And then, in tears again, in tears always, she ended her prayer and went on about her work until the next time that rage swelled up in her heart and she began again her prayer of sarcasm, then repentance, then pleading.

  A pain swept over her, an insistent one. The sun was still up, but she had no choice. This baby was not going to be as slow as Aaron or Miriam were.

  Three-year-old Aaron was playing with the distaff, making a tangle of the thread.

  “Miriam!” called Jochabed, her voice made sharp by pain.

  Miriam came indoors at once. “The water hasn’t boiled yet, mother.”

  “I don’t care about the supper,” said Jochabed.

  “Aaron,” said Miriam, “leave the thread alone, you’re undoing Mother’s work!”

  “I don’t care about the thread,” said Jochabed.

  Miriam’s eyes grew wide. In all her seven years of life, she had never known her mother to speak slightingly of any labor.

  “Go tell . . . go to the house of Puah . . .”

  “The Egyptians watch her house.” Was even a child aware of the terrible things that had befallen the people of Israel? Oh, Miriam, that you should live in such a time!

  “No. I know that. I meant, go to the house of . . . go find your father and whisper to him that the time of a woman has come upon me. Speak to no one else.” Jochabed had meant to wait until Amram came home in the evening; she had made no plan for how to notify him before the afternoon was out. If their Egyptian neighbors got word that a midwife had been called for, they would set up a vigil outside the house, and there would be no hope then.

  Not that there was hope even now. Should she wish for a mute child, so he would not cry? As well she might wish to keep him muffled up in cloth, hide him in a basket until he reached manhood. Oh, why not simply carry him to the river herself, and spare them all the agony of dread!

  “Go,” said Jochabed. And then: “Wait.”

  Miriam stopped in the doorway, confused, afraid that she had done something wrong.

  “No, I just—no, don’t fetch your father, no. Go instead to the boatmakers. Tell them I need pitch. A jar of hot pitch.” The idea was only half-formed, but already Jochabed knew what she was going to do. A basket. Take him to the river herself. God chose to send her a boy at a time like this—well, let God find a way to save him! Jochabed knew the moment the idea came to her that it was from God. Like Noah, her baby would ride atop the flood in a boat smeared with pitch to make it watertight. Pharaoh’s edict said that Israelite boy babies must be given to the river. But he never said they could not be in a boat!

  A basket. One of the baskets here in the house would have to do. A new one, with a tight weave. Large enough to hold a baby.

  Another pain seized her and she stopped, gasped for breath. Give me time, child! Don’t be in such a hurry to get to the river that you insist on arriving there before I have your ark ready for you!

  I meant it, Lord! Save this baby, and he belongs to thee. Only let me see that he’s alive. Not that I insist on it—I beg it of thee as a favor, that’s all. Be merciful and let me see that he’s alive, let me know that he has found favor in thy sight, and then I will be content, I will bless thy name forever. Or if thou wilt not save him, then let me die in bearing him, so I never have to know of his death, or spend my life imagining those terrible moments as he drowns or is taken by a crocodile.

  Jochabed slid down the rough mudbrick wall to the cold earthen floor of her house. Hurry, Miriam. My baby needs the Lord, but I need the midwife.

  * * *

  Hatshepsut was getting ready to go down to the river when Jannes came to her. “Your father wants you,” he said. And since her father was Pharaoh, there was no question but that she would go to him at once.

  Hatshepsut knew something that no one else knew, however, for her father had shown it to no one else: She knew that besides being Pharaoh, he was also Tuthmose, a mere man, beset with a man’s doubts and fears, a man’s griefs and regrets. These days Father seemed to sink more deeply inside himself with every passing day. Hatshepsut suspected that he was preparing to die. Not that he was ill, not that he was old, but that he saw that his life had been for nothing. For Hatshepsut’s two full brothers, either of whom would have been her husband and Tuthmose’s successor to the double crown of Egypt, had died in their youth, and from the way the concubine Mutnefert pushed her own son forward, it was hard to doubt the gossip that Mutnefert had a hand in the convenient death of each heir. And it wasn’t as if Mutnefert was subtle: Father had tried to raise two more half-brothers ahead of Mutnefert’s loathsome boy, and each of them had met with an unfortunate accident.

  The fact that their “accidents” had come when Mutnefert was nowhere near did not absolve her; it merely implied that she had more and more allies within the palace, who expected that when Tuthmose died it would be very, very good for their careers to be friends of Mutnefert. How many times had Hatshepsut whispered to her father that for the sake of his other children, he really ought to put Mutnefert to death? Until finally Tuthmose spoke harshly to her, despite her status as his most beloved child: “The house of Pharaoh is the house of a god,” he said. “Do I publicly declare that I have unknowingly brought a snake into my house? Then I must not be a god, and the house comes down.”

  This had come as a shock to Hatshepsut, for she was logician enough to understand that her father was confessing a terrible secret: that he was not a god, for he had brought a snake into the house. And worse: that it was so important to maintain the illusion of the godhood of Pharaoh that he would sacrifice all his sons and let the twisted spawn of a monster take the crown in order to preserve it.

  Since that day—and she was only twelve when it happened, not yet come into her beauty but already possessed of her wisdom and the confidence of her father—she had come to understand better that it is by illusions that men rule. The illusion of Pharaoh as all-seeing and all-powerful was necessary to allow him to govern, especially because he saw only what his aides showed him, and his power reached only as far as people were willing to obey him. The illusion of god-Pharaoh led the common people to obey him even when snakes in his own house bit his heel.

  Only the gossip about Mutnefert had spread far and wide—and, more to the point, high and low. The people sensed the weakness in the king’s house. They demanded a hero. They remembered the achievements of Amose and Amenhotep, Tuthmose’s grandfather and father, who had driven out the Hyksos overlords and suppressed their rebellions and restored the ancient glory and sovereignty of Egypt. Tuthmose was weak? Then look to the past: What did Amenhotep do that made him strong? He struck with his armies across the borders to break the will of the enemies of Egypt. He brought back triumph and tribute from foreign lands.

  And he executed his enemies within Egypt.

  Did the people want to maintain Egypt’s greatness? They could not send out armies or bring back tribute. But they certainly could execute the enemies of Egypt. And now that the Hyksos were gone for good, who was left to kill but the Israelites, those hapless desert people who first came to Egypt during a famine centuries before and who were raised up to power and privilege by the Hyksos Pharaohs, who used their loyalty, their learning, their hard work, to help them maintain their grip on Egypt? When the Hyksos fell, the Israelites were friendless.

  The vengeance of the Egyptian people was not harsh at first. Israelites had been their overlords, so now they became slaves. Teachers and magistrates now made mud bricks and built levees and walls, monuments and roads. The pleasure of this did not last, however, especially since the Israelites continued to be more learned than the common Egyptians, as if they thought they were all priests, and kept on with their loathsome customs of keeping herds of animals and killing them in bloody, smoky, stinking sacrifices to their invisible private god. More to the point, the Israelites also had far more children than most Egyptian families, so that not only their herds of animals but also their herds of children increased.

  Not long ago the common people began to form mobs and storm the homes of Israelite women giving birth. These incidents, if allowed to flourish, would lead to anarchy. Jannes and his son Jambres advised Tuthmose that the only way to harness the rage of the people was to make his own laws to satisfy them.

  The first attempt was an order given to the Israelite midwives that they must suffocate male children as soon as they emerged from the womb, before they could ever draw breath. Thus they would never have been alive and it would not be murder. The idea was that the Egyptian people would be satisfied if they could foresee the eradication of the Israelites as a people, for within a generation the Israelites would be a nation of women, forced to turn to the Egyptians for their husbands, and within two generations Israel would cease to exist. And yet it would have been achieved without battles or bloodshed—and without public disorder.

  In vain did Hatshepsut counsel with her father that to give in to the mob would weaken the crown still further. The people are not fools, she said. They’ll know that you are obeying them, not ruling them.

  But Jannes and Jambres were men, were priests, and Jannes had been Tuthmose’s dear friend in their youth. The foolish law was announced.

  Hatshepsut almost laughed aloud when Puah and Shiphrah, the leading midwives among the Israelites, were hauled into court to explain why Israelite boy children continued to be born despite the law.

  “Israelite women give birth so quickly,” Puah explained. “By the time we get to their houses, the babies are already breathing and they have been given names. We can’t very well suffocate them then!”

  What did Father and Jannes think, that the Israelites were so stupid they would willingly cooperate in their own eradication?

  Still Father wouldn’t heed Hatshepsut’s advice. Instead he followed Jannes’s advice and passed a new law, that newborn Israelite boychildren would be given to the river. Let the mobs watch and tell the temple guards of the birth of an Israelite baby; if the child was given to the river, it would still not be murder but rather an act of piety. Everyone would be content, and the Israelite threat would be eliminated in a generation.

  Hatshepsut wept then, pleading with her father—in private, of course—to rescind the order. “No one is deceived!” she cried. “Mobs have committed murder in your kingdom, and your answer has been to commit their murders for them! What kind of king are you! Egypt is ashamed!”

  She thought her father would kill her in his rage when she said these things. For days he did not speak to her. And now he had sent for her—had sent Jannes to fetch her. She was sick at heart. Would she be disowned? Set aside and banned from the palace? Oh, please don’t do it, Father! I am your last true friend. Send me away and you are left alone with only Mutnefert!

  But she would not beg or plead with him. For the sake of his own kingdom she would beg, but not for the sake of her place within it.

  It was a bad sign that he waited for her in open court, with many priests and officers as witnesses. She approached him, knelt before him, waited for her doom to be pronounced. He told her to stand.

  “For the last time my daughter stands before me,” he said.

  The last time. She could not stop the tears that leapt to her eyes.

  “Follow me,” he said to her.

  He led the way into the private room where he dressed for ceremonies and met less formally with aides. He closed the door. Then, to her surprise, he began to weep; he threw his arms around her and clung to her. “Oh, Hatshepsut, I have been a fool, and you were the wise one.”

  This was not at all how she thought the scene would go. “Father,” she said, “you are never a fool.”

  “I have been manipulated. Jannes plots with Mutnefert—I learned of it only today. He tells me to send you away. To raise Mutnefert to the status of my wife, to make her runty little loin-goiter into my heir. Tuthmose the Second! And yet I fear that this insult is also the truth: That I have been as weak in my own way as Mutnefert’s spawn would be in his. What am I now? A killer of babies, a monster, all because Mutnefert has control of . . . everything!”

  “She controls nothing,” said Hatshepsut.

  “What do I know except what my officers tell me? Now I learn that they tell me only what she wants me to know. What power do I have except the obedience of my officers? Yet I discover that they are more loyal to her than to me.”

  “Father, think. Jannes is your friend. Isn’t it just as possible that he, too, has been fooled? That his advice was wrong but sincere?”

  Tuthmose heard this in silence. Because the idea comforted him? Or because he hated hearing from her, once again, that he was wrong?

  “What are you planning now?” asked Hatshepsut. “Why is this the last time I will ever stand before you? How will expelling me help you with—”

  “Expelling you?” Tuthmose laughed. “Don’t be absurd. You were always the best of my children. Your beauty makes all men in awe of you, yes, but I know that you have always had the keenest mind in the palace. How many times have you contradicted my advisers! And yet never once have they been right, and you wrong! I have spent these last days thinking over and over again, if only Hatshepsut were my son! And then it finally dawned on me. I’m a god, aren’t I? And can’t a god change a girl into a boy? We Pharaohs wear these artificial beards—what’s to stop me from putting such a beard on you? If I declare you to be my son, who will dare to contradict me?”

  The audacity of it, the impossibility of it, left Hatshepsut speechless. And yet she also knew that it was a brilliant stroke. Mutnefert had left her alive all these years because it wasn’t worth killing a girl—and because she clearly intended Tuthmose to give Hatshepsut to Mutnefert’s miserable calf as his wife. But now the girl would become, not her daughter-in- law, but her Pharaoh and god. And, when Tuthmose died, her husband! The prospect of Mutnefert’s reaction was so delicious that Hatshepsut laughed aloud.

  “You laugh—for joy?” asked Father. “Let it be for joy, because you see the wisdom of this plan, you see that Amon has placed this idea in my head.”

  “Father, how can it work? Who would follow me? While you live, yes, but after you die, who would obey me?”

  “You underestimate the power of the name of Pharaoh.”

  “You underestimate the power of resentment. You would merely create a thousand new allies for Mutnefert.”

  “You’re smarter than she is,” said Father.

  “But not more ruthless,” said Hatshepsut.

  “Not?” he asked. “I think you are as ruthless as my father. I think you would survive, you would overmaster her, you would rule.”

  “Or Egypt would collapse in anarchy, in civil war as captains and aristocrats rose up in revolt against a woman Pharaoh. Do you really want me to die, torn apart by a mob or tortured by the priests for the blasphemy of wearing the beard and the crown?”

  “You haven’t had time to think about it,” said Father. “Go, think, consider. Down to the river and while you’re gone I will pray to the gods to show you that this idea is truly of divine origin. You are Pharaoh’s daughter when you go to the river, but when you come back, you must be Pharaoh’s son!”

  “I will think and I will also pray,” said Hatshepsut. “But Father, I hope the gods will show us both a better road through this swamp of treachery and decay.”

  With that she kissed him and embraced him and then left through the other door. She gathered her womenservants and went down the steps to the river. Let the water of the Nile wash away her confusion. She was being offered the crown of Egypt, not through her influence on a brother-husband, but in her own right, under her own name. She was also, in all likelihood, being offered a terrible death—unless she was strong and clever enough to make it work. She would have to kill so many rebels that the river would run with blood. O gods, she cried, caring not which god heard her, for any that might answer her would be her true god forever. O gods, open the door to life and close the door of death!

  * * *

  Jochabed smeared the inside of the basket with pitch, thick and hot and gloppy; she made sure there was no break in it, no place where water could get through and drown the child. Then she covered the pitch with a blanket so it wouldn’t get on the baby. She was still tamping it down when Amram came home. He brought a half-dozen elders with him. Jochabed glanced up for only a moment, but she saw at once that one—and only one—of the men was beardless and wore a hood over his hair.

  “Greetings, Puah,” said Jochabed. “I hope no one thought that disguise fooled anyone.”

  “No one took note of us,” said Puah, pulling off the hood.

  Amram spoke calmly. “We have nothing to fear. I hear the voice of the Lord in my heart, telling me that this boychild will do mighty works in the name of God.”

  “I believe you, husband,” said Jochabed. “And this basket is what the Lord will use to save the baby.”

  Another pain swept over her. They were coming every few minutes now; she knew that she should already be squatting over the birthing straw.

  “What is this basket?” asked Amram.

  Miriam answered, because Jochabed could not speak. “Mother smeared it with pitch. It will float.”

  “Go,” Jochabed said, wincing. “Miriam, go now. Down by the river. Hide in the reeds there, so no one knows you’re waiting.”

  “What is this insane plan you’ve come up with?” demanded Amram.

  “This insane plan was given to me by God,” said Jochabed. “The command of Pharaoh is to give new-born Israelite boys to the Nile. Well, that’s what we’ll do — ourselves! In a basket that will float!”