for his remarkable career. Quite enough.
Senenmut was a legend among the younger scribes, for he was a wonderful example of how a person whose background is quite ordinary may rise to great heights through diligence and royal favour. He grew up, I believe, in the small town of Iuny, and his parents were worthy but dull and far from rich. His schooling he had from an elderly priest who retired to Iuny to grow vegetables. He first came to the attention of the late Pharaoh Thutmose the First, may he live, through the Pharaoh’s architect, the incomparable Ineni, who identified the young Senenmut as a most promising student of architecture. He worked under Ineni’s tutelage for several years and the old man drove him hard.
Being a man of many parts, Senenmut was also an able administrator and furthermore good with children, so Pharaoh Thutmose the Second appointed him to be tutor to little Neferure who was born to Queen Hatshepsut when she was the Great Royal Wife, and also made him steward of the child’s property. Senenmut dearly loved that little girl and she loved him. He would bring her along on a trip to a new building site, but only if he was sure she would be safe. I often saw her sitting on his lap, listening intently to some story that he was telling with much drama, or giggling uproariously because he was tickling her. They were always laughing together. He had a finely developed sense of the ridiculous and could mimic pompous officials and priests with wicked vividness.
I remember how one day he was doing a fine imitation of Hapuseneb for the amusement of the child and several junior scribes, myself included, during a time of rest under some trees at Karnak, where a section was being added to the hypostyle hall on the orders of the Pharaoh. The two men, the scribe and the priest, were similar in some ways, mainly in being very competent, but utterly dissimilar in others, and they never got on well. That day Senenmut had tied a huge bush of some kind to his head to represent Hapuseneb’s imposing ceremonial wig, and was pretending to pray to the gods, while responding in asides to his wife Amenhotep. This lady, as everyone knows, rules the roost at home and the Grand Vizier and Chief Priest of Amen jumps at her commands.
“Blessings and thanksgiving to thee, O my Father, my Lord!” intoned Senenmut in the high-pitched, slightly nasal tones of Hapuseneb. “Hear my prayer! The earth waits for thy precious seed!” Then he added, in an aside to imaginary words from his wife: “No, dear, I have not spoken to the builder. He is still completing the alterations at the palace. Amenhotep, my dove, I am busy. The earth waits for thy precious seed! Come thou and inseminate it! No, my dove, I do not want you to live in a hovel. Of course not. I assure you …”
By this time everybody was laughing. The imitation was brilliant.
Senenmut was getting well into the swing of things: “All people sing thy blessings and praise thy name,” he prayed, in the very voice of Hapuseneb. “We must be patient, my dove. The pyramids were not built in a day, you know.” He did not notice that a group of priests had emerged from the pylon behind him and were fast approaching our resting place. Nor did he realise that the jeers and cheers around him had suddenly fallen silent. “O give ear to our pleas!” he wailed, clutching the bush to his head. “Be thou generous, be thou …”
At last a loud cough from one of the minor priests attracted his attention. Senenmut turned around, to be confronted by Hapuseneb in person. “ … merciful!” he said, tailing off. The bald, immaculate priest stood glaring at him with his arms crossed. Sheepishly Senenmut removed the bush and shook some leaves from his thick dark hair. He was as tall as the other, but rangy rather than elegant, and he was covered in dust from the building works. “Sorry,” he said, carelessly. “We were just … fooling around.”
Hapuseneb looked him up and down with a sneer. “And you are the appropriate person,” he said, his high-pitched voice even higher with anger, “to play the fool.”
“At least I do not have a wife who makes a fool of me,” snapped Senenmut.
Hapuseneb blinked twice. “But then you are the Pharaoh’s fool, not so? A flea-bitten base-born buffoon.”
I thought the scribe would strike him for that. He did make a forward movement, but then he restrained himself, with a visible effort. “Better than being a two-faced onion-eyed footlicker.”
At that they almost did come to blows, but two of the priests accompanying Hapuseneb laid restraining hands on his arms. “Vizier, come away,” one of them muttered. “This is unseemly.” With one last glare, the Vizier and Chief Priest turned on his heel and left the scene. Senenmut gave a yelp of laughter and the junior scribes giggled, but not too loudly, for it does not pay to anger such a powerful man.
Her Majesty, I observed, used to pit them against each other. She would often call upon them both to offer suggestions for solving a problem, and they tried to outdo each other with their advice. But in the end it was usually the Pharaoh who cut through to the core of the issue, and it was always she who decided what was to be done. There was never any doubt as to whose hand was at the helm of state.
I pray that her grip may never falter. That she may hold the Black Land safe.
THE FIFTH SCROLL
The reign of Thutmose I year 16
As I sat there at the fish pond trailing my fingers in the water and watching Senenmut walk away, a strange mix of feelings was roiling in my heart, like one of Hapu’s pots in which he boiled up medications. There was sorrow for my brother, so young and strong, so suddenly bereft of breath; there was sadness for my parents who had to weep again for a lost child; there was a measure of fear, for if someone had killed the prince, might they not think also of me, who was the last of Pharaoh Thutmose’s children with the pure blood royal? And there was beneath all these a shiver of excitement … and more than a touch of bitterness. Because I should be next in line for the Double Crown when my royal parents passed into the Afterlife; but since I was a girl, I knew I would be overlooked. I sighed. I should go to talk to Thutmose, my remaining half-brother, I thought. This disaster would change his life, and mine as well.
The corridors echoed with the grief of ritual mourning, but as I walked along them towards my half-brother’s suite of rooms, I heard a different sound. A thin keening, full of such deep sorrow that the hair on my arms stood up. I pushed at the door whence it came. There I discovered Inet, huddled into a tight bundle on a low seat, hugging her knees, rocking and moaning.
I went to kneel beside her and took her in my arms. Why, she is quite little, I thought in surprise. I had looked up to her for so long, but now she seemed to have shrunk with age and grief. “Oh, Inet, please don’t,” I said helplessly. I was yet young enough to be greatly upset by adult weeping.
“My last prince gone,” she sobbed into my shoulder. “Gone to the gods. It isn’t right, it isn’t right for young ones to go first. The gods have got the order wrong. All wrong. Quite wrong.” She shook her head and moaned and rocked. I patted her heaving back.
I realised that she had loved my brother Amenmose every bit as much as my mother had. She had indeed seen more of him as a small child. She had brought him up. Of course she was bereft. “There, there,” I said, as she had so often said to me. I searched for something to say to her. “He will be waiting for you in the Fields of the Blessed, and he will be young and strong, and he will always remain so,” I offered at length. “He will never grow old and have a stiff hip and painful teeth and joints that ache. Think of that.”
She calmed a little and sniffed.
“He will come to welcome you, Inet, when your time comes to go to the Fields of the Blessed,” I told her. “To take you by the hand, and you will row in a little boat together and he will shoot ducks and the sun will always shine.” I found it strange that I was now trying my best to comfort the one who had always comforted me.
“But I want him to be here,” she said childishly. Then she gave a deep, tremulous sigh. “Well, well, it cannot be. We must put up with it. The older one gets, the more one must put up with.” She looked at me closely with her little swollen eyes. “Praise be to the gods that you are