King and Goddess (9 page)

At much too long last she answered the question he had
asked. “What does it matter whether I want to be king? I never can be. The
least of the laborers in the fields is more likely than I to wear the Two
Crowns. He has only to marry me and to claim the throne, and it is his. I who
am a woman—I can never be more than the king’s wife.”

“That is not so little,” Nehsi said.

“But is it enough?” she demanded. “Is it, Nehsi? Is it?” He
could not answer her. She did it for him.

“It must be, mustn’t it? Since the gods have ordained that
he be king, and I be his queen.”

The words hinted at resignation, but her voice was sharp
still with rebellion. She went on pacing, silent now, ignoring him. He was
invisible again: a chair she had no mind to sit in, an image in ebony of a
forgotten king.

It was better than being seen, pierced to the heart by those
big dark eyes.

Oh, yes. He was in love with his headstrong young queen. It
would never be more than it was now, nor did he wish it to be. She trusted him.
She told him things that no one else could know. Even this: that she could have
worn the Two Crowns with far more grace than her husband ever had.

The gods would never allow it. Pity; but gods were gods.
Once they had fixed upon a thing, there was no changing it.

One morning not long after the queen sailed away
undismissed from the king’s hunt, a messenger found Senenmut among the queen’s
scribes. It was a woman, one of the royal maids: the one with the perpetual
sniff of scorn, as if the world were beneath her notice. “She wants you,” she
said, inelegant to rudeness.

Senenmut was tempted to keep her waiting. But he had
finished the letter he was given to copy into the archives, and the next was
both long and difficult, as well as crashingly dull: an accounting of the
revenues of the nomes of Upper Egypt. He left it gratefully.

The maid led him not to the queen’s chambers as he had
expected, nor to the hall where she held audiences and administered the affairs
of the Two Kingdoms. The way was not one he had taken before. It led away from
the inner palace and even from the outer one, to the wall that rimmed and
warded the palace. Built into and along the wall were stables, barracks,
armories: a kingdom of men and war, as alien to the scented quiet of the
queen’s apartments as Senenmut’s family’s house to the House of Life.

The queen was in the royal stables. She looked strange, a
little, with her artfully painted face, in the scent of hay and horses. But her
gown was plain and her ornaments simple, and her wig was the short Nubian wig
that both men and women wore when they would be practical. She was deep in
converse with a tall and imposing personage, a hawk-nosed, bearded foreigner in
a striped coat. From the look and the scent of him, he was a master of horse.

The subject of their discussion, a chestnut-colored horse
with a white nose, stood patiently beside the foreigner. It was newly come, it
seemed, as tribute from a king in Asia.

The foreigner spoke Egyptian with a heavy accent, but
Senenmut understood him well enough. “No, I think not the whitefoot mare for a
chariot-mate to this one. She’s too short of stride. This beauty pours herself
over the ground like a lioness in the desert. The mare they call Star of
Hathor—she has the movement, and she has some need of a calming influence.”

“Well then,” the queen said. “Call her Moon of Isis and try
her in the yoke with Hathor’s Star.”

The foreigner bowed deeply in the Asiatic fashion. “It shall
be as your majesty wishes.”

Hatshepsut nodded briskly and moved down the line of
tethered horses. She could not have failed to see Senenmut, but she was
choosing not to acknowledge him.

Partly at a loss, partly to be contrary, he followed her.
The master of horse was just ahead of him, the maid just behind.

Near the end of the line, almost to a wall with a door in
it, the queen’s Nubian guardsman busied himself about a fine blood bay. The
queen nodded to him but kept walking through the door and out into a broad and
sandy court. It was full of the thunder of hooves and the rattle of chariot
wheels.

Senenmut had never seen a place like it. The glare of sun
through a haze of dust. The snorting of horses, the champing of bits, the snap
of a whip and the sharper snap of a charioteer’s voice, calling to order a
fractious team. The reek of dust and dung and sweat that was Egypt was overlaid
here with the pungent-pleasant scent of horses.

He had always loved horses. They were new in the Two Lands,
brought in by the kings whom no one named, the foreigners who dared to conquer
Egypt. Those were a hundred years gone, driven out and rightly so. Egypt had
effaced their names from the earth, willed to forget them; but it had kept
their gift of horses. Horses drew chariots; chariots carried princes who not so
long ago would have been condemned to march and to fight on their own feet. Now
they could ride, and carry their weapons without inconvenience, and strike
swift against their enemies.

But Senenmut loved the horses for themselves, for their
beauty and fire, their strength and their swiftness and the drumming of their
feet on the earth. He had not known before how splendid their eyes were,
fiercer than the eyes of cattle, with a keener intelligence. Nor had he
suspected that they would welcome him with the rush of warm breath in his palm,
lipping it, forbearing to bite.

He ventured to stroke a sleek red-brown neck. It arched
under his hand, and the horse snorted, tossing its head. He held his ground. It
meant him no harm. He could see that in its eyes.

Servants brought out two of the horses: a pair as like as
two pups in a litter, red-golden both, with pale manes. A chariot waited,
handsome enough but not nearly as magnificent as the state chariots that
Senenmut had seen. This was meant for use.

The horses set themselves in place for the yoke, opened
mouths for the bits. They were eager: one pawed lightly as the chariot was
hitched behind.

The queen sprang into the chariot and took the reins from
the groom. “You,” she said, flashing a glance at Senenmut. “Ride with me.”

He stood flatfooted. Of course she would be asking for him,
since she had had him brought here. But why in the world . . . ?

~~~

The horses backed against the traces, dancing with
impatience. The queen reined them in. “Come!” she commanded him.

He hardly knew which foot to lift first. The Nubian seized
him with effortless strength and tossed him into the chariot behind the queen.
He staggered, clutched at the first thing that presented itself: the queen’s
body.

She most graciously declined to cry sacrilege. He pried his
arms from their panic-lock about her middle and found a more permissible thing
to cling to: the side of the chariot, with its rim rolled by design or by
accident into the most useful shape for gripping hard to keep one’s balance.

Once he had recovered from the shock of being thrust into a
swift-moving, sharp-turning chariot, Senenmut began to take a keen and still
half-terrified pleasure in it. He saw how the queen stood, light, poised, firm
yet supple, riding with the lift and sway of the chariot-floor under her feet.
She held the reins lightly, not strained back against them as he had seen
others do, battling the horses’ will to run. She rode with them, coaxing rather
than compelling.

She did not, as he had expected, ride among the rest in the
court of the chariots. She directed her horses toward the gate and out along
the palace wall. A second chariot followed, with the Nubian for charioteer. He
had no companion, nor seemed to need any. If there were an attack—as if such a
thing could happen in the heart of royal Thebes—Senenmut supposed that he would
bind the reins about his waist and fight as kings fought in the histories,
strong-armed against thousands.

He still could not imagine what the queen could want of him.
He was a scribe. He knew nothing of horses or of chariotry.

As if she had plucked the thought from his mind, she thrust
the reins into his hands. They trembled like living things.

The right-hand horse tossed its head. Senenmut willed his
fingers to unclench. “Lady,” he said. “What am I supposed to—”

“Steady,” she said. “Light and soft. No, not loose! Feel the
horses always.”

He fought the rigidity of shock and awe. He—he, Senenmut,
whose father was a seller of pots—was a charioteer. A poor and vastly nervous
one, as the queen pointed out with acid precision; but he held the reins and
the horses obeyed him.

It grew easier, the longer he did it. He declined to commit
the error of cockiness; but he felt magnificent, like a prince, driving fee
queen’s chariot around the walls of the palace.

It was glorious. Yet he had to ask. When he was surer of
himself, when the horses seemed in hand and the road’s curve not too taxing, he
spoke the word. “Why?”

The queen could have pretended not to understand. It rather
pleased him that she did not. “Because,” she said.

He tensed. The horses jibbed. He made himself ease, for
their sake. “You thought you could mock me. Didn’t you? You expected me to be
run away with.”

“If I had wanted that,” she said mildly, “I would have
called for the new mare, and had her yoked with a stranger. These are my best,
my queens. No one else has ever driven them, except on occasion my Nubian.”

“Then why?” Senenmut demanded.

She shrugged, maddening as a woman can be, and a young one
worst of all. “I thought you might like it.” She paused. “Do you?”

No. He would not believe it. That she would give him a gift
simply for the sake of giving it. She was a queen. Queens gave nothing of their
free will, with no expectation of return.

“What am I supposed to do, to pay for this?” he asked her.

She was angry: he saw the flush on her cheek, that was
almost alarmingly close. When the chariot swayed, she swayed against him,
inevitably. She did not seem to notice how often their bodies touched.

Nor would he, nor should he, if he had not been a fool.
Another woman would have meant to seduce him, if she had done as this one did.
But Hatshepsut was hardly aware yet that she was a woman.

“There is a price,” he persisted. “There must be.”

“Yes,” she said. “That you take pleasure in it. That you be
as glad of it as I am of the words you teach me.”

He felt his brow climbing. “Gratitude? From a queen?”

“Even from a queen,” she said.

“But,” he said. “Why this?”

That shrug again. “It seemed like nothing you’d tried
before. And,” she added after a moment, “any number of fine young princes would
give their hope of an afterlife to ride where you ride now. Though none of them
would suffer me to teach them.”

“So that’s why,” he said. “Because I’ve never done it. You
need to master me.”

“I can master any man,” said the queen with a lift of the
chin. “I saw your face when you looked at the horses. I wanted you to have
them. You want them, you see. So many of the rest . . . they
don’t care. You do.”

What, a hint of softness? Senenmut was astonished.

It dawned on him that perhaps she liked him. He did not see
why. He was sharp-tongued, waspish for a fact; he had no patience to speak of;
and he had never been pretty to look at.

Strange was the mind of a woman.

“You should,” she said, “exercise your body as well as your
mind and hand. I’ll not have you squatting like a toad in the scribes’ house
whenever you aren’t instructing me. You may consider yourself commanded to learn
the art of chariotry. The bow, too, I think; and perhaps the spear, for
hunting.”

“I thought you hated to hunt,” Senenmut broke in on her.

“Oh, no,” she said. “Why would you think that?”

He opened his mouth, closed it again.

She laughed. “Ah! You saw me in my husband’s hunt. But that,
O scribe of mine, was folly, time wasted, a kingdom left dangling while its
king indulged his whim. The kingdom must come first in the heart of a king.
When he’s attended to it—then let him hunt, let him race his chariots, let him
do whatever he pleases.”

Somewhere in their colloquy she had taken back the reins and
slowed the horses to a walk. They had nearly circled the palace round. Just as
they would have turned and passed through the gate that led to the court of the
chariots, she straightened their heads, bidding them circle the palace again.

They rode for a while in silence. Senenmut understood at
last: or well enough. It was not a simple thing that she was doing. At its
heart it was a message to her husband, a lesson that he should learn.

Senenmut doubted that the king would even notice. He had not
seemed an observant man. And with this queen, one must watch every movement,
measure every moment. She was headstrong, and she could be reckless, but in her
way she was subtle. Too subtle for such a man as the king seemed to be.

He had never thought that he could pity a queen. Poor child:
yoked to a man whom she understood no better than he understood her. If they
had been a chariot team, the master of horse would have separated them long
since.

All the queen’s plotting seemed like to shatter on the
rock of her own obstinacy. She would not oblige her husband. She would not
indulge his escapes from kingship. She was not even slightly grateful to the
concubine Isis, who kept him sufficiently distracted that he showed no sign of
riding off to war.

Nehsi had learned not to fret himself into a fever when his
lady flew in the face of all common sense. That was well; for on an evening
when she had not spoken to the king, nor he to her, in three full days, even as
they sat side by side at the feast and in the hall of audience, she ordered her
maids to prepare her for the king’s bedchamber.

She went about it like a king preparing for war. She
mustered the weapons of her beauty. She arrayed her troops: a gown as sheer as
mist in the desert, a collar of gold and lapis and carnelian, a wig of
elaborate plaits and curls, garlanded with golden flowers. She was washed in
the scent of musk, cloaked and armored in it.