King and Goddess (27 page)

“You would know the truth of that,” Ahotep said. “You sit in
all their councils. But do you listen to rumors? Most of them are nonsense. The
one for example that makes you rather more than the queen’s friend and
counsellor.”

Senenmut went very still. He hoped that his expression did
not alter. “Oh, is that still lurking in corners? It’s inevitable, I suppose.
The queen is still young enough to attract such whispers; and all her
counsellors are men. Does anyone say why I must be the one who comforts her in
more ways than the usual?”

“Maybe,” said Ahotep, “because you do.”

Senenmut found that his mouth was open. He shut it.

His brother regarded him levelly, sternly, till he began to
bristle. Then, startlingly, Ahotep laughed. “Gods, brother! You look so
guilty.”

“I am not—”

“Don’t,” said Ahotep with a return of his sternness. “Don’t
lie to me. I’ve known for years. I followed you once or twice, long ago. You
never knew. I saw where you went. I could guess what you did there. There’s not
much else a man will do in a queen’s chamber in the hours between midnight and
dawn.”

Senenmut sat back, suddenly limp. He felt as if the air had
been driven out of his lungs. And yet he knew an enormous, almost giddy relief.
“You never said a word,” he said.

Ahotep shrugged, looking faintly embarrassed. “By the time
I’d turned into a dutiful soldier of the king, it had been going on for years,
and the king her husband was dead. What was betrayal had become a kind of
comfort. She can’t marry again, not without complicating the regency. You’ve
always been discreet: I’ve heard barely a word of what you are to each other.
The little I have heard is simply the spite of courts. They say she’s taken the
priest Hapuseneb to her bed, too, and her Nubian—that’s the heaviest wager—and
even some of her less likely counsellors. Ahmose Pen-Nekhbet, Ahmose the General,
has a surprisingly large faction.”

“Old Ahmose? Gods! I didn’t know he still had a shaft to
raise. He’s absolutely ancient. He even fought against the Hyksos, when he was
just old enough to carry a spear.”

“So he says,” Ahotep said. His voice rose to an old man’s
quaver. “Yes, yes, I served under King Ahmose himself. Now that was a king,
that was!”

Senenmut laughed too loud, perhaps, and too long, but he
needed the release. “Oh, yes! That’s Ahmose Pen-Nekhbet to the life.” He
sobered. “Do you despise me, brother?”

“For what?” Ahotep asked. “Keeping the queen so content with
you that she’s never looked at another man?”

“No,” Senenmut said. “Keeping the secret from you.”

“That was only sensible,” said Ahotep. “I admit, I was angry
at first. You could have told me. But when I grew a little older I reflected on
what I was then, how I never could keep quiet. You were wise to keep your
counsel.”

“I’m glad,” said Senenmut. He meant it. Ahotep the child had
been an endless nuisance. Ahotep the man was friend as well as brother. As much
a friend, he acknowledged to himself, as Hapuseneb; as much even as the queen.

They did not embrace one another. It would have been false
somehow; as if they protested too much.

They drank wine for a while in companionable silence. As
Senenmut poured a second cup for each, Ahotep said, “People are saying that our
brother and the queen are sharing more than confidences in those long hours
they’ve begun to spend together.”

Senenmut had been hoping, foolishly enough, that Ahotep would
not say what he had been leading up to since he invited Senenmut to share a new
jar of wine. It was not that Senenmut preferred to avoid the truth. He had not
seen it; had refused to see it. But Ahotep had forced him to open his eyes.

“It may be,” said Senenmut, “that the rumor is as false as
the queen regent’s liaison with her Nubian.”

“Do you think that?” Ahotep asked.

Senenmut had to meet that steady stare. It was not easy. Too
many things were coming clear. The sudden vanishing of Neferure’s boredom. The
way she sang to herself when she thought no one was listening. The sheen on
her, the beauty grown notably greater, and not because she had changed her wigs
or her eyepaint or her jewels. She had the look of a woman with a lover.

Or a friend. He clung to that, as feeble as it was. “It is
so difficult,” he said, “to be a queen. To have a friend—a person who wants
nothing of her but her company, who loves her for herself—is well-nigh
impossible. She’s enough like her mother that she takes little pleasure in
women’s company. Why shouldn’t she have chosen a man for a friend?”

“When a woman is as young as that,” said Ahotep, “and has as
little to do, it’s not only friendship she looks for in a handsome and charming
young man. Our brother is both.”

Senenmut shook his head. “I don’t want to believe it.”

“Neither do I,” Ahotep said, “but someone must. When you
became more than the queen’s friend, you knew as well as she that there would
be no more children. This queen’s husband is a child. If her belly swells as is
the way of things, the world will know that the king had nothing to do with
it.”

“Thutmose might prove precocious,” Senenmut said. But he
stopped himself before Ahotep could begin. “No, don’t say it. He’s much more
intelligent than he looks, but his body is a child’s still. He was late to
walk, late to talk. He’ll likely be late to manhood, too.”

Ahotep nodded. “So. Which of us corners Amonhotep and
convinces him to see sense?”

“You don’t think the queen will?”

“I think we can wield a stronger flail against our erring
brother than against the Great Royal Wife.”

Senenmut closed his eyes. He was weary suddenly, weary to
the bone. “Sweet Hathor. And it’s I who brought her here where she could meet
the boy. I never imagined—”

“One never does,” Ahotep said. “I wonder. Has anyone ever
said it of you and the queen regent?”

“Seti-Nakht has never regretted a thing in his life,” said
Senenmut. “For all I know he intended it.”

“Seti-Nakht is a wiser man than either of us.” Ahotep
drained his cup and rose. “I say we do it now. Soonest done, soonest over.”

Senenmut swallowed his protests. He had never felt less
decisive than he did now. But Ahotep the soldier more than made up for it.

That came of training in combat, Senenmut thought. A man
learned to face his fear and kill it quickly. Courtiers were more inclined to
run away from it.

Senenmut was a courtier. He had never liked to think of
himself as such. He was the queen’s servant, the commoner whom she had made a
prince. Courtiers were idlers, cat-sleek creatures born to rank that they had
never earned. The queen’s true servants, the men and women who labored long in
her service, must be something other; something more honorable.

But courtiers they were, and courtiers they would always be.

He sighed. “Well then,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

~~~

Amonhotep was not in his rooms. The lone drowsy manservant
knew nothing. “He went to the villa,” he said yawning. “Or maybe to dinner.”

Ahotep would have whipped the truth out of the fool, but
Senenmut stopped him. “Don’t waste time. You know where he is.”

Ahotep nodded heavily. “We’ll wait till morning, I suppose.
He’ll creep back in the night.”

So had Senenmut done for nights out of count. So would he be
doing tonight if Ahotep had not delayed him. He set his lips together and
withdrew from the empty rooms.

He did not seriously consider confronting the lovers in the
queen’s own chamber. It was not a scandal he wanted. A quiet meeting among the
brothers, a measure of persuasion—a thump or two if the boy needed it. That
would do. It would have to.

Amonhotep did not return home in the morning. He had,
Senenmut discovered, gone to the villa. It was the season for the stallions to
be put to the mares—apt enough, if one stopped to think.

Senenmut could not ride in pursuit. He had too many duties,
too many obligations in Thebes; and the queen regent was considering another
royal progress into Lower Egypt. Senenmut would be expected to assist in
preparations, and to accompany her.

The queen and the young king would go. It was their
progress, their faces whom the people should see. Which, Senenmut, thought,
might resolve the dilemma of Neferure and Amonhotep. Amonhotep was bound to his
brother’s estate till breeding season was done. If he had hoped to slip back at
intervals, creep into the palace by night and leave before morning, then he
would be disappointed.

It was well, thought Senenmut. He allowed himself to cease
fretting. Except for the doubled guard on Neferure’s chambers, with
instructions to admit no one through any door or passage, secret or otherwise,
he did nothing, nor confronted his brother among the herds of horses.

He continued to visit Hatshepsut: an irony that he could
well appreciate. He had said nothing to her of her daughter’s indiscretion. She
did not need to know it, nor would it serve any of them if she did.

~~~

As royal progresses went, this one was brief: down to
Memphis in barges on the river, then up again to Thebes. Hatshepsut wished to
secure the people’s loyalty by showing them their king and his beautiful young
queen. The king accepted his duty as he did all else: quietly, meekly as befit
a child-ruler under his regent’s guidance.

His mother accompanied him as she always did. She was
constrained to silence, to say or do nothing that would persuade the queen
regent to dispose of her. She had settled into it with a kind of contentment:
like a hound accustomed to its chain, or a bird to its cage.

It was all very quiet, very calm, very civilized. The
tension beneath was barely perceptible. Often Senenmut wondered if it was there
at all—if he deceived himself with night fears and useless frettings. The king
accepted his lot. He would rule in the end; there could be no doubt of it. In
this his minority, while he was still so young as to require a regent, he
demanded no more power than Hatshepsut would give him, nor seemed to feel any
lack.

In front of her he was utterly still, as if quenched. The
brightness that Senenmut had seen in him so often when he was in others’
company was sunk to an ember. It was as if the fire that burned in her had
turned his own all cold.

“He has hardly a word to say for himself,” Hatshepsut said
as she lay with Senenmut in the palace of Memphis. The secret ways there were
many and intricate, more than enough to be lost in, if he had not had a gods-given
memory for any place that he had seen more than once.

They had to be circumspect here. The servants of this palace
knew little of the queen regent and less of her scribe and servant. There was a
certain slither to them, a remembrance of ancient rivalries. Memphis had shrunk
since it was the chief city of the Two Lands; since it was taken captive by
foreign kings, and freed by kings out of Thebes.

Sometimes Senenmut thought that he could smell the foreign
kings still: a hint of incense, a ghost of outland unguents. They had brought
horses into Egypt, their one great gift and their downfall, because Egypt
embraced the new creatures and with them a new art of war.

Their spirits watched and whispered while the queen regent
lay with her common-born lover, embracing him with urgency that had faded but
little since they were young together. In the quiet after, she shook her head
over the king in whose name she ruled. “For all that I see of him, he could be
a simpleton,” she said. “He hardly says a word. He sits the throne, wears the
crown and grips the crook and flail as if he were a carven king. Does he have a
thought in his head, do you think?”

“I know he has many,” Senenmut said. “He’s afraid of you.
You are so strong, and you rule so well; and he’s so young.”

“And with such a mother as he has . . .” She
hissed a little as she always did when she spoke of Isis, in exasperation.
“It’s a wonder he can walk without her hand to hold him up.”

“You could be rid of her,” Senenmut pointed out.

She shook her head. “No. Too many people love her. They’d
cause me far more trouble than they prevented.”

“And maybe you need her,” he said. “To prove that you were
chosen wisely; that no one else is as well fit to hold the office of regent.”

“Certainly no other woman,” Hatshepsut said, “and what man
would dare?”

She was beautiful in her arrogance. He could not help
himself: he kissed her. She responded with passion enough, but it was all of
the body. Her mind was elsewhere. “I do worry. What if the king is as great a
fool as he seems? You say he has intelligence. But what is that worth, if he’s
too weak-willed to use it?”

“He’s very young,” said Senenmut.

“Some children never grow up. He was a slow child, you know
that. Slow to walk, slow to talk, slow to show himself apart from his mother.
We may find ourselves afflicted with an idiot king.”

Senenmut set his lips together. Thutmose was anything but an
idiot. It was Hatshepsut who made of him a useless thing, a mute and passive
creature who could only go where he was led. Sometimes Senenmut thought the
child must be in love; or so deep in hate and fear that he could not see for
the force of it.

Hatshepsut did not need to hear any of that. “We’ve years
yet,” he said, “before you’ll need to fear.”

She pulled free of his grasp. “You think I want that. You
think I’ll be glad to hold a regency my life long.”

“I think you’ll do ill in retirement,” he said: “forbidden
the heights of rule, forced to see your daughter and her husband in the place
of power, and you outside of it.”

She shivered. It was not anything she willed: he saw how she
glowered, and shook herself with a sharp, fierce movement. “As you say. It will
be years before I need to fear that. Love me now. Help me drive away the dark.”