The Shepherd Kings

by Judith Tarr

  Jerubaal did not stand on ceremony with the man whom he had first known as a naked, toddling child. It was he who had caught the very young Khayan on the day he decided, all on his own and eluding his nurses, to visit the horses. Khayan had gone in among the mares and played for a long while with the foals, and fallen asleep with his head on the shoulder of an equally tired colt. The first face he had seen when he woke was Jerubaal’s, younger then and much less grey, but as narrow and humorous as ever. “So, little prince,” the man had said then. “Chosen your stallion already, have you?”

  Today, a good score of years since, Jerubaal sat beside Khayan and poured himself a cup of wine. He would have been in the stable at this time of day, when it was too hot to work the horses: mending harness, trimming hooves, grooming horses. He seemed glad enough to have been called away; he did not ask why, nor trouble Khayan with chatter. Like his horses, he had the art of silence.

  Khayan basked in it for a while, sipping the last of his wine and regretting, somewhat, that last honeyed cake. He was almost sorry to have to break the silence; but the day was slipping away. “So,” he said, soft in the stillness. “Tell me about the Mare.”

  “Ah,” said Jerubaal. He took his time with the rest of it, savoring a sip of wine, a spiced nut. “So. You saw.”

  “I saw,” Khayan said. “Who is she?”

  Jerubaal shrugged. “Gods know. Not one of ours.”

  “I think you know,” Khayan said.

  “Well,” said Jerubaal. He toyed with his cup, turning it in his long gnarled fingers. “She’s a slave in this house, but time was when she was a lady in it. She’s the rebel’s daughter—the old lord who was killed fighting for the southern king.”

  “Is she?” Khayan did not trouble to berate himself, but he paused to be rueful. He should have discovered who the girl was the day he came here, when he found her the center of so much attention. Of course a mere slavegirl would not be granted the gift of the Lady Nefertem’s regard.

  “Jerubaal,” Khayan said, out of that thought. “Is she the daughter of the woman who fancies herself lady here?”

  “So I’ve been told,” said Jerubaal. Which meant that he had discovered it to be the truth.

  Khayan sat back against the cool stone of the wall, running fingers through his beard, tugging at it. The small pain kept him on edge; helped him to think. “Does my lady mother know?” he asked at length.

  “Not from me,” Jerubaal answered.

  Perhaps therefore she knew it from no one. And surely, if she had, he would have known it. “When did you first see her with the Mare?”

  Jerubaal frowned, counting on his fingers. “Well, my lord. Four—no, five days ago. She came wandering in among the horses, scared half out of her wits but walking like a woman bewitched. The Mare found her.”

  Khayan sat bolt upright. “The Mare? The Mare found her?”

  Jerubaal nodded. He poured another cup and drank it down, as if he needed what courage was in the wine. “She came to the horses, but I’d wager it was a summons. The Mare went right up to her, touched her and herded her where the Mare had in mind to go. She didn’t have the look of one who does such a thing of her own will.”

  “Was she afraid?”

  “No,” said Jerubaal. “Not of the Mare.”

  “The Mare called her,” Khayan murmured. “Gods. My mother is going to be appalled.”

  “It is irregular,” Jerubaal said.

  “Irregular.” Khayan snorted. “It’s absolutely unheard of. This is an Egyptian.”

  “So what will you do about it?”

  “I don’t know.” Khayan sprang to his feet, unable to bear another moment’s stillness. He paced in and out of the sun, from welcome shade to searing blaze and back again.

  “This is a women’s thing,” Jerubaal said from the sanctuary of the arbor. “Why not leave it to the women?”

  He spoke wisdom, as he usually did. But Khayan was oddly reluctant to do the thing that would free him from the whole affair. He had done as his mother had asked; he had inquired of the Mare, and received an answer. He had only to send word to her, and the rest was in her hands.

  So simple. And so difficult. He stopped and spun. “Tell no one of this until I give you leave. See that your men do the same. Will you do that for me?”

  “For you,” said Jerubaal, “I’ll do it.”

  Khayan nodded. Jerubaal drained his cup of wine, belched appreciatively, and took his leave.

  Khayan lingered, though the day was dwindling. He had never kept a secret from his mother before, or from any woman.

  It was strange. It might anger Earth Mother. But not, he thought, Horse Goddess.

  She had her reasons. What those were, were not for a mere man to know.

  But he could certainly do his best to discover them.

  ~~~

  In the morning Khayan rose before dawn, harnessed his horses with his own hands, and slipped out through a gate guarded only by a yawning young recruit. The recruit leaped to attention when the guttering torch showed him his lord’s face, but Khayan bade him be at ease.

  It was almost cool at this hour, when the stars had just begun to fade, and the very first of the light woke on the eastern horizon. The Egyptians had a god for this most mysterious of hours, the god of the first dawn: Khepera, Ra of the Horizon, who wore the face of the dung beetle, rolling the burning ball of the sun into the sky.

  The earth was waking about him: birds calling, fish leaping, a riverhorse bellowing from the middle of the river, echoing over the water. He thought then and poignantly of first dawn among his mother’s people, wind in the sea of grass, and a clear eerie voice rising over it: the Mother of the tribe, waking first as she did every morning, and going out to sing the sun into the sky.

  Her song came to him as he drove his horses into the waking morning, words so old that all meaning was forgotten, and music ancient beyond human memory. He could not sing it aloud—that would be blasphemy. But it hummed through him. It sang in the reins, in the lightness with which his stallions took their bits, and caught the rhythm of the wheels over the uneven ground.

  The horses were in their morning clusters, grazing where dew had fallen. He found the Mare’s people down near the river, and the Mare grazing with a handful of her sisters. The youngest of those was a still a yearling and inclined toward silliness, but the rest forbore to encourage her.

  Khayan hid his chariot in a bed of reeds, unharnessed his stallions and hobbled them apart from the herds. They would do well enough, if Horse Goddess was kind.

  He had brought wherewithal for a day of lying in ambush, but of weapons only his short sword and his bow and quiver. He was not hunting to kill. Simply to see what he might see.

  ~~~

  She came just at full morning, striding as all these Egyptians did, even on the pavements of palaces: the gait of a people who had trusted to their own feet from the dawn of the world. Among Khayan’s people, only the lowest walked so; and among his mother’s people none did at all. They were all riders and charioteers.

  Now that he knew who she was, he tried to see something of her mother in her. Apart from slenderness and a certain grace, which most Egyptians had, there was little. She was good to look at in her way, but not as the Lady Nefertem was—not a glorious and luminous beauty. She favored her father, perhaps.

  She was rather unexceptional, truth be told. A girl or young woman of the conquered people, naked and sleek as a fish, with a blue bead on a string about her middle, and painted eyes. And yet as she came, all the Mare’s people lifted their heads, and some whickered, welcoming her. She stroked necks and shoulders and rumps as she passed through them, fearless of them as she was not of other horses. Them she knew. Them she trusted.

  The Mare waited for her on the herd’s edge, too proud to mingle with her sisters and aunts and cousins. The girl seemed unsurprised by that. They met somewhat as lovers meet, in a kind of breathlessness.

  The Mare lowered nose into the girl’
s palm. The girl rested her head against the Mare’s neck. And so they stayed, for a while, until the Mare remembered herself and went back to her grazing.

  Khayan watched them the whole morning long. They did nothing of great interest, nothing wild or striking or magical. They lingered in each other’s company, that was all.

  At noon, as the sun touched the zenith, the girl bade the Mare a reluctant farewell, and walked back over field and hill to the house. She had never seen or sensed Khayan at all, though the Mare was well aware of him. The girl lacked a hunter’s instinct, or a horse’s. She was a simple mortal woman, that was all. Nothing more, if nothing less.

  ~~~

  Still he did not seek out his mother, or his sisters either. He was outraged, that was it. Appalled, and somewhat blackly amused. For the Mare to choose a foreigner, that was unheard of. But such a foreigner. No beauty, no brilliance, no royalty of lineage. Her ancestors had never known the Mare’s people, had never known horses at all.

  In the evening he asked that the Lady Nefertem’s daughter wait on him. The one whom he asked, one of the understewards, rolled his eyes rather like a startled horse, but did not muster the courage to contest his lord’s command.

  The girl, however, was another matter. When the wine came round, she who brought it was a lissome Egyptian beauty, but she was not the one who went out every morning to keep company with the Mare.

  Khayan endured the daymeal with less than his usual patience. Nor was he assisted by the boisterousness of his brother’s following. They had got at the wine well before they came into the hall, having mounted a raid on the storeroom that would not, he swore grimly to himself, be repeated. Those who fell over face-first in the roast duck were bearable. The rest bade fair to raise a riot.

  Khayan left them to their folly—and bade the guards secure the entrances. Any that had in mind to wander off would find himself confined till morning. Or perhaps even longer, if Khayan happened to forget that he had shut the lot of them in the hall. With, he could not help but note, a dwindling supply of wine, but enough bread and meat to sustain them for a respectable while.

  Maybe he would simply leave them there. It would be inconvenient for banquets, but for peace in the house, it well might be worth the sacrifice.

  ~~~

  A lord did not usually make it his business to know every cranny of his house. But Khayan was not the usual sort of lord. He knew where the servants slept, and where they took what ease their duties left them. It was a useful thing to know when one was lord of a conquered country.

  The girl, whose name, he had discovered, was Iry, had a room of her own. It was tiny and airless and boasted few comforts, but it signified much. A mere serving girl should not have her own place—no more than a fallen lord’s wife should rule over the women’s house as she had done when her husband was alive. They were all rebels here, subtle but unmistakable.

  He brought a lamp with him from the hall to illumine the darkened passages. As much as he knew of the house, he had not walked often in the servants’ corridors. They were narrow and dark, and their walls were of plain mudbrick without adornment. No march of painted Egyptians here, no beasts or birds or thickets of papyrus, no strange-faced gods watching over those who passed. When a door stood open, the light of his lamp showed a bare box of a room, and sometimes a huddle of bodies in it, servants sleeping in a heap like puppies, men together or women together or, once or twice, a man and a woman wound in one another’s arms.

  He trod silently as a hunter will. He had left his robe outside the hall, and kept only the tunic beneath. His feet were bare. He stalked his quarry to its lair, and found it—waiting?

  Sitting on a bed that, though utterly without elegance, was more than most servants could claim. A lamp burned on a table beside the bed. She looked like one of the images that Egyptians so loved to set in tombs: cross-legged and utterly still, with eyes as dark and flat as stones.

  He paused in the doorway. The room was tiny; if he entered it, he would fill it. She regarded him in silence, with neither surprise nor fear.

  He saw then how she was like her mother. She had that same air of pride that nothing could break, and obstinacy that nothing could shift. Whatever she did, she did of her own choice. No one had ever compelled her, or ever truly would.

  He smiled faintly. Indeed; how like the Mare.

  It was still an outrage. He glared at her. She stared coolly back. “You were not in hall tonight,” he said.

  She did not speak. Her shoulder lifted just visibly: the suggestion of a shrug.

  “Are you not my slave?” he demanded of her.

  “I do not choose to be,” she said.

  “Have you always been so defiant?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Then why?”

  Another shrug, a little clearer this time. “You’re softer than your father was,” she said.

  “You think so?”

  “He’d have had me brought to him by force, and made me kneel and beg his pardon.”

  “Ah,” said Khayan. “I did think of that. But it’s such a usual thing for a lord to do. I try not to do the usual.”

  “You are soft,” she said.

  “And you are your mother’s child.” He paused. “I gave her to my mother. What would you do if I did the same to you?”

  She neither paled nor flinched. “I would do whatever seemed wise.”

  “Even if that were to serve her?”

  “I might,” she said. Her head tilted. “Are you going to take me before you send me there?”

  “Why? Do you want me to?”

  For the first time he saw a flicker of emotion. What it was, he could not be sure, but there was no mistaking it. Had he startled her? Amused her? Even dismayed her? “You are a strange man,” she said.

  “I’m my mother’s son.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  There was a silence. Khayan considered leaving, but he had not said what he came to say. She could not escape: there was only one door, and he was in it. She lay back and propped herself on her elbow, at evident ease. She was naked as she always was, and as innocent of immodesty as a newborn child.

  She made him think of his mother’s people—and that was a dangerous thought; dangerous to his outrage.

  “I saw you,” he said. “Among the horses.”

  She did not move. Had she tensed a very little? “Is that a forbidden thing?” she asked.

  “Do you think it should be?”

  “You don’t seem to approve,” she said. “Why? Because I go out? Because I don’t labor in the house from dawn far into the night?”

  “No,” he said. He paused. He asked her, “Do you know what horse it is that calls you until you come?”

  There: at last. Visible, and honest, stiffening, and eyes wide in the narrow face. “How do you know— What do you mean? Is it a sacred horse?”

  “Sacred,” he said, “yes. As you knew. Didn’t you?”

  “My presence defiles her.” She did not sound bitter; merely reflective. “You’ve come to forbid me. She won’t like that. What will you do when she calls me again, and I go?”

  “No,” he said. “Oh, no. She can’t be defiled, nor is she ruled by any human creature. If she chooses to trouble herself with you, it’s not my place to permit or forbid.”

  “I don’t think I believe that.”

  “Believe it,” he said. “That is the Mare. She does as she pleases. And it seems that she pleases to take you for her servant.”

  “Is she a goddess?”

  “No,” Khayan answered, “and yes. Horse Goddess lives in her. But Horse Goddess is more than simple flesh.”

  “Of course,” the Egyptian said, dismissing that whole great mystery with a toss of her head. “So she wants me as a sort of priestess. Why me?”

  “If I knew that,” Khayan said, “I would never have had to come here. It’s unheard of.”

  “Ah,” she said in sudden understanding. “That’s what you don’t approve
of. But she doesn’t care, does she? She wants what she wants.”

  “She is the Mare,” he said, with a faint and, yes, exasperated sigh.

  “And your mother is going to be even less pleased than you. And your sisters. The fierce one, the one who rides about and wears a sword—she’ll try to kill me. Won’t she?”

  “She won’t dare,” he said.

  “But she may threaten.” Iry seemed not at all dismayed. “I see how awkward it all is.”

  “It’s worse than awkward. It’s appalling.”

  She laughed. She was not mocking him, not really. Her laughter was infectious. He had to struggle not to echo it. “I do think I like you,” she said. She sounded surprised. “Will you teach me to ride the Mare?”

  He bit his tongue on his first answer, which was a resounding “No!” Instead he paused, drew a breath, and when he was calm, asked her, “Why do you want to do that?”

  “I don’t want to,” she said. “She wants me to. But I don’t know what to do.”

  Ai, he thought. The Mare was not going to have mercy on any of them, he could well see. “Mostly,” he said with some care, “one learns from the horse.”

  “I think I’m too old for that,” she said. “And too afraid.”

  “Why do you ask me? I should think you’d be afraid of me, too.”

  “Of course I’m not afraid of you,” she said. “And if it’s you teaching me, who can stop me? Whereas if I asked someone else . . .”

  Khayan did laugh then, a little incredulously. “Gods,” he said. “You and my sisters . . . they’ll hate you for being Egyptian—and for being so like them.”

  “Then will you teach me?” she asked.

  “I suppose I had better,” he said, “or the Mare will never forgive me.”

  She did not clap her hands or indulge in any other style of girlish delight. She lay there, that was all, and gave him the gift of her smile.

  X

  Khayan took that smile away with him. It was as warm as sun on one’s face after a long and bitter winter among the tribes. Her body had done little to arouse him, but that smile, in all its innocence—that he could not forget.