The Shepherd Kings (52 page)

It took all that remained of that day, fighting crowds and
beating the streets about the harbor, but at last he found
Dancer
drawn up on the shore, and crewmen who greeted him with joy
that seemed genuine. One of them guided him to a house nearby, such a one as
the Cretans favored, poor and shabby outside but splendid within. It was empty
of any but servants, but those assured him that Naukrates would return as soon
as might be.

They did not speak of Iphikleia, nor did he ask. He was a
coward, he supposed. He whiled the time with a bath and a drowse in a cool and
airy room, surrounded by images of ships and the sea. He slipped easily into a
dream of sailing on
Dancer
, breasting
the waves in a dash of cold spray, while dolphins leaped all about the ship,
and a fair wind blew him toward a distant island.

Her face shaped itself out of wind and spray, her hair like
the blue-black gleam of the sea in storm, streaming down about him, and her
eyes both dark and bright, drinking him in. How, before the gods, had he ever
thought her cold? She was the wildfire that could run up a ship’s mast and
dance along the rigging. She was the lightning out of a roiling heaven. She was
the cold kiss of the sea, and the fierce hot stroke of the sun on blue water.

Then all words were gone, and there was only the meeting of
body and body. He woke into it, and it was all real, all there, her warm
familiar presence in his arms, her scent, the way she fit just so, taking him
inside her and holding him deep. Her arms were strong, as if she would never
let him go.

For all their urgency, they prolonged it as much as they
might, a long, slow, easy swell and surge like a quiet sea. There was beauty in
it as much as pleasure, and a joy that deepened the longer it went on, till
surely he must burst with it.

She gasped and stiffened and gripped him with bruising
force. He let go then, at last. They rode the last long swell down into
stillness. And there, for a while, they rested.

~~~

Kemni woke with a small start. He had not meant to fall
asleep. Iphikleia was still there—-no dream, thank the gods. She lay watching
him, her face as unreadable as it had ever been before he learned to see the
heart of her. He smiled and fitted his palm to the curve of her cheek. “I
missed you,” he said.

“I should think you’d have been too busy,” she said in a
tone of surpassing mildness.

“Never too busy to love you,” he said. “Never for a moment.”

“Such pretty words.” She turned her head till her lips
touched his palm. Then she drew away—slightly, but enough. He let his hand
fall. “You were away a long while.”

“I was discovering great things about the Lower Kingdom—and
about the men who claim to rule it.”

“And the women?”

“Are you jealous?”

“Should I be?”

“No,” he said. “No, you should not.”

“Even the one whose hand I feel on you?”

His heart clenched. Which was silly of it, but he was only
in part its master. “If you mean my cousin Iry, she was never more to me than a
kinswoman should be. If you mean—another, then I can only remind you that it
was you who trained me to approach a woman only if she asks. And that one had
great need of a man who would do such a thing.”

“Tell me about her,” Iphikleia said. She was not offering
him a choice. He gathered his wits and his words. There was more here than a
woman’s jealousy. He could feel it in the air. What he told her would matter,
and how he told it. “Her name is Sadana,” he said. “She rides horses and
carries weapons and knows how to fight like a man. Her mother’s people come
from the east, where the horse-tribes are, but she has never been there. Her
brother was sent instead, because their goddess asked for him. Then when he
came back with the white horse, the Mare, who is a goddess, Sadana was supposed
to be chosen to be the priestess, but she wasn’t—she had more to bear than
human woman should.”

“You pity her, then,” Iphikleia said.

“No,” he said. “No, I don’t pity her. But the gods haven’t
been kind to her. She didn’t know that a man can be gentle. She only ever knew
force.”

“Poor thing,” said Iphikleia. “And you left her.”

Kemni drew himself up as best he could while lying flat in a
tumbled bed. “First I’m an ill creature for touching her, now you upbraid me
for leaving her? I asked my cousin to help her. It was the best I could do,
with all I had tugging at me. Ariana has been waiting overlong for all of us.”

“You don’t think I mean to be reasonable, do you?” Iphikleia
asked him.

“Of course not,” Kemni said.

“Good,” said Iphikleia. “You still should not have left her.
Or should never have gone near her at all.”

“She asked,” he said.

“How difficult.” Iphikleia slapped him lightly—for the
transgression—but then she kissed him. “Because,” she said, “you are what you
are.”

Kemni did not pretend to understand her. It was enough that
she understood him.

~~~

He had meant to return to the palace late that night,
redolent of beer and bad wine. But Naukrates was sailing in the morning.
Another day and Kemni would have been left to fend for himself.

The gods had spoken, as had Naukrates. Kemni would have to
vanish then, and hope to be forgotten.

He surprised himself with regret. As little time as he had
spent in that household, he had made himself a part of it. It had been home to
him when he was a child, and even broken and conquered, it was still in a way
his own.

But he must return to the Upper Kingdom, to his king and his
queen and his manifold duties. When he came back to this place, he would come
back in arms—or die in the trying.

~~~

Kemni was gone. Iry had expected that, but not so quickly,
or without a farewell. She was angry—foolish, but she could not help herself.
He must have been swept away by his allies. But what if he had been captured or
killed? She might never know.

She had to trust that he had found his Cretans, and that
they had taken him back to Thebes. Meanwhile she was left with only half her
complement of guardsmen, and no simple explanation for it.

The first day at least, there were distractions. From as
little as Iry knew of courts, she knew that kings never received anyone at
once, even ambassadors from great kingdoms. A king made people wait upon him.
It was one of the things that made him a king.

And yet, almost before she had risen and dressed and greeted
the sun as the Mare’s servant was supposed to do—but in her heart she sang a
hymn to Re, who was the sun of Egypt—there was a messenger at the door, a lofty
and self-important one, with a summons to the king.

Unlike kings, kings’ subjects must not keep others waiting.
Iry was given no time to eat the breakfast that had been laid out for her. She
was summoned. She must go now.

Alone then, for Iannek had not come yet to his day-duty, and
Kemni of course was gone, Iry followed the king’s chamberlain. It occurred to
her, briefly, that this might be a trap and the chamberlain an impostor, but if
that was so, she would almost welcome the danger.

She was in an odd mood. Her cousin’s presence had given her
something very like comfort: the nearness of kin in a world gone strange. Now
he was lost again. The Mare, whom she could trust, was out beyond the city,
doing whatever it pleased her to do. Here in these walls, in the hands of her
enemies, Iry was all alone.

And she was almost glad of it. It was like leaping from a
high wall into endless space, or for that matter, essaying the back of a horse,
and riding wherever the horse wished to take her. Which was, just now, deep
into the palace, into the heart of those high walls.

Everything about her was odd, not quite Egyptian but not
quite Retenu. The images painted on walls and carved in stone were sometimes
altogether alien, but often Egyptian or almost Egyptian. Kings in the Two
Crowns and the proper royal kilt, carrying crook and flail, but bearded like
Retenu; or men carved in the scribe’s pose, seated cross-legged, but no scribe
had ever worn his hair cropped above the ears in that preposterous way.
Sometimes the gods painted or carved were Set in his own image, but sometimes
they were something else that seemed meant to signify Set—Baal, that would be,
the Skyfather of the Retenu, whose temple they had built in the city’s heart,
vast as a mountain. There were other gods, and the gods of her own people, too,
but those were the greatest and the most often seen.

Far inside the palace, in a maze of corridors, the
chamberlain brought Iry to a pair of tall doors watched over by men in polished
armor. They eyed her from the shadow of their helmets, but bowed and suffered
her to pass in the chamberlain’s wake.

She had come, of course, to the king’s chambers. They went
on and on, a maze of rooms and passages, all seemingly deserted, but the
shadows were full of whispers. She could feel the eyes on her, though she never
caught any of those who stared.

In the heart of those chambers was a room of surprising
smallness. It had windows, which rather surprised her. They looked out on the
central court of the palace, a deep space of pillars that made Iry think,
somehow, of a bed of reeds made vast and set in stone. Or a forest such as
Khayan had described it to her, pillars of trees that marched on and on into
green shadow.

This room was high above it, and must be near the roof of
the palace. There was no one in it, but there were chairs to sit in, even a
couch if she had a mind to lie at ease, and wine and cakes to tempt her, and a
bowl of flowers to regale her senses.

She should sit, she knew, and be patient. But she had been
expecting to see the king, not be forced, after all, to cool her heels until he
deigned to see her. She paced, pausing with each turn to gaze down and far down
into the courtyard. People passed below, sometimes alone, more often in
companies. She amused herself trying to guess what each person was, whether
lord or soldier, servant or commoner wandering gape-jawed through the palace.

Sometimes there were dogs, alone or on leads, wanderers or
hunting dogs or, once, what must be the warhounds she had heard of but not
seen. They were large even from this vantage, grey as wolves, in collars spiked
with bronze. Their handlers struggled a little against the tug and surge of
them.

No cats, she thought. She had not seen one since she passed
these walls. Retenu did not like cats. Wicked, uncanny creatures, they said,
given to creeping about and startling passersby with a leap and a sudden slash
of claws. Which was perfectly true, but that was what made them cats and not
simply very small dogs.

Iry did not like dogs. She particularly did not like the
warhounds, even seen from so high and far away. She was glad when they were
gone.

She had by then become very comfortable in the deep
embrasure of the window, curled like a cat herself, with warmth all about her
from the sun as it rose above the walls. She let herself drift and dream, till
a gnawing in her belly reminded her that she had not eaten since she woke in
the morning.

The cakes were not as good as she might have had in the Sun
Ascendant, but they were pleasant. The wine, well watered, was of royal
quality.

Just as she sat licking her fingers, wondering if she could
finish another cake, footsteps sounded—not at the door, but above. She looked
up startled. The footsteps passed, grew dim, paused. Then she heard the sound
of feet on a stair.

A chamberlain, not the one who had brought her here, opened
the inner door. “You will come,” he said in the soft light voice of a eunuch.

Eunuchs, like warhounds, were a thing she had heard of but
not seen. Neither of the lords she had been slave to had had eunuchs.

She had heard that they were gross and vastly fat, and
warbled like birds. This was a very tall, thin, elegant personage, and his
voice was higher than a man’s but low for a woman’s. He reminded her of an
ibis, as tall as he was, and as gangling-graceful. He did not look like a
woman, except that he was beardless; but Egyptian men did not grow their
beards.

She followed him more because she was fascinated than
because she was obedient to his summons. He led her out into a passage and up a
stair. The top of it was blinding sunlight and the broad expanse of a roof.
Much of that was cleared for ease of defense, but not far from the stair,
someone, king or queen, had made a garden. It was small, and nestled against
the foot of one of the four tall towers that warded the corners of the palace.
A low wall surrounded it. Greenery overhung the wall, and a torrent of flowers.

Within, there was no sense of smallness at all. Everything
was green, and dizzying with scent. Above it Iry could see the grim face of the
tower, but veiled and softened in leaves and bright petals. The center of it
was, as always in this land of desert and precious green, a pool: here, rimmed
with stone and glinting with fish. Lotus grew there, flowers like moons
floating on the water.

A man sat by the pool. The same guards who had attended him
the day before attended him now: favorites, they must be, and trusted as she
had trusted Kemni and—yes—Iannek.

Of course the man in the menagerie had been the king. She
remembered clearly Iannek’s face—he had known but not spoken, the idiot.

King Apophis, against whom she had sworn perpetual hatred,
smiled at her and said, “Good morning, my lady. Did you rest well?”

“Very well, majesty,” Iry said. “Were the rest of the
animals as entertaining as always?”

“Quite so,” he said. “One of the lionesses cubbed in the
night—I was visiting her, or I’d not have kept you waiting.”

Gods, she thought. It was ghastly difficult to hate this
pleasant man who loved his animals. And yet he was Apophis of the Retenu. He
ruled the Lower Kingdom. He was the conqueror of conquerors, king of the
foreign kings. All that she hated, all that she had sworn to fight against, was
embodied in him.