by Judith Tarr
It boomed shut behind them. The road stretched ahead in the grey dawn. Kemni let Lion and Falcon find their own pace, which was steady enough once they had run out the excitement of the lighter chariot and the strange hour and his own thrumming urgency.
Iphikleia was silent behind him, leaning lightly against him, which she need not have done, but he was glad of it. The air was cold in this hour before sunrise, blowing fresh in his face. If his dream was true, and he was not pursuing the track of a shadow, he was some distance yet from the princes’ messenger. The man would have found a place to hide and sleep; when the sun rose, he would rise with it and go on.
If there was no messenger, if Kemni had come on a fool’s errand, then he would be glad. Need all his dreams, after all, be true? Might he not dream a mere dream, but as vivid as life?
He did not turn back for that thought, nor for any of those that galloped on its heels. There was truth to be found on this journey, whether his own or Seti’s or another altogether.
The road bore him through villages still asleep, but some in them had risen and set to baking the day’s bread. The warm scent of it followed him. The nearer morning he came, the stronger the scent grew, till it mingled with the sharper one of beer. Children were up by then, running about in the half-light, stopping to gape at the chariot as it passed.
It dawned on him, much too late, that these people had seen neither horses nor chariots. All that passed to the Bull of Re had come through the Red Land, or hidden in boats on the river. No charioteer had ridden openly through the villages as Kemni in his madness was doing.
But if he turned aside, if he sought the desert, he might not come to his destination in time. He had to risk the stares and murmurs, and hope that the children’s tale would be disregarded as whim or fancy.
He was close now. So too the sunrise. But not, thank the gods, any town or village. In his dream the messenger had taken shelter in the ruin of a house—a farm abandoned long ago, when the river’s flooding shifted and left it in a corner of the Red Land without the yearly renewal of black earth that made a farm rich.
The lie of the land was as the dream had shown him. He could see where the river had shifted, eating into the farther bank, carving a steep descent, but here the Red Land had crept in, a field of sand and stones where must once have been wheat and barley. The ruin stood far back in it, too far to run water, though there were remnants of old channels eaten away by the wind of years.
A man on foot, with a need to hide, could walk there easily enough, and conceal himself through the night. The walls of mudbrick still stood, though the roof had tumbled in.
Kemni left the horses near the river, dropped the stone weight like an anchor that would keep them from wandering with the chariot, and unwrapped Iphikleia’s larger bundle. There were two bows and a sword, as he had suspected, and a quiver of arrows. She took a bow and the quiver, leaving him the rest. Without a word, soft on her feet as a hunter should be, she made her way toward the ruin.
Kemni followed somewhat belatedly but with equal softness. The sun was close now. The eastern horizon had flooded with light. A wise messenger would have left long since, but this one was weary and perhaps ill. He had been coughing in the dream, as he trudged bent under his burden.
The ruin was silent, not even a bird to rouse it to life. But as Kemni drew near, he heard a sound like the clatter of a stone falling—or the hard dry cough that someone had once, in Kemni’s hearing, called the song of Egypt. This was no simple fever. This was the lung-rot, the cough that killed.
But not quickly, not, sometimes, for years. Foolish to send a man so ill on such a journey, but then, if he had hopes of surviving till his message was delivered, he could die thereafter and so keep his secret. It was an odd, cruel choice of messenger, but not altogether improbable.
There was more to the ruin than Kemni had thought. It had been less a peasant’s farmstead than a small holding. It must have belonged to a man of substance in the region, a man wealthy enough to own a house with half a dozen rooms and a small courtyard, and an orchard now parched and dead, and a byre and granary fallen in upon itself but the lines of it still clear to see. There were touches of beauty in it: a painting on a wall of cattle and a herdsman, a lotus pillar holding up the fallen lintel of a door.
Just as the sun climbed above the horizon, Iphikleia slipped into the darkness of the house. Kemni was hard on her heels.
It was dark within, but enough light slipped through the doorway that Kemni’s eyes, after a brief struggle, came slowly into focus. The room was empty. So too the one beyond that. Past that was the court, pale gold with morning light, and in it, again, nothing.
But as Kemni raised his foot to cross the court and search in the rooms beyond, the sharp bark of a cough brought him about.
What he had taken for a corner of deep shadow was a man. He might have hoped to remain in concealment, but his sickness had betrayed him.
Kemni altered his step to move toward the man. He surged up and bolted.
Iphikleia was there, braced to catch him. She was not as strong as a man, but he was wasted with illness. She held him long enough for Kemni to reach them both, to seize him and haul him away from her—and none too soon. A knife gleamed in his hand, stabbing at Kemni. Kemni struck the hand aside, caught the wrist and wrenched hard. The man gasped. Kemni swung him about and against the wall. He crumpled down it in a renewed spate of coughing.
“I,” said Kemni, “would have sent a man in better health.”
He dragged the messenger out into the court, the better to see his face. It was the one he had seen in the dream, thin and nondescript, the face of any man in Egypt. He blinked in the light, peering up at Kemni. “Sir,” he said. “I regret—you woke me—I didn’t mean—”
Kemni frowned. “You know me?”
The man nodded. As his eyes cleared, he stood a little straighter, and eased visibly. “Yes, sir, my lord. He sent you, didn’t he? He said someone would come from the holding. Have you brought the things that I was to carry?”
Kemni’s mind had begun to race. That the messenger should pass this way—yes, he would have had to pass by the Bull of Re, though not near, not except by design. But that meant . . .
Not now. He must not tangle himself in denials. The messenger had mistaken him for a messenger himself. “Yes,” Kemni said, “I was sent.” Never mind by whom. “I’ve nothing with me, but they’re at the holding. I’ll bring you back with me.”
He held his breath. But the messenger did not seem suspicious. He nodded. Kemni kept a grip on him as he retrieved the bundle that he had carried so far, and left the house and went back down to the chariot. Iphikleia followed in silence. She had her bow strung, an arrow in her hand. Her face was white and set.
Kemni dared not speak to her lest he betray them. The messenger seemed to have judged her harmless, though he eyed her a little oddly. As indeed he might, if he thought Kemni one of the circle of traitors.
The chariot, ample for two riders, held three only with difficulty—and with the messenger’s bundle, it was impossible. Iphikleia, still silent, sprang calmly onto Falcon’s back. He shied a little and rolled an eye back at her, but she stroked and murmured to him until he quieted.
“So it is true,” the messenger said. “There are women who ride on the backs of horses.”
“And carry weapons,” Kemni said, “and fight like men. Yes.”
“Marvelous,” said the messenger. His eyes on Iphikleia were hungry, the eyes of a man who had not had a woman in much too long.
Kemni would have loved to strike those eyes out of his head, but he was too valuable alive and unmaimed. When the chariot started forward, he clutched wildly at the sides, just as Kemni had done the first time. With somewhat of evil intent, he let the restive horses choose a fast pace, not back the way he had come, but round and into the Red Land as he should have done when he began. The messenger asked no questions. He was too busy holding on, and, from the look of him, refrain
ing from shrieking aloud with terror.
This was a mad thing that Kemni did, but all of it was mad. Iphikleia riding Falcon ahead of him, perched amid the traces. The messenger in his arms, because it was safer there than behind him and able to leap out. The thing he did in letting the man believe he was—yes, that he was Gebu’s servant, and part of the conspiracy.
He went back to the Bull of Re, for lack of better inspiration. He did not know what he would do when he came there. The way he took led to the valley in which the horses were hidden, passing out of sight of the holding, and indeed of any habitation.
It was well on in morning now, and fiery hot. The messenger had gone limp. Asleep, Kemni hoped, and not unconscious or dead.
There were men among the horses: Seti and some from his wing, capturing colts to be broken to harness. And, with them, Ariana in a tunic with her hair bound up, just as Iphikleia’s was.
The gods had ordained this. Kemni was sure of it. He rode straight through the herds out of the Red Land, having descended the steep narrow cleft with little memory of how he had done it, and halted before Ariana. “I brought you a gift,” he said. And flung the messenger out of the chariot at her feet.
Seti, bless his quick wits, was on the man before he could come to his senses and bolt, binding his hands with a rope meant for one of the horses, and holding him fast.
And that was well, because Ariana was not looking at him at all. Iphikleia had slid from Falcon’s back and fallen lifeless to the ground. Much, much too late, Kemni saw the dark stain on her tunic, the blood that had flowed and then dried, but had begun to flow again, seeping through the leather.
She had said no word. Not one. Kemni had thought that he had deflected the knife; but he had been too slow.
He leaped toward her, but there were others there before him, Ariana foremost. They would not let him through.
“Fetch Imhotep,” Ariana said. Her voice sounded remote and very cold.
Imhotep, whose name was in fact something else altogether, was the king’s best gift, in Ariana’s estimation: a physician trained in the high arts, and reckoned worthy to serve the king himself. He was a personage of no little consequence; for him to be fetched, rather than for the fallen to be fetched to him, did not bode well at all.
Indeed, Seti protested. “Won’t it be faster if we take her to him?”
“She’s ridden enough,” Ariana said. “You—you—you. These horses are exhausted. Set them loose and harness another pair. Now! Quickly!”
Lion and Falcon were let loose to drop and roll and make their way eagerly toward water. A different team, a pair of chestnuts whom Kemni vaguely recognized, were harnessed in their place. Then one of the men sprang into the chariot and drove them off at a gallop.
Silence fell. Seti stood guard still over the captive, who was alive and awake—Kemni saw his eye roll white. Kemni bent down to him. “If she dies,” he said, “I will hang you from the wall with spikes.”
The man did not speak. Kemni would have smitten him silly if he had tried.
At last they would let Kemni near Iphikleia. She was not dead. He saw her breast rise and fall. He dropped on his knees beside her. “I did this,” he said. “I did this to her.”
“Stop that,” Ariana said, so like Iphikleia that Kemni gasped. “Now. Tell me what this is.”
There was no brief way to tell her. But they had time. It would be some little while before Ay came back with the physician.
He supposed he should be careful, should not speak where so many could hear, but he could not make himself care. Either they could be trusted or they could not. If they could not, he would kill them.
“This is a messenger,” he said, “from a gathering of princes who have in mind to stop the war. We caught him upriver from here, and surprised him. He had a knife.”
“I can see that,” Ariana said. “How did you know where to find him?”
“The gods told me,” Kemni said. In front of so many people he said it. “I dreamed that he was coming, that he was on his way to the Lower Kingdom with messages and tokens for the king there. The bundle beside him—there is gold in it. Open it and see.”
Seti was already moving to do it, cutting the cords that bound it, folding back the reeking rags that Kemni had seen and smelled in the dream, freeing a flame of gold.
It was gold of honor, yes; a massive plated collar graven with symbols, enameled in red and green and blue. Only a prince could have ordered such a thing. Even a lord had no such resources, or the power to command goldsmith or scribe. The smith might have been allowed to live, but Kemni could not imagine that the scribe had.
“There are other things,” Kemni said in a voice that sounded, to his own ears, very far away. “He was coming to the Bull of Re, to fetch them.”
“Here?” Ariana frowned in puzzlement. “Why would they be here?”
“Because,” Seti said—daring greatly, and he should pay for it, save that he had spared Kemni the need—“the master of the conspiracy is here.”
“Gebu,” Ariana said. She said it without hesitation, and without surprise.
Seti did not seem astonished that she knew. He, like the rest of the men, was in awe of her, and madly in love. If she had sprouted wings and soared up to heaven, he would have reckoned it no more than proper.
“Shall I fetch him, lady?” he asked.
“No,” she said. She went on kneeling beside Iphikleia, stroking the pale brow. “No. Wait.”
Seti opened his mouth as if to protest, but he clearly thought better of it. Ariana smiled at him, casting him into confusion. “Good,” she said as if he had done something worth her praise. “Good.”
There was nothing to do then but wait, and pray. One of the men had found Kemni’s Cretan mantle among the baggage cast out of the chariot, and fashioned a canopy propped on spears. It offered a little shade, enough to keep the sun from Iphikleia’s face.
She seemed unaware of it. She was deathly pale, breathing shallowly. Kemni would not, could not think of where the wound was, how it had pierced her belly. That was the worst of wounds, save only a stroke to the heart.
The gods must protect her. They had brought her to this place. They could not take her. Not so soon, or for so little cause.
IV
It seemed a very long time before Ay returned in the chariot, with yet another fresh team, and Imhotep the physician clinging grimly behind him.
Imhotep was not what one might expect of so august a personage. He was young, not greatly older than Kemni, with a long, pleasant face and a crooked smile, with which he was rather generous.
There was no sign of it now. Even before the chariot had rolled to a halt, he had sprung from it, stumbling but keeping his balance, and waving away the hands that reached to support him. He had no eyes for anything but the figure lying on the ground, supported in Ariana’s lap. Then one could see the gift that the gods had given him, the utter and perfect concentration of all his souls, his body and his mind, in the art of healing.
He knelt beside her, and paused for a moment, taking in what there was to see. Kemni wanted to howl at him. But he would not be hurried. Blood had dried and bound tunic to undertunic, and undertunic to flesh. With exquisite care he worked them all free of one another.
There had been a terrible lot of blood. The wound itself was narrow, and had gone in low in the belly. Imhotep frowned at that, and murmured to himself, words that Kemni could not catch. They were an incantation, perhaps, or a prayer to the gods.
The wound bled still, a slow seep of blood. Iphikleia’s skin was the color of milk, with a grey cast beneath. Her lips were blue.
Ay the charioteer had brought from the chariot the box that went with Imhotep wherever he was, his box of medicaments. Imhotep opened it without looking at it, reached in with a sure hand, and brought out a selection of vials, rolled bandages, and an oddment or two for which Kemni could see no purpose. He cleansed the wound carefully, filled it with a grey powder from one of the vials, and
wrapped it close in the bandage. He held another vial to her lips and coaxed her to drink, even as unconscious as she was, and said to Ariana, “Now you may move her. Take her where she can be in complete quiet. See that she has strong wine when she wakes, and such meats as I instruct. And pray, lady. Pray hard. This wound is in an ill place. If anything is pierced, if I’ve not seen all there is to see, no art of mine will be of any use.”
Ariana regarded him with the solemn stare of a child. “She could die?”
“She could die,” Imhotep said.
Ariana bent her head. But it was not in to collapse in tears, though Kemni would have been glad to do as much. She looked up with sudden intent. “We’ll take her back. But quietly. Do you all understand? No chatter. No taletelling. My cousin collapsed in the field. The sun was too strong for her, perhaps; or she’s taken ill of a fever. Ay: did you speak to anyone before you fetched Imhotep?”
“No one, lady,” Ay said. “The others were out doing whatever duty bade them do. I had to fetch Imhotep myself; there was no one to run the errand for me, except a lad or two in the stable—and I thought it better for them to tend the horses.”
“Excellent,” Ariana said. “Now remember, all of you. Fever, that’s all.”
“And this?” Seti nudged the prostrate messenger with his foot.
“This comes back as baggage,” Ariana said grimly. “Keep him hidden. Bring him to me when I’ve settled my cousin.”
Seti bowed. He would do it, Kemni knew. As did Ariana. She nodded and turned her attention back completely to her cousin.
~~~
The world should properly then have shrunk to Iphikleia and nothing more. If she lived, Kemni would live. If she died . . . he did not know what he would do. Life was strong in him, and beautiful, but she had become the heart of it.
He was not permitted such luxury. Once she was settled in Ariana’s own wide airy chamber, with Imhotep beside her and Ariana’s maids and servants all about her, and the best of the guards on the door, Ariana beckoned to Kemni.