King and Goddess (3 page)

The queen bade him eat, as imperious in that as in
everything else. To his surprise, he was hungry. She, it seemed, was not. She
watched him, censoriously maybe, or maybe only curious to see how a commoner
ate. He took some small pleasure in showing her the manners that he had learned
among the scribes.

He could not tell if she was disappointed. When he had had
his fill, the Nubian took the rest away—little enough, at that—and left him
alone again, for a little while, with the queen.

“Read to me,” she said again.

There were indeed scrolls in the case, written in a
workmanlike hand, nothing beautiful in them. They were meant to be read and
recorded, not to be admired. Why anyone should want to remember them, Senenmut
could not imagine. They were only letters from foreign kings to the king of
Egypt, begging for gold and offering daughters and whining that they needed his
aid in this war or that.

“Surely you can read these,” Senenmut said, “lady. There’s
nothing complicated about them.”

Ah: he had stung her, and he had not even been thinking when
he did it. She spoke with excessive precision, through tightened lips. “I can
read. A little. But not enough.”

“What, no one taught you?”

“I was taught,” she said, still stiffly. “I was not taught
well. My father died, you see. My husband is not a man for, as he puts it,
trifles. Scribes read and write. Queens command the scribes.”

“You could command a scribe to teach you,” Senenmut said.

“I have,” said the queen. “Or I thought I had. Seti-Nakht
has a nasty sense of humor.”

He did indeed, thought Senenmut. “Is that what you want of
me, then, lady? To read to you?”

“Read,” she commanded him.

In a fit of temper he obeyed her. He read from the scrolls,
every word, even to the endless repetitive formulae of greeting and salutation.
She sat with hands folded in her lap, listening with all apparent serenity. If
the fourth consecutive recounting of the same arguments on behalf of the same
king who was, he declared, destitute, did not bore her silly, then she was a
stronger spirit than Senenmut.

He could let his eyes glide over the words, and his tongue
utter them, and leave his mind to wander as it pleased. It noted that the
Nubian came back and established himself on guard at the door. It saw how a
strand of the queen’s own hair, glossy black and very thick, had escaped
beneath her wig. It observed that the sun had shifted toward noon, and that the
light in the room was fading slowly, for the window faced east.

She heard the whole of one scroll and most of another.
Senenmut’s throat was raw, his voice hoarse. As he finished one letter and
began another, she said, “Enough.”

He lapsed into welcome silence. The Nubian filled the cup
that had been empty; he drank. The wine made him dizzy. He had had wine once or
twice before, thin sour stuff, nothing like this sweet heady vintage. This must
be the wine that kings drank at their feasts.

The queen had drunk nothing. Maybe there was calculation in
that. “You read adequately,” she said. “I wish to learn. Can you teach me?”

“I am not a schoolmaster,” Senenmut said in the heat of the
wine. “I do not wish to be one. If I did, would I be here?”

“Probably not,” said the queen. “I disappoint you, I see.
Had you expected to be taken to the king and appointed Vizier of the Upper
Kingdom?”

He was too furious even to blush. He was all cold, white and
still.

She went on as if oblivious. “My husband dislikes scribes.
He prefers what he calls honest men: soldiers and their kind, men armed with
sword and spear instead of brush and palette. He’d be rid of your kind if he
could. Scribes and priests, he says, are the bane of a warrior king. They
throttle swift action. They diminish the glory of battle in a niggle of
numbers.”

“I might be different,” Senenmut muttered.

She arched a painted brow. “My husband would never have
summoned you. I the mere woman, I who am no more than Great Royal Wife—I have a
use for you, or someone like you. You may refuse. The palace will be closed to
you thereafter, but that surely will be no impediment to a talent as vast as
yours.”

Senenmut bristled. “And what do I have to gain if I play
schoolmaster to your majesty?”

“Why,” said the queen, “nothing. Except presence in the
palace and the prospect of admittance to my counsels. I do have them, scribe.
Yes, even I, who am not a king.”

Her irony was honed a shade too keenly. It irked her, then,
that someone else must be king. That was a weapon if Senenmut had known how to
use it.

He knew the scribe’s art. He was learned in the lore of the
Two Kingdoms. He had heard of the intrigues of courts, the subtle and deadly
games that the high ones played to allay their boredom. Boredom like gold was a
luxury; only the wealthy were free to indulge in it.

The queen was bored. Whatever she did with herself, whatever
was allowed her as the king’s wife, was not enough. She wanted more. This
teaching that she asked for was but a means to an end. It would give her
something that she needed, further a plan that she had in train. Through it she
played the game of princes.

Senenmut meant to be one who ruled the game, not one who was
ruled by it: a counter on a board, helpless to move except as his master
decreed. Just so would this child-queen use him, take what he had and cast him
away.

He rose. He bowed as correctly as he knew how. He said, “I
wish my lady well of her ambition.”

She had not dismissed him, but neither did she stop him when
he turned and left her. Part of him—and rather a large one—was railing at him
for a fool. The part that ruled his feet wanted simply to be away from there,
away from that imperious, impossible, exasperating girlchild.

Senenmut looked back on the gates of the palace in a kind
of bleak exultation. He had talked himself out of his chief ambition. And for
what? Because he had taken a dislike to the king’s wife.

He was fortunate that she had not had him flogged or worse.
Her youth had preserved him: no doubt she had never been spoken to with such
rudeness. She had not known how to punish it.

And now he had nowhere to go. The House of Life was closed
to him. He had barred himself from the palace. If he went home so early, his
mother would not rest until she had discovered the reason. Then she would flay
him as royally as the queen had failed to do. And after that . . .

What? Sell jars to the brewers of beer? Write letters for
the poor and the feckless? Talk himself into, at best, a lesser temple that
stood in need of a scribe?

He stood in the middle of the street, the great processional
way that led from the palace into the city, and saw nothing but the magnitude
of his folly. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, gods.”

~~~

He wandered till evening, not caring where he went.
Someone relieved him of his provisions, but even in abstraction he kept a grip
on his scribe’s satchel. He did not know why he should, when he stopped to
think. It was no use to him.

He could, he thought, go back to the queen, grovel at her
feet, beg her to let him teach her.

And be schoolmaster to a chit of a girl?

He turned on his heel at that, and looked about him. He knew
only vaguely where he was. His feet had carried him down to the river: far down
and well away from both the palace and his father’s house.

It was running as low as it ever ran, as it did at every
turn of the year. When the moon came round again the river would begin to
swell; in a remarkably little time it would stretch as vast as a sea, drowning
the rich farmlands that now were ripe with the harvest. When after a season it
retreated, the black earth that it left behind would grow green again, and
burgeon with the wealth of Egypt.

Even so shrunken it was a wide and potent river, thick with barges
and with lesser boats: fishermen, ferrymen, a prince in his gilded yacht with
musicians following in a smaller vessel, and a second with a cookstove lit and
preparing his dinner, and a third laden with the flock of his concubines.

Senenmut leaned perilously far out above the river. He
wanted what that man had. Yes, even now, when he was sunk in despair. The
prince had a harper on his yacht, a young woman with a piercingly sweet voice.
It rang clear over the water, singing of love among the reeds.

“Truer to sing of love betrayed,” he said.

The singer did not hear him. The little fleet passed away
down the river. A barge followed it, heavy laden with cattle; and a fisherman
hauling in a net.

As the sun sank low over the red and barren hills beyond the
river, Senenmut turned his feet toward his father’s house. He would not lie, he
had decided. He would simply fail to inform his mother that Seti-Nakht had
dismissed him, and that he in turn had dismissed the queen. The longer he put
off the inevitable, the more likely he was to discover a way out of his
predicament.

Or it could simply be that he was a coward. He went in as he
did every evening. The servants had water for him to wash hands and feet and
face. The aunts fluttered. The baby crowed in his nurse’s arms. Ahotep
demonstrated a new accomplishment: somersaults across the family’s gathering
room, till he came near to oversetting the table and the dinner that was laid
out on it. Their father seemed not to notice. Their mother was abed with the
headache.

That much reprieve Senenmut was granted: not to face her stern
all-seeing eye. He ate hungrily, which spared him the aunts’ worry and fret. He
could always eat, even in the depths of adversity.

~~~

That night, lying in the bed he shared with Ahotep, he dreamed
that he had returned to the palace. The queen was there, sitting on a golden
throne. Her headdress was shaped and colored like the wings of a falcon. Its
head crowned her, its eyes lambent in the dimness of the hall; one blazing
gold, one cold unseeing white. Such were the eyes of Horus, falcon-god,
protector of kings. His eye that saw clear was the sun. His blind eye was the
moon.

He turned his sun-eye on Senenmut, and then his eye that was
the moon. He saw; he did not see. In dream it had meaning, but Senenmut was
slow in the wits. He did not understand.

He woke still groping for understanding. Ahotep for once was
up before him. He felt heavy. His head ached. So: he was ill. He had dreamed
it, all of it, even to his meeting with the queen.

A small figure hurtled out of air onto his middle. He
grunted. Ahotep bounced with bruising enthusiasm. “Senenmut! Senenmut, do you
know who’s here? Guess who’s here!”

Senenmut growled and heaved the brat off him and shut his
eyes tight. But there was no getting rid of Ahotep.

“Mother’s up and dressed and acting civil. Father’s beside
himself. Senenmut, he’s asking for you! ”

“Who in the world—” Senenmut’s mind woke more slowly than
his tongue. Mother not only awake but dressed and being civil. Father
flustered, who never noticed enough to be perturbed by it.

Gods. The queen had done it. She had sent her soldiers to
seize him and carry him away, no doubt to a terrible and too richly deserved
fate.

It was not courage that brought Senenmut out of the dubious
safety of his sleeping-room. He was too practical to imagine that he could
escape. If he went over the wall and disappeared into the city, the queen’s men
would simply assuage her wrath with the blood of his family.

He would happily have seen his brother muzzled and chained
in a kennel like the yapping pup he was, but never in the world would Senenmut
have wished him dead. Nor Mother, sharp-tongued ungentle creature that she was,
nor Father who was all that his wife was not. The baby, the servants . . .

He took time to bathe first and to make himself properly
tidy: head new shaved, kilt his best and cleanest. He brought his satchel,
because if he was to die, he wanted to do it as a scribe should: with pen and
brush close to hand.

~~~

Bes must have had his bread and beer early this morning.
There was no one near the shrine. They were all in the room the family gathered
in to eat. It was no more splendid than Senenmut remembered, but his kinsfolk
were on their best behavior. They were almost quiet. No one clamored for attention.
Even the baby sucked peacefully at the nurse’s breast.

A personage sat in the best chair, where Father usually sat.
He had been offered date wine and new bread: both lay on the table beside him.
He did not seem to have touched either.

He might be a soldier. Senenmut had not thought to inquire
when he was in attendance on the queen. His height and breadth and his ebon
darkness were impossibly exotic in that small and common room with its middling
bad wall-painting of palm trees and crocodiles. He did not seem discommoded by
it, but neither was he at his ease. He simply sat, still as a stone panther,
waiting as he must have been ordered to wait.

Senenmut’s coming brought him alert. It was a subtle thing:
a light in his eyes, expression in his face where had been none before.
Senenmut did not see death there. Maybe it was only that he could not read a
Nubian face as he might an Egyptian.

Nehsi the queen’s servant rose to greet Senenmut. He did not
have to rise quite so high, Senenmut thought nastily, or loom quite so huge.
His head brushed the ceiling. He spoke in good Egyptian, in a voice as deep as
a drum beating. “You are summoned to the queen,” he said.

Senenmut bit his tongue. No way in the world could he ask
what he wanted to ask, not here in front of his mother. She was simpering—she
of all people. It shamed him. If she knew what he expected, which was to be fed
to the crocodiles, she would be appalled.

“Imagine,” she said with a lilt in her voice such as
Senenmut had never heard. “Our boy is going to be the queen’s own teacher and
scribe. Who’d ever have thought it? I would have been content to see him
settled in the House of Life.”