The Heretic Queen

THAT EVENING, as I undressed for bed, my nurse remarked on my unusual silence.

“What? Not practicing languages, my lady?” She poured warm water from a pitcher into a bowl, then set out a cloth so I could wash my face.

“What is the point of practicing?” I asked. “When will I use them? Viziers learn languages, not spare princesses. And since a girl can’t be a vizier . . .”

Merit scraped a stool across the tiles and sat next to me. She studied my face in the polished bronze, and no nurse could have been more different from her charge. Her bones were large, whereas mine were small, and Ramesses liked to say that whenever she was angry her neck swelled beneath her chin like a fat pelican’s pouch. She carried her weight in her hips and her breasts, whereas I had no hips and breasts at all. She had been my nurse from the time my mother had died in childbirth, and I loved her as if she were my own mawat. Now, her gaze softened as she guessed at my troubles. “Ah.” She sighed deeply. “This is because Ramesses is going to marry Iset.”

I glanced at her in the mirror. “Then it’s true?”

She shrugged. “There’s been some talk in the palace.” As she shifted her ample bottom on the stool, faience anklets jangled on her feet. “Of course, I had hopes that he was going to marry you.”

“Me?” I thought of Woserit’s words and stared at her. “But why?”

She took back my cloth and wrung it out in the bowl. “Because you are the daughter of a queen, no matter your relationship to the Heretic and his wife.” She was referring to Nefertiti and her husband, Akhenaten, who had banished Egypt’s gods and angered Amun. Their names were never spoken in Thebes. They were simply The Heretics, and even before I had understood what this meant, I had known that it was bad. Now, I tried to imagine Ramesses looking at me with his wide blue eyes, asking me to become his wife, and a warm flush crept over my body. Merit continued, “Your mother would have expected to see you married to a king.”

“And if I don’t marry?” After all, what if Ramesses didn’t feel the same way about me as I felt about him?

“Then you will become a priestess. But you go every day to the Temple of Amun, and you’ve seen how the priestesses live,” she said warningly, motioning for me to stand with her. “There wouldn’t be any fine horses or chariots.”

I raised my arms, and Merit took off my beaded dress. “Even if I were a High Priestess?”

Merit laughed. “Are you already planning for Henuttawy’s death?”

I flushed. “Of course not.”

“Well, you are thirteen. Nearly fourteen. It’s time to decide your place in this palace.”

“Why does everyone keep telling me this tonight?”

“Because a king’s coronation changes everything.”

I put on a fresh sheath, and when I climbed into bed, Merit looked down at me.

“You have eyes like Tefer,” she said tenderly. “They practically glow in the lamplight.” My spotted miw curled closer to me, and when Merit saw us together she smiled. “A pair of green- eyed beauties,” she said.

“Not as beautiful as Iset.”

Merit sat herself on the edge of my bed. “You are the equal of any girl in this palace.”

I rolled my eyes and turned my face away. “You don’t have to pretend. I know I’m nothing like Iset—”

“Iset is three years older than you. In a year or two, you will be a woman and will have grown into your body.”

“Asha says I’ll never grow, that I’ll still be as short as Seti’s dwarfs when I’m twenty.”

Merit pushed her chin inward so that the pelican’s pouch wagged angrily. “And what does Asha think he knows about dwarfs? You will be as tall and beautiful as Isis one day! And if not as tall,” she added cautiously, “then at least as beautiful. What other girl in this palace has eyes like yours? They’re as pretty as your mother’s. And you have your aunt’s smile.”

“I’m nothing like my aunt,” I said angrily.

But then, Merit had been raised in the court of Nefertiti and Akhenaten, so she would know if this were true. Her father had been an important vizier, and Merit had been a nurse to Nefertiti’s children. In the terrible plague that swept through Amarna, Merit lost her family and two of Nefertiti’s daughters in her care. But she never spoke about it to me, and I knew she wished to forget this time twenty years ago. I was sure, as well, that Paser had taught us that the High Priest Rahotep had also served my aunt once, but I was too afraid to confirm this with Merit. This is what my past was like for me. Narrowed eyes, whispering, and uncertainty. I shook my head and murmured, “I am nothing like my aunt.”

Merit raised her brows. “She may have been a heretic,” she whispered, “but she was the greatest beauty who ever walked in Egypt.”

“Prettier than Henuttawy?” I challenged.

“Henuttawy would have been cheap bronze to your aunt’s gold.”

I tried to imagine a face prettier than Henuttawy’s, but couldn’t do it. Secretly I wished that there was an image of Nefertiti left in Thebes. “Do you think that Ramesses will choose Iset because I am related to the Heretic Queen?”

Merit pulled the covers over my chest, prompting a cry of protest from Tefer. “I think that Ramesses will choose Iset because you are thirteen and he is seventeen. But soon, my lady, you will be a woman and ready for whatever future you decide.”

CHAPTER TWO

THREE LINES OF CUNEIFORM

  EVERY MORNING for the past seven years I had walked from my chamber in the royal courtyard to the small Temple of Amun by the palace. And there, beneath the limestone pillars, I had giggled with other students of the edduba while Tutor Oba shuffled up the path, using his walking stick like a sword to beat back anyone who stood in his way. Inside, the temple priests would scent our clothes with sacred kyphi, and we would leave smelling of Amun’s daily blessing. Ramesses and Asha would race me to the whitewashed schoolhouse beyond the temple, but yesterday’s coronation changed everything. Now Ramesses would be gone, and Asha would feel too embarrassed to race. He would tell me he was too old for such things. And soon, he would leave me as well.

When Merit appeared in my chamber, I followed her glumly into my robing room, lifting my arms while she fastened a linen belt around my kilt.

“Myrtle or fenugreek today, my lady?”

I shrugged. “I don’t care.”

She frowned at me and fetched the myrtle cream. She opened the alabaster jar with a twist, then spread the thick cream over my cheeks. “Stop making that face,” she reprimanded.

“What face?”

“The one like Bes.”

I suppressed a smile. Bes was the dwarf god of childbirth; his hideous grimace scared Anubis from dragging newborn children away to the Afterlife.

“I don’t know what you have to sulk about,” Merit said. “You won’t be alone. There’s an entire edduba full of students.”

“And they’re only nice to me because of Ramesses. Asha and Ramesses are my only real friends. None of the girls will go hunting or swimming.”

“Then it’s lucky for you that Asha is still in the edduba.”

“For now.” I took my schoolbag grudgingly, and as Merit saw me off from my chamber she called, “Scowling like Bes will only scare him away sooner!”

But I wasn’t in the mood for her humor. I took the longest path to the edduba, through the eastern passageway into the shadowed courtyards at the rear of the palace, then along the crescent of temples and barracks that separated Malkata from the hills beyond. I have often heard the palace compared to a pearl, perfectly