The Shepherd Kings

by Judith Tarr

  “Pray the gods that’s so,” Kemni said. “But that necklace—how could you let him give you such a thing? His father may not care for us, but he will come after us for that treasure.”

  “He will not,” said Iphikleia. She turned so that he could see her in the starlight. There was a necklace about her neck: blue beads, dark in the night. No gold. No massive amber.

  “But where—”

  “It’s in the child’s hands,” she said, “where it will catch him trouble enough, but nothing that need concern us.”

  Kemni subsided reluctantly. She had always got the better of him; she always would. He was a fool to think otherwise.

  Then she did a thing that melted his anger altogether. She slipped into his arms, warm and solid and blessedly real. “Beautiful man,” she said, “someday I may ask another man to love me, because it’s needed or because my heart calls to him. But not tonight. Not that child. I gave him dreams. He’ll never have more.”

  “Do I have more?” Kemni asked a little bitterly.

  “Stop that,” she said, but without temper. “You’re very pretty when you sulk, but it wastes time. Wouldn’t you rather have this?” Her kiss was long, deep, and dizzying. He took it as an answer: all the answer he needed, and all the proof of what was his.

  ~~~

  They came down out of the Red Land into Memphis, just as the river crested in its flood. From the desert it seemed that all the green land was becoming a sea, and men had taken to it in boats, or sought refuge in houses set apart from the water.

  The city in flood season, before the heat and damp and stinging flies had frayed everyone’s patience, was one long festival. Time was, when the Two Kingdoms were whole, that the king himself had come down the river to serve as priest at the rite of the river’s cresting. Now the king of the Retenu made an excursion out of it. What the priests of Ptah thought, none of them was saying. The river brought its blessing no matter who sat the throne of the Lower Kingdom. In that, no doubt, they took such comfort as they could.

  The city hummed with joy. But there was a frenetic quality to it. Tempers were brittle. Drinking bouts ended in battles. Packs of young Retenu prowled the streets, hunting whatever prey presented itself. The women who sold themselves for riches were worn ragged. Those who sold themselves for less, or simply to eat, had more custom than they could handle; and sometimes, if they were unfortunate, they died.

  Kemni and Iphikleia came into this hive of men on the day of the flood’s cresting. Even as they made their way through drunken throngs, the Retenu king stood beside the priests of Ptah as they measured the river’s height, marked it in the book of years, and blessed it with the great rite. Kemni had no desire to see that great bearded outlander next to the shaven priests, nor to hear him speak the ancient words in his guttural accent.

  Iphikleia was leading him. For lack of greater inspiration, he let her. They looked of even less account than they had before the caravan: after so many more days in the desert, they were filthier, more redolent, and even more ragged.

  He kept an eye alert for a face he recognized, whether from long ago or from the caravan. But they were all strangers, all those people who jostled one another amid the white walls and the walls of mudbrick, between the river and the desert.

  She was leading him through a quarter he knew, though not well, nearer the river than the palace, where traders had their houses, and foreign embassies, and travelers from abroad. The streets were a little quieter here, the throngs less excitable. The markets were shut, the shops closed to the world, in honor of the holiday. Those who were out and about seemed intent on business nonetheless, or simply on being seen.

  He, who had no interest in that at all, shrank and slunk and tried to keep to shadows. But Iphikleia was walking with her head up, albeit wrapped in her mantle, nor showing any great concern for secrecy.

  Just as he was about to remonstrate, after she had been all but run down by one of the packs of half-grown conquerors, she turned abruptly down a side way, then down another. That one led to a small square, hardly larger than a courtyard in a minor lord’s house. There was a cistern in it, and a trough for watering animals. The house that faced it was like every other house in the city: blank walls, barred gate. All its light and life, if it had any, would be within.

  She set hand on that tall and forbidding gate, and slid a bar that he had not seen. A smaller gate opened within the larger one. She slipped through. He hastened to follow before it shut in his face.

  He had expected a house like that in Thebes to which Gebu had taken him, when he first dreamed of dancing the bull. That had been poor and rather small beside this one, and deserted; but here were flocks of servants, Cretans all, and masters who kindly let the newcomers be until they had been scoured clean and rendered fit for decent company.

  Kemni had forgotten what pure luxury was in a bath. Hot water, scented oils, strong skilled hands scraping away the filth and the accumulated vermin. They shaved him as he asked, all over, as if he were a priest going into the temple. There was no other way to be truly clean; and it was a sort of consecration, a beginning of—who knew what.

  Clean, then, and tingling—and yes, stinging where the razor had gone too deep—he rested a while on a couch covered with soft rich weavings. There was a kilt waiting for him, a wig, and eyepaint, and ornaments if he wished. Maybe he did. He pondered it, lazily.

  While he pondered, he dozed. It was cool in that room, and dim. It invited sleep.

  A shadow bent over him, a waft of scent. He blinked up into Iphikleia’s familiar face. Familiar not from days in the desert, but from the time in Crete, when she was lady and priestess, and one of the great beauties of the island. Her hair was washed and combed and piled on her head in the fashion of a Cretan lady; her face was painted, and her beautiful breasts. She wore the many-tiered skirt and the embroidered vest that were so wonderfully alluring to Egyptian eyes.

  She looked down at him in—dismay? “What did you do to your hair?”

  He ran his hand over his shaven skull. “Lice,” he said. “It will grow back.”

  “I do hope so,” she said tartly. “You look—” Her eyes narrowed. “You don’t look terrible. But you look . . . strange.”

  “Clean,” he said. He stretched again, and yawned vastly. “Ah, lady. Whatever I hoped for in Memphis, it was never such a wonder as this.”

  “What, were you thinking to find a gutter somewhere, and beg us a loaf of bread?”

  “Not as bad as that,” he said. “I’ve a little silver. We would have been in reasonable comfort.”

  “This is better.” She sat beside him, demurely as she must in those clinging skirts, and began, still demurely, to run her hand down his clean smooth body. His manly organ rose to meet her. She smiled. She teased it, running her finger round the base of it, and up, barely touching, and yet the touch rocked him.

  She drew away, which won from him a groan of protest. “We’re wanted in the hall,” she said.

  She helped him dress and prepare, not without further torment—but he was ready very quickly even so, in a kilt of fine linen, and belt and pectoral, and a wig in the style called Nubian, short close curls bound with a bit of golden wire. He looked well enough, and fit to face a king.

  ~~~

  It was not a king he faced, though it was a lord of Crete. Naukrates rose from his seat in a long pillared hall, hands outstretched—greeting not only Iphikleia but Kemni with the embrace and the kiss of kinsmen.

  There were others in the hall, men and a woman or two, with a look and an air about them of the high ones of the Labyrinth. Kemni did not know any of them, but perhaps he knew their kin.

  They were in Memphis, Naukrates said as he settled Kemni beside him, as traders and wanderers. There was an ambassador in the king’s court in Avaris, but he did not know of this other gathering. “And that serves him well,” Naukrates said as servants brought wine and dainties, “for if we do anything that the king would disapprove of, he can tr
uthfully swear that he knew nothing of it.”

  “So,” said Kemni, “you know why we’re here.”

  “We had word from upriver,” said Naukrates. “Your brother came safe home, and all his cargo with him.”

  Kemni allowed himself a long sigh. He had trusted in it, but to know—that was a great relief. “If you can send word,” he said, “if it pleases you—”

  “It’s done,” Naukrates said smiling. “They’ll be glad to know that you’ve found us.”

  “It wasn’t as mad a venture as they thought,” Kemni said. “We were safe enough.”

  “It would seem so,” said one of the others—a woman, weathered and wind-seared like the men, and kilted as they were. Her name was Dione. She was captain of a ship, Kemni had gathered when she was presented and named to him: a rarity, but not wholly unheard of. She had the manners of a man, brusque and practical; she affected none of the graces of the Cretan ladies he had known. She looked him up and down in frank appraisal, and said, “The Ariana is not greatly pleased with you.”

  “I didn’t think she would be,” Kemni said a little wryly. “Now tell me I was a fool to have done it.”

  “No, not a fool,” she said. “Reckless, but it had to be done. For the rest . . . we have our spies here, but we are foreigners. A man of this country may be better suited to this task you’ve set yourself.”

  “And yet you don’t approve.”

  She shrugged. “It’s not for me to approve or disapprove. The Ariana would prefer to keep you safe.”

  “I’ll not stay away long,” Kemni said. “I only wanted—”

  “Yes,” Dione said. “You saw your own country, and you hated to leave it.”

  “That wasn’t—”

  “Of course it was,” Iphikleia said. “I’d have done the same.” She sipped from her cup, and nibbled something both green and pungent: a grape leaf wrapped about a bit of meat and onion and cooked in the lees of wine. Kemni found that taste too strange for his stomach. He had settled for the bread and cheese, and the sweet cakes, and the fruit stewed with honey.

  It was a feast, of which he was wise enough to eat sparingly, for he had been on short commons for some considerable while. Having vexed him sufficiently with their perception of why he had taken on this journey, they settled to other matters: trade, ships, gossip of the courts, both in Crete and in the Lower Kingdom.

  “Apophis is complacent,” said one of the men, whose name Kemni had not caught in time to remember. “His kingdom is secure, his sons are no more murderous than they ought to be, and he’s certain that the king in Thebes is properly cowed. They say he’s thinking of demanding tribute in some fashion, or even taking the kingdom; though he wonders if it’s worth the trouble.”

  “He’d be a fool to do that,” Naukrates said. “Even if he’s had no word of rebellion in the south, he can’t but know that he’d have to fight to keep whatever he took.”

  “He knows that,” said Dione. “His sons are at him constantly, or he’d not trouble himself at all. They want a war.”

  “We can give them one,” Kemni said, “if they’re only a little patient.”

  “Patience is not a virtue these people cultivate,” Dione said. “Tell me, kinsmen: did you hear what happened to old Iannek?”

  “What, the lord who married a woman from the horse-people?” She nodded; Naukrates frowned slightly. “I heard he’d died. What was it, poison?”

  “Hand of the gods,” Dione said. “No, that’s clear enough; there’s no scandal in how he died. But did you hear who took the lordship?”

  “I know his eldest son was carrying on as if he were the lord, well before his father died,” Naukrates said. “What was the man’s name? He wasn’t another Iannek, was he?”

  “No, that’s one of the younger sons.” Dione drained her cup, reached for the jar, filled the cup to the brim and drank deep again. She was not even slightly soft about the edges, though Kemni had counted three cups, and this was the fourth. “It’s been the talk of the court. All the sons came to their father’s deathbed—even the one who went away.”

  “What, the wild horsewoman’s son?” Naukrates sounded mildly astonished. “I’d thought he was exiled.”

  “Not at all,” said Dione. “He went because his mother sent him—to be taught properly, she said, and that ruffled a few feathers, as you can imagine. He came back, it’s said, not long before his father died. It’s not clear exactly what happened, but after the old man died, his eldest brother challenged him—maybe not even for the lordship; maybe for a woman, or simply for that he’d been away so long, and it was thought he’d be weak. But weak, he was not. He killed his brother in the fight. Then some of the others challenged him. When the dust had settled, all his brothers were dead or cowed, and he was lord in his father’s place.”

  “Imagine that,” Naukrates said. “A son of that people taking a lordship in this country. I suppose he brought horses with him?”

  “Horses,” Dione answered, “and more than horses. He’s let it be known that he’s taking one of the estates his father left him, and settling his herds on it. Rumor has it that he’ll settle in the Sun Ascendant.”

  Kemni had been listening rather idly. The lord Iannek he knew—too well. That had been the Retenu who called himself overlord in Kemni’s native country. He had been glad to hear that the old monster was dead. But this new and younger one—if rumor was true, he had chosen the holding that Kemni knew best next to his own Golden Ibis, the holding that his uncle and his cousins had held before they died fighting for the Great House in Thebes.

  He had been calm. He was proud of it. Even if this she-captain saw truly, and he had come back into the Lower Kingdom as much out of love and longing for it as out of desire to aid his king, he had not let himself think too long or too deeply on what he saw about him. This was his country, his homeland, surely. And he would fight to the death to restore it to Egyptian hands.

  Yet when these Cretans spoke of the Sun Ascendant, that small and yet lovely holding, with its fields both many and rich, he knew the piercing pain of yearning to be home again. In his own country, among his own people, speaking the dialect that had won him mockery in Thebes.

  They must be dead, all his kin. No word had come to him of his father or his mother, except a rumor that his father was dead. His uncle, his cousins were dead in battle. Their holdings—his holdings—would be in Retenu hands. Those hands: the hands of this stranger who had lived among the tamers of horses.

  “His name is Khayan,” Dione was saying. “He’s terribly young, though he’s no child. He has his mother’s spirit, they say. If that’s so, he’ll be the very plague to cross.”

  “And he’s a horseman.” Naukrates seemed to find that fascinating. “I wonder . . .”

  But he did not say what it was that he wondered. No one asked. Kemni thought to, but held his tongue. The conversation wandered elsewhere, leaving Kemni to his silence and his thoughts.

  X

  “Tell me what a horseman is,” Kemni said.

  Iphikleia turned from taking her hair out of its many elaborate curls and plaits. She had left the hall when he did, and come to the room he had been given, nor did anyone remark on it or seem to find it objectionable. Women’s belongings had appeared among those that had been given to Kemni, and the bed was spread and scented with herbs, as if for a wedding.

  She was much too casual for a bride, but quite as beautiful as a bride could be. She paused with her hair tumbling down over her shoulders, her paint softened with the hours’ passing, and all her skirts in a tousle, now she need not take care to keep them in order. Kemni had had a little to do with that. More than a little.

  She answered his question in her own time, a little thoughtfully, as if she needed to consider, herself, what it was that had drawn Naukrates’ attention. “Among these people, a horseman is more than simply a man who has horses. Asses are sacred, and are the root of their power: strong legs, strong backs, greater speed than a man can mu
ster. Horses are something more than sacred.

  “These people of the Retenu are not, in themselves, horsemen. They were lurkers in barren places, savages with a gift for trade, fierce fighters who dreamed of ruling kingdoms. They tamed the wild ass and made him their servant. They learned to conquer, and then to rule. In time they built cities, and made them great. But they knew little of horses.

  “There are, far to the east of their old cities, cities older yet, now sunk into dust; and people who ruled once in those cities, but left them long ago, and settled in tribes far away from other men. Women rule these tribes. They have little use for men, it’s said, except to use them as the mare uses the stallion: to breed her in her season, and thereafter to let her be. Their men and their sons live in remnants of the ancient cities, while the women wander with the herds.

  “Sometimes—not often, but not seldom, either—men or women of these tribes wander westward. Your Retenu have always welcomed them, and been a little in awe of them, because they’ve mastered horses. They brought the chariot into the west of the world long ago, and taught the Retenu to drive their own beasts, and made them great conquerors.

  “If this Khayan is a horseman,” she said, “or the son of a horseman—or a woman rather, since it’s his mother who comes from the tribes—then it’s most interesting that he was allowed to inherit his father’s lands. Horsemen are objects of awe and veneration, but they are not given rank or power. It’s said they refuse it. I think not. I think the Retenu keep it from them, in fear of them. They have great powers, it’s said; great magic. They command the winds, and the grass will grow for them. And of course, the horses are their servants—though it’s said that’s not so; it’s they who serve the horses.”

  Kemni pondered all the sides of that, as much as he could between the wine and her beauty. “So,” he said, “if this horseman has been allowed to take his father’s place, he must have some power that no one’s speaking of. Or his power is so negligible that no one fears him, even knowing what he is.”