The Sekhmet Bed (39 page)

Mut’s white finger stretched forward again, and touched the water. Ripples spread from the place, rings spreading and multiplying, a handful of pebbles thrown into the palace lake. The ripples surged outward, shaking the water as they went. They distorted the world as they passed, broke the surface of the mirror into glimmers of light. All the people of the land were touched by the spreading ring. All the people were shaken. But the first to be shaken was Tut.

A sigh from the sanctuary opened Ahmose’s eyes. Mutnofret leaned against the door frame, her eyelids fluttering. Ahmose pushed up from the ground stiffly, went to her sister and nudged beneath one arm, holding her up.

“
Let’s go home,” Ahmose said. “You need rest.”

“
No. Help me to the next altar. I’ll need you to say the prayers now; I’m tired. But I will be with you.”

Ahmose hesitated, torn between appealing to the gods –
Perhaps there is still hope
– and seeing to her sister’s immediate needs. Mutnofret’s chest quivered. She drew a ragged breath. Ahmose made her decision, took the bundle of offerings from her sister’s hands, and helped her to the next sanctuary door.

Tut may shake, and Mutnofret may shake, and all of Egypt may shake. But Ahmose would stand at the center of the spreading rings, and for her family’s sake she would not be shaken.

FORTY

Ramose was laid in a tiny golden sarcophagus in Mutnofret’s tomb. The sun was high and scolding. Ahmose kept her face turned toward the ground and held tight to Hatshepsut’s hand as Menketra, the High Priest, recited the ceremony to commend the boy’s ka to the gods.

He’d died the same night Ahmose and Mutnofret went to Ipet-Isut. While they prayed in the Holy House, Ramose’s tiny flame flickered out with no one near but his father, the king. They had returned to find the Pharaoh weeping silently over his son’s body. Mutnofret, her face as blank as a statue’s, stared at the scene, then wandered into her bed chamber and fell onto her mattress, still dressed and wigged. Ahmose and Tut undressed her gently while she slept, her body as heavy and formless as silt. She stayed asleep for nearly three days, and when she woke, she cried for a week. But now, seventy days later, she watched the ceremony with calm, wistful eyes.

The tomb was in a lush green valley not far from Ipet-Isut. A dark rock bluff rose above the entrance, hung with a rank growth of vines, smelling of green life in the afternoon air. It was a good place to wait eternity. Ramose’s sweet little ka would be happy here.

While Menketra recited prayers, a shadow passed over the ground where Ahmose’s eyes rested. Her scalp prickled with foreboding. She tracked the shadow with her eyes: a flying bird. The gentle sound of feathers in the wind. She looked up to the bluff above the tomb’s mouth in time to see a vulture alight, just as it had done before the dead hare in the women’s garden, with a careless shrug of its wings. It looked down on the mourners, its white crest raised, strange obsidian eyes glittering in its naked face. It spread its wings wide and held them, basking in Ra’s light, triumphant. Ahmose held her breath.
Nekhbet,the vulture goddess, come to see that we finish the job she started.

Ahmose glanced at Mutnofret. The second queen saw the vulture, too. She looked at it unafraid, a simple question hanging round the black lines of her eyes. Then she looked away again, as if she knew she would receive no answer from this god or any other.

Hatshepsut, dressed properly today in a girl’s long belted tunic, tugged at Ahmose’s hand. She pointed up at the vulture and seemed about to speak, but Ahmose held a finger to her lips. The girl frowned – frowned at her mother, frowned at Ramose’s funeral. She frowned at white Nekhbet, too, as if to say,
You took my friend away.
Ahmose could feel a storm of words building in the princess. She looked around for Sitre-In. The nurse swept in and quietly took Hatshepsut away, off to the edge of the crowd, and distracted her by picking flowers to weave into her sidelock.

“
As Prince Ramose journeys into the afterlife, we know that he will be guided by Hathor. He will be with the rising sun each morning, so that we will never forget him.” Menketra finished the rites, and blessed the sarcophagus with salt and oil and ankh. Then it was time to carry Ramose down into the tomb. Tut and the other bearers came forward, lifted the pitiful small golden sarcophagus between them, and stepped over the tomb’s threshhold. The darkness swallowed them.

The vulture took flight.

Mutnofret sighed, a desolate sound, a wind in the desert. Wadjmose and Amunmose held onto her two hands, both boys fighting back tears. Ahmose knelt and held out her arms to her nephews. They both leaned into her; she shielded their faces from the gathered nobles while they sniffled and sobbed.

“
Where is he?” Amunmose asked.

“
He is with Osiris,” she told him. “It’s a wonderful place. Always green, because Osiris makes all the green things grow. It’s never too hot there, and there is always still water for swimming, and lots of good things to eat. And there are many other children to play with.”

“
Won’t he miss us?”

“
I’m sure he will,” she said, smiling at the boy’s innocence. “And we’ll miss him, too. But we must be happy for him. He gets to live with all the gods, and he will never have any worries again.”

Amunmose pulled back from her shoulder. His face was serious, as it had been all these seventy long days. She missed his laughter, his jokes.
His smile will come back with time
. He said, “I don’t want to go live with Osiris, even if it is nice. I like it here.”

Ahmose’s ka felt sick. She glanced up at the rock bluff where the vulture had perched. “I don’t want you to go live with Osiris, either. Not until you’re a very old man.”

***

Thutmose came to her that night. They made a desperate, mournful kind of love in the dimly striped light of her bed chamber. They were a soft confusion of flesh and seed, hot living breath and hot living skin, a double proclamation of vitality against the cold, open mouth of the tomb. When it was over, Ahmose lay still and listened to Tut’s breathing. He was awake, but silent. She stayed silent, too, content to let the warmth of their passion burn off her cold fog of sorrow.

Finally, Tut spoke. “Why did the gods take him?” His voice was curious, not wounded. He’d had more than two months to heal that wound, as much as it could ever be healed.

Ahmose said nothing. She didn’t want to speak.

He rolled over and propped himself up on an elbow, peering into her face to see if she slept.

Finally she said, “I don’t know.”

Tut was quiet again for a long time. Out in Ahmose’s private garden an owl fluted its hollow, repetitive call. The sound caught his attention. He turned toward the pillared wall, and starlight limned the planes of his face, the hard edges, the soft curve of his scalp above his temples, the lines in his forehead, the sharp arc of his nose. She loved him. She would give anything to spare him. If she only could.

“
You do know,” he said quietly. “Please tell me.”

“
Tut, don’t make me do this.”

“
Was it something I did?”

“
How could it be?” she asked dully.

He lay back again, his fingers laced together over his chest. She loved his thick, strong hands, the strength of his body. She didn’t know whether his ka inside was as strong as the outside of him. She didn’t want to see him shake.

“
Is it Hatshepsut?” He whispered the question.

Ahmose sat up. She rubbed her eyes. She glanced at the jar of water beside the bed, thought of taking a drink to stall answering. Then he touched her arm, insistent.

“
Yes,” she said.

There was silence again, an uncomfortable, attenuated thing that clung between them like a spider’s thread. This time, Ahmose broke it.

“
The gods are not pleased that you haven’t named their heir yet, Tut.”

He laughed softly, a self-deprecating huff. “You’re always on me about naming an heir. You always have been.”

“
It’s important.”

“
I know it is. I know.”

The spider’s thread stretched and quivered.

“
I fear for the other boys,” she said. “Of all the ways a three-year-old child can die – a vulture’s bite? If ever I saw an omen, Tut...”

“
What if I’d named Wadjmose heir years ago, when you pestered me about it? What would the gods have done?”

“
I don’t know,” she said truthfully. “I can’t tell what they’ll do now. Maybe Ramose was enough for them. Maybe….” She didn’t finish the thought.

“
It’s just that…I cannot…I fear doing this thing, Ahmose.” Admitting the fear took something out of him. He sighed, and trembled.

She reached out in the darkness and stroked him, brushing his shoulder and arm as if he were a flighty horse. “Don’t fear what the gods set before you,” she told him, although she feared it, too. She feared all the things the gods had ever set before her: the queen’s throne, and the temple, and Aiya, and Mutnofret. Ineni. Thutmose. Hatshepsut.

“
If they take me from the throne, what will become of me? I can never go back to being a general. Not now that I’ve been a king.”

It was true. If Tut were pulled from the Horus Throne, it wouldn’t be a gentle thing. He’d be lucky to be banished to another land. More likely, he’d end up dead. And Ahmose…she’d die, too. She was no God’s Wife anymore, with power over the priests. She had no power. No power, except as the mother of a secret half-god. Precious little to stop an uprising.

“
I love Hatshepsut dearly, but she can’t be my heir.”

Ahmose’s hand froze on Tut’s shoulder. “You taunt the gods by doing this,” she said, afraid. “You put us all in danger.”

“
Maybe. But perhaps you’ve read the signs wrong, my love.” He rolled over and put a hand on her belly. “Perhaps tonight – or some night yet to come – a son.”

“
No, Tut. I will never bear a son.” Her voice was half whisper, half wail. If she could give birth to a child with a body that reflected his ka, she would. A thousand times over, she wished that she could. Not just for Tut, and not for herself. For Hatshepsut. Was it Ahmose’s fault, that the princess was such a jumble inside? Had she done something wrong during the pregnancy? Had she not said the right prayers, not made the correct offerings, or not made enough? Or was this warrior-girl who housed eight male kas and one female soul a punishment for Ahmose’s sins?

No. Never. Hatshepsut was never a punishment. She was a blessing and a gift, a delight. Though her very presence caused turmoil in the royal family, Ahmose wanted no other child, could imagine herself as mother of no other child. Her life had begun when her daughter was born. Her daughter
was
her life now.

“
I’m sorry Hatshepsut is female,” she said, “on the outside. If her body was like her kas, we wouldn’t argue so much.”

“
It’s not your fault, and it’s not hers,” he said, taking Ahmose in his arms.

She laid her head on his chest. She listened to his heart beating, gratefully. At length Ahmose said, “What will you do?”

He stroked the smoothness of her scalp. “For now, nothing. I still need time to think. I don’t know what to do yet. So I’ll do what I have been doing. Listen to petitions, send soldiers off to dredge canals and build fortresses. And I’ll pray. I hope the gods will take pity on me and send me a clear answer to my questions.”

Hope for anything but that
, she wanted to say. But she allowed him to go on stroking her head, and she kept her ear to his heart. How she loved him. How she would hate to see him shake.

FORTY-ONE

For months after Ramose’s funeral, Ahmose prayed daily, burning offerings in her bronze bowl before the statue-filled niches in her bedchamber wall. She was tense all the time, especially around her daughter and husband, expecting some terrible, divine blow to fall on her family. Yet none ever did. And as the seasons went on in their accustomed march and Mutnofret’s two boys grew taller, stronger, more confident, the prayers and offerings didn’t come so frequently. She allowed herself to hope the boys would be spared. And when Hatshepsut marked her fourth birthday, Ahmose felt sure the gods had been appeased.