Pillar of Fire by Judith Tarr

Author:Judith Tarr [Tarr, Judith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Akhenaten, Moses, Egypt, Exodus, historical novels, Tutankhamon
ISBN: 9781611385915
Publisher: Book View Cafe
Published: 2016-02-02T08:00:00+00:00

Thirty-Seven

Johanan left Memphis in the morning, with the queen’s safe-conduct hidden in his robes. Nofret had fetched it from the scribe and given it to him before he left the palace. He lingered so long that she wondered if he meant to sleep in the room where he had eaten; but at last he rose from his seat.

His robes were waiting for him, clean and mended. He put them on. They changed him, made him both more and less a foreigner. They blurred the fine width of his shoulders, the narrowness of his flanks; but they were better fitted to his face, keen as it was, like a desert falcon’s.

He hesitated, as if he wanted to speak but could not bring himself to begin. Nofret could not speak, either. She had been distressingly glad to be rid of Seti. This man, this stranger, this friend of her youth, who had never touched her as a man touches a woman, nor ventured such a liberty . . .

Except once. He had been leaving then, too, for years and perhaps forever.

Anger surged up in her. It drove her forward, caught him in her arms, pulled his head down till their faces were level. Strange, to kiss a bearded man; neither pleasant nor unpleasant, simply different.

She pulled away first. He looked at her, his eyes dark, almost soft. “You have a lover,” he said.

She caught her breath. “How can you—”

“I’m glad,” he said. “I was afraid for you, so lonely as you can be, and so prickly-proud.”

“You have a wife,” she said. She did not know it, or see. She only meant to wound.

The blow fell short of the mark. “No,” he said. “I have no wife, or lover either.”

“Of course you do. You’re a man grown. Every man marries, to sire sons.”

“There’s no one in Sinai,” he said, “who makes my heart sing.”

She glared at him. “What does that have to do with it? A wife is a commodity. She bakes your bread, weaves your robes. She gives you sons. What more do you need of her?”

“Nothing, I suppose,” he said. He brushed her lips with his fingertip. Her lips were hot, his finger cool. “May the god keep you.”

He was gone before she moved. She did not seek him out before morning. When her messenger found the house where he had been staying, he was set long since on the road to Thebes.

Nofret did not know why she was so angry. She loved him no more than she loved Seti. Less. Seti had been her lover. Johanan had never been anything but a friend. He was not even that now. He was a stranger, a wild tribesman, and nothing to her at all.

oOo

The war in Asia, as far as anyone in Egypt knew, was a mighty success, with victory after victory, and the king smiting his enemies wherever he went. War in Egypt could never go otherwise, nor could its king ever be seen to fail in anything he undertook. He was a god, after all, and infallible.

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