King and Goddess (2 page)

None of which Senenmut had ever noticed in the lords’ sons
who studied among the scribes, but he was no such fool as to say so. What he
understood of this lesson was simple. A lordling who carried himself high was
tolerated, because he had been born to do just that. A tradesman’s son was
expected to conduct himself with greater circumspection.

Even—especially—when he knew that he had no equal among the
apprentices. No one else was so quick with the pen or so adept in the learning
of languages. No one else wrote so clearly and with such elegance.

“Quick wits are a gift of the gods,” said Seti-Nakht. “The
ability to use them is more seldom bestowed. You are clever. No task is too
difficult for you; most are too easy. It would do you little good, I think, to
keep you among the apprentices. Boredom, like any other ill, can teach as well
as vex the spirit; but you were never of a mind to find lessons in adversity.”

And what, Senenmut wondered fiercely, was this? With every
word he sank lower, and at the same time grew angrier. “What have I done,” he
demanded, “but excel in the tasks you set me? Should I have pretended to be
less capable?”

“You could,” said Seti-Nakht, “have been less careful to let
every scribe and master and apprentice know that you excelled in the tasks you
were set.”

Senenmut threw himself at the master’s feet. “I yield! By
the gods, I yield! I am unworthy!”

Seti-Nakht’s rod did not come whistling down upon his back.
It slipped beneath instead, and levered him up, holding him lightly across the
throat.

He looked into Seti-Nakht’s face. The master of scribes
stared calmly back. “Until you become a courtier, take this to heart. Never lie
to any man who is better armed than you.”

“And when I am a courtier?”

“Then make sure that your attendants are most well armed.”
Seti-Nakht shook his head, and to Senenmut’s astonishment he smiled.

Senenmut had never seen him smile before. There was nothing
reassuring in it.

Seti-Nakht lowered the rod from Senenmut’s throat. “I am not
admitting you to the House of Life,” he said. “Your talents lie elsewhere.”

Senenmut staggered. All of this ordeal, he had thought, was
to prepare him for the passage from apprentice to scribe. Not to cast him out.
Not the most brilliant of the apprentices, the one who was most often given
real scribes’ work to do, and not simply endless repetitive copying of old
poems.

It came out of him in a cry. “But I was the best of them!”

“You were the most clever,” Seti-Nakht said. “The House of
Life is no place for the easily bored.”

“Then where am I to go? What am I to do? I can’t be a seller
of pots and jars.”

“Why not? Your father is.”

Senenmut’s fingers clawed. Only a last remnant of prudence
kept them from the old man’s throat. “I’ll die,” he said, flat and
hurting-hard.

“Contrary to all the tales,” said Seti-Nakht, “no one has
ever died of frustrated ambition.”

This time Senenmut could not stop himself from throttling
Seti-Nakht where he sat. Not unless he backed away, whirled, and ran.

The rod caught him as he spun, whirled him back. “Stop
that,” said Seti-Nakht. “Even more than arrogance, you have a besetting flaw.
You listen only as far as it pleases you, and no further. I have decided that
you will not enter the House of Life. This I judge best. But,” he said as
Senenmut came near to erupting yet again, “I find it difficult to imagine you
in your father’s profession. You have no talent for it. What you do have . . .”
He paused. He drew a breath, as if he needed to think; as if it were not thought
of thrice and thrice over, since long before Senenmut came to stand before him.
He said, “Go to the palace. Tell the chamberlain that Seti-Nakht sends this
gift to be used as it may best be used.”

Senenmut rocked on his feet; and yet he nearly laughed. No
wonder indeed that everyone was terrified of Seti-Nakht. Even his gifts he gave
with sting of rod or tongue. He had cast Senenmut into the depths of
despair—and then he had set him free. He had sent him to the palace. And in the
palace was the king.

“Go,” said Seti-Nakht. “Out of my sight. Get!”

Was there a glimmer of something in his eye—sorrow, perhaps?
Pride clothed in regret?

Not likely, Senenmut thought. The old horror was glad to be
rid of him.

He turned quickly enough, he hoped, that Seti-Nakht could
not see the gleam of tears. He had what he wanted, at last, at last. But it was
not as effortless as he had dreamed, to depart from the Temple of Amon. Nor was
it easy at all to leave Seti-Nakht. The bitter tongue, the merciless rod—gods;
what would he do without them?

With the sting of that last blow still clear in his body’s
memory, Senenmut walked away from the House of Life, toward the palace and the
king’s service.

Senenmut entered the palace with thudding heart and
trembling knees. He would have died before he admitted to either.

He was passed from guard to servant to chamberlain, each
time repeating the name of Seti-Nakht, which was his password and his surety.
He was too proud—arrogant, his master would have said—to gawp like a yokel, but
his eyes darted, taking in splendors. Gold and jewel-colors, painted images,
wall after wall limned from vaulted ceiling to stone-tiled floor with prayer or
poetry or princely puffery. There were halls as high as the sky, forested with
pillars; gardens sweet-scented with rarities, flowers and trees that grew
nowhere else in Egypt; even the roar and the pungent reek of a menagerie that
seemed filled mostly with enormous cats. And everywhere there were princes,
images of elegance drifting or strolling or striding past in clouds of
attendants.

None of them took any notice of a weedy young man in a
scribe’s kilt, clutching palette and ink and brushes as he followed the latest
of several guides through a maze of passages. There was no clear order here, no
coherence, only the whim of this king or that. One built a wing flying off the
palace proper. Another made it greater. A third added a colonnade and closed it
in with a garden. And so it went, more like a living thing than the work of any
one man’s hands.

Senenmut judged that he had gone deep into the palace before
he was led to a room and told to wait. It was a small room, nearly bare, with a
chair and a table and a woven rug on the floor.

There was a bowl on the table, half filled with water, and
floating in it a lotus blossom. The walls reflected it, painted with lotuses,
simple and somewhat faded, beautiful in their antiquity. A window in one of the
walls looked out on yet another colonnade, and a garden of trees.

No one seemed to come here. The crowds of princes were all
elsewhere, on the other side of the colonnade and behind a guarded door. One
person trotted past the door of the room in which Senenmut was left, a woman in
a tight linen shift, carrying a tray laden with bottles and jars.

Senenmut, reflecting on the likelihood of solitude in a
crowded palace, allowed himself to dream. If he had been meant for lesser
tasks, surely he would have been taken to the scribes’ hall and set to work.
But he was singled out, led to a room in what surely must be the royal quarters,
and left to his own devices. Was he being tested? Were there eyes in the
painted walls, watching to see what he would do?

He judged it wise, after a circuit or two of the room, to
sit in the best of the light and set out his palette and inks and brushes, and
unroll the bit of papyrus that he kept for need. For a while he sat still,
empty of inspiration. Then all at once it came to him. He bent to the papyrus.

~~~

“What are you doing?”

Senenmut had heard the footsteps, seen the shadows on the
floor, reckoned and counted them. There were only two, one very large and wide
in the shoulders, one much smaller and more slender.

The voice that spoke to him was light, a child’s voice or a
young woman’s. It had a child’s curiosity but a woman’s self-possession, with
nothing tentative in it.

He looked up. Yes, a child, but dressed as a woman in a
white linen gown and a wide jeweled collar, with a wig of heavy plaits. A small
imperious cat-face regarded him from amid the braids. “Are you writing a poem,”
she demanded, “or a hymn to the gods?”

Senenmut quelled the first, impulsive retort. The king might
be watching, judging him by his response to this girlchild, whoever she was.
Royal kin certainly, or royal servant, to carry herself with such sublime
self-confidence.

He answered her as sweetly as he knew how. “Why, lady,
neither. I’m writing a letter.”

Her painted brows went up. Her eyes tilted upward like a
cat’s, with no little in them of a cat’s expression: fiercely intent, fixing on
him as if he were prey. “To whom would you write a letter?”

He bristled at the tone of it. And who are you, it said, to
write to anyone at all?

But he remembered his resolve. The king might be listening.
Or the king’s chancellor. Or any one of the great lords of the Two Lands. He
answered this impudent child as if she were worthy of respect. “I am writing,
lady, to my master, Seti-Nakht. He set me lessons, you see, and I am recalling
them.”

“How dull,” said the girlchild. She lifted a hand.

Her shadow shifted slightly, coming into the light. Senenmut
had thought it a trick of the eyes. No man could be as large as that.

This one was. He was as black as the kohl that lined his
lady’s eyelids, so tall that he had to stoop to pass the door. And yet he did
not move like other giants that Senenmut had seen. He was as light on his feet
as a hunting cat, poised as if to spring.

“Nehsi,” she said—it was not a name, not properly: it simply
meant ‘Nubian.’ “Fetch wine. And, I think, dates. And bread with cheese baked
in.”

The Nubian bowed low. His face was still, but his eyes
begged her to reconsider. She did not choose to see. He backed away, still
bowing.

When his shadow had passed down the colonnade, the girlchild
sat in the chair, which happened to be set just in front of the place where
Senenmut had chosen to sit. She was pretty rather than beautiful, but she moved
with striking grace, as if she had studied to be a dancer.

“Tell me your name,” she said abruptly.

Senenmut stiffened. One did not toy with names. There was
too much power in them. And to demand a name of a stranger, with such a
presumption of obedience— “You are arrogant,” he said.

The words escaped before he could call them back. Seti-Nakht
would have flayed him with the rod, had he known.

This child seemed taken aback. But not enough, and not for
long. “You dare much,” she said.

“So do you.”

Her lips went tight. “Do you know who I am?”

“Should I?” asked Senenmut.

With late-dawning wisdom, Senenmut began to suspect that she
was more than a servant, and perhaps more than a royal cousin. She looked at
him as if no one else had ever spoken to her so, with such complete disregard
of her station.

When she spoke, she seemed almost amused. “Yes, scribe, you
should know who I am. I am called Hatshepsut.”

His teeth clicked together. Yes, he should know who that
was. Hatshepsut. Daughter of the old king, the king who was dead, and his Great
Royal Wife. Wife of the God. The king’s wife, Great Royal Wife, queen and
goddess.

He could not fling himself on his face. His inks would
spatter. He bowed over the palette, cursing the flush that burned his cheeks.
“Lady,” he said—and cursed himself. He was a scribe. He knew all the proper
forms of address, or he had known them once. They were all fled; all forgotten.

The queen had no mercy on him. “Now will you tell me your
name?” she demanded.

His eyes flashed up of themselves.
Spoiled
, he thought.
Brat
.

Queen.

He answered her with as much grace as he could muster. “I am
called Senenmut, Ramose’s son.”

“Senenmut Ramose’s son,” said the queen, “who sent you here?”

“The Temple of Amon, lady,” he answered, “and Seti-Nakht the
master of scribes.”

“Seti-Nakht.” The queen sounded—not pleased. Satisfied,
somehow. But when she looked at Senenmut, that satisfaction vanished. “Did he
send you to me as a punishment?”

“I am sent—?” But of course he was. This must be the queen’s
house within the palace. This was certainly the queen: no one else would
address him so directly, or with such certainty of her right to do it. He said,
“Lady, he simply sent me.”

“That would be like him,” said Hatshepsut. “He believes that
I need reining in. You too, I suppose. You have the look.”

Senenmut was blushing again, and cursing his body’s folly.
“Are you saying, lady, that I should return to him? Shall I tell him that the
gift does not suit?”

“Would you do that?” she asked. She sounded honestly
curious.

“You are the queen,” he said. “I’m bound to obey you.”

She did not argue that. “No, don’t go back to him. Not yet.
He must have had his reasons for sending you. I asked,” she said, “for a man of
years and wisdom, a scribe well fit to serve a queen.”

And Seti-Nakht had sent a boy with few years and no wisdom,
who had never learned the meaning of humility.

Hatshepsut was even less familiar with that virtue than
Senenmut. He would have thought that only a king could be as haughty as she
was.

“Read to me,” she said abruptly.

Senenmut’s mind emptied of wit. There was nothing to read
but the letter in his lap, and he was not minded to regale her with that.

By the gods’ good fortune, the Nubian returned just then,
bearing the wine and the dates and the bread. He carried other things, too: a
case of scrolls and another in the same shape as Senenmut’s own, a scribe’s
satchel, and not a new one, either. This had seen use.