Read The Crook and Flail Online
Authors: L. M. Ironside
The Crook and Flail
THE CROOK AND FLAIL
The She-King: Book Two
L. M. Ironside
CONTENTS
Part One: Son of the God
Part Two: Hand of the God
Chapter Seventeen
Part Three: Banner of the God
A Note to the Reader
THE CROOK AND FLAIL
The She-King: Bo align="ceok Two
When I was firm upon the throne of Re, I was ennobled until the two periods of years. I came as the One Horus, flaming against my enemies.
-Inscription from Djeser-Djeseru, mortuary temple of Hatshepsut, fifth king of the Eighteenth Dynasty.
Hatshepsut’s fingers ached from the harp strings, but she had played better today than ever before. Her music tutor, a pinched and dour old woman named Mut-tuy, had even raised an eyebrow and nodded at the performance. From Mut-tuy, this was as good as resounding acclaim. She suspected she would find a few blisters on her fingertips by supper time, but Hatshepsut was well pleased. She drifted unhurried through the halls of the House of Women, rustling faintly in her bright blue gown of a hundred pleats. To either side, her guardsmen hulked as solid as river barges. They passed the sunlight of a courtyard in full flower where a group of women sat gossiping over chilled beer and cheese. The daggers at her guards’ belts glimmered in the afternoon glare. She was not pleased that she must have an armed escort even in the harem palace. She had grown up here, as was customary for a king's daughter. Here the most common kitchen servants’ faces were as familiar to Hatshepsut as her own. But this was what her mother Ahmose had commanded six years ago, when Hatshepsut's father the Pharaoh died, when she was but a girl of eight. What the Lady Regent ordered was not to be questioned.
When they reached her private apartment Hatshepsut dismissed the guards to her door. In the courtyard outside her room slender lotus pillars rose up beside women’s private porches. The courtyard was heavily planted with sweet flowers and broad-leaved climbing vines, which cast an inviting green shade on the paving stones. The odors of perfume and the incense of offerings drifted from the halls of the palace. It was a pleasant afternoon. A swim in the harem’s lotus pond would be welcome, but there were lessons yet today. Judging by the sun, her tutor was likely already waiting. She smiled.
Inside her dressing room, Hatshepsut’s servants stood ready: Sitre-In, her sweet-tempered old nurse with the soft green eyes; Ita and Tem, the two chatty women who tended her bath and brought her meals; and – there he was – Senenmut, the tall, quiet tutor-priest with his solemn face and expressive hands.
At the sight of him she chased the smile from her face, though it fought to remain. His services chap whad been gifted her by the Temple of Amun when she was only ten years old, but he was no slave. Senenmut chose to serve the Temple and the throne of his own free will. Whether he did it out of loyalty to the royal family or simply to advance his own well-being mattered not a whit to Hatshepsut. He was an exceptional teacher, though he was young – perhaps twenty-two or -three, if that. Under his guidance, she had refined her reading and writing until she was as capable as any scribe in the Two Lands. He had coached her in all the tongues a Great Royal Wife would need: the language of Retjenu from the north and east; Phoenician for dealing with tradesmen; sharp and brutal Heqa-Khasewet; the language of Kush. She had enjoyed his daily presence in her life from the start of his service. Senenmut took her seriously, even as a young girl; he answered all her questions without the usual patronizing air most adults reserved for children. And now that her womanhood was near she enjoyed his presence even more.
“Bring me a fresh kilt,” she said to her maids, “and help me out of these sandals.” She was weary after all. Mut-tuy was a demanding harp-mistress. She sank onto the stool at her dressing table with a sigh, rotating her wrists to work the ache from her hands. Ita knelt to untie the laces of her sandals. Hatshepsut flexed her toes, causing the bones of her feet to crackle.
She glanced up at Senenmut, who stood patiently waiting her pleasure. When he met her eye, he said, “I have brought scrolls for you, Great Lady: all the histories I could find on the station of God’s Wife of Amun.”
Hatshepsut’s mouth went dry. There was no more putting it off. Though she still had not begun to bleed, she was fourteen years old – well into marriageable age – and her half-brother Thutmose was nearly eleven. He was old enough now to take the throne, and probably would as soon as Hatshepsut became a woman. It was not for the daughter of a Pharaoh to pick and choose among suitors, as common women may. She had no sisters left living who might take her place and spare her a lifetime of Thutmose.
Well, if she must resign herself to a sour fate as Thutmose’s wife, she would at least perform her duty with dedication, and do honor to her dead father’s memory. She would learn the station of God’s Wife so well that she would be beyond reproach. She would be the greatest God's Wife of them all. To achieve such a thing – ah, it would have made her father's face light with approval.
Maat is all, Hatet
. She had heard him say it so many times that his voice still sounded in her heart, long after he had left the living world for the Field of Reeds.
If Egypt does not have its righteous order, then Egypt has nothing. Let maat be your guide in all things, and you will never place a foot wrong
. Marriage to Thutmose was maat – the righteous way, the fundamental what-must-be that kept the world in working order. And that was that.
“Thank you, Senenmut. I will begin reading them tomorrow. What of our lesson this afternoon?”
“I thought I might discuss with you how the southern outposts fare, and what Egypt’s presence in Kush means to the throne.”
Boring, drier than old bones. But it would have to be done. A Great Royal Wife must know – a God's Wife must know. She nodded, inspected her braided sidelock in her electrum mirror, passed a hand over the stubble that powdered her scalp. It was a boy’s hairstyle she wore, one thick lock of black hair worked into a braid over her ear, the rest shaved bald as an old man’s pate. But it suited her, the sharpness of her nose, the steady black glare of her eyes. She had her father’s features; she liked to stress them. She had been going about with a boy’s hairstyle since she was a baby, to hear Sitre-In tell it, and she had no plans to change her ways now. But her scalp did need a pass of the razor. Time enough for that when Senenmut’s lesson was finished.
Hatshepsut slipped the rings off her fingers, dropped them one by one into the ebony box Ita held. She removed the bangles from her wrists – all but one, a golden band set with a double row of tiny lapis scarabs. It was her favorite. She twisted its coolness against her skin as Ita and Tem removed a broad, heavy collar of golden leaves from her shoulders, laid it in its case, and helped her out of her gown.
As always when she undressed in his presence, Senenmut turned tactfully away, gazing out through the door of her chamber to the warm sunlit glow of the garden, predictably immaculate in his manners. She wished he would at least try to glimpse her bare flesh. She would not have punished him for that particular impudence.
Tem wound a short white boy’s kilt around Hatshepsut’s hips, fastened it with an ivory pin in the likeness of Sekhmet, the warrior she-lion. For modesty’s sake, Hatshepsut chose a drape of hundreds of strings of tiny beads to hang around her neck, covering her small new breasts. What she wouldn’t give to be able to run once more bare-chested in boy’s clothing, with her boy’s hair, unfettered through the gardens. Too much was changing, and too fast, now that she was nearly a woman.
“Let’s forgo the lesson, Senenmut. Walk with me in the garden,” she commanded, and he turned back to her, his long face flustered. “Don’t look so put out. There will be time enough to teach me all about Kushite politics tomorrow. Or the day after. Or in a year.”
Senenmut smiled. “
Tomorrow
, then.”
They strolled out together into the afternoon heat. Clouds of gnats shimmered white and silver above the most fragrant of the flowers. Brown darts of birds dived among the flies, snatching supper on the wing. Sitre-In and the maids wandered in their wake, far enough away to afford privacy of conversation but not so far as to let the king's daughter out of sight with her tutor.
Senenmut walked with hands clasped behind his back, his long, straight nose tilted toward the ground, immersed in the depth of his thoughts. He was inscrutable at times like these, turned inward and waiting for a word from her, a question, a challenge, to pull him into reality again, to make him blink like a man shaking off a magician's spell, draw a sudden breath, a swimmer breaking the surface of an unknowable water. She allowed a smile, but only when her face was turned away from her women, so Sitre-In would not grow suspicious.
“I am to be God’s Wife soon.”
And there was the blink, the breath. “Soon or late, it is bound to happen. You are nearly a woman.”
“And that means I will soon be married.”
“This troubles you, Great Lady?”
“Thutmose is weak-spirited and ill-tempered. I do not look forward to calling him my husband.”
“He is young,” Senenmut said gently. “With time, he will grow to be a better man.”
On that count, Hatshepsut had her doubts. “Meanwhile, I must marry the whining, pouting boy, and not the better man.”
“Who knows? Your womanhood may be far off yet. Perhaps by the time you marry he will have matured into a respectable king. You share a father. Thutmose the First was the greatest Pharaoh in living memory. Surely the son will take after the father.”
In a misery, Hatshepsut longed for her sister, and not for the first time. Neferubity had died when she was still but a babe on the breast, barely old enough to walk and babble her half-formed words in her sweet, lisping way. It was not inconceivable that a younger daughter of the Pharaoh might be chosen as Great Royal Wife. It had happened to Ahmose; she had been set above her elder sister, wedded to the new king when she was only thirteen years old.
“In any case,” Senenmut went on, breaking into her bleak musings, “you will enjoy learning the stations of God’s Wife. There are many ceremonies you will perform, many rites you will be expected to know. And you must learn all the histories of the station, of course, and the locations of all the temples in the Two Lands, the names of all the High Priests, the incantations. If I know my student, she will relish the pursuit of this knowledge.”
She nodded, but said nothing.
“You are so quiet. If I may be so bold as to question you, Great Lady, why does the prospect of marriage trouble you so? Ever since you were a small child you have known you will be wed to Thutmose. You have always understood what it means to be the king's daughter. This is no surprise.”
“Knowing the name of the spice does not make a foul dish more palatable. Come, tell a story to cheer me. Something of when you were my age – when you were an apprentice in the Temple.”
The light in the garden slanted, deepening toward evening’s orange-red glow. Hatshepsut slapped insects from her arms and her bare waist, waiting for Senenmut to begin.
“All right,” he said. “Here is a true story from my days as an apprentice at the Temple of Amun.
“We had a boy in the temple, an apprentice who did not want to be tnt ant to behere. He had other plans for his life, and being a priest of Amun was no part of his desires. Even though he got his bread and beer every day and had a comfortable enough place to sleep each night, he dreamed of freedom from his duties. He was forever trying to sneak out of the temple. One time the boy tried to drug the apprentice-master’s beer, to put the man to sleep long enough that the boy could run away. But he used the wrong herb, so the apprentice-master’s bowels ran for two days and the discontented boy was chosen to attend the master's privy. Another time, he stirred up a fight between five different boys, and they all began brawling in the courtyard. When the priests’ attention was on the fight, he tried to sneak out through the temple gate, but one of the fighting boys threw a rock. It missed its intended target and knocked the boy senseless well before he could reach the road.