King and Goddess (48 page)

She never waited for this younger Thutmose to do the same.
Nor had time softened her contempt for him or his fear of her. Nehsi knew
little of despair, but when he pondered the two of them, he knew something
remarkably like it.

“What I fear most,” he said to Bastet, “is not that it will
go on for years as it is now, as ill a thing as that will be. No; I’m afraid it
will change, and not for the better. He’s a deep one, is Thutmose; and when he
takes a thing into his head, he never lets it go.”

“And he hates Hatshepsut.” Bastet nodded. “I see it, too. I
think everyone does. It scares me, how he sits so quiet and never says a word.
Men like that—when they break, they shatter everything around them.”

“She won’t listen,” Nehsi said. “I’ve tried to tell her; nor
am I the only one. She won’t hear us. Her husband was a weak-spined fool. She’s
sure his son must be the same.”

“Well then,” said Bastet. “If she won’t do anything about
it, then someone else must.”

He stared at her. “No man can kill a king. The gods will
destroy him.”

“That was not what I meant,” Bastet said, exasperated. “And
you should know it. He needs to be kept occupied—the more, the better.”

“A war would be just the thing,” Nehsi mused.

“You know Hatshepsut will never agree to that,” Bastet said.

“Pity,” said Nehsi. “Asia has been restless of late. It’s
thinking of breaking itself free of us, I think.”

“But she won’t do anything about it.”

“She is not incapable,” Nehsi said, pricked almost to
sharpness. “She simply does not see where war can be of any use.”

“Even,” said Bastet, “where it is. She’s spent far more on
these great rearing vaunts of hers, and on that temple she is so proud of, than
her husband ever did on his campaigns. Sometimes I think Thutmose should get up
his courage and tell her so.”

“You know what she would tell him,” Nehsi said. “She makes
and builds; she rules in peace. The Two Lands are the better for what she does,
and the gods are pleased, and bless her with prosperity.”

“Maybe she should let him build a temple. Or lead an
embassy.”

“She won’t give him that much power,” said Nehsi. “She can’t
afford to.”

“No,” said Bastet. “But in the end she’ll have to do
something. He won’t sit still forever, or keep bowing his head.”

“Which is what I said to begin with,” said Nehsi. He dug
fingers into his aching temples. “Ah, gods. I don’t know what to do.”

She laid cool hands over his. “We watch him, and we do what
we can to stop him if he shatters. That’s all we can do.”

He looked up at her as she stood over him. Sometimes, he
thought, she seemed much older than he, who was still young enough that
strangers mistook her for one of his daughters. “Are we presumptuous?” he asked
her. “He’s a living god. We’re all too mortal.”

“If the gods give us the gift to see, they expect us to use
it.”

It might be youth that made her so certain. Or wisdom. Or
perhaps, thought Nehsi, both.

He sighed and bowed his head. She worked fingers into the
knots in his neck and back, rousing them to sharper pain, and then to a
blissful ease.

If only this trouble of kings might be resolved as swiftly.
There might be no help for it at all; no hope but to watch them play it out,
even to extremity.

The Dawn Wind was ill, and might be dying.

Senenmut had left his mare, his beloved, his king’s gift, at
home while he labored in Aswan. She had been bred then and had come in foal.
While he oversaw the sheathing of the king’s obelisks in gleaming golden metal,
she delivered herself of a handsome filly. The young one had done well, and the
birth had gone as it should. The mare was up, nursing her foal, seeming well;
but then, with deadly swiftness, she took sick.

When he was brought to her by a white and trembling
stablehand, his master of horse was with her, and the man who looked after the
mares and the foals. She was down, thrashing in the straw.

Someone, Senenmut noted with distant precision, had had the
wits to remove the foal. An old mare who had lost her colt, but who had
remained heavily in milk, had been persuaded to nurse the filly.

The Dawn Wind was beyond caring for the loss of her child.
Senenmut was cursed with clear sight. He could not see hope where there was
none. She had the foal-fever, and it was killing her.

She was only an animal—a horse, a creature who had never
spoken a word, nor uttered a prayer to any god. And yet he grieved no less to
watch her die than he had at the deaths of his kin. She had been born in his
hands. He had raised her, trained her, cherished her companionship. She had
been used to paw with her foreleg, demanding tribute, as imperious as any queen.
Now she lay still, except when she struggled, senseless with pain.

She died with her head in his lap, too worn by then with
pain to struggle against it. He smoothed her forelock, worked a tangle from her
mane. The people who stood about had blurred in his sight. He had forgotten who
they were. “Call the embalmers,” he said.

One of them ventured to remonstrate. “Sir! They won’t come
for a horse.”

“Call them,” he said, and kept saying it until one of them
obeyed him.

While he waited for the embalmers, he remained where he was.
All the life was gone out of her, and yet her neck kept its silken softness. He
rubbed it where it was stiff with sweat, grooming her with his fingers as she
had loved to have him do.

Only a horse, he thought. Indeed. Only the companion of his
heart, the joy of his days, a delight in memory when he was away from her. She
had never grieved him, never caused him pain; had only loved him as a good
beast can, with all her great heart. She was not even very old, still in the
prime of her life, dead because he, the arrogant one, had insisted that she
give him a foal to enrich his herd.

“She will guard the gate of my tomb,” he told the embalmers
when they came. “Wrap her well and surround her with words of power. When I
come to the Field of Reeds, I would see her waiting there in her harness, with
the chariot behind her.”

The embalmers bowed to him. That was more than their usual
reverence, but he had paid them extraordinarily well. They took up the mare,
with no little muttering at the weight and the mass of her, and carried her
away. He resolved to visit them on the morrow, to be certain that she lay in
her own vat of natron, and for the full seventy days, so that she was well fit
to travel into the Field of Reeds.

When they were gone and the Dawn Wind with them, Senenmut
was seized by a fit of coughing. There were knives at the bottom of it, as was
not unusual; but these felt as long as swords. He could not stop once he had
begun. Blind, doubled up, spitting blood, he was still aware of hands on him,
lifting him, carrying him away from that place.

~~~

Senenmut was infuriatingly weak, but not so much that he
could not finish his labor with the obelisks. “I’m wearing myself out even
more, fighting with you, than I would if I just went out and got to work,” he
snapped to Hapuseneb.

The First Prophet of Amon, who should have been far too
lofty a personage to sit in Senenmut’s bedchamber and bar his way to the door,
fixed him with a disconcertingly level stare. “So stop fighting with me. Do you
want another dose of the wine?”

Senenmut hissed in exasperation; or tried to. Everything he
did seemed to set off another spasm of coughing. Hapuseneb held him up until
the fit had passed, and wiped away the issue of it. He said nothing, only held
the cloth so that Senenmut could see.

Blood. Of course there was blood. His lungs were full of
knives.

“Just don’t tell her,” he managed to gasp.

“She already knows,” Hapuseneb said.

“She doesn’t, either. Or she’d be here.”

“Well,” said Hapuseneb. “We didn’t tell her everything.”

“Good,” said Senenmut. Cursing, but silently, as he began to
cough again.

He was dying. He could not seem to stop it. He called in
healer-priests, who should have been able to do something useful; but all they
did was raise a reek of ordure and put the steward of his household, the
heretofore endlessly amiable Harmose, out of temper. Senenmut had to raise
himself up as much as he might and dismiss them; and that prostrated him for
hours after, while Harmose alternately sang to him and upbraided him for a
fool.

One thing in particular he wanted, and would be outraged if
he could not have it. He wanted to see his obelisks raised in the temple of
Amon, set gleaming on their bases and towering up to heaven. Hapuseneb could
not hover over him through every moment of every day, and Harmose had to sleep,
if only in snatches.

In one such respite, Senenmut prevailed on his servants to
set him in a litter and carry him to Amon’s temple. He had always hated to
travel so, hot and stifling behind curtains, but in this extremity it was a
useful thing. No one could see him or move to prevent him.

The obelisks were nearly finished. One was tipped already
with gleaming electrum. They were sheathing the other as he came, doling out
the precious alloy with scrupulous care, covering the tip and no more. All
below it was beautiful with carving, with the names of the kings, their titles,
and Hatshepsut’s own words wrought forever in stone.

He laid his hand on the base of the first, completed
obelisk. It was enormous, seen so close: its thickness half again his height,
its length a dozen times that. It seemed impossible that a thing so massive
would be raised to pierce the sky.

They were already preparing it, readying the ropes and the
scaffolding. The pillar was ready on which it would rest. They must take great
care: even as wide as that hall was and open to the sky, it was forested with
pillars. A false move, the slip of a line, and the great shaft could come
crashing down, taking with it half the hall.

Men of genius though his engineers were, they fretted
appallingly over his presence there. Everyone seemed to think that if he took
to his bed and forgot everything that he had ever been or done, he would
somehow, miraculously, be well again. No use to tell them that they were fools.
They could not help but know it; and yet they persisted.

As did he. Weak though he was, he was more stubborn than
they, with excellent authority over his servants. Each day they brought him to
the temple. He lay in his litter in a shaded corner and watched the king’s
obelisks grow beautiful. Then with much shouting and straining, echoing in the
holy place, they raised first one and then the other, and set them upright
where they had been meant to go.

It was as the king had envisioned. The sun rose between
them. The light of them shone brilliant far up and down the river, marking the
site of Thebes with doubled splendor.

She herself came to see them raised, stood motionless and
exalted as they reared up within the roofless hall. She did not see Senenmut
then, which was entirely as he wished it. This moment should be unmarred by
fretting over mortal things.

~~~

But when her obelisks were raised, when she had celebrated
the feast, the culmination of her Myriad of Years, and when the Two Lands were
quiet again, returned to their round of days, she came to Senenmut.

He had not attended any of the celebrations. He would have
wished to appear, to give her honor, but his body would not allow it. He could
not rise or walk; could only lie in his bed, which he had his servants carry
out of his dim and stuffy chamber by day and lay in the garden in which he had
planted a myrrh tree, scion of those that grew in the garden of Djeser-Djeseru.
He had never loved that scent, finding it too cloying for his taste, but now it
seemed to lessen his sickness. He could breathe easier for it. When he coughed,
the pain seemed a fraction less.

When she came into the garden, he was lying in the shade in
the half-drowse that was all the sleep he could have now. He did not mind greatly.
Soon enough he would sleep and never wake.

He was propped in cushions so that he could breathe, and
draped in a linen coverlet. Like Hat-Nufer before she died, he insisted that he
be clean, bathed and shaved and made presentable, so that he did not shame his
servants.

He was glad of that insistence now, though it taxed him
sorely. The horror in his king’s eyes was for his thinness, his terrible
weakness, and not for that he was squalid and stinking of sickness.

She swept toward him in a waft of perfume, so beautiful that
he nearly wept. Her gown was embroidered with gold, her wig crowned with the
Two Ladies, Wadjit and Nekhbet, serpent-goddess, vulture-goddess, protectors of
Egypt. She must have come from some kingly duty: she had never visited him so
before, in the daylight, as king and goddess.

She knelt beside him, heedless of her gown on the raked sand
of the path. For a moment he thought that she would lift him and shake him. “I heard,”
she said, soft and furious. “At much too long last, someone had the courage to
tell me why you slighted my festival. I had thought you merely obsessed,
unwilling to leave your labors.”

“I was,” he said. His voice was barely there, but she heard
him clearly enough.

“They kept me away from you,” she said. “When I would have
summoned you, they distracted me with sudden duties, or pretended that you
could not be found. They lied to me. I’ll flay them for it. I’ll feed them to
the crocodiles.”

“Don’t,” said Senenmut. “I made them do it.”

“Even Hapuseneb? Even that prince who is greater than you?”

“Hapuseneb is a sensible man. He knows when it’s best to do
as I ask.”

She tossed her head like an angry mare. “You conspired
against me. I could put you to death for that.”

He laughed helplessly, though it racked him with coughing.
He had to stop: she was terrified, and when the blood came she gasped.