The Crook and Flail (5 page)

“I cannot speak of it,” she said, suddenly agitated.  “I took a vow.  No doubt if anyone could find this particular record, you could, Senenmut.  You know the scrolls better than any man.  And so I can be certain that no record exists.”

Her brusque reply left him at a loss for words.  He tilted his head at her, quizzical, hoping to coax out by gesture something more to go by.

Hatshepsut smiled in spite of her strange preoccupation.  “Don’t worry yourself.  If a record no longer exists, that indicates nothing, as you say.  It is not so easy to erase history.  The past cannot be scratched out just by tearing up scrolls or defacing a few carvings.  History lives in the minds of men, too – you have said as much.  One day I will have the truth of Annu.  If the gods will it, I will have the truth.”

“You grow wiser every day, Great Lady, and more like a Great Royal Wife.”

Ordinarily his words would have made her beam, exposing the large front teeth she had inherited from her father, the slender dark gap between that made her smiles so unaccountably riveting.  But she frowned.

“What do you know of the time my father proclaimed Thutmose his heir?”

“It happened here in Waset, at the Temple of Amun, seven years ago.”

“And records exist?”

“<рspan>Oh, yes, Lady.  Many.  I could bring them to you, if you wish to read them.”

She pursed her lips, an expression that pinched her already rather unrefined face.  He knew the look well.  The prospect of reading the scrolls did not please her.

“Bring me everything you can find.”

“Great Lady?  Did I say something wrong?”

“No,” she said, smoothing her face and her short kilt.  She even put on a little smile for him.  “I was only lost in thought.”

“What sort of thought, if I may ask?”

She shrugged and toyed again with the thick drape of beads.  Just as she drew a slow breath to make an answer, a clamor erupted at the far end of the garden.  Hatshepsut leaped to her feet.  Startled out of all self-possession, Senenmut sprang in front of her, shielding her with an out-thrust arm, from what he did not know.  In a heartbeat they both realized that the dreadful noise was only two cats battling.  Senenmut laughed, and this time he did not mind when the heat of embarrassment rose to his face.

“Oh, bother those beasts!”  Ita shuffled off toward the racket, waving her hands fiercely to scatter the cats apart.  She disappeared into a flower bed, and on the instant shrieked like a bird in a net.  Tem and Sitre-In went laughing into the dusk to remove the clawing cat from Ita's skirt.

“Senenmut,” Hatshepsut said, commanding. 

He turned to look at her.  And she stepped forward, laid her hands on his chest, pressed her lips to his.  The kiss lasted only a moment.  He jerked back.

“Hush,” she said, to forestall his protests.

Alone with my charge,
he thought in a panic, glancing around for the nurse, the handmaids.  They were still preoccupied, giggling and squealing in the bushes.  Hatshepsut's little game made a queasy sort of sense to him now.  She had been testing him, probing at his feelings for her, an oarsman finding the depth of muddied water.  And she had misread his flustered responses as...
love?

The women came struggling from the flower bed, Ita wailing over her shredded skirt.  Hatshepsut turned triumphant eyes on him. 

“That's enough tutoring for today,” he said. 

“You may go then.”

Senenmut fled the garden as quickly as propriety would allow.

It was a testament to Hatshepsut’s stubbornness that she was able to kiss him once more, when rare privacy presented itself.  Tutor and princess were seldom alone for more than a moment; Senenmut made sure of it, calling a woman to fetch him water for his dry throat or a fan to keep the flies away, though in thetchough in is season flies were scarce and seldom a bother.  He drew Hatshepsut's servants toward him constantly as he worked, like a fisherman drawing in one net, then casting it out only to draw immediately upon another.  But Hatshepsut was more practiced than he at managing servants.  Smoothly attending to her history lesson with bright, keen eyes and pertinent questions, she sent her servants on a series of urgent errands in a display of juggling that would have made a court acrobat sick with envy, and soon Senenmut found himself without a witness.  For the briefest moment there was no one to observe them, and in the middle of a somber question about the defeat of the Heqa-Khasewet, Hatshepsut stopped speaking and leaned forward to press her lips to Senenmut’s.  Gently, he laid his hands on her shoulders and pushed her away.

“Great Lady, I am your humblest servant and it is not for me to deny you.  However, this is highly improper and should not continue.”

“Why?”

“You are still a girl, and I am a grown man.  Beyond even that consideration, you are the king's daughter.  I am a common man, and your servant.  Kissing games between two children may be natural enough, but this is not maat.”

Hatshepsut narrowed her black eyes.

“Do not be angry with me, Great Lady, I beg you.  It is my place as your tutor and priest to advise you, to guide you toward wiser actions.  Aside from all that, it could be dangerous for me.  What if one of your maids sees?  Do you suppose Ahmose will believe it was all your idea?  Certainly not; she will assume that this man who was trusted to educate you has taken advantage of his station to impose himself upon an innocent girl.  I would be punished, and quite harshly, I imagine.”

She slumped.  “All right.  You have made your point, Senenmut.  I see that you are correct.”

She was a lioness of a girl, fierce and arrogant.  But he had known her all these years.  Beneath her poise there was, he knew, the same tender heart all girls possessed.  For its sake, he did not allow his relief to show on his face.  He smiled tenuously and took up the lesson where he had left off.  When he had finished his day's duty he begged her leave to go.  She hesitated, more distracted than she had been for days, with a sorrow in her eyes that cut Senenmut's throat and belly with guilty knives.  But at last she nodded and waved him away.

He said, “Until tomorrow, Great Lady,” and bowed at her door.

Hatshepsut made no reply.  She turned away from him, a curt dismissal, and Senenmut was arrested by the flash of an unfamiliar expression: eyes gazing inward at some raw, tender truth, mouth pale and quivering.  It was the first time he had ever seen doubt on his young mistress's face.

CHAPTER FIVE

The season of Akhefona Tt, the inundation, drew near.  The morning air was close and damp, opulent with the scent of the flood.  Frogs, anticipating the great stretches of still water that would rise along the banks of the Iteru, woke from their underground chambers to rattle the evenings with song.  To their choruses, the flood itself arrived, first turning the harvested fields black with dampness, then seeping up to break furrows with lines of reflected sky, at last ascending until every house and road on hillock or causeway stood clear of a vast, sparkling plane of green water.  Rekhet opened the sluices in irrigation ditches; their farmland slumbered beneath the water while farmers traveled to construction sites in city and hills to build the tombs of noble men until the season of Peret arrived.  When the flood receded they would resume the farming life, planting their fields, tending their crops and cattle, and Egypt would burgeon with its green and growing riches.

Hatshepsut waited for her blood to arrive, hopeful and anxious.  But as the flood brought fertility to the land, she remained a girl.

She told no one of her failed attempt to make Senenmut her lover.  His refusal had humiliated her.  As much as the rejection shamed her, though, she was far more ashamed that she had not seen the situation clearly, that her thinking had been clouded by desire.  How unlike her.  Senenmut was right, of course.  Such an involvement with the king's daughter could be dangerous for him, possibly fatal, and however like a woman she may feel, her bloodless months proclaimed her a child.  Senenmut would be unnatural if he desired a child.  She burned with mortification whenever she thought of her attempts to seduce him. 
Childish
, she told herself. 
How could you have been so childish?

In her lessons she was all focus and composure, applying herself to Senenmut’s teachings even more completely than before.  He never mentioned the slip of her graces.  Hatshepsut still felt a surge of desire whenever she looked at him, though, still cried sometimes at night when her maids had retired.  She may weep alone, but a fact was a fact: his heart did not burn as hers did. 

For his part, Senenmut remained dutiful as always.  He worked eagerly at Hatshepsut's request for her family's histories.  He had found more than a dozen scrolls on Thutmose's heirship, and brought every one to his pupil’s chambers.  When lessons and feasts did not occupy her, Hatshepsut combed through the scrolls, searching for some answer to the puzzle.  Why had her father named her the heir at Annu, and three years later also named Thutmose heir in Waset?  For all the scrolls agreed on one point:  he had proclaimed Thutmose during the season of the emergence seven years ago, in a gathering of high priests and other powerful men at the Temple of Amun. 

Sitre-In noticed Hatshepsut’s pensive mood.  She did all she could to bring Hatshepsut around:  soothing music during meals, a dance instructor to teach her all the most popular steps.  But Hatshepsut was rather coarse and graceless despite her age, and she gave up dance quickly, too discouraged by her lack of natural talent to apply herself.  Finally, at her wits’ end, Sitre-In alerted the regent that her daughter was caught up in a black mood, and Ahmose herself visited the House of Women to see to the king's daughter on her own terms.

Hatshepsut dressspaepsut dreed in her finest blue gown to greet her mother, angrily aware of how blocky her body was, how unfeminine.  The fine fabric slumped about her shoulders and hips rather than falling like water, the way it did over the supple bodies of the harem women.  If only she were a woman herself, she might have won Senenmut’s heart.  But even the most beautiful clothing could not make her look the part.  When Ahmose arrived, Hatshepsut bowed in greeting and tried to conceal her unhappiness behind an emotionless face.  It did not work.

“Whatever has come over you?”  Ahmose stood, hand on hip, eying her daughter critically. 

Hatshepsut wilted a little more beneath the stare.

“Have you nothing at all to say?”

“Perhaps it is the change of seasons.”

“Boredom, like a rekhet child?  Shall I send you off barefoot to run errands for some tomb builder?”

The prospect sounded like an improvement over another day of lessons with Senenmut, where she must act as if her foolish attempt at seduction had never happened.  But it would never do to admit such a thing to Ahmose.  “Please sit with me,” Hatshepsut said, struggling to recall some semblance of courtly manners.  She waved toward the cushioned chairs surrounding her senet board.  Ahmose took her seat with a natural, casual grace that even Hatshepsut’s simplest gestures lacked. 

“Wine and honey cakes,” Ahmose called to Tem, who bowed low and hurried from the room with an energy she never showed for Hatshepsut’s commands.  “Sitre-In certainly had it right.  You are moping.  No, I don’t want to know why; I can guess the reason.  I was a girl once, too, you know.  All I will say to you is that you had better come out of it, and quickly, too.  Young Thutmose is growing older and more confident all the time, and the nobles of the city have begun to question why I have not yet given him the throne.  He is ten years old now, old enough to at least sit upon the Horus Seat, if not to rule from it.  Time forces my hand sooner than I would like, but we must make our move.  I have sent to Annu to summon the priests who were present when your father declared you the heir.  As soon as they reach Waset I will present you to the Temple of Amun as your father’s successor.”

All thoughts of Senenmut left her in a rush.  She gaped at Ahmose, gripping the arms of her chair to steady her body.

“Well, that brightened your eyes,” Ahmose said.  “But don’t leap ahead of yourself.  The priests from Annu are not here yet, and even with their support it will be difficult to convince the servants of Amun.  They will be the first obstacle in your path, but not the only one.  The nobles of the city will need convincing, too.  And Mutnofret knows them well.  Many are loyal to her and to Thutmose.  You will need the priesthood and the wealth of the nobles behind you if you are to claim your birthright.  This is not merely a decision between two sons with an equal claim, Hatshepsut.  They will see only your physical form, not your kas.  To them you are a female, and fit only for the office of Great Royal Wife.”

ife size="+0“Then what shall I do to help?”

Tem returned with a tray of cakes and cups of wine.  She laid the tray on Hatshepsut’s senet table and backed away, bowing.  Ahmose plucked up a cake between thumb and forefinger, nibbled delicately.  “Keep up with your studies, for now.  The more intelligent and capable you look when set beside your lout of a brother, the more inclined they may be to support you.  You must be strong and confident, a woman ready to make decisions and give orders.  No more of this moodiness.”