King and Goddess (8 page)

She coveted that, Nehsi thought. The king had not sent her
away empty-handed: there was something plaited into the thick masses of her
hair, something that let slip a gleam of brightness.

The queen, who could be very quick of eye when she chose,
saw the direction of Isis’ glance. She beckoned to the chief of her
maidservants. “Mayet, my lesser jewel-box, if you please.”

When Mayet had brought it, the queen plucked from it a
pretty thing, a necklace of blue beads and golden blossoms. Isis received it
with open pleasure. “Wear it and prosper,” Hatshepsut said, “and remember
always why you do this. Now go. The king will want you near him; see that he
has his desire.”

Isis bowed to the floor, slipped the necklace about her neck
and backed away. When she came to her feet past the door, still just within
Nehsi’s sight, she was stroking the necklace and smiling a sly cat-smile.

Senenmut had dreamed when he was very young of a royal
hunt in all its glory. The king, Senenmut imagined, went out in his golden boat
with his court and his princes and all their servants and hangers-on. He sat at
ease on his throne with the Two Crowns on his head, arranged in the impossible
contortion of his painted images, bending a golden bow and bringing down his
quarry with an arrow tipped with gold.

Senenmut’s dream was not so very far from the truth. Gold of
course was too soft to keep either edge or point, but the shafts of the king’s
arrows were certainly gilded, and likewise the bow. He did not keep to his
throne however; he preferred to stand in the prow, face to the wind, while his
beaters sent up clamoring flocks for him to shoot. When he signaled by lowering
his bow that he had had enough, the rest of his companions could take what
quarry was left: always enough, for the beds of reeds were rich in waterfowl.

Senenmut could not see the city from here, though they were
not remarkably far from it. They might have been all alone in a wilderness of
reeds and river, bounded by the bleak cliffs of the Red Land, the desert that
held the Black Land of Egypt in its hard dry hands.

He had not expected to enjoy himself. And yet he was almost
happy, sitting at the queen’s feet with a book across his knees, dictating to
her while she wrote on a bit of papyrus and her husband engrossed himself in
his hunt.

A canopy shielded them both from the sun; there was a breeze
playing over the water, a breath of coolness. The shouts of men, the cries of
birds alarmed or wounded, mingled with the lapping of waves and the rustle of
reeds and the sound of his own voice reciting a hymn to Amon. He even heard,
faintly, the scritch of her pen on papyrus, and the soft snores of Hapuseneb
the priest, who, like Senenmut, had obeyed the queen’s command to accompany her
on this hunt.

She was not as content as Senenmut was. However dazzled by
sun and honor and royal splendor he might be, he could not fail to see the
shadows under her eyes. Paint obscured but did not altogether conceal them.

Her Nubian was not with her, he noticed. Another guardsman
stood closest to her, a silent and expressionless Egyptian.

She was attentive enough to Senenmut’s teaching, focused on
it perhaps as a refuge against tedium. Hunting clearly did not delight her as
it did the king. She hardly glanced up when a whoop marked a particularly
shrewd shot; she grimaced slightly as a goose, pierced to the heart, fell
broken-winged nearly at her feet.

The king seemed oblivious to his queen’s lack of enthusiasm.
Nothing could free him entirely from the bonds of his kingship, but here, away
from the city and the press of the court, he showed himself a different man. He
was lighter of heart, quicker, more eager; he laughed at a sally, and cast one
back in kind.

None of it was particularly witty. It was soldier’s humor,
more crude than elegant.

How he must love to ride on campaign, Senenmut thought,
watching him as he received the news that a herd of river-horses had been found
just ahead. He had come prepared to hunt water-birds, but the larger prey
brought a gleam to his eye. He barely hesitated before he leaped into one of
the smaller boats. His weapons-bearer scrambled after, and as many of his guards
as the boat could carry.

The barge could not follow where he went. The thickets of
reeds were too dense, the channels too narrow. It moored where the bank was
almost clear of reeds, where might have been a village once but was no longer:
a stand of date-palms, a mound or two that might have been the remnants of a
mudbrick house. The desert had encroached on it, but nearest the river it was
green still.

The queen and her attendants, undismayed to be left behind,
settled to their various pursuits: reading, sleeping, playing on the harp or
singing to it. She alone seemed restless. She was thinking, Senenmut guessed,
of the duties she had left behind by her husband’s order, the petitioners
gathering in the empty audience-hall, the scribes and clerks waiting to
inundate her with papyrus. He knew enough of her by now to know that she felt
the dereliction of her duty. What else she felt for it, he could not tell.

Some people were cursed to be perpetually dutiful. Senenmut,
who shared the curse, found himself closer to liking the queen than he had been
before. She did not know how to dally about, either, nor what to do with
herself when she was not engaged in something useful.

Her face mastered itself, maintained its expression of royal
blandness, but she could not seem to govern her glances. He watched defiance
grow in her eyes. The noise of the hunt had faded up the river; the wind that
blew from the north carried the last of it away.

It was remarkably easy to read her. One only needed to watch
the eyes; and the slight movements of the hands, clenching and unclenching on
the arms of her throne. Yesterday she had done all as his majesty desired.
Ignored once she was trapped on the throne beside his, unregarded except as
mute companion to his splendor, she had whiled the day in deadly tedium.

Today, with her scribe to instruct her and her musicians to
play for her and Hapuseneb the priest for amusement, she was all the less
willing to be counted among the furnishings of the king’s barge. Hapuseneb
rattled on at her, some charming nonsense about a monkey and a baboon and the
god Thoth. Senenmut barely listened; so, he suspected, did she.

He watched her resolve harden. She silenced the priest with
a gesture, beckoned to the steersman. “Return us to the city,” she said.

The steersman stared at her. The others were mute.

Not all were hers. Some were the king’s, too many for the
smaller boat, or too languid to contest for a place in it.

She faced the steersman with all the arrogance of her blood
and breeding. “Do as I say,” she commanded him.

For a moment Senenmut thought that the man would resist. But
he was only startled. At length he fumbled a bow. “Yes, lady. Yes—yes, lady. At
once, lady.”

Someone sucked in a breath, perhaps in outrage. No one
spoke. She was, after all, the queen. The king was not there to countermand
her. He would perforce return home in lesser state than was strictly fitting,
but the queen was in no mood to care for that.

Rowing against the freshening wind, taking what aid the
current could offer, the royal barge made surprisingly good speed back to
Thebes. Senenmut was a little sorry to see the city’s walls ahead. He had
conceived a fondness, perhaps even a passion, for the freedom of the river.

Still he was as duty-bound as the queen, and there was work
to do: two kingdoms’ worth. Someday, he swore to himself, he would be rich
enough to have not only a boat for the river but a house beside it, an estate
worthy of a prince, where he could take his rest from the vexations of power.

~~~

The king was as angry as Hatshepsut had expected; as Nehsi
had known he would be. He came back late, as the sun was setting, with a king
of river-horses dead and flyblown in the boat behind him. There would be no
feast tonight, although the cooks took the river-horse to prepare it for the
morrow.

The queen had taken her dinner in her garden by the lotus-pool,
where she liked to dine if she was alone. The king found her there. He came
with few attendants, in little state, wearing the lapis-and-gold striped linen
of the nemes-headdress and the simplicity of a soldier’s kilt.

He stood over her as she sat by the pool with the remains of
her dinner. He was not tall, none of his line were, but he was taller than she,
even if she had stood; and he was using every finger-length of it. “You left me
out there,” he said.

She looked up slowly, taking her time about it, as if she
had no fear in the world. In anyone else it would have been insolence. She said
in a sweet soft voice that she never used with anyone she liked or trusted,
“You had your hunt and your guards and your fleet. I had duties that called me
till I had no choice but to answer. Did you know that there’s a cattle plague
in the Delta? Or that the fourth and fifth nomes are quarrelling again, and
their nomarchs would go to war if they could? Or that the priests of Amon and
the priests of Ptah are contesting precedence even into the halls of audience?
Are you aware of any of that?”

He might have struck her, but her eyes were too steady. She
had never been afraid of anything but the dark. He settled for a slash of the
hand that was more petulant than royally disdainful, and a curl of the lip as
he said, “I am aware of it. Must I concern myself with it every moment of every
day? May not even a god enjoy a respite?”

“Certainly,” she said. “But not two days running, and not in
such haste that it looks like the whim of a child. You left lords and princes
dangling while you indulged yourself. One of us at least had to repair the
insult.”

“Nothing is an insult if a god wills it,” the king said
haughtily.

“You,” she said, “are such a child. Go play with your wooden
soldiers, and leave the rest of us to tend your kingdom.”

He drew himself rigidly erect. Whatever words might have
flooded out of him, he was able or willing to utter none of them. He turned on
his heel and stalked out, precisely like the child she had called him.

~~~

Nehsi remembered at last to breathe. The queen’s eyes were
fixed on the place where her husband had stood. If a glance could be a sword,
his blood would have poured out on the earth.

It was a long while before she spoke. When she did, it was
so quietly, so calmly, that one could almost miss the white heat of passion in
it. “Why? Why was it all given to him, and only the dregs to me? What is so
splendid, so wonderful, so all-powerful about a man, that even a puling child
can be king, but a woman cannot even dream of it?”

There were answers to that. Priests had them in plenty, and
kings, and soldiers too. Nehsi kept his tongue between his teeth. If he knew
every answer a man could imagine, then his lady knew it, too.

Hatshepsut held up her hands. They were small hands, oval,
long-fingered but broad in the palm, more strong than delicate. For all the
struggles of her maids to keep them white and soft, they were more like a boy’s
than a woman’s. “These can bend a bow,” she said, “hold the reins of a
chariot-team, clasp a scepter. What can his do that these cannot? Bend a bigger
bow? I can bend a bigger one than my scribe can, I’ll wager you that. Master a
team of half-broken stallions? I’ve done that, and done it well. Wield the
scepter in the hall of audience? What else did I do today while my great royal
husband, my lord of the Two Lands, my living Horus, amused himself hunting
river-horses in the reeds?”

She rose and began to pace. She looked remarkably like the
king in one of his own fits of restlessness: a likeness she would not have been
pleased to acknowledge. “He is older than I,” she said. “But I am the daughter
of the royal wife. He is the child of a concubine. He holds kingship only
through me. And does he thank me for it? Does he even notice that I exist?” She
tossed her head in scorn. “Oh, certainly! When I get in the way of his
pleasure—then he remembers me.”

Nehsi considered for some time before venturing to speak.
She paced, prowling around the garden. She plucked a blossom, drew in its
scent, let it fall into the lotus pool.

“Lady,” he said, “the gods have made him king. There must be
gentler ways to remind him of it.”

She rounded upon him. “What? Do you mean that girl, that
Isis? As if she could be anything more than a goddess’ plaything. Would you
have her flatter him into doing his duty?”

“She might beguile his nights sufficiently that he can
endure the days of drudgery.”

“It is not drudgery. It is the price the gods exact for
making him one of them. It’s a great thing, a noble thing, a thing of beauty
and splendor, to wear the Two Crowns; to be king of Egypt. And he,” she said,
“has no faintest conception of the honor. Only of the burden—which he far too often
evades.”

“It’s no burden to you, either?” asked Nehsi. He honestly
wanted to know.

“Of course it is a burden,” she said impatiently. “I won’t
run away from it for that.”

“Do you want to be king?”

She stared at him as if she had never seen him before. He
wondered briefly if she ever had. High ones, he had noticed, often treated
their servants as they did their animals and their furnishings: took them for
granted, and never truly looked at them, nor cared to know what thoughts lay
behind the familiar faces.

True enough, most servants were content with that. But Nehsi
was a fool. Nehsi wanted to be seen for himself.

It was a surprising discomfort to be visible. He worried
suddenly that his kilt was crooked, his belt ill fastened, his cheeks too
roughly shaven.

He was impeccable as he always strove to be. She could not
see the flush on his cheeks, either, or—he hoped—read his expression.