King and Goddess (54 page)

Only a few of the physicians lingered, and a handful of
priests, and her maids still huddled in a corner, too stark with grief and fear
to join the others in the feast. They were nothing and no one.

Hatshepsut was awake. She fought off sleep, he suspected,
lest she miss any moment of the life that was left to her. When he knelt beside
her, she took his hand in her two thin cold ones. “You look so grim,” she said.
“Don’t grieve for me. I go to be Osiris.”

“I grieve that you leave untimely,” he said.

“It is not untimely,” she said, “when the gods allow it to be.”

He stared at her. “Where did you learn such resignation? The
lady I know would have been raging against her murderer, seeing to it that he
was punished.”

“He has been punished,” she said serenely. “He stood aside
while I ruled for years as king. Usurper he may think me, terrible creature, a
female who dared to wear the crowns and bear the titles that only a male should
claim; but not even he can deny that I ruled well. I brought peace to Egypt,
and prosperity beyond any that it has known before. No one can say that these
two kingdoms fared ill because their king was a woman.”

“Ah, lady,” said Nehsi. “You were always wiser than I.”

“Of course,” she said. “I am your king.”

He wept then, without warning, unable to slow or stop it.
She held him till he was done. It should have felt like presumption, and yet it
did not.

When he lifted his head, she smiled at him. “Better?” she
asked, sounding for all the world like Bastet when one of the children had
taken a tumble.

“Better,” he said roughly. His throat was sore. “Oh, gods.
Everything is so dark, with your light gone out of it.”

Her smile warmed and deepened. “I’ll be with you as I can.
Listen for my wings. Look for my eyes in the dimness. Bless my name then, and
remember me.”

“Do you think that I could ever forget?”

She shrugged, the barest lifting of a shoulder. “The living
go on living. The dead fade and are forgotten.”

“Never,” he said fiercely. “Never!”

“I do hope not,” she said. Her voice was hardly more than a
whisper, a murmur in shadow. “I meant to be remembered forever and ever. All
that I did, I did for that. And for Egypt. Always for Egypt. Remember my name.
Remember me.”

He named her as he must always do, so that he might
strengthen her memory. “Maatkare,” he said. “Hatshepsut.”

She smiled. “Remember,” she said again. “Remember me.”

He saw the life slip out of her: the dimming of light in her
eyes, the passing of breath, even—or so he imagined—the shape of the
ka
that was the shadowy image of her. It
paused in its going, and met his stare with eyes that shone lambent in the
gloom. He bowed low and low. “Fare you well and forever,” he said, “my lady and
king.”

Menkheperre Thutmose stood in the great pillared court of
Djeser-Djeseru. Men labored feverishly about him, yet he stood quiet, smiling a
faint, almost languid smile. He smiled so when one of his ladies had pleased
him well, or when he saw the heads and hands and private members of his enemies
heaped at his feet; for he was a great warrior, the greatest that the Two Lands
had ever seen.

They called him Thutmose the Great, the mighty one, the
scourge of Asia. He was not as young as he had been, but he was strong. He
intended to live for many years yet, and to spend much of that life on the
battlefield where he was most vividly alive. The rest of it he would spend
ruling in Egypt, being the king that for a score of years he had been forbidden
to be.

Her face was all about him, her name carved on every wall
and pillar and statue. In this place of all places in Egypt, there was no
escaping the name or the memory of that one whom he had both hated
and—yes—guiltily, tremblingly adored, Maatkare Hatshepsut.

His mother had held him back for long years. But Isis was
dead. They were all dead, all those loyal ministers, Thuty the Treasurer, Ineni
the builder, Nehsi the Nubian whose presence had loomed huge and shadow-dark; for
whom even in death Thutmose knew a shiver of apprehension.

He thrust it down and set his foot on it. Nehsi was dead. So
too was Isis, that shy and gentle creature with her surprising core of
stubbornness. Only the day before he had laid her lovingly in her tomb, opened
her senses to the life beyond living, and sealed her against the depredations
of thieves. Now he made certain that her soul would be as safe beyond the
horizon as her body was in the valley of the dead.

His smile widened as the workman nearest him, wielding
hammer and chisel, put out the eyes of a sphinx that wore Hatshepsut’s face.
Her name was gone already from its plinth. Men beyond toppled statues with a
splendid roaring and crashing. Others advanced through the temple like an army
across a field of battle, cutting out her name and the name of her cursed
arrogant fool of a lover wherever they might find it.

A runner halted panting in front of him and flung himself
down. “Great king! Foreman bids you, if it pleases you, come with me.”

Thutmose wasted no words on him, but followed where he led.
Through the temple first, but out of it thereafter, up toward the loom of the
cliff. As they went they passed throngs of laborers, ringing of hammers,
shattering of stone.

It was scarcely less quiet under the sky, but as they went
on, the clamor muted. When it was almost gone, Thutmose heard it raised anew,
just ahead of him. They clambered up a last steep slope and came to a halt.

There stood the foreman of a division of his workmen,
trembling with either fear or eagerness. There was no mistaking what he pointed
to: the shaft of a tomb.

Men had hacked open the door already, but waited for
Thutmose before they ventured within. They had the look that men of the
daylight always had when they came face to face with the dead: white, shocked,
afraid. Thutmose shook his head at their frailty. “Open it,” he said.

They flung themselves flat in obeisance, then did as he
bade.

It was a splendid tomb, as one might expect; laden with
golden treasure that Thutmose could well and properly use. Great queens had
been buried in less opulence than this commoner who had shared the bed of a
king. He who should at most have been buried among princes on the other side of
the cliff, had presumed so far as to set himself within sight of
Djeser-Djeseru. From the angle and length of the shaft, his body might well
rest beneath it. Thutmose could feel the bulk of the temple overhead; fancied
that he heard a distant and muffled crash as yet another statue fell in shards.

He turned his mind from that, and even from the gold that
gleamed in the light of the foreman’s torch. A sarcophagus stood in the center
of the tomb-chamber, sealed as was proper, overlaid with words of guard and
protection.

Thutmose, living Horus, king and god, had no care for the
feeble magic of the dead. At his command, his men set lever to the massive lid,
and thrust it up and away. The wooden coffin lay bared within.

One enterprising fellow with an axe hacked away at it.
Splinters flew, rich with gilding. Then at last the wrapped body lay before
them, sheathed and heaped in amulets, with a crown of withered flowers laid
upon its breast.

A kind of madness flared up in Thutmose. He took up the dead
thing in his own arms, lifted it high, and flung it down.

It broke like a bundle of reeds. He caught his breath;
someone cried out, curse or mere astonishment, he never knew.

It had weighed as light as dried reeds, and shattered as
reeds shatter. For reeds it was, bound and shaped into the image of a man. No
dry dead bones crumbled inside of it. In the jars of the vitals were mockeries:
dates preserved in honey, a handful of stones, the mummified body of a cat, a
bag of barley flour.

Thutmose stared at them. The rage that had possessed him
heretofore had been cold, clear, and very practical. He would preserve his
mother’s safety among the dead by destroying her enemy; and he would destroy
that memory among the living, so that he and he alone would be remembered as
king and god. It had been, and would still be, a beautiful revenge.

That had been cold anger, cherished for forty years, until
at last he could let it loose. This was a white heat. Senenmut the arrogant,
Senenmut the accursed, had dared even beyond death to mock a king.

And yet Thutmose laughed. “Oh, you reckoned yourself
clever,” he said to the face that was painted on the wall beyond the
sarcophagus: deep-lined hook-nosed unlovely face with its long wry mouth. “But
I have won the war. I have slain her among the living and among the dead. She
shall be utterly forgotten. None hereafter shall remember her.”

The painted face went on smiling, mocking him, even as a
workman scoured it from the wall. You may try, it said. You may even think you
succeed. But you will never find my body where it is buried; and you will never
destroy her utterly. I have seen to that: I, Senenmut, who was born a
tradesman’s son in Thebes.

“Air,” Thutmose said, “and empty wind. You are dead. So too
is she. Dead for everlasting.”

Even through the clamor of workmen, the hacking, the
chipping, the shattering of stone, he heard a flutter as of wings, a flicker of
laughter.
So you dream,
it said,
O king of vaunts and battles. So you well
may dream.
And all about that dry dead voice, the murmur of her name, the
name that Thutmose would have caused to vanish from the earth.
Maatkare,
it whispered.
Hatshepsut.

Maatkare Hatshepsut was not the first or the only female
king of Egypt, but she is the most famous, and certainly the most notorious.
Her story, its events and characters, needs little embellishment in order to
“work” in modern narrative terms. I have had to invent almost nothing, nor was
it necessary to enliven the story with invented protagonists. Senenmut and his
family, Nehsi the Nubian, Hapuseneb the priest, the two Thutmoses, Isis the
concubine, all are historical figures. Even Senenmut’s little red mare was a
real horse; her mummy was found in the “public” tomb of her master, along with
the mummies of his parents and his brothers and his brother’s wife. Of all the
characters in this novel, only Nehsi’s wife and children, and the occasional
spear-carrier, are fictitious.

I did choose to invent the third tomb of Senenmut, in
addition to the two that are known, and the deception of his “official” burial.
Likewise there is no evidence that the concubine Isis, mother of Thutmose III,
was ever a servant of Hatshepsut or had anything to do with the then-queen; and
the princess Neferure is in no way known to have died in childbirth. Nor is it
known for certain that Thutmose had anything to do with the death of
Hatshepsut, although this has been proposed by more than one scholar.

No one knows, either, why it took Thutmose twenty years
after Hatshepsut’s death to wreak his terrible vengeance on her memory. He was
a master of biding his time, but that seems rather excessive. Two decades seem
time enough for certain powerful and perhaps intimidating friends of the female
king to have grown old and died; perhaps Thutmose did swear an oath or make a
promise, which he could not break until after the death of the one to whom it
was sworn. Whatever the reason, it is one of the great oddities of history that
a man of such genius, perhaps the greatest of all the warrior Pharaohs of
Egypt, lived the first twenty-odd years of his life in near-total obscurity,
completely overshadowed by the power and personality of the woman who dared to
be king—then, a full twenty years and more after her death, turned suddenly and
viciously against her.

~~~

In spite of Hatshepsut’s fame, few books have actually
been devoted to her life and history. General histories of Egypt, of course,
never fail to mention her. Accounts of the great trading voyage to Punt are
frequent and detailed, as are descriptions of her mortuary temple at Deir
al-Bahri: the temple which she herself called Djeser-Djeseru. There is a very
good if rather opinionated summary in Barbara Mertz,
Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs
(New York, 1978)—readers may know
this popular Egyptologist more readily under her pseudonyms of Elizabeth Peters
and Barbara Michaels. Mertz is one of those who postulates that Thutmose III
had a hand in Hatshepsut’s demise.

As for the peculiar beauty of this great queen and Pharaoh,
the dedicated museum-goer need only visit the Metropolitan Museum in New York
City, a whole room of which is dedicated to the works and images of Hatshepsut.
Her face once seen is difficult to forget. The resemblance to portraits of her
co-king, her nephew and stepson, is striking. There can be no doubt that they
were of the same family. They seem to have shared a similar personality as
well, though hers turned conspicuously to the arts of peace, and his, perhaps
in rebellion, to those of war. Her achievements alone would have rendered her
remarkable, but even more striking is the degree of dominance she exercised for
so long over her brilliant and bellicose fellow king.

A novelist, like a scholar, can only guess the reasons why.
Unlike the scholar, however, the novelist is privileged to choose among the
possibilities and to elect the one that seems most suited to the requirements
of her narrative. In the case of Hatshepsut, that process of selection proved
in the end quite simple, and needed almost no invention. The history itself is
almost pure story.

In the New Millennium

Since this book was written, Egyptian archaeology (even
through the upheavals of revolution) has entered a new golden age. The mummy of
Hatshepsut seems to have been found, and much new scholarship has been
undertaken. The most famous of the women kings of Egypt (who may have been considerably
more numerous than previously suspected) has indeed been remembered, and
studied, and celebrated by new generations of historians and scholars.