by Judith Tarr
“Oh yes! Do you know how truly wearing it is to be royal?”
“I never found it wearing,” she said, “but I ran away often. I even sailed in ships. I came to Egypt more than once.”
“You see?” said Gebu. “It dragged at you. You escaped it as often as you could. That gift wasn’t given me—till my battle-brother helped to set me free.”
“He helped you, too?” Her voice was cool. “He’s not happy with his gifts, I don’t think.”
Gebu laughed softly. “No, he’s not. My poor brother. So blessed, and so reluctant.”
Kemni stopped his ears with the rough sack that was all the blanket he had, and tried to sleep. They chattered on through the night, as far as he knew, as friends will, or friends who would be lovers.
It was fitting. They were of like rank. Kemni was markedly lower in station than they, honored of the king or no.
~~~
Such thoughts had no place and no purpose in the burning daylight. Kemni could not keep them away in the dark, and suffered rather too much loss of sleep thereby. But when the sun was in the sky, he fixed on what was his to do: sail the boat, command the men, see that the fishing went on as it should. The river was running even swifter now, and rising higher. The flood was coming, the great Inundation that would spread the water wide across the land of Egypt, and leave behind it the rich black earth that was the wealth of the Two Kingdoms.
He began to think that perhaps he had been less than wise to venture the river in a fishing-boat with the water rising. But it was a sturdy boat, made of reeds bundled together in the ancient way, born on this river and begotten of it. It gave to the surge of the river as a boat of wood might not have done, and rode with it, borne lightly atop it.
There were fish in plenty, though the nets had to drop lower and dredge deeper. Kemni chose to continue trading the catch in towns along the river, though that grew more dangerous the farther north they went. They gathered gossip in that way, and news, and rumors that ran swifter than the river. One such persisted, and grew stronger as they drew nearer to Lower Egypt: that war was coming. The foreign kings and the king in Thebes would meet in battle as they had ten years agone.
“Why would either of them trouble to do that?” Seti drawled in the marketplace of a town not far south of Memphis. Seti had a good ear; he could mimic dialects with ease, though he was not as quick with languages as Kemni was. He managed, at every town, to speak in the accent of the town before that, so that people would think he had come from just upriver. It was wonderfully clever, and well he knew it, too.
“So,” he said in the dialect of a day’s long sail upriver, “tell me why war should come now. It’s been years since the kings fought. Isn’t old Apophis getting on a bit? He’s not the young lion he used to be.”
“Neither is Ahmose,” said one of the idlers in the market, while an assortment of wives and servants haggled over the fish. “They’ve both got grown sons. But that never stopped a king, that I ever heard of.”
Kemni was occupied with a supremely contentious harridan and her even more contentious servant, but he kept half an ear on the conversation, and half an eye on Gebu, who had flat refused to stay with the boat. Days of sun and sailing had given him a rough and suitably common look, but he had lifted his head at his father’s name. Those eyes had never belonged to a simple fisherman.
Seti, whose air of worldly ennui passed here for youthful foolishness—though the women tended to like it; it charmed them—snorted at the king’s name. “Ah! Ahmose. He’s younger than Apophis, but I’d have hoped he was wiser. Why would he fight a war he can’t win?”
“How do you know he can’t?” another of the idlers demanded.
Kemni had sold the harridan a basketful of fish, each one selected with exacting care and endless haggling. He left the next buyer to another of the crew, and busied himself between Seti and Gebu, brushing flies from the fish and shifting the bit of sail that shaded them from the sun.
Seti had stopped even pretending to help with the selling. “So tell me how Ahmose can win a war against the Retenu.”
“By fighting it,” the idler answered, speaking as if to an idiot child. “He sits in his big house away upriver, eats off his golden plates and shits in his golden pot, and wishes he could be lord of Two Lands instead of one. I tell you, man, if he got up and dropped the girl he’s bouncing on his knee, took up his sword and called his armies and got to work, he’d be king of everything before the flood came to the full.”
“That fast?” Seti’s voice was deeply and mockingly awed. “And what about the king downriver in his big house, with his chariots and his herds of asses? Won’t he have something to say about it?”
“Oh,” said the idler. “Him. He’s so busy with his hundred wives, he doesn’t have time to bother with a war.”
“But his two hundred sons,” said Seti, “might find a war well worth the trouble. It’s hard these days, being a king’s son of a warrior people. No women to rape, no cities to pillage. Give them a war and they’ll be glad to take it.”
“Surely,” the idler said, “and so would good Egyptians. I’ve got kin up by Memphis. They’ve been eating ass manure for years, and hating every bite of it. Give them a king to fight and an army to join, and they’re ready to march.”
“That’s not what my lather says,” Seti said.
“Your father’s old, isn’t he? Sure it’s made him wise, but has it made him brave?”
“Bravery’s for young men,” Seti said. “You’re that brave down this way?”
“Braver!” declared the idlers in chorus.
Seti shook his head. “I hope you’ll say the same when the Retenu come to conquer you.”
“They already did that,” the chief of the idlers said. “We wore them out, here. Down the river where they’re still strong—they’ll need a harder hand.”
“We could all be kings,” drawled Seti, “if we were as wise as you.”
“Laugh all you like,” the idler said. “I’m telling nothing but the truth.”
~~~
Gebu told the tale by the fire that night, where they all had come together in the boat’s shadow. He was alight with it. “They will fight. They will.”
“They say they will,” Kemni said. “They’re near enough to the enemy here to feel his breath on their necks. Those who live under his sway may be less willing to endanger themselves and their kin.”
“You were willing,” Gebu said.
Kemni shook his head. “I went because I was bored and I was angry, and I was wild to fight foreigners. My uncle and my cousins were all killed. We were all that had the will to fight.”
“Maybe the years have changed even your people,” Gebu said. “Talk like that in the market—we never heard such a thing before, even when we won this kingdom under my uncle Kamose.”
“We were never simple fishermen before,” said Kemni. “Princes don’t hear what the people talk of. It’s not reckoned dignified.”
“Do you think that of me? That I’ve lost my dignity?”
Kemni laughed in startlement. “No! No, of course not. I only meant—”
Gebu waved that aside. “I hear more than people know. They do sometimes talk when I can hear, or forget how near I am, and tell one another the truth. We learn, we princes, to gather knowledge wherever we may.”
“Such a life,” Iphikleia said. She leaned against the hull, wrapped in her mantle. If it troubled her to spend every day in hiding, she was not admitting to it. She managed somehow to be clean, to keep her hair in order, to look much as she always had.
The sight of her made Kemni’s heart beat hard. She was as oblivious to him as she had ever been. Her eyes were on Gebu, as they so often were. “A palace is a world in itself,” she said. “It’s hard to remember what other worlds there are.”
“Unless one determines to remember,” Gebu said.
“Yes,” she said. She stared into the dark beyond the fire’s light, frowning slightly, as she did when she was pondering
matters too deep, no doubt, for a mere mortal man to understand.
When she spoke again, it was to no one of them in particular. “This serves us. When we come back, my lord, it would be well if your father knew; if he sent his men here to muster an army.”
“And north of here?” Kemni asked. “What of the people in the foreign kings’ power?”
“When we’ve seen them,” she said, “and heard what they say to one another, we’ll know.”
“I think you know already,” he said.
She did not answer that. He had not expected her to.
VI
Memphis was the gate of the Lower Kingdom, but Retenu power stretched somewhat to the south of it. Kemni did not want to go as far as that city where he was known, not if he could find what he looked for in another, lesser city.
As he had while he sailed on Dancer—and not so long ago, either—he saw how the land changed even as it remained the same: how it began to fill with foreigners. The people seemed much the same, but they were not as bold as their kinsmen to the south. They kept their heads down and their eyes veiled, and did their best to escape the notice of their foreign overlords.
Kemni and his crew were not remarkable, there, in wishing to be invisible. Everyone slunk and crept past the Retenu. It was expected.
That served them; but they would have to move soon, find a nest of Retenu, and search for the makers of chariots. Kemni’s knowledge of that country was years old. Those who lived in it were closemouthed and wary of strangers. It was only wise where any man might be a spy, and the lords were all outlanders, all enemies.
And yet where there was beer there was hope of loose tongues. Kemni had fish to trade, and barley, and a bolt of middling fine linen that he had taken from that harridan in the south, in return for a basketful of fish. He steered the boat toward a town that he had known when he was young, but that, he hoped, would not know him in this disguise.
The gods were kind, in their way. The town had grown since he was a child: it had added a temple to the Retenu god, whom they called Baal and men in Egypt called Set; and near the temple, on an outcropping of rock over the river, had risen a wall of stone and a low tower. Men were building it even as the boat made its way to the shore below, hauling stone and raising the wall higher.
Someone foresaw a battle. Although, Kemni thought, Retenu were always prepared to fight. They lived their lives in expectation of war, ate it, slept in it, breathed it. Everything was war. There was no glory in peace, nor any hope that a man’s name would be remembered.
This had been a lively town when Kemni knew it. It was hectic now, and bursting at the seams, between the new fortress and the new temple. Its market was as large almost as a city’s, full not only of the wonted barley and beer, bread and meat, onions, greenstuff, bolts of linen, amulets, potions, herbs and eyepaint and scent; but richer things too, a coppersmith, even a goldsmith and a seller of jewels, and a thriving market in slaves.
There the Retenu seemed mostly to be: big, bearded men in elaborate robes, with their hair plaited and their beards curled, and no women with them. Their women lived locked behind walls, less free than the slaves who stood naked on the block.
Kemni, pausing outside the slavemarket, saw how fiercely they battled one another for possession of a single woman: a creature of surpassing strangeness, milk-fair of skin, with hair the color of copper. Her face was not particularly beautiful—its features were blunt, her lips overfull, her nose too small and upturned at the tip. But her hair was wonderful, and her skin. Her body was overly rich for Egyptian taste, her hips broad, her thighs heavy, and her breasts as white and nigh as large as twin lambs. The Retenu slavered at the sight of her. Kemni saw one, near the edge of the throng, slip his hand beneath his robe and begin to rock gently. He had called out a price, but it was long since overwhelmed.
Someone jostled Kemni from behind, and cursed him for blocking the way. He moved on past, caught in the crowd. Somewhere behind him was Seti, and Gebu. He could not see them; they were lost. But they knew where he was going, to the market and in search of a beerseller’s stall.
They would find him. Or not. They all knew where the boat was; that much he could trust in.
So many people. Kemni had been living like a prince, if he was honest about it. He had forgotten what a crowd was like, how irresistible its currents could be, how manifold its voices. Haggling mostly, and snatches of song; the cry of a child and the shrilling of a woman at her feckless man. And, buried within it, the bray of an ass.
He had not even thought before he turned toward that one sound among so many. Asses were the wealth of the Retenu, their honor, and their royal sacrifice. Where asses were, must be chariots. And if there were chariots . . .
He slipped under and over and through the press of people, working his way to a side-current, and thence to a street that made its twisting way inward through the town. The crowds were much less here, and quieter, except for the pack of children that howled past like hounds on a scent. Kemni plucked his bag of barley grains from clever fingers, and smiled sweetly into a grubby young face. The child grinned, gaptoothed and unrepentant, and sprang in pursuit of his fellows.
Somewhat more wary but still intent on his own hunt, Kemni strode swiftly down the street. It went on rather longer than he had expected, with several bends and turns. More than once it crossed another street, lesser or greater, but none of those led where he had in mind to go.
Then at last he came to it: a broad open space, a square bounded by the low mudbrick houses that were everywhere in Egypt. It was, he saw with interest, not far at all from the new temple, and just below the fortress that was rising on its jut of hill.
The market here was a cattle market, as it must have been for time out of mind. But one side of it was given now to lines of long-eared asses, and to clusters of bearded Retenu settling bargains in their guttural language.
There were no horses. And no chariots. These were pack-beasts for caravans, Kemni could see: some were sold in their pack-gear, some even laden, their burdens sold with them. Kemni wondered if the buyers knew what they had bought, or if they took what luck brought them. Certainly they must hope for better fortune than those who had died or been lost, leaving their beasts to be sold in the market.
No chariots. But the fortress rose on its hill, its walls half-finished but already warded with a gate and guards. Kemni had hoped for a lord’s estate with its open gate and people passing in and out. This was a stronghold, a house of war.
And yet its gate was open. People passed in and out. Most were Egyptian, of every rank and station. The lord must be in residence, then, and his following with him.
Kemni hesitated for a moment. But he was alone—no sign of Gebu or Seti—and unarmed and nondescript. Surely he could walk in with any of the other unarmed and barely noticeable commoners, see what there was to see, hear what he could hear, and come out again with none the wiser.
It seemed wise enough, and safe enough, though he might have been wiser to find his companions and tell them what he intended to do. But they would insist on coming with him; and three men together, with one who was not skilled in concealing the manners and bearing of a prince, would attract far more notice than one man alone.
His feet decided somewhat before his wits did: he was walking around the edge of the market, casually, not slinking or creeping as if he had something to hide. He was but one of many of his kind, unmarked by gold or fine garments or a retinue, and therefore scarce to be marked at all.
And yet, as he passed between the two tall bearded guards under the half-finished gate, his back tightened. They could not know that he was different from any other small wiry red-brown nonentity. He wore no jewels, put on no airs. He was nothing to them. Danger came armed and in multitudes, not single and weaponless.
The guards never even seemed to see him. He forbore to collapse with relief once he had passed them; they would see and, perhaps, begin to wonder. He walked on instead, with but the hint
of wobble in his knees.
He had been in Avaris of the kings, even walked there briefly as a conqueror, and in lesser holdings of the Retenu, long ago and in his father’s company. He had walked in a fortress or two, the high house of a man who claimed lordship over Kemni’s lands and people. This was much the same: part palace, part encampment. It had few of the graces of the Egyptian palace, though to be sure, this was unfinished, and rough with it. Workmen were clambering over the wall as he walked briskly past, fitting stone to stone and raising the wall high.
A stable would be set against that wall, most likely, or just outside of it. As indeed it was: just outside, a square of mudbrick buildings, and the very earliest beginnings of their like in stone, and a broad court of smoothed sand marked now with the ruts of chariot wheels.
A handful of shaggy young men were playing at battle, whooping and clattering about the court, whipping on their teams and making a great show of hairbreadth turns and sudden skidding stops. None of them drove horses. This lord perhaps had none, or did not choose to indulge in those larger, swifter, but more costly and more delicate creatures.
But Kemni was not here for the horses. He sidled along the edge of the court, in and out of shade and sun. He did not see any Egyptians here: a flaw in his plan, but he was not ready, yet, to retreat. Perhaps, if no one expected to see an Egyptian there, no one would see him.
It was a thin hope to rest a life on, but it was the best Kemni had. He would not withdraw. Not yet. He had to see where those fine and gleaming chariots had come from.
They well might have come from Memphis or Avaris. He had no honest right to expect that there might be a workshop there. And yet he went on. He found the storage for fodder; the stable proper, where asses stood or lay in company, some tied to the wall, some left loose; what must be the quarters for the stablemen, empty now but full of their clutter. And then, when he had begun to wonder if he would ever find it, the place in which they kept the chariots and the harness. It was much larger than he had expected. Men worked there, repairing—no, building a chariot.