King and Goddess (33 page)

“It will be nothing too terribly unreasonable,” he said.
“Something within your power to grant, even as queen regent.”

“Not the regency,” she said quickly.

He grinned. “Oh, I should ask for that! But no; I’m not a
fool. Make me chief prophet of Amon—the great god’s high priest. That should be
stakes enough to match a king’s wealth of wine.”

“Oh,” she said. “Indeed. To persuade the temple; to win over
the king . . . yes. That will be difficult enough to be worth
the hazard.”

“Then it’s done,” said Hapuseneb.

“Not,” Senenmut interceded, “until the rest of this madness
is played out. Lady, will you insist on it?”

“Not I,” she said. “The god.”

He pressed his lips together and conspicuously refused to
say another word.

Nehsi said it for him. “You grieve for the Lady Neferure;
your anger is strong, and your sense of betrayal. Will you challenge the gods
now? Is that why you do this?”

“No!” she cried in a fever of impatience. “Have you heard no
word I’ve said? The god challenges me—and with me the whole of Egypt. Maybe he
does it to punish me; to make me suffer as my daughter suffered, because I gave
her too little to do.”

“You could tell him,” said Senenmut, “that saving his grace,
what he asks of you is impossible.”

“One does not say such things to a god.” Her voice was
chill. Oh, the lovers were quarrelling, and no mistake.

“You would say such things,” said Senenmut, “and escape
unharmed. Even from a god. But you will not. You want it, O lady who would be
king. You want it with all your heart.”

“Maybe I do,” she said. “Maybe I’m glad. Maybe I’ll shock
you all, and not only take the Two Crowns but hold them, and be such a king as
these kingdoms have not seen in many a year.”

“Now that,” said Senenmut acidly, “is true enough.”

In all their years of prickly friendship, Senenmut had
never quarreled so with Hatshepsut. Lovers they had been, but they had never
been excessively tender in it, nor inclined to spare one another.

Still this went far beyond plain speaking or hard words.
That she could rule as well as any king, Senenmut did not for a moment doubt.
But that she should be king . . .

No. He could not accept it. A woman in those crowns, claiming
that title, made mockery of all that they were.

And if he could not accept it, who loved her, how would the
rest of Egypt be? He feared for her. He dreaded what this world of theirs would
do to a woman who insisted that she would be king.

She would not speak to him. When he applied for admittance
to her chambers, the guards were apologetic, but they would not yield. “She
said,” they said, all but shuffling their feet, “she won’t see you.”

The door that he had used for so long, the secret way, was
locked and barred. He came near to beating on it in frustration; but that would
have betrayed them both. He did not care greatly for his own skin, but her he
loved, even as he quarreled bitterly with her.

Desperation drove him to come to her in public audience,
when she would refuse no one, from the least to the greatest. He had no
petition to offer. He simply wished her to see his face—and himself to see
hers. What good it could do, he did not know. She was not sane then, not in any
way that he could name.

Perhaps after all it was a god who drove her. She was set on
it; immovable, implacable.

She had sworn her counsellors to silence. When the time had
ripened, she would speak to the rest of Egypt. All of it, lords and commons
both. On that she was determined.

She prepared them. Senenmut had been too blind to notice
before, how little by little the king shrank from public scrutiny. He appeared
less and less in hall of audience or court of justice. He was indisposed, it
was said; or occupied among his soldiers; or engrossed in prayer to the gods.
He had become very devout.

For all Senenmut knew, that was the truth. Children had odd
enthusiasms, and this child was odder than most. He might well have turned to
the gods in defense against the terror of his regent.

She continued to act in his name. She was careful of that,
meticulous in her reverence. “The king’s majesty is sacred,” she said—and if
those who heard only knew, how well they would understand why she so guarded
the rights and privileges of the king.

She could charm a crocodile away from its dinner, as people
said. A smile, a tilt of the head, a word exactly chosen to make her victim
preen, and she had an ally, a man whom she had flattered into taking her part
in whatever it was she intended.

She never lied. She might stretch the truth, but never to
breaking. That was her boast and her pride.

It was pain to see her winning Egypt to her cause, and Egypt
never knew what it was. Senenmut saw one day how she entertained a gaggle of
princelings from the nomes of Upper Egypt, vain and purse-proud men who
reckoned it only their due that the queen regent should regale them with a
gazelle-hunt in the desert beyond the city, and then a feast in the palace,
with such pleasures laid on as those provincial princes had hardly dared to
dream of. A pretty maid for each, well trained in the arts of pleasing a man,
and devoted each to her allotted princeling.

Senenmut had been spared the task of finding and preparing
the women, but he happened on the room where they all waited, a round two dozen
naked and begauded beauties, gossiping among themselves until they should be
summoned to the hall. He had only been passing by on his way somewhere onerous.
The sound of their voices and the scent of their perfumes in a room that
heretofore had always been deserted, brought him to a halt in the doorway.

They saw him, but forbore to shriek or scatter. He did
admire a woman who kept her composure in the face of the unexpected.

They reminded him rather forcibly of Hatshepsut. And indeed,
while he stood there gaping like a bee in a field of flowers, she herself
appeared in the inner door. She who had come in from the hunt windblown and
sheened with dust had bathed and dressed and adorned herself as befit a queen.

Her chosen ladies bowed low before her. She raised them with
a word, looked them over as a general inspects his armies, nodded crisply and
said, “You’ll do. Remember what I told you. This is war—as fierce as any
battle, and rather more dangerous to the unwary. See that your man is well pleased,
his every need met, his whims indulged.”

“And if he gets unreasonable?” one of them wanted to know.

“Yes,” said someone else. “Sometimes they want things they
shouldn’t have: things with whips, or games of pain.”

“No whips,” Hatshepsut said. “No pain. My word on that. This
is simple seduction: wine, perfume, flowers. If your lord takes a particular
liking to you, be aware that you’ll be given to him as a gift.”

They all exchanged glances. One said, “No one ever thought
to tell us this before.”

“That’s foolish,” Hatshepsut said. “Doesn’t everyone serve
better if she understands the stakes?”

“But no one asks,” the maidservant said. She paused, as if
in thought. Then she said, “I hope I like the lord you’ve allotted me. If I do,
may I have him?”

Hatshepsut laughed. “Why, certainly. Win his heart, or his
body at least, and persuade him to ask for you. Then he’s yours, and my word on
it.”

She was a warmer presence here than she ever was among
princes, a woman among women, teaching these servants of hers to love her. When
only a little while thereafter she had entered the hall of feasting with pomp
and fanfare, and received the lords’ homage as a queen should, she was never
the woman who had spoken face to face with servants; she was all royal, haughty
and subtly terrible.

And these men loved her for that. So should royalty be,
remote and set apart, but watchful as a god, intent upon their welfare. The
hunt, the feast, the pleasures promised by each smiling, scented maidservant,
said all that she need say, without the vulgarity of words.

Then when they were done, drowned deep in wine and in their
servants’ arms, she slipped away to receive an embassy from somewhere far in
Asia. They never knew she was gone; would swear, come morning, that she had
been with them till nightfall, when the last of them dropped insensible to the
floor.

Hatshepsut seduced them as adeptly as her servants. She made
herself more beautiful than they, and more alluring: far too high for any of
them, thus he must content himself with a lesser woman; but he could dream of
her, and perhaps he did, while he lay with the woman whom she had given him.

Senenmut, relegated to the shadows, denied her touch or her
glance, watched and knew how it was to be a spirit of the dead, all eyes,
strengthless and powerless. If he told them why she did this, they would turn,
not on her, but on him. She had laid a spell on them, the same spell that she
meant to lay on the whole of Egypt.

~~~

Egypt, ancient and weary and wise, succumbed to her as had
the lords of its nomes, blind to the truth till she spoke it where every one
must hear. She chose a great festival for it, the day the river rose to its
highest. There was a measuring-stick in every town and city, marker of the
flood and proof of its strength or weakness; but the great marker, the measure
of all the rest, was in Memphis at the gate of the Delta.

She went down to the city in advance of the crest, sailing
on the swollen river over inundated fields. The Black Land was at its
narrowest, all its people crowded up against the Red Land, but in joy and
celebration, for there had not been such a flood in living memory. It was the
highest since the foreign kings were driven out; what it signified was
splendid, a broader spread of rich black earth, and from it a greater harvest,
sufficient not only for the year ahead but for a year and more beyond. Even if
the flood failed utterly in its next rising, there would be no famine. Egypt’s
prosperity was safe.

It was given to the king to sanctify the festival. But the
king was left behind in Thebes, where he nursed a sniffle and played with his
soldiers.

The sniffle was his regent’s excuse. Small sickness could
become greater, too deadly swift to turn aside. For his protection therefore,
she said, he would remain in his gods-guarded palace, closely watched by his
physicians, while his regent performed the rite for him in the heart of royal
Memphis.

Thutmose might have no choice but to be left behind, but
Senenmut was made of sterner stuff. He simply assumed that he was going. He had
his own boat; in Memphis he had a house, a pretty place that he had bought on a
whim, when it seemed that one of his brothers might wish to seek his fortune in
Lower Egypt. As it happened, Ahotep and Amonhotep were content to dwell in
Thebes, but he kept the house. It was most useful now, when he would not rely
upon the queen regent’s charity.

Their quarrel was stretching longer than either of them
could have expected. She would not yield, of course not. She was Hatshepsut.

No more would Senenmut give way to this madness of hers.
Queen and regent he would serve till his last breath. Queen become king was a
freak of nature, a thing that should never be. A woman belonged in a woman’s
place, beside a man, equal to him in most things, superior even, if she were
royal born and he a commoner. But the king was a man. He could not be a woman.

She called it utter unreason. He called it tradition. If
women had been meant to be kings, the gods would have made them so.

He loved her no less because she was both mad and obsessed.
He went to Memphis therefore, following in his boat with his own flock of
servants, and settled in his house that stood within sight of the White Palace.

They arrived some days in advance of the day that the
priests had foretold would see the flood to its height. Already it had risen as
high as it ever had. And still it rose. Those whose houses stood close to the
river at its widest heretofore, found themselves with water lapping at their
doorsteps. Senenmut’s own estate near Thebes had shrunk to a few man-lengths of
ground before the villa’s walls. The servants there had been instructed to move
everything of value to the roof and cover it well, lest the river break down
the gate.

It was glorious, but it was terrifying. The river was the life
of Egypt. Its flood wrought the Black Land—but when it flooded as mightily as
now, it could be deadly.

In Memphis people kept festival, singing praises to Hapi who
was god of the river, but beseeching him too. He might well have chosen, this
year of all years, to cover the whole of Egypt, to conquer all of the Black
Land that had ever been, even to the palaces of the kings.

The coming of the queen regent comforted them in no small
degree. “It would have been better,” Senenmut heard a man opine in the street,
“if we had a king here, but she’s royal. She’ll do.”

“Isn’t she Amon’s child?” his companion reminded him.
“Aren’t they all, who are descended from Queen Nefertari?”

“Well,” said the first man, “that’s true enough. But what
does a sun-god have to do with the river flooding?”

“Sun dries water,” his friend said. “Makes the barley grow,
ripens it in the ear.”

“So you think she can rule the river, do you?”

“Why not? She’s a goddess born. She can do anything.” And
that, thought Senenmut, for most who were of common blood and kind, was that.
Royalty was divine—yes, even a queen.

He had stopped being a commoner a long while since. It had
crept up on him: first familiarity with palaces, then comfort therein, and at
length an inability to be altogether content anywhere else. He could not have
gone back to the house in which he was born. It would have shrunk about him,
dragged him down with its smallness.

~~~

Every day the city drifted toward the tall post of the
river-measure. Every day the priests gathered there, invoking Ptah of Memphis
and Hapi of the river and all the gods of Egypt. Once the queen regent was in
Memphis, she too went with the rest, borne in her golden chair, wearing a tall
plumed crown and carrying a scepter.