The Shepherd Kings

by Judith Tarr

  However far away a woman’s mind might wander, her body could not ignore forever the persistence of touch. Her skin warmed under the drift of gauze. Her nipples tautened. Did her breath quicken? Of that he could not be certain.

  He rose over her. She was as remote as ever. Her wig had not moved in all this while. Was it perhaps, after all, her own glossy black hair?

  The paint masked her face in odd ways: made her eyes long and strange, shaped her lips into a perfect bow. It was like kissing a painted image, and yet the flesh beneath was warm. “Lady,” he said in her own language, breathing the word. “Lady, you are beautiful.”

  Beauty without life; without living response. He would rouse it. He made a vow to himself. She would wake and see him, and know him for her lord.

  Arrogance. He laughed suddenly, dropped to the bed beside her and propped himself on his elbow and said, as if she would respond, “My father never touched you, did he?”

  To his astonishment she replied, “He never dared.”

  “So,” said Khayan. “You’re not a lifeless thing.”

  She did not move, did not glance at him. But her words were clear enough. “You will never master the Two Lands.”

  “I’ll be content to master you, lady.”

  “You may try,” she said.

  “Did he talk to you, too?”

  “In his own language,” she said.

  “Did you answer?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Are you sorry I can understand you?”

  “They say you were far away, living among a people we never knew. Where did you learn to speak the language of the one true people?”

  “I was born in Memphis,” he said. “My nurse was Egyptian.”

  “Pity,” she said.

  “It did corrupt me,” he said.

  How strange to be lying here naked beside the most beautiful woman he had seen in his life, and she not moving, not a muscle, except to speak in that soft, clear voice. He had gathered, from words dropped here and there, that her beauty masked a mind of no particular acuity or wit. Lying here, listening to her, he rather doubted it. It was not a mind like other minds—but it was keen enough.

  She moved suddenly, taking him off guard. She rose over him as, a little before, he had risen over her. Her hair hung down, hovering just above his cheeks. Her white breasts swayed. Her eyes were alive, glittering like the eyes of the cobra that to these people was sacred.

  The cobra was a goddess. She protected her people. Some she devoured—but that was the way of divinity.

  The Lady Nefertem raked long painted nails down his cheek, his throat, his breast. He lay utterly still.

  She kissed him. Her kiss was fire. Songs sang of such things. He had never believed in them. Kisses were wet, warm, and yes, arousing. But fire?

  This was fire. It licked his limbs with pleasure close to pain. It brought his rod springing erect, so sudden and fierce that he gasped.

  Her fingers closed about it. Bands of heated bronze, holding it close, not tight, but with a hint, a glimmer of cruel strength.

  She smiled. Her smile was sweet, remote, and not a little mad. “Now who is master here?” she asked him.

  “Why, you are,” he said, and not terribly unwillingly, either. “But out there, where the world can see, I am. For that world’s sake, I can’t let you rule in this house. I hope you can understand.”

  “What is there to understand?” Her fingers tightened on his rod. He set his teeth. She began to stroke him, slowly, with skill to find each separate point of pleasure or pain.

  “You are not my master,” she said. “You are not master in the Two Lands. We will cast you out, foreigner: you and all your kind.”

  “I could have you put to death for that,” he said—gasped, for she was doing marvelous, terrible things with those clever fingers.

  She laughed. It was true laughter, sweet and achingly pure. “You? You could never harm a woman.”

  “But certain of my men could.”

  “Surely,” she said. “And you would never set them on me. Your heart is soft, foreigner. You have no cruelty in you.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I know you very well indeed,” she said. Stroking, stroking; sending ripples through his body, till he was near convulsed—just on the edge of bursting, but never, quite, past it.

  A woman could still, after a fashion, think, even in the midst of this oldest of dances. With what little was left of his wits, Khayan regretted that part at least of being a man. He was entirely in this woman’s power, and well she knew it.

  Maybe she thought to break him so. If he had been as other men of his people, so might she have done. But he was his mother’s son. He had learned these arts in the arms of women more skilled and colder-hearted than this one could begin to be. As they had taught him, he gave himself up to it; he let himself be mastered. So he protected his spirit; so he kept his heart whole, though she did with his body as she would.

  At last she let him go—a release so welcome that he groaned aloud. She laughed at him, sweet rippling laughter like water running.

  He astonished her: he laughed with her. She fell silent, staring. He would dearly have loved to collapse into sleep, but that would not be wise at all. He rose—staggering slightly, which he hoped but doubted she would not see—and smiled at her. “You are rather skillful,” he said. “For an Egyptian.”

  He gathered up his clothing, shrugged into the robe and bundled the rest under his arm, and left her there. What she was thinking, he did not know, nor overmuch care.

  VIII

  When Khayan had bathed and put on fresh garments, he summoned Teti the steward. The man came with reasonable dispatch, as he should have done: he would have been waiting with the rest in the hall of judgment for Khayan to begin the day’s deliberations.

  Khayan would do that, oh yes. But first he had a task for his steward.

  Teti was a small man as all Egyptians were. Unlike some who seemed to bake and dry in the desert heat till they left little for the embalmers to do when they died, he was in good flesh, firm rather than soft, with a solid belly and broad bull’s shoulders. He walked with authority, and carried himself as one who matters in the world.

  There was in fact a remarkable lack of servility in this place. The Egyptians called it the house of the Sun Ascendant, a grand name for a minor lord’s holding. Certainly its people conducted themselves as if they believed in it.

  Khayan sat in the chair that he had made his own, conspicuously at his ease, and regarded the steward of the Sun Ascendant.

  The steward waited patiently. He had served three lords now, two of them foreigners, and remained alive, unmaimed, and in full possession of his office. He had well learned the virtue of silence.

  “Teti,” Khayan said. “You will do a thing for me.”

  The steward bowed his head in its heavy wig. His collar glittered. It was a massive thing, made all of beads, blue and white and green and red, and here and there a gleam of gold.

  “You will go,” said Khayan, “and take the woman Nefertem, and conduct her to my lady mother. This is a gift, you will tell her, to do with as she pleases.”

  Teti had been still before, but not as still as this. His cheeks had gone grey. Khayan saw well his heart’s trouble. He was servant to this master, had accepted this lordship and therefore bound himself in obedience to it. And yet he had an older loyalty, and a deeper awe.

  Khayan had no intention of sparing him this. A lord could not be a lord without his people’s obedience. That lesson he had learned from his childhood.

  “Go,” he said. “See that it is done.”

  Teti bowed again, so low that Khayan could not see his face at all. He backed out so, as if from a king.

  Khayan pondered briefly the wisdom of sending one of his own men to be certain that the Egyptian obeyed. But that would confess to weakness. He rose instead, stretched the knots and stiffness out of his body, and went to judge whatever disputes
had need of his judgment.

  ~~~

  Teti came into the hall while Khayan was in the midst of a lengthy, tedious, and profoundly confusing debate between two farmers over the value of an ox. It was not that either of them actually owned the ox, so much as that they appeared to share it with a third farmer, who was present but not involved in the dispute. As far as he could understand, they were perfectly agreed as to who had the use of it at which time and for what purpose. The disagreement seemed to have something to do with who was to feed the ox, and who was to repair its stable, which was in need of a new roof. But it was all tangled up in a great number of other things, from the marriage of one man’s daughter to the shrewishness of their neighbor’s wife.

  Khayan would dearly have loved to halt the proceedings, send the fools away, and hear Teti’s news, if there was any. But that was not a lordly thing to do. However long the disputants driveled on, he must hear them out. Then he must, as best he could, issue a judgment.

  Teti had taken his proper place beside and somewhat behind Khayan’s chair, which by accident or design set him just out of Khayan’s sight. Khayan could feel him there, the heat of his presence; hear the soft hiss of his breath.

  The dispute went on and on. The sharing of the ox and the repair of its stable had delayed the wedding of one of the farmers’ daughters. Why that should be so, was still not entirely clear. It seemed she did not wish to marry while her father was embroiled in a quarrel with the uncle of her intended.

  Khayan’s head had begun to ache. As feuds went, this one was remarkably bloodless, but it was also remarkably complicated. And the shadows marched across the floor of the hall, growing longer and ever longer. He thought he could catch a hint of fragrance: meat roasting, bread baking for the daymeal.

  At last, as the light shifted over toward the mellower gold of sunset, Khayan struck his staff on the floor. The babble of argument barely slowed. He rose. He did not lift his voice, but he made certain that it could be heard. “I have heard enough.”

  He held his breath. They could ignore him, easily. But something in his voice brought them up short and stilled them, so that they turned all in a gaggle and stared at him.

  He let his breath out slowly. “Very well,” he said. “You will continue to divide the use of the ox according to your older agreement. You will feed him on alternate days. You will both repair his stable. And,” he said, “your children will wed on the next day of good omen.”

  “But that is tomorrow!” one of them gasped—the girl’s father, Khayan seemed to recall.

  Khayan smiled. “Then you had best get to it, had you not?”

  That rid him of them, and handily. Any others who waited must wait another day; it was far too late to hear them. Khayan beckoned to Teti. “You come,” he said. The rest he left behind, all but the one of his young fighting men whose turn it was on guard.

  On most days Khayan would have gone back to his rooms to prepare for the daymeal, but he had had enough for the moment of roofs and walls. He went to the stable instead.

  That might not have been the wisest choice of places to take an Egyptian—they hated horses, and feared them unreasonably—but Khayan’s mood was too contrary to care. There in the open sandy courts, in the smell of horses and cut fodder, he could breathe; he could think.

  He went in among his own horses, his team of duns that he had bred and raised and broken to the yoke himself. They whickered at his coming, there in the space that they shared, crowding together to take the bits of barley cake that he had brought. He smoothed forelocks, rubbed broad brows, murmured into ears that cocked to catch his words. The language he spoke to them was the language of an older people than his father’s, the language of the eastern tribes.

  Almost he forgot the Egyptian hovering in the doorway and quaking when the horses glanced at him, but waiting doggedly upon his lord’s pleasure. He turned in the embrace of his stallions, and saw himself for a moment as an Egyptian must see him: surrounded by monstrous creatures and nigh overwhelmed.

  The vision made him smile. “So tell me,” he said more warmly than he might have done in other company. “Did she go quietly?”

  Teti’s lips were tight. He was angry, and taking care that Khayan knew it. “Yes, my lord,” he said. “She went quietly.”

  “Tell me,” Khayan said.

  A more taciturn man might have set his lips and refused, but Teti had no such gift of restraint. He hated to speak to this foreigner, he made it clear, but speak he did. “She made no protest,” he said. “She bowed her head and did as you bade her through me.”

  “And when she came to my mother?”

  “I did not go in,” Teti said severely. “I sent her with your lady mother’s guards.”

  Khayan’s teeth clicked together. Ah: revenge. It was petty, but it must be sweet.

  Let him enjoy it. Khayan would go later, and see how that haughty lady fared among women of her own ilk, if not of her own tribe and nation. “You’ve done well,” Khayan said to Teti. “You may go.”

  The man departed with visible relief. Khayan lingered in the warmth of his horses’ regard. Moon had a tangle in his mane; Star had cut his foot. Khayan tended them with care and without haste, for the simple pleasure of it.

  But his mind could not stop spinning. He was born in this country, under this immensity of sky. He loved it. He had yearned for it in his years away, for all the beauty of the eastern lands, for all that they had bred his mother and her mothers before her. When he came back to Egypt, he had wept for joy.

  Its people hated him and all his kind. A hundred years they had been in Egypt, and Egypt had never forgiven, never forgotten. No foreign king had ever sat the throne of Egypt, until Salitis of Retenu. Every king after him had been hated the more.

  “And yet we are solid here,” Khayan said to his stallions. “We’ve taken root. We belong here.”

  They who had been foaled in the broad grasslands of the east had no care for such things. Horses did not take root. Horses went where the good grazing was, and where their master wished to be. The grazing here was good indeed, and he was here. In the way of horses, they were content.

  ~~~

  Khayan did not, that night, go to his mother or inquire after the welfare of his gift. Let them settle with one another, he reflected as he sat to the daymeal with the men of the house. There was a guest this evening: one who greeted him with a whoop and a rib-cracking embrace.

  “Iannek!” he said when he could speak again. “When did you come here?”

  His brother grinned at him. “Just now,” he said, “and yes, the king let me go. He was tired of my moping about, he said. He told me to go somewhere where I’d learn to smile again.”

  “Here?”

  Khayan must have sounded more dubious than he knew. Iannek slapped his shoulder, not lightly, and laughed. “What can I say, brother? I missed your somber glower, your foreboding frowns, your—”

  “So,” Khayan said. “Who was she this time?”

  Iannek’s face fell, betraying him, even as he said, “Who was she? What makes you think it was a woman?”

  “Because I know you,” Khayan said. “If you could keep it sheathed even half of the time, you’d be a much happier man.”

  “I’d rest better,” Iannek admitted. “But happier? No, brother. Not that.”

  “So who was she?”

  Iannek ducked his head and mumbled it. But Khayan’s ears were keen. “Prince Kastan’s seventh wife. But,” he was swift to add, “he hadn’t even looked at her since their wedding was over, and his other wives were cruel to her, and—”

  “You were cuckolding the king’s favorite brother?” Khayan could not say he was surprised. What did amaze him— “And you were allowed to go away free and unmaimed?”

  “Well,” said Iannek. “I left quickly. If you take my meaning.”

  “You were encouraged to make yourself scarce while the king pretended to be unaware of you.” Khayan sighed. “He must love you. He�
�d never do this for another man.”

  “It’s my charming smile,” Iannek said. “He says I remind him of himself when he was younger.”

  “He was never that bad,” Khayan said, with a growl in it. “So now he’s inflicted you on me. What does he want me to do with you, besides clip your wings?”

  Iannek shrugged. “Ignore me? I’ll behave myself.”

  “Swear to it.”

  “Well,” said Iannek. “I’ll try.”

  “Swear,” said Khayan.

  Iannek wriggled and muttered and fussed, but Khayan was unrelenting. At last the young fool said, “I swear.”

  “Good,” said Khayan, no doubt to his brother’s great relief. “Come, dinner is waiting. Sit by me; tell me all the gossip from court.”

  Iannek eyed him sidelong, maybe looking for further signs of lordly sternness, maybe incredulous that Khayan of all people should care for court gossip. Khayan did not, not really; but a lord had to know who was feuding with whom near the king. That much he had learned while he was himself at court.

  Whatever he thought of the matter, Iannek was willing enough to share roast ox and stewed duck, and more than willing to chatter on about this lord and that, this feud, that alliance, so-and-so married into thus-and-so’s family, some young idiot dead in a knife-fight in the streets of Avaris, and now half the young idiots at court were hot to follow his example.

  “Delightful,” Khayan said to that. “They’ll kill each other off, and spare the rest of us the trouble.”

  “Oh, no,” said Iannek. “They’re not killing one another. They’re hunting Egyptians. Egyptians killed Samiel. So now everybody’s out to get revenge.”

  “I’m surprised they aren’t hunting in native coverts,” Khayan said dryly.

  “Oh, they’re doing that, too,” Iannek said. “But mostly they go to the towns, or even down to Memphis. Some of them are bringing back the right hands of their kills, like old Egyptian warriors.”