The Shepherd Kings

by Judith Tarr

  He entered a space that though small, seemed as wide as a palace. The linen hangings, the lamps hung or set with cunning intent, balanced light and shadow in ways that were almost magical. There were two couches set facing one another, spread with the faded splendor that Kemni had seen often in the captain’s cabin, and a low table between.

  She reclined on the couch farthest from the entrance. He did not know why he had expected a woman of years perhaps equal to Naukrates’. She had moved like a young woman in her heavy mantle, but the authority of her voice and the arrogance of her carriage had bespoken, to him, both age and power.

  If she was as old as Kemni was himself, he would be astonished. She must be kin to Naukrates: her face was much like his, if softened somewhat by youth and by her sex. Naukrates was a handsome man, in his Cretan fashion. She was a handsome woman, though not, he decided judiciously, beautiful. Her face was too strong for that, her stare too direct, straight and keen as a man’s.

  Though that was no man reclining there, dressed in the fashion of a lady of Crete: long, many-tiered and flounced skirt of richly woven fabric, belted close and high about her narrow waist; and vest of like weaving, trimmed with gold and pearl. It left her breasts not only bare but beautifully and strikingly so, lifted high and arrogant, flaunting them before the world.

  Women in Crete were proud to be women—that, he could well see.

  She studied him with perhaps more intensity than he studied her, though she must have seen all of him that there was to see, outside by the cargo. As if she wanted to know him, or to understand what he was. He understood nothing of her, nor even knew her name; but he was not about to let it trouble him.

  She might be an enemy. He could not tell. He rather doubted that she would betray him to the foreign kings. Not out of any care for embassies or alliances, but because such a course might bring harm to the captain of this ship, and to its crew.

  All this passed in a moment, though it seemed ages long. Kemni sat on the couch opposite her, not waiting to be invited; waiting to see what she would do.

  She did nothing. As if his sitting had been a signal, the cook’s boy brought food and drink, no better or worse than Kemni had dined on with Naukrates. He was hungry. Though neither of them had yet spoken a word, he took bread, broke it, offered her half. She accepted it without visible hesitation.

  They ate in silence as they had begun. It was an odd silence, almost comfortable, as if they were friends and not utter strangers.

  When they had both eaten all that they would, and the winejar had been filled again, but neither moved to pour from it, at last, she spoke. “My name is Iphikleia,” she said—in his own language, and not badly, either.

  “Iphikleia,” he said. Or tried to say. His tongue stumbled from beginning to end—worse than Naukrates’ struggle with Kemni’s own and simpler name. “Mine is Kemni.”

  “Kemeni,” she said, as the captain had. She inclined her head. “You’re not what I expected.”

  His brows rose. “Oh? And what did you expect?”

  “Someone older,” she said.

  “Someone of more power and presence in the world?”

  She shrugged. It did fascinating things to her breasts. “A king chose you. He must have had a reason.”

  “It seemed sufficient to him,” Kemni said. “For me . . . I would rather be in Thebes, hating the foreigners and waiting for the next battle against them.”

  “This is battle,” she said. “Never doubt it.” She shifted suddenly, speaking words that meant nothing, until his lagging mind put sense to them: Cretan words, spoken somewhat slowly, as if she wished to be very clear. “There is no place here for children or fools. I hope for your sake that you are neither.”

  “And are you the captain,” Kemni asked in the same language, “to say who is permitted on this ship?”

  Her eyes widened slightly. “You speak our language well.”

  “Well enough, for an Egyptian.” Kemni met her level dark stare. “Naukrates is your father, yes?”

  “My uncle,” she said. “My mother’s brother.”

  “And he lets you command on his ship?”

  Kemni’s incredulity pricked her pride: he saw her lips tighten. “He is the captain,” she said stiffly. “He sails the ship. I own it.”

  “Do you now?” Kemni had heard of women owning boats before. But a whole trading ship? And this of all that sailed the river of Egypt— “You were in Memphis,” he said. “What were you doing in Memphis?”

  “Is that any affair of yours?”

  This was too subtle for his stumbling Cretan. He shifted back to Egyptian—swiftly and rather pleasantly gratified to see in her the same moment of confusion as she had caused him, when she shifted languages without forewarning. “As long as I serve the king who rules in Thebes, any stranger who has tarried in Memphis is a matter for suspicion. What were you doing in this city? Were you, perhaps, forging alliances with the foreign kings?”

  “You sit on my ship,” she said, low and level. “You accuse me of treachery. If I were what you fancy I am, I would have had you seized and taken long since.”

  “Not if you hoped to learn my king’s secrets,” Kemni said.

  Her lip curled. It was a beautifully molded lip, painted with great artistry—and why he should even care for that, in this that was as keen as any battle he had fought with spear or sword, he could not imagine. “I doubt that you are privy to anything but the few words of a king’s message. A dancing ape could do as well, or a singing bird.”

  “And do apes dance the bulls, then, in the courts of the Double Axe?”

  She had moved before he knew what she had done. Her fingers were strong about his throat, strong and strangely cool, like bands of bronze. Her face filled all his world. Her voice was a whisper, like the hissing of wind in reeds. “Do not ever,” she said. “Do not ever, even in anger, even to vex the likes of me, speak so of that dance. Do you understand me?”

  He understood. But she had stung his pride, and he had no fear of dreams; even dreams that came from the gods. “Was it you I saw, then, taunting the young men, till one died trying to match your leap?”

  She went still. No, that had not been her face; he had known it even as he said it. But close. Very close. As if that one had been her blood kin. The lines were much the same, though hers were not as exquisitely drawn, nor near as beautiful.

  Her hand drew back, slowly, as if she hated to do it, but some force compelled her. “So,” she said in a new tone, a cold tone, but empty of anger. “So. That is who you are. I should have known.”

  “Known what?”

  Of course she did not answer. She returned to her couch, but did not recline there in comfort. She sat as a woman might sit in Egypt, carefully upright. “Be aware,” she said, “that the gods may speak through you, but they add nothing to your wisdom. You will be judged as you are—not simply as the gods’ instrument.”

  “I should hope so,” Kemni said a little sharply.

  She took no notice. “Presume nothing,” she said. “And know this. We have as little need to love your king in the south as the king in the north. And the king in the north stands athwart the gate to the sea. We do whatever we must do, to keep that gate open.”

  “Including betrayal of the king in the south?”

  “If it should suit us,” she said. “At the moment it does not.”

  “Then why were you in Memphis?”

  He pressed too hard; he knew it. But he could not seem to stop. She was driving him half mad: her odd, too-strong beauty, her impudent breasts, her mind that was as keen as a blade and more relentless than any man’s.

  She did not leap again, nor did she threaten him. She said in a voice that might have been thought mild, “We are a trading people. We trade wherever trade is to be had.”

  “In secret? Shrouded from the world?”

  “Not all trade is conducted under the sun. Not even most of it.”

  Kemni felt his eyes widen. “Smuggli
ng—what?”

  “You, for one,” she said with a flash of wit that he had not expected.

  “I was not in Memphis.”

  “Do you ever give up?” she asked him.

  “No,” he said.

  “Then we’ll continue to mistrust one another,” she said. “Go now. Sleep as you can. We sail with the first light of morning.”

  Almost he challenged again her right to say what was and was not done on this ship; but she was, after all, the owner of it. “You must be a very great lady in Crete,” he said.

  “And you are a lord of little enough note in Egypt,” said Iphikleia.

  He laughed. It did not take her aback as he had hoped, but it did lessen a little the twist of scorn in her lips. “And that, princess, is truth. But I do serve my king. That much you can believe.”

  “I do believe it,” she said.

  ~~~

  She let him go then. He would have liked to imagine that he had left her, but when he walked out of that place of light into the dark and odorous night, he did it because she allowed it. He stumbled below and fell into the bunk that had been given him, and lay unmoving, but still wide awake. Not even in front of the king in Thebes had he been pressed so to his limits, or been wrung so dry.

  This was not a king. This was something perhaps more than a king. And a woman, and young, and gods, it had been a long and barren while since he tumbled that pretty maid in Thebes.

  The god Atum, some said, had begotten the world and all creatures in it, one night when his wife denied him her body. Kemni could have done no more or less than a god might, if he could have moved at all. His whole body felt as if it drifted under deep water, his mind wound with confusion like a riverbed with weed, and thoughts darting through it, too quick to catch.

  He knew that he was dreaming. It was not prophecy, not this; no god sent it, nor goddess either. And yet it was as vivid as the living daylight—a paler light than was in Egypt, fully as clear and yet far softer. Light in Egypt was white, so bright it blinded. This was mellow gold. It illumined a great work of hands, a white palace that sprawled and stretched over a strange green country girdled with the sea. Every tower and summit was surmounted with the image and likeness of the bull, his horns that clove the blue-blue sky.

  Kemni flew above them, high as the falcon against the sun. This was his dream-soul, his bird-soul, the ba that would endure past the body’s death; that could fly free when his body slept, and seek out new places, strange places, places that he had never been in waking life. He soared through the blue heaven, looking down on the horned towers; and indeed, from so high, they seemed a great herd of snow-white cattle, jostling and lowing amid the craggy summits of their island.

  Then as one may in dreams, he had plummeted to earth, and somewhere cast off his wings, and become that other face of his soul, the ka, immortal image of his mortal self. He walked through the courts of that white palace. Cold courts, empty courts, courts bereft of life or warmth. On every wall was painted a single image: the double axe that, like the bull’s horns, was sign and seal of royal Crete.

  Round and round he went through that maze of courts, deeper and deeper. There seemed no end to them. Labyrinth, they called that palace: House of the Double Axe. That was not an ill word for a maze, or for paths so convoluted and turns so numerous that the mind, dizzied, lost all sense of where it was or where it had been.

  And yet he persisted, because this was his dream, and he had a great yearning in his belly to see the end of it. That end, when it came, was as he had somehow expected: a great and echoing hall, a forest of pillars, and a march of images in bronze and silver and bright-gleaming gold: great-horned bull, double axe, taking turn on turn down the length of the hall.

  But Kemni was not to pause there. His dream drew him with winged ease past the bulls and the twin-bladed axes, toward the great golden throne, and then past it, through a door cunningly hidden behind the tall chair.

  And there was the heart, the center of the Labyrinth. It was a room of some little size, though small after the hall without. The walls were painted, not with bulls, not with axes, but with men and women, youths and maidens, crowned with garlands, dancing in a long skein. The many lamps that illumined them gave them the semblance of life, so that they seemed to move, to toss their ringleted heads, to whirl in a shimmer of laughter.

  The living form amid them seemed less lively than they. It was a single figure, seated on a low couch, hands resting quietly on knees. It did not move, seemed not even to breathe. Only its eyes were alive. Dark eyes, large in the narrow face, fixed on him with a fierce intensity.

  He knew that face; knew those eyes, and those high impudent breasts, and that body in its tiered skirt and its embroidered vest. As if she had only waited to be recognized, Iphikleia rose to face him. She held out her arms.

  He moved toward her; but stopped, breathing light and fast. What he had taken for armlets of ornate and subtle artistry had stirred and roused and lifted narrow serpent-heads. Forked tongues flicked. Jeweled eyes gleamed.

  Serpents in Egypt were sacred, but they were deadly—as gods could all too often be. No priest or priestess would dare to wear them like jewels, or stroke them as they coiled about her arms, and smile over their heads at Kemni.

  That smile was sweet and terrible. Whatever fear had roused in him, suddenly was gone. In its place was a white and singing exultation. It came from nowhere and everywhere. It took sustenance from her eyes.

  The snakes coiled and slid up her arms, over her shoulders, down about her breasts. They circled them, lifting them briefly even higher, as if to say, See! See how beautiful! And they were beautiful, as beautiful as the moon.

  Twin moons. Twin goblets carved of alabaster, tipped with carnelian. The serpents left them, perhaps with regret, down the sweet curve of her belly, girdling her tiny waist and the sudden flare of her hips. She had, somehow, forsaken her garments. She stood all naked, like an image in ivory. Her only covering was jeweled serpents.

  They joined about her middle, circled it and settled and were still; save one that, wicked, dipped its head down and for an instant, too swift almost to see, kissed the dark-curled thatch that shielded her sex.

  Kemni’s breath caught. He would have given—oh, worlds—to be so blessed. But he could not move. He dared not. He had known when he saw her in the waking world that she was more than simple woman. That would have been difficult to mistake, once he had seen her appear out of the shadows of Memphis and take the ship with the sure hand of one who owned it.

  But this was more. This was a thing of gods and mysteries. Whatever his manly parts cried out to him to do, and they cried out most piteously, his wiser spirit knew that whatever he did, he did only by her sufferance.

  She beckoned. Her smile had warmed to burning. Now, she said, he thought, the air itself murmured.

  He did not take her. She was not one to be taken. He approached her as one approaches the shrine of a goddess, bowed down before her, worshipped as she should justly be worshipped. He drank her like wine. He folded his arms about her and sank down to a floor that had, in the way of dreams, become as soft as water.

  They floated there, drifting on a warm and surging tide. She opened to him. He plunged deep. She sighed like a wave drawing back from the shore. A wave as warm as blood. He sank into it, deeper and deeper, stronger and stronger, hotter, more urgent, till all the world had shrunk to that single awareness.

  It narrowed to a point, a pinprick of blinding light; and burst, and blazed, and consumed him.

  IV

  Kemni woke in the dark, rocked still on the wave that had borne him in the dream. It faded inescapably into waking: the dimness of his own space under the deck, his bunk under him and the planking of the deck just above. From the quality of the dark, it was still night without, but Dancer had come alive—softly, quietly, but unmistakably. Men ran hither and thither, voices called not far above a whisper.

  He crept out blinking into starlight and wan moon
light and the bustle of the ship getting under way. The moon rode low, casting deep shadows over the westward bank of the river. The old tombs of kings rose there like mountains sheathed in silver.

  No one ever sailed at night, unless he had strong reason. Kemni made his careful way toward the captain’s place on the deck.

  Naukrates was not there. His niece Iphikleia stood where he was accustomed to stand, ordering the sailors with the perfect presumption of authority. They obeyed her without a murmur.

  “Where is he?” Kemni demanded of her. He was still more than half asleep, or he would have been more circumspect. But he was rather fond of Naukrates. “You can’t be leaving him behind!”

  She ignored him. Even in his half-dream he could sense the urgency, see how the sailors labored to ready the ship and cast it off.

  “What is this? Why are we going at this hour?”

  Still she paid him no heed. He was not fool enough to strike her, or to shake her till she looked at him. He squatted at her feet, where she must step over him if she moved, or fall.

  The anchor slid up, hand over hand. Softly, almost silently, the oars slid out. Iphikleia raised her hand. The oars poised. Her hand dropped. The oars bit water. Dancer trembled like a live thing, shook herself, and leaped suddenly ahead.

  Kemni clung to the deck at Iphikleia’s feet. He was waking now, roused by the movement of the ship and the wind in his face, damp and almost cool in this hour before the sun’s coming. He was aware, rather sharply, of her presence; of her body in the tiered skirt and the scrap of vest; and above all, that she must not know where his dreams had taken him.

  He drew up his knees and clasped them, and hoped that that would be enough. One thing the woolen robes of the Retenu were good for: concealing a man’s more rampant moments. The Egyptian kilt had no such capacity.

  Dancer was moving quickly now, riding the strong slow current of the Nile. The oarsmen had not slackened once they reached the middle of the stream. This was urgency, as if they fled something.