The Shepherd Kings

by Judith Tarr

  “After the Mare’s servant died, the elders in the east were commanded by Horse Goddess herself to single out my brother. He was to return to his father’s people, and take with him such of the horse-herds as wished to go. Among them were the Young Mare and her kin.”

  “All of them?”

  Again, that sharp nod, as if it offended Sadana to confess to such things.

  “Then it seems to me,” said Iry, “that the Mare has in mind to change the world.”

  “I am not in the Mare’s counsels,” Sadana said.

  “Sadana,” Iry said, “if I could give you all of this, I would. Am I allowed to make you my successor?”

  Sadana’s eyes went wild. Her hand swept up, round, down: averting evil, and casting off any temptation to it. “You must not do that! You don’t know me at all, nor should you trust me.”

  “Why not? You know more of all this than I ever will.”

  “What if I killed you, or trapped you so that you would die? Then I would have what I want. I would have it all.”

  “No,” said Iry. “Not if the Mare wouldn’t choose you.”

  “What makes you think she would, if you were gone? Or that her own successor would?”

  “That’s hers to do,” Iry said.

  Sadana tossed her head like an angry mare. “You aren’t making sense.”

  “I am,” Iry said. “If you kill me, you have nothing. If you wait and have patience, you have everything.”

  “You’re younger than I am. You’ll outlive me.”

  “I might,” Iry said. “Then your daughter has the office. Is that why you resist? Because you want it all now? Isn’t it worth the gamble to accept? I could die in the next fever season, or fall from a chariot, or die bearing a child. Death is beside us with every breath we take.”

  “And in this country,” Sadana said, “it towers above you. What was it with your old kings, that they built tombs as great as cities?”

  “They haven’t done that for a thousand years,” Iry said. “It was something they had in mind to do then, because the gods asked it, or they felt a need to do something grand and mighty, that no one had ever done before. Then that grew old, and their successors hid their tombs, as they do still.”

  “I know that,” Sadana snapped. “But why? Why tombs so rich? The dead need nothing.”

  “The dead need everything. All that they had in life, they have in death. But they have to take it with them—body, possessions, everything.”

  “How very cumbersome.”

  “It’s what is,” Iry said.

  “And you want me to come after you.” Sadana shook her head. “No. I will not. I was to be the Mare’s servant in this age of the world. The Mare refused me. I’ll not be second best, or wait futile years for a fulfillment that never comes. What I am now, I remain. Your successor will make herself known when it’s time, just as the Young Mare will appear when your Mare grows old.”

  “I can’t compel you,” Iry said. “But—”

  “No,” said Sadana. “Give me again the prayer you sing when one of the Mare’s kin delivers herself of a foal.”

  Iry drew a breath. That was nothing to do with death—very much the opposite. It was a more comfortable thing to consider, and simpler, once she had groped for and found in her memory the words and the gestures. Sadana did not speak again of death or of successors, or require that Iry recite prayers and rehearse rituals that she would never need. That had been a test, perhaps, or a slightly cruel whim. Once it was past, as far as Sadana was concerned, it was forgotten.

  ~~~

  It was not death that vexed Sadana, nor, entirely, her long grievance with Iry. Her trouble, Iry discovered, was something quite different. It came to Iry almost by accident at the end of that day’s lessons, which had begun to circle and circle as if Sadana were persistently distracted.

  The end came soon after the changing of Iry’s half-unwanted guard. Iannek, who had slept—and snored—through much of that afternoon, wandered off without a word. And Kemni wandered in, a much quieter and more compact presence, to sit neatly in a corner and entertain his own thoughts while Iry did whatever it pleased her preceptor to have her do.

  Sadana’s questions grew more and more strange, and less and less coherent. Her eyes were carefully not fixed on the figure in the corner, but Iry caught the dart of glances.

  He seemed oblivious. His face in that light was striking in its beauty, and strikingly like the Lady Nefertem’s, though he practiced no art but that of painting the eyes, which no Egyptian would omit.

  Iry went still inside. If Sadana could see—if she began to suspect—

  But no. That was not what made her glance return again and then again. Iry had seen a stallion look just so at a mare. It was an odd, intent, almost dreamlike expression, as if Sadana had been taken out of herself.

  It made her angry. In that she was like the Mare. When the Mare came into season, she reveled in it, and yet also she resented it, as if that loss of her body’s control and her mind’s good sense sparked her temper.

  “You should ask him,” Iry began to say. But she choked on it. She was remembering quite another face than Kemni’s smooth clean-carved one, and a soft deep voice. You have to ask, it said.

  No, she thought. Oh, no. She was not yearning after the Lord Khayan as the Mare yearned after a stallion, or Sadana—angrily, reluctantly, but beyond a doubt—after Kemni.

  No wonder Sadana was angry. Kemni was an Egyptian, a foreigner, and, as far as she knew, a slave. Iry was not angry, oh no. But she would not think of Khayan in that way. Not that great hulking shaggy beast of a man with his yellow eyes and his drumbeat of a voice.

  The world was too untidy. Sadana should be wanting one of her own kind—Iannek, maybe, or one of the other young lords who ran wild about this kingdom. Iry should not be wanting anyone. Or if she did, she could want Kemni. He was good to look at, he was pleasant company, he had been her friend since she was a child.

  He was her kin. She trusted him. But she looked at him, and it was a pleasure, and she was glad to have such a thing; but she did not want to stare and stare as she did when she was in sight of Khayan.

  Sadana ended the lesson abruptly and stalked out in a wholly baseless fit of temper. Iry meant to let her go, but her tongue had other intentions.

  “Come back,” it said. “You’re not done here.”

  Sadana turned her on her heel in the doorway. Her expression would have been frightening if Iry had been a more timid sort. “I am quite done,” she said coldly.

  “Aren’t you going to ask him?”

  The high cheeks flushed scarlet. The thin nostrils pinched and paled. “Ask whom? Ask what?”

  “You know what I’m saying,” Iry said. “Ask. You do want to. Why not get it over?”

  “Because I do not wish to.”

  “Are you afraid he’ll refuse?”

  “He can’t refuse.”

  “So ask,” Iry said.

  She was being cruel. She knew it. Kemni could not only refuse, he most likely would. And if he did that . . .

  She was putting him in danger. It was like a madness in her. As if she wanted to break the tension that held them all, the delicate and improbable balance of deception and misperception that kept her cousin safe in the midst of the enemy.

  But Sadana, who had never yet refused a challenge, refused this one. She spun away from Iry and the room that had Kemni in it, and vanished into the depths of the house.

  VII

  Kemni did not understand the quarrel between his cousin and the warrior woman Sadana, nor did he particularly want to. He was glad when Sadana was gone, though Iry paced and muttered and was difficult company for an interminable while. She did not go to dinner as she was expected to, nor would she go when she was summoned. A servant brought her something there, in the room she had been given, which she picked at and insisted Kemni finish; and after she had eaten what little she would, she retreated to her bed.

  He supposed he
should have asked her what was troubling her. But the glances she shot at him were not encouraging, and he was in an odd mood himself. It had struck him as he guarded her, that it had been a considerable while since he saw Iphikleia, or even dreamed of her. It was as if, once he had come into the Lower Kingdom, where he was born, where he was meant to be a lord and a warrior, the gods chose to vex him by day and leave him in peace while he slept.

  But sitting in the corner that he had chosen for its clear view of the room and its ease of access to the door, he saw Iphikleia’s face as vividly as if she stood in front of him. He could almost have reached to touch her, or bent to kiss those ripe red lips.

  She was sitting in a room he had not seen before, chin in hand, pensive, while Naukrates paced and gesticulated. There were others about them, shadowy figures, Cretan shapes: broad shoulders, narrow hips, the curve of a woman’s breast left bare in the fashion of that country. It was a dream, and yet not. He was seeing what passed in this moment, in Avaris as he supposed; and that must be the gathering of Cretan captains there.

  Naukrates was lively but not urgent, Iphikleia pensive but not troubled. That comforted Kemni, though his heart ached to be there, with them, and not trapped here in this game that he had been a fool to play.

  If he left now, this very night, found a boat and rode the branch of the river, he would be in Avaris by morning.

  But he stayed where he was, listening to Iry’s deep slow breathing. She did not need him to protect her, he had no illusions as to that. Yet she needed the comfort that his presence gave her. He was the only one of her people who was allowed so close—and when he came to Avaris, he must leave her. He had his king to serve, and his queen whom he had been away from too long, and Iphikleia who was more to him than king or queen.

  A face hovered over him, born as if out of his dream. But it was never a Cretan face. Not this one, with its blade of a nose and its fierce falcon-eyes.

  “Get up,” Sadana said in terrible but understandable Egyptian. “Come with me.”

  “I can’t do that,” he said. “I’m on guard.”

  “Come,” she said.

  “No,” said Kemni.

  She hissed in frustration, seized him and pulled him to his feet. He quelled the instinct to resist. It was better that he stood, if there was to be a fight.

  “I must guard my lady,” he said carefully. “I cannot leave her.”

  She hissed again and stalked out as she had done earlier, as seemed to be her way. Kemni sank down again in his corner. Belatedly it came to him what she had been asking; and what she had been speaking of to Iry, that he had taken too little notice of.

  He had refused her. That had not been wise. Not at all.

  Ah, he thought; so be it. He would be gone before she could endanger him. Iry was safe, he could hope. The Mare would protect her.

  ~~~

  He was almost asleep when Sadana came back. Fool that he was, for thinking her defeated. She brought a blear-eyed and stumbling Iannek with her, the import of which was all too clear. “Now come,” she said to Kemni.

  He did not want to. But those eyes were wild, and perhaps a little mad. He could at least go with her, and hope to appease her. That would be safest for them all.

  He sighed and rose. Iannek sighed more vastly and slumped down in the place that Kemni had left. Kemni nudged him with a foot. “Don’t fall asleep,” he said.

  Iannek growled at him. He growled back. Sadana was growing impatient.

  He had perforce to leave the drunken fool there, and hope that Iry could do as well with as without him.

  Sadana was an odd one. In some ways she was like Iphikleia: brusque, abrupt, and seeming cold. But Iphikleia was warm beneath, and strong. Sadana was like a fire in dry grass.

  She led him to a room not far from Iry’s. It seemed deserted; it was clean, but there was a drift of dust across the floor. It had lamps, which she lit from the one she carried, all of them, a whole bank of them. Kemni stood where she had left him, just within the door. Perhaps she was daring him to bolt. But he would not do that. He had, in coming with her, made a promise of sorts.

  This was a little like his nights in Crete, when importunate and beautiful young women had come to him and bidden him do their will. But they had done it in laughter, for their lady and for their own sake, because they found him delightful. Sadana did not delight in anything, that Kemni could see. She was a creature of oaths and duties. Pleasures were foreign to her.

  They were all like that, these women from the eastern horizon. Perhaps that was why she seemed so angry as she turned in the blaze of all the lamps, and glared at him as if she blamed him for making her want him.

  Women were incalculable creatures at best. A woman like this could be dangerous.

  Danger was a sweetness, like honey. She was beautiful in her way, as a falcon is, or the new moon. Even as forbidding as she was, glowering at him with terrible temper, he approached her steadily, one step, two, across the cool tiles of the floor. She neither leaped on him nor spun and fled.

  Her hair was not the blue-black of his own people, or of most of hers. There was a ruddy sheen to it, as if it were not darkest blue but darkest red. There were faint flecks of gold in a spray across her nose, like kisses from the sun. They were charming, and surprising, because the rest of her was so like a sword: keen and hard and brilliant.

  Her skin was soft, smooth as new cream, and white as milk. She shuddered as he touched her cheek. He drew back, a little alarmed.

  She caught his hand. He went still. She stared at it as if she had never seen its like before.

  He began to wonder. Had she never—had she ever—?

  Of course she must have. All these women were raised to love men as men in Egypt loved women: early, often, and with pleasure.

  And yet, if she had undergone such rites as Iphikleia had told him of, when a girl became a woman, and some wise and skilled man of the people saw to it that she did it in gladness and in as little pain as might be, then perhaps she had not sought that pleasure often since. Her riding and fighting, her duties and oaths, and her long hope and her great disappointment, had preoccupied her till she had will for nothing else.

  Maybe he read her all awry. But she was strangely shy, and strangely stiff.

  He set himself to gentle her as he had learned to gentle her brother’s horses. He moved softly; he moved slowly. He let her ease to his touch on her cheek before he ventured to free her hair from its plaits. It was wound as tight as she was, and bound fast. Patiently he worked it free.

  She suffered it with a kind of quivering resignation. He stroked her hair with his fingers, smoothing it. The ripples of it, once freed, flowed about her face, and gave her quite a different beauty: much softer, and much gentler.

  But her eyes were still wild. He ventured a boldness, reaching for the fastening of her tunic and teasing it free. There was a long row of such fastenings, bits of intricately carved bone slid through a loop of leather. They could be maddening, or they could be a pleasant and prolonged game, a slow unfolding of her hidden beauty.

  Her heart was beating hard. Her breath came quick. He did not hasten for that.

  There was a tunic beneath the tunic, fine linen, damp with the heat of her body. And no wonder, if she would trammel herself so in the sowing time, when the heat was both heavy and potent. The undertunic was fastened with laces, simple indeed to undo. He slipped it from her white shoulders, baring the small pink-tipped breasts. So lovely, and so tender. They rose high above the arch of her ribs, her flat belly.

  The belt of her trousers tempted him, but not yet. Not while she tensed anew, shivering with something other than cold. Her eyes had closed as if she could not bear to look at him.

  He bent to kiss the tip of her breast. She gasped. He circled it with his tongue, lightly, oh so lightly. Her hands snapped into fists.

  He smiled, bent down where she could not see, even if she opened her eyes. She was rousing wonderfully, but tight, so tight stil
l.

  He circled each breast with kisses. There was not a great deal of either, but what there was, was sweet. Then when she had arched her back and reached to clutch at him, he slipped free the clasp of her belt and let it fall. A cord bound her trousers. It gave way. Her trousers slipped down over hips nigh as narrow as a boy’s, but with the same sweet curve as her breasts.

  He freed her from them. She was all naked, and all lovely. He told her so, in words spoken soft lest he frighten her, and slow so that she would understand.

  “Get to it,” she gritted in her own language. “Just get to it.”

  It was fortunate for his intent that he chose not to understand any language but Egyptian. He stroked her lightly, long slow strokes, following the scant curves of her. She could seize him if she liked, fling him down, force him to do what she said she wanted. But she did not. He did not think she would. She had given herself to him, though perhaps she was not aware of it. Whatever he wished of her, she would do, or permit.

  Men took such gifts for granted in this part of the world. But Kemni who had been in Crete, who had been and still, by the gods’ will, was Iphikleia’s lover, was not a man to presume any such power over a woman. He moved with great care and great gentleness. She arched at his touch, and opened like a flower of bronze.

  And yet . . . not yet. He stroked her with hands and tongue, breasts and belly and the ruddy black fleece of her sex. She tensed and eased, tensed and eased. And when at last the dry land was moist, he entered it. She cried out, but not in pain. He rode her as if she had been one of her own horses, a strong slow gait that quickened only at her will.

  The end of it was breathlessly swift. It startled a cry out of him, a shout of astonishment. But what burst out of her was laughter.

  Kemni sank down beside her, still breathing hard. She lay on her back, lovely in her nakedness. The sweat-dampened hair clung to her cheeks and breasts. He reached to stroke it away, but she closed against him. He drew his hand back carefully, and lay silent.

  After a while she rounded on him. “Why do you not fall asleep?” she demanded in her ragged Egyptian.