Sea Lion Shores metal and dust

“speech”

Of course Hatshepsut had wondered if she could have one day loved Thutmose, but she determined it would have been impossible. She had watched him grow; they had all but been reared together, and so the Regent knew that he would have never become an object of desire for her, even if his usual attitude had not been overbearing and repulsive. She could not have remained subservient in the shadow of one far inferior to her. Their father, the Mighty Bull, had not wanted Hatshepsut to wed her half-brother — indeed, he had elevated her above Thutmose, made her Regent in his stead. He had intended that his beloved, fierce daughter follow him as Pharaoh, though this was not to be. Tradition prevailed after his death.

Ankh spoke that which might be considered treason, had not the pair of them been in an unmarked land, and of the same mind. Her gaze softened, and her body relaxed from the tension she had been holding since his inquiry. “I also could not have wed my brother, had my father intended it. I would have defied him.” Her eyes held his own, and she was struck anew by their beauty, though the intricacies of what she had said moments before caused her mouth to tremble slightly with its intensity. To stave off the moment, Hatshepsut chuckled coolly. “Ah, we are a well-met pair, by Ra!” she swore lightly. “We are both disobedient children in our own ways. What are the chances that we would have met here, upon this distant and foreign shore?”

Her question was rhetorical, but her eyes glimmered with a new light. Like most of her kith, the diminutive ruler did not believe in chance, but in Fate. Hatshepsut had been intended to be elevated by her father, only to lose the crown to the more conservative supporters of her brother, and she had been intended to be banished, also. Why not believe that Fate had led her to this man, if only for cruel humour?

For a moment the Egyptian pondered the other possibility, wondering vaguely if he was questioning of the same, but dismissed it all the same; she was an embittered woman, devoid of her lineage and her virginity. She, surely, with her darknesses and her ambitions, was not the fresh-limbed young bit of feminine royalty Ankh's father had envisioned for him, and so she quelled the inner quaver for his masculine loveliness with a stiffening of her heart.

While he was beautiful, Hatshepsut was no simpering dalliance, to be drunk up and tossed aside. She had given of herself to no man — Thutmose had taken what was hers — and the Regent was quite taken with the notion that she would never do so. In the harem, there had been concubines and wives who, divested of their king's presence once he had summoned them for a few nights, took comfort in the perfumed presences of one another, but Hatshepsut did not believe that the glissade of loneliness that fell upon her at times would prevail enough for her to desire that.

“What will you do now, Pharaoh?” she asked at length, her voice a proper tone. “Will you seek out a daughter of this land and return home? will you continue to wander?” She herself was lost, oh so lost, but she was unwilling to reveal this to him, the pale Pharaoh Khafra.

Photo by Daniel Lee