The Heretic Queen

Asha handed the iron blade to me, and I gripped the hilt in my palm. “You could use this to decapitate Muwatallis!”

Ramesses laughed. “Or at least his son, Urhi.”

Asha looked between us.

“The emperor of the Hittites,” I explained. “When he dies, his son, Urhi, will succeed him.”

“Asha doesn’t care about politics,” Ramesses said. “But ask him anything about horses and chariots . . .”

The double doors to the balcony swung open, and Iset fixed us instantly in her gaze. Her beaded wig was adorned with charms, and a talented body servant had dusted the kohl beneath her eyes with small flecks of gold.

“The three inseparables,” she said, smiling.

I realized how much she sounded like Henuttawy. She crossed the balcony, and I wondered where she’d gotten the deben to afford sandals with lapis jewels. What gold had been left when Iset’s mother died had long since been spent educating her.

“What is this?” She looked down at the sword I had returned to Ramesses.

“For war,” Ramesses explained. “Would you like to watch? I’m going to show Asha and Nefer how it cuts.”

Iset frowned prettily. “But the cupbearer has already poured your father’s wine.”

Ramesses hesitated. He breathed in her perfume, and I could see how he was affected by her closeness. Her sheath was tight over her curves and exposed her beautifully hennaed breasts. Then I noticed the gold and carnelian necklace at her throat. She was wearing Queen Tuya’s jewels. The queen, who had watched me play with Ramesses since we were children, had given her favorite necklace to Iset.

Ramesses glanced across at Asha, and then at me.

“Some other time,” Asha said helpfully, and Iset took Ramesses’s arm. We watched as they left the balcony together, and I turned to Asha.

“Did you see what she was wearing?”

“Queen Tuya’s own jewels,” he said with resignation.

“But why would Ramesses choose a wife like Iset? So she’s pretty. What does that matter when she doesn’t speak Hittite or even write cuneiform?”

“It matters because Pharaoh needs a wife,” Asha said grimly. “You know, he might have chosen you—if not for your family.”

It was as though someone had crushed the air from my chest. I followed him into the Great Hall, and that evening, when the marriage was formally announced, I felt I was losing something I would never get back. Yet neither of Iset’s parents were there to see her triumph. Her father was unknown, and this would have been a great scandal for Iset’s mother had she lived through childbirth. So the herald announced her grandmother’s name instead; for she had raised Iset and had once been a part of Pharaoh Horemheb’s harem. She had been dead for a year, but this was the proper thing to do.

When the feast was finally over, I returned to my chamber off the royal courtyard and sat quietly at my mother’s ebony table. Merit wiped the kohl from my eyes and the red ochre from my lips, then she handed me a cone of incense and watched as I knelt before my mother’s naos. Some naoi are large and granite, with an opening in the center to place a statue of a god and a ledge on which to burn incense. My naos, however, was small and wooden. It was a shrine my mother had owned as a girl, and perhaps even her mother before her. When I kneeled, it only came up to my chest, and inside the wooden doors was a statue of Mut, after whom my mother had been named. While the feline goddess regarded me with her cat eyes, I blinked away tears.

“What would have happened if my mother had lived?” I asked Merit.

My nurse sat on the corner of the bed. “I don’t know, my lady. But remember the many hardships that she endured. In the fire your mother lost everyone she loved.”

The chambers in Malkata to which the fire had spread had never been rebuilt. The blackened stones and charred remains of wooden tables still stood beyond the royal courtyard, reclaimed by vines and untended weeds. When I was seven, I had insisted that Merit take me there, and when we arrived I’d stood frozen to the spot, trying to imagine where my father had been when the flames broke out. Merit said it was an oil lamp that had fallen, but I had heard the viziers speak of something darker, of a plot to kill my grandfather, the Pharaoh Ay. Behind those walls, my entire family had vanished in the flames: my brother, my father, my grandfather and his queen. Only my mother survived because she had been in the gardens. And when General Horemheb heard that Ay was dead, he came to the palace with the army behind him and forced my mother into marriage. For she had been the last royal link to the throne. I wondered if Horemheb felt any guilt at all when she too embraced Osiris, still crying out my father’s name. Sometimes, I thought of her last weeks on earth. Just as my ka was being formed by Khnum on his potter’s wheel, hers had been flying away.

I looked over my shoulder at Merit, watching me with unhappy eyes. She didn’t like when I asked questions about my mother, but she never refused to answer them. “And when she died,” I asked, even though I already knew the answer, “who did she cry out for?”

Merit’s face grew solemn. “Your father. And—”

I turned, forgetting about the cone of incense. “And?”

“And her sister,” she admitted.

My eyes widened. “You’ve never said that before!”

“Because it’s nothing you needed to know,” Merit said quickly.

“But was she truly a heretic, as they say?”

“My lady—”

I saw that Merit was going to put off my question, and I shook my head firmly. “I was named for Nefertiti. My mother couldn’t have believed that her sister was a heretic.”

No one spoke the name of Nefertiti in the palace, and Merit pressed her lips together to keep from reprimanding me. She unfolded her hands and her gaze grew distant. “It was not so much the Pharaoh-Queen herself, as her husband.”

“Akhenaten?”

Merit shifted uncomfortably. “Yes. He banished the gods. He destroyed the temples of Amun and replaced the statues of Ra with ones of himself.”

“And my aunt?”

“She filled the streets with her image.”

“In place of the gods?”

“Yes.”

“But then where have they gone? I have never even seen a likeness of them.”

“Of course not!” Merit stood. “Everything that belonged to your aunt was destroyed.”

“Even my mother’s name,” I said and looked back at the shrine. Incense drifted across the face of the feline goddess. When she died, Horemheb had taken everything. “It’s as though I’ve been born with no akhu,” I said. “No ancestors at all. Did you know that in the edduba,” I confided, “students don’t learn about Nefertiti’s reign, or the reign of Pharaoh Ay, or Tutankhamun?”

Merit nodded. “Yes. Horemheb erased their names from the scrolls.”

“He took their lives. He ruled for four years, but they teach us that he ruled for dozens and dozens. I know better. Ramesses knows better. But what will my children be taught? For them, my family will never have existed.”

Each year, on the Feast of Wag, Egyptians visit the mortuary temples of their ancestors. But there was nowhere for me to honor my own mother’s ka or the ka of my father with incense or a bowl of oil. Even their tombs had been hidden in the hills of Thebes, safe from the Aten priests and Horemheb’s vengeance. “Who will remember them, Merit? Who?”

Merit placed her palm on my shoulder. “You.”

“And when I’m gone?”

“Make sure you are never gone from the people’s memory. And those who know of your fame will search out your past and find Pharaoh Ay and Queen Mutnodjmet.”