King and Goddess (42 page)

“That is so,” Nehsi agreed with careful blandness. Careful
because for all her studied calm, she thrummed with tension. He could not tell
whether it was because she wanted him, or because she loathed the idea and
could not bring herself to say so.

Though it was unlike Bastet not to say exactly what she
thought.

She asked him, “Do you remember when I first met you, how I
was then?”

“Vividly,” Nehsi said. And he did. Her silence; her refusal
to utter a word. Tama had coaxed her into speech, just by being Tama.

“I was thinking,” Bastet said. “It takes me a while to
think, sometimes. What I was thinking was that, sooner or later, I was going to
marry you.”

Now it was Nehsi’s turn to stare at her in flat
astonishment. She seemed unaware of it. She was watching Tama and the monkey,
both of whom seemed perfectly oblivious to the conversation that went on above
their heads.

“You were so beautiful,” she said. “The most beautiful man
I’d ever seen. I couldn’t speak. What could I say, that wouldn’t make me sound
like a fool?”

“You never sounded like a fool to me,” Nehsi said.

She seemed not to hear him. “And I was remembering who I
was, what rank I had to claim. And you a great prince, the king’s most faithful
servant. You’d never look at me. I wouldn’t, if I were as beautiful as you, and
as noble, and as great in respect. And of course I’m so young. An infant,
really. Nothing worth your attention.”

“So,” he said. “Was that why you took on Tama? To get my
attention?”

Her eyes flashed on him, caught all off guard, as furious as
he could ever have wished. “Of course not! That was a thing that needed
doing—and patently no one else was going to do it.”

He grinned, startling her straight out of her temper. “Of
course not indeed. I’ve thought many of the same things. You are beautiful, you
know; and will be breathtaking when you’re older. Were you a homely child?”

“Horrible,” she said. “Gawky and gangly. Bones everywhere.”

“So was I,” Nehsi said.

She glowered at him. “You’re indulging me. You think I’m
just a child.”

“I think you may find me old and tedious, once you’ve opened
your eyes to other and younger men.”

“Never,” said Bastet with perfect certainty. “Yes, I’ll
marry you. On one condition.”

Nehsi raised his brows.

“No other wives. Only me.”

His brows rose higher. “What, are you so jealous as that?”

“More,” said Bastet. “I know how many women you have here,
how many you’ve had—and how many mothers have borne you children. There’ll be
no more of that while I’m your wife. If you’re to have a new crop of children,
it’s I who’ll bear them for you.”

“Now it is very odd,” he said, musing half to himself, “but
I was in Punt for a year, and never lay with a woman. I don’t believe I’ve gone
so long without since I was a boy.”

“Maybe,” she said, “you’ve lost the art.”

He growled. She showed him her teeth. “Witch!” he said. “You
laid a spell on me.”

“Not a one,” said Bastet.

“Your face is spell enough.” He took it in his hands. Such
big hands, such a little face, big-eyed and pointed-chinned like a cat’s. He
meant the kiss to be the lightest touch, a brush of lips on lips; but she was
of another mind altogether. She was fierce, and hungry enough to startle him.

Yet they did not embrace, did not fling one another down
right in front of Tama and the monkey, and eat one another alive. It was a
simple kiss, if such passion was simplicity.

He had hunted waterfowl as they said in Egypt, with many a
courtesan, and many a lady who put the courtesans to shame. This was a child
clearly, a maiden, artless and untaught. Yet she was not shy at all, or afraid,
or in awe of him for his size or his age or his rank. She had known him for a
year, with no more between them than friendship, and never less.

Somewhere between kiss and kiss, she said, “Do you remember
the storm on the sea, that raged for three days, and we were all certain that
we would drown?”

He nodded. “Who could forget?”

“That’s not what I remember,” she said. “I remember when it
was over, you went out of your cabin and went to help the sailors. Your kilt
was wet—everything was wet. You let it drop and went naked. The way you dropped
it, the way you walked away, the pure and simple splendor of you . . .
I thought that I would die.”

“I thought,” Nehsi said after a pause, “that you were
asleep.”

“No,” she said.

“And I thought,” he said, “that you never saw me at all,
except as someone who was pleasant to talk to.”

“I made sure you thought that,” said Bastet.

“Clever,” he said. “Wise, I suppose.”

“I did try to be wise,” she said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have.”

“I like a woman who is wise,” said Nehsi. “I’ve always
wanted one for my wife.”

“Yes, but do I have to be wise always? May I be silly now
and then? For variety?”

“Certainly,” said Nehsi.

“Good,” said Bastet, and kissed him again, almost chastely,
but such fire that he gasped. He, the prince, the great lover of women. “But
you still haven’t promised,” she said when it was done. “No other wives or
women or lovers. Only me.”

“You drive a hard bargain,” he said.

“I have to,” said Bastet. “I’m very jealous. If you had
another woman, I think that I would kill her.”

He could believe that. Cats were small and delicate and
sleekly graceful, but they were hunters. They killed; and what they killed,
they ate.

Well. He had been called lion and panther, and both of those
were no more than outsize cats. “Very well,” he said. “Only you.”

“Then I’ll marry you,” said Bastet.

The wedding of Nehsi the Nubian was a splendid affair, and
a mighty shock to the women of the Two Lands. The men were mildly startled,
too, but less so than their wives and daughters. Anyone who had seen the young
woman from Bubastis could well understand how she had captured the Lion of
Nubia. And after a year in Punt, too, with her on his very ship—they nodded
wisely, and looked at their own wives, some of them, and sighed. Of course a
man who looked like that would marry a beauty.

They married in a festival that put to shame the king’s
welcome of the travelers, and settled down to producing sons and daughters as
handsome as themselves. Those, with Nehsi’s elder offspring, made a noble
tribe, an army born and bred to serve the King Maatkare.

Senenmut, childless by his own choice and the gods’ will,
and wifeless, too, looked on them and sighed. He had been ferociously jealous
of Nehsi for winning the prize of the expedition to Punt, but while Nehsi was
gone, Senenmut had bent himself to a great and glorious labor. He built the
temple that the king had dreamed of, Djeser-Djeseru the beautiful, at the gate
of the Red Land, with its face to the rising sun.

He chose the beauty of simplicity, but simplicity transmuted
into art. There was a temple already in the place that the king had chosen,
tomb of a king who had died half a thousand years ago. Senenmut set his own
king’s temple beside it, in harmony with it, because the land desired it. He
built a causeway, a long ramp rising up to the height on which he built the
temple.

There on that height he raised up a forest of pillars, each
a simple fluted column, plain to starkness in itself, but beautiful as it
marched in ranks with all the rest. He built his temple of light and shadow,
and within it, in the two great courts, he set yet more colonnades, and avenues
of sphinxes, each of them bearing Hatshepsut’s face.

The temple was full of her. She was everywhere, carved in
kingly majesty among the marching pillars, painted and limned upon the walls,
circled within the beauty of her names and her royal titles. If she must be
king, then she would be king and king again, for as long as her temple endured.

The Horus, powerful of souls, the Two Ladies, rejuvenated of
years, Horus of gold, divine of appearances, King of Upper and Lower Egypt,
Maatkare, son of Re, Hatshepsut who joins with Amon.

In the shrine of Hathor beyond the courts of the sun, the
goddess’ image wore her face, her peculiar beauty that to Senenmut was the only
beauty there need ever be. In the shrine of Anubis the guide of the dead, she
was remembered over and over. Even in the storerooms, the priests’ houses, the
secret corners and crannies, he carved her name.

And he carved his own, and his likeness with it, even in the
shrine of Amon, in the niches where the priests would keep the sacred vessels;
everywhere that a name or a face could be carved. It was beyond presumption.
Yet he had to do it, for her sake. She must not be forgotten. In forgetfulness
was death, death of the spirit.

He knew what Egypt did to kings who defied tradition. It let
their bodies die in the natural order of things. Then it killed them in memory:
effaced their names, rendered them as nothing, forgot them utterly. So it had
done with the foreign kings who had ruled not so long ago, but whose names were
all forgotten—banished, destroyed by the vengeance of those who came after.

Egypt would not kill Hatshepsut. She would live while her
name lived, and while her temple stood—and he would live with her. If there was
a word for a commoner who believed himself worthy of remembrance even as was a
king, then it was not written or spoken in Egyptian; but it must exist in some
language, somewhere.

He explained to the gods why he did it, lest they be angry.
Amon in particular, her father to whom she prayed every hour of every day,
heard him out, or at least did not strike him dead where he stood. “I love her,
you see,” he said. “I want to live as she lives, and protect her, even beyond
the gates of death. She will never look after herself as I can, in carving our
names everywhere, and our faces, so that we never die.”

It was not an explanation that any priest would accept.
Senenmut, Steward of Amon in the Two Lands, knew that very well. A god,
however, might be more supple of mind.

Certainly Senenmut was not prevented, even when he built his
secret place, the tomb of his body with its passage that ran beneath the very
temple of his king. He had another in the valley where princes were laid to
rest, and that one tenanted already by his father and his old nurse—and, great
grief in this time that should be triumphant, both of his brothers.

Amonhotep, the young, the beautiful, died of a fever that he
had caught while boating on the river. He stayed out too late; night-demons
caught him and carried him off in a great wailing of women. He had been going
to marry a wellborn girl. She wept over his coffin, and had to be carried from
the tomb by maids with fans and fainting-potions. Not half a season later she
was married to a princeling from the south, and happy in it as far as Senenmut
ever heard.

So much for fidelity, he paused to think.

That was grief. But when Ahotep died, Senenmut came near to
dying with him.

It was even less fair and just than Amonhotep’s fever.
Ahotep went with a company of the king’s soldiers to preserve order in Asia. He
should have remained in Thebes, but the wife whom he had married in such joy
had soured into a termagant. A child might have softened her, but the gods were
never so kind. She screeched in his ear till she deafened it; and then he had
won himself a captaincy and gone to Canaan.

He died there, not even in battle. He was drilling troops
under the sun that was never so strong as that of Egypt, and he fell down dead,
as if struck by the arrow of a god. He had done nothing to offend any divinity;
his general had taken great care that Senenmut should know that. He was simply
and irrevocably gone, laid in the tomb that Senenmut had built for himself.
Senenmut laid him there with his own hands, opened the senses of his body,
limned his name with stark simplicity: Ahotep, whom he loved.

Tall, strong, handsome Ahotep who was all that Senenmut was
not. Senenmut remembered him so, in the pride of his manhood; but in youth,
too, gawky and exuberant, and in noisy, uproarious childhood. All that he kept
in memory, in his house that echoed empty, with his mother Hat-Nufer wandering
grey and lost and old, and Ahotep’s wife gone silent. His death had done what
his living self had never sufficed to do: it had quelled her.

Senenmut had meant to cast her out, but in sight of her wan
quenched face he could not bring himself to say the words. Thus she stayed; and
when she faded, as she did with grievous swiftness, she too was laid in the
tomb by her husband’s side.

It was full, that tomb, overburdened with grief. But the one
where he meant to rest, his great tomb, great enough for a king or for a king’s
beloved, was his deepest secret. The men whom he hired to build it were sworn
with great oaths to betray the truth to no one. He bound them in the name and
the power of Amon himself, secured by the names of Anubis and the judges of the
dead. Warded in terror, oathbound to silence, they made him a tomb worthy of a
king. In its deep chamber he painted with his own hand a sky full of stars, so
that he might remember even in death the march of the seasons and the wheel of
the sky over the land of the living.

He did it for her. He told himself that, and the gods, too.
He would be her guardian spirit. Had he not sworn that he would die and go
before her?

He did not tell her everything that he did. She would
understand, he did not doubt it, but what she did not know, she could not be
guilty of. Nor did he confess his fears for her. Those she would scoff at, and
not gently. “Amon defends me,” she would say as she often had before. “He will
see that I live forever.”

Senenmut would see that Amon kept that promise. That power
was given him by the queen’s will and the god’s gift.

~~~

She was grown great in her kingship; but she was still
Hatshepsut. Senenmut had heard someone whisper that she took her vitality from
the king whose regent she had been.