Sovereign of Stars (25 page)

On nights when her stomach was not too tender from
the disorienting motion of her boat, Hatshepsut joined the men in
hunting. It was a welcome distraction from the strain of long
travel, and for the most part, the creatures of this land were the
same as the creatures of the Iteru’s green valley: waterfowl and
brush birds, pigeons in the stands of trees, dark-colored gazelle
that sprinted along the crests of grass-fringed dunes. When they
were a week outside of Tjau, Hatshepsut even managed to bring down
a gazelle with a shot through the heart – a shot which was more
luck than skill. That night she tried to focus on Bita-Bita’s
lesson in rudimentary Puntite, listening from the solitude of her
tent as her sailors and basket-bearers sang around their fires,
roasting bits of gazelle meat on twig skewers. Senenmut brought a
haunch dripping with savory juices, dismissed Bita-Bita from her
duties, and shared the meat with Hatshepsut, wiping the fat from
her chin, kissing the sheen of it from her lips there in the
lamplit glow of the king’s tent, where no one else could see.

Senenmut had grown foreign to her, as foreign as the
shores where her encampments rose at night, but as exotic and
enticing. There was no room on their Set-cursed boats for luxuries,
and neither time nor still mooring to attend to one’s appearance.
Razors and cosmetics were left behind, save for the kohl that
protected the eyes from the sun, so even the king went as
plain-faced as a rekhet. Senenmut’s hair, like hers, grew, and
stood out in tufts beneath the foremost fringe of his wig. It was
shot with silvery grey, an intrigue she found most appealing. His
cheeks and chin roughened with a sparse growth of hair, and a trail
of black fluff crept from the belt of his kilt, up his rather soft
belly like a climbing vine. His legs and underarms darkened. He was
a wild thing, as was she, stripped of civilization, pure as Atum’s
first creations. She loved him anew, seeing him so untamed.

In another week more the shores turned from dry
grassland to scrub, with pockets of trees holding fast in the
stream-carved depressions of the hillsides. In the evenings when
they landed Hatshepsut could see the dense dark greenery looming to
the south, where the land sloped steadily from waterline to a wall
of hills so large and steep she could sense their monumental weight
even from a great distance. “Forest,” Ineni had said, nodding to
the wash of deep emerald along the southern horizon. Hatshepsut
tried to imagine what a forest was like. She pictured a garden,
well-trimmed and planted in organized beds and rows, and knew in
her kas that it could not be so.

At mid-day, when the sun was high and merciless on
the restless, gray-green surface of the sea, the expedition of
Maatkare, the Good God, arrived in Punt. “Thank Amun,” Hatshepsut
whispered fervently as her boat rolled toward the shallows. She
peered anxiously over the dipping and rising rail. A crowd of
people had gathered on the sand, waving their arms. Most of them
were rather short of stature, with the cool-hued, deep brown skin
of southerners. Men and women alike wore brief aprons about their
waists, made from some rather sheer cloth; yet she could tell even
from the rail of her ship that it was not fine enough to be called
linen. Their chests were bare, and she could see ornaments of gold
and polished stone glinting at the women’s breasts, pierced through
their nipples.

Beyond the strand where the waves made fall in long,
frothy arcs, a line of short dunes stood sentinel amongst tufts of
salt grass – the kind with leaves as sharp and strong as blades, as
they had seen on Tjau’s shoreline. Beyond still, the deep
green-black density of forest reared toward the sky, a profusion of
heavy, damp trunks, cold shadow, and the incessant, mindless,
sinister waving of the leafy canopy.

The boat ran aground with a loud scrape. Nehesi was
the first over the rail, and he reached up to assist first
Hatshepsut onto land, then her servant Bita-Bita. Hatshepsut’s feet
hit the cold water with a splash; the feel of the waves surging
about her calves, seething up to soak the hem of her kilt, filled
her with excitement. She strode toward the Puntites with Nehesi and
Bita-Bita in tow, heedless of any danger. In spite of the dark
menace of their environment, there was nothing to fear from the
people themselves. Of that she was certain. They welcomed the
Egyptian fleet with eager gestures, with broad smiles, and she
smiled back at them, throwing her arms wide.

Bita-Bita took to her work at once. She raised her
girlish voice above the cheering crowd, speaking her mother’s
native tongue. When she fell silent, the Puntites looked at one
another in confusion. Hatshepsut waited.

“I told them you are the king of Egypt, Great Lady,”
said Bita-Bita apologetically.

A man’s voice burst into laughter amidst the
Puntites. Nehesi took a menacing step toward the crowd, one hand on
his hilt.

Before the chancellor could do more, though, a stir
of activity rose. Bita-Bita craned her neck to see, and said in
hasty Egyptian, “Many of them are speaking two names, Great Lady.
Parahu, and Ati.”

“Important folk,” Ineni suggested.

“King,” Hatshepsut said. “I heard the word
king,
did I not, Bita-Bita? And queen.”

As a child’s sand-palace crumbles at the touch of
water, so the crowd of Puntites fell, dropping to their knees on
the sandy expanse of the beach, heads bowed and hands outstretched.
As they lowered, Hatshepsut could see into the crowd’s depths. It
parted before the progress of a man, wizened, small in stature, his
close-cropped, tightly curled hair showing beneath a red cloth cap.
His beard was likewise shot with white, and curved upward at its
point, like the beards of many of the Puntite men in the crowd. The
well-stretched lobes of his ears swung with golden bangles; about
his shoulders he wore a wide collar, similar in style to those of
fashionable Egyptian courtiers. But where an Egyptian collar was
made of gold and precious stone, or electrum foil shaped into
dozens of tiny flowers, the man’s was made of feathers – hundreds
of iridescent feathers, catching the light in ripples of blue,
violet, green. The cloth wound about his waist was white,
embroidered brightly at its hem with images of running animals
whose forms Hatshepsut did not quite recognize. Each stride
jangled, for one leg was bound with hundreds of metal rings –
copper, silver, gold, above the knee and below it. He carried a
staff as he walked, ebony worn smooth and shiny from many years of
handling. He did not seem to need the thing for support, and
Hatshepsut understood that the staff carried ceremony, reverence –
as her own crook and flail carried reverence. The man cried out as
he went, his voice nasal and high, brandishing his black staff,
shouting words Bita-Bita struggled to interpret: admonishments to
be wary of him, for he carried great magic in his bones.

Behind the man, a tiny white donkey moved with
mincing steps, its neck thrown back with the strain of carrying its
burden through the sand. For on its back rode the largest and
strangest woman Hatshepsut had ever seen. Her shoulders were round
and broad, slick and shining with some aromatic oil that caused her
skin to glow like polished wood. Her breasts, exposed, hung
pendulous against her body, each one fleshy and wide, the large
nipples bearing gleaming golden studs. Her abdomen sat upon itself
in neat stacks of flesh. When the king in his feather collar
halted, so did the struggling white donkey, and, with an air of
immense dignity, its rider dismounted. Standing, the woman’s hips
and thighs were especially large; they soared from her body,
clearly visible beneath the sheer weave of her bright yellow kilt,
the flesh dented and pocked as the sand was marked from the
activity of so many feet. The woman slapped her thighs, drawing all
eyes to her body; she turned slightly, as if giving Hatshepsut a
better view of her full majesty. Her buttocks jutted well out from
her back, and gleamed in the sun beneath the kilt. When the woman
looked frankly up and down the length of Hatshepsut’s frame, her
keen, wide-set eyes darkened with something close to mockery, and
the full lips twisted into an appraising sneer. Hatshepsut was not
accounted the slenderest woman in Egypt, but beside this woman’s
size and forcefully female shape, the Pharaoh felt positively
puny.

“He is Parahu, king of Punt,” Bita-Bita said,
crouching beside Hatshepsut in a half-bow. “And she,” the girl
indicated the great, strutting woman with a quick shift of her
eyes, “is Ati, his queen.”

**

Decades had passed since Punt had enjoyed major
trade with Egypt. Parahu was eager for the gifts Hatshepsut bore.
Once her mission had been made plain – to give Kushite gold, and a
goodly sum of it, in exchange for the wealth of Punt – its fine
woods, its animals for Egypt’s menageries, and most of all the
resins, incense, and myrrh trees so beloved by Amun – the people on
the strand set up a great cheer, some of them breaking out into a
lively, hopping dance right there on the sand. Hatshepsut’s men
caught the festive mood, and when the ships had been made secure
the whole gathering, Egyptian and Puntite, went clapping and
singing songs by turn, each people doing their best to pick up the
words and the tunes of the others’ music, all encompassed by a
feeling of brotherhood and, for the Egyptians who would not be
required to return to their boats for several days, relief.

They were led through the grassy dunes to the edge
of the forest, where the village of Parahu resolved out of the
gloom like a vision in a Shemu heat-dream. Naked children swung
from the branches of trees, dropped down to dodge between great
trunks that stood in groups of four, stripped of bark, stoic and
still like the legs of oxen waiting at the plow. It took Hatshepsut
some time to realize that the trunks held aloft platforms, and on
the platforms, half-concealed by the lower reaches of the forest’s
canopy, stood strange houses made of mud. They were heaped and
rounded like bee hives, each one with a little door covered by a
cloth. Thin wisps of smoke rose from some houses to dissipate among
the treetops. Near each home’s base-poles stood smaller mud hives;
a girl bent over one, feeding sticks into its depths, and a shower
of sparks rose up from the oven to dance about her face.

They gained an open clearing, ringed all about by
the elevated houses and the dark sentinel trees. In the midst of
the clearing stood a fire-ring as wide as a man was tall, lined
with large white stones and heaped inside with piles of ash. The
ground around the ring was well trampled, worn featureless by
generations of feet. Hatshepsut was reminded of the courtyard in
Kush where she had conquered Dedwen. This, then, was the communal
meeting-place of Parahu’s village. The king of Punt circled the
unlit fire-ring, his arms thrown wide, his black stick waving. He
cried out in his strange, high voice. Bita-Bita leaned close to
offer her translation. There was to be a celebration, it seemed, to
welcome the She-King of Egypt to Punt’s glorious shores. The people
cheered, the women trilling a piercing, wordless song of joy.
Hatshepsut grinned.

A retinue of young women led her along a dark forest
path wet with dew and rich with the scent of loam. They came upon
the four posts of a Puntite house, and indicated with gestures that
Hatshepsut should climb up into it via a crude ladder made of
lashed wood. She stared up at the platform, which seemed to stretch
above her, tripling its height.

“Nehesi, you will go up first.”

“And leave you here with these strangers?”

“I’ll be all right. The sharpest weapon any of them
has is a feather fan. An anyhow, I have Ineni and Senenmut
here.”

“Stewards! What good are stewards?”

“What good is a chancellor? Climb.”

Grumbling, Nehesi tested the ladder with his hands
and the toes of his sandals, bounced against it to be sure of its
solidity, then climbed gingerly up to the platform. He crawled
through the rounded door of the mud hut. Hatshepsut waited until
his head and shoulders reappeared; he motioned to her, and she made
her way up the ladder, cringing at the way it wobbled faintly
beneath her. Arms and legs trembled from the effort by the time she
gained the platform. It was made of split logs laid side by side,
lashed together by some tough, fibrous vine. The platform created a
small porch before the door of the mud hut. Nehesi was holding
aside the door-cloth, which was, she could now see, made of thick
wool colored a deep purple-blue. Hatshepsut crawled inside.

The interior was not at all unpleasant, for all the
humbleness of its outer walls. The mud was thick and dry, quite
pleasantly cool. It trapped the ample shade up among the leaves of
the nearby trees, and the sweet smell of the treetops, too –
exceptionally fragrant growth, as pleased the god Amun. Even Nehesi
could stand to his full height inside. Many soft mats, covered in
woven wool bright with unfamiliar patterns, lay along the walls.
The inner walls themselves were painted with bold shapes, some of
them recognizable as dancing women, men wielding spears and short
bows, gods in postures of supernatural power. Other shapes were
painted only, it seemed, for the harmony of their proportions: rows
of circles, squares within squares, a line of triangles dancing now
on their bases, now on their tips, like pyramids frolicking in a
child’s dream. At the door’s threshold an intricate white line
writhed in a circle, twined back upon itself. Bita-Bita whispered
that it was a charm to keep tree-snakes away. In the center of the
floor, below the highest point of the humped roof, sat a low table
of ebony wood and several three-legged stools. The table was piled
with fruits Hatshepsut did not recognize, jars of sweet-smelling
liquid, tiny eggs with pale blue shells in bowls made of
slick-polished wood.