The Shepherd Kings (38 page)

That was Iphikleia. He could let it drive him mad, or he
could suffer it, since there was no changing it. With a faint sigh he
shouldered his own pack. “It’s a long walk,” he said. “Shall we begin?”

~~~

Long indeed, and dry, and burning hot in the day, but icy
cold at night. They traveled in the almost-cool of the mornings and in the
somewhat lessened heat of the evenings, and rested in the middle. Their water
dwindled. Kemni found his way to one of the oases that he remembered from a
campaign long ago. It was still there, the well still good. They drank deep and
long, and slept well after a livelier loving than either had looked for when
they stumbled parched and spent into the oasis.

Kemni woke with a small start. He had gone to sleep in the
shade of the oasis’ palms, with his mantle over him to block out the harsh
light of noon, and Iphikleia in his arms. It was daylight still, but softer,
the sun hovering low. The heat was breathless, and the air utterly still. Iphikleia
slept at a little distance in a tumble of dusty black hair, creamy bare
shoulder, ragged brown mantle.

Wind there was none, but there was ample stirring in that
green and pleasant place. Asses—a whole herd of them. For a dazed moment he
knew they had followed him from that hidden place to the westward. But none of
them had had caparisons like this, or been attended by bearded men in
embroidered robes.

It was a caravan, and not a small one, either. Packbeasts,
chariot teams, men afoot and in chariots—it could have been an army, so large
was it, and so well armed. It was coming from Nubia, perhaps—the Retenu traded
with that nation, the better to discomfit the king in Thebes. There were great
tusks of ivory bound to some of the packs, with armed men on guard. And in
those chests and boxes might be gold, or ebony, or spices.

They had not seen Kemni or his companion, or else had
reckoned them of no account. The place Kemni and Iphikleia had chosen was
somewhat away from the well, up a slope, in a grove of date-palms. Unless
someone had a fancy for green fruit, he was hardly likely to trouble himself
with either the place or its occupants.

So Kemni told himself. Two people alone, with no visible
weapons, would be little threat to such a caravan. If they were bait for a
trap, he doubted the caravaneers would be greatly concerned. It would take an
army to capture this caravan.

They seemed intent on making camp, ordering their ranks,
securing their defenses. The beasts were strung together in lines, the chariots
set in the middle like a wall around the heaps of baggage, with men on guard,
armed and watchful. Kemni would have divided those mounds of treasure and
scattered them a bit, rather than gather them all together for the ease and
comfort of robbers who might fall on the caravan, but he was only a soldier. He
knew little of managing caravans.

He was glad, then, that he had not yielded to temptation and
brought a donkey to carry the packs. A donkey would have raised questions that
he had no desire to answer.

He lay a while longer, breathing carefully, holding off the
rush of panic. He was nothing to draw their lordly eyes, nor need he be.

A soft sound brought him about. Iphikleia was awake, lying
on her stomach, taking in the caravan as Kemni had done just now. Her brows
were knit, but they always were when she first woke from sleep.

Still—

“Trouble?” he asked her, just above a whisper.

She did not answer at first; he thought she was not going
to, until she said, “No. No trouble. Unless . . .”

“Unless?”

She slanted a glance at him. “Unless we yield to
temptation.”

“Temptation? What. . . ?”

“Tell me you don’t want to go down and eavesdrop.”

“I don’t,” he said. “They’re merchants, not princes. They’ll
not know any secrets that we can use.”

“Can you be sure?”

“I’d prefer to find my way alive and undetected to Memphis,
and do my listening where Egypt and the Retenu meet.”

“Noble of you,” she said. “Merchants know everything, you
know. And love to talk about it.”

“So what would you do?” he asked with an arch of the brow.
“Walk up to them and ask them what they know of rebellion in the Lower
Kingdom?”

“That would be foolish, wouldn’t it?” She rose lazily, and
stretched. The mantle slipped from bare shoulders. He would happily have fallen
on her and done what a man does most joyously, but her eyes were not on him.
She restored her mantle, slowly, and not too snugly, either.

Kemni turned to follow her gaze. There were three of them,
one of the armed guards and two in embroidered robes. The guard was ageless as
those heavily bearded men always seemed to be, but the two in robes were young.
One was beardless but for a shadow on his lip; the other’s beard was a thing of
wisps and patches. Their eyes were huge.

“Good evening,” Iphikleia said in Egyptian.

“Good evening,” the older boy replied, as if in a dream, or
as if he could not help himself. His accent was not too appalling.

Kemni’s fists clenched. He hated to hear the Retenu speak
his language. Why, he did not know; it should not matter. And yet it did.

Iphikleia, who could hardly have been troubled by such a
thing, said in a sweet and rather baffled tone that was utterly unlike her
wonted self, “Is that a caravan? Is it yours?”

“Oh, yes,” the boy said. “Oh—oh, yes. My father’s, that is.
Our father’s. We’re just coming up from Nubia. We’re going to Avaris.”

“We’re going home,” Iphikleia said. “Is that an elephant’s
tusk?”

Kemni could have killed her. If she had kept quiet and kept
her face hidden, they might have escaped invisible, or been disregarded, which
was just as much to be desired. Now not only were they visible, they had faces
that these Retenu would remember.

She managed, with her wide-eyed curiosity and her
fascination with everything, to be brought back to the heart of the caravan
with the older boy for her guide. The younger one and the guard gathered dates
from the trees. Kemni, who was still apparently invisible, elected to go with
Iphikleia after he had scrambled together their belongings and shouldered the
lot of it. It was a pitiful small bundle by now, and he a disreputable vision,
no doubt, unshaven and filthy and all but naked.

She was beautiful even in that state, and more adept than he
could have imagined at seeming to be a silly chit of a girl. “We ran away,” she
said, her light chatter the image of her cousin Ariana’s—and she looked a great
deal like that mistress of enchantment, too, just then. “Father wasn’t happy at
all with us, and he was threatening to have my Ptahmose beaten for daring to
touch me. But Mother and the aunts are fond of him, and they’ve been working on
Father; and now he’s letting us come back. I’m so glad. It’s very adventurous
to live in the desert. But it’s terribly hot, and terribly cold, and so very
dry.”

Kemni, or Ptahmose as he was to be, kept his head down and
his shoulders bent. Let them think him of no account.

“You don’t think,” the boy was saying to Iphikleia, “that
this might be a trap? Your father may simply be luring you back so that he can
give your man his beating.”

“Oh, no!” said Iphikleia in tones of great shock and
surprise. “Father would never do that. He likes Ptahmose, he really does. He
just says he isn’t good enough for me.”

“Jubal!”

The boy started. The man who had called to him was sitting
under a canopy near the well, sipping wine and overseeing the settling of the camp.
It must be his father or close kin: the noses were the same, great leaping
arches, and a certain angle of the head, an inclination to the left, that was
rather striking to the eye that troubled to see.

“Jubal,” the man said in the Retenu tongue. “Who are these
people?”

“This is—” The boy blushed crimson. Of course he did not
know her name. But he mustered his wits rather well, if Kemni had in mind to be
fair. “This is Ptahmose from a village by the river,” he said, “and this is
Ptahmose’s bride. They’re going home to their kin.”

“Indeed,” said the master of the caravan. His eyes were
keen, taking in the two of them; narrowing slightly as they passed over
Iphikleia. She smiled sunnily at him and let her mantle slip to bare a shoulder
and a round white breast. His eyes glazed. If he had recognized the Cretan face
and form in a woman who claimed to be of Egypt, all that vanished in the light
of her beauty.

“Good evening, great lord,” Iphikleia said. “Is this your
caravan? Do you have any horses? When you were in Nubia, did you see
elephants?”

The master understood Egyptian: he blinked, taken aback
perhaps by her boldness and her utter lack of concern for the modesty that
Retenu prized so highly. But he spoke in his own language. “Jubal, my son, this
is a charming little she-cat. Take her, see her fed, give her a trinket. Then
do what you like. But be sure, when morning comes, that she doesn’t follow you.
These creatures can be all too persistent.”

“Take—” Jubal was still blushing. It was not at all becoming;
it made his face appear diseased. “Oh! But I couldn’t—”

“Of course you could,” his father said. “Go, enjoy yourself.
But remember what I told you.”

“Yes—yes, Father,” Jubal stammered. “Father, I—”

His father had already forgotten him, absorbed in some matter
involving one of the packs, a skirmish between packbeasts, and the safety of a
delicate burden.

Kemni would have lingered to discover more, now that there
was no help for it, but Iphikleia tugged him with her, deeper into the camp.
People glanced at their master’s son and his ragtag foundlings, but aside from
a spark of interest at Iphikleia’s still ill-concealed charms, they seemed
altogether unconcerned.

Arrogant. So thin a story would never have deceived an
Egyptian. He certainly would have recognized that this woman was as much a
foreigner as the men she moved among, chattering as lightly as Ariana could
ever have done, and with as little regard for either sense or consequence.

They were taken to a tent—a pavilion indeed, of noble size
and airy height—in the camp’s heart, not far from the chariots and the heavily
guarded baggage. Servants moved in and around it. There were not, somewhat to
Kemni’s surprise, any women in evidence. Everyone here was a man. They took
their pleasure where they found it, then.

Iphikleia must have heard what the master said to his son.
She was remarkably unconcerned.

Kemni could not share her trust in the harmlessness of
fools. The boy was callow and terribly awkward, but he was half again as large
as Kemni, and though he was soft, he looked strong. If he met with resistance,
he had an army of guards to help him, and a whole caravan to bolster his
courage.

Iphikleia continued to play her part, to exclaim and coo and
clap her hands over the smallest things: the wine in its jar, the cups of
hammered bronze, the necklace of blue beads that Jubal produced with a flourish
and clumsily fastened around her neck. Her astonishment was overplayed, Kemni
thought sourly, but no one else seemed to think so. Jubal was profoundly
smitten. He had a look Kemni knew well, like a calf who has just discovered the
beauty of heifers. When he put on the necklace, he hardly dared touch her; each
time his fingers brushed her skin, they recoiled as if from a flame.

Just as he was about to draw them away, she caught them.
They happened to have paused just above her breasts, where the sweet swell
began, and where—as Kemni well knew—the skin was as soft as new cream. She
smiled. “It’s so pretty,” she said. “May I really keep it?”

“You really may,” said Jubal, stammering and stumbling but
managing, in the end, to get it out. His eyes had fixed on his hands, and on
what was just below them. His mind must be lower yet, if he was even as much a
man as he seemed.

Iphikleia shifted a little, as if by accident. The boy’s big
raw-looking hands slipped inevitably, and irresistibly, to cup her breasts.

He recoiled as if she had burned him. She smiled, brilliant
and vacuous. “Do you have rubies?” she asked. “I always loved that word.
Rubies. They’re red, people say. Like blood. Are they really?”

“Yes,” Jubal said as if she had snatched him out of a dream.
“Yes—yes, they’re red. But we don’t—we only have gold. And ivory. And
something—here!” he said, scrambling away, rummaging in a box that rested
against the wall of the tent. He muttered as he did it, cursing the length of
the search, but refusing to give it up until a last and heartfelt curse broke
into a hiss of triumph. “Yes. Yes!”

He turned with the thing in his hands. It was enormous and
rather gaudy: great nuggets of gold polished and rounded, and even greater
lumps of amber, each the color of honey, and in each one the dark fleck of a
winged and many-legged creature.

Kemni thought it hideous. But Iphikleia clapped her hands
and crowed. “Oh!
Oh
! This must be a
king’s ransom.”

“Actually,” said Jubal, “it was. A Nubian king. He fell on
our caravan just after we’d finished trading for the gold and ivory. It was a
very good battle. We won. My father captured the king and dragged him behind
his chariot, till the king and all his people begged for mercy. We took this as
ransom, and all the gold from his wives and sons.”

“Why,” said Iphikleia, wide-eyed, “you must be as rich as . . .
as kings.”

“We’re as rich as traders,” Jubal said.

“So much gold,” she said, stroking the smooth heavy nuggets.
Her fingers lingered over the amber, as if she cherished its warmth.

“You can keep it,” Jubal said.

She squealed like an idiot girl and clapped her hands. “Put
it on me. Let me see it!”

It looked quite as ghastly on her as Kemni had expected, but
she professed herself delighted. Jubal was blind with young lust, or else he
truly had no taste. He seemed pleased. He would not be so full of his own
generosity, Kemni was sure, when his father discovered what treasure he had
given away to a chance-met stranger.