Sovereign of Stars
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Authors: L. M. Ironside
Tags: #History, #Ancient, #Egypt, #Literature & Fiction, #Genre Fiction, #Historical, #Historical Fiction, #African, #Biographical, #Middle Eastern, #hatshepsut ancient egypt egyptian historical fiction egyptian
SOVEREIGN OF STARS
The She-King: Book Three
L. M. Ironside
TABLE OF CONTENTS
SOVEREIGN OF STARS
The She-King: Book Three
Behold, Amun: I make offerings unto thee; I prostrate
myself before thee; I bestow the Black Land and the Red Land upon
my daughter, King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Maatkare, living
eternally, as thou hast done for me. …Thou hast transmitted the
world into her power; thou hast chosen her as King.
-Inscription at Ipet-Isut by Thutmose the First,
third king of the Eighteenth Dynasty.
Senenmut watched from the shade of the royal canopy
as the last known enemy of his king left Waset forever.
The fine ship cleared the calm waters of the harbor
and rocked gently as it settled into the deep, confident current of
the river Iteru. Broad across its beam, its hull painted the bright
turquoise of a Shemu sky, its gilded rails glinting in the sun, the
ship was as beautiful a vessel as any great lady could desire. But
Mutnofret stood stiffly at the rail, ignoring the musicians who
struck up a jaunty traveling tune, the servants who bowed at her
elbow offering jars of cooled wine and beer. The ship pulled
farther away and Mutnofret's stare vanished, the piercing, helpless
ferocity of those tragic black eyes fading from view with the
Amun-blessed distance, though the lady kept her face turned toward
Waset – toward the king – for as long as Senenmut watched, until at
last the boat grew too small and blurry for him to make out
anything more than the sparkle of the sun on its rails.
He shifted the slight, dear weight of his burden:
the king's infant daughter, Neferure, sleeping contentedly upon his
shoulder. He had not realized the tension he had carried in his own
body until now, when it drained away like water into thirsty sand.
He sighed with the relief of it, and turned his eyes to the
king.
Hatshepsut remained motionless, staring after the
ship, her body rigid with the quivering wariness of a cobra poised
to strike. Beside her the Great Lady Ahmose, King's Mother and
one-time God's Wife of Amun, gazed unseeing into the yellow haze of
the quayside, into the rising dust of dock-workers' feet, of
children and dogs prowling between moorings for scraps of discarded
fish and dropped crusts of bread. Her lined face wore an expression
of tentative grief, a mild confusion of sorrow and solace. Beyond
the King's Mother stood the ranks of guards in their short striped
kilts, encircling the stone dais where the royal family now stood.
The guards faced outward, alert and ready. They went everywhere now
– everywhere the Pharaoh went.
An escort of guards was always a prudent measure
beyond the palace walls, within the press and bustle of the city.
The Pharaoh, after all, was nearly a living god, and one never knew
when a crush of rekhet might surge toward her royal person, seeking
to touch the hem of her kilt, her golden skin, seeking to take some
small essence of her ka to their own hearts for the luck and
prosperity it might bring them.
But so many soldiers were an excess. Hatshepsut had
nothing to fear from the rekhet, Senenmut knew. The people still
adored her, and would go on adoring her for as long as Senenmut
could engineer it. Beer houses and rest houses continued to bubble
with talk of the treasure the Good God herself had shared out
amongst the people on the day of her coronation, two months past.
Waset remained enamored enough with her generosity to overlook the
fact that their Pharaoh was a woman. She had enriched them all, and
so she was loved. For now, this was enough to hold her close to
their hearts.
A crowd of sailors erupted into coarse shouts and
Hatshepsut turned toward them with a twitch; the guards nearest the
sailors clutched the hilts of their weapons. But in another moment
it became clear the shouting was no more than an argument over some
dockside matter – where to tie the lines, where to stack the cargo
– and the royal contingent lapsed back into guarded peace.
Neferure made a noise at the interruption, a murmur
of sleepy complaint. Senenmut swayed unconsciously, soothing his
charge. Of course, he thought, stroking the baby's back as one
might calm a bristling cat, it was neither rekhet nor sailors the
king feared. It was plotters, politicians, those who would take her
power for their own. Those who would not balk at sending knives in
the darkness, or poison in the wine. And he knew as he rocked the
King's Daughter that Hatshepsut feared less for her own well-being
than she did for those she loved. She would take any measure to
ensure their safety. She would even banish her own kin.
“I did right,” Hatshepsut said suddenly.
Ahmose turned a questioning look on the king.
“I did right by sending Mutnofret away.” She said it
as a declaration, as confident and regal as ever, though Senenmut
saw the flicker of doubt in her eyes and knew she wanted
reassurance. He was about to give it, but Ahmose laid a hand on her
daughter's shoulder.
“You did,” she said, a note of resignation in her
voice.
“Will you miss her, Mother?”
Ahmose considered the question for a long while,
weighing it, Senenmut thought, testing its heft and the heft of all
its possible answers. At last she said quietly, “I have always
missed my sister.”
Young Thutmose, riding in his nurse's arms, began to
writhe and squeal, pulling irritably at the blue wings of the small
cloth Nemes crown tied about his head. It was midday and the little
co-Pharaoh was hungry, no doubt, and had had all he could tolerate
of this standing and gazing after ships. As the nurse struggled to
soothe him, Neferure woke, stared a moment at her crying brother,
and broke likewise into wails.
Hatshepsut laughed. It was the first merriment
Senenmut had seen in her for days. The light of it shone in her
eyes.
“My little ones say it is time to go.”
She raised a hand, casually imperious, to signal for
the royal litters.
**
In the king's apartments they sank onto couches
opposite one another, the wide ebony supper table crouching between
them on its carven lion's paws. Senenmut was weary. Caring for
Neferure drained his energy and often left him dull-hearted with
sluggish, sleepy thoughts. The baby never allowed him more than two
or three hours' sleep at a stretch. She would wake squalling, and
often even the breast of her wet nurse could not soothe her in the
darkness. She would settle again only in the arms of her steward
and guardian, the one the Good God had appointed to watch over her.
He would hum to her, lullabies or tavern songs, anything that came
to him in the daze of interrupted sleep. Sometimes he would simply
talk, carrying on a one-sided conversation about any stray idea
that wandered into his tired heart – the health of the temple's
sacred cattle herd, the details of quarrying blocks for the new
monuments – as though the tiny girl were a fellow steward or a wise
and attentive priest. But the sound of his voice sent her back to
sleep as nothing else did, and Senenmut always took a small and
secret pride in that fact. Though his duty was taxing, he would not
trade it for any other.
Hatshepsut's women brought in the supper trays.
Batiret, a slim brown girl still some years away from womanhood,
bowed and showed her palms to her mistress while the others set the
fare upon the table.
“I did not leave the food for a moment, Great Lady,”
Batiret said. It was the same litany she recited at the
presentation of every meal, and yet she said it with a crispness to
her voice, as though her words were fresh. “I stood by and watched
as the cook prepared each dish in turn. I tasted each with my own
tongue and waited an hour, and have no complaints. I broke the seal
on the wine jar with my own hands and allowed no other near it. It,
too, is pure.”
“Good. We will eat, then, and I thank you as always,
Batiret.”
When the servants were gone Senenmut ladled a little
of each dish into Hatshepsut's wide, shallow bowl, then into his
own. Peas cooked in duck fat and herbs, doubtless plump and juicy
when they came from the cook's pot, were now withered and gray, and
the fat had congealed into thick lumps. Medallions of gazelle meat,
once tender, now stood drying and crusting around the edges above a
puddle of unappetizing sauce. He lifted a pottery dome from a
platter to reveal white fish steamed in grape leaves, after the
northern fashion. The steam had gathered on the inside of the dome;
at his disturbance it rained down upon the soggy fish and their sad
shroud of limp greenery in fat, cold drops.
“A feast,” he said sardonically.
“Safe,” she replied, and tucked into her meal.
Senenmut picked at his meat. He had never been
overly fond of gazelle. It was worse when it was cold. “Where did
you send her?”
“Mutnofret? I found a fine estate for her near
Ankh-Tawy. A farm with a great house as pretty as a palace, with
its own private lake and an olive orchard. It is far enough from
the city to afford her plenty of privacy.”
“Far enough from the city that she will meet no
noblemen with whom she might conspire.”
“I do think Mutnofret's conspiring days are over.”
She paused in her attentions to the cold gazelle. A thoughtful
stillness settled over her features. “There have been moments when
I have thought myself cruel to send her away now. Thutmose has been
in his grave hardly two months. Was it just to remove her from the
vicinity of her last son's tomb? I look at my own children, and I
do not know if I did right.”
“You said at the waterfront...”
She waved her supper knife, dismissing his words.
“Yes, yes. I know what I said. It was right, in the end – to send
her away, I mean. I only question my timing. I have no desire to be
cruel. Mutnofret is my own kin, after all: my mother's sister, the
mother of my dead husband, grandmother to my son.”
“Your stepson,” Senenmut corrected gently, quietly.
Before Neferure arrived, he had never objected to Hatshepsut's
motherly tendencies toward the boy. Somehow things were different
now. Neferure was the child of her very body, after all, while
Thutmose was the get of her despised and mercifully departed
husband, conceived on a harem girl. But it would never do to refer
to Iset as a mere harem girl – not where the king could hear. She
was something more to Hatshepsut. Senenmut knew that. And so he
must accept that Iset's son was something more, too, no matter how
it galled him.