King and Goddess (47 page)

So many hands, so much eagerness, almost defeated itself.
Senenmut and Nehsi between them, and such of the engineers as could fight their
way through the crowds, made order of the tumult, saw the new workers and the
old arrayed in ranks, and set them to the labor. Commanders of the army and
captains of the navy helped as they could. In short enough order it was a
useful working-party that had been shaping for an unruly mob.

The king could not in propriety set hand to rope and pull
with the rest, but she could lead them, and encourage the women and the
children to dance and sing, escorting them with rejoicing to her father’s
temple.

Joy, it was all joy. Singing, shouting, throwing the full
weight of body and souls against the massive resistance of the stones. So
compelled, inevitably they yielded. They rode up from the river. They slid
through the gates into the vast pillared hall, the greatest in the world, huge
almost beyond comprehension; but they were not dwarfed by it.

There, for that time, they rested. The people departed in
gladness: high ones to the palace, commons to the streets and market-squares of
Thebes, where the king’s bounty had laid a feast.

For Senenmut it was all splendid, all glorious; and never
mind that there was a great deal of labor still to come, what with polishing
and carving the roughness of the stones, and sheathing them in electrum made
from Thuty the Treasurer’s doled-out baskets of gold and silver, and raising
them in the court of the temple. For this day he could let himself be glad,
because he had come home again, and she was here, and happy as he had never
seen her, even at the building of Djeser-Djeseru.

~~~

“Did I do well?” he asked her.

They were alone at last, if not in each other’s arms. That
would come later. Now they had snatched a moment between feast and feast, run
away like children to the wall that happened to look toward the temple of Amon,
and stood hand in hand, concealed by the parapet, and gazed on the loom of the
temple.

Nothing from here betrayed the marvels that lay within.
Later, when the obelisks were gilded and raised, they would shine from far
away, like towers of light.

“You did very well,” Hatshepsut said to Senenmut. She
laughed as freely as the girl she had never been allowed to be. “Oh, you were
glorious, riding in atop that great monster of a barge, with my stones at your
feet.”

“I did it in half a year, too,” he said: “and well for us I
did. Even with the flood, it was hard going through some of those channels. I
never saw such a draught on a ship before, and neither has anyone else.”

“No one has ever done what you did,” she said.

“What you dreamed,” he said. “I was only the hands. Yours
were the mind and the will. I did it for you, my beloved. Always and only for
you.”

“And for your own glory,” she said. She leaned against him.
With her royal emblems laid aside, she could have been any noble lady come to
keep her lover company on the palace wall. Her eyes were on the temple. “I can
see them now. The sun will rise between them, and send rays of light up to
heaven.”

He nodded. “Every morning they will remember you. Every
evening they will catch the last light of the setting sun. They will stand for
a thousand years.”

“And a thousand more,” she said, “and yet a thousand.” She
turned still clasping his hand, and looked into his face. A little of the light
had left her. She saw him now, rather too clearly. “Have you been ill?” she
asked, direct as the thrust of a spear.

He shrugged. He thought of denying it. He had never lied to
her; he could not begin now. “A little,” he said. “Stone dust is hard on the
lungs. I’ll recover, now I’ve come home.”

“You had better,” she said. “You have a great task to
finish. Then when that’s done, I’ll see that you rest.”

“I do intend to,” he said.

They carved the great obelisks in the court of the temple,
much vexed by wanderers-in and gogglers-at until the king detailed a company of
her guards to keep the crowds of the curious away from the workers. They shaped
and polished and made them beautiful, and set on them the names of four kings:
all three of the Thutmoses, none of whom could be slighted, and at the summit,
sealed in electrum, the name and titles of Maatkare Hatshepsut.

By his will I did it, she had them carve in the hard red
stone. He led me, my father Amon. Well I knew the desires of his heart.

There was one who wandered in nearly every day, but he could
not be kept out. He came in his guise of a minor priest of Amon, a burner of
incense before the god; but all the guards knew him, and Nehsi, taking command
of them as often as not, forbade them to bar his way.

Thutmose had grown up well. He had no height; his was a line
of smallish men. But he was solidly built and strong, and he looked uncannily
like his aunt the elder king. A life of exercise in the training fields had
bronzed his skin and strengthened his body. Beauty, alas, he would never have:
his face was too odd, full-cheeked and narrow-chinned, with a jutting prow of
nose. But he was an attractive young man, graceful in his movements, well known
among the soldiers for his skill with bow and spear and sword.

He was nearly twenty now. By rights he should have emerged
from the regency some years since. But Hatshepsut was king, and a king in the
full pride of her youth and power did not step down for a younger king. He had
sat through her feast of the Myriad of Years, watched her run the race that
every king ran who would renew his strength and the strength of the Two
Kingdoms. No one had read the expression on his face. It was pure and hieratic
stillness.

In the temple, watching the stoneworkers carve his name and
that of his father and grandfather, and of his aunt, too, he seemed much more a
human creature. He was curious as any young man would be, asking questions
where he could do it without interrupting, waiting with laudable courtesy for
the answers.

The workers were not in awe of him. If he had come crowned and
in his majesty, they would have fallen at his feet. But a shaven priest in a
plain kilt, perched on a stray block of stone, watching bright-eyed as a
painter outlined in vivid colors the glyphs that shaped his own name,
Menkheperre Thutmose, was nothing to be afraid of. He was a living god, but
this was the great god’s temple. His presence here seemed somehow fitting.

He never spoke to the elder king’s ministers who came and
went, overseeing the work of the carving and gilding, nor did he acknowledge
them beyond a glance or an inclination of the head. Except Nehsi. They had
always got on well together, considering that Nehsi was wholly Hatshepsut’s
man.

It might be that Thutmose knew the virtues of silence.
Nehsi, who had never been a chatterer, found it restful. They stood often side
by side, Nehsi at ease but on guard, Thutmose watching the carving. Nehsi could
not be there every hour of every day; he had duties that crowded close and
filled his days from dawn till long after sunset. But he was there often
enough, and perhaps it was the young king who brought him.

When they finished carving the third Thutmose’s names and
titles and set to work on Hatshepsut’s, Thutmose happened to be present. He
watched them limn the glyphs one by one, cutting carefully so that each stood
forth from the stone. They had already carved the words of her royal vaunt,
that she was more beautiful than anything in the world. He read that aloud,
with the ease of one who reads well and quickly. When Nehsi glanced at him he
said, “Do you believe that?”

“I believe that she is beautiful,” Nehsi said.

“Oh, yes,” said Thutmose. “But more beautiful than anything?
Is she?”

“What do you reckon beautiful?”

Thutmose thought about it. It was this slowness, this
deliberation of mind, that led people to think that he was slow-witted. But
that, he most certainly was not. He could judge swiftly when he must: on the
training field, at the reins of a chariot, on the hunt. It was only in speech
that he came close to being hesitant.

After a while he said, “To me a horse is beautiful, running
in the yoke of a chariot. The flight of Horus’ falcon in the morning. A woman
seated by a lotus pool, combing her hair.”

“Why, you are a poet,” said Nehsi.

The dark eyes narrowed, contemplating temper. But Nehsi was
not mocking him. “I do not believe,” Thutmose said, “that nothing in the world
is more beautiful than that one.” He paused. “Do you?”

Nehsi did not answer.

“Yes,” Thutmose said, as if he had. “I shall never make such
a boast.”

“A king should boast of something,” Nehsi said.

“Then I’ll be the greatest king and conqueror the world has
ever seen.”

Thutmose looked as unmartial as it was possible to be,
dressed as a priest and sitting on a block of stone left over from the carving.
Still Nehsi was not moved to laugh. “That’s a worthy vaunt,” he said.

“She,” said Thutmose, “speaks continually of peace. See,
they carve it on her stones: how she raises them in peace, and proclaims her
power through gentler means than war. What is wrong with war, that she sets
herself against it?”

“She says that it is costly and wasteful of blood and
spirit,” Nehsi said.

Thutmose curled his lip. “That is woman’s thinking. A man
knows better. You know better. I’ve seen you in the practice-yards. You’re a
fighting man. And yet you bow at her feet.”

“She is my king,” Nehsi said.

The younger king regarded him sidelong. “And she always will
be. Yes? That too I’ll never understand. How men love her; how they fall down
before her.”

“Do you envy her?”

“No!” But then Thutmose said, more slowly, “Yes. Yes, I do.
I watch how she wins men’s souls. She does it so easily. A lift of the brow, a
tilt of the chin, and every man’s heart is in her hand. I have no such art, and
no grace. If I try, men forbear to laugh—after all I am the king—but I see how
their eyes mock me.”

“No one laughs at you,” Nehsi said, “even in his heart.”

“Don’t lie to me,” said Thutmose. “I know what men say
behind my back. That here am I, a man grown, and I suffer a woman to set her
foot on my neck. I’m afraid of her, they whisper. I’m so much less than she; I
can’t move for fear of offending her.”

“You would do well,” said Nehsi, and his voice was cold, “to
learn to be reasonable about her. She could have deposed you or had you killed.
She did neither. She means you to be her heir.”

“She despises me.”

Nehsi could not deny that. He said, “So do you despise
yourself. Be a man, my lord. Be as strong as your lineage allows you to be. You
are not the least of the men of your line.”

“I am still less than that one woman.”

“She is older than you,” Nehsi said, “and has ruled since
before you were born. She learned the arts of kingship at your grandfather’s
knee. Your father, however noble his memory, was not greatly gifted in
kingship. She ruled for him, and with his consent.”

“She ruled well.” The words seemed dragged out of him. Nehsi
admired him for suffering himself to speak them. It was hard to tell the truth.
“She . . . does . . . rule well. Better now than
I.”

“If you would test that,” said Nehsi, “you might contemplate
taking on your share of the kingship.”

“My share?” Thutmose was sneering again, and not to his
advantage. “My share is here, ladling incense into the burners for some greater
priest to light. She’ll never give me more. She dares not. For if she does,
Egypt might remember: it has a second king. A king who is a man.”

“You wait for her to give,” Nehsi said, “when you could
take.”

“She would never let me take anything,” said Thutmose with
bitter certainty.

“Have you ever tried?”

Thutmose fixed him with a long and burning stare; then
turned abruptly and strode—it could not be said that he fled—down that vast and
pillared hall.

Nehsi watched him go with some regret. It had not been wise,
perhaps, to provoke this of all discontented young men. A lesser man, a soldier
perhaps, vexed to immobility by his women—yes. But the woman who wielded such
power over Thutmose was Hatshepsut the king. Nehsi’s lady. The one whom he
would serve until he died.

Nonetheless it ate at him to see a spirit so stunted and
embittered, and no need for it to be so. They had done ill who raised that
child—and Nehsi counted himself among their number. On his own ground Thutmose
was capable, even brilliant. But before Hatshepsut he could show none of it.

It was a curse, perhaps. A jest of the gods. Hatshepsut had
worshipped her father, despised her brother-husband. That brother’s son, she
could not love or even respect. And he—perhaps in his heart he was desperate to
win her admiration, even to love and be loved by her who after all was his
blood kin; but nothing that he did sufficed. He would always be inept and
stumbling, hopelessly awkward before her.

Yet, thought Nehsi, in himself this Thutmose was nothing
like his father, and very much indeed like the great king his grandfather. No
one chose to remember how that Thutmose too had been slow of speech except at
need, deliberate unless necessity demanded that he act with blinding swiftness;
and he too had seemed hesitant, even simple, to those who did not know him
well. If was as if their minds worked so swiftly that their bodies could not
keep pace.

Hatshepsut remembered none of that. With his daughter the
first Thutmose had been at his best always, moved to match her quickness with
quickness of his own. When she saw him in council, saying no word perhaps from
beginning to end, she called it wisdom, and an art of ruling that let his
counsellors talk themselves out. Then when they had reduced themselves to
silence, he uttered a few firm words that settled everything; and they yielded
to his kingly judgment.