The Shepherd Kings

by Judith Tarr

  “I would say that his dream lied,” Kemni said. In spite of himself he remembered what Nefertari had said to Ariana, how she dreamed of gods, and a god, maybe, had been her father. That was not a lie. He had been there. He had heard her. She had spoken from the heart.

  What if this man had done the same? No; it was unthinkable. “Who was it? Was it one of the lords of the nomes? The chancellor? A priest?”

  “A prince.” Seti said it as if from a core of pain.

  There had been several of the princes in the king’s camp. Gebu, of course; he was a charioteer still, and not a bad one, either. One or two of his brothers of the same mother, and a number of sons of concubines, and the royal princes, the sons of Nefertari, and Amonhotep the heir foremost. A dozen, perhaps. Maybe more. And one of them, or more, contemplated betraying his own father.

  Small wonder that Seti was so troubled. Kemni reined in the horses, wound reins around the post, and turned to face his second. This was a man whom he had thought he knew; not from childhood, not even from the wars, but since he began this venture with horses. They were comrades in arms, not yet battle-brothers, but that time would come—if this conspiracy of princes did not stop it.

  “We should go to Gebu,” Kemni said. “These are his brothers. He should know what they’ve been plotting.”

  Seti’s face went still. “No. You don’t want to go to Gebu.”

  “Who better? I have no power to stop them, but Gebu—”

  “Gebu led them!”

  Kemni stopped with words half-formed on his tongue. “What? I don’t understand—”

  “Of course you understand!” Seti snapped. “You don’t want to, but you do. Gebu was playing ringleader.”

  “No,” said Kemni. “You misheard him. Or heard someone else. Some of his brothers sound remarkably like him.”

  “It was Gebu,” Seti said stubbornly.

  But Kemni was equally stubborn. “Gebu could not do such a thing. He’s one of us—he’s a charioteer. He’s my battle-brother. I have no better friend in the world. Of all the princes, he is the most honorable, and the least inclined toward intrigue. How can you accuse him of such a thing?”

  Seti’s lips set tight. “I heard what I heard. Maybe he’s all of that. But if he’s afraid, and if he wants to be king—he might bend to others’ persuasion.”

  Kemni did not want that to make sense. And yet, in a terrible way, it did.

  He turned from Seti, closed himself away, though they were close together in the chariot, and set the horses in motion once more. They walked sedately forward, but the pause had restored them. In a moment they were trotting, and then cantering; and then, with a toss of the head, they had surged into a gallop.

  Kemni let them. He made no effort to slow them, only to keep to the smoother ground and veer somewhat away from the herds. Some of those caught the stallions’ urgency and swirled into motion, running with them round the broad sun-parched valley.

  The wind was burning hot, the wind of Upper Egypt that blew like the blast from a furnace. It could scour flesh from bones, if it chose. But it could not scour thoughts from a man’s mind, not such thoughts as these.

  Gebu. No, not Gebu. If truly there was a conspiracy of princes, Gebu was the last man to indulge in it. He was a simple man, as princes went. He was known for his loyalty to his friends and his refusal to play the game of courts. Most of the fiercer players discounted him because of that, reckoned that he had little desire to be anything but what he was: royal and princely but, as the son of a minor wife, unlikely to come close to the throne.

  He was content with that. Kemni would have sworn it before the gods. What he had done in coming to the Bull of Re, in joining the ranks of charioteers, was a gift to his battle-brother. He had said so, more than once. He was not a great horseman, but he had a gift for fighting from a chariot. With one of the more skilled men for charioteer, he was formidable in the practice battles.

  He could not be plotting to stop this war, and worse, to overthrow the king and set himself on the throne. Not Gebu of all the princes. Gebu wanted the war. He wanted his father to be lord of the Two Lands, king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Great House of a reunited people. That was as much honor as he needed, and as much ambition as he had.

  Kemni convinced himself, in that long wild gallop, that Seti had somehow misheard, or misunderstood. There was no other way to explain it.

  Unless Seti himself conspired against them all, to weaken them with lies—but that too was inconceivable. Seti had proved to be a strong second-in-command. He had offered his place to Gebu, in fact, but Gebu had refused it. A prince could be a charioteer, but he could be second to no one but the king himself.

  Seti did not say anything at all even when the horses tired at last and slowed to a canter and then to a jarring trot, and finally to a hard-blowing walk. Kemni had nothing to say to him. They returned slowly to the Bull of Re, rubbed down and stabled the horses together, but before Kemni was done, Seti had vanished.

  ~~~

  Kemni had further duties, exercises mounted and afoot, and at day’s end, as the light grew long and heat bore down like great and heavy hand, a mock battle between two of the chariot-wings. He commanded one. Gebu commanded the other.

  There was nothing furtive in the prince’s command of his men, nothing cowardly. He kept to the fore, and fought splendidly with his blunted sword, holding off the foil force of Kemni’s charge. Such a man would never shrink from war, nor would he creep and skulk and slink along the traitor’s way.

  Gebu’s wing won that battle, with great and whooping glee. Kemni’s own promised a terrible revenge, but later. This evening, in the swift fall of dark and sudden cool of desert night, they gathered in the charioteers’ hall for an uproarious feast.

  Gebu sat beside Kemni, and Kemni, as the defeated captain, had to serve as his cupbearer. Gebu was warm with wine and victory, and expansive, giving gifts of gold and gems to those of his wing who had fought most well. If he labored under a burden of guilt, he showed no sign of it.

  No; Gebu was not a traitor. Kemni willed himself to ease, to forget what he had heard. Seti had not been lying, not as he understood it, but he had not seen the truth, either. He could not have.

  III

  “Tell me what troubles you,” Iphikleia said.

  Kemni had not thought that he was troubled at all. He was tired. It was a great work, to receive the king’s recruits, to bring them into the ranks of the charioteers, to see that they had proper training and swift, but not so swift that they broke and fled. He rose before dawn and fell into his bed long after dusk. He had no time to brood over anything.

  But Iphikleia had caught him as he stumbled in somewhat earlier than usual, having managed to bed down the latest boatload of recruits with no more than half a dozen greater mishaps or half a hundred lesser ones. He had nothing on his mind but sleep; though her presence gave his body somewhat else to think of.

  She lay beside him without inviting him to do more, propped on her elbow and regarding him steadily. Her face was as drawn as his must be, hollow with exhaustion, but her eyes were clear. “You’re troubled,” she said. “You’ve been half among us for days.”

  “I’ve been doing the king’s duty for days,” Kemni said a little crossly.

  “More than that,” said Iphikleia.

  He was not going to tell her. There was nothing to tell. But his tongue had a mind of its own. It told her what Seti had told him, every word of it, as preposterous as it was, and as perfectly and manifestly false.

  She listened in silence, without change of expression: no surprise, no horror. When he had finished, she did not speak at once, but narrowed her eyes a little, as if deep in thought.

  He had nearly slid into sleep when she said, “No wonder you look as if something with sharp teeth has been gnawing your liver.”

  He started awake. “It’s not true. Nothing he has ever done or said has betrayed a sign of it.”

  “And yet it eats at you.” />
  “It can’t be true.”

  “Have you dreamed anything?”

  He shook his head hard. “Nothing. Not one thing.”

  “Ah,” she said, and was silent for a little while. Then: “You could ask him,” she said.

  He stiffened. “Are you mad?”

  “You would know if he lied,” she said, “or if he told the truth.”

  “I can’t do that,” Kemni said. “He would be well justified in killing me for accusing him of such a thing.”

  “Still,” said Iphikleia, “if he loves you as a brother, he’ll forgive you.”

  “No,” said Kemni. “He’s guilty of nothing except, maybe, keeping ill company. I don’t doubt that a good number of the lords and princes would be pleased to stop the war, or that some of them might even be conspiring with the Retenu. But not Gebu.”

  “Whether he is or he is not,” Iphikleia said, “if there is a conspiracy at all, the king should know of it.”

  Kemni lay very still. If he moved, he would cry aloud. Fool and worse fool. Of course she had the right of it. And he, blind to everything but Gebu’s innocence, had never thought of the danger—of what it all signified.

  “You should tell Ariana,” Iphikleia said. “She’ll get word to the king.”

  “Yes,” Kemni said. “Yes. In the morning, before I do anything else. I’ll tell her.”

  “Good,” Iphikleia said.

  ~~~

  He slept well, better than he had in a long while. Out of sleep he emerged into a dream, a harsh and vivid light like the light of noon in the Red Land. There was desert all about him, stark stone, bare sand, and at great intervals, a brown and shriveled thing that once had been green.

  It was not the plain on which they had shown the king their chariotry, but a dream-image of it. There were the stark hills, the level land, the descent to the river. And there was the camp, both smaller and larger than in life, with the king’s pavilion gleaming like a sun come to earth.

  Kemni knew in his bones where the dream would take him—and he did not want to go. But the dream, or the gods, ruled him. He flew like a falcon against the blue heaven, spiraling down and down, till at last he came to earth within the king’s camp.

  He must be standing where Seti had stood, concealed by the corner of a tent; able, if he peered, to see the circle of men passing the winejar round, and able to hear them clearly. They were oblivious to him—fools, with such things as they were saying, such enormities as they professed to contemplate.

  He did not want to look. He did not want to see. But it was laid on him. When he resisted, he was again a falcon, or perhaps his own ba-spirit, hovering in the air above the heads of the gathering.

  There were perhaps a dozen of them. He knew them all, some—those who were princes—rather well; others by name or face. They were not the greatest lords of the court, nor the highest of the princes. They were sons of lesser wives, followers of the great ones, even a man whom Kemni had seen close by the chancellor of the Upper Kingdom. No one of them held great power, but together they could muster a remarkable amount of influence.

  The leader, the one they all looked to, the one whose words began and ended the circle, was hidden in a darkness of dream. But Kemni was not to be given mercy. He knew the voice. He knew the face when it was brought before him in that bitter light.

  He knew the lines of it, the set of the brows, the long nose, the square chin; the body stocky for an Egyptian’s, though slender enough if he had been Retenu. But the expression, the way in which he said the words, Kemni had not seen before. This was a stranger wearing Gebu’s face, a man whose spirit had gone hard with old anger and old fear. When he spoke of the throne, his hands twitched, fingers opening, closing, as if to clasp the crook and flail of the Great House, the Pharaoh.

  “King of the Upper Kingdom is half a king, some would say,” he said, “but my father looks to be king of nothing, if he forces the Retenu into a war. They’ll kill him and set up a vassal king, one of their own—give him a name of our people, a royal seal, all the trappings of the office, but he will still and always be Retenu.”

  “Unless one of us can win them over,” said the chancellor’s servant. “There is that. Let the king lose the war, or let us lose it for him. Put us all out of our misery. They might even be glad of a vassal who comes of the old king’s blood. The people will accept him, and he’ll owe them too much to betray them.”

  “Maybe,” Gebu said. “I would rather not be a vassal king. King unchallenged of a kingdom that, though halved, is extraordinarily rich—I would prefer that. Let us stop the war, then. Let us do whatever we must do.”

  “Even to . . . remove the king?” the chancellor’s servant asked with a twist of distaste. But no fear; no horror. He had thought the unthinkable, and found it less than difficult.

  Gebu, too. Gebu nodded, with no visible reluctance. “Whatever we must do. Send a messenger to the Retenu. Then let us see what we will see.”

  They all nodded, every one, as conspirators must. None shrank from it, or protested. It was decided. It was done. The king was betrayed. The war . . .

  Maybe not yet. Kemni knew how difficult it could be to pass undetected into the Lower Kingdom. These traitors would not use Cretan ships—that way was not open to them. How, then? A fisherman, again? Another ruse?

  The dream swirled and shifted about him. He had soared up again, far into the sky, till the plain was shrunk to nothing below him, and the river wound serpent-supple through the narrow ribbon of the Black Land.

  He hovered at the zenith of heaven. As a god might, as Horus of the noonday sun, he saw all below both remote and close, high above it and full within it. There was the north of the Upper Kingdom, the Black Land narrow still, but ahead of it, the broad green branches of the Delta, and the Red Land held far at bay. The Lower Kingdom was a different world, a world of wet and greenery, tangled skeins of river, great beds of reeds, grasses, fields planted thick with barley and wheat, onions, lettuces, green things both pungent and savory.

  He had wandered far afield. His flight brought him circling back to the harsher land south of the great surging sprawl of Memphis and the loom of the old tombs. There were boats in the river, many of them, and caravans on the roads, and an endless train of people on foot.

  The eyes that he had been given, the eyes of a god, fixed on one of all the multitudes below. One man, nondescript, trudging beneath a laborer’s burden. But inside the bundle, wrapped deep in noisome rags, was gold: a collar of honor, that was his passage to the conquerors’ king. The symbols graven on it, shaping words of praise, were a message also, subtle perhaps beyond the wits of a foreigner, but the messenger would be instructed, surely, to make them clear to him.

  The messenger’s progress was slow, as it must be. He was some considerable distance still from Memphis, and far yet from Avaris. He was—

  By all the gods. He was close by the Bull of Re, on the stretch of road no more than a day’s journey south of it.

  The gods had given a gift. If it was true. If it was not his own wishing shaping the dream.

  This was a true dream. The light in it, the inevitability of it, convinced him of that.

  He could wake. He must wake. He must take chariot and ride. He must find that single man among all the men on the roads.

  He clawed his way out of sleep into the dark of deep night. Iphikleia slept beside him in a tangle of hair. Her arm lay heavy across him. He slipped from beneath it, taking great care not to disturb her.

  She started awake in spite of him, glowering as she always did on first waking, but sharply and fiercely alert. “You dreamed,” she said.

  Kemni glared back at her. “You, too?”

  She shook her head. “But I can feel it in you. The air is full of gods’ voices.”

  “Ill spirits walk the night,” he said.

  “Surely. But these are gods.” She rose, raking hair out of her face. “Where are we going?”

  “You are staying here,�
�� he said. “I am going out.”

  “We are going out,” she said. She rummaged in the clothing-chest. Mostly it was his, but she had left a garment or two there, by chance or design. One was the tunic she wore for riding in her chariot, and the fillet with which she bound her hair.

  She was dressed before he was, though he had less to put on—a kilt only, and sandals. Almost he forbore to put on his eyepaint, but habit was strong, and some vestige of sense. As dark as it was now, come morning the sun’s glare would be fierce. So too its heat, though the chill, now, made him shiver even in that closet of a room.

  Iphikleia dropped his Cretan mantle about his shoulders and said, “I’ll fetch bread and beer. You go harness the horses.”

  He could do worse than to obey her. The stable was dark, but he had brought a lamp, which though dim was enough to see his way to his stallions’ stalls.

  Falcon was awake and alert, Lion curled in sleep, but he roused as his brother trod softly out to be fed a bit of fodder while he was brushed and harnessed. Falcon went on with his breakfast, calmly, while Lion underwent his own toilet.

  When both were ready, Kemni led them out to the court of the chariots. The chariot they usually drew was heavy, a war-chariot; but Kemni sought out Ariana’s, which was lighter and therefore faster. Lion and Falcon snorted and champed the bits at the feel of a different chariot behind them, tugging at the reins, eager to run.

  Just as Kemni knew that he could hold them in no longer—and was ready to let them go, so that when he came back he would protest to Iphikleia that he had tried, he had really tried, to wait for her—she appeared with two bundles wrapped each in a cloth. One was smaller, round and soft. The other was long and narrow and hard. It looked like a bow in a case, or two, and a quiver of arrows; and possibly a sword.

  They were weapons, indeed: they clattered to the floor of the chariot. The other must be the bread she had promised, and she carried a jar, which she laid carefully between her feet. “I had to wait for the bread,” she said.

  It was warm against Kemni’s foot, even wrapped in its cloth. He gave the horses their heads, and let them find their own way out of the court. The outer gate gave them pause, but the sleepy guard would not defy Iphikleia or his own commander. He opened the gate for them.