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wife.
Four were named Hathor, for the goddess of love and beauty. One was Meritre:
Beloved of Re.
    The last was named Isis for the mother of Horus. She was the
youngest, only a season or two older than the queen, and in Nehsi’s estimation
the loveliest. She had a face like a flower, and soft ivory skin unkissed by
the sun, and masses of blue-black curling hair that she kept fastidiously clean
and scented with myrrh. Like the rest she was naked but for a string of beads
about the hips, but she had made herself a collar of lotus-blossoms that all
but hid her little pink-tipped breasts.
    The Hathors stood huddled together like heifers, staring
with wide brown eyes at the terrible golden queen. Meritre seemed above such
folly: her chin was lifted, her lips tight with scorn. She was the eldest, the
one whose lord had died, it was said, in her embrace.
    She had neither confirmed nor denied the rumor. Nehsi
reckoned her too proud to have much sense, but there was passion in her glance
as it flicked upon him, a smoldering promise that he knew better than to
acknowledge. If she was meant for the king, the least he would lose for
trespassing with her would be his two best jewels.
    If the king must have a teacher, she would do admirably. The
subtleties of courts and kings were beyond her. But in the bedchamber she would
have few equals.
    Beyond a word or two of greeting and inquiry, the queen
ignored her. She was more interested in the Hathors, who had recovered enough
to stammer out their names and the places from which they had come: the house
of the queen’s maids, the household of a lord, one child of a woman who had
sold herself on streetcorners but who had found herself a patron of ample means
and little concern for his lover’s antecedents. The queen’s rank and power made
them stammer and stumble and cling to one another more tightly than ever.
    Isis, like Meritre, preferred to stand erect and a little
apart, but not perceptibly for scorn. Like the Hathors she shivered as she
darted glances at the queen, but she was not terrified into immobility. She
kept her eyes lowered, seeming unaware of how alluring she was with the long
lashes on the ivory cheeks.
    Hatshepsut left the Hathors in what might have been relief.
They had little of intelligence to say. Not, Nehsi thought, that the king would
care for witty conversation in the bedchamber, but a woman who would teach him
the finer arts would need more than a halting tongue and trembling knees.
    “Isis,” said Hatshepsut.
    The girl stiffened slightly but did not look up. “Lady,” she
murmured.
    “Here, look at me,” the queen said with the exasperation of
five times’ repetition.
    Isis lifted her eyes. They were large and dark, less heavily
painted with kohl than most women in Egypt preferred.
    Their expression was at once wary and trusting: wary of the
queen’s majesty, trusting her to do nothing actively dreadful.
    “What were you before you came to me?” Hatshepsut asked her.
    Nehsi had told the queen already, but neither he nor Isis
said so. “Lady,” Isis said in her soft sweet voice, “before I came to this
place I was a servant in your own household, the least of your many children,
attendant of an attendant in your majesty’s bath.”
    The queen tilted her head slightly under the weight of the
tall crown. “And how, may I ask, did you acquire expertise in the pleasuring of
men, if you were a servant of servants in my bath?”
    The faintest of delicate flushes stained the ivory cheeks.
“Lady, I have only been a servant of servants for a season. Before that I was a
maid to Lord Hapi’s wife. Lord Hapi was—is—a man who prefers his ladies young.
He loves to teach them, lady, and to give them pleasure in such measure as they
give him.”
    Hatshepsut’s brows had risen remarkably. So too had Nehsi’s
when he first heard the child’s story. Lord Hapi was a man of late middle
years, soft and rolling in fat, with a reputation for subtlety in the