King and Goddess (7 page)

“He may want a war,” she said, “but he won’t have one just
yet. I’ll give him something to think about instead.”

Nehsi followed her glance. Isis the maidservant had been
given the task of clothing the queen in her court gown of sheerest linen. She
had not been given to the king yet. The queen was awaiting her moment.

“Is this the time?” he asked. “With the king so out of
sorts, and insisting on hunting when he should be attending to matters of
state—”

“When better?” said the queen. “He’s bored. He needs
distraction. I’ll give it to him: set it in his way and let him do with it as
he pleases.”

“It may work,” Nehsi admitted. “But the moment he finds
himself a war, he’ll forget everything but that.”

“Certainly,” she said, “but it might delay him for a while.
If he learns well and quickly, well enough that he’s fit to come to my bed,
then I may be with child when he goes away again.”

“That is an end devoutly to be desired,” said Nehsi. “But,
lady—”

She ignored him. She beckoned to Isis. “Here, child. Come
here.”

Isis came obediently, eyes lowered, and bowed as she had
been taught, kneeling with becoming grace and touching her forehead to the
floor.

“Tonight,” the queen said, “do as I told you to do when the
time was ripe. Be prominent among my servants. Let the king see you, and let
him desire you. If he lacks the wits to do more, enlighten him. See that he
takes you to his bed.”

Isis, still bowed to the floor, said softly but clearly,
“Yes, lady. I remember.”

If she trembled with either fear or excitement, Nehsi did
not see it. Sometimes he wondered if it was intelligence she lacked, or simply
a normal human portion of wariness. She trusted too well. She was afraid of no
one, nor saw the need to be.

The queen found that useful. He wondered, himself, how loyal
such a creature could be, without fear to bind her.

Whatever his misgivings, the queen had decided. Isis would
seduce the king tonight, and teach him if she could to be a lover of women
rather than a soldier who took his bedmates, like his enemies, by storm. Nehsi
could hope that once Isis was done, the king would turn willingly to the queen.

~~~

Feasts in the court of Thutmose, son of Thutmose, began
before sunset and ran the night long. This one began late but showed no sign of
ending earlier. They were all gathered in the great hall of feasting, tables
laid among the pillars, and the king on his throne at the head of the hall.
Naked servants ran without rest, bringing in jars of wine and beer, platters of
dainties, all the booty of the day’s hunt, and for the great of appetite a
whole ox borne in on a palanquin like a prince, with flowers wound around its
horns, and fruits heaped about it, and bread, and savory cakes.

Most of the men and all of the ladies wore cones of scented
fat atop their wigs, that melted as the night went on and the heat of their
revelry mounted, streaming down over the elaborate edifices of curls and
plaits, dripping in their faces. The mingling of a myriad perfumes shocked the
nose into numbness, caught at the back of the throat and made thirst a constant
and urgent thing.

The king was a great man for wine, and he served only the
best, the royal vintage, sweet and dizzyingly strong. He was eating little,
Nehsi noticed. He had the look of a man who drinks to find oblivion, an
expression of boredom sunk deep and gone sour.

He was not in any mood or condition to notice one naked
servant among a hundred, even if she were nearly beside him, waiting on the
queen. His eyes were fixed on the wine in his cup, or, with blurred intensity,
on the shadows that flocked near the roof of the hall, fleeing the lights and
clamor below. Perhaps he was seeing the heat and tumult of a battlefield,
tasting the heady wine of terror.

Isis sought to catch his eye each time she filled the
queen’s cup or arranged a new delicacy on the queen’s plate. It was clear but
not blatant: a curve of the body just so, to show the lovely line of hip; an
inclination forward to let her breasts swing enticingly; a shift about on
pretext of relieving another servant of a platter of spiced cakes, so that he
could see the sweet rounding of her buttocks. Nehsi, schooled though he was to
ignore temptation while he stood guard, felt a stirring that he could not
mistake. A stone could not have resisted that most lovely of women when she set
herself to drive a man wild.

A stone, or the king in his cups. He was not even aware that
she existed. He took each filled cup blindly from the hand of his cupbearer,
drank it dry, held out his hand for the next.

The queen was watching. Nehsi saw how her eyes narrowed. She
beckoned to Isis, whispered. Isis nodded, bowed deeply. She circled round to
the king’s chair and leaned toward the cupbearer. That personage was well above
taking heed of any mere maidservant, but a maidservant bearing a command from
the queen required at least a moment of his attention.

He obeyed ungraciously, but obey he did. Quietly, without a
word to the king, he drew deep from the jar of water before he filled the cup
lightly with wine. The king, as the queen must have hoped, grimaced but did not
appear to notice why the flavor of the vintage had grown so weak.

Then Isis did a thing that the queen could not have asked
her to do, because it was impossibly, unthinkably bold. She plucked the next
cup from the cupbearer’s hand and set it teasingly just out of the king’s
reach. He groped. She shifted it He lifted bleared eyes.

They must have been full of her. She stood close, so close
that he could have seen nothing else.

Her smile was impossibly sweet. She slid into his lap,
effrontery beyond effrontery, and linked arms about his neck, and said, “Aren’t
I sweeter than wine, O beloved of Horus?”

To Nehsi’s astonishment, no one seemed to have noticed her
audacity. The hall was hazy with wine and sweat and the heat of bodies crowded
together. Anyone alert enough to see clearly was watching a display of dancers
and acrobats, all of them beautiful, all of them impossibly supple.

The queen, who did see, could hardly contest the execution
of her own order. She pretended to be engrossed in a confection of flowers
dipped in honey. The maid Meritre served her wine that was mostly water, with
which she took issue. “If you must feed me water,” she said sharply, “feed it
untainted with wine.”

Meritre bowed low and did just that.

They were both, surreptitiously, watching how Isis wound
herself about the king. No one could hear what she said—the hall was too
hideously noisy, and she said it direct to the king’s ear. It was difficult to
see what he was thinking. His face was never very expressive; when he was
sodden with wine it set into a mask.

Isis nibbled the royal ear. The king shivered perceptibly
and tensed, lurching to his feet. Isis clung. Now, Nehsi thought, he would
fling her off.

His arms tightened about her, lifted her. Nehsi held his
breath.

Isis giggled, clear in the lull that will fall on any crowd,
even the most boisterous. To Nehsi’s lasting astonishment, the king echoed her.
He shifted her, but not to cast her off; to settle her more securely. Lightly,
quickly, and much more steadily than Nehsi would have thought possible, he bore
her out of the hall.

~~~

The queen was not jealous. She told Nehsi so, repeatedly.
She had ordered this. She had planned it from the first, set the bait and
sprung the trap.

She paced her chambers in the dark before dawn, when the air
was as cool as it ever became in Thebes in the season between Inundations of
the Nile. Her robes and wig were laid aside; she had on a kilt like a boy, but
she was no boy to look at, even so young. She could stride out in it, and
stride she did, stiff-legged, fists clenched at her sides, waiting for Isis to
come back. If Isis came back. The king might keep her with him. That would be a
triumph.

“But she must come back to me,” said Hatshepsut fiercely.

Nehsi swallowed a yawn. A sleepless queen meant a sleepless
guard; and when she was in this mood she wanted no other guard but Nehsi. She
was not above dragging him out of the bed he had just fallen into, and
demanding that he watch while she paced her state bedchamber with its golden
bed and its headrest of chalcedony inlaid with gold, regarding none of that,
aware only of her own confusion.

“You could,” he said, “distract yourself.”

She stopped her pacing and whirled. Oh, she was distracted:
into a fine hot fury, with him as the target. “Are you saying that I am as
scatterbrained as my husband, may he live a thousand years?”

“Your husband,” said Nehsi, “may he live a thousand years,
is as nothing to the brilliance of your sagacity.”

“Are you trying to make me laugh, or are you tempting me to
kill you?”

He looked her up and down as she stood there. After a while
he said, “You aren’t a child any longer, that’s clear to see.”

“And I’m acting like one,” she said. She could do that: see
with bitter clarity, and say what she must say, as if there were two halves of
her, the one that paced and snarled and hissed with temper, and the other, the
quiet one, the one that was never less than calm.

But he shook his head. “No,” he said. “It’s not a child who
says these things, or does the thing that sparked them. This is a woman’s
trouble. You don’t love or greatly like your husband, but you’re not as willing
as you thought you were, to share him. He is, after all, yours.”

“Do you think he would share me?” she demanded. And when he
was silent: “I thought not. But it’s women who have to share, isn’t it? Never
men. They take what pleases them, and keep it, and never willingly let it go.”

“Like you,” said Nehsi, “lady and queen.”

Someday, he thought with distant clarity, she would have him
flayed for the things he said to her. But not yet. It was her eccentricity, in
this her youth, to favor servants who spoke freely to her. Time and queenship
would alter that.

Until then, he was suffered to live with a whole skin. She
stared at him for a long moment, a dark, deadly level stare. “Yes,” she said.
“Like me. I’m not like other women, am I? I am the queen. The king will learn
to be worthy of me. As for the woman I sent to him . . .” She
paused. In the pause she wandered to a chair and sat in it, as close to
relaxation as she had come since this night began. “If she fails to return by
full morning, find her and bring her to me.”

Nehsi bowed. “Lady,” he said.

And now maybe she would let him go back to his too brief,
too often interrupted rest.

He should have known better. “Stay with me,” she said, “till
she comes back or you go after her. I’ve no sleep in me. Where’s the board?
We’ll play at Hounds and Jackals till the sun comes up.”

Nehsi swallowed a sigh, and the yawn that went with it. The board
was where she had left it the last time she challenged him to a match, on a
table in her sitting-room. He fetched it and set it before her, slipping the
tall counters from their place inside the golden board: ivory hounds, ebon
jackals like images of Anubis who watches over the dead. It was her humor to
choose the jackals and leave him the hounds, ebony hand on ivory counters as
they pursued one another round the board.

He was direly short on sleep and growing short on temper,
which made him a deadly player of Hounds and Jackals. He was not in the least
minded to let her win, even if she would have suffered it. And win he did,
thrice over, and the fourth time she won by a jackal’s whisker. And after that
the sun came up, and still no Isis bowing at her lady’s feet, telling in her
soft sweet voice of her night’s lessoning of the king.

~~~

Nehsi had never been a coward, but the thought of
approaching the king’s chambers and demanding to see the king’s new concubine
gave him more than a moment’s pause. Still he had his orders, and he was an
obedient servant.

The gods favored him, though perhaps they mocked the queen.
Just as Nehsi girded himself to venture the king’s portion of the inner palace,
the queen’s door-guard let in Isis herself. Nehsi, whom fortune had placed at
the door as she entered it, could see her unguarded face, the face he doubted
very much that she would show the queen. It had the look of a cat in cream:
sleek and richly sated.

Before the queen she was properly demure, keeping her head
down lest her eyes betray her. The queen, still in her kilt but with maids
fluttering about, trying to coax her toward the baths and the day’s toilet,
stood over her like an image of a conquering king. “Well?” she demanded.

“Lady,” Isis said, soft and seeming shy, “by your leave I
did well. He said that he was pleased. He asked me to come back tonight.”

“Yes?”

“Yes, lady, I—I tried to do what you said, lady. I made him
take a bath first, and anoint himself, not too heavily. He was angry, lady, but
it only made him the more eager. He said that I was insolent. Beauty, he said,
excuses much, but I should remember who he is. I told him that I never forget.”

Hatshepsut frowned, but she was nodding: reluctant but
accepting the girl’s skill. If of course she told the truth; but what profit
could she see in a lie? The slant of her glance was not honest, but it was not
false, either. She was telling less than she might but inventing nothing, in
Nehsi’s judgment.

“Did you rein him in,” the queen asked, “and insist that he learn
the virtues of gentleness?”

“I tried, lady,” Isis said. “He was clumsy, if I may say it,
but not cruel. No one ever told him what to do before. He didn’t like it at
first, but I taught him to think better of it.”

“Did you?” Hatshepsut studied her. She did not look up,
continued to fix her eyes on the floor, with glances aside: at Nehsi, at the
maids, at the glitter of a golden necklace on the queen’s table.