King and Goddess Read Online Free

as it pleased. It noted that the
Nubian came back and established himself on guard at the door. It saw how a
strand of the queen’s own hair, glossy black and very thick, had escaped
beneath her wig. It observed that the sun had shifted toward noon, and that the
light in the room was fading slowly, for the window faced east.
    She heard the whole of one scroll and most of another.
Senenmut’s throat was raw, his voice hoarse. As he finished one letter and
began another, she said, “Enough.”
    He lapsed into welcome silence. The Nubian filled the cup
that had been empty; he drank. The wine made him dizzy. He had had wine once or
twice before, thin sour stuff, nothing like this sweet heady vintage. This must
be the wine that kings drank at their feasts.
    The queen had drunk nothing. Maybe there was calculation in
that. “You read adequately,” she said. “I wish to learn. Can you teach me?”
    “I am not a schoolmaster,” Senenmut said in the heat of the
wine. “I do not wish to be one. If I did, would I be here?”
    “Probably not,” said the queen. “I disappoint you, I see.
Had you expected to be taken to the king and appointed Vizier of the Upper
Kingdom?”
    He was too furious even to blush. He was all cold, white and
still.
    She went on as if oblivious. “My husband dislikes scribes.
He prefers what he calls honest men: soldiers and their kind, men armed with
sword and spear instead of brush and palette. He’d be rid of your kind if he
could. Scribes and priests, he says, are the bane of a warrior king. They
throttle swift action. They diminish the glory of battle in a niggle of
numbers.”
    “I might be different,” Senenmut muttered.
    She arched a painted brow. “My husband would never have
summoned you. I the mere woman, I who am no more than Great Royal Wife—I have a
use for you, or someone like you. You may refuse. The palace will be closed to
you thereafter, but that surely will be no impediment to a talent as vast as
yours.”
    Senenmut bristled. “And what do I have to gain if I play
schoolmaster to your majesty?”
    “Why,” said the queen, “nothing. Except presence in the
palace and the prospect of admittance to my counsels. I do have them, scribe.
Yes, even I, who am not a king.”
    Her irony was honed a shade too keenly. It irked her, then,
that someone else must be king. That was a weapon if Senenmut had known how to
use it.
    He knew the scribe’s art. He was learned in the lore of the
Two Kingdoms. He had heard of the intrigues of courts, the subtle and deadly
games that the high ones played to allay their boredom. Boredom like gold was a
luxury; only the wealthy were free to indulge in it.
    The queen was bored. Whatever she did with herself, whatever
was allowed her as the king’s wife, was not enough. She wanted more. This
teaching that she asked for was but a means to an end. It would give her
something that she needed, further a plan that she had in train. Through it she
played the game of princes.
    Senenmut meant to be one who ruled the game, not one who was
ruled by it: a counter on a board, helpless to move except as his master
decreed. Just so would this child-queen use him, take what he had and cast him
away.
    He rose. He bowed as correctly as he knew how. He said, “I
wish my lady well of her ambition.”
    She had not dismissed him, but neither did she stop him when
he turned and left her. Part of him—and rather a large one—was railing at him
for a fool. The part that ruled his feet wanted simply to be away from there,
away from that imperious, impossible, exasperating girlchild.

3
    Senenmut looked back on the gates of the palace in a kind
of bleak exultation. He had talked himself out of his chief ambition. And for
what? Because he had taken a dislike to the king’s wife.
    He was fortunate that she had not had him flogged or worse.
Her youth had preserved him: no doubt she had never been spoken to with such
rudeness. She had not known how to punish it.
    And now he