The Shepherd Kings (59 page)

Ay the charioteer had brought from the chariot the box that
went with Imhotep wherever he was, his box of medicaments. Imhotep opened it
without looking at it, reached in with a sure hand, and brought out a selection
of vials, rolled bandages, and an oddment or two for which Kemni could see no
purpose. He cleansed the wound carefully, filled it with a grey powder from one
of the vials, and wrapped it close in the bandage. He held another vial to her
lips and coaxed her to drink, even as unconscious as she was, and said to
Ariana, “Now you may move her. Take her where she can be in complete quiet. See
that she has strong wine when she wakes, and such meats as I instruct. And
pray, lady. Pray hard. This wound is in an ill place. If anything is pierced,
if I’ve not seen all there is to see, no art of mine will be of any use.”

Ariana regarded him with the solemn stare of a child. “She
could die?”

“She could die,” Imhotep said.

Ariana bent her head. But it was not in to collapse in
tears, though Kemni would have been glad to do as much. She looked up with
sudden intent. “We’ll take her back. But quietly. Do you all understand? No
chatter. No taletelling. My cousin collapsed in the field. The sun was too
strong for her, perhaps; or she’s taken ill of a fever. Ay: did you speak to
anyone before you fetched Imhotep?”

“No one, lady,” Ay said. “The others were out doing whatever
duty bade them do. I had to fetch Imhotep myself; there was no one to run the
errand for me, except a lad or two in the stable—and I thought it better for
them to tend the horses.”

“Excellent,” Ariana said. “Now remember, all of you. Fever,
that’s all.”

“And this?” Seti nudged the prostrate messenger with his
foot.

“This comes back as baggage,” Ariana said grimly. “Keep him
hidden. Bring him to me when I’ve settled my cousin.”

Seti bowed. He would do it, Kemni knew. As did Ariana. She
nodded and turned her attention back completely to her cousin.

~~~

The world should properly then have shrunk to Iphikleia and
nothing more. If she lived, Kemni would live. If she died . . .
he did not know what he would do. Life was strong in him, and beautiful, but
she had become the heart of it.

He was not permitted such luxury. Once she was settled in
Ariana’s own wide airy chamber, with Imhotep beside her and Ariana’s maids and
servants all about her, and the best of the guards on the door, Ariana beckoned
to Kemni.

Kemni had meant to stay on the other side of Iphikleia, face
to face with Imhotep. Ariana’s will rolled over his and overwhelmed it with
ease that recalled to him how she was, after all, both queen and goddess.

She took with her only Kemni, and she went by ways that were
frequented by servants, walking apart from the broader, brighter corridors and
the open courts. Kemni had not realized how many such ways there were, or how
secret they could be. Anyone not a servant might never know how easily the
servants came and went, or how invisibly.

Ariana clearly did. She moved quickly and with the air of
one who knew those ways well. In very little time they had traversed the house
and come near the walls, into one of the guard towers, no less. At the top of
it they found Seti, and the messenger bound and set against a wall. He rolled
eyes at the newcomers, but could not speak: Seti had gagged him.

Ariana stood over him. “She lives,” she said to him,
“through no fault of yours.”

He stared up at her. Maybe he contemplated defiance. She
bent down and ripped the gag free. He gasped and sucked in air, and coughed
convulsively.

Blood stained his lips. She wiped it free with the gag, not
particularly gently. “Now talk,” she said. “What were you to fetch here?”

He set his lips and would not answer.

She drew a knife from her belt and laid it lightly, oh so
lightly, not against his throat, but against the faint bulge within his
loincloth. “In the country to which you were going,” she said, “both kings and
queens enjoy the service of eunuchs. I shall send them another, if you wish it.
It’s yours to choose.”

It was not an empty threat. He must have known it. He held
for a moment longer, but her blade edged closer by a fraction, and pressed just
a little harder.

“I was to fetch—I was to fetch letters. And tokens. To admit
me to—to certain houses.”

“Lordly houses?”

He nodded a little painfully. Her knife had not lifted. If
he moved his body, he well might do to himself what she had threatened.

“Why letters and tokens? Wouldn’t the gold be enough?”

“That’s for the king of kings. To keep safe till I came to
him. The rest is for others.”

“Who was to give these things to you?”

“A—a messenger.” He yelped. Her blade had drawn blood. “A
prince! There’s a prince here. He was supposed to—”

“I see,” Ariana said.

So did Kemni. “Letters that would betray him,” he said.

“Possibly,” said Ariana.

“Shall I go?” he asked.

Her brows drew together. “Can you be circumspect? Are you
strong enough?”

“Maybe not,” he said, “but I can try.”

He watched her consider denying him and sending Seti. If he
had been Ariana, he would have done just that. Seti could be calmer, could
think more clearly.

But Kemni could more plausibly be seen in Gebu’s rooms,
could seem to have gone in search of the prince, or to have conveyed a message
to or from his battle-brother.

She nodded. Like Iphikleia, she always knew what he was
thinking. “Go,” she said.

~~~

Gebu was not in his rooms. Kemni had bargained on that. He
also gambled, and maybe without hope, that the letters and tokens would be
there and not on Gebu’s person, or on that of one who served Gebu. The
messenger had been clear: he was not to fetch them from a hiding place. He was
to be given them from a living hand.

Gebu could have no reason to know he was suspected. He might
leave the things in plain sight, the better to conceal them. Just as he had
done with himself, establishing his presence in that of all places, not so very
far from the border of the Lower Kingdom.

It was all a gamble, a pattern of guesses and hopes, and the
memory of a dream. Gebu’s door was not guarded. There was no need for guards,
if he was not there. Kemni walked into rooms that he had come to know rather
well, where he had spent not a few evenings sharing a jar of wine or beer,
tossing the bones, or talking of trifles. Once they might have shared a willing
maid or two, but here, when Kemni had Iphikleia, that was not a thing he chose
to do.

For her sake he did this, for her life that could even now
be ending. Kemni could blame the gods for that, or himself. Certainly he blamed
the messenger. But the man who had sent this messenger, the leader of the
conspiracy—if there was blame to bear, he bore the brunt of it.

Anger kept Kemni on his feet, though he struggled to keep
his mind clear of it. The worst of all sins was betrayal. He must remember
that; must never forget it. A man who would betray his father and his king
would hardly hesitate to betray a friend.

If Kemni wanted to hide letters and tokens in plain sight,
he would do it quite simply: in a scribe’s box, with the inks and brushes and
the palette of the trade. Gebu had such a box. Not all of the princes had
schooling, but Gebu had had a leaning toward it. He did a little reading still,
and a little writing, for the pleasure of it.

Indeed, there was his box, beside his bed as it had always
been. It was plain, with little ornament, but beautifully made as was proper
for a prince. Kemni hesitated to touch it. As if, somehow, there might still be
some hope.

He steeled himself and raised the lid. The inks were there,
the brushes, the stone palette. And no more.

Before he collapsed in relief or despair, it little mattered
which, his fingers had found the palette’s edge and lifted it carefully.

There. Papyrus in small rolls, folded tightly, and a packet
wrapped in linen. The letters were not sealed, though Kemni suspected that they
would have been when the messenger came for them. With beating heart he
unrolled the first that came to hand. It was nothing exceptionable, at first
glance: a prince’s letter to a lord with whom he would confirm alliance. But
that lord’s name, though written in the Egyptian characters, was a foreign
name, and he was bidden to win to the cause such of his fellows—both Egyptian
and otherwise—as seemed to him trustworthy.

Two more of the dozen letters said much the same. The packet
amid them proved to contain a handful of scarab-seals, each of a different
stone, but all carved with the same name: Gebu’s princely name, by which he
would be known to the gods after he was dead. To it was added a second name, an
epithet of the god Re. And that was circled with the cord of the cartouche, as
if it had been the name of a king.

Kemni stood with one such in his hand. It was carved of
lapis, deep blue like the sky over the Red Land. It held the weight of a world,
and the chill of folly.

No man with his wits about him, no man who was not at heart
a fool, would dare to write his name so, not unless he was the king. Had
someone urged this on Gebu, perhaps? Perhaps someone who had in mind to destroy
him and take what he laid claim to?

Yet he had allowed it. Out of blindness or pride or simple
failure to understand the consequences, he had let these stones be carved, and
kept them here, till they could be sent to strangers who might also betray him.

It must have been the spirit that wove about these things,
that darkened Kemni’s heart and caused him to do what he did. He kept the lapis
scarab, but wrapped the rest as they had been before. He laid them with the
letters in the box, and set the palette over them, carefully, lest he disturb
the arrangement of the inkpots and brushes atop it. He closed the lid on it
all, and with the scarab still in his hand, burning his palm like a living
coal, he left those rooms and returned the way he had come.

~~~

Nothing had changed, that he could see. Iphikleia lay like
the dead, with Imhotep seated beside her. Ariana sat across from him. The crowd
of servants was gone, but they had not mattered before and did not matter now.

Ariana raised her head at Kemni’s coming. He knelt in front
of her, took her hand in his—great daring, but she did not resist him—and laid
the scarab in it.

She examined it, turning it in her palm, frowning at the
carving on its underside. Her fingertip brushed the oval of the cartouche. “A
king’s name?”

“Gebu’s.”

“Ah,” she said. It seemed she understood. “Is this all you
found?”

“No,” Kemni said. “There were a dozen of them. And letters.”

“And?”

“I left them,” he said. She raised her brows. “I thought . . .
we should conspire against the conspiracy. If they think that a messenger has
come and taken the letters and gone, how soon will they understand that no man
of theirs ever came to the Lower Kingdom? Whereas if we uncover it all now . . .”

“Yes,” she said. Only that, but it was all the praise he
required. “Will he know who was sent here? Or believe in a stranger?”

“Surely we can find a man with the coughing sickness, who
looks enough like the messenger to pass muster. If he learns his lesson well,
says the words he’s bidden to say, then is last seen walking away northward, he
well may persuade the traitors that their errand is done.”

“What will you do with him when he’s finished?”

“We could kill him,” Kemni said with a cold heart, “or we
could reward him lavishly for his silence and send him somewhere suitably
remote. It’s a risk, but so is all of it.”

“What in life is not?” Ariana nodded abruptly. “Do it. Do it
quickly.”

Kemni swallowed a sigh. It had been too much to hope that he
could linger here, counting Iphikleia’s breaths and praying that she would
heal. Maybe Ariana thought it better for him to be up and doing, however weary
he was, and however much he yearned to rest.

It would be like her to care for such a thing. But it would
also be like any queen or king, not even to notice how great was the burden
that she laid on him.

Nevertheless he carried it. Seti would know where to find
such a man as they needed; and indeed, when Kemni told him what was afoot, he
made no secret of his glee. “My lord! That is clever.”

“And I’m not usually clever?” Kemni asked dryly.

Seti was never one to blush at a misstep. “Well, my lord, as
to that, lords are lords, and what with people wiping their noses for them all
their lives, and wiping their arses, too, and doing most of their thinking for
them . . . well, they can plot and they can scheme, but real
cleverness isn’t usually their habit.”

“I think I shall be flattered,” Kemni said. “I can’t be
insulted, or I’d have to beat you senseless. And I need you.”

“Of course you need me,” Seti said. “That’s clever of you,
too, because you know it.”

Kemni growled and made as if to strike him. He danced away
grinning. “I’ll find a messenger for you, and never you worry. You’d best go
now and be commander of the charioteers. They’ll have expected you to be
distraught, what with the lady being so ill of a fever, but you’re best advised
to drown your sorrows in work.”

That was intensely annoying but inescapably true. He must
play out the game, however long it lasted.

~~~

Seti found a man who looked eerily like the one who was
still a captive in some hidden part of the holding. In fact when Seti brought
him into Kemni’s workroom, not long before sunset, Kemni could have sworn that
it was the same man. But the other had been a little older and a little
smaller, and his voice had been less deep. And this was a stronger man, less
far gone in the coughing sickness.

“This is Amonmose,” Seti said.