The Shepherd Kings

by Judith Tarr

  They were taken in with songs and dancing, in a rain of flowers. Kemni had never seen such joy here, even when he was a child. It struck him strangely—as if he wanted to laugh, but if he did, he would burst into tears.

  The courts were full of people, all the servants, the scribes and clerks, the guards, the women. Every one of them must have come out to see the holding in Egyptian hands again, and to celebrate the victory.

  The Lady Nefertem was sitting in the second court, the court of the lotus pillars, shaded by a canopy, with her women about her. Kemni smiled to see her. Yes, she would let them come to her. Even her daughter, who was become her ruling lady.

  Her beauty was as marvelous as ever. She would not mar it with a smile, but her eyes were brilliant with joy. As they approached, she rose, and did a thing she had never done in her queenly life: she stepped down from the dais on which her chair was set, and held out her arms to her daughter.

  Iry eyed her rather dubiously, but stepped into her mother’s embrace. It must have crushed the breath from her: she gasped. But she did not struggle to escape.

  “My child,” Nefertem said. “Oh, my child.”

  Iry won free at length and left the field to Kemni. Nefertem did not speak to him, simply held him hard and long. The comfort in that, the embrace of kin, astonished him. It nearly broke him.

  He would come in the end to the Bull of Re, and be a prince of the Two Kingdoms. But here in the Sun Ascendant, he had come home.

  X

  The Lady Nefertem regaled them all with a feast of welcome. She had not been pleased to find herself host to remnants of the Retenu, as she thought of them; or to be informed by her daughter that those remnants would join in the feast. “They are slaves,” she had said. But Iry had stared her down.

  Iry was still shaking with the memory of that. No one, even lords of the Retenu, defied the Lady Nefertem. Only one man had ever come close. And that one was seated beside her, not willingly, but she would have him nowhere else.

  Khayan was quiet and rather pale in this hall that had been his once, before his people’s kingdom fell. She regretted, a little, that she had made him come with her; it was costing him pain. But she needed him here: his solidity beside her, the warmth of his presence, his strength that seldom wavered.

  Everyone else was dizzy with joy. Even Kemni, who had become a somber man since his Cretan priestess died, was drinking deep and joining in the singing.

  He was a pleasure to watch: grief had fined his beauty and given it a poignance that caught the heart. Women sighed wherever he went, and mourned when he was oblivious to them.

  Silly creatures. It was only a face, he would say so himself. He was the least vain of men, with the most cause to be.

  Tomorrow the world would be real again. There were houses to rebuild, people to feed and clothe, horses to breed. The king must come back to a strong kingdom. This part of it was given to Iry to make whole.

  Her hand crept out beneath the table and found Khayan’s. His was cold, but its grip was strong. She leaned toward him. “Soon. We’ll be done soon.”

  He sighed: a faint lifting of his breast. She wanted to touch it, to stroke the curly fleece, and when he had begun to laugh that wonderful deep laughter, to let her hands wander down and down. And then . . .

  Another hand touched her arm, much lighter, but very firm. Her mother spoke in her ear. It mattered little what she said. It drew her away from Khayan, which perhaps was the intention.

  Well enough—for this hour. Tonight they would all be shut in their chambers, and Iry would lie with Khayan, and the world would vanish. It would be only the two of them, and the lamps’ light, and the dance that was the sweetest in the world.

  She was thinking, perhaps—the gods knew she might be hoping too much, but her courses, which had never failed to come exactly on the day of the new moon, were still not begun, and the moon was waxing night by night. Sometimes when no one could see, she would lay her hand on her middle, and wonder if there was something there—someone, some living creature, a child. Then her heart would be so full that surely it would burst.

  It would have begun, if it had begun, the night after Avaris fell, when they lay together in the citadel. He had wept, startling himself; then grown angry and called himself a fool. She had had to comfort him, comfort that went the way it could not but go.

  Tonight she gave him such comfort again. The room they lay in had been his once, and his father’s before that, and before that, her own father’s.

  None of them had changed it, as it happened. The Retenu had covered the walls with heavy hangings and buried the tiles in carpets. Stripped of those veils and concealments, it was a beautiful room, a little worn with time, its vivid colors softened till they were almost gentle. There were dancers on the walls, long skeins of them, young girls with plaited hair, and young men leaping like acrobats, and even, in a corner, a wicked-faced monkey mimicking the dancer above him.

  They had danced their own dance to its completion, and lay tangled in one another, breathing hard. When Iry could move again, she raised herself over him, looking down at his face. He smiled as if he could not help it.

  “Does it hurt too much?” she asked him.

  He shook his head. “I thought it would hurt more.”

  “And you still do it.”

  “Am I given a choice?”

  “You could have gone with your mother. Or followed Apophis.”

  “What, to Sharuhen?” He sighed. “No. You aren’t in Sharuhen. You won’t ever go to the east.”

  “I would let you go. If your heart yearned for it.”

  “My heart is here.” He laid his hand on her breast.

  She laid her own hand over it. “But every day is pain. Every day you are humiliated. People call you a slave. Sometimes they spit at you. When we came here—I saw how they stared, and how they whispered. If I’d let you go where you wanted to go, to sleep among the servants, they would have tormented you.”

  “I would have seen that they never did it again.”

  She recoiled a little, not for revulsion, but for startlement. More fool she: she had forgotten what, after all, he was.

  That pricked her temper. “I should just turn you loose? Let you fight like a stallion, and win the herd?”

  “Why not?”

  She sat back abruptly. “Yes. Why not? What if you’re killed?”

  “No one will kill me. I still belong to you.”

  Was he bitter? She thought perhaps not.

  That was the Mare’s people in him. They could accept what a warrior of the Retenu might never hope to do.

  ~~~

  The Lady Nefertem summoned her daughter to her on the day before the full moon. Some of the servants who had attached themselves to Iry were not pleased: she was the ruler of that domain, and not Nefertem. But Iry was pleased enough to obey.

  She met Kemni on the way there, going about some errand of his own. He was lingering, she had noticed, as if he could not bring himself to leave.

  She wondered if he knew how much that had to do with his frequent companion. Sadana might not be aware of it, either: how they were drawn toward one another. They were not lovers at all; if Sadana had been a man, people would have called them comrades in arms. They were always out and about the horses or the chariots or the boys and young men whom they had begun to train in chariotry. The king needed as many as could be sent on, all the way into Canaan, to the kingdom called Sharuhen, where Apophis had turned and made his stand.

  But just now Kemni turned on a whim and said, “I’ll go with you. It’s been a little time since I paid my respects to your mother.”

  Iry eyed him a little warily. “Is there something I should know?”

  “No,” he said. “Except possibly that she should be coming to you. You’re the lord here.”

  “My mother has always made the lord come to her,” Iry said. “Why should I be different?”

  Kemni snorted. “Yes, why? The gods made her a queen. Men
have been somewhat slower to get about it.”

  Iry stopped. “What are you saying? Should I marry her off to the king?”

  “Would you like to?”

  It was not as preposterous a thought as it might have seemed. Except . . .

  “She’d never share him with anyone,” Iry said. “And he has two great queens already.”

  “Then she’ll be queen here. But you can’t let her rule you.”

  “I don’t intend to,” Iry said.

  ~~~

  They had come to the women’s house, past the guards who bowed and smiled—they never could keep their faces as expressionless as they should, not in these days. It was great joy to them to bow to one of their own as lord.

  She went in to her mother with a daughter’s obedience but a lord’s heart. Nefertem was occupied as she liked to be, with the accounts of the holding, and Teti the steward with her. She greeted Iry calmly and Kemni without surprise—indeed, with pleasure—and sent Teti politely away. He left without reluctance, with the flicker of a smile at Iry, as if he knew why she had been summoned, and was much pleased with it.

  The Lady Nefertem was determined to make this a proper occasion, with food and drink and talk of nothing in particular. Iry sighed but endured. Her mother was not to be hurried, nor could she be compelled to do anything she was not minded to do.

  At length—and long after Iry had promised to meet with Khayan among the chariots—Nefertem came to the point. “It has occurred to me,” she said, “that while it is all very well that you rule here in the name of your father and brothers, it would be much more proper if this holding looked to a lord of suitable rank and lineage.”

  Iry declined to be taken aback. “Lady,” she said. “Mother. The king himself named me lord here. My office, my position, grant me grace to be more than a woman.”

  “Still, you are a woman. In days past, after your courses began you would have been matched with a husband. Now the Two Lands are whole again, and a king wears the Two Crowns. It’s time we returned to the ways of propriety.”

  “The Two Lands are whole,” Iry said, “and the foreign kings will be forgotten, their names scoured from our earth. But some things have changed. The king rides in a chariot now. Where cattle grazed and barley grew, we raise horses for that chariot. Those horses are my charge. The king has said nothing to me of surrendering them to a man.”

  She had not meant to be or to sound so angry. Men ruled this world, she knew that. It was what was. But she was the Mare’s chosen. In the Mare’s world, women ruled. And she could not go back. Not for this.

  “I am not asking that you give up your horses,” Nefertem said coolly. “But the rest of it, the lands, the lordship—what can be so ill in letting a man hold the title? It’s proper, it’s accepted, it may serve you in court when you go there. You will go there. Did you think that you would not?”

  “I know that I will,” Iry said, fighting for calm. “And that court, Mother, is ruled now by a pair of queens.”

  “In the king’s name,” Nefertem said with devastating logic. “Come, child. If nothing else, you should give thought to the question of an heir. None but a man can give you that.”

  Iry’s belly clenched around what might be, indeed, an heir. But she was not about to speak of that.

  “Do consider,” said Nefertem, “what I have considered. There are a number of lords who might do. Long ago, when you were a child, your father and I had spoken of a match that would please him well.”

  Her eyes turned to Kemni. To his credit, he looked as startled as Iry must.

  “Yes,” the lady said in tones of considerable pleasure. “I see you understand. And why not? You two are kin. You were children together. You hold like rank, and like favor with the king. And you share an office: to give him horses. What better match can there be?”

  Why, thought Iry, if one looked at it so, there was none. The gods knew, he was beautiful, he was pleasing, he was her dear friend. He was everything that a woman could want in a husband.

  None of which removed the fact that they both knew, but her mother surely did not: that neither of them had any desire to marry the other. Iry’s beloved was out among the chariots. Kemni’s heart had died with a Cretan priestess, though Iry thought it might be coming to life again for a woman who rode horses and who fought like a man.

  She could not say this. Not yet. She rose abruptly, but she did not care if it seemed rude. “Thank you, Mother,” she said. “I will consider it.”

  ~~~

  Kemni followed her out, which was as she wished. She led him toward the bit of garden where they had spoken together, that day when he came over the wall to spy on the Retenu. It was as quiet now as then, and as deserted.

  She faced him there. He met her gaze and waited for her to speak: an art he must have learned in Crete, or from Sadana. Men never did such things in the rest of the world.

  “Do you want this?” she demanded.

  He lifted a shoulder: half a shrug, as if he had but half a heart for it. “Do you?”

  “Will you be offended if I say that I do not?”

  “Maybe a little,” he said.

  She shook her head in irritation. “Silly man. You don’t want me.”

  “I could,” he said, “if it were my duty. Just as you could want me. We were raised to marry as the family bade us. If you don’t accept me, who knows what sort of man your mother will find for you?”

  That made her shudder. “Don’t tell me you don’t know why I have to refuse this.”

  “I know,” he said, “that your mother would be properly appalled if she knew what keeps you warm of nights.”

  “Are you?”

  He shook his head.

  “And would you be? If we were wedded—would you try to forbid me?”

  “Yes,” he said without hesitation.

  “Yet you would take other women if you were so minded.”

  He had the grace to flush and lower his head. “It is the way of the world here. Though if you forbade—”

  “What, so that we both could suffer?” Her eyes narrowed. “Yes, I would do it. And then we would be miserable alike.”

  “Maybe not miserable,” he said. “We might get on very well. We always have.”

  “As kin,” she said. “As friends. What then of my beloved? Must I send him away? I can’t keep him here. Then we truly would be wretched.”

  “Send him to the south,” Kemni said, “to the Bull of Re. He’ll be much needed there, and most welcome.”

  “You will consider this,” she said. “You really will.”

  He spread his hands. “Won’t you? It’s sensible. It’s useful. It serves both our purposes. And it will content your mother.”

  “Mother must be kept content at all costs.” Iry snapped off the words. “You can say such a thing? Knowing what I have? Or is that why? If you can’t have yours, I’m not to have mine? Is that what it is? Is it?”

  She had driven him back to the wall. He flattened against it, not particularly cowed, but wary of her temper.

  And well he should be. She stepped back, letting him go. “Go away,” she said, “and let me think.”

  He obeyed her without a word. She caught herself wishing he had protested. It would have been easier then to stand against this thing.

  She did like him. A great deal. Love him? Yes. As a brother, as her close kin.

  That would hardly prevent them from marrying, not in Egypt, though the Retenu had a horror of it. Was not Queen Nefertari the king’s own sister?

  But when her heart sang, the name it sang was Khayan’s. And that was altogether impossible. He was a foreigner, a captive. He had been lord here, and done well, but the people had hated him—still hated him, because he was Retenu.

  Egypt labored already to forget that they had ever been. Their names, the memory of them, would be scoured away, cut from the monuments, buried in the sand and in the black mud of the Delta. The captives who remained, who had not be killed or sold far
away, must become Egyptian, as far as they could; as far as he could, whose face would never be anything but foreign.

  “Lady,” she said to the goddess in the solitude of that place, “could you possibly have chosen a more awkward man for me?”

  The goddess refrained from answering, as well she might. She had chosen Iry, too—out of all the women of the tribes and the Retenu, she had turned aside to set her hand on an Egyptian, a stranger to horses, who had grown up hating them. That she would then bind that Egyptian’s heart to a man of the Retenu was utterly like her humor.

  Now it must end. Egypt must be Egypt again. Iry would take her cousin as her mother ordained, in marriage that was an alliance of princes. So had the Ariana of Crete wedded the king in Thebes. It was the way of this world, right and proper.

  She straightened her back and firmed her spirit. She went to duties that had been waiting for far too long while she contended with this folly of resistance.

  ~~~

  When those duties were done, she did as Kemni had reminded her that she should do. She summoned her mother into her presence.

  There were others, too. This was not a formal audience, but what she had to say, she must say in front of everyone who was concerned in it. Therefore she had established herself in the smaller reception-hall, in the chair that had been the lord’s for time out of mind.

  Kemni was there, and Teti the steward and his wife, and inevitably his daughters. Sadana also, and Iannek because he could hardly be kept away, and Huy the scribe, who could remember what he heard, though he could no longer see to write it. And, of course, since all the rest were there, Khayan making himself a large and silent presence at Iry’s back.

  The Lady Nefertem kept them waiting, but Iry had prepared for that. There was wine, there were cakes as was fitting. The five Beauties filled the silence with chatter, sparing the rest the need to do so. They did not seem to recall that their former lord understood Egyptian; they raked him over with frank appraisal.

  “Such shoulders,” Mut-Nefer said. “Like a bull’s. I wonder—do you think the rest of him—?”