The Shepherd Kings

by Judith Tarr

  Kemni shrank as deep into shadow as he might. His hand had risen to the amulet of Amon that he wore on his breast, and clasped it tight. The gods were with him, oh, indeed. In the first place of the enemy to which he had come, to find what he sought . . .

  And well he might find it, but to make use of it—that was not so simple.

  No lord of the enemy would be so much a fool as to leave his prized artisans for any passerby to steal. These would, he suspected, be housed above their workshop, close to the heart of the stable, and in full view of the guard atop the gate.

  But at night . . .

  Kemni itched to go. Still he lingered, watching and listening. He understood their language, if he set his mind to it; he had learned it long ago, as one learns all one may of one’s enemy, the better to do battle against him. They were speaking of little that mattered, and nothing that need trouble him. Except that one said, “I’ll be glad when this one is done. It’s well past time we saw Avaris again.”

  “Tomorrow,” another said. “Now quick, finish that wheelrim. Soonest done, soonest over—and we’ve a journey to prepare for.”

  The first man sighed. “And none too soon for me. The next time the king sends us out to build chariots for one of his pets, he can leave me at home. I’ve had a bellyful of these lordlings and their ‘Do this, do that, do somewhat else of no use whatever, but great pleasure, because it makes the king’s men leap to our bidding.’”

  “Ah,” said the second. “Well. That’s lordlings for you. We’re gone in the morning, thank the Great God; and we’ve left good work behind us.”

  “We have done that,” his companion agreed.

  Kemni thrust his fist into his mouth and bit down hard. Tomorrow? They left tomorrow? But that meant—

  He could not run. He must walk out as casually as he had come, and make his way past the guards, and pass with maddening slowness through the crowds in this town that had ambitions to become a city.

  It seemed an endless while before he came to the boat, and found it all but deserted. The two men who had drawn guard-duty were loitering about as if they had nothing more pressing to do. Iphikleia was not in any of her wonted hiding places. He could not dare to hope that she had hidden herself too cleverly for him to find: it was not a large boat, nor blessed with many recesses in which a grown woman could conceal herself.

  She was gone, the gods knew where. Kemni could see no profit in searching for her. He hated himself for that practicality; but he was a practical man. He paced and fumed and fretted, till one of the men on guard, sauntering past, slapped a jar of beer into his hands. He nearly dropped it. It was heavy: full almost to the brim. It was good, too, well brewed and not too sour, with just the proper taste of barley and a hint of the bread from which the beer had been born.

  He could not drink himself into a stupor. He sipped—just enough to dull the edge of his anxiety, and no more. When he was beginning to be comfortable, his men began to straggle back. Some were well gone in beer. Others looked as if they would have liked to be.

  Last of all, Gebu came, and Seti behind him, looking inescapably like a man of rank and his servant. They glowered at Kemni. “Where did you get to?” Gebu demanded. “We hunted high and low for you.”

  “I’ll tell you,” Kemni said. “But first—where is Iphikleia?”

  “Here,” she said.

  He nigh jumped out of his skin. She was sitting on the boat’s rim, wrapped in her shabby cloak, with bare dirty feet and her hair in a tight plait. She looked like a child, and not one of rank, either.

  He most certainly had not found her on the boat. She must have come up the other side, and waited till he was off guard before she made herself known.

  He set his teeth and throttled his temper. “Where have you been?” he inquired.

  “Here,” she said.

  “You have not.”

  She lifted her chin. The urchin was suddenly a princess, haughty and cold. He grinned at her. He would rather have snapped his teeth in her face, but that would not be proper. “Well; you’re here now, and no armies on your track. I’ll presume that you haven’t done anything excessively deadly.”

  “How generous of you,” she said.

  “Isn’t it?” He turned back to Gebu, deliberately putting her out of his mind—or as much as he could ever do, when he felt as if she had, somehow, captured one or more of his souls.

  They were all in place at the moment, and he had no time to waste. The sun had begun to sink. “I’ve found what we’re looking for,” he said without preamble. “It’s up there, in the fortress.”

  Faces that had brightened when he began, fell quickly at the end of it. “We’ll never get into or out of that,” Seti said for them all. “Not without an army.”

  “No,” said Kemni. “We won’t. It’s strong even half-finished, and it’s crawling with men. But we won’t need to storm the fortress. The gods are with us. These chariotmakers—they’re not the lord’s own. The king lent them to him. And tomorrow—tomorrow they go home.”

  “Home?” Gebu frowned. “To Avaris?”

  “So they said,” Kemni said.

  “But that means—”

  Kemni nodded.

  Gebu’s scowl vanished. He flung arms about Kemni and whirled him in a brief, headlong dance. “Brother! Little brother! What a wonder you are!”

  Seti was not so quick to credit it. “You think they really will leave tomorrow? Well; and if they do, how will we follow? I’ll wager silver they’ll go in chariots.”

  Kemni had been pondering that for all that long afternoon. “They’ll go on land, I’m sure. They’re Retenu; they hate boats. But the river’s running fast. We can keep pace well enough. Let them travel well away from here, until they’re in the empty places—then we can fall on them and capture them all.”

  “I don’t think there’s room in the boat for that,” Seti said.

  “We’ll make do.” Iphikleia had not softened her expression at all, but she had spoken for Kemni. That would do, he supposed. She slid down from the boat to the bank, and said, “You’re sure they’re what we need.”

  “I’m certain,” he said. He was still, carefully, patient.

  “Well then,” she said. “Someone should watch to see them leave. Even tonight—they might go early. And if they do—”

  “I’ll go,” Seti said. “Only feed me first, and give me a jar of beer. It will be a long night, whatever comes of it.”

  Kemni had thought to go himself. But he did not need Iphikleia’s long look to understand that he could not both spy on the fortress and set his men in order. He bent his head toward Seti. “Eat,” he said, “and go. And the gods protect you.”

  VII

  None of them slept overmuch that night. Soldiers learned to sleep wherever they paused to rest, but this was something other than war. They had known that they were deep in the enemy’s country, but it had meant little.

  Now they began what they had come to do. If they failed, they failed their king. Even if they succeeded, they could be found and killed, and Ahmose—and his Cretan queen—would not have what they needed to win the war.

  Kemni could torment himself with fears. Or he could lie wrapped in his blanket and try not to think of Iphikleia. She slept on the boat as always, a shadow among the shadows of its cargo. Whatever they had said or done at the Bull of Re, it was gone and forgotten here. He was no more to her than any of his men; and less, perhaps, than Gebu the prince.

  He lay open-eyed for an eternity of starlit darkness. The town slept. The river was rising: the boat had been drawn up away from the water, but now it lapped just short of the pointed bow. If they did not cast off by full morning, he judged, the river would do it for them.

  When his bones felt the first hint of dawn, when the night was darkest, the air full of whispers and unseen passings, he rose softly and walked the edges of the camp. It was a frequent boast hereabouts that neither crocodiles nor lions of the desert dared trespass within the town. Kemni
was watchful nonetheless. Not only beasts could be a danger here.

  Seti had not come back from watching over the fortress. Kemni hoped that meant the Retenu had not left yet, and not that Seti had been captured or worse. It was quiet round about, no company of guards approaching to take them all prisoner.

  He perched on a heap of flotsam just past the camp, clasped his knees and waited for the dawn. Slowly, infinitely slowly, the darkness paled. The east, over the barren hills of the Red Land, came clearer little by little, under a pellucid sky. The stars faded. Away in the beds of reeds, now all but sunk in the river, a bird began to sing.

  ~~~

  They were all up and fed and girded for the day, somewhat before the sun climbed over the horizon. Seti still had not come back. Kemni was half minded to wait for him; but urgency ate at his belly. “Get the boat in the water,” he said to his waiting people. “We’ll fish downstream this morning, and see who rides on the northward road.”

  They were glad to obey. All this journeying had been adventure of a sort, but this was what they had come to do. There was a lightness in their movements, an eagerness; even a snatch of song, quickly cut off—till Gebu said, “No, no. Sing. Sing. We’re honest fishermen, setting out to bring in the day’s catch—not spies creeping about by night. Sing!”

  They sang therefore as they slid the boat into the water and clambered aboard and set off down the river. Their songs reminded Kemni rather more vividly of a guardroom than a fishing boat, but he doubted the enemy would know the difference.

  The river was fractious this morning, the steering oar strong in his hands. The flood was rising fast. He had to hope it would not keep him from the bank when the time came.

  For the moment it was well; they needed no oar or sail, simply rode the current, fishing with lines off bow and stern, and pulling in what the lines caught. They watched the east bank, idly, as it might seem.

  Boats passed them as the morning brightened into full day. Some hailed them; others were too full of their own importance. None held a cargo of chariotmakers bound for Avaris.

  On the bank meanwhile, there was somewhat less coming and going, but enough. Twice, bearded men rattled past in chariots. People on foot came and went—came, mostly, at this hour, walking to market or to business in the town. A noble passed with his retinue, perched aloft in his gilded chair.

  That could have been Kemni, and should have been Gebu—if this had been the Two Lands of the old time, or of the new one that Ahmose hoped to begin. Filthy and reeking of fish, unshaven, ragged, and beneath any great one’s notice, they rode the river down toward Memphis.

  At midmorning Kemni began to edge toward the eastward bank. The reeds were thick here, bulrushes and tall fans of papyrus. They hid a flock of geese, which fled honking and flapping, and with care, the boat itself. The men, armed with knives and sickles, cut a path through the reeds, those who cut leaning down over the boat’s sides and prow, held tightly by their fellows.

  The crocodiles were not hunting here this morning, it seemed; there was no sign of them. Kemni murmured a prayer to the god Sobek, who wore a crocodile’s face, that his children should let them be, for the winning back of the Lower Kingdom.

  When the cutting and pruning was done, the boat rested in a clearing in the reeds with its prow up against the riverbank. They anchored it there. No one could see them from the river, or from the land either. They were perfectly hidden.

  Kemni slipped from prow to land and ghosted up the bank to be certain. Even before he had emerged from the reeds, the boat and its people were invisible.

  He paused on the edge of the thicket. Oh, the gods were kind: the reeds gave way to bare sunburned earth, the Black Land bleached almost white by heat and sunlight. He could see how far the river was wont to rise: where the richer earth of the river’s gift gave way to the sand and stones of the Red Land. There, on the edge between the two, ran the road to Memphis.

  There was no one on it just then. Fresh droppings marked the passing of an ox or oxen, a farmer most likely. None of the foreigners’ donkeys had passed by this morning. They were still behind, then—if they were coming at all.

  Kemni must trust that they would. He settled behind a screen of reeds, as if he were hunting waterfowl and not men. He was aware that someone had followed him, but he did not look to see who it was. It must be Gebu. No one else would be bold enough to leave the boat without Kemni’s leave.

  The other slipped beside him, in under his arm, and said in a voice that was anything but cool, “Oh, you clever man!”

  He tensed to recoil from Iphikleia, but his arm tightened around her instead. She turned in the circle of it. Whatever she did, however she did it, she was naked, her mantle spread beneath her, and his loincloth suddenly, magically vanished.

  Some part of him snarled at her, and upbraided her for sparing him not even a glance between the Bull of Re and this thicket. And what, he almost asked, of Gebu?

  But his body knew no such folly. It fell on her like one starving. She caught at him with sudden fierceness, wrapped herself about him and drove him deep inside her.

  He gasped. She was eating him alive. Kisses, love-bites, one after another, everywhere that she could reach. She rode him as if he had been a ship on a high sea, deep strokes and long, drawing him almost—almost—to the summit, but sinking away. She tormented him. She sapped him of wit and will. She conquered him as utterly as the Retenu had conquered the Lower Kingdom.

  Then at last, when he was ready to scream at her to end it, she let the tide take him and cast him up gasping on the shore.

  When he could breathe again, he said, “I think I hate you.”

  “I’m sure you despise me,” she said. She dropped down onto her mantle, arching her back and stretching like a cat. Her body was limned in light and shadow, bars and blades of dark and gold.

  Memory struck like a blow. Kemni scrambled to hands and knees and peered out through the screen of reeds.

  The road was deserted. He let his breath out slowly.

  Iphikleia’s hands smoothed and stroked his back, rubbing away the tightness, winning from him a soft groan. He stilled it quickly. She laughed in his ear, and nibbled it.

  He pulled away slightly, coming somewhat to himself. “You never even looked at me,” he said.

  “Of course I didn’t,” she said. “Did you want a whole boatload of snickering spectators?”

  He could never best her in a war of words. And yet he had to say, “You looked at Gebu often enough.”

  “Ah! You’re jealous.”

  “Do I have reason to be?”

  “No,” she said. She slipped from his back to lie beside him, chin on fists, gazing out at the road. “Mind you, I like him. He’s well-spoken, he’s charming, he’s just as a prince should be. But I don’t dream of him.”

  “I’m surprised,” Kemni said.

  He meant it honestly. It seemed she took it as such. She shrugged a little, a shift of warm bare shoulder against his. “Would you be happier if I did?”

  “No.”

  “So,” she said. Then: “Listen.”

  He opened his mouth to ask what she meant by that, but his ear had caught it also: a distant sound like the braying of an ass.

  She shifted beside him, a small flurry that ended in her being wrapped in her mantle again. He should find his loincloth and put it on, but he paused, listening. Another bray. A murmur of men’s voices. The hollow clatter of hooves on the hard-beaten road; the rattle of wheels.

  It could be another party of Retenu on its way to Memphis. Kemni remembered to breathe, to calm himself. He rose then, softly, and wrapped his loincloth and fastened it tightly. A brief flash of vanity regretted that he could not do this thing in a clean kilt and a shaven face; but it would serve him better to be thought a mere brigand. Brigands were not hunted in this country as a lord from the Upper Kingdom would be.

  “I’ll tell the others,” he breathed in Iphikleia’s ear. She nodded, keeping her eyes on the road
.

  His men were waiting. They were not precisely atwitch with eagerness. Most seemed asleep or nearly so. But when they heard the news he brought, they woke abruptly.

  There were no orders to give. Those were all given long since. He slipped back to the place where he had been. Iphikleia was gone from it, the gods knew where. Not, he trusted, to betray him to the enemy.

  It seemed a long while before the company rounded the curve of the road. When at last it appeared, it was less than Kemni had expected. There were only two chariots, each with two men in it, and a string of laden donkeys, and a handful of men on foot: servants, those must be, and nearly all Egyptian. One of them—

  Kemni bit his lip till it bled. Seti. Seti striding briskly with the rest, as innocent as if he had been all he seemed, and no one eyed him oddly or asked him who he was.

  And what if . . .

  No. They were too calm. No one looked about him, or seemed to care that he might be ambushed. There were guards, but they idled behind, half a dozen on foot and one in a chariot driven by a curly-headed child. Kemni saw and heard no more than that. Nor was there any signal from his men who had been given the charge, that an army waited in hiding.

  It was arrogance. Or the Retenu did not believe that Egypt truly could rise up against them.

  Whatever the cause of it, Kemni took it as a blessing, and a sending from the gods.

  They were level with him now, idling along, laughing and singing. Kemni raised the signal: a clear shrill call like the falcon’s as he stoops for his prey.

  There was a breathless hush. Even the Retenu paused a fraction, and their laughter stuttered. Just as it smoothed again, the earth erupted.

  Kemni’s men had seemed few enough when he mustered them. But falling on the Retenu from every side, armed with swords and knives and spears, they seemed as numerous as the king’s own armies.

  They took the Retenu utterly by surprise. Kemni himself leaped on the captain of the guard, pulled him out of his chariot and wrested his sword from him, and cut his throat before he could muster breath to cry out.