The Shepherd Kings (14 page)

Music followed her, and song, and people calling like the
crying of gulls. Their princess was leaving them, going away to be a queen in
Egypt.

~~~

“You weren’t supposed to come
now
.” Kemni was trying not to rail at her, but not succeeding. They
were well out to sea, the sail up, the oars shipped, and
Dancer
skimming before the wind. The women had put off their finery
and put on more practical garb. So too had Kemni, taking a few moments’ respite
in the sea-chest of a cabin that had been his own on the voyage to Crete. He
was rather surprised to have it, and undismayed to discover that he would share
it with the captain. The women, of course, had the captain’s cabin with its
greater space and comfort.

Now they were all on deck in the sun and the spray, the
great green expanse of Crete skimming past. Ariana was much restored to
herself, now the thing was done—now she had set sail for Egypt.

Kemni should not have said what he was thinking. But they
had been passing round a jar of wine, and the sun was strong and the spray was
cold, and this was Ariana. “You were supposed to wait till the war was over,
then come in suitable state to seal the victory. What if the Retenu get rumor
of this? You’d be a hostage beyond all others. And if—
if
—we pass them undetected and come as far as Thebes, how will you
manage? Queens reckon their rank and estate by the number and quality of their
attendants. One attendant, however royal, however holy, will serve you poorly
in the queens’ palace.”

She sipped wine and appeared to listen, but she offered no
response. She was doing it to madden him, he was sure.

“Listen to me,” he said. “What good does it do you or any of
us to come to Egypt now, in secret as it must be, and when you come to Thebes,
if you come there, to be married without full public ceremony, or the enemy
will know what’s transpired? What are you looking to gain?”

“Time.” That was Iphikleia, answering with her wonted lack
of patience for Kemni’s profound male idiocy. “Wisdom, maybe. Advice in your
king’s ear, from someone who knows all the secrets of Crete. A queen is a
pretty thing, and a wedding is a pleasant festival. But Egypt needs more. Egypt
needs us.”

“You, too?” Kemni demanded. “What, you’ll offer my king two
queens when he looked for one?”

“Not likely,” said Iphikleia with a slight curl of the lip.
“He’ll take this one and be more than glad of her.”

“He might have been gladder if she’d brought her horses,”
Kemni said.

“Horses can be had,” said Ariana, speaking at last, and as
clearly as ever. She was back among them in truth. “Egypt does need me, you
know. I know the fleet, I know how it sails and where, and what signals it
answers. I know horses, I know chariots. Being a wife I may not know, but I can
be priestess and queen. Now teach me,” she said. “Teach me while we sail. Teach
me of Egypt.”

“I should teach your captain to set you off at the first
port,” Kemni muttered.

She laughed. “You will not. Now begin. I would know
everything. All you can think of—and as much of your language as I can learn. I
taught you the chariot. Teach me Egypt.”

Kemni might upbraid her, and he might disapprove highly of
what she did, but in the end, he could only obey her. She would, after all, be
his queen.

The river flooded early that year, taking almost by
surprise the priests whose task it was to predict the rising and falling of the
waters. One day, it seemed, the river ran low and slow. The next, it roared in
flood, spreading wide over the parched land. People fled, but they laughed as
they ran, and sang, for this was the wealth of Egypt, the life and prosperity
of the Two Lands.

“It’s a plot,” Ramerit said as she heaved up a great basket
of soiled linen. “Thebes knew of this days ago. But did it tell any of us, up
here past Memphis? It did not!”

“Well,” said Nefer-Ptah, who despite her utterly Egyptian
name was utterly and imposingly a Nubian. “You can hardly expect them to give
us anything here. Not as things stand.”

Ramerit sniffed. “They should have told us.”

Ramerit had never been a reasonable person. Iry, who was not
particularly reasonable either, but who at least knew when to be quiet, went on
bundling linen into the baskets. If she worked quickly, she might be able to
escape while Ramerit and Nefer-Ptah were occupied with arguing over rebellion
in Thebes.

Iry did not want to think about rebellion in Thebes. She
ducked her head till the straight black hair hid her face, and bent more
assiduously to her work. As she had half dreaded, the two womenservants were at
it full force. They would dredge up every slight against both halves of Egypt,
all the way back to King Salitis who came roaring in his chariot out of the
north and seized the whole of Lower Egypt for himself and his sons and his lords
and lesser kings, and all the way forward to Ahmose who was king now, away
south in Thebes where Egypt was still Egypt.

She loaded the last basket while they were but halfway
between the kings, ducked even further and slid and sidled and, in a breathless
rush, was gone.

No squawk of outraged discovery pursued her, for once. She
escaped the breathless closeness of the linen-room, darted down the dim and
odorous passage that led to the kitchen, and slipped out the door into the
sudden and blazing brilliance of the day.

The heat was heavy, oppressive, but she was naked as any
sensible creature would be here, but for the blue bead on its string about her
hips, and the amulet of Bastet that hung between her young small breasts. She
stopped to embrace the light and heat both, with a pleasure as pure as any
animal’s.

Like a cat, she thought with a little purr in her throat. As
if in answer to what was half thought, half prayer, one of the cats that
deigned to live in this house came and mewed and wove its sleek spell between
her ankles. She bent down. The tawny back arched to meet her palm.

As she straightened, a hand stroked her back precisely as
she had stroked the cat’s. She had arched to meet it before she thought; and
certainly before she saw who did it.

She hissed and recoiled. Her least favorite tormentor
grinned at her and, in the moment of her startlement, wheeled her over and
against the wall. She was trapped in the cage of his arms, breathing the musk
of him that said, inescapably,
foreigner
.
And no matter that she had been bound to these conquerors for the past two
hands of years.

This son of the conqueror was remarkably callow, in her
opinion, and intolerably determined to be the light of her life. She looked
into his broad high-nosed face with its patchy young beard, and considered
spitting at it. But that would only make him laugh. Milord Iannek was the least
easily offended of men, and the most difficult to be rid of.

Iry sighed deeply and determined to be as nothing: a breath
of wind, a shadow on the wall. It was not easy, with hot and none too fragrant
breath on her cheeks, and tall thick-muscled body looming over her. He had
grown since last he trapped her against this wall. He was—gods, he was almost a
man.

Under the heavy robes that he affected, that were a matter
of pride to these Retenu—and no matter that the sun of Egypt could kill a man
wrapped to the eyes in wool and leather and furs—she still could feel the rod
risen and grown hard in her honor. It did not match the rest of him, which was
tending toward the burly; it was a slender wand of a thing.

But eager. Very eager. Not for the first time, Iry was glad
of his swathings of garments. If he had been wearing a proper Egyptian kilt, he
would have had it off and her on the tiles in the blinking of an eye.

He certainly was thinking of it, robes or no. She bared her
teeth at him. “
Little
man,” she said.
“Let me go.”

“Not likely,” he said. “And not before you give me a kiss.”

“That’s not all you’ll ask for,” she said.

“It’s a beginning,” Milord Iannek said.

“You only want me because I won’t have you,” she said.

“I’ll always want you, my beautiful one,” he said.

She snorted. “Go chase Ramerit. She’s prettier than I am,
and she loves to hunt ducks in the reeds.”

“My duck mates for life,” he sighed, “and he has chosen
you.”

“Then he’ll pine away unrequited,” Iry said.

He swooped to seize his kiss, whether she would or no. She ducked,
slithered, slid—and was free. Quick as a lizard from the hawk, she darted for
cover.

Milord Iannek’s laughter followed her. He was never
offended, not even by her cruelty. Nor, gods help her, was he ever deterred.

~~~

This time no one barred her escape. She had nowhere in
particular that she wanted to be, except that it was elsewhere—away from
duties; away from importunate lordlings. She went where her feet led her,
guided by the slant of a shadow, the angle of sunlight on a wall. She knew
every cranny of this place, this house of the Sun Ascendant in the green
country north of Memphis. How not? She had been born here.

The bitterness had shrunk to a tightening in the back of her
throat. If she tried, she could remember as vividly as yesterday, though it was
ten years gone and she had been a small girlchild, how it had been to be lady
and mistress here, and not menial and slave.

But that was past. Her father had joined in rebellion
against the Retenu. He had died for it, he and his sons. His wife and his
daughter had gone to the conqueror.

The conqueror had a name. She never called him by it. She
never looked him in the face, either, or acknowledged his existence, though
when he visited this one of his several estates, she was expected to wait on
him. It was an amenity of the house, to be served by a slave who had been a
nobleman’s daughter.

He had been gone since the last Inundation. No one had
missed him greatly. Teti the steward, preoccupied with skimming the cream of
the estate, would have been delighted never to see the overlord at all. Milord
Iannek, who seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time cooling his heels in the
country for one infraction or another, was a minor annoyance—however much he
might vex Iry.

She found herself atop the wall, leaning on the parapet
above the eastward gate. There was supposed to be a guard up here, but Teti
only troubled to post one if the lord was in residence. No one would dare
invade this house, not since it had passed into the hands of a lord of the
Retenu.

It lay wrapped in its lands not far from the road between
Memphis and the foreign king’s city, but not so near that many were minded to
turn aside. There were richer pickings to the south of it, great and noble
houses, houses whose wealth had not all frittered away into a shabby gentility.

That had been so before Iry’s father died. She had no shame
of it. Her mother, the Lady Nefertem—that was a different matter. But Nefertem
kept to the women’s house, and never ventured into the sun lest it darken the
perfection of her skin. She would never follow her daughter up so high, nor
know of it either, unless one of the servants was minded to tattle.

Nefertem was a slave, too. Somehow she managed to forget it,
except when the lord was in the house. Then she served him as a woman of great
beauty must serve her conqueror—not as Iry did, pouring his wine and tasting
his dinner, but in the inner room.

Milord Iannek would have liked to make the same use of Iry,
but he lacked his father’s authority. Which was well for him, and well for Iry,
too.

She leaned on the parapet and gazed out across the lands
that had belonged to her family for a thousand and half a thousand years. They
were shrunken now, covered over with the river, an expanse of water as broad,
said those who knew, as a sea. The river had risen even since this morning. At
its fullest extent it would stretch almost to the house, and naught between but
a thin rim of dry land.

The heat was heavy, like a wash of steam across her body. No
breeze rose to cool her skin. She did not mind, much. She was born to this. And
it was more pleasant than Milord Iannek’s hot breath and scratchy wool, by far.

As she lingered there, half-dreaming, a cloud of dust caught
her eye. She watched it idly, thinking little of it, though travelers on this
road were few. This one moved fast, and ran four-footed.

Retenu. Only one of those would come in a chariot, at the
gallop, behind a team of horses.

Iry hated horses. Every good Egyptian did. Horses were a
weapon; were the enemy. With horses and with their cousins the long-eared
asses, the foreign kings had trampled the armies of the Two Lands and killed
its princes, and ruled where none but men of Egypt had ever ruled or thought to
rule.

She hated horses. And yet she could not take her eyes from
them. They looked like antelope, more or less, but larger, heavier, stronger.
They had no horns. They had manes that streamed on their necks, and tails that
flowed long behind them. They were terrible, and they were beautiful. And
swift—oh, so swift. Like a bird on the wing, like a fish in the river. No man
could outrun a horse. The cheetah could do it, and the gazelle—but even they
were hard pressed to hold the lead.

These were fine horses, and fast. The chariot behind them
was of the lighter sort, a racing chariot. A messenger, then, and in a great
fever of haste. He nigh ran through the gate. It opened in the last instant to
let him thunder in.

Iry atop the gate, unnoticed and unregarded, heard perfectly
clearly what the messenger said to Kamut, who happened to be manning the gate.
He spoke in bad Egyptian, worse even than most, but it made sense enough.
“Master’s dead. Where’s the Lord Iannek?”

Milord Iannek was nowhere to be found. Iry could have told
them where to look, but she was crouched above the gate, transfixed with shock.