The Shepherd Kings

by Judith Tarr

  “Yes,” she said. “They have a great belief in the power of names.”

  “Have they cursed us, do you think?”

  “I’m sure they have.” She took his hand and held it in her own, and smiled up at him. She was much smaller than he was; a fact that always subtly amazed him. She had been nigh a woman grown when he was born. Now he was a man, and she but a smallish woman nearing middle years, unmarried and some would think unregarded. But Maryam was no such feeble creature as that.

  “We should go,” she said to him. “Our mother is waiting.”

  He nodded. She led him inward, into the realm of shadows and half-lights, subtle scents and soft voices, that he had always thought of as the women’s country. He felt large and ungainly there, creature of sun and wind and open places that he was.

  The Lady Sarai was waiting in the heart of her domain. They had set up a loom there, and she and her women wove a fabric of wondrous complexity, colors mingled so subtly and with such artistry that the eye could barely begin to encompass them. He looked, the quick dart of a glance. But there was no sign of Barukha.

  He had come prepared to fret greatly over that most maddening of women, and to face the accusation of dishonor. And yet, in Sarai’s presence, all of that ceased to matter. She was not thinking of that one of her servants. Perhaps she seldom thought of Barukha at all.

  Khayan let out a barely perceptible sigh. He had not been summoned here for that, then. Sarai had another use for him. He set himself to be wary, to watch for ambush, but in that quarter at least he was safe.

  Sarai looked up from her loom. He was the child of her age, he and his sister Sadana who had been born in the year before him. After him had been no more.

  And yet, as she sat at the great loom, with only the lightest of veils over her hair and none concealing her face, she seemed no older than her daughter Maryam. Her hair was ruddy still, barely touched with grey. Her eyes were as clear as they had ever been, wide amber eyes that she had passed to her son and her younger daughter.

  For all the terror of her presence, when she looked up from the loom and smiled, he was as besotted as any raw boy must be with a queen.

  “Khayan,” she said. “Come. Sit by me.”

  There was room, because her women saw to it that there was. It was not so unfamiliar to sit at a loom, or to take his turn with the shuttle, either.

  When he had added a finger’s breadth to the pattern, Sarai said, “You’ve labored mightily to be lord in this place.”

  He stared at the fabric stretched out in front of him, as if a response had been woven into it. But it was only colored thread. “I’ve done what I may to fulfill my duty,” he said.

  “You’re not loved for it.”

  “Love has little to do with it.”

  “Yes,” she said. She wove her own stretch of cloth, then paused again. “Why do you trouble yourself?”

  “How can I not?”

  “Not and be Khayan.” She petted him as if he had been a fine hound. “Yes, child. As futile as it is, you will go on doing it. But have a care. No Egyptian in this country is friend to one of us.”

  “What, none?” he asked. He was not mocking her, not exactly. He had been away, after all. Much could have changed. Though, it seemed, little had.

  “We are all enemies,” she said. “Egypt has not accepted us in a hundred years. I doubt that it ever will.”

  “Does that matter, as long as we rule it?”

  “As long as you rule it,” she said, “no.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “What, Mother? What have you heard?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Then you summoned me simply for the pleasure of my company?”

  “May not a mother do that, when her son has been away for most of the years of his manhood?”

  “She may,” he said. “But you have never yet done anything for a simple reason. What is it? Rebels in the house? Murderers under the beds?”

  “No more than there ever are,” she said. “No, I’ve another thought entirely. The Mare.”

  He raised his brows. That was a great thing and a mystery, a deep matter of gods and their servants, and he was part of it. He had been sent in childhood to his mother’s people, far away in the sunrise countries, to grow to a man where men were not taught to be arrogant lords of the world, but obedient servants to women and the gods. His father had not objected; this was a younger son, and the mother who sent him was high in the lord’s favor.

  Then when Khayan was grown to manhood, he was given a task, chosen over the women of the tribes—most of whom felt themselves far more suited to it than a mere and youthful male—to bring into the west the living image of the tribes’ great goddess, Horse Goddess herself. That was the moon-white Mare. Her predecessor, the goddess’ elder image, was dead. The Young Mare would go where the elder had gone, away into Egypt, there to bless the conquering kings with her presence.

  It was the will of the Mare herself, the elders had said, that Khayan be her escort into the west, nor were they at all pleased to say it. But since the Mare was what she was, her will was to be obeyed, and never questioned.

  The elders had been in much dismay, even in their obedience. The Mare before this had left the east when she chose her priestess who would serve her till she died, had gone through all the lands of the west until she came to Egypt, and there made it clear that she would stay—a shocking thing, and a great loss to the tribes, for the White Mare had lived in the east since the dawn of the world. Then too soon she died, and her servant died with her, felled by some fever of this pestilent country.

  That had been a tragedy, but not unbearable—until the Young Mare in the east had made it clear to the priestesses that she also would go into the west. More—that she would take her kin with her, the herd of moon-white horses. Horse Goddess had departed from the tribes, taken her living presence and the blessing of her regard from the people and bestowed it on their distant and somewhat estranged kin.

  There had been great mourning and weeping, and a great rite of grief and parting, but no one presumed to stop the Mare or bind her. One did not bind a goddess.

  Khayan stood now in front of his mother, who was a queen’s daughter of the tribes, and said, “What is it? Hasn’t the Mare chosen her servant?”

  For the first time since he could remember, his mother looked less than perfectly serene. A frown marred the smoothness of her brow. Her lips were tight. “No. She has not.”

  Khayan blinked. “But the Mare always chooses—” His eyes passed swiftly over the room. “Where is Sadana? Has something happened to her?”

  “Sadana is out drowning her sorrows,” Sarai said. “Riding, as she always is.”

  “But not on the Mare.” Khayan shook his head. “But, Mother, she was supposed to be chosen. No one ever doubted that she would. That was why they let me go—because they thought I’d take the Mare to my sister. She was the priestess’ acolyte. She was to be the chosen one.”

  “The Mare passed by your sister in the rite as if she were no one at all.”

  “That’s unheard of,” he said.

  “The Mare does as she pleases,” Sarai said with calm that must be hard won. “Yes, I thought that my daughter would be chosen. I never thought that she would fail.”

  “How could she fail? She’s your daughter.”

  “The Mare doesn’t care for that,” Sarai said.

  “Gods,” said Khayan. “What this must be doing to Sadana— She hasn’t come to me at all.”

  “And what could you do if she did?”

  “Comfort her,” he said. “Console her.”

  “That’s not a thing she’ll take from a man just now,” Sarai said. “And from you least of all.”

  “Still,” he said stubbornly and not too wisely. “Why wasn’t I told sooner? You must have known this soon after I brought the Mare back.”

  “We delayed the rite when your father died,” she said. “Then you were chosen heir, and there was a great to-
do over that. It wasn’t till you’d left to come here that we did what had to be done.”

  “And the Mare chose no one.”

  “And the Mare chose no one,” Sarai said.

  Khayan bent to the loom. The simple labor helped him to think. This was not a thing of the men’s side, not at all, but Khayan was his mother’s son. For the Mare to choose no one was unheard of. Or else . . .

  “Is there a candidate you could have presented but didn’t? Someone you never thought of, or thought of and discarded?”

  “We presented every woman of suitable age who was within our reach,” Sarai said. “She ignored them all.”

  “Then there’s one you forgot,” he said.

  “What, one of our eastern cousins?”

  Khayan shrugged. “Maybe. Or some lord’s wife or daughter who wasn’t able to be at the choosing. I rather doubt that every lord with women of suitable age would have sent them, the Mare’s servant being what she is, and living as she does, free and unveiled before the people. Wouldn’t it be like some of them to hide away their kinswomen, and lie to the searchers? Not every man is as obedient to the gods as the people in the east.”

  “We did think of that,” Sarai said a little dryly. “This has never happened before. Always, at the choosing, there has been one chosen from among those presented—however many or few those might have been. This Mare would have none of them.”

  “It’s said,” Maryam said, daring greatly to speak in front of their mother, “that this is a message and an omen. This country has no love for us. We should leave it.”

  “And yet I’ve heard,” Khayan said, “that when the Old Mare came here, that was an omen, a token of great favor. Horse Goddess had blessed my father’s people and chosen them to be her own.”

  Maryam bent over the loom as he had done just now, but her hands were still, making no move to add to the pattern. “Who knows what the gods think? If the Mare has no companion, then Horse Goddess’ rites can’t be celebrated. The men have their own gods. They claim that horses are theirs, but all the wise know that without Horse Goddess we lose the greater part of our strength.”

  “There are precious few men of such wisdom in Egypt,” their mother said with a suggestion of weariness. “No, my son, and nor are you. But the horses have always spoken to you. If you might go to the Mare—”

  “She won’t choose me,” he said a little too quickly.

  “No,” said Sarai, “she’ll not choose a man to be her one great servant. But she might reveal somewhat to you that she has declined to reveal to the rest of us. She chose you, after all, to be her guardsman.”

  Khayan opened his mouth, but shut it again. He could hardly argue with such logic. It was women’s logic, Mare’s logic. He bowed to it.

  VII

  Khayan could not go out at once to confront the Mare. Night had fallen while he spoke with his mother. The daymeal was long since spread, and he had been absent from it. There was a sizable repast waiting for him in his chambers, and a lissome woman in his bed—not the astonishing Barukha, somewhat to his surprise. This was one of the maids, an Egyptian, with smoky eyes and smooth bare limbs and no modesty at all.

  He ate what was laid out for him, and took the maid, too, because she was willing—or so she pretended. She lacked Barukha’s liveliness, but not the skill. She was very skilled, even with a man too tired and preoccupied to do her justice.

  She soothed his body. His mind was not so easily comforted. It spun back and forth, round and about: Barukha, his mother, his sisters, the Mare who would not bind herself to a human woman.

  Nor would Khayan, either, but that was half laziness and half circumstance. He did not want a wife. He did not want to exert himself to the degree that a wife required.

  Nor had one been presented to him, Barukha notwithstanding. Barukha had made it clear that he would have to wait for her. She wanted that old and wealthy man first, to make her a widow, and therefore free to choose. Then she would come to Khayan.

  And all the while his mind rested on Barukha’s face and voice, the maid stroked and fondled, bringing him erect in spite of himself. He woke with a small start to awareness of her face, little pointed Egyptian cat-face, long Egyptian eyes. The lips smiled but the eyes were dark, dark and cold.

  He gasped. She mounted him and rode him as one of his own sisters would ride a stallion, still with smiling mouth and empty eyes.

  That was Egypt. Yes. That was all this country to a lord of the conquering people.

  ~~~

  It was a full hand of days before Khayan could do his mother’s bidding. He could not escape his duties, nor would he shirk them. When he woke in the morning, the steward Teti was there with his list of things that the lord should do. After Khayan had done as many of them as mortal flesh could bear, the dusk was closing in and the daymeal was spread and waiting.

  One such duty was presented to him the day after he spoke to his mother. His summons there had put him in mind of that other house, the women’s house proper. He remembered all too vividly how he had gone into that house that first day, fresh with the delight of his bright new lordship, and found a huddle of Egyptian women around one of their own who was ailing. That one had flung a cup at his feet, full of something perfectly foul; most sane and sensible of her, he had thought then. She had done well enough since, he had undertaken to discover. She had served him wine that very night, though not on the nights thereafter.

  She was but one of the slaves. But the one who had made herself the center of that room—that one was no more a slave than she could well bear to be. Teti would not speak of her unless pressed, and then in tones of barely muted awe.

  The Lady Nefertem. She had been the lady of this house while it was an Egyptian holding, wedded to its lord who had died in a rebellion against King Apophis. She had been enslaved as was proper, but that fact had never impinged upon her consciousness. She had kept her house, her place, her servants.

  Khayan’s father had not been a weak man, but he had had a weakness for strong women. And beautiful women. Khayan remembered well the face turned to him in the dim light of the sickroom, the ivory pallor of it, the lines as pure and clean as carving in white stone. There was beauty such as he had never seen, exquisite in its perfection. It knew itself completely, accepted itself utterly. It did not even trouble to be vain.

  Khayan could not see that it was reasonable for a lord of his people to live in a house still half in Egyptian hands. Particularly since, if certain rumors were true, the winds of rebellion were blowing strong again. It was enough that the steward of the estate was a native man: that needed one who spoke the language, and who could make the slaves and servants and the farmers in their fields work for their lord. There was no need and no sense in suffering the women’s house to remain an outpost of the enemy.

  Therefore, between his morning’s travels out and about and his afternoon’s sojourn in the hall of judgment, Khayan turned toward the women’s house.

  He was not stopped, no more than he had been on the first day. But his coming this time was no surprise. He found the hallways open to him, the guards submissive. And in the heart of that brilliantly colored and strikingly bare house, he found her.

  She was sitting in a chair of carved ivory, an ivory image herself, sheathed in the translucent gauze that Egyptian women called clothing. Her wig was severe in its simplicity, straight black hair cut to frame her face. It shone like a jewel in that setting. One almost forgot the body so barely hidden by the gown, the breasts rose-tipped and half bared, the dark triangle in the curve of her lap.

  Almost. Every fingerbreadth of her was exquisite. The face merely crowned it, still and cold in its perfection.

  She did not acknowledge him, though he stood in front of her, towering over her. He was huge in that place, outsized, looming and awkward. Her maids cowered away from him. She did not even seem to see him.

  “Nefertem,” he said.

  The sound of her name should have roused a flicker at
the least. But she was lost in her own strange world.

  He did a thing he would never have done if she had seemed even slightly aware of him: he reached and took her chin in his hand and tilted it up. It moved like a child’s toy, with lifeless obedience. The eyes so lifted to his were blank. She might have been carved in stone, for all the life or soul he found there.

  Again, if she had seemed alive, he would not have done what he did. He swept her off her chair. She resisted him not at all. Her maids fled shrieking; none even tried to fend him off.

  There was, in the pattern of such houses, a room beyond this one, and a bed on a platform, draped in gauzy veils. He let her fall to it. She made no move to protect herself, simply lay as he had cast her. Save that she was warm, and her breast rose and fell as she breathed, she might have been a dead thing.

  Khayan stood over her in a kind of despair. A proper man of his people would take her now, take her and master her, and make himself truly lord of this place.

  Khayan was his mother’s son. He had grown to manhood in the east, in a tribe ruled by women. He could not master a woman in such a fashion.

  Almost he turned and walked away—fled, to give it its honest name. But he had his own kind of stubbornness. Rape he would not—could not—commit.

  So let it not be rape.

  Carefully and with deliberate slowness he put off his robe and his tunic and his loincloth. She never moved. He resisted the temptation to arrange her limbs, to make her more comfortable.

  He lay naked beside her. He was fiercely, almost painfully aware of his height, his breadth, his pelt of black curly hair—all so alien to that ivory slenderness. What she thought of him, if she thought at all, she betrayed no sign.

  But of course. His father had had her. That had been made clear to him. Cold as a fish, she must have been. But the old man had had no such foolish compunctions as Khayan had. He would take a woman if he reckoned she needed taking.

  Khayan would take her, too, but in the way that suited him best. Gently, barely perceptibly, he stroked his hand down that still and lightly breathing body. It did not quiver. Nor did he retreat. He stroked her as if she had been a filly he wished to tame, over and over, gentle, steady, and perfectly persistent.