration, a royal jubilee. The
Myriad of Years, it was called: the great affirmation of the king’s power, the
feast of its renewal, a beginning made again before the whole of the Two Lands.

The barge could not be hurried. Too much haste, the
engineers insisted, and it would sink. It was shipping water at a rate that did
not unduly alarm them, though it looked horrendous from below. It would come to
Thebes, they promised, and its cargo with it. But not if it was pressed harder
than its fabric could bear.

He endeavored not to fret. They crawled down the river.
People came to see the king’s barge go by, to stare at the stones it carried
and to exclaim over the size of them.

And then at last, with the suddenness of all things that
seem too long awaited, they came in sight of Thebes. Its walls rose up out of
the Black Land, beyond the river’s flood. Senenmut’s own beautiful temple,
Djeser-Djeseru of the western shore, shone before him. He sat poised as it were
between his two great works, filled with a gladness that was almost too much to
bear.

She was waiting for him: she and all the rest of her city, her
armies, her navies, every strong man in Egypt, brought here to aid his laborers
in the moving of the obelisks from river to temple. Those gleaming creatures,
those beautiful young men in their soldiers’ kilts, were so alien to his eyes
after his naked or loinclothed, sinewy and unlovely but indomitable workmen,
that he almost forgot her for staring at the massed ranks of them.

But she stirred, glittering under her golden canopy, and he
ceased to be aware of anything else. The barge wallowing toward the quay, the
mariners in their boats, the engineers calling out commands, the priests
raising their chants and their incense, all faded and vanished before the light
of her face.

She was more beautiful than he remembered. Here she was king
and goddess, and nothing of the woman in her. But the eyes in the stillness of
her face—those were vividly alive, fixing on him, drinking him in.

He could not tell if she was shocked. He had lost flesh, he
knew, gone all leathery and brown; and several of his teeth had chosen these
months to bid him farewell. He could hardly be a sight to gladden the eyes of
such beauty.

And yet it seemed that he did. She did not smile; that was
not a kingly thing to do. But her eyes were splendid with joy.

~~~

The work of lifting the stones from the barge and
conveying them to the temple was nigh as great as that of bringing them down
from the quarry. But where Senenmut had had only his crews of workmen, here he
had the whole army and the navy, the men of Thebes, princes and commoners,
priests and courtiers and idlers of the street. They were all caught up in the
glory of it, leaping to offer a hand, to draw the king’s obelisks to Amon’s
temple.