The Bull of Min (The She-King) Page 5

  “Where do we go, Lord?” Tjaneni murmured, careful to keep his voice low.

  “Back to the Temple of Min.”

  “So early? The god isn’t even awake yet.”

  Thutmose did not reply, but paced on grimly through the streets. The square tops of the temple pylons were picked out against the coal-gray sky by a string of lamps flickering below fading stars.

  They arrived at the temple just as a faint tinge of blue crept along the eastern horizon. A scatter of stars still shone here and there, fading gradually from view like a school of silver fish making their slow way into deeper water. The courtyard was silent between its raised ponds, though from some hidden sanctuary the odors of fresh burning incense and charred meat drifted, thin and light, across the open ground. The servants of Min would wake soon, and would set about their business. His time was limited.

  Thutmose turned to his men. “Wait here. I won’t be long.”

  “Let us come with you, Lord,” Tjaneni said.

  “There is no need. I have business with the god, and then I’ll return. Brace up; no harm can come to me in a temple, even if somebody were to recognize me. And anyway,” he said, his hand straying to his belt, “I have my knife.”

  He slipped quickly down the wide, empty walkway, his eyes steady on the pillars at the temple’s mouth. No one moved about the entrance to Min’s sacred home. As Thutmose paused at the foot of the steps, staring up into the blackness between the pillars, he heard the staggered, hesitant calls of birds waking, a distant, sleepy music in the pale morning air. He climbed the steps with one hand resting near the hilt of his dagger.

  Beyond the entryway, the braziers stood cold and unlit on their thin legs. Thutmose peered into darkness. The air inside was dense with its own silence, pressing a great weight upon his body. He shivered at the sensation.

  Thutmose turned toward the hallway where he’d run the day before. He had no reason to think he would see Neferure there again, but some faint whisper in his heart hoped that if he went back to the storeroom door, the gods would work some unseen power for him, producing Neferure from the darkness the way a court magician produces a live cobra from the folds of his sash.

  The storeroom was closed, the door barred. He glanced this way and that, bouncing on the balls of his feet, at a loss. A faint scraping sounded from further down the hallway, the scuffling of sandals on stone. He made his way toward the noise, trailing his fingers along the wall to guide his steps through deep shadow. He was close enough now to the source of the scuffling that he could make out the rhythm of footfalls: the stride of a person of small stature, feet dragging under the weight of a burden. Thutmose stepped carefully, slowly, lifting and placing his feet with exaggerated care, toe to heel, soundless as a cat.

  His fingers found the wall’s sharp corner; the hallway intersected another, and suddenly the footsteps were upon him. In a heartbeat he saw the form in white linen emerge from the darkness, stooped under the bulk of a large, rough sack. He recognized her face at once, even turned down toward the sandstone floor and half lost in dimness. Thutmose seized her arm; she yelped and dropped the sack. It clattered when it fell, and the pungent scent of raw myrrh filled the hallway.

  “It is you. I knew I saw you yesterday.”

  She shrank away from him. “Let me go or I’ll scream.”

  “You won’t, by order of the Pharaoh.”

  “Thutmose.”

  He dragged her back down the hallway, pressed her into the recessed doorway of the storeroom. Outside the temple, dawn had come. A cold gray light suffused the hallway, barely brightening the interior. It limned Neferure’s face with a soft sheen. She was as beautiful as she had ever been, fine-featured, dark-eyed, solemn, but she was thinner, too, and her arm, fully encircled by his grip, felt wiry and strong beneath his hand. Touching her gave him a queer thrill – partly the dark compelling arousal he’d felt whenever he had taken her before, and partly the chilling presence of divinity she had always worn about her like some brilliant shawl. That air of holiness and unreasoning self-assurance was thicker than he’d remembered. Perhaps the temple magnified it. She shifted against the storeroom door, and the tense muscle of her little arm writhed like a captured snake. The strength of her body seemed to him an outward manifestation of her holy power. Almost, he released her in fear. Then he recalled that he was the Lord of the Two Lands, and he dug his fingers into her flesh until she cringed.

  “I should kill you,” he growled, “I know it. For what you did to Senenmut – for what you did to Hatshepsut.”

  She stared up at him defiantly. His insides vibrated with the sudden force of her stare, the black shimmer of her eyes leaping at him from the soft perfection of her face. He recalled, against his will, the way she had gazed up at him in the field of emmer, a little girl standing on her toes to stroke the head of a quivering white bull.

  “And yet you will not,” said Neferure.

  “You seem very confident of that.” His voice was a croak, and he cursed the dryness of his throat.

  “You are too devout. You would never harm a vessel of the gods.”

  “Neferure…”

  “My name is Satiah. Neferure is no more.”

  He shook her, furious and helpless before her stare. “Neferure stands before me, guilty of murder.”

  “Murder? Not I. I made a sacrifice.”

  Thutmose’s grip loosened without his permission. She tugged her arm free but made no move to leave the alcove of the doorway. She stared steadily up at him, and it seemed to Thutmose’s bewildered eyes that she grew in stature.

  “I set a sin to rights,” Neferure murmured, “and the gods blessed me for it.”

  “Blessed you? What are you talking about?”

  “I speak of the reason why you will not kill me, brother-husband.”

  Thutmose blinked at her.

  “Come with me,” she said. “I will show you now.”

  With his hand on the hilt of his knife, Thutmose trailed her reluctantly. She slid through the hallways of the Temple of Min, a blur of white linen against the slowly warming colors of sandstone, swift and silent as the shadow of a cloud. He held his breath as he moved in her wake. A curious buzzing filled his ears; a rushing sensation throbbed along his limbs.

  Neferure stopped at the last door in a row of doors, all of them facing outward along the rear wall of the temple. The dawn light picked out the refuse of habitation scattered in the dusty soil of the temple’s rear courtyard: three pots stacked one inside the other beside a door, a discarded pair of sandals beside another, a child’s toy river horse lying on its side beneath a makeshift blanket of leaves. This was where the lesser priests and priestesses lived – they and their families. The dormitories.

  Neferure pushed her door open, stepped into her room without looking round to see whether Thutmose followed. She was intent on whatever was inside, focused the way a woman only ever was in the presence of…of her child.

  From the threshold, Thutmose watched Neferure lift a bundle to her shoulder. She cooed softly. A bit of blanket hung over the baby’s face. Thutmose reached out – the room was small enough that he could touch the child from where he stood – and lifted the corner of the blanket away.

  The baby was asleep, one fat cheek pressed against its mother’s shoulder, the lips shining with wetness. Black curls of hair, soft and still fine, covered the warm head.

  “His nurse will be here soon,” Neferure said quietly. “I went out early to do some work while he slept. He always sleeps well. He’s a perfect child. And why not? He was born of perfection.”

  Thutmose withdrew his hand. A low flame guttered in a dented lamp on a simple, well-used table. In the fitful light, he studied the baby’s face. One baby looked much like another, but it was clear already that this child would have a sharply hooked nose and small chin, the stamp of their family line. Thutmose knew precious little of babies, but he had spent enough time with his own son to tell at a glance that this child was of an ag
e with Amunhotep. He counted the months backward. It was possible…. But he and Neferure were both grandchildren of Thutmose the First. The mark of the Thutmosides did not necessarily come from him, the present king.

  “Who is the father?”

  Neferure spun to face him, hiding the baby from Thutmose’s gaze. She stared up into his eyes with a directness that turned his stomach.

  “You dare ask me such a thing? I am your Great Royal Wife.”

  “But surely you know you’re not. You gave that all up when you left the palace.”

  “Should I have stayed imprisoned forever? I had work to do – a great work. I am not a bird, to sit singing in a cage.”

  “You are a murderer. That’s what you are.”

  “I am a priestess. You understand nothing of it.”

  “Is the child mine?”

  Neferure scowled at him. He resolved to draw out an answer with staunch silence, and scowled back twice as hard.

  At last she said, “You remember the carvings on the walls of Hatshepsut’s temple.”

  “Ah, of course.”

  “You remember how she came to be: Amun entering our grandfather’s body, showing his guise only to Ahmose as she lay on her bed.”

  Thutmose peered at her through narrowed eyes. She was not angry now, but solemn, almost rapturous. She believed that a god had come to her to conceive this child, believed it down to the root of her ka. He saw that truth shining on her face.

  “So a god came to you. Is that it?”

  Neferure said nothing, only stared at him levelly.

  “Which god, Neferure?”

  “I am Satiah.”

  “Which god, Satiah?”

  Her eyes stared beyond him, beyond the dusty communal courtyard to a vision far away. The solemnity of her face relaxed into a radiance of bliss. “All of them, brother.”

  Thutmose shook his head. “In a man’s body? Whose?”

  She came back to herself, and her eyes traveled scornfully down his own body to the belt of his kilt. “Yes. In a man’s body.”

  Thutmose shifted under her reproachful stare. “Regardless of what you think of the child’s conception, tell me, Satiah, why I shouldn’t kill you.”

  “I did not say you shouldn’t. I said you will not. You remember, Thutmose. I know you do. You remember the Bull of Min. You know the power I have always held within me. You know I am chosen by the gods. If you strike down a sacred vessel, you will be forever cursed – you know it’s true. And this child – Amenemhat, my son, my gift from the gods, my reward as their consort – he is the proof of my divinity.”

  She turned again, so Thutmose could see the sleeping babe in profile. The little nose was indeed showing signs of the same strong arch that Thutmose himself had. He stared at the boy, and he was not certain that the boy’s blood was not his own. The rays of the rising sun broke free of the temple’s high outer wall. They fell warm upon Thutmose’s back, spilled over his shoulder. A shaft of sunlight, sparkling with drifting motes, fell across Amenemhat’s face. His soft skin lit with a strange translucence. Thutmose staggered backward through the doorway. Neferure – Satiah – stepped out into the light of morning. The sun glowed on her, too, picking out her features in sharp poignancy, glimmering in the strands of her simple wig as though her braids were threaded with gold.

  Thutmose heard again the bellowing of the bull, felt its thunder shake his bones. Before she could see any tremor of fear in his body, he turned on his heel and left Satiah standing there with her child. But the piercing power of her eyes followed him, taunted him, dogging his heels all the way back through the temple gates to the place where his men stood waiting for their king.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE FIVE FESTIVAL DAYS OF the New Year had come and gone, and with them came the Inundation. Egypt turned once more into a vast plain of water, running the length of the Iteru’s long northward track, a lush, lazy wetland lying satisfied in the sun between the hills and cliffs of the eastern and western banks. The days grew redolent with the earthy perfumes of the flood. By night, the stars themselves seemed to chant the loud choruses of frogs. Akhet was a season for replenishment, for healing. It was a time to start life anew.

  Meryet grunted as she lifted Amunhotep to her hip. The boy was over a year old now, and though his height was nothing for the nurses to exclaim over, he was growing stocky and strong just like his father. He was a stout little bull, though his temper was sweet as a gazelle’s. Meryet kissed his fat cheeks until he squealed with laughter, held him close to her chest. She was grateful to the gods for this boy – ah, all mothers were grateful for their babes. But Amunhotep seemed imbued with a special kind of magic. As the flood waters rose, gifting their black silt to make Egypt bloom with life once more, Hatshepsut had begun to return tentatively to the world, and all because of this little boy.

  “You are a golden treasure,” Meryet whispered to her son. Nothing but Amunhotep could coax a smile to his grandmother’s face. Nothing but holding the boy, playing with him, watching him toddle about her garden, could cause Hatshepsut to forget her many sorrows, her bitter regrets, and live instead in the moment the gods laid before her.

  Meryet made her way through the Pharaoh’s great apartments to the garden behind her bed chamber, trailed by her retinue of women, Amunhotep’s nurse, and, of course, Nehesi. The grass beneath her sandals was wet and lush, the earth still springy with the last traces of the flood. Hatshepsut waited on a blanket in the sun, a few of Amunhotep’s favorite toys scattered around her. She wore a man’s kilt and a profusion of beaded necklaces, her chest and back bare. The plucky, daring nature of the garb cheered Meryet – it seemed another small sign that some fractional part of the Pharaoh’s old self was returning.

  “There is the little king,” Hatshepsut said, smiling up at them, squinting through her kohl in the glare of the sun.

  Meryet lowered Amunhotep and herself onto the blanket. The boy at once wiggled from her arms and busied himself with a wooden deby and a wool-stuffed lion. Batiret joined them, dipping cool wine from a jar, passing cups to her mistress and to Meryet.

  “He grows so fast,” Hatshepsut said, never taking her eyes from Amunhotep. “In a blink, he’ll be as big as a horse with a deep voice and hair on his chin.”

  She shifted to take one of the cakes Batiret offered, but her outstretched hand arrested in the air. Hatshepsut’s face paled; Meryet could see from the sudden stillness of the beads on her chest that the Pharaoh held her breath.

  The pains again, Meryet thought. Hatshepsut often complained of sharp aches in her hip and thigh. Sometimes spells of weakness overtook her, too, and seemed related somehow to the mysterious, transient pain. Meryet wondered whether Hatshepsut’s condition were not due to a lack of movement. Many months had passed since Senenmut’s death. Hatshepsut’s grief had stalled her. She was sedentary; she had grown stout with her own inactivity, though even subdued as she now was, she could not put off the air of regal command that was hers by nature. Even playing gently with Amunhotep, even stilled by her long sorrow, Hatshepsut spoke and moved with authority. When she spoke or moved at all.

  “Do you suppose,” Hatshepsut said, recovering herself, toying with Amunhotep’s short side-lock, “you may have another?”

  Meryet laughed. “One day, but gods make it not too soon. This one is enough of a handful for me, even with the royal nurses caring for him most of the time.”

  Batiret plied her fan on its long golden pole, swirling the flies away. “The Lady Horus would like an entire nest full of little Horuslings to pamper and spoil.”

  Hatshepsut grinned up at her fan-bearer with great affection, showing the charming gap between her teeth. “And why not? The world could use a few more of these.” She tickled Amunhotep’s foot; he squealed and clutched at his own soft belly in merriment. “The gods know there is precious little to be glad for in this life.”

  Meryet felt the smile slip from her face. No one wanted to rush Hatshepsut through her grief.
Young though she was and relatively untouched by tragedy, Meryet still sensed intuitively that sorrow found its own route through the heart, wearing a crooked path, eroding the ka like a stream of water through dark soil until at last it sank away in its own time, and healing flowered in its place. But Hatshepsut’s depression compounded Thutmose’s guilt, and Meryet was left to impel him on his path. It seemed sometimes that she drove him against Hatshepsut’s grief, goading him like a drover does his cattle. And Meryet was weary – Amun, but she was weary.

  “Where is Thutmose?” Hatshepsut asked suddenly.

  Meryet gave an involuntary jump, startled that the king had chanced so close to her private thoughts. “Drilling his soldiers. The southern circuit, I believe he told me.”

  “It’s a good army,” said Hatshepsut rather dully. “The new recruits seemed very sturdy.”

  Meryet doubted whether Hatshepsut had seen the new recruits. She nodded in agreement, careful to keep her skepticism well away from her face.

  “Maybe we ought to find a sturdy soldier for this one, here.” Hatshepsut jerked her head toward Batiret. “She should have a baby of her own.”

  Having finally convinced the troublesome flies to try their luck elsewhere, Batiret leaned casually on the shaft of her fan. “My steward Kynebu is sturdy enough for me. The last thing I need in my bed is a soldier, all muscle and no brains, stinking like horse piss.”