Sovereign of Stars (23 page)

“Bring me food – bread and beer. Meat, if there is
any.”

The girl ran to do her bidding. Neferure listened to
the sound of her retreating footsteps, and when silence filled the
temple again, she shut her eyes to remember the vision.

A god will fill me in truth,
she said within
the quiet of her heart, and the joy of the knowledge weakened her
legs anew.

She turned to offer her thanks to the aspect of
Hathor that had guided her. The light streaming through the open
door penetrated the shrine with a shaft of brilliant gold. It fell
upon the painting of the goddess on the shrine’s far wall: the
lion-headed one, grinning her feral smile, teeth flashing like
daggers as she strode through a river of blood.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The dawn came red, a rising swell on the eastern
horizon. Hatshepsut stood in the door of her tent and watched
morning break. The living sun cast a ruddy mantle on the world
below. The line of cliffs to the north, the rank of rocky hills to
the south, and beyond them, in the cruxes of their hunched
shoulders, an endless expanse of dunes – all were like carnelian
stone, luminescent and burnished in the blood-red light. Her bare
feet sank into sand. It, too, was red, a powder so fine it worked
its way into the cracks of her skin, dried her out, roughened all
she touched with the faint trace of desert dust.

It is no wonder the gods have named this place
the Red Land,
she mused, brushing her hands together to clear
them of the powdery sand. Her efforts made no difference. In
moments her hands would be coated again.
Everything is the color
of blood.

As the sun shrugged itself free of the horizon,
Hatshepsut became aware of a deep violet haze hanging below the
dawn’s glow.
The sea.
They would reach it by evening – at
last, after a week of trudging through the Red Land. She had sailed
her fleet upriver one day’s journey from Waset to the place where
the river bends. There she moored and met with a fleet of a
different sort: an overland one, made of donkeys and men in vast
numbers, strong men with broad backs to tote the light poles and
linens that would become her tents, to carry uncountable skins full
of tepid water, to carry great woven baskets upon their shoulders
bearing to Punt vast measures of Kushite gold and Egyptian
turquoise, and which would, she hoped, fill with the exotic
treasures of Punt for the trek back to Waset. They had set out
eastward, at first following the flat plane of an ancient trade
route, a depression through the desert sands barely visible to the
untrained eye. Ineni had hired the best and most experienced desert
navigators the king’s wealth could buy; within hours of walking the
faint track, it led them between two low lines of hills, ridges of
deep red rock against which the sand lay in great soft heaps. The
hills turned to cliffs, and the track became a broad, long-dry
wash, not unlike the one she had ridden between Ta-Seti and Kush,
years before when her blood had been as hot and fierce as the
desert itself. The wash went on for spans uncountable, for days,
and Hatshepsut’s expedition followed it under the guidance of
Ineni’s navigators.

Nehesi had taken a great liking to those navigators,
learning the secrets of desert travel from them and chattering back
what he’d learned to Hatshepsut, secrets of finding the rare seeps
that held water far below the sand, clever ways to trace the flight
of birds to rare patches of greenery where leaves and roots could
be chewed and sucked for moisture. Nehesi seemed to thrive on
desert travel; in no time at all, he had grown to love the long
mornings of trudging through deep sand, the afternoons crouched and
dozing beneath dust-stained linen shades through the worst of the
daytime heat. He loved the evenings, too, when the expedition would
strike its temporary encampments, roll the linens and poles onto
the bearers’ backs, dole out a few mouthfuls of water to each man
and each beast, and head into the gathering night to walk until the
moon was setting.

Nehesi loved it, but Hatshepsut despised it. Late
mornings were a torment, an unbearable slog with sweat coursing
down her back, running into her eyes and stinging until her vision
clouded with tears. She would force herself onward until she could
tolerate the heat no more, and then would call a halt and fall,
grateful but uncomfortable, into the wan shade of her makeshift
tent. At least the night walks were cooler, but the hours allotted
for sleep were too few, and she was soon plagued by headaches and
the shakiness of exhaustion.

We will reach the sea tonight, thanks be to
Amun.
She could press on for one more day.

Senenmut emerged from his tent, separated from
Hatshepsut for propriety’s sake but pitched nearby in case his lady
should call on her steward. Her lips cracked as she smiled at him,
aware it was the first she had smiled at anyone in days of
trekking. The violet horizon cheered her. Her goal was within
sight. Senenmut ambled over, kicking his feet in the sand, and
bowed to her.

“Great Lady.”

“Do you see it, Senenmut?” She pointed eastward.

“Ah! It is the sea, unless it’s another cruel
illusion made by the gods.”

Those illusions had tormented Hatshepsut at first,
those green shimmers in the near distance, a wavering in the air as
of the humidity above a fresh, cool garden. Ineni’s navigators had
warned her that the gardens were but a trick of the eyes, and soon
Hatshepsut had taken to cursing their sight as she sucked her spare
mouthfuls of musty water from her drinking-skin.

“It’s not an illusion. Oh, Senenmut, won’t it be
wonderful to see the water again? I miss the Iteru.”

“I miss it all – the Iteru, cold water, fresh food.
Our wheat cakes have gone stale, and I have never liked the taste
of dried fish.”

“I would wrestle a man for a fresh melon.”

“Had I any melons hiding under my wig, I’d take you
up on that.”

Hatshepsut laughed. She pulled her own wig from her
head and ran her hand over her hair. Natural hair, unshaven –
something she hadn’t experienced since she still wore the side-lock
of childhood. The growth was not much more than stubble, but still
she had forgotten how it felt, tickling against her scalp, the nape
of her neck.

“Leave it on,” Senenmut warned. “The sun will be
well up soon, and without something on your head you’ll catch
heat-sickness.”

“Yes, Mawat.” She replaced the wig while Senenmut
affected a scowl.

Ineni approached from the direction of his tent.
Hatshepsut had worried about the old steward, thinking the journey
too trying for a man of his years. The week in the desert had
thinned him, so that the skin hung more loosely from his deep-lined
face, but he had held his own admirably, often striding alongside
Nehesi, engrossed in conversation.

“Great Lady,” Ineni said, bowing. “Are you ready to
strike camp? The navigators estimate that we will reach the port of
Tjau by early evening.”

“I am more than ready,” she said.

From somewhere in the encampment a donkey brayed,
its grating voice sounding clear and close in the dry dawn air. The
murmur of men’s voices came to her, the clack of poles being
bundled together.

Hatshepsut clapped her hands, and raised her voice
to the morning. “Break camp, men! Tonight we meet the sea!”

**

The expedition marched into the port town of Tjau to
the cheers and acclaim of its meager population. Tjau was a distant
outpost in the vast Egyptian territory, and had little care for
proper Egyptian culture. Rather than kilts and linen gowns, men and
women alike wore simple tunics of coarse wool, and kept their heads
unshaven and unwigged, though close-cropped. Their deep, rich
complexions and broad faces indicated their Puntite heritage; these
people were descended from the god’s land. The fact of it buoyed
Hatshepsut’s kas. It seemed a good omen.

Tjau, being remote and far removed from the
Pharaoh’s benevolence, was a poor holding. Its governor had little,
and so Hatshepsut did not require a feast, but accepted his
obeisance with good grace and his offerings of fresh meat and fruit
with eagerness. She took the small tribute of Tjau to her
encampment at the edge of the town, and sat in the confines of her
tent reveling in the taste of melon juice on her tongue. The water
in her cup was cold and fresh and tasted lightly of a mineral
saltiness. She drank it greedily until her belly protested.

When she felt rested, she emerged into her night
camp, happy at the sound of men laughing. The air was dense with
humidity, a familiar feeling reminiscent of home. It lifted the
spirits of her men. She breathed deep; the smell of the sea
clutched at her senses with a compelling force, an odor of clean
air and faint decay, of sharp salt and the pale skin of fishes. Its
movement made a continual susurrus in the night-time, a soothing
sound.

She found Ineni passing through the crowd, a skewer
of goat’s meat in his hand, and called to him.

“Great Lady. Try the meat; it is well spiced.”

“Thank you, no. I had my fill in my tent. Walk with
me; I would see the water.”

She summoned Nehesi, and Senenmut came along with
her guardsman, for they had been engaged in a game of dice and an
earnest discussion of the problems of desert warfare. They walked
together through the camp, past the place where the donkeys stood
tethered in rows, switching their tails against the small,
persistent flies of the seaside, their shaggy heads buried happily
in heaps of cut grass and scatters of grain. A rocky strand led out
to the hard-packed sand of the shore. South of where they stood,
the poor buildings of Tjau flickered with torch fires and rare
spots of lamp light, burning in the high, narrow windows of the
mudbrick houses.

A cluster of torches bobbed near the shoreline like
a flock of waterfowl on the Iteru. Ineni pointed toward them. “The
men I hired, Great Lady. They are making ready to assemble the
ships in the morning.”

He had told her of the process before they’d even
set out from Waset. The port of Tjau was full of clever
ship-builders, who could piece together great boats as a child
assembles a wooden puzzle. Hatshepsut’s gut quivered with worry.
Ships were solid, enduring things. She had been uncertain in her
throne room, when Ineni had delineated his plans, that piecemeal
boats could carry her safely to Punt and back. Now, as she stood
listening to the sea move restlessly in the night, her uncertainty
tipped closer to fear.

The calm, cool air of the seaside was a relief from
the ferocious heat of the Red Land – ah, no mistake in that. But
the sea itself turned out to be a beast just as fearsome as the
desert. She had envisioned another Iteru: wider and deeper, to be
sure, but with gentle, lapping waves, the kind children may swim in
on a Shemu day. The reality was sobering. It pitched constantly in
the starlight, each wave a sharp tooth in a black mouth, tipped by
a cold white glow. Nearer, where the water met the shore, it curled
in cascades that chased one another down the strand, and the
violence of its movement set froth to churning, leaving webs of
white behind that dissipated from the surface of the gravel.

“Can their boats truly carry us all that way,
Ineni?”

“It has been done before, Great Lady.”

“Not for many generations.”

Nehesi slapped his hands against his broad hard
stomach, as if preparing for a much-anticipated feast. “Have you
lost your taste for adventure, Great Lady? Why, I recall a girl of
seventeen years who kicked the Pharaoh out the back of a chariot
and raced against the Kushites. Surely that girl is not so far
away.”

Hatshepsut squinted at him. The starlight limned his
features, the bull-strength of him, the eager gleam in his eye.
“Perhaps I should give this expedition over to you,” she said. “You
are so hungry for adventure, after all.”

“Ah!” He laughed. “You could make me a chancellor. I
like the sound of that.”

“Very well,” Hatshepsut said, grasping at the
suggestion, absurdly grateful for the distraction from her growing
fears. “You are my chancellor, and if you keep our toy boats
together, and bring me to Punt and back still in my own skin, the
gods will never forget your great deed.”

“
Chancellor
Nehesi. Do you hear that,
Senenmut?” He pounded Senenmut on the shoulder, and the steward
winced. “Watch yourself, or you may find yourself deposed.
Great
Steward
Nehesi has an even prettier ring to it.”

“Remember,” Hatshepsut said, “you still must keep me
alive until we return to Waset.”

“An easy thing.”

“We should rest, Great Lady.” Senenmut bobbed his
head at her elbow, and she recognized her own anxiety in the
tightness of his voice. “Ineni tells me that the boats will be
sea-worthy by tomorrow afternoon. We must set out then. It has been
a long walk across the desert. We all need a good night’s
rest.”

Sea-worthy.
She gazed out at the waves for
another long moment. Their incessant clamor, their sharpness and
single-mindedness, brought to her heart the image of a lioness
clawing doggedly at a small creature’s rocky den.
Have I
overstepped myself? Have I reached too far in my desperation to
retain my throne?

But no. No – Punt was Amun’s own land, full of all
the sweet perfumes and beauties that appeased the god. He would not
allow her to reach too far. He – and Nehesi – would see her home
safe again.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Thutmose counseled himself to lay back calmly on his
cushions as Neferure approached the palace lake. He lay in his
two-person replica of the great pleasure barges, reclining against
his rich silks as he watched her come, making her quiet, careful
way down the garden path. Her entourage of women trailed her, four
of them holding aloft a bright red sun-shade. In its warm shadow
her face was demurely downturned, her eyes shyly on the gravel of
the path. Fan-bearers flanked her, stirring the air, and a harpist
trailed the lot, plucking a sweet and soothing melody. Even gazing
at her feet, she was fine as an artist’s carving, smooth-polished
and delicate. Her two weeks in Iunet seemed to have lent a glow to
her cheeks, a secret, confident happiness that Thutmose had never
seen in his sister before.