King and Goddess

KING AND GODDESS

Judith Tarr

www.bookviewcafe.com

Book View Café Edition
July 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61138-530-4
Copyright © 1996 Judith Tarr

To the people who helped to make this book
possible:

Joanne and Steve, for help with research and development,

and John, for the means to do it.

The boat of the sun sailed slowly over the horizon. All night
long it had drifted through the land of the dead, pouring its light upon the
dry land. Now it drove the stars away. It ruled all alone in the blue vault of
heaven, with no attendance but a lone circling falcon whose eye bent piercing
keen upon the land of the living.

Senenmut stirred and groaned and started awake. He was
stifling. He could not breathe. He was trapped in the tomb, bound to the body,
with no spells or magic to guide him out of the dark and into the Field of
Reeds where the blessed dead go.

He gasped. The weight on his face began to purr. The warm
solidity that trapped him against the cold wall muttered sleepily till he
kicked it; then it yelped. “
Ai!
You’re killing me! Mama! Help, Mama!”

He clapped a hand over his brother’s mouth. Ahotep’s bright
black eyes laughed at him. If he lifted it, the brat would shriek till their
mother came running, and in no kind mood toward Senenmut. Then Ahotep would
laugh and skip off to his breakfast, while Hat-Nufer, who cherished her title
of Lady of the House, drowned her eldest in the wine of correction.

Senenmut heaved his brother up, hand still clapped to his
mouth, and carried him out into the bustle and clatter of morning in his
father’s house.

He dropped Ahotep squawking into the tub that they all
bathed in, and bathed himself around him. Ahotep splashed in the water while
Senenmut dried himself and put on a clean white kilt. Senenmut tossed another
at his brother. Ahotep grimaced at it. He was a scant season removed from naked
and insouciant childhood; he was not greatly reconciled to the servitude of
clothes.

Senenmut left him to find his own way into the kilt. The
house had quieted as it did every morning just before sunrise. Everyone—his
mother, the aunts, baby Amonhotep with his nurse, the two servants—had gathered
in front of the shrine. His father bowed before the image that had resided in
the niche for time out of mind, and poured out a drop or two of beer, and
offered a bit from the new loaf of barley bread.

Senenmut bowed to the god from force of habit. It was a
graceless thing, a grinning, leering dwarf with luck in his stumpy hands and
blessing on his head. Bes, dwarf-god, luck-god, presided over the house of
Ramose as he did many another middling prosperous house in Thebes.

But in his mind’s eyes Senenmut saw another god. A great
god, a noble and straight-backed god, a god who was a king: Amon-Re of Thebes,
who ruled above such lesser gods as Bes.

At this very moment, in his tall palace set apart in walls
from the rest of Thebes, the king offered wine in a golden cup and fruits of
the earth on golden platters, as many as all his servants could carry, to the
image of Amon in his ancestral shrine. By his offering the sun was persuaded to
rise. By the strength of his devotion the Two Lands of Egypt measured their
prosperity.

It was a noble thing, to bring the sun back to the sky.
Senenmut had never seen the rite, only heard of it. He had seen the king, of
course, going by in procession for this reason or that: riding to war,
returning in victory, celebrating the festival of a god.

Senenmut was a commoner, a tradesman’s son. The king stood
as high above him as the moon. But he could dream. Someday he would stand
beside the king. Someday he would be a power in the world, a voice in the
king’s ear, a sharer in his counsels.

“Senenmut!” His mother’s voice was sharp, pitched to pierce
the veil of fog about her eldest son. “Are you going to break your fast today?
We have dates, fresh from the tree.”

There was nothing tender about Hat-Nufer. Still she looked
after her children well enough, and she knew how Senenmut loved dates. She
thrust the bowl at him and said not a word as he gorged himself—at least until
Ahotep appeared in a damp and drooping kilt, to lay vociferous claim to the few
that were left.

There were more wrapped in a cloth with the bread and cheese
and the jar of beer that would sustain him till evening. He grinned and kissed
his mother, who slapped him for his presumption, and saluted the aunts, and offered
due respect to his father. Ramose, intent on coaxing the baby with a sop of
bread in goat’s milk, acknowledged him absently.

The memory followed him: the small inelegant room, the noisy
inelegant people, even the servants joining in some altercation or other with
Hat-Nufer and Ahotep.

“They are so unbearably common,” Senenmut said as he shut
the door and paused in the street, blinking against the dazzle of sunlight.
“Father—gods, father is in trade. How much more common can you be?”

He thrust himself away from the door. He was going to rise
in the world.

He knew precisely where he was going to begin, if not
exactly how. His mother, clear-eyed ungentle creature that she was, had seen to
that when he was no older than Ahotep. She had taken the whole profit of a
season from Ramose’s trading of pots and jars for the brewing and storing and
drinking of beer, and delivered it to the temple of Amon, and not the little
temple that stood at the head of the street, either, but the great one, the
temple in which the king himself had been known to set foot. In return she had
demanded schooling for her son, and only the best of that.

The priests had reckoned the payment sufficient, after some
discussion with Hat-Nufer. Senenmut even then could have told them what use it
was to haggle with his mother. She had never lost a battle.

He had grown from child to man in the temple of Amon. Every
morning after sunrise he went there, to the lofty halls and gilded pillars and
the murmur of cultivated voices in every tongue that was spoken in the courts
of Egypt. Every evening he returned home to his mother’s fierce interrogation
and his father’s vague beneficence, Ahotep’s boisterousness and the baby’s
wailing.

Someday he would be rich. He would live in a high house and
dine on a gilded table and never—no, never—share a bed with anyone not of his
choosing.

Thebes roared and surged about him. He rode it as a boat
rides a cataract, skimming above the eddies, veering in the cross-currents. It
was the greatest city in the world, and one of the most ancient, a city of
kings beside the river that was the lifeblood of Egypt.

He threaded the narrow ways with the ease of the Theban born,
taking no great notice of their squalor, but aware of it nonetheless. Lords and
princes never saw the warren of streets hidden behind the temples and the
palaces, nor soiled their gilded sandals with the dust of common feet. They
rode in chairs on the backs of burly bearers, or in chariots drawn by snorting,
dancing horses. And they traveled on the wider roads, the processional ways
that ran from end to end of the city, past the splendor of temples and palaces.
They did not ever, he was convinced, run barefoot through a clutter of
market-stalls, ducking the spray from a hurled chamberpot, making haste to the
Temple of Amon before the master of scribes grew impatient with waiting.

~~~

The temple was enormous, tall as a mountain reaching up to
heaven. The air within the shrine was fogged with incense, trembling with awe.
The god’s wisdom breathed from the walls.

Senenmut had entered that great gate nearly every day since
he was seven years old. He had long since learned to pass by the temple proper
and slip through a smaller door guarded by one of the priests, into a world of
clear and uncompromising daylight. There were no shadowy recesses here, no
clouds of incense. In a colonnade off a sunlit courtyard, row on row of boys
and young men sat each in the place he had won for himself, clean-shaved head
bent, kilt tight-stretched across his knees, papyrus or potsherd resting there
while he wrote to his master’s dictation.

There was a new gaggle of children in the corner that was
warmest at midday, learning to mix the inks and hold the brush and draw
painstakingly the first lines of the first glyph that the master was minded to
teach them. He had a long rod in his hand, which he whipped out like a
serpent’s strike, lashing the knuckles of a child who dared to draw a stick-man
with an enormous hooked nose instead of the feather of Maat. The boy sniffled,
but he already knew better than to cry in front of old Ranefer.

As Senenmut strode past them, they looked up. Their awe made
him swallow a smile. He must have seemed enormously tall to them, enormously
haughty, making his way with lordly confidence to the inner wall of the
colonnade. There the school gave way to the House of Life, the scribes’ hall
where those who had passed into the mysteries of the craft sat all day with
palette and pen and papyrus, recording the affairs of the Two Lands.

Senenmut was not a scribe yet. But soon. He bowed to the
master of masters, Seti-Nakht. Seti-Nakht frowned nearsightedly at him. “You
dallied,” he said. “Consider yourself properly flogged.”

Senenmut bit back a grin. He was never early enough for
Seti-Nakht. Even when one day he came in the dark of dawn, before any other
student stumbled yawning into the temple, Seti-Nakht had been sitting there
already, roll of papyrus on knees, reading by the light of a lamp.

While Seti-Nakht waited in conspicuous patience, Senenmut
retrieved his brushes and inks and palette from the chest where he was
privileged to keep them, and sought his place up against the wall of the
scribes’ hall, carefully out of reach of Seti-Nakht’s rod. As he crossed his
ankles and prepared to sink down, Seti-Nakht said, “Stop. Be still.”

Senenmut had obeyed before he thought. He looked down at the
plump little shining-pated man who was the most feared of the masters in Amon’s
temple.

Seti-Nakht ran his rod through his fingers. Senenmut did not
honestly fear that it would strike him, but his back tightened nonetheless.

Seti-Nakht looked him up and down. “Well,” he said. “You’re
no beauty, if beauty matters. You’re arrogant enough for six. Do you think
you’re good enough yet to take a place in there?” He tilted the end of the rod
toward the scribes’ hall.

Senenmut’s heart leaped. “Are you—am I—”

“Be silent,” said Seti-Nakht.

Senenmut bit his tongue.

Seti-Nakht saw it: his brow drifted upward. “Your
arrogance,” he said, “is a matter of note. Not, mind you, that it’s an ill
thing for a man to know his own worth. But you reckon yours well above your
station.”

Senenmut’s face was hot. “I am a scribe. My station is
whatever my merits make it.”

“You are an apprentice in the temple of Amon,” said Seti-Nakht,
“and not yet of any rank at all. You know, I presume, what your fellows call
you when you strut past with that nose of yours in the air. ‘His lordship,’
they say. ‘Mighty in papyrus, beloved of Amon, the great prince Senenmut.’”

The flush crawled out of Senenmut’s cheeks and down his neck.
“And have I done anything, Master, to earn this reprimand?”

“Was I reprimanding you?” Seti-Nakht tapped his rod lightly
against his palm. “I think that you might consider the virtue of reticence, if
modesty is beyond you. Pride is an ornament in a prince, but it sits ill on a
tradesman’s son.”

“Even if that tradesman’s son is reckoned the most brilliant
of the apprentices?”

Seti-Nakht’s rod caught Senenmut across the shins. The blow
was precisely calculated to sting but to leave no lasting mark. Senenmut’s
breath hissed between his teeth.

“You are rather extraordinary,” Seti-Nakht said mildly, “but
the judgment .of brilliance is hardly yours to make. It takes more than
cleverness to make a great lord. It needs something less common. Intelligence;
tact. The art of graciousness toward one’s inferiors.”