The Bull of Min (16 page)

“No,” Batiret sobbed, falling to her knees before Meryet, clinging to the hem of her gown. “I beg you, Great Lady. Do not do this. For the sake of what you and I shared between us, please…”

“Rise, Batiret,” Meryet said quietly.

But Batiret pitched herself onto her face and lay keening on the Pharaoh’s floor.

“Batiret, please.”
Meryet stooped, pulled the woman onto the couch beside her with some difficulty. All the strength seemed to have gone out of the fan-bearer’s bones like water from a dropped pail. She hung limp as an old doll in Meryet’s grasp. Meryet bundled her into her arms and rocked her, murmuring comfort or excuses into the woman’s ear.

“I believe you are right,” Thutmose said.
“There may be no other way.”

“She told you once,” Batiret howled, “she told you once not to put the throne before what is good, what is maat!
I know she told you. I know you swore.”

“Don’t speak to the Pha
raoh that way,” Meryet said, but in spite of her admonishment there was a note of sympathy in her words.

But Thutmose did not heed the weeping woman’s impertinence.
Had his own heart not been stilled by the horror of what he contemplated, he would have fallen to the floor and wailed his grief, too. The sound of Hatshepsut’s words came forcefully to his memory, that blue night in her garden when she had fallen into the grass, a king defeated by her own hand, and cursed all the gods.

Tell me you will not choose the throne over the things that truly matter – over family, over love.
Over eternity.

And he had promised.
The gods curse me,
he thought angrily, then realized with a shiver of bitter humor that the gods had cursed him indeed. And would go on cursing him, and cursing him, striking him, confounding him. How could they do less? What else would a sin so enormous earn him, but the spite of the gods? Hatshepsut had said that she lived only in stone. It was truer now than it had been when she had still walked among the living. Her images on her monuments, her name encircled by the royal cartouche – these were the places where her kas now dwelt. If Thutmose erased her image and name from the land, her kas would lose their eternal homes and flee into darkness. She would be lost forever. Forgotten. She would be dead eternally.

But the throne would be safe.
The riots would cease. Egypt would remain whole. And was that not the very thing Hatshepsut had worked for all her life, to keep Egypt whole?

Thutmose let his he
art wander painfully, stumbling back to the blue night in the garden. He recalled with a pang of guilt the words he had told himself as he crouched in the wet grass beside the weeping king:
the Horus Throne is the legacy of our family. It is an unbreakable link to those who came before, to those who will come after, for generations unending. It is our blood, our bones, our kas.

Thutmose sat carefully on the couch beside Meryet.
Batiret had stilled her weeping, but she kept her face turned away from Pharaoh and Great Royal Wife alike.

“It is a terrible thing I do, Meryet.
And yet, can I do any differently?”

Pain made
Meryet’s face gaunt and sickly. “I can see no other way.”

He hung his head in defeat.
“Hatshepsut, forgive me. She must forgive me. She must understand.”

Meryet laid a hand on his shoulder.
Thutmose felt how it trembled, felt the weight of regret sink from her flesh into his own. Guilt and duty. They were braided together as tightly as the fibers of a rope. Thutmose knew the work that awaited him, knew the obligation he must tend to, though it stabbed deep into his heart with a pain that no eternity could ever abate. He thought of his son, growing into the inheritance Thutmose had worked so hard to secure. He thought of Hatshepsut keening her regrets, cursing even the divinity that was inside herself. He thought of Egypt, kept whole and safe by the terrible sacrifices Hatshepsut had made.

When he rose
up to see to his task, he did so abruptly, strong, decided, a cobra rearing from the sand.

EPILOGUE

I
N THE BLUE CHILL BEFORE dawn, a heavy mist hung above the slick dark mirror of the Iteru. It would dissipate quickly as Re rode his golden barque into the morning sky, but by then Thutmose would be gone, sailing north at the head of his mighty war fleet. He stared down the water steps, parting the veils of fog with his eyes, searching for the solid shape of his fastest ship. The mist was too thick to permit a view of the boat, but he knew it was moored there, waiting for him as it had so many times before, on so many mornings like this one, dense with river haze and expectation.

“And so you are going away again.”
Meryet gave a dramatic sigh, but she smiled at him. The years had not diminished her beauty, though time on the throne had hardened her features. It was a pleasant enough hardness, the sharp definition and unbreakable countenance of a goddess carved in stone.

No – not stone.
Stone breaks all too easily.
Thutmose knew by now how easily stone cracked, how it smoothed beneath the cruel bite of the chisel. Meryet would never break.

Beside his wife
, Amunhotep bounced on the balls of his feet. He was seven years old now, growing fast, taller than Thutmose could believe. “When do I get to sail with you, Father? I want to go to war!”

Thutmose raised the boy’s chin in his hand, savored the precious sight of him in his childhood sidelock, the sweet roundness of his face.
“Don’t be in such a hurry to grow up, Amunhotep.”
Amun knows you’re doing it fast enough already.

The prince scowled.
“Well, I am in a hurry. Waset is boring. I want to fight in the north like you!”

“I know.”

“Your time will come,” Meryet assured him. She took Thutmose’s hand. “I will keep your throne warm until you return.”

He laughed and swept her into his arms, kissed her long and deep until Amunhotep groane
d in protest.

“I’ll hurry back,
” Thutmose promised.

“As soon as
you’ve made Egypt a little bigger; I know. Be safe, Thutmose. Go with the gods.”

The mist parted for him as he made his way down the water steps.
His great war boat rocked eagerly in its moorings, its cedar nose reaching high and arrogant above the fierce Eye of Horus that stared at him from the prow. After so many campaigns both up and down the river, the ship was his oldest friend, save for Meryet. His feet found the ramp as easily as his hands could find the hilt of his sword or the haft of his spear.

The pre-dawn lights of Waset receded into a black, mist-shrouded distance as his rowers struck out for the middle of the Iteru, where the
northward current ran fast and deep. Thutmose took up his favorite position in the ship’s prow. He watched the sun rise, a gathering glow piercing through the fog, a golden light spreading across the horizon, illuminating the mist with such ferocity that he had to drop his eyes from the sky to the ship’s rail.

He studied his own hands where they lay on the gilded rail, lifted one to inspect beneath his nails.
He had scrubbed and scrubbed his hands in his bath that morning, as he did every morning and every night. There was not a speck of stone dust beneath Thutmose’s nails, and yet he could feel the accusing grit of altered and destroyed monuments there, and everywhere on his body, pressing into his flesh, stinging against his skin. He could feel the grains of dust that had once been Hatshepsut’s image, Hatshepsut’s name – her kas. The sense of her destruction never left his body, a palpable discomfort, a weight around his neck.

But Amunhotep’s inheritance was secure.
The legacy of Thutmose the First would go on into eternity. It was Hatshepsut’s legacy, too – she was a part of all he did, all he achieved – she who had been a mother to Thutmose.

He lifted a small leather pouch that hung
from his sword belt. The drawstrings were stiff with the dirt of many foreign roads, many campaigns past, but his fingers knew how to work them open. Inside was his small treasure, the seed he would plant when he reached the lands far beyond Retjenu, beyond Ugarit, stretching away to the north and east, the new borders he had laid to expand Egypt out across the whole of the earth. He lifted the treasure out of the bag, examined it on his palm.

It was a stone scarab – not
large, carved in simple granite, not bright turquoise or lapis or brilliant deep malachite, river-green. It was plain, but strong; enduring enough to last centuries unchanged, so long as no chisel or hammer found it. He studied the shape of the scarab’s wings, the intricate detail of its feathered antennae folded back across its rounded body. Thutmose turned it over in his hand.

On the flat reverse
side was a name, encircled by the cartouche of royalty. He traced the familiar characters with his thumb.
Maatkare Hatshepsut.

How many of these scarabs had he left in his wake, planted like hopeful vines across the expanding frontier?
How many small tablets that bore her name and titles, how many tiny statues of her image, striding as bold as a god? Dozens. He would hide this one in the earth somewhere, in a cave, if he found one, or bury it on a hilltop just beneath the surface where the sun’s rays could reach through the dust and warm her name, bring her back to life. Her name intact, fixed into eternal stone.

He hoped it was enough to atone for what he did in the temples and courts of the Two Lands, scraping her from history with the stroke of his workmen’s chisels.

Thutmose slipped the scarab back into his pouch, tightened the strings carefully so it would not be lost. Too much of her was lost already. Many nights he had lain awake, imagining her kas scattered, torn loose from their familiar stone moorings in the Black Land. He pictured her forlorn kas wandering, disjointed and confused but not dead. Never dead, so long as he had his scarabs to plant in the earth, his little statues.

It was a very small comfort to him.

A far greater comfort was the battle to come. War was his only balm now, the only cure for the deep, aching wound in his ka, a wound as deep as if it had been carved by one of his own chisels. Yes, he was strong, and he gloried in his strength and his strategy. He would add more lands to Egypt’s territory; of this he had no doubt.

But he did not fight merely for the sake of it, nor push the borders of the Two Lands ever outward to increase his wealth or his infamy among the world’s
lesser kings.

He did it for the sake of his scar
abs – for the sake of her name.

For he had destroyed every one of her monuments
that he could reach, erased her name from obelisks and temple walls. He did it for the sake of Egypt, ah – but knowing his reason was just did not ease the burden of his guilt.

If
he must banish her kas from the Two Lands, if he must erase her memory from the hearts of men, then he would expand his empire until it was so great that Hatshepsut’s lost kas would never find themselves without Egyptian gods. He would make all the world his, and no matter where Hatshepsut wandered, she would never be without the light of Amun-Re to guide her home.

My command stands firm like the mountains; the sun’s disc shines upon my royal name.
My falcon rises high above the kingly banner, eternally.

-Inscription from the Temple of Pakhet by Hatshepsut, fifth king of the Eighteenth Dynasty

THE END

THE BULL OF MIN

The She-King: Book Four

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