The Shepherd Kings

by Judith Tarr

  This Seti had an air of one who relished a fight. Which could be a good thing, or could be a terrible nuisance. Kemni met him with a bland stare and the suggestion of a smile. “Here, in this place, there is only one queen. That queen is the Ariana of Crete. That is a great lady, my friend, and a priestess, and a living goddess. She may not be our goddess, but she is our queen.”

  “She holds herself high,” drawled Seti. Others near him nodded. Some grinned lazily at Kemni.

  Kemni knew the look of a manpack when he saw one. He let his smile widen a fraction, just enough to show a gleam of teeth. With no more warning than that, he kicked Seti’s legs from under him and knocked him flat. As Seti lay winded, stiff with shock, Kemni said, “You will speak of her with respect.”

  Seti, unlike Kemni, did not appear to learn quickly. He drew himself up painfully, licking blood from a cut lip. “Respect?” he said. “But why?”

  “Because,” said Kemni, sweeping a blow that knocked him flat again, “I said so.”

  Seti bowed to that. He did not appear to resent Kemni’s rough handling; if anything, like a dog that learns to welcome its master’s kick, he was glad of it. It proved to him that where he offered obedience, he offered it to strength.

  Kemni suppressed a sigh. The manpack would go where its leader led. The rest, if he was fortunate, would follow Ariana for herself, and not simply because her commander of a hundred was heavy with his fist.

  He faced them all as he would have done on a battlefield. “You are sworn to serve the king. Your service to him resides now in your service to this lady from Crete. Any who fails in that, answers to me.”

  That satisfied them well enough. Kemni swept them with a last, raking glance, turned on his heel and stalked away as a commander of a hundred could not but do.

  ~~~

  “Hail the hero! Hail the conqueror.”

  Kemni jumped nigh out of his skin. In the sudden blind dark of his passage from blazing sun of the courtyard to shade of the colonnade, Iphikleia’s voice sounded eerily clear. Her mockery lashed him like cold sea-spray.

  It took all the strut out of him, and most of the self-satisfaction, too. “Sometimes,” he said, “you might leave a man one or two of his delusions.”

  “Why would I want to do that?” she asked.

  He should be raging at her. And yet there was something so bracing about her, and so unlike anything else he knew, even Ariana, that he could only laugh a little painfully, shrug and sigh and say, “Yes. Of course. Why should you trouble yourself?”

  “It’s not good for a man to indulge his fancies,” she said. One or both of them turned at the same time, and they walked together down the colonnade to the gate. “Men are so strong, you see, in the body, but so weak in the spirit. They’re like bulls: everything they are has to do with rutting.”

  “Oh, come,” he said. “There’s a little more to us than that.”

  “Why, surely,” she said: “when there are women to teach you discipline.”

  “Sometimes I think you do that just to see if I’ll take the bait,” he said.

  They paused in the gate, blinking at the light of the larger courtyard, but not quite too dazzled to see each other’s faces. Was she smiling? No, he was dazzled. Or was it her smile that was doing it?

  Gods. She did not know what he dreamed of—still, so often that it had become an old familiar thing. She in her royal rank, her sanctity, and her unshakable conviction that the world was hers to command, could not possibly be dreaming as he was dreaming. That would be far beneath her.

  He did not even like her.

  She did not ask to be liked. Neither did she particularly want to be.

  And perhaps, he thought, that was a mask she wore. When he dreamed her, she was a warm and laughing armful, warmer and merrier even than Ariana. It was always a shock to see the waking woman, and to come face to face with her coldness.

  She did not seem so cold now. The pause stretched. It was cooler in the gate than in the sun, and there was a faint waft of sweetness from the tattered but indomitable garden. Kemni was wanted in the stable, where the first of the horses had come in to be trained. But it was oddly pleasant to stand here, saying nothing, doing nothing, simply and comfortably at rest.

  She touched his arm, light as the brush of a feather. He started a little. Almost he might have doubted that she had done it, but his arm burned as if she had brushed it with fire.

  She stepped past him, out into the sunlight. He thought of holding back, or of speaking. But he did neither. They walked across the court to the stables.

  ~~~

  There was a terribly great deal to learn, and terribly little time to learn it. Many of the horses, Ariana said, showed signs of having been trained to the chariot before; as they would have expected, since most had come as prizes of war. That made matters somewhat simpler. So did Ariana’s ruthless assessment of Kemni’s recruits on their first day in front of her, and her dividing them into companies, each with its duties as well as its daily lessons. Seti the insolent, Kemni happened to notice, was chosen among the first. She did not appear to care if a man was ill-mannered, if only he learned what she had to teach.

  Seti did have a gift: with horses. With them he put aside his air of eternal ennui. They responded in kind, and even granted him respect: not an easy thing to earn, with those self-willed beasts.

  Kemni had to learn all that his men did, and command them, and look after them, and still wait on Ariana and assist both her and her cousin in their study of the language of Egypt. He rose before dawn and fell abed long after sunset, his head buzzing with all that it was being forced to hold. So much to learn. So much.

  In sleep he had little rest, either. Iphikleia haunted him. He knew her so well, as she was in dream, that he could have been her husband of a dozen years. Though if husbands had of their wives what Kemni had of Iphikleia, marriage was a blessed state indeed.

  Now that Kemni was in the house of the Bull of Re, he dreamed that he came together with Iphikleia there. The room they trysted in did not exist outside the dream—he had looked; but there was no chamber that opened on the garden, and that had on its walls a fresco of the bull-dance. The girl who danced the bull was painted in Ariana’s likeness. The young men were not those whom he had seen in the dance. One could have been Naukrates a score of years past. The other was Kemni, odd with his Egyptian face and long painted Cretan ringlets, preparing to dance the bull as that one had who had died for it.

  Kemni refused to take that as an omen. It was a dream. Dreams could be treacherous.

  This night, not long before the time of the river’s flood, he had come to the chamber first, naked as he always was, and rampant with it. Often when he came before Iphikleia, he lay in the great bed ornamented with the horns of bulls. But tonight he was restless. He paced the room, slowly at first, then more quickly, swift strides, sharp, almost angry.

  She was very late. She never came so late; she was always hard on his heels, and eager. But tonight he paced for long and long before he heard that step without.

  He stopped—by chance or design, in the shadow of a pillar. She walked blindly through the door, dressed as always in the many tiers and flounces of a Cretan lady. Even in dream she was not as simply beautiful as her cousin Ariana. Her beauty was a subtler thing, slower to strike the senses, but much more lasting.

  She did not appear to see Kemni. Nor did he move to greet her. He hung back, gritting his teeth against the aching in his loins, and watched her. She paced for a while as he had, frowning, biting her lip. Just as he gathered himself to speak, to ask her what so troubled her, she stopped abruptly and spun. “Goddess!” she burst out. “This has to stop. I can’t bear it.”

  There was no answer, no stirring in the air, no flicker in the corner of the eye. Iphikleia flung herself onto the bed, headlong as a child. “I can’t let him know,” she said. “He’ll laugh. He may even hate me. Every night, to steal his spirit because I—because I—” She buried her face
in cushions.

  Was she weeping? Iphikleia, crying like any mortal woman? It did seem that she was; or else she was laughing till her body shook, racked as if with sobs.

  It had to be laughter. Iphikleia was not a woman who wept.

  She sat up at last. Tears ran down her cheeks; but one could weep with laughter. She wiped the tears away, a sharp gesture, more like her waking self than most of what she did here. “I can’t tell him,” she said as if to someone standing over her, someone who taxed her with her deceit. “I can’t. My beautiful man, my Bull of Re—if he knew, he’d never forgive me.”

  He had to move then, or not at all. He came strolling as if he had come from the twilight of the garden, yawning and stretching, with his rod so stiff he dared not touch it lest he cry out in pain.

  She did cry out—but not, quite, in pain. She flung herself into his arms, bearing him backward, eating him alive with kisses. Her body was fever-hot. He could only defend himself as best he could, and hold her till she calmed. She took him inside herself then, rocking slowly, startling after the wildness that had come before.

  She was weeping—truly weeping. He kept on holding her, settling to the slow rhythm that she had taken, which was like a slow swell of the sea.

  She was slow, too, to come to the height of it. He tried to hold back, to slacken, to slow, but there was only so much a man could do. He let go almost guiltily, with a gasp that made her cling even tighter.

  She held him inside her for as long as she could. He tried to babble apologies, but she was not listening. She was rocking him still, holding tight. If a spirit could wander beyond even dream, hers had done it.

  Often after the first fierce heat of passion they would lie together, talking lazily of this and that. Tonight she had no speech in her. She was so real in his arms, so warm and solid, and so strangely sad.

  If it was possible to sleep in dreams, they slept in one another’s arms. Even after he woke, he could feel her there, a living presence, as if she had been there in truth. But he was alone. The dream faded as it always did, but for a lingering presence, like a scent of her that wafted for a while through the room, and slowly vanished.

  IV

  Iphikleia in daylight was as she always was: remote, forbidding, but willing enough to teach him what she knew. Of course she had not changed. She knew nothing of the world he walked in while he slept. How could she?

  And yet he caught himself eyeing her sidelong as he harnessed one of the horses or mended a rein or taught a group of his recruits, with her help, to catch and groom a horse. His wild boys had learned at once, and thoroughly, to keep their hands to themselves. One was still nursing the scar of her knife through his hand.

  Kemni could well imagine what she would say if she knew what his dreams were like. He must not imagine that he knew her, simply because the gods brought the image of her to his bed every night. This living woman was a stranger, nor cared to be aught else.

  When the horse had been captured, groomed to a sheen, and let loose again to roll in the wallow that the herd had made near the stream of water from the river, the recruits were dismissed to another duty. Kemni had duties himself, and so no doubt did Iphikleia. But he was minded to linger for a bit, and she had paused to reckon the count of horses in this particular herd.

  There were the same number that had been in the valley before the lesson began, and that had been there the day before, and for days before that. More would come, the king had promised, but it would take time to gather them all together and herd them toward the Bull of Re.

  Somehow, when Iphikleia turned to stride back toward the chariot that brought her from the house, Kemni happened, just then, to turn himself. They collided, she with a gasp, he with a sudden hammering of the heart. She fit into his arms just as she had in dreams—perfectly. For half a breath’s span he held her, and she rested her weight against him.

  They stiffened in much the same instant, and drew carefully apart. She sprang into the chariot and gave the restive horses their heads.

  Which left Kemni to walk, and it was some small distance. He shrugged and sighed. He had trusted to his feet long before he ever set foot in a chariot. He could trust to them again.

  It was rather pleasant, for a walk in the full glare of the sun. He had water at his belt, to quench his thirst. As he came in sight of the house-wall, Prince Gebu rose lazily from the stone on which he had been sitting, and said by way of greeting, “So, brother. What did you say to her?”

  “Nothing,” Kemni said. “Why? What is she—”

  “She rode in like the wrath of Set,” Gebu said, smiling at the memory. “She ripped the harness off the horses and put them up with every hair in place, slammed through half the house, and locked herself in the women’s quarters. We thought you must have threatened to make her laugh.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Kemni said. Which was not exactly the truth, but surely she could not be as angry as that, simply because, by accident, he had touched her.

  ~~~

  Wisdom would have kept him well away from her. But he was not particularly wise, and he needed her to help him teach his rebellious recruits to put together a heap of jumbled straps and lines and bits of bronze until it showed itself to be a chariot harness. Maybe she would forget her temper, if he determined to ignore it.

  In any ordinary great house that had become home to a queen, no man would have dared to walk into the women’s quarters without escort. But women in Crete lived more freely than ladies in Egypt. Kemni’s presence set a flock of maids to fluttering and screeching, but they were silly fools who had seen him there a hundred times before. Gebu would have said that they did it to catch Kemni’s eye. Kemni rather feared that that was the case.

  It was fortunate, then, that Gebu had had occupations of his own that kept him from following Kemni into this place. Kemni extricated himself from the gaggle of girls and went where they managed, amid their flutter, to direct him.

  Iphikleia had sought the deepest part of the house, and the highest: a room of somewhat surprising size and spaciousness, at the top of a steep and narrow stair. It might have been a guard’s post once, or a tower to shut a treasured daughter in, that no touch of the world should sully her.

  Kemni rather favored the latter. Guards might not be as enchanted with the painting of the walls as a young girl would be: forests of reeds, flocks of ducks and geese, a riverhorse lifting its head from the river, and a pair of ibises dancing amid the reeds. It was much faded, and peeling in patches, but it had still a dusty beauty.

  Iphikleia perched in the deep embrasure that hinted at a guardroom after all, though it might serve to torment a prisoner with so narrow and so distant a vision of the world beyond. Iphikleia had turned her back on that, and drawn into a knot, glaring at the world.

  The force of that glare rocked Kemni back a step. Perhaps he should have waited after all.

  And yet, he had come this far, and he was winded, and his temper was just a little frayed. A servant must endure all the vagaries of his masters. That he had been taught. That he had done his best to do, even if it galled him.

  Even the best of servants might fail of his duty. Kemni was a simple mortal creature; and he was vexed out of all patience, waking and asleep. He glared straight back at her.

  “Go away,” she said.

  He did not move. “You’re wanted below,” he said. His voice was cold.

  “I said,” she said, “go away.”

  “No,” said Kemni.

  At first perhaps she did not believe her ears. “You—no? That is an order!”

  “And I’m not taking it.” Kemni leaned against the wall, arms folded, as insolent as he knew how to be.

  Which was not very; but it seemed to be enough. She flew out of the window-embrasure and fell on him with force enough to knock the breath out of him. They tumbled in a heap, Kemni beneath. He hardly held her, and yet she struggled, cursing him for everything he was and was not.

  He slapped her. She st
opped, startled into stillness. Her face was just above his own, her eyes wild, but slowly coming into focus. They fixed on him. Something in them went strange. She bent down and deliberately, carefully, set her lips on his.

  It was just like his dreams. In them he had not been flat on a dusty floor, with the throb of bruises to keep him wide awake. And yet the rest was the same, her warm and supple body, the brush of her breasts across his breast, the taste of her mouth, which was like sweet wine. She knew just where to kiss, just where to nibble, and exactly where to stroke him till he arched like a cat.

  There was no thought in it at all. She had tugged his kilt free, letting it fall where it would. Her own had vanished somewhere. He knew exactly when to lift his hips, and when to take her hands in his hands and guide her down.

  There was one difference. A difficulty. A barrier that he had broken before he knew what it was. And when it was too late, when the thing was done, he could not stop; he could not even slow, though his heart was cold with a kind of horror.

  But she had taken him as he would have thought no maiden would know to take a man. If she knew pain, she betrayed no sign of it. She took him with a kind of wild joy, with abandon that swept him with it, cold heart, gibbering mind, and all the rest.

  She would not let him go till she had had the whole of him. There came a point, deep in the heart of terror, in which, he discovered, it no longer mattered. Then the terror was—not gone. But transmuted. It was almost pleasure, and just short of pain. It was exquisite. Just as she was.

  She brought herself to the height of pleasure again and again, but held him just short of it, till he was nigh to screaming with that sweet torture. Then at last, with a slow sweep of those wondrous hips, she let him go. He cried out, utterly without will.

  And when it had passed, when his body had ceased its throbbing, his rod fallen slack, he lay as limp as sea-wrack. She knelt astride him, gasping, running with sweat. Her skin was hot and slippery where it touched his. Runnels ran down between those lovely breasts. He could not help himself; he took them in his hands. They were just as they should be, fever-hot, firm yet soft, the wide dark nipples waking, tautening at his touch.