The Shepherd Kings

by Judith Tarr

Khayan was proof to Kemni’s mind that Retenu grew their beards not to seem more manly, but to conceal faces that were all too easy to read. Khayan was as transparent as clean water. His thoughts now were half of anger and half of guilt—because he reveled in this battle, though he fought against his own people.

  He answered willingly enough, whatever his thoughts. “These are lords of the court,” he said. “The citadel must be breaking.”

  “Or broken.” Seti halted his horses beside them. His left arm was bound up in a rag and his cheekbone was split as impressively as Iannek’s brow, but he was grinning as if he had no care in the world. “Will you wager we’re winning?”

  “Not if they keep coming,” Kemni said. “There’s no end to them. We’re all there is.”

  “There has to be an end,” Seti said. “The citadel’s only so big.”

  “It’s bigger than you might think.” Kemni let himself rest briefly against the chariot’s side. His legs and feet were aching—the price every man paid for riding in a chariot. Sadana seemed impervious, but she was not joining in the conversation, either. All her mind seemed focused on the horses. They were weary, standing hipshot, heads low. They would need water soon, and grazing, if they were to thrive.

  They all watched a company of footsoldiers overwhelm and drag down a gilded prince in a chariot more elaborate than their own king’s.

  “That’s not Apophis,” Seti said.

  “No,” said Khayan. “That’s a man whose wealth comes from trade, and who bought himself a noble wife. The king won’t come out till the last.”

  “You think he’ll come here?”

  Khayan’s face was set. Even what color it had—for he was a white-skinned man, whiter than a woman—had drained from it. “Not likely,” he said. “If he surrenders, he’ll do it by the river, as king to king.”

  “Unless he means to run and not surrender,” Seti said.

  “There is that.” Khayan shook himself, hunching his wide shoulders, then squaring them so that they seemed as broad as the city’s gate. “Look, there’s another wave of them. Iannek—”

  Iannek had already moved, whipping up the horses, driving them back toward the battle. Kemni’s bays followed, and Seti’s blaze-faced chestnuts. They fell on the advancing chariots with almost their full strength, and bow and spear and sword, and no memory of weariness until the battle paused again.

  Earlier charioteers had taken no particular notice of the Retenu among the Egyptians. But these were lords—perhaps even Iannek’s old drinking companions. They took his presence as a personal affront. They, and those behind them, each of whom seemed richer than the last, struck again and again for that of all parts of the line. “Keep moving!” Kemni called out. “Don’t let them trap you.”

  Counsel he could well heed himself: after Iannek, the Egyptian captain won the greatest share of their hatred. If they were not intent on merely breaking through the line—and these lords of warriors wanted a toll paid in blood—they struck for Kemni nigh as often as for Iannek.

  He fought them off with an arm that grew heavier with each attack. If Seti had the right of it, and there truly was no end to them, Kemni would die of exhaustion before he died of his wounds.

  He could not think of that. Fight—he must fight. His arrows were long gone. His spear was broken. His sword had grown dull. And still they came. The city was emptying of chariots. They were not turning once they had broken through the line, not going back within the walls. Those that escaped, escaped northward.

  They were coming faster now, and some were wounded, stained with bright blood. Kemni’s men held—brave fools, every one of them, and the more beloved for it. He called them off at last, pulled them back, left the way open.

  Their numbers were fewer—grievously so. Empty chariots, masterless horses, wandered the field. Of foot there were more standing, but those too had withdrawn from the fight. It was a retreat, they could all see—a rout.

  Avaris was taken from the river and secured from the land. Apophis came last out of the citadel—but if Seti had been wagering with Khayan, Seti would have won the wager. Apophis did not surrender to the Great House in the harbor. He led the last of his armies to the northward gate, and fought his way out. Even as the Egyptians held back to let him go, his men turned on them, as a boar at bay will turn on the hounds that would herd him toward the hunter’s spear.

  Kemni rallied his men almost too late, and almost too feebly. This was death. This, at last, was the end he had been praying for: at the hands of a prince of the Retenu, after Avaris was taken and the Lower Kingdom had fallen into Ahmose’s power.

  But, for that, he could not let himself be killed. He had to see it, to know it was so: that the war was won.

  Sadana crooned to the horses, who were nigh at the end of their strength. There had been water for them, the last of the skins, with little spared for Kemni or Sadana. Either they would drink again within the city, or they would die.

  They moved forward barely faster than a walk, but as they advanced they found a remnant of speed, enough to meet the king’s riding as it passed the broken gate. They fell on it from every side that they could, and the scattered fragments of the footsoldiers among them, so that the ground and the air were deadly, both, and Apophis paid toll in blood for his use of the northward road.

  Kemni gathered all the chariots that he could, for one last stroke. He set himself at the head of them and hurled them upon the king and his royal guard. All the hundred years of subjection, conquest, slavery, made weary arms strong, and honed their hate. They smote without care for life or safety, only for an end to the long war.

  Apophis’ chariots reeled before that charge. But they were fresher by far, and they protected their king. They steadied, rallied, thrust back.

  “Take the king alive!” Kemni roared to his men. “For all the rest—no quarter!”

  He would hardly have known Apophis from that night of spying on Gebu in the garden of the citadel. That quiet, rather ordinary man was become a warrior king in a golden chariot, crowned with gold. The beard beneath the helmet was grey, but the shoulders were broad in the gilded armor, the arms corded, strong, wielding a great sword and a heavy-hafted spear. This king of warriors had no fear of war, and though he was well protected within his circle of guards, he thrust past them into the thick of the fight.

  Maybe he too taunted the gods, and dared them to destroy him. Kemni pressed toward him, but there was a wall of chariots between, bearded men with flat dark eyes and grim faces. Their stallions challenged his, rearing and striking, daring them to fight as their charioteers did, to the death.

  Kemni had taken advantage of a lull to sharpen his sword, a moment or a lifetime ago. It hummed as it wheeled and smote. It yearned for the taste of blood—king’s blood.

  The battle narrowed to this one man and this one purpose. The defenders between were shadows, albeit shadows armed with bronze. Edged bronze could banish them.

  There were others on his right hand and his left. Seti, indomitable, with Ay for his charioteer—that was not how they had begun; Kemni would wonder, later, when they had made such a pact. Most likely when Ay’s chariot was broken or his warrior killed. And on Kemni’s right, Iannek of the Retenu and his brother Khayan. They hung back by an almost invisible fraction, but only by that.

  They were following Sadana. Kemni might not have thought of that, except that the chariot lurched over something—fallen warrior, wrack of the storm—and rocked her briefly against him, and he glimpsed her face. It was white, set, terrible. It was not that she wanted to die, but that she had no pressing desire to live.

  That, he thought distantly, was a pity. She had beauty and strength and courage. She should live in joy, and not die in blood.

  All the while his wits wandered, his arm rose and fell, striking and striking again. He did not see whom he wounded, or who was killed. Only that the way was clear to the golden gleam that was the king.

  One more man. One more defender armed with bro
nze. This one was fierce in defense of his king, and greatly skilled in the arts of the sword.

  Kemni’s strength was failing. Pain niggled at the edges of awareness, and weakness gnawed at it. He was wounded, he did not trouble to determine where.

  Take the king alive. His own words, echoing in his skull as if a stranger had spoken them. He reeled, dizzy. He saw the blow come, swayed away from it, but not far enough. It caught the edge of his helmet and flung him aside, tumbling end over end. Hooves flew past him. Wheels roared a scant handspan from his head.

  He lay on the tumbled earth in a mire of mud and blood. The battle had passed him by.

  He was conscious. His head was remarkably clear. He could not hear well: his ears rang like smitten bronze. But he could see. He could even, after a while, sit up.

  Apophis was gone, running northward in the diminished circle of his guard. Kemni’s charioteers had stopped, their horses gasping, staggering. The men’s faces were blank, flat with exhaustion.

  Their own people found them there, footsoldiers and mariners in service to the Great House of Thebes, striding out of the city that they had taken.

  Kemni by then was on his feet and had found his chariot. Sadana was still in it. She eyed him oddly and tried to say something, but he did not hear her.

  He leaned against the familiar side of the chariot, as comfortable as he could ever remember being, even without the Retenu king for his prisoner. It did not matter greatly that he had failed. Maybe if he had been Retenu, and had come so close to the enemy’s king, he would have fallen on his sword.

  But he was Egyptian. His gods had a sense of irony, and a sometimes cruel humor.

  There at last was Ahmose, striding on his own feet, in armor that had seen hard use. He seemed to be looking for Kemni. Kemni tried to offer obeisance, but he was too dizzy. He clung to the chariot instead and mustered a smile. “Sire. I regret—I lost—”

  “We’ll catch him,” Ahmose said, brisk and cool, just as he needed to be. He looked about. “You have done well. Very well indeed.”

  “We did try, my lord,” Kemni said. Then, because he had a need to hear it from the king, and from no one else: “It’s done? The city is yours?”

  “The city is mine,” Ahmose said with quiet but enormous satisfaction.

  VIII

  Apophis had escaped, running north, but he had left people in the citadel: his queens, his concubines, ladies of the court, and the formidable lady Sarai, whose children, all but one, had fought for the Egyptian king. They sued for surrender as they could not but do, and through the lordly eunuch who was their messenger, begged leave to follow their lords out of Egypt.

  Ahmose received them in the hall of the palace that Khayan remembered well: the great hall of audience with its throne of gold. His heart clenched at the sight of that little brown monkey sitting where the great bulls of Canaan had sat for so long. The throne was too high for Ahmose; his feet rested on a footstool. He had had his servants set him upon cushions, to appear less dwarfed by that throne of giants.

  He seemed undismayed by that sacrifice of dignity. By some miracle of servants’ art he was clean, clothed in linen of impeccable whiteness, with a splendid collar of gold, and golden armlets, and on his head the Blue Crown of war. People murmured that somewhere, some man of great honor and skill was making for him what had not been seen since the Lower Kingdom fell to the conquerors from Retenu: the Two Crowns of the Two Lands, White Crown embraced within Red. He would wear it, it was said, when he took formal possession of this kingdom, not here in the conqueror’s city, but in Memphis of the ancient kings.

  But all that was still to come—and Khayan dared still, however unwisely, to hope that it might not come at all. For this day, Ahmose was lord in Avaris, and victor in war. He had the royal ladies brought before him, knowing surely what dishonor it was for them to be seen, even veiled, by the eyes of men and foreigners.

  By the laws of war, they were his to do with as he pleased. Had he been one of the people, he would have taken them for his own and led them away into his harem. That he did not do such a thing, that he agreed to speak to them as if they had been men and kings, was strange and perhaps ominous.

  Khayan might not have come to this place, nor would Iry have forced him, but he found he could not stay away. He came as what he was, the slave of an Egyptian.

  They were all there, Iannek, Sadana, such of her women as were alive and well enough to walk. So too the Cretans, those great allies, and the little princess who had wedded the king. She stood beside and somewhat behind him, not seated on a throne brought in and set next to his as the Great Royal Wife was, but close, and in a place of great honor.

  She smiled when Khayan, somewhat unwarily, caught her eye. She seldom stood on ceremony unless it suited her.

  She liked the look of a handsome man, or so it was said. There was a rumor that while she could never in honor bed any man but her wedded lord, she well might send maidservants in her name, who would give great pleasure to a fortunate few. Kemni the Egyptian was said to have been a favorite of hers, until he became her kinswoman’s lover. Now no woman was known to come to his bed, nor was any wanted there, for he grieved too greatly for his lost priestess.

  Sadana was standing close beside him now, by accident or design, just as she had appointed herself his charioteer. When this was over, Khayan would consider the meaning of that.

  Now he fixed his eyes on the ladies who came in procession, a long line of veiled figures, all in black unadorned. But many betrayed beneath the veils a gleam of gold or the flash of a jewel.

  Behind the guards who preceded them and the eunuch who led them, Khayan recognized the straight back and proud carriage of his mother, and the likeness of her just behind, his sister Maryam. They must be able to see him: he was standing on the dais of the throne, as guard to Iry—and still in Iannek’s armor, too, somewhat to Iannek’s disgust. He did not try to meet their eyes, which in any event were hidden behind black gauze.

  Such division this war had wrought, and all because the Mare had chosen a woman of the conquered people. Khayan could not bring himself to regret the fault that was partly his, for letting himself be prevailed upon to bring the young Mare into the west when word came that the old one was gone. It was all as the gods had willed—pain as much as joy.

  Sarai halted at the foot of the dais as the guards drew back on either side. She went down in full reverence. Behind her, all the great ladies did as she did, however stiffly and unwillingly some chose to do it. It was as graceful as barley rippling in the wind.

  Ahmose inclined his head, a great concession to the captives of war. “My lady,” he said to Sarai. “Rise and face me.”

  She obeyed without servility, rising as a dancer might, or a warrior. Perhaps she expected that he would ask her to unveil, but he did not do that. He said to her, “You ask leave to depart. If I grant it, where will you go?”

  “North, great king,” she answered, “into Canaan.”

  “You do understand that I will pursue your king?”

  “I would expect it,” she said calmly.

  “It may serve you to travel with us for a while, if your companions can endure such speed as we will make.”

  Her head lifted a fraction, as if her back had stiffened. “Great king, I offer no insult, but if we travel with your army, will we not be captives of it?”

  “Say rather that we would be your escort, and that when we found your king and his people, we would surrender you with full honor. That I swear to you by my crown and my kingship.”

  “That is a great oath,” she said after a pause. “Still, great king—”

  “If you travel apart from us,” Ahmose said, “I can promise you no safety. I can assure you that you will come to your people late, and find them perhaps defeated, and certainly embattled.”

  “Then you will leave soon,” she said, as if she had not expected that.

  “On the morrow’s morrow,” Ahmose said, “I go. My queens will d
o what it is needed for the securing of these kingdoms. For my honor and my office, I must assure that the Two Lands are never again invaded and never again conquered. That duty, my gods have laid on me.”

  “So they have,” she said, “great king. Very well. On your oath and for our protection, we will accept what you offer. If, which the gods forbid, our men are overwhelmed and taken before we can be given back to them, will you swear me another oath? Will you set us free to find our kin in Canaan?”

  That was great presumption, but Khayan would have expected no less. Nor, it seemed, would Ahmose. His eyes glinted within their mask of paint, as he inclined his head.

  Sarai bowed low once more. “You are indeed a great king,” she said, “and a great prince of this world.”

  ~~~

  “And not of the next?”

  Iry had lingered only briefly once the ladies of the Retenu had left the hall. Khayan should have expected that she would follow them, would wait a little while till they could settle again for the last night but one in the queens’ chambers of the citadel. Then she went as she had gone so often, to the rooms that were Sarai’s.

  As with the hall of audience, Khayan was not asked or expected to remain in her shadow, but he could not bring himself to stay away. It was like a boil: he must lance the whole of it, or see no end to the pain.

  Sarai was overseeing the preparations to depart, although there was a full day yet, and clearly she had been ready for some time. It was something to do, he supposed: a means to keep the women occupied, and therefore less inclined to succumb to hysterics.

  She greeted Iry as if they had never been parted, and Khayan with a glance, no more—but also no less. In that brief flicker she set all that he needed to know, and all that she would give him: every gift, every blessing.

  She sat with Iry in a small chamber that had been cleared of every personal thing, though it remained rather richly furnished. There was wine. There was bread, and a pot of honey. Khayan declined them, but Iry professed to be hungry. She ate and drank with her wonted composure.