The Shepherd Kings

by Judith Tarr

  They quieted somewhat at Kemni’s coming, a hush he knew well from other times: The commander comes, it said.

  They remembered their insouciance soon enough, with Seti for ringleader. “My lord!” he called. “Come here, lend me your wits. I’m sore outnumbered.”

  “Surely,” Kemni said, “if I may borrow you a moment first.”

  Seti betrayed no reluctance. “We’ll return and conquer you all,” he promised as he left them.

  Kemni’s old workroom was cleared of its clutter now, the heaps of scrolls put away or packed for the march, the table unwontedly bare. The lamp at least was there still, and primed with oil. Kemni lit it from the lamp in the guardroom and set it on the table. He did not sit, though Seti perched on a stool, waiting with a servant’s patience for his lord to deign to speak.

  It was almost insolence—but then most of what Seti did was like that. “Help me with a thing,” Kemni said to him. “Prince Gebu is here. He wants a chariot; and the king hasn’t spoken to forbid him. Who is unwaveringly loyal, strong with the horses, and willing to serve as both guard and charioteer to a prince who may be a traitor?”

  “May be?” Seti shook his head. “Well. He might have changed his mind, after all. Let me think.”

  Kemni was happy to do that. He wished he had brought wine or a jar of beer from the guardroom; he was suddenly parched. But there was nothing here but a locked scroll-case and the empty table, and a stool or two.

  Seti did not take overlong to run over in his head the muster of the chariots. “There’s one man,” he said, “rather young, but steady. His name is Ahmose, like the king’s. People call him Ahmose si-Ebana—Ebana’s son. He’s asked for a change of companion; he was matched with one of the recruits, who’s proved to be a poor fighter. If you’ll shift that one to the reinforcements, the prince can ride behind si-Ebana.”

  “Will si-Ebana stand fast if there’s sign of treachery?”

  “I’ve found him trustworthy,” Seti said, “and rather interesting, too. He was a scribe before he came into the army. He can read, and he writes well. If the treachery takes the form of anything written as well as spoken, he’ll be able to read it.”

  “Bring him here,” Kemni said. “Let me speak to him.”

  Seti was not visibly insulted that Kemni had not taken him at his word. But then very little dismayed Seti. He went to do Kemni’s bidding, leaving Kemni alone, dry, and regretting his decision to linger.

  The boy who brought bread and beer would never know why Kemni laughed. Seti the wise, Seti the perspicacious, had seen Kemni’s distress and set about disposing of it—and without a word spoken, either, that Kemni had heard.

  Just as Kemni had downed most of a cup of beer and begun to gnaw on the hard barley bread, Seti returned with a young man behind him—a boy, in truth, whose cheeks barely knew the razor. But he had the eyes of a much older man, weary and wise.

  In that, he was very like Seti—who could not have been past a score of years himself. He bowed to Kemni, not too low, but low enough for respect. “My lord,” he said in a youth’s light voice.

  “Ahmose si-Ebana,” Kemni said in return. “Has Seti told you what I need?”

  The boy nodded. “A charioteer, my lord, for a prince who has ambitions to be a king.”

  “And are you incorruptible?” Kemni asked him.

  The world-weary eyes lit with a spark of amusement. “My lord, no man is incorruptible. But reward me well and command me fittingly, and I’ll be yours till the gods release me from my oath.”

  “What reward will you take?”

  “I’d have to think on that,” he said.

  “You’ll be paid in gold,” said Kemni, “and the king will honor you. Will that content you?”

  “It will do,” said Ahmose si-Ebana.

  ~~~

  They marched in the morning. The army was divided as the king had ordained, the fleet embarked down the river for yet some distance, to a haven where it would wait to be summoned into the Lower Kingdom. The bulk of the fighting men, and the chariots, set off on the long road to Sile.

  Kemni was the king’s charioteer. If he had thought at all, he would have expected that the king would be borne in a chair as kings in Egypt had gone to battle for time out of mind. But Ahmose was not one to be left behind in the march of years.

  “When I come to Sile,” he said to Kemni that first morning, as he mounted the chariot, “I will know how to fight from this thing. Will you teach me?”

  “Gladly, sire,” Kemni said, he hoped not too dubiously.

  The king grinned like a boy. It was his grand pleasure to take the head of the march as no Pharaoh had done before him.

  The queen, in a chair as was much more proper, rode with her husband to the edge of the holding’s lands. Ariana was not to be seen, nor Iphikleia.

  Nor did they appear in the ceremony of farewell. It was all Egyptian: the priests, the princes, the words and prayers that would set the king on his way. When that was done, when the king and his Great Royal Wife exchanged embraces, as formal as the ritual in a temple, no Cretan faces appeared among the throng that had gathered to watch.

  Kemni’s heart sank. He barely heard the words that the queen spoke to the king, soft words and strangely tender. “Go with the gods, my lord and my brother,” she said, “and return to me in triumph.”

  “I will bring you greater victory than our brother brought, ten years agone,” Ahmose said. “That I swear to you.”

  “Yes,” she said. “What you have taken, be sure that you hold.”

  “Farewell, my lady,” said Ahmose.

  “And you, my lord,” said Nefertari.

  Then they parted, and the army marched, the whole long column of it, soldiers and servants, baggage, weapons, trains of oxen bearing what men would not carry; and even here, in this land that belonged to Ahmose, companies of guards afoot or in chariots. They might not be needed till they had passed into the Lower Kingdom, but best, as Ahmose said, to begin as they meant to go on.

  Kemni drove his chariot blindly, even while he upbraided himself for a fool. It had been wise of Ariana to keep herself hidden, and not to intrude on the king’s farewell to the first of his queens. And of course Iphikleia had remained with her. There was more than enough to occupy them at home in the Bull of Re.

  And yet, neither had given Kemni any farewell. Not even a word. That Ariana had taken leave of the king in private, he did not doubt. From Iphikleia he had had nothing. If he died in this war—and war being war, that was likely—he would never see or speak with her again.

  Foolish. Worse than foolish. What they had, had no need of words or of rituals. He would live to see her in the conquest of Avaris, or he would see her in the gods’ country. Even if his gods were not hers, and her death would not be as his was—surely, by the gods of both Egypt and Crete, they would find a way to be together again.

  With that thought in his mind, he turned himself resolutely to the task of commanding his chariots and ordering their march and being the king’s charioteer.

  Ahmose si-Ebana, by Kemni’s orders, followed not far behind Kemni’s own chariot, in the first wing of charioteers. Gebu the prince was safely settled in the chariot at his back. For a man who must know by now that his attempt to halt the war had failed, he seemed remarkably cheerful. Or did he expect that the Retenu would be waiting for them on the road to Sile?

  Maybe he did not know which road they took. The men would have been told that the army was divided—they could see it for themselves. But Ahmose had not stood up before them to tell them what he would do. He had simply ordered them to march.

  Kemni gathered his courage. It took a goodly while, but they had the whole of the day. At length he spoke. “Sire.”

  “Yes?” said Ahmose behind him, a soft calm voice like the voice of a god.

  “Sire,” Kemni said. “Your son—does he know where we go?”

  “He will know it,” Ahmose said. “There’s no help for that. But now . . . no.
He knows only what the rest know, that we march into the Lower Kingdom.”

  “Do you think,” Kemni asked, “that he’ll try anything? Once we’ve passed the border?”

  “I hope not,” said Ahmose, as calm as ever, but with perceptible chill.

  And that, Kemni understood, was for Kemni to accomplish. Come evening he would speak to Seti, and to si-Ebana.

  Then the king said, “He has been under guard since he returned to Thebes. He remains under guard. If he speaks to anyone, approaches anyone, I know.”

  “You could have put him to death,” Kemni said.

  “I could,” the king agreed.

  “Yet you didn’t.”

  “It was of greater advantage to let them all be, to let them think I knew nothing. It is even more so now, when we go where no one expects.”

  “He doesn’t know?”

  “He’s not meant to.”

  “Will he ever?”

  “That’s in the gods’ hands.” Ahmose sighed faintly, scarce to be heard above the wind and the rattle of chariot-wheels.

  Kemni did not press him further. How it must be, to so contrive that a prince of Gebu’s rank and intelligence should know nothing of the web woven about him—Kemni would not have been a king for all the gold in the world.

  And now it was Kemni’s task to see that Gebu continued in ignorance. The first wing, Seti’s wing, was well placed to shield the prince from aught that he should not know.

  But in the end he would know. What then?

  Kemni could ask, but he chose not to. He had no desire, just then, to know the answer.

  ~~~

  Seti, and through him the first wing, already knew what the king wished done with his son. Kemni should not have been surprised. He had been caught up in fretting over women, or he would have been much quicker to understand.

  They marched through the Red Land, camped at night far from cities, and so advanced into the far east of the Lower Kingdom. These were desert places, bare of greenery and empty of habitation. But as they advanced, the land changed. It grew marshy, buzzing with flies and biting things; and bare sand and barren rock gave way to strings of lakes thick beset with reeds.

  By then even the dullest of wit must understand that they had not marched toward Avaris, not at all. In the way of armies, who managed to know everything in short order, it was widely understood that they had marched east and then north; that they advanced upon the eastward gates of the Lower Kingdom.

  “Sile,” Kemni heard men say round the campfires at night. “It has to be Sile. That’s where the road into Canaan begins.”

  Wise men, to see so clearly. They could, if Kemni lingered, map out the whole campaign, and conceive it as clearly as the king ever had.

  Even Gebu. Kemni came upon him one night under the stars of this wetter land, in a mist that had risen off the marshes. He was sitting by the fire, shivering with damp, while certain men of the wing took their ease nearby. He was a prince; he must not find it strange that there were always people where he was, and always eyes upon him.

  He greeted Kemni with a wan smile and a doleful sneeze. “Good evening, brother,” he said.

  Kemni squatted on his heels by the fire. “Are you well?” he asked.

  “Well enough,” Gebu said, though he belied himself with another sneeze. “We’re not going to Avaris, are we?”

  “We are,” Kemni said. “Just not—”

  “Just not the shortest way.” Gebu warmed his hands over the flames. “So it’s true? We’re taking Sile?”

  Kemni nodded. It was a direct question, after all; and Gebu was under guard. If he succeeded in betraying them after this, then he was a greater master of intrigue than Kemni had ever taken him for.

  “That’s clever,” Gebu said, “cutting off the lifeline before taking the heart. Have you thought of what it would have been like if my uncle Kamose had thought to do that? And if he’d secured Nubia in back of him?”

  “He did neither of those things,” Kemni said.

  “He was young,” said Gebu. “Older than we are now, but . . . young. He should have listened to his mother when she told him how to fight his war. But he shut his ears to her. ‘War is for men,’ he said. ‘Stay at home, lady, and rule as you are best fit to rule.’”

  Kemni remembered the Queen Ahhotep, who had been mother to Kamose the king, and to Ahmose the king after him, and to Queen Nefertari, too. If any woman could be greater or more terrible than Nefertari, that one had been.

  And yet she had yielded to her son’s will—reluctantly, as Gebu professed, but in the end obedient.

  “Maybe she should have defied him,” Gebu mused. “She would have won the war.”

  “Would you have wanted her to?”

  Gebu slanted a glance at Kemni. “If she had,” he said, “we wouldn’t be camped in this marsh, and I would not be vexed with a rheum in the head.”

  “Would you stop the war if you could?”

  That was a dreadful question, and pure folly. But Kemni’s tongue had a will of its own.

  Gebu turned to face him. “Why would I want to do such a thing?”

  Kemni shrugged. “Because you could?”

  “That’s mad.”

  “Not if it gained something. Power. Wealth. A throne.”

  For an instant Kemni knew that he had done it: he had pierced that mask. There was darkness beneath, black as the space between stars.

  Then the mask was whole again. Gebu said with practiced ease, “I have wealth and power. I was born to them. A throne is for the gods to give.”

  “Would you take one, if it were given you?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “No,” Kemni said. “Not if Amon himself offered it. I’ve no desire to be a king.”

  “Fortunate man,” said Gebu.

  ~~~

  “Madman,” Seti said. He had been listening, of course. Most of the wing had been.

  “What can he do?” Kemni demanded. “He’s under full guard.”

  “He can think,” said Seti.

  Gebu was out of earshot, safe in the tent he shared with si-Ebana and two others of the wing. Kemni had in mind to seek his own bed in his own and solitary tent, but he lingered by the dying fire. “A man may think as he pleases,” Kemni said. “I catch myself thinking—maybe it’s all a deception. Maybe he never did any of it. Even when I saw and heard . . . it might have been a dream or a false seeming.”

  “It was true,” Seti said.

  “Then why is he so calm? Why does he seem so pleased to be a charioteer?”

  “Maybe,” said Seti, “because while he wants to be king, he also wants to drive a chariot. And maybe, when he finds opportunity, he’ll try to take the chariot he’s been riding in, and bolt for the enemy.”

  “He won’t get far,” Kemni said a little grimly. “He’s a poor horseman at best, and si-Ebana’s team is inclined to be headstrong.”

  “I had noticed,” Seti said. He sighed, yawned, stretched. “I’m for bed, my lord. Will you stay here yet a while?”

  “Not long,” said Kemni.

  “Sleep well, then, my lord,” Seti said.

  Kemni watched him go, idly, thinking of little but his own bed. The burden of worry, even that which was closest, the man who had been and was no longer his brother, had faded somewhat. He was all but asleep where he sat.

  And yet he saw how Seti walked on past the tent that was his, and slipped away into shadows. Without thought, Kemni was up and in pursuit. When he did pause to think, it was that he had seen his second-in-command in odd places before, walking apart from the wing.

  It was not treachery, surely. It might be a woman. There should have been none among the army, but Kemni knew there were a few smuggled among the tents and the baggage. There always were, in armies.

  Kemni wanted to sleep, not follow Seti to an assignation. And yet he did not turn away from the pursuit. He trusted Seti. He had trusted Gebu; he still wanted desperately to do that. And Gebu was a traitor.
r />   Seti did not go far. In the interlocking rings and squares of the camp, tent was sometimes pitched almost on top of tent, and one wing blurred into the next. This tent might have belonged to either the first or the fourth wing, or to neither. It was pitched out of the light, near a bed of reeds, so that anyone who came or went might not easily be seen.

  There was a woman inside, or women. Seti scratched at the flap; a soft voice answered, too high and sweet for a man’s.

  Kemni knew he should turn and walk away. It was no concern of his if there were women among the charioteers, unless they bred contention. And he had heard not one word of such.

  But he had not laid eyes on a woman since he left the Bull of Re. And maybe he had a small and not entirely laudable desire to tax Seti with his deception.

  Seti had slipped inside the shadowed tent. There was light within: it gleamed forth briefly as the flap lifted, then vanished again. Kemni guided himself by his memory of that, advanced soft-footed in the dark, and found the flap where he had thought it would be. He paused there, ears sharpened.

  There were voices within, but not what one would expect of an assignation in the night: low, intent, no lightness to be heard.

  This was a night for the body to do as it pleased in despite of the mind’s prudence. Kemni lifted the flap as Seti had, and slipped into a blaze of lamplight.

  It was dim in fact, but brilliant after the dark without. Kemni’s eyes cleared quickly enough, while he stood dazzled, peering at three shapes that sat decorously in front of him. One was Seti. The others . . .

  He was not astonished. He should have expected precisely this. Their absence from the king’s farewell; his own abandonment, and never a word or a sight of them. And no wonder, if they had smuggled themselves into the army.

  “How?” he asked: the simplest question he could think of.

  “Baggage,” Ariana answered with equal succinctness. “Who notices servants among the oxen? Or an extra bag or two among the rest?”

  “The king will have your hide,” Kemni said.