The Shepherd Kings

by Judith Tarr

  He was too far, too far. Even if he leaped from the chariot and ran, he could not—

  “Go,” the king said at his shoulder.

  He did not ask what Ahmose meant. One last time he cracked whip above the horses’ heads, while Ahmose called his men to him, afoot and in chariots.

  The horses’ leap was not as strong as it had been before, but their great hearts bore them onward through the wreckage of the camp.

  Kemni could fight in the chariot—but not with the king behind him. He could only drive the horses and leave the rest to Ahmose, and pray that it would be enough.

  The horses pounded to a rearing halt in front of the tent. It was a melee within, even the wounded rising—those who could—and wielding whatever came to hand.

  Ahmose sprang down, tossing something into Khayan’s hand as he went. It was the king’s own sword. Ahmose had a throwing spear, shortened in his fist.

  Kemni left the horses as they were and ran in pursuit. The king’s sword was beautifully balanced in his hand, like a live thing, lovely and deadly. It whirled almost of its own accord and cut down a bearded barbarian who had stooped over one of the most sorely hurt. He dropped. Kemni kicked him aside from the unconscious Egyptian, thrust the sword into his throat and wrenched. The Retenu gurgled and convulsed and died.

  Kemni waded onward. There were women among the healers, he saw, and not cowering in corners, either. They had set hands to the prostrate wounded and dragged them out of harm’s way, as much as they could in such confusion.

  One or two were even armed. Sadana was fighting her own people over the body of a man he doubted she had ever seen before. Iry had a spear. And past them, Ariana wielded a sword, and Iphikleia in her charioteer’s tunic, though she had been sailing on her uncle’s ship.

  Or had she been? He had not seen her on the field, nor recognized her chariot or her horses.

  He fought his way toward her. It was not anything he needed to ponder before he did it. The king was moving in much the same direction.

  Most of the attackers were down. A few, their giant of a captain among them, fought on with trapped ferocity. They pressed toward the women, as if they had some hope even yet of taking hostages against their escape.

  It all came together in that small and crowded space. Battle hand to hand, hand to throat. Kemni grappled with a man almost as large as the captain. But the captain was beyond him, stronger than any Egyptian, bellowing as he flung them aside. They were like children about him: armed and deadly children, but children nonetheless.

  Kemni saw the giant break through. Heard him grunt as Ariana’s blade bit his arm; grunt and raise the great sword that in his hands seemed little more than a long knife, and hack at her in return. But there was another between them, a body flinging itself against his blade, driving it back with all of its weight and speed. Driving it full into Kemni’s sword.

  The king’s beautiful blade bit deep, clove up beneath that coat of boiled leather, through flesh, veering off bone. The giant roared in agony and writhed, twisting against the keen-edged bronze.

  Kemni’s arm alone could not have driven that blade as deep as the giant’s struggles. The huge body toppled, nearly taking Kemni down with it.

  He staggered aside. The giant fell full on the sword; hung briefly as it caught in his flesh and bone and against his breastplate; then sank down with a kind of sigh. A broad handspan of notched bronze protruded from his breast, bright with heart’s blood.

  Kemni barely saw. Someone else had fallen too, someone far smaller and far lighter, but no less terribly wounded.

  He caught her before she struck the ground. Her eyes were open. They saw him. She frowned as if to ask him what he did here when he should be out on the field, finishing the battle. But when she opened her mouth to speak, the words were lost in blood and foam.

  He sank down slowly with Iphikleia in his arms. She was all over blood. His mind was empty. As empty as her eyes.

  She was dead. He knew that. He did not try to deny it. But there was nothing real about it.

  People kept trying to take her from him. Some of them seemed to think she lived; could be saved. But she had died even as she recognized him.

  The battle was over. The giant had been the last to die—and much too late for Iphikleia.

  Kemni felt nothing. Not grief, not rage. Not the terrible irony of it, that she should have been wounded again so soon after she had nearly died, as if the gods truly were determined to take her to themselves. Not anything at all. And he would not let her go.

  Even the king tried. Kemni recognized Ahmose. He bowed as much as he might. But he held fast. Imhotep came and told him, with little patience, that he was in the way. He took no notice. Ariana stood over him and wept. He would have comforted her if he could, but he had no comfort for himself.

  Even Iry came, but not her guardian hound—not Iannek, who would have been killed if he had walked in that place in that hour. Kemni might have yielded for her, if he had had any yielding in him. She had the right of it; they did need the space he was sitting in, and Iphikleia should be taken, tended, made seemly for her journey to the gods’ country. The embalmers were there already among the dead, wrapping them and carrying them away.

  They would not have his beloved, the half of his soul. Not until he had mourned her.

  A clear voice spoke through the clouds of grief. It was not Iphikleia’s, no, never again. And yet it was the same kind of voice, sharp, keen-witted, and unforgiving of nonsense. It scattered the people about Kemni. It sent them all away, even the king—who after all, as the voice said, had a victory to oversee.

  Sadana sat on her heels in front of him. She had been fighting: she was filthy, and there was a bruise on her cheekbone; and from the way she moved, he thought she might have a wound somewhere, perhaps more than one.

  She did not say anything. She set to cleaning her sword instead, carefully, lovingly, with a cloth she must keep for the purpose. Then she brought out a stone and began to sharpen it.

  Her concentration was remarkable. Healers plied their trade about her, but did not trouble her—not as they had hounded Kemni. She was like a stone in a flood, and the flood parting before her.

  “You fought for us,” he said.

  “I fought for the Mare’s servant,” she answered, never lifting her eyes from her task. She was meticulous in it, and painstaking.

  “Against your own people?”

  “My people are in the east, beyond your horizon,” she said.

  “My lady is dead,” Kemni said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  That struck him with a thought. “You knew?”

  “Everyone knows.” She sharpened her fine bronze blade, sharpened and sharpened it. When she was done, it would draw blood from the wind.

  “But I never told—”

  “We knew.”

  “So you know—why—”

  “I know what she was to you.” Sadana tested the edge against her arm, shook her head slightly, went back to sharpening the blade. “You should let her go. Her spirit is gone. That is her shell you cling to.”

  “No,” he said. “No. She needs it whole. For when she passes into the gods’ country.”

  “Then shouldn’t the embalmers see to her, before she rots?”

  “She won’t—she won’t be allowed to—” His breath caught in his throat. “She’s from Crete. They burn their dead. And priestesses—priestesses are taken away forever, their names, their selves, everything they were. They’re given back to Earth Mother. The embalmers will give her to the Cretans. I know they will. Then I’ll lose her. Do you understand? I can’t lose her!”

  “You’ve already lost her.”

  “Not if I find a way,” he said. “There must be one. Maybe if the king commands? But will her spirit know where it was supposed to go? What if it goes to her own gods’ place? I can’t go there. I don’t even know where it is.”

  “But can you learn?”

  His eyes widened. He had
not thought of that. He had only thought of the terrible thing, the thing that emptied him of everything else: that they could not be together in death. Their gods were different gods. The life-in-death that she expected was nothing like that to which he had been raised. And that was unendurable.

  “You can learn,” Sadana said. “Let her people take her. Let them set her on her way as they know how to do. Then let them teach you the path. When your time comes, you can follow her.”

  “It won’t be Egypt,” he said slowly. “It won’t be—”

  “It will be with her.”

  He looked at her. She was the first thing he had truly seen since Iphikleia fell, except for Iphikleia’s face. This was a very different face, with its odd yellow eyes and its fierce bones. That difference gave him something like comfort—if he could ever know comfort again.

  He nodded. His arms loosed their grip. Hands took her from him, gently, as if she slept and they had no wish to wake her.

  He knew how heavy she was. Death weighed a body down, turned it, as it were, to stone: cold and stiff and still.

  She was dead. If she had been Egyptian, he would have had the threescore days and ten of her embalming to find tears for her. But she was from Crete. They would build her pyre at evening, and destroy the flesh that housed her spirit. That set it free, they said. If they left the body whole, the spirit was trapped inside it, rotting with it, unless it mustered strength to torment the living.

  If he was to follow her, he must learn to think that way. He did not know that he could.

  It was too late to call her back. When he tried to rise, his knees would not obey him. Not all the blood on him was hers. He was hurt, not badly, he did not think, but enough to weaken him.

  He would not die of it. Which was well. He had to learn. He had to school himself to go where she had gone. Or else there was no life for him, in this world or any other.

  X

  Sadana had pierced through the madness of Kemni’s grief and persuaded him to let the Cretan priestess go. That was well, Iry thought. It was a terrible thing that the enemy had done, and a terribly unwise one. Ahmose might have been inclined to be merciful toward the captives of this battle, even to set some of them free. But when their kinsmen attacked his wounded and killed a great lady among his allies, he sent out the order. All the worst wounded were to be killed and burned on a pyre with their dead—terrible retribution for an Egyptian to take. Those who were whole or but lightly wounded, he had confined without food and with but a little water. They would be made an example, he said. He would bring them to Avaris, and there under the eyes of their king and their kin, he would slay them.

  His advisors rose up against that. Most would have had him kill them now, rather than be a burden on the army. A few pointed out that for men of that nation, to be shorn and whipped and enslaved would be a terrible punishment, more terrible than death.

  “That is true,” Ariana said in the council. She had wept for her kinswoman, and would again. But as a queen must, she had gathered her wits and firmed her will to face what must be faced. “It is true—for them, there’s honor in death, but slavery is the worst dishonor. Strip them of the hair they’re so proud of, and the beards that mark them as men; flog them till they scar; and set them first to disposing of their own dead, and then to the most menial labor you can think of—and they’ll wish to all their gods that they had been fortunate enough to die.”

  Ahmose was more like his great enemy Apophis than he would ever have wanted to know: affable as kings went, and warmer than most of his kind were known to be. But today he was a king, as hard as forged bronze, tempered with anger. His eyes had narrowed as his councillors and then his queen spoke. They had found the gate into his anger, Iry could see.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes. That to them would be worse than death. If the enemy sees them—some of them his lords, even a prince or two—then he will know how terribly he has offended against us.”

  So it was decided. There was a darkness in the camp, even through the songs of victory. It was not the death of one Cretan priestess, though that was a terrible thing. It was that men had waged war against the wounded and the dying, and their lords had fled like cowards and fools, leaving those of low estate to rampage at will.

  Some of those lords were captured, either because they had left last, or because their long-eared asses were not as swift as the king’s horses. They were kept a little apart from the lesser captives, still in their fine armor, though their jewels and gold were long gone: ripped from ears so that they bled, torn from fingers and arms and necks.

  Iry was there when the king’s command was carried out. They began with the lords, haughty creatures that they were, braced for death or to be paraded in chains before the Egyptian king. Those would have been acceptable fates.

  They were shocked, and then appalled, to be taken by strong men, stripped naked and dragged to the center of the camp, where the barbers waited with their razors sharpened and gleaming. They were sure, Iry could see, that this was a new and painful way to die.

  Some broke and tried to flee. Some stood taller, brave to the last, though that was somewhat weakened by the way they all shuffled with their hands covering their manly parts.

  None escaped. They were dragged kicking, fighting, shrieking into the circle, flung down and pinned, and the barbers went to work.

  Then even the brave ones bellowed like bulls. The Egyptians roared with laughter, mocked them, stripped off kilts and waggled organs in their faces.

  Nor did the barbers stop with hair and beards. They were under orders to strip the captives utterly, from crown to toe. It was a great undertaking, as shaggy as these foreigners were, and as persistent in their struggles. Not a little blood flowed; though one clever barber found a cure for that: he let his blade slip just a fraction while he shaved a man’s jewels. The man shrieked as shrill as a woman.

  He must have thought he was being gelded. It silenced the rest, for a while; and that was well, in Iry’s estimation. The Egyptians did not even pause in their chorus.

  At length they were all shorn like strange sheep. Ahmose’s soldiers dragged them up again, a dozen white peeled wands of men, big men still and massive, but greatly diminished by the shearing.

  It was purely cruel, and a great vengeance. Iry should have been more pleased with it than she was. Her time in Avaris had changed her—corrupted her. These were men to her now; some whose names she even knew. She could not hate them as perfectly as she wished to.

  She had been intending to leave when the lords left. Many of the other high ones did, though the king’s soldiers gathered in even greater numbers to see men of their own rank brought low by so simple a thing. Nor had she seen the one she had half expected to see. He was dead, or fled.

  No. Dead. Khayan would not run away as the others had. It was not in him. She should go, search among the dead. Or she should send Sadana, or call Iannek from the ship where he sulked in furious exile—there was no safety for him here, where any bearded foreigner was killed or captured on sight.

  But she lingered. She hated Khayan. She did not want to see him dead.

  The lesser men were not shorn completely as their lords were. There were too many of them, and they were of too little account. The barbers settled, with them, for stripping them of their garments and shaving their beards and cropping their hair close, as quickly as could be. It was still a great shame to them to be made like Egyptian slaves. One or two tried to trick the barbers into slitting their throats, but the barbers were too deft with the razors, and too much on their guard.

  There was one near the end who drew her eye. He was walking wounded—surprising; most of those had been killed. Maybe he had concealed it until he was stripped naked? He was young, and large; no giant but tall enough, and leaner than some, less bull-broad. He looked—like—

  As if she had spoken the thought aloud, he raised his head. His face was a blank Retenu face, pale arch of nose thrusting from amid the thicket of beard
, but the eyes she knew. No other man of that people had such eyes, golden as a falcon’s. They were blank now, as if he had gone blind. He did not seem to see her, or if he saw her, to know who she was.

  When the guards took hold of him, he did not resist. His spirit had gone away. They threw him down and held him as they had the rest, as casual now as shearers with the sheep. The barber finished sharpening his razor—ignoring bystanders who encouraged him to do no such thing; to let the blade go dull, the better to torment the prisoner.

  A faint sound escaped Iry as the man set blade to that thick and beautiful hair. But she did not move, did not try to stop him.

  It was over in a few deft strokes. The guards hauled him to his feet.

  He was—very good to look at. Very good indeed. Almost as lovely as Kemni, and Kemni was the greatest beauty she knew, who was not a woman. His eyes seemed all the stranger now that they stared out of a face and not a black shadow of beard.

  She spoke then. She moved forward a step. “That one,” she said. “I’ll take him.”

  At first she thought she would be ignored. But everyone knew who she was. The guards glanced at one another and at their commander. There was no lord of greater rank here now; even the king had gone to other duties.

  “I’ll take him,” she said, “as recompense for what was done to my kin and my holding.”

  Some of the soldiers standing about grinned at one another and remarked on her taste. “He’s a pretty one,” one of them said with a leer. “And a fine young bull of Baal, too. You’ll get good use of him.”

  Iry had always been able to keep her face cold, even when the blush flamed inside. It was a gift, and she was glad of it. If any of them had known what he was to her . . .

  What he was no longer. He did not even recognize her. No doubt, to him, all Egyptian women looked alike: too small, too thin, and hidden behind their masks of paint.