The Twelfth Transforming by Pauline Gedge Page B

estates at Akhmin to the demanding task of disciplining two girls and entertaining for her powerful husband, though in her own way she loved them all. At Akhmin she designed jewelry, dictated long, rambling letters to her family, and flirted harmlessly with the male members of her staff. It was a pity, Tiye found herself thinking more than once as she walked beside Nefertiti’s pure, immobile profile, that neither she nor Mutnodjme had inherited their father’s strengths. But at least Nefertiti was diligent in dictating replies to her future husband’s letters, and when she spoke of him, which was not often, she used extravagant words of affection and longing.
    On a day full of a lush new greenness, when buds everywhere in Pharaoh’s vast acres were bursting into flower, the women of the harem took to their boats and drifted, with much laughter and loud chatter, up and down the Nile in the windy sunshine. Tiye lay on her couch, longing to join them but submitting impatiently to the impersonal touch of her physician. She had reluctantly summoned him after several bouts of nausea and a dragging fatigue but now regretted it, chafing at the time being wasted. At last he completed his examination and drew back, smiling. “Your Majesty is not ill, but with child.”
    Tiye sat up, blood draining from her face, hands clutching the sheet. “Pregnant? No! You must be mistaken. It is too late, I am too old! Tell me you have made a mistake!”
    The man bowed, edging toward the door. “There is no mistake. I have attended Your Majesty at the birth of every royal child.”
    “Get out!”
    When the doors had closed behind him, she flung herself from the couch, overturning the ivory table, kicking at the shrine beside it. “I will not tolerate this, no!” she shouted at her cowering attendants. “I am too old! Too old…” She sat on a cushion on the floor, now limp and sullen, her breast still heaving, her limbs trembling. “I wonder,” she muttered acidly, “what Pharaoh will say.”
    Amunhotep said nothing. He laughed until he had to cling to his swollen belly and tears streaked kohl down his cheeks, laughed at the irony of the news and from a secret, wholly masculine pride. “So there is yet life in my divine seed!” he chortled while Tiye looked down on him, unwillingly amused at his mirth. “And a spring fertility in that winter body of yours. The gods must also be laughing.” With a surge of new strength he swung himself from his couch, tossing the sheets aside and standing beside her. She had forgotten how much taller he was than she. She lifted her head to meet his still-streaming eyes. “Are you pleased, my Tiye?”
    “No, I am not pleased at all.”
    He cupped her face with his hands. “What a prolific pharaoh I am! We must consult the sphinx oracle immediately as to the future of the child.” All at once his features became cunning. “What if it is a boy? Healthy and vigorous? I might then have second thoughts about the succession.”
    Tiye jerked her head from his touch. “I think the oracle ought not to be approached until the birth,” she snapped, “and any haggling over the succession can wait also.”
    “I like to make you angry.” He grinned boyishly. “I feel better today than I have in months. Let us order out Aten Gleams and join the harem women on the river. I shall sit in the sun, and you can curse me and flick at the flies.”
    Tiye did consult an oracle, but on her own behalf, not for the child in her womb. She stood before the seer in the little sphinx temple set high above the western cliffs, gifts in her hands, while the man bent over the water in the black Anubis cup. Watching his hesitancy, she found herself wishing for the first time that the Son of Hapu were still alive. While she had hated him as a rival in Pharaoh’s affections, a maker of policies that she had fought to oppose, he was matchless as an oracle. He had been an impartial arbiter of the mysteries, interpreting what