Sovereign of Stars (24 page)

She arrived at the raised stone lip of the lake and
paused, waiting for her servant to offer a hand. Neferure stepped
lightly onto the stone. Her sandals were polished silver, chased
across the upturned toe, and a collection of bracelets at her ankle
chimed gently, a coy counterpoint to the slap of water against the
boat’s hull. She lowered herself carefully into the boat, sinking
with her customary light, natural grace to the cushions. Thutmose’s
man on the shore cast off the line, and the boat drifted toward the
center of the lake, carrying the two into privacy.

Neither spoke. Neferure watched Thutmose with shy,
dark eyes, painted with the alluring, metallic shimmer of the
crushed carapaces of sacred beetles. The light danced around her
eyes, which said all that her lips did not. He took in her fragile
beauty, her retiring gentleness, in contented silence.
I could
look at you for hours and never mind the passage of time,
he
wanted to say. But he did not wish to break the beguiling
silence.

When the boat found the center of the lake and
rotated idly in a chance breeze, Thutmose recalled the work at
hand. He cleared his throat, and Neferure looked away, her lashes
lowering like a modest fan obscuring a court woman’s face.

“You enjoyed your time in Iunet, I trust.”

A smile lit her face, so sudden it made the breath
catch in his chest. “Oh, yes, Majesty. I will be forever grateful
for your gift.” Then the smile faded, and a queer intensity flooded
her face, an expression tense with the weight of momentous
expectation.

Thutmose’s thoughts fumbled about inside his heart.
He recalled the mystery of her face as she gazed up at him from the
side of the white bull, recalled the ribbons of the God’s Wife
crown dancing about her shoulders. Here were those same shoulders
before him now, bared to the sun, adorned by red ribbons that held
up a strange white gown. It covered the swell of her small breasts
against all dictates of current fashion, and was closer in style to
a priestess’s robe than a great lady’s sheath. The fabric of it was
enticingly sheer, so that he could see the color of her skin
beneath it, but no detail of her body.

“Well,” Thutmose said, flustered. “Well. I have
brought you here to ask…to tell you…” Inwardly, he cursed himself
for a fool. In the three weeks since Hatshepsut had been gone from
Waset, he had accounted himself well, handling the court and the
throne with an alacrity that at first surprised him, then seemed
only natural, only maat. Was he not the Pharaoh, after all? But
here, before the shy gaze of his sister, his confidence and his
words failed him. He drew a steadying breath and tried again. “I
would make you,” he said in a voice that sounded far more confident
than he felt, “my Great Royal Wife.”

Neferure stared at him, her expression
unreadable.

“If you would have it,” he added weakly.

“Great Royal Wife,” she repeated, her voice faint,
considering. Then her eyes sharpened, and she leaned toward him on
her cushions, as hawkish as her mother ever was in negotiation with
ambassadors or nobles. “But the Pharaoh has already made me heir.
The other Pharaoh, I mean – Maatkare. A Pharaoh’s proclamation
cannot be undone, brother.”

Thutmose sat up straight. A sudden quiver of
excitement came to life in his belly, a trembling of power he had
not felt before on his throne, at the reins of his chariot,
training with his soldiers. “It can be undone by me. I am a Pharaoh
– as much as Pharaoh as she.”

“My mother will be angry.” The prospect did not seem
to displease her.

“Only at first. When she sees the reason of it she
will understand.”

“The reason of it?”

“There is no woman in the Two Lands as fit to bear
an heir as you, Neferure. Both your mother and your father have
ruled from the Horus Throne, and your mother was sired by Amun
himself.”

“Yes,” Neferure said quietly, that curious intensity
lighting her face once more.

“What is more maat – that a woman such as you, with
your breeding, your blood,
be
the heir, or
bear
the
heir? Our child,” he said, low and urgent, “will have more royalty
and more divinity than any man who has ever lived. The gods mean
this, Neferure. Look into your heart – you will see it.”

She breathed deeply; her eyes fluttered closed,
sparkling in the sunlight reflected from the surface of the lake. A
rising joy seemed to suffuse her, coursing along her skin until she
visibly trembled.

She sees it,
Thutmose thought, half frantic,
half afraid, entirely eager.

“I will,” she said at last. “It is maat. At last,
maat will be served.”

And before he could speak another word, Neferure
reached up to the red ribbons at her shoulders, loosed the ties.
Her gown fell to her waist, exposing in one rapid, ragged heartbeat
the smoothness of her chest, the slimness of her body, the dark
shadow of her navel, the sweet, ripe fruit of her breasts.
Stop;
go slowly
, a voice cautioned in Thutmose’s heart, but he was
already moving toward her. His hands found her, reached to trail
along the hollow of her back until she arched, gasping. He bent his
head to take her breast into his mouth, and her cry of pleasure was
filled with a wild ecstasy.

Thutmose had never seen such eagerness in a woman
before, not in any of his harem concubines, though they never
failed to please him. Neferure was something different altogether.
She fumbled at her gown, tore it from her hips, then went for his
kilt with her nails flashing. Thutmose shied back, undid the knot
himself. When he stretched her along the cushions, down in the warm
hull of the boat, she clawed at his shoulders, pulled him to her
body, raised to meet him, her legs locking around his hips with a
force he never dreamed the small, delicate girl could command.

When he entered her, whimpering, yoked and trembling
under the power of her passion, she whispered a word in his ear.
Her breath was hot with the sound of it.

Maat.

**

The king and the King’s Daughter summoned Ahmose two
days after their union. She was not surprised. In fact, she
expected the summons sooner; gossip concerning the event on the
palace lake reached her well before Thutmose’s brief letter
informing her that Neferure had accepted his offer and would soon
be declared Great Royal Wife. She sat limp in the shade of a
sycamore, Thutmose’s papyrus curling on her lap. She watched the
gardeners go about their business of weeding and watering with
unseeing eyes, puzzling at her sudden despondency.

I have done wrong, somehow, somewhere.
Yet
the gods would not elaborate, and Ahmose still felt a thrill of
certainty that this marriage was right. She had told Hatshepsut
once that even the god-chosen could not always be sure of divine
will. Hatshepsut had countered that Amun would not allow her to
choose wrongly
. And what of me? Would Amun allow
me
to
choose wrongly? He has before now. Oh, Mut, bless your foolish
daughter. Guide me.

She waited a long time, while the gardeners moved
from row to row, and finally worked their way out of sight, their
bent backs disappearing beyond the dark line of a hedgerow. Mut
stayed silent. Ahmose shook her head, rose briskly from her bench,
braced herself against the dizziness that accompanied such
movements of late.

I am growing old. Gods, so many years have passed
me, and what wisdom did I glean from them?

She recalled Mutnofret in her youth, splendid and
arrogant, swaying through the House of Women as bright and
arresting as a beam of light through a temple door. A sudden
yearning to see her sister again seized her, so sharp it pierced
her heart and would have made her cry out, had its force not stolen
her voice away. Did Mutnofret still live? Ahmose did not know.

“Lady?” One of her servants left her spinning lying
on the grass and stepped quickly to Ahmose’s side, steadying her
sway with a strong young arm around her shoulders. “Are you
well?”

“Yes, yes, Tenetsai. It is only the heat.”

“I’ll fetch you some cold beer, Lady.”

Ahmose stepped away from her on steadier legs. “Very
good. And lay out a better gown than this one, if you would be so
kind. The king has summoned me, and I must go to him.”

An hour later she was admitted again to the king’s
fine chambers, and swept inside on a tide of firm
self-admonishments that she was god-chosen, she had been a Great
Royal Wife once herself, consort to a god, and was surely no fool,
no matter how adamantly her beating heart said otherwise. Thutmose
and Neferure rose to receive her, then settled again onto one of
the fine couches, huddled close as only two children in love may
do. Neferure held tight to Thutmose’s hand, a soft, dreamy glow
pinking her skin. Thutmose looked at Ahmose with a somewhat
bewildered gaze.

“I was pleased to hear your news, Majesty.”

“Yes. It is a great thing.”

“And Neferure – you are amenable to this?”

“Amenable, Grandmother?” Neferure laughed sweetly.
“Of course.”

“It is nothing to be undertaken lightly. The mantle
of Great Royal Wife is a heavy one.”

“I know it. I supposed as much. But it is an
opportunity, too – one I cannot pass by.”

“An opportunity?”

“I learned so many things in Iunet, Grandmother – so
many wonderful things. If I am Great Royal Wife, I will have the
freedom to restore Hathor to her former glory: all her temples, all
her rites. I will spread the love of Hathor throughout the Two
Lands, and it will be as it was long ago.”

Many people, even in the royal family, had their
particular preferences among the gods. There was nothing unusual
about a woman devoting herself wholeheartedly to Hathor, who was,
after all, the paramount of women. But the fervency of Neferure’s
devotion stirred Ahmose’s vague sense of uneasiness.

“You will still be God’s Wife of Amun. On that we
are agreed.” She looked to Thutmose for confirmation, and he
nodded. “You will not neglect your duties to Amun in favor of
Hathor.”

“No.” Neferure spoke the word solemnly, and turned
an intense gaze, full of palpable longing, upon Thutmose. “I will
not neglect any of my duties to Amun.”

Ahmose stood, went to them, took their hands in her
own. “Then I give you my blessing, Majesty, God’s Wife. Not that
you require it – but it is yours.”

They passed an hour in conversation, planning the
marriage rites, which were, at Thutmose’s insistence, to be
announced and enacted in all haste. Ahmose suspected that he hoped
to have a little heir already growing in Neferure’s womb by the
time Hatshepsut returned.
That might stay her anger, some,
Ahmose thought.

When the king dismissed her, Ahmose walked slowly
back to her own apartments. Night was gathering above Waset’s
palace, filling the courtyards with the softness of violet shadows.
From the direction of the ambassadors’ wing, the sound of foreign
music lifted and moved gently through the night-darkened pillars.
The tune was both bright and melancholic, soft and benign. Yet
somehow the sound of the reedy flute filled her with guilt, with
horror. She stopped at the edge of a courtyard, looked about her
with wide eyes. A breeze ruffled the leaves of a climbing vine
winding its way across the porch of an apartment with a tight-shut
door. A cat trotted across the smooth paving stones, slender tail
erect. Ahmose’s women drew up around her, glancing curiously about,
looking for the threat that had stopped their mistress in her
tracks. But only shadows moved in the courtyard, only late-roosting
birds moved in the dusky sky.

“Lady?” Tenetsai said softly.

“Nothing – it is nothing at all,” she said, and led
her women on.

I have stayed too long in Waset,
Ahmose said
sensibly to herself, passing from the courtyard and back into the
deep blue shadow of a pillared hall.
Perhaps I should take to
one of my estates in the country, after all.

Hatshepsut’s wrath would be terrible when she
returned from Punt to find her careful plans undone, no matter that
a Pharaoh was the one who undid them. Ahmose had played a part, and
she would be blamed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Five boats set out from Tjau. They were made from
planks of a lightweight wood, well lacquered with wax and oil,
lashed one to the other by ropes of some rough, pale fiber. Lengths
of rope mortared the cracks between planks, too. Ineni had
explained to Hatshepsut how the fibers would swell in the sea
water, packing the space between the planks until the hull became
watertight. Hatshepsut did not quite trust the engineering, and yet
the boats did float. They floated perhaps too well, yielding to any
small movement, rolling violently on their bowl-shaped bellies with
the passing of each wave. And thousands upon thousands of waves
came and went, came and went, as the little fleet made its rocking
way along the red coastline south from the isolated port. No ship
on the Iteru ever sailed so roughly – not even in the cataracts.
Hatshepsut braced herself against the nausea of the motion. Most
days she was able to keep her water and dried fish in her
stomach.

They put ashore each evening at sunset, camping
gratefully on solid land that still seemed to pitch with the
fearsome memory of the angry sea. The shore was a wilderness,
showing no signs of human use. Her expedition raised tents whose
linen walls felt entirely too thin against the vastness of the
untamed land. Every night she brought into her tent a certain gift
from the governor of Tjau: Bita-Bita, a young woman of the port
town whose mother had come originally from Punt. Bita-Bita did have
the dark skin the people of the fabled god’s land were reputed to
have; Hatshepsut had no cause to doubt that the girl was authentic.
Bita-Bita’s now-dead mother had taught the girl the Puntite tongue
from the cradle, and she still spoke it passably well, as far as
she could tell, having never ventured outside of Tjau. It would
suffice. It must suffice; Bita-Bita was the only Puntite speaker
that could be located, even by Ineni, though he had assured her
that trade could still be accomplished using nothing but
hand-signs, if necessary.