Sphinx's Princess (36 page)

He cocked one eyebrow. “You have a strange idea of being ‘all right,’ Nefertiti.”

“But I
will
be once your parents come back; we both know it. And when that happens, I—I’d like it very much if you and I could make a new beginning.”

“I’d like nothing better.” He went to the door of my prison and gave orders. I heard a scurry of retreating feet
and, before too long, the sound of them returning. A guardsman came in carrying my heavy stone scribal palette, my pen case and burnisher, and several rolls of papyrus. I welcomed them like long-lost friends and laid out one papyrus sheet right away. Thutmose watched me work diligently, scraping the nubbly surface smooth with the burnisher, and didn’t even try to hide his amusement.

“Such obsession! You
are
a sorceress: I’ve been turned invisible,” he teased. “Once you’ve got your writing tools in hand, you don’t need anyone’s company, do you?”

I looked up. “I’ll always need my friends.”

“Like my brother,” he said softly, kneeling beside me.

“And Henenu, and Sitamun, and—” I gazed into his eyes and remembered how he’d freed me from the obligation to marry him. I recalled how he’d stood up for me against the priests at my trial.
Where he pronounced your death sentence!
a fierce voice whispered in my mind.
Where he
delayed
it, too
, I replied.
Even a stone can soften. I want to give him a chance to show me that he’s changed.

I set aside the scraper and clasped his hand. “And you.”

His fingers closed warmly around mine for an instant before he let go again. “What an honor, to be included in such company. I don’t know how to thank you for this.”

“Thutmose—” I hesitated for an instant.
I want to trust you. I want to believe you
can
be my friend, that you’ll make sure this message reaches my family, that perhaps you’ve even got the power to let me receive word
from
them at last, after all this time!
“Thutmose, could I have visitors? Please?”

“Visitors …” I thought I saw a flicker of the old, mistrustful look in his eyes, but it vanished in the flash of a grin
before I could be sure. “Of course. Why not? I’ll arrange it; however”—he grew thoughtful—“I think that it should be only my sister, at first. You heard the chief priest: He believes you cast a spell over Amenophis. He’d probably suspect the same if you were allowed to have any male visitors.”

“Except you,” I joked. “My ‘evil’ magic can’t touch you, O prince!”

“Don’t be so sure of that,” he said, and kissed me.

My lips were still burning when he left. I sat there, staring at the door, trying to make sense of everything that I was feeling. It all turned into tangles in my head. At last I made myself put it aside and concentrated on preparing the papyrus for my message home.

I was still working on the letter when a servant came in with food and fresh water. He also brought me a short-handled ostrich plume fan. “From Prince Thutmose, for the heat of the day,” he said, bowing. I asked him to wait until I finished writing to my family, then told him to take the finished message to his master. “He’ll know what to do.” I spent the rest of that day wandering from daydreams of freedom to the maze of events from the previous night. Bits and pieces of memory nagged at me, insisting,
Something in all this makes no sense, something is wrong! You must discover it or—

But then I would stir the heavy air with Thutmose’s beautiful gift, and inhale the fragrance of the dying roses, and remember his kiss, and fall back into daydreams.

Much later that day, when the shadow grew long and the light in my lone, narrow window turned from gold to amber, my door swung open and an armed guard
announced, “Her royal highness, beloved of Amun, great in beauty, Princess Sitamun.” He scarcely finished speaking before my friend pushed past him and hugged me to her so fiercely that it squeezed me breathless.

Then she let me go and began to curse. It was amazing to hear her. Where did a royal princess learn such language? The guard was just as dumbstruck as I, and a second guard leaned against the doorpost to gawk as well. Sitamun’s stream of fiery words was overwhelming, vicious, and thorough. She named no names—only “he”—but the unknown object of her fury was doomed to all sorts of sickness, accident, disfigurement, misery, and affliction while he lived, and condemned to be the prey of every demon and agony that the Afterlife could provide after he was dead.

Her blind rage was terrifying and fascinating, so much so that it was only after she fell silent that I noticed the guards had shut the door to my prison and that Sitamun wasn’t my only visitor that evening. Wide-eyed and quivering like a cornered rabbit, Nava peeked up at me from behind the princess. Her little hands clutched a leather bag.

“Nefertiti?” Her voice had lost its rough, unused edge. It was just an ordinary child’s voice now but sweeter than any music to me.

“Oh, Nava!” I knelt and opened my arms. She dropped the bag and was on me in an instant, babbling my name over and over, begging me to tell her that everything was going to be all right.

“Shhh, don’t worry,” I said, patting her back. “Nothing is going to happen to me, unless”—I grinned at Sitamun—“unless
you
ever get angry at me. By Bes, Sitamun, you could
peel the skin off a crocodile with that language! Who’s the unlucky soul that made you
that
mad?”

Her face was flint. “The gods will punish me for my words, but I don’t care: It’s my brother Thutmose.” She spoke his name so low it was almost a whisper.

“Oh, Sitamun, no!” I exclaimed. “You don’t understand.” And I repeated everything that he had told me, all the reasons that excused him for having ordered my death, all the things he was doing to save me. “You know that your father will never permit my execution, and he’s sure to get to the bottom of this when he comes back. If I’m locked up, it’s just to pacify the priests, but I’m in no real danger. Do you see?”

She looked unconvinced, so I added: “Thutmose is—I think he likes me now.”
More than
likes
me
, I thought, and my heart beat a little faster. “He’s doing whatever he can to make my imprisonment comfortable. You wouldn’t be allowed to visit if not for him. And look, he brought me this and sent me that”—I indicated my garland and the feathered fan. “Best of all, he let me have those”—I pointed at my scribe’s tools—“so that at last I could write a letter home that
will
reach my family!”

Sitamun bent to pick up the sack Nava had dropped. She pulled out a wrinkled tattered scrap and handed it to me. It was so mangled that I asked myself why my friend was giving me such a rag. Then I saw my own handwriting and recognized a shred of the letter I’d written with such care and love.

“He was reading this when he sent for me, to tell me I could visit you,” Sitamun said. “By Amun, how he laughed!
When he was through, he tore it to pieces and threw them on the floor. My brother is strong, to be able to tear papyrus like that. Most men wouldn’t make the effort.” She sneered. “I thought I glimpsed your name on one of the scraps, so I asked him what it was. He told me to mind my own business.” Her sneer became a satisfied smile. “So I did. The servant who gathered up the pieces is a little richer for it.”

I closed my eyes. Tears slid down my cheeks. “Nefertiti?” Nava put her arms around my neck. “Don’t cry.”

Sitamun knelt and put her arms around me, too. “Listen to her, my friend. He’s not worth your tears.”

“But why am I worth his hate?” I tore the wreath from my head and threw it at the door. I was about to do the same with the fan, but she grabbed my wrist and stopped me.

“Nefertiti, control yourself,” she murmured. “Throw that and it will attract attention. There are two pairs of ears on the other side of that door, two tattling tongues that are in my brother’s pay. Why do you think I’ve been keeping my voice down? Your life’s in peril because of all the secrets he’s kept from you. Let’s try to keep some from him.”

“Keeping secrets from me is no challenge,” I said bitterly. “I’m easily blinded. The smallest kindness dazzles me, the least bit of attention from a good-looking young man is like a donkey’s kick: It scrambles my brains. I should have suspected him from the moment I saw how perfectly dressed and groomed he was at my trial. Who paints his eyes at that hour of the night? The Amun priests didn’t set my doom in motion; he did. It was right in front of me and I didn’t see it.” I shook my head. “Stupid, stupid,
stupid.”

“You’re
not
stupid,” Nava said staunchly. “Remember
the funny milk we drank? It made me sleepy, and my head was all fuzzy, and I only had a little. You had
lots
more.”

“Funny milk?” Sitamun looked at me quizzically. I told her about another of her brother’s “kindnesses,” sending the old physician Ptah-hotep to my room. “A sleeping potion … no wonder you had trouble speaking in your own defense against that boy’s testimony.”

“Poor Meketre,” I said. “Thutmose must have terrorized him into telling such awful lies.”

“You can save your pity,” Sitamun said. “Meketre acted willingly.”

“Why would he? I don’t know him; I never did anything to him.”

“Not to
him,”
she said. “To his mother. He’s the son of one of the Ugarit women whose conspiracy you discovered.”

“Oh!” Comprehension struck me like a blow. “Was she—was she executed?”

“Exiled. Her friend didn’t fare as well, nor the nobleman who worked with them, but Father was merciful to her, for Meketre’s sake. He divorced her and sent her to the farthest reaches of Nubia as a gift for one of his officials. She might as well be dead, as far as Meketre’s concerned. When Thutmose wanted his help, that boy must have leaped at the chance for revenge.”

“Thutmose must be happy to have a brother who’s like him, for a change,” I said. “No wonder he didn’t challenge any of the holes in Meketre’s testimony.”

My limbs felt suddenly heavy. It wasn’t enough for Thutmose to condemn and imprison me; he’d played
games with me, filling me with hopes he knew were nothing but smoke and dust. And why take such pains to hurt me now, when he’d achieved his dream and had one foot firmly on the steps to the throne? The answers hammered inside my head:

Because you preferred his brother, and how could you do that when he
knows
he’s so much stronger, more handsome, more important than Amenophis? Because your choice wounded his pride. Because Amenophis can never have anything without Thutmose believing it was wrenched away from him, whether he ever wanted it or not. You helped the thief, and now you have to pay.

“Nefertiti?” Nava’s voice shook. “Nefertiti, last night when the nice prince carried me back to our rooms, Kepi asked him what was happening and—and he told her that—that the reason you’re shut up in here is that Ta-Miu is dead. Is it true?”

“Not at all, little bird, I swear it,” I said. If Ma’at couldn’t forgive me for that lie, I didn’t care.

Nava was unconvinced. “I know you’d never hurt her, but someone else who wants you blamed for it could have—have killed …” Her lower lip trembled.

I stilled it with the touch of my finger. “Prince Thutmose loves Ta-Miu very much. He doesn’t like me, but no matter how much he wants to punish me, he would never sacrifice her to do it.”

“Oh. Good.” Nava believed me now. I wished I could believe myself.

Before Sitamun and Nava left me, they emptied the leather bag that had held my ruined letter and gave me a comb, a fresh gown, and a little flask of perfume.

“We’ll bring you more nice things tomorrow,” Nava promised, and kissed me goodbye. She would have thought I was silly if I’d told her that the sound of her restored voice was the nicest gift of all.

I was left alone with my anger and my thoughts. At first, all I could do was imagine all the things I’d like to do to Thutmose for the way he’d deceived me, but once I’d exhausted my nastiest dreams of revenge, I realized that they were never going to happen.
And not just because I haven’t got the strength or the means to accomplish them
, I thought.
If I’d do such things to punish him, then I
become
him, and that is something I must never do.

A servant brought me more food and drink—bread, a pair of roasted quail, a few dates, a jug of weak beer. There was also a note from Thutmose:
Be happy, Nefertiti. The letter to your parents has already left the palace.
I could just picture him saying such lies and felt a fleeting urge to slap them off his lips.

Nefertiti, control yourself.
Sitamun’s words came back to me. I conquered the impulse to throw his note out of my window or into the clay pot on my toilet stool. Instead I tucked it under my sleeping mat, just as if I were still starry-eyed over him.

Let him see it like this the next time he comes here
, I thought, placing it deliberately so that one corner stuck out from under the mat.
He mustn’t discover that I know exactly what he’s done to me. He thinks he’s won, but this little game of Hounds and Jackals isn’t over yet. I swear by Isis, I’ll do everything in my power to outplay him.

I ate my dinner at peace with myself. The light in my window turned scarlet and began to fade. One of my guards came in to kindle my tiny lamp. I knew that its comforting flame wouldn’t last long, so I used its light to write down a question that I needed to ask Sitamun but that I didn’t dare voice where Nava could hear:
How long do I have until he sends me to my death?
It was a reasonable question. Thutmose claimed I was safe until his parents returned, but he’d lied about everything else. I had to know.

Once that was done, I stretched out on my mat, said a prayer to Isis to keep scorpions out of my room, and went to sleep. I woke up to a day like the one that had gone before. Thutmose came to see me, bearing a fresh garland of flowers. How the gods must have laughed to see the two of us together, trading false smiles, dueling with deceit. He mentioned his brother, the way a hunter uses a lure to attract his quarry, but I brushed aside Amenophis’s name and turned our talk to other things.
If you want an excuse to fuel your hate, I won’t give it to you
, I thought. He left disappointed, and I gloated over it.