The Shepherd Kings

by Judith Tarr

  “What, not their rods, too?”

  Iannek stared.

  Khayan shook his head. “They all must be as ignorant as you. The old Egyptians would bring back the right hand and the rod—so that the king knew it was a man indeed that had been killed, and not a woman.”

  “That’s barbaric,” Iannek said.

  “Yes,” said Khayan.

  Iannek was immune to subtlety, or to irony either. “Well, and a hand is enough, these days. It’s quite a fashion in some circles. Not mine,” he was quick to add. “I’m not a great one for hunting men.”

  “That’s well,” Khayan said. “Nor am I. War is one thing. This—the Egyptians hate us enough as it is. This will tip them straight over into rebellion.”

  “Ah,” said Iannek with a tilt of the head, “rebellion. They’re always rebelling. We’ll put them down, we always do. Even the time they took Avaris. That will give us a nice war.”

  Khayan shook his head. There was no reasoning with a mind as simple as this, and little profit in trying. He applied himself to his cup and bowl and plate, while Iannek chattered on, wandering mercifully away from tales of Egyptians hunted like animals, toward the safer ground of yet another family feud.

  ~~~

  Khayan’s men were not in fact any older than the pack of young rowdies that ran with Iannek, but they were horribly dull in comparison. Khayan had chosen them for their sobriety and self-discipline—not easy virtues for any young horseman—and for their skill with horses. If he was to increase his herds, and that on Egyptian land, with Egyptian labor as much as might be, he needed men who could conduct themselves with restraint.

  No such requirement accompanied Iannek’s following. Most, from what Khayan could gather, had attached themselves to the young lord for a lark, or because, like him, they had reason to vanish for a while from the king’s city. They were a restless, troublesome lot, idle and fond of brawling.

  When they discovered that the wine was not free for the taking, and the beer was handed out at the kitchen door by a large and humorless personage who was immune to every threat, from pleading to outright force, they howled like dogs. They actually tried to storm the storehouses—only to find themselves face to face with grim men and sharp spears.

  None of the maids was safe from them. Khayan had, as soon as Iannek was well settled, seen that they were moved into his mother’s house of nights, but these young rakehells were at them from dawn till dusk. Never an hour passed, it seemed, but that he heard a shriek and a scuffle, and saw a bruised and tousled girl running from a bellowing male. Or he would walk around a corner and stumble into a pair of them going at it with good will, maid as well as man. That he never tried to stop; but the other roused his temper, sometimes to an injudicious degree.

  He had to make order in this house, if he was to continue ruling it. And had he not thought the same of the Lady Nefertem? He had hardly dealt with her when this new plague of disorder fell upon him.

  Maybe she had cursed him, at that. Egyptians were great masters of magic, everyone said so. Not that he had ever seen anything more wondrous than a charlatan in the market of Memphis, turning staves into serpents and water into wine. Still, he had not been in the temples or seen the great rites of which people whispered. Who knew what that lady might have done? Her will was as remarkable as her beauty, and she hated his kind with a perfect hate.

  If that was so, then she was laughing at him now. He could not cast these ramping fools into his mother’s clutches, no matter how he might be tempted. He could send them away—but Iannek was his brother, and his burden as lord of the house.

  He would bear the burden somehow. He pondered it as he rode out of a morning—could it be a mere hand of days since he spoke with his mother? It seemed a great deal longer.

  He had intended to ride out past the horses’ fields, to ride the eastern border of these lands and visit the village that sat between this estate and that of the Oryx, which belonged still to an Egyptian lord. That one kept to himself, Khayan had been given to understand, and did not either vex or commune with his overlords. He had beautiful daughters, it was said, and sons even more beautiful, and they were all kept as close as royal ladies.

  One day Khayan would visit this lord and see if the tales were true. Tomorrow, maybe, unless his house found better order in between. He might even, he thought a little wildly, inflict himself on his neighbor for a day or three, taxing that lord’s hospitality as his brother’s following taxed his own.

  But not this morning. He was alone but for a pair of guards following in a second chariot. Even beyond the gate he could hear the start of the day’s uproar: voices raised, yelling for wine; snatches of drunken song left over from the night before; and the squeal of a woman set upon by what sounded like a hungry mob. He almost turned back at that, but the next voice that sounded was that of his own captain of guards, a great beautiful bull-bellow that made Khayan laugh aloud. Ah: so they had gone after Bashan’s woman. Not wise of them. Not wise of them at all.

  He was free of them, for a while. He glanced over his shoulder at his guards. They looked as glad to be out of that uproar as he was.

  He grinned. They grinned back. “Race you!” he called out.

  They grinned wider. Melech the charioteer whipped up his fine strong bays. Daleth his brother clung to the side of the chariot and whooped.

  Khayan was already somewhat behind. Star shook his head in the traces and snorted. Moon squealed in rage. He could never bear to lose a race. Khayan gave them rein and braced his feet. They leaped from trot into gallop.

  The wind whipped his face, sharp-edged with sand. He laughed at the small stinging pain. The heavy tail of his hair lifted and streamed out behind him. His tunic flattened to his body, pressed as tight as a woman’s embrace. “Faster,” he sang to his stallions, his golden-coated, black-maned beauties. “Faster!” They stretched their stride.

  Melech’s bay mares were flat to the ground, racing at full speed. Khayan’s duns were still at their ease. He shortened rein a little, held them level with the mares, though Moon snatched at the bit in protest. “Not yet,” he crooned to them. “Not . . . quite . . . yet.”

  The hill was still ahead, the long low ridge that divided the house and its lands from the farther fields. Just as the ground began to rise, Khayan slackened rein.

  Moon needed no urging. His yokemate was of one mind with him. They had been racing Melech’s bays. Now they raced the wind itself.

  They breasted the hill far ahead of the others, still fresh enough to object mightily to his bidding that they slow. But Khayan hardened his heart. They had still a fair distance to go, if they were to go at all. He brought them to a fretful and jigging walk, and sang them into calm, though not into full acceptance. They were too high-hearted for that.

  In slowing them he had turned and run along the hilltop for a little distance. When they would walk at last, he turned again, angling somewhat down the hill. The herds spread out below, all his horses, those that he had inherited from his father, and those that he had acquired since he came back to Egypt—and most beautiful of all, if least numerous, those that, like his duns, had come all the way from the east of the world.

  Most of those were duns, too, and bays and blacks. But the Mare’s herd ran near them as always, greys all, from dark filly-foal to cloud-white queen. Khayan could never see them without remembering the land that they came from: windy fields of grass rolling toward the sunrise, and the sky’s vault over them, and Earth Mother’s spirit breathing through them.

  These were the Mother’s children, her beloved, Horse Goddess’ own. Their foremothers were foaled in time out of mind, long and long ago in the dawn of the world. It was still strange to see them here, under this sky that had never known their like, before gods that wore the faces of beasts and birds, but never of horses.

  They seemed well content in this land to which they had asked to be brought. The heat troubled them little, that he could see, though their lesser kin suffe
red in it, fell ill and too often died. The sun beat on their pale coats and left them as cool as ever. Their wide nostrils breathed deep of the air, though it burned like the blast from a furnace. Their dark eyes gazed easily into the glare. They gleamed in it like bright metal, or like snow on the mountaintops, far away on the world’s edge.

  They grazed now in their herd, moving slowly over the broad field. In time they would come to the water-passage that ran from the river, the stream that men had dug and filled to keep these fields green. Then they would drink, and wander away again.

  The stallion walked behind them, he of the great white neck and the streaming mane. He was beautiful; his ladies less so, with their sagging bellies and their air of great weariness with the world. And yet any horseman, once he cast eyes on them, could not easily turn away. They had no match in the world, and well they knew it.

  At last Melech and his bays came level with Khayan. He greeted his guardsmen with a glance and a nod, and said, “Daleth, come here. Drive my beauties down by the road, and wait for me past the last of the fields. I’ll walk there in a while.”

  The brothers glanced at one another and rolled their eyes. This was one of their lord’s oddities, to walk among the horses—most peculiar, to their minds, and no matter what the arrival of a chariot drawn by a pair of stallions would do to the delicate balance of nations within the fields. A man afoot in a tunic of fine-tanned horsehide, smelling of horses, scarce alarmed even the shyest of the foals.

  He passed among them with a deep pleasure that he knew nowhere else. The horses raised their heads at his coming, drew in the scent of him, blew softly but knew no fear. The young ones came to him, and some of their elders, too, so that he might rub an ear, a neck, a shoulder. It was a royal progress of sorts, if he could be so arrogant as to see it so.

  Horse Goddess’ children did not stoop to come to a man, however great he might reckon himself in the world. Their foals were less circumspect. The youngest, the lovely colt with the star on his brow, called out in a shrill whinny.

  He led the others in a grand charge. Khayan waited for it, fearless and full of a sudden, piercing joy. They swept around him but never touched him, swirled and circled and came to rest all about him. They blew warm breath into his hands; they slipped warm necks under his arms. They nipped, or made as if to try. He laughed and pushed them away.

  The star-browed colt was closest and most persistent. When Khayan moved away at last, the others wandered off, but he followed. If Khayan paused, he made certain that Khayan’s arm rested over his back. He was a most determined colt.

  The mares watched with wise dark eyes. Horse Goddess was in them all. But she who was most truly divine, she who had been born at the full of the moon in a Great Year, a year of the women’s mysteries, was nowhere among them.

  Still trailed by the colt, though the colt’s dam called to him, summoning him, Khayan went hunting the Mare. She could not be difficult to find: a moon-colored coat among the black and brown and dun, dappled like the moon, and a mane like a fall of bright water.

  And yet he searched far through the herds that he had brought to this place, and beyond them, and saw no sign of her. Not until he had almost turned back in despair, when he had come all the way to the river, where it shrank nigh to its smallest extent. The grass there was newer than elsewhere, soft and vividly green. Great stands of reeds grew there, and the fans of papyrus that were so precious in Egypt. Birds fluttered and called in the coverts. A little distance down the river, a riverhorse surged to the surface, breached and rolled and gaped its great maw at the sky.

  Khayan was parched with thirst, but he knew better than to drink from the river. Demons of sickness lived in that water, and worse yet for one who stooped to drink, crocodiles lurking, lying in wait for prey. They could sever a man’s head from his shoulders with one swift leap and snap, and leave his body for the vultures to find.

  He shook his head at his morbid fancies. He had a waterskin hung on his belt, and clean water in it, too. He paused to drink, sipping as one learned to do in the desert. Though he was parched—fool, to come so far in the sun and never touch his waterskin—he fastened it up again with much of its contents intact. He kept the last sip on his tongue, rolling it, savoring each vanishing drop.

  Beyond a tall thicket of papyrus, something moved; something pale. He stilled with a hunter’s instinct. Softly he advanced.

  She was there, past the thicket, grazing in the rich grass. Nor was she alone.

  At first Khayan did not see the figure sitting in the shade. It made him think of a young deer, though it was indisputably human; and incontestably female, too, for in the manner of young Egyptians of whatever station, it was as naked as it was born.

  It—she—rose up out of the grass as he watched, went to the Mare and tangled fingers in the pale mane and leaned against that strong shoulder as if she had done such a thing many times before. And very likely she had.

  She was Egyptian. Her slim brown body, her straight black hair cut level with her brows in front and cropped to the shoulders behind, her long painted eyes and her narrow pointed face—those had never ridden out of any eastern tribe. And yet she kept company with a horse—with the Mare—as if she had been born to it.

  He was standing in plain sight, yet she was not aware of him at all. She was half turned away from him, intent on the Mare, plaiting a string of flowers into her mane. It was so utterly a thing that a woman would do, and a young one at that, that Khayan bit his lips against laughter.

  Just as the colt betrayed him, he slipped—again with hunter’s instinct—into the cover of the thicket. The colt whickered and trotted toward the Mare, aware at last, perhaps, that he was far away from his mother.

  The Mare flattened ears and snapped at him. He veered, mouthing submission. Had he had speech, he would have been crying for mercy.

  “Lady!” the Egyptian said—clear, sharp, and in his own birth-tongue. “Why did you do that? Here, little one, where did you leave your mother, then?”

  The colt was no fool: he knew when he had found an ally. He insinuated himself into her arms much as he had done to Khayan, and with the same success, too. She lacked a certain skill, but she knew where to rub, and she did it with a good enough will. She had none of the fear, and certainly none of the loathing, that he had seen in every other of her people.

  Khayan drew back further into hiding. She intended, plainly, to seek out the colt’s dam and return him to her. It would not be an arduous search: the mare and a handful of her herdmates were a little distance behind him, following the wayward child since he would not follow them.

  The reunion was as touching it could be among horses. The colt dived for his mother’s teat. She nipped him sharply on the rump as he passed, by way of rebuke. The rest crowded toward the rich sweet grass.

  The Egyptian was Egyptian after all: she flinched a little as the horses surrounded her, drawing back against the Mare. And the Mare shifted until she stood between the girl and the rest of her herd. Guarding her as a mare guards a foal—or a human whom she has made her own.

  IX

  Khayan had much to think on. He had found his chariot and turned his stallions and driven back to the house of the Sun Ascendant, gone as far as his bath and let himself be attended in it, before he remembered that he had been riding to the eastern village.

  That would wait as long as it must. So too the day’s judgments in hall.

  “Put them off,” he said to Teti the steward.

  Teti would not ask why, and Khayan had no intention of answering. Nor would he put on the robe that his servant had laid out for him. He demanded and received a tunic of linen: Egyptian fabric, outland fashion. It was cool, which was all that mattered to him then. Cool and unobtrusive.

  He needed the steppe: the endless sea of grass, where a man could ride forever and never meet another human soul. What he had was here: a stiff little box of a garden, and a pool with fish drifting lazily in it, and an arbor of green branches unde
r which a man could sit and try to dream that he was free.

  His mind was still in great part by the riverbank, watching the Mare with her—her!—Egyptian. He could with no difficulty remember the Mare before her, who had been old when he was young; but they were long-lived creatures. The woman who belonged to her had been of no age in particular, a small plump woman of great power among the priestesses of Horse Goddess. Had her ascent to eminence been a shock to those who knew her?

  That, he rather doubted. She was of an old line out of the east, if not of the oldest. Her breeding was as impeccable as the Mare’s.

  This . . .

  An Egyptian. A slender fawn of a girl, whose face he had reason to recognize. She had been ill when he came into the women’s house, his first day in his new lands. She had poured his wine that night, hale as if she had never suffered any sickness; and then he had no memory of her.

  And no wonder in that, if she had spent her days with the Mare.

  “Melech!” he called.

  His guardsman, who had been hovering in clear hopes of not being seen, crept out from behind a pillar and bowed. “My lord?”

  “Fetch my master of horse,” Khayan said. “And then, if you please, put yourself to bed. You were up half the night playing my nursemaid. It’s time you gave someone else a part in the game.”

  Melech grumbled at that, but he was obedient. Khayan settled to wait. A servant brought wine kept cool in a deep storehouse, and a platter of the cook’s whimsies: little cakes, spiced fruits, nuts rolled in honey. Khayan had not known he was hungry till he looked at the platter and saw that half of it was empty.

  His master of horse appeared while there were still cakes and fruit to offer him, and most of the jar of wine. Jerubaal had been born in Byblos, but his ancestors had been horsemen since the dawn time, riders, charioteers, masters of horses. He had the look of his kind: thin, wiry, dried to whipcord by years of wind and sun. But for the worn leather tunic and the curly black-grey beard, he might have been an Egyptian.