CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

PI-RAMESSES

Avaris

  NEWS OF THE Sherden conquest traveled quickly up the River Nile. As we sailed toward the city of Avaris, people along the shore chanted triumphantly, “PHARAOH! PHARAOH!” Then the soldiers in the fleet took up the cry of, “WARRIOR QUEEN,” which the people on the shore returned without knowing why. And yet, I felt unease—for I wondered what Henuttawy would do when she heard that chant repeated.

Three days after the Sherden were defeated, we stood on the deck of Amun’s Blessing as the ship sailed into port. Because war and rebellion had stolen recent summers, the court in Thebes had not made its progress to Avaris since Ramesses had been crowned, and I was shocked by how much the city had changed. In the years I had been away, it was as if someone had taken a painting and left it out in the sun, allowing it to fade, then crack, and finally peel. I turned to Asha.

“What happened?” he gasped.

We both looked at Ramesses, and although he should have been basking in the adoration of the people who crowded the shore shouting his name, his face was stricken. “Look at the quay! Half of it’s falling to pieces!” Entire boards were rotten, and there appeared to be no system for washing away the grime, which clung to the women’s robes and feet. Merchants had dropped fish heads to rot where they lay, not bothering to kick them back into the river. “And the litters!” He pointed to the faded canopies resting atop chipped carrying poles.

“It’s like Pharaoh Seti hasn’t stepped outside of his palace in years,” Asha murmured.

“But he came to Thebes for the Feast of Wag. He must know about this! He had to have seen . . .”

We disembarked with twenty soldiers who would accompany us to the palace of Pi-Ramesses, and the clapping mobs were too happy to notice Ramesses’s distress. They ran before the litter he was sharing with me, throwing lotus petals into the air and passing the soldiers tall cups of barley beer. And even though he waved, I knew what Ramesses was thinking. Large holes in the main road had gone ignored, when all they would have required was dirt and stone to fill them in. The streets were littered with half-eaten pomegranates, sewage, and discarded papyrus. There was the unmistakable look of abandonment in Avaris, as if the city had been left to rule itself and no one much cared what happened to it.

When we reached the palace, heavily armed guards opened the gates. As Ramesses descended from the litter, he shook his head fearfully. “Something has happened. Something terrible has happened in there.”

The gardens had been allowed to grow untended, and on a carpet of weeds the towering statues of Amun stood cracked and dirtied. Every house in Egypt kept a courtyard of tile or dirt at its front where no snakes would be able to hide, but weeds and grass had been allowed to grow right up to the steps of Pi-Ramesses. We reached the heavy wooden doors, and when Ramesses saw how worn they had become, he snapped angrily, “Is this my father’s palace or the ruins of Amarna?” Even the tiles underfoot were cracked and broken. He turned to me. “I don’t understand this—what could be more important than maintaining this palace? My grandfather built Pi-Ramesses. If it’s crumbling now, what will happen in a hundred years? What will be left for our family to be remembered by?”

The doors swung open, and when there was no one in the hall to greet our arrival, the soldiers escorting us grew nervous. A figure emerged from the shadows, and as it grew closer I could hear a dozen swords being drawn from their sheaths. Then the light fell across Woserit’s face, and she was weeping.

“Ramesses, your father has taken ill. He’s lying in his chamber, waiting for you.”

The color drained from Ramesses’s cheeks. “When?” he cried. “When did this happen?”

“After we arrived. Just yesterday.”

Ramesses dismissed his soldiers with a wave of his hand, and Asha knew to settle them in the Great Hall with food and drink. I followed behind Ramesses and Woserit, and because I had never seen her cry, the sound frightened me. Her turquoise cloak trailed before me, and I tried to concentrate on its beaded hem rather than allow myself to feel the horror of what was happening. Seti was ill, but that didn’t explain why the city had been allowed to deteriorate; or why the palace, besides the few servants peering nervously between the columns, seemed to be an empty husk.

When we entered Seti’s chamber, several guards parted their spears to allow us through. But the man in the bed was not the same man I had seen during the Feast of Wag. Not even the linens they had covered him with could conceal how slight he was, or how pale he had grown since I’d last seen him.

“Father!” Ramesses cried.

Queen Tuya, Iset, and Henuttawy already stood in a circle around him. Paser sat on a wooden stool nearby, and Woserit joined him. Pharaoh Seti opened his eyes, but he seemed to know his son more by his voice than by sight. “Ramesses,” he whispered, and coughed.

“Iset will find you more juice,” Henuttawy said. “Is that what you’d like?”

Seti nodded painfully, and she took Iset and quickly left the chamber.

Ramesses knelt at his father’s bed. “What is it, abi?” He used the intimate word for father. I had never heard him use it before. There was heartbreak in his voice.

Pharaoh Seti let out a heavy sigh, and Queen Tuya began weeping. Her iwiw lay with his muzzle between his paws, looking almost as sick at heart as his mistress. He didn’t even raise his head to offer me his customary growl. “I have been sick for many months now, Ramesses. Anubis is following me.”

“No, abi. Please, not yet!”

Seti coughed again and bent his finger for Ramesses to come closer. “I want you to repair Pi-Ramesses for me. She has fallen into ruin.” Seti groaned, grasping the heavy linen covers in his hands. “For a hundred years, the Hittites have threatened to invade. They think to rule Egypt when I am gone. All of the treasury’s gold has gone to the stables. To my charioteers. Now the Hittites will become your problem . . .”

“We have just tasted victory over the Sherden! We have brought them here as prisoners to train with your army—”

Pharaoh Seti struggled to sit up. It was difficult for me to believe that this was the same man who had picked me up and sat me on his knee when I was a child. Eyes, voice, flesh: everything about him appeared shrunken, as if he was turning into the mummified Osiris before us. “I am past care, Ramesses. The physicians say it is a condition of the heart. The heart is weak,” he wheezed.

Ramesses opened his mouth to argue, but Seti raised his hand. “There’s not enough time. Bring me the maps.” His watery eyes fell on a low-lying table. “My projects.” Pharaoh Seti breathed heavily. “These are what you must finish for me.”

That very morning, we had been celebrating our triumph. Now I realized we might be mourning Seti’s death before the day ended. It occurred to me that the gods held life on Ma’at’s silver scales. Great happiness must be balanced by great sorrow.

“There is my tomb in the Valley,” Seti said. “The paintings are done. All that is left is to carry my sarcophagus into its chamber.” A violent sob escaped from Tuya, and I pressed my lips together so that I wouldn’t sob as well. But Pharaoh Seti carried on. “And this palace.” His breathing became labored. “Be certain to restore this palace, Ramesses. Make it your capital so that you can be closer to Hatti. If you can defend the city of Avaris, Egypt will never fall.”

“Egypt will never be conquered while I am Pharaoh—”

“Then you must not let the Hittites take back Kadesh. Without her, our lands are vulnerable.” Pharaoh Seti sighed. “And Nefer.”

Ramesses glanced at me. “Do you want to speak with her?”

“No!”

He was vehement, and I pressed my back to the door.

“Let her remember me as I was. Nefer—” His voice began to fail. “Nefertari is the mother of your eldest sons. A clever princess . . . but the people still don’t want her.”

“Who told you this?” Ramesses demanded. Woserit looked across the chamber at me, and we both knew at once: Henuttawy.

“It doesn’t matter who told me this. I have heard. The people are what’s important, Ramesses. You know what happened to Nefertiti. The people killed her—”

“The priests killed her,” Ramesses argued.

“And the priests are the mouths of the people. Akhenaten—”Pharaoh Seti grasped the covers, and I imagined that I could hear his heart rattling in his shrunken chest. “Wait at least another year before you choose your Chief Wife.”

“Abi,” Ramesses protested. “It’s already been a year.”

“Do not risk what this family has built! Wait at least another year. Promise me.”

I held my breath and waited for Ramesses to make the promise. But Ramesses didn’t speak.

“Promise!” Pharaoh Seti exclaimed, and Ramesses whispered, “I promise.”

I closed my eyes and slipped quietly out the door, shutting it behind me. The pain in my chest felt as if it burned with flame, and I ran to the Audience Chamber to be alone. The door was slightly ajar. As I stepped inside I almost cried out, but for the sound of voices from behind a pillar. I crept along the wall toward the front of the chamber, listening.

“I have bought you a year, and you will wipe that ugly scowl from your face and look me in the eye,” whispered Henuttawy.

“The gods will see what you’ve done—” Iset swore.

“What we’ve done.” Henuttawy’s voice was calm. “Every servant in Avaris saw you with that cup last night.”

“Because you gave it to me!”

“And who was there to see that? And anyway, all we did was speed his interminable passing. The longer we wait, the stronger Nefertari will grow. No one may ever question this,” she said, “but if I should remind them—” Henuttawy glanced over her shoulder at the empty chamber before continuing in a harsh whisper. “You shall find a way to repay me, or as I am bound to Isis, I will take back everything I have ever given you! If he makes that girl queen, she’ll have him banish us to Mi-Wer, and don’t think I won’t sacrifice you to save—”

There was noise outside the Audience Chamber, and their conversation fell silent. I escaped through the door and steadied myself with several deep breaths in case they should see me. Woserit appeared in the hall with Paser, followed by Ramesses and Queen Tuya.

Ramesses looked as pale as alabaster. “He’s gone, Nefer.” He shook his head and was not ashamed to weep. “Gone to Osiris.”

I took him in my arms as Henuttawy and Iset appeared with cups of shedeh.

Seeing our tears, Henuttawy cried out, and Iset placed her hand across her mouth.

I buried my face in Ramesses’s chest so that no one could see how sick the sight of them made me. Ramesses removed himself from my embrace. “Letters will have to be drafted . . .”

“With Your Highness’s permission, I will take care of the letters,” Paser said.

Your Highness.

The words struck Ramesses a visible blow. There would only be one Pharaoh of Egypt now.

“And what would you like me to do?” Henuttawy asked.

I wanted to shout that murdering the King of Egypt was sufficient, but the words stuck in my mouth and the burning in my chest increased.

“Go with Iset and Woserit,” Ramesses said. “They will take my mother to the Temple of Amun where she will let the gods know . . .” He hesitated, since the truth was too terrible to speak. “She will let the gods know that my father is coming.”

When everyone turned to leave, I motioned for Paser, and he saw me hovering near the door to the Audience Chamber.

“Nefertari, what are you doing?” he demanded.

“He should never have died!” I whispered fiercely.

Paser looked behind him, but the hall had cleared.

“When I left the chamber I heard Henuttawy speaking with Iset. They were talking about a cup,” I said frantically. “Henuttawy told Iset that she had bought another year. Another year,” I repeated.

“We all saw Iset pass Pharaoh a cup last night . . .” Paser replied.

“But it was Henuttawy who gave it to her! And now she has a secret she can use to ruin Iset if Iset won’t give her whatever she wants. And what she wants is to banish Woserit to the farthest temple in the Fayyum, then rebuild the Temple of Isis so that she’ll control the largest treasury in Egypt.”

“This only comes to pass if Iset becomes queen—”

“And now she has another year to try! You heard Ramesses’s promise, and even if he doesn’t honor it . . . if Henuttawy could kill her own brother . . .”

For the first time, I saw fear in Paser’s eyes. “The physicians said it was Pharaoh’s heart. No one suspected poison.” He looked at me. “Who else has heard this?”

“No one,” I promised.

“Then keep your own counsel. I will tell Woserit—”

“And Ramesses? Pharaoh Seti was his father!”

But Paser shook his head. “And there is no proof of what you’ve heard.”

“A physician can determine if it was poison.”

“Or he might determine that it was his heart, and you will have wrongly accused the High Priestess of Isis. Keep your silence. Ramesses may believe you; he may even summon a physician, but how will we know he’s not in the pay of Henuttawy? There are politics in everything, Nefertari.”

“So Seti’s death will go unpunished?” I clenched my fists to keep the rage from shaking my whole body.

“No evil deed ever goes unpunished.” He raised his eyes to a mural of the goddess Ma’at, who was weighing a heart against the feather of truth. Because the heart had been honest in life, it was equal in weight to the feather, and in the painting, the man was smiling. His ka would not be devoured by the crocodile god. His soul would go on to live for eternity.

“Henuttawy’s heart will outweigh the feather,” I swore.

Paser looked suddenly sad when he replied, “Yes. It probably will. Eat nothing that Merit hasn’t prepared for you, Nefertari.”

Paser left me standing alone in the hall. I had birthed two sons, I had gone with Ramesses into battle against the Sherden, and I thought selfishly of how all of those triumphs would be forgotten now that Pharaoh Seti was dead. The words that the soldiers had chanted this very morning would become songs of mourning by tomorrow. In the nearby Temple of Amun, Henuttawy and Iset were already weeping false tears with the queen, tears for my truest protector at court. It was as if everything I touched turned into ash.

That evening, dinner in the Great Hall was solemn, and Ramesses left his father’s chair empty on the dais. When Iset suggested that he take his place in it, he asked sharply, “Why?”

The court knew enough to be silent after that.

Later that night, in the privacy of my chamber, I bit my lip to keep from telling Ramesses what I’d heard. He sat on the gold and ebony bed I had slept in during every childhood summer in Avaris. Raised on a platform in the middle of the room, it overlooked the gardens that Seti had let grow untended. Layers of scum stretched unbroken over the pools, and I wondered if the fish had survived such neglect.

“Have you seen my father’s stables?” he asked quietly. He didn’t want to speak about his father’s death. He will carry it with him like a heavy chain around a prisoner’s waist, I thought. “They are massive,” he said, though his voice was distant. “Five thousand warhorses in all.”

I pressed the covers to my chest. Even the fires in the braziers did nothing to warm me. “That’s more than all of Thebes.”

“And they are well kept,” he said, a flicker of life in his eyes. “He had weaponry for more than ten thousand men, and four thousand chariots are polished and ready. He was serious about war with the Hittites, Nefer.”

“The Hittites have threatened war for generations—”

“Not like this. Look around. Do you see the disrepair? All of the treasury’s gold has gone to preparation for this! Since the Hittite emperor conquered Mitanni, there remains no buffer between ourselves and Hatti. My father recognized how dangerous that was. He knew it was only a matter of time. Paser says that Muwatallis will move as soon as he hears of my father’s death.”

“Another battle?” We had just returned from victory over the Sherden. There was a funeral to plan. Too much sorrow had fallen on us.

Ramesses gazed into the brazier ruefully. “No, not another battle, Nefer. A war.”

ON THE deck of Amun’s Blessing the next morning, Pharaoh Seti’s body was wrapped in linen and placed on a small dais surrounded by myrrh. His lips were curved in a gentle smile, released now from his watch on Egypt’s northern wall. In twenty days we would arrive in Thebes, and after seventy days of mummification, Seti would sleep in the tomb he had chosen, among Egypt’s greatest kings.

Ramesses stood at the prow, and a single flag painted with an image of the mummified Osiris flapped solemnly in the breeze. Women lined the quay dressed in their long white robes of mourning. They floated lotus blossoms ahead of the ship and beat their chests with their hands so the gods would know of our plight. All along our passage south, I watched villagers and fishermen kneel on the shore in honor of their Pharaoh. If only they knew the truth of his passing, how many of them would be content to quietly bow and weep?

When we reached the palace of Malkata, Woserit warned, “Do not let your sons from your sight. Not even to bathe.”

“And Merit?”

“You may tell her what you heard.” There were deep half-moons beneath Woserit’s eyes, and I wondered if Paser had comforted her through the nights the way I had tried to comfort Ramesses.

Inside my chamber, Merit greeted me. I felt guilty over the pleasure I took in seeing my children while the rest of Egypt was in mourning. The milk nurses stood and watched as my sons raised their hands to me. “Look how they’ve grown!” I cried. We had been gone for a month, and my sons were nearly unrecognizable. They smiled when I called each of them by name, and I marveled at how clever they already were. “And their hair!” My sons’ heads were like crowns of the finest gold.

“Like the king himself,” Merit replied, but as soon as she said his name, she thought of Seti’s death and her voice dropped to a whisper. “I was sorry to hear of Pharaoh, my lady.”

“It happened as soon as we arrived in Avaris.”

“We heard that the Sherden had been conquered, then news came that Pharaoh was ill, but no one could believe it. They said it was his heart—”

“It was poison,” I said harshly.

Merit covered her mouth. She waved the milk nurses back into their chamber, and when they had shut the doors, I told Merit the full story.

“I can’t understand . . .” Merit cried. “What happened to his tasters?”

“He dismissed almost all the palace servants,” I said. “To pay for war with the Hittites, and to buy armor from Crete.”

Merit pressed her fingers to her lips. “Henuttawy has given up her ka to make Iset queen. She will come for you,” she said with certainty. “You must hire a taster of your own.”

I recoiled from the idea, but Merit persisted.

“Ramesses has tasters.”

“Because he is Pharaoh.”

“And you will be queen! If you use a taster, Henuttawy will know, and she will never risk poison. Think of your sons! What would become of them if something were to happen to you? Do you think that Iset would keep me in this palace to watch over them? I would be sent with Woserit to the farthest temple in Egypt, while they lay here, defenseless.”

I felt my limbs grow cold. It was true. I looked at my children, beautiful princes of Egypt who might someday be kings. “Hire a taster,” I said.

“And if Pharaoh asks?”

“I will tell him . . .”

“That you are afraid of Hittite spies?” Merit said helpfully.

Henuttawy and Iset were liars. I didn’t want to lie to Ramesses as well. I should tell him the truth, I thought: that I am afraid his own aunt will kill me with a cup of wine or sip of shedeh.

There was a knock at the door, and before Merit received it, she turned to me. “Another year, my lady . . . Do you think he will keep his promise?” she asked.

I tried to ignore the hurt of Pharaoh Seti’s request. “He has never broken a promise,” I said.

“Even when Pharaoh Ramesses knows he made it to honor a lie? The people in Thebes heard from the messengers what happened to the pirates. They are starting to call you the Warrior Queen. They are saying that you risked your life for Egypt.”

But I repeated, “Ramesses has never broken a promise.”

Her shoulders sagged and she answered the door. “Your Highness!” She was startled in the doorway, quickly straightening her wig. “You have never knocked before . . .”

“I heard voices and thought Nefer might be telling you what happened in Avaris.” Ramesses entered my chamber and saw me with our sons. “I didn’t want to interrupt.”

“I am sorry for what happened to your father. He was like a father to my lady as well. Always kind, always gentle.”

“Thank you, Merit. We will all be moving down to my father’s court at Avaris as soon as his funeral has been held.”

“The entire palace?” she cried.

“Even Tefer.” Ramesses looked down, and Tefer responded with a plaintive cry. The cat had been sleeping beneath our sons’ cradles and appeared in no hurry to abandon his post. “It will take seventy days to prepare my father’s body. But once he is buried in the Valley of the Sleeping Kings, the court will move with us to Pi-Ramesses.”

I could already see Merit cataloguing the work that would have to be done. She excused herself with a bow, and Ramesses stood next to me.

“My father loved you, Nefer.”

“I’d like to believe that,” I said softly.

“You must believe that. I know you heard what he made me promise. He feared for my crown. He wanted to see you made queen, but someone misguided him.”

“I don’t think he was misguided,” I said carefully. “I think he was lied to.”

Ramesses watched me, and I wondered whether he was thinking of Iset and Henuttawy. I could not be the one to tell him the truth. It would have to be something he came to on his own. At last, his look of concentration faded, and he put his arm around my waist. “I will protect you. I will always protect you, Nefer.”

I closed my eyes and prayed to Amun, Just let him discover whom to protect me from.