by Judith Tarr
THE SHEPHERD KINGS
The Epona Sequence, Book Four
Judith Tarr
www.bookviewcafe.com
Book View Café Edition
June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61138-524-3
Copyright © 1999 Judith Tarr
PRELUDE
THE FOREIGN KINGS
On the day the world changed, Iry escaped her nurse to play in Huy the scribe’s workroom. Huy never minded. If he was busy writing in his sunlit corner, palette and pens to hand and roll of papyrus on his lap, Iry would play in a corner of her own, and be very quiet, and for a reward, when he was done with his writing, he might tell her a story. He told marvelous stories. Or better yet, he would let her draw a word, or even two, on a bit of scrap.
Words were wonderful. They looked like beasts or birds or even people, waves of water or hills or houses or the eye of the sun, but they meant so many different things. Iry wanted to be a scribe when she grew up, though that meant she would have to grow up to be a man, and that, her brothers told her haughtily, was not possible.
Iry’s brothers were dreadfully haughty. They were all older, men or almost men, and they had all gone away to war with Father and the levies from the villages and their cousin Kemni. They looked down from a great height on small fools of sisters. Brothers were like that, Kemni said. Kemni was as old and as full of himself as they were, but he was much less haughty. Iry liked Kemni; she was sorry he had gone off to war instead of staying and keeping her and Huy company.
Today, quite a long while after Father and the others had gone, Iry played quietly in a patch of sun while Huy frowned and muttered over his papyrus. On it he was writing the accounts for the holding, full of tiny crabbed columns, and his eyes were not what they had been. Sometimes he asked Iry to look at the scrap he was copying from and tell him what the words or the numbers were, so that he could write them on the great heavy roll in his lap.
He had not done that today. Iry had watched him for a while, admiring the way the sun shone on his bald brown head. Then she had engrossed herself in a game. She had brought her youngest brother’s wooden army with her, a forbidden pleasure but Huy never said anything, and built a house of papyrus scraps. Some of the army lived inside, being lords and servants. Some were outside practicing in the fields. The great prize, the wooden chariot that Father had brought back from the foreign kings’ city, drawn by wooden horses, she set to galloping past the fields as fast as the horses—and her hand—would go. She liked to make the chariot go fast on its rattling wheels. The terrible figure in it, the foreigner from the land called Retenu with his brush of black beard and his fierce painted scowl, rocked and swayed as the chariot raced. Iry would have liked to make him fall out and break his neck, but that would get her a beating when her brother came home.
She settled instead for stopping the chariot and standing the charioteer in a field, and letting the Egyptians with their spears and wooden swords practice killing him. The Retenu were bad men, Father said. They had swept into Egypt when Great-Great-Grandfather was young, and taken the whole of the Lower Kingdom, and made themselves kings. “Kings!” Father would burst out in the evening when he had had a little more beer than Mother liked to see him drink, pacing the dining hall like a leopard in a cage. “They are no kings. They are interlopers—invaders—foreigners.”
“Conquerors,” Mother would say in her cool sweet voice, but with the hint of a smile. She always smiled at Father’s fits of temper. “They do rule us, after all. Yes, even you.”
Father used to snarl and fret and seethe until she coaxed him into her calming embrace. But then, not too long ago, he had stopped snarling. Word had come: the king, the true king, the Great House of Thebes, lord of the Upper Kingdom, had mounted an army and come down the river to take back the Lower Kingdom. Father had lit up with joy. So had Mother, but visibly less so when Father gathered the levies and his sons and his sister’s son who had come bearing the news, and marched away to the war.
He was coming back soon. The Great House and his armies—including Father’s part of it—had come to Avaris, the conquerors’ own city, and set about taking it. Everybody expected the war to be over after that, and the Retenu driven back into the far cold country where they belonged, and Egypt would be the Two Lands again, both Upper and Lower.
Iry let her wooden soldiers kill the bearded Retenu. He lay stiff at their feet, still scowling his terrible scowl. She regarded him with a frown of her own. Retenu should not have funerals so that they could live forever beyond the horizon; they should die like dogs, Father said, and wither away to dust and be forgotten. But if she embalmed him and wrapped him, he could be a proper Egyptian corpse. Then she could give him a funeral of surpassing solemnity.
As she looked about for something that could serve as mummy-wrappings—her own clothing not being possible, since she wore none, and nothing else either but the amulet about her neck and the blue luck-bead about her middle—people began to make a great commotion outside. Servants ran back and forth, shouting, and some of them were shrieking.
Iry sat very still. At first when she went missing, her nurse had carried on appallingly, but now everybody knew where to look. And she had not done anything before she came here, to get people so upset—not at all like the time she had let the heifer out because she lowed so piteously, and the bull had happened to be in the nearest field, and had broken down the house gate to get at her. Iry had come straight from her nursery to Huy’s workroom. To be sure, she had the wooden army with her, but the one who would object to that was far away, fighting with a real and fleshly army.
No, this uproar was not for her. She had never heard anything quite like it. She left the army where it was, safe in its patch of sun, and found that Huy had done the same with his papyrus. She did not know why, but she slipped her hand into his as she came up to him. His fingers were thin and surprisingly cold. They went out together to see what there was to see.
~~~
It was a messenger, a man with a white and haunted look, and his arm bound up in a filthy bandage. He had come down the river in a boat, running from something terrible. Iry knew him. He was her father’s master at arms, Pepi who liked to bounce her on his knee and sing her silly songs. There was no silliness in him now.
“Lost,” he was saying to the people in the courtyard just inside the outer gate, “all lost. We had Avaris, and the Lower Kingdom. We had it. But the Retenu were too clever for us. They sent word to their allies in Nubia, away to the south of Thebes, and had them start a war there, a greater one than we could wage here. The Great House had to turn back or lose it all, Upper Kingdom as well as Lower. He’s fighting his way south.”
“But maybe,” said Teti the steward, “if he leaves his lords who are of the Lower Kingdom behind, and lets them fight—”
“No,” said Pepi, with sharpness he might not have used to a man of Teti’s rank, but he was clearly exhausted. “We’re not enough.”
“At least,” said Teti’s wife, “we’ll have our lord and his sons back. Maybe the Retenu won’t notice that they were gone. Maybe—”
“The Retenu know,” Pepi said. His voice was flat, so flat the words seemed to have no meaning. “They’re dead. All of them. They died in the retreat from Avaris. A company of chariots caught us on our way to the boats. It mowed them down. The rest of us who survived were allowed to retrieve their bodies. The embalmers have them. When the embalming is done, they’ll come back. The Retenu don’t mind giving honor to enemies who have fallen. And giving—” Pepi’s voice broke. “Giving their belongings to the one whose chariots killed them.”
Huy’s hand gripped Iry’s so hard she nearly cried out. But she bit her lip and kept silent. Not everyone understood wha
t Pepi had just said. But Huy did. He said it for them all. “All of us. All of us here in the Sun Ascendant—we belong to the Retenu?”
“To a Retenu lord,” Pepi said. “When our lord comes back in the funeral boat, the Retenu will bring him. He’ll see to the burial. He’ll take the holding. He’ll be our new lord.”
“We can’t do that,” Teti’s wife Tawit said in her strident voice. “That’s ridiculous. We were never conquered—we were left alone, except for the tribute.”
“That,” said her husband dryly, “was before our lord took arms against the foreign kings. We’re booty now—captives.”
“I won’t be,” said Tawit. “I refuse. I’ll leave.”
“And go where?” Teti asked.
That quelled her, though she stood and simmered, and Iry knew she would burst out again later. But not now. Everyone was asking questions, battering poor exhausted Pepi with words. He answered as much as he could, but none of it mattered to Iry except the one thing, the main thing. Father was dead. Her brothers, Kemni—dead. There was a new lord coming. A foreign lord, a bearded and scowling Retenu, whom she could not kill as she had killed the wooden charioteer.
She could try, she supposed. She was only a child, and only a girl, but her will was strong. Everybody said so. Headstrong, they said, and stubborn. She was not going to give in to the foreigners, any more than Tawit would.
Or Mother. Mother was in the women’s house still, because Mother would not come out in the court like a vulgar servant. She must know what Pepi’s message was. Mother knew everything. Mother would not give in to the Retenu. No, not ever. Nor would Iry. Not in her heart, or in her spirit. Not anywhere that mattered.
HORUS
I
They danced the bull in the court of the sun.
There were three of them, two whip-slender youths and a maiden as slender as they. The bull was vast, looming and terrible, dappled white and red like seafoam flecked with blood. His horns were long and curved and deadly sharp.
The dancers danced to the beat of a drum and a skirling of pipes, a rhythm as old and yet as young as the morning of the world. The bull’s snorts cut through it, and the soft thunder of his hooves in the raked sand. He was swift for all his bulk, and deadly strong.
The youths and the maiden danced a ringdance about him, the two youths with set intensity, but the maiden smiling, sweet and wild. It was she who broke the ring at the moment of the bull’s lunge toward her, flew into a handspring, caught the spear-keen horns and whirled and spun and vaulted over his back onto the waiting shoulders of the taller youth.
The bull grunted, cheated of his prey. The wall of the bull-court loomed in front of him. He thundered to a halt, spraying sand; wheeled and spun with terrible speed.
The smaller youth, jealous perhaps at the girl’s bravado, leaped in close as she had done. But he had leaped too soon. The bull’s horn caught him in the air. It pierced him as if he had been made of linen, pierced and tore.
The bull tossed its head, grunting at the sudden weight trapped on its horn. The youth’s body convulsed. But he made no sound. Nor could he move, even to grasp the horn that stabbed him to the heart. He slid down the horn onto the bull’s head and shoulders, lying there as if at ease, staring open-eyed into the pitiless face of the sun. He was not dead, not yet. But death lay upon him as he lay upon the bull. The bull bellowed in sudden anger at his ungainly burden, reared and twisted and flung it lifeless on the sand.
~~~
Kemni started awake. In his dream he had not been the bulldancer, and yet in his waking he could feel the agony of the horn in his own vitals, ripping through them, rending the life from him.
He lay gasping, running with sweat—and not alone because the night was warm. His throat was raw. Had he been screaming?
If so, no one had heard, or troubled to come. Slowly the world came back to him, and with it memory. He lay in his bed in the palace of Thebes, in his cell of a room that he had managed, one way and another, to fill with possessions. One such, the lamp painted on its side with a many-armed and coiling sea-creature, burned low but steady. It made great shadows about the carved and painted chest in which he kept his clothes, and the plainer chest of his weapons, and the box atop it that held his treasures.
His eyes rested on none of those, but on the lamp itself. It had come from Crete, or so the trader had assured him. Was that then why he had dreamed a Cretan dream tonight?
He had heard how they danced the bulls before their gods, and seen pictures painted, but never in life. Yet he could smell the sharp sweat of the dancers, and the heavier, muskier reek of the bull, and the dry hot scent of sand—and over it all, the stink of blood and riven entrails.
He sucked in a breath. It brought him nothing more terrifying than the pungency of his own sweat and a hint of perfume from the maid who had been in his bed when he fell asleep. She was gone. He was all alone. He and his dream.
He sat up, fighting the urge to protect vitals that no bull’s horn had ever gored. His head ached abominably. Of course the winejar was empty. He had drunk the last of it with the girl—what was her name? He did not recall that he had ever asked.
He stumbled to his feet, clutching the jar to his chest, and went somewhat foggily in search of wine.
It was the black hour before dawn, when even the servants slept, and only the night-guard struggled to remain awake. He had walked these ways before in the whispering dark, by the slant of moonlight across a courtyard and the flicker of a torch in a passageway. Spirits of the dead and those who slept like the dead fluttered and chittered overhead.
He had no fear of those. They were only air. Nightwalkers he did fear, drinkers of blood and eaters of souls, but he was protected: amulets of no little power hung about his neck.
He had never been able to find one that was proof against the dreams.
Wine never prevented them, but it softened the blow afterwards. He found a jar in the nearer storeroom, and it was nearly full of the strong sweet wine that came over the sea. Not much of that came as far as Thebes since Lower Egypt was taken by foreign kings—and all the gods curse them. But this was the palace, and this was the princes’ house within it. For them, never aught but the best.
Someone was waiting for him as he came out of the storeroom with the filled jar, a shadowy figure lounging against the wall. Unless the ka walked of its own volition while its master slept, this was a shape Kemni knew well indeed. “Gebu,” he said.
The figure straightened, bringing itself into the light of the torch by the storeroom’s door. It was a young man, though older than Kemni; taller, a little, and broader, a big man as men went in Egypt. He reached for the jar and took it from Kemni’s unresisting hands, and sipped. His brows went up. “Since when,” he inquired, “did you have leave to dip from that jar?”
“Since a dream of mine saved the prince-heir’s life,” Kemni said. “And what are you doing awake at this ungodly hour?”
“Tracking you,” Gebu said. “So it was another dream?”
Kemni nodded. It was not cold, not even near it, and yet he shivered. “Drink,” Gebu bade him.
Gebu was a prince, though not the heir. Sometimes it pleased Kemni to remember that. And now, remembering it, he thought it best to obey.
The wine was strong, unwatered. It dizzied him a little. Gebu’s hand steadied him, and guided him out of the passage and into a courtyard full of moonlight.
This was the court of blossoming trees, some long-gone prince’s fancy that had endured for later princes’ pleasure. The air was heavy with fragrance. The moon turned every blossom to silver, and every shadow to blackest black.
Gebu sat Kemni down under a tree, in a cool wash of moonlight. “You’ve not dreamed in a while,” he said.
Kemni drew himself into a knot about the winejar. “No,” he said from the midst of that shelter.
“Tell me.”
Kemni raised his head. This was not the king’s heir. But he was a prince, and a power in th
is place; and, which mattered more than the rest, Kemni’s friend and battle-brother. For that, Kemni did not put him off. “It’s nothing much. Really. No one we know died.”
“Tell me,” Gebu said again.
“I dreamed,” Kemni said, “that I was in Crete. I saw them dance the bulls. One of the dancers died. He leaped too soon, you see. The bull caught him on its horn.”
Gebu frowned. “Crete? Bulls? You never dreamed outside of Egypt before.”
“I am not a prophet!”
That came out of Kemni’s heart. Futile as it was, it comforted him a little. “I dream dreams,” he said. “Sometimes they signify something. I always know—there is a difference to those that the gods send me. But I am not a prophet.”
“You are not a prophet,” Gebu said with the air of one who obliges a friend. “But—Crete? Why would their gods vex you with visions?”
“Gods know,” Kemni said sourly. His fingers tightened on the winejar. It was brimming full still, but he had no stomach for it, suddenly. He set it down.
“This one you should tell my father,” Gebu said.
Kemni shook his head firmly. “No. No, I will not.”
“Then I will,” said Gebu.
“No,” Kemni said. “Then all the world will know—”
“That you dream dreams?” Gebu shook his head. “Not if we do it properly. Come now, you should sleep. It will be daylight soon enough.”
~~~
Kemni had no intention of sleeping, particularly with Gebu standing over him. For a while he did not, though he shut his eyes to gain himself a little peace. He did not want to be known as a dreamer of dreams. People had a way of expecting things; and of prophets they expected prophecies. The dreams came when they came. Kemni did not invite them. He did not particularly welcome them. They were a gift, he supposed; but a gift edged like a sword.
In spite of himself he slid into sleep. The dream came back in fragments, scattered and incomplete. The horror of it had drained away. It was merely strange.