Nine White Horses (25 page)

He held her and stroked her and soothed her until at last
she quieted. She lay gasping, clutching him with blind strength. He rocked her until
her grip loosened and her breathing slowed. When she stiffened against him, he let
her go. She would not thank him for being stronger than she, or calmer.

No more would she speak of the dream that had waked her
screaming. He could not ask. In most things she was his beloved. In this she
was his king.

o0o

Senenmut dreamed again of the living palace that was the
image of this one in the land of the dead. He dreamed again, and yet again, of
the king who lived in that palace. Simple dreams, harmless dreams, dreams of
the king at rest and at the labor of his rule. They were rather dull, as dreams
went.

Hatshepsut, as if to counter that dullness, dreamed horrors.
She could not elude sleep. If she tried, it came on her while she sat listening
to the singers or watching the dancers or hearing the gods’ praises.

She did once, in a moment of great weakness, betray to
Senenmut a little of what she dreamed. “Darkness,” she said. “Darkness
absolute. Nothingness. To be blind, deafened, sunk in oblivion—not to be…to be
nothing. Nothing at all. That—is what—”

He stopped her before she said more. She was dreaming of
death. True death. Death of the soul, with no life after.

It was a horror of most peculiar potency in this place to
which her strength of wit and will had brought her. Her body was preserved as
it must be for eternity. Her name was written everywhere that a name could be
written, that no one might forget it. Her self was safe, her soul secure in its
palace in the Field of Flowers. She had nothing to fear.

And yet she feared. She dreamed, and woke raw-throated with
screaming.

The wise among the dead knew no cure for ill dreams. Such
were not a malady of the dead. Senenmut, in the company of his faithful mare,
sought out the most ancient of them all, one by one, even some so ancient that
only the loremasters remembered their names. None had any help to offer.

Hatshepsut was sinking. Preposterous to think that of one
who was dead and therefore, one should imagine, free of such mortal frailty,
but there was no other way to perceive it. She was like a woman dying of a
nameless malady.

Her strength was fading. Her eyes had grown dull. She seemed
somehow transparent, as if the fabric of her being had frayed. Invocation of
her name strengthened her for a little while, but it was not enough.

“There is one thing,” said a king of vast antiquity and
remarkable freshness of face, like a youth just come to manhood. Senenmut had
found him tilling a field of barley by the banks of a river of light, with a
white ox yoked to his plow, and a golden goad. It seemed to be a kind of
ritual, or a habit of such long standing that even he could not remember why he
did it.

He was not displeased to pause, nor unduly perturbed to be
approached by an obvious commoner, a soft-bodied, shaven-headed scribe dressed
in the fashion of the most recent dead. “It might be,” he said when he had heard
Senenmut out, “that someone in the land of the living is casting ill fortune on
your king’s memory.”

“But,” said Senenmut, “what mortal is strong enough to touch
her even here, among the dead who are blessed?”

The ancient king shrugged. “The gods know. You could ask
them.”

Senenmut shivered. He had never approached a god here. It
was not that the gods discouraged petitioners—quite the opposite. There were
throngs of souls about every divinity who wandered in the Otherworld. But most
of those souls were royal souls. Senenmut was a commoner. To approach a god,
even on a king’s behalf…

While Senenmut pondered, the ancient king had gone back to
his plowing. Senenmut thanked him as was proper. He did not seem to hear, or to
remember that Senenmut had spoken to him.

o0o

The land of the dead was full of gods, now that Senenmut
took time to notice. They seemed to be everywhere, surrounded by sycophants,
doing nothing in particular, except for those whose task it was to rule the
dead.

Osiris sat in his grave-wrappings in his hall of judgment.
Senenmut watched him oversee the weighing of a man’s heart. The heart weighed
far too light on the scale of Justice. The man’s soul, appalled, shrieking
curses and prayers and promises of anything, everything, if only he could
escape, was fed feet first to the Eater of Souls.

The great beast belched thunderously and eyed Senenmut as if
it might fancy a final morsel. He fled.

Anubis the Guide, jackal-headed and jackal-quick, was
herding a flock of souls to the judgment. Senenmut could not come close enough
to ask his counsel, let alone to win an answer.

Great Ra in his mantle of light was walking by the river, as
he did every day of this afterlife, resting from his journey through the lands
of the living. Surely he of all gods would know best what mortal man worked
spells of torment on a king who was dead. But kings surrounded him. Queens
waited on him. Senenmut despaired of ever gaining his ear.

Senenmut wandered away up the river, with his mare walking
dejectedly at his side. What god would ever stop to listen to the likes of him?
What god would care, even if he heard what Senenmut had to ask?

Out of sight of the bark of Ra but still in the sphere of
his light, Senenmut stopped and sat on a stone. The mare dropped her head to
graze. He gazed blindly at the river, at the bright fish that leaped there,
pursuing dragonflies that were spirits of the dead.

A cat came walking out of the tall grasses. At first she was
only a movement in the comer of Senenmut’s eye. He glanced at her without
thinking. She was a sleek cat, small as his mare was small, with delicate feet
and a long, elegant tail. She stalked directly to Senenmut and sprang into his
lap and began to wash her paws.

He was not ready, quite, to see her as a portent. Cats were
their own creatures here as in any other place. He smoothed her fur with his
hand, finding it soft, like sleep.

But she was wide awake. She left off bathing to lean into
his hand. He rubbed her ears. She began to purr.

After a while he wearied of stroking her and let his hand
fall. He sighed. If the dead could die, then Hatshepsut was dying. “And I don’t
know what to do,” he said. “I don’t know at all.”

“You could,” said the cat, “finish scratching my left ear.”

Senenmut started. Of course animals could talk here, if it
suited them. It did not suit his mare, but clearly it suited this cat.

He did as she bade him. Cats, as every Egyptian knows, are
all goddesses, all faces of Bastet. One should always oblige a goddess.

“Ah,” she said, “that’s better.” She yawned and stretched.
Her claws just pricked his thighs under his kilt.

He expected her to leap down then, since she had got what
she wanted. But she stayed in his lap, blinking her big yellow eyes at him,
until he said, “If madam has any further wishes, madam has only to ask.”

The cat yawned. “I know a thing,” she said.

Senenmut’s brows rose.

“You could ask,” said the cat after a while, “what it is
that I know.”

Her claws had tightened on his thigh. He drew a careful
breath. “What does madam know?”

“Madam knows,” said the cat, “that a certain king is ill,
here where no illness should be. And madam knows that the king has cause to be
ill.”

Senenmut’s breath had begun to come faster. If his heart had
been in his breast and not in a jar beside his body in its tomb, it too would
have beat a quicker rhythm. “Would madam please to name that cause?”

“I might,” said the cat, leaping from his lap. His leg stung
where she had sunk her claws. She walked away from him, tail high and
delicately curled at the tip.

Almost he failed the test. Almost he let her go. But she was
walking, not bounding through the tall grass as a cat might who goes about its
own business. She meant, surely, for him to follow. He thrust himself up from
the stone and hastened after her. The mare trotted after him, snatching a last
mouthful of grass for the journey.

The cat did not lead them far. She followed the river’s
bank, then turned somewhat away from it, toward a hill of stones that might, in
time long past, have been a king’s palace. Now it was only rubble and broken
walls with grass growing on them.

A falcon perched on a crumbling jut of wall. Senenmut’s eye
met the falcon’s. The bird blinked once, slowly, and spread its wings.

Senenmut bowed low, even to the ground. Lord Horus mantled
and took wing into the vault of the sky.

Much heartened and a little afraid, Senenmut looked back
toward the cat. She was gone.

His heart sank. Then he saw the flick of a tail, the passage
of a supple sand-brown body among the sand-brown stones. He scrambled after
her.

Just as he came level with her, she halted so quickly that
he tripped and fell sprawling. The world spun away from him. As in a dream, or
an image painted on a wall, he saw the cat, and the mare standing stiff with
alarm, and the hard flat vault of heaven beyond the stones of the wall.

He fell, and fell without ending—fell down and down into a
swooping dark.

There had been an opening in the wall, he remembered dimly,
and perhaps a stair. He spared an imprecation for the treachery of cats.

He struck bottom at last with force that would have
shattered bones if he had been a living man. Even as it was, it was a whirling
while before he could see, and longer before he comprehended where he was.

Walls. Pillars. A mingling of deep gloom and sudden brightness.

The gloom was shadow under a lofty roof. The brightness was
sunlight lancing through the pillars. He knew the shape and placement of them—knew
them as he knew his own hands. He had built them, he and all the king’s workmen,
raising her temple to the glory of her name.

He was lying on his back. He was not, as he had half
expected, in the form of a
ba
-spirit,
human-headed, bird-bodied. The shape he wore was his own, kilt and all—his
ka
, the strongest of his spirit-selves.
He rose slowly, prepared to count bruises, but there were none. Of course. He
was dead. The dead could not suffer the ills of the living.

Unless the dead were Hatshepsut, and were dying in the place
where death, once having come, did not return.

Voices rang beyond the pillars. Senenmut knew the sound of
chisel on stone. There was a crash, a chorus of shouting.

What, were they building anew in the temple that he had
raised for his king?

“Go and see,” said the cat.

She was sitting at the base of a pillar, tail curled neatly
around her paws. She seemed a solid creature, a living cat, with even a ring in
her ear, a gleam of gold in the gloom. But he saw the light of the goddess on
her.

He bowed to her. “I regret,” he said, “that I thought—”

“Oh, I am treacherous,” said the cat. “That’s true enough.
But not now. Go and see what they do to your king.”

Alarm blared in him at that. He ran toward the light.

It was splendid. Blinding. Sheer raw sunlight in the land of
the living, unsoftened by the magic of the dead. He blinked in it, dazzled,
weeping with the splendor of it.

But even as he wept, he strained to see what he must see.

There were men swarming on the outer face of his temple, men
with hammers, with chisels, with ladders. Even as he stood on the edge of the
light, one scaled the mighty image of the king that stood nearest to Senenmut,
and set chisel to the carved and painted eye, and with the hammer drove it
home. He struck out the eyes of the king, as one below effaced her name.

They were doing it all through the temple—all through the
Two Lands. They were putting out her eyes. They were casting down her images.
They were hacking out the name of Maatkare Hatshepsut and carving that of Menkheperre
Thutmose.

A low wail wound about Senenmut. It was his own voice, his
own cry of horror and despair. Terrible things he had expected; cursings, ill-wishings,
pure mean human envy of the woman who had dared to call herself a king.

But this.

This was more than hate. This was murder. This was destruction
of all that Hatshepsut had been. In blinding her images, in effacing her name,
they were unmaking her. They were destroying her soul. They were slaying all
that she had ever been, even to her memory.

The doer of it, the unmaker, sat on the palanquin that had
been hers, wore the Two Crowns that she had worn, held the crook and the flail
as she had held them, in strong small hands. His long eyes, drawn longer with
lapis and malachite and kohl, were smiling as he watched his workmen. They swarmed
as locusts will, destroying all they touched—all that had been Hatshepsut.

Senenmut sprang upon the workman nearest him and seized the
hand that held the chisel. The man never paused. Senenmut’s strength was no
greater than a whisper of wind, his voice nothing to these living men, not even
a fly’s buzzing. He was spirit only, bereft of flesh. He was powerless.

He raged and wept. He whirled about Thutmose’s palanquin.
The wind indulged him, raised a flurry of dust, but the king’s servants merely
raised the screens to keep it out. The king knew nothing but a moment’s
inconvenience.

“Why?” Senenmut shouted at him—for all the good it did; for
all the power he had to make anyone hear him. “What did she ever do to you?”

“She was king,” said the cat.

Senenmut spun. The cat had followed him into the sunlight.
People could see her: the servants eyed her askance, but did not drive her off.

She ignored them. “She was king, and he—though she let him
hold the title—was not.”

“But,” said Senenmut, “twenty years…he never tried…”

“No?” said the cat. “She died rather young, when you think
about it. He might have helped her. He’s a brooder, you know. Twenty years of
waiting for her to get tired of playing king and let him have what was his to
begin with—that was twenty years of deciding exactly how he was going to avenge
himself on her when he was king.”