The Shepherd Kings (15 page)

The master dead. The conqueror, the invader, the slayer of
her father. Dead. Big black-bearded man with a laugh that boomed through the
house, and a rod, the servants said, as long as a child’s arm. Iry hated him
even more than she hated horses. Horses were animals, and innocent. He had
known exactly what he did when he killed a rebel and the rebel’s sons and
kinsmen, and seized the rebel’s lands and wife and daughter.

~~~

Now he was dead. Killed not in battle, the messenger said
over wine and bread, nor on a hunt, but in bed with one of his concubines.

“She wore him clean out,” Nefer-Ptah opined, much later,
when they all should have been asleep. But the house was in an uproar. Milord
Iannek had been found at last, too coincidentally abed with the buxom
Tuty—which rather proved Iry’s judgment in such matters. He was summoned to the
king’s city, and without delay, too. Which meant that the servants must be up
all night gathering his belongings, including his women and his dogs, and
readying them for the journey.

Iry never asked questions where anyone else could hear. It
was a matter of pride. But Nefer-Ptah had been her nurse before they were
slaves together. With her, Iry could stoop to be curious. And for once they
were alone, folding robes and tunics and packing them in boxes by the light of
a bank of lamps. “Why is he summoned to the king?” she asked. “Don’t they bury
their dead where they fall?”

“Right on the spot,” said Nefer-Ptah. “But now there’s the
estate to settle. King Apophis will have called all the sons together to tell
them who inherits.”

“What, won’t it just go to the eldest son?”

Nefer-Ptah shrugged. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But with
kings one never knows. I heard the firstborn was killed in some suitably
ignominious fashion, and the rest have been at each other’s throats since they
were born.”

“How many of them are there?” Iry asked.

“Three or four dozen,” said Nefer-Ptah, who seldom troubled
herself with mere numbers. “Who knows? Too many.”

“
One
would be too
many,” Iry said, “if they’re all like Milord Iannek.”

“Ah, little bird,” said Nefer-Ptah. “He’s not so bad.”

Iry did not dignify that with a response. Nefer-Ptah laughed
deep in her throat and clapped the lid shut on the last of his lordship’s
tunics. There was still the formal robe to pack, which Iry had been leaving for
last.

But she paused. “Do you think he’ll get it?” she asked.
“Will he be lord over us all?”

“Not likely,” Nefer-Ptah said. “He’s too young. And he’s
always getting in trouble. And,” she said, delivering the crowning blow, “he
won’t exert himself to make friends at court.”

“His mother might do it for him,” said Iry, who was not an
utter innocent in the ways of courts.

“His mother is dead,” said Nefer-Ptah. She took the state
robe from Iry’s heedless fingers and smoothed and folded it more quickly and
much more acceptably than Iry could begin to do. “No, you don’t need to worry.
He won’t ever be more than a frequent nuisance. Maybe not even that, if the
place goes to a brother who’s no friend of his. Then won’t you be glad? You’ll
finally be rid of him.”

“Pray the gods it be so,” Iry sighed.

And yet in spite of herself she could not help a small,
fugitive pang of regret. Not that they might be losing their unwelcome visitor.
No. Of course not. But whoever came after him—if anyone troubled to come at
all—would be different. And different, in Iry’s experience, was never better.
Usually it was worse.

Milord Iannek went away in the morning, much earlier than
he would have been most pleased to do. But the king’s messenger was insistent.
His majesty wished to resolve this matter quickly. He would not wait upon
laggards, nor look kindly on them when they deigned at last to appear.

The lordling’s departure left a great quiet in its wake. Iry
had not even known till they were gone, how many people he had brought into the
house, or how very noisy they had been. There was hardly anyone left. A few
servants, the cook, the gardeners. Teti the steward and his household, who kept
to themselves in the main, and made no incursions on the lord’s quarters or
those of his ladies.

It was almost like being free again. Iry’s duties were few
and none too onerous on the whole. Much of the time, she could do as she
pleased.

That, chiefly, was to bedevil Huy the scribe to teach her
what he knew. Huy was old and going blind, and he had no sons or kin; they had
all died long ago in some forgotten pestilence. He loved nothing in the world
but his palette and brushes and the inks in their bright array.

He could see them still, in a dim and shadowy fashion,
though that was fading fast. He did not remember, or did not profess to
remember, that Iry was a slave now. He called her “young mistress,” and treated
her with a courtly respect, as if she had been a great lady.

At first she had tried to remind him of the truth, but as he
persisted in his conviction, she let him be. It was pleasant to sit in the room
that he had been suffered to keep when newer, younger scribes came in to do the
accounts for Teti. It was small but very well lit, with a linen fan to keep it
cool, blowing in breezes from the garden.

Iry kept the fan wetted down with water from the jar when
she was there, and tied its cord to her foot and so kept it swaying as she read
and wrote and listened. Huy was not a man of many words, unless they were
written on papyrus. But sometimes he was minded to tell a story, and then he
was well worth listening to.

Iry would write as he spoke, for the practice, and because
so few of his stories were written anywhere in the scrolls that heaped the room
and overflowed into the hallway. Those were all household accounts, legal
records, dull and daily things that seemed, to her, to be a great waste of papyrus.

But his stories were wonderful. Stories of kings and gods,
great adventures from long ago, battles, magic and wonders, priests’ arts and
princes’ exploits—and much of it, as he averred, as true as the record of the
barley crop from the farthest south field.

“Probably truer,” he said a day or two after the Inundation
had reached its height. There had been a festival in honor of the event, a
small enough thing in so diminished a household, but there had been wine and
barley beer and enough song to give everyone a headache the day after. Iry’s
head was pounding: she had indulged in a whole jar of wine, because Teti’s
daughters had dared her to do it.

Huy was oblivious to her scowl and her tight-set lips. Of course
he would be; he was nearly blind. “Barley crops are as large, sometimes, as the
steward wants them to be. Or, often enough, as small.”

“He skims a share, you mean,” Iry said. “Everybody knows
that.”

“And do you know what the lord used to do to him, if he was
found out?”

“Cut off his ears and his nose,” she said, “and set him to
work in the privies.”

“So you would think,” said Huy, rubbing his long crooked
chin. “But oftentimes, if he was more useful than not, the lord would turn a
blind eye, but manage to skim a half of what the steward skimmed. And so a sort
of balance was kept.”

“I like stories of Horus and Set better,” Iry said. “Lords
and stewards are dull. And a little sordid.”

“That’s the world of the living,” said Huy. “The world of
gods, and the world of the dead . . . now those are different.”

“I’d rather be there than here.”

“You would not,” the old man said.

“And why not?” Iry demanded. “Look about you! Or
remember—what a world this is. Foreign kings in Lower Egypt, and the king in
Upper Egypt bows his head to them. The king, the god, bowing to foreigners. And
here— and here—”

“Ah,” said Huy as he always did when Iry touched on the way
of things in this house, breaking it off before it was well begun. “A rebel,
are you? Will you run away to Thebes, and learn how to fight like a man?”

Iry hissed at him. “If only I could! I’d wield a great
sword, and I’d slay the enemy in his thousands. But I can’t do it. I’m only a
girl.”

“A woman can do a great deal,” Huy said in his gentle voice,
“if she puts her mind to it.”

“Yes,” Iry said bitterly. “And if she puts the rest of her
body to it, too. I won’t do that. Mother does it—Mother hasn’t any choice. I
have. I won’t give it up.”

“That’s a brave thing,” Huy said, “if perhaps not wise.”

“I don’t want to be wise,” Iry said. “I’m not sure I can be
brave. I just want—”

She trailed off. He waited with patience that he must have
learned in youth, when he was one of the royal scribes.

When she spoke again, it was not to finish what she had
begun. It was to say, “Tell me about Set again. Set and Osiris.”

Huy’s brows rose slightly, but he did not try to return to
what they had been speaking of before. “Set was the enemy of Osiris,” he said
in the singsong tone of the taleteller, “brother and bitterest enemy. Some say
there was cause: some slight, some sin committed. Others say no, it was simpler
than that. They were rivals, and Set was jealous of his brother, who was the
elder and the stronger and by far the more beautiful, and who—perhaps most
unbearable of all—had wooed and won their sister Isis, and taken her for his
bride.

“There came at last a day before the days of this world,
when Set could bear it no longer. He tricked his brother, tempted him with a
wonderful thing, a chest of gold and precious stones, which would belong only,
Set declared, to the one who could lie in it, and whom it fit exactly. That
one, of course, was Osiris. But the box was wrought with a dark enchantment,
that cast him into a sleep; and Set and his allies sealed the box and cast it
into the sea.

“But Isis found the box, hunting far and wide over the
earth, and undertook to bring Osiris back to life again. This, Set found even
less endurable than the rest. He seized the body before it could be revived,
and hacked it in pieces, and flung it all along the valley of the River.

“Still Isis would not give up, nor would she give way before
the dark god. She yearned for the bright god, the beautiful god, her brother
and her lover. She hunted as she had before, but with even greater purpose, to
find each and every piece, and bring them back together, and make them live
again.”

“And that is just what she did,” Iry said, impatient
suddenly with this tale that she had known since she was a child—and never mind
that she had asked to hear it. She was all at odds this morning, cross-grained
and ill-tempered. “She gathered every part of him, every one—all but the one,
the manly organ. Even that at last was brought to her, when she had all but
despaired; and she did with it what woman should do, and conceived and bore her
son Horns. And he avenged his father and cast down the dark god—but lost an eye
in doing it, so that now the eye of Horus that sees is the sun, but his blind
eye is the moon.” She shook herself, impatient, twitchy as a cat. “I don’t know
why I want to remember this. The Horus in Thebes lies too solidly under the
heel of the foreign Set. Rebels fight, and rebels die. Or are taken into
slavery.”

Huy sat where he always sat, in his crisply starched linen
kilt that Nefer-Ptah put on him every morning, with his shaven head gleaming in
the bright clear light of the room, and his eyes staring placidly into their
private dark. “Memory is a gift of the gods,” he said.

“Memory is a curse,” said Iry.

She left him after that, none too graciously. Later, she
would regret that. Now, she was too irritable to care. It was late in any case,
and her one duty of the day was waiting.

~~~

Iry’s mother was still, to everyone in this house, the
Lady Nefertem. Her lord was dead, her body enslaved, but like Huy the scribe,
she seemed impervious to the world’s changes. Even the foreign lord had found
himself unable to oust her from her apartments, though he had been firm enough
in claiming her bed. His own women, when they were in the house, had found
accommodation elsewhere.

The rooms were as they had been for as long as Iry could
remember. The scent of her mother’s perfume, a rich mingling of musk and
flowers, wafted out long before she reached the door. The Nubian on guard in
front of it was the same massive eunuch whom her father had given her mother in
honor of some forgotten occasion, as huge and impassive as ever, like a
guardian carved of gleaming black stone. His eyes glinted on Iry as she
approached. He never said anything to her, nor did his face change expression,
but his eyes always smiled. She always smiled back.

But not today. She scowled and stalked past, mad at the
world and no good reason why. Her head still ached, and her back had decided to
join it; and there was a griping in her belly.

She was not falling ill. She refused.

The Lady Nefertem was holding court as she did every day at
this hour. She had bathed and been anointed and taken the chair in her
receiving-room. No ladies from other estates came now to visit her or to share
gossip, but Teti the steward’s wife never failed to be in attendance, and her
daughters with her. They babbled like a flock of geese, and not much more brain
to share out among them than one goose was gifted with, either.

They welcomed Iry with shrieks that fair split her skull,
and dragged her to sit in the midst of them. Iry never could understand why
they were so enamored of her, even when she was in a presentable mood.
Probably, she thought sourly, because she was the Lady Nefertem’s daughter.
That counted for something in this house, foreign conquerors or no.

That lady had acknowledged Iry’s coming with a regal
inclination of the head, and gone on calmly addressing the steward’s wife. When
the daughters’ uproar had died down, Iry was able at last to make some sense of
it. “Yes, this unguent is perfectly wonderful for the skin. Here, try a bit of
it. Soft, yes?”