The Shepherd Kings

by Judith Tarr

  “I won’t come back,” she said.

  “We shall see,” said Apophis.

  V

  When Iry came out of the city, the battle had already begun. Ahmose had ordered it before she went in, nor delayed it by more than a little for the embassy she had taken on herself. He left that gate alone and the siege-engines silent, but his ships had closed in from the river, battering the city where it could raise no defense.

  That was no fight for chariots. But once Iry had come out, white-faced and wordless, and let herself be taken away to safety, the king called out his chariotry to be a wall of living bronze about that side of the city.

  Kemni was ready for the summons. All of him that had been given up to grief was given now to war. When he went to fetch his chariot, he found it ready, the horses harnessed, and a charioteer waiting.

  “I mean to fight alone,” he said—foolish words, and weak, but they were all he had.

  “No one fights alone here,” Sadana said. “Why? Am I objectionable?”

  “No, but—”

  “Ah,” she said. “I’m a woman. I’m not ill luck, man of Egypt. Trust me in that.”

  “I never said you were,” he said. “But—”

  “Get in,” she said. “The king wants us out there now, not in a day or three or six.”

  That was true, and the rest of the chariots were waiting for his signal. Kemni sighed hugely and stepped up beside her.

  That was the signal they had looked for. The trumpeter blew the call to advance. The line of chariots rolled forward toward the city. They were not to go in too close. Along the edges, by the river, Sadana’s women rode on their light fast horses. There would be no escape from Avaris, except into death.

  The ships attacked the soft underbelly of the city, the riverbank and the canals that ran into the city itself. The enemy was waiting. He might have fled here, he might have given Ahmose the north, but he had no intention of letting go this city.

  It was a river-battle now, the enemy’s chariots shut up within his walls. Kemni had little to do but ride up and down and watch and listen, and see the ships’ crews do battle with men on land. Sadana’s women swooped in and out along the river’s edge, darting toward the wounded and the dying and bringing them out as they could, whether toward the ships or toward the open land.

  Kemni could have done such a thing, but the king’s orders were precise. The chariots were not to be spent wantonly. They would circle and look threatening, and wait. When the king was ready, he would summon them.

  There was some small challenge in eluding arrows from the walls, and once they caught a handful of Retenu in flight—men of low rank and less courage, fleeing like rats. Like rats they died and were flung into the river, fed to the crocodiles.

  Sadana seemed content to drive the horses up and down, making a show of force but offering none that was real. She was not given to idle conversation. Kemni had been once, till grief changed him. It was almost a comfortable silence, the silence of those who saw no need to fill the air with chatter.

  ~~~

  Near sundown the king sent them a summons, but it was not to battle; it was to rest. The morrow would be the same, and the day after that, as long as the Retenu resisted Ahmose’s war.

  The river-fighters were full of vaunts that night, brandishing the right hands of enemies whom they had killed, and some flaunting the gold of valor that was given only to the best of them. The land-fighters huddled by their tents and snarled. Their time would come—but it was not likely to be soon.

  “I don’t call it a victory,” Iannek declared by Kemni’s campfire. He had appeared not long after dark, as pleased with himself as ever, and looking somewhat happily battered.

  “You got onto a ship,” Seti said. His envy was palpable. “How in the gods’ name did you manage that?”

  “I got on board,” said Iannek. “It wasn’t hard. The man who’s named after the king, si-Ebana—they’ve made him a captain of marines. I asked him if he needed an extra hand. He allowed as how he did.”

  “It couldn’t have been that simple,” Seti said.

  “Things with Iannek are always simple.” Sadana startled some of them, if not Kemni: he suspected that they had not seen her sitting just out of the fire’s light, knees drawn up to breast, never moving. Until she spoke; then it was impossible to ignore her. “Iannek lives the life of the blessed idiot. Wherever he goes, people take him in.”

  “I wouldn’t call myself an idiot,” Iannek said, aggrieved. “Si-Ebana can fight! He took a hand from a dockside lord, and wounded a dozen more. He said they used to take more than the right hand, but in these days the old customs have worn thin.”

  “Those are your own people you’re fighting,” Seti said.

  Iannek shook his head, beard and heavy braids and all. “I’m fighting where the Mare is.”

  “And they cast you out.” Seti prodded the fire till the sparks flew. “They say you’re a good man to have at one’s back. Would you fight at mine, if I asked you?”

  “If you could give me a battle,” Iannek said.

  “Someday we may,” Seti said with a sigh. “I’m thinking I should have stayed with the boats.”

  “You men,” said Sadana. “It’s always about fighting. I thought Egyptians were peaceable people.”

  “Not when there’s a war to fight,” Seti said.

  Sadana snorted in disgust, but did not add to it.

  After a while the two boys—for they must have been near the same headlong age—wandered off. Kemni stayed where he was. He was not so very much older than either of them, and yet he felt as old as the world.

  Sadana was still sitting in the shadows, gazing at the campfire’s flames. “Tell me something,” she said after a while.

  Kemni raised a brow.

  “Are you like them?” she asked. “Do you live to fight?”

  “I think I did once,” he said.

  “Ah,” she said. “Until you discovered that men are mortal. And . . . women.”

  The pain was so sharp and so sudden that he gasped.

  “So now you live to die,” she said, seeing far too clearly for his comfort. “Has it occurred to you that if she knows this, wherever her gods and her faith have taken her, she well may be grieving that you grieve so much?”

  He surged to his feet in a flare of sudden rage. “What do you know of this? What do you know of anything that is between men and women?”

  He had struck to wound, and wound he had. Her face was white in the firelight. Yet she spoke calmly, without the fierce temper that he would have expected. “I know,” she said, “that death is a terrible thing, and death untimely is the worst of all. Yet I also know that she was a great lover of life. She would want you to live, and live in joy.”

  “There is no joy without her.”

  “Not even in memory?”

  “Memory.” He spat the taste of it out of his mouth. “Memory is a cold companion in the nights.”

  “Just so,” she said.

  He stood speechless. She rose to face him. She was as tall as he, if not actually taller. Her body was all sharp lines and spare angles, its curves somewhat too subtle for his taste. He could, if he let himself, remember how surprisingly sweet they could be.

  Never as sweet as the one who was gone. There would never be another like her.

  “I think,” Sadana said, “that you are wallowing. It surprises me rather. I had always taken you for a man of sense.”

  “What sense is there in death?”

  “Very little,” she said, “which is why we wrap it about in ritual—and none more so than you Egyptians.”

  “She was not Egyptian. She had her own rites.”

  “Ah,” said Sadana.

  “Yes, that was pain! But it’s past.”

  “Is it?”

  He would dearly have loved to strike her for what she was doing to him. But he found he could not raise his hand. He knew how deadly she was, like a finely honed blade, trained in all th
e arts of war and the chase. And yet when she stood before his face, she seemed as slender as a grass-stem, and as likely to break.

  That was a weapon, and surely she was aware of it. “What would you have me do?” he demanded of her.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “Truly,” said Sadana. “I want nothing of you but what I would want of any man. That you live; and that you conduct yourself with some semblance of common sense.”

  Laughter startled itself out of him. “Gods! Dear gods. You sound just like her.”

  “Then she was a sensible person.”

  “She could be like a cold dash of seawater in the face,” he said, “or like the wind blowing across the pinnacles of the island where she was born. She had no patience whatever with what she considered to be nonsense. Which was most of what men did.”

  “Most men make very little sense,” Sadana said.

  “And women are different?”

  “Profoundly.” The fire was dying. She knelt to rouse it, feeding it with bits of grass and dried dung. Her concentration on the task was wonderfully complete.

  He could have walked away, and he suspected that she would not have stopped him. But he stayed. He had nowhere else to go but his bed, where the dreams would come crowding in, and the black grief.

  When the fire was burning strong again, she straightened, sitting on her heels. Her plait had fallen forward over her shoulder. It was inky black in this light, but in the sun, he happened to remember, it had a ruddy cast quite unlike the blue-black of his own people, or of Iphikleia’s.

  She was more foreign even than the foreign kings. He knew a little of what she was, from things that Iry and others had told him. He did not understand her at all.

  It did not matter, when he thought about it. There was an ease about her presence, a not quite pleasure in her company. As if they were kin, in some odd way.

  He found that he could contemplate sleep, even the dreams it brought, without quite so much dread as before. After a while he rose and bade her good night. She nodded, making no move to rise herself.

  He paused. “Won’t you sleep?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “I don’t sleep much. I never did.”

  “But if there’s battle tomorrow—”

  “I’ll be awake, aware, and as strong as I ever am.” She tilted her head up, peering at his face above her. “Stop fretting. I’ll sleep in a little while.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise,” she said solemnly.

  He decided to be content with that. But as he slipped into his tent, he paused, and looked back. She had returned to her contemplation of the fire. It was almost as if she stood guard—but over what? Kemni?

  Foolishness. He let the tentflap fall, and groped through familiar darkness to his bed.

  VI

  The ships went on battering Avaris from every branch of the river, till the city was laid waste some distance inland. The Retenu had built a wall of rubble against the unrelenting invasions. It was slow work, tedious and exhausting, fighting for each hand’s breadth of land, against enemies who flatly refused to yield.

  The chariots began at last to have somewhat to do. Outlying lords had gathered their forces and marched on the city. They were a great army, harried by uprisings among the Egyptians until Ahmose had sent out word: Let them come. Let them think us weaker than we are.

  He had, meanwhile, divided his forces on the land and sent some of them out as if to forage—and that they did; but their chief duty was to seem to have dissipated his strength around the landward walls of the city. Only a token few companies of foot, and his chariots, remained in evidence there.

  It was a trap, neatly laid, and Kemni’s chariots were the bait. Iry saw them on the day she rode the Cretan flagship, out of curiosity but also to be a banner for the war. The admiral from Crete had thought of that, and the Cretan woman who was one of Ahmose’s queens. They believed, for whatever reason, that Iry’s presence would hearten the fighters, and perhaps bring them victory.

  She had ridden in boats, of course, all her life. But never on a ship built to sail the sea. It was larger and higher, and it was made of hewn wood, which was precious-rare in Egypt; here, boats were most often made of reeds, or of bundled papyrus.

  She had wandered all over it at first, to the manifest amusement of the crew: slender laughing men with long curling hair, who seemed for some reason to find her delightful. They called her by a name that, Ariana the queen said, meant beautiful lady, and brought her gifts when she had settled under the canopy on the deck: a necklace of translucent shells, a fish carved of bone, an odd silvery pearl that looked, if she held it just so, like the Mare when she pranced and snorted and tormented the stallions.

  It seemed that Ariana and the admiral had seen clearly: she was more than welcome here. And she was safe, as safe as anyone could be in the midst of a war. The flagship kept well back, overseeing the fight. The rest of the ships, greater and lesser, were ranging up and down the river, hurling missiles from the decks, and dispatching companies of fighting men to rampage through the city.

  “We’ll win through to the citadel soon,” Naukrates the admiral said beside her. He never stayed in one place for long; he was up and about, up and down the sides and the prow and the stern, sending messengers in small swift boats or ordering that signals be sent to this ship or that, or to the whole of the fleet. He had paused just then, peering under his hand at the rise of those massive walls. “Yes, we’ll surround it; then we can take it.”

  “If the Retenu will let you,” Iry could not help but say.

  He grinned at her. He was not a young man, but he could be as lighthearted as a boy—they all could, these dancers and sailors from Crete. “Oh, they’ll let us. We’ll sweet-talk them and croon to them and make love to them with our spears and our swords, till they’re begging us to have our will of them.”

  Khayan laughed behind her. He had been remarkably light of spirit himself since they came back from the citadel. She might have expected him to be sunk in sadness, but he had been conducting himself as if a great weight had been lifted from his heart. She had not asked him why; it did not seem a question she should ask.

  He had also proved surprising in another way. Warrior and horseman and charioteer as he was, he was also at ease on the water. That was not like the rest of his people. But then he had been born in Memphis, and his nurse had been Egyptian. He was more like her people than anyone liked to admit, even Khayan himself.

  He stood at her back as he undertook always to do, more at ease here than he was in the camp—maybe because these too were foreigners, and kin from long ago. He was a kind of prince to them, as she understood it, both because he belonged to her, and because he was the son of a great queen of the tribes beyond the eastern horizon.

  Even more than that—here, he would actually rest a hand on her shoulder, a light touch, familiar, and blessed in it; but he would never have done such a thing in front of her own people. She leaned very slightly into it, just enough that he would know she was glad of it.

  Khayan and the admiral were peering under their hands now, but not at the citadel; at the sky. It did have an odd look: dark along the horizon, and streamers of cloud overhead. Clouds were not as rare here in the Lower Kingdom as in the desert realm of the Upper Kingdom.

  Still, these were not like any she had seen before. If they had been closer to the Red Land, she would have wondered if there was a sandstorm coming toward the river.

  She opened her mouth to ask what such a thing could be, but Naukrates spoke before her. He spoke not to either of them, but in a voice pitched to carry. “Signalers! To me.”

  They came from all around the ship, at such speed as they might, for his tone was urgent. “Halt the battle,” he said. “Call in the fleet. Have it put to shore beyond the city, as near as is practicable, but far enough to be safe; then batten the ships. Beg the Pharaoh’s indulgence, and ask that his ships do the same.
Quickly.”

  “Why should he do that?” Iry asked.

  Naukrates looked as if he would snap at her, but remembered, almost too late, who she was. He muttered in his own language, shifting somewhat belatedly to Egyptian. “Yes, he’ll argue, too; he’ll not likely know.”

  “Tell the Great House,” Khayan said to the messenger who went most often to the king, “that a storm is coming. It were best his ships were beached and battened before it strikes.”

  “A storm?” said Iry. “But there are no storms in this country. This isn’t the sea, or your steppe. This is the Lower Kingdom of Egypt.”

  “All the more reason to protect against it,” said Khayan. “In other countries, people know what to do. Here, no one knows. Few of you at all have seen water fall from the sky.”

  “But it can’t be—”

  They were not listening. Naukrates was turning about, testing the wind. His frown deepened the longer he went on. Khayan with his heavy brows and his strong face looked even more forbidding. “If you were at sea,” he said, “you could run ahead of it. But this . . .”

  The oars were out, the ship beating its way down the river amid the gathered fleet. The enemy on the shore had stopped their fighting. Some even clambered to the top of their barricade to stare. A few had raised a ragged cheer. They thought, perhaps, that the fleet was retreating.

  So it was—but not before them.

  Word had gone to the army. As the flagship passed the southward edges of the city, Iry saw the tents fall, the men racing to pack and secure them. The chariots had come in from the field. They guarded the rear as the army began to march. They would join with the fleet downriver, and take what shelter the beached ships could offer, since the city’s walls were still closed to them. The siege-engines they left, in some despair; but the Cretan captains were agreed. There was no time.

  Iry wondered if the king doubted what he had been told, that there was a storm coming, and a deadly one. If it failed to come, they might indeed find that they had lost the city and the war. It could even have been a plot far more clever than the one for which the prince Gebu had died.