The Shepherd Kings

by Judith Tarr

  He was glad, then, that he had not yielded to temptation and brought a donkey to carry the packs. A donkey would have raised questions that he had no desire to answer.

  He lay a while longer, breathing carefully, holding off the rush of panic. He was nothing to draw their lordly eyes, nor need he be.

  A soft sound brought him about. Iphikleia was awake, lying on her stomach, taking in the caravan as Kemni had done just now. Her brows were knit, but they always were when she first woke from sleep.

  Still—

  “Trouble?” he asked her, just above a whisper.

  She did not answer at first; he thought she was not going to, until she said, “No. No trouble. Unless . . .”

  “Unless?”

  She slanted a glance at him. “Unless we yield to temptation.”

  “Temptation? What. . . ?”

  “Tell me you don’t want to go down and eavesdrop.”

  “I don’t,” he said. “They’re merchants, not princes. They’ll not know any secrets that we can use.”

  “Can you be sure?”

  “I’d prefer to find my way alive and undetected to Memphis, and do my listening where Egypt and the Retenu meet.”

  “Noble of you,” she said. “Merchants know everything, you know. And love to talk about it.”

  “So what would you do?” he asked with an arch of the brow. “Walk up to them and ask them what they know of rebellion in the Lower Kingdom?”

  “That would be foolish, wouldn’t it?” She rose lazily, and stretched. The mantle slipped from bare shoulders. He would happily have fallen on her and done what a man does most joyously, but her eyes were not on him. She restored her mantle, slowly, and not too snugly, either.

  Kemni turned to follow her gaze. There were three of them, one of the armed guards and two in embroidered robes. The guard was ageless as those heavily bearded men always seemed to be, but the two in robes were young. One was beardless but for a shadow on his lip; the other’s beard was a thing of wisps and patches. Their eyes were huge.

  “Good evening,” Iphikleia said in Egyptian.

  “Good evening,” the older boy replied, as if in a dream, or as if he could not help himself. His accent was not too appalling.

  Kemni’s fists clenched. He hated to hear the Retenu speak his language. Why, he did not know; it should not matter. And yet it did.

  Iphikleia, who could hardly have been troubled by such a thing, said in a sweet and rather baffled tone that was utterly unlike her wonted self, “Is that a caravan? Is it yours?”

  “Oh, yes,” the boy said. “Oh—oh, yes. My father’s, that is. Our father’s. We’re just coming up from Nubia. We’re going to Avaris.”

  “We’re going home,” Iphikleia said. “Is that an elephant’s tusk?”

  Kemni could have killed her. If she had kept quiet and kept her face hidden, they might have escaped invisible, or been disregarded, which was just as much to be desired. Now not only were they visible, they had faces that these Retenu would remember.

  She managed, with her wide-eyed curiosity and her fascination with everything, to be brought back to the heart of the caravan with the older boy for her guide. The younger one and the guard gathered dates from the trees. Kemni, who was still apparently invisible, elected to go with Iphikleia after he had scrambled together their belongings and shouldered the lot of it. It was a pitiful small bundle by now, and he a disreputable vision, no doubt, unshaven and filthy and all but naked.

  She was beautiful even in that state, and more adept than he could have imagined at seeming to be a silly chit of a girl. “We ran away,” she said, her light chatter the image of her cousin Ariana’s—and she looked a great deal like that mistress of enchantment, too, just then. “Father wasn’t happy at all with us, and he was threatening to have my Ptahmose beaten for daring to touch me. But Mother and the aunts are fond of him, and they’ve been working on Father; and now he’s letting us come back. I’m so glad. It’s very adventurous to live in the desert. But it’s terribly hot, and terribly cold, and so very dry.”

  Kemni, or Ptahmose as he was to be, kept his head down and his shoulders bent. Let them think him of no account.

  “You don’t think,” the boy was saying to Iphikleia, “that this might be a trap? Your father may simply be luring you back so that he can give your man his beating.”

  “Oh, no!” said Iphikleia in tones of great shock and surprise. “Father would never do that. He likes Ptahmose, he really does. He just says he isn’t good enough for me.”

  “Jubal!”

  The boy started. The man who had called to him was sitting under a canopy near the well, sipping wine and overseeing the settling of the camp. It must be his father or close kin: the noses were the same, great leaping arches, and a certain angle of the head, an inclination to the left, that was rather striking to the eye that troubled to see.

  “Jubal,” the man said in the Retenu tongue. “Who are these people?”

  “This is—” The boy blushed crimson. Of course he did not know her name. But he mustered his wits rather well, if Kemni had in mind to be fair. “This is Ptahmose from a village by the river,” he said, “and this is Ptahmose’s bride. They’re going home to their kin.”

  “Indeed,” said the master of the caravan. His eyes were keen, taking in the two of them; narrowing slightly as they passed over Iphikleia. She smiled sunnily at him and let her mantle slip to bare a shoulder and a round white breast. His eyes glazed. If he had recognized the Cretan face and form in a woman who claimed to be of Egypt, all that vanished in the light of her beauty.

  “Good evening, great lord,” Iphikleia said. “Is this your caravan? Do you have any horses? When you were in Nubia, did you see elephants?”

  The master understood Egyptian: he blinked, taken aback perhaps by her boldness and her utter lack of concern for the modesty that Retenu prized so highly. But he spoke in his own language. “Jubal, my son, this is a charming little she-cat. Take her, see her fed, give her a trinket. Then do what you like. But be sure, when morning comes, that she doesn’t follow you. These creatures can be all too persistent.”

  “Take—” Jubal was still blushing. It was not at all becoming; it made his face appear diseased. “Oh! But I couldn’t—”

  “Of course you could,” his father said. “Go, enjoy yourself. But remember what I told you.”

  “Yes—yes, Father,” Jubal stammered. “Father, I—”

  His father had already forgotten him, absorbed in some matter involving one of the packs, a skirmish between packbeasts, and the safety of a delicate burden.

  Kemni would have lingered to discover more, now that there was no help for it, but Iphikleia tugged him with her, deeper into the camp. People glanced at their master’s son and his ragtag foundlings, but aside from a spark of interest at Iphikleia’s still ill-concealed charms, they seemed altogether unconcerned.

  Arrogant. So thin a story would never have deceived an Egyptian. He certainly would have recognized that this woman was as much a foreigner as the men she moved among, chattering as lightly as Ariana could ever have done, and with as little regard for either sense or consequence.

  They were taken to a tent—a pavilion indeed, of noble size and airy height—in the camp’s heart, not far from the chariots and the heavily guarded baggage. Servants moved in and around it. There were not, somewhat to Kemni’s surprise, any women in evidence. Everyone here was a man. They took their pleasure where they found it, then.

  Iphikleia must have heard what the master said to his son. She was remarkably unconcerned.

  Kemni could not share her trust in the harmlessness of fools. The boy was callow and terribly awkward, but he was half again as large as Kemni, and though he was soft, he looked strong. If he met with resistance, he had an army of guards to help him, and a whole caravan to bolster his courage.

  Iphikleia continued to play her part, to exclaim and coo and clap her hands over the smallest things: the wine in its jar, the cups of
hammered bronze, the necklace of blue beads that Jubal produced with a flourish and clumsily fastened around her neck. Her astonishment was overplayed, Kemni thought sourly, but no one else seemed to think so. Jubal was profoundly smitten. He had a look Kemni knew well, like a calf who has just discovered the beauty of heifers. When he put on the necklace, he hardly dared touch her; each time his fingers brushed her skin, they recoiled as if from a flame.

  Just as he was about to draw them away, she caught them. They happened to have paused just above her breasts, where the sweet swell began, and where—as Kemni well knew—the skin was as soft as new cream. She smiled. “It’s so pretty,” she said. “May I really keep it?”

  “You really may,” said Jubal, stammering and stumbling but managing, in the end, to get it out. His eyes had fixed on his hands, and on what was just below them. His mind must be lower yet, if he was even as much a man as he seemed.

  Iphikleia shifted a little, as if by accident. The boy’s big raw-looking hands slipped inevitably, and irresistibly, to cup her breasts.

  He recoiled as if she had burned him. She smiled, brilliant and vacuous. “Do you have rubies?” she asked. “I always loved that word. Rubies. They’re red, people say. Like blood. Are they really?”

  “Yes,” Jubal said as if she had snatched him out of a dream. “Yes—yes, they’re red. But we don’t—we only have gold. And ivory. And something—here!” he said, scrambling away, rummaging in a box that rested against the wall of the tent. He muttered as he did it, cursing the length of the search, but refusing to give it up until a last and heartfelt curse broke into a hiss of triumph. “Yes. Yes!”

  He turned with the thing in his hands. It was enormous and rather gaudy: great nuggets of gold polished and rounded, and even greater lumps of amber, each the color of honey, and in each one the dark fleck of a winged and many-legged creature.

  Kemni thought it hideous. But Iphikleia clapped her hands and crowed. “Oh! Oh! This must be a king’s ransom.”

  “Actually,” said Jubal, “it was. A Nubian king. He fell on our caravan just after we’d finished trading for the gold and ivory. It was a very good battle. We won. My father captured the king and dragged him behind his chariot, till the king and all his people begged for mercy. We took this as ransom, and all the gold from his wives and sons.”

  “Why,” said Iphikleia, wide-eyed, “you must be as rich as . . . as kings.”

  “We’re as rich as traders,” Jubal said.

  “So much gold,” she said, stroking the smooth heavy nuggets. Her fingers lingered over the amber, as if she cherished its warmth.

  “You can keep it,” Jubal said.

  She squealed like an idiot girl and clapped her hands. “Put it on me. Let me see it!”

  It looked quite as ghastly on her as Kemni had expected, but she professed herself delighted. Jubal was blind with young lust, or else he truly had no taste. He seemed pleased. He would not be so full of his own generosity, Kemni was sure, when his father discovered what treasure he had given away to a chance-met stranger.

  That stranger ate and drank everything that was set in front of her, or seemed to; and encouraged the boy, eagerly, to match her cup for cup and bowl for bowl. Kemni, forgotten, ate sparingly and drank less, but was not fool enough to refuse it all.

  Iphikleia relaxed greatly as she ate and drank. As she relaxed, her mantle slipped, till it had fallen to her waist. The ugly necklace, which would have looked well enough on a great bull of a Nubian, gleamed over her breasts. Jubal could not take his eyes from them.

  Perhaps he had not seen such a sight since he was a child at his nurse’s breast. Women of the Retenu lived hidden, and as far as Kemni knew, spent their lives wrapped in robes and cloaks and veils. Iphikleia, utterly easy in herself and well aware of her body’s beauty, must be a revelation to this child of robes and modesty.

  A revelation and a growing obsession. Kemni had determined already that there were weapons in the tent, and seen where some of them were. In his own pack was a sword and a dagger—and if the Retenu found those, the questions would be difficult, to say the least.

  He could only sit poised, ready to leap, and hope that Iphikleia knew indeed what she was doing. Jubal had a look that Kemni did not like. Young bulls had it, and young stallions. There was nothing of intelligence in it.

  He lunged suddenly. Iphikleia giggled. He crouched blinking, baffled. She sat just out of his reach. He groped toward her. “Oh, no,” she said. “You have to ask.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Yes, you do,” she said sweetly. “What would you like to touch?”

  “I want to—touch—your—”

  “This?” She held out her hand, turning it, making it a dancer’s gesture. It circled and swooped like a bird in flight, until it settled, oh so softly, on the curve of her breast. She stroked it, long and slow. Jubal’s eyes were rapt.

  Kemni had not known that those robes could show anything of the body beneath. But this was a man of noble proportions after all, or a boy so engorged that he must be in pain. Almost Kemni pitied him. He was no match for this priestess from Crete; no mere man was.

  She began to sing, low and honey-sweet. It was a wandering song, wordless, moving as her hand moved, round and round. Her body swayed with it. Supple as a serpent, alluring as no serpent had ever been: white breasts, round hips, dark secret place that Kemni knew—oh, very well indeed. And this child wished to know it, too; dreamed of it, yearned for it.

  She dared him to dream. She dared him to hope for what was no man’s to take, and only hers to give.

  Kemni set his teeth. She was weaving a spell. He had not even noticed that Jubal’s guards were gone. When had they left? He was alone with Iphikleia and the boy in that dim and airy space, lit by a lamp that seemed brighter than it had before. The sun was setting beyond the tent’s walls. Night was coming.

  Iphikleia swayed toward Jubal, and then away. He swayed less gracefully after her. She brushed the fingers of her free hand against his face, ruffling the patchy young beard. He quivered. She drifted away again. He gasped. She swayed closer than before, brushing his breast with her breasts. He looked ready to faint.

  This time she did not withdraw. She hovered, just touching. Her song had sunk to a murmur, but sweeter, more enchanting. She stroked his face, long and slow, as she had stroked her breasts. His eyes had shut. His head fell back. She brushed his lips with a kiss. He collapsed with a sigh and lay still. On his face was an expression of pure amazement.

  Iphikleia rose from her knees, sought her mantle, wrapped it close. “Come,” she said. “Before anyone catches us.”

  Kemni could hardly be startled at the restoration of her usual self, but she had caught him off guard. He could only think to ask, “Is he dead?”

  “Of course not,” she said impatiently. “Quick! Do you want them to find us here?”

  “No, but I—”

  “He dreams,” she snapped. “He thinks—you know what he’s thinking. You think it yourself often enough, but I suffer you to do it awake as well as sleeping.”

  Kemni plunged to the heart of that. “You enspelled me?”

  She dragged him out, pack and all, under the back of the tent and into merciful darkness. There were no guards here, and lights were few.

  Kemni’s own feet carried him once he had begun. Escape was all his world; escape, and the shadow in front of him.

  These merchants watched closely for any who might seek to come into the camp. They never looked for two who sought to go out. Iphikleia slipped behind a guard, almost close enough to touch, and ghosted out into the desert, a shadow upon shadow, all but invisible under the stars.

  IX

  Kemni followed Iphikleia because he was only half a fool, and because he could think of nothing better to do. They traveled in silence even after they had left the oasis behind in its fold of the barren hills. When Kemni stopped to relieve himself of what little wine he had drunk, she did not pause. He had to stretch to catch h
er again. After a long while he shattered the silence with a word. “Iphikleia.”

  She did not pause. He did not know if she heard. But if she had, she would hear the rest of it, too. “Iphikleia, you laid a spell on that child. And if you did it to him . . .”

  “Are you telling me I shouldn’t have done it?”

  “No! I’m telling you—”

  “You’re telling me I did the same to you. I did not. The gods did that, man of Egypt. Your gods and mine.”

  “Can I believe you?”

  “I don’t lie,” she said. Her voice was flat.

  Kemni bit his lip. The going was deep, a long slope of sand. For a while he needed all his breath for that. But his mind raced on, a churning in his belly.

  Past the hill of sand they paused. It was deep night, and chill. Kemni wrapped himself in his blanket, sipped water from the skin that he had filled at the oasis, and let his body rest for a little. It ached. His eyes were gritty, and not only with sand. The caravan had robbed him of his sleep.

  Maybe he dozed for a while. He woke with a start. Iphikleia sat near him, a shadow against the stars.

  “Tell me why you did it,” he said. “Why did you torment that child?”

  She started, which gratified him. But her voice was cool, unruffled. “He might not call it torment. As far as he will ever remember, he had great pleasure of our meeting. Then I left, because the night was calling, and my kin were waiting for me. Would you rather I had let us be known for what we are?”

  “Now we’re known,” he said. “They’ll remember our faces.”

  “The faces of peasants,” she said.

  “The face of a sorceress.”

  She laughed, as clear and cold as only Iphikleia could be. “Whatever that child remembers, it won’t be a Cretan priestess and her Egyptian companion. His father bade him take his pleasure and dispose of us. As far as he knows, he did exactly that. There’s no more he need remember.”