by Judith Tarr
He went direct to his bed, yawning, tired suddenly to the bone. Servants were waiting up for him, ready to undress him, bathe him, comb out his hair. He waved them all away. He wanted to sleep. He wanted—yes, he wanted to dream of that smile, and of that odd quick wit and those calm dark eyes.
His bed was occupied. He saw, at first, only the long sweep of back, the curve of buttocks, and the broad flare of a woman’s hips. Then she stirred, rolling lazily onto her back, arching it. Her breasts were beautiful, round and full; the nipples huge, deep red like the lips that curved in a smile of greeting.
It was meant to allure, that smile; and maybe in another hour it would have. But he was fresh from the memory of a different smile altogether. “Barukha,” he said, flat and unwelcoming. “What are you doing here?”
She pursed those ripe red lips and frowned, but coyly. “Why, my lord! What do you think I’m doing?”
“Vexing my rest,” he answered, making no effort to soften the snap in his voice. “I didn’t summon you.”
“You did not,” she said. “And a fine state of affairs that’s been, too. I had to practice every art of intrigue I had, to escape your mother’s clutches. She guards me more closely than my brothers ever have.”
“Does she?” He turned toward the door, opened his mouth to call the guard.
“My lord!” she half-sang behind him. “Summon a guard and I tell him what I’ll tell my brothers—and your mother. You ordered me here. You compelled me to lie naked before you. You—”
He turned back to face her. Her smile had taken on a hint of triumph. “I understand you,” he said. “Good night, madam. Sleep well.”
He hoped that she was suitably nonplussed to be left alone in his bed. She was welcome to it, for all the good it did her. Even if she chose to tell the tale that she had threatened—he took care to sleep where no one could mistake his presence: in the guardroom, among his own chosen men. They greeted him with pleasure and a careful lack of curiosity, offered him the best corner and a cup of their middling bad wine, and let him into their game of stones and bones.
He was, he realized as he lost resoundingly to a downy-cheeked stripling of a guardsman, as happy as he had been in a considerable while. Even with a beautiful woman abandoned in his bed, and his manly parts aching with the deprivation.
When he slept at last, rolled in a cloak and secure against the wall, in the warm redolent snoring company of his own people, he dreamed not of Barukha lolling in his bed, but of another woman altogether. She lay in her cell of a room, fixing him with her level and unflinching stare, until suddenly—dazzlingly—she smiled.
~~~
Once again Khayan rode out before dawn. This time he brought a companion: Iry still more than half asleep, dragged protesting from her bed and flung into his chariot. She clung blindly to the sides, her eyes clamped shut, as the chariot lurched and rattled from rutted road to plowed field.
It came to him belatedly that she must be terrified. “Have you ever been in a chariot before?” he asked her.
At first he thought she had not heard. Her eyes were still shut tight. Then she shook her head, a sharp jerk of the chin.
“Here,” he said, shifting easily, balancing on the rocking floor. Her hands were locked on the chariot’s sides. He wound the reins about his middle and pried her loose. Before she could clamp on again, he had shifted her from behind to in front of him, secure between his body and the foremost rim. She was as stiff as a stone.
He shifted the reins till they were in both his hands again, and his arms bracing her, holding her easily between them. Her head came just to his chin. She did not use heavy perfumes as so many did in Egypt. The only scent she wore was her own, light and clean, with a faint pungency of fear; but that was fading.
Her hands slid down his arms, so light that at first he did not think what it meant. She had let go her deathgrip on the rim. She was reaching for his hands—no, for his hands on the reins. Not trying to take them. Simply resting there, small and cold, but warming slowly.
He was aware as he had not been in too long, of the living tension in those lines, the feel of the horses’ mouths at the end of them, their eagerness held softly in check, their bright will that they placed at his disposal. It was a gift, and a great one, but worn thin with use. He had been taking it since he was a child, born and raised among the horses.
To her it was all new. Her fear had melted into wonder. At any moment, she would ask if she could take the reins; but he was not about to let her do that.
Not yet.
He had misjudged her, perhaps. She did not ask anything. She rode with him, that was all, in among the fields of horses, and stood by while he unharnessed his stallions and hid his chariot away. When he had done that, she said, “Wouldn’t it be easier just to ride one here, and never mind the rest?”
He considered several answers. In the end he chose the most obvious, and the most immediate. “Then you don’t need me to teach you? You ride already?”
“Of course not,” she said.
“So then,” he said. “Come. The Mare is waiting.”
That distracted her, as he had hoped. She turned away from him with almost insulting eagerness, and went in search of that one of all the horses.
He sighed a little as he followed. A woman could want a man quite as fiercely as a man could want a woman. She could also conceal it, and often would, if it suited her purpose.
He did not think that this one was concealing anything. He was nothing to her but an intrusion upon her world, and, for the moment, a set of skills that she could use. He still had not gone to his mother, and certainly not to his sisters. He had gone out, truth be told, in secret, and he was proceeding in secret. As if he, the lord of this domain, the master of his kin, should need to hide anything—least of all from his mother and sisters.
He would speak with them when the occasion presented itself. For the moment he had a pupil, and she was waiting upon his instruction. He had brought with him a bridle and a saddle-fleece, and other things bound up in it for the tending of the Mare.
She was grazing in her wonted place. At sight of the two of them together, she snorted softly, but did not take alarm. No more did she recoil from what he carried. She was no stranger to them. Far away in the east, Horse Goddess’ priestesses had raised her and taught her what she should know. It was expected that she be ready when she chose her own servant—as it was expected that the servant be ready for the choosing.
This was utterly irregular. The Mare cared not in the slightest. She greeted the Egyptian with the soft sound that mares make to their foals: a flutter of the nostrils, a low whicker in the throat. Iry took the beautiful pale head in her arms and laid her forehead on the broad forehead, and rested briefly there, with an air of one who has come home.
Just as Khayan was about to lose patience, Iry straightened, and the Mare sighed and drew back a little. Khayan unrolled the saddle-fleece and took out the wherewithal for grooming and tending the Mare, and set them in Iry’s hands. “Now,” he said, “begin.”
He did not mean to be merciful. No more did he mean to be unjust. She would learn as a boychild learned among his father’s people, first to tend the horse, then to put on the harness in its proper order—or, here, bridle and saddle-fleece. He showed her how to brush and polish the coat, and comb the mane and the long, tangled tail, and pick out the big round hooves. When the Mare was gleaming, and only then, he showed Iry the way of bridle and saddle.
Then when the Mare was saddled and bridled to his satisfaction, he taught her how to take them all off again, and smooth the back and head and ears, and grant the Mare her freedom.
Iry did it all as she was told, without a murmur of protest—until he said, “Now let her go.”
Then she said, “I’m not to ride her?”
“Not today,” Khayan said. “Not until you are perfect in these lessons.”
“And what if that is never?”
“What, are you retreating now, foreigner child?”
“You are the foreigner here,” she said: an unguarded utterance, startled out of her by an altogether unexpected flash of temper.
He was almost sorry to see her master herself again quickly. “I am not retreating,” she said then. “I am asking.”
“You will learn,” he answered, “because it’s I who teach you.”
“A little bit arrogant, are we?” She turned her back on him—quite shocking in a slave before her master—and set off toward the place where he had hidden the chariot.
“Not so fast,” he said. When she stopped and, as if against her will, turned, he pointed with his chin toward the bridle and saddle-fleece and the rest. “You will look after that,” he said, “and carry it. Now begin.”
She rolled everything together with dispatch and with impressive skill, bound it and tucked it under her arm and looked him in the face. And waited.
He turned on his heel and set off where she had been going. Not till he was well turned away from her did he allow the grin to break loose. He had always had a peculiar fondness for the less docile of his pupils, man and horse both.
But to her face he must be as stern as ever lord and preceptor should be. He set her to work with the chariot, too, and the much greater complexity of its harness. If he tired her out, so be it. If her mind could not absorb it all, then that was a pity; because he would expect her to know it when next she came out with him.
She would not ride back with him. “I can walk,” she said.
He opened his mouth to object, but wisdom silenced him. It was full morning now. If he rode back with this of all women in his chariot, all the household would know that something was afoot. Or, more aptly, ahorse.
He held his tongue therefore, sprang into the chariot and took up the reins. Iry was on her way already, walking easily with her long stride. She did not glance up as the horses trotted past her, or meet Khayan’s gaze. She might have been alone under that endless Egyptian sky, for all the notice she deigned to take of him.
~~~
Khayan should have known better than to think that he could conceal anything from his mother. That very day, the day he began to teach Iry to ride the Mare, he received a summons into her presence.
Two such, so close together, did not bode well. He had a brief, wild thought of disregarding it, but lord of the domain or no, he had no power to match that of the Lady Sarai.
He chose therefore to go at once, leaving Teti the steward to settle yet another tedious and tangled dispute. Teti’s lot was lighter, perhaps, but Khayan had hopes of escaping sooner.
His mother waited for him in her place of audience. She was alone but for a single servant. That servant made Khayan pause the fraction of a step, then sigh ever so faintly and advance to stand before his mother.
Iry did not know why she was there. Khayan would have wagered silver on it. She seemed bored and considerably annoyed, though she was hiding it rather well. Khayan wondered what his mother had been doing to vex her. Nothing, most likely, beyond having summoned her and kept her standing there with empty hands and no visible task.
Iry was no better a servant than her mother Nefertem. Khayan bit back a smile before either of them saw it. He bowed to his mother as was right and proper, and waited to be acknowledged.
She looked him up and down. “My son,” she said. “You are well?”
“Most well,” he said serenely. “And you, lady mother? Do I find you well?”
Had her brow twitched? “Very well,” she replied. “Your domain: how does it fare? Are your people pleased with you?”
“No more or less, lady mother, than they believe they should be.”
“Ah,” she said. And let him stand there, waiting upon her pleasure.
He was content to wait. He did not even mind that he had been left to stand, with no chair fetched for him, nor any to fetch for himself. He had been sitting for much of the time since noon. He was rather glad to be on his feet.
At length Sarai said, “I asked you to discover a thing for me, not long ago. Did you discover it?”
Khayan was almost taken aback. That was striking directness, and very sudden. But it was like her. He answered honestly, “Yes. I did.”
“And what did you discover?”
“I do think you know,” he said.
“Why do you think that?”
“Because,” he said, “you are my mother, the Lady of the White Horse people.”
“Why did you wait so long to tell me?” she inquired.
“Because I am a coward,” he said. “And because it seemed too preposterous to believe.”
“And yet it is so,” she said.
All the while they tested one another like warriors in a battle, neither glanced at Iry. Khayan was aware of her, keenly. She had roused a little when his mother asked after his people, but had subsided once more into boredom. She did not know that they spoke of her. How could she? Her people knew nothing of the Mare, or of the Mare’s servants.
Now Sarai turned to her and said, “Girl. Who are you?”
Iry stared at her, astonished. “Who— What does that matter?”
“Answer my question,” Sarai said, cold and clear.
Iry shrugged in something very close to insolence, and said, “I am your son’s slave.”
Sarai’s hand swept that nonsense away. “Don’t play me for a fool, girl. I know what you and your mother are in this house. Tell me who you are.”
“If you know what I am, you know who I am,” Iry said. By the gods, she was fearless. Perhaps it came of caring nothing for her life. It was worth so little, after all, slave that she was.
“I would prefer that you tell me,” Sarai said.
Iry shrugged again. One must indulge the old, her gesture said, and the feeble of wit. “My name is Iry. I am the daughter of the Lady Nefertem and of the Lord Meren-Ptah, who rests now among the justified of Osiris. They were lord and lady of the Sun Ascendant, children of children of the first lord and lady, of kin who have ruled here a thousand and half a thousand years. And who,” she demanded with a flash of heat, “are you?”
Sarai laughed, sweet and clear as a girl. “Oh, girl! What a spirit you have! My name is Sarai. I am the daughter of Sadana, the daughter of Sarai, the daughter of Savita, the daughter of Sadana, daughter of the daughters of the granddaughters of Sarama of the White Mare’s people, who have ruled in the east of the world for a thousand and a thousand and yet again a thousand years. And so, child, since my line is older than yours, suppose that you put aside your impudence and answer me a question.”
“Ask it,” said Iry, undismayed, and not visibly awed by lineage so demonstrably ancient. No doubt, in Egypt, it was reckoned merely venerable.
“Do you know what the Mare is?” Sarai asked her.
She frowned. “So that is what this is for,” she said. “She’s a goddess—a goddess’ image. Your son told me. He said you would be angry.”
“That is not exactly what I said,” Khayan interposed.
But they were not listening to him. As always when women dealt with women’s matters, the mere male was forsaken and forgotten.
“Why would I be angry?” Sarai wanted to know.
“Because I am Egyptian.” Iry spoke as to a child.
Sarai’s eye sparked at that, but she forbore to be provoked. “That is irregular,” she conceded. “More than irregular. Do you understand what you have done?”
“I suppose,” Iry said bitterly, “you want me to stop answering when the Mare calls me, and let someone proper do it instead. I could try. But when she calls, I go. I can’t help it.”
“No one can,” Sarai said. “No, you don’t understand. The Mare chooses her servant. None of us has a say in it. What it means . . . girl, it is an omen. Never in thrice a thousand years, and in years beyond count before that, has the Mare chosen any but a daughter of one kindred. It was regarded as a great omen when the last Mare brought her servant into Egypt, and a greater one when this Mare brought her kin to live he
re. Now she has not only chosen a servant of another clan and kindred, that servant is not even of our people.”
Iry’s head had come up. Perhaps in spite of herself, her eyes had begun to blaze. She knew what sort of omen that was.
“We will fight this,” Sarai said. “Be well aware of it. The Mare may be telling us that Egypt is truly ours; that we have taken it as she has taken you.”
“Or,” said Iry, almost too low to be heard, “that we will take it back, and drive you out.”
She paused. Sarai let the pause stretch. Iry said, “You can’t get rid of me, can you? If you kill me—what will the Mare do?”
“That would be sacrilege,” Sarai said. “No one will kill you. But because the Mare has chosen you, you belong to her, and therefore to us. There is much that you must learn, and much that you must do; duties, obligations, offices that you must fill.”
“And if I won’t?”
“You will,” Sarai said with terrible gentleness. “You begin now. Part of the day, you belong to the Mare—and to my son, who has taken on himself the task of teaching you to be a horseman. The rest of the day, and the night, you are mine. You will do as I say, when I say it, without question.”
“I will be, in short, a slave.”
“You will be a priestess,” Sarai said, “whether you will or no. This is the Mare’s doing, her choosing. For her you do it. For her you suffer it, and perform it as best you may. Any less dishonors her.”
“I’ll run away,” Iry said. Was she perhaps growing frightened?
“The Mare will bring you back,” said Sarai. “Endure it, girl. You’re hers now, and have been from the moment you answered her call.”
Iry lowered her head. It only looked like submission. Khayan saw how she glared up under the black fringe of her hair. “Do I have to wear a robe?” she asked: startling question, and he thought she knew it.
“When you are among my people,” Sarai said, “you will observe the proprieties. For the rest, you may do as you please.”
Iry kept her head lowered. She would be among Sarai’s people now, and not her own—that much she had to understand. But she said nothing. One might almost think that she had surrendered to necessity. Except for those eyes. There was no submission in them.