The Shepherd Kings (32 page)

In sleep he had little rest, either. Iphikleia haunted him.
He knew her so well, as she was in dream, that he could have been her husband
of a dozen years. Though if husbands had of their wives what Kemni had of
Iphikleia, marriage was a blessed state indeed.

Now that Kemni was in the house of the Bull of Re, he
dreamed that he came together with Iphikleia there. The room they trysted in
did not exist outside the dream—he had looked; but there was no chamber that
opened on the garden, and that had on its walls a fresco of the bull-dance. The
girl who danced the bull was painted in Ariana’s likeness. The young men were
not those whom he had seen in the dance. One could have been Naukrates a score
of years past. The other was Kemni, odd with his Egyptian face and long painted
Cretan ringlets, preparing to dance the bull as that one had who had died for it.

Kemni refused to take that as an omen. It was a dream.
Dreams could be treacherous.

This night, not long before the time of the river’s flood,
he had come to the chamber first, naked as he always was, and rampant with it.
Often when he came before Iphikleia, he lay in the great bed ornamented with
the horns of bulls. But tonight he was restless. He paced the room, slowly at
first, then more quickly, swift strides, sharp, almost angry.

She was very late. She never came so late; she was always
hard on his heels, and eager. But tonight he paced for long and long before he
heard that step without.

He stopped—by chance or design, in the shadow of a pillar.
She walked blindly through the door, dressed as always in the many tiers and
flounces of a Cretan lady. Even in dream she was not as simply beautiful as her
cousin Ariana. Her beauty was a subtler thing, slower to strike the senses, but
much more lasting.

She did not appear to see Kemni. Nor did he move to greet
her. He hung back, gritting his teeth against the aching in his loins, and
watched her. She paced for a while as he had, frowning, biting her lip. Just as
he gathered himself to speak, to ask her what so troubled her, she stopped
abruptly and spun. “Goddess!” she burst out. “This has to stop. I can’t bear
it.”

There was no answer, no stirring in the air, no flicker in
the corner of the eye. Iphikleia flung herself onto the bed, headlong as a
child. “I can’t let him know,” she said. “He’ll laugh. He may even hate me.
Every night, to steal his spirit because I—because I—” She buried her face in
cushions.

Was she weeping? Iphikleia, crying like any mortal woman? It
did seem that she was; or else she was laughing till her body shook, racked as
if with sobs.

It had to be laughter. Iphikleia was not a woman who wept.

She sat up at last. Tears ran down her cheeks; but one could
weep with laughter. She wiped the tears away, a sharp gesture, more like her
waking self than most of what she did here. “I can’t tell him,” she said as if
to someone standing over her, someone who taxed her with her deceit. “I can’t.
My beautiful man, my Bull of Re—if he knew, he’d never forgive me.”

He had to move then, or not at all. He came strolling as if
he had come from the twilight of the garden, yawning and stretching, with his
rod so stiff he dared not touch it lest he cry out in pain.

She did cry out—but not, quite, in pain. She flung herself
into his arms, bearing him backward, eating him alive with kisses. Her body was
fever-hot. He could only defend himself as best he could, and hold her till she
calmed. She took him inside herself then, rocking slowly, startling after the
wildness that had come before.

She was weeping—truly weeping. He kept on holding her,
settling to the slow rhythm that she had taken, which was like a slow swell of
the sea.

She was slow, too, to come to the height of it. He tried to
hold back, to slacken, to slow, but there was only so much a man could do. He
let go almost guiltily, with a gasp that made her cling even tighter.

She held him inside her for as long as she could. He tried
to babble apologies, but she was not listening. She was rocking him still,
holding tight. If a spirit could wander beyond even dream, hers had done it.

Often after the first fierce heat of passion they would lie
together, talking lazily of this and that. Tonight she had no speech in her.
She was so real in his arms, so warm and solid, and so strangely sad.

If it was possible to sleep in dreams, they slept in one
another’s arms. Even after he woke, he could feel her there, a living presence,
as if she had been there in truth. But he was alone. The dream faded as it
always did, but for a lingering presence, like a scent of her that wafted for a
while through the room, and slowly vanished.

Iphikleia in daylight was as she always was: remote,
forbidding, but willing enough to teach him what she knew. Of course she had
not changed. She knew nothing of the world he walked in while he slept. How
could she?

And yet he caught himself eyeing her sidelong as he harnessed
one of the horses or mended a rein or taught a group of his recruits, with her
help, to catch and groom a horse. His wild boys had learned at once, and
thoroughly, to keep their hands to themselves. One was still nursing the scar
of her knife through his hand.

Kemni could well imagine what she would say if she knew what
his dreams were like. He must not imagine that he knew her, simply because the
gods brought the image of her to his bed every night. This living woman was a
stranger, nor cared to be aught else.

When the horse had been captured, groomed to a sheen, and
let loose again to roll in the wallow that the herd had made near the stream of
water from the river, the recruits were dismissed to another duty. Kemni had
duties himself, and so no doubt did Iphikleia. But he was minded to linger for
a bit, and she had paused to reckon the count of horses in this particular
herd.

There were the same number that had been in the valley
before the lesson began, and that had been there the day before, and for days
before that. More would come, the king had promised, but it would take time to
gather them all together and herd them toward the Bull of Re.

Somehow, when Iphikleia turned to stride back toward the
chariot that brought her from the house, Kemni happened, just then, to turn himself.
They collided, she with a gasp, he with a sudden hammering of the heart. She
fit into his arms just as she had in dreams—perfectly. For half a breath’s span
he held her, and she rested her weight against him.

They stiffened in much the same instant, and drew carefully
apart. She sprang into the chariot and gave the restive horses their heads.

Which left Kemni to walk, and it was some small distance. He
shrugged and sighed. He had trusted to his feet long before he ever set foot in
a chariot. He could trust to them again.

It was rather pleasant, for a walk in the full glare of the
sun. He had water at his belt, to quench his thirst. As he came in sight of the
house-wall, Prince Gebu rose lazily from the stone on which he had been
sitting, and said by way of greeting, “So, brother. What did you say to her?”

“Nothing,” Kemni said. “Why? What is she—”

“She rode in like the wrath of Set,” Gebu said, smiling at
the memory. “She ripped the harness off the horses and put them up with every
hair in place, slammed through half the house, and locked herself in the
women’s quarters. We thought you must have threatened to make her laugh.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Kemni said. Which was not exactly
the truth, but surely she could not be as angry as that, simply because, by
accident, he had touched her.

~~~

Wisdom would have kept him well away from her. But he was
not particularly wise, and he needed her to help him teach his rebellious
recruits to put together a heap of jumbled straps and lines and bits of bronze
until it showed itself to be a chariot harness. Maybe she would forget her
temper, if he determined to ignore it.

In any ordinary great house that had become home to a queen,
no man would have dared to walk into the women’s quarters without escort. But women
in Crete lived more freely than ladies in Egypt. Kemni’s presence set a flock
of maids to fluttering and screeching, but they were silly fools who had seen
him there a hundred times before. Gebu would have said that they did it to
catch Kemni’s eye. Kemni rather feared that that was the case.

It was fortunate, then, that Gebu had had occupations of his
own that kept him from following Kemni into this place. Kemni extricated
himself from the gaggle of girls and went where they managed, amid their flutter,
to direct him.

Iphikleia had sought the deepest part of the house, and the
highest: a room of somewhat surprising size and spaciousness, at the top of a
steep and narrow stair. It might have been a guard’s post once, or a tower to
shut a treasured daughter in, that no touch of the world should sully her.

Kemni rather favored the latter. Guards might not be as
enchanted with the painting of the walls as a young girl would be: forests of
reeds, flocks of ducks and geese, a riverhorse lifting its head from the river,
and a pair of ibises dancing amid the reeds. It was much faded, and peeling in
patches, but it had still a dusty beauty.

Iphikleia perched in the deep embrasure that hinted at a
guardroom after all, though it might serve to torment a prisoner with so narrow
and so distant a vision of the world beyond. Iphikleia had turned her back on
that, and drawn into a knot, glaring at the world.

The force of that glare rocked Kemni back a step. Perhaps he
should have waited after all.

And yet, he had come this far, and he was winded, and his
temper was just a little frayed. A servant must endure all the vagaries of his
masters. That he had been taught. That he had done his best to do, even if it
galled him.

Even the best of servants might fail of his duty. Kemni was
a simple mortal creature; and he was vexed out of all patience, waking and
asleep. He glared straight back at her.

“Go away,” she said.

He did not move. “You’re wanted below,” he said. His voice
was cold.

“I said,” she said, “go away.”

“No,” said Kemni.

At first perhaps she did not believe her ears. “You—no? That
is an order!”

“And I’m not taking it.” Kemni leaned against the wall, arms
folded, as insolent as he knew how to be.

Which was not very; but it seemed to be enough. She flew out
of the window-embrasure and fell on him with force enough to knock the breath
out of him. They tumbled in a heap, Kemni beneath. He hardly held her, and yet
she struggled, cursing him for everything he was and was not.

He slapped her. She stopped, startled into stillness. Her
face was just above his own, her eyes wild, but slowly coming into focus. They
fixed on him. Something in them went strange. She bent down and deliberately,
carefully, set her lips on his.

It was just like his dreams. In them he had not been flat on
a dusty floor, with the throb of bruises to keep him wide awake. And yet the
rest was the same, her warm and supple body, the brush of her breasts across
his breast, the taste of her mouth, which was like sweet wine. She knew just
where to kiss, just where to nibble, and exactly where to stroke him till he
arched like a cat.

There was no thought in it at all. She had tugged his kilt
free, letting it fall where it would. Her own had vanished somewhere. He knew
exactly when to lift his hips, and when to take her hands in his hands and
guide her down.

There was one difference. A difficulty. A barrier that he
had broken before he knew what it was. And when it was too late, when the thing
was done, he could not stop; he could not even slow, though his heart was cold
with a kind of horror.

But she had taken him as he would have thought no maiden
would know to take a man. If she knew pain, she betrayed no sign of it. She
took him with a kind of wild joy, with abandon that swept him with it, cold
heart, gibbering mind, and all the rest.

She would not let him go till she had had the whole of him.
There came a point, deep in the heart of terror, in which, he discovered, it no
longer mattered. Then the terror was—not gone. But transmuted. It was almost
pleasure, and just short of pain. It was exquisite. Just as she was.

She brought herself to the height of pleasure again and
again, but held him just short of it, till he was nigh to screaming with that
sweet torture. Then at last, with a slow sweep of those wondrous hips, she let
him go. He cried out, utterly without will.

And when it had passed, when his body had ceased its
throbbing, his rod fallen slack, he lay as limp as sea-wrack. She knelt astride
him, gasping, running with sweat. Her skin was hot and slippery where it
touched his. Runnels ran down between those lovely breasts. He could not help
himself; he took them in his hands. They were just as they should be,
fever-hot, firm yet soft, the wide dark nipples waking, tautening at his touch.

The lower part of him was spent, but his hands had still
their strength. They left her breasts, running down her sides to the sweet
curve of her hips, and slipping in beneath. She arched, with a catch of
breath—just as, one night, he had dreamed it, dreaming all the places that her
body most loved to be touched. Just as in dreams, she gave herself up to it,
head thrown back, long hair trailing down. She rocked lightly against his
hands, then more firmly, her breath coming faster, faster.

It caught. She throbbed against him. He was rousing, long
before he might have expected, and just as she subsided in his hands.

With the hint of a sigh, she sank slowly down. Her body lay
along the length of his. It was familiar to the point of pain. Even its
imperfections, just as he had dreamed them: the faint soft down on her lip, the
mole on her shoulder, the scar on her palm where she had, on a child’s dare,
lifted a still-searing blade out of a forge.