The Shepherd Kings (26 page)

“I’m my mother’s son.”

“Yes,” she said.

There was a silence. Khayan considered leaving, but he had
not said what he came to say. She could not escape: there was only one door,
and he was in it. She lay back and propped herself on her elbow, at evident
ease. She was naked as she always was, and as innocent of immodesty as a
newborn child.

She made him think of his mother’s people—and that was a
dangerous thought; dangerous to his outrage.

“I saw you,” he said. “Among the horses.”

She did not move. Had she tensed a very little? “Is that a
forbidden thing?” she asked.

“Do you think it should be?”

“You don’t seem to approve,” she said. “Why? Because I go
out? Because I don’t labor in the house from dawn far into the night?”

“No,” he said. He paused. He asked her, “Do you know what
horse it is that calls you until you come?”

There: at last. Visible, and honest, stiffening, and eyes
wide in the narrow face. “How do you know— What do you mean? Is it a sacred
horse?”

“Sacred,” he said, “yes. As you knew. Didn’t you?”

“My presence defiles her.” She did not sound bitter; merely
reflective. “You’ve come to forbid me. She won’t like that. What will you do
when she calls me again, and I go?”

“No,” he said. “Oh, no. She can’t be defiled, nor is she
ruled by any human creature. If she chooses to trouble herself with you, it’s
not my place to permit or forbid.”

“I don’t think I believe that.”

“Believe it,” he said. “That is the Mare. She does as she
pleases. And it seems that she pleases to take you for her servant.”

“Is she a goddess?”

“No,” Khayan answered, “and yes. Horse Goddess lives in her.
But Horse Goddess is more than simple flesh.”

“Of course,” the Egyptian said, dismissing that whole great
mystery with a toss of her head. “So she wants me as a sort of priestess. Why
me?”

“If I knew that,” Khayan said, “I would never have had to
come here. It’s unheard of.”

“Ah,” she said in sudden understanding. “That’s what you
don’t approve of. But she doesn’t care, does she? She wants what she wants.”

“She is the Mare,” he said, with a faint and, yes,
exasperated sigh.

“And your mother is going to be even less pleased than you.
And your sisters. The fierce one, the one who rides about and wears a
sword—she’ll try to kill me. Won’t she?”

“She won’t dare,” he said.

“But she may threaten.” Iry seemed not at all dismayed. “I
see how awkward it all is.”

“It’s worse than awkward. It’s appalling.”

She laughed. She was not mocking him, not really. Her
laughter was infectious. He had to struggle not to echo it. “I do think I like
you,” she said. She sounded surprised. “Will you teach me to ride the Mare?”

He bit his tongue on his first answer, which was a
resounding
“No!”
Instead he paused,
drew a breath, and when he was calm, asked her, “Why do you want to do that?”

“
I
don’t want to,”
she said. “She wants me to. But I don’t know what to do.”

Ai
, he thought.
The Mare was not going to have mercy on any of them, he could well see.
“Mostly,” he said with some care, “one learns from the horse.”

“I think I’m too old for that,” she said. “And too afraid.”

“Why do you ask me? I should think you’d be afraid of me,
too.”

“Of course I’m not afraid of you,” she said. “And if it’s
you teaching me, who can stop me? Whereas if I asked someone else . . .”

Khayan did laugh then, a little incredulously. “Gods,” he
said. “You and my sisters . . . they’ll hate you for being
Egyptian—and for being so like them.”

“Then will you teach me?” she asked.

“I suppose I had better,” he said, “or the Mare will never
forgive me.”

She did not clap her hands or indulge in any other style of
girlish delight. She lay there, that was all, and gave him the gift of her
smile.

Khayan took that smile away with him. It was as warm as
sun on one’s face after a long and bitter winter among the tribes. Her body had
done little to arouse him, but that smile, in all its innocence—that he could
not forget.

He went direct to his bed, yawning, tired suddenly to the
bone. Servants were waiting up for him, ready to undress him, bathe him, comb
out his hair. He waved them all away. He wanted to sleep. He wanted—yes, he
wanted to dream of that smile, and of that odd quick wit and those calm dark
eyes.

His bed was occupied. He saw, at first, only the long sweep
of back, the curve of buttocks, and the broad flare of a woman’s hips. Then she
stirred, rolling lazily onto her back, arching it. Her breasts were beautiful,
round and full; the nipples huge, deep red like the lips that curved in a smile
of greeting.

It was meant to allure, that smile; and maybe in another
hour it would have. But he was fresh from the memory of a different smile
altogether. “Barukha,” he said, flat and unwelcoming. “What are you doing
here?”

She pursed those ripe red lips and frowned, but coyly. “Why,
my lord! What do you think I’m doing?”

“Vexing my rest,” he answered, making no effort to soften
the snap in his voice. “I didn’t summon you.”

“You did not,” she said. “And a fine state of affairs that’s
been, too. I had to practice every art of intrigue I had, to escape your
mother’s clutches. She guards me more closely than my brothers ever have.”

“Does she?” He turned toward the door, opened his mouth to
call the guard.

“My lord!” she half-sang behind him. “Summon a guard and I
tell him what I’ll tell my brothers—and your mother. You ordered me here. You
compelled me to lie naked before you. You—”

He turned back to face her. Her smile had taken on a hint of
triumph. “I understand you,” he said. “Good night, madam. Sleep well.”

He hoped that she was suitably nonplussed to be left alone
in his bed. She was welcome to it, for all the good it did her. Even if she
chose to tell the tale that she had threatened—he took care to sleep where no
one could mistake his presence: in the guardroom, among his own chosen men.
They greeted him with pleasure and a careful lack of curiosity, offered him the
best corner and a cup of their middling bad wine, and let him into their game
of stones and bones.

He was, he realized as he lost resoundingly to a
downy-cheeked stripling of a guardsman, as happy as he had been in a
considerable while. Even with a beautiful woman abandoned in his bed, and his
manly parts aching with the deprivation.

When he slept at last, rolled in a cloak and secure against
the wall, in the warm redolent snoring company of his own people, he dreamed
not of Barukha lolling in his bed, but of another woman altogether. She lay in
her cell of a room, fixing him with her level and unflinching stare, until
suddenly—dazzlingly—she smiled.

~~~

Once again Khayan rode out before dawn. This time he
brought a companion: Iry still more than half asleep, dragged protesting from
her bed and flung into his chariot. She clung blindly to the sides, her eyes
clamped shut, as the chariot lurched and rattled from rutted road to plowed
field.

It came to him belatedly that she must be terrified. “Have
you ever been in a chariot before?” he asked her.

At first he thought she had not heard. Her eyes were still
shut tight. Then she shook her head, a sharp jerk of the chin.

“Here,” he said, shifting easily, balancing on the rocking
floor. Her hands were locked on the chariot’s sides. He wound the reins about
his middle and pried her loose. Before she could clamp on again, he had shifted
her from behind to in front of him, secure between his body and the foremost
rim. She was as stiff as a stone.

He shifted the reins till they were in both his hands again,
and his arms bracing her, holding her easily between them. Her head came just
to his chin. She did not use heavy perfumes as so many did in Egypt. The only
scent she wore was her own, light and clean, with a faint pungency of fear; but
that was fading.

Her hands slid down his arms, so light that at first he did
not think what it meant. She had let go her deathgrip on the rim. She was
reaching for his hands—no, for his hands on the reins. Not trying to take them.
Simply resting there, small and cold, but warming slowly.

He was aware as he had not been in too long, of the living
tension in those lines, the feel of the horses’ mouths at the end of them,
their eagerness held softly in check, their bright will that they placed at his
disposal. It was a gift, and a great one, but worn thin with use. He had been
taking it since he was a child, born and raised among the horses.

To her it was all new. Her fear had melted into wonder. At
any moment, she would ask if she could take the reins; but he was not about to
let her do that.

Not yet.

He had misjudged her, perhaps. She did not ask anything. She
rode with him, that was all, in among the fields of horses, and stood by while
he unharnessed his stallions and hid his chariot away. When he had done that,
she said, “Wouldn’t it be easier just to ride one here, and never mind the
rest?”

He considered several answers. In the end he chose the most
obvious, and the most immediate. “Then you don’t need me to teach you? You ride
already?”

“Of course not,” she said.

“So then,” he said. “Come. The Mare is waiting.”

That distracted her, as he had hoped. She turned away from
him with almost insulting eagerness, and went in search of that one of all the
horses.

He sighed a little as he followed. A woman could want a man
quite as fiercely as a man could want a woman. She could also conceal it, and
often would, if it suited her purpose.

He did not think that this one was concealing anything. He
was nothing to her but an intrusion upon her world, and, for the moment, a set
of skills that she could use. He still had not gone to his mother, and
certainly not to his sisters. He had gone out, truth be told, in secret, and he
was proceeding in secret. As if he, the lord of this domain, the master of his
kin, should need to hide anything—least of all from his mother and sisters.

He would speak with them when the occasion presented itself.
For the moment he had a pupil, and she was waiting upon his instruction. He had
brought with him a bridle and a saddle-fleece, and other things bound up in it
for the tending of the Mare.

She was grazing in her wonted place. At sight of the two of
them together, she snorted softly, but did not take alarm. No more did she
recoil from what he carried. She was no stranger to them. Far away in the east,
Horse Goddess’ priestesses had raised her and taught her what she should know.
It was expected that she be ready when she chose her own servant—as it was
expected that the servant be ready for the choosing.

This was utterly irregular. The Mare cared not in the
slightest. She greeted the Egyptian with the soft sound that mares make to
their foals: a flutter of the nostrils, a low whicker in the throat. Iry took
the beautiful pale head in her arms and laid her forehead on the broad forehead,
and rested briefly there, with an air of one who has come home.

Just as Khayan was about to lose patience, Iry straightened,
and the Mare sighed and drew back a little. Khayan unrolled the saddle-fleece
and took out the wherewithal for grooming and tending the Mare, and set them in
Iry’s hands. “Now,” he said, “begin.”

He did not mean to be merciful. No more did he mean to be
unjust. She would learn as a boychild learned among his father’s people, first
to tend the horse, then to put on the harness in its proper order—or, here,
bridle and saddle-fleece. He showed her how to brush and polish the coat, and
comb the mane and the long, tangled tail, and pick out the big round hooves. When
the Mare was gleaming, and only then, he showed Iry the way of bridle and
saddle.

Then when the Mare was saddled and bridled to his
satisfaction, he taught her how to take them all off again, and smooth the back
and head and ears, and grant the Mare her freedom.

Iry did it all as she was told, without a murmur of
protest—until he said, “Now let her go.”

Then she said, “I’m not to ride her?”

“Not today,” Khayan said. “Not until you are perfect in
these lessons.”

“And what if that is never?”

“What, are you retreating now, foreigner child?”

“
You
are the
foreigner here,” she said: an unguarded utterance, startled out of her by an
altogether unexpected flash of temper.

He was almost sorry to see her master herself again quickly.
“I am not retreating,” she said then. “I am asking.”

“You will learn,” he answered, “because it’s I who teach
you.”

“A little bit arrogant, are we?” She turned her back on
him—quite shocking in a slave before her master—and set off toward the place
where he had hidden the chariot.

“Not so fast,” he said. When she stopped and, as if against
her will, turned, he pointed with his chin toward the bridle and saddle-fleece
and the rest. “You will look after that,” he said, “and carry it. Now begin.”

She rolled everything together with dispatch and with
impressive skill, bound it and tucked it under her arm and looked him in the
face. And waited.

He turned on his heel and set off where she had been going.
Not till he was well turned away from her did he allow the grin to break loose.
He had always had a peculiar fondness for the less docile of his pupils, man
and horse both.

But to her face he must be as stern as ever lord and
preceptor should be. He set her to work with the chariot, too, and the much
greater complexity of its harness. If he tired her out, so be it. If her mind
could not absorb it all, then that was a pity; because he would expect her to
know it when next she came out with him.