The Shepherd Kings (10 page)

The lord nodded, sighing a little as men did at the ways of
those set above them. They parted in amity, each to go his way: the lord on
some errand of his own, Kemni to explore the palace further, and to learn the
ways and faces of its people. He was not brought before the king, nor did he
ask to be. That would come in its time.

He dined in a hall that seemed half a garden, with a portico
that opened on a green and pleasant place. Sweet airs wafted in. Revelers
drifted out, then in again, in no order that he could discern. The wine was
strong and sweet, the tables laden with wonderful things. Flowers bloomed in
painted splendor on the walls, and in scented beauty on the tables and trailing
over the portico. One was expected, Kemni saw, to crown oneself with them, and
to breathe their fragrance, which held back for a while the dizziness of the
wine.

In Egypt they did as much, and crowned themselves with cones
of unguents mixed in fat. And as the evening went on, the fat melted in the
heat of the revelry, and released its scent over the revelers’ heads and
shoulders. There was no such fashion here. There was no Egyptian but Kemni, no
foreigner at all, only the lords and wanton ladies of Crete.

Oh, so wanton. They had no shame and no shyness, nor any
fear, it seemed, of retribution. Kemni had hardly sat to eat before wicked
hands crept under his kilt and closed around his manly member. They gripped
just hard enough to hold him where he was, and stroked and teased until he was
ready to cry aloud, then left him as wickedly as they had come, trembling
violently, aching and unsatisfied.

Nor could he say a word. In Egypt women could be reckless,
particularly if they were warm in wine, but there was always the looming shadow
of father or brother to keep the young men honest.

Here there seemed to be no such check on them at all. As far
as he could see, a man did not ask a woman for her favors, but waited for her
to ask him—and when she did ask, he had little choice but to oblige her. No one
seemed concerned for any woman’s honor—not the men, and certainly not the women
themselves.

But Kemni was not a Cretan. He extricated himself as best he
might, not without a sense of tearing reluctance, and went in search of the
house that had been given him.

There was someone in his bed. He could not say he was
surprised—nor could he deny that he was relieved. She was not the same who had
been there the night before, though very like her. She grinned at him from amid
the cushions, and informed him with evident satisfaction, “I won the toss
tonight. Am I not prettier than my sister?”

She was certainly pretty. Kemni wondered briefly if he
should be annoyed that the sister priestesses were gambling for his favors. It
was flattering, in its way, but hardly comfortable to think of.

“You are Ariana, too,” he said. “Yes?”

“Of course.” She bounced up out of the cushions, as bare as
she was born, with her impudent little breasts and her pointed kitten-face.
They did not have cats here—he had seen that. With such creatures as this
priestess, he doubted that they felt the lack.

She was wilder than her sister, and wickeder, too. She did
not even wait for him to be ready. She fell on him where he stood, kilt and wig
and golden collar and all, and laughed as he rose suddenly and rather painfully
to meet her. She was on him and he inside her, her legs wound around his
middle, her breasts brushing his breast, each touch of those small hard nipples
shocking him as if he petted a cat in the dry desert wind. He fancied he saw
sparks between them.

All his life in Egypt, where the dry wind and the fierce
heat were as perpetual as the roar of the sea was in Crete, and he had never
played at love with a woman till the sparks flew. She traced his body in little
tingling shocks, half pain, half pleasure. Last of all she touched lips to lips
with a jolt that wrung a cry out of him, and sent the seed bursting in a hot
irresistible stream.

He sank down panting, struggling not to fall. His knees had
turned to water. This Ariana went down with him, still joined to him, though he
was limp and shrinking inside of her.

He slipped slackly free as they tumbled on the floor. Her
hair trailed across his face. He gasped, and sneezed.

She rose above him, laughing. “Dear lovely man. Has anyone
told you how delightful you are?”

He could not see what was delightful about his graceless
sprawl on the floor, but he had never claimed to fathom a woman’s mind. He lay
and gasped and took what refuge he might in silence.

She swooped closer. Her long hair veiled them both.
“Remember,” she said. “If a woman asks, always give her what she asks for. But
never try to take it from her.”

“I—had suspected that,” he managed to say, between struggles
for breath.

“Wise man,” she said approvingly. “You’ll do well among us.
For a stranger.”

He was too weak to protest. She was rousing him again, which
he would have thought impossible; but Cretan women were great masters of this
branch of the magical arts. In a very little while he had no will at all, and
no mind for aught but the things that she was doing to his body.

~~~

The days filled quickly, with the horses, with the
Arianas, with the court and the palace. Kemni did not pause to reckon the
passage of time. One did not, when one waited upon kings. He saw the king once
or twice from a distance, and once stood in a doorway and watched him dispense
his justice. Minos was a Cretan; that was all he could really see, a middle-sized
man, broad of shoulder, narrow of hip, with black hair going grey, and, rare to
vanishing among these people as among Egyptians, a black and curling beard. He
sat in the hall of justice beside a tiny woman, no larger than a child, but no
child had ever possessed so very womanly a body. She could not but be the
queen, the lady of the bulls, mother and mistress of this palace and all who
dwelt in it.

Kemni was not summoned before them. He saw other embassies,
bearded and robed princes of Asia, wild sea-raiders, coal-black Nubians—and one
that made Kemni stare till his eyes were nigh starting out of his head. They
were giants, half again as tall as a tall man in Egypt. Their skin was the
color of milk, and their hair was yellow as gold; their eyes were the blue of
lapis. They came, a servant said, from somewhere far to the north of the world,
and their language was as barbaric as their manners.

Next to those, Kemni was utterly ordinary. And yet he was
the emissary of the Great House, the son of Horus, the lord of Upper Egypt. And
he was losing patience.

One night, after yet another Ariana had come and wrung him
dry and gone, with some little commentary on how many of her sisters waited
their turn with the man whom their mistress reckoned beautiful, Kemni raised
his aching body in his bed, and struck the cushions with his fist. “Enough,” he
said. “Enough of this waiting. Tomorrow I speak with the king, or never speak
with him at all.”

There was no one to hear, unless it were the ghosts and the
night spirits. But Kemni had sworn an oath to himself. He meant to keep it.

He slept deeper than he had thought to sleep, and woke
later, well past dawn, with the sun slanting bright across the tumble of the
bed. His breakfast was waiting as always, his clothes laid out, and no servant
to be seen. One would come if he called, but he had made it clear long since
that he preferred to endure his mornings alone.

There was someone waiting for him when he came out, an
elegant personage who could hardly be a servant, not with that lofty manner and
those golden armlets. He carried a staff of ivory topped with golden horns,
cradling it as if he cherished it. As no doubt he did; for it marked him a
king’s messenger.

Perhaps, after all, the night spirits had heard Kemni’s vow
and chosen to convey it to those who might fulfill it. He greeted the messenger
with courtesy, and with such grace as he had. It fell short of perfection: the
man’s lip curled ever so slightly.

Kemni shrugged, making no effort to hide it. He was a
fighting man and a prince’s friend, not a great lord. Such as he was, he was.
His king had judged him fit for this errand. It was for the king of Crete to
make a like judgment; not for this underling. For that, however haughty his
bearing, he was.

The messenger sniffed audibly. “You are summoned,” he said
baldly, without embellishment, “to the king’s presence.”

Kemni nodded. “Lead me,” he said with equal simplicity.

~~~

Even so early, the king was about his duties, seated in
the hall of justice. That hall, for this palace, was almost small, on a throne
made of the great curving horns of bulls. Its seat was woven of their hides and
spread with their skins, red and white and black, spotted and pied and subtly
brindled. Another was set beside it, and the queen sitting in it, that
child-small woman with skin like cream and beautiful rich breasts, and hips as
broad as her waist was tiny. She was not young, but that mattered little. Her
beauty was of a sort which would never fade, merely grow finer as she grew old.

He could see Ariana in her, in the wide bright eyes and the
delicate features. She smiled at him with warmth that he had never looked for
in a queen. He blinked, dazzled.

It came to him, rather slowly, that he had come here to
speak with the king, not to gape at the queen. The king did not seem disturbed
by the lapse. He was smiling slightly, neither as warm nor as welcoming as his
queen, but amiable enough, as kings went.

He rose, which was a great honor. One of the servants who
stood about, the inevitable attendance of kings, hastened to fetch a chair. It
was lower than the king’s, Kemni noticed, but not so very much lower. He was
being accorded great honor.

He acknowledged it with an inclination of the head. Here,
after all, he was not merely Kemni the commander of a hundred; he was the voice
of Egypt in this foreign kingdom.

When he had sat and been given wine in a golden cup shaped
like the head and horns of a bull, he sipped the rich sweet vintage and waited
for the king to speak. As he waited, he took in the room in quick glances. It
was a high and airy place for all its smallness, the walls painted with images
of sea and sky. Except for the two royal seats and his own carved chair, there
were no furnishings, only a bank of lamps and a painted image: one of the
mother goddesses that he had seen throughout the palace. They all looked like ladies
of the court, dressed in the height of fashion, their waists cinched tight with
golden girdles, their faces painted with white and rose, carnelian and
malachite. And they all wielded the serpents that were sacred here as in Egypt,
brandishing them like living swords.

The goddess in this hall of private audience wore a skirt
embroidered with gold and silver, and a vest studded with jewels. Her smile was
sweetly serene, her serpents seeming almost to hiss, so lifelike had the
sculptor made them. Her face was Ariana’s face, and the face of the queen. But
then, they were the living goddess. That much Kemni had come to understand.

The king spoke as Kemni’s eyes rested on the goddess’ image.
He spoke of small things: greeting, welcome, inquiry as to Kemni’s comfort in
his palace. Kemni answered as one does in courts, with patience hard learned,
and suitable inconsequentiality. It was a dance, each step prescribed, a
graceful circle that came round, at last and at the king’s whim, to the purpose
for which Kemni had been sent here.

He tried not to look relieved when the king shifted the
conversation to Egypt and its bearded invaders. Often in this dance of courts,
it might be days before a king came to the point. This king of Crete was almost
precipitous; and well for Kemni’s peace of mind that it was so.

“My captain and my sister’s daughter tell me,” said Minos,
“that the north of Egypt grows restless under the Retenu.”

“It would seem so,” Kemni said: with a spark of interest
that Iphikleia was, it seemed, of higher rank and family than he had thought.
“The south—Upper Egypt—feels a turning of the tide. But not enough. We can
muster armies, and more if the lords of Lower Egypt will join with us, but the
Retenu are strong. And they have chariots.”

“It might serve you to muster your own force of chariotry,”
Minos said.

Kemni nodded. “Yes. Yes, I had been thinking the same. But
if we’re to acquire herds of horses and asses to pull them, or train men to
drive them, we need time. More time than any king is minded to spare. I suppose
a few of the northern lords may have taken up the art; we can search and find
them, and try to win them over to us. But to win this war, my king believes
that we need something the enemy doesn’t have.”

“Ships.” Minos sat back stroking his rich curled beard.
“Tell me what you could do with ships. You can’t fight a sea battle with men in
chariots. There’s no reasonable way to spirit your armies to the sea, where our
ships could take them on and sail up the river into your enemy’s cities.”

“But,” said Kemni, “if we brought our armies down the river
in our own boats, and you sailed up it with your fighting ships, we could crush
the enemy between us.”

“That is supposing that the enemy would sit still to be
crushed,” Minos said.

“He is sure of his supremacy,” Kemni said. “And he has no
fleet.”

Minos frowned. “It would be a great undertaking. We would
have to fight our way through the Delta. Memphis would be too far, too hard to
win. Avaris . . .”

“Avaris is the king’s own place, and the heart of his
kingdom. If we took that, we would have Lower Egypt.”

“So easy? So simple?”

“We did it before, half a score of years ago. But we lost
it, because we had to defend our backs. This time we are prepared for that.
And, lord king, consider. For all his power, the enemy is few. He rules with
his chariots and with the force of his weapons. Cut off his head, the city and
its king, and cut open its belly—its bond to Asia—and the rest will wither and
fall away. Even those who won’t fight for us against the Retenu would rise up
with good will and help to destroy their remnants.”