King and Goddess (22 page)

He dreamed this, perhaps. The dark that seemed a living
thing, lying even on this palace, breathing vast and slow beyond the flicker of
lamps or torches. The distant cries, sounds like women keening, wailing for the
dead. What it signified—that was nightmare. It could not be—

“The king is dying,” Hapuseneb said, “or dead.”

Senenmut’s hand slashed the air in a sign against evil.
“Avert! If he hears of this, if he believes you have ill-wished him—”

“I’ve done nothing,” said Hapuseneb. “A little fever, an imp
of the marshes, a few days’ inconvenience, has conquered our lord and king.
Who’d have thought it?”

“Who,” muttered Senenmut, “except the Lady Isis?” He paused.
“Do you think—?”

“No,” Hapuseneb said. He smiled sweetly at the king’s
door-guard. “You will let us in,” he said.

The guard opened his mouth, then shut it again. Maybe
Hapuseneb laid a small magic on him. Maybe not. Senenmut was no priest, to know
the truth of it.

~~~

The king lay in his bed which was much grander and higher
than the queen’s, in a room full of the images of his kingship: Thutmose in the
Two Crowns, Thutmose administering justice, hunting lions, conquering enemies
in their hundreds and thousands. Senenmut’s eye, wandering, took in a scrap of
inscription: “Mighty am I, unconquerable, living Horus, god and ruler, Great
House of Egypt.”

The mighty, the unconquerable, the living Horus, Thutmose
son of Thutmose of the line of Ahmose, had fallen not to the sword of an enemy
but to the indignity of a fever. He seemed to have felt the shame of it before
it stripped the life and souls from him. His face was set in lines of
petulance, small niggling irritation that he must die so soon, and for so
little.

The one who had shrieked and wailed over him was gone,
carried away on a wide black shoulder. Nehsi the Nubian came back as Senenmut
stood like a witling in the door. “Her women will tend her,” he said in his
voice like a lion’s purr.

Hatshepsut nodded briefly. Of all the crowd of priests and
physicians, guards and servants, not one dared interfere as she stood over the
body of her husband. How she must have come in where for so long she had been
forbidden, Senenmut could well guess. She had done it as simply as he had. She
had walked up to the door and informed the guard that she would enter.

Her eyes were clear, untormented by visions. Her face was
calm. She could hardly mourn this man whom she had liked so little. But he had
been king, and her husband. She must know at least some small stabbing of
regret.

There was none that he could see. “How like you,” she said
to the king, heedless of any who heard, “to go galloping off into the Field of
Reeds without a thought for the turmoil you leave behind. Your son is three
years old. My daughter, whom he must marry, has hardly begun her tenth year.
You leave the Two Kingdoms in the care of children.”

He had nothing to say. His eyes were open, blind as the eyes
of the dead must always be. If any of his souls lingered, fluttering in the
dark, it offered no response.

She loosed a sound that was half a sigh, half a snort of
disgust. Her voice rose. “You! Yes, you, sniveling there. Fetch the embalmers.”

The sniveler was a great prince, a darling of the court, but
under her cold eye he could do no other than obey. She sent others on errands
of like import: summoning the king’s counselors, passing word to the court,
informing the temples that the living Horus was become the dead Osiris. None
protested. None dared disobey her. She was terrible in her calm, goddess and
queen; and no king now to stand against her will.

“
You
did it!” Isis
shrieked. “You poisoned him! You ill-wished him! I know it! I smell it in you!”

“Please,” said the queen in silence that rang after the
shrilling of Isis’ voice. “Sit down. Will you have wine? It might calm you.”

Isis gasped and sucked in breath like a great, whooping sob.
Nehsi braced to leap if she succumbed yet again to hysterics.

But she seemed to have mastered herself. She could even weep
beautifully, he noticed: a glistening trail of tears down those ivory cheeks,
and a pathetic charm to that mouth all twisted with grief. In the hour and more
since he had carried her into her chamber and entrusted her to her servants,
she had managed to bathe, refresh the paint of cheeks and eyes, and put on a
mourning robe. He contemplated that without great surprise. No one else had
been prepared for this; but Isis in her fear and her foolishness had expected
that the king would die.

He admired her no more for that. Nor for her sudden, lightly
trembling calm, her big eyes fixed on Hatshepsut’s face. “I do not need wine,”
she said in a small, contained voice. “You do not need to treat me like an
idiot child.”

“I treat you as your conduct deserves,” the queen said. She
stood while Isis sat, in Isis’ chambers deep in the king’s palace, but it was
she who ruled here and Isis who remained by her sufferance.

“You were my servant,” said Hatshepsut, “before I gave you
to my husband. Now that my husband is dead, you hold a certain rank as the
mother of his heir. You continue in that rank; no one will or can deprive you
of it. But you will remember, O concubine whom men call Isis: I am Great Royal Wife.
I am the daughter of daughters of Queen Nefertari. If I am given the smallest
reason to suspect that you aided my husband on his passage to the realm of
Osiris, then you will join him on the journey.”

Isis had gone even whiter than paint and artifice could make
her. “You cannot blame me for his death. He died of a fever.”

“Certainly,” Hatshepsut said. “And whose yearning to hunt in
the marshes caused him to fall ill? He could have remained here, horrendously
bored but safely alive.”

Nehsi thought that Isis would burst into tears again, but
she seemed to have wept herself dry. Burning dry; or perhaps that was hate. “He
never loved you,” she said with sudden venom. “He detested you.”

“And I detested him,” said Hatshepsut. “He was still the
king, and I was his wife. You may cherish illusions of ruling as regent in your
son’s minority. Dispose of them. I am the daughter and wife of kings. You were born
into servitude, of a line of servants. You have risen higher than any before
you. But you will rise no higher.”

“I have friends,” Isis said. “Those who were the king’s
loyal servants, who have no love for you, nor ever will—”

“They may not love me,” said Hatshepsut, “but they know
whose daughter I am. What will you do to contest it? Seduce them singly or all
together?”

“You are reckoned beautiful,” Isis said, “but I am more
beautiful than you. And the prince—the king—is my son.”

“You mew like a cat,” Hatshepsut said to her. “Have you
claws, then? Will you wage war with me? Or have you just enough sense to understand
how tedious it is to rule two kingdoms? Dispose of me, destroy me with
treachery, and it all falls to you. All of it, little kitten. Forty-two nomes,
forty-two nomarchs, a hundred scribes for each one, each reckoning up a hundred
accounts for his lord and master. How many baskets of grain, how many cattle,
how many fat geese and how many jars of beer are in each nome, and who receives
them, and how, and for what services—”

Isis clapped her hands to her ears. “Oh, stop that! He told
me what it was like. He hated it. He said you love it—live for it.”

“I loathe it,” said Hatshepsut. “But it is necessary; and I
have a gift for it. Before you dream of seizing power, of making yourself
regent while I languish in exile or worse, consider that without me you have no
one to bear the tedium.”

“A queen can command anyone she pleases,” Isis said with
what perhaps she fancied was queenly hauteur.

Hatshepsut, who was queen in truth, lifted her chin a
fraction. “A queen may. A regent who was a concubine, who has no gift or talent
for ruling kingdoms . . .” She shrugged. “Perhaps I should leave
you to it. It would be pleasant to be free; to call my time my own, to do and
go as I please.”

“You would go into exile,” Isis said.

Hatshepsut laughed, light and free. “Oh, how hard you try to
roar like a lion, and still you mew like a kitten. Of course I would not be
exiled. You might demand it, but the lords of Egypt would decline to obey you.
No man will touch or harm the living Isis.”

“I am—” Isis stopped. Nehsi doubted that it was wisdom that
constrained her. She was afraid of Hatshepsut—deathly afraid; and hating her
for it.

The hatred of a child was a frail and changeable thing.
Hatshepsut seemed undismayed by it. Nehsi was more wary. A child could harm
where it hated; could kill, if it came upon a weapon. It lacked the sense that
would stay a wiser hand.

“The kingdoms will look to us for strength in this time of
trouble,” Hatshepsut said: “a king dead before his time, his heir hardly more
than an infant. We must present to them the face of amity, and give them a
strong regency, that they may have no fear of the kingdoms’ fall.”

“The Two Lands can never—”

Almost Nehsi thought that Hatshepsut would strike the little
fool. But she struck the arm of her chair instead. “A hundred years ago, the
king in Thebes was subject to a foreign king. Yes, the Two Lands can fall. They
can topple in a night, if the gods will it. You who do not know this, whose
faith is as blind as it is inviolate: would you presume to demand a share in
this regency?”

“I must.” Isis’ voice was light and sweet; it could not be
otherwise. Yet it was astonishingly firm. “My son is not safe with you.”

“Which?” demanded Hatshepsut. “His life or his adoration of
you? Are you afraid that once he knows me, he may learn to despise you?”

“You would teach him to hate me,” said Isis. She was perhaps
close to tears, but too stubborn to give way to them.

“And therefore you teach him to hate me,” Hatshepsut said:
“as if one hatred could fill him up, and leave no room for more.”

Isis twisted her hands in her lap. She was grievously
overmatched, and she must know it. “I am his mother,” she said. “To you he is
nothing but a head on which to set the Two Crowns, since you can’t wear them
yourself.”

“And whose fault is that? Who has kept me rigorously apart
from him, and never allowed me to come within a spearlength? He must marry my
daughter. What will she have of him who is her brother, whom she has never
spoken to, whom she has never known?”

Nehsi drew breath to speak, but said nothing. What the
tutors had done was common knowledge among the servants: that they had brought
sister and brother together, and the two had begun to be friends.

The high ones knew nothing of it. He was not sure why he
kept silence. Out of circumspection, he hoped; to forestall a war. It was not
loyal, but it seemed to him that it was wise.

“She will know him now,” Isis said, “since they will marry.
But until he’s old enough to do what a husband does, it were best if—”

“My husband and I were kept apart,” said Hatshepsut. “No one
was afraid, and no one feared that my mother would corrupt my husband until he
turned against his mother. It was simply the way of things. I am a woman, he
was a man. Our worlds seldom met.”

Isis brightened visibly. “Then they can—”

“No,” said Hatshepsut. “That way lies division, and
eventually hatred. The king and his queen are the twinned souls of Egypt. When
they are at odds, the kingdoms suffer. These children who will be king and
queen—for them I would wish a better fortune.”

Isis did not understand. Nehsi did not think that she ever
would. She lacked both subtlety and wit. Nor was she one who changed her mind
once she had made it up. She had decided that Hatshepsut was a threat to her
son. She would not alter that decision, nor yield to reason.

Yet fear could sway her; and Hatshepsut wielded it as a king
should wield a sword. “We will preserve all semblance of amity,” Hatshepsut
said. “Our children will be wedded and crowned as soon as may be: when the
seventy days of the king’s embalming are over and he is laid in his tomb, and
the kingdoms turn again to the world of the living. Now and hereafter, I am
queen regent of the Two Lands. You may continue in this place, or in another if
you so wish. One properly distant and appropriately secluded.”

“I will stay here,” said Isis, shaking but standing fast.
“Someone must protect my son.”

“The whole of Egypt will protect him,” Hatshepsut said, not
troubling to conceal her exasperation. “Very well. Stay and fret. It matters
nothing.”

~~~

“You could have handled that better,” Nehsi observed in
the quiet of the queen’s inner chamber.

Hatshepsut paused in readying herself for sleep. The maid
Mayet, deft and circumspect, continued to brush out her mistress’ hair.
Hatshepsut took no notice of her except to refrain from turning to glare at
Nehsi. “How should I have handled it? The woman is an idiot.”

“She was a perfect match for your late and too little
lamented husband.” Nehsi leaned back in the chair that he preferred: the tall
one nearest the door. “It’s the gods’ jest, you know: to give you the gift of
winning hearts—all but those of your husband and the mother of his heir.
Nothing that they say or do can please you.”

“It’s always calculated to the finest degree, to drive me
into screaming fits.” The queen sighed. “Oh, gods, Nehsi, I have no
self-control around either of them. If anything she’s worse than he was. He had
a glimmer of intelligence, hidden deep. She has none at all.”

“Maybe not,” said Nehsi, “but she has a certain level of
cunning. She knows what will vex you past the edge of reason.”

“So does that blasted monkey Neferure used to keep,”
Hatshepsut snapped. “It had the grace to die before someone throttled it.”

“One can always hope,” Nehsi said with careful lack of
expression.