The Shepherd Kings (34 page)

He insisted that he did not mind. “It’s a grand lark,” he
said to Kemni, the third night downriver from the Bull of Re. They were
traveling slowly, but not as slowly as Kemni had feared. The river’s current
had grown swifter. It was coming to the flood early this year.

In a day or two or three, they would pass into Lower Egypt.
Then they must be more circumspect, and pray the gods that what they looked for
could be found soon. Kemni half feared that they might have to sail as far as
Avaris.

But that was ridiculous. There were strongholds of the enemy
much closer than the royal city. In one of them, there would be makers of
chariots.

Iphikleia professed to know where some might be. “How did
you know that?” Kemni inquired.

“This way and that,” she said. She was not fond of Egyptian
beer, but they had brought no wine. Fishermen did not drink it. She sipped,
grimaced, began to set the cup down.

Gebu caught her hand, held it. “No,” he said. “No, lady.
Wine, one sips. Beer, one drinks down as quickly as one can. Here: shut your
eyes and drink deep.”

She did not at all appear to mind that he had touched her.
She did as he advised, screwed up her face and squeezed her eyes shut and
drained the cup in a swallow. She gagged, gasped, coughed, but opened her eyes
and said in somewhat breathless surprise, “It’s not so bad!”

“You see?” said Gebu. “It’s not a taste to linger over. But
taken quickly, without pause to think—it’s rather splendid.”

“It. . . does grow on one,” Iphikleia admitted. She went
back to gnawing at her share of barley bread.

Kemni watched them narrowly. Gebu was sitting close to her,
as someone had to; it was a tight circle round the fire, well back from the
river with its threat of crocodiles. Kemni had found a place somewhat apart
from them, between Seti and a tongue-tied young man who regarded Iphikleia in
awe. Gebu the prince affected him not at all, but Iphikleia in her shabby
mantle and her redolence of fish was an object of veneration.

She was suffering Gebu to sit very close. He touched her
often, by accident as it seemed, but Kemni knew that art as well as any.

It should not matter. Iphikleia was not Kemni’s possession.
She had barely glanced at him since she set foot in the boat—as if what they
had had was left behind in the Bull of Re.

And now she favored the prince. Had she lied, then, when she
said that it was not Gebu she fancied? Or had she changed as a woman could do,
and turned toward him after all?

Fruitless thoughts, and futile here, where every eye could
see and every ear hear what passed between any two of them. If he indulged in
jealousy, he must do it alone—and know it for folly.

“This is splendid,” Gebu was saying in response to a murmur
from Iphikleia. “I’ve never fended completely for myself before. It’s
refreshing.”

“I’m glad you think so,” she said.

“Oh yes! Do you know how truly wearing it is to be royal?”

“I never found it wearing,” she said, “but I ran away often.
I even sailed in ships. I came to Egypt more than once.”

“You see?” said Gebu. “It dragged at you. You escaped it as
often as you could. That gift wasn’t given me—till my battle-brother helped to
set me free.”

“He helped you, too?” Her voice was cool. “He’s not happy
with his gifts, I don’t think.”

Gebu laughed softly. “No, he’s not. My poor brother. So
blessed, and so reluctant.”

Kemni stopped his ears with the rough sack that was all the
blanket he had, and tried to sleep. They chattered on through the night, as far
as he knew, as friends will, or friends who would be lovers.

It was fitting. They were of like rank. Kemni was markedly
lower in station than they, honored of the king or no.

~~~

Such thoughts had no place and no purpose in the burning
daylight. Kemni could not keep them away in the dark, and suffered rather too
much loss of sleep thereby. But when the sun was in the sky, he fixed on what
was his to do: sail the boat, command the men, see that the fishing went on as
it should. The river was running even swifter now, and rising higher. The flood
was coming, the great Inundation that would spread the water wide across the
land of Egypt, and leave behind it the rich black earth that was the wealth of
the Two Kingdoms.

He began to think that perhaps he had been less than wise to
venture the river in a fishing-boat with the water rising. But it was a sturdy
boat, made of reeds bundled together in the ancient way, born on this river and
begotten of it. It gave to the surge of the river as a boat of wood might not
have done, and rode with it, borne lightly atop it.

There were fish in plenty, though the nets had to drop lower
and dredge deeper. Kemni chose to continue trading the catch in towns along the
river, though that grew more dangerous the farther north they went. They
gathered gossip in that way, and news, and rumors that ran swifter than the
river. One such persisted, and grew stronger as they drew nearer to Lower
Egypt: that war was coming. The foreign kings and the king in Thebes would meet
in battle as they had ten years agone.

“Why would either of them trouble to do that?” Seti drawled
in the marketplace of a town not far south of Memphis. Seti had a good ear; he
could mimic dialects with ease, though he was not as quick with languages as
Kemni was. He managed, at every town, to speak in the accent of the town before
that, so that people would think he had come from just upriver. It was wonderfully
clever, and well he knew it, too.

“So,” he said in the dialect of a day’s long sail upriver,
“tell me why war should come now. It’s been years since the kings fought. Isn’t
old Apophis getting on a bit? He’s not the young lion he used to be.”

“Neither is Ahmose,” said one of the idlers in the market,
while an assortment of wives and servants haggled over the fish. “They’ve both
got grown sons. But that never stopped a king, that I ever heard of.”

Kemni was occupied with a supremely contentious harridan and
her even more contentious servant, but he kept half an ear on the conversation,
and half an eye on Gebu, who had flat refused to stay with the boat. Days of
sun and sailing had given him a rough and suitably common look, but he had
lifted his head at his father’s name. Those eyes had never belonged to a simple
fisherman.

Seti, whose air of worldly ennui passed here for youthful
foolishness—though the women tended to like it; it charmed them—snorted at the
king’s name. “Ah! Ahmose. He’s younger than Apophis, but I’d have hoped he was
wiser. Why would he fight a war he can’t win?”

“How do you know he can’t?” another of the idlers demanded.

Kemni had sold the harridan a basketful of fish, each one
selected with exacting care and endless haggling. He left the next buyer to
another of the crew, and busied himself between Seti and Gebu, brushing flies
from the fish and shifting the bit of sail that shaded them from the sun.

Seti had stopped even pretending to help with the selling.
“So tell me how Ahmose can win a war against the Retenu.”

“By fighting it,” the idler answered, speaking as if to an
idiot child. “He sits in his big house away upriver, eats off his golden plates
and shits in his golden pot, and wishes he could be lord of Two Lands instead
of one. I tell you, man, if he got up and dropped the girl he’s bouncing on his
knee, took up his sword and called his armies and got to work, he’d be king of
everything before the flood came to the full.”

“That fast?” Seti’s voice was deeply and mockingly awed.
“And what about the king downriver in his big house, with his chariots and his
herds of asses? Won’t he have something to say about it?”

“Oh,” said the idler. “Him. He’s so busy with his hundred
wives, he doesn’t have time to bother with a war.”

“But his two hundred sons,” said Seti, “might find a war
well worth the trouble. It’s hard these days, being a king’s son of a warrior
people. No women to rape, no cities to pillage. Give them a war and they’ll be
glad to take it.”

“Surely,” the idler said, “and so would good Egyptians. I’ve
got kin up by Memphis. They’ve been eating ass manure for years, and hating
every bite of it. Give them a king to fight and an army to join, and they’re
ready to march.”

“That’s not what my lather says,” Seti said.

“Your father’s old, isn’t he? Sure it’s made him wise, but
has it made him brave?”

“Bravery’s for young men,” Seti said. “You’re that brave
down this way?”

“Braver!” declared the idlers in chorus.

Seti shook his head. “I hope you’ll say the same when the
Retenu come to conquer you.”

“They already did that,” the chief of the idlers said. “We
wore them out, here. Down the river where they’re still strong—they’ll need a
harder hand.”

“We could all be kings,” drawled Seti, “if we were as wise
as you.”

“Laugh all you like,” the idler said. “I’m telling nothing
but the truth.”

~~~

Gebu told the tale by the fire that night, where they all
had come together in the boat’s shadow. He was alight with it. “They will
fight. They
will
.”

“They say they will,” Kemni said. “They’re near enough to
the enemy here to feel his breath on their necks. Those who live under his sway
may be less willing to endanger themselves and their kin.”

“You were willing,” Gebu said.

Kemni shook his head. “I went because I was bored and I was
angry, and I was wild to fight foreigners. My uncle and my cousins were all
killed. We were all that had the will to fight.”

“Maybe the years have changed even your people,” Gebu said.
“Talk like that in the market—we never heard such a thing before, even when we
won this kingdom under my uncle Kamose.”

“We were never simple fishermen before,” said Kemni.
“Princes don’t hear what the people talk of. It’s not reckoned dignified.”

“Do you think that of me? That I’ve lost my dignity?”

Kemni laughed in startlement. “No! No, of course not. I only
meant—”

Gebu waved that aside. “I hear more than people know. They
do sometimes talk when I can hear, or forget how near I am, and tell one
another the truth. We learn, we princes, to gather knowledge wherever we may.”

“Such a life,” Iphikleia said. She leaned against the hull,
wrapped in her mantle. If it troubled her to spend every day in hiding, she was
not admitting to it. She managed somehow to be clean, to keep her hair in
order, to look much as she always had.

The sight of her made Kemni’s heart beat hard. She was as
oblivious to him as she had ever been. Her eyes were on Gebu, as they so often
were. “A palace is a world in itself,” she said. “It’s hard to remember what
other worlds there are.”

“Unless one determines to remember,” Gebu said.

“Yes,” she said. She stared into the dark beyond the fire’s
light, frowning slightly, as she did when she was pondering matters too deep,
no doubt, for a mere mortal man to understand.

When she spoke again, it was to no one of them in
particular. “This serves us. When we come back, my lord, it would be well if
your father knew; if he sent his men here to muster an army.”

“And north of here?” Kemni asked. “What of the people in the
foreign kings’ power?”

“When we’ve seen them,” she said, “and heard what they say
to one another, we’ll know.”

“I think you know already,” he said.

She did not answer that. He had not expected her to.

Memphis was the gate of the Lower Kingdom, but Retenu
power stretched somewhat to the south of it. Kemni did not want to go as far as
that city where he was known, not if he could find what he looked for in
another, lesser city.

As he had while he sailed on
Dancer
—and not so long ago, either—he saw how the land changed even
as it remained the same: how it began to fill with foreigners. The people
seemed much the same, but they were not as bold as their kinsmen to the south.
They kept their heads down and their eyes veiled, and did their best to escape
the notice of their foreign overlords.

Kemni and his crew were not remarkable, there, in wishing to
be invisible. Everyone slunk and crept past the Retenu. It was expected.

That served them; but they would have to move soon, find a
nest of Retenu, and search for the makers of chariots. Kemni’s knowledge of
that country was years old. Those who lived in it were closemouthed and wary of
strangers. It was only wise where any man might be a spy, and the lords were all
outlanders, all enemies.

And yet where there was beer there was hope of loose
tongues. Kemni had fish to trade, and barley, and a bolt of middling fine linen
that he had taken from that harridan in the south, in return for a basketful of
fish. He steered the boat toward a town that he had known when he was young,
but that, he hoped, would not know him in this disguise.

The gods were kind, in their way. The town had grown since
he was a child: it had added a temple to the Retenu god, whom they called Baal
and men in Egypt called Set; and near the temple, on an outcropping of rock
over the river, had risen a wall of stone and a low tower. Men were building it
even as the boat made its way to the shore below, hauling stone and raising the
wall higher.

Someone foresaw a battle. Although, Kemni thought, Retenu
were always prepared to fight. They lived their lives in expectation of war,
ate it, slept in it, breathed it. Everything was war. There was no glory in
peace, nor any hope that a man’s name would be remembered.

This had been a lively town when Kemni knew it. It was
hectic now, and bursting at the seams, between the new fortress and the new
temple. Its market was as large almost as a city’s, full not only of the wonted
barley and beer, bread and meat, onions, greenstuff, bolts of linen, amulets,
potions, herbs and eyepaint and scent; but richer things too, a coppersmith,
even a goldsmith and a seller of jewels, and a thriving market in slaves.