The Shepherd Kings

by Judith Tarr

  And yet there was no fear in her. The dark eye was mild. The ears were up, alert. With such an expression, Iry might greet a friend.

  She was no friend to this creature of the outlands. She willed herself to turn away, but her body chose not to obey her.

  The horse slowed as it drew nearer, till it was standing still, just out of reach. Its nostrils flared. It was breathing lightly, and sweating lightly, too, a warm odor, pungent but not unpleasant.

  She had never stood so close to a horse before. She had never wanted to. It was larger than she had expected, but smaller than she had feared: chin-high in the back. Its head rose above her own, longer and wider by far than any gazelle’s.

  Her hand reached out. She did not will it; it did it of itself. The horse did not shy away. Its neck was smooth, flat and warm, and very strong.

  The great head turned. Iry froze. The horse brushed her arm with its nose. Soft nose, not at all harsh as she might have expected, and warm, with a tickle of breath.

  She was not afraid. She was not afraid. This huge creature, this enemy of her people, was gentle, soft in its touch, and strangely amiable. It meant her no harm.

  She still hated horses. But not this one. She stroked its neck and its big flat shoulder, and then, daring greatly, leaned against the curve of the barrel, pressing her face to the warm pungent back. It smelled of grass and dust and horse—a good smell. It comforted her.

  As she rested there, a great knot unraveled in the center of her. She had not even known it was there until it was gone. An ache that had been part of her for longer than she could remember was all smoothed away. It came to her, but slowly, that her eyes had brimmed and overflowed.

  Tears? But whatever for?

  For everything. Her father and her kinsmen dead. Her mother gone all remote and strange. Her world broken and left where it lay: her freedom taken from her, her body relegated to the lot of a slave.

  She had not wept since her father marched out to his death. Now she wept for it all: every moment of the years between, and every grief, and every humiliation. All on the warm and steady shoulder of an animal that belonged to the enemy.

  When she was wept dry, she lifted her head from the horse’s shoulder. The horse blew gently, ruffling her hair. She laughed painfully. “Why,” she said, “you’re like a cat.”

  The horse did not dignify that with a response.

  A horse like a cat. Such a thought. Iry entertained it nonetheless. Cats were divine, everyone knew that. Horses were anything but—except for these with their coats like the moon. Iry stared at her thin brown hand on the pale neck, and looked from that into the soft dark eye. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  The horse did not mew or purr like a cat, and yet she could see well enough what it thought. What was there to understand? The world was as it was. Iry should simply accept it.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t accept. I don’t endure very well, either.”

  Then that was as it was, the horse said with a tilt of the ear. Oh, yes, it was very like a cat. Just as mystifying, and just as maddening. And like a cat, it had wanted her here, for gods knew what reason; and now that it had her here, it would not tell her why. It simply asked her to accept.

  She would not play such a game. Not unless she knew the stakes. She thrust herself away. The horse made no move to stop or keep her.

  She walked down from the hill—quickly, but she did not run. She was proud of that. Nor did the horse follow. It had set her free—for the moment. And if it summoned her again—when it summoned her again . . .

  She turned her mind from that, as she had turned her back on the horse. The house was waiting, both refuge and prison. She was almost glad, just then, to go back to the life of a slave.

  VI

  Khayan came in dusty and sweaty and reeking from his morning with the chariots. He had nothing in mind but a bath and a clean tunic, and a cup of wine maybe, and something other to eat than the endless Egyptian barley bread.

  When the ambush fell on him, he was taken off guard. He reeled against the wall.

  His attacker laughed, sweet as water in the desert. She wrapped strong slender arms about him and trapped him there against the wall, with her breasts against his breast and her hips against his hips and the strongest part of him, just then, rising high between.

  “Barukha!” he gasped. “What are you—”

  “Tormenting you,” she said. For proof, she nibbled his ear. He yelped. She laughed.

  “Should you not be waiting on my mother?” he demanded—not as harshly he wanted; there was too little breath in him.

  “Your mother has maids enough in attendance,” she said. “She’ll not miss me for a while.”

  “And when she does, and if it gets out, and if your father and your brothers hear of it—”

  “My father and my brothers are safe in Avaris,” she said, “waiting on the king. They’ll never know what we do here.” She paused. “Are you a coward, then, my beautiful lord?”

  “I am not!” he burst out; no thought in it, either.

  And at that, too, she laughed. “You are so lovely,” she said, working fingers beneath his robe, weaving them into the curly hairs of his chest. “Who would have thought it? Such a great gawk of a boy you were, all knees and elbows. Your mother’s people made a man of you.”

  He bit his tongue before he betrayed secrets. But in the safety of his mind, he laughed a little bitterly. They would never make a man in the way she meant.

  She knew nothing of the people who had guested him and suffered him to ride with them, afar away in the east. Nor would he be the one to tell her. “You have grown,” he said, for something to fill the silence. “You have grown—beautiful.”

  And so she had. He had known her when she was a child, too young to conceal herself in veils, with no more shape to her than a peeled twig. That image, now, one would never think of in relation to her. She was all, and entirely, a woman.

  He could see it perfectly clearly. She was veiled, oh yes, but those veils were of Egyptian weaving, gauze as fine as spidersilk, revealing far more than they concealed. Her face with its full cheeks, its ripe lips. Her shoulders, so sweetly rounded. Her breasts—such breasts, milk-white beneath the frost-white linen, the rose-red nipples erect, taunting him. His hands had found the rich curve of her hips, the narrow waist above, and below—

  He pulled away. “This is dishonor!”

  “Dishonor is what I say it is,” she said with a suggestion of edged bronze beneath the sweetness. “Come here, my lord, my beautiful one, my lion of the desert. Am I not beautiful? Are you not the most splendid of men?”

  “I’ll be the most thoroughly emasculated of men, if your father gets wind of this.”

  “Oh you coward!” She looked ready to spit on him. She seized him instead, and got a grip on his robe, and with strength that made him stare, rid him of it.

  He stood like a plucked goose, naked but for his loincloth, and caught all flatfooted. “Barukha—”

  “Khayan,” she said, mocking him. “I can scream now, and the guards will come. You know what they’re going to think.”

  “I think you may scream regardless,” he said tightly, “when you have what you want of me.”

  “I might,” she said. “Won’t you gamble? Am I not beautiful?”

  “You are glorious,” he said with a kind of despair.

  “So then,” she said, capturing him again, and somehow she had lost her veils. She was as naked as she had been born, but for the golden bells that swung from her ears. They chimed softly, oh so softly, as she mounted him—even standing there, with him braced against the wall, and no more will or resistance in him than in a stallion broken to the bridle.

  They began so, but they ended in the bed, as was more proper—though what could be proper about a lord’s daughter dancing the oldest dance with a man not her husband, Khayan could not for his life’s sake imagine.

  Once there was no escaping it, Khayan gave up the fight.
Fear made it keener—that much was true. And she was no maiden, either. He was not, by then, astonished to make the discovery. Barukha had always been wild, even as a small big-eyed child trailing after her brothers.

  She had had excellent teaching. But then, so had he. Honor among his mother’s people was a strong thing, as strong as the life that bound blood to bone, but it was not the same honor that his father’s people knew. In that world, a woman would indeed do as this one had done. Had she known it, then? Had she trusted in it, in laying her ambush?

  For a while then, all thought vanished. Her lips, her hands, traced his body in lines of fire. He found her hot secret place, and plunged deep. She gasped; then she laughed. “O beautiful!”

  He had no words. If he had, he might have cursed her—or blessed her. Beautiful. Yes, beautiful. And oh so deadly dangerous.

  ~~~

  They lay in a tangle, breathless. She was laughing—she lived her life in laughter. He was rather perfectly spent. But he could not fall into the sleep that lured him so irresistibly. “Where—” he managed to say. “My servants—”

  “Now you notice,” she said. Her fingers tangled in his hair, tugging lightly, not quite enough to rouse pain. “They’ll be back in a little while, and ready for your bath, too. Don’t you feel marvelous? Aren’t I a wonder?”

  “You are horrifying,” he said. “What do you want of me?”

  “Ah, suspicion.” She rose over him, smiling down, swooping to kiss him: brow, cheeks, lips. “Do you know,” she said, “it’s strange to kiss a bearded man, now. Egyptians all shave their faces.”

  “You’ve been consorting with Egyptians?”

  She grinned, wild as a boy. “Oh! I’ve shocked you.”

  “If your father knew—”

  “My father wants to marry me off to someone dull, suitable, and preferably elderly. Then I’ll bear him a son, and he’ll oblige us all by dying, and my father will have his lands and wealth, and I’ll have a regency to keep me occupied. It’s a sensible plan, don’t you think?”

  “I may be dull,” said Khayan, “and for all I know I’m suitable, but I am not elderly.”

  “No,” she said tenderly, stroking her breasts against his breast till he was nigh mad with the mingling of annoyance and pleasure. “You are not elderly. I’ll not marry you, my beautiful lord. But if you would like to sire my son . . .”

  “What, are you leaving tomorrow to marry some ancient?”

  She laughed. “Not likely! No, I’ll be here for a goodly while. I’m your mother’s servant and her pupil. I’m to learn whatever she can teach.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. It did wonderful things to her breasts. “I asked. She consented. It seemed a useful thing, to know what she knows.”

  His eyes narrowed. He was wide awake, and that was no small feat, either. “You came to serve the goddess?”

  “I came to wait on your mother,” Barukha said. She had not answered him, precisely.

  “And I’m what? Diversion in the afternoons?”

  “If you like,” she said. She curled against him, head cradled on his shoulder. “I’ve always wanted you, ever since I knew what it was to want a man. When you came back from the east with the Mare and her people, and won the lordship from that lout of a brother—what a wonder that was. And what a pleasure. I knew I’d have you then. Whatever it took to win you.”

  “Very little,” he said, more wry than angry. “Tell me your father didn’t have something to do with the delegation of princes who persuaded me to fight for the lordship.”

  “Did he need to?”

  “I’m the foreign woman’s son, the one who went away, who came back on another errand to find his father dying and a war ready to break out over the spoils. I’m hardly the most likely of choices.”

  “He chose you,” she said.

  “How did you know that?”

  “Your mother told me.” She drew idle swirling patterns on his breast and belly. “There were sons ahead of you, and not a few of them, either, and one who was sure he would be lord. But your father named you the heir.”

  “He was half out of his head,” Khayan said sharply. “And he was well out of patience with the vultures flocking to the feast. They were already squabbling, though he was still alive to hear it. I came in, he rose up, he pointed to me. He said, ‘That one! That one is my heir!’ He only did it for spite.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “A man can be both spiteful and wise.”

  “Wise?” Khayan nigh choked on the word. “I had to kill three brothers whom I barely knew, and one of whom I was almost fond, when they challenged me for the lordship. And now I have blood on my hands, and enemies among my own kin. He’d have reckoned that a fair price, I suppose, for going away for so long, and living among my mother’s people.”

  “You didn’t refuse to take the lordship,” she said as her hand wove and spiraled downward. “You could have done that. You could have gone back into the east again once you’d brought the Mare to her priestesses, and been free of it all.”

  “So I could,” he said.

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No,” he said. “I didn’t.”

  “So,” said Barukha.

  “So,” he said. “Tell me what you want of me.”

  “You,” she said.

  “That can’t be all of it,” he said.

  “It’s more than enough.” Her hand closed around his shaft, which was waking again at last. “A widow is allowed to choose her husband. Maybe I’ll choose you.”

  “And if I don’t wish to be chosen?”

  She smiled and did something astonishing with her fingers. He gasped in shock and sudden pleasure. “Imagine this,” she said, “whenever you want it.”

  He could not answer. She had shocked the words out of his head—again. She was a witch, no doubt of it. Her spell was on him, too strong for any escape.

  ~~~

  Khayan was not at all surprised, that evening, to be summoned into his mother’s presence. He had left Barukha with more reluctance than he liked to admit, and gone to the duties that he had taken on himself. When he came back to his rooms, she was of course gone, and the servants were all in attendance as if nothing had ever happened.

  But there was a messenger waiting, a shy boychild who spoke the words in a rapid singsong: “My lord your lady mother summons you at once if you please.”

  Khayan did not please, but he knew better than to refuse such a command. He went as he was, in the robe he had worn for sitting in judgment, with the staff of lordship still in his hand.

  None of the women had settled in what was, he had been assured, the women’s house. That was the province of that strange and very beautiful woman who had been lady of these lands while they were still in the hands of an Egyptian. His own women—such as they were, for he had no wives and precious few concubines; most of those who had ridden with him had belonged to his father, and had nowhere else to go—his own women had taken up residence in a lesser house, but one, they professed, much more to their liking.

  Once he had entered it, he could see why. No wide bare Egyptian spaces here. No walls crawling with vividly colored images: beasts, birds, flowers and trees, and human shapes, too, drawn in the strange twisted way that was the fashion of this country. All the walls in this house were decently curtained, the floors carpeted. The scents were scents of home: incense, musk, roasting mutton. Egyptians were all too fond of complicated and difficult perfumes, and bread and barley beer, and profusions of strangely scented flowers.

  The guards on the door here were women, daughters of the eastern tribe from which he had too lately come. He yearned for it with sudden and fierce intensity. They greeted him with bold eyes and no more respect than they reckoned any male deserved. There was a surprising degree of comfort in that.

  Here, in this world, he was not a lord of creation, or even of these lands. He was the son of his mother. That set him moderately high, but not as high as one of her daughters
.

  She kept him waiting for some little while. That it was to humble him, he had not the slightest doubt. He set himself to be patient; to refrain from any display of temper. He sat in a room hung with dark draperies, but one of them had been looped up and away from a window. There was little enough to see beyond: a covered colonnade, a dazzle of sunlight in a courtyard—brilliant even so close to its setting. The room was cooler than the air without, but warm still.

  Not for the first time, Khayan considered Egyptian dress, or lack thereof. A linen kilt, one’s head and face and body shaved smooth, a wig for grand occasions. Ornaments in profusion to mark a man’s standing in the world. No heavy, scratching wool, no sweat-sodden weight of leather to bear one down.

  Some of the lords in Avaris had succumbed to temptation. Khayan could well see why. The sun could flay skin little accustomed to it, but for idling about under canopies and in palaces, it was a thoroughly sensible garment.

  He ran fingers through his thick curly beard and sighed. Some things a man would be hard pressed to give up. If it meant that he kept the rest . . . well, and so be it.

  A step brought him about. His sister Maryam stood in the doorway. His smile was swift, broad, and altogether unselfconscious.

  She smiled back, warmly. One forgot, then, her unfortunate resemblance to their late father: the solid features, the thick sturdy body. Her eyes were beautiful, and her smile. She had her share of pride, as all his family did, but she tempered it with grace.

  “Ah,” he said. “My favorite sister. And are you keeping well here?”

  “Very well,” she said. “This house is pleasant, I do admit. It’s not so ill after all to have our own place, apart from the Egyptians.”

  “It’s as bad as that?”

  She shrugged. “No one ever conquered them before. They don’t know how to endure it.”

  Khayan frowned, though not at her, nor particularly at what she had said. “That’s true, isn’t it? They hate us. They call us the Hyksos, the Foreign Kings, and the people from Retenu, which is what they call Canaan, and ‘vile Asiatics.’ They won’t call us by our names. Any of them. As if, in refusing to acknowledge our names, they refuse our existence.”