The Shepherd Kings

by Judith Tarr

  “He is young,” said Iphikleia. “But young needn’t be harmless. He did battle for his place—”

  “He was challenged,” Kemni said. “He’d have had to fight or suffer loss of honor. Honor is a terribly important thing to his people.”

  “But why was he challenged? What purpose would that serve? He was a younger son. He needn’t have been a threat at all.”

  “I’m sure there was a reason,” Kemni said. “But that’s not what intrigues me. Why is your uncle so enthralled with this? It can’t have a great deal to do with the war. This Khayan is only one lord of many, and not among the highest. Most likely he’s weak—he’d have to be, as young as he is, and as recently come to his seat. Why does it matter to a lord of Crete, that the lord of a smallish holding comes from that particular tribe?”

  Iphikleia frowned. “It’s an oddity. My uncle has always been interested in oddities. You never know, he’ll say, when a small thing will grow into force enough to topple a kingdom.”

  “He doesn’t think this is a small thing,” Kemni said.

  “What, have you spoken with him?” she asked with a twist of mockery. “Maybe it’s only because we’re kin to the horsemen, very long ago and far away—to the women who ruled the ancient cities before men came with horses and changed the world. Our ancestors grew restless, wandered westward, and in time found the sea. His ancestors lingered in the sea of grass. We take an interest, still, in our remotest cousins.”

  Kemni shook his head. He could not find words for the niggle in his belly. Maybe it was only that this horseman had taken his own kin’s house and lands, and become, if he wished to see it so, his own overlord. It struck too close. It mattered too much.

  Everything here mattered too much. When he sailed through the Lower Kingdom to Crete, the river had borne him up. He had kept at bay his yearning for the land, for the country that was his own. But once he set foot in it, when he had left the fishing boat to capture a maker of chariots, its spell had fallen on him. This was his own land. This was his mother, his beloved. He belonged in it, though if he were known, he could die.

  He was not doing this for his king, though it might serve his king’s purpose. He was doing it because he had come home, and because he yearned, to the very heart and soul, to make this land his again, free of any foreign invader.

  Iphikleia turned back to her toilet, taking her time about it, transforming the ornate beauty of the day into a simpler and, to his taste, even more potent nighttime splendor. She cleansed the paint from face and breasts, and combed out her long curling hair, and put aside her ornaments and her garments and came to him as she had in his dreams, naked and gleaming. Her skin was soft, scented with sweet oils. Her hair smelled of flowers.

  They came together almost gently, without haste, and without great urgency. The whole of the night lay before them. She seemed preoccupied, somewhat, but not so much as to turn away from him. Her touch was gentle, a little abstracted. Her kisses wandered aimlessly. When she took him into herself, it was as if she could not help it, but neither was she desperate to end it. They rocked together, just enough to keep him aroused, but not so much as to bring it to its summit.

  It was peaceful, in an odd way. Quiet. Comfortable—but not, gods be thanked, dull. There was fire beneath, banked but clear in memory.

  She woke it suddenly, startling him, so that he laughed; then gasped. He had never meant to be taken so completely off guard.

  They slept in each other’s arms, or feigned to. Kemni kept his eyes shut and his breathing slow. He was pondering, still, thoughts without words, scattered memories, fragments of dreams that he had all but forgotten. Dancing the bull. Driving a chariot. Standing under a wind-tossed sky in a sea of grey-golden grass, as a herd of horses grazed and mated and played about him. He had not seen such horses in the waking world: pale horses, grey or silver or white. They glowed like the moon in that dream-softened light.

  He woke with a start. That was not a dream he had had before. It lingered, without fear but with a kind of intensity that made him—almost—groan aloud. The gods were toying with him again.

  He would go. He lay beside the soundly sleeping Iphikleia in the cool of dawn, and knew that he did this for no king, though perhaps for a god—which god, he did not know. He would go toward Avaris, toward the foreign king’s city. And if he happened to pause in his own native country, to see what lord now ruled it—well, and that would serve his king well enough, when all was considered.

  SOWING

  I

  The life of the Mare’s servant was both utterly familiar and utterly strange. Iry lived as she had always lived, in the house that had been her ancestors’ for time out of mind. Even that she was enslaved to a lord of the Retenu: that had become the way of her world. She hated it, but it was inescapable.

  And yet, in a way she barely began to understand, she had become one of these foreigners, these people from Retenu. She would think of them in no other way. Names were power. A name remembered conferred immortality. A name forgotten was a death beyond death.

  She would forget the name they called themselves. It was a petty revenge, and probably useless: she was a slave, after all, and they were kings. But it gave her pleasure.

  These who called themselves rulers of the Sun Ascendant were foreigners among the foreigners. The lady Sarai and her daughters were of another blood, blood of tribes far away in the east of the world. They had great power and great magic. They spoke direct to their goddess of horses, who was also, to them, all that was of earth. She was somewhat like Mother Isis, but her rites were older, and wilder.

  They were rites of windy grassland and open sky, cold clear spaces that ran forever into a blue horizon. There were no gods beyond that horizon. The gods were in the earth beneath and the sky overhead, the wind and the sun, and the rain that fell out of the sky. Blood was their sustenance. Life was their mystery, and death its continuance. They ran on the hooves of horses, and fell with the rain.

  And greatest of them all was Horse Goddess, Earth Mother, the Lady of all that walked and swam and flew. She wore the likeness of a white mare, among many others. A mare—the Mare—was her living self among mortals. And the Mare, of her nature, required a servant. That servant, for some incalculable reason, was Iry.

  Iry was not made for the rites of cold and empty places. She was of Egypt, and Egypt was Red Land and Black Land, desert and rich black earth, heat like hammered bronze, and light so vivid it seared the eye. Blood was not its sacrifice. A handful of barley, a garland of flowers, delighted the Mare far more than blood that made her snort and stiffen, or flesh of sacrifice that she would not, of her nature, touch.

  But these women would not hear such things. Sarai did not bear alone the burden of Iry’s teaching. Her elder daughter Maryam took on herself, or was given, the task of transforming an Egyptian slave into a foreign priestess.

  She was there in the morning, the day after Iry came into Sarai’s power. Iry had been interested to be given, the night before, a room of her own above the garden, and a small mute maid who insisted on waiting on Iry as if Iry had been a lady. Which she had been once, but now she was a slave. She had lost the habit of being served.

  In the morning she woke in the rather ample bed, in the pale-gold light of morning, and looked into a face without beauty of feature, but with wonderful eyes. They made her think of the Mare’s eyes, dark and strong and rather wicked. They were not merciful, or kind. But neither did they bear her any malice.

  And that she found fascinating, even half asleep. “You should hate me,” she said.

  “Why?” said Maryam. “What profit would there be in that?”

  “Hate isn’t for profit,” Iry said. “And I should not be what you all think I am.”

  “You should not, but you are. The Mare is wise,” Maryam said, “and a goddess. She cares little for our understanding. Only for our obedience.”

  Iry rose, because it irked her to lie abed with this foreigner standing over her.
The little maid was waiting, and another who must have come with Maryam. They had orders to bathe her and anoint her and clothe her as these people reckoned fitting. The robe at least was linen, and therefore less unbearable than the swathings of wool that Iry had dreaded. It was simple, without ornament: a votary’s robe. They combed and plaited her hair, and when she was seemly, delivered her into Maryam’s hands.

  Hard hands they were, too. There were no horses for Iry this day. Khayan, it seemed, was gone, and likewise his sister Sadana, the one who rode horses and bore arms like a man. The one who should have been the Mare’s servant, but the Mare had chosen otherwise.

  There was a crocodile down the river, and it had been snatching infants from cradles, and had taken a woman who had been working in the fields some distance from the water. Very sad, and very urgent, but Iry could not help but suspect that Sadana had been removed, with care, from Iry’s vicinity.

  Meanwhile Iry was to learn the ways of a woman of the tribes, ways that often made little sense, but were tradition. The keeping of the house, which in the east would be a tent; the feeding and ordering of its people; the weaving and embroidering of robes and all that went with it, from shearing the sheep to dyeing the wool to spinning the thread: all that, she was expected to know. And the works and days, the festivals, the rites of each sunrise, each sunset; the rites of new moon and full moon, shift of the seasons in a country that knew neither heat nor river’s flood, the great sacrifices and the lesser, with the choosing of beasts and offerings for each, and the words one spoke or sang, the music, the dancing, the song . . .

  She fell into bed that night in exhaustion such as she had never known. Her head felt as if it would burst with all that she had been given to learn. Her belly was knotted as if she had gorged on a feast of strange meats and stranger spices.

  And this was to be her lot every day, for as far ahead as she could see.

  She could run away. The thought tugged at her on the edge of sleep. Run—where? Thebes? Anywhere in the Upper Kingdom? Oh, indeed, if she had been a man she would have done it years ago, and died too, no doubt, as her father and her brothers and her cousin had; but she would have died free.

  What then would the Mare do? If Iry fled, would she follow? That would bring the wrath of the Retenu on the Upper Kingdom, and no mistake.

  She was bound here; bound to the Mare. And yes, to her mother and her people in the Sun Ascendant, though she had seen none of them in all that day. She could have been shut away in another world, for all she saw or knew of her own.

  She had not been given a choice in the matter. Gods never troubled with such things. Nor should they; and neither should mortals resist them. Yet Iry could not help the small stab of resentment.

  That resentment must be nothing to what drove Sadana. She was being kept away. That was evident when, after a handful of days, the lord Khayan came back without her, but with the crocodile’s head and hide for trophy. His sister, he said, had gone hunting gentler quarry, she and her warrior women.

  Iry kept quiet. Now that he had returned, she was let out of the house, away from a teacher who stood over her like a guard on a temple. She would have gone regardless, because the Mare was calling her; but Sarai had made it clear: Iry was to go in his company.

  What that meant, Iry well knew. The secret was out. There would be no hiding, and no concealment. Iry would be seen next to the lord, and marked for what she was.

  How that served Sarai or for that matter Khayan, Iry did not know. Her mind was not deep. She was no master of intrigue, nor skilled in the ways of courts. She did as she was bidden, because it suited her fancy.

  He was waiting for her in the stableyard—a lord waiting for a slave; how wonderful. Her step caught on something as she came out into the sunlight—the hem of her damnable robe, surely. He seemed much larger than she remembered, which was absurd; much broader and more imposing, and yet, oddly, much less foreign.

  His yellow eyes widened slightly at her approach. Of course: she must look different. Her hair, the garment that had been forced on her—but no one could compel an Egyptian to forsake her eyepaint, even to be a priestess of a tribe from beyond the edge of the world.

  There were people about. Some were Retenu. More were Egyptian. They were staring. She quelled the urge to slink and hide and dive into shadows. There was no shame in this. She could hold her head high, and be proud of all that she was.

  She stepped into the chariot without a word. Nor did Khayan speak, though he seemed to bite back a word of his own. With a slight shrug, he took up the reins and urged his horses forward.

  This was her world, her Egypt: river and reeds, fields of black earth growing rich with the new crops, and the sun beating down and the heat rising up, blessed and familiar. She stripped off the robe once they were out of the house, let it fall to the floor of the chariot, and let the wind of their speed cool her body.

  Khayan slanted a glance at her. Amused? It seemed so. She tossed her head like the Mare in a temper, and gripped the chariot-rim, eager enough, almost, to leap out and run on her own two feet. But the horses were faster.

  Out among the horses, nothing had changed. The Mare greeted her as if she had been there every day: disappointing, a little, but it suited the Mare’s humor. It was preferable to a royal sulk, which Iry had been more than half expecting.

  The lesson proceeded as always: chariotry, management of horses, and at last, saddling and riding the Mare. For that Iry could not go bare. “You’ll regret it richly,” Khayan said. Was he blushing? No, of course not. Not that arrogant young lord.

  He had brought, among the other things that came with him every day, a garment such as Iry had seen Sadana and her women wear. It went on a leg at a time, and fastened about the middle. Trousers, he called it, or them. “They’re all the fashion among the tribes,” he said.

  They were not at all beautiful, were in fact rather well worn, but they fit well enough. And they were indeed useful for sitting on a horse. Iry had not expected much of what that was like. To be up high, oh yes, but there was a living, breathing, shifting weight beneath her. It moved in a slow and rolling rhythm, a little like a boat on the river.

  She was not to clutch and cling. Khayan made that bitterly clear. She must sit quiet and let the Mare carry her. That should have been easy, and yet it was astonishingly difficult.

  If Khayan was laughing at her, he hid it well. He was patient as always, but never indulgent. She must do as he asked, exactly, or he made her do it over and over and over again. She had protested when they first began, and more than once. Every time, he had said, “I am far more forgiving than the Mare is.”

  That was true. The Mare expected perfection of her servant. Nothing else was worthy of her.

  Iry’s time with her was too brief. All too soon, Khayan ended the lesson as it had been ending of late, with both of them retrieving and harnessing the chariot-team. Then when they were in the chariot, he handed the reins to her.

  She had driven often enough, out in the field. He had never allowed her to drive back to the house. That too was proof that the secret was secret no longer.

  The horses were stronger when their heads were turned back toward their stable. Stronger and more willful, taking the bits in their teeth, tugging hard against her hands. She was not their lord, and they knew it.

  He had taught her well. She had not his strength, but she knew how to set her weight, and how to twitch the reins out of clenched teeth, to slow the team, to master them until they advanced at the pace she chose. She was too preoccupied to be proud of herself. And yet there was a deep and thrumming joy in it, in the wind in her hair, and the reins in her hands, and the horses stretching, eager, toward home.

  ~~~

  They could not keep Sadana away from Iry forever. No more could they keep Iry from her own people. But they could manage it for a goodly while, and so they did: long enough that Iry felt herself becoming a foreigner, growing accustomed to the damnable robe, speaking the language,
thinking in it—gods help her, shaping her thoughts in a language that she hated to the very blood and bone.

  And all for a white Mare, an imperious, heedless, headstrong creature who cared not in the slightest what her servant sacrificed in order to belong to her. Iry was hers. That was all that mattered.

  And Sadana was not—and that mattered altogether too much.

  Iry the slave would have had her spies and her allies. Iry the novice priestess had nothing but herself. She was cut off from her old friends, her old fellows. Her mother, who lived in that house, she never saw. She had always kept to herself; she would not have minded, so much, if she had not needed her spies to tell her when Sadana was coming.

  Because there were no spies, Iry could only wait and try to be wary. That was wearing, but no more than anything else that was laid on her.

  And after all of that, when Sadana came back, Iry had no warning. As she had the first morning in Sarai’s house, she woke to a stranger standing over her. This time it was not Maryam; it was Maryam’s wild sister, looking even wilder than Iry remembered, as if she had come straight from her riding, in a gust of wind and sand and horses.

  She was staring down at Iry without expression, and without a word. There was no weapon in her hand—that much consolation Iry could take.

  Iry thought of sitting up. It would make her less vulnerable. But it would be a confession that she thought she was in danger. She stayed where she was, therefore, yawned and stretched and blinked sleepily at her guest, and said, “Good morning. Did you come back just now?”

  “Before dawn,” Sadana said tightly.

  “Ah. Then you rode through the night.”

  “It was cooler.”

  Iry sat up then, not to defend herself, but to set her head level with Sadana’s. She was the priestess, the Mare’s servant. Her rank must be higher. And this was her country, which made her even stronger. She had no need to slink and hide and be afraid.