King and Goddess (5 page)

Nehsi paused. “And this?” He tilted his head toward the
baskets and the swaths of drying linen.

“It will wait,” Nutnefer said. She tugged at his hand.
“Quick! Time’s flying.”

The queen inspected the women whom Nehsi had brought to
her. She had taken pains with her appearance: had put on one of her state robes
and the tall crown like plumes of gold, and under that an elaborate wig. Her
jewels were pure gold, her collar as broad as a breastplate, the wealth of a
kingdom weighing down her neck and shoulders.

She received her servant and his hoard of living treasure in
one of the audience chambers on a throne of faience and gold, with her maids
about her and a company of guards standing at rest along the walls. It was no
more state than she was entitled to, but for receiving half a dozen trembling
maidservants it was slightly overdone.

Nehsi was wiser than to remark on it. For what she intended,
which was to terrify his charges into silence, it succeeded admirably. One,
ironically enough the most robust-seeming of the lot, looked ready to faint.

She did not disgrace him, however. Nor did the rest. They
entered in procession, knelt each as he had instructed, and did obeisance. He
observed them out of the corner of his eye. The center of his focus was the
queen.

The twins had guided him well. All six whom they had aided
him to choose were young—none more than three years past first womanhood—but
skilled in the arts of love. They were all beautiful, all lissome and graceful
of body. Most could sing well, and one sang remarkably. All played an
instrument, none badly. And every one was prepared to offer allegiance to the
queen whose whim had raised her fortunes.

Nehsi named each as she came forward, with her age and rank
and service and her particular talents. They were all servants, some of the
palace, some in lords’ houses. Two had been noblemen’s concubines, but one lord
had died and the other set all his women aside when he married a jealous wife.
Four were named Hathor, for the goddess of love and beauty. One was Meritre:
Beloved of Re.

The last was named Isis for the mother of Horus. She was the
youngest, only a season or two older than the queen, and in Nehsi’s estimation
the loveliest. She had a face like a flower, and soft ivory skin unkissed by
the sun, and masses of blue-black curling hair that she kept fastidiously clean
and scented with myrrh. Like the rest she was naked but for a string of beads
about the hips, but she had made herself a collar of lotus-blossoms that all
but hid her little pink-tipped breasts.

The Hathors stood huddled together like heifers, staring
with wide brown eyes at the terrible golden queen. Meritre seemed above such
folly: her chin was lifted, her lips tight with scorn. She was the eldest, the
one whose lord had died, it was said, in her embrace.

She had neither confirmed nor denied the rumor. Nehsi
reckoned her too proud to have much sense, but there was passion in her glance
as it flicked upon him, a smoldering promise that he knew better than to
acknowledge. If she was meant for the king, the least he would lose for
trespassing with her would be his two best jewels.

If the king must have a teacher, she would do admirably. The
subtleties of courts and kings were beyond her. But in the bedchamber she would
have few equals.

Beyond a word or two of greeting and inquiry, the queen
ignored her. She was more interested in the Hathors, who had recovered enough
to stammer out their names and the places from which they had come: the house
of the queen’s maids, the household of a lord, one child of a woman who had
sold herself on streetcorners but who had found herself a patron of ample means
and little concern for his lover’s antecedents. The queen’s rank and power made
them stammer and stumble and cling to one another more tightly than ever.

Isis, like Meritre, preferred to stand erect and a little
apart, but not perceptibly for scorn. Like the Hathors she shivered as she
darted glances at the queen, but she was not terrified into immobility. She
kept her eyes lowered, seeming unaware of how alluring she was with the long
lashes on the ivory cheeks.

Hatshepsut left the Hathors in what might have been relief.
They had little of intelligence to say. Not, Nehsi thought, that the king would
care for witty conversation in the bedchamber, but a woman who would teach him
the finer arts would need more than a halting tongue and trembling knees.

“Isis,” said Hatshepsut.

The girl stiffened slightly but did not look up. “Lady,” she
murmured.

“Here, look at me,” the queen said with the exasperation of
five times’ repetition.

Isis lifted her eyes. They were large and dark, less heavily
painted with kohl than most women in Egypt preferred.

Their expression was at once wary and trusting: wary of the
queen’s majesty, trusting her to do nothing actively dreadful.

“What were you before you came to me?” Hatshepsut asked her.

Nehsi had told the queen already, but neither he nor Isis
said so. “Lady,” Isis said in her soft sweet voice, “before I came to this
place I was a servant in your own household, the least of your many children,
attendant of an attendant in your majesty’s bath.”

The queen tilted her head slightly under the weight of the
tall crown. “And how, may I ask, did you acquire expertise in the pleasuring of
men, if you were a servant of servants in my bath?”

The faintest of delicate flushes stained the ivory cheeks.
“Lady, I have only been a servant of servants for a season. Before that I was a
maid to Lord Hapi’s wife. Lord Hapi was—is—a man who prefers his ladies young.
He loves to teach them, lady, and to give them pleasure in such measure as they
give him.”

Hatshepsut’s brows had risen remarkably. So too had Nehsi’s
when he first heard the child’s story. Lord Hapi was a man of late middle
years, soft and rolling in fat, with a reputation for subtlety in the poisonous
games of the court. His wife was older than he, as wiry thin as he was roundly
plump, with all the sweetness and gentility of a hungry crocodile. Astonishing
to think of that man, married to that woman, as a beloved preceptor to his
wife’s young maids.

“He . . . taught you to give men pleasure?”
Hatshepsut asked.

“Oh, yes,” said Isis. “His own predilections are for maids
whose breasts have barely budded; but he takes great pleasure in preparing them
for the service of men who prefer their women less youthfully tender. It’s a
gift he gives, and with great pleasure, too.”

“And you,” said the queen, “have grown a little old for
him.”

Isis looked sad. “Yes. Yes, when my breasts grew—it was so
sudden, lady; it was distressing—he lost his passion for me. He was very good
to me, lady. He saw me placed in your majesty’s service. He does that for all
his ladies: not here, not before this, lady, but in good service and with fine
expectations.”

The queen’s eyes narrowed. “Yes? Did he say why he chose to
send you here?”

“Why,” said Isis with all appearance of innocence, “yes, he
did. He said that I deserved better than to disappear among some lordling’s concubines.
I could please the king, he said, but he thought that you, lady, might need me
more.”

“What need would I have of you?” Hatshepsut demanded.

Isis blinked at her vehemence, but did not flinch. “Lady, a
queen needs many things. How may I serve you?”

“You could,” said Hatshepsut, “be a trap. Still . . .
Lord Hapi? What has he to gain?”

“Your favor, one would suppose,” Nehsi answered, though she
had not directed the question at him, “and perhaps a useful degree of
gratitude.”

“No,” said Hatshepsut. “It’s too subtle. If he had meant to
throw her across my path, he would have placed her higher than attendant of an
attendant in my bath. He was disposing of her as he best might.”

“With maybe some small hope that she would come to your
attention,” Nehsi said. “Why not? Forcing her on you would dispose you against
him. In this he lost nothing and stood the chance of gaining much.”

She frowned. “Are you telling me that I should choose this
one?”

“I think,” said Nehsi carefully, “that you will choose as
you are best pleased to do.”

“Don’t be politic with me,” she said sharply. “It makes me
feel a fool.”

He set his lips together and bowed.

She rose from her throne, moving with slow grace under the
crown. The Hathors clung together all the more tightly. Meritre lifted her chin
a fraction higher. Isis watched calmly. Was that a gleam of avarice as her eyes
rested on the queen’s adornments? Or was it only the glitter of gold, dazzling
her?

The queen walked down the line of them. She paused before
each, searching the face turned up to hers. The Hathors tried to flinch away.
She caught each, and held her till she would look up.

She shook her head. “Too shy,” she said. “Too much in fear
of royalty. Nehsi, was this meant for a mockery?”

“Hardly, lady,” he said. “They were bold enough in front of
me.”

Meritre sniffed loudly. “They didn’t think. The palace lured
them—it never occurred to them to recall who lives there.”

“Did it occur to you?” the queen inquired.

“Immediately,” said Meritre. “What do you want of us? You
can’t have need of our particular skills, surely.”

“I admire a sweet singer,” Hatshepsut said.

“None of them sings more sweetly than I,” said Meritre. “But
there are singers among your attendants who put me to shame. What we all have
in common, which is the pleasing of men—what is your need of that, great lady
and queen? Is it true what they say, that no man has yet touched you? Are you
looking for a teacher?”

“You are more clever than I thought,” Hatshepsut said. “No,
not I. The one I would have you teach . . . he likes his women
sweet-spoken and biddable. Or so I’m told.”

“Then he must not be overly fond of you,” said Meritre.

At least one of the Hathors sucked in her breath. Nehsi held
his own.

Hatshepsut smiled. “I, on the other hand, have rather a
fondness for insolence in a servant. It’s a challenge, you see. To turn
insolence into respect; to tame the crocodile.” Before any of them could
respond, she took Isis by the hand. “Come, my friend. I have a task for you.”

Isis had the grace not to look unduly complacent. Meritre
shrugged. The Hathors burst into tears.

Hatshepsut shook her head at them. “Find them something to
do, Nehsi. I’ll be needing more bath attendants, I suppose. But this one”—she
indicated Meritre—“may try her hand among the maids of my chamber.”

Meritre sniffed again. No gratitude there. Hatshepsut
laughed, a startling sound if one was not accustomed to it: it was as free as a
boy’s, untrammeled by maidenly delicacy. Still leading Isis by the hand, she
left Nehsi to contend with the rest.

The Hathors, freed of the constraint of the queen’s
presence, were not shy at all. They screeched rather alarmingly, in fact. He
handed off two to grinning guards, thrust the third into Meritre’s
unsympathetic grasp, and took the last in his own charge, clapped a hand over
her mouth to stop her shrieking and carried her off to the queen’s baths.

Senenmut was surprised, not that the queen was a quick study—he
had rather thought so—but that the teaching of her was not as unpleasant as he
had expected. She showed him no great respect, but she took his instruction
without argument, and suffered him to correct her when there was need.

There was not, much. She learned swiftly and she learned
well. It gave her rather too much pleasure, and she was rather too forthright
about it, but that was easy enough to forgive.

As elegantly as she dressed, as beautifully as she was
painted and plucked and oiled to seem a lady, she was at heart no lady at all.
Someone had failed in the teaching of her. She lacked womanly discretion. Her
rich laugh was a boy’s, and she had little restraint in indulging it.

Senenmut was too often its target. “You are a brilliant
scribe,” she said to him once, “and a fair to middling teacher. But the airs
you put on—Hathor! How silly you look with your nose in the air. Where did you
learn to be so haughty?”

“I begin to think,” Senenmut said acidly, “that all the
world colludes in taxing me with arrogance. I’ll grovel, O living Isis, but
only after you’re done with this passage from Imhotep.”

She grinned at him, unrepentant, and rattled off the passage
so quickly that the words ran together. But she read it accurately, as he had
expected that she would. Almost in the same breath she said, “I didn’t say
arrogant. I said haughty. You carry yourself like a prince of princes. Though
some of it must be your nose. A falcon would be proud of such a weapon.”

He rubbed it, caught himself, scowled. “Not every living
creature can be as beautiful as you, lady.”

“Oh, I’m not beautiful,” she said. “I’m interesting. I much
prefer that. Beauty can be crashingly dull.”

Was that an apology of sorts? He rather doubted it.
Hatshepsut was queen. She did not apologize.

~~~

Every morning he went to the palace. Every evening he
returned to his father’s house. He was not with the queen for all or even most
of the day. She had duties and pleasures that had no place for him. While she
indulged in those, he sat among the queen’s scribes in their cramped and
antiquated hall, doing whatever the chief of scribes saw fit for him to do.

He was given no preference, offered no favors for that he
was the queen’s instructor in reading and writing. Nor did her scribes trouble
to envy him, that he could discern. They were all men of middle years, and some
were elderly. They had been in service in the palace since long before their
lady was born. They were rooted in it, bound to it, oblivious to the world
beyond their cracked and faded walls.