The Crook and Flail (11 page)

They had waited outside the audience chamber for at least three hours, first standing at attention, then pacing, finally falling to idle talk while Senenmut slumped on the floor.  He was about to make some half-hearted attempt to raise a conversation again when he became aware of a strange, muted buzz coming from the chamber doors.  It rose in pitch, and he scrambled to his feet, recognizing the collective thrum of many angry voices.  His knees protested as he straightened; he shook each leg in turn, and heard Nehesi grunt as he levered himself away from the wall.

The door opened; the guards started, snapped more fully to attention, pointing their spears exactly upright.  Hatshepsut was among the first to emerge, following close behind Lady Regent Ahmose.  The girl caught Senenmut's eye, and something like relief filled her narrow, harsh features.  He tried a tentative smile, but she shook her head, the braided side-lock swinging.  Senenmut bowed low as the princess and the regent approached.

“An adjournment only,” Hatshepsut told him quietly as men streamed from the audience hall.  “No one has been swayed to my side yet.  To tell the truth, we may have lost some of the few we brought into that chamber with us.”

The frown on Ahmose's face deepened, darkened.  “Good men, accompany my daughter into the garden.  She and I both need time to collect our thoughts, and I must be alone to pray.”  She turned and swept down the hallway, raising and turning her shoulders to avoid brushing against any of Mutnofret's men.  She did not move in the direction of her royal apartments, but heading for the garden, no doubt t's uzz cwepo seek the comfort of the shade trees or the raised edge of the great rectangular lake. 

“Shall we go?” Nehesi said.

“No.”  Hatshepsut gazed after her mother with a curious, detached sadness.  Senenmut held himself very still, and watched in her eyes an intricate play of remorse, anger, guilt, resolution.  “Come with me.”

She led them through halls he did not know, past open courtyards where men and women, dressed in bright finery, gathered to entertain emissaries of far-off lands, past the doors to humble offices where scribes worked endlessly, recording the words and works of the regent, composing letters to foreign kings, tallying the wealth of Egypt.  As tutor to the king's daughter, his services had seldom been required at the palace; most of his work was confined to the House of Women.  It took him some time to realize where Hatshepsut led them, but once he knew, he reached out to touch her wrist, trying to restrain her.  She shook off his touch with a peremptory twitch.

Two guards, dressed in the blue-and-white kilts of royal protectors, stood attentive before Lady Regent Ahmose's private rooms.  Hatshepsut halted a little way down the hall, evidently struck by sudden uncertainty.  Senenmut felt a wash of relief; the guards would not allow even the king's daughter inside without Ahmose's permission.

Nehesi saw the dilemma and, ducking his head in a brief, apologetic bow, stepped ahead of Hatshepsut.

“Good day, my brothers.”

The two men eyed him, murmured a tentative greeting.

“Have you heard the news from the barracks?  Our new bows have arrived from Mehu.”

One guard glanced at the other, his eyebrows raised. 

“I've heard they can shoot from here to the Delta,” Nehesi said.

The second guard looked back at his mate, paused, and at last shrugged.  “Who's to take over?” he asked of Nehesi. 

“I am.  Be gone quick; I haven’t anything else for you.  You will need to find out the rest when you get back to the barracks.”

“Right.”  The men trotted away, their striped kilts rippling.

Hatshepsut took Senenmut by the hand and pulled him toward the queen's chamber.  Somehow the gesture soothed his heart after the way she had shaken him off moments before.  He had not even realized her avoidance of his touch had wounded him. 
And how silly that it should.  You are her tutor, man, and she is still a girl.
  His heart, his thoughts were like the ruffled feathers of a bird, disorganized and rattling, obscuring all shape and form and sense.  He tried to sort through these disorienting emotions as Hatshepsut dragged him across the queen's threshold.  He could see but one idea clearly: that something in his young lady's manner, something in the very air today, spoke of sudden change – catastrophic, perhaps, but definitely momentous.  It made him wild te idth="1emo cling to the here-and-now, and he stared at Hatshepsut desperately, as if he had only moments to memorize her face, her manners, before a god or a demon spirited her far away forever.

Inside the chamber, Hatshepsut barred the door, then beamed at Nehesi.  “Good man!  Those were secret words you spoke, weren’t they?”

“New bows, Mehu, the Delta.  The three together tell any man in the royal guard, ‘Disregard your previous order.  A new one has been given.’”  He paused, rolled his lower lip into his mouth.  “I took a risk, Great Lady, for you.  I can never go back to the guard.  I have falsified an order from a commander.  It could mean my death.”

“Say no more.  You entered this chamber a palace guard, but you will leave my personal servant.  I claim you for my own.  No one will question the king's daughter in this matter.”

Senenmut sucked in a cold breath, but she forestalled his protest with one quick, brown hand.  “Now there is no time to waste.  Help me, both of you.”

Despite his fear and his strange sense of floating detachment, Senenmut could not help but gape at the luxury of Ahmose's apartments.  She lived in great resplendence, from the sweep of her tiled floor – bright faience pieces forming an image of the goddess Mut that stretched the whole long span of the room – to the tall electrum mirror framed by a pair of carved ebony-wood goddesses, to the senet board perched on her little game-table, its squares and pawns fashioned from precious stones and polished to a deep, rich luster.  Windcatchers near the ceiling let in a rising mid-day breeze that smelled of high water and sweet herbs; the breeze stirred tapestries of the lightest, finest linen so that the goddesses painted upon them swayed in a languid dance. 

Hatshepsut surely had visited her mother here before.  Indeed, she had spent most of her earliest days in these apartments, until she reached the age of six and was sent off to the harem to be educated.  She led the men confidently across the expanse of the anteroom, past a finely made table where Ahmose received her visitors, past a gold-ribbed harp, its strings sparkling in a column of sunbeams admitted past the windcatcher’s bars.  She took them directly to a great door carved with the image of the sun-scarab and into Ahmose’s own bed chamber.

The chamber was a stunning work of architecture.  Through his dizzy rush, Senenmut checked and stared at the wonder of the room.  The wall opposite the door was not solid, but a series of flat, rectangular columns, with spaces between perhaps two hands wide, so that one saw straight out into Ahmose’s private garden as if peeking through fingers held over the eyes, or through a grove of saplings.  The columns stretched from floor to ceiling, the entire soaring height of the palace, and high up where the smoke from the queen’s night-braziers had darkened the sandstone, huge, heavy bolts of woolen fabric hung rolled, ready to be loosed to cover the miraculous wall against winter’s chill and damp.  In the center of the wall, dividing the widest of the columns, a door afforded access to the walled garden. 

The whole place was lit up with an intense, bright white light, the brilliance of the sun at its zenith.  It fell across Ahmose’s bed, a huge and opulent thing piled with bright linens, crowned by a cuoset urved ivory headrest.  The light fell, too, on a bank of wardrobes and jewelry boxes.  Hatshepsut crossed to one of these, a chest so large Nehesi could have stood inside of it comfortably.  It smelled strongly of oiled wood, and faintly of sweet myrrh and lavender.  Hatshepsut tugged open its doors.  The sweet scent intensified, overwhelming the room.  Hatshepsut paused, suddenly shaken in her strange, headlong determination.  Senenmut said tentatively, “Great Lady?”

“My mother's favorite perfume,” she said.  Her eyes were locked on nothing, on some memory playing out before her own private heart.  She shuddered and squeezed her eyes shut, drew in a breath as if savoring Ahmose's scent, as if this would be the last time she would ever breathe it in. 

She reached into the wardrobe and pulled out a gown, thin-woven red linen so fine Senenmut could see her hands through it; a veil, little more.  She handed it to him, sorted through her mother’s belts and sashes, settled on one particularly fine belt of lapis scarabs rolling golden balls, linked one after the other.  In another chest she located fine sandals, braided and wrapped with cool golden wire, beaded with turquoise.  “My feet are larger than Ahmose’s, but I need not wear these for long.”

She tugged the knot of her boy’s kilt loose.  Senenmut and Nehesi both turned away from her nakedness, but she said, “Don’t be fools.  We have no time for modesty.  Help me into the gown.”

“Great Lady,” Senenmut turned back at her command and looked away, looked anywhere but at her bare flesh.  She had often undressed before him; the fact of it had never flustered him before.  Now he felt out of his depth, swimming against a hot current of desire and regret and fear.  He stammered, “I don’t know how to dress a woman.”

“I can’t tie these knots myself.”  She snatched the gown from his hands and threw it over her shoulder, fussed with its drape about her waist. 

“Sake of Sobek,” Nehesi hissed at Senenmut. “I can do it.  The gods know I’ve helped enough women back into their frocks before their husbands came home.  You’ve led a boring life, tutor.”  Hatshepsut raised her eyebrows, gave her guard a sharp stare.  “Begging your pardon, Great Lady.”

“Only tie this thing so it stays on me, and I will pardon you anything.”

Nehesi bent over her shoulder, knotting the delicate fabric with fingers surprisingly deft for their thickness.  She fastened the belt herself, then sent Nehesi to choose the finest jewels from Ahmose’s casks.

She settled onto the stool at Ahmose’s mirror-table.  She stared at herself sternly in the round, bright mirror.  “The razor, Senenmut.” 

He moved toward her on reluctant, numb feet, as slowly as a man entranced.  He took up the regent’s delicate copper razor; it was ivory-handled, cleverly curved.  Then he stopped, uncertain.  “Er – Lady?”

“Shave off my lock.”

Senenmut held her eye in the mirror.  He knew now what she intended.  “Lady, you have not begun to bleed.”  His voice was hardly more than a whisper.  He would not shame her in front of Nehesi.  “You cannot do this thing.  Not until….”

“I will do it all the same.  Surely you two heard the council from the palace halls.  If I do not do something now then Egypt will rip itself in two, starting with my mother and Mutnofret.  Do you believe strife will stop with them?  Of course it will not.  It will spread like a disease until the whole land is broken.  I will not allow that, Senenmut.  It is not maat, this fighting.  Shave off my lock.”

He hesitated only a moment longer.  This was where his regret came from. 
A grown woman has no need of a tutor.
  This was the last he would ever serve her.  The knowledge, now named, now identified, filled him with a poignant sorrow.  He gripped the handle of the razor until the skin of his his knuckles stung.

There was no time to whip salt and oil together into a soothing froth.  He shaved her head dry, scraping carefully at the root of her side-lock until the last vestige of her childhood hung by a few dark hairs, pulling at her tender skin so that she screwed her face up in a girlish wince.  Senenmut made one more pass, and the side-lock parted from her head with the razor’s faint hiss.  The braid fell onto the ground, still as a dead snake, its loose end raveled.  Hatshepsut looked down at it, lying so frank and dark against the shining floor tiles.  Then she straightened and pointed to one of Ahmose’s wigs, waiting with its sisters on their ornate stands.  Senenmut retrieved it, laid the linen padding on Hatshepsut’s scalp, and set the heavy wig in place.  It was worked in hundreds of small braids that brushed past her shoulders.  Each braid was banded with gold and weighted with cinnabar beads like droplets of blood.  The beads clattered as she turned her head this way and that, assessing.  Finally she nodded.  It would do.

Nehesi laid a collar of mother-of-pearl about her shoulders.  He had chosen wisely.  The collar was worked in the shape of two great vulture’s wings: the wings of the goddess Nekhbet, the patroness of Egypt’s Great Royal Wives.  The tips of the wings came together in a point above Hatshepsut’s small breasts, and from them hung a bright blue scarab cradling a golden sun-disc in its forelegs.  The collar was heavy; she shifted her shoulders as if the skin beneath its weight itched, but the effect was stunning. 

Quickly, Hatshepsut freshened the kohl around her eyes, dusted her lids with blue powder, and stained her lips crimson.  Senenmut watched all these rituals of womanhood with a hot lump welling in his chest.  She slid the rest of Nehesi’s selections onto her graceless, girlish body: wide golden cuffs for her wrists and rings of red jasper for her fingers.  She stood and gazed a moment at her image in the electrum mirror.  The scarab belt and the wide collar did fool the eye; they gave the impression of a woman’s curves.  And the loose weave of the red gown both hid and revealed her small breasts with their pale nipples, the shadow of her navel, the clean-plucked juncture of her thighs.  The dark slash of her wound was clearly visible.  She frowned when her eyes fell upon its reflection.  But painted as a woman, wiggwnetheed and gemmed, she did lose much of her square inelegance; Senenmut was forced to concede that much within his pained heart.  She was, in fact, very nearly pretty, ornate as she was now – a thing which was often said of the poor fierce girl by fawning courtiers, but never before said in truth.