The Shepherd Kings

by Judith Tarr

  “You,” she said to the guard who held the rope that bound his hands. “Bring him behind me. If your captain can spare you?”

  The captain bowed low. He was hiding a grin, she could see. She would exact a price for that—later. At the moment it was enough that he had given her one of his men.

  She had no expectation that Khayan would escape. He had the look of a man who had retreated into himself, far and far, until he felt nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing. Beneath the shorn black curls, she thought she saw a swelling, and perhaps a glisten of blood.

  For that, and for the clotted and oozing wound in his side, she had him taken not to her tent but to the healers. They had begun to recover from the battle. A new tent had been raised for them, and their instruments and their boxes of medicines recovered as much as could be, and more brought from the ships. The dead were taken away, the wounded looked after.

  When she came, Imhotep was just finishing with a limp and unconscious man. Acolytes hastened discreetly away with a bundle wrapped in a cloth.

  The man had lost his leg. Iry shivered and swallowed bile. Now the embalmers would take it and do what they did, letting that part of him go before, so that when he died he could be reunited with it.

  Imhotep smiled at her. He had taken a liking to her from the first, for what reason she did not know. Maybe because she knew a little of the healing arts, and asked to learn more. He did not keep secrets, did that one, though others of his order frowned to see him instructing her.

  His smile faded however as he saw who followed her. She drew aside to let him see.

  Khayan obliged them both by crumpling at their feet. Imhotep stepped neatly aside to let him fall, then bent down and arranged the long scattered limbs, frowning as he did it, counting grazes, bruises, and of course the most obvious wound; but he went on. When he came to the head, he paused. “Blow to the head,” he said, with a glance at Iry.

  She nodded. She had thought so.

  The long clever fingers searched amid cropped curls. “Nothing broken. But the brain might be . . .” The rest subsided into a murmur.

  Iry kept silent as Imhotep sent acolytes for this medicine and that, and set one of them to cleaning and stitching and binding the gash in Khayan’s side. Only when Imhotep had drawn back and paused for breath did she ask, “Is he badly hurt?”

  Imhotep shrugged. “With blows to the head, one never knows. The rest is nothing, unless it festers. I’ve done as much as I may. If you should be inclined to pray, that would be useful.”

  Iry could pray. She wanted this man alive. Not because she loved him or wanted him happy. She wanted him to suffer.

  Imhotep sent Khayan away, and Iry and the guard with him. “Watch him,” the healer said. “If he sleeps too long, if he seems confused, if he acts strangely—bring him back to me. He should wake in the morning with a hammering headache, but no more than that.”

  “And maybe a little wound-fever?”

  “I hope not,” Imhotep said. He had already turned away toward another who needed him.

  She let him go. The guard was willing to continue with his charge, at least until he was settled in Iry’s tent. As for what she would do then . . .

  There was little to do, at least with this captive, aside from see a pallet spread for him and mount guard over him. Iry sent the guard away, over his protests—which rather startled her. Even after she had given him a bit of silver, he wanted to stay.

  Odd man. But he had a captain waiting for him, and duties that had nothing to do with the Mare’s servant or her sudden prisoner.

  She mounted guard herself, then, though there were other things that she could have been doing. Khayan slept uneasily, stirring and murmuring. His brow was cool; no fever. His face was pale, but so was the rest of him. He was whiter-skinned than anyone in Egypt, white as milk where the sun had not touched him.

  She hated him. He had bedded her, left her, forgotten her. Then he had, like a blazing fool, let himself be condemned on that preposterous charge. No one had believed it, except the woman’s father. And for that, he had lost his rank and his honor, and now, his freedom.

  “Idiot,” she said to him. “Idiot.”

  He did not hear. She settled comfortably, prepared to wait for as long as she needed to. Part of her knew that she should leave this task to a servant and go out to be an omen, and to help as she could. But the Great House had servants and subjects in rather astonishing number. Khayan had no one. Not that he deserved anyone, but it did not seem right, somehow, to leave him to the care of strangers.

  She would have to summon Sadana. Eventually. And Iannek, too, she supposed. They were his close kin. But not until he had got over whatever horrors he would need to get over, once he woke and discovered what had become of him.

  She did not do it out of concern for his spirit, she told herself, but out of concern for theirs. He was their brother. Whatever shame fell on him, to a degree they shared it.

  ~~~

  She slept, perhaps. The day darkened into night. The camp quieted slowly, though the sounds of singing and revelry went on. The king would have to pause for a day or two, so that his men could recover.

  That would serve her well enough. She roused with a start, to find that his eyes were open. They were clear—startling, a little. “Don’t tell me I dreamed it all,” he said.

  It was strange to hear that rich familiar voice out of that stranger’s face. That beautiful and unguarded face. Why, she thought: a man who had a beard to hide behind might never learn to conceal what he was thinking.

  He did not know yet. If he felt strange, maybe there were too many oddnesses, and to many small and greater pains.

  “This isn’t Avaris,” he said, looking about in the lamplight. “This is—are we in camp? Do I remember—I went to war? Then what are you doing here?”

  “This is a stronghold south of Sile,” she said. “You are in camp.”

  “I remember. . .” He sighed, and gasped: it must have stabbed him with pain. “There was a battle. I fought. It wasn’t a dream, was it? I really did—Barukha—”

  “Yes.”

  “So the king came after all? And brought you?”

  “I brought myself,” she said. “This is the Egyptian camp. You lost the fight. Most of your lords have fled.”

  His mouth, which was long and remarkably well shaped, twisted wryly. “Lords. Never enough sense among the lot of them to come in out of the sun.”

  “I suppose you would know,” she said.

  He winced. Then at last he seemed to understand that something was odd. His hand crept up. She thought briefly of stopping it, but he had to know. Best to get it over.

  His hand explored his face, which surely was as strange to him as it was to her, and his shorn hair. It lowered slowly. He lay very still. “I was fighting,” he said quietly, calmly. “Then I woke, and I was here.”

  “You don’t remember anything?”

  “Nothing. We lost?”

  She nodded.

  “Then—what—”

  That calm was a thin shell over hysteria. She knew. She had known it herself often enough. “You were wounded. You took a blow to the head. Then you were captured.”

  “And not killed?”

  “The king decided to let all the captives live,” she said.

  “As slaves?”

  “As whatever he needs them to be.”

  “Slaves.” Khayan raised his hand again to his face. “You, too?”

  “Oh, no. I’m their omen. I came with the Mare, you see. She brought me to my own people.”

  “Of course.” He should have sounded bitter. He sounded merely tired. But his wits were quick enough. “I suppose I was your share of the booty?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I just took you and walked away.”

  “Why?”

  “You’d rather I’d left you where you were?”

  “That depends on what you want with me.”

  “I don’t want anything,” she sa
id. “You should sleep. Is your headache very bad?”

  “Dreadful.”

  “Then sleep. You’ll be better in the morning.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said: and that was bitterness. But his eyes closed, perhaps of their own accord.

  ~~~

  Iry could have left then. But she stayed and watched him sleep. She was not thinking of anything in particular, though it might be useful to consider what indeed she wished to do with him. She owned him now as once he had owned her. His hand on her had been light—that much she granted him. But whether her own could be as light . . . she did not know.

  Tomorrow, she thought. She would think about it tomorrow. Tonight she would sleep as he slept. Part of her babbled that he was feigning it, that once she had fallen into a drowse he would rise and escape; but the rest knew that he would not. Where would he go? How would he dare to show his face among the men of his own people? He had already been dishonored. He was worse than that, now.

  No. He would stay. He had nowhere else to go.

  KING OF UPPER AND LOWER EGYPT

  I

  The world was a strange and shifting place. Khayan, for being a fool, had fallen as low as man could fall. He was a captive, a slave. Far better had he died than be subjected to this.

  Others of his people had searched for ways to kill themselves. One even succeeded: provoked a short-tempered guard into running him through with a sword. He was cast into the river for the crocodiles to devour— a terrible fate, if he had been an Egyptian, but no more terrible than what the Egyptians had done to him.

  All of that, Khayan knew. And yet he had no desire at all to die. One of the most difficult things he had ever done was to walk out of Iry’s tent into the pitiless glare of the sun, where every eye could see his face laid naked to the world. He would almost rather have stripped off the kilt that was given him, than show his bare cheeks.

  Still, once it was done, it was done. The Egyptians stared briefly, then ignored him. A beardless man, to them, was a natural thing, far less unnatural than the beard he had been robbed of.

  He still could not remember that, or anything after he took a stand with his men near the fort’s wall. They were pulling that wall down now. Of his men there was no sign. Dead, he supposed, or fled. None of them had been taken captive; of that, he was certain.

  No one tried to prevent him from walking through the camp. He had waked alone, eaten and drunk what he found beside him—bread and beer and a bowl of onions—and ventured out before his courage failed him.

  He did not know where Iry was. Was she hoping that he would escape? Did she want him to be killed in the trying?

  She was angry with him. He had seen that, though she hid it rather well. This was her revenge on him, this slavery, and perhaps this abandonment, too.

  The fort that his people had built was coming down in a great crashing and eruption of cheers. Once it had fallen and been trampled into the earth, the army would go on. All the dead were tended, the wounded seen to. The wrack of battle was all but cleared away.

  His fellow slaves had been given the lowest of tasks: digging new privies and burying old ones. More than one bore the marks of the lash. They had not been washed as he had, fed and given a clean kilt. They were all naked and filthy.

  There at last he was not permitted to go. A guard with a whip of many thongs interposed himself. The man was half Khayan’s size, but the whip was convincing. He stepped back out of reach. The man smiled. It was not a malicious smile, at all. It was as if—

  Khayan wandered away, puzzled and uncertain whether he should be angry. When he sharpened his ears and his understanding of the Egyptians’ speech—not as easy as he might have thought; the dialect of Thebes was different from that of Memphis—he heard what made him pause. They all knew who he was. Don’t touch that one, they said. It belongs to the white priestess. For that was what they called her, for the white robe she wore and the white Mare she served.

  To belong to her . . .

  Well. They all did, all the Mare’s people. He began to be—not angry, no. Amused. Even a little wild, as if—no, he could not be happy. Relief; he would call it relief. The world was a strange place, and yet he was glad to be living in it.

  ~~~

  He found her where he would have expected, near the horses. She was speaking with a man in a plain kilt and a short wig, who must have been a person of rank: he wore a golden collar. There were other people about, a great number of them, but they were of no account.

  Except one. His sister Sadana met his eyes across the stretch of field. He shrank inside himself and came within a breath’s span of bolting—but one thing kept him where he was. What in the gods’ name was she doing here?

  She strode toward him as no woman of his father’s people did, with pride and confidence that were given only to men. But she was of the Mare’s people, and warrior-trained.

  She stopped in front of him and looked him up and down, taking her time about it. He set his teeth and suffered it. Her brow rose. “You’re even prettier than you were when you were small. I think I rather like it.”

  He rubbed his chin, which rasped already with stubble. “I suppose I know why you’re here. But why is she?”

  “The Mare called her,” Sadana answered.

  Khayan sighed faintly. He had not seen the Mare when he came, but as he stood there, a herd of duller creatures shifted, and she was there, her moon-pale coat gleaming.

  There were others beyond her. Khayan forgot Sadana, forgot even where he was. He advanced a step, set fingers to lips, loosed a piercing whistle.

  His dun stallions, his beauties, his beloved, flung up their heads and whinnied back. Moon stamped his foot. Star tossed his head till his black mane flew. They wheeled together and galloped toward him—straight through the crowd of Egyptians.

  The little brown men scattered, some with severe loss of dignity. Only the one beside Iry held his ground as she did, and the duns veered around them, as they would have done if any of the others had stood where he was.

  They checked as they came up to Khayan, eyes rolling, snorting. He laughed: laughter that was half a sob. “My poor beautiful brothers. You don’t recognize me, do you?”

  They snorted again, explosively, and approached in delicate steps. He held out his hands. Their soft noses brushed his palms, blowing into them. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, it’s I.”

  But they had to be certain. They nosed and sniffed him all over, licking, offering to nip until he halted them with a rebuke. He stroked their heads and necks and shoulders, rubbing their napes were they loved to be rubbed, and combing tangles out of the thick manes. They wrapped themselves around him, shutting him off from the world, so that all there was to see was golden hide, black mane, and the roll of a bright eye.

  It was only with great regret that he ended the greeting and looked past them. Sadana was laughing at him. Iry was smiling. So too the man beside her, a man past his youth and somewhat soft, but who carried himself with a certain loftiness that marked a lord.

  Iry’s smile faded. Khayan felt as if a cloud had gone across the sun. It was with difficulty that he made sense of the lord’s words, which were addressed not to him but to Iry. “So. This is your Retenu?”

  “I do own him, don’t I?” Iry said. “Yes, that is the one I took from among the captives. Do you want him back?”

  “No,” the man said. “You may keep him. Only see to it that he behaves himself.”

  Khayan bridled. Even the memory that he was a slave could not keep him quiet—but Iry’s glance clove his tongue to the roof of his mouth.

  “Come here,” she said. “Tell us something.”

  He left his stallions reluctantly. The Egyptian lord regarded him with calm curiosity—measuring him as if he had been a stallion himself. He set his teeth and ignored the man, and bowed to Iry.

  “We’ve captured a number of horses,” she said, “and many more asses. The asses we’ll set to carrying baggage. The horses we’
re very glad of—but we’re lacking charioteers. Should we send them north, do you think? And keep them where they’ll be safe, until we win back the whole of this kingdom?”

  “You may not win it at all,” Khayan said, not wisely. He could have been flogged for it, but as he had thought, they were not interested in punishing him for too free a tongue. They ignored that and listened to the rest. “If the decision were mine to make, and I know well that it is not, I would take them with the army. You’ve not met the full force of our chariotry yet. When you do, you may find you need all the remounts you can muster. Our men are trained, you see. They strike for the horses.”

  Iry shuddered. “Yes. I do remember that.” She glanced at the Egyptian lord.

  He nodded. “That’s wise enough. We’ll keep them, then. Can you spare enough men to look after them?”

  “Those we have should be enough,” said Iry.

  The lord looked pleased, after the fashion of lords. He wandered back around the edge of the herd. All the others followed, and Iry at his side.

  Khayan walked behind them, with a stallion on either side of him. Sadana he had lost somewhere; he could not see her.

  It had begun to dawn on him who this slightly slack-bellied, unpretentious man must be. The flock of people about him, the way they glanced at him, and no one spoke to him but Iry, who was as easy with him as she was with everyone: this must be the Great House of Thebes, the Pharaoh.

  Khayan was a little disappointed. The Pharaoh, he had always heard, lived his life as a priest in a ritual, from waking till sleeping, without respite ever. He was always crowned; he always carried the crook and the flail that marked his office.

  Ahmose, it seemed, had not heard that he was supposed to conduct himself perpetually like a king. He was as easy with Iry as she was with him, taking transparent and almost childlike pleasure in the horses. So much, Khayan thought, for the Egyptian hatred of horses and their long-eared cousins.

  Still, Ahmose was the king. He could only linger so long before his duties called him away. When he left, he took with him the crowd of his followers, and left Iry and a handful of men who must be the herders of horses, and Khayan.