Sovereign of Stars (29 page)

“She says…” Bita-Bita faltered. “She says that even
kings are not as great as the stars.”

“What does she mean by that?”

“I don’t know, Great Lady.”

Hatshepsut forced away her anger, made herself
concentrate on Ati’s words.

“You came here to my land seeking a gift to please
your god,” Ati said, her voice drawling now, slow with amused
contempt, the twist of her mouth speaking plainly of the mistrust
she had of Hatshepsut’s motives. “And yet you withhold from your
gods. What am I to make of it? What is the Mistress of Starlight to
make of it?”

“You forget,” Hatshepsut said, making as if to rise,
“that I am a king, and not subject to your insults, Ati of Punt. I
will gladly take my gold and turquoise and leave your land
empty-handed, rather than suffer your disdain.”

“It is not I who disdains you. Look to the goddess
to see true wrath.” The odor of burning blood seemed to steal the
air from the dark hut. Hatshepsut clenched her fists.

“But there is yet time to amend your wrongs.”

“Oh?” Disbelief at the woman’s audacity pitched her
voice high, and she bit her lip at the childlike sound of it.

“If the tribute comes to the goddess from your own
hand, woman-king, then you will be spared. If not…”

“Spared! Indeed!”

“If not, death in this life will be the end for you.
A true death. A final death.”

Bita-Bita gasped. Hatshepsut held her body very
still, while inside her chest her heart fluttered wildly.

“No afterlife,” Ati said. “The goddess will see to
it.”

In the call of crickets in the forest canopy,
Hatshepsut could hear the cold ring of a chisel on stone.

**

Senenmut heard the murmur of Hatshepsut’s voice,
talking to her servant girls in low, urgent tones, long before he
saw her come through the forest gloom. From where he crouched on
his heels, sipping palm wine on the platform outside Hatshepsut’s
borrowed hut, he saw the golden necklaces around her neck first,
pinpoint gleams of starlight reflected in their finely worked
chains. The shape of her body followed, the tension of her
shoulders evident in the darkness, the stiff carriage of her neck.
She fairly stamped her feet as she walked the forest path, making
the rough fabric of her Puntite skirt swing from side to side. He
rose smoothly when she reached her ladder, so his presence would
not startle her, distracted as she was.

“Great Lady. How was supper with the Queen?”

Hatshepsut stalled on the ladder’s lowest rung.
“Senenmut.” She said his name with a note of deep relief, and,
sensing her need, he climbed down to her side.

“Leave us,” she said to her girls, and they
scampered up the ladder, disappearing into the quiet hut as though
they feared she might recall them.

“Something is wrong,” he said.

“The Queen of Punt,” Hatshepsut growled, “is a
foul-tempered, unpleasant, vile sorceress of a woman, with a black,
hopeless ka.”

“So it did not go well,” he guessed.

To his surprise, she covered her face with trembling
hands and sniffled, holding back tears.

“Now, now,” Senenmut murmured. “Don’t fret. Tell
me.”

“Not here. My girls – anybody may hear.”

And so they took the path deeper into the forest,
following its dark breadth with hesitant feet, their hands clasped
together so they could not lose one another in the gloom. The
leaves moved constantly above them, a sound almost like falling
water, but not nearly so soothing. There was an undeniable menace
to the forest, a pale, unseen threat hanging all about the god’s
land. Senenmut had felt it, an itch on his skin, all that day while
he and Ineni and Nehesi led the men into this very wood to procure
the saplings of myrrh. They would sail soon for Tjau, and Senenmut
would be glad to see the tiny, stinking port town. When they
reached Tjau, they would be that much closer to Egypt, and a more
benevolent environment with kinder, more sensible gods.

Their path gave way to a wide clearing, a swath of
grass and weeds close-cropped by animals. Senenmut suspected it was
a favored pasture for the little donkeys the Puntites rode. The
ever-present, ever-whispering canopy drew back, and the silver of
moonlight fell bright and clear into the grass, turning all it
touched to colorless uniformity, dreamy but clearly seen, nothing
hidden. Hatshepsut let his hand fall and stepped out into the pale
light, turned her face up toward the moon. Tears slid from the
corners of her eyes.

Senenmut sank onto his heels again, for he was tired
from the day’s long work. The grass was soft and welcoming. He sank
back further, lay along it with his head propped on one arm.

“Tell me,” he said again, and watched her as she
simply stood, calm at last, bathing in the light.

“Khonsu,” Hatshepsut muttered. “The moon god. Here
he is, even in Punt, shining as he always does.”

“Of course.”

“Do you think it’s true, Senenmut, that the gods of
this place are no different from the gods of our land?”

Senenmut considered the question. “Well, after all,
this is Amun’s homeland.”

The answer seemed to displease her. She turned
away.

“You were hoping I would deny it.”

“No – yes. I don’t know.”

“What troubles you, Hatet?” There was no one to hear
him use the pet name, the name she had been called from the time
she was a child, learning at Senenmut’s knee. No one to hear his
outrageous disrespect, the unseemly familiarity of a simple scribe
for Maatkare, the Good God.

“I am afraid,” she said, and her voice broke with
the strain of keeping her tears in check. He stretched his arms
toward her, and she crumpled onto the grass, pressed her face
against his chest. Her body shook with sobs.

“What? What do you fear?”

But she would not answer. She only wept.

Far in the forest, echoing amongst the trees, a
coughing call sounded, then a yowl. The men had heard something
similar in daylight while they dug the myrrh saplings. Their
Puntite guides had identified the caller as a cat: one of the cats
that stalked the woodlands – small, but known now and then to
attack a man when easier prey was scarce. Never had two people been
easier prey, lying prone in the grass, one of them weeping like a
lost ka in a tomb. And yet Senenmut was not afraid. Was she not the
Pharaoh? Did the gods not watch her and protect her? He pulled her
tighter against his body, his shield against the terrors of the
night.

Hatshepsut mumbled something against his chest. He
drew back, looked with concern at her deep-shadowed face.

“What is it, Great Lady?”

“I do not want to be forgotten.”

He laughed, the way he had often laughed at
Neferure’s small fears when she was just a little thing. “You can
never be. Look at your temple, your monuments! Look at your works!
Your name is carved on every beautiful thing in the Two Lands –
every obelisk, every mural, every palace wall. The gods will always
know you – ah, and men, too. You will not be forgotten.”

She drew away from him, sat up, rubbed the heels of
her hands into her eyes. “Yes. Yes, my monuments. My temple. My
name.” She pulled her knees to her chest and hugged them, lost in
her own thoughts, and Senenmut studied her face in the moonlight.
She had grown thinner under the strain of their journey, the long
trek across the dry Red Land, the lean provisions, the heaving and
dullness of appetite on the sea. The shape of her face stood out
sharper and starker than ever before, and he was struck by how like
a falcon she was, the sharp curve of her nose, the piercing
darkness of her eyes. And how frail she seemed, holding herself,
pensive and quiet. This was a Hatshepsut he seldom saw, and though
her strange, dark mood disturbed him, still he reveled in their
solitude, in the chance to drink the sight of her as a parched
soldier drinks at an outpost well.

“Will you tell me why you are so upset?” he said,
hesitantly, reluctant to break this rare spell.

She shook her head.

“Then let me cheer you, at least.”

“You cannot cheer me.”

“Oh, can I not?” He stroked her shoulders, let his
fingers run slowly down the curve of her spine, the skin smooth and
supple and scented with the lush oils of Punt.

“
No
, you cannot. I am in no mood for
lovemaking tonight.”

“When will we have another opportunity?” Likely not
until they were back in Waset, and even then it would be days
before they settled into the court routine, before chance was kind
enough to lend them a few precious moments of solitude and they
could touch each other’s skin, taste each other’s bodies. Senenmut
was parched for her, starved of her. He brushed the strands of her
wig aside and took her ear in his teeth gently, and heard her quiet
gasp of pleasure. It was her secret place – the one way he could
always turn the current of her moods to his favor, turn her
refusals into acquiescence.

“That’s not fair,” she said, shrugging her shoulder
to push him away. But then she was in his arms, pressing her mouth
to his, slipping her tongue past his teeth. Her breath was faintly
perfumed with incense.

Senenmut pulled her to her feet, the better to
undress her, and stood back to take in the sight of her as the
skirt fell from her hips, as she pulled the wig from her brow and
shook out her natural hair. It was grown to a hand’s width now,
dense and tightly curled, black as onyx. It framed her eyes with a
dark halo. Her unpainted face was as colorless as silver in the
moonlight, but still its tones darkened with a flush that filled
him with impatience. Yet he made himself wait, made his body yield
to his eyes, allowed his eyes the rarity of the sight of her
unclothed. Beneath her wreath of golden necklaces, her collarbone
moved delicately with her breathing, and her breasts, flattened
only slightly by motherhood and the intervening years, stirred too.
Below the shadow of her navel, below the few pale tracks in her
skin bearing witness to her long-ago pregnancy, a thick thatch of
unfamiliar hair darkened the unplucked crux of her thighs. A jagged
line cut through it, the scar – the wound she had inflicted upon
her own flesh to win over the men of Egypt’s court. Senenmut
recalled, with a force of memory that startled him, the weight of
Hatshepsut falling into his arms, fainting away from the pain and
the loss of blood. He recalled how light she had been. He had
lifted her, cradled her, shouted for a chariot – and known in that
moment that she carried his helpless heart, held it as tightly as
he held her body.

He fell to his knees before her, pressed his face
against the scar. The black hair of her groin trapped the smell of
her, intensified it, and his senses were flooded with her scent,
flooded like a field yielding to the rising river, encompassed
entirely by her.

The cat in the woodlands coughed again. He tugged at
her until she, too, fell to her knees, and put her arms about his
shoulders, covering him with the shield of her power. He kissed the
tears from her cheeks, from her eyelids. He tasted her salt.

“Senenmut,” she whispered, and his name on her lips
was deep with the sound of relief.

“Maatkare,” he replied, invoking her divinity,
pulling her protection like a cloak around their two hearts.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

It was not such an unusual thing, Neferure told
herself, scowling, to see the Great Royal Wife in Waset’s palace.
So why, then, did the people who filled it glance at her wide-eyed
and startled before they dropped into their requisite bows? Indeed,
Neferure spent much time alone in her small private palace,
sequestered with her own thoughts, her prayers, her worship, her
endless longing. But she made her appearance at court daily as duty
dictated. She presented herself to Thutmose whenever he summoned
her – though he had summoned her again only twice since that
disastrous time when the magic of her own expectations, the
anticipation of her great and beautiful fate, had fallen from her
eyes. Now when she went to her husband, she lay back as servile as
a captured slave and allowed him to rut upon her, tainting her with
his mortal flesh.

True, she was not yet the consort of a god, and so
her own flesh was still mortal. But this unfortunate circumstance
was only temporary. She would discern her sin – whatever unknown
flaw in her person blocked her divine lover from coming to her bed.
She would make the proper amends, debase herself before the proper
altar, grovel, sacrifice. And then she would be elevated.

Neferure paced from the doorway of the audience hall
through a long colonnade where pale light alternated with the
shadows of the great pillars. The sun was high and hot, the season
of Shemu nearing its close. The light in the palace’s halls was
bright and blue. All about her, servants moved with lagging feet,
their linens damp with sweat, their minds dully on their small and
meaningless tasks until they caught sight of the Great Royal Wife
moving among them, a shaft of sunlight in cloud, and staggered into
their bows. Neferure ignored them. The impudence of their behavior
infuriated her – the implied insult, that they should be startled
by her presence in the palace.

She left the colonnade and made her way through the
long eastern garden. A god’s-kiss bush held the last of its pink
blooms up to the sun; small birds dived among its branches,
feasting on the insects attracted to the sweet smell of the
flowers. Neferure stood and watched a moment, soothed by the simple
beauty of the scene, encouraged by it. She plucked the freshest
blossom she could find and tucked it into the strands of her wig so
that she might enjoy the perfume of the god’s-kiss all afternoon
while she searched.

For it was a search, a restless roaming, chasing her
thoughts down the airy corridors of Waset’s great palace, circling
her own footsteps past store-rooms, treasuries, ambassadors’
quarters and servants’ rooms. Any place in the palace might hold
the answer to the mystery of her sin. Once her mother returned from
Punt, Neferure’s various duties to the throne and the Temple of
Amun would redouble, and she would no longer be free to search.
Hatshepsut had been gone over a month already. Time was growing
short, and Neferure had found nothing to enlighten her in all her
many days of searching.