Sovereign of Stars (37 page)

“Here,” Kynebu whispered.

Thutmose stepped past him.

The floor of the chamber was bright with blood, a
lake of it, dark and congealing around its edges. A great cloud of
flies circled above, singing their unceasing, sickening tune. The
man lay sprawled face-down in the pool. His kilt was soaked red; it
clung to the backs of his legs.

“Majesty,” a low voice muttered.

Thutmose whirled. Nehesi stood, his dark face rather
blanched, his eyes dull with sorrow.

“I have stood vigil ever since Kynebu told me. I
have allowed no one to touch the body.”

“Why?”

A strange question – Thutmose knew it sounded both
strange and childish the moment it left his lips.

“I wanted you to see it first. To see the manner of
his death.”

Thutmose did not need to roll Senenmut’s corpse over
to see the manner of his death. He had spent enough time on the
battlefield to know. Only the vein that tracked up the side of the
throat would bleed so profusely, forcefully enough to create a lake
of blood.

“His throat was cut.”

“Ah, Majesty. By a knife.”

A chill fell into his ka so intense that Thutmose’s
legs tremored. He stare around the room, and noted a line of bloody
prints leading out into the garden. The footprints were small – so
small only a child could have made them, or a very small woman.

“Neferure,” he said.

Nehesi nodded.

“Very well.” Thutmose gripped his self-possession
desperately, grateful his voice did not shake. “Kynebu, tell one of
my guards to take you back to the palace. The Great Royal Wife and
my son are to be placed in secure chambers, with my personal guard
to watch them at all times.
At all times.
Am I
understood?”

“Ah, Majesty.” Kynebu fled the house, obviously
grateful to be gone, grateful for work to which he could turn his
mind.

If only I could shut out this horror as easily as
he,
Thutmose thought.

“Summon the poor man’s servants, Nehesi. They must
take his body to the palace enbalmers. I will pay the cost myself.
He will have all the funeral rites of a noble – of one who was
loyal to the king.”

Nehesi’s jaw tightened. His eyes closed briefly –
his only concession to grief. “We went to Punt together,” the man
said at last. “He was my brother – my brother in service to our
lady.”

Thutmose laid a hand on his arm, the only comfort he
could think to offer. “I know.”

“Who will tell her?” Nehesi asked.

“I suppose I must, though it pains me to think of
it.”

“If you will allow it, Majesty, I will come, too.
This is a burden one man should not carry on his own. Not even a
king.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Hatshepsut took three with her to Djeser-Djeseru,
and no one else.

Batiret, her scarred arm strong beneath Hatshepsut’s
quaking hands.

Meryet, pretty and fine, young and worthy, still
untempted by life, unmarked by sin.

Sitre-In, hobbling on a staff of ebony wood, most of
her teeth gone, a little sack of myrrh swinging from her hand.

They sat silent around Hatshepsut beneath the canopy
of her boat, folding their bodies around her, shielding her from
the eyes of the people and the gods. They touched her with gentle
hands, they whispered to her in sympathy, in love, but she and her
kas were far distant, beyond their reach, drifting.

Batiret guided her ashore, and Hatshepsut stood on
the quay, gazing at her temple with dull eyes.

This is all that is left of him,
she
thought
. It is all that is left of me.

They walked with her down the long avenue, the
paving stones bright in the unforgiving sun. She went at a dawdling
pace, absently trailing her hand along the base of a seshep statue,
then the rough bark of a myrrh tree, the stone of a statue, the hot
dryness of a tree. She remembered the soldiers crying
Seshep!
in a long-lost place, a place that had never been,
shouting the name to a woman who had never been, and never would
be. That woman was rent by the lion-claws of grief – a lifetime of
it, piled one loss upon another, one duty upon another, one sin
upon another. When she pressed her hand to her face to rub at her
tears it smelled sweetly of the trees’ sap.
Like our
salvation,
her heart whispered to Senenmut. She saw him smiling
at her beneath Khonsu’s white eye, heard the whisper of millions of
dark leaves. And his laugh turned into the call of a hunting cat,
the black of his eyes to smoke rising on a fire in Punt.

Hatshepsut climbed the ramp to her temple’s terrace,
where her own face smiled at her from countless seshep. She had
never looked so at peace, so strong. She turned in the midst of the
statues, bewildered, circling to take in the sight of her own self.
She was stone – hard and unchangeable, and yet she was changed.

She had meant to go with her ladies into Amun’s dark
sanctuary, to throw herself down in the god’s presence and admit
defeat, weep in abasement, beg for mercy. But she passed the door,
and her ears caught the sound of a chisel, light and far away, a
happy ring. She sank to her knees behind the door and found with
her fingers his name, traced it in the cold, pale stone.

Senenmut.

A wail ripped from Hatshepsut’s throat. She screamed
her hurt, screamed her losses, one long, ragged, wounded cry that
went on and on into eternity, until she drew a burning breath and
screamed again, rocking. She fell against the wall, let her tears
run into the symbols of his name, and she sobbed against the stone,
“Live.”

But he did not live. Nor did Iset, lolling on her
bed, sparkling in chains and cuffs of silver, more beautiful than
any woman had ever been. Nor did Ahmose, leaning over Hatshepsut in
her bed, scowling at the wound across her groin. Neferure did not
live. Neferure, still wet with her birth water, held close in
Senenmut’s arms. Her brother Thutmose, riding with her in the Feast
of Opet. Her father, holding her upon the rail of a ship while the
pyramids slid by, dark in a red, red sky.

Senenmut did not live. Senenmut, holding her up
against the wall of the sanctuary as he entered her, his face
earnest and guilty with passion. Holding the black braid in his
palm in the darkness of a starlit garden.
We catch
falcons.

Hathor had won – had exacted a payment from
Hatshepsut too weighty to bear. Hathor had punished her for her
pride, her singular focus on the throne. And Amun – Amun had
spurned her, leaving her to grope in doubt.

Why, Father?
she demanded of Amun, one last
flicker of pride giving her strength to ask, a dying ember in her
heart. She stared about her, searching for an answer, stared out
into the terrace where the sunlight was impossibly bright. When she
closed her eyes tight, crumpling under the blow of Amun’s silence,
the terrace light echoed against her lids as green as resurrection
fire.

Her ladies drew close about her, bending to offer
their comfort, their voices, their hands.

She shrank against the temple wall, clinging to it,
clawing it, knowing it was the only afterlife she would have. For
her kas would be damned when she went to the Field of Reeds. Damned
for her pride, and damned for her love.

And so Hatshepsut pressed herself against the stone,
until her skin burned with its rough grit, until it scraped her raw
and she bled. She pressed, seeking in vain to push herself into the
blocks themselves, where she might find Senenmut dwelling, moving
like water in the tracks of his carvings, waiting in the stone of
his creation.

Truly my heart turns this way and that, when I
consider what the rekhet will think and say - people who will see
my monument years later, who will speak of what I have made. … As
long as my father Amun refreshes me with the breath of life, it
must be said that I have worn the white crown, and I shine in the
red crown. I have ruled the Two Lands like Horus. I am strong like
the son of Nut. Re sets in the boat of night and rises in the boat
of morning. As long as the sky is there and Re’s work is steady, I
shall be forever like the star that does not end. I shall reign in
the afterlife, bright as Aten.

-Inscription from the obelisk at Ipet-Isut by Hatshepsut, fifth
king of the Eighteenth Dynasty

THE END

Of

SOVEREIGN OF STARS

The She-King: Book Three

THE BULL OF MIN

The She-King: Book Four

The final volume of this series

Coming in the winter of 2014

If you enjoyed this book, please take a
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Please read on for historical notes and more
commentary from L. M. Ironside.

MORE BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR

The She-King Series:

The Sekhmet Bed: Book One

The Crook and Flail: Book Two

The Bull of Min: Book Four (winter of
2014)

Tidewater: A Novel of Pocahontas and the
Jamestown Colony (spring of 2014)

Revelator: A Novel of Joseph Smith (fall of
2014)

Writing as Libbie Hawker:

Baptism for the Dead

A Light in the Merced River (short story)

Schrodinger’s Kitty: A Short and Uncertain
Story

Finnegan’s Pig: Or, How Saskatoon Got Bacon
for Seven Years (short story)

Sugar House (2014)

Tin Moan (2015)

HISTORICAL NOTES

I write this note with more than a little
trepidation.

For both The Sekhmet Bed and The Crook and Flail,
I’ve received lovely feedback from readers praising my accurate
working of real history into these fictional portrayals of the
Thutmoside Dynasty. Well, as I worked on Sovereign of Stars, let us
just say that “my heart turned this way and that” nearly as much as
good old Hatshepsut’s. I’m afraid I played much faster and looser
with history in this book than I am used to doing, and I feel I
must make amends for it here by setting the record straight.

I confess to freely reorganizing events in
Hatshepsut’s reign to suit the particulars of my story. The
golden-crowned obelisks were not commissioned until the fifteenth
year of Hatshepsut’s kingship, and finished in the sixteenth. This
is clearly indicated on the obelisks themselves, so I plead no
contest to messing with reality here. I moved the event forward in
Hatshepsut’s reign to about the seventh year, simply because it was
just the thing I needed to shape the characters’ development, to
set them up for the denouement of the novel. As Hatshepsut’s
approximately twenty-two years on the Horus Throne were
characterized by a wealth of monuments, temples, and restoration
projects on a scale unseen in the reigns of most other Pharaohs
before and after, I figured she was likely to have built something
interesting and grand in her seventh year. It just wasn’t anything
fancy enough to replace the less impressive pylon gates of her
half-brother Thutmose II.

(If you are wondering, by the way, whether it gives
an author of historical fiction a certain thrill to rejigger actual
events from world history in order to suit her own creation, well,
I plead no contest on that count, too.)

I also changed the date and circumstances of the
expedition to Punt, moving it forward in time by about four years.
It actually occurred around her tenth year on the throne, and while
it was considered a momentous enough achievement to become one of
the featured stories depicted on the walls of Djeser-Djeseru,
Hatshepsut almost certainly did not visit Punt herself. She sent
her representatives, Nehesi, Ineni, and Senenmut. However, I wanted
my fictional Hatshepsut to experience Punt for herself, and
particularly to meet the strange and mysterious Queen Ati, and so I
contrived an excuse to send her there. I think the real Hatshepsut
would have wished to go, to see the fabled God’s Land for herself.
Why not?

The exact location of Punt remains a total mystery,
but that it was a real place, visited now and then by the ancient
Egyptians for purposes of trade, is not in dispute. In fact, the
expedition scene in Hatshepsut’s temple is one of the key pieces of
evidence for Punt’s factuality. The carvings of the exotic fish in
the water below her expedition’s boats are so specific and so
accurate that scientists have been able to identify them down to
the species name – and have used this information to place Punt
somewhere along the Red Sea, or at least accessible via the Red
Sea. That is about all that’s known of its location, though, and
less is known of its culture. Most of what we do know – the type of
housing, the fashions, the trade goods – comes again from
Hatshepsut’s temple.

And let us discuss for a moment poor Neferure. It’s
here I feel I have the most special pleading to do, waving my
artistic license frantically in the air.

Hatshepsut’s daughter – her only child, depending on
which Egyptologist you ask – is another mystery of the 18th
Dynasty. Not much is known about her roles or her fate. She
appeared very prominently in inscriptions and art throughout
Hatshepsut’s reign, up until approximately year 17. At that point,
she disappeared entirely from the record. It was never clear
whether she was married to Thutmose III or not, and there is much
speculation amongst professional and armchair Egyptologists whether
she was Hatshepsut’s heir, and whether Hatshepsut intended the
throne to pass from herself down a new line of female Pharaohs. We
will never know the truth of it. The only clear certainty about
Neferure’s place in the historical record is that she served as
God’s Wife of Amun, that, like all God’s Wives, she played a
prominent role in religious ceremony, and that she disappeared when
she was still very young – presumably dying in her late teens,
though even that is uncertain, as her tomb has never been found,
nor has any inscription that seems to reference either her death or
her continued life amongst Hatshepsut’s or Thutmose III’s court.
She simply vanishes without further mention, though later in
Thutmose III’s reign some monuments show where Neferure’s name has
been carved over with the name of one of his confirmed wives,
Satiah.