She only nodded.
“Didn’t you hear me, Nebet?”
“My lord, I did. But don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
“I will keep this one. Trust me. I will set you free.”
“My lord, I have chores to do. And Prince Khyan is waiting for you.”
She would say nothing more, and Methos gave it up, hastily wrapping his kilt about his waist and slipping his feet into his sandals, then leaving the room.
Khyan was, indeed, waiting, and looking disgustingly hearty. “So, there you are! I should never have given you that woman; she takes up too much time!”
A dangerous topic. “Had I known you were looking for me, Prince Khyan,” Methos said smoothly, “I never would have kept you waiting. We two who are touched by the gods have too much in common.”
“True, true.” Khyan paused. “I need to speak with you. Privately.”
“Of course.” Does the chapel of nasty Set count, I wonder, he thought sardonically, as Holy Ground?
But Khyan was catching him by the arm, propelling him along. “The dreams,” the prince murmured, and suddenly his heartiness was replaced by the shyness of a frightened child. “You told me that they could not harm me.”
“And so they cannot!”
But then Methos stopped short, thinking quickly. Useless to tell the prince, They’re all in your head. You did not tell the insane they were insane. You did not remove all hope.
“There are demons,” Methos told Khyan gently. “We both know that. And they envy you.”
“They… envy me?”
“Why, yes! You have your brother’s love—and what demon can make claim to any love? Here is what you must do, Prince Khyan.”
“Fight them?”
“No,” Methos said hastily, thinking of how Nebet had been injured. “No. Mock them. No matter how terrible the dreams may seem, no matter how terrible the demons, if you laugh at them, you conquer. They cannot bear your laughter.”
“Splendid, splendid!” Khyan’s slap on the back nearly staggered Methos. “Laugh at them like the foolish things they are—yes! We are alike, we two. And I am glad that when my brother wanted to kill you, I told him no!”
I didn’t know there had been such a discussion! Quickly covering, Methos forced a grin. Friendship, he reminded himself, build friendship. “So am I, Prince Khyan, so am I. Come, let us walk together.”
And let me not kill you, either.
Yet.
Chapter Seventeen
Egypt, Avaris: Reign of King Apophis, 1573 B.C.
They lay in drowsy contentment, Methos and Nebet curled up together by flickering candlelight, somewhere in the small hours of the night.
“Now I know how Isis felt,” Nebet murmured, “if such a thought is not sacrilegious. Now I know how she felt, divine lady, with her beloved Osiris. Even death could not separate them.”
“I know.” The Egyptians believed that after Set had murdered his brother, Isis had restored Osiris to life, though he could only remain so in the Afterworld, where he reigned supreme. “And Horus, their son, defeated Set. Nebet, this is strange talk for the middle of the night.”
“No, no, you don’t understand! For us, for the Egyptians, life is the thing, stronger than any death. And so our Afterworld is but Egypt’s life continued, with no grief, no harm, nothing but joy.”
“I know that, and it sounds charming. But I’m not quite ready to visit it, thank you. Assuming,” he added with a chuckle, “that your Osiris would ever allow me in there!”
“Hush, my lord. Hush. The gods hear all.”
“Then why do they—”
She silenced him with a kiss that was more soothing than passionate, then settled herself back to sleep.
Methos, still awake, smiled to himself, in this moment of privacy for once allowing true warmth to show. Could he have only known Nebet for merely a month? Such an incredibly short time! A month of seeing her turned to warm silver by moonlight or washed in bright gold sunlight. A month of watching her move, so wonderfully graceful even when merely carrying a water bucket, of watching her bloom, learning her hopes, her dreams, finding the warm, witty, tender woman who had been hiding behind the safe, dull mask of “I don’t feel.”
One small month, and yet, it already felt strangely as though she’d always been here, in his room, in his bed, in his life—
Gods, you’re not going to get maudlin about it!
Nebet murmured in her sleep, cuddling up against him, and Methos sighed. Controlling his mind was simple; not so easy to control the rest of him.
Lovely, though, truly lovely, to be, for however briefly, at peace: no Immortal nearby, no Game, no lunatic prince out for who knew what weirdness. Just now he could pretend with all his heart that he was no more than one ordinary man in bed with a woman he…
But Methos stopped just short of that perilous word “love.”
Nebet suddenly stirred, awake again, and gave the softest of chuckles.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing, my lord.”
“Nebet, I told you, in this room you may speak freely and frankly. What?”
“Merely that I never expected this. I thought my emotions as dead as my village, but they were not. I thought them burned away when… when Prince Khyan threw that oil lamp. But again, they live.”
“For which I am grateful,” he added, tapping her gently on the nose with a forefinger.
She turned onto her side to study him. “I should hate you.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I wanted to hate you.”
“Why?”
“For being free, for being… unmarred.” Her voice faltered. But then Nebet continued flatly. “I had built up a wall about me. So no one could touch me. Hurt me. I wanted to hate you because you tore it down. I started feeling again. Caring. You saw me too clearly, the true, inner me.”
Her expression softened, and she rested a hand on his cheek for a moment before continuing, “But I cannot hate you. Whatever happens next, whatever the gods bring, at least I have had this time with you.”
He hoisted himself up on one elbow. “Hey now, no need to speak of us in the past tense. There are still things that we can do together.”
His fingers began to trace a delicate path down her body, strolling lightly down her breast, her belly, and Nebet laughed and caught his hand before it could go any lower.
“Yes, we can,” she purred. “We can, indeed.”
“Methos! My lord Methos!”
Methos woke with a start at the autocratic shout sounding from just outside his room and the warning blaze that an Immortal was near, and was up and out of the bed in an instinctive instant, sword in hand. Behind him, Nebet, dislodged from her comfortable curling against him, murmured something incoherent and unhappy, eyes resolutely shut. Gods, what time was it, still the middle of the night?
No, judging from the dim light, it was the merest dawning of the new day.
“My lord Methos!”
With a sigh that wasn’t really of relief, Methos sheathed his sword. “Doesn’t the man ever sleep? No, don’t answer that; idle question. Prince Khyan,” he called out in resignation, “I’ll be with you in a moment.”
Yawning, Methos hastily wrapped a linen kilt about his waist and ran a hand through his hair. Good enough.
Nebet, now more or less awake, looked blearily up at him from the bed, hair fallen half over her face. “Must you?”
“If I don’t, he’ll come bounding in here like an eager hound.” Methos bent to give her a quick kiss. “Till later, my dear.”
Sure enough, the prince was waiting just outside the door, clearly on the verge of bursting into the room. “Ah, here you are! Here you are!”
He lunged. For one stunned moment, Methos, with no idea of what he’d done wrong, was sure it was an attack. But then he realized that all Khyan meant to do was embrace him.
All?
“It worked!” the prince yelled.
&nb
sp; “I’m delighted to hear that. But if I may ask, what worked?”
Khyan drew back with a frown, then laughed. For all Methos’s attempts to dodge without making it look as though he were dodging, he still couldn’t avoid the prince, who dropped a companionable arm across his shoulders. Trying not to stagger under the unwelcome weight, Methos thought as he had with ever-increasing frequency lately, I’m going to kill him. One of these days I am going to kill him.
And get himself killed in the process? What could not be changed, Methos reminded himself, must be endured. And at least the prince did seem to have wholeheartedly adopted him as a friend.
“Methos, it did work!” Khyan all but shouted in his ear, and at last explained. “The demons in the night—I wouldn’t let them frighten me. No, no, I laughed at them—and they vanished into mist and let me be! Just the way you told me, I mocked them, and they vanished!”
“Excellent.” For the moment. Until your disturbed mind forgets this and we must begin all over again.
For three days now, they had gone through a similar process, Methos carefully wooing the prince, helping him out of the morass of his dreams—only to have Khyan forget from one moment to the next.
“Now you must come, hurry,” the prince added, “to attend the rites of Set.”
Methos, smothering another yawn and edging ever so subtly out from under the royal arm, asked, “Isn’t it a bit early for, ah, regular services?”
The hearty camaraderie vanished from Khyan’s face in a flash. “Do you question me?”
“Of course not, Prince Khyan!” Methos said smoothly. “It’s merely that, as a newcomer to this court, I sometimes do display my ignorance.”
“Ah, of course, of course. I forget that you have not been here forever, you and I, the two touched by the gods.” Khyan paused, smiling slyly. “That would be the future, you and I, the guardians of the realm, the rulers of the world, you and I, touched by the gods and gods ourselves.”
“It… would be intriguing,” Methos said warily, knowing better than to try to follow Khyan’s convoluted reasoning.
“Intriguing,” Khyan said with a laugh. “That is what is wrong with you, Methos. You think small. Listen: I love my brother, I wish him ever, ever well. You know that. You do know that!”
“Prince Khyan,” Methos told him with absolute honesty, “there is no love more unique than that between you and your brother.” For any other king would have had such a liability as you eliminated long ago.
Khyan, of course, took it for a compliment. “True, true. But—ah, look. The guards are practicing their swordplay. We shall join them.”
So much for the rites of Set. Not that I regret missing them.
But he didn’t want to get caught up in more swordplay, either. “Prince Khyan,” Methos began carefully, “I wonder if I might ask a kindness of you.” Now, while we are still good friends.
“I know, you want a different woman. An unflawed one! I jested in giving the scarred one to you. Come, you shall pick another!”
“That’s not necessary.”
“I said, you shall pick another!”
“Prince Khyan, I would not deign to deny your royal kindness. But I… I am a humble man. I would not feel at home with too, ah, rich a diet.”
A pause. Then Khyan gave a sharp bark of a comprehending laugh and slapped Methos on the arm. “Indeed, indeed! Too rich a diet can kill a man, and I do not wish you killed!”
Very delicately, Methos asked, “But… the favor?”
“You wish something? Ask.”
“I have seen some of the splendor of your brother’s court”—oh, indeed, if thick fortress walls, imitations of Egyptian frescoes, and the occasional pretty piece of Canaanite pottery can be considered splendor—“but only some. Surely there are more wonders? And what of the town? Shall there not be wonders to be seen there, too?”
Khyan frowned. “You cannot go alone. Ha, but I shall go with you! Come.”
He led Methos on a complicated, irrational tour of palace, town, palace, garden, town, all the while keeping up a running monologue of hopes and fears and dreams, none of them rational, either. Methos nodded when appropriate, added phrases of comfort or approval from time to time, and all the while noted everything around him.
The outer walls: just as impermeable as those of the citadel. Methos saw merchants and waterbearers in wagons or on foot coming into the city only after rigorous searches by the guards, the other merchants leaving only after undergoing similarly thorough searches.
No smuggling of anyone in or out. Well, I thought not.
In Khyan’s erratic company, he wandered the marketplace, seeing some handsome weavings and ceramics, some handicrafts in gold or bronze. The people seemed an edgy, grim-faced lot. Even so, Methos stopped in unexpected pleasure to listen to a talented harper with a many-stringed instrument foreign to Egypt—only to have Khyan take him by the arm and pull him impatiently away.
“Those are common things, unworthy of our time,” the prince said with an aloof wave of his hand. “There are better things to see. And we have some most important issues to discuss.”
“Forgive my ignorance, but: We do?”
“Yes! About the future and the ruling of the world!”
And we are off and running through a fantasy realm once more, Methos thought wearily.
Were they? In the middle of the marketplace, Khyan stopped short and said suspiciously and utterly without preamble, “Do you love her?”
It caught Methos by surprise. “Her?”
“The slave! The marred one! Do you love her?”
Jealousy? Too strong a denial would be as risky as an admittance. “She’s a slave,” Methos said in an absolutely neutral voice. “What is that to me? Do you want her back? I would—”
“No, no,” Khyan cut in, predictably. “She is a gift. What do you think of this dagger, eh? Worthy of a prince?”
Methos gave an inward sigh of relief. Khyan had dropped the subject of Nebet so suddenly that it was clear his mind had already abandoned it.
And I am not about to remind him.
Back into the fortress. Back through a maze of insanity. And all the while, Methos pretended, as he had been pretending for what seemed an eternity now, to be fascinated by Khyan’s weird visions, listening to him boast about being a prince (conveniently forgetting his lack of royal blood), hearing all the dreams that could never come true. And all the while, Methos managed to never once say the undeniably suicidal things that were on his mind.
He was almost relieved when King Apophis called for him.
To his surprise, though, this was not a royal audience. “Walk with me,” the king commanded, and every one of Methos’s survival instincts came alert and wary.
Guards followed them down the fortress corridors, but at a discreet distance, granting them the illusion of privacy.
“I am in a difficult position,” Apophis said without warning. “I need not tell you that even after a hundred years of occupation, we still do not truly own Egypt. And I cannot afford even the smallest of weaknesses or, shall we say, liabilities.” He glanced shrewdly at Methos. “I don’t think I need to spell out the details.”
“Your Majesty, might we be speaking about one who has been… ah… touched by the gods?”
“My brother, you mean. Indeed.” After a moment, the king continued, “I could wish he were not touched by the gods. But the great god Set is, after all, a deity of chaos. And who are mortal men to argue with that? Khyan is as he is. And I do love him; I have since the days when he was a small boy waking in terror from one of his dreams and only I could comfort him. Now… I cannot keep eternal watch over him.”
In other words, oh king, you are looking to me to take your beloved, troublesome brother off your hands. Yes, and grateful to me for what I’ve already done, though that you will never say.
Methos, wisely, said only an innocuous, “One does what one can.”
“Yes.”
As though suddenl
y impatient with himself for having revealed anything of himself, the king turned away. “Keep him from harm.” He added with a gesture of dismissal, “You have our leave to go.”
Methos went.
But he stopped at the edge of the central courtyard at the sound of men’s shouts. That was most notably Khyan’s voice rising over the others.
And that is Nebet he has cornered!
Methos broke into a run, just in time to see Khyan’s men cut off her escape and Khyan grab her, laughing. Nebet, struggling with the ferocity of someone with nothing left to lose, snaked her head down and bit him on the hand. The prince released her with a yelp of startled pain. A savage backhanded slap sent Nebet staggering right into Methos’s arms.
“What,” he asked mildly, “is happening here?”
Khyan, sucking the hand that Nebet had bitten—though, of course, any toothmarks were already healing—said, “I told you that one was damaged. I was just getting rid of it for you, getting you a new one.”
Methos felt Nebet tense, but he tightened his grip on her arms, hard enough to make her wince but keep silent. “That is very kind of you,” he told Prince Khyan. “But, do you know something?” Methos chucked Nebet under the chin. “I’ve just gotten this one nicely broken in.”
He gave Nebet a kiss so savage it bordered on an attack, hearing the catcalls of Khyan’s men.
Khyan wasn’t laughing. “She bit me,” he muttered. “She assaulted the royal presence.”
Gods, that’s probably a beheading offense around here.
“Don’t worry,” Methos said with a fierce grin. “She will be punished.”
More catcalls at that, some cries of, “Let us help!”
Only Khyan, disconcertingly, still showed no sign of humor. But then, without warning, he began to laugh as a child laughs, far too loudly, mouth too wide. He was still laughing as Methos, trying not to shudder at the insane sound, dragged Nebet away.
Once they were behind the relative safety of the closed door of his room, Methos released her, asking, “Are you all right?”
Khyan’s slap was still blazing red across her too-pale face, livid as the scars, but she nodded.
The Captive Soul Page 13
