by Judith Tarr
Kemni’s cheeks burned. They were not supposed to speak of him. He was not supposed to be there. He should be invisible, intangible, forgotten.
But this was not in any way a proper meeting of god-king and royal bride. Ahmose said, “He has served me well, do you not agree?”
“Most exceptionally well,” she said. She tilted her head toward the horses. “Is this his reward?”
“Would you like it to be?”
“Does it matter what I like or dislike?”
“I should be pleased to have pleased you,” Ahmose said.
“Then,” she said with lovely composure, “I should like it if he were to become a lord of horses. Have you chariots, my lord?”
“They are being made,” Ahmose said.
“Tomorrow,” she said, “I shall see them.”
“As you wish,” said the king.
She nodded briskly. “I thank you. So, my lord: are we agreed? Do you pay all the price my father sets?”
“You wish to be a queen,” the king said. “You must know that you cannot be Great Royal Wife.”
“So I was told,” said Ariana. “That suits me well enough. What I would do is best done without excessive press of duties. But authority—that I must have.”
“And what is it that you would do?”
She tilted her head toward the chairs set by the table. Ahmose bowed, granting her leave. She sat with delicate care, as a cat will, smoothing her skirts, accepting wine in a cup of chalcedony set in gold, and nibbling a bit of sweet cake.
When she was well settled, and when Ahmose had sat also and the others arranged themselves as befit their rank or their sense of what was proper, she said, “You want the whole of your kingdom back. My father can help with his ships and his mariners. You have armies, I’m sure, all ready to strike. What you lack are chariots. These horses are a beginning, but you need more. Many more. If horses aren’t to be had, then find asses, preferably trained to the yoke already. I will need, for this beginning . . .”
She paused, as if reckoning numbers in her head. “Let us begin with three-score good chariot teams, and a hundred men willing and able to learn a new way of war. Give me this man to command them, and full discretion in equipping and paying them. And—”
“And?” Ahmose interposed. “There is more?”
“There is always more,” Ariana said. “Do you want to win this war?”
“I am going to win this war.”
“So then,” she said. “Give me all of that, and give me the rank and the authority to command as I must. And with that, a house, and servants who can be trusted. An estate would be best; a holding with fields of grass, not too close to a city, nor too near a road. We’d not want the enemy to know what we do there.”
“What you ask,” Ahmose said, “is to be made lady of a holding, and given full power to rule therein as you please. Do you wish to be queen as well?”
“We should marry as soon as may be,” she said. “All this will be easier for a queen than for a lady of rank. But we’ll not make the wedding public. When your war is won, then you may take me to wife with all suitable ceremony.”
“You have everything laid in order, I see,” Ahmose said.
“Yes,” she said, apparently oblivious to irony. “How not? You’ve waited a hundred years to take back the Lower Kingdom. Your brother took it, but let it go. Won’t you both take it and hold it?”
“Won’t I indeed?” said Ahmose. His eyes were laughing. “My lady, it seems to me that your father gave me a very great gift in you.”
She raised her own eyes to his face. Kemni saw how he started a little, as if he had not known till just then what brilliance was in her glance. “I gave myself,” she said. “I asked to come.”
“Why?”
Such simplicity. She smiled at it. “Because I wanted to.”
“Why did you want to?”
He was not going to let her go until he had an answer that suited him. She answered gravely, though there was laughter still in her eyes. “My people are seafarers. They came out of the east long ago, came to the sea and knew it for their own. I was born a princess, and would be priestess by my lineage; and our goddess chose me to be the chief of her servants. But my heart knew that there was more she asked of me. When you sent this man to be your messenger, because he dreamed a dream and I was in it, I knew my goddess was speaking to me. She was calling me to Egypt.
“More usually,” she said, “she calls us to herself. We dance the bull, and he takes us. But the bull spared me. I was to come here. And so I have come, my lord, and so I will stay. You will not refuse me.”
“I am king and god,” said Ahmose. “I do no man’s bidding.”
“But,” she said, and the laughter rippled in her voice, “I am not a man.”
He laughed himself, deep sudden startled laughter. “Lady!” he cried. “Oh, lady! You may never command me. But I may choose—and I choose to do as you wish.”
“Of course you will do it,” she said with great composure. “How can you not?”
“How indeed?” Ahmose took her hand. “Very well, my lady of the sea-people. I will take you for my queen, and you will make us horsemen. Only win our war for us, and you may have anything else that your heart desires.”
“Anything?” she asked with an arch of the brow.
“Anything,” he replied, “but to be my Great Wife.”
“Oh,” she said, shrugging. “Well. No. Not that. But when the war is won . . . I will remember.”
“Yes,” he said. “Remember.”
II
Kemni reckoned himself lucky to escape unnoticed and even unscathed from that audience of the king and his new queen. But he was not to rest in peace for more than a night. In the morning, as he slept off a good night’s revelry in the princes’ palace, a chamberlain dragged him bodily out of bed. He was dressed, wigged, and at the trot before he woke enough to demand, “Who are you? Where are you taking me?”
“You are summoned,” the chamberlain said. And that was all he would say.
Kemni considered digging in his heels and refusing to move, but he had come too far already. No doubt the king wanted him. Or Ariana, perhaps. He was being herded in the direction of the queens’ palace.
Yes; there it was, with its gates carved and painted like the fans of papyrus, and Nubian guards on either side of it, gelded to make them safe for the warding of women. The chamberlain surrendered Kemni at that gate, handed him over to a woman of noble girth and severe expression, who looked him up and down as if he were an ox she had in mind to slaughter, and clearly found him wanting.
He had begun to suspect, and to dread, who had summoned him here. Ariana could not have shifted herself as yet to the queens’ palace; she was not yet a queen. But there was one here who could command any and all of the servants in this house and in the greater one. Who ruled among the women, and who was great lady and queen of all this kingdom.
Queen Nefertari received him in a hall of lofty pillars, where sun slanted in long golden shafts through a scented gloom. It was cool in that high airy space, and quiet but for the liquid trilling of birds in a golden cage. All along the walls marched processions of dancers, young girls and beautiful, whirling in the abandon of wine.
Their living images sat or stood or reclined about the steps of a dais. Some were naked but for a bead or an amulet or a garland of flowers. Others were dressed in linen as sheer as a cloud over the moon. Those in their way were more alluring than their sisters who were naked.
The queen sat above them on a throne of gold and lapis and chalcedony. Her gown was as sheer as the sheerest, just barely concealing the beauty of her body. Her breasts were high and pointed like a girl’s, her nipples large and rosy-dark, blushing beneath the gauzy linen. Above them she wore a great collar of gold, and a golden headdress in the likeness of a falcon’s wings spread to embrace her head and shoulders. The falcon’s head rose above her brow, its eyes of crystal glittering on Kemni as if it were a livin
g creature.
He was no stranger to beauty in royal women, who had sailed from Crete with Ariana and her cousin Iphikleia. Ahmose Nefertari, queen, Great Royal Wife, was not, if he acknowledged it, as fair of face as they, nor as rich of body. And yet she was beauty pure, and beauty whole. She was queen and goddess, great lady of the Upper Kingdom, matched and mated to her king and god.
He fell on his face before her. It was nothing he thought to do, nor was it required. It would have been enough simply to bow to the floor.
“You may rise,” she said above his head. Her voice was low, its music subtle. It practiced no artifice. It was simply itself.
Kemni rose obediently to his knees.
“Come closer,” the queen said.
He rose fully to do that. But when he had reached the foot of the dais, he went down again to his knees, and sat on his heels, eyes fixed carefully on the floor.
“Look up!”
He had done it before he thought, full into her face. The dark eyes in their mask of paint were nigh impossible to read, and yet he thought they might be amused.
“You are good to look at,” she said as if to herself. Her voice rose slightly. “Tell me, Kemni, once of the Lower Kingdom. Did you bring back a princess from Crete for my husband’s sake, or for your own?”
Kemni gasped as if she had struck him. He was taken utterly aback, or he would never have said what he said. “Are you jealous, lady? Will you make me pay the price for it?”
She did not rise up, did not call her guards to destroy him. She sat as still as she had before, and said in that deep sweet voice, “A queen cannot afford to be jealous. Now answer my question.”
“I brought her for Egypt,” Kemni said. “Because it might win us back the Lower Kingdom.”
“And for yourself?”
“Lady,” Kemni said steadily, “I am not a prince or a great lord, but I am an honorable man. That is a daughter of queens. She is meant for a king.”
“She will have a king,” said Nefertari. “And she will do what she came to do. But she will not be Great Wife in this or any other kingdom.”
“She understands that, lady,” Kemni said. “I told her father so, and I told her. They both accept what must be.”
“Do they?” Nefertari leaned forward slightly. “Do you trust them?”
Kemni stared at her. “Lady, does it matter what I think?”
“Yes.”
He drew a breath. He did not like it that kings and great queens were interested in him. It was like walking past a nest of crocodiles. One wanted to be quiet, to be invisible, to be ignored. The attention of kings was not a comfortable thing, nor at all a safe one.
But he had attracted the attention of this queen, and she was waiting for his answer. He gave it as best he might. “I . . . trust them as far as it serves them to be our allies. We have much that they want. They’ll be faithful to their promises.”
“But?”
“There is no ‘but,’” Kemni said. “When Ar—when the princess marries our king, she will promise to be faithful to him, to serve him, to stand beside him in all that he does. She’ll keep that promise.”
“But will her father?”
“Minos is honorable, lady,” Kemni answered: “as honorable as a king can be.”
“So innocent,” she murmured. “And yet. . . Ahmose thinks highly of you. Ahmose is not a fool.”
Kemni certainly hoped not, but he knew better than to say so. He stood silent, leaving the queen to her pondering. Her eyes rested on him as if she needed, somehow, to remember his every line.
She reminded him of Iphikleia. It was a startling thought, and perhaps a little shocking. Iphikleia had the same brittle and brilliant temper, and much the same ruthlessness of mind. Kemni wondered, perhaps presumptuously, if Nefertari had been a hoyden in her youth. Somehow he doubted it; but he would never have believed it of Iphikleia, either.
He hoped that he would not dream of this, his queen and goddess, as he still did of the Cretan priestess. The thought made him blush—just as Nefertari looked into his face again and said, “I give you a charge, Kemni of the Lower Kingdom. Go with her as she asks. Learn from her. Watch her, and guard her. And if she makes a move to betray us . . . do as you must.”
Kill her, that meant. Kemni could expect no less from this of all the queens. “Do you trust me to do the utmost?” he asked her.
She looked him in the face. “Can I?”
He could not lie to her. “I don’t know,” he said. “When we were in Crete, she was my teacher and—if I may be so presumptuous—my friend. If she betrayed Egypt . . . I don’t know what I would do.”
“Honest as well as honorable,” Nefertari said. “Yes, I trust you. As my husband does; and as, I think, does she.”
He bowed low. For a long moment he feared that she would keep him there; that she would torment him further. But she let him go.
His departure was not quite like flight. He walked erect, with shoulders back, out of that long hall, down the corridors and through the courts, and out through the lotus gates into the glare of the sunlight.
~~~
There he stopped, and his knees nearly betrayed him. But he steadied them. It had not been so long an audience, or so terrible. And yet he was wrung dry, as if he had fought a whole day’s battle, and been wounded in it, too.
And now he was bound to her, as he was bound to the king, and to Ariana. Three bindings, three loyalties. Nor were they all the same. If one came into conflict with the others . . .
He could not think of it now. He had much to do with his new duties, to be horsemaster and pupil to Ariana. That began as soon as he could muster his wits and his spirit, for she was determined to inspect the workshop where men undertook to build chariots for the king.
It was set apart within the great walled city that was the palace, not far from the armories, and from the king’s forges. Shieldmakers labored nearby. Smiths wrought swords and spearheads, axes and daggers. The clamor was astonishing, and yet it had in it a rough music.
Ariana had come already to the chariotmakers’ shop. Her escort was small: Iphikleia, the Prince Gebu, and a pair of Nubian guards. The king was not present. He was much in demand elsewhere, and could not, even to amuse himself, tarry overmuch with this interesting foreigner.
It was as well. The palace, thus far, had noticed little of the Cretan ladies but that they were present as ambassadors—striking, unusual, but how unusual it was, no one seemed as yet to have guessed.
Ariana’s presence here in the workshop that was kept secret by being set openly among so many others, was neither greatly public nor greatly hidden. She had dressed herself as an Egyptian woman, modestly and plainly, but there was no disguising the tumbled curls of her hair. She had caught them up in a fillet, to keep them away from her face.
The workmen had paused at her coming, but when she did nothing, simply stood near the door, they went back to their work.
They were building the body of a chariot. The wheels rested against the wall, already made. Ariana wandered over toward them. She frowned slightly as she examined them, tracing the curve with her hand, measuring, judging.
Egypt had not used the wheel before, except the potter’s wheel. It was a new thing, and strange; but these artisans were gifted in creating exactly what the eye could see. They kept their model before them: a war-chariot won from the enemy. There was still a dark stain inside of it, the blood of the charioteer who had died to give Egypt this prize.
Kemni shivered a little. As much as he wanted to be a charioteer, he still had that old fear, the horror of Egypt for the enemy’s great weapon. Even knowing what it was like to ride in a chariot—he had not ridden in a war-chariot. That of Crete had been smaller, lighter, less visibly deadly.
This he must learn; must master. He stroked the bronze that sheathed its rim. This had conquered Egypt. Now Egypt would conquer it. And if the gods were kind, the Lower Kingdom would belong again to its proper king.
~~~
“You must work faster,” Ariana said to the king. “And you must work with greater care. It’s not a toy you make, or a work of art. The wheels must withstand rough ground, stones, the bodies of the fallen. The axles must be strong, and slow to break. The chariot has to be light enough for two horses or two asses to pull, but strong enough to carry the weight of a man. If you were wise, you would steal yourself a chariotmaker, and make him teach you all he knows.”
“How are we to do that?” Ahmose inquired.
It was evening of what had been a furnace-hot day. The king had invited Ariana to dinner, and Ariana had brought both Iphikleia and, somewhat to his surprise, Kemni. They had come braced for a court banquet, but it was only the king and a few of his sons, and, quiet as a cobra in its lair, the Great Wife Nefertari.
Ariana had shown no dismay at sight of that of all women. She had done reverence as one should to a queen, and greeted the princes civilly, and settled almost at once to the thing that had been engrossing her since, that morning, she visited the workshop. She barely waited for dinner to be done or for the wine to be drunk.
Now the king had asked her what to do, and she was glad to answer. “There are chariotmakers in plenty among the enemy. When his armies travel, they take a few with them, to repair the broken chariots and if necessary to build new ones. Surely a party of enterprising men could abduct one or two and persuade them to divulge their secrets.”
“Surely one could,” Ahmose agreed. “And would you be the one to give it its orders?”
“If my lord so wished,” she said demurely, “yes. Of course. They’d want to be certain that it was a master chariotmaker, and not an apprentice or a servant. And more than one would be useful.”
“Then would you persuade these prisoners to do as you ask?” Ahmose inquired. “Might they not simply refuse, or persist after torture had ruined their usefulness?”
