The Shepherd Kings (24 page)

But not this morning. He was alone but for a pair of guards
following in a second chariot. Even beyond the gate he could hear the start of
the day’s uproar: voices raised, yelling for wine; snatches of drunken song
left over from the night before; and the squeal of a woman set upon by what
sounded like a hungry mob. He almost turned back at that, but the next voice
that sounded was that of his own captain of guards, a great beautiful
bull-bellow that made Khayan laugh aloud. Ah: so they had gone after Bashan’s
woman. Not wise of them. Not wise of them at all.

He was free of them, for a while. He glanced over his
shoulder at his guards. They looked as glad to be out of that uproar as he was.

He grinned. They grinned back. “Race you!” he called out.

They grinned wider. Melech the charioteer whipped up his
fine strong bays. Daleth his brother clung to the side of the chariot and
whooped.

Khayan was already somewhat behind. Star shook his head in
the traces and snorted. Moon squealed in rage. He could never bear to lose a
race. Khayan gave them rein and braced his feet. They leaped from trot into
gallop.

The wind whipped his face, sharp-edged with sand. He laughed
at the small stinging pain. The heavy tail of his hair lifted and streamed out
behind him. His tunic flattened to his body, pressed as tight as a woman’s
embrace. “Faster,” he sang to his stallions, his golden-coated, black-maned beauties.
“Faster!” They stretched their stride.

Melech’s bay mares were flat to the ground, racing at full
speed. Khayan’s duns were still at their ease. He shortened rein a little, held
them level with the mares, though Moon snatched at the bit in protest. “Not
yet,” he crooned to them. “Not . . . quite . . .
yet.”

The hill was still ahead, the long low ridge that divided
the house and its lands from the farther fields. Just as the ground began to
rise, Khayan slackened rein.

Moon needed no urging. His yokemate was of one mind with
him. They had been racing Melech’s bays. Now they raced the wind itself.

They breasted the hill far ahead of the others, still fresh
enough to object mightily to his bidding that they slow. But Khayan hardened
his heart. They had still a fair distance to go, if they were to go at all. He
brought them to a fretful and jigging walk, and sang them into calm, though not
into full acceptance. They were too high-hearted for that.

In slowing them he had turned and run along the hilltop for
a little distance. When they would walk at last, he turned again, angling
somewhat down the hill. The herds spread out below, all his horses, those that
he had inherited from his father, and those that he had acquired since he came
back to Egypt—and most beautiful of all, if least numerous, those that, like
his duns, had come all the way from the east of the world.

Most of those were duns, too, and bays and blacks. But the
Mare’s herd ran near them as always, greys all, from dark filly-foal to
cloud-white queen. Khayan could never see them without remembering the land
that they came from: windy fields of grass rolling toward the sunrise, and the
sky’s vault over them, and Earth Mother’s spirit breathing through them.

These were the Mother’s children, her beloved, Horse
Goddess’ own. Their foremothers were foaled in time out of mind, long and long
ago in the dawn of the world. It was still strange to see them here, under this
sky that had never known their like, before gods that wore the faces of beasts
and birds, but never of horses.

They seemed well content in this land to which they had
asked to be brought. The heat troubled them little, that he could see, though
their lesser kin suffered in it, fell ill and too often died. The sun beat on
their pale coats and left them as cool as ever. Their wide nostrils breathed
deep of the air, though it burned like the blast from a furnace. Their dark
eyes gazed easily into the glare. They gleamed in it like bright metal, or like
snow on the mountaintops, far away on the world’s edge.

They grazed now in their herd, moving slowly over the broad
field. In time they would come to the water-passage that ran from the river,
the stream that men had dug and filled to keep these fields green. Then they
would drink, and wander away again.

The stallion walked behind them, he of the great white neck
and the streaming mane. He was beautiful; his ladies less so, with their
sagging bellies and their air of great weariness with the world. And yet any
horseman, once he cast eyes on them, could not easily turn away. They had no
match in the world, and well they knew it.

At last Melech and his bays came level with Khayan. He greeted
his guardsmen with a glance and a nod, and said, “Daleth, come here. Drive my
beauties down by the road, and wait for me past the last of the fields. I’ll
walk there in a while.”

The brothers glanced at one another and rolled their eyes.
This was one of their lord’s oddities, to walk among the horses—most peculiar,
to their minds, and no matter what the arrival of a chariot drawn by a pair of
stallions would do to the delicate balance of nations within the fields. A man
afoot in a tunic of fine-tanned horsehide, smelling of horses, scarce alarmed
even the shyest of the foals.

He passed among them with a deep pleasure that he knew
nowhere else. The horses raised their heads at his coming, drew in the scent of
him, blew softly but knew no fear. The young ones came to him, and some of
their elders, too, so that he might rub an ear, a neck, a shoulder. It was a
royal progress of sorts, if he could be so arrogant as to see it so.

Horse Goddess’ children did not stoop to come to a man,
however great he might reckon himself in the world. Their foals were less
circumspect. The youngest, the lovely colt with the star on his brow, called
out in a shrill whinny.

He led the others in a grand charge. Khayan waited for it,
fearless and full of a sudden, piercing joy. They swept around him but never
touched him, swirled and circled and came to rest all about him. They blew warm
breath into his hands; they slipped warm necks under his arms. They nipped, or
made as if to try. He laughed and pushed them away.

The star-browed colt was closest and most persistent. When
Khayan moved away at last, the others wandered off, but he followed. If Khayan
paused, he made certain that Khayan’s arm rested over his back. He was a most
determined colt.

The mares watched with wise dark eyes. Horse Goddess was in
them all. But she who was most truly divine, she who had been born at the full
of the moon in a Great Year, a year of the women’s mysteries, was nowhere among
them.

Still trailed by the colt, though the colt’s dam called to
him, summoning him, Khayan went hunting the Mare. She could not be difficult to
find: a moon-colored coat among the black and brown and dun, dappled like the
moon, and a mane like a fall of bright water.

And yet he searched far through the herds that he had
brought to this place, and beyond them, and saw no sign of her. Not until he
had almost turned back in despair, when he had come all the way to the river,
where it shrank nigh to its smallest extent. The grass there was newer than
elsewhere, soft and vividly green. Great stands of reeds grew there, and the
fans of papyrus that were so precious in Egypt. Birds fluttered and called in
the coverts. A little distance down the river, a riverhorse surged to the
surface, breached and rolled and gaped its great maw at the sky.

Khayan was parched with thirst, but he knew better than to
drink from the river. Demons of sickness lived in that water, and worse yet for
one who stooped to drink, crocodiles lurking, lying in wait for prey. They
could sever a man’s head from his shoulders with one swift leap and snap, and
leave his body for the vultures to find.

He shook his head at his morbid fancies. He had a waterskin
hung on his belt, and clean water in it, too. He paused to drink, sipping as
one learned to do in the desert. Though he was parched—fool, to come so far in
the sun and never touch his waterskin—he fastened it up again with much of its
contents intact. He kept the last sip on his tongue, rolling it, savoring each
vanishing drop.

Beyond a tall thicket of papyrus, something moved; something
pale. He stilled with a hunter’s instinct. Softly he advanced.

She was there, past the thicket, grazing in the rich grass.
Nor was she alone.

At first Khayan did not see the figure sitting in the shade.
It made him think of a young deer, though it was indisputably human; and
incontestably female, too, for in the manner of young Egyptians of whatever
station, it was as naked as it was born.

It—she—rose up out of the grass as he watched, went to the
Mare and tangled fingers in the pale mane and leaned against that strong
shoulder as if she had done such a thing many times before. And very likely she
had.

She was Egyptian. Her slim brown body, her straight black
hair cut level with her brows in front and cropped to the shoulders behind, her
long painted eyes and her narrow pointed face—those had never ridden out of any
eastern tribe. And yet she kept company with a horse—with the Mare—as if she
had been born to it.

He was standing in plain sight, yet she was not aware of him
at all. She was half turned away from him, intent on the Mare, plaiting a
string of flowers into her mane. It was so utterly a thing that a woman would
do, and a young one at that, that Khayan bit his lips against laughter.

Just as the colt betrayed him, he slipped—again with
hunter’s instinct—into the cover of the thicket. The colt whickered and trotted
toward the Mare, aware at last, perhaps, that he was far away from his mother.

The Mare flattened ears and snapped at him. He veered,
mouthing submission. Had he had speech, he would have been crying for mercy.

“Lady!” the Egyptian said—clear, sharp, and in his own
birth-tongue. “Why did you do that? Here, little one, where did you leave your
mother, then?”

The colt was no fool: he knew when he had found an ally. He
insinuated himself into her arms much as he had done to Khayan, and with the
same success, too. She lacked a certain skill, but she knew where to rub, and
she did it with a good enough will. She had none of the fear, and certainly
none of the loathing, that he had seen in every other of her people.

Khayan drew back further into hiding. She intended, plainly,
to seek out the colt’s dam and return him to her. It would not be an arduous
search: the mare and a handful of her herdmates were a little distance behind
him, following the wayward child since he would not follow them.

The reunion was as touching it could be among horses. The
colt dived for his mother’s teat. She nipped him sharply on the rump as he
passed, by way of rebuke. The rest crowded toward the rich sweet grass.

The Egyptian was Egyptian after all: she flinched a little
as the horses surrounded her, drawing back against the Mare. And the Mare
shifted until she stood between the girl and the rest of her herd. Guarding her
as a mare guards a foal—or a human whom she has made her own.

Khayan had much to think on. He had found his chariot and
turned his stallions and driven back to the house of the Sun Ascendant, gone as
far as his bath and let himself be attended in it, before he remembered that he
had been riding to the eastern village.

That would wait as long as it must. So too the day’s
judgments in hall.

“Put them off,” he said to Teti the steward.

Teti would not ask why, and Khayan had no intention of
answering. Nor would he put on the robe that his servant had laid out for him.
He demanded and received a tunic of linen: Egyptian fabric, outland fashion. It
was cool, which was all that mattered to him then. Cool and unobtrusive.

He needed the steppe: the endless sea of grass, where a man
could ride forever and never meet another human soul. What he had was here: a
stiff little box of a garden, and a pool with fish drifting lazily in it, and
an arbor of green branches under which a man could sit and try to dream that he
was free.

His mind was still in great part by the riverbank, watching
the Mare with her—her!—Egyptian. He could with no difficulty remember the Mare
before her, who had been old when he was young; but they were long-lived
creatures. The woman who belonged to her had been of no age in particular, a
small plump woman of great power among the priestesses of Horse Goddess. Had
her ascent to eminence been a shock to those who knew her?

That, he rather doubted. She was of an old line out of the
east, if not of the oldest. Her breeding was as impeccable as the Mare’s.

This . . .

An Egyptian. A slender fawn of a girl, whose face he had
reason to recognize. She had been ill when he came into the women’s house, his
first day in his new lands. She had poured his wine that night, hale as if she
had never suffered any sickness; and then he had no memory of her.

And no wonder in that, if she had spent her days with the
Mare.

“Melech!” he called.

His guardsman, who had been hovering in clear hopes of not
being seen, crept out from behind a pillar and bowed. “My lord?”

“Fetch my master of horse,” Khayan said. “And then, if you
please, put yourself to bed. You were up half the night playing my nursemaid.
It’s time you gave someone else a part in the game.”

Melech grumbled at that, but he was obedient. Khayan settled
to wait. A servant brought wine kept cool in a deep storehouse, and a platter
of the cook’s whimsies: little cakes, spiced fruits, nuts rolled in honey.
Khayan had not known he was hungry till he looked at the platter and saw that
half of it was empty.

His master of horse appeared while there were still cakes
and fruit to offer him, and most of the jar of wine. Jerubaal had been born in
Byblos, but his ancestors had been horsemen since the dawn time, riders,
charioteers, masters of horses. He had the look of his kind: thin, wiry, dried
to whipcord by years of wind and sun. But for the worn leather tunic and the
curly black-grey beard, he might have been an Egyptian.