The Bull of Min (The She-King)

  “I know,” Satiah called. Her voice was musical, light, confident as a king's. “It's the Bull of Min you remember, Thutmose. You remember, and you fear.”

  Conspiracy and treason simmer in the northern reaches of the Two Lands. Thutmose is crippled by guilt over past wrongs. Hatshepsut is subdued by the grief of betrayal and loss. Meryet, the new Great Royal Wife, is the sole force holding the royal family – and Egypt – together.

  When an unexpected challenger to the succession arises, all three are faced with impossible choices. To protect what she most loves, Meryet will match wits against a demon from the past. Hatshepsut stands on the brink of the ultimate sacrifice. And Thutmose, torn between throne and family, must commit an unthinkable act against Hatshepsut...or allow Egypt to fall into the hands of an unpredictable killer.

  This novella (about 130 pages) is the final volume of The She-King, L.M. Ironside's saga of the Thutmosides of Egypt.

  THE BULL OF MIN

  The She-King: Book Four

  L. M. Ironside

  CONTENTS

  The Bull of Min

  More Books by This Author

  Historical Notes

  Notes on the Language Used

  Glossary

  A Message for the Reader

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright Information

  THE BULL OF MIN

  The She-King: Book Four

  O my mother Nut, goddess of the night sky, stretch thyself over me. Place me among the imperishable stars which are in thee, that I may not die.

  -Inscription from the sarcophagus of Hatshepsut, fifth king of the Eighteenth Dynasty

  PROLOGUE

  THE MORNING SUN CAME WEAKLY over the garden wall. The old, disused wing of Waset’s sprawling palace was overshadowed by taller structures, high roofs and the soaring, angular arches of gateway pylons. Deep violet shade cast everything in gloom, even at Re’s golden dawning. Neferure crouched in her garden doorway, back against the stone, knees drawn to her chest. The scuff of footsteps high on the wall above mingled with birdsong as the guard on the roof walked his rounds. The birdsong was thin and faint, distant. No birds came to Neferure’s garden. It was bare and inhospitable, dry and desolate.

  Thutmose had kept her here in solitude for nearly two months. Neferure counted the days, first wondering with a quiet calm when her imprisonment would come to an end, as it must surely, someday. It made no sense for her brother to keep her secluded indefinitely. What purpose could she serve here? Even the spirit of vengeance that prompted her husband to isolate her in a forgotten corner of the palace could not be satisfied forever by imprisonment.

  The weeks dragged on, though, and Neferure remained confined. Soon she found herself pacing and panting like a leopard in a menagerie cage. A servant brought her meals and oil for her skin, carried away her chamber pot covered in a tidy cloth. But how long until the servant forgot – until Thutmose forgot, engrossed as he was with a Pharaoh’s duties? Even the soldiers prowling the walls would forget to walk their endless, silent circuits, and Neferure’s abandonment would be complete. She would starve or perish of thirst, clawing desperately at the perfectly smooth, unclimbable walls of her prison.

  But no. That would not be her fate. It was not a fitting end for Hathor’s handmaid, for the consort of a god, to rot in forgotten captivity. Today she would go free, or die trying.

  The hinge of her chamber door creaked. The servant woman appeared, timid and suspicious as always, hunched over her tray. Beyond the woman’s furtive frame, the door guard stood alert and immovable.

  “Good day to you,” Neferure said sweetly.

  She remained huddled on the garden threshold as the woman, unspeaking, set about her duties. The servant left the tray in its usual spot, on the hard, narrow bed against one wall, and deposited a new jar of bath oil on the floor.

  “You may go,” Neferure whispered, though there was no need to dismiss the woman. She went every day when her work was finished, whether Neferure willed it or no.

  When the door swung closed, Neferure eased herself to her feet. Her muscles and bones ached from remaining crouched so long – from remaining captive so long. She gazed with some regret at the little Hathor shrine standing opposite the bed, its offering bowl cold and empty, ringed with a bit of pale ash from last night’s prayers. I must leave you, Lady, she said in her heart, sorrowing. For the goddess herself lived in the seven small statues arrayed on her shrine – or a tiny bit of her lived there. From the seven statues, the Lady of the West had watched Neferure’s confusion and solitude, had been her only companion in the darkness. It was a bitter thing, to leave Hathor behind. But Neferure would be able to carry nothing with her.

  It is time to go.

  She ate methodically, tasting nothing of the sweet cakes and fruit, thinking only to fuel her body for the task ahead.

  In the small, unadorned bath, Neferure stepped down into the sunken tub. The closed sluice stood at chest height in the sandstone wall, a few beads of water leaking from its corners. Neferure breathed deeply to steady herself, then seized the handle of the sluice door in shaking hands. She pulled upward with all her strength. The cedar planks of the little door had swelled with the moisture of the ducts, and with the pressure of the bathwater it held back. It resisted her. She crouched, braced her hands and one shoulder against the handle, strained against the door, the muscles in her legs and back crying out. The sluice gave way all at once, and she gasped as she stumbled backward, the cascade of water forceful against her thighs, plastering her dress to her legs.

  Neferure watched the water pour from the duct. The flow was strong, but as the water collecting in the tub edged up above her ankles, she was certain she saw now what she had only thought she’d noted on previous days. The rush of water was slowing. Not by much – not yet. But the flow decreased enough to give her hope.

  She scrambled from the tub and kicked off her sandals, shed her dress and wig, shoved them far beneath the stone bench against the bath’s wall. Then she stood shivering with excitement and fear as the water level rose in the sunken tub, and slowed yet more from the mouth of the sluice. The water in this duct in this old wing of the palace must have long since been diverted for some other, more important source. A continual supply would not be spared for a disused room such as this one. Thutmose must have overlooked it – must have neglected to order the ducts fully opened when he moved Neferure in. The water she bathed in each day must be some sort of overflow, a finite daily supply, if the slackening volume from the sluice was anything to judge by. The only question that taunted her was whether it would slow enough to allow her to escape before it flooded the room, seeping beneath the door into the hallway outside, alerting the door guard and bringing Thutmose and Hatshepsut down upon Neferure before she could break free.

  The tub was three quarters full now. The flow of water had reduced until it ran down the wall rather than spurting outward with force. I must go now – now! Neferure seized the jar of bath oil and upended it over her shoulders, smeared it quickly across her back and shoulders until her skin and hands were slick. Then she splashed across the tub, the water lapping mid-thigh, and braced her hands in the mouth of the sluice.

  The duct looked barely wide enough for her to wriggle inside. There was a shallow lip in the stone; she hauled her head and shoulders up into the dark passage, cringing from the fearful roar of moving water echoing against black stone. Her slick fingers slipped, and she thrashed her legs, caught a hold on the edge of the tub with one toe, and slowly, painfully squeezed her thin body deep into the duct.

  Inside, pressed flat by the constricting walls, unable to
see, she arched her neck painfully backward to keep her nose clear of the water. The crown of her head scraped against stone. She kicked her legs feebly, and her heel caught on the sluice door. With a rasping grate, it dropped back into place.

  There is no going back now. I find my way out, or I die.

  With arms stretched before her and face barely clear of the water, Neferure inched against the water’s flow, pushing with bruised toes, pulling with frantic, clawing fingers. She prayed to Hathor that the duct was as good as dry, that the closed sluice would not cause this tunnel to refill and drown her. It was a very narrow and unfriendly tomb. She writhed like an eel, pushing herself forward desperately, forward, forward as the water rose to cover her mouth. Her breath rasped through her nostrils. But the oil on her skin and the slime coating the walls of the duct freed her movement. She raced against the refilling water while her heart roared in her ears.

  In the blackness she detected a louder roaring: an adjoining duct. Neferure’s hands fell off the lip of her duct into cold, wet nothingness; she plunged momentarily below water, and struggled back, straining to keep her nose free, to breathe the chill, desperate air. She felt carefully with weak, shaking fingers. Her duct had come to an end, sure enough, emptying into a deeper passage. Craning her neck like a stork, she could just feel, with the scraped and bruised top of her head, where the duct’s ceiling opened out into a larger pocket of air. She had found her way to a main tunnel, like the trunk of a tree from which many dark, cold branches sprouted. She eased herself forward into the deeper blackness, clinging to the lip of her narrow duct with desperate hands. As terrible and menacing as the passage was, in this impenetrable blackness it was the only thing familiar to her. Her toes just touched a soft silted floor. By taking bouncing steps, she could edge her face free of the waterline and suck in a desperate breath before falling back beneath the surface.

  Neferure counseled herself to calmness, though her heart gibbered with panic. She held a lungful of air and sank beneath the water, one hand on the slimy wall. She felt the gentle flow of a slight current, heard a distant, muffled rushing somewhere to her left. With one last, desperate prayer to gods of water and air, she kicked away from the wall and swam into the unknowable blackness.

  After a great eternity of gliding blind through the darkness, the breath burning in her lungs, Neferure’s hands struck cold stone. She clawed against it, pulling herself in a direction she hoped was up, straining for the surface. Please, Hathor, let me not have passed beneath a wall, let there be air above me – air!

  Hathor was good. Neferure burst from the surface with a desperate gasp. The air that filled her lungs was sweeter than honey on her tongue. She pawed at the wall, felt the stone give way to the smoother, slime-covered planks of a great cedarwood sluicegate. She could feel the gate vibrating faintly, moving with the strength of a healthy current on its other side. It is my only possible way out. I must try it. Groping, she found a gap at the top of the gate just above the waterline and hoped it was wide enough to admit her.

  Her cheek and scalp scraped against the stone of the great duct’s ceiling. The sluicegate forced the precious air from her lungs as she struggled through the gap. Below her she could feel the deeper chill of fast-moving water, hear it slapping and gurgling against the walls of the duct. And, with a desperate wonder, she realized that she could see the surface of the water, a grey glimmer dancing before her disbelieving eyes. She caught one brief glimpse of daylight, a distant point sparkling golden in the echoing blackness of the tunnel, before she fell over the sluicegate and plunged again beneath the water. When she broke the surface again, gasping with weakness and triumph, swimming with feeble strokes against the flow of the current, she wept in gratitude and relief.

  It was an easy enough thing to dive beneath the bronze grate at the duct’s head, once she had clung to its bars for a long while, catching her breath, stilling the terrible quivering in her bones. Compared to swimming through the unknown dark or holding her head free of the rising water in her narrow tomb, it was the simplest thing she had ever done to press her body deep into the soft silt and writhe beneath the bars, kick against them with her small feet, pull herself hand over hand up into the air, the light, the blessed light.

  Neferure dragged her exhausted body up the bank of the canal, heedless of the mud that coated her skin and stung in the cuts and scrapes along her back, her belly, her thighs. She curled into a sun-warmed hollow beneath an olive tree and slept, naked and vulnerable, until the wind in the branches woke her. When she made to rise, her muscles were so cramped and resistant that she cried out with a hundred pains. She was obliged to uncurl herself with great care, massaging her limbs, stretching them tentatively. The wind rattled the olive branches again. A bird called harshly above her, and she smiled to hear it. Both of them were free now, she and the bird. Nearby, the palace’s outer walls had begun to glow red with the approaching sunset.

  I must get away from here. They have realized by now that I am not in my chamber. They will be looking for me.

  A line of trees and tall grasses ran along the bank of the canal, out from the palace’s flank through spans of crop fields. She picked her way between the trunks of the trees, moving casually, not furtively, careful to look as nonchalant as any woman might who was naked and covered in a crust of dark dried mud. The mud will help disguise me among the foliage, she thought, hoping it was true. I will be difficult to spot from the palace walls.

  The further she drew from the palace, the lighter her heart grew. Its sounds receded, the faint lift and echo of soldiers’ voices calling the change of the guard, the more distant, murmuring music of the city of Waset, the voices in its marketplaces, the pounding of artisans’ tools, the harsh, shrill singing of city women. A gentler song caressed her. Birds hopped and warbled in profusion among the trees, delighting her eyes with flashes of color, their feathers glimmering in the deep warmth of a lowering sun. An early chorus of frogs emerged from the reeds. Their voices joined in a haphazard, uncoordinated chant. The humble homes of rekhet farmers came into view, raised slightly above the fields on their little earthen hillocks. A mother called for her child from one of these homes, the voice mingling with birdsong. “Satiah! Sati-ah!”

  The sun disappeared below the western horizon in a blaze of crimson. Purple night gathered over the fields. Neferure shivered, rubbed her hands briskly over her arms, crumbling her coating of mud to dust. Her stomach gnawed at her fiercely. She had eaten practically nothing all day, and had suffered a great trial by anyone’s reckoning. The olives in the trees were still unripe, much too hard and bitter to eat. She paused, gazing out across the fields, uncertain and alone.

  What shall I do, Hathor? I am yours. Direct me, and I shall go where you will, do as you will.

  Neferure’s feet turned toward the field to her right. She hesitated among the tall grasses of the verge, plucking at the spiny seed heads with trembling hands. The palace, far behind her now, had darkened to a great gloomy shadow. The golden pinpoints of lamps flickered faintly along its wall. There was no way to know who might be hunting for her, or where. Yet she could not remain hidden in the grass forever. She would starve, and when the day came again, the high sun would burn her unprotected skin. There was nothing for it but to trust in the goddess, to go where she directed.

  Neferure crossed the field. A mound of earth rose at the far end, and at its peak stood a small, humble rekhet hut. A friendly light glowed in its narrow, slitted windows. She kept her eyes fixed on that glow and moved calmly, her pace deliberate and serene, even when she heard the distant barking of hounds echo from the palace walls. The low sprouts of new grain brushed her ankles, tickled against her skin. She rubbed her body, doing her best to clear away the dried plaster of mud that had not shaken free as she had walked beneath the trees. Her fingers broke open a cut on her thigh, and it bled freely down her leg. Neferure kept moving.

  When she gained the base of the hut’s little hillock and gazed up at the home, its
edges lost in the violet darkness, she paused in uncertainty. Should she clap at the door? Shout for help? And what would she tell the rekhet who lived within? She let her heart fall open to the gods, questioning, but there was no answer. As she waited servilely for inspiration, a shadow passed across the glow of one window. The silhouette halted its movement with a jerk, and a heartbeat later a woman’s startled shriek split the night.

  “Holy Iset!”

  The hut’s door flung open. A shaft of deep yellow light fell down the hill to land at Neferure’s bruised and swollen feet.

  “In, in! Come in, you poor creature!”

  The deeper tones of a man’s voice muttered something from within the hut, and the woman answered.

  “It’s a child – a girl. Look at her. You can see she’s in a bad way. Come in, child, come in.”

  A hound bayed, the cry distorted by distance. It sounded as if it called from south side of the palace, far from this quiet hut. Neferure moved up the hill with growing confidence.

  The woman, draped in a simple tunic of rough linen, enfolded Neferure in warm, plump arms. She was approaching middle age, if the lines of her face were any indication. Her eyelids closed and fluttered with the force of sympathy.

  “Ah, gods, look at you! What a tattered thing you are, and thin as a minnow.”

  “By Sobek,” the man’s voice said from a dim corner, “we don’t need another mouth to feed. Send the stray pup back to its dam.”

  The woman tutted. “Keep your cruel mouth shut, Baki.” She scolded the man, but her voice was affectionate. “You can see the poor thing has been abused.”

  Neferure sighed and covered her face with her hands. She felt a gentle touch on her thigh, and the woman raised her fingers to examine the trace of blood she found there.