The Crook and Flail (19 page)

Hatshepsut gazed up the ramp.  The entrance to the temple gaped violet in the gathering dusk, a hungry mouth.  She pulled her shawl more closely about her shoulders.

“Help me down, Nehesi.  Ita?  Tem?”  Her women stepped to her side, the baskets of goods clutched in their arms.

“God's Wife of Amun.”  Hatshepsut turned quickly.  At the top of the ramp, two priestesses stood side by side in the temple's mouth.  The shorter of the two gestured with her hands and arms; after a heartbeat the other, thin as a twig with the high voice of girlhood, spoke again.  “Be welcome to the House of Hathor, the Mistress of the West, the Sovereign of Stars.”  The short woman moved her hands again with a fascinating precision, each finger dancing.  When the gesturing had finished, the thin girl spoke.  “The goddess is eager to speak to her vessel.”

Nehesi, Amun's man through and through, growled under his breath.  Hatshepsut laid a hand on his arm.  “She means no harm.  I am the servant of all the gods, not only Amun.  Come.”  She started up the ramp.

As she drew level with the two priestesses, her steps faltered.  The short one was quite broad across the bridge of her nose, and her eyes were mismatched: one as dark-black as Hatshepsut's own, the other a blue so intense it rivaled the color of a summer morning sky.  Neither priestess wore a wig; their natural hair was done up in layers of fine plaits and gathered together into two symmetrical locks that fell over their ears in imitation of Hathor's own style.  Hatshepsut was startled to see that although the short woman was still rather young, her hair was shot with white at the fore; several of her tiny braids were as pale as sun-bleached bone.  The short woman raised her hands and gestured, picking at the air delicately, her wrists swaying this way and that.

The young priestess spoke as if in response to the other's movements.  “The Hand of Amun, who brings pleasure to the god.  I see a grove of myrrh trees; I smell their sap; it is a cloud of joy, and Amun rejoices in your name.  But will you remember Hathor?  She is jealous, and she has marked your flesh with her lion's claw, that you will not forget her.”

Hatshepsut arrested her hands before they could fly to the scar at her groin.  “I marked my own flesh.”

Once more the gesturing, and once more the girl-priestess's response: “It is enough, for now, that you bring the Lady gifts.”  The short one with the unsettling eyes turned away, into theld dimness of the temple's interior.  “Imer will take you to the Lady.”

Following, Hatshepsut stepped into a forecourt of deep indigo shadows.  Pillars stood in orderly rows, rank upon rank.  She gazed upward; the pillars held up a cedarwood roof, lost in black shadow.  But the pathway Imer walked, a direct line that ran between the ranks of pillars to a high stone sanctuary, was left unroofed.  Stars began to emerge in the visible strip of night, cold white fires in a violet distance.  The light of a sickle moon, its points as sharp as a cow's horns, fell wanly into the forecourt to light the priestess' steps.  Nehesi, too, stared up into the deep-shadowed heights, eying with a singular suspicion the faces of Hathor that crowned each pillar.  In his carelessness he blundered into one pillar; the hilt of his dagger clanged against the stone.  The young priestess checked and glanced back at him, amusement curving her lips.  But Imer continued on, unaware, and Hatshepsut realized that the priestess heard nothing.

“You are her voice,” she said to the thin girl.

“Yes.  Several of us who serve the Mistress of the West have learned to read Imer's hand-signs.  She was born into a poor farmer's family.  When it was discovered she could not hear, she was put out for the beasts to take.  But it was Hathor took her instead.  I have heard it whispered that a she-cow found Imer lying in the fields, and lifted the babe upon her horns, and carried her here to the temple.”

The roof of sky ended at a great facade, the heart of Hathor's domain.  Women in the simple white linen of priestesses moved along the temple's face, lighting a long row of braziers.  As the oil inside caught and flamed to life, a golden light reached upward to illumine six of Hathor's seven faces, the crowns of great pillars staring down at Hatshepsut and her servants.  The light wavered and danced.  Each face of the goddess appeared to changed, flickering from benevolence to rage to indifference to motherly adoration as rapid and regular, as mutable as sun on water.

Imer had turned in the doorway to Hathor's sanctuary.  Her hands spoke, and the young priestess gave voice to their meaning.  “You must carry your offerings with your own hands, God's Wife.  Before Hathor, it is you who are the servant, not your women.”

“Yes. Of course.”  Hatshepsut took a basket in each arm.  “Wait for me here,” she said to Nehesi and her maids.

Inside, lamps revealed a cacophony of color.  The walls of Hathor's temple were more brilliantly painted than any dwelling of Amun.  The lapis-blue bodies of gods seemed to leap out from walls the color of fine turquoise stone.  Imer led her across a massive sun-disk painted on the floor in the ripe red shade of pomegranates.  Amid the confusion of color she could identify no single form of the goddess to worship, no statue in which the goddess could dwell.  Instead, Hathor dwelt everywhere.  Against one wall the goddess took the form of a pacing cow, adorned in jewels, lifting the sun-disc high between the great sweep of her horns.  Against another she was a lioness, grinning with a terrible thirst for blood.  Here she was the gentle midwife, urging a child from the womb of a squatting woman; there, she clutched a sinister flail to her breast and stared knowingly into an urnenfathomable distance.

“Hathor is all about you,” the girl said.  Beyond her shoulder Imer stared impassively at Hatshepsut.  That unnerving blue eye saw everything, Hatshepsut was sure of it.  Everything.

They ascended a staircase to the roof of the temple.  The stars had come to brilliant life; they banded together in a great streak of white across the heavens. 
The milk that flows from Hathor's udders.  She is in the very night sky.  I am in the presence of a goddess nearly as mighty as Amun
. 

Hatshepsut set her offerings upon the bare rooftop and sank to her knees, pressed her forehead against the cold stone, facing the west.  “Mistress of the West,” she called to the night sky.  “Lady who is all goddesses in one body.  I offer to you, that you will be pleased with me, your servant.” 

When she lifted her face and clambered back to her feet she saw that Imer wore a slight smile, though her strange eyes were untouched by her pleasure.  She signed, and the young priestess said, “How did you know that we leave our offerings here on the roof?  We did not tell you to do it.”

“It seemed right.  The goddess is here; I feel her.”

“The Pharaoh came this way not long ago – a week, perhaps.  He is still a boy.  He does not yet understand the importance of worship.”

“He did not pay homage to Lady Hathor?”

“Oh, he did,” the young priestess said.  “He did the duty he thought was required, then left again to be feasted at the governor's house in Iunet.  He gave only the smallest honor to our Lady, a cursory offering.”

A swell of foreboding built queasily beneath her heart.  “I am sorry.  That was unjust.”

“It was,” Imer agreed, and Hatshepsut did not need to hear the words to read the offense in the woman's gesture. 

“The Pharaoh's house must make amends to Hathor.  When I return to Waset, I shall send girls here to Iunet, girls from fine houses to be raised by the goddess, to unite Amun's city with Hathor's.  And I will build,” she added, sensing the pledge of girl children was not enough.  “A chapel to the goddess, in Ipet-Isut, among the chapels of Amun's own sacred family.”

“It will suffice,” Imer said.  Her hands paused, clutched together at her breast, her face turned up to the broad white spray of stars as though she heard, after all, a voice speaking beyond the reach of Hatshepsut's own ears.  “And remember the Mistress of the West, the Sovereign of Stars.  If she asks any gift of you, you must not deny it, God's Wife.”

The impossible breadth of the sky spread above her, and seemed to thrust at her body, to force her back to her knees, her forehead to the stones.  Somehow Hatshepsut remained standing, though she swayed with tgifhe effort.  She could not think what else any goddess could desire.  Hathor was all but a stranger to her, but potent and present, here at the pinnacle of her own temple.  She did not know how to appease the goddess's jealous desires.  She wished for the presence of Amun.  She knew, at least, what that god required of her: lead the chants, approve his offerings, caress him, bathe him, anoint him.  She sensed that Hathor required something darker, something stranger, something infinitely more precious than anything Amun had ever demanded.

“I will deny her nothing,” Hatshepsut promised.  “Nothing.”

“Good.  Imer will take you back now.  Go in peace.”

It was only as she rode back toward Iunet, clutching the rail of the governor's chariot, that Hatshepsut realized what had unsettled her so about the Temple of Hathor.

I spoke.  I spoke, and somehow Imer understood my words – heard my words – although she hears nothing.
  She recalled how the priestess had turned her face toward the heavens, receiving Hathor's word – and Hatshepsut had been the one who was deaf, plunged in a dark, star-studded silence.  She shuddered.

That night the tjati if Iunet feasted Hatshepsut in his modest palace, and offered her his finest room for her rest.  Maids had prepared it with music and sweet oils burning in shining lamps, with fine-spun linen to cover her.  Her women lay upon soft mats on the floor, and when the lamps burned out one by one, dying with a gentle hiss, the room filled with the sounds of their slumbering breath.  Hatshepsut lay awake for a long time, staring into the impenetrable dark.  Her thoughts were all of Imer beneath the stars, demanding that Hathor not be forgotten.  The way the woman knew Hatshepsut's words even as she spoke them was a torment; she rolled continually on the governor's bed, and rest evaded her.

All too soon, though, she fumbled into a harsh, unwelcoming sleep.  She dreamed of squatting upon the birthing bricks, the Seven Hathors gathered in a half-moon before her to tell the fate of her child.  Their voices raised in a gabble from which she could draw no words, and at last she heard nothing but a rushing, as if plunged beneath swift-moving water, and the pounding of her heart in her own ears.  The Hathors' mouths continued to move, to twist upon their own black prophecies.  And she could hear nothing!  She struggled on the bricks; from between her thighs there came the form of a she-cow with the sun disc glowing between her horns, so bright Hatshepsut shut her eyes in fright.  When she opened them again, the cow-child had changed form, and stood before her lion-headed: Sekhmet, She Who Mauls.  Hatshepsut screamed, a sound that tore at her throat but never reached her ears, and the Sekhmet child tore into her heart, drinking her blood, eating her kas until nothing was left of her.  And when she had finished, she turned toward the solitary form that now advanced from the shadows: a man, long-faced and wise, his eyes downcast in shame. 
Senenmut
.  Hatshepsut tried to warn him, but the Sekhmet child leaped first, slashed his throat with her claws, lapped at his blood as it flowed upon the floor, a terrible satisfaction, a terrible grief in its eyes.

When dawn at last came, Hatshepsut was glad to board her ship and commtriand the captain to cast off his lines.  She left Iunet behind her with trembling relief.

CHAPTER TWENTY

“Ka-Khem!  Ka-Khem shore ahead!”  The voice of the man high in the ship's rigging fell upon the deck thin and distorted.  Hatshepsut had been sipping beer in her cabin, her women gossiping at her side; when she heard the man's words she leaped to her feet and strode into the open air.  It was mid-day.  The sky was bright, a high watery haze refracting the sun into a glow that made her blink tears from her eyes.  The man in the rigging came shimmying down the mast.  He had a dark cloth tied about his face; a small slit allowed his eyes to peek out at the bright world.

The captain came forward and slapped the man on the back.  “Good!  We'll moor before the sun is halfway to the horizon.”

She sighed with relief.  Adventure was more exhausting than she had imagined.  She had slept in a different bed each night, and though the nobles and governors who hosted her were suitably gracious – even in the most rural of sepats – she suspected it was the unfamiliar beds which had allowed the dreams of Hathor and her strange priestesses to haunt her.  She expected to stay in Ka-Khem for several days.  The regular rest should do her some good.

As the afternoon progressed, the sepat of Ka-Khem appeared on the gray northern horizon.  It was a blur of golden green distorted by the haze.  As
Biddable Mare
drew closer, Hatshepsut could pick out the low, blocky forms of buildings and the individual plumes of smoke where farmers burned refuse in preparation for the sowing to come.  Before long the scents of the shoreline – cattle dung and fish offal, the dry, harsh smell of caulking lime – came drifting over the water.  Sounds, too, at last could be made out beyond the splash of water against the prow.  Men laughed and shouted as they worked along the shore.  Children sang their chanting games.  Intermittent and faint, the high reedy call of a flute crested above the rest, a bird calling high in a far-off tree.  She had reached her destination.  Perhaps the hardest part was already done.  In a few days Nebseny would be in her hand, and she would remain God's Wife, unchallenged.