The Bull of Min (13 page)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

M
ERYET ROSE EXPECTANTLY FROM HER couch when she heard the low, urgent conversation of her servants outside her chamber door. She knew the message they bore before she admitted them: the Pharaoh had returned. Her women bowed low when Nehesi opened the scarab-carved doors of her chambers, and plump Hemetre said breathlessly, “Mighty Horus is in his chambers, Great Lady.”

“Take me there.”

Batiret and Hemetre accompanied her, following the train of her festival gown, a floating gauze of green linen to honor Waser and the New Year. Jewels and gold hung heavily at her throat, her wrists, her ankles. She felt so weighted by ceremony and expectation that it was a wonder she could sweep through the halls of the palace as quickly as she did, with head high and gaze steady. Her heart’s beat was certainly not steady; it fluttered in her chest like a bird dodging the strike of a tree-snake.

Nehesi clapped to announce her arrival at the Pharaoh’s do
ors. Even through the barrier of limestone wall and cedar door, she heard the weariness, the bewilderment in Thutmose’s voice. “Come.”

He sat on one of his lovely couches, elbows on knees, hands dangling useless between his legs.
Thutmose stared into the shadow of the niche below his windcatcher, watching the wine jars cooling there with a dull, distant expression.

“Thutmose.”

He looked up at her, blinked at her finery as though her brightness and beauty were some incantation that muddied his senses. He still wore the simple kilt and plain wig he had donned when he’d flown to Satiah’s estate.

“The Feast of the New Year begins in an hour,” she reminded him.
“You can’t go looking like this.” Meryet clapped for his body servants, and they came scrambling from their small adjoining chambers. “Make the Pharaoh ready for the feast,” she commanded, her voice far harder and more impatient than she would have liked.

They dispersed to gather his finery from his chests and dressing tables, and Meryet dropped onto the couch beside him.
“What happened, my love?”

“The boy was not there.”

Meryet nodded, unsurprised. It had been too much to hope, that it could be so simple, that Satiah would play into Thutmose’s hands with such ease. The woman was mad, it was true – but she was also no fool.

“Nehesi’s men couldn’t
find him in the temple, either,” Meryet admitted. “Nor anywhere in the palace. They are still looking, of course, but…”

Thutmose shook his head.
“It makes no difference. She is already making her bid for the throne.”

“She can’t!”

“She revealed her true identity to at least some of the priests in the temple – why else would they have dared to take the boy? No priest would have crossed the Pharaoh for a mere Lady Satiah. But for Neferure, the daughter of Hatshepsut, who was the son of Amun himself….”

Meryet’s hands felt suddenly cold.
“But Thutmose, you have been an ideal king. The priests have no reason to try to depose you.”

He threw up
his hands. “I can think of no reason, but the gods alone know what she’s told them. Clearly, Meryet, someone at the temple is under her influence. And if one man, why not a dozen? If a dozen, why not a hundred, or a thousand? Kings have been pulled down by conspiracies before. Even good kings.”

Meryet took his hand in her own, hoping to lend him some courage.
But her hand shook.

“By Amun,” Thutmose growled.
“I’ve been so preoccupied with the rebellion in Kadesh, and before that, Hatshepsut’s illness. I neglected Satiah; I didn’t watch her closely enough.”

“How under Re’s light did she
manage to communicate with the temple? She never left that estate.”

“I don’t know.
I have turned it over and over in my heart, but I can’t puzzle it out. This is exactly like the first time I had her. She escaped from her cell then, and I never knew out how she did it. She says the gods spirited her away.”

An uneasy silence fell between them.
At last Meryet ventured, “Do you believe it?”

“No,” he said.
“Never. There is some other explanation, for all of it. She is mad, not divine. And I will not allow a madwoman to conspire against me.”

“That hound has already been loosed,” Meryet said quietly.
“Now we must find some way to leash it again.”

“Lord Horus?” One of Thutmose’s men bustled out of
the royal bedchamber, the fine white length of a formal kilt draped across his arms.

“The feast,” Thutmose muttered, annoyed.
“Gods, but there is nothing I feel less like doing now than feasting.”

“It is expected,” Meryet said apologetically.
“I can think of no way out of it. And believe me, I have tried.”

“I had best get dressed, then,” Thutmose said, rising slowly.

The clatter of running feet sounded outside the apartment door, and the next moment, Thutmose’s door guard shouted a challenge. Thutmose and Meryet shared a nervous glance. The urgency of a clap carried through the door. Thutmose nodded for his servant Hesyre to see to it.

“Please, old brother,” said a man’s voice, panting and puffing.
“I must see the Pharaoh. It’s of the greatest urgency.”

“Let him in,
” Thutmose said.

Meryet clutched at her own fingers, her hands workin
g into a painful knot. A man dressed in the blue-and-white striped kilt of a royal guard stumbled into the chamber and fell on his face before the king, stretching his hands along the ground in frantic subjugation.

Thutmose waved an impatient hand.
“Get up, man. What is it?”

“The Lady Satiah, Mighty Horus.
She’s gone.”

Meryet sprang
to her feet, gripped Thutmose’s arm. “Blessed mother Mut,” she whispered, never knowing whether she spoke to Thutmose or to her own panicked ka. “She is coming here. The feast – the court.”

“
How did she get free?
” Thutmose shouted.

“Please, Good God.
” The guard cringed on the floor. “Be merciful to your loyal servants. We are investigating – Djedkare is working tirelessly to find out. But we do not yet know.”

“She is coming here, Thutmose,” Meryet said.
“To…to
reveal herself
before the entire court.”

“By Set’s red blood, she is
not
. Let her try.”

“We’ve been so foolish,” Meryet said close to his ear, her voice pitched low.
“We should have killed her long ago.”

“Nehesi,” Thutmose shouted.
“Put every guard you can find in the palace on the feast hall’s doors. The kitchen doors, too. The entire wing is to be patrolled. The Lady Satiah is not to set one foot inside that hall. She is to be apprehended on first sight and brought to me.”

“As you say, Lord Horus.”
Nehesi dodged from the chamber, intent as a falcon on his task.

Thutmose sent the estate guard back to his post with a message of encouragement for Djedkare and his men. Then he turned to Meryet, took her hands in his own.
He kissed her knuckles. “She cannot be in Waset yet. The travel time from the estate – even if she has access to a boat, it would take her an hour or more to get here. Go back to your chambers. I will send Nehesi to you the moment he’s arranged the guard on the hall.”

“But what shall we do?
The feast…”

“It must go on, as if nothing is amiss.
We mustn’t allow her to disrupt the court in any way. Can you be brave, my lioness?” His fingers brushed her cheek. “I know you can. I know you are the true Great Royal Wife, whatever that twisted creature might think.”

“Amunhotep…”

“Is safe, and so are you.”

“Very well,” Meryet said, her voice quavering.
“I will be brave.”

She collected her women outside Thutmose’s door.
Hemetre’s round face was flushed, her eyes wide with barely controlled fear. Batiret looked calmer, but her pale face was tinged a sickly green shade around the mouth. She glanced about her continually as they made their way back to Meryet’s chambers, as if she feared what might lurk in the shadows of the pillars.

For Meryet’s part, never had walking sedately through the palace colonnades and c
ourtyards seemed such an impossible task. Her legs shook; she feared she might collapse with every step. Her heart throbbed painfully in her throat. But the gods were good to her; somehow she managed to breathe, and restrained herself from running. Any of the servants they passed, any foreign dignitary or noble woman fanning herself under the shadow of a vined porch, might be Satiah’s creature. Meryet gave none of them the satisfaction of seeing fear on her face. She was, after all, the Great Royal Wife, whatever schemes the creeping spider Satiah might be weaving.

Her wing of the palace appeared around the bend of an outer hall cast half in bright light and half in sinister blue-black shade.
She found Batiret’s hand and squeezed it. They had made it to their sanctuary unharmed.

Meryet
slipped through her scarab doors with her two women beside her and shoved the doors closed, leaning her back against them in relief, her eyes shut tight against her anxiety. “Oh, gods,” she moaned.

The rustle of several linen gowns answered he
r. Meryet’s eyes snapped open. Several women sank into deep bows in her antechamber; in the frantic heartbeats before she recognized them, she thought a small, vengeful army of Satiahs had arrived before her, appearing under the power of the dark gods she served like a mist above the river. Then she pressed her hands hard against her roiling belly, and with relief so vast it nearly dropped her to the tiles of her floor, she knew the women. Meritamun, Khuit, and Henuttawy – women of Thutmose’s harem.

“Mut preserve me!
Ladies, why are you here?”

They straightened, and Meryet saw the confusion and fear clouding their eyes.
Satiah, of course.

“So she went to the harem,” Meryet mused aloud.
“We thought she would appear at the feast, but it’s the House of Women she seeks to control next. Is that the way of it?”

It made sense
, after all. The House of Women was a chest full of living jewels: daughters of Egypt’s finest and most influential families. It was a subtler and more politically astute maneuver than barging into a feast like a gout of leaping flame.

“Great Lady,” Meritamun stammered.
The tall woman was still bent double in a subservient bow. “We beg your forgiveness for coming to you like this. Your women let us in when they understood the urgency of our errand.”

“It’s all right.
Rise, all of you. Tell me.”

Henuttawy spoke up.
Her voice, usually light and musical with the practiced charm of a harem favorite, was strangled and ugly now. “
She
appeared, Great Lady. We thought her dead. The King’s Daughter – Neferure.”

“She is not dead,”
said Meryet, quite unnecessarily. Her tongue was sluggish and thick in her mouth.

“She had a child with her,” Khuit said.
“A boy. She told us the boy is her son and the true heir to the throne.”

Meryet’s heart worked feverishly to piece together this riddle.
Thutmose had said it would take Satiah an hour by boat to travel from the estate. She must have left just after Thutmose had departed, and sailed directly for the House of Women. Somewhere along the way she met with the priest who had snatched Amenemhat from the temple that morning. This was a carefully orchestrated plot, well-crafted over many weeks. What other paths had Satiah paved for herself, what roads had she laid into the hearts of Egypt’s great houses, into the temples and priesthoods?

The women’s w
ords tumbled over one another now, so eager were they to spill out the story.

“
She said the boy is the son of the gods…”

“…demanded that those women who are loyal to the gods bring their families into line…”

“…she wanted us to swear our support to her cause. Imagine!”

“…after what she did to Batiret.
We are no fools; we remember.”

Meryet
raised a hand for silence. “Did any women swear to her cause?”

The women looked uneasily at one another, but none spoke.

Meryet choked back a curse. “Who? I need to know which noble houses are backing Sati…Neferure. Immediately.”

“We don’t know, in truth,” Meritamun said quickly.
“We left for the palace as soon as we understood what she was about.”

“But many of the
women do fear her,” Khuit supplied. “You see, Great Lady, when she lived among us she had a…a reputation.”

“A reputation?”

“For great power.”

“For great strangeness,” He
nuttawy said with a snort. “That woman is mad as a donkey with a wasp in its ear.”