Sovereign of Stars (22 page)

“Mistress of joy without end,” Neferure
whispered.

“The goddess delights in you, as you delight in
her.”

The two priestesses were at her side now. Full of
gratitude, Neferure looked upon their faces for the first time. The
one who spoke was thin and wiry, and had the confident posture of
one who had been appealingly slender and womanish in her youth. She
was a youth no longer, though; her face had begun to show its
years, the pale brow crossed with fine lines, and deeper lines
edged her nose and mouth. But she was as full of confidence as she
must have been in her younger days. She smiled benevolently at
Neferure, and Neferure could not help grinning back.

The other was more arresting. Shorter and broader
than her companion, her face was curiously broad, the eyes
wide-spaced, and while one was as black as any Egyptian’s, the
other glimmered a sharp, intense blue. The braids surrounding her
face were no wig, but the woman’s natural hair, and at her brow the
braids glowed bone-white in the lamplight. Her appearance was so
startling that Neferure nearly took a step backward. If not for the
open delight of the other priestess, Neferure may have fled from
the strangeness of her companion.

The odd-eyed priestess gestured elegantly, and the
other spoke. “Do not be afraid. She is Imer, chosen of the
Mistress. The goddess has brought you here, Lady Neferure, most
fortunate and blessed of women.”

Imer moved her hands again, and again her
companion’s voice filled the silence. Neferure realized that Imer
could not speak with her tongue; her fellow priestess understood
her signs and spoke in her place. “The goddess has a great work for
you. Open your heart and receive her.”

“I try,” Neferure said. To her horror, tears stung
her eyes.
Weeping, in the very seat of the Mistress of Joy. It’s
shameful.
But she could not stop herself. Tears broke to spill
down her cheeks. She wiped frantically at her kohl with her
fingers. “I try, but the Mistress never enters my heart. Not she,
nor any other god.”

Imer smiled broadly, and pulled from her red sash a
square of linen. She dabbed at Neferure’s cheeks with the
gentleness of a nurse.

“It is no matter,” said the thin priestess. “Imer
will teach you.”

**

The days bled one into another with the sweet, lazy
slowness of honey dripping from a knife. Neferure meted out
Thutmose’s treasure as he had instructed, but that task cost her
hardly a day. For the first time in her life she was freed from
duty, imbued with a sense of liberation that tingled along her
spine. Never before had she chosen for herself how she would spend
her time. And she knew that if she had been fortunate enough to
have been born something lesser than a King’s Daughter, she would
have chosen no other life than this.

Each morning she rose early to the high-pitched song
of an apprentice, no doubt one of the many girls Hatshepsut had
conscripted into Hathor’s service. The girl stood on a stone
platform in the center of a small, sparsely planted courtyard
behind the temple itself, her voice rising and falling as the sun
made its way inevitably up the great blue vault of the sky. Her
hymn was sweet. Neferure never tired of hearing it, though it
brought her out of too few hours’ sleep on a rather hard and
unfriendly bed.

With the other apprentices, Neferure tended the
shrines, parceling out the offerings that best pleased each of
Hathor’s faces: sweet cakes to the face of love; plain, honest
wheat bread to the face of judgment. Strong beer to the Mistress of
Dance, she who loved inebriation; milk to the mother; blood to
grinning lion-face of She Who Scratches.

She joined in the dances, giving her ka over to the
trance of movement, until, spinning and stamping, she was
transported into another realm, where her thoughts swam dizzily and
her breathing grew sluggish on the thickness of incense.

By night, she joined Imer on the rooftop sanctuary.
They sat deep in conversation, bathed in silver starlight,
discussing each facet of Hathor’s sevenfold self for hours. These
were the best times. The sounds of night insects drifted up from
the fields surrounding the temple, an endless chant to the
goddess’s greatness. At first, Neferure had needed the assistance
of Imer’s thin companion to understand the great priestess’s words.
But with diligent practice, she came to grasp most of Imer’s signs
for herself, and could even respond with her own clumsy form of the
gestures. Imer’s wisdom was boundless. She unlocked mysteries like
long-forgotten chests, and the gems contained within dazzled
Neferure’s ka.

It was nearly her final night at the Temple of
Hathor. Neferure’s feet dragged with the knowledge that she must
soon return to Waset and the roles fate had laid out for her, but
she climbed the stairway to the rooftop sanctuary in spite of the
cold fist of sorrow clutching her heart. The stars were especially
bright tonight, each one shining with such an individual intensity
that she thought she might reach out and pluck a handful from the
black sky. If they had been discs of electrum strung on a belt,
they would have chimed in the gentle night wind.

Imer sat in her accustomed place, her back against
one of the many pillars that stood on the rooftop, holding up
nothing but the vibrant night sky. Her little reed mat was below
her as always, and some servant had laid out a clay platter of
melon slices and a jug of water. Neferure approached, full of
melancholy. When Imer saw her, she bowed low over her own lap, as
an apprentice bows to a High Priestess.

“Sit,” Imer said with her hands, her gestures clear
in the ample glow of starlight. She offered Neferure a little mat
of her own; Neferure took it with a nod of thanks.

“You are sad tonight,” Imer signed.

“I will miss the temple, and the Mistress.”

“You can let her inside now.”

Neferure hoped it was true. Certainly, under Imer’s
tutelage she had allowed some presence into her heart more fully
than ever before. Her face warmed to recall it, the insistent
throbbing that filled her middle, the hot thrumming along her
limbs. She assumed the presence to be Hathor. Who else could it
have been, here in this place? She demurred with a gesture, and
Imer went on:

“Something else troubles you.”

“Many things.”

“Tell me.”

Neferure sighed. Her hands failed her; she could not
seem to recall all the signs she needed to express herself, and at
any rate, mere hand-signs seemed insufficient to express the weight
of duty that dragged at her, pulling at her ka as a crocodile pulls
at its prey.

“Speak, if you will not sign. I will watch.” Imer
tapped her own lips.

She drew a deep breath, and the scroll of her
sorrows unrolled. She spoke of the way Amun spurned her, turned his
back on her entirely, so that in his presence she felt only a
great, uncaring distance, a coldness of abandonment, though she
danced for him as passionately as she danced for Hathor, and burned
myrrh until the smell of it singed her nostrils, and poured oil
over his visage until the floor of his dark sanctuary was slick
with it. She spoke of the way all gods drew back from her,
retreating from her worship, though there was no one in the Two
Lands as devoted or as earnest as she. She spoke the word
heir
with loathing, said it was not maat, not her fate, but
she was chained to it like a bull is chained to a temple wall.

“What can I do, Imer? I am god-chosen – everyone
says it, and I can feel the gods so close to me. Yet they do not
come in. Why? All I wish is to be here, in Hathor’s temple, serving
the Mistress of the West. Oh, can’t I stay? Can’t you find some way
to make my mother release me from my duties?”

Imer sat unmoving for a long while, her blue eye
gleaming in the starlight. Neferure grew uncomfortable under her
scrutiny. She fidgeted on her mat, embarrassed of the way she had
poured out her fears and insecurities. Finally, though, Imer lifted
her hands.

“You must return to Waset.”

Neferure’s ka fell.

“You have duties yet to be done, child.”

Always duties. Always more to be done.
Neferure felt tears rising, but squeezed her eyes tightly shut to
drive them away.
I will not weep again in the House of Joy. I
will not so offend the goddess.

She steadied herself, then said with her hands,
“Very well. What duties?”

“You will learn that for yourself.”

Neferure sucked at her lower lip, waiting for the
priestess to say more.

“The goddess will make it plain. Sit in the shrine
of your choice from starlight to starlight. Take only one jar of
water, but no food. The goddess will fill you, child, I swear
it.”

Neferure had her doubts, but she also had her
instructions. Ever obedient, she rolled her mat and bowed to Imer.
She turned her back on the blessing of starlight and descended the
stairs into the heart of Hathor’s temple.

**

With her belly clutched by fear and the anticipation
of failure, Neferure did not pause to consider which shrine she
entered. She staggered through the darkness of the unlit temple,
one hand on the wall so she would not lose her way entirely. Her
sandals slid easily along the slick faience floor-tiles. Beneath
her blind fingers, she felt the carven scenes of Hathor’s presence
flicker and shift about her. At last her hands found a door, and
she pushed it open, stepped into a darkness that was denser
still.

“Lady,” she whispered in the cool blackness of the
shrine, “have mercy on me at last, and fill me.”

Neferure sank to the floor, folded her legs beneath
her, and waited.

She waited for hours, until her legs seared with
cramps. She stretched them out on the floor and shook them, but she
did not rise. She waited until the thin sound of the morning song
came through the shrine’s walls as pale and distant as a waning
moon. Morning had come, but the shrine she had chosen remained
closed, and she remained enveloped in darkness. She waited as
hunger seized her belly, an insistent gnawing at first, then, as
the darkness whirled through her senses, intensifying with a
ferocity that rent her from within.

“Neferure.” The voice was sharp, shrill. Her
mother’s voice. It rebounded off the unseen stone walls, echoing,
reversing upon itself as a ring of ripples rebounds when a stone is
dropped into a pool. “Neferure, Neferure, Neferure,
Neferurerurerurerure.”

The voice quieted, became melodic and soft.
“Neferure.”

She felt an unseen presence bend over her, a warmth
tipping across her body, the warmth of a nurse raising her from a
cradle and holding her close against a bare, male chest.

“Who is there?” she said, and her words came out
slowly. Her tongue, addled by hunger, did not know how to
speak.

“Mistress of jubilation,” said the soft voice, “Lady
of the dance.”

“Lady?” Neferure turned her head, quivering with
eagerness. She tried to do as Imer had taught her, as Ahmose had
taught her, letting her ka fall open like a blossom in the sun.

“Mistress of the harp, Lady of joy without end.”

“Yes,” Neferure sobbed. The blackness drew in close
about her, touched her with eager, rough hands, and she fell open,
a blossom wilting in the sun. “Lady, come in!”

There was a pressure against her chest, a rushing
sensation as a chariot in the wind, a gasp, a chill rising through
her body, a warmth pulsing deep inside.
O, gods,
her ka
cried, overwhelmed at their sudden presence, the undeniable force
of them, all clamoring at once within her heart. She would burst –
she could not contain them all.

And then she saw, with pale, trembling disbelief,
that she did not need to contain them. She was becoming them,
becoming one of them, by the grace of Hathor, whom she had served
selflessly for so many years as she had served the thronw,
patiently awaiting her reward.

“How?” she cried out, reaching for the divinity that
was her birthright, not knowing how to grasp it.

She stretched her hand into the darkness, and
beneath her fingers she felt once more the dry, dusty hair of the
bull of Min, its hot, trembling strength beneath her fingers, its
breath on her thighs. She had looked up from the bull, gazed
through the settling dust, and it was Thutmose she saw, staring
back at her, his eyes full of fear, of awe, of worship.

It is my birthright,
her ka insisted.
But
how?

Thutmose and the bull merged into one form, and it
was her brother she felt now beneath her grasping hand, his breath
blowing like a bellows, his body roaring with a god’s might.

“You begged for a god to fill you,” the soft voice
whispered, “and so he shall.”

“Yes,” Neferure said again, but this time she did
not weep. At the sound of her voice, a hinge sang behind her.
Someone was pushing the door to the shrine open. Lamplight fell
across the floor, crept toward Neferure where she crouched on the
cold floor, pained by her cramps and by hunger. The light crossed
her face. She squinted, eyes streaming with tears.

“Great Lady,” said a young apprentice, “Imer told me
to bring you water.”

There was the thump of a jug settling onto the floor
beside her. Neferure thrust her hands into its mouth, sucked
greedily at tepid water cupped in her palms.

“What is the hour?” she croaked.

“First starlight, Great Lady.”

“Help me up.”

The girl obliged, pulling Neferure to her feet, then
sliding one thin shoulder beneath Neferure’s arm to support her. A
wise decision; Neferure’s legs shook, weakened by her long ordeal.
With the apprentice’s help, she staggered toward the door. When she
reached it, she clutched at the stone, sagging against the doorway.
She could not move another step.