Sovereign of Stars (33 page)

Batiret offered cool, sweet melon and honey cakes on
a tray, and Hatshepsut ate hungrily, laughing with her mouth full
at the drunken dancing in the circuit below. Batiret laughed along
with her mistress, and plied her ostrich-feather fan happily,
waving the dust of hundreds of dancing feet away from Hatshepsut’s
face. Her most loyal and trusted servant had taken some time to
recover from the shock of Neferure’s mistreatment, but she had
steadfastly refused to retire from service in the Good God’s
personal chamber. After so many years of service she had become
more friend than servant, and now, without Senenmut for company,
Hatshepsut found herself turning more and more to Batiret for the
things she lacked: laughter, comfort, reassurance, joy. For her
part, Batiret had not only her loyalty to her mistress as
motivation to stay on. With Senenmut gone from Waset, Hatshepsut
had been in need of a new Great Steward, and was quick to appoint
Kynebu to the position. She suspected her fan-bearer and her
steward might soon be wed, and the thought brought her the pain of
envy along with genuine happiness. In moments when pensiveness
overtook her, Hatshepsut wondered whether Senenmut kept any women
at his estate, whether he had filled his bed and his heart with
someone else.

In due time, the priests raised their rattles,
shaking them hard and long, but it took many long moments before
silence spread throughout the drunken crowd and attention returned
to the dais. As rested and refreshed as she was ever likely to be,
Hatshepsut rose to bless the crowd, which brought about their
cheers once more, then she descended with Nehesi to run the circuit
– the final rite of renewal she must perform before the Feast of
the Tail could truly begin.

Four pillars had been raised, roughly delineating a
great rectangle in the flat, dusty earth. The crowd retreated,
exposing the grounds of the circuit once more, and as Hatshepsut
stepped from beneath her canopy the force of the sun fell upon her,
unrelenting in its glare. A faint pain twinged in her hip; she
rubbed it away, shook out her legs one at a time, limbering for her
last feat of strength. A troupe of musicians struck up a marching
tune, and, pausing first before the High Priest Hapuseneb to
receive his blessing, Hatshepsut began her run.

At once the sweat sprang up on her body, and it
cooled her somewhat in the breeze of her own motion. Soon enough,
though, the heat in the air, in her own muscles, became oppressive.
She gasped as she rounded the second pillar. Before she was halfway
to the third, her throat began to burn. She completed the first of
four circuits and loped into her second lap. The faces of the crowd
blurred as she passed, stretching into one long swath of brown skin
and black wigs, white fans, the flash of canopy poles flitting past
her vision. Hands raised as she went, pale palms seeming to slap at
her sight. She fell into a steady rhythm of breaths, each one dry
as it entered her throat, burning hot as it left. She passed the
starting pillar for a second time, swung into her third lap with a
wheeze, her breasts painful from the bouncing, her knees
protesting, her ankles swollen and stiff. Hatshepsut pushed on.
Sweat ran past her temples, onto her chin, her neck. The furrow of
her spine was like a river. As she was nearing the final pillar of
her third lap, her eyes suddenly caught and held on something in
the crowd – a half-familiar face, leaping out amidst the blur of
all the other faces, there and gone. She could not stop, but ran
on, and several flagging paces more her heart processed the sudden
vision, and she recognized the face.

As her final lap came to a blessed close, Hatshepsut
turned to look into the crowd in the place where he had been.
Senenmut stared back at her, his eyes locking with hers, his mouth
forming some word she could not read before she passed him by.
Mut’s wings snatched up her feet like a hawk snatches up a mouse,
sudden and unexpected, and Hatshepsut fairly flew the last stretch
of her race.

When Nehesi helped her back to her shade canopy,
pressing another skin of water into her hands, Hatshepsut fell into
her chair gasping with grateful laughter, tears running down her
cheeks to mingle with her sweat.

“It seems you enjoyed that run,” Thutmose said,
chuckling.

“Oh, ah,” she replied, “never have I felt so
renewed.”

When Thutmose turned his attention to the roasted
duck his servants brought him, Hatshepsut slipped her arm around
Batiret’s shoulders, pulled her close, stopped the girl’s hands in
their busy-work of toweling the sweat from the Pharaoh’s body.
“Send me Kynebu,” Hatshepsut whispered. “I have a message for him
to carry to someone in the crowd.”

Batiret saw the pleasure sparkling in her mistress’s
eye.

“Ah, Great Lady. As you wish.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

The morning after the Feast of the Tail dawned too
bright and sharp for Thutmose’s aching head. He had managed to
conduct himself with seemly restraint throughout Hatshepsut’s rites
in the circuit, and had kept himself in check for most of the
feast. But when the throne of the Great Royal Wife remained empty
beside him and he realized at last that Neferure would not present
herself at the festival she opposed, Thutmose had sunk sullenly
into his cups.

The girl disturbed him when he recalled with a pang
of impotent fear the way she had calmly set upon Hatshepsut’s
servant with that copper knife. He did not know quite what to do
with her. He couldn’t keep her indefinitely in her confinement
cell, only drawing her out to set on display when festival or court
made it necessary. Had he not accused Hatshepsut of the very same
misdeed? And yet he could not keep her as wife, either. He knew now
that he despised Neferure, her unfeeling coldness, her abnormal
preoccupation with the divine. He could never again bring himself
to lie with her, and so she was useless as a Great Royal Wife. But
to set her aside, and leave her free to marry? She would be snapped
up by a noble house faster than any former harem girl, and his and
Hatshepsut’s fears for their security would be redoubled. He might
expose the secret of her parentage to the court, but only at great
cost to Hatshepsut, the only mother he had ever known.

Thutmose shifted the problem of Neferure this way
and that inside his heart while the Feast of the Tail went on
raucously around him, a seething crowd of revelers, acrobats,
dancers, servants, laughing and shrieking in the expanse of the
Great Hall. And Hatshepsut had sat triumphant and glowing upon her
throne, accepting the happy acclaim of her court with a confidence
she had not shown in years. She was renewed in truth. Thutmose
could not deny it.

Before he had realized just how many cups of wine
he’d consumed, Thutmose was well and truly drunk. He barely
remembered Hesyre leading him back to his chambers, giving quiet
orders to the soldier who guided Thutmose on his strong arm. Now,
in the stark light of morning, Neferure returned to his thoughts to
plague him like the ache in his head.

He gave himself a long time to collect and order
this thoughts, soaking in a warm bath, breathing deep of the
bracing, invigorating oils Hesyre selected for his massage,
allowing the pleasure of one of a servant woman’s kneading hands to
soak into his bones. At last, as prepared as he could be, Thutmose
slid the Nemes crown onto his brow and stood eying his own
reflection in his dressing-room mirror.

“We must go to her – Hatshepsut and I,” he said to
his own image. “We must decide her fate, and do it today.”

And so he met with his co-Pharaoh late in the
morning, accompanied as she always was by Nehesi and her new
steward Kynebu. Thutmose nodded a silent greeting to her in the
courtyard that lay between their two separate apartments. He did
not fail to note the somber expression on her face, braced and
accepting. She knew, too: the time to sort the tangle of Neferure
had come at last.

They walked without word to the confinement chamber,
a small, isolated affair set in a wing of the palace mostly filled
with the locked doors of storage rooms and disused servants’
quarters. Thutmose had been inside a time or two, hoping to pry
some explanation from his sister, some remorse, some affection. It
was a small room with an even smaller privy and a cold, unadorned
bath. A narrow, hard bed stood against one wall, and opposite, a
small table with a single stool where Neferure took her meals. The
remainder of that wall was dominated by the platform of her Hathor
shrine, where seven carved and painted figures stood, each
representing one of the Lady’s aspects, each staring at Thutmose
with hard black eyes. Above the shrine, the wall and ceiling were
dark with the residue of countless offerings of incense and charred
meat, for Neferure prayed almost constantly. A single door gave
admittance to a very confined and none too cheery garden. Thutmose
had ordered the single scraggly tree in the garden cut down, the
vines cleared from the stones so that Neferure might have no
opportunity for climbing. A guard stood atop the roof above her
chamber day and night, watching for any sign that the Great Royal
Wife might attempt to scale the slick stone of the garden wall,
ready to call for reinforcement should she make any bid for
freedom.

But Neferure seemed accepting of her captivity. She
made no complaints, only made occasional requests via the one woman
who tended to her needs for more incense, and oil for her
baths.

Thutmose and Hatshepsut drew up outside Neferure’s
door; Thutmose accepted the salute of the guard on duty with a
distracted grunt.

“Well,” Hatshepsut said quietly.

“Open the door,” was Thutmose’s command.

He knew something was amiss the moment the door
swung wide. It took him a few heartbeats, hesitating on the
threshold, to discern why. The smell of incense was stale and old.
Neferure had burned no recent offerings to her seven-faced goddess.
Clutched by sudden dread, Thutmose rushed into the room, Hatshepsut
and her men on his heels. A tray of half-eaten food lay on the
neatly made bed. In the doorless bath, the recessed tub, tiled in
old, cracked faience, stood overfull, the water puddling on the
floor. He pressed on through the doorway and out into the garden.
The light stabbed into his head.

“Gods,” Hatshepsut swore. “Where is the girl?”

The garden was a flat expanse of half-dried grass,
ringed by weedy flower beds. There was not so much as a bush where
Neferure might conceal herself. Thutmose raised his eyes to the
roof, caught the salute of the guard on duty there, turned away
with a growl.

“She’s nowhere – gone!”

“How…?”

Thutmose flashed a sharp eye toward Nehesi; the man
at once apprehended the guard on the door, and called down the man
on the roof. Both men groveled at the feet of the Pharaohs, clearly
as shocked by the disappearance of the Great Royal Wife as the
kings. After careful questioning, Thutmose had no choice but to let
the men go, dismissing them from service.

Thutmose at last turned to Hatshepsut, his palms up
in a show of weak desperation, a gesture he hated and cursed within
his heart even as he made it.

“She’ll go straight for Iunet,” Hatshepsut said.
“For the Temple of Hathor.”

“Right.”

“Nehesi, summon your best men – the men you trust
the most. And Kynebu, go – use my seal to secure the fastest boats
available; I don’t care who owns them; they are mine now. Get to
Iunet with all haste. She will be there.”

The men sprinted from Neferure’s chamber to do
Hatshepsut’s bidding, and Thutmose turned away from her eyes. In
the small room there was nowhere to rest his own gaze but on his
wife’s shrine. The bronze offering bowl was greasy and black with
char on the inner surface, but its outer side was smooth and clean,
well-worn from Neferure’s near-constant handling. It surface
reflected his own image back at him, bent, distorted by the curve
of the bowl, a blur that could hardly be said to resemble a man.
Around the reflection, the seven Hathors stood tall and perfectly
formed, a pretty mockery of his weakness.

**

The Iteru overspilled its banks, yielding to the
endless cycle of time, filling the fields with muddy water and the
life-giving silt that would blacken the earth anew when the river
receded. There was no hesitation to the flood, not so much as a
day’s delay: nothing to indicate that the gods were displeased. The
reassurance of the flood, its familiar wet odor hanging heavy on
the air, should have bolstered Hatshepsut’s kas. But weeks had
passed without word of Neferure. There was no hint of her
whereabouts. Messengers from Iunet and further afield streamed
constantly into the palace, as Hatshepsut had commanded, but all of
them carried the same news. The Great Royal Wife had not been
found.

Other messengers, though, did bring novel word. It
was word she would rather not have heard. At the remote borders of
the northeastern reach of the kingdom, the Heqa-Khasewet were
raiding, sweeping down upon Egyptian outposts and villages, burning
and pillaging, making captives of children, raping. The number of
Heqa-Khasewet offenses increased with each breathless messenger who
fell on his knees before the throne. It was a clear bid for
war.

“They must be stopped,” she said wearily when she
was alone with Kynebu and Nehesi, trying to concentrate on her
supper. But Hatshepsut knew she had no stomach left for battle. She
was not the youth she once was, and as time had diminished the
strength of her body, her worry over Neferure diminished what
little taste she may have mustered for bloodshed.

“May I suggest, Majesty,” Kynebu said carefully,
“that you send the young Pharaoh to deal with the Heqa-Khasewet?
Menkheperre is spoiling for action. He is as troubled as you are, I
think, over the loss of the Great Royal Wife. Perhaps even more so.
A young man sunk so deep in his troubles often finds relief on the
battlefield.”