King and Goddess (55 page)

If I were writing this book now, I would write it rather
differently. I would definitely rethink Thutmose and his obscurity, reevaluate
the reasons for the obliteration of Hatshepsut’s name, and reconsider the
question of whether she was poisoned. It appears that she may have been correct
after all, and Nehsi, in his grief, may have been looking for conspiracies
where, for once, there were none.

But that would be another book. This one stands as it is, in
remembrance of the woman who was king.

Tucson, Arizona, April 2015

King and Goddess

Judith Tarr

Book View Café 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61138-530-4
Copyright © 1996 Judith Tarr

First published: Forge, 1996

Cover illustration © 2015 by Neilneil | Dreamstime.com

Production Team:

Cover Design: Pati Nagle

Proofreader: Sheila Gilluly

Formatter: Vonda N. McIntyre

This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Digital edition: 20150721vnm

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Judith Tarr’s first fantasy novel,
The Isle of Glass,
appeared in 1985, and went on to win the Crawford Award. Her space opera,
Forgotten Suns,
has just been published by Book View Café. In between, she has written historicals and historical fantasies—including World Fantasy Award nominee
Lord of the Two Lands
—and epic fantasies, some of which have been reborn as ebooks from Book View Café. A short story, “Fool’s Errand,” a prequel to
Forgotten Suns,
appeared in the January/February 2015 issue of
Analog.
She lives in Arizona with three cats, two dogs, and a herd of Lipizzan horses.

The Epona Sequence

White Mare’s Daughter

Lady of Horses

Daughter of Lir

The Shepherd Kings

Avaryan Rising Series

The Hall of the Mountain King

The Lady of Han-Gilen

A Fall of Princes

Avaryan Resplendent Series

Arrows of the Sun

Spear of Heaven

The Hound and the Falcon Series

The Isle of Glass

The Golden Horn

The Hounds of God

Novels

Ars Magica

Alamut

The Dagger and the Cross

Forgotten Suns

King and Goddess

Living in Threes

Lord of the Two Lands

A Wind in Cairo

His Majesty’s Elephant

Collection

Nine White Horses

Nonfiction

Writing Horses: The Fine Art of Getting it Right

BVC Anthologies

Beyond Grimm

Breaking Waves

Brewing Fine Fiction

Ways to Trash Your
Writing Career

Dragon Lords and Warrior
Women

Rocket Boy and the Geek Girls

The Shadow Conspiracy

The Shadow Conspiracy

The Shadow Conspiracy II

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The Epona Sequence, Book Four

Judith Tarr

www.bookviewcafe.com

Book View Café Edition
June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61138-524-3
Copyright © 1999 Judith Tarr

THE FOREIGN KINGS

On the day the world changed, Iry escaped her nurse to
play in Huy the scribe’s workroom. Huy never minded. If he was busy writing in
his sunlit corner, palette and pens to hand and roll of papyrus on his lap, Iry
would play in a corner of her own, and be very quiet, and for a reward, when he
was done with his writing, he might tell her a story. He told marvelous
stories. Or better yet, he would let her draw a word, or even two, on a bit of
scrap.

Words were wonderful. They looked like beasts or birds or
even people, waves of water or hills or houses or the eye of the sun, but they
meant so many different things. Iry wanted to be a scribe when she grew up,
though that meant she would have to grow up to be a man, and that, her brothers
told her haughtily, was not possible.

Iry’s brothers were dreadfully haughty. They were all older,
men or almost men, and they had all gone away to war with Father and the levies
from the villages and their cousin Kemni. They looked down from a great height
on small fools of sisters. Brothers were like that, Kemni said. Kemni was as
old and as full of himself as they were, but he was much less haughty. Iry
liked Kemni; she was sorry he had gone off to war instead of staying and
keeping her and Huy company.

Today, quite a long while after Father and the others had
gone, Iry played quietly in a patch of sun while Huy frowned and muttered over
his papyrus. On it he was writing the accounts for the holding, full of tiny
crabbed columns, and his eyes were not what they had been. Sometimes he asked
Iry to look at the scrap he was copying from and tell him what the words or the
numbers were, so that he could write them on the great heavy roll in his lap.

He had not done that today. Iry had watched him for a while,
admiring the way the sun shone on his bald brown head. Then she had engrossed
herself in a game. She had brought her youngest brother’s wooden army with her,
a forbidden pleasure but Huy never said anything, and built a house of papyrus
scraps. Some of the army lived inside, being lords and servants. Some were
outside practicing in the fields. The great prize, the wooden chariot that
Father had brought back from the foreign kings’ city, drawn by wooden horses,
she set to galloping past the fields as fast as the horses—and her hand—would
go. She liked to make the chariot go fast on its rattling wheels. The terrible
figure in it, the foreigner from the land called Retenu with his brush of black
beard and his fierce painted scowl, rocked and swayed as the chariot raced. Iry
would have liked to make him fall out and break his neck, but that would get
her a beating when her brother came home.

She settled instead for stopping the chariot and standing
the charioteer in a field, and letting the Egyptians with their spears and
wooden swords practice killing him. The Retenu were bad men, Father said. They
had swept into Egypt when Great-Great-Grandfather was young, and taken the
whole of the Lower Kingdom, and made themselves kings. “Kings!” Father would
burst out in the evening when he had had a little more beer than Mother liked
to see him drink, pacing the dining hall like a leopard in a cage. “They are no
kings. They are interlopers—invaders—foreigners.”

“Conquerors,” Mother would say in her cool sweet voice, but
with the hint of a smile. She always smiled at Father’s fits of temper. “They
do rule us, after all. Yes, even you.”

Father used to snarl and fret and seethe until she coaxed
him into her calming embrace. But then, not too long ago, he had stopped snarling.
Word had come: the king, the true king, the Great House of Thebes, lord of the
Upper Kingdom, had mounted an army and come down the river to take back the
Lower Kingdom. Father had lit up with joy. So had Mother, but visibly less so
when Father gathered the levies and his sons and his sister’s son who had come
bearing the news, and marched away to the war.

He was coming back soon. The Great House and his armies—including
Father’s part of it—had come to Avaris, the conquerors’ own city, and set about
taking it. Everybody expected the war to be over after that, and the Retenu
driven back into the far cold country where they belonged, and Egypt would be
the Two Lands again, both Upper and Lower.

Iry let her wooden soldiers kill the bearded Retenu. He lay
stiff at their feet, still scowling his terrible scowl. She regarded him with a
frown of her own. Retenu should not have funerals so that they could live
forever beyond the horizon; they should die like dogs, Father said, and wither
away to dust and be forgotten. But if she embalmed him and wrapped him, he
could be a proper Egyptian corpse. Then she could give him a funeral of
surpassing solemnity.

As she looked about for something that could serve as mummy-wrappings—her
own clothing not being possible, since she wore none, and nothing else either
but the amulet about her neck and the blue luck-bead about her middle—people
began to make a great commotion outside. Servants ran back and forth, shouting,
and some of them were shrieking.

Iry sat very still. At first when she went missing, her
nurse had carried on appallingly, but now everybody knew where to look. And she
had not done anything before she came here, to get people so upset—not at all
like the time she had let the heifer out because she lowed so piteously, and
the bull had happened to be in the nearest field, and had broken down the house
gate to get at her. Iry had come straight from her nursery to Huy’s workroom.
To be sure, she had the wooden army with her, but the one who would object to
that was far away, fighting with a real and fleshly army.