King and Goddess (6 page)

He regarded them with a kind of horror. Their existence was
little different from that of scribes in the House of Life, but it seemed
notably worse. It was dull; it led nowhere. Day after day, copying letters,
rendering them into the language of this embassy or that, recording accounts of
the queen’s household, keeping the records in endless and exacting detail.

Senenmut endured it because he did not intend to do it for
his life long. He could silence the clatter of his mind and become, as it were,
one with the march of words, each glyph drawn swift and sure in his clear firm
hand that had won him such praise in the Temple of Amon. There were some, and
not all of them ignorant, who said that words were magic, and the glyphs
themselves gave it shape.

He had studied little of the hidden arts. They did not
engage him. But in those long slow hours while the sun tracked across the worn
tiling of the floor, he began to understand the allure of the word without
flesh or substance, simply the power of itself.

It was not, nevertheless, enough. One day as he came from
the scribes’ hall to the queen’s lesson-chamber, he found no one there. All her
chambers were likewise empty; except for a bored guard or two and a maid
desultorily sweeping the floor, they were deserted.

Senenmut stood in the outermost antechamber, at a loss. The
sweeper was mute and simple. She had barely looked up as he passed.

This was a child’s nightmare, or a courtier’s: to find
oneself in the palace, but the palace was empty, the king and queen departed,
and nothing left but dust and sunlight. There had been no word spoken of the
queen’s departing for another city or another palace; no rumor of a royal
progress. She was simply gone.

After loss came anger. She could at least have informed him
that she had no need of him, or told him where else he was to come. He might
have nothing better to do than wait about for her, but in merest courtesy she
might have left a message.

He was in a fine pitch of temper by the time he approached
the guard on the outermost door. The lout had been snoring when he came in, was
awake now but barely.

He did not seem to understand plain Egyptian. “The queen,”
Senenmut gritted through clenched teeth. “Your lady, the Great Royal Wife, the
living Isis. Where is she?”

“Out,” said the guard, yawning and loosing a belch that was
purest insolence.

Senenmut’s fists clenched on his scribe’s satchel. “Out? Out
where?”

“On the river,” the guard said. “In a boat.”

Which could mean a journey of any duration at all, for any
purpose. Senenmut was too furious to manage another question. He knew more or
less where the royal barges were moored, in the river outside the palace walls.
He ran from inner palace to outer palace to river, hardly aware of his speed
until he stumbled to a halt on the quay.

A scribe never ran if he could help it. Mostly he sat and
wrote, and others ran for him. Senenmut crouched, gasping for breath. Only
slowly did he become aware that he was watched: there were a number of people
about, most with the air of lofty ennui that marked a courtier. Those under
parasols, being waited on by servants with fans, were elaborately bored. The
lesser luminaries were engrossed in finding what shelter they could from the
sun.

They were all waiting as if they had been doing it since
time began. Since morning at least, and for much the same reason as Senenmut:
they had services to perform, but had met with empty rooms and insolent guards.

One of those who waited was less pretentious than the rest.
He was not young, but neither was he old. He wore the robe and the emblems of a
priest of Amon and was attended by a gaggle of younger priests, but he squatted
in a patch of shade with no more dignity than a laborer in the fields. He even
had a jar of beer, which he held out as Senenmut stood staring. “Here, boy,” he
said. “You look thirsty.”

In a calmer mood Senenmut would have declined to do anything
so openly vulgar, but at the moment he did not care. He lowered himself beside
the priest, tucking up his legs as a scribe learned to do, and took the jar.
The beer startled him. “It’s good!” he said.

The priest grinned. He was missing a handful of teeth; the
rest were decidedly unlovely. Still it was a remarkably appealing grin. “What
did you expect? Back-alley cat piss?”

Senenmut choked. The priest pounded him on the back. He
gasped and gagged, hiccoughed, swallowed mightily. His eyes were streaming; his
nose itched. He glowered at the priest. “You have no dignity,” he said.

“None whatsoever,” the priest agreed. He reclaimed the jar,
downed another draught. His eyes were bright and wicked. “They call me
Hapuseneb,” he said.

“Senenmut,” said Senenmut somewhat grudgingly.

The priest nodded, still grinning. “Ah: I thought so. The
young scribe who enjoys the favor of Seti-Nakht. You shouldn’t feel too
insulted that the queen wants you for a schoolmaster. She’s young but she’s
quick, and she’ll not let herself play weak second to the king. Serve her well,
and you’ll go far.”

Senenmut nearly dashed the remnants of the beer in the man’s
face. Priest or no, he far overstepped his bounds.

He did not seem alarmed by Senenmut’s expression. “There
now,” he said. “Learn a lesson from an old courtier. Bluntness can be the best
weapon of all, and truth more dangerous than any deception. People who tell the
truth, you see, are difficult. They can’t be talked round. They don’t yield to
threats, nor will they tell a lie when it would best serve them. The common run
of courtiers find them appalling.”

“It would seem to me,” Senenmut said, “that such people
would die early and unpleasantly.”

“That’s the other half of the lesson,” Hapuseneb said.
“Always tell the truth, but always tell it from a position of power. Show no
fear. Look even the king in the eye, and never think it insolence.”

“Dangerous advice,” Senenmut said, “for a cocky boy whom you
have never seen before.”

Hapuseneb laughed and saluted him. “There! You see? You know
it. You’re not as cocky as you used to be, are you? Waiting on kings can do
that. There’s no contending with a king for sheer and headlong arrogance.”

“What of queens? I’ll wager there’s one who puts kings to
shame.”

“She does, at that,” Hapuseneb said. He peered under his
hand at the river. The sun was descending from noon; in an hour, maybe a little
more, it would shine direct into his eyes. “Then again,” he said, “it takes a
king to drag his entire household off at dawn to hunt river-birds, and never relieve
his lesser servants of the obligation to wait on him. So we wait, and he hunts
ducks in the reeds.”

“Gods may do as they please,” Senenmut said.

“So devout,” said Hapuseneb. “The gods must love you.” He
reached under his robe and drew out a packet. “Here, I’ve dates, and a bit of
cheese. Shall we have a feast?”

Why not? thought Senenmut. His anger had lost itself
somewhere. This untypical priest was refreshing. Intelligent too, and amusing.
Altogether he was excellent company.

If one had to wait about while the queen indulged her
husband’s whim, there were worse ways than this, sitting on the quay by the
palace with courtiers either sneering or looking on incredulous, sharing dates
and cheese and beer with a priest of Amon. Senenmut had bread in a napkin, his
mother’s good baking; it was received with delight. They shared it back and
forth, eating till they were replete.

~~~

The sun rode low when the king came back, riding the
current down the river. There had been a wind, but with the approach of evening
it had died to a whisper. The last heat of the day lay like a living presence
on city and quay: a great slow-breathing animal, heavy with sleep.

Senenmut started out of a drowse. Hapuseneb was still
snoring. Others of those who waited had moved away from the riverside, forming
in ranks as if they had been in court.

The priests and the scribe found themselves set well apart.
Since some of the priests out of their season in the temple were courtiers,
there was a degree of irony in that.

It was irony also that the priests were farther upriver than
the rest, and therefore had a clearer view of the fleet as it approached the
quay. Prows and masts were gilded, and the oars likewise, prodigal of wealth as
only royalty could be. Strains of music floated over the water, harp and flute
and drum, tambour and sistrum, and the high sweet voice of a singer.

Senenmut did not trouble to count the boats in the fleet.
Most were full of courtiers or servants. Only one mattered: the great golden
barge that rode before the rest, long and broad as a hall in the palace,
crowded with oarsmen, musicians, fan-bearers, people trained to fetch this
dainty or that. The cooks rode beside and just behind the barge with their
oven-fires lit and savory scents wafting on the faint hint of breeze.

As long as it had been since he and Hapuseneb divided the
last of the bread, he forgot the growling in his stomach to stare with a wholly
different hunger at the man who stood in the prow of the barge. There was a
golden canopy amidships, and a pair of golden thrones set under it, and the
queen in one with her maids behind her.

But the king, it seemed, had grown restless. He had left his
throne. He wore the Blue Crown, the crown of a warrior, and a fine white kilt
belted with gold, and golden sandals.

He was not a tall man, nor a particularly prepossessing one
except for the crown he wore. His face was like his sister-wife’s, oval,
delicate in features except for a noble jut of nose. His body was lightly but
compactly built, his shoulders wide, well-muscled and strong. A woman might
find him attractive. Senenmut had no such thoughts, nor would he allow himself
to think them.

He was staring at the living god, Horus on earth, lord of
the Red Land and the Black Land, Great House of Egypt, Thutmose son of Thutmose
of the line of Ahmose. The living god was a man with a stern and rather chilly
face and a voice rough-edged as if he had honed it on the battlefield,
exchanging some pleasantry with one of the princes privileged to stand behind
him. He was a warrior king, a leader of armies: that much everyone knew of him.
He looked as if he hated to be still, hated worse to vex himself with the
consequentialities of state.

His eyes were quick, as brightly alive as his face was stern.
It was a mask, then, a trained thing. What it must do to a man to be king and
god, to be constrained to a life of perpetual and unrelenting ceremony . . .

Senenmut had never thought such thoughts before. It came of
sitting next to the priest of Amon, full of his beer and wanting badly to piss.
But a man could hardly aim a stream into the river, with the king sailing right
past him.

The king did not appear to see the people gathered on the
quay. The barge had barely touched the bank before he leaped out, striding past
rows of men flung suddenly on their faces, with his servants scrambling to
follow.

The queen conducted herself with more decorum. Among the
servants who followed her from the boat were several with bows and quivers of
arrows, and strings of fat geese and ducks and long-legged wading birds. There
would be a feast in the palace tonight.

She did not look as if she had quarreled with her husband.
Her expression was serene to boredom, her movements languid, unhurried. Bearers
waited with a golden chair to carry her to the palace. She stepped into it
without visible reluctance. They carried her away.

One of her servants, a maid whom Senenmut had not seen
before, left the company of her fellows and approached the scribe and the
priests. She spoke as if the words were grains of barley flung at a flock of
geese. “He wants to go hunting again tomorrow. She’s to go with him. You’ll be
here at dawn, ready to embark. Be prepared to be amusing.”

Senenmut opened his mouth, but shut it again. Hapuseneb
smiled his gaptoothed smile. “We can always be amusing. Are they fighting
again?”

“They never fight,” the maid said frigidly.

“I’m sure,” said Hapuseneb.

The maid turned on her heel. Hapuseneb watched her go with
open pleasure.

She was much more pleasant to look at than to listen to.
Senenmut caught himself before he sank too deeply into contemplation of her
beauty. The way the long plaits of her hair swung as she walked, brushing her
hips behind . . .

“Yes,” said Hapuseneb. “Oh, yes.”

Senenmut thrust himself to his feet. He must have muttered a
farewell: Hapuseneb replied to it in kind. He was careful to take another way
than the one the maid had taken. Since he was going into the city rather than
to the palace, it led him well away from her.

And why he ran away from a maid when he was bold enough to
face the queen, he did not know. Maybe because the queen piqued his pride, but
the maid aroused a much less lofty portion of his anatomy. Pride he knew. That
other thing he had never had much time for, nor indulged it when he had
leisure.

She would laugh if she knew. Most women would. He tucked his
head down and beat his way through the crowds that thronged the city, escaping
to the sanctuary of his father’s house.

The king was in a dangerous mood.

“He needs a war,” Nehsi said.

The queen’s lip curled. “I shall never understand this need
of men,” she said. “What profit is there in fighting one another?”

“Much,” said Nehsi, “if the conquered is rich in gold and
captives.”

“That is not what I meant,” she said. “Why do men fight with
spears and swords? Aren’t words enough?”

“In most cases, no,” Nehsi said. Since, after all, she had
asked.

She tossed her head in its heavy plaited wig. She was
preparing for the feast. Her maids labored through her temper to make her as
beautiful as a queen should be, but she was not making it easy for them.