The Bull of Min (The She-King) Read online

  She shifted a little, but said nothing. Still, in her small response he sensed her acceptance. She did not forgive him, and he deserved no forgiveness. But she accepted the rough, heartfelt offering of his words.

  It was time. Thutmose drew a ragged breath, stared out into the garden’s deep blue-green. He knew his words would shatter whatever peace she had managed to find in the time since Senenmut’s death, and whatever small comfort she took from his apology. He knew, too, that Meryet was right, that Hatshepsut’s kas could not heal their grave wounds until she knew the truth.

  “Mawat…Nehesi and I have reason to believe that it was Neferure who killed Senenmut.”

  For one hopeful heartbeat the garden remained still, and Thutmose thought wildly that perhaps she already knew – perhaps she had already grieved for this, too. Then the world seemed to contract around them, a strange sinking, sucking feeling, as if all of Egypt drew in a great breath of choking poison. Hatshepsut swayed, staggered to her feet like a puppet in a marketplace show, her body pulled inexorably upward by an unseen hand on an unbreakable cord. Her mouth opened, and Thutmose braced for the agony of her scream. Instead, only a short, low wail came from her chest, thin, almost musical. It pierced deep into his heart.

  She crumpled onto the grass. Thutmose saw, from the tail of his eye, her women rush forward. They stopped when he held up a hand; they milled in the shadows like restless horses their bodies colliding and rebounding, their hands flying like startled birds.

  Thutmose knelt beside the king. Already a layer of dew had sprung up on the grass. It soaked the hem of his kilt; a chill crept into his skin. He took Hatshepsut’s shoulders in his hands, tried to lift her from the wet grass, but her grief pinioned her to the earth, and he was as helpless to raise her as he would be to lift an obelisk into the sky.

  “I curse you,” Hatshepsut keened against the earth, her voiced high and ragged with pain. Thutmose’s heart quailed under the curse, but she spoke on, and he realized her hatred was not for him. “Mut, Khonsu, Iset, Sobek! All the gods! Amun, I curse you! Hathor, I curse you – I curse you!”

  What could he do but kneel beside her? Her head lolled from side to side, face down against the grass. When her sobs grew less frequent, Thutmose took her in his hands again, and this time he could lift her to rest her wet cheek against his neck. The stained tunic she wore was soaked through with dew and tears; she shivered in the night breeze. Thutmose wrapped his arms tightly around her shaking body.

  “I remember,” he said quietly, close to her ear, “standing in a field of emmer at the Festival of Min. Do you recall? That year with the bull….” He bit his tongue. Better not to remind her of Neferure now. “I remember looking up at you, at how fine and strong you looked in the white crown. I was just a boy. I thought I would never live up to your strength. I am just a boy still, Mawat. But you have the same strength inside you. I know you do.”

  “It is gone,” Hatshesput moaned. “Drained away.”

  “Never. You still live. You are still the king.”

  Moving as stiffly as a crone, she extracted herself from Thutmose’s arms. Hatshepsut climbed to her feet, hobbled down the blue-green path to stand facing away from him, gazing high and far beyond the top of the garden wall.

  He went to her, stared out into the night in the direction of her stare, but saw nothing at first. Then he realized that two stars burned brighter and larger than the rest, and with a warmer hue. They rode low in the northern sky, barely clearing the violet line of the wall. No – they were not stars, but moonlight reflecting from the golden capstones of the two obelisks at Ipet-Isut.

  “That is where I live,” she said dully, “there, and nowhere else. Only in stone. Only in memory. The breath of life has gone out of me.”

  “No, Mawat.”

  She turned to stare into his face. The sudden intensity of her eyes pushed him backward. For a moment he thought foolishly of fleeing. But he was the king, as surely as she, and a king ran from neither his fears nor his loves.

  “Gods, Thutmose. You have regrets? They are nothing beside mine. I spent so much time fretting over others taking my throne from me – taking all I loved from me. In the end, it was I who took it all. I stole it from myself. I robbed my own heart. I clung so tightly to what didn’t matter, and I lost everything that did. Everything. You cannot imagine how bitter it tastes. Do not make the same mistake, Thutmose. No gilded chair or palace is worth this loss, no temple, no crown. Promise me you won’t sacrifice everything. Not everything.”

  Thutmose swallowed hard. His eyes burned; he rubbed them hard with his fists. His ka was not so certain that the throne was not worth sacrifice. The Horus Throne was the legacy of their family; it their unbreakable link to all who had come before, and to all who would come after for generations unending. It was their blood, their bones, their kas. He thought of Amunhotep, warm and safe and growing in the nursery. He thought of grandchildren to come, all of them inheriting the divinity and the power that was his to give. He tasted Hatshepsut’s bitterness, but felt, too, his own determination rise like a cobra from the sand.

  But Hatshepsut was staring at him, expectant, her eyes alight with the fire of her urgency. She seized him by the shoulders with hands suddenly as strong as a hawk’s talons, and he quailed under the hardness of her grip. “Promise me, Thutmose. Tell me you will not choose the throne over the things that truly matter – over family, over love. Over eternity.”

  “I promise, Mawat. I promise.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  SATIAH LOWERED THE BAG OF incense outside the High Priest’s door. She sighed gratefully, stretching her back, shaking a cramp from her thigh. The sack weighed nearly as much as she, and toting it from the storeroom to the High Priest’s chamber had taken her longer than it would have taken a strong young man. But the chore was an opportunity to demonstrate her dedication. Satiah never missed such an opportunity, if the gods would allow it. Of course, it was not dedication to the High Priest that concerned her. In the end, he was but a man, and men were impermanent. It was the god she hoped to impress. Ah, that was her goal in all things.

  She clapped, and after a long moment the door creaked opened. Tenry, High Priest of Min in the city of Abedju, was as kind a man as Satiah had ever met. He was barely clinging to the last threads of middle age, and his shameful mortality had begun to show plainly in the deep lines of his face and the gray wisps of hair that sometimes poked from beneath his wig when he had grown careless with his appearance. He stood at his doorway now with one side of his face rather puffy and red, an obvious sign that he had given in to an old man’s weariness and stolen a nap when all the god’s servants, even the highest, should have been hard at work.

  I mustn’t judge him, Satiah reminded herself. It is not his fault he’s mortal. True divinity is given to few – only the most devout, the most pure.

  “Ah,” Tenry said. “Incense for tomorrow’s offerings.” He chuckled as he assessed the weight of the sack. “Tomorrow’s and much more. What a diligent priestess. Min blesses us in you, little Satiah.”

  She allowed her cheeks to color, and looked shyly down at her toes.

  “It is past time for the mid-day meal. Have you eaten yet, child?”

  “No, High Priest. I have been working.”

  “Won’t you share some bread and beer with me? I would be grateful for the chance to get to know you better. One of my newest priestesses, and yet the hardest-working. You must have had a remarkable life, remarkable parents, to raise such an obedient and dutiful daughter.”

  “You are kind, but I have so many chores to see to.”

  “Well,” Tenry said, “it is true that a priest’s work is never done. Or a priestess’s work, I suppose. Very well; we will talk some other time, when we both have more leisure. You won’t forget to take some leisure now and then, will you? It is good for the heart and the ka. Here, take some bread and cheese with you. No, I insist. A little wisp of smoke like you needs all the bread she can get.”
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  Satiah took the food with a nod of thanks and turned back to her duties. The door shut softly behind her, accompanied by another of Tenry’s fond chuckles. She sped back toward the storerooms, and when she rounded a bend in the temple’s corridor she pressed herself into the shadow of a recessed doorway and ate the crumbling bread and hard cheese in a few bites. The bread stuck painfully in her throat; she gulped at it, eyes watering, until at last it settled into her hollow stomach.

  She was thinner than ever now, for though she received ample vouchers for bread and beer, the usual payment for an apprentice priestess, as well as a share of Abedju’s offerings of fruit and cheese, meat and honey cakes, most of what she earned as a priestess was paid out again. She cashed only enough of her vouchers at the city’s storehouses to keep herself alive and strong enough to do her work – not enough to get plump and indolent like the other priestesses of Min. No – she needed her earnings. Satiah had expenses that must not be neglected. She had a duty to the gods. She checked the yellow belt cinching her rough-spun linen tunic. The week’s vouchers were still safely tucked away in the folds of its fabric.

  The bread and cheese dulled the familiar, pervasive gnawing of her belly. She stretched her arms above her head, humming a happy tune. There were indeed duties yet to attend. She had not simply thrown Tenry off the subject of her family and history out of habit, though the gods knew she had become adept at polite deflections and quick to dodge the kind inquiries of priests at temples all along the course of the Iteru. No, there were offerings of gold and precious stones to weigh and sort, and somebody had to oversee the washing. The tunics of the servants of Min would never stay gleaming white on their own.

  Satiah smiled at the prospect of a full day still laying ahead. Work was good. Work made her happy, filled her with a deep satisfaction at the setting of the sun, a sensation she had come to appreciate as she had lain on the creaking wicker couch in Harit’s hut night after night, those many months ago. She had loved weeding the dark rows of the fields, plunging her hands into the damp coolness of moist earth, though her back cramped from the stooping. She had loved hauling water for the goats, milking them, pressing her face against their bristly sides and giggling at the sounds their wide bellies made while her hands coaxed frothing milk from warm udders. She had grieved when she’d realized it was time to move on from Harit’s farm, but Waset was too near, and Satiah could never rest easily at night, knowing that the palace was only a bowshot away. Satiah had work to do even then, duties to fulfill. Her old life was a threat to her new and precious obligations, and so the very city itself was a threat.

  When she knew the time had come to leave, she had slipped a sharp knife from Harit’s small, humble kitchen, tucked it into her belt, and made her way north toward Senenmut’s estate. From there, her new life had begun, and Satiah had never before known such joy. With her family’s sins atoned for and the taint in her blood washed clean, the gods had given her what she had longed for. At last.

  In the alcove behind the Room of Offerings, Satiah worked with her fellow priestesses to organize the tangle of gold chains, the hoops of copper bracelets, the unset cabochons of glimmering stones. They packed each type of treasure into flat cedar chests between layers of linen while Satiah led them in song after song to lighten their hearts as they bent to the task. By the time the evening bell sounded, a clangor that rang rhythmically through the corridors and courtyards of the Temple of Min, her crew of workers were wiping sweat from their brows but could not chase the grins from their faces.

  “Satiah,” Tuya said, laughing, “you know how to make the most dreary task go by in a wink.” She threw her arms around Satiah, who returned the warm embrace. “I don’t know how we got along here before you came stumbling through the temple gate with your feet blistered and swollen.”

  “By Min,” said Iset-Weret, an older priestess with a voice as rich and soft as smoke, “our little Satiah has blossomed like a flower in the sun. It won’t be long before she’s High Priestess, I wager.”

  “Not I.” Satiah waved away their praises with frantic hands. “I’m not worthy!”

  “Pah! There’s never been a worthier woman. Come share some wine with us tonight. We’ll have a game of senet.”

  “You’re kind,” Satiah said, “but I must get to bed early tonight.”

  “Another early morning for the little buzzing bee. Very well, then. Sleep soundly, child. When you’re High Priestess you can send us all to bed early without our wine and senet.”

  It might make them more dedicated workers, she mused, before she could dismiss the unworthy thought.

  High Priestess. She considered the peace she had here in Abedju. Since leaving Harit and Baki, she had worked her way from temple to temple, walking from one town to the next, living off what she could earn as a priestess and the occasional kindness of strangers. The only temples she avoided were Hathor’s. Though it pained her to keep far from the Lady’s side, she knew where Hatshepsut’s eyes and ears would be, and so she served instead at the houses of lesser gods. They were lesser compared to the Lady’s brilliance, but ah, still divine. They were the best times she had ever known, those days of free movement, living off her wits and her charm, maintaining a near-constant state of rapturous communion with the gods. But High Priestess – such an assignment would require her to put down roots, to remain in Abedju. It would be an honor, but a vanishingly small one compared to the great honor the gods had given her already. She needed nothing else. She had the ultimate proof of her devotion, proof of a sanctity no High Priestess could ever hope to achieve.

  Satiah made her way through the quiet corridors as the sun sank red across the wide, gleaming expanse of the Iteru. The evening air was dusty and calm, and filled her lungs with its spicy-dry taste, a satisfaction that was nearly deep enough to quell the hunger that returned to plague her belly. She pressed her hand against her sash once more and heard the grain vouchers crinkle reassuringly.

  She reached the door to her tiny chamber at last, pushed it open on squealing hinges. Besu bent over the small, narrow bed, her broad back to Satiah as she worked. A small bronze lamp was already burning on the rickety table in the corner. Beneath the table was the tiny, dark-oiled cedar chest containing all of Satiah’s belongings: the only furniture the room could hold.

  Besu straightened, lifted the freshly swaddled babe to her shoulder. When the boy saw Satiah, he smiled his pink, toothless grin.

  “Give him here,” she said, and Besu handed him over gently. Beneath her cheap linen dress, the woman’s breasts swung heavy with milk. Satiah pinched the baby’s fat little elbow, smiling in satisfaction. He was growing well, getting strong, though he was small for his age, she knew. She kissed him on his plump, rosy cheek. “Mawat missed her little prince, yes she did.”

  She laid Amenemhat carefully on the bed, where he fussed in his crackly voice. Satiah drew the vouchers from her sash and counted them carefully, subtracted her small share, and handed the remainder to Besu.

  “Thank you, Lady Satiah.”

  Satiah smiled in spite of the hollow pain in her middle. She thought longingly of the bread and cheese she’d had at mid-day, pushed the thought away again roughly. It does you no good to dwell on your hunger. The gods will provide. They always do.

  “There is a jar of goat’s milk for him there on the table, for his night feedings.”

  “Good. You have done well, Besu, as always. The gods blessed me when I found you.”

  “I’ve…I’ve taken the liberty of bringing you some honey cakes from home, Lady Satiah. I hope I didn’t overstep….”

  Satiah laughed with pleasure. “You are so kind. I am grateful. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Besu took her leave, and Satiah unwrapped the bit of oiled linen to expose the cold, sticky cakes. She at them slowly, savoring the sweetness and the coarse graininess of the crumbs. She lay on her narrow bed with her son propped against her chest, and felt the cadence of her heart thrumming through his tiny
body, echoing along his small, plump limbs.

  “Son of the gods,” she whispered, and kissed the top of his warm, soft head. “Son of all the gods. One day we will make our way home, and then, I promise you, the throne will be yours.”

  The taste of that certainty was sweeter than the honey.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “…OR AT LEAST, THAT’S WHAT his nurses tell me.” Meryet set her wine cup back on the table. It clicked faintly against the polished ebony wood, and at the sound, Thutmose’s eyes snapped out of their unfocused blear. He stared at the cup; the sharpness of its details shocked him, the brilliance of the blue scarabs dancing around its rim leaping forward with accusing ferocity. He had been staring into the distance, had hardly heard a word of his wife’s conversation. He struggled to recall, through his fog of vague worry, what Meryet had been saying.

  “Er…standing already? That boy’s a strong one.”

  Meryet frowned at him. “I told you he’s standing minutes ago, Thutmose. I was speaking of his words. He will begin talking soon – real words – that’s what the nurses say. It’s early, for both standing and talking. He is blessed by the gods.” She said this last with the annoyed air of having repeated herself.

  Thutmose passed a hand across his face as if he might wipe the tension away. “I’m sorry, Meryet. I didn’t mean to let my thoughts wander. We rarely spend time together these days, I’ve been so preoccupied. I do want to hear all your news.”

  They paused awkwardly while the servants entered with the supper trays. A fragrant roast of goose, sprouting a tail of herbs singed from the clay oven, steamed on a golden platter. Bowls of sauces and stewed fruits joined it, and long, thick cores of lettuce drizzled with spiced honey – a dish appropriate for an evening of lovemaking, with its well-known ability to enflame the desires. Thutmose stared mournfully at the lettuce. He was so weary he doubted he could manage to undress his wife, never mind give a more taxing performance.