The Crook and Flail (9 page)

Nehesi drew rein.  At once the crowd surged toward them.  “Stand back,” her guard shouted, and leaped from the chariot.  His hand clutched the hilt of his knife, ready and eager to draw. 

Calm.  The greatest...the greatest skill...
  Senenmut's words faltered in her heart.  She thought she could hear her tutor laughing at her, or perhaps it was a nobleman in the crowd.  Astonishing herself with her own composed air, she stepped lightly from the chariot and stood near to Nehesi's side, back straight, eyes on the temple, haughty and self-possessed.

Nehesi's blades were not needed.  The mere sight of him, hulking and bristling, was enough to part the crowd as she moved toward the temple's mouth.  On the steps the priests clustered together then fluttered apart like a flock of ibis disturbed, their red sashes flapping.

“They have been whipped into a frenzy,” Nehesi muttered behind her.  “They are dogs eager for a fight.  Religious fervor is the last thing I like to see in a crowd, even in a small crowd.  Anything may happen when the gods are involved.”

Hatshepsut did not reply.  It was too late now to withdraw.  She must go on to stand before Amun, whatever may come of it.

She gained the steps and sketched a slight bow to the High Priest, barely bending at the waist, the measured, courtly respect a king must show to Amun's chief servant.  Then, breathing deep, hoping she did not shake, she turned to face the crowd.  “Good noblemen of Egypt,” she said.  The crowd had ceased its milling, ceased its murmuring.  All saathineyes turned upon her.  She felt the force of those stares, suspicious and hard.  “The gods bless you for coming to the temple on this most auspicious day, the day when I shall present myself to the god and receive his blessing as heir to the Horus Throne.”

There was the smallest ripple among the crowd as heads turned to seek out some brave volunteer who might speak for all.  At last an older man stepped forward, deep lines long-formed around his eyes and mouth.  His short-cropped wig was slightly askew.  She knew him from court: a kindly grandfather, patron of a wealthy house, and a long-time friend to her family.  Senenmut had once told her how the old man's house had been staunch supporters of her father, even in the earliest days when he was nothing but a common soldier seeking to find his feet in Waset's fierce political currents.  She was saddened to see her father's supporter here, standing against her own claim.  But she made herself smile down at him, as delighted as though he had taken her hand at a festival.  “Harwa.  I am glad to find you here.  You have always been a friend to Thutmose, and to all his house.”

“Er....”  Harwa lowered his eyes.  “Great Lady, we mean you no personal affront, you must understand.  It is maat that brings us here.”

“Maat!” someone shouted from the edges of the crowd, a shrill and wild call.

“Maat has ever been my first and greatest concern,” she said, loudly so all might hear.  “My father Thutmose taught me to revere it above all else.  As your king, I will guard maat as keenly as the falcon guards her nest.  You have nothing to fear.”

The crowd gave off a muffled groan, the sound of an ox moaning under its burden.

“We fear, Great Lady, that a woman – a
girl
on the throne would itself be an offense to maat.  When maat is disrupted, all manner of evil may fall upon Egypt.”

Harwa's words were too much like Mutnofret's threat the night before.  Hatshepsut could not stop her eyes narrowing.  More men found their bravery and shouted at her with the words of the second wife.

“There is a son!  The king left a son as heir!”

“I saw young Thutmose proclaimed the heir myself, here at the temple!”

“I will have no king who has not undergone the rites.”

At this last, Hatshepsut raised a hand for silence.  It did not come, and she was obliged to shout back: “What rites?  What rites do you demand?  Only tell me, and I will give my people what they require.”

“Circumcision,” a young man replied, boldly raising one fist into the air.  His response was immediate and far too determined.  Frustration stabbed at her heart; Mutnofret had set this up, no doubt – had put the thought of circumcision into these men's hearts, then set them loose upon the temple.  It was a rite any fourteen-year-old prince would be expected to endure, to prove his bravery and strength.&earrcunbsp But Hatshepsut had no manhood to cut! 
A plot to discredit me, to make me look foolish.  Beyond foolish – helpless, inadequate.  Female.
  And in her anger and haste, Hatshepsut had walked obligingly into Mutnofret's snare.  What answer could she give to such a demand? 

She stared at the young man, helpless to save face, while he rhythmically waved his fist.  Soon the men nearest him took up his chant. 
The rite!  The rite!
  She did not know the man.  He had the shaved, wigless pate of a priest, and though his kilt was unadorned, as befitted a servant of Amun, it was made of especially fine linen.  The crowd seemed to esteem him; men thumped him on the back and smiled confidently into his face as his clenched fist led their chanting.  When their cries died away, the young man shouted, “We all bled for Egypt, to show our strength and fearlessness, to prove we were worthy men of the Two Lands.  We will not have any king who cannot do the same!”

“The king must bleed,” someone cried.  “Bleed as we bled!  Or maat will not stand!”

Hatshepsut shouted over the din.  “You speak foolishness.  What flesh would you have me cut?  I will hear no more of this.”

Nehesi growled a warning.  The crowd surged toward the steps, clamoring.  Led by the fine-kilted priest, several men ran up the steps themselves, giving Hatshepsut and her guard a wide berth.  They stayed well beyond the reach of Nehesi's sword, but when they reached the temple doorway they linked arms to bar her entry.

“Move aside,” Nehesi commanded the nearest man, “or I'll cut a door through your guts.”

Hatshepsut's heart raced.  To kill on the steps of the temple – that would offend maat, with certainty.  She laid a hand on Nehesi's arm to restrain him, but the fire of battle burned in him.  Unaware, he twitched free of her touch as though her hand was a gnat on his skin. 

Quickly, she stepped in front of her guard and faced the men who blocked the way herself.  “Stand aside.  Do you know better than Amun?  If he wills that I take the throne, then I shall, no matter what you say or do.  If he wills that my brother should be king, then Amun will surely tell me now.  Stand aside, and allow me to commune with my god.”

The High Priest, quivering and pale, moved to her side.  He addressed the brash young priest with a dry whisper of a voice.  “The king's daughter speaks with great wisdom, Nebseny.  There is no harm in consulting the god.  If she is not meant for the throne, then Amun shall make his truth known to us all.  Let the girl pass.”

“Never,” a rough voice shouted from the courtyard. “Stand your ground, Nebseny!” 

Hatshepsut did not dare look behind her.  She could feel Mutnofret's little fire fanning itself into a conflagration at her back.  These men were like horses racing with bits in their teeth, wild, unthinking, headlong.  And she had thrown herself into their path.

“There must be a circumcision!”

“No king who does not bleed!”

“As we bled, ah, for Egypt!”

“Amun's eyes,” Hatshepsut spat, and the High Priest gulped at her curse.  She snatched a dagger from Nehesi's belt; he grunted in surprise.

A brazier stood beside the blocked temple doorway, crackling as it consumed nuggets of myrrh, raising a column of blue smoke to the sky.  As she approached it with the dagger held before her, the men nearest the brazier drew back, pressing into their companions' sides, but still they did not give way.  Hatshepsut thrust the dagger into the flame.  The smoke made her eyes burn, and she blinked, furious, unwilling to let the crowd see tears in her eyes.  A hollow clatter of hooves rang in the forecourt; she looked up in time to see Senenmut fling himself from a chariot while the two old priests of Annu struggled to take hold of the loose reins.

Hatshepsut spun to face the crowd, the knife blackened and smoking in her hand.  The Amun priests drew back, retreated down the steps; the crowd at last fell silent.

“Princess,” Nehesi said, low and warning.

Hatshepsut fumbled one-handed at the knot of her kilt.  It dropped at last.  She stood before them unclothed, sunlight shimmering on the sweat of excitement that dampened her skin.  A wordless shout came from somewhere in the distance; the courtyard and its crowd were unaccountably receding, drawing out to the end of a dark tunnel so that she stood isolated and powerful, the only living thing to feel Re's glorious light, alone in the world as Atum was alone on his hill at the birth of all things. 
Senenmut
, murmured a voice in her heart, and she saw with her distant eyes the tutor pushing his way through the crowd, fighting to reach her, his mouth shouting her name, though she did not hear his voice.

Hatshepsut lowered the knife, drew it slowly across the crux of her thighs.  She felt a stinging cold that in her far-off state did not register as pain, but as a surge of power coursing along her limbs, making her tremble with the force of her own might, with Amun's might.  And then a wash of heat down her legs as the blood flowed to pool beneath her feet.

“Gods' mercy,” a voice whispered, or shouted – Hatshepsut's ears were full of the sound of the river, a frantic rushing.  She could not say who had spoken.

A gentle hand pried the knife from her fingers.  Senenmut was there with her – Senenmut, drawing her awareness to a great pain lancing upward from her loins, tracing a path of fire through her belly; to the astonished faces of the nobles, the pale silence of the priests.

“Give me your hands,” he said quietly.  His voice carried deep into the heart of the transfixed crowd, though it had never been a powerful voice.  “I am the one who comes to be among you.  I am the blood that falls from the root of Re, who cuts his own flesh to bring forth the ancestral gods.  I am Re, the sun; I am Hu, the word of poweingnbsp; r; I am Sia, the all-knowing.  We who are one follow Atum, the father-sun, in the course of every day.”

No one spoke.  No one moved.  Hatshepsut's eyes widened with the pain; her nostrils flared, but she she did not cry out.

Messuway and Nakht mounted the steps to stand beside her.  Their priestly robes were disheveled.  “Here before you stands the heir to the Horus Throne, Hatshepsut, daughter of the king.”  Messuway waved his arm toward her, his flesh loose and swinging.  She quivered, bracing herself against the burning in her groin, refusing to show her pain on her face.

“As it was proclaimed before us in Annu,” Nakht intoned, “so be it here.  Amun himself has sired her.  Let no man doubt the god.”

At the foot of the steps, a handful of the Amun priests knelt, palms toward her.  And a scattering of nobles, too, sank to their knees in the courtyard.  Nebseny half-crouched, seemingly torn between supplication and disgust.  Many who had been clamoring moments before, priests and nobles alike, now hastened away, fleeing from the blood, the strangeness, the disorder. 

Nehesi shouted after those who fled.  “Who among you held the knife in his own hand when he was cut?  And she did not cry out – not once!”

“Let them go,” Senenmut said.  “Let them carry the story back to Waset.  Let them leave now.  It is better that they don't see.”

Don't see what?
Hatshepsut tried to say, but her head was light and silly, and when she opened her mouth to speak only a pained gasp emerged.  Her knees had gone unaccountably weak.  She swayed. 

In an instant Nehesi's arms were there, lifting her as gently as a nurse lifts a babe, for all their great strength and hardness. 

She heard Senenmut shout for his chariot. 

Hatshepsut closed her eyes.

CHAPTER NINE

When she roused, she was lying in her own soft bed in the House of Women.  Sitre-In, facing away from where Hatshepsut lay beneath a wool blanket, drifted between the cosmetics box on its ebony table and the great painted chest full of gowns and kilts.  Hatshepsut watched her nurse move through a hazy blur and blinked to clear the film from her eyes.  Somewhere – outside – the garden – she heard Tem's voice, rising into the range of Hatshepsut's hearing and falling away again, distant as a thin red haze on the horizon.  “On the very steps of the temple...the whole crowd...then that tutor of hers quoted the holy texts....”

That tutor.
  She looked around for Senenmut, but he was not there.

The blanket was too hot.  She raised one leg to kick it away, and hissed in paiifynbsomewh

Sitre-In turned at the sound.  “Oh!”

“Get it off.  Hot.”

“There, there.” Sitre-In peeled the blanket back. 

Cool air fell across her naked skin like a blessing from Mut.  She looked down to the cut across her bare hillock.  Someone had stitched it up with horses' hairs; a thick translucent paste, sharp-scented, covered the length of the wound. 

“That great hulk of a guard carried you all the way back in his arms while your tutor drove the horses like a demon wind.  You fainted clean away from loss of blood.  Or from pain; the physicians aren't sure which.”  She paused a moment, fussed with a length of linen in her hands.  “I feared for you.”