King and Goddess (10 page)

As she swept her maids behind her in a flurry of light robes
and shrill voices, Nehsi did a thing that he had sworn never to do. He caught
the queen as she passed him. He demanded, “Why? Why now?”

She slipped free, but she paused. “I have to,” she said.

“Now?”

“Now.”

“But what if—”

She was gone. He could hasten after; or he could stay where
he was, on guard over empty rooms.

His was the coward’s choice. Later he would drown his
sorrows with the twins, a jar of beer for each. Now he paced a sentry’s track
through the queen’s chambers, startling maids and chamberlains, putting them to
flight with a hard flat stare.

He could imagine what went on in the king’s chambers. There
were not so very many different things that a man could do with a woman. But
what they said to one another, how she approached him, he did not know, nor
want to know.

He knew only that she came back while the night was still
young, gowned and adorned as before, but walking with a difference. He would
not call it pain. She was too proud for that. She had done, it was clear, what
she had set out to do.

Her maids put her to bed as always, with order and ritual as
old as the throne of Egypt. When she was abed, she called for Nehsi as she
sometimes did, and sent the maids away.

He said what he always said. “This is not seemly, lady.”

Always before she had laughed at him and told him to sit down,
and challenged him to a game of Hounds and Jackals, or simply to a battle of
wit. Tonight she had no laughter in her. She clasped her knees, sitting up in
the splendid bed with its lion-feet and its coverlets of whitest linen. She
looked small and bruised and defiant. “It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would
be,” she said.

Nehsi did not want to hear it. No more did she care that he
shrank from the telling.

“He had had a little lessoning,” she said. “He was polite
enough, once he got over his incredulity.”

Nehsi raised his brows. “Polite? Then you did no more than
talk.”

“No,” she said. She had no humor: it was a flaw, though she
had never known it. “No. Once he’d observed a few amenities, he was very . . .
direct. He agreed with me, you see. There must be an heir.”

“Were you astonished?”

She frowned at him. “What, that he understood one part of
his kingly duty? No, I was not astonished. I was glad that he would oblige me.”

“I doubt he had much difficulty,” Nehsi muttered.

He rather hoped she had not heard him; but her ears were
keen. Humor she had none, but her wits were quick. She flushed. “You are a low,
coarse man! Why do I trust you?”

“Perhaps, lady,” he answered, “because I tell the truth.”

She shook her head. “No. That’s the worst of you. You don’t
think I should have gone to him. Do you?”

“It is not my place to judge the actions of the queen’s
majesty,” Nehsi said in his coldest voice.

She had never been in awe of him, and certainly never feared
his temper. “What should I have done, then? Let someone else present him with
an heir?”

Since he had argued against that very thing, he could hardly
gainsay her now. He shrugged. He supposed he looked sullen. “It was sudden.”

“It was years in coming,” she said.

“And an hour in the doing,” he shot back, “and not a tenth
of that devoted to thinking about it. It was poor generalship, if that had been
a battle.”

“It was a battle,” she said. “I won it.”

“Did you?”

But she was not to be conquered by the edge of his tongue.
She lay down on her bed, turned her back on him, shut him out. She looked like
a child, small and bird-boned and fragile.

She did not want his pity. She would sneer at his
compassion. He gave her the only thing he could give, which was his silence.

~~~

She must have wrought well. The next night she did not
have to intrude upon the king’s peace. He summoned her with something
approaching grace, sending a chamberlain with pretty words and a prettier face,
to invite her to attend him. The night after that she did not return to her
rooms from the court’s banquet. The king had taken her by the hand after the
wine went round, and led her away.

Among the king’s attendants Nehsi happened to notice Isis.
Propriety kept the royal concubines in their own chambers, away from prying
eyes and wagging tongues. But Isis had always made free of the court, a freedom
that she turned into an image of self-effacement. Her head was demurely
lowered, her posture humble. She ventured nothing bold, nothing openly defiant.

When the king departed with the queen, Nehsi watched the
concubine carefully. She did not move from her place that had been at the
king’s feet.

He could read nothing in her face, as little of it as he
could see. Perhaps there was nothing to read. Still it troubled him that she,
so innocent, so tenderhearted, shed no tears as she watched her lord and
beloved walk away from her, and never a glance back. He was engrossed in some
sally of the queen’s.

It well might be that she was loyal to the queen. Nehsi
could not convince himself of it. He was a low, coarse man as his lady had
said, wary and trusting no one. So must a guardsman be, or fail of his
guardianship.

~~~

After a month and more of doing her wifely duty to the
king, Hatshepsut woke one morning looking green and ill. Nehsi, who saw her,
watched carefully. And the next morning she was ill again, and the morning
after that.

Even a man could hardly mistake it; and Nehsi was not as
some men were, willfully ignorant. The queen, young as she was, might well have
failed to understand, but her maids were wise in the ways of women. “Wait,”
they bade her, “and count the days. If your courses are late . . .”

“They will be,” the queen said. She spoke as one who knows
for a certainty, with relief that she did not try overly hard to hide. “I will
bear the king a son, and he shall be king.”

“Gods grant,” murmured the more pious of the maids.

~~~

As the count of days stretched, and no sign of her woman’s
courses, the queen went less often to the king’s bed. Then one evening as she
took her ease with a book and a flute-player, his messenger came to bid her
attend her husband.

“May my royal lord forgive me,” said Hatshepsut; and humble
though the words were, her tone had never known humility: “but my majesty is
indisposed.”

The messenger was taken aback. “Lady! You cannot—”

“The queen’s majesty,” she said, sweetly precise, “is
indisposed.”

He must leave or be ejected. He bowed and retreated.

“When he comes back,” the queen said, “my door is closed.”

~~~

She could not, however, keep out the king. It took him a
handful of nights and a dozen summonings through messengers who were not
permitted to pass the door. Nehsi would have expected him to drown his sorrows
with one of his concubines—Isis might have rejoiced in the victory—but if he
had done that, it had not removed the shame of his royal wife’s refusal.

The queen received him perforce, in as little state as she
might. She lay in her bed, wrapped in a robe, with only her eyes painted, and
no wig, only the plait of her own hair. Nehsi thought her quite fetching, like
the girlchild she so seldom permitted herself to be.

There was no telling what the king thought. He was in a
temper, with a high flush under the bronzing of wind and sun on his cheeks. The
scent of wine swept in with him. “Lady!” he said brusquely, not troubling with
a greeting. “Are you ill? No one has seen you for a good hand of days.”

“I am not ill,” she said. “I am indisposed.”

“And what of your royal duties?”

Her eyes flashed up at that. He grinned without humor. She
smiled back, with an edge of cold mockery. “I have done what must be done,” she
said, “from these chambers, with the aid of servants and chamberlains.”

That rather lowered his crest; but he was in too high a
dudgeon to come down all at once. “Well, then. You are ill. That doesn’t give
you leave to refuse my messengers.”

She lay back as if suddenly too weary to face him. “Your
messengers are tedious. I thought I told the first two or three that they were
not welcome.”

“They were
my
messengers,” the king said.

“So they were,” said the queen without a flicker of guilt.

He glared at her. He was not, Nehsi must remember, an
unintelligent man; simply one who used sparingly the wits the gods had given
him. He could see perfectly well what his wife was telling him.

She regarded him calmly. “I am carrying your child, who will
be your heir. My duty to you is done until that child is born.”

He understood her. Nehsi saw how his body stiffened as if at
a blow. “Then,” he said in a tone that perhaps no one had heard from him
before, “all the words you said . . . all the sweetness you
showered on me, the promises, the kisses . . . those were only
duty.”

“Did I not do it well?” she inquired.

He drew a sharp breath. “You did it most well.”

She nodded, cool as ever. “Then I am content. I shall appear
tomorrow in the hall of audience as befits your queen and consort. You will see
no further failing in my public duty, not at least until the child demands it.”

“And . . . your private duty?”

“That is done,” she said. “I wish you goodnight, my lord.
May the gods grant you dreams of honor and prosperity.”

He heard the dismissal; he moved slightly as if to indicate
that he would go. But not quite yet. “Lady,” he said, “you are cold: cold and
too perfectly the queen. I could have loved you.”

“The gods commanded that we be mated to one another,” she
said. “Therefore it was done. I give you the heir you require.”

“And no more,” he said. He straightened. “Well. I should
have known how you would be. Your father was the same.”

“He was your father also,” she said.

“No,” said the king. “I was always the lesser, the son of a
woman who was not the queen. You were his child in heart and soul.”

She did not gainsay that. “Goodnight, my lord,” she said.

This time he went as she bade him. Nehsi could not see that
she watched him go, or that she cared how she had stung him.

She could have had a lover, a husband who cherished her.
Instead she might well have made an enemy.

It was not Nehsi’s place, no more than it had ever been, to
remind the queen that she was fortunate. She had not been beaten or visibly
harmed. Her husband had been entranced with her, had been wounded deeply when
she cast him off. She was a fool to have done it, and no matter how awkward he
might have been, or how little pleasure he might have given her.

He kept his tongue between his teeth. She slept, to all
appearances, with a clear conscience. She woke greensick but triumphant,
because it was proof. She had done as she intended, as her duty bade her. She
was free of the nightly battle—for so she must think of it.

“When my son is born,” she said to the silent and, he hoped,
unreadable Nehsi, “he’ll forgive me anything. You’ll see. He’s not half the
hardened soldier he pretends to be.”

“Then why,” Nehsi made bold to ask, “can you not love him?”

She was in the mood for once to answer. “Because I can’t,”
she said. “He grates on me like a sour note on a flute. He ruts like a bull,
grunting and straining. He smells like a goat. He could bathe in oil of myrrh
and still reek of the byre.”

“Many women seem to find him irresistible,” Nehsi observed.

“His title is irresistible,” said the queen. “I don’t like
him, Nehsi. I never have. When did the gods ever say that I should fall in love
with the man they bound me to?”

“Love,” said Nehsi, “is hardly required. But liking,
respect, consideration—those might be worth a moment’s thought.”

She turned her shoulder to him, ostensibly to oblige the
maid who was arranging her pectoral.

He started to speak again, sighed, held his peace. Not for him
would she see sense. Her father might have enforced it on her, but her father
was years dead.

A queen, like a king, could do much as she pleased. If that
was to drive her king away and teach him to hate her, then no mere servant
could deter her.

~~~

It would have been fair enough if the king had declared
war against his wife. He chose however to declare war in Asia. He gathered his
armies with fierce and single-minded speed, swept them with him, led them away
just as the river began to rise in its yearly flood.

The queen remained behind as was proper, ruled as regent in
his place, suffered with exemplary patience the slow days and months until she
was brought to bed of the king’s heir.

Well might she be patient. She had no husband there to vex
her. She greeted news of victories with what seemed to be honest joy, and sent
felicitations as a queen should, and with them such gold and provisions and
reinforcements as he asked for. She was a very perfect queenly queen.

She could afford to be generous. He had not taken Isis with
him to the war, though she had begged and schemed and done everything in her
power to persuade him. She had even—the little fool—tried to enlist the queen’s
aid. Hatshepsut declined, smiling as demurely as Isis herself, murmuring, “War is
no place for a woman—he himself has said it.”

And maybe she took care to remind the king of that.
Certainly, when he rode away, Isis stood with the rest of his servants and his
concubines, and watched him go. It was ill luck to weep for a man who went off
to war; but her great eyes swam with unshed tears.

He could not have seen. He had forgotten even the favorite
of his concubines, the greatest solace against the queen’s cold heart. All of
his mind was focused on the war, and on the road that he must travel before he
came to it.

In the days of the queen’s gravidity, Senenmut came to
know her perhaps better than he had any right to. She did not settle into the
bovine calm that he had heard was the way of bearing women; but she was less
sharp-tongued than she had been. She had more patience for the exactitudes of
the priestly script, more willingness to accept correction if there was need.