King and Goddess by Judith Tarr

crashingly dull: an accounting of the
revenues of the nomes of Upper Egypt. He left it gratefully.
    The maid led him not to the queen’s chambers as he had
expected, nor to the hall where she held audiences and administered the affairs
of the Two Kingdoms. The way was not one he had taken before. It led away from
the inner palace and even from the outer one, to the wall that rimmed and
warded the palace. Built into and along the wall were stables, barracks,
armories: a kingdom of men and war, as alien to the scented quiet of the
queen’s apartments as Senenmut’s family’s house to the House of Life.
    The queen was in the royal stables. She looked strange, a
little, with her artfully painted face, in the scent of hay and horses. But her
gown was plain and her ornaments simple, and her wig was the short Nubian wig
that both men and women wore when they would be practical. She was deep in
converse with a tall and imposing personage, a hawk-nosed, bearded foreigner in
a striped coat. From the look and the scent of him, he was a master of horse.
    The subject of their discussion, a chestnut-colored horse
with a white nose, stood patiently beside the foreigner. It was newly come, it
seemed, as tribute from a king in Asia.
    The foreigner spoke Egyptian with a heavy accent, but
Senenmut understood him well enough. “No, I think not the whitefoot mare for a
chariot-mate to this one. She’s too short of stride. This beauty pours herself
over the ground like a lioness in the desert. The mare they call Star of
Hathor—she has the movement, and she has some need of a calming influence.”
    “Well then,” the queen said. “Call her Moon of Isis and try
her in the yoke with Hathor’s Star.”
    The foreigner bowed deeply in the Asiatic fashion. “It shall
be as your majesty wishes.”
    Hatshepsut nodded briskly and moved down the line of
tethered horses. She could not have failed to see Senenmut, but she was
choosing not to acknowledge him.
    Partly at a loss, partly to be contrary, he followed her.
The master of horse was just ahead of him, the maid just behind.
    Near the end of the line, almost to a wall with a door in
it, the queen’s Nubian guardsman busied himself about a fine blood bay. The
queen nodded to him but kept walking through the door and out into a broad and
sandy court. It was full of the thunder of hooves and the rattle of chariot
wheels.
    Senenmut had never seen a place like it. The glare of sun
through a haze of dust. The snorting of horses, the champing of bits, the snap
of a whip and the sharper snap of a charioteer’s voice, calling to order a
fractious team. The reek of dust and dung and sweat that was Egypt was overlaid
here with the pungent-pleasant scent of horses.
    He had always loved horses. They were new in the Two Lands,
brought in by the kings whom no one named, the foreigners who dared to conquer
Egypt. Those were a hundred years gone, driven out and rightly so. Egypt had
effaced their names from the earth, willed to forget them; but it had kept
their gift of horses. Horses drew chariots; chariots carried princes who not so
long ago would have been condemned to march and to fight on their own feet. Now
they could ride, and carry their weapons without inconvenience, and strike
swift against their enemies.
    But Senenmut loved the horses for themselves, for their
beauty and fire, their strength and their swiftness and the drumming of their
feet on the earth. He had not known before how splendid their eyes were,
fiercer than the eyes of cattle, with a keener intelligence. Nor had he
suspected that they would welcome him with the rush of warm breath in his palm,
lipping it, forbearing to bite.
    He ventured to stroke a sleek red-brown neck. It arched
under his hand, and the horse snorted, tossing its head. He held his ground. It
meant him no harm. He could see that in its eyes.
    Servants brought out two of the horses: a pair as like as
two pups in a litter, red-golden both, with pale manes. A chariot