Free King and Goddess by Judith Tarr

humor,
more crude than elegant.
    How he must love to ride on campaign, Senenmut thought,
watching him as he received the news that a herd of river-horses had been found
just ahead. He had come prepared to hunt water-birds, but the larger prey
brought a gleam to his eye. He barely hesitated before he leaped into one of
the smaller boats. His weapons-bearer scrambled after, and as many of his guards
as the boat could carry.
    The barge could not follow where he went. The thickets of
reeds were too dense, the channels too narrow. It moored where the bank was
almost clear of reeds, where might have been a village once but was no longer:
a stand of date-palms, a mound or two that might have been the remnants of a
mudbrick house. The desert had encroached on it, but nearest the river it was
green still.
    The queen and her attendants, undismayed to be left behind,
settled to their various pursuits: reading, sleeping, playing on the harp or
singing to it. She alone seemed restless. She was thinking, Senenmut guessed,
of the duties she had left behind by her husband’s order, the petitioners
gathering in the empty audience-hall, the scribes and clerks waiting to
inundate her with papyrus. He knew enough of her by now to know that she felt
the dereliction of her duty. What else she felt for it, he could not tell.
    Some people were cursed to be perpetually dutiful. Senenmut,
who shared the curse, found himself closer to liking the queen than he had been
before. She did not know how to dally about, either, nor what to do with
herself when she was not engaged in something useful.
    Her face mastered itself, maintained its expression of royal
blandness, but she could not seem to govern her glances. He watched defiance
grow in her eyes. The noise of the hunt had faded up the river; the wind that
blew from the north carried the last of it away.
    It was remarkably easy to read her. One only needed to watch
the eyes; and the slight movements of the hands, clenching and unclenching on
the arms of her throne. Yesterday she had done all as his majesty desired.
Ignored once she was trapped on the throne beside his, unregarded except as
mute companion to his splendor, she had whiled the day in deadly tedium.
    Today, with her scribe to instruct her and her musicians to
play for her and Hapuseneb the priest for amusement, she was all the less
willing to be counted among the furnishings of the king’s barge. Hapuseneb
rattled on at her, some charming nonsense about a monkey and a baboon and the
god Thoth. Senenmut barely listened; so, he suspected, did she.
    He watched her resolve harden. She silenced the priest with
a gesture, beckoned to the steersman. “Return us to the city,” she said.
    The steersman stared at her. The others were mute.
    Not all were hers. Some were the king’s, too many for the
smaller boat, or too languid to contest for a place in it.
    She faced the steersman with all the arrogance of her blood
and breeding. “Do as I say,” she commanded him.
    For a moment Senenmut thought that the man would resist. But
he was only startled. At length he fumbled a bow. “Yes, lady. Yes—yes, lady. At
once, lady.”
    Someone sucked in a breath, perhaps in outrage. No one
spoke. She was, after all, the queen. The king was not there to countermand
her. He would perforce return home in lesser state than was strictly fitting,
but the queen was in no mood to care for that.
    Rowing against the freshening wind, taking what aid the
current could offer, the royal barge made surprisingly good speed back to
Thebes. Senenmut was a little sorry to see the city’s walls ahead. He had
conceived a fondness, perhaps even a passion, for the freedom of the river.
    Still he was as duty-bound as the queen, and there was work
to do: two kingdoms’ worth. Someday, he swore to himself, he would be rich
enough to have not only a boat for the river but a house beside it, an estate
worthy of a prince, where he could take his rest from the vexations of