Sovereign of Stars (18 page)

“I have been preoccupied of late,” Hatshepsut said
drily. “I've had little time for keeping up with the Holy
Lady.”

“Well...” Opet's voice went limp with reluctance, as
weak as the lotus leaves in the shrinking pool. “She has put it
about that the...the river, Great Lady...is...”

“Yes?”

“...that the river is the work of Hathor.”

“Hathor. Of course.”

“She says that Hathor is angry with you, Great
Lady.”

Hatshepsut held her tongue and her composure with
difficulty. She eyed the outline of Neferure's small palace, dim
across the span of the garden. A single lamp burned in one of its
windows, flickering and low. There was no sign of movement
within.

More men than ever before had engaged her harem
women in polite conversation at festivals and feasts. How much
longer would it be before the women returned their affections, and
petitioned her for release? And once she granted them the freedom
to marry and become mothers, they would spill Neferure's tales
directly into the ears of Egypt's noble men.
The Sovereign of
Stars is angry with the Pharaoh. The king has lost all favor with
the Mistress of the West. The goddess caused the flood to fail,
because Hatshepsut displeases her.

“What exactly does my daughter say?”

Opet ducked her head in apology. “In truth I know
very little about it. I am repeating only the murmurs of the other
women, you see. The Holy Lady is careful never to speak against you
where I might hear it directly. She knows how close you and I
are.”

Hatshepsut rode back to the palace wearing pensive
silence like a winter shawl, drawn tight all about her. Nehesi
accompanied her back to her own chambers, and there she fell upon
her bed, wracked with superstitious dread. She kicked her feet
against her sheets and fine cushions, unable to find any comfort.
Was
Hathor angry with her, after all? Were Neferure's
whispers true? The girl was god-chosen; Ahmose was still certain of
it, though for all her mystical airs, Neferure had shown precious
little talent that Hatshepsut could see. She had been certain, ever
since the Feast of the Valley, that Hathor wanted Neferure. Yet as
much as she feared Hathor, she feared Amun more. He was the patron
of Waset, the king of the gods, and her own sire. Amun required a
God's Wife, and Hatshepsut would not offend him by taking Neferure,
gifting her to Hathor like a basket of pomegranates. To say nothing
of the vital part the girl now played as Hatshepsut’s heir, a charm
to protect the line of succession against scheming men until
Thutmose came of age and sired an heir of his own.

Unless the High Priest or Ahmose told her otherwise,
Hatshepsut would retain the girl for Amun's service. She had
committed Neferure, and her word before the god would remain
unbroken.

No,
she told herself, trying to sound
sensible within her own troubled heart,
it is not Hathor who's
stayed the flood. It cannot be.

Which god, then?

A spasm of fear seized her belly and ran cold up her
spine.
Amun?
Was the king of the gods himself displeased
with his begotten daughter?

If he is angry with me, it can only be over
Senenmut.

She would marry him. Yes – take him to her bed as a
husband, not as a lover, and the holy trinity would be complete in
the mortal world as it was in the world of the divine: mother,
father, and child.

But in another heartbeat she rejected that idea,
too. A man who would be Pharaoh might marry into the blood royal,
as her own father did. There was no shame in raising up the low.
But for a Pharaoh to marry a commoner – and not only as a
concubine, but as Great Royal Consort...? As much as she loved
Senenmut, she saw at once that such an action would not raise him
up, but would degrade her own position. Were the Pharaoh to give in
to her emotions so completely, so publicly, she would only seem too
mortal, not the slightest bit divine.
It would only speed them
taking my throne from me. No – I can never marry the brother of my
heart.

She fought to clear herself of all thoughts, to
sweep herself clean so she might at last sleep. From the direction
of her servants' quarters, she heard a rustling, the sound of a
woman shifting heavily in her sleep. Weariness dragged at her, a
desire for peace. She cast her heart back to the days when Iset
still lived, recalled with a tender pang the night she had
convinced the girl to lie with her brother and conceive their
Little Tut. What a good mother Iset would have made, had she lived.
She would have known how to handle Neferure, how to appease the
gods. She would have danced, and sung in her sweet, lilting voice,
and told Amun tales of the deby in the northern marshes, and he
would forget his wrath, and let Hatshepsut sleep.

**

Senenmut was a clumsy hunter at best. At worst, he
was a humiliation to men everywhere.

As a youth his friends had goaded him into fowling
one day when the afternoon had grown too hot to continue their
lessons at the Temple of Amun. They had begged a little
reed-cutting skiff from the priest whose duty it was to keep the
temple's canal clear of weeds, and paddled it out into a thick
stand of papyrus. Meryre, one of his friends, had a fine horn bow,
a gift from his father. They had taken turns firing rather cheap,
disposable arrows into the green density of the riverbank until at
last a flock of geese rose, honking indignantly at being roused
from their afternoon nap. By then it was Senenmut's turn with the
bow and he could not even pull it; his chest was too weak. All the
geese got away. The boys watched the flock glide across the expanse
of the river and settle, a line of black dots, onto the far
bank.

His skill with a spear was nearly as lamentable. The
skiff nosed through a wall of reeds to reveal the haul-out of six
or seven crocodiles. They lay half concealed in mud, their
malevolent pale mouths open as if they might speak. One rolled a
strangely keen, golden eye toward the boat and slid into the water.
The boys screamed, paddling frantically to make their escape. The
crocodile kept coming, though, and Senenmut was obliged to pick up
the hunting party's lone spear in defense. He jabbed it at the
crocodile, striking its face twice, and the beast fled with a great
thrashing of its tail. The other boys hailed Senenmut as a hero all
the way back to the Temple of Amun, but even now, standing on the
deck of the Pharaoh's hunting boat with her servants in a bustle
around her, he recalled the weakness of his blows, the ineffectual
way the spear's point had bounced off the crocodile's snout. He
certainly had not killed it; he had not even drawn blood. For all
he knew, it was the stink of his terrified sweat that had driven
the crocodile away, and not his spear.

In spite of his unimpressive record as a huntsman,
Senenmut felt a certain gladness to be underway. Hatshepsut, driven
to distraction by her worries over the harem, had thrown up her
hands two days ago when court duties were done, and declared that
she would hunt lions, though Senenmut was certain she had not
hunted since her youth. Now here they were, rocking together on the
deck of her swift hunting boat, watching as a singing band of
sailors scurried from rail to rail, preparing to land the boat deep
in the valley opposite Waset.

Hatshepsut, clutching the rail at the ship’s
sharp-pointed nose, breathed deep as the canal narrowed. Before
their prow, the broad face of the temple stretched along the base
of the cliffs, dominating the valley. Djeser-Djeseru, Hatshepsut
had named it: The Holiest of the Holy. It was a good name. The
avenue of seshep paralleled the canal. Each face that rose above
each lion's body was a match for Hatshepsut's own, rounded and
firm, the eyes insistent, the mouths barely curved in knowing
smiles of complete self-assurance. Even without celebrants to tread
from the quayside to the temple for a festival, the whole valley
felt stately, holy. Perhaps the only feature that marred the effect
was the bleached skeletons of the long-dead myrrh trees, strange
white slashes like scratching nails against the golden
landscape.

They landed at the clean new stone of the festival
quay. Senenmut escorted Hatshepsut ashore, where they stood in the
welcome coolness of a hastily erected cloth sunshade, watching
while a veritable army of servants and soldiers unloaded their
boats. The cloth and poles of tents came ashore on the shoulders of
strong young men. The more adventuresome women from the palace's
cadre of servants bore baskets of fruit and sacks of flour, which
they would make into fresh cakes around nightly campfires. Soldiers
led teams of skittish horses down the ramps, and staked them out
with piles of hay on the bare ground between seshep. The horses'
tails made sounds like whip-lashes as they swatted at flies. Men
lowered sections of chariots from the boats' rails. Here a
platform, there a pair of wheels, here an axle and tongue came
together with pegs and mallets until the Pharaoh's small fleet of
hunting carts gleamed in the mid-day sun. Men sang as they worked;
women danced the rustic steps of servants, shouting and clapping
their hands. A hunt, it seemed, was nearly as good as a
festival.

Hatshepsut seemed to have caught the mood, and
Senenmut quietly rejoiced to see the old worries fall from her
face, even for one day. She cheered the women's dances, and
chattered with Nehesi about the horses, finally instructing him to
set aside for her own use the team of dark brown mares with blazes
of white up their faces. She encouraged two soldiers to wrestle to
settle their good-natured argument over who should be first to kiss
a pretty serving girl, and when Nehesi kicked the winner's feet out
from beneath him and planted a long kiss of his own on the girl's
lips, Hatshepsut roared with laughter.

“Gods, but it is good to see you this way,” he said
close to her hear. “It has been long since I've heard you laugh.
It’s better than music to me.”

“I laugh like a braying ass. Don't argue; I've
always known it to be true.”

No one was near, and Senenmut could not resist
catching her hand in his own. He held it just for a moment before
she tugged it away, smiling.

“Your laugh is a tribute to Amun,” he murmured.

“I can see that the prospect of hunting inflames
you. I never knew you were so blood-thirsty.”

“You know I'm not. I live to see your smile; that is
all.”

She did smile up at him then, full and joyous. The
sight of it caught at his heart. There were lines around her eyes
now, fine when she was still, but definite when she smiled. He
loved the lines as he loved all her features, the sharp curve of
her nose, the roundness of her face, the ostentatious teeth. She
was imperfect, and unspeakably holy.

My djeser-djeseru,
he said silently.

A commotion rose up from the quayside. They looked
round in time to see Hatshepsut's team of brown mares backing
frantically as four soldiers struggled to harness them. Nehesi
shouted and dashed forward to seize their reins, but not before the
hindquarters of one careened into the body of a chariot. The cart
lurched backward and smashed into the trunk of a dead myrrh
tree.

Hatshepsut strode to Nehesi's side, stroked the
mare's neck until she was calm and blowing.

“Has the chariot been much damaged?”

“Just a bit of a wound to the platform, Great Lady.
It is still sound enough to drive.”

Senenmut followed Hatshepsut as she inspected the
cart, shaking its platform side to side, assessing the creaking of
its springs, the stability of its wheels. The rearmost portion of
the platform was dented and splintered, but only a hand's width of
wood was damaged.

“It seems sound enough,” Nehesi said, then cursed as
a great white claw dropped onto his face, scratched his shoulder.
It bounced from Nehesi's body and fell onto the chariot's platform:
an old, twisted branch of myrrh.

Hatshepsut scrambled into the cart. She laughed as
she raised the branch, held it aloft like a war banner. “Nehesi,
beware! These trees were sacred to Amun once. Has the god cursed
you?”

“Amun's eyes!” Nehesi swiped at the scratches on his
skin. Senenmut could see that he was not bleeding.

Hatshepsut dropped the branch and grimaced; she
spread her fingers wide, then flexed them, spread them again.

“Is something wrong, Great Lady?” Senenmut said.

“Sap; it's only sap.”

“I am impressed that trees so long dead can still
have sap in them.”

“Not much,” Nehesi said. He scored the trunk of the
myrrh tree with his knife, rather viciously, taking vengeance for
the tree’s attack. Only one small bead of sap appeared, hardly as
large as a pomegranate seed. “These trees are so dry, it's no
wonder the god throws their branches at innocent men. He must be
furious.”

Hatshepsut raised her palm to her nose, closed her
eyes as she inhaled. “Gods, but it smells glorious. Even better
than it smells when it's burning on the temple fires.”

When she opened her eyes again, she looked down at
Senenmut with a wide-mouthed grin of triumph. She stretched her
palm down to him, and because he could not resist the opportunity
to touch her skin, he took her hand in his own and breathed in the
scent of the sap. It was warm with spice, sweet as fresh wine, and
beneath the odor of the myrrh tree was the odor of her skin, golden
and dusty, sharp with sweat. He breathed it in again, deeply.

“Do you know what it smells like to me,
Senenmut?”

Reluctantly, he let her hand fall from his and gazed
up at his king. A halo of light surrounded her face, and the shadow
of the myrrh branches fell across her chest like the intricate lace
of a fisherman's net.

“It smells like an answer to my riddle. It smells
like our salvation.”