Free The Bull of Min by Lavender Ironside Page B

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CHAPTER NINE
     
    H ATSHEPSUT BENT OVER THE MAP. Her finger traced a line Thutmose had marked across the northwestern border with a stump of charcoal. She squinted; the brown of her bare lids showed through brilliant malachite eye paint in patches, evidence that she had rubbed carelessly at tired eyes. Thutmose gestured for a lamp. Hesyre fetched it at once, set it near the lady Pharaoh, and withdrew with a bow.
    “I am not an ancient,” Hatshepsut muttered without looking up. “I don’t need to be surrounded by lamps just to find my way to the privy.”
    “It’s my own eyes that feel the strain.”
    “Nonsense. You are hardly more than a child, Thutmose.”
    “I a m a king as much as you,” he said playfully.
    The warmth he felt at the revival of Hatshepsut’s ka was, he often thought, the only thing keeping him from descending entirely into madness. The strain of planning the campaign into Kadesh made him feel as addled as a toothless grandfather. At least he had the benefit now of Hatshepsut’s assistance. It was a relief to pass some portion of the burden onto her strong shoulders. Knowing Egypt stood to lose that crucial corridor between the northern border and the fortress of Ugarit had roused her heart and ka from its long slumber.
    “We must not lose Retjenu,” she had declared, storming into his chamber one morning in her man’s kilt, the Nemes crown flying back from her round face like the wings of a stooping falcon. “Treat with them, trick them, crush them – I don’t care how it’s done, but the trade routes must remain open, and indisputably ours.”
    They had begun that very day, closeting themselves in Thutmose’s apartments with their maps and messengers’ scrolls, with the reports of hired eyes they had both worked so hard to sprinkle unseen amidst the Retjenu populace. And they had kept at their labors, while the flood waters receded into the breast of the river, withdrawing once more into the vein of life that sustained the Two Lands – their lands, Thutmose’s and Hatshepsut’s. By the time the crops in the fields stood ankle-high, Hatshepsut was confident of their plan, her faith as solid as granite.
    Thutmose still harbored doubts.
    Now she looked up from the map, her finger absently pinning Kadesh to the papyrus. She spoke some words to him, but Thutmose never heard. The grayness of her complexion took him aback, and he stared at the darkness ringing her eyes, the weary set of her mouth, in dull surprise. It was not the first time her appearance had caught him off guard. Since Senenmut’s death, the signs of some vague but undeniable illness had stolen over her features, and the illness seemed to make its mark more firmly known each day. She had grown plump with her own inactivity, and yet there was a haunting, alien frailty about her now, a quality which Thutmose could only call gauntness in spite of her extra flesh. The palace servants kept him well informed, and so he knew she suffered from fits of vomiting and weakness, though she never mentioned these spells to him or to Meryet.
    He had called on the best physicians in Egypt, who examined her skin, her breath, her pulse, her morning urine. The best they could surmise was that her ka had suffered a great shock – an unsurprising revelation. They recommended poppy milk for plenty of restful sleep, and the smoke of semsemet to soothe the pain and stimulate the appetite. One physician had offered to cut into her scalp and remove a bit of her skull to release the demons that inhabited her body. The man barely left the king’s apartments with his own skull intact.
    Magicians, too, were ineffective. They prescribed particular songs and chants, amulets, beseechings to this god and that, and not a note or gesture of their efforts eased her discomfort. That chilled Thutmose. If even the gods could not lift this malady from Hatshepsut’s body and kas, how long would she remain in the realm of the living?
    At least this –