King and Goddess (15 page)

When he swam up out of it, the world was much as before. But
the center of it had changed. He looked at his wide airy room, at its walls
painted with fans of papyrus, and saw that it was lovely, but that it was
empty. She was not in it.

He had no doubt that she woke to her great chamber and her
army of servants, and missed him little if at all. Fever had driven her to
cling to him. Now that it was gone, she would return to herself, queen and goddess,
trusting in no man for her heart’s ease.

That was as it should be. He could not fault her for it, nor
wish it otherwise.

~~~

The morning was well advanced as he left the bath—having
concluded that there were twice as many servants as he remembered; and what, he
wondered, was paying for them all? They were quiet, which was in their favor,
and they performed their tasks well and quickly.

That would be his mother’s doing. She had a hard hand with
servants, but she was fair; and they seemed to obey her with a good will.

Breakfast waited for him, and a small mincing person who
said, “When you have eaten your fill, your lady mother requests the honor of
your presence.”

“Where,” Senenmut asked him, “did she come by such
formality?”

The servant blushed and dipped his head and would not
answer. Senenmut sighed heavily. He took his time in eating and drinking; he
was hungry and thirsty, and the bread was fresh and remarkably fine, the cheese
likewise, and the spiced fruit very like a dish he had had in the queen’s
chambers. He would not have put it past his mother to have bullied the queen’s
cook till he taught her the way of it.

When he was well ready, he sauntered to the rooms in which
his mother held court. There seemed to be more servants about than he ever saw
in the palace, even in the king’s presence. Most were busy: polishing floors,
washing or drying linens, running on errands.

His mother did not favor the royal habit of surrounding
oneself with idle attendants. She had one of the aunts with her, Aunt Tanit who
was a little simple. They entertained guests: a woman whom Senenmut remembered
vaguely from their house in the city, and a younger woman, not much more than a
child, with a ripe body and a pretty, petulant face.

The older woman was deep in gossip with Hat-Nufer. The
younger one, clearly and elaborately bored, looked about her with hungry eyes.

Senenmut could not at first see why she looked so greedy. It
was a pleasant room, with its walls painted with images of a lady at home,
performing her toilet, dandling her pet monkey, listening to musicians as she
chattered with a handful of ladies. The paintings were not badly done, but they
were dreadfully old-fashioned, with the lady decked out in ornaments that had
been all the rage a hundred years ago.

Still, to a young woman from the city, they must seem
wonderfully grand and lordly. The furnishings were no great wonders of richness
or quality, not if one knew the palace, but they were pretty enough, with
touches of gilt and a carving or two. The eye could slide past the chair-leg on
which Amenhotep had cut his first tooth, and the cushions that Aunt Teti’s cat
had rather neatly shredded. A girlchild from the city well might covet it all,
if she knew nothing better.

Just as she caught sight of him, his mother broke off her
spate of gossip. “Senenmut! Come here.”

When she sounded as brightly lively as that, all her kin had
learned to step softly. The woman—Ramerit, that was her name; wife of a potter
with whom Senenmut’s father had done business—fairly simpered. The girl stared
frankly at him, taking him in and finding him reasonably unprepossessing. Since
he found her precisely the same, he returned stare for stare, with an arch of
brow that had infuriated a better woman than she.

She blushed and lowered her gaze. Senenmut set himself to
forget her.

His mother beckoned him to a seat beside her. “Here,” she
said. “You know Ramerit, of course. And this is her daughter Amonmose.”

Senenmut’s eyes sharpened. He remembered Amonmose: a gratingly
shrill child with a talent for tormenting children younger or smaller than she.
She had grown up better than he expected. She was almost pretty, and she looked
mildly civilized.

He refrained from saying so. He bowed instead, in lordly
fashion, and said, “I give you good morning.”

Ramerit clapped her hands. She had always been a silly
woman: girlish well beyond the years of her girlhood, and given to cooing
nonsense at animals and children as if they were too excessively dimwitted to
comprehend plain Egyptian. Her shriek of delight made him wince. “Oh, Hat-Nufer!
Isn’t he charming? He talks just like a prince.”

“Doesn’t he?” said Hat-Nufer dryly. “It’s gone to his head a
bit, I’m afraid. But he does well enough.”

“Oh, he does beautifully!” cried Ramerit. “Doesn’t he,
Amonmose? Isn’t he princely, with his golden collar and all. Was that a gift,
young prince? Did the queen give it to you?”

Her eyes were avid. Senenmut almost sprang to his feet and
took his leave, but his mother’s eyes warned him. He would be on his best
behavior or she would make certain that he heard of it after.

He answered, therefore, with civility that he had learned in
service to a queen. “Yes, lady, that was her majesty’s gift. All that you see
here is of her bestowing.”

“
Really
?” Gods;
the woman could not utter a word without a cloying lilt. “How wonderful. She
must value you greatly.”

“I serve her as well as I can,” he said, still civil, but
with a tightness in it that should do well to warn his mother. “She rewards me
as it pleases her.”

Hat-Nufer caught the warning. Her response was ominously
bright. “Oh, he’s too modest! The queen relies on him as she does on no one
else.”

“Imagine,” said Ramerit with a blissful sigh. “Amonmose, did
you hear? This is the most trusted servant of the queen.”

“There are others,” Senenmut said, “whom she trusts as
well.”

“But none whom she trusts more,” said Hat-Nufer. “Ramerit;
Amonmose. Date wine?”

“Oh!” said Ramerit. “No. No, we thank you. We must go. You
know how my husband is when I stay away too long.”

Her giggle was meant to evoke a smile of complicity.
Senenmut could manage no such thing. Nor, he was somewhat relieved to note,
could his mother.

She pressed the jar of date wine on them. They did not
protest too strongly. Ramerit seemed to think that it was the queen’s gift,
too; she clutched it greedily, with profuse thanks.

~~~

“You should have told her you and the aunts brewed it,”
Senenmut said when they were gone. A reek of perfume lingered: Ramerit must
have bathed in it.

Hat-Nufer shrugged. “She can think what she likes. It’s the
new brewing—it came out extraordinarily well. And her husband adores date
wine.”

“So, as I recall, does she,” said Senenmut. “Father used to
make a tidy profit selling her jars to drink her date wine out of. What was it,
three jars a day?”

“Two,” said Hat-Nufer, “and you are impudent. What did you
think of Amonmose? Hasn’t she grown up well?”

“I’m amazed she grew up at all. She was a fanged horror in
her youth.”

“Ah,” Hat-Nufer said. “I’d forgotten. She bit you once for
snatching away her doll and tossing it into a cistern.”

“Before I snatched the doll,” Senenmut reminded her, “she
had been beating me about the head with it, laughing when I objected, and
calling me Baldhead and Scribe’s Monkey. You can still see a scar or two when
the light falls just so.”

“Ah well,” said Hat-Nufer. “Children grow up. They change.
Have you reflected that you’ll be eighteen years old tomorrow? You’ve grown
into a man.”

Senenmut had not reflected on it. The queen’s sickness had
driven all such trifles out of his head. He shrugged. “So? I’ve been a man in
the world’s eyes since I entered the queen’s service—and what was I then, all
of fifteen?”

“Still,” his mother said. “You’re growing older. You’ve got
your full height now, I think, such as it is; I notice you’ve a beard to offer
the razor. Don’t you think it’s time to think about what a man thinks about?”

“What? Earning a living? Aren’t I doing it well enough to
please you?”

She glowered at him. “Stop pretending you don’t know what
I’m talking about.”

He opened his mouth to deny any pretense. But he was only
half an idiot, though he might be all a fool. He knew what it meant when a
mother summoned a son for brief converse with a woman of her own age and
station, who came accompanied by a nubile daughter. Prince or commoner, it was
all the same. When he reached a man’s years, his mother set herself to marry
him off.

Hat-Nufer spoke in his silence. “I do worry about you, you
know. As far as anyone can tell, you have no interest at all in women. Is
something wrong? Do you . . . prefer men?”

That was difficult for her to say; but she had never minced
words in her life, and she did not choose to begin now.

Senenmut laughed with honest mirth. “Oh, Mother! Of course
not. What makes you think that?”

“You have no woman,” she answered. Her voice was almost
flat. “You take no lover. You haven’t even tumbled one of the servants. What am
I to think? That you’re incapable? Or that you incline toward something else?”

It was almost a relief to see how honestly she worried. He
laid his arm about her shoulders and shook her lightly. “There, Mother. There.
I’m a perfectly ordinary and capable man. It’s just . . . there
never seems to be time.”

“A young man always has time for women,” his mother said.

He shook his head. “No, Mother. Not if he serves in the
palace.”

“Well then,” she said. “Have you ever even wanted it?”

His body flushed so suddenly that it took him by surprise.
He had been going to deny it. But the memory of a certain woman in his arms, or
clinging to his hand, or commanding him with queenly hauteur . . .

Hat-Nufer let out the breath she must have been holding.
“Ah. So you aren’t altogether backward. There may be hope for you yet.”

“Mother,” he said rather desperately, “I am backward. Yes.
It comes sometimes with intelligence. The body lags behind the mind. I know I’m
not ready to marry.”

“No man is ever ready to marry,” Hat-Nufer said. “And the
younger he is, the less ready he professes to be. Readiness is much simpler
than you children will admit. You have eyes. They look at a woman. A certain
other part of you rises to salute her. That’s as ready as a man ever needs to
be.”

“I do not,” he said through clenched teeth, “salute
Amonmose. She has a voice like the scrape of a nail on slate.”

“She spoke sweetly enough to me,” said Hat-Nufer. “You’re
remembering her as she used to be. She’s a woman now, child. She’s ripe for a
husband.”

“Then let her find one who didn’t know her when she was the
worst breaker of heads in the potters’ quarter.”

“I think not,” his mother said with terrible calm. “Her
father is rather surprisingly wealthy: he’s been doing well with his line of
cookpots. They have feet, you see, like men or lions or dogs; and the lids are
the heads of whatever beast the feet belong to. They’re ridiculous, but people
can’t seem to resist them. He could afford a house at least as handsome as this
one, but it suits his whim to live in the potters’ quarter as he always has.”

“And his wife and daughter have nobler ambitions,” Senenmut
said. “Why don’t they simply set themselves to trap a lordling’s youngest son?”

“Because,” Hat-Nufer said reasonably, “there’s no need. You
are precisely what they’re looking for. You grew up in the city. You speak as
they speak, though you’ve taken to affecting a noble accent. You serve the
queen, who is well pleased with you. You’re a catch, child, homely face and
all.”

Senenmut narrowed his eyes. “Am I? Am I, then? Then these
aren’t the first who’ve come sniffing. Are they?”

“We have interviewed a number of prospects,” she said, and
no shame in her, either, that he could see. “This seems the best of them. She
brings with her a substantial settlement. If, gods forbid, you ever fall from
the queen’s favor, or if the queen—and gods prevent it—should be taken from the
world of the living, you’ll still be well taken care of.”

“That,” said Senenmut, “is the most venal nonsense I’ve ever
heard. I will not marry for money. If I can help it, I’ll not marry at all. I
don’t want a wife.”

“But I,” said Hat-Nufer, “want grandsons.”

“You have two other sons,” Senenmut said. “Do you forget
that?”

Her face had gone hard and cold—but no harder or colder than
his heart. “I remember well that I have three sons. Two of whom are children
still, and neither has been gifted by the gods as you have been.”

“Well then,” he said. “Surely one of them will do for a
stud-bull.” He rose and bowed as he would to a lady of the court. “I have
duties in the palace, which I am neglecting. Good day, Mother.” And with that,
headlong and willfully oblivious to the cost, he left her.

~~~

He fully expected her to call him back. But she did not.

He escaped from the house altogether and fled to the palace.
His duties there were onerous enough, and his fear for the queen had abated
only slightly since her fever broke; but they were all outside of himself. They
had nothing to do with the reality of a commoner raised to royal favor: the
eyes of a greedy child slipping past him to drink in his wealth and his
proximity to the queen.

“I will never marry,” he said when he could, when there was
no one about to listen or to demand explanations. “No, never; not without
respect at least, and affection. I’ll never take a wife who cares nothing for
me, only for the riches I can give her.”

The words sounded weak in his own ears, the brave and
foolish speech of a child. And where in the world would he find such a woman?
Not in the palace, certainly—noble ladies would not look at him, and servants
were beneath him. And not in the city, either, where they were all like
Amonmose and her mother.