The Shepherd Kings

by Judith Tarr

  Huy sat where he always sat, in his crisply starched linen kilt that Nefer-Ptah put on him every morning, with his shaven head gleaming in the bright clear light of the room, and his eyes staring placidly into their private dark. “Memory is a gift of the gods,” he said.

  “Memory is a curse,” said Iry.

  She left him after that, none too graciously. Later, she would regret that. Now, she was too irritable to care. It was late in any case, and her one duty of the day was waiting.

  ~~~

  Iry’s mother was still, to everyone in this house, the Lady Nefertem. Her lord was dead, her body enslaved, but like Huy the scribe, she seemed impervious to the world’s changes. Even the foreign lord had found himself unable to oust her from her apartments, though he had been firm enough in claiming her bed. His own women, when they were in the house, had found accommodation elsewhere.

  The rooms were as they had been for as long as Iry could remember. The scent of her mother’s perfume, a rich mingling of musk and flowers, wafted out long before she reached the door. The Nubian on guard in front of it was the same massive eunuch whom her father had given her mother in honor of some forgotten occasion, as huge and impassive as ever, like a guardian carved of gleaming black stone. His eyes glinted on Iry as she approached. He never said anything to her, nor did his face change expression, but his eyes always smiled. She always smiled back.

  But not today. She scowled and stalked past, mad at the world and no good reason why. Her head still ached, and her back had decided to join it; and there was a griping in her belly.

  She was not falling ill. She refused.

  The Lady Nefertem was holding court as she did every day at this hour. She had bathed and been anointed and taken the chair in her receiving-room. No ladies from other estates came now to visit her or to share gossip, but Teti the steward’s wife never failed to be in attendance, and her daughters with her. They babbled like a flock of geese, and not much more brain to share out among them than one goose was gifted with, either.

  They welcomed Iry with shrieks that fair split her skull, and dragged her to sit in the midst of them. Iry never could understand why they were so enamored of her, even when she was in a presentable mood. Probably, she thought sourly, because she was the Lady Nefertem’s daughter. That counted for something in this house, foreign conquerors or no.

  That lady had acknowledged Iry’s coming with a regal inclination of the head, and gone on calmly addressing the steward’s wife. When the daughters’ uproar had died down, Iry was able at last to make some sense of it. “Yes, this unguent is perfectly wonderful for the skin. Here, try a bit of it. Soft, yes?”

  “As a baby’s behind,” said Tawit, who was not precisely genteel. Unlike her daughters, she knew it, accepted it, and let it be. She studied her plump brown hand next to the Lady Nefertem’s slender ivory one, and sighed. “I swear, my lady, you look younger every year. That’s the gods’ gift, I’m sure; or I’d be a beauty, too, for all the potions I’ve slathered on my face.”

  Lady Nefertem smiled faintly—the most expression she ever allowed herself. Smiles, as she frequently admonished Iry, caused wrinkles, and wrinkles were not to be borne.

  Tawit went on robustly, not even slightly deterred by the lady’s silence. “Ah well, my lady, we’re as the gods made us. These bones can be content with that.”

  Tawit’s daughters were all named for beauty: Nefertem after the lady, Nefertiri, Mut-Nefer, Neferure, Nefer-Maat. Nefer-Maat, the youngest, pinched Iry’s arm till she gasped, and said in a tone of great annoyance, “Iry! You aren’t listening!’’'’

  “She is now,” said Mut-Nefer with a little too much relish. “Iry, haven’t you heard? We have a new lord.”

  “Should I care?” Iry wanted to know.

  “I’d think you’d want to,” Mut-Nefer said.

  Iry sighed in exasperation. “It’s Iannek, then.”

  “Oh, no,” said Nefertem-the-younger. “Not hardly.”

  “Not hardly,” her youngest sister echoed her, giggling and clapping her hands at her own wit.

  Mut-Nefer rolled her eyes at them both. “No, it’s not Iannek. He’s much too young. It’s someone else—an older brother. He’s been abroad, they say. Away far away, beyond even the foreigners’ own country.”

  “Really?” In spite of her determination not to be interested, no, not in the slightest, Iry could not help but state the obvious. “If he’s been away, how could he have influenced the king and his ministers, and won his father’s holdings?”

  “That’s the wonder of it,” Mut-Nefer said. “And the foreignness, too. He fought for it.”

  “Fought for it?”

  Mut-Nefer grinned at Iry’s incredulity. “Yes. He came back, and another brother was claiming the inheritance. But his father chose him, and the king agreed with it. The other brother challenged, of course—how could he avoid it? The king had to let them settle it by combat. He won. He killed the other one and took the lordship.”

  “No,” Iry said.

  “Oh yes,” said Mut-Nefer. “That’s how they do it.”

  “Maybe they’ll all start fighting at once, then, and kill each other off,” Iry said nastily.

  “You are bloody-minded today,” Mut-Nefer said. Her sisters giggled in chorus.

  Silly nits. Iry wished her head would stop pounding and her belly would stop cramping. As if it could matter at all which of the Retenu called himself master of this place—and therefore of Iry. They were all the same. Foreigners. They did not belong in Egypt. They did not, before the gods, belong in the world.

  III

  No wonder that Iry had been so conspicuously ill. At last and rather excessively late, her woman’s courses had come upon her.

  She was first and most powerfully aware of it when she went to rise from the cushion she had been sitting on, and reeled dizzily. Nefer-Maat, beside her, let out a little shriek. “Iry! You’re bleeding!”

  “Of course I’m not bleeding!” she said crossly, till Nefer-Maat snatched up the cushion and thrust it in her face. Then she could hardly deny the evidence; it was darker than heart’s blood, a dark and secret thing, a thing she suddenly—overwhelmingly—did not want.

  But there was no denying it. Late, unlooked for, and with an unwarranted amount of pain and sheer irritability, Iry had become a woman.

  If she had had any sense at all, she would have recognized it when it began, and seen to it before it became the talk of the house. The new lord was a great matter for speculation, but Iry was an actual, living presence. Her cherished anonymity and frequent invisibility was, she hoped briefly, gone.

  The women made a great fuss over her, with pads and possets, petting and pampering. Worst of all, the Lady Nefertem was roused to action. For the first time in recent memory, she not only recalled Iry’s existence, she remembered that Iry was her daughter.

  The Lady Nefertem as distant, regal personage was more comforting than not. She sat in the heart of the house as the goddess Isis sat in the heavens, remote and vaguely benevolent. The Lady Nefertem as mother was frankly alarming. She hovered. She fretted. She summoned flocks of servants to stand about and yawn and grin at Iry behind the lady’s back.

  Iry wanted nothing more than to crawl into shelter like a wounded cat and nurse her misery till it was gone. But the Lady Nefertem was having none of that. She took the place of honor beside her own bed, in which she had insisted that Iry be laid, and with her own fine white hands applied cooling cloths to Iry’s brow.

  The cloths were clammy, and the herbs and spices in which they had been steeped were cloyingly potent. Even at that, they were better than the potion, which, from the taste, must be made of ox-dung and river water. Iry gagged and flung it across the room.

  The cup, her mother’s best one, carved of chalcedony and rimmed with gold, clattered to the floor but did not—mercifully—break. The horrid concoction sprayed wide. The great bulk of it found purchase on the hem of a heavy woolen robe.

  Th
e whole roomful of chattering women fell abruptly silent. A hawk among the pigeons, Iry thought. A lion among the gazelles. A great broad-shouldered black-bearded man with a sword at his side and a staff in his hand, and eyes—such eyes—

  The Retenu were dark men, bigger and hairier than Egyptians, but dark-eyed as any human creature should be. This one—she thought of the hawk again, and of the lion. His eyes were light, almost gold. They were fixed on her, and she knew that he was perfectly aware of the stain on his hem and the stench that wafted up from it. But he was, just then, much more interested in the perpetrator of the stain.

  He wanted to kill her, she supposed. Or rape her. Retenu always wanted to do one or the other. At the moment she was too intensely annoyed to care. “What are you doing here?” she demanded—forgetting every scrap of discretion she had learned in ten years of slavery, and forgetting the audience, too.

  He raised a brow. He had a nose like the curve of the new moon, or like a falcon’s beak. What the rest of his face was like, she could not tell. His beard was thick, and grew high up on his cheeks. Maybe he was smiling. Maybe his lips were set in a thin line. There was no way to see.

  But his eyes—those smiled. Mocking her. “What am I doing here?” he echoed in reasonably passable Egyptian. “Serving as a target for practice, it seems. Shall I move a little closer? Would you like another missile?”

  That pricked her temper even more deeply than before. “Who are you? How dare you come in here?”

  “How dare I indeed,” he said, with a glance that took in the whole of the room and everyone in it—even the Lady Nefertem mute, staring. At that one, he paused. Both brows went up. The tawny eyes went briefly, truly gold, as if dazzled by the sun.

  He inclined his arrogant head to her, as he would never have dreamed of doing to Iry, and said in a voice much softened and gentled, “I beg your pardon, madam.” As smoothly then as a servant in a palace, he backed through the door and drew it shut, with him on the other side of it.

  Once he was gone, the room erupted. Iry clapped hands over her ears and buried herself in sheets and cushions. But there was still no escaping the uproar, or the hands that plucked her out.

  They belonged to several of the five Beauties, and every one of them seemed to be shrieking at the top of her strong young lungs. Out of the racket, she managed to distinguish one intelligible fragment: “Iry! What was that?”

  Iry shook herself free and struggled to her feet. Against such numbers, she needed every advantage she could get. One of those was height: she was a good handbreadth taller than any of them. “That was one of the Retenu. What was he doing here? He should have been plaguing Teti, not ogling the women!”

  “The new lord must have sent him,” Mut-Nefer said. “That was a nobleman’s dress, and a fine sword, too. And that staff—he’s no servant, that one. Now he’ll be telling the lord what a sharp-tongued slavegirl he has. If you escape with only a whipping, you’ll be fortunate.”

  “Hush,” Tawit admonished her daughter. “Let’s not be prophesying trouble before it falls on us. If there’s one Retenu in the house, you can wager there’s a whole pack to follow. We’d best be ready for them.”

  That shook them all out of their silliness—though it could hardly silence them. Tawit gathered them together like a goose her goslings and herded them mercifully out.

  There was still the Lady Nefertem, and those of the maids who had nothing to do but wait on her. The lady had not moved through all the fuss and flutter, nor seemed to take particular notice of the invader past that first, incredulous stare. She had a gift of not seeing what she did not wish to see. It must serve her strangely in the lord’s bed. It spared her a great deal of suffering otherwise, as far as Iry could tell.

  Iry had no such luxury. She could stay here; her mother would pamper her and cosset her and drive her mad, but she would not have to face another pack of invaders. A new lord—the old one had been tolerable only in his frequent absences. What if this new one was worse?

  She had to know. She escaped easily enough, between her mother’s lingering silence and the maids’ incapacity to do more than stand and gape at whatever passed by them.

  ~~~

  The house was in mighty disarray. An army of Retenu had invaded it, with no warning but itself; no messenger had come ahead of it.

  That was deliberate, Iry was sure. A truly canny lord would do such a thing to test his steward; to see what his house was like when he was not there to oversee it.

  Teti could be lazy and he was not entirely honest, but he kept the house in decent order. It was clean, the storehouses were as full as they could be in this season, the servants found their places soon enough and bent themselves to duties that they had hoped to be free of for yet a while.

  Iry’s place was between kitchen and banqueting hall, wherever she happened to be needed. In taking herself to it, she managed to go the long way about. The men’s quarters were humming, as she had expected; there were Retenu everywhere, beards and robes and voices speaking their barbaric tongue. She spoke it, though she did not like to. They were saying nothing much worth listening to, except the lord’s name: Khayan. And that he was there; he had not sent them ahead, he had come himself.

  And he had horses. A whole herd of them, whom Teti was beside himself to find housing for. One of the Retenu, as Iry slipped past, said in exasperation, “Fool of an Egyptian! What’s that field we rode past on the way in? It will do.”

  “That is the eastern barley field,” Teti protested. “If we lose that, we’ll lose the fifth part of our harvest.”

  “Now it is the field for the horses,” the Retenu said. “Tubal, see to it.”

  Another Retenu dipped his head and ran to do as he was bidden. Teti looked ready to shriek aloud, but clearly remembered where he was and who faced him. He swallowed the cry, though his face twisted; and turned his back on the foreigner; and betook himself elsewhere.

  So too did Iry. She did not want to see the horses, but somehow the way she chose brought her to her vantage atop the gate. The herd had been kept contained just outside of it, warded by men in chariots, and by something else that she had not seen before, nor imagined: men riding on horses. Sitting on their backs. Sending them hither and yon as if they had been hounds on a lead.

  She stood astonished in the hard bright sunlight, forgetting to crouch low lest she be seen. But no one looked up or called out. The herdsmen were occupied with the horses.

  So many horses. The old lord had had a number of them, as great lords did; but most of the beasts that had come with him on his visits were asses. Many, many long-eared asses to draw chariots and bear burdens and walk in caravans.

  This new lord had only horses. Some were familiar in color and shape, red or brown or dun. But those that ran in the center, like a current of clear water in a mud-sullied river, were the color of clouds and mist and rare, precious rain: white, silver, grey. Some were dappled like the moon. Some were dark, but sheened with silver.

  They ran together, surging like wind-ripples on the river, pale manes streaming. Iry had never seen anything so strange, or so strangely beautiful. She watched them all the way down the road and over the hill to the eastern field. Even after they were gone, she stayed where she was.

  She hated horses. Her cousin Kemni had died under trampling hooves, broken by the wheels of chariots. She had seen his body when they brought it back. The embalmers had done what they could, but there was no disguising how broken his limbs had been, or how his skull had shattered. There had been no face to bid farewell to, even as shriveled as the embalming would have made it.

  Still she could not forget these horses. Horses of the moon; horses of cloud and rain. They were not of earth as the others were. They were of another country. The gods’ country, maybe, though not such gods as she had ever known.

  It was a long while before she came down from the gate. Even then she might not have left, but she heard rough male voices and the tramping of booted feet. The new lord wa
s posting a guard on the wall. She slipped around and down by another way, and came at last to her proper and servile place.

  ~~~

  The new lord had brought a great riding with him, and his own cooks and servitors, too, which put Rahotep the cook severely out of countenance. “I share my kitchen with no one,” he declared in the face of the robed and portly Retenu who would have made himself lord of the hearth and the bread-ovens. “Find yourself another kingdom. This is mine.”

  The lord’s cook retreated in such order as he might. Maybe he would find a place in the women’s house. Or he would settle to a life of ease, and take it as a gift of the gods.

  Once freed of the interloper, Rahotep returned to what he had been doing, which was the preparation of a feast for the new lord and his following. They were all men, he was assured. “But there are women coming,” said one of the house servants, come in late and breathless and full of news. “A whole houseful of them.”

  “What, are they pausing here on their way to Memphis?” Nefer-Ptah inquired. She was not one of those whose place was in the kitchen, but everyone passed through there if she could; all news came there, and every rumor in that part of the Delta.

  “They’re not pausing,” the servant said. “They’re staying.”

  “No,” said one of the undercooks, who had finished preparing a brace of fine geese and set them in the oven to roast, and taken a few moments’ rest. “What would they stay here for?”

  “They’re all staying,” the house-servant said. “The lord’s making this his chief estate.”

  “What’s he doing that for?” Nefer-Ptah demanded, voicing Iry’s own thought. “This isn’t the least of his holdings, but it’s far from the greatest, either. Why would he want to stay here?”

  The servant shrugged. “That’s what they’re saying. He wants to live here.”

  “He’s mad,” Nefer-Ptah said.

  Iry considered taking umbrage, but she rather agreed. If the lord made his home here—farewell to freedom, and to long easy seasons while the lord made his home elsewhere. Even if he was out and about his lands, serving his king, fighting in wars, his women would be here, meddling, giving orders and treating the servants like—gods, like servants.