King and Goddess (18 page)

And now he was left to his own devices. If he went home, his
mother would reckon that he was ill, or that he had fallen out of favor; she
would try to cure him with yet another marriageable female. He had no one whom he
could call friend; no confidant, no drinking companion. All his heart and his
wit were given to the queen.

He was not lonely. He needed no friend. But someone to bear
him company, to teach him how to be idle, would have been welcome.

He wandered without purpose, as courtiers constantly seemed
to do. He lacked their languid ease, their propensity for gossiping in corners.
His heart inclined toward none of their diversions. Wine did not allure him,
and of women he desired only one; and he had never seen the sense in poisoning
his enemies. If he could call them enemies. He would have had to poison the
whole court, and the king too.

There were always the horses. But the Star of Hathor was
lame, and the Moon of Isis would not run without her. He had no others; had
never had time for them.

Still, he thought, the queen’s stablemen knew him. He could
command a team and a chariot. It would pass the time, certainly; and if he
tarried long enough, he might find his way into the training-court, where the
young horses were gentled to the yoke.

His heart was light as he sought the stable, his reluctance
diminished to a niggle on the edge of his mind. Such adventure: to go out alone
in a chariot, to drive where he pleased and to pause when it suited him, and no
one to call him back.

The queen’s own master of horse met him at the stable door.
“She sent word,” he said. And there were her own beauties, her red-golden mares
whom she suffered no other to touch, save the master of horse. It was a gift,
subtle and splendid. He accepted it with the joy that it deserved.

When Senenmut returned to the stable near sunset, having
run the queen’s mares well and far, he found the master of horse in the
foaling-stall. The mare who stood there, so huge with foal that she could only
brace her feet and endure, was the queen’s own darling. She had been foaled
herself in this stall, of a mare whom the old king had given his daughter: a
queen for a queen, he had said, or so Hatshepsut remembered, and had told
Senenmut.

It was a beautiful mare, even so swollen with pregnancy. She
was a red horse as the queen preferred, a deeper red than some, the color of
dark carnelian. She had no marking, nor any scar or flaw. She was surpassingly
light and swift of foot; few could match her, and for this year and more she
had had no companion in the traces. She had been put to the swiftest of the
stallions, the king’s moon-white Eye of Horus.

She had yet a while before the foal came. A mare almost
never foaled in daylight. It was horse-magic, moon-magic; the sun enfeebled it.

The master of horse was called Kamose. His true name was
something incomprehensible in one of the tongues of Asia; but Kamose did well
enough, and he answered to it. He stood in his striped robe, bent from his
great height to press his ear to the mare’s flank. His hands ran over her belly
and slipped beneath. He nodded. “Tonight,” he said.

The mare sighed and lipped at a wisp of cut fodder. Kamose
stroked her neck and withers. “Ah, beautiful one,” he said in sympathy. “It’s
over soon, and well over.”

She knew. She had foaled before. But as all mares will when
they are within hours of their time, she chose not to believe him.

Senenmut stayed to comfort her. Kamose welcomed the
assistance. As much as he loved this one mare, he had a stableful to look
after, and a horde of stablehands who must be driven with a tight rein and
watchful eye. Senenmut, sitting on a heap of straw just outside the foaling
stall, was out of the way and acceptably quiet.

He even slept, dozing with his back to the wall, but it was
a light, uneasy sleep, marked by the movements of the queen’s red mare. He was
aware, if distantly, of the evening round of the stable: bringing in those
horses that had been turned out to run in one of the courts, feeding them all,
bedding them down, snuffing the lamps one by one in procession toward the
doors. A lamp remained burning on a shelf over his head, casting a glimmer of
light into the mare’s stall.

She was quiet, but it was a restless quiet. She had picked
at her evening’s fodder, scattering more than she ate. She went back to it at
intervals, but she was beginning to feel the pangs of the foal’s coming:
stamping, snapping at her sides.

When she went down, Kamose was there as if some god had
called him; and another behind, a slight figure in a kilt with its hair in a
braid. But for the eyepaint that no Egyptian would be seen without, the queen
was bare of adornment, stripped for whatever action the night would bring.

They had foaled mares before, she and Kamose; and Senenmut
was no novice, either, though never such a master as the others were. They
moved in concert as they had more than once before. The mare knew her duty and
did it well and quickly, without fuss. She left them little enough to do until
the foal lay wet and glistening on the straw. Then she suffered them near her,
inspecting the red filly-foal, uttering words of guard and guidance upon it,
awaiting and then examining the afterbirth and finding it all as it should be.

That was great power, great magic, to bring a creature whole
and perfect into the world. And such a creature: red like her mother, it seemed
she would be, and on her forehead a marking like a crescent moon. It was
Senenmut who held her soft and still damp in his arms, welcoming her to the
world of the living, finding in her eyes the secret of her name. He whispered
it in her ear, and she heard him: the ear twitched; she butted her head against
his hand.

She was seeking her mother’s teat. He let her go. She
wobbled in her soft new feet, tangling them in one another, questing with blind
intensity for the thing she must have above all others. The mare, the worst of
her task done, nuzzled its outcome and urged it gently toward her flank.

Senenmut was grinning like an idiot. So was Hatshepsut; and
Kamose had so far forsaken his dignity as to allow a smile through the thicket
of his beard.

“She is beautiful,” said Senenmut, “like the young moon in
the planting time.”

“She will be as lovely as her mother,” Kamose agreed, “and
as noble as her father. See how she stands already, straight for one so young,
and strong. She’ll be as swift as a wind in the desert.”

“Then let her be the Dawn Wind,” the queen said. Her eye
caught Senenmut’s. “And let her belong to my scribe, the tutor of my daughter.”

Senenmut caught his breath. “Lady! You can’t mean—”

“Do I ever say aught but what I mean?”

He flinched slightly at the edge in her tone, but he was not
cowed by it. “Lady, she was to be her mother’s heir, the queen of your stable
when her time comes. You can’t give her to me.”

“I can,” Hatshepsut said inflexibly, “and I have. Are you
fool enough to refuse her?”

“No,” he said. “But you are a fool to give her away.”

“Sometimes,” said the queen, “it pleases me to be a fool.”

He shook his head. The filly, just then, chose to wander
away from her mother, pressing up against him, unbalancing him till he must
embrace her or fall. He could feel the sleep in her, the sated hunger, the
drowsy wonder at all this strange new world. As he sank down, she went with
him, laid her head in his lap and sighed and went to sleep.

“You see,” the queen said. “Even if I hadn’t given the gift,
she would have given herself.”

If anyone else had been standing where Senenmut had stood,
that one would have received the gift instead. He did not say so. The gods were
playing with him again. It had been a hard lesson; but he had learned not to
quarrel with them when they were determined to give him whatever he had dreamed
of.

He bowed therefore, as formally as if he had been in court,
though somewhat impeded by the weight of the foal in his lap. “I thank my
lady,” he said, “with all my heart.”

~~~

The king’s concubine bore her child on the same night that
Senenmut’s filly was born. It was a son, as its father had prayed and its
mother had serenely expected. He was named Thutmose, like his father and his
grandfather before him. That in Senenmut’s mind was great presumption.

The queen was astonishingly calm. “It’s fitting enough. His
father was a concubine’s son, too. Now if he had been mine . . .
I would have named him something different. Something powerful, something
worthy of a queen’s son.”

~~~

She went in the morning to call on the king and on the
king’s concubine. She had dressed with care, as queen and goddess; but not so
splendid that she mocked the concubine’s rank and station.

The guards at the gate of the king’s palace stood firm in
front of her and would not let her pass. Nehsi, who spoke as her herald, chose
calm reason over wrath. She did not gainsay him, which spoke well for her
wisdom. “Send word to his majesty,” he said, “that her majesty waits without.”

“His majesty is in seclusion,” said the captain of the
guard, as calm as Nehsi, and as reasonable. “I am certain that when he emerges
he will be delighted to receive her majesty.”

“Her majesty recognizes the king’s desire for quiet,” Nehsi
said, “but she wishes to speak with him now.”

“Alas,” said the captain of the guard, “his majesty will see
no one.”

“He will see her majesty,” Nehsi said, suffering a hint of
iron to enter the blandness of his voice.

The captain of the guard neither moved nor yielded. Nehsi
set himself to thrust past, but the queen’s voice halted him. “No. Allow him
this indulgence. For the moment.”

She did not retreat. She withdrew as if the choice had been
hers, with the air of a queen who humors her husband’s whim.

~~~

Not until much later, when she had held the day’s audience
and judged in the tribunal and entertained a gaggle of court ladies at a feast
in honor of one who was to marry the nomarch of Abydos, could she retreat to
her chambers. Then she unleashed her temper. It was short, but it was fiery.
Her maids fled the blast. Her guards took refuge in the corridor—all but Nehsi,
who retreated to the door but did not escape through it.

Senenmut alone was bold enough or fool enough to remain
where he was. He had come to read to her from a new book, a collection of poems
that he had found thrust inexplicably into a heap of archives from the time of
Queen Nefertari. He clutched the scroll-case to his chest, standing in the
middle of her sitting-room while the storm broke about his head.

She could swear like a trooper, but when she was truly,
bone-searingly angry, she uttered each innocuous word with the mincing
precision of a court dandy. Likewise, when she was merely furious, she hurled
whatever came to hand, with deadly accuracy. True rage found her motionless,
erect and still, hands clenched into fists at her sides.

But ah, such things she said, such devastating commentary on
the king, on his proclivities, on his fondness for leaving her to do all his
duties that he found excessively dull. She spoke rapidly, in a tone so flat it
might have seemed calm, except for the crisp and crackle of fire on a
listener’s skin. It was that calm which had struck terror in the hearts of her
servants. Hatshepsut in a rage was dangerous. Hatshepsut in the calm beyond
rage was deadly.

Senenmut did not honestly fear for his life, nor overmuch
for his hide. But that he risked exile or return to the rank of his birth,
simply for showing his face in front of her when she was clearly ready to kill
something, he did not doubt for a moment.

“He does not trust me,” the queen said to the air just in
front of her. “He dares to tell me, as clearly as if he had written it on
papyrus, that he will not permit me to visit his concubine or to look on her
son. Fool! Does he think that I would strangle the brat in his cradle?”

Senenmut bit his tongue. She wanted no answer, and certainly
no comfort. He had to hope that his presence would calm her, soothe her rage,
turn her mind away from the magnitude of the insult. Vain hope—arrogant, too.
But he could not help it.

“That child,” she said, “will be king, the husband of my
daughter, the lord of these two kingdoms. I am their lady and queen. It is my
right that I should see him; that I should know what he is.”

“At that age,” Nehsi dared to say from the safety of
distance, “there’s no telling what a baby will turn into. They all look like
shriveled monkeys.”

Her eyes blazed. Her chin rose even higher. “I would know. A
queen knows a king. Even when I was small and my so-noble husband was a handful
of years older than I—even then I knew that he was no match for my father.”

“Can’t you wait?” Nehsi asked her. “Patience is a queen’s
best virtue. If he’s healthy he’ll live; if not, he’ll be out of your way. And
when he’s old enough that the kingdoms may see him, and he them, then you can
reckon his worth.”

She laughed, a whipcrack of sound with no joy in it. “This
is not about patience. This is about my right as queen to know who—and what—will
be king when my husband is dead. My husband denies it. Were I a man, O my
servant, I would go to war for it.”

“You still could,” Nehsi observed.

“Yes. Indeed I could. And I could put on wings, too, and
leap from the highest tower of this palace, and command the gods to let me
fly.”

She dropped down abruptly, heedless of her robes’ stiffness,
sitting on her heels on the floor. Her fists struck the tiles once, twice: a
child’s fierce eruption of temper, as swiftly ended as it had begun. “May a
jackal devour his liver! I had no love for him ever, but I was never his enemy.
Never till now.”

“That, I think, may be what Isis is hoping for,” Senenmut
said.