The Shepherd Kings (73 page)

She should keep it to herself, all that roiled in her. But
she could not make it matter. “I need the sky,” she said. “I need the Mare.
I’ve been cut off from her—gods, for months. I must see her.”

“We can bring her—” Iannek began.

“We cannot,” Sadana broke in. “The Mare never enters cities,
except for the greatest need.”

“This isn’t great need?” Iannek demanded.

Sadana sighed. “Maybe it is. But she’ll not be commanded by
any of us.”

“Then Iry has to go to her,” Iannek said with sublime
simplicity.

“The king has ordered that she be kept within the palace,”
Sadana said.

“Isn’t she above the king?”

Sadana opened her mouth, then shut it again. “She can’t just
walk out. The guards obey the king. And the king has ordered them to keep her
in.”

“He can’t do that.”

“And yet he has.”

Iry found it fascinating to be discussed as if she had been
invisible. She might have let it continue—its direction was most pleasing—but
she was too much a fool for that. “You can’t be thinking of disobeying the
king.”

“Why?” Sadana asked her. “Aren’t you?”

“If death is disobedience,” Iry said, “then yes. But I’m
Egyptian. I’ve never sworn myself in service to him. I never will.”

“You can’t die,” Iannek said. “We won’t let you.”

“Then let me go.”

Iry should not have said that. But there was nothing
reasonable in anything she was feeling. She wanted the Mare. The Mare wanted
her. But that proud bright spirit would not enter so great a city. Not alone.
It would break her.

Iry scrambled up and dived again for the parapet. She had
some thought, dim and half-formed, of trying to see past the city, to see if
she could find one distant white shape in the fields beyond. But they must have
thought she wanted to finish the leap she had begun.

Again they dragged her back. This time Sadana sat on her,
shaking her till she was dizzy. “Stop doing that! There is a way, and you
needn’t die for trying it. If you’ll let me—”

“Where?” Iry asked. “What way?”

“It’s a postern,” Sadana said. “At night, with care, we
might—”

“How do you know I can trust you? Or,” Iry said, fixing her
stare on Iannek, “you?”

“I am your servant,” Iannek said.

“And I,” said Sadana a little slowly, as if she had to think
through the words before she spoke them, “belong to the Mare, though she would
not have me for herself. I swore oath to her when I was a child. I never swore
oath to any man, or to any king.”

“And if I choose to betray the king of this city?” Iry
asked. “Will you kill me? Confine me?”

“You are the Mare’s servant,” Sadana said.

“You hate me for it.”

“No,” said Sadana.

Iry might find her own way out, once she knew there was one.
But these two would watch her more carefully even than the king’s guards had
done. If she could trust them, if they would help her, she well might succeed.
If she tried to do it alone—they might stop her.

She had not thought about what she was doing, or what she
would do once she had won free of that prison.

The answer was plain enough. Egypt had risen. She was of
Egypt. But these two—she could not—

She would find a way. Somehow. If these were not to be
trusted, or if they turned against her and killed her, then so be it. It was
better than living trapped in walls, surrounded by enemies.

~~~

It was hardly strange to walk softly and keep secrets, or
to conspire against the Retenu. But this time Iry’s conspirators were Retenu
themselves. Or Iannek was. Sadana was something different.

Iry considered that this might be Sadana’s way of destroying
the interloper who had taken the Mare from her. But what did that matter?
Whether she leaped from the walls or took an arrow in the back while escaping
through a postern, it was all the same. The postern might truly offer escape,
whereas a leap from the walls offered only death.

“Give me two days,” Sadana said to her. “Then go into
seclusion. Invent a rite if you must, that will keep you cloistered for as many
days as you can manage. Three will do. Seven would be better.”

“But your mother—” Iry began.

“Leave my mother to me,” Sadana said. “Tell her nothing.”

Iry would hardly confide in Sarai. Even more than Sadana,
she was of the Mare’s people, her blood untainted with the blood of the Retenu.
And yet she had cast in her lot with these people. She had brought Iry here and
colluded in her confinement. She was no friend, nor anyone Iry trusted.

The habits of slavery served Iry well now. Silence and
lowered eyes and mute obedience. It was nothing different than she had given
Sarai before.

On the second night, as Iry lay in her bed, open-eyed in the
nightlamp’s glow, Sadana slipped through the door. “It’s time,” she said.

“But I haven’t told the king—” Iry began.

“The king will be told,” said Sadana.

Iry sat up, regarding her narrow-eyed. “I don’t know if I
trust you.”

“Then stay here,” Sadana said.

Iry shook her head. “No. But if we’re caught, I’ll know
you’ve betrayed me.”

“I haven’t betrayed you,” said Sadana. “Are you coming?”

Iry rose from the bed, pulled on the dark robe Sadana had
brought her, and shouldered the bag of belongings she had gathered for herself.
Sadana had more: food, a waterskin, and weapons. A bow for each of them, and
arrows, and long knives on baldrics. Iry took her share. Without a word then,
Sadana led her out through the servants’ passages.

Iry knew these ways. They had been her only escape while she
was trapped here. But the postern Sadana knew of—that, she had not found
before. It was well hidden in a fold of the wall, seeming part of the wall
itself, till Sadana set hand to it and opened it into the redolence of the
midden.

Which, indeed, explained why no one knew of it. Iry drew her
mantle over her nose and tried to breathe shallowly.

There was a wan moon, enough to see where they walked,
picking their way among the heaps of refuse and the odorous pools. Sadana was a
tall cloaked figure ahead of Iry. She spoke no word, nor seemed to care if Iry
followed her.

When Iry stumbled and fell into one of the pools of filth,
she never stopped or slowed. Iry scrambled up, gagging and choking, and
half-ran to catch her, but with care lest she fall again.

Past the midden was a stretch of open land, parkland and
garden, dark under the moon, and the broad branch of the river that flowed past
the whole of the city. They were to go north, Iry knew, along the river for a
while, then away from it lest they be seen and captured.

The Mare waited ahead of them. Iry could feel her like a
warmth on the skin, strongest when she faced the north, weaker if she turned
away. That warmth gave her strength. She did not even want to pause to wash off
the stench from the midden, but she did that for prudence, and for Sadana’s
sake. With wet and clinging skirts and dripping hands, she pressed on past
Sadana, toward the North Star.

~~~

When morning was close and the city well behind, Sadana
caught Iry as she strode onward, tripped and felled her. She lay winded but
already struggling to rise. Sadana set a foot on her breast. “Stop,” she said.
“Be quiet. Come with me.”

She let Iry up, but kept a grip on her arm, dragging her
into the reeds that bordered the river. Iry tried to protest, to remind her of
crocodiles and snakes and swarms of biting flies, but Sadana clapped a hand
over her mouth. “Quiet,” she breathed.

Iry stopped struggling. Then she heard what Sadana must have
heard long before her: hoofbeats on the road, approaching at speed. Her heart
leaped. If it was the Mare—

But the Mare was ahead of her. This one came from behind,
from Avaris. She crouched low in the reeds.

It was a chariot drawn by a pair of horses, and a single man
in it. Iry bit her tongue. It was Iannek.

“I ordered him to—” she began.

Sadana’s hand stopped her mouth again. He rattled swiftly
past, unaware of them, intent on the road ahead. She strained to hear, but no
one followed him.

When he had been gone for a long count of breaths, Sadana
let Iry rise at last, and continue—as it happened, in the direction he had been
going. She could walk no faster. She could run, but she would exhaust herself
before she ever caught the man in the chariot. If he was riding to capture the
Mare, then he would fail. If he went to betray her, he might succeed.

She was armed. She was making all speed that she might. It
must be enough.

Grey light washed slowly over them. Moon and stars faded.
They must leave the road soon, before they were seen on it. Traffic northward
had faded to a trickle except for the king’s runners and his armies, but
traffic southward was an unending flood.

Sadana turned aside from the broad and beaten track into the
fields beyond. The barley had been harvested and taken away. They made what
speed they could through the stubble. There were copses of trees beyond,
orchards, a vineyard.

Daylight found them walking among the pruned and tended
trees of an orchard, keeping to cover and out of sight of the road. Iry was
aware, dimly, that her feet were blistered and bleeding, and that her body was
stumbling. But she had to come to the Mare. She had to find Iannek and stop
him—from whatever he was doing.

She was leading Sadana as she had done since they left the
palace gardens. Sadana had voiced no complaint, expressed no exhaustion. She
was made of bronze, maybe, or honed to a keener edge than most women knew was
possible.

Iry could not go much farther. Her body knew that. Her
spirit was beginning to acknowledge it.

Just as she knew she must stop, crawl into hiding, and sleep
like the dead till night came again, the orchard ended. Wild land lay beyond,
marshes and tangled thickets, rich ground for hunting and for hiding in.

A pale shape glimmered amid the green. Iry forgot weariness,
forgot pain, forgot even fear. She began to run.

The Mare called out to her, a clear and piercing call, and
burst out of the thicket. They met on the field’s edge, the Mare pounding to a
halt, Iry all but falling against her neck. The Mare was sweating, but lightly.
Her mane was brushed and smooth, not in the knots Iry had expected. She looked,
in fact, as if she had been freshly groomed, her feet trimmed, her body
pampered as it well deserved to be.

A patchy-bearded face grinned at her from amid the tangle of
shrubbery. “Good morning, my lady,” Iannek said.

Iry would have leaped on him, but the Mare was in the way.
She settled for a murderous glare. “I told you to stay in the city. What made
you think—”

“I had older orders,” he said, “to stay with you no matter
what happened. I was never released from those.”

“Convenient,” Iry muttered. “Now get you home. And pray the
gods no one asks what you were doing riding north alone in a stolen chariot.”

“It’s not stolen!” he protested. “A friend borrowed it from
another friend. I promised to return it. Which I did. The man who owns it has a
house not far from here.”

“And the horses?”

“Well,” he said. “Wouldn’t you rather we could all ride, and
not just you?”

“Gods,” Iry said. She glanced about. She could hardly stand
on the edge of a field, instructing this perfect fool in simple prudence. She
turned her face toward the thicket. As she had expected, the others followed,
Iannek and the Mare, and Sadana at a little distance, as if she had at last
succumbed to exhaustion.

He had made camp deep in the thicket, where a clearing
offered space; from the look of the edges, he had widened it till it was large
enough for three horses and three people. The pair of dun stallions stood
together in hobbles, one grazing, one drowsing, though the Mare’s arrival
roused them both.

Iry knew those stallions. They were Khayan’s own, his
darlings, whom he had bred in the east, and raised from foals. Their dam, he
had told Iry, was one of the Mare’s people, their sire the king stallion of a
great queen’s herd. He doted on them as if they had been his children.

The elder, who had a star on his brow, whickered at the
Mare. The younger, whose brow bore a crescent moon, kept his head low. He must
have offered insolence and been corrected for it.

The Mare ignored them both. She set to grazing where the
grass was not too badly trampled, and left Iry to confront Iannek unhindered.

Iannek seemed unaware of his danger. Even when Iry advanced
on him, he stood his ground. He smiled. He said, “There’s bread. And beer.
Yakub, the man with the chariot—he says it’s the best beer in the Delta.”

“A Retenu would know?” Iry stood face to face with him, or
rather face to breast. When had he grown so large? He was as large as Khayan.

He was still a flaming fool. She jabbed a fist in the hollow
of his belly. With a faint wheezing sound, he crumpled to his knees.

She kept him there with her hands on his shoulders. “You
rampant idiot. Look what you’ve done. You’ve stolen these horses, you’ve
advertised your presence by returning the chariot, and now you think you can
travel with us? They’ll be hunting for the horses, you can lay wagers on it.”

“They won’t, either,” he said, aggrieved, and still wheezing
slightly. She hoped he was glad she had not struck lower. Then he would have
been in genuine pain. “I was supposed to have sent them back to the Sun
Ascendant. The rest of the horses can go to the war, but Mother wanted these
kept apart.”

“Were you to be sent there as well?” Iry demanded.

“Well,” he said, “no. But I let everyone think that’s where
I was going. If they look for me at all, they’ll look to the south.”

“Or to the north, where your brother went—since you were known
to have returned the chariot by this road. Your brother to whom you are
famously loyal, to whose exile you’ve been heard to object in no uncertain
terms.”