The Shepherd Kings

by Judith Tarr

  Iry did not share it, but for this little while she was free. Or as free as she could be, with Iannek in her shadow. Kemni had handed her over to that annoyingly loyal young man, then arranged to vanish. He would be finding his allies, she supposed, and conveying to them all that he had learned.

  Iannek managed at least to be quiet, a virtue he had not cultivated before; but he had not been her guardsman, either. Sometimes she caught him on the verge of his old relentless chatter, but he mastered himself, bit his tongue and was silent. She caught herself almost liking him, Retenu though he was. When he was not leaping about chattering like a monkey, he was quite bearable. In fact he was rather charming.

  There were other people in the menagerie, walking about as she walked, Retenu all, some in robes, some in Egyptian kilts. It was odd to see those here—odd and somewhat dismaying. Those even addressed one another by Egyptian names, in their uncouth accents, as if it were a fashion they affected and were excessively pleased with.

  Iannek growled at that. She raised a brow at him. He sucked in a breath, thought anew of silence, but yielded to the invitation. “So that’s back in fashion,” he said. “It goes in and out, you know, like floods on the Nile. And of course the king takes an Egyptian name, so that people will know he has a right to rule here. But these kilts—and did you see that man? He shaved his face!”

  “Appalling,” Iry agreed blandly.

  It was a moment before he caught the irony; then he glared. “Well, to you it’s not. But he’s not one of you!”

  “No,” she said. “He’s not.”

  She paused in front of a cageful of baboons. They were wise creatures, the old stories said, living images of the god Thoth as the Mare was of Horse Goddess. They were also dangerous, with their long sharp fangs and their uncertain tempers—as gods could be. Two of them now were mating, the female nursing her child while the male sired another with an expression of intense concentration. Perhaps he was pondering great mysteries as his body performed its duty to the race.

  Someone else had come up to watch the baboons. It was a man, not young, though not yet old, robed in fine linen embroidered with gold, and escorted by a pair of discreet guards. By that, Iry knew he was a lord of consequence, though he affected no airs, nor did he come closer to the Egyptian fashion than the lightness of his robe.

  He watched the baboons with calm interest and an air of one who came here often. “Do you see that one?” he said to Iry. “That’s the father of the tribe. He mates with all the females, and drives the young males away, or kills them if they’re importunate.”

  “He’s much like a lord of men,” Iry observed.

  The man laughed, a warm deep sound. It reminded her of Khayan—which made her cheeks grow hot. And why that should be, she did not want to know.

  “Men are very like apes, when it comes to it,” the man said, seeming oblivious to her discomfort. “See, there the lord goes, off to court another lady. He has his favorites, and that yonder is a great one, a queen of the tribe. I watched her beat a younger lady once for importuning the lord. It was a terrible battle, as terrible as any in the queens’ house.”

  “And was there bloodshed?”

  The man nodded. “The young hussy lived, but she was never the same thereafter. In the end she went to a menagerie in Tanis, where she could live alone without fear or rivalry.”

  “You must come here every day,” Iry said, “to know so much.”

  “I come as often as I can,” the man said. “It takes me out of myself.”

  Iry nodded. “I do much the same,” she said, “except with me, it’s horses.”

  “Indeed?” the man said. “Horses need open spaces, and sky. They’re not themselves inside of walls. Those of us confined to palaces . . . we take other pleasures, such as we may.”

  “I could never be confined to a palace,” said Iry. “It’s a pity you must.”

  “Ah,” said the man. “Well. But that’s as the gods will. So I visit the menagerie, and I watch the animals. It’s rather more amusing than watching courtiers, and often more civilized.”

  “You know all the animals, then,” Iry said. “Tell me about the striped ones, the ones who are almost horses. Are they from Nubia? Are they horses?”

  “They come from south of Nubia, from great grasslands that stretch away to the edge of the world,” the man said. “They’re called zebras. They aren’t horses—they’re more like wild asses. It’s very difficult to train them, if anyone is minded to try. They don’t have the minds that horses have, or our tamed asses, either.”

  “Pity,” said Iry. “A team of these zebras would be a fine novelty for a prince.”

  “A prince or two has thought so,” the man said, “and failed miserably in the trying.”

  “Maybe the gods want them to stay wild,” Iry said.

  They walked down the path, past the baboons’ great cage and a cage with a lion sleeping in it. The guards had fallen back, Iry noticed out of the edges of her eyes. So too had Iannek. He looked odd, as if something he had eaten had suddenly disagreed with him. She thought of sending him away to rest, since she was safe enough here, but her new companion was regaling her with stories of the lion and the elephants, and the aurochs bull grazing peacefully on cut fodder. “They live in forests far to the north,” the man said, “crashing through the trees with their great horns gleaming. They are terrible to hunt, as strong as they are, and huge, and fast on their feet.”

  “Like elephants,” Iry said.

  “Rather like,” the man agreed. “Whole tribes will hunt them, with packs of huge dogs, and chariots, and vaunting bravery. The man who kills an aurochs is a great hero, and is given rich rewards: the best of the food and the women, and the aurochs’ hide and horns for his tent.”

  “And they brought one here,” Iry said in wonder. “What army of heroes was it who dared that?”

  “Ah,” said the man with a deprecatory smile. “No great army. He came as an infant, a calf no larger than a large donkey. Someone, we suppose, killed his mother and took him from her side, tamed him as much as an aurochs can be tamed, and sent him here as tribute to the king.”

  Iry was a little disappointed, but also a little relieved. The thought of anything so vast rising up in rage was disconcerting to say the least. But it seemed the bull was a placid enough creature, and tamed. He came to the man’s call, and took a bit of sweet from a hand he seemed to know well. He was no more threatening than an ox, or any less interested in sweetness than Iry’s own imperious Mare.

  He let her touch his broad wet nose, and lightly rub his jowl. He lowered his head so that she could do it, for he was far taller than she. He loomed above her like a mountain in the desert.

  Such a beautiful great black beast with his ivory horns. He was almost as beautiful as the Mare; and that was as high praise as she knew to give.

  She went away well content, with her companion bearing her company as far as the outer cages. He would linger yet a while, he said; but she had wandered apart long enough. There would be a hunt out for her soon, if there was not one already.

  Still with Iannek in her shadow, she found her way back to the guest-chambers. Iannek was even more silent than before, a silence so profound that she came close to rounding on him and demanding to know what he was so patently not saying.

  But even if she had been inclined to unbar those gates, the outriders of the hunt had found her, a pair of Sadana’s warrior women with faces even grimmer than usual. They were not taking Iry prisoner, they made that clear, but they were not inclined to let her out of their sight thereafter.

  Iannek’s trouble, if trouble it was, was lost in Iry’s return to confinement. She was not to go out again, it was made clear, without Sadana and a guard of warrior women. Her young male guardsmen were not enough. She must be protected, and closely, in this of all places.

  No less a personage than the lady Sarai told her this, receiving her in a chamber that had become her own with miraculous speed. It looked,
in fact, precisely like the one in the Sun Ascendant in which she received guests and entertained scapegrace priestesses. Her expression was no more than wontedly severe, and she did not seem angry at all—quite unlike Sadana, whose expression was thunderous. But Iry was to know that she had overstepped her bounds.

  “In this place,” Sarai said, “no one is safe. Not even the king. Every passage has its web of intrigue, and every gathering its hidden currents. A word spoken unwisely in the morning is shouted from the rooftops before the sun reaches its zenith. Men have died for a slip of the tongue. And you, child, are not best known for your discretion.”

  Iry kept her head down and her lips together. She would not quarrel with this of all women, but neither would she swear oaths she did not intend to keep. She took her rebuke in silence, and when it was over, accepted her dismissal.

  It seemed to satisfy Sarai. It set Iry free, somewhat; she could not go where she pleased, not any longer, but she was allowed to seek her own closet of a room, and rest there. There was no punishment laid on her, beyond the burden of Sarai’s disapproval.

  It would do. Not well, but it would suffice.

  IX

  Kemni slipped out of Avaris’ great fortress and stronghold with almost disturbing ease. Even here, Egyptians were simply not seen. They crept about in shadows, performed tasks that Retenu would not do, ran errands and conveyed messages and, for all he knew, spied on the lords, all unnoticed.

  Kemni was but one of the many. He passed once more beneath that deep and echoing gate, into the teeming throngs of the city. Where he was going, he was not entirely certain, but it seemed reasonable enough that he should seek the river and the harbor. That Iphikleia might not have waited so long—that all his king’s allies might have left—he refused to consider. They must be waiting. Or they would have left messages, and safe paths for him to follow, back to the Upper Kingdom and safety.

  It took all that remained of that day, fighting crowds and beating the streets about the harbor, but at last he found Dancer drawn up on the shore, and crewmen who greeted him with joy that seemed genuine. One of them guided him to a house nearby, such a one as the Cretans favored, poor and shabby outside but splendid within. It was empty of any but servants, but those assured him that Naukrates would return as soon as might be.

  They did not speak of Iphikleia, nor did he ask. He was a coward, he supposed. He whiled the time with a bath and a drowse in a cool and airy room, surrounded by images of ships and the sea. He slipped easily into a dream of sailing on Dancer, breasting the waves in a dash of cold spray, while dolphins leaped all about the ship, and a fair wind blew him toward a distant island.

  Her face shaped itself out of wind and spray, her hair like the blue-black gleam of the sea in storm, streaming down about him, and her eyes both dark and bright, drinking him in. How, before the gods, had he ever thought her cold? She was the wildfire that could run up a ship’s mast and dance along the rigging. She was the lightning out of a roiling heaven. She was the cold kiss of the sea, and the fierce hot stroke of the sun on blue water.

  Then all words were gone, and there was only the meeting of body and body. He woke into it, and it was all real, all there, her warm familiar presence in his arms, her scent, the way she fit just so, taking him inside her and holding him deep. Her arms were strong, as if she would never let him go.

  For all their urgency, they prolonged it as much as they might, a long, slow, easy swell and surge like a quiet sea. There was beauty in it as much as pleasure, and a joy that deepened the longer it went on, till surely he must burst with it.

  She gasped and stiffened and gripped him with bruising force. He let go then, at last. They rode the last long swell down into stillness. And there, for a while, they rested.

  ~~~

  Kemni woke with a small start. He had not meant to fall asleep. Iphikleia was still there—-no dream, thank the gods. She lay watching him, her face as unreadable as it had ever been before he learned to see the heart of her. He smiled and fitted his palm to the curve of her cheek. “I missed you,” he said.

  “I should think you’d have been too busy,” she said in a tone of surpassing mildness.

  “Never too busy to love you,” he said. “Never for a moment.”

  “Such pretty words.” She turned her head till her lips touched his palm. Then she drew away—slightly, but enough. He let his hand fall. “You were away a long while.”

  “I was discovering great things about the Lower Kingdom—and about the men who claim to rule it.”

  “And the women?”

  “Are you jealous?”

  “Should I be?”

  “No,” he said. “No, you should not.”

  “Even the one whose hand I feel on you?”

  His heart clenched. Which was silly of it, but he was only in part its master. “If you mean my cousin Iry, she was never more to me than a kinswoman should be. If you mean—another, then I can only remind you that it was you who trained me to approach a woman only if she asks. And that one had great need of a man who would do such a thing.”

  “Tell me about her,” Iphikleia said. She was not offering him a choice. He gathered his wits and his words. There was more here than a woman’s jealousy. He could feel it in the air. What he told her would matter, and how he told it. “Her name is Sadana,” he said. “She rides horses and carries weapons and knows how to fight like a man. Her mother’s people come from the east, where the horse-tribes are, but she has never been there. Her brother was sent instead, because their goddess asked for him. Then when he came back with the white horse, the Mare, who is a goddess, Sadana was supposed to be chosen to be the priestess, but she wasn’t—she had more to bear than human woman should.”

  “You pity her, then,” Iphikleia said.

  “No,” he said. “No, I don’t pity her. But the gods haven’t been kind to her. She didn’t know that a man can be gentle. She only ever knew force.”

  “Poor thing,” said Iphikleia. “And you left her.”

  Kemni drew himself up as best he could while lying flat in a tumbled bed. “First I’m an ill creature for touching her, now you upbraid me for leaving her? I asked my cousin to help her. It was the best I could do, with all I had tugging at me. Ariana has been waiting overlong for all of us.”

  “You don’t think I mean to be reasonable, do you?” Iphikleia asked him.

  “Of course not,” Kemni said.

  “Good,” said Iphikleia. “You still should not have left her. Or should never have gone near her at all.”

  “She asked,” he said.

  “How difficult.” Iphikleia slapped him lightly—for the transgression—but then she kissed him. “Because,” she said, “you are what you are.”

  Kemni did not pretend to understand her. It was enough that she understood him.

  ~~~

  He had meant to return to the palace late that night, redolent of beer and bad wine. But Naukrates was sailing in the morning. Another day and Kemni would have been left to fend for himself.

  The gods had spoken, as had Naukrates. Kemni would have to vanish then, and hope to be forgotten.

  He surprised himself with regret. As little time as he had spent in that household, he had made himself a part of it. It had been home to him when he was a child, and even broken and conquered, it was still in a way his own.

  But he must return to the Upper Kingdom, to his king and his queen and his manifold duties. When he came back to this place, he would come back in arms—or die in the trying.

  ~~~

  Kemni was gone. Iry had expected that, but not so quickly, or without a farewell. She was angry—foolish, but she could not help herself. He must have been swept away by his allies. But what if he had been captured or killed? She might never know.

  She had to trust that he had found his Cretans, and that they had taken him back to Thebes. Meanwhile she was left with only half her complement of guardsmen, and no simple explanation for it.

  The first
day at least, there were distractions. From as little as Iry knew of courts, she knew that kings never received anyone at once, even ambassadors from great kingdoms. A king made people wait upon him. It was one of the things that made him a king.

  And yet, almost before she had risen and dressed and greeted the sun as the Mare’s servant was supposed to do—but in her heart she sang a hymn to Re, who was the sun of Egypt—there was a messenger at the door, a lofty and self-important one, with a summons to the king.

  Unlike kings, kings’ subjects must not keep others waiting. Iry was given no time to eat the breakfast that had been laid out for her. She was summoned. She must go now.

  Alone then, for Iannek had not come yet to his day-duty, and Kemni of course was gone, Iry followed the king’s chamberlain. It occurred to her, briefly, that this might be a trap and the chamberlain an impostor, but if that was so, she would almost welcome the danger.

  She was in an odd mood. Her cousin’s presence had given her something very like comfort: the nearness of kin in a world gone strange. Now he was lost again. The Mare, whom she could trust, was out beyond the city, doing whatever it pleased her to do. Here in these walls, in the hands of her enemies, Iry was all alone.

  And she was almost glad of it. It was like leaping from a high wall into endless space, or for that matter, essaying the back of a horse, and riding wherever the horse wished to take her. Which was, just now, deep into the palace, into the heart of those high walls.

  Everything about her was odd, not quite Egyptian but not quite Retenu. The images painted on walls and carved in stone were sometimes altogether alien, but often Egyptian or almost Egyptian. Kings in the Two Crowns and the proper royal kilt, carrying crook and flail, but bearded like Retenu; or men carved in the scribe’s pose, seated cross-legged, but no scribe had ever worn his hair cropped above the ears in that preposterous way. Sometimes the gods painted or carved were Set in his own image, but sometimes they were something else that seemed meant to signify Set—Baal, that would be, the Skyfather of the Retenu, whose temple they had built in the city’s heart, vast as a mountain. There were other gods, and the gods of her own people, too, but those were the greatest and the most often seen.