The Heretic Queen

protected within its shell. On one side are the sandstone cliffs, on the other is the lake that had been carved by my akhu to allow boats to travel from the River Nile to the very steps of the Audience Chamber. Amunhotep III built it for his wife, Queen Tiye. When his architects had said that such a thing could never be made, he designed it himself. With his legacy before me, I walked slowly around the Arena, past the barracks with their dusty parade grounds, and then beyond the servants’ quarters that squatted back into the wadis to the west. When I came to the lakeshore, I approached the water to peer at my reflection.

I don’t look anything like Bes, I thought. For one, he has a much bigger nose than I do. I made the grimace that all artists carve on statues of Bes, and behind me someone laughed.

“Are you admiring your teeth?” Asha cried. “What kind of face was that?”

I glared at him. “Merit says I have a face like Bes.”

Asha stepped back to scrutinize me. “Yes, I can see the resemblance. You both have big cheeks, and you are rather short.”

“Stop it!”

“I wasn’t the one making the face!” We continued our walk to the temple and he asked, “So did Merit tell you the news last night? Ramesses will probably marry Iset.”

I looked away and didn’t reply. In the heat of Thoth, the sun cast its rays across the lake like a golden fisherman’s net. “If Ramesses was going to be married,” I said finally, “why wouldn’t he tell us about it himself?”

“Perhaps he isn’t certain. After all, it’s Pharaoh Seti who will ultimately decide.”

“But she isn’t a match for Ramesses at all! She doesn’t hunt, or swim, or play Senet. She can’t even read Hittite!”

Tutor Oba glared as we approached the courtyard, and under his breath Asha whispered, “Prepare for it!”

“How nice of the two of you to join us!” Oba exclaimed. Two hundred faces turned in our direction, and Tutor Oba lashed out at Asha with his stick. “Get in line!” He caught Asha on the back of the leg, and we scampered to join the other students. “Do you think that Ra appears in his solar bark when he feels like it? Of course not! He’s on time. Every sunrise he’s on time!”

Asha glanced over his shoulder at me in line as we followed Tutor Oba into the sanctuary. Cloth mats had been spread out for us on the floor, and we took our seats and waited for the priests. I whispered to Asha, “I’ll bet Ramesses is sitting in the Audience Chamber right now, wishing he was with us.”

“I don’t know. He’s safe from Tutor Oba.”

I snickered as seven priests entered the chamber, swinging incense from bronze holders and intoning the morning hymn to Amun.

Hail to thee, Amun-Ra, Lord of the thrones of the earth, the oldest existence, ancient of heaven, support of all things.Chief of the gods, lord of truth; maker of all things above and below.Hail to thee.

As the incense filled the room, a student coughed. Tutor Oba turned around to look fiercely at him and I elbowed Asha in the side, bent my mouth into a mean, angry line, then imitated Oba’s snarling. One of the students laughed out loud, and Tutor Oba twisted around. “Asha and Princess Nefertari!” he snapped.

Asha glared at me and I giggled. But outside the temple, I didn’t ask him to race me to the edduba.

“I don’t know why the priests don’t throw us out,” he said.

I grinned. “Because we’re royalty.”

“You’re royalty,” Asha countered. “I’m the son of a soldier.”

“You mean the son of a general.”

“Still, I’m not like you. I don’t have a chamber in the palace or a body servant. I need to be careful.”

“But it was funny,” I prompted.

“A little,” he admitted as we reached the low white walls of the royal edduba. The schoolhouse squatted like a fat goose on the hillside, and Asha’s footsteps slowed as we approached its open doors. “So what do you think it’ll be today?” he asked.

“Probably cuneiform.”

He sighed heavily. “I can’t afford another poor report to my father.”

“Take the reed mat next to mine, and I’ll write big enough for you to see,” I promised.

Inside the halls of the edduba, students called to one another, laughing and exchanging stories until the trumpet sounded for class. Paser stood at the front of our chamber, observing the chaos, but when Iset entered, the room grew silent. She moved through the students, and they parted before her as if a giant hand had pushed them aside. She sat across from me, folding her long legs on her reed mat the way she always did, but this time, when she swept back her dark hair, her fingers seemed fascinating to me. They were long and tapered. At court, only Henuttawy surpassed Iset’s skill with the harp. Was that why Pharaoh Seti thought she’d make a good wife?

“We may all stop staring now,” Paser announced. “Let us take out our ink. Today, we translate two of the Hittite emperor’s letters to Pharaoh Seti. As you know, Hittite is written in cuneiform, which will mean transcribing every word from cuneiform to hieroglyphics.”

I took out several reed pens and ink from my bag. When the basket of blank papyrus came to me, I took the smoothest one from the pile. Outside the edduba a trumpet blared again, and the noise from the other classrooms went silent. Paser passed out copies of Emperor Muwatallis’s first letter, and in the early morning heat the sound of pens scratching on papyrus settled upon the room. The air felt heavy, and sweat beaded behind my knees where I sat cross-legged. Two fan bearers from the palace cooled the room with their long blades, and as the air stirred, Iset’s perfume moved across the chamber to tickle my nose. She told the students she wore it to cover the unbearable smell of the ink, which is made from ash and the fat boiled off a donkey’s skin. But I knew this wasn’t true. Palace scribes mixed our ink with musk oil to cover the terrible scent. What she really wanted was to attract attention. I wrinkled my nose and refused to be distracted. The important information in the letter had been removed, and what had been left was simple to translate. I wrote several lines in large hieroglyphics on my papyrus, and when I’d finished with the letter, Paser cleared his throat.

“The scribes should be done with the translation of Emperor Muwatallis’s second letter. When I return, we will move on,” he warned sternly. The students waited until the sound of his sandals had faded before turning to me.

“Do you understand this, Nefer?” Asha pointed to the sixth line.

“And what about this?” Baki, Vizier Anemro’s son, couldn’t make out the third. He held out his scroll and the class waited.

“To the Pharaoh of Egypt, who is wealthy in land and great in strength. It is like all of his other letters.” I shrugged. “It begins with flattery and ends with a threat.”

“And what about this?” someone else asked. The students gathered around me and I translated the words quickly for them. When I glanced at Iset, I saw that her first line wasn’t finished. “Do you need help?”

“Why would I need help?” She pushed aside her scroll. “You haven’t heard?”

“You’re about to become wife to Pharaoh Ramesses,” I said flatly.

Iset stood. “You think that because I wasn’t born a princess like you that I’ll spend my life weaving linen in the harem?”

She wasn’t speaking about the harem of Mi-Wer in the Fayyum, where Pharaoh’s least important wives are kept. She was speaking about the harem behind the edduba, where Seti housed the women of previous kings and those whom he himself had chosen. Iset’s grandmother had been one of Pharaoh Horemheb’s wives. I had heard that one day he saw her walking along the riverbank, collecting shells for her own husband’s funeral. She was already pregnant with her only child, but just as that had not stopped him from taking my mother, Horemheb wanted her as his bride. So Iset was not related to a Pharaoh at all, but to a long line of women who had lived, and fished, and made their work on the River Nile. “I may be an orphan of the harem,” she went on, “but I think everyone here would agree that being the niece of a heretic is much worse, whatever your fat nurse likes to pretend. And no one in this edduba likes you,” she revealed. “They smile at you because of Ramesses, and now that