by Judith Tarr
“You should have stayed where you were told to stay.”
“Ah,” she said, a sound of disgust. They had fought that battle days ago, and she knew it as well as he.
“Ah,” he echoed her, drawing it out till she slapped him to make him stop. He grinned down at her face in the hollow of his shoulder. “Very well. I admit it. I’m glad you came. I’m glad to have you here. I’m more than glad to have had you—”
This time she silenced him by holding his rod hostage. But she could not stop his laughter. “Gods,” he said. “Gods, I love you.”
“Beautiful man,” she said. “Show me how you love me.”
“I’ve shown you and shown you and—”
“Show me more.”
“Cruel woman,” he said. There was little left in him but kisses, but of those he had a thousand.
~~~
In a siege there was little enough use for chariots. But the king was not about to let them stand idle. He sent them out as scouts in small companies, to find provisions which larger companies on foot could bring back, and to hunt down escapes from the city, and to range wide in the army’s defense.
Their speed, and the distances their teams could cover, delighted Ahmose to no end. “Old kings dreamed of this,” he would say when Kemni brought back word of the day’s explorations. He loved his chariots; he was like a child with a toy, wielding it in every way he could think of, playing to his heart’s content.
The siege went well, for a siege. The city was cut off. The road into Asia was shut, with an army across it. But the people within the walls were holding fast. No doubt they preferred starvation or death to the life of captives.
Kemni could understand that. The Lower Kingdom had lived so for a hundred years.
He rode out with the rest, though as commander he was not required to do it. It was relief from the boredom of the siege, long days of sitting in camp while the engines hammered the walls and the archers shot off fire-arrows from both the ships and the land. Those who would fight when the gates fell had nothing to do but wait, unless they were fortunate to be sent out as Kemni’s men were.
He ranged wide to the south, till he knew all the villages within a day’s ride of Sile. Word had gone to Avaris, he knew; they could not keep every messenger from escaping. But likewise the Retenu could not prevent the army from learning what passed in the south. The king in Avaris had sent armies to the defense of Sile. And yet, said those of his men whom he had sent out, they were traveling slowly. They seemed in no haste to reach the city.
“They’re not coming to Sile,” Seti said. “They’re outriders from Avaris—they’re defending the kingdom’s heart.”
Kemni could not argue with him. As few as the enemy were, lords set over a foreign land, they could not spend their men in defending the outer cities. If they would retain their power, they must retain it from the center, from their strongest places.
The king was not minded to engage them. Not yet. First he would take Sile. Then he would advance into the south.
VII
Kemni’s outriders had found the foreign king’s army. As Seti had foretold, they were not attempting to rescue Sile. They had camped two days south of the city, and set to building what looked like a fort across the road.
They could not build a fort across the river. Kemni found he almost pitied them, poor mariners that they were, and not given to thinking of water as well as land—even after a hundred years.
He went out hunting on a morning when it seemed the siege was close to ending. He had shot a fine flock of geese, enough to feed a fair few men, and the men with him had chariots full of fat quarry as well. Time, he thought, to turn back, though the day was young. If they surrendered their prey to the cooks, they would have time after that for battle-exercises.
They paused to rest and graze the horses, in a field near the branch of the river. Some of the men ate and drank, taking their ease, though they kept their weapons close to hand, nor let their horses stray. One or two had wandered afield, he supposed to relieve themselves, or to while the time.
A shout brought him to full alert. None of them ever forgot that this was war.
He strung his bow and fitted an arrow to the string, but stayed beside his chariot. His bays had lifted their heads to stare at the field’s edge. Their nostrils flared. Falcon, who was always the leader, snorted explosively. Lion pawed the ground. Suddenly, deafeningly, he whinnied.
Seti and one of the others—Ay, that was his chariot, with the ibis painted on it—drove slowly over the hill. There were others behind them, men of the fourth wing, Kemni saw, whom he had sent to keep watch on the enemy. They rode in a circle around something else. Three horses, and three riders on the horses.
Riders, not chariots. Two of the horses were ordinary enough, if very fine: golden duns. The third was as pale as the moon.
Kemni had not even known that he was running, till he was half across the field. The others had not moved. They were all staring, waiting for Seti and Ay and the fourth wing to come to them.
The riders were captives, they could be nothing else, but neither they nor their horses were bound. Two were Retenu. One of those two—by the gods, one was a woman, a tall fierce creature with falcon-eyes. And the third . . .
“Iry!” Kemni called, and never mind who heard, or what he thought. “Iry! Cousin!”
She lifted a hand. She was as he remembered her in Avaris, as calmly self-possessed as ever, until he met her eyes. Then her smile broke free, wide and white and irrepressible. “Kemni!” she called back. “Cousin! Well met! Well met!”
Everyone was goggling. They must think these were spies for the enemy. Kemni could not think how to explain, not in haste. Orders, for now: “Let them go,” he said. “They’re friends.”
His men did not want to, but the habit of obedience was strong. He brought Iry and the others back to the rest of the chariots, to bread and beer and as fine a welcome as he could manage.
The other woman he knew quite well indeed, but she seemed not to remember him, or to be lost in a kind of dream. The man had been a great gawk of a boy when Kemni saw him last, and was now a large man and strong, with great bull’s shoulders and the beginnings of a handsome beard, but there was no mistaking that wide and deceptively foolish grin. Iannek of the Retenu and his sister Sadana had followed Iry into the north. Followed, not led. That much he could well see.
Preposterous. And yet there they were. “You are friends?” he said to Iry.
She nodded a little impatiently. “Of course we are. Yes, the others, too. They belong to me. How far is it to Sile?”
“Half a morning,” Kemni answered, letting be for a moment the thing that she had said, that she was mistress to a lord and lady of the Retenu.
“So close?” She sighed. For a moment he saw how weary she must be, and how far she must have traveled. “Thank the gods. I’d begun to think we’d never come there.”
That too Kemni let be. Time enough to hear it when he had brought her to the king.
He appropriated a chariot from one of the men, and set Iry in it with Iannek. Of necessity, Sadana rode with him. The horses followed: the duns on their leads at the tail of Kemni’s chariot, the Mare free, but keeping close.
There was much to think of, and much to remember. Kemni had not seen the Mare so close before. She looked, at first glance and except for her color, like a rather ordinary, rather heavy-bodied, short-legged mare of a kind quite unlike the slender-legged stallions that the king had brought out of Libya. And yet in motion she was splendid, a beauty to stop the heart.
She had eyes for no one but Iry. It was striking, that intensity; fixed on her servant as if there were no one else in the world.
For the matter of that, the same could be said of the two humans who followed his cousin. Iannek was as devoted to her as a dog to its master. Sadana . . .
She had not spoken since she came in front of Kemni. When Iannek took the second chariot as charioteer, Iry had got in as a mat
ter of course; and wisely enough, if he might think of escape. Kemni doubted that he ever would.
That had left Sadana to ride with Kemni. She still had not acknowledged him, even with a glance.
Was she angry, then? “I’m sorry,” he said as the chariot left the field for the smoother surface of the road. “I’d not have left you like that, if I could. But—”
“That’s what you were doing,” she said, abrupt as if she had chosen to enter into the middle of a conversation. “You were spying.”
“Yes,” he said.
“You’re not a servant at all. I thought so. You put on too many airs for a slave.”
“Not a few slaves in this kingdom have been born to rank and station.”
“And what is yours?”
“Commander of the king’s chariots,” he answered, not without pride. “King’s charioteer. But before I was that, I was heir to the Golden Ibis, not far from the Sun Ascendant.”
“And her cousin.”
Kemni glanced at Iry. “Yes. Our mothers were sisters.”
“Where I come from,” said Sadana, “that would make you as close as brother and sister, and bind you together from birth till death.”
“That’s almost true,” he said. “I used to run wild with her brothers. She followed us when she could, though she was so much younger. She was just the same then as she is now, only smaller.”
“I imagine she was a very self-possessed child,” Sadana said coolly.
“She was that.” Kemni let the horses go on for a while. Then he said, “You’re angry at me.”
“Why do you think that?”
“I left you.”
She laughed, a brief, sharp sound. “How like a man! So you think that one night’s pleasure has made you the center of my world?”
“Not at all,” said Kemni. “But I never went back. And I never spoke to you.”
“You had to go,” she said. “Spying.”
“Spying,” he said a little wearily. And something else, but he was not about to speak to her of that. Iphikleia had been waiting for him. He could hardly tell a woman that he had left her for another, or that he had barely thought of her since, in the light of that other’s presence.
Sadana did not speak again. Nor did she touch him except as the chariot’s motion compelled her.
He wondered if Iry had been able to find her a lover who could stay with her and be gentle to her. Probably not. It had been a ridiculous thing to ask, and impossible to accomplish. None but Sadana could find a man who loved her. If Sadana did not want him, or did not want to find him, then that was her choice.
She would hate him if she knew what he had asked Iry to do. It smacked of pity, and of condescension. And she deserved neither.
He almost apologized again. But that would gain him nothing. He drove in silence instead, back to the plain and the city, and the king in his great camp amid the hammering of the siege-engines.
The gates had buckled. Soon they would fall. Kemni found the king just behind the great ram, seated under a canopy with a flock of his lords and generals, and a fair company of priests who had been invoking the gods’ names with each blow. They had, when Kemni came, run through the Ennead of the Two Kingdoms and begun on the lesser deities.
Between the priests’ chanting and the thunder of the ram, there was no lull in which to speak. But Ahmose did an unwonted thing: at Kemni’s coming, he rose from his golden chair and walked on his own feet into the sun, and bellowed in Kemni’s ear, “Come with me!”
Everyone was staring. It was a mark of enormous and potent favor for a mere lord to be approached by the king. But Ahmose was taking no notice. He led Kemni and his three guests or captives back to the relative quiet of his tent. The gaggle of followers was shut out, and none admitted but a single quiet servant.
There, in scented dimness, Ahmose said, “Well met, lady of horses. Well met at last.”
Iry inclined her head. She seemed immune to the awe of kingship. “You were expecting me, my lord?”
“I had a foreboding,” Ahmose said with the hint of a smile. “And my Great Royal Wife . . . she is closer to the gods than most. She told me that I might expect such a guest. And such an omen.”
“I suppose,” said Iry, “I am that.”
“The White Mare of the conquerors chooses for her priestess a conquered Egyptian,” Ahmose said. “She suffers that Egyptian to return to her own people. It might be said that she has, in so doing, shifted her favor from the conquerors to the conquered.”
“It has been said,” Iry said, “and will be.”
“Then it must be true.” Ahmose’s smile escaped its bonds. “Welcome indeed, then. Welcome in great joy.”
~~~
There was a great deal to be said for a god-king’s favor. It won Iry and her two silent shadows a tent of their own, the best grazing for their horses, servants to attend their needs, and unquestioning—if sometimes teeth-gritted— acceptance from the king’s people.
It was, as Ahmose had said, a great omen. Greater for that, even as he spoke with Iry in his tent, the ram broke down the gate of Sile. The army was caught almost off guard. But they mustered quickly, formed their ranks and took their weapons in hand and swarmed over the broken timbers into the city.
City fighting had little room in it for chariots. But Kemni had been a footsoldier long before he became a charioteer. He found a company that would be glad to take him, under a commander he had known since he was a boy. He stormed the city with the rest of them, in a kind of black delight. At last—at last, reparation for all the years of servitude, for the victories under Kamose that had turned in the end to defeat, for slavery and humiliation and the conquest of the Two Lands by barbarians out of Asia.
They fought, and yes, they killed. The enemy fell back before them. Kemni kept no count of the blows he struck, only of the steps of his advance, street by street to the center and the citadel.
There he was halted, as they all were. The citadel was open. Its commander had surrendered in fear of his life.
Kemni came to himself as if out of a dream. Surrender—terms—the king!
He had not known he had strength in him to run through the whole of that fallen city, through massed armies, past the broken gate and the silenced siege-engines to the camp and the king.
None too soon, either. The king’s chariot was almost ready. Iphikleia was standing by it with a jar that proved to be full of excellent beer, and a basin and a heap of cloths.
With some, as he drained the jar, she cleansed him quickly of dust and blood and sweat. The rest resolved itself into a fine new kilt wrapped about his best ornaments and the wig he kept for festivals. She clucked her tongue over wounds he had not even known he had, but they were scratches only. They needed no tending.
The king was ready in his golden armor and his blue crown, crook and flail held crosswise over his breast, and even the false beard that he was seldom inclined to trouble with: all perfectly the Great House of Egypt.
Kemni sprang into the chariot and took up the reins. The horses were fresh and a little headstrong. Kemni was hardly fresh at all, but the beer had filled his parched and empty spaces, and Iphikleia’s cleansing—and her presence, and the touch of her hands and, slyly, her lips—had roused him to life again. He was as ready as he could be, to see the king borne in his chariot to the citadel of Sile.
~~~
The commander of the garrison surrendered to the Great House in the courtyard of the citadel. He was not the governor; that worthy was still absent, and unlikely to return. This was his second-in-command, the man who, Kemni was sure, had actually ruled the city in the governor’s name: a gnarled and grizzled soldier, not tall for a Retenu but thickset and strong. He neither wept nor quailed in front of the king. He handed over his sword with regret but no hesitation, won freedom to gather his wounded and tend the dead, and agreed—as if he could have argued with it—that once all that was done, he would take his men and leave his weapons and withdraw into
Canaan.
“On foot,” the king said. “Your chariots and your teams, we keep.”
That was a blow: the commander flinched just visibly. But he bowed his head. “Sire,” he said, “I can hardly resist you. But if you would leave us enough pack-beasts to carry our baggage and our wounded—”
“You may have oxen,” the king said, “and such of the asses as we can spare.”
“That will be enough,” the commander said, “sire. And I thank you for it.”
Ahmose inclined his head. He could afford to be gracious. His victory was complete. He had won far more than a city full of booty. He had won the northward way, and the road into Asia.
VIII
Sile had fallen. Khayan could not imagine that anyone had not expected it, and yet the howls of dismay as word flew through the army were both lengthy and loud. Surely at least a few of these bellowing bullcalves had understood that Sile was a sacrifice, a gobbet of fresh meat cast in front of the crocodile, to give the king time to fortify the center of his kingdom.
And yet it did not seem so. Khayan had been reckoning himself, if far from happy, at least not unhappy. The misfortune that had cast him here had a habit of haunting him in the nights, but in the daylight he was as content as he could be. He had rank, to a degree. He had men who seemed willing to fight for him. He was not too terribly humiliated, all things considered.
So he had been telling himself. But all the folly that he heard in the army made him yearn to be a lord of high degree again, a royal favorite—because a commander of a hundred foot was not entitled to speak before the council of the generals, still less to upbraid them for fools.
They had built this hasty fortress athwart the road from Sile, with no apparent concern for the fact that the enemy had simply to sail past in his Cretan ships. Or, for that matter, if his army was too numerous for the ships, they could ferry him across to the far bank, and he could march lightly on his way, grinning and baring his brown behind at the idiot barbarians.
And now they wanted to abandon their stronghold and fall back to Imet, not far from Avaris. It was a city, they said to one another, or at least a town of respectable size, and its walls were higher and stronger than anything they could erect here. They said no word of fighting, only of retreating. And had not the king told them to stand their ground?