King and Goddess (32 page)

Hatshepsut knew none of that.

“Some men,” Nehsi ventured, “are hopelessly shy with women.
I’ll wager the king is one. And you, great lady, are terrifying.”

She snorted. “Senenmut says the same thing. You’re both
fools. Are you so in awe of the Two Crowns that you can’t honestly see the one
who wears them?”

“Are you so convinced of the king’s incapacity that you
can’t honestly see any evidence to the contrary?”

Nehsi held his breath. He walked very close to the edge;
dared what might be too much. But it seemed necessary.

She did not burst out in rage. That in its way was more
alarming than if she had, but he held his ground. Softly, calmly, she said,
“Fetch my counsellors. Yes, even Ahmose the General, who is so enamored of the
king. Fetch them all, and bid them attend me in my hall of audience.”

Nehsi had ceased some time since to run errands for any man,
or woman either. But for Hatshepsut he did this. He set aside his rank and
position, forgot everything that he had become, and was her guardsman again,
her messenger and her defender. She would never know how great a gift he gave
her, nor would he ever tell her.

He fetched them as she commanded: Ahmose from the training
field, Senenmut from among the scribes, Hapuseneb from the temple; haughty
Ineni the builder of tombs and temples, Thuty the Treasurer from his
strongrooms and his bushels of gold; and the others with them, the handful of
men whom the queen trusted. She had not summoned them so before, not all
together and out of season, bidding them come at once. They were proud men and
they had risen high, but for her they left what they were doing and came at her
command.

She received them in deliberate lack of state, sitting in
her audience-chamber, dressed in a simple gown with few jewels, and a plain
wig, and no mark of rank. Her chair was no higher than theirs, her manner
quiet, but beneath it she was drawn as taut as a bowstring.

If she paused for preliminaries, none of them after
remembered. She favored each with a long look, both those whom she had raised
to this eminence and those who had been great lords and princes while she was
still a small princess in her father’s house. Nehsi noticed that none shrank
from her stare, nor tried to defy it. No cowards here, nor fools either. She
had chosen them well.

But then, he thought, she did most things well. It was the
gods’ gift to her, one of many, and far from the least.

After what seemed a very long while she spoke. Her voice was
quiet, as she herself was, and without pretension. She said it simply. “I have
dreamed,” she said. “Hear the dream that I have had.”

Nehsi had heard it before, and so, from their expressions,
had Senenmut and Hapuseneb. To the others it was a new thing; they heard her in
silence, as they must.

“I dreamed,” she said, “that great Amon came to my mother,
and put on the face of her lord the king, and lay with her. But she knew him;
she felt the fire of him within her, and knew that this was no mortal man. She
called him by name, and he answered her. He loved her, and for all that night
she lay with a god, and when morning came, she knew that she had conceived a
child.

“She expected that it would be a son. She was astonished when
the child was born, and it was a daughter. But it was the child of Amon. She
saw the light of him in those eyes, and knew from whom it came. She named the
child First Chosen of the Palace—Hatshepsut. It was a princess’ name, fitting
for a queen. But she knew what else it signified.

“So I dreamed, my friends. I dreamed, and the god came to me
and called me his own. ‘Beloved,’ he said. ‘Daughter. Chosen of my heart.’”

There was a silence. None of them moved, none spoke.
Hapuseneb, ever garrulous, stirred as if he would venture a word or six, but
for once he chose to remain mute.

It was Ahmose Pen-Nekhbet who spoke at last, and not to the
queen regent; to Hapuseneb. “Well, priest. You belong to Amon. What dreams has
he sent you?”

“Why, none,” Hapuseneb answered him.

“Is she telling the truth?”

Hapuseneb glanced at the queen regent. She sat still,
expressionless. “Well,” he said, “that’s difficult to say. She’s royal born,
daughter of a king and a queen. They’re all descended from Amon. Who’s to say
that he didn’t decide to visit his descendants, and take one look at Queen
Ahmose and fall head over heels? He wouldn’t have been the first, man or god,
to do that. She was a beautiful woman.”

“So you don’t know,” the old general said. He had no fear of
royal wrath, having weathered storms of it since the foreign invaders were
driven out. “Imagine that. A priest of Amon admitting to ignorance. Will the
world end now?”

“I hope not,” Hapuseneb said. He grinned at Ahmose, who
grinned toothlessly back. In the old days, Nehsi had heard, Ahmose had had
handsome white teeth and a face that won many a lady’s heart—and the rest of
her, too, if even half the stories were true.

His rakehell days were ended, but his wits were as keen as
ever. He said, and this time he spoke to the queen regent, “You didn’t bring us
here at the run and with our whole day’s duties half done, to tell us bawdy
stories. That’s not like you. What are you getting at?”

Hatshepsut did not forgive impertinence, but from Ahmose she
could endure much. “I am telling you,” she said, “that I dreamed, and I dreamed
true. This dream has been with me since I was young. It’s come again and again
since my royal husband died. Now it comes on me every night. Every night Amon
comes to me, shows me the night of my conception, says to me, ‘Daughter.
Beloved. I chose you; why do you close your eyes to me?’”

“I’d say he wanted you to do something,” Ahmose observed.
“If it’s he who comes, and not a lie or a wish made flesh.”

“It is he,” Hatshepsut said with bone-deep certainty. “He burns
like fire. Last night he laid his hand on me.” She lifted her arm that she had
kept close to her side, wrapped in her mantle for the day was rather cool.

More than one man caught his breath. There were the marks of
fingers above her elbow, red as if branded. One could think, Nehsi reflected
rather sourly, that she had had an altercation with her lover, and he had
bruised her; but Senenmut seemed as taken aback as the others.

She lowered her arm, covered it again with her mantle. “This
he gave me as proof, and not only to you. I too have wondered if my dreams were
false. But they are not. Amon comes to me; he calls me his daughter. He bids me
do somewhat that I am to discover for myself.” She drew a long breath, lifting
her head as if she gathered strength. “I’ve been slow to understand, my
friends. Criminally slow perhaps, but what he intends for me . . .
I tell you true, it makes me afraid.”

They were silent again, even Ahmose. The tension stretched
so taut that it thrummed.

She snapped it with a word. “I’ve thought long. I’ve prayed.
I’ve invoked other gods than Amon. Every day it’s come clearer, that I must do
what Amon bids me do. When my daughter died”—her voice caught on that, but
steadied—“I knew surely; but I could not bring myself to face it. Now I cannot
escape. I must do as I am bid. I must be Amon’s chosen one. I must be king.”

Ahmose spoke for all of them. “You are mad.”

She met his eyes. “That, I may well be. But I have dreamed
as I have dreamed, and I have prayed, and pondered every side of it. The god’s
will is clear. I am to be king.”

“A woman cannot be king,” said Ineni the builder.

“That too I know,” she said, and without impatience, which
was remarkable. “I said as much to the god. He said to me, ‘I have chosen you.
You will be as you were meant to be.’”

“Did he admit that he’d made a mistake?” Hapuseneb grinned
at all the shocked expressions. “Oh, yes, and I a priest of Amon, too. How
irreverent of me. Still, lady, do think. If he had meant you to be king, surely
he would not have omitted one small detail.”

“And what,” she demanded with sudden ferocity, “does a man’s
rod do for him but pass water and get sons? Am I so much the less for lacking
one?”

“It is traditional that the king have one,” Senenmut said
dryly. “If you go ahead with this, the scribes will be in fits. There is no
word for a king who is a woman; no place in the language for one. There is the
Great House, the ruler of the Two Lands; there is the Great Royal Wife, the
woman who stands beside him and assists him in his rule. There is no way to
conceive of a woman who wears on her head the Two Crowns.”

“I am not the first,” she said. “Perhaps not the second,
either, or the third.”

“And why is that?” Senenmut asked sharply; then answered
himself. “Because, O my lady, neither gods nor men find it fitting that a
woman’s head should uphold the Two Crowns.”

“Amon finds it fitting,” she said very softly, almost
gently. “Now tell me, my servant whom I had thought loyal to me: in what way am
I less than the child who wears the crowns? Do I lack his strength of will? Do
I waver in diplomacy? Have I no such gift of speech as he has shown us all?”

Senenmut cut through her mockery with a slash of the hand.
“Please, lady. You know well that no matter how little he pleases you, he
pleased the gods and the people sufficiently that they allowed him to be
crowned king of Egypt.”

“I will not strip him of his crowns,” she said. “I will
simply do as I would have done had I been a man and not a woman: I will rule
beside him, as his equal. So should I have done from the first. This regency is
a travesty. Even the river-bargemen know whose hand in truth has steadied the
steering-oar these past six years and more.”

“But,” said Senenmut, “they want to see that hand resting
lightly atop the hand of a manchild. It’s long been the way, lady, that a man
rules.”

“Not all ancient ways are good,” she said. “What of the very
old ones? Shall we go back to sanctifying every tomb and temple with a man’s
blood? Or shall we command that every king devote the wealth and power of his
reign to raising a great vaunt of a tomb like those at Giza? Shall we do that,
Senenmut?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said.

“Then open your mind,” she shot back, “and think of what the
god has willed for me. I fought it, too. I argued exactly as you have. He never
wavered. ‘You are my chosen one,’ he said.”

“Did he happen to tell you,” Hapuseneb inquired, “why he
took it into his head to choose you?”

“It was time,” she said, “and I was fit. Am fit. I rule now
in all but name. He bids me take the name as well, so that my rule is blessed
by truth, untainted by falsehood.”

“So you claim to do it in the name of truth.” Nehsi had let
them forget he was there; now, to the shock of some, he reminded them. “Is that
how you will present it? A regency in its way is a lie, a pretense of lesser
power than the king himself possesses. You will strip yourself of deception and
rule undisguised.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. That is the way of it.”

“In the kilt?” Senenmut asked. “With crook and flail across
your naked breasts? With the false beard strapped to your chin?”

A faint flush stained her cheeks, but that might have been
anger. “If need be, yes.”

“I don’t think we need to go that far,” Hapuseneb said as if
to soothe them both. It was a lovers’ quarrel; a blind man could have seen it.
“There are variations on the royal robe that would be more suited to a woman’s
body than a kilt. As for the beard . . .” He sighed. “Well.
Maybe we’re doomed to that. It is so much a part of the regalia, and so very
ancient.”

“So is a man’s body,” Senenmut said nastily. “Will she find
a way to put that on, too?”

“If I could,” she snapped, “I would.”

“Then why don’t you?”

“Now,” said Hapuseneb. “There now. Stop it. You,” he said to
Senenmut, “sit down. You, lady, if you will, listen to me. What you propose may
be the god’s will, but the Two Kingdoms will never accept it. They live by
tradition. Tradition commands that a man be king.”

“I will change it,” she said inflexibly. “Haven’t you heard
me? I’ve considered every argument. The god has countered every one. It will be
as it must be.”

“It can’t,” Senenmut said, though Hapuseneb moved to hush
him.

“I say it can,” she said. “Remember who I am. Is there
anyone who can deny me?”

“Certainly,” he said. “The king. And the king’s mother.”

She laughed aloud. “
They
,
you say? The king, who cannot put together a coherent sentence in front of me?
The king’s mother, who hasn’t shown her face outside her apartments since the
gods know when? What friends have they? What allies can they claim? Have you
ever seen the court follow them as it follows me?”

“The court has followed you,” said Nehsi, again speaking unlooked
for, “because you uphold the kingship. If you claim the title yourself, you may
discover that your allies have fled.”

“I think not,” she said. She was growing more determined
rather than less, the more they resisted her. “My friends, I lay you a wager.
I’ll win the Two Lands into my hand, even if I call myself king.”

“A wager?” Hapuseneb could not seem to help himself: his
eyes gleamed at the prospect. “What are the stakes, my lady?”

Senenmut hissed at him, but she took no notice. “All our
lives, I would say, but since we are practical people . . .
shall we wager something more tangible? When I’m crowned as king, you shall
provide the wine for my coronation feast.”

He blanched. He was a wealthy man, and Amon the wealthiest
god in Egypt, but a king’s coronation feast required the wealth of a kingdom to
do it justice.

Still he loved a gamble, and he could not be thinking that
he would lose. “When I win,” he said to Hatshepsut, “you shall grant me
whatever I ask.”

“Oh, no,” she said, as hot for this wager as he. “You must
tell me what you expect me to pay. Although of course,” she said, “I’ll never
need to pay it.”