The Shepherd Kings

by Judith Tarr

  Sarai shared with her a cup of wine, sipping it slowly. Here, the veils were gone. Her face was much as always; somewhat thinner perhaps, and somewhat paler, but as strong as ever.

  “You really will go?” Iry asked her after a while.

  She nodded. “It’s time,” she said.

  “All the way, then? Back to the tribes?”

  “Yes,” Sarai said.

  Iry sighed a little. “I wish you might stay.”

  That perhaps startled Sarai, though not Khayan: her eyes widened slightly. “Why would you wish that?”

  “To teach me,” she said. “To be mother to your children.”

  “My children are men and women grown. And you,” said Sarai, “have gone past me.”

  Iry shook her head with a look Khayan knew well: lips tight, long eyes narrowed. “I had only begun my lessons with you.”

  “Everything I taught you, you can continue, or my children can teach. I should like to see my kin again, and ride the wide sea of grass, and sleep under the sky.”

  Iry bowed to that perforce. But she had not given up yet. Surrender was not a thing Iry knew the meaning of. “You could go, and stay for a while, and then come back.”

  “I think not,” Sarai said almost gently. “When I go, I go to live out my life, and then to die. I have no desire to wither in the sands of Egypt, or to rot in these fens. I would have a clean death, and a long sleep under the grass.”

  “Did you hate Egypt so much?” Iry asked her.

  “No,” she said firmly. “No, I did not. I could say that I loved it. But it was never home to me. You understand that, child. You better than any, how Egypt may welcome guests, but if they seek to claim it for themselves, it turns and casts them out.”

  “But your children—”

  “My younger children were born here. My elder daughter is a daughter of the steppe.” Sarai paused, caught by Iry’s expression. “What, you never knew? Yes, Maryam was born among the tribes. She came with me when she was very young, when the Mare before yours chose her servant and brought her into Egypt. I was chosen, too, though not to be the Mare’s chief servant.”

  “And when you came here, you were given to a lord of the Retenu.” Iry spoke slowly, as if she needed to understand.

  “I gave myself,” Sarai said. “I chose him. He was beautiful then, and kind. His heir is very like him.”

  Khayan flushed.

  They laughed at him, but not too cruelly. “So,” Iry said when the laughter had died, “you will go. I pray you come there safe, and live long under your eastern stars.”

  Sarai bowed low, lower than she ever had to a king. “From you,” she said, “such a prayer is a thing of great power.”

  There was a silence. Iry rose after a while and wandered off.

  Which left Khayan alone with his mother. He was sure that was their intention—both of them. Women were always conspiring in ways that men could not understand. Sometimes he was certain that they spoke from mind to mind, without the interference of mere words.

  Sarai regarded him as she often had, with a clear, measuring gaze. When he was younger he had wondered what she found lacking. Now he was a man, he still wondered that, but it mattered less. Whatever his failings, she was gracious enough to forgive them.

  “Come here, child,” she said.

  He came as she asked, and sat at her feet. She smoothed his cropped hair and brushed her fingers across his shaven cheek. He shivered lightly. The wind no longer felt so strange, or his head so light, shorn of its weight of hair; but at her touch, he remembered vividly how it had been when first he stood naked before the world.

  “My beautiful child,” she said. “You know we’ll never meet again.”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t. I lived in the east. What’s to prevent me from going back?”

  “Why, nothing,” said Sarai. “But I am not young, and you are very young. And there is much to do in Egypt.”

  He opened his mouth to deny that, but he was too clear-sighted: her gift from the womb, and a curse of sorts. “In Crete,” he said instead, “they say that the tide of years bears all things away, and seldom brings them back. I wish that were not so.”

  “As do I,” Sarai said. She would never break and weep; that was not her way. But her eyes were suspiciously bright. “You give me great pride, my child.”

  “Even as I am?”

  “Chosen of the Mare’s chosen. You will be a prince again, Khayan. The stars have told me.”

  “I was going to say it doesn’t matter,” he said after a moment, “but I find it does. I’m male enough for that.”

  Her smile had a hint of wickedness that reminded him oddly of Iry. “You are male enough for any purpose.”

  His face flamed again, as it had a habit of doing. She laid her cool palms against it, and tilted it up till he could not but meet her gaze. “I give you no wisdom,” she said, “and no advice, either. Except this. Love her, Khayan. Simply love her.”

  “And remember you?”

  “If your heart desires.”

  “My heart. . .” His throat was tight; he had to force the words through it. “My heart will grieve to see you gone—but be glad, too, because you’ve gone home.”

  “You always were too wise to be a man.” She set a kiss on his brow and on each cheek and on his lips. “May the goddess love you and keep you for her own.”

  IX

  Ahmose the king rode in pursuit of the fallen enemy, leaving behind him Nefertari the Great Royal Wife and Ariana the queen and his allies from Crete; and a great force that had gathered of lords and commons from the Lower Kingdom. Those would restore the wreck of the storm and the wreck of the war: a mighty undertaking, mightier than the closing and barring of the gates of Egypt against the invaders from Canaan, but no more or less vital to the life of the Two Lands.

  Before Ahmose departed, he did three things that would be remembered. He crowned himself with the Two Crowns. He took again to wife Ariana of Crete with as much pomp and ceremony as haste and war would allow. And he gave Iry the lands and lordship of the Sun Ascendant, and bade her raise horses there, to draw his chariots. With the Bull of Re in the Upper Kingdom, it would give him a great weapon for all his wars hereafter.

  He rode away in a chariot, but Kemni was not his charioteer. Kemni had walked away from the battle in, he thought, as splendid health as could be expected, and passed much of that day in the aftermath of battle. But near sunset he had fallen over.

  He did not remember that, or much of the hour before it. When he woke again, he was in the citadel of Avaris in the rooms of a prince, and Imhotep the king’s physician was bending over him. So, and more to his surprise, was the warrior woman Sadana.

  At first they did not seem to see that he was awake. They were frowning at one another as if they had been quarrelling.

  “Of course you know nothing of that herb!” she snapped in her accented Egyptian. “It grows on the steppes of Asia. It gives dreams and visions, but it also gives healing.”

  “And it can kill,” Imhotep said through gritted teeth. “That, I have heard. You hinted at it yourself.”

  “Not in this infusion. And not as I will give it. Can you put aside your arrogance for one moment, and admit that maybe—maybe—there are things you do not know?”

  “There are a thousand things I do not know. Medicine is not among them.”

  “The medicine of Egypt. This is not of Egypt. I will give it to him. Now stand aside.”

  Imhotep stood his ground. Sadana raised a hand.

  Kemni stirred and tried to speak. Nothing came out but a strangled grunt.

  It was enough. They stared at him, their quarrel forgotten. He stared back. Words were there, if his tongue would shape them. It felt thick and unwieldy in his mouth. “I want—I must—where—”

  “Thank the gods!” Imhotep said.

  But Sadana’s expression did not lighten. “Look at his eyes. He’s all addled.” She slipped in past Imhotep, cradled Kemni’s he
ad in her arm, and poured into him a vial of liquid fire.

  He gasped and choked. She held his mouth shut till he must swallow or drown. The potion went down as it had gone in, in a stream of searing heat.

  He lay breathing hard, head and heart pounding alike. But his thoughts had stopped jangling and steadied. “What in the name of the gods—”

  “Something to help you heal,” she said.

  “And make me dream?”

  “It might.”

  He groaned and shut his eyes. Of all the things she could have given him, he needed dreams the least.

  But the fiery stuff had cleared his head, and even, after a while, made it stop aching. They were both still there, still watching him, as if they feared that he would die between one breath and the next.

  “I’m not as badly hurt as that,” he said to them.

  “You had a blow to the head,” Imhotep said, “that came near to splitting your skull. The king has informed me that if you fail to recover, my skull will be split in its turn. You are wonderfully dear to the king.”

  “Gods know why,” Kemni muttered.

  “Everyone loves your pretty face,” Sadana said.

  ~~~

  However that might be, Kemni stood by the gate when the king departed, leaning on a support which happened, just then, to be Sadana’s large and amiable brother Iannek. Ahmose had been most clear. Kemni was not to go. He had been wounded and was still barely able to stand.

  The king would drive out the Retenu, hunt them all the way into their own country, and take it if he could. He was bent on revenge. But he had not forgotten the kingdoms he left behind him in the care of his queens.

  “When you are well,” he had said to Kemni before he mounted his chariot, “I have a task for you. Will you be my master of horse?”

  Kemni was still addled, after all. He could only stare and say, “Master of horse? But—”

  “I give you the Bull of Re and the lands about it,” Ahmose said, “as I’ve given your kinswoman the Sun Ascendant. You in the Upper Kingdom, she in the Lower, will begin a thing that will make us stronger than ever. Give me horses, my son. Give me chariots. Make me as strong in them as I am in men afoot.”

  That was a great charge. Too great for his throbbing head and his many aches and bruises. But he would not stay abed. He saw the king ride out with the strength of his army that remained—much more than Kemni had looked for, with those who had remained in reserve on the ships and those who had come in from round about the Lower Kingdom.

  The storm had wrought terrible destruction, therefore there were fewer fighting men than had hoped to come, but their numbers were still very great. And though storehouses had fallen and provisions been destroyed by war and storm, there was still enough to bear his army into the land of the Retenu.

  Some of the Cretan fleet went with him as far as the river would go, and would then go out to sea, following the coast and bearing provisions as they could. The rest remained in the service of the queen from Crete, and among them the admiral himself, her kinsman Naukrates.

  ~~~

  They dined together the night the king departed, no formal gathering, but when Kemni was carried off bodily to the rooms that everyone insisted were his, Naukrates came at the head of a procession of servants with the makings of a feast, and ordered it spread in one of the outer rooms. Kemni was spread with it, as it were: laid on a couch like a lady with the vapors, and served like one, too, by a pair of maids whom he thought he recognized. When under his stare they began to giggle, he knew them in truth. They were Arianas—maids of the Ariana of Crete.

  As if that recognition had been a signal, she appeared herself, dressed as he so loved to see her, in the tiered skirts and the vest that flaunted her beauty. The pain of that, of remembering another who had dressed so and smiled so when they were alone, was oddly remote—perhaps because of Sadana’s potion, which she had been feeding him in fiery doses.

  They dined together in the style to which, Ariana told him laughing, he should become accustomed, “For you are a prince now.”

  “I’ve lived with princes since I was little more than a boy.” That was sadness too, to remember Gebu and what he had been and what he had become. Kemni would never, please the gods, fall to the temptation that had destroyed Gebu. He did not want to be a king.

  “But you are more than a prince’s hanger-on,” Ariana said. “You hold the rank yourself.”

  That was true. Kemni had not realized; his head was still too addled. Master of the king’s horse was a high rank: noble, royal perhaps. Why not? He would need as much wealth as the king or the queens would bestow on him, to do as they bade him. And power, too, to command and be obeyed.

  It was too much to think of all at once. He ate what he was given, instead; or tried. This feast was like the thoughts that crowded in his mind: delicious, exhilarating, but too rich for his weakened spirit.

  He would be strong again. Both Imhotep and Sadana, in a rare moment of agreement, had assured him of that. Tonight he was allowed to indulge his weakness.

  Naukrates had been drinking deep of the wine. He was one of those men who grew warmer with it and more expansive, but never more quarrelsome. He laid an arm about Kemni’s shoulders and embraced him. “Poor boy! You look overwhelmed. Why not escape from it all? Come with me, take ship on Dancer, run away to sea. We’ll sail beyond the world’s edge. We’ll cross wakes with the barque of the sun.”

  After a few sips of wine, Kemni was even more fuddled than Naukrates. “That,” he said with great care not to trip over his tongue, “would be splendid. Shplendish—splendid.”

  “You can do that,” Ariana said, crisp and sharp, “when you’ve given the king his horses. And not before.”

  “Not give king horses,” Kemni said. “Make king horses. Many many many many many—”

  “Many horses,” Naukrates said helpfully. “Then ship.”

  “Then ship,” Ariana said.

  ~~~

  Kemni remembered that after he had recovered from both wine and addlement—a remarkably short time, all things considered. The king had left at the moon’s full. By the time of the new moon, Kemni was well enough, and matters well enough in hand, that he could travel with a company of the queens’ soldiers and with others who were going to rebuild their holdings, or to take holdings that had been given them out of the booty of war. All over the Lower Kingdom, lordly houses that had been subject to the Retenu were in Egyptian hands again, and were, many of them, in sore need of tending.

  This would be the work of years. If Kemni ever ran away to sea, the beard he did not grow would no doubt be as grey as Naukrates’.

  But that, as Naukrates reminded him, was not so terribly old. Meanwhile, in his youth, he had a great work to share in.

  So too did Iry. She rode with them, and her following at her back: warrior women, lone bearded Retenu lordling, and the shorn one who, everyone knew, was her lover. They would take the Sun Ascendant as Kemni was to take the Bull of Re. He had in mind to pause there, if he might, for a little while.

  ~~~

  The return to the Sun Ascendant was a homecoming—for Kemni as much as for Iry. It was not his own holding, nor had it been, but he had known it from his childhood.

  The storm had battered it, but not as terribly as some. The roof was off one of the houses within the wall, the Retenu women’s house, no less. The rest had fared well enough. There were even houses still standing in the villages, and people rebuilding those that were fallen, a vision of industrious labor that would warm any lord’s heart.

  The horses were well, the herds intact. There were foals already, some born in or about the storm, and most of those ran at the sides of moon-pale mothers. The Mare’s people had increased by a blessed number.

  Iry would simply have ridden in as if she did so every day, but her foreigners, of all people, would not hear of such a thing. They insisted that she put on her robes and her golden headdress and mount the freshly bathed and shining Mare, an
d ride home like a queen in procession.

  They were all in their best finery, the brothers in the chariot that they had appropriated for themselves, with Khayan’s duns to draw it; and as had become their custom, Iannek wore the kilt and served as charioteer, and Khayan rode in armor as a warrior should. Kemni had overheard them casting the bones to decide their places; and Iannek had cursed thunderously when he lost the throw. “By Set’s black balls! I always lose!”

  Khayan had laughed and said, “So swear by Mother Isis’ tits next time, and maybe she’ll let you wear the armor for once.”

  Khayan was not laughing now. Kemni, riding nearby, tried to read that face, to see what he thought of riding back to the holding a slave, who had ridden out of it a lord and prince. But for once his thoughts were not written as clear as on papyrus. He looked like an image carved in ivory, with his arched nose and his firm jaw, and his long mouth, usually so mobile, set and still.

  Iannek seemed to regard it as a lark, as he did most things. He sang to himself and crooned to the stallions, filling his brother’s silence with cheerful noise.

  That was a kind of wisdom, Kemni supposed. It lightened hearts remarkably, and made people smile.

  The holding was waiting for them. Its gate was open, and people in it: guards with polished helmets, dignified people in good linen with their best ornaments, and young girls and slender boychildren with garlands of flowers.

  Kemni saw familiar faces, many he could name and a few he could not. There was Nefer-Ptah the Nubian, black and towering amid the little brown people; Teti the steward with his wide shoulders and his air of authority; Tawit his wife and his daughters the five Beauties, chattering like a flock of geese; even Huy the scribe, leaning on the shoulder of Pepi the master of the stables, waiting on the greatest gladness, maybe, that they had ever known: the return of a lady of the old blood, bearing the blessing and the authority of an Egyptian king.

  But there was one face he did not see, a face of unmatched beauty. The Lady Nefertem lived; they had been assured of that. They had been assured that she remained in the Sun Ascendant, where she had taken back the women’s house and ruled it as she always had—even while the Retenu were still lords in the Lower Kingdom.