The Bull of Min (The She-King) Page 2

  “Ah!” Her face twisted in disgust. “So that’s the story. Some vile young men in rut found you in the fields, did they? No, don’t speak. Don’t say a word. It’s the plight of women, my little thing, my poor minnow. You’ll be all right with time.”

  “I say, send her away,” Baki barked.

  Now there was real anger in the woman’s voice as she turned away to shout into the depths of her home. “Another word out of you, and I’ll beat you with your own walking stick. The child stays. It is not a matter for discussion.”

  Baki made a disgusted noise deep in his throat.

  The woman shut the door firmly on the night and the hounds, on the palace with its soldiers, with its thrones and Pharaohs. She tucked Neferure beneath a plump arm and guided her into the hut. A wool blanket was strewn across a rickety little couch woven of tough, dry reeds. She snatched it up and bundled it around Neferure, covering her nakedness.

  “There. That’s better. Baki, bring me a bit of that stew and some bread. And a jar of wine.”

  A rough man tending toward old age rose stiffly from a stool beside a rustic brazier. He shuffled off to an adjoining room, muttering beneath his breath about the costliness of wine.

  “I am Harit,” the woman said, easing Neferure down onto the woven couch. When Harit sat beside her, the couch’s coarse reeds squeaked beneath the weight. “What is your name, child?”

  Neferure hesitated. She had not thought so far ahead, had not considered that she must meet people sooner or later, must give them some plausible identity that would leave no trail back to the palace. Gaping, she cast about for a name, and the only one she had heard recently came at last to her lips.

  “Satiah. I am Satiah.”

  The food arrived: an unremarkable stew of fish and onions, a piece of bread, and a clay cup of cheap, sour wine. Neferure gulped it all down gratefully, then finished off the hunk of coarse bread, picking crumbs from her blanket. Harit beamed her approval, then bedded Neferure down on the couch of creaking reeds.

  Sleep was dreamless, deep, and healing. She woke renewed, blinking her eyes in a wan morning light that fought its way in through the narrow slit of the hut’s window. Harit was already bustling about her morning chores, humming the simple repetitive phrases of a rekhet tune that Neferure did not know.

  “You’re awake. Good.”

  The woman brought her more bread topped with a meager chunk of honey still in the comb. Neferure ate it gratefully, chewing the earthy wax of the honeycomb until all the sweetness was gone. She donned the tunic and sandals Harit had laid out for her. Both were too large and the weave of the unbleached linen was inelegant and scratchy, but their plainness added to Neferure’s disguise. She had no wig, but her natural hair had grown in somewhat during her confinement, and she did not look wholly out of place. Harit had also thoughtfully provided a simple head-cloth, the kind the rekhet wore in outdoor labor to ward off the worst of the sun’s rays. Of course Neferure had never worn the like before, but she managed to fasten it with a tied linen band as confidently as if she had worn a head-cloth every day of her life.

  She followed Harit out into the bare yard. The sun was still low and pale on the horizon. It cast long, cool shadows out into the field, where Neferure could make out the form of Baki stooping among the ankle-high sprouts, working at the earth with a long wooden pole. Harit handed her a crude bucket of leather stretched around a wooden hoop. A braid of dirty linen served as a handle.

  “Water for the goats first,” Harit said. “Then we make bread.”

  Neferure slung the bucket on her shoulder and stepped toward the footpath Harit indicated. It wended northward through the fields, paralleling the road on its raised causeway. Some hundred paces down the path, the canal’s banks were less steep and the water flowed through a dark culvert beneath the road. Beyond, sitting like a throne upon the royal dais, the distant, pale walls of a large house and several outbuildings caught the rising sunlight, gleaming above a vast expanse of grape vines and the spread green blankets of new growth.

  “What is that place?” Neferure asked, pointing.

  Harit looked up from sweeping the threshold of her hut. “Don’t you know? It’s the estate of the Senenmut, the Great Royal Steward. Go on, now, little minnow. The goats cannot water themselves.”

  As she stared toward the great estate, her heart fell open like the petals of a flower beneath a hot, fierce sun. There is a wrong to be righted, a voice whispered inside her. She gasped at the sudden presence, trembling with joy. Give me a sacrifice to soothe my anger. Spill the blood that is not divine, and the taint will pour out of your own blood. Then you will be purified, and worthy of me forever.

  Yes, Neferure replied. I will do it. It will be as you say.

  She set her feet firmly upon the path.

  PART ONE

  FALL

  OF THE GOD

  1464 B.C.E.

  CHAPTER ONE

  MERYET-HATSHEPSUT KEPT THE HEAVY CURTAINS of her litter tightly drawn. She climbed from the quay through the streets of Waset, the litter wending its way through streets choked with hawkers and craftsmen, children at play and women balancing baskets on their heads, messengers squeezing through the press with their masters’ scrolls tucked beneath their arms. Hatshepsut rode ahead in a larger litter, a more ornate conveyance suitable for a Pharaoh, together with her women Batiret and Stire-In. As the litter tilted to gain the final hill before the palace gates, Meryet sank gratefully back onto her cushions, sighing, giving vent to the nameless emotion that tightened her chest. It was half sorrow, half relief. Sorrow for the sake of Hatshepsut. Relief on Meryet’s own behalf, that she could draw her curtains and shut out, even for a short time, the terrible force of the Pharaoh’s pain. Set apart from her king’s grief as she now was, the distance felt as bracing as a cold drink of water in the heat of Shemu. And yet, having witnessed Hatshepsut’s private sorrow, Meryet knew she could never be entirely free from the weight of it.

  Grieving or not, Hatshepsut was a king to her very center. She did not betray her pain with a single tear, nor even the quiver of her lip – not where her subjects might see. The Pharaoh had wept and wailed her loss inside the echoing walls of Djeser-Djeseru while Meryet and the other women looked on, helpless in the face of a torment too great to ever be soothed. And yet when they boarded the ship to return to Waset’s shore, Hatshepsut had been as still as a clouded pool, her face as impenetrable. Dutifully, Meryet had seated herself like a stone seshep beside Hatshepsut in the cabin of the boat, eyes forward, ignoring the sailors and guardsmen, the seabirds and the gaily leaping fish, as isolated and emotionless as the Pharaoh herself. It was the most difficult task Meryet had ever worked at, to keep her face expressionless. How could a woman remain so regal and calm when her heart split like an over-ripe fig, weeping all its sweetness away? Will I ever learn to do it as easily as she does? Meryet had wondered, cutting one sideways glance at Hatshepsut’s unfeeling profile, stern as stone in the shade of the ship’s canopy.

  The litter moved from the mid-day sun to the deep, cool shadow beneath the pylons of the palace gate. Men’s voices called and responded, the guards giving the correct signs to proceed into the Pharaoh’s private realm. Lost and exhausted by her musings, Meryet did not hear the words, but only felt the brush of the cries against her senses, a faint tickle like a moth’s wings in a twilight garden. When the litter sank to the ground in the courtyard she parted the curtains a finger’s width.

  As the bearers of the larger litter straightened, stretching their backs and arms, the fan-bearer Batiret emerged. Her pretty features were closed, forbidding, and none of the palace servants or ambassadors watching the arrival dared approach to make their bows to the king. Batiret offered her hand to her mistress, drew Hatshepsut from the veiled depths of her litter into the bright sun of the courtyard.

  The Pharaoh was a woman in her middle years, thirty-six or –seven by Meryet’s reckoning. Her form was more blocky than curved, powerful-looking eve
n now, with shoulders stooped from exhaustion. The great sharp hook of her nose curved above a stern mouth edged with the lines of approaching age, and between her plucked and painted brows, two vertical tracks of worry had incised themselves permanently into her skin. Hatshepsut had never been pretty, not even as a girl – Meryet had seen that plainly from the moment she had first met the Pharaoh. But a woman’s power did not reside in beauty, whatever the poets and singers might say. Hatshepsut’s power was in her subtlety, her intelligence, which even now shone from her black eyes when her grief, so tightly and impossibly reined, did not. She could put her sorrow away before the eyes of her subjects and servants, but she could not put away the power she wore. It was as much a part of her as the confidence of her stride, the square and resolute posture of her shoulders, or the honey-brown color of her skin.

  Hatshepsut raised a hand in a commanding gesture, and the guardsman Nehesi responded, moving swiftly to her side. The Pharaoh lifted the hem of her simple tunic dress and swept from the courtyard with her women in tow, her face an uncracked mask of power.

  Meryet exhaled. She had not known she’d held her breath until Hatshepsut was gone. She left her own litter hastily, never seeing the bows of the servants and scribes through which she moved. Her body maids and personal guards fell in around her, silent and dutiful.

  Meryet hesitated at the corridor that led to the chamber of the Great Royal Wife. The peaceful sanctuary of her own apartments beckoned to her. A hot bath, a massage with oil of soothing herbs rubbed into her skin – but no. There was work yet to be done, and she alone could do it.

  Meryet turned toward her husband’s chambers. Inside, Meryet found that Thutmose had set an untouched tray piled with figs, roasted fish, and discs of golden bread on the bright tiles of his floor. Instead of his mid-day meal, a scattering of maps and scrolls lay strewn across the ebony-wood table. Baubles from the Pharaoh’s apartment held curls of papyrus open: a silver drinking cup, a dagger in a turquoise sheath, a fist-sized scarab of chipped blue lapis, carved on its flat underside with some tidbit of news or other – the birth of a new child into a noble house, a wedding, a funeral. Thutmose hunched over his scrolls, tracing a line on a map. The slide of his finger over the papyrus hissed softly like a snake moving through river reeds. He glanced up at her through the fringe of his wig and smiled, but did not straighten from his work.

  Meryet made her way to Thutmose’s side, sank onto his silk-covered couch to rest her head against his strong shoulder.

  “Trouble in Kadesh,” Thutmose muttered.

  “There is always trouble in Kadesh.”

  “More trouble than usual this time, I think. The raids are worse than any I’ve read about in previous years. More raiders, too. Kadesh is riling itself for war – a greater war than it’s yet attempted.”

  Meryet said nothing. She knew he liked to talk his plans over, to pour his thoughts into her like wine into a cup, so he might taste their merit on his own tongue. More would be forthcoming.

  “My forces are already spread too thin. Kush is finally subdued, I think, but Mitanni has been so demanding this past year. And there have been disturbing reports from the Delta. The Sea People are marauding again. They are not in the Delta – not yet. But they will make their way south, and they will strike. It’s a matter of when, not if. But Kadesh – that’s my most immediate concern. Hatshepsut and I have worked hard to install fortresses near their border, and no doubt they’ve realized we plan to push Egypt’s boundaries across their own. But I may have underestimated their response.”

  “What is your plan, then?”

  Thutmose sighed. He rested his cheek on the crown of her head, finally tearing his eyes from the scrolls. “I don’t have one. Yet. I ought to speak with Hatshepsut, but…”

  “Now is not the time, Thutmose.”

  “I know.”

  Meryet left the couch, paced across the expanse of his chamber to examine the gleaming statues of the gods set into their little alcoves. She stared pensively at their small faces and felt the same strange mixture of embarrassment and dread she always felt when she looked at a god. Their eyes were always so distant, so unseeing. And yet they smiled at her, small, almost secretive smiles, as if they saw her plainly and were amused by the futility of her mortal efforts and fears. If a Pharaoh is the next thing to divine, then why do I never see Thutmose smile this way? Why are gods free of cares, but not a king – or his Great Royal Wife?

  As she turned back to her husband, she caught her own reflection in his wall mirror, a wide expanse of electrum polished to a flawless silver glow. The startling youth of her image arrested her for a moment, and she stared, disbelieving. This round, smooth, unlined face could not be what her subjects saw – could it? She felt the weight of her cares dragging at her, and yet she stood easily, gracefully erect, moved with a freedom her ka did not feel. Even her breasts were round and firm, having recovered from Amunhotep’s birth as only a very young woman’s body may do. In the mirror’s reflection she watched Thutmose turn back to his scrolls, and the smooth boyishness of his hands, the faint suggestion of childhood plumpness still rounding his cheeks, nearly made her laugh aloud.

  We are barely more than children, she thought, and half divine. With all the weight of responsibility on us. And somehow it does not show.

  “Thutmose,” she said, “I have never seen such grief before.”

  He sat back, turned his full attention upon Meryet. “Hatshepsut?”

  “When will it be time to tell her the truth?”

  Thutmose sighed. “I don’t know.”

  “She knows Senenmut was murdered. Once her grief is not so fresh, she will want to know who killed him, and why. She will want his killer brought to justice.”

  “Will she want that, once she knows the truth?”

  Meryet considered. At last she said, “I don’t know. But I do know that she must be told. It is maat.”

  “You are right, of course.” He held out his arms to her, and gratefully, she went to him. She settled against his side, tucked her face against his neck to breathe in his scent, a rich, earthy smell of horses, harness leather, the offering smoke of the temples. “I fear telling her, you know,” Thutmose went on. “I fear how she will react. What she might choose to do.”

  “And yet it is a choice she must make, whether to seek justice or not.”

  “I fear she will blame me.”

  “You are not to blame.”

  “I’m not so certain of that.” He flipped a sandaled foot at his table, and his toe caught the edge of a scroll. The papyrus sheets whispered together like dry leaves on a winter sycamore. “I’m not certain of anything just now.”

  “I am certain of you,” Meryet said, twining her arms around his waist, holding him tight.

  “I wish I shared that certainty.”

  “You must tell her soon, Thutmose. Let her do all her grieving at once.”

  He paused, and in the silence she felt his hesitation. She bit her lip, willed him to see the sense of it, willed him to see maat.

  Then she felt the tension leave his body. She felt his back stoop a little as he assumed yet another of the gods’ burdens. “I will,” he promised. “I will tell her everything I know when she is ready to see me. When she summons me, I’ll tell her.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  FOR TWO WEEKS THE SECOND throne on the Pharaohs’ dais stood empty, and Thutmose held court alone. He knew himself to be a capable young man, equal to the task of shouldering the burden without his partner-king beside him. All the same, he missed Hatshepsut, for her presence in the throne room had become as routine to him as watching the sun rise in the eastern sky. The starkness of her vacant seat left a heaviness in his chest that dulled his wits and plagued him with a constant nervous tension, so that when her fan-bearer Batiret finally appeared one evening requesting his presence in Hatshepsut’s garden, the relief of seeing her again was almost greater than his guilt and worry.

  He went to her at once, allowing
Batiret to lead him in silence through the dim night-time corridors of the palace toward Hatshepsut’s wing. Her apartments, usually lively with the sound of her women spinning flax and laughing, or ringing with the performances of her musicians, stood silent and blue in the cooling air. When the two great doors of Hatshepsut’s chambers materialized out of the darkness, carved with scarabs, their gilded surface quietly alive with a night-dampened shine, Batiret slowed and crept forward as hesitant as a mouse. In the eloquence of the silence that greeted him, Thutmose understood that the past two weeks had been a time of unrelenting mourning for the woman he loved as a mother. Sour guilt curdled in his heart.

  He made his way to her garden, feet dragging on her cold, quiet floors. Servants clustered near the door to her chambers, hanging back, reluctant to approach their mistress unless commanded. He moved out alone into the foreign coolness of Hatshepsut’s garden, borne on a current of maat, helpless to stop his own drifting. The night had turned everything within the high walls to a curious shade of blue-green, the color of a turquoise stone plunged into deep water. The sameness of color made his head swim. He felt he moved through the veils of a dream.

  He found her crouched on a stone bench beneath a little stand of myrrh trees. The odor of their sap burned his nostrils with their sweetness. Hatshepsut’s shoulders sagged; her hands lay listless on her knees. She did not look up at him when he lowered himself to the bench at her side.

  Thutmose had practiced what he would say to her dozens of times, but now, confronted with the dullness of her sorrow and the fierce burning of his own self-loathing, he found all his rehearsed words had withered on his tongue. He sat in silence, listening to the calls of insects in the flower beds, a sound as monotonous and soothing as the endless rolling of a chariot’s wheels.

  At last he said, “Lately I have felt many regrets, Hatshepsut. I regret the thing I made you do – sending him away. I thought it was maat, but now I am not certain. Now that I know what true companionship is – what I have with Meryet – now I feel evil for having caused you such pain.”