The Shepherd Kings

by Judith Tarr

  It was a while before he could speak. When he could, Kemni understood that that was indeed the case: he had come up from the river with profoundly startling message. “The queen,” he said, “the Great Royal Wife—Nefertari—she—”

  Queen Nefertari had come down from Thebes, in secret, on no less a ship than Dancer. Her appearance and attendance were those of a woman of good birth, but certainly not royal—as if she had taken passage to visit kin downriver, and the Cretan ship had been convenient, and its captain perhaps a little smitten with her, so that he offered her the best of his hospitality.

  So much secrecy. So many ruses. Kemni knew that he was bitter, but he was in no mood to care. He had difficulty even being glad to see Naukrates, whom he was fond of. The captain was sailing back toward the sea, intending to catch the Cretan fleet.

  For the war was beginning. It was sooner than Kemni had expected, still some time from the harvest, but the king was determined, Nefertari said.

  She spoke to them after the feast of welcome, sitting in Ariana’s garden in the fading daylight: Ariana and Naukrates, Kemni and, by no one’s summons but with everyone’s acquiescence, Seti. In this guise of a lady of high birth but mortal breeding, Nefertari seemed a warmer, more human creature; but Kemni still could see the hard bright light of divinity behind those eyes.

  “When you sent back his son with word of his betrayal,” she said, “my lord undertook to search out the roots of it, and discover its branches. He did nothing, as you so wisely suggested, choosing rather to let them flourish in ignorance for a yet a while. But it made him think. They might have failed in this one thing, but there must be others that had succeeded, or were in train. He determined then to move more quickly than anyone expected. To press for the war now, while there is still some chance of surprise.”

  “But are we ready, lady?” Kemni asked, since no one else seemed inclined to. “Can we fight the war so soon?”

  “Can you?” she asked him, question for question.

  He began to say that he could not, but some vestige of prudence made him pause. So many preparations, so many things still to do, and the recruits—the horses—the chariots—

  “I think . . .” he said. “I think, if I must, I can. But it will be difficult.”

  “But not impossible.”

  “No,” he said. “Not quite.”

  “Then you will do it,” she said. “In a month, at the full moon, the army will come past the Bull of Re. You will be ready for it.”

  So soon. Sooner even than he had expected. He breathed deep, to steady himself, and prayed the gods that it could all be done in time. The king would expect it. Kemni must, somehow, grant him what he wished.

  “Will you stay with us?” he asked the queen.

  She nodded. “The war’s heart will be here, hidden for the moment, but beating strong. When my lord comes, it will go with him into the Lower Kingdom. Then all will be as the gods decree.”

  “Do you think,” Kemni asked after a pause, “that this can remain a secret even so long?”

  “I rather doubt it,” she said. “But the later the discovery, the better for us.”

  He nodded. So he had thought. “And the prince. The traitor. What has become of him?”

  She did not rebuke him for the impertinence of so many questions. “The king has sent him on an errand,” she said, “that will keep him away from the city and from knowledge of the war until the army is ready to march.”

  “And then?”

  “And then,” she said, in a manner that warned him to ask no more, “it will be as the gods will.”

  Kemni bent his head. He could imagine that the gods—among them the king and the queen, god and goddess—would ordain for the king’s son who had betrayed his father. There was no sentence for him, in the end, but one.

  ~~~

  Iphikleia was awake when Kemni came to bed late as always, for after his audience with the queen he had had duties still to perform, and things to do that could not wait till morning. It was deep night when he dragged himself away, yawning and stumbling, to the lamplit room and the wide and welcoming bed, and her eyes upon him, open and alert as they had not been since the gods knew when.

  He stopped halfway from door to bed, swaying a little on his feet. “Beautiful man,” she said. “Have you been at the wine again?”

  “I’ve been at my work again,” he said. His heart had risen and began to sing: for her voice, though weak, was her own, a little sharp, a little wry; and her expression was nigh as vivid as it had always been.

  “You look as if you haven’t slept in a month,” she said.

  “Maybe,” he said. “I don’t remember.”

  “Come here,” she said, “before you fall over.”

  He was happy to obey. It was all he could do to lower himself gently beside her, and not fall flat on his face. Her hand—so thin and so frail, with a tremor in it—brushed his cheek. “Poor lovely man. You’re working yourself to death.”

  “You’re awake,” he said. “You’re talking. You’re twitting me.”

  “Of course I am,” she said.

  “But it’s been so long since—”

  Her fingers pressed to his lips, silencing him. “Imhotep told me. I dreamed . . .” She shook her head. “No. That doesn’t matter. I’m awake. When I sleep again, it will be a plain and mortal sleep. I’m going to live, my love, whether it pleases you or no.”

  He could not find words to answer that. He gathered her in his arms and held her, all bird-light bones that she was. She sighed and rested there, but she was far from asleep.

  “Tell me,” she said. “I didn’t dream it, did I? My uncle is here.”

  “Yes. And Dancer.”

  “The war’s beginning?”

  “Soon.”

  She sighed again. “Then I have to recover, don’t I?”

  It was a moment before he understood. “You are not going to the war!”

  “I am not staying here.”

  “You can’t—”

  “I do intend to,” she said.

  He bit his lip. They could argue it later. That she was awake, stubborn and contentious and insisting on doing the maddest possible thing—the joy in him was so piercing that he thought he would die of it.

  VII

  With the great Royal Wife in residence and the war approaching with terrible speed, the Bull of Re forsook sleep, and forsook quiet. The armorers, the harnessmakers, the captive chariotmakers in their shop that was half prison, labored day and night to prepare for what must come. The last gathering of recruits found itself pressed to learn more swiftly and more thoroughly than perhaps human mind and body could bear. But Kemni had no mercy. He could allow none.

  They hated him. Hate could be a good thing. It sharpened the spirit and strengthened the will. They would learn faster, fight better, because they detested him so cordially.

  It was a different hate he met when he ventured into the chariotmakers’ workshop. Amid the scents of new-planed wood and fresh paint and the sharp hot reek of metal shaped in the forge, the captives and their Egyptian apprentices built chariots for the king. They built well—Ariana made sure of that, and Iphikleia had done so while she was able to walk about. But they did not build willingly.

  Four of them, in the end, had come back to the Bull of Re from the Lower Kingdom. The master was not the eldest, but he seemed, for his rank, to cultivate the longest and most luxuriant beard. Kemni found it fascinating that he could keep it out of whatever he worked at, nor ever caught it or stained it.

  The others cropped their beards close, and the youngest had none: a sullen and remarkably pretty boy who spoke the most Egyptian, but seldom saw fit to display it. Even as young as he was, he labored in the shop beside his father, and it was he who drove the chariots as they were finished, to ascertain that all was well.

  Although Kemni had not brought them to this place, they seemed to have decided that he was the lord here, and to have concentrated in him all their hatred of
this captivity. It had a reek like hot bronze, and a force like a blow whenever he came into their workshop.

  And yet he visited often. He found their craft fascinating. They had perfected a way of building many chariots at once: taking each a portion—body, axles and wheels, shafts—and overseeing a company of workmen who completed each part according to instruction. Then the master himself oversaw the putting together, the completion—and no weakness anywhere, no frail spot on an axle or a wheel, no flaw in the body so that it would break when its rider needed it most.

  Kemni had asked him why he did not do such a thing. He had regarded Kemni in utter contempt, and said, “Because I have my pride.”

  “Your chariots are worth more to you than the preservation of your people?”

  The man spat. “Don’t twist my words! I build chariots. My chariots are the best of all. I will not build one that is flawed, simply to gratify an urge for revenge.”

  “Even if it would protect your people?”

  “Do you think,” the chariotmaker had asked him with a curl of the lip, “that half a hundred chariots, however well made, will even begin to oppose the king’s hundreds?”

  “Probably not,” Kemni said. “But even a little is something.”

  This day, a handful of days after Iphikleia woke and came to herself again, they were completing one of the last of the chariots. There were guards on all the doors as always, and the apprentices were loyal to the king. Some of the commanders would have preferred that the master at least be kept chained, but Kemni would not allow that. It was an insult that would, he knew in his belly, compel even that proud craftsman to break his word and bolt.

  The master, whose name was Ishbaal, greeted Kemni as he always did: not at all. He was overseeing the painting of the body, frowning as one of the Egyptian artists painted it in the style of the Two Lands. “Ugly,” he muttered, still not acknowledging Kemni, but no one else was close enough to hear.

  “It may be ugly,” Kemni said amiably, “but it’s ours. And how are you this fair morning, sir?”

  Ishbaal snorted. “Don’t ‘sir’ me. I’m a slave.”

  “You are not,” Kemni said—as he had said often before.

  “Then I may go?”

  “Of course not,” said Kemni. “We need you.”

  “What will you do when I’m done, then? Shut me up in a box? Kill me?”

  “Keep you at work building chariots,” Kemni said. “What else would we do?”

  “Dispose of me,” he said. “I’m difficult. I’m miserable. I’ve taught these fools everything I know.”

  “Not your years of mastery,” Kemni said, “and not your incomparable eye. Come now, admit it. You’re not miserable. You thrive on this: despising us all, building chariots day and night, being the first master chariotmaker in the Upper Kingdom.”

  Ishbaal snarled. “You! Fool! Not that way. This way.” And he stalked off to correct the turning of a spoke for a wheel.

  “We could let him go,” Ariana said from beside Kemni, startling him, for he had not heard her come in. “Once he’s done, he has the right of it: his apprentices will do well enough.”

  “I think not,” Kemni said.

  “Have you ever reflected,” she asked him, “that by stealing him, we might have done great harm to his family? Caused a wife to grieve, or children to go hungry?”

  Kemni bit his tongue on a sharp rejoinder. “This is war. Would you rather we lost it out of pity for this man’s children—who are no doubt well looked after, if in fact he has any at all besides yonder glowering child?”

  “How like a man,” she said, “to say such a thing.”

  He stared after her as she walked away. She was always odd; she was the Ariana of Crete. But this was odder than usual.

  He lingered only a little longer among the chariotmakers, to satisfy himself that all was going as well as could be expected; then, as he turned to go to the next of his thousand duties, he turned a little further instead, and followed where Ariana had gone.

  It was not perhaps a wise thing to do. She was on her way to confer with the Great Royal Wife. Still, she did not order him away when he established himself a step behind her. She simply said, “You were slower than I expected.”

  “Sometimes I stop to think,” he said.

  “Amazing,” she said.

  “Is something troubling you?” he asked before he could think better of it.

  “No,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

  He shrugged. “One would think you had regrets about this war.”

  “Hardly,” she said. “Egypt reunited will serve Crete much better than Egypt half-conquered.”

  “But the war itself—you dread it.”

  “Don’t you?”

  He did not answer at once. “I’m not a coward. I’m loyal to my king. I want this war, and I want to see it won. I’ll do whatever I must to accomplish that.”

  “But you dread it.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Men,” said Ariana.

  Kemni paused, but quickened his step again before she drew too far ahead. “What message did the king send you through Queen Nefertari? Did he command you to stay here when the chariots go out to the war?”

  She would not answer. But her expression was clear enough.

  “Will you defy him?”

  “He’s the king.”

  “Will that stop you?”

  She stopped, spun, so that he nearly collided with her. “What is it to you?”

  Temper from her was vanishingly rare. Kemni regarded her in some startlement, not least for how closely, just then, she resembled her cousin. “Someone has to hold the Upper Kingdom behind us,” he said.

  “The Great Royal Wife will do that,” said Ariana.

  “Not alone.”

  “No, not alone. In the company of a hundred lords and scribes and priests and servants.’'

  “And you.”

  She shook her head slightly, not to deny what he had said, but as if to cast off the thought and the rebellion that it aroused in her. She never had thought as Kemni expected a woman to think, nor accepted the lot that was given her sex. Perhaps it came of being from Crete, where the greatest of the gods was a goddess.

  She walked the rest of the way in silence, with Kemni behind her as before. The Great Royal Wife had been given a house of her own within the encircling wall, displacing a flock of servants and a handful of the charioteers, for whom Kemni had had to find room wherever he could.

  The guards at the gate would not have let Kemni pass, but Ariana spoke sharply to them. They subsided, albeit with dark glances and fingerings of their weapons. They were eunuchs, Kemni happened to notice. Men entire were not common in Nefertari’s house.

  In the courts of Asia, Kemni had heard—and certainly in the courts of the Retenu—a man who walked in the women’s house without the king’s leave could be carried off to join the ranks of eunuchs, or actually put to death. That was not, he hoped, the case here. Whether Ariana was glad of him or merely tolerated him, she kept him with her even into the elder queen’s presence.

  Nefertari was not, for once, waiting for them in hieratic immobility. She was sitting in a small cluttered workroom with a pair of scribes, with ink on her fingers, and no more state to her dress or her person than a noble lady might affect in her own household. It dawned on Kemni that Nefertari might be regarding this venture as an escape—a brief taste of freedom from the strictures of court and palace. The king welcomed such escapes. Why not the first of his queens?

  Kemni looked at her somewhat differently then, though with little less awe. She was still Nefertari.

  She looked up from the heaps of scrolls and written scraps of papyrus, frowning faintly as if she paused to capture and pen a thought before she turned her mind to her visitors. With a slight shake of the head, she smoothed the frown, though she did not smile. “Good morning, lady,” she said to Ariana. And to Kemni: “Commander. Welcome.”

  He flushed and resi
sted the urge to shuffle his feet. He had not expected to be acknowledged, or to be granted his rank, either.

  She rolled a scroll neatly and with the deftness of long practice, fastened it and handed it to one of the scribes to be tagged and put away. “It looks better than I thought,” she said, “if not as well as it must. We must be ready within the month.”

  “We will be,” Ariana said, sparing Kemni the need. She sat in a chair across from the worktable, easily, without asking leave. “Tell me something.”

  Nefertari raised a brow.

  “Did you find and root out the whole conspiracy? Every bit of it?”

  “We can hope so,” said Nefertari. “Why? Is there a thing that we should know?”

  “No,” Ariana said. “I was only thinking . . . what if we told them false things? Let them send a messenger in haste to the Lower Kingdom, to tell their allies there that we come to the war sooner and in greater disarray than we actually are?”

  “And have them ready and waiting for us when we come?”

  “Not likely,” Ariana said, “if we let it be thought that we begin the war elsewhere than we intend to. Suppose that they’re waiting on another branch of the river, for a different kind of attack—say that we move toward Tanis instead of Pelusium, or attack north and west of Memphis instead of round about Avaris. And that, instead of armies in boats, they expect armies on the march. And more—that the Cretan envoys in Thebes feign a quarrel and a departure in dudgeon, with a withdrawal of all their alliance. Can this be done?”

  “It can,” Nefertari said slowly, “but it would have to be done now, and from here, and in great haste. My lord king is in Thebes, mustering the last of his armies. He might not—”

  “You know,” said Ariana, “that the king will bow to anything you bid him do.”

  Nefertari raised her chin a fraction. “He may. But there are matters of policy, and of appearance. People must think only what we wish them to think.”

  “That the king rules, and not the Great Royal Wife?” Ariana shrugged. “Well, don’t do it, then. It’s likely the traitors will have sent messengers of this new and swifter war, and that we’ll not have caught them. It was the gods’ will and fortune that we caught the one who came near the Bull of Re. When we come to the Lower Kingdom, we’ll find the enemy waiting—maybe not in all his armies, but he’ll be expecting us.”