by Judith Tarr
Iry sighed deeply and determined to be as nothing: a breath of wind, a shadow on the wall. It was not easy, with hot and none too fragrant breath on her cheeks, and tall thick-muscled body looming over her. He had grown since last he trapped her against this wall. He was—gods, he was almost a man.
Under the heavy robes that he affected, that were a matter of pride to these Retenu—and no matter that the sun of Egypt could kill a man wrapped to the eyes in wool and leather and furs—she still could feel the rod risen and grown hard in her honor. It did not match the rest of him, which was tending toward the burly; it was a slender wand of a thing.
But eager. Very eager. Not for the first time, Iry was glad of his swathings of garments. If he had been wearing a proper Egyptian kilt, he would have had it off and her on the tiles in the blinking of an eye.
He certainly was thinking of it, robes or no. She bared her teeth at him. “Little man,” she said. “Let me go.”
“Not likely,” he said. “And not before you give me a kiss.”
“That’s not all you’ll ask for,” she said.
“It’s a beginning,” Milord Iannek said.
“You only want me because I won’t have you,” she said.
“I’ll always want you, my beautiful one,” he said.
She snorted. “Go chase Ramerit. She’s prettier than I am, and she loves to hunt ducks in the reeds.”
“My duck mates for life,” he sighed, “and he has chosen you.”
“Then he’ll pine away unrequited,” Iry said.
He swooped to seize his kiss, whether she would or no. She ducked, slithered, slid—and was free. Quick as a lizard from the hawk, she darted for cover.
Milord Iannek’s laughter followed her. He was never offended, not even by her cruelty. Nor, gods help her, was he ever deterred.
~~~
This time no one barred her escape. She had nowhere in particular that she wanted to be, except that it was elsewhere—away from duties; away from importunate lordlings. She went where her feet led her, guided by the slant of a shadow, the angle of sunlight on a wall. She knew every cranny of this place, this house of the Sun Ascendant in the green country north of Memphis. How not? She had been born here.
The bitterness had shrunk to a tightening in the back of her throat. If she tried, she could remember as vividly as yesterday, though it was ten years gone and she had been a small girlchild, how it had been to be lady and mistress here, and not menial and slave.
But that was past. Her father had joined in rebellion against the Retenu. He had died for it, he and his sons. His wife and his daughter had gone to the conqueror.
The conqueror had a name. She never called him by it. She never looked him in the face, either, or acknowledged his existence, though when he visited this one of his several estates, she was expected to wait on him. It was an amenity of the house, to be served by a slave who had been a nobleman’s daughter.
He had been gone since the last Inundation. No one had missed him greatly. Teti the steward, preoccupied with skimming the cream of the estate, would have been delighted never to see the overlord at all. Milord Iannek, who seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time cooling his heels in the country for one infraction or another, was a minor annoyance—however much he might vex Iry.
She found herself atop the wall, leaning on the parapet above the eastward gate. There was supposed to be a guard up here, but Teti only troubled to post one if the lord was in residence. No one would dare invade this house, not since it had passed into the hands of a lord of the Retenu.
It lay wrapped in its lands not far from the road between Memphis and the foreign king’s city, but not so near that many were minded to turn aside. There were richer pickings to the south of it, great and noble houses, houses whose wealth had not all frittered away into a shabby gentility.
That had been so before Iry’s father died. She had no shame of it. Her mother, the Lady Nefertem—that was a different matter. But Nefertem kept to the women’s house, and never ventured into the sun lest it darken the perfection of her skin. She would never follow her daughter up so high, nor know of it either, unless one of the servants was minded to tattle.
Nefertem was a slave, too. Somehow she managed to forget it, except when the lord was in the house. Then she served him as a woman of great beauty must serve her conqueror—not as Iry did, pouring his wine and tasting his dinner, but in the inner room.
Milord Iannek would have liked to make the same use of Iry, but he lacked his father’s authority. Which was well for him, and well for Iry, too.
She leaned on the parapet and gazed out across the lands that had belonged to her family for a thousand and half a thousand years. They were shrunken now, covered over with the river, an expanse of water as broad, said those who knew, as a sea. The river had risen even since this morning. At its fullest extent it would stretch almost to the house, and naught between but a thin rim of dry land.
The heat was heavy, like a wash of steam across her body. No breeze rose to cool her skin. She did not mind, much. She was born to this. And it was more pleasant than Milord Iannek’s hot breath and scratchy wool, by far.
As she lingered there, half-dreaming, a cloud of dust caught her eye. She watched it idly, thinking little of it, though travelers on this road were few. This one moved fast, and ran four-footed.
Retenu. Only one of those would come in a chariot, at the gallop, behind a team of horses.
Iry hated horses. Every good Egyptian did. Horses were a weapon; were the enemy. With horses and with their cousins the long-eared asses, the foreign kings had trampled the armies of the Two Lands and killed its princes, and ruled where none but men of Egypt had ever ruled or thought to rule.
She hated horses. And yet she could not take her eyes from them. They looked like antelope, more or less, but larger, heavier, stronger. They had no horns. They had manes that streamed on their necks, and tails that flowed long behind them. They were terrible, and they were beautiful. And swift—oh, so swift. Like a bird on the wing, like a fish in the river. No man could outrun a horse. The cheetah could do it, and the gazelle—but even they were hard pressed to hold the lead.
These were fine horses, and fast. The chariot behind them was of the lighter sort, a racing chariot. A messenger, then, and in a great fever of haste. He nigh ran through the gate. It opened in the last instant to let him thunder in.
Iry atop the gate, unnoticed and unregarded, heard perfectly clearly what the messenger said to Kamut, who happened to be manning the gate. He spoke in bad Egyptian, worse even than most, but it made sense enough. “Master’s dead. Where’s the Lord Iannek?”
Milord Iannek was nowhere to be found. Iry could have told them where to look, but she was crouched above the gate, transfixed with shock.
The master dead. The conqueror, the invader, the slayer of her father. Dead. Big black-bearded man with a laugh that boomed through the house, and a rod, the servants said, as long as a child’s arm. Iry hated him even more than she hated horses. Horses were animals, and innocent. He had known exactly what he did when he killed a rebel and the rebel’s sons and kinsmen, and seized the rebel’s lands and wife and daughter.
~~~
Now he was dead. Killed not in battle, the messenger said over wine and bread, nor on a hunt, but in bed with one of his concubines.
“She wore him clean out,” Nefer-Ptah opined, much later, when they all should have been asleep. But the house was in an uproar. Milord Iannek had been found at last, too coincidentally abed with the buxom Tuty—which rather proved Iry’s judgment in such matters. He was summoned to the king’s city, and without delay, too. Which meant that the servants must be up all night gathering his belongings, including his women and his dogs, and readying them for the journey.
Iry never asked questions where anyone else could hear. It was a matter of pride. But Nefer-Ptah had been her nurse before they were slaves together. With her, Iry could stoop to be curious. And for once they were alo
ne, folding robes and tunics and packing them in boxes by the light of a bank of lamps. “Why is he summoned to the king?” she asked. “Don’t they bury their dead where they fall?”
“Right on the spot,” said Nefer-Ptah. “But now there’s the estate to settle. King Apophis will have called all the sons together to tell them who inherits.”
“What, won’t it just go to the eldest son?”
Nefer-Ptah shrugged. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But with kings one never knows. I heard the firstborn was killed in some suitably ignominious fashion, and the rest have been at each other’s throats since they were born.”
“How many of them are there?” Iry asked.
“Three or four dozen,” said Nefer-Ptah, who seldom troubled herself with mere numbers. “Who knows? Too many.”
“One would be too many,” Iry said, “if they’re all like Milord Iannek.”
“Ah, little bird,” said Nefer-Ptah. “He’s not so bad.”
Iry did not dignify that with a response. Nefer-Ptah laughed deep in her throat and clapped the lid shut on the last of his lordship’s tunics. There was still the formal robe to pack, which Iry had been leaving for last.
But she paused. “Do you think he’ll get it?” she asked. “Will he be lord over us all?”
“Not likely,” Nefer-Ptah said. “He’s too young. And he’s always getting in trouble. And,” she said, delivering the crowning blow, “he won’t exert himself to make friends at court.”
“His mother might do it for him,” said Iry, who was not an utter innocent in the ways of courts.
“His mother is dead,” said Nefer-Ptah. She took the state robe from Iry’s heedless fingers and smoothed and folded it more quickly and much more acceptably than Iry could begin to do. “No, you don’t need to worry. He won’t ever be more than a frequent nuisance. Maybe not even that, if the place goes to a brother who’s no friend of his. Then won’t you be glad? You’ll finally be rid of him.”
“Pray the gods it be so,” Iry sighed.
And yet in spite of herself she could not help a small, fugitive pang of regret. Not that they might be losing their unwelcome visitor. No. Of course not. But whoever came after him—if anyone troubled to come at all—would be different. And different, in Iry’s experience, was never better. Usually it was worse.
II
Milord Iannek went away in the morning, much earlier than he would have been most pleased to do. But the king’s messenger was insistent. His majesty wished to resolve this matter quickly. He would not wait upon laggards, nor look kindly on them when they deigned at last to appear.
The lordling’s departure left a great quiet in its wake. Iry had not even known till they were gone, how many people he had brought into the house, or how very noisy they had been. There was hardly anyone left. A few servants, the cook, the gardeners. Teti the steward and his household, who kept to themselves in the main, and made no incursions on the lord’s quarters or those of his ladies.
It was almost like being free again. Iry’s duties were few and none too onerous on the whole. Much of the time, she could do as she pleased.
That, chiefly, was to bedevil Huy the scribe to teach her what he knew. Huy was old and going blind, and he had no sons or kin; they had all died long ago in some forgotten pestilence. He loved nothing in the world but his palette and brushes and the inks in their bright array.
He could see them still, in a dim and shadowy fashion, though that was fading fast. He did not remember, or did not profess to remember, that Iry was a slave now. He called her “young mistress,” and treated her with a courtly respect, as if she had been a great lady.
At first she had tried to remind him of the truth, but as he persisted in his conviction, she let him be. It was pleasant to sit in the room that he had been suffered to keep when newer, younger scribes came in to do the accounts for Teti. It was small but very well lit, with a linen fan to keep it cool, blowing in breezes from the garden.
Iry kept the fan wetted down with water from the jar when she was there, and tied its cord to her foot and so kept it swaying as she read and wrote and listened. Huy was not a man of many words, unless they were written on papyrus. But sometimes he was minded to tell a story, and then he was well worth listening to.
Iry would write as he spoke, for the practice, and because so few of his stories were written anywhere in the scrolls that heaped the room and overflowed into the hallway. Those were all household accounts, legal records, dull and daily things that seemed, to her, to be a great waste of papyrus.
But his stories were wonderful. Stories of kings and gods, great adventures from long ago, battles, magic and wonders, priests’ arts and princes’ exploits—and much of it, as he averred, as true as the record of the barley crop from the farthest south field.
“Probably truer,” he said a day or two after the Inundation had reached its height. There had been a festival in honor of the event, a small enough thing in so diminished a household, but there had been wine and barley beer and enough song to give everyone a headache the day after. Iry’s head was pounding: she had indulged in a whole jar of wine, because Teti’s daughters had dared her to do it.
Huy was oblivious to her scowl and her tight-set lips. Of course he would be; he was nearly blind. “Barley crops are as large, sometimes, as the steward wants them to be. Or, often enough, as small.”
“He skims a share, you mean,” Iry said. “Everybody knows that.”
“And do you know what the lord used to do to him, if he was found out?”
“Cut off his ears and his nose,” she said, “and set him to work in the privies.”
“So you would think,” said Huy, rubbing his long crooked chin. “But oftentimes, if he was more useful than not, the lord would turn a blind eye, but manage to skim a half of what the steward skimmed. And so a sort of balance was kept.”
“I like stories of Horus and Set better,” Iry said. “Lords and stewards are dull. And a little sordid.”
“That’s the world of the living,” said Huy. “The world of gods, and the world of the dead . . . now those are different.”
“I’d rather be there than here.”
“You would not,” the old man said.
“And why not?” Iry demanded. “Look about you! Or remember—what a world this is. Foreign kings in Lower Egypt, and the king in Upper Egypt bows his head to them. The king, the god, bowing to foreigners. And here— and here—”
“Ah,” said Huy as he always did when Iry touched on the way of things in this house, breaking it off before it was well begun. “A rebel, are you? Will you run away to Thebes, and learn how to fight like a man?”
Iry hissed at him. “If only I could! I’d wield a great sword, and I’d slay the enemy in his thousands. But I can’t do it. I’m only a girl.”
“A woman can do a great deal,” Huy said in his gentle voice, “if she puts her mind to it.”
“Yes,” Iry said bitterly. “And if she puts the rest of her body to it, too. I won’t do that. Mother does it—Mother hasn’t any choice. I have. I won’t give it up.”
“That’s a brave thing,” Huy said, “if perhaps not wise.”
“I don’t want to be wise,” Iry said. “I’m not sure I can be brave. I just want—”
She trailed off. He waited with patience that he must have learned in youth, when he was one of the royal scribes.
When she spoke again, it was not to finish what she had begun. It was to say, “Tell me about Set again. Set and Osiris.”
Huy’s brows rose slightly, but he did not try to return to what they had been speaking of before. “Set was the enemy of Osiris,” he said in the singsong tone of the taleteller, “brother and bitterest enemy. Some say there was cause: some slight, some sin committed. Others say no, it was simpler than that. They were rivals, and Set was jealous of his brother, who was the elder and the stronger and by far the more beautiful, and who—perhaps most unbearable of all—had wooed and won their sister Isis, and
taken her for his bride.
“There came at last a day before the days of this world, when Set could bear it no longer. He tricked his brother, tempted him with a wonderful thing, a chest of gold and precious stones, which would belong only, Set declared, to the one who could lie in it, and whom it fit exactly. That one, of course, was Osiris. But the box was wrought with a dark enchantment, that cast him into a sleep; and Set and his allies sealed the box and cast it into the sea.
“But Isis found the box, hunting far and wide over the earth, and undertook to bring Osiris back to life again. This, Set found even less endurable than the rest. He seized the body before it could be revived, and hacked it in pieces, and flung it all along the valley of the River.
“Still Isis would not give up, nor would she give way before the dark god. She yearned for the bright god, the beautiful god, her brother and her lover. She hunted as she had before, but with even greater purpose, to find each and every piece, and bring them back together, and make them live again.”
“And that is just what she did,” Iry said, impatient suddenly with this tale that she had known since she was a child—and never mind that she had asked to hear it. She was all at odds this morning, cross-grained and ill-tempered. “She gathered every part of him, every one—all but the one, the manly organ. Even that at last was brought to her, when she had all but despaired; and she did with it what woman should do, and conceived and bore her son Horns. And he avenged his father and cast down the dark god—but lost an eye in doing it, so that now the eye of Horus that sees is the sun, but his blind eye is the moon.” She shook herself, impatient, twitchy as a cat. “I don’t know why I want to remember this. The Horus in Thebes lies too solidly under the heel of the foreign Set. Rebels fight, and rebels die. Or are taken into slavery.”