The Heretic Queen

For the first time, the old man smiled. “Pharaoh Ramesses himself—for his marriage ceremony.”

The tapered paddles had been carved into the heads of sleeping ducks, and he caressed the ebony heads as if the feathers were real. “His Highness will use them to row across the lake while the rest of the court follows behind him in vessels of their own.”

I imagined Ramesses using the oars to paddle closer to Iset as she sailed in front of him, her dark hair covered by a beaded net whose lapis stones would catch at the light. Asha and I would have to sail behind them, and there would be no question of my calling out to Ramesses or tugging his hair. Perhaps if I had acted less like a child at Ramesses’s coronation, I might have been the one in the boat before him. Then, it would be me he would turn to at night, sharing the day’s stories with his irresistible laugh.

I followed Asha to the stables in silence, and that evening, when Merit instructed me to change from my short sheath into a proper kilt for the night, I didn’t complain. I let her place a silver pectoral around my neck and sat still while she rubbed myrtle cream into my cheeks.

“How come you’re so eager to do as I say?” she asked suspiciously.

I flushed. “Don’t I always?”

The pelican’s pouch lengthened as Merit pushed in her chin. “A dog does what its master says. You listen the way a cat listens.”

We both looked at Tefer reclining on the bed, and the untamable miw placed his ears against his head as if he knew he was being chastised.

“Now that Pharaoh Ramesses has grown up, have you decided to grow up as well?” Merit challenged.

“Perhaps.”

WHEN IT was time to eat in the Great Hall, I took my place beneath the dais and could see that Ramesses was watching Iset. In ten days she would become his wife, and I wondered if he would forget about me entirely.

Pharaoh Seti stood from his throne, and as he raised his arms the hall fell silent. “Shall we have some music?” he asked loudly, and next to him Queen Tuya nodded. As always, her brow appeared damp with sweat, and I wondered how such a large woman could bear living in the terrible heat of Thebes. She didn’t bother to stand, and fan bearers with their long ostrich feathers stirred the perfumed air around her so that even from the table beneath the dais it was possible to smell her lavender and lotus blossom.

“Why don’t we hear from the future Queen of Egypt?” she suggested, and the entire court looked to Iset, who rose gracefully from her chair.

“As Your Highnesses wish.”

Iset made a pretty bow and slowly crossed the chamber. As she approached the harp that had been placed beneath the dais, Ramesses smiled. He watched her arrange herself before the instrument, pressing the carved wooden shoulder between her breasts, and as the lilting notes echoed across the hall, a vizier behind me murmured, “Beautiful. Exceptionally beautiful.”

“The music or the girl?” Vizier Anemro asked.

The men at the table all snickered.

ON THE eve of Ramesses’s marriage to Iset, Tutor Paser called me aside while the other students ran home. He stood at the front of the classroom, surrounded by baskets of papyrus and fresh reed pens. In the soft light of the afternoon, I realized he was not as old as I had often imagined him to be. His dark hair was pulled into a looser braid, and his eyes seemed kinder than they had ever been. But when he motioned for me to sit in the chair across from him, tears of shame blurred my vision before he even said a word.

“Despite the fact that your nurse allows you to run around the palace like a wild child of Set,” he began, “you have always been the best student in this edduba. But in the past ten days you’ve missed six times, and today the translations you completed could have been done by a laborer in one of Pharaoh’s tombs.”

I lowered my head. “I will do better,” I promised.

“Merit tells me you don’t practice your languages anymore. That you are distracted. Is this because of Ramesses’s marriage to Iset?”

I raised my eyes and wiped away my tears with the back of my hand. “Without Ramesses here, no one wants to be near me! All of the students in the edduba pretended to be kind to me because of Ramesses. Now that he’s gone they call me a Heretic Princess.”

Paser leaned forward, frowning. “Who has called you this?”

“Iset,” I whispered.

“That is only one person.”

“But the rest of them think it! I know they do. And in the Great Hall, when the High Priest sits at our table beneath the dais . . .”

“I would not concern myself with what Rahotep thinks. You know that his father was the High Priest of Amun—”

“And when my aunt became queen, she and Pharaoh Akhenaten had him killed. I know that. So Iset is against me, and the High Priest is against me, and even Queen Tuya . . .” I choked back a sob. “They are all against me because of my family. Why did my mother name me for a heretic?” I cried.

Paser shifted uncomfortably. “She could never have known the hatred that people would still have for her sister twenty-five years later.”

He stood and offered me his hand. “Nefertari, you must continue to study your Hittite and Shasu. Whatever happens with Pharaoh Ramesses and Asha, you must excel in this edduba. It will be the only way to find a place for yourself in the palace.”

“As what?” I asked desperately. “A woman can’t be a vizier.”

“No,” Paser said. “But you are a princess. With your command of languages there are a dozen different futures for you. As a High Priestess, or a High Priestess’s scribe, possibly even as an emissary.”Paser reached into a basket and produced several scrolls. “Letters from King Muwatallis to Pharaoh Seti. Work you missed while you were in the palace pretending to be sick.”

I’m sure my cheeks turned a brilliant scarlet, but as I left, I reminded myself of the truth in Paser’s words. I am a princess. I am the daughter and niece and granddaughter of queens. There are many possible futures for me.

When I returned to the courtyard of the palace, a large pavilion of white cloth had been erected where Ramesses’s most important marriage guests would feast. Hundreds of servants scurried like ants, rushing from the Great Hall into the tent with chairs and tables held high above their heads. Beneath a golden sunshade, away from the chaos, Pharaoh Seti’s sisters had arrived to oversee the preparations. Iset was there, too, with her friends from the harem.

“Nefer!” Ramesses called from across the courtyard. He left Iset to hurry over to me. He had taken off his nemes crown in the heat, and the summer sun set his hair aflame. I imagined Iset running her fingers through the red-gold tresses, whispering in his ear the way Henuttawy whispered to handsome noblemen whenever she was drunk.

“I haven’t seen you in days,” he said apologetically. “You can’t imagine what it’s been like in the Audience Chamber. Every day it’s another crisis. Do you remember last year how the lake receded?”

I nodded. Ramesses shaded his eyes with his hand. “Well, that’s because the Nile didn’t overflow its banks. And without an overflow to water the land, very little was harvested this summer. In some cities it’s already led to famine.”

“Not in Thebes,” I protested.

“No, but in the rest of Upper Egypt,” he said.

I tried to imagine a famine when tomorrow the palace would feed a thousand people. Cuts of beef, roasted duck, and lamb were already being prepared in the kitchens, and wide barrels of pomegranate wine were waiting in the Great Hall to be rolled into the pavilion.

Ramesses caught my glance and nodded. “I know it’s hard to believe,” he said, “but the people outside of Thebes are suffering. We’ve had a little rain, but not cities like Edfu and Aswan.”

“So will Thebes share its grain?”

“Only if there’s enough. The viziers are angry that the Habiru are growing so plentiful in Egypt. They say