The Shepherd Kings

by Judith Tarr

  “He may,” she agreed, unperturbed. “But he’s going to find he needs me when we come to Sile. I can speak to the Cretan captains for him, and win from them respect that he, for all his godhood, would never gain. They’ll follow his orders if I’m there to strengthen them.”

  “Why? Is Crete contemplating treachery?”

  “Of course not,” she said, nor did she seem offended. “But we have our own ways and our own gods. They’ll listen to me where they’d argue with your king.”

  “I hope he believes that,” said Kemni.

  “Are you going to drag us in front of him tonight?”

  Kemni would dearly have loved to, but after all he had a little sense. “Not tonight,” he said, “but sooner than Sile. He’d best know where you are before he begins the battle.”

  “Why? So that we can distract him?”

  “So that he can keep you safe.” Kemni sank down to a floor that was rather richly carpeted—part of the concealing baggage, he supposed—and took a moment to simply stare at his queen and her priestess. Iphikleia seemed determined to ignore him. Why she should be angry at him, when she had deliberately flouted the king’s own command, Kemni could not imagine. It was a woman’s thing, surely. It was always a woman’s thing.

  But there was a man’s thing amid all this, an affair of Kemni’s own command. He fixed Seti with a hard stare. “You have earned yourself a whipping for this,” he said grimly.

  Seti winced, but he shrugged. “So I have, my lord. May I ask that you be a little gentle? You do need me to keep your charioteers in order.”

  “There is nothing gentle about the rod,” Kemni said.

  “A few strokes,” said Seti, “for those I’ve earned—but the men will want to know why. Surely you won’t—”

  Clever, wicked Seti. Of course the men would ask why their commander had flogged his second with right and proper severity; and if Kemni answered, he would betray the women. Which he should very properly do, but he knew that he would not.

  So too did they. Ariana smiled at him. Iphikleia turned her eyes upon him at last, and that warmed him even more than Ariana’s smile. He should not be so easily subdued, but there was no help for it. No hope, either. Nor could there ever be. He was too utterly hers.

  HARVEST

  I

  Iry had thought her time in Avaris would be brief, but it seemed that once the king had got hold of a thing he was reluctant to let it go. Khayan and Iry between them delighted him immoderately. They were, Iry realized, favorites.

  She would much have preferred to be disliked intensely—for if she had been, she would have been sent away long since. As it was, she was trapped here in this great mountain of worked stone, in the palace of the conqueror king.

  She had not even the solace of the Mare. The Mare, like any sensible creature, had refused to enter either city or fortress. She was somewhere amid the fields and marshes of the Lower Kingdom, waiting for Iry to be freed from this captivity.

  There was some diversion at least in remembering her promise to Kemni to find a lover for Sadana. Iry was no courtier, least of all of this court, but as the Mare’s priestess and the king’s favorite, she could go wherever she pleased. If that was to walk among the young men at their drinking and fighting and dancing, so be it. She might have gone among them at their whoring, but they were too shy for that.

  She had no honest expectation of finding what she looked for. Sadana was not likely to thank her even for the search. But it was preferable to sitting in the room she had been given, going slowly out of her wits with boredom, or else suffering Sarai’s less than tender instruction in the arts she believed the Mare’s servant should know. That had not stopped or abated simply because Iry was in Avaris.

  But the rest of it, the lessons with Khayan, the instruction with Sadana, had stopped: Khayan’s because the Mare was gone, and Sadana’s because the warrior woman had not been in evidence since Kemni vanished. No one knew where she was. Iry hoped that she had not gone looking for him—or, gods forbid, found him and discovered what he was.

  She must trust that he had escaped, that he had returned to the Upper Kingdom with all that he had discovered. His disappearance had attracted notice, but not too much; people believed, or said that they believed, that she had sent him back to his kin in Memphis, though Iannek would have liked to know why.

  “He didn’t stay long,” he said soon after Kemni’s departure. “Was it that easy for everyone to forget whatever he did?”

  “Evidently,” Iry said in her most dismissive tone.

  But Iannek was not to be dismissed. “Don’t you find it strange? That as soon as he came here, he went away again? Is there someone here he didn’t want to see?”

  “That’s possible,” said Iry.

  “It’s inconvenient is what it is. I don’t suppose anybody is going to take his place?”

  “Should anyone?”

  That gave Iannek pause. “Someone’s got to protect you.”

  “Why, from what?” Iry asked. “From myself?”

  Iannek shrugged uneasily. “You don’t know what people here might do. Not everyone’s happy to see an Egyptian so close to the king. And since you insist on tramping about, everybody sees you.”

  “Everybody sees me and grows accustomed to me,” she said a little sharply. “Isn’t that to my advantage? I’ve become familiar. I’m no longer anything to marvel at.”

  “But you might still be something to dispose of.” Iannek sighed gustily. “I suppose there’s no hope for it. I’ll have the servants spread a pallet tonight in front of your door. It’s not what my rank calls for, but it is the safest thing.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” Iry said. “There are guards everywhere in this part of the palace, especially at night.”

  Iannek set his jaw and looked obstinate. “You don’t know whose guards they may be. And my brother commanded me—”

  “Your brother saw a simple way to keep you out of mischief,” Iry said.

  “Isn’t it succeeding?” said that maddening creature. “Maybe he only did it to rein me in, but who’s to say you don’t need me?”

  Iry threw up her hands. “Oh! You’ll drive me mad.”

  “But you’ll go mad in safety,” said Iannek.

  ~~~

  Sometimes Iry thought she truly would forsake her wits; that she would break and run screaming in search of something, anything, that was not Retenu; that was plain and honest Egyptian. She had the run of that palace, but she could not pass the outer gate.

  She did try. The guards politely, respectfully, but firmly denied her escape. She was a captive indeed, for all her rank and her freedom within the walls.

  At that she stopped. Simply stopped. Sat in her chamber and refused to rise, to eat, to dress, to move. If she was not to claw the walls, she would do nothing. Whatsoever. She would not answer Sarai’s summons to her daily lessoning. She would not attend the king when he asked. She would not do anything at all.

  People tried to vex her, but for once Iannek proved useful: he kept them out. Not without excessive vexation of his own, but she was inured to that. She could ignore it.

  She did not know how long she sat in that dim room. After a while her stomach stopped asking to be fed. She would drink a little water, if her mouth grew parched.

  It was rather peaceful, once Iannek began to hold visitors at bay. She lost count of those, nor cared who they were. Iannek said once that even the king had come, but had been turned away. “And that won’t endear me to him, you can be sure,” he said.

  She shut the door on him then, and barred it. Then she was blessedly alone.

  For a while. Of course these people would not leave a woman to her sulks. They began to hammer at the door, to call out to her, and worse, to consider coming in through the window, even as high and small as that was.

  She clapped hands over her ears and buried herself in the coverlets of her bed. It did little good, but it was something to do.

  When the
door came down, she was half in a dream in which the Retenu had never taken the Two Lands, and her father was alive, and her brothers; and she was the lady of her own household. It looked a great deal like the Golden Ibis, and the man who stood beside her in the dream looked a great deal like Kemni. Except that he was much larger. And no Egyptian had ever had such a face, carved as if with a blade, or a nose like the arc of the new moon.

  He did not, in fact, look like Kemni at all, except in being young and male. He looked very much like the face that hovered over her as she started out of her dream, if that face had not been thick with black curly beard.

  The door was open behind him, the bar broken. There was no one else with him, not even Iannek. Iry blinked at him. “What did you do to your brother? He only did what I asked.”

  “I sent him on an errand,” Khayan said.

  “To repair the door?”

  “Among other things.” Khayan reached in among the coverlets, got a grip on her, lifted her as easily as if she had been a child, and set her wobbling on her feet. He held her there, which was well, or she would have fallen. “Now tell me. What’s the cause of this?”

  “Walls,” she answered.

  He frowned, but not with incomprehension. “They won’t let you out?”

  “Not past the outer gate.”

  His frown deepened. He lifted her suddenly, startling her into immobility, and carried her out with a long and purposeful stride.

  Just before she had made up her mind to struggle, she saw where he was taking her: to the baths of the women’s quarters. They were not empty. Iry saw a blur of faces, none of which she could put a name to, and heard the shrieks of alarm.

  “Out,” Khayan said in his deep voice. It would not have swayed Iry, but these creatures of veils and confinement obeyed as they had been trained to do, and fled.

  When they were gone, totally without ceremony, he dropped her into the pool. She sank like a stone in her Retenu robes. The water closed about her. She struggled wildly, thrashing, bursting into the air, blessed air, gasping and choking and spitting water. She lunged at Khayan in pure mindless rage.

  He caught her wrists as she clawed at him, pinned them, and set his free hand to the damnable robes. She stopped struggling to glare at him, but did not resist as he stripped her out of all the wet and clinging wool and linen. She had no modesty to constrain her, and no love for these robes, either.

  Free at last, and clean, she stood in the pool and still, implacably, glared at him.

  His eyes did not waver from that or from the sight of her body. “I could have you flogged for this,” she said.

  “Surely,” said Khayan. “But it woke you up. And you are much pleasanter to the nose.”

  “I was not—”

  “Oh, not so bad, no,” he said amiably, “but this is better. Will you come out?”

  He held out his hand. She glowered at it. It did not fall. She reached for it, but not quite far enough. He leaned to meet her own hand. When he was as far as he could go, she caught hold, and pulled hard.

  He tumbled headlong into the pool. Just as she had, he thrashed and struggled and came up gasping. But he was laughing.

  She only wanted to wipe the laughter from his face. With grim intent she gripped his robes and tore at them. The wool was strong, but the fastenings gave way. As he had done to her, she stripped him, and left him standing in a puddle of water and wool and linen.

  His laughter died, but not into the horror she had hoped for. He was as beautiful as she remembered, a beauty that was nothing like Egyptian beauty.

  He let her look at it. He made no move to cover it.

  The plait of his hair had fallen over his shoulder. She unbound it.

  That made him shiver. Someone had told her, somewhere, that no one touched a man’s hair among these people but a servant or a lover.

  She was not his lover. It could be said that she was his servant—or he, perhaps, hers. She stroked the heavy locks out of the plait, which was as thick as his wrist. Thick and curling and night-black, but with a faint, ruddy cast. Her fingers loved the touch of it.

  His eyes closed. He was doing nothing to stop her. Why? Because he dared not? Or because he had no desire to?

  A man, like a stallion, cared little who a woman was, if only she was a woman. Iry bade her hands thrust him away in disgust. Somehow they ran down his breast instead, raking lightly through the crisp curling hair. He shivered, with pleasure it seemed. Certainly his manly member thought so. It was a magnificent thing, small enough beside a stallion’s, but for a man’s, more than ample for the purpose.

  “If I asked you,” she said to him, “would you?”

  His eyes opened. They were always a little startling under those black brows: amber gold, sun-clear when one expected the dark of deep water. “Do you know,” he said to her, “that legend says that when the Mare’s servant first rode out of the dawn into Earth Mother’s country, she asked that same question of the great queen’s son?”

  “What did he answer?” Iry asked.

  “He answered,” said Khayan, “that if she had chosen him, he could do no other than accept.”

  “But did he choose her?”

  “It’s said he did,” Khayan said, “and did everything in his power to persuade her to choose him.”

  “Is that how it’s done in the east of the world?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “And you? Are you like that? Or are you like the rest of the Retenu?”

  “If I were like the rest of the Retenu,” he said, “I would have taken you that first night in the Sun Ascendant, and had my will of you.”

  “Even though I proved to be the Mare’s servant?”

  “I didn’t know that then,” he said. “If I had, it might have slowed me, but not for long.”

  “You could be killed for that.”

  “A man of the Retenu, doing what a woman clearly asked for? A foreign woman without kin and therefore without honor, even one whom a goddess has chosen? I might be flogged for it, or sent into exile, but no more.”

  Such words should have wrought cold distance between them. But as they spoke, they moved imperceptibly toward one another, till they were almost touching.

  Iry was aware of the heat of his body, and the scent of it, salt and musk and sweat, and the lovely pungency of horses. He was so much larger than she—and yet, so were horses. She had no fear of them, not any longer. She had learned not to hate them.

  She could never learn not to hate the Retenu. And yet, this man was not entirely of them. His mother’s people had never conquered the Lower Kingdom.

  He was a lord of the Retenu. He had fought and killed to take that rank. To rule in Egypt; to set his foot on the necks of a conquered people.

  She did not care. Not so close to him, body just apart from body, and no move from him unless she asked it first. Impossible for a man to show such restraint; and yet he did. It was a torment: she saw how he quivered, and how he breathed short and fast. But he was master of himself as of his horses.

  If he had broken, if he had seized her, she could have fought him. This stillness, at such cost, broke down all her defenses.

  She only had to ask. But if she asked—what then? What would he expect of her? Or she of him?

  If she could be like a man, if she could take as a man did, for the moment, and let the rest look after itself—would she take this man?

  In an instant.

  She closed the space between them. Body to body then, flesh to flesh.

  He gasped as if in pain. She could feel the hard hot thing between them, swollen as if it would burst. It was a wonder it had not done that already.

  “Do it,” she said. “Finish it.”

  He shook his head. His beard brushed her forehead. Something swelled deep inside her, rose up and grew and bloomed like a flower. But he said, “I can’t.”

  “You can.”

  He was not going to. Maddening, contrary man.

  She knew what a man
did, and what a woman did. She had seen it often enough, but never done it. Never wanted it. Never known a man from whom she wanted to take it.

  Till this one. This enemy, this lord of a hated people.

  “I am asking you,” she said. “You have to accept. Yes?”

  “No.” But it was not an answer; it was more a groan of pain.

  She struck him with her clenched fists, hard, on the breast. He grunted but did not fall back. “What is it?” she cried out at him. “You don’t want me? Is that it? I’m ugly? I’m little? I’m not one—of—your—own—kind?”

  Each word was a blow; and these did drive him back, step by step, till he caught the edge of the pool and fell ignominiously onto the rim. She swooped over him, still pummeling him. “I hate you!”

  He gasped and flung up his hands, but not to thrust her away. He pulled her close, too close to strike. So close that there was nothing in the world but that big warm body, and the hot and urgent thing between.

  There was somewhat that one did—that the body did. One opened. One shifted. One took—with a gasp, and a long moment of impossibility—so large, so very large, she so small. And there was pain, but the urgency was greater. She must do this. She must.

  The pain mounted till she could not bear it, till she must retreat.

  Not retreat. Surrender. Open, ease, allow. There was still pain, but not so much. It was almost—it was—pleasure.

  ~~~

  They lay in a tangle on the pool’s edge. He was inside her, filling her to bursting. His eyes were wide. Appalled?

  No. Astonished. Maybe afraid. But not appalled.

  “Show me,” she gasped. “Show me—what—”

  To that he was obedient. Even joyful.

  And gentle. That, she had not expected, even knowing how he was with his horses. He was so big and so strong, like a stallion. But he moved gentle and slow, careful of the pain, waking the beginnings of pleasure. He stroked her, and traced her face and shoulders with kisses. He roused all her body, not only the part that held him within itself, till the simple brush of lips across her lips made her gasp.

  Then he began the dance that she had seen but never known, slow at first, but quickening as she learned the way of it. It was like riding the Mare from walk to trot to canter to gallop, the same lift and surge, and the same pure delight in the body’s motion.