Mara, Daughter of the Nile (19 page)

He stepped down, looking for someone to hold the horses. The huge courtyard swarmed with beggars, hurrying priests, white-clad Thebans buying frankincense and temple offerings from the hawkers whose booths lined the walls. Sacrificial fowl squawked and fluttered in their cages, lambs bleated plaintively. The smell of dust, animals and sacred unguents mingled with the fragrance of a mass of fresh lilies on a flower-seller’s stall.

“
Haiii!
Rejoice, master!”

An old peddler had spotted him, set down his tray of consecrated bread and hurried forward to catch the horses’ reins. Tossing him a few
deben
, Sheftu made his way through the crowd and into the vast, columned corridors of the temple proper.

He found the priest he sought in a tiny anteroom off the Shrine of Hathor. Djedet was a calm, portly man with a face like a moon, wearing the leopard skin of the
sem
rank over his snowy linen robes. He was tying up onions into the hollow, circular bunches proper for the offering table, but at sight of Sheftu he paused.

“Your lordship, rejoice!” He came forward at once, beckoning a subordinate to take over his task. “There is some matter in which I may serve you?”

“Aye. It concerns the mortuary shrine of my father’s tomb. I wish to increase the number of loaves and honey jars left for his
ka
each month. And in addition—”

“A thousand pardons, my lord. Pray come into more comfortable quarters, that I may offer you refreshment. My private chamber will serve …”

Sheftu followed the solid, stately figure out of the anteroom and down a hall lined with columns so massive they made even Djedet seem fragile as a splinter. Once the door of the little room had closed firmly behind them, the priest’s impassive manner vanished.

“Is it the signal? Shall I order the—”

“Nay, my friend. The time is not yet. Indeed, the time will never be, unless you and I can perform one last impossibility.” Sheftu sighed, the heaviness of his dread settling over him again. “Sit you down, Djedet. I will tell you what we must do.”

The priest’s round face grew graver and graver as he listened. When Sheftu had finished, the little room was silent. Then Djedet rose ponderously and walked to the table, where he stood staring down at a pile of scrolls. “You have a plan?” he muttered.

“Aye. We will need two diggers—men we can trust to be silent. Ashor can find them. And to ensure their silence, after the task is done I will send them to my farthest estate, to live in luxury—and solitude—until it is safe to loose them. I know a river captain who will arrange all that. As for your part, you must obtain the Royal Seal.”

Djedet swung around, eyes bulging. “But I cannot do that! Only the high priest of the City of the Dead—”

“I know. But you must accomplish it somehow. Listen.”

Djedet listened, his expression changing slowly. He moved back to his chair and sank into it, his face intent, his voice low as he put a question or two. At last he nodded. “I think it can be done. Unless the guards at the Valley …” He chewed his lip a moment, then shrugged heavily. “
Ai
, the plan is shot through with danger; but what is not, these days? Better we die, my lord, than Egypt.” He rose, touching
forehead and chest. “I will do my best, and send word. May the gods be with us.”

Better we die than Egypt, repeated Sheftu to himself as he walked slowly back down the corridor. His eyes moved to the columns rising close-set and massive on either side, stretching up and up until their carvings were lost in the dim reaches far above him. Old beyond memory they were, like Egypt itself, and they would stand unchanged a thousand years more. Aye, and so would Egypt, no matter who had to die! One death alone would be enough, thought Sheftu grimly—that of a bejeweled and willful queen …

He turned a corner and strode along a passage, neither noticing nor caring where it led. A few moments later, roused by the faint, irregular beat of hammers, he stopped and looked around him. Scowling, he realized he had strayed into the North Wing. Not since last summer had he come to this place, and he had sworn then he would never come again.

Slowly he pivoted to his left. There, only a few paces distant, was the entrance to the hall the First Thutmose had built as his kingly gift to the god. Sheftu walked toward it, his face set, the tap-tap of goldsmith’s hammers growing louder in his ears. At the tall doorway he stopped, looking into a huge room flooded with sunshine.

There, in the middle of the roofless hall, stood the queen’s new obelisks. They were no nightmare, then, but seven hundred tons of solid reality—monstrous needles of stone ninety-seven feet tall, soaring straight up into the brilliant sky. Sheftu’s gaze traveled their length, part of which was at the moment obscured by scaffolding upon which gold workers swarmed. Well he remembered the day last summer those shafts came floating down the river from the quarries, on a flotilla of linked barges that seemed to stretch back to Nubia. No man had ever seen their like, for they had been cut from single blocks of granite, without a seam or a joint,
and—because the queen was impatient—in only seven months’ time. There was an inscription on them swearing to it.

How, in Amon’s name, had mortal hands accomplished it? It was all but impossible. So was raising the obelisks here, within the temple itself. But here Hatshepsut wanted them, and here they stood, though it had been necessary to tear out many of her father’s beautiful cedar columns and the whole roof of the hall to make room for them. Bitterly Sheftu stared at the wreckage, remembering the crack of the lash and the antlike swarm of men straining on ropes, dropping, dying, being trampled by their fellows as with a shuddering slow movement the great shafts rose into place—monuments to Hatshepsut’s pride and malice.

And now—Sheftu’s eyes moved to the scaffolding, through which a growing surface of pale yellow glittered in the sun. Furiously he turned and strode back toward the courtyard, the faint tapping of the goldsmiths’ hammers following him. Through the sound he could hear again Hatshepsut’s voice: “My Majesty is not pleased. The obelisks are mere dull stone and so unworthy of the Daughter of the Sun. I desire that they reflect Ra’s beams from every surface. They shall be cased in electrum …”

Extravagance upon extravagance, until the very gods must be outraged! She would bring ruin upon the Black Land …

The temple’s dim quiet ended abruptly as Sheftu stepped into the noise and dust and mingled odors of the outer courtyard. It was like plunging into another element, and the shock steadied him and dissipated his wrath.

Fool, anger gets you nowhere, he told himself as he gathered his horses’ scarlet reins and popped the whip over their flanks. Let her have her obelisks—she will soon have nothing else. As for the task ahead, think no more of it now. Djedet will arrange all. You have nothing to do but wait.

BUT WAITING was hardest. A day dragged by, then another, without word from the priest. Sheftu had spoken to Ashor early; the diggers were arranged for and waiting, though they knew not what their task was to be. Nekonkh was waiting, the
Beetle
provisioned and ready to spirit the men away. The king was waiting for word, Mara waiting to carry it, Sheftu waiting, in a torment of suspense, to act.

For the first time in six years the wheels of his secret life had ground to a dead halt. All plans hinged on one now, and that one hung like an unanswered question on the air, growing hourly more urgent. It was all Sheftu could do to grace the court of Hatshepsut with unchanged serenity, to behave as usual under the eyes of his household. Hardest of all was to hide from Mara the strain he was feeling, to parry her questions and then laugh at her anger. Each night she came to the inn for news, and he could tell her nothing. Their conversations were like duels. Rather than dreading the task which still hung over him, he now began to long for it, that the issue might be settled. Inactivity ached like a tooth.

Soon after noon on the fourth day, restlessness led him down to the barracks of the queen’s bodyguard, whose quarters and parade field occupied a large open area to the rear of the palace grounds. He found Khofra sitting on a hard chair in his severe and cell-like quarters, waiting for the
bugle which would summon him to his afternoon inspection of the troops.

“Come in, my lord, come in!” the old man greeted him, waving to a second, and even harder, chair. “Sit down, and test the rigors of military life! Though I promise this is luxury compared to what those poor devils on the parade grounds yonder call their own.
Ai
, well, there’s no other way to make soldiers of them. Hard chairs, hard beds, hard fighting.”

“And a general as hard as they,” suggested Sheftu, sitting down.

Khofra gave his soundless laugh. “Aye, they look up to me, knowing I’ve slept on rocky ground oftener than they’ve slept in their couches. They’re coming on, Lord Sheftu, they’re shaping up. Someday we’ll have an army here, instead of a crowd of idlers. But I warn you—” The old general lowered his voice, and his face grew grim. “I’ve promised them action. Campaigns, foreign battlefields, victories like those we knew in the old days, for the glory of Egypt. Take care you produce them.”

“Never fear! There’ll be action in plenty once Thutmose takes command. By the Feather, our empire’s in a sorry mess,
Haut
Khofra!” Sheftu got up and began to pace. “Every week a new dispatch comes in. There’s another uprising in Nubia, a bad one, and an outbreak on the border farther north. Worse yet, the King of Kadesh has stirred up every city king in northern Palestine and Syria—they’re banding together to defy us, and the queen does nothing, nothing! Our governors are going frantic, they need more men, more gold—”

“
They
need it! So do I, by Amon! Yet she’s even taking what I have.”

Sheftu stopped. “She’s doing what?”

“Reducing my forces. Cutting down allotments. Refusing to fill my orders for supplies. You didn’t know this?”

“By the Devourer, no!”

He listened with growing fury as Khofra explained. The bodyguard, normally two thousand troops, had been reduced by a third even before Khofra had assumed command. In the past two weeks a hundred more had been dismissed, and the pay for those remaining was already five days late.

“Then about the helmets,” Khofra growled. “A week ago I sent in a requisition for two hundred archer’s helmets, of scarlet leather, well padded and quilted, with a good gold fringe. I needed three hundred, but some of the old ones will serve, though they be shabby enough! This morning the requisition came back—refused. Perhaps she means to send the archers into battle bareheaded? Something must be done.”

“Something will be done!” snapped Sheftu. “Now. At once. What of the regular Army, those not of the bodyguard? How badly have they dwindled?”

“By more than half. And as for chariots and horses—” Khofra threw up his hands.

“That will be the task of our prince,” said Sheftu. “He’ll build the regulars up soon enough, once we’ve set him on his throne. But to set him there we need the bodyguard, full strength and well equipped. And by Amon, we’ll have it! Who rules on these requisitions?”

“My Lord Nahereh, Master of Armories and of the White Storehouse for Linen. He of the face like a chip of granite. He doles out the pay, too—when there is any.”

“Nahereh,” said Sheftu thoughtfully. Brother of the Architect himself—a man to be reckoned with. Sheftu knew him only too well. It was not the first time that stony face had stood between him and his goal. He dropped into a chair. “He’s Senmut’s right hand,
Haut
Khofra—and Senmut’s the queen’s. Obviously she needs the gold elsewhere—for some new extravagance.”

“Was not her last one folly enough?” snorted Khofra. “I mean the two obelisks. Gods of Egypt! How does the woman
conceive these things? Single blocks, unmarred by joints or even chisel marks—”

“That was merely the beginning,” remarked Sheftu drily. He mimicked: “ ‘The obelisks are mere dull stone and so unworthy of the Daughter of the Sun. I desire that they reflect—’ By my
ka!
” he burst out suddenly. “There’s her need for gold! Did you know,
Haut
Khofra, that she is casing the shafts in electrum?”

Khofra’s shaggy eyebrows soared. “Those man-made mountains? Impossible!”

“Aye. Our queen is fond of the impossible. Gold and silver over every inch of those monster slabs—I saw them at work on it myself, only a few days ago. By this time, I’ll wager, they’re working up near the roof and Egypt’s treasury’s nigh empty.”

“Small wonder she needs funds!”

Sheftu was on his feet, stalking about the bare little room. “She’ll not steal them from the bodyguard. Look you, my general. It’s clear how this came about. The queen fretting for more gold—the Architect as usual scheming out a solution. ‘Most Glorious Majesty, why feed and clothe two thousand idle soldiers in time of peace? Riffraff, eating their bellies full at Your Radiance’s expense! And it is my brother Nahereh who holds the purse strings…’
Aiii!
He’ll wish he’d held his peace!”

Sheftu paused beside his chair, fingers drumming upon its back. A smile was beginning to curve the corners of his mouth.

“But what can you do?” put in Khofra.

“I can see the queen. I can inform her, with the gravest concern, of the bodyguard’s condition. I can thank Amon repeatedly, and loudly, that I discovered the situation before it was too late—”

“You mean she doesn’t know of it?”

“Of course she knows! But my general, if I behave like one saving her from disaster, she will not admit she knows. She
will first try to find out what is so wrong with Senmut’s little scheme.”

“And what will you tell her?”

Sheftu smiled. “
Haut
Khofra, Her Radiance the Daughter of the Sun fears one thing only—the loss of her throne. Suppose it were suggested to her that Senmut’s motives might not be pure—that he might have reasons to wish her bodyguard depleted, her protection undermined …”

“She would never believe it! Not of her precious Architect!”