The Shepherd Kings

by Judith Tarr

  But there was more than that. Some dim part of her remembered—there was something that happened. Something . . .

  This. Like the swell of a wave. Like the hawk arrowing up into the vault of heaven, poising at the zenith, and plummeting like a stone. Down and down and down, headlong, blinding fast, full upon the prey. And the strike, hard and swift, the explosion of feathers, the sudden, enormous, breathless stillness.

  Her body throbbed from the center to its outermost extremities. She lay limp along the length of him. He was still inside her, though softening, shrinking. She tried to hold him, but he slipped free.

  He was all slack, as she was. She raised her head with great effort and looked into his face. She had half expected that he would be asleep, but his eyes were open. When she met them, they warmed so suddenly and so completely that she nearly wept.

  Tears always made her angry. “I suppose you smile like that at all your women,” she said nastily.

  “Only those who make my heart sing.”

  “All of them,” she muttered.

  He shook his head. He was still smiling. Laughing at her.

  If she pummeled him again, the rest of it would happen again; and she hurt too much for that. She kissed him instead.

  His lips were twitching. He gusted laughter through the kiss.

  She was stiff with fury—and yet she caught that laughter, caught it and could not let go of it. It flung her to the cool tiles, rolling and kicking, roaring for no reason at all, except that the world was one grand and glorious jest, and she was the butt of it.

  II

  Khayan was bewitched. Ensorceled. Taken altogether by surprise, and altogether by storm.

  What Iry thought . . .

  His mother and his brother Iannek were merely grateful that, whatever he had done, Iry had come out of her retreat. He doubted that they could imagine how he had done it, or that they would be at all pleased to know.

  The Mare’s servant was not enjoined to any laws but those that bound the women of the tribe, and those set her as free as a man to love when, and how, she pleased. Nevertheless this was not as other Mares’ servants had been.

  Sarai had told him already: “I will keep her as straitly as any father his daughter, and protect her against any who might prey on her. She is an innocent. I will not have her corrupted.”

  And Iannek, of course, was Iannek—as headlong a young idiot as ever sprang from a noble house. He would try to hunt down Khayan and kill him, or something equally ridiculous.

  Iry, corrupted, dishonored, and robbed of her maidenhood, after succumbing to fits of laughter, sat up hiccoughing and fighting off gusts of giggles, and seemed to realize just then that she had fetched up beside him. She stared at him, all of him, and then down at herself. Her eyes widened a little. “I—I’m—”

  She touched the blood that stained her thigh. For an instant he thought she would cry, or scream. But she only stared.

  With all the gentleness that was in him, he brought water from the pool, and a soft cloth, and washed the blood away. She let him do that, unresisting, till he began to draw back. Then her hand fell over his, stopping it on her thigh. His breath caught. She did not want him to think what he was thinking—surely she did not.

  “You may want,” he said carefully, “for a day or two, to do what you would do in your courses. Because sometimes—”

  “Sometimes it goes on.” She nodded. “I know. I had that lesson. Since, your sister said, I likely wouldn’t have learned it from my own mother.”

  “My sister? Maryam?”

  “Sadana.” Iry took his hand in both of hers and lifted it to rest between her breasts. Her heart was beating a little quickly, her breath coming a little shallow, but she was remarkably composed. “I’m not going to command you to come back. But if you should wish to . . . you may.”

  “Will you welcome me?”

  Her breath shuddered as she drew it in. “I—if you want me—”

  “How could I not want you?”

  “But I’m not—”

  “Stop that,” he said. It was not perhaps a wise or a respectful thing to do, but he gathered her in his arms, drew her in like a child, curled in his lap with her head on his shoulder.

  She did not resist, not at all. She sighed in fact, and nestled against him.

  “What do we do now?” she asked. Her voice was lighter than usual, as childlike as her comfort in his lap, but he knew better than to think that her mind was a child’s.

  “What do we do?” he echoed. “Why, whatever you like.”

  “No,” she said with a hint of impatience. “Tell me what I should do. Should I walk away? Should I pretend that this never happened? What is proper? Is anything proper?”

  “In the east,” he said slowly, “you would have several choices. You could send me away as unsatisfactory. You could express yourself pleased, and invite me back into your bed. You could even, if you were truly delighted, order me to move myself and my belongings into your tent.”

  “And you? Would you have any say in it at all?”

  “I could refuse to come back, though I might not insist on coming if you forbade me.”

  “What if I ordered you to move into my—not tent; my rooms, then. What would you do?”

  “It would be a scandal,” he said.

  “Would you refuse?”

  “No,” he said. He did not know what he would say until he said it, but that was the answer that came to him. It was not the reasonable answer, or the sensible one. It was the one that his heart spoke, as he met that clear and level stare.

  “What if I ordered you to go away and never speak to me again?”

  In spite of himself, his belly clenched. “I . . . would obey.”

  “Willingly?”

  “You know I wouldn’t.”

  “Do I know that?” She frowned slightly. Her head tilted. “You don’t lie, do you? Many in this court, they live in a fabric of lies. Everything they do is false, sometimes a little, sometimes entirely. They dance a long dance of words that are not true, and faces that are masks, and smiles that never reach the eyes.”

  “That isn’t so in an Egyptian court?”

  “I’ve heard it’s so wherever there are kings,” she said. “But you tell the truth. You must be well hated.”

  “Am I?”

  “I haven’t noticed,” she said.

  Of course she had not. She was above the petty maneuverings of the court.

  Khayan was, he realized, utterly besotted with her. It struck him with the force of a revelation, though it had been clear enough for a while that he found her more than merely interesting. As he looked at her now, his heart melted, and another part of him would have been delighted to continue what they had begun not so long before.

  She did not notice that any more than she had noticed whether Khayan was loved or hated in the court of Avaris. Women were like that. They could think of a dozen things at once, and ignore the one that, to a man, was most important.

  He sighed faintly.

  She heard that. “You must have somewhere to be,” she said.

  He shrugged. “Nowhere more important, or that I’d rather be.”

  “That’s charming,” she said, “but I’m sure you’re wanted in many more places than this one. If I promise to behave myself, and go to my lessons with your mother, will you go where you were going before you rescued me?”

  “Was it a rescue?” he asked.

  “From myself,” she said. She paused as if to gather courage. Then she said, “Tonight we both should rest. Tomorrow night . . . come to me. If you will. And only if.”

  “I will come,” he said. “My word on it.”

  The light in her face almost felled him. It was all he could do to dress—with her help, which flustered him far more than he ever wanted her to see—and make order of himself, and gather his wits to face the greater world.

  She all but pushed him out the door, with a promise to follow after a judicious while, properly
and modestly attired. That, from her, was no small promise.

  It was almost pain to walk away from her, to become a lord of the people again, to think as a man and a warrior, and not as a lover. He had to pause once, in a corridor mercifully deserted, and lean against the cool stone of the wall, and simply breathe.

  Women did not do such things to him. He had loved, so he thought, and more than once: a priestess of the tribe, a chieftain’s daughter, and yes, the lovely and wanton Barukha, whom—thank the gods—he was not likely to find in his bed tonight; her father was keeping her close. He had had great pleasure of them, and great joy. But when he was not with them, he seldom thought of them, except when his manly organ grew weary of waiting for him to notice their absence.

  This woman he thought of often. He always had, even in the beginning, when she was a baffling and excessively forward child, a slave among his slaves. And of course once the Mare chose her, he had to think of her. He was one of her teachers. But what he was thinking of teaching her now had little to do with chariotry, or with the mastery of horses—unless that were of mares in season.

  He had to stop this. He had to clear his mind. It was late, but not so late that he could let himself slip out of the thing that he had been set to do when his mother sent for him and bade him rouse the Mare’s servant from her decline. He sincerely doubted that she had intended him to do it as he had, but she would surely be pleased with Iry’s new diligence.

  If Iry told his mother what he had done . . . why then, he could only die once.

  With a short bark of laughter, he thrust himself upright, shook his robes into place, and strode onward with new and firmer purpose.

  ~~~

  The gods, it seemed, had been kind. The king’s guards greeted him as amiably as always. One, who had shared a jar or three of wine and a game or six of the bones with Khayan, grinned at him and said, “You’re in luck, my lord. He was out later than he expected; he’s just come in. There’s men with him, but he said to send you in when you came.”

  Khayan breathed a sigh of relief. “Ah. That’s well.”

  “We’ve got a game in the offing tonight,” the guard said. “Come and play with us if the king lets you go.”

  “I’ll do that,” Khayan said willingly enough. If he was not to go to Iry, a game in the guardroom would do.

  He passed the guards with a smile and a nod, into the rooms that he had come to know well since he came out of the east. The king would be in the smaller audience chamber, if he was entertaining guests; and indeed, there he was, with a larger gathering than Khayan had expected. Khayan recognized most of them: the chancellor of the kingdom, one or two commanders of the armies, the master of horse, and a gathering of nobler courtiers. Khayan was hardly a minor lord, but in this company he was the youngest and the least.

  He thrust himself past that moment’s hesitation. The king had asked for him. It was awkward to come in so late, but Apophis betrayed no anger. He rose, in fact, and beckoned to Khayan, bidding him sit at his own right hand, and calling the servants to bring him whatever he desired.

  Those signs of great favor could hardly go unnoticed. Khayan marked whose eyes slid, and whose face went a little too still. Young puppy, these august lords must be thinking. But they maintained expressions of civility, and made no effort to challenge him. There was time for that later.

  Once Khayan was settled with a cup of wine, the council—for so it was—returned to the deliberations that he had interrupted.

  “You do believe this?” Apophis asked his general of the armies.

  That old soldier, who had lost a hand in some battle long ago but who was still a deadly fighter, nodded his scarred and grizzled head and said, “Ten years ago this city was almost taken by the Egyptians because we were caught off guard. But for your foresight, my lord, in bidding Nubia remember its alliance, we would have lost this kingdom that our fathers conquered.”

  “The Egyptian was driven back,” one of the lesser lords said. “He died not long after, fighting Nubians, it’s said. His brother, who took the throne—his brother has never offered us even a skirmish. He’s ruled by women, they say: first by his mother, then by the wife he inherited from his brother.”

  “She’s his sister, I’m told,” said the man next to him. He shuddered. “Barbarian, to bed his own father’s child.”

  They all murmured at that, except Apophis and the general Khamudi, who were intent on the greater concern. “I do believe,” Khamudi said, “that the rumors are true. The Egyptian is mustering his armies. Have you had word from Nubia since last the moon was at the full? Have you sent messengers there? It’s been silent, my lord. As if the Egyptian has cut us off from our allies.”

  “How can he do that?” the minor lord demanded. “Or if he’s done it, maybe he’s marching into Nubia. It’s rich country, and everyone covets it. Why not the Egyptian?”

  “Because,” Khamudi said with an air of sorely strained patience, “the Egyptian would find it more satisfying to attack us and take back what his predecessors used to hold.”

  “Rebellion,” said the master of horse. He sounded unsurprised. “Yes, I’ve heard rumors, rumblings in the earth. These people are servile, but some of them are proud. Those would pay dearly to drive us back the way we came.”

  “We came from this very country,” the chancellor said. “I was born in this city. I’m as Egyptian as any of these alleged rebels.”

  “Remember what the late pharaoh said,” said Khamudi, “when he stood in front of these walls and taunted us with his victory. ‘Vile Asiatics,’ he called us. ‘Dogs of foreigners.’”

  “And he fled,” said the chancellor, “and died soon after. Surely his people understood what the gods were telling them.”

  “And yet rumor is,” the king said, “that his successor is marching toward us.”

  “Rumor only,” the chancellor said. “I’ve sent out spies and runners. There’s word of a fleet well south of Memphis, but no one has seen it sailing northward. If it exists at all, I suspect that it is there simply to taunt us. The Egyptian is hardly strong enough to challenge our armies—and he has no more than his kingdom will supply, while we have the might of Asia at our backs.”

  “Suppose,” Khayan ventured to say, “that he had found a way to cut us off from that. It’s a narrow ribbon of road that binds us to our people. What if he managed to cut it?”

  They all regarded him as if he had been a child piping up in the council of his elders. Even the king looked on Khayan with more patience than credence.

  “How would he cut off the road to Asia?” the chancellor demanded. “We hold all the ways to it. And even if he managed that—what strength would he have? We have great armies. He would have no more than he could spirit through the desert or across the marshes and fens, which are impenetrable. His attempt would be feeble and doomed to fail.”

  Khayan shut his mouth carefully, though words in plenty begged to tumble out of it. They were all nodding, some smiling at him with pitying expressions, others looking much too pleased at what they reckoned his folly.

  Maybe it was folly. It would be a ghastly undertaking, and impossible to sustain, even if it could be done at all. But if he were the Egyptian king, he would look for a way to do it. Particularly if he could rely on the Egyptians within the kingdom—whose numbers were vast, and Khayan’s own people terribly few—to rise up and fight for him when he came.

  “So,” Apophis said in the stretching silence. “No one has more than rumors. All’s quiet within the kingdom. If the fleet moves, if it exists—we’ll know, yes?”

  They all nodded. Khamudi said, “Most rumors I’ll ignore, my lord. But this one is worth our attention. If it’s false, well, our young men could use a dose of marching and guarding. A sufficiency of days in the sun and nights in the fens, with hardships enough, and maybe a skirmish—that would keep them quiet for a while.”

  “Then you would take a company or two southward,” Apophis inquired, “and investigate the
se rumors of a fleet?”

  “Perhaps three large companies,” Khamudi said, “or four. A show of strength would not be amiss.”

  “Do it,” said Apophis.

  Khamudi bowed in his seat.

  “Sire,” Khayan said. “If it’s as simple a matter as that, and as little a thing, why not send a company to Sile, too? If nothing else, the march will give them occupation, and they can visit their kin in Asia if they’ve a mind.”

  Apophis considered that. Khayan granted him as much. “It might not be an ill thing,” he said. “But if attack comes upon us, it will come from the south. Best not to dissipate our forces by sending a portion of them into the north.”

  “But if the attack is from the north—”

  “My dear young cousin,” Apophis said warmly, but with a warning beneath, “your concern is admirable. But there is no danger from the north.”

  Khayan bowed his head. “Then . . . sire, might I take my own men, and only those, on a training march? And perhaps we may pause at Sile, and assure ourselves that my fears are unfounded?”

  “In time,” said Apophis, “perhaps. For now, I prefer you here.”

  There was nothing Khayan could say to that. This was the king, and these were the wisest of his counselors. If they saw no merit in what he proposed, then perhaps, indeed, it was only silliness.

  The council ended so, with Khayan set aside, and Khamudi bidden to march into the south in search of the Egyptian king’s fleet. Khayan would have left with the others, but Apophis kept him there with a word and a glance.

  That was not excessively well received. But Apophis took no notice. When the last of the lords had passed the door, and there were only the servants and Khayan remaining in the suddenly empty hall, Apophis said, “There, lad. No need to sulk. Are you tired of this city already?”

  “No, sire,” Khayan said. “But—”

  “I understand,” Apophis said, and smiled. “Come, then. What would you say to a few days’ escape? A hunt—we’ll hunt for whatever the land will give us.”