Sovereign of Stars Read online

  SOVEREIGN OF STARS

  The She-King: Book Three

  L. M. Ironside

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Part One: The God’s Wrath

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part Two: Adoration of the God

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Part Three: The God’s Land

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Part Four: The God’s Judgment

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  More Books by This Author

  Historical Notes

  Notes on the Language Used

  Glossary

  A Message for the Reader

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  SOVEREIGN OF STARS

  The She-King: Book Three

  Behold, Amun: I make offerings unto thee; I prostrate myself before thee; I bestow the Black Land and the Red Land upon my daughter, King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Maatkare, living eternally, as thou hast done for me. …Thou hast transmitted the world into her power; thou hast chosen her as King.

  -Inscription at Ipet-Isut by Thutmose the First, third king of the Eighteenth Dynasty.

  PART ONE:

  THE GOD'S WRATH

  1483 B.C.E.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Senenmut watched from the shade of the royal canopy as the last known enemy of his king left Waset forever.

  The fine ship cleared the calm waters of the harbor and rocked gently as it settled into the deep, confident current of the river Iteru. Broad across its beam, its hull painted the bright turquoise of a Shemu sky, its gilded rails glinting in the sun, the ship was as beautiful a vessel as any great lady could desire. But Mutnofret stood stiffly at the rail, ignoring the musicians who struck up a jaunty traveling tune, the servants who bowed at her elbow offering jars of cooled wine and beer. The ship pulled farther away and Mutnofret's stare vanished, the piercing, helpless ferocity of those tragic black eyes fading from view with the Amun-blessed distance, though the lady kept her face turned toward Waset – toward the king – for as long as Senenmut watched, until at last the boat grew too small and blurry for him to make out anything more than the sparkle of the sun on its rails.

  He shifted the slight, dear weight of his burden: the king's infant daughter, Neferure, sleeping contentedly upon his shoulder. He had not realized the tension he had carried in his own body until now, when it drained away like water into thirsty sand. He sighed with the relief of it, and turned his eyes to the king.

  Hatshepsut remained motionless, staring after the ship, her body rigid with the quivering wariness of a cobra poised to strike. Beside her the Great Lady Ahmose, King's Mother and one-time God's Wife of Amun, gazed unseeing into the yellow haze of the quayside, into the rising dust of dock-workers' feet, of children and dogs prowling between moorings for scraps of discarded fish and dropped crusts of bread. Her lined face wore an expression of tentative grief, a mild confusion of sorrow and solace. Beyond the King's Mother stood the ranks of guards in their short striped kilts, encircling the stone dais where the royal family now stood. The guards faced outward, alert and ready. They went everywhere now – everywhere the Pharaoh went.

  An escort of guards was always a prudent measure beyond the palace walls, within the press and bustle of the city. The Pharaoh, after all, was nearly a living god, and one never knew when a crush of rekhet might surge toward her royal person, seeking to touch the hem of her kilt, her golden skin, seeking to take some small essence of her ka to their own hearts for the luck and prosperity it might bring them.

  But so many soldiers were an excess. Hatshepsut had nothing to fear from the rekhet, Senenmut knew. The people still adored her, and would go on adoring her for as long as Senenmut could engineer it. Beer houses and rest houses continued to bubble with talk of the treasure the Good God herself had shared out amongst the people on the day of her coronation, two months past. Waset remained enamored enough with her generosity to overlook the fact that their Pharaoh was a woman. She had enriched them all, and so she was loved. For now, this was enough to hold her close to their hearts.

  A crowd of sailors erupted into coarse shouts and Hatshepsut turned toward them with a twitch; the guards nearest the sailors clutched the hilts of their weapons. But in another moment it became clear the shouting was no more than an argument over some dockside matter – where to tie the lines, where to stack the cargo – and the royal contingent lapsed back into guarded peace.

  Neferure made a noise at the interruption, a murmur of sleepy complaint. Senenmut swayed unconsciously, soothing his charge. Of course, he thought, stroking the baby's back as one might calm a bristling cat, it was neither rekhet nor sailors the king feared. It was plotters, politicians, those who would take her power for their own. Those who would not balk at sending knives in the darkness, or poison in the wine. And he knew as he rocked the King's Daughter that Hatshepsut feared less for her own well-being than she did for those she loved. She would take any measure to ensure their safety. She would even banish her own kin.

  “I did right,” Hatshepsut said suddenly.

  Ahmose turned a questioning look on the king.

  “I did right by sending Mutnofret away.” She said it as a declaration, as confident and regal as ever, though Senenmut saw the flicker of doubt in her eyes and knew she wanted reassurance. He was about to give it, but Ahmose laid a hand on her daughter's shoulder.

  “You did,” she said, a note of resignation in her voice.

  “Will you miss her, Mother?”

  Ahmose considered the question for a long while, weighing it, Senenmut thought, testing its heft and the heft of all its possible answers. At last she said quietly, “I have always missed my sister.”

  Young Thutmose, riding in his nurse's arms, began to writhe and squeal, pulling irritably at the blue wings of the small cloth Nemes crown tied about his head. It was midday and the little co-Pharaoh was hungry, no doubt, and had had all he could tolerate of this standing and gazing after ships. As the nurse struggled to soothe him, Neferure woke, stared a moment at her crying brother, and broke likewise into wails.

  Hatshepsut laughed. It was the first merriment Senenmut had seen in her for days. The light of it shone in her eyes.

  “My little ones say it is time to go.”

  She raised a hand, casually imperious, to signal for the royal litters.

  **

  In the king's apartments they sank onto couches opposite one another, the wide ebony supper table crouching between them on its carven lion's paws. Senenmut was weary. Caring for Neferure drained his energy and often left him dull-hearted with sluggish, sleepy thoughts. The baby never allowed him more than two or three hours' sleep at a stretch. She would wake squalling, and often even the breast of her wet nurse could not sooth
e her in the darkness. She would settle again only in the arms of her steward and guardian, the one the Good God had appointed to watch over her. He would hum to her, lullabies or tavern songs, anything that came to him in the daze of interrupted sleep. Sometimes he would simply talk, carrying on a one-sided conversation about any stray idea that wandered into his tired heart – the health of the temple's sacred cattle herd, the details of quarrying blocks for the new monuments – as though the tiny girl were a fellow steward or a wise and attentive priest. But the sound of his voice sent her back to sleep as nothing else did, and Senenmut always took a small and secret pride in that fact. Though his duty was taxing, he would not trade it for any other.

  Hatshepsut's women brought in the supper trays. Batiret, a slim brown girl still some years away from womanhood, bowed and showed her palms to her mistress while the others set the fare upon the table.

  “I did not leave the food for a moment, Great Lady,” Batiret said. It was the same litany she recited at the presentation of every meal, and yet she said it with a crispness to her voice, as though her words were fresh. “I stood by and watched as the cook prepared each dish in turn. I tasted each with my own tongue and waited an hour, and have no complaints. I broke the seal on the wine jar with my own hands and allowed no other near it. It, too, is pure.”

  “Good. We will eat, then, and I thank you as always, Batiret.”

  When the servants were gone Senenmut ladled a little of each dish into Hatshepsut's wide, shallow bowl, then into his own. Peas cooked in duck fat and herbs, doubtless plump and juicy when they came from the cook's pot, were now withered and gray, and the fat had congealed into thick lumps. Medallions of gazelle meat, once tender, now stood drying and crusting around the edges above a puddle of unappetizing sauce. He lifted a pottery dome from a platter to reveal white fish steamed in grape leaves, after the northern fashion. The steam had gathered on the inside of the dome; at his disturbance it rained down upon the soggy fish and their sad shroud of limp greenery in fat, cold drops.

  “A feast,” he said sardonically.

  “Safe,” she replied, and tucked into her meal.

  Senenmut picked at his meat. He had never been overly fond of gazelle. It was worse when it was cold. “Where did you send her?”

  “Mutnofret? I found a fine estate for her near Ankh-Tawy. A farm with a great house as pretty as a palace, with its own private lake and an olive orchard. It is far enough from the city to afford her plenty of privacy.”

  “Far enough from the city that she will meet no noblemen with whom she might conspire.”

  “I do think Mutnofret's conspiring days are over.” She paused in her attentions to the cold gazelle. A thoughtful stillness settled over her features. “There have been moments when I have thought myself cruel to send her away now. Thutmose has been in his grave hardly two months. Was it just to remove her from the vicinity of her last son's tomb? I look at my own children, and I do not know if I did right.”

  “You said at the waterfront...”

  She waved her supper knife, dismissing his words. “Yes, yes. I know what I said. It was right, in the end – to send her away, I mean. I only question my timing. I have no desire to be cruel. Mutnofret is my own kin, after all: my mother's sister, the mother of my dead husband, grandmother to my son.”

  “Your stepson,” Senenmut corrected gently, quietly. Before Neferure arrived, he had never objected to Hatshepsut's motherly tendencies toward the boy. Somehow things were different now. Neferure was the child of her very body, after all, while Thutmose was the get of her despised and mercifully departed husband, conceived on a harem girl. But it would never do to refer to Iset as a mere harem girl – not where the king could hear. She was something more to Hatshepsut. Senenmut knew that. And so he must accept that Iset's son was something more, too, no matter how it galled him.

  Hatshepsut went on as though she had not heard his interjection. “But Mutnofret plotted against me. She has always plotted against me. I cannot forget the way she brought her influence to bear on Waset, how she took my throne right from under me.”

  “You ceded the throne,” he reminded her, not knowing where his impertinence came from. Perhaps it was the disappointment of the peas and sodden fish.

  “To save Egypt from destruction,” she replied, narrowing her eyes. “You are most foul-tempered tonight. You are not getting enough sleep.”

  “The King's Daughter won't allow it.” He smiled to appease her, though he did not truly feel like smiling.

  “At any rate, she was the last known agitator in my city, and she is gone from Waset now like the rest of them.”

  The king had moved swiftly, sussing out those who opposed her and propelling them up or down the Iteru to comfortable but distant banishments. Only time would tell whether the measure had increased or diminished her security on the throne.

  “With your enemies confirmed gone, perhaps we might get back to hot suppers.”

  “My taster must have time to do her job. If you are displeased by the rate at which peas cool, take it up with the gods, not with me.”

  Senenmut scowled. “That child is too young to be a taster. If you believe some enemy or other will try to poison you again, why risk an innocent girl to find out?”

  Hatshepsut lowered her eyes. “I know. I feel the same. I tried to discourage her, but she insisted. She all but begged for the honor of the duty.”

  “You are the king.”

  “Batiret has proven herself unusually loyal. I would give her whatever she asks of me.”

  “Loyal?”

  “She chose to keep a secret rather than take it to my husband, or to Mutnofret, and profit by it.” She held his eyes for a moment, sober and pale, and he nodded, biting his lip. “Besides,” Hatshepsut went on, “the girl is at least as smart as you are, and twice as observant. Nothing slips past her notice.”

  “If nothing slips past her notice, then why not allow her to supervise the cooks and leave off the tasting duties? You could eat your food at the proper temperature once more. After months of cold peas and sauces turned to jellies, a bowl of hot broth would be as good as a festival.”

  “I am surrounded by enemies.”

  “You are not, Hatet. You said as much yourself moments ago.” He stared at her resolute face helplessly. A sudden burning in his chest caught at his ka, a relentless tenderness for her, a fierce desperation to comfort her, though she was as far beyond his comfort as the moon was beyond the reach of his hands.

  “I have managed to rout only the enemies I knew from my city. It's the enemies I cannot identify that keep me awake in the night. They are like shadows in darkness. I cannot see them, but I feel their chill. I know they are there.”

  “By the gods! You cannot live like this indefinitely. You'll make yourself mad. You have Nehesi and his guardsmen. You have me, for whatever that is worth. You even have the hearts of the rekhet; they love you! What more do you want?”

  She did not answer for a long moment, but stared cold-eyed into the king's chambers, past arrangements of ebony tables, black granite statues of gods, through walls painted with chariots in battle and papyrus in bloom. She saw nothing that Senenmut could see. Then without warning her lips trembled, and she raised her hands to her face, pressed the heels of her palms hard against her eyes. Senenmut was beside her in an instant, dodging around their supper table, pulling her into his arms, rocking her the way he rocked her child.

  “I want peace,” she said in a strangled, plaintive voice – a small voice, high and childish.

  She is only seventeen, he reminded himself. Seventeen, and a woman, and the king.

  Hatshepsut reined herself in, gathered herself up. Her hands fell away from her face and it was calm once more. The only evidence of her loss of control was the light tremor in her chest, and the single tear that crept down her cheek. The tear was black with kohl. Senenmut smoothed it quickly away with his thumb.

  “All I want is peace – that is all. I want safety. I w
ant to know that no man will ever take from me someone I love – anything I love, including my throne. Yet how can I have peace now, knowing as I do how many men wait to tear me from my birthright? Ankhhor was not the only one – I am not naïve enough to think that he was the only one.”

  “No,” Senenmut said. “You are not.”

  “It is only a matter of time before some enemy emerges again. Where is he now? Is he in my city? In my palace's own walls?”

  “You will make yourself mad...”

  “Then I shall be mad!”

  “It is no way to live.”

  “This is no way to live.” She waved her fist at the king's chambers, an arc that took in the gilding and faience, the fine furniture, the gentle whisper of cool air through the high, ornate wind-catchers. “And yet I love it. It is what the very gods bred me for. I cannot turn my back on it, any more than I can allow another to wrest it from me.”

  Silence fell heavy between them.

  Hatshepsut jabbed at her cold peas with the point of her knife. “I wish sometimes that I had been born a rekhet. Then I could live how I please, without the gods' yoke around my neck. I could love whom I please.”

  Senenmut looked away from her, blushing, though there were no servants here to see. He went reluctantly back to his own couch and drained his wine cup. “No rekhet lives as he pleases. They all wish to be nobles.”

  “Then I wish I had been born a noble, or a priest.”

  He laughed. “The nobles and priests all wish to be the Pharaoh.”

  She smiled in spite of herself, and in another moment, quick as a leaping fish, she had snatched a green fig from the bowl on the table. She threw it at him hard. It would have smarted, had it connected with his forehead, but he caught it and bit into it. The flesh was grainy and still just shy of sweet.