The Shepherd Kings (37 page)

Gebu smiled at him, sweetly insolent. He did not speak the
language of the Retenu—he would not stoop to it—but the tone was clear enough.

This foreigner bridled at the smile, which was indeed
provoking. It was the smile of a prince in the face of an upstart underling—and
such a prince, filthy, unshaven, and dressed in a scrap of rag. “Bandits!
You—slave. Tell them to take that pack-donkey yonder, and let us go.”

The slave he spoke to was Seti, standing amid the scared
huddle of servants, surrounded by half-naked and ill-shaven men with bright and
well-kept weapons. Seti was as cool as Kemni had always seen him, as well he
might be; he had nothing to fear from these brigands.

He did, it was clear, understand what the foreigner had
said. “Tell them yourself,” he drawled with wonderful insolence.

The foreigner sucked in a breath of pure outrage. Kemni
intervened before he could collapse in an apoplexy; he was, after all, the
whole cause and purpose of this venture. “I thank you,” he said in that
guttural tongue. His own command of it was rough, but it was serviceable.
“We’ll take the donkey—along with the rest.”

“Just the donkey,” the foreigner said, pivoting to face him,
speaking slowly as if to an idiot child. “Just one donkey. We take the rest. We
belong to the king; we go to him in his city. These are the king’s donkeys.”

“Are they now?” Kemni smiled as sweetly as Gebu had. “Better
and better.”

He tilted his chin at his men who were waiting. They were
delighted to oblige: falling on the foreigner and his mute, staring charioteer,
plucking them from the chariot and binding them and stringing them together on
a lead, like a train of asses in a caravan.

Kemni disliked to abandon the chariots and their trained
teams, but they could not escape on the road. As difficult as it would be to
row and sail upriver against that powerful current, they must do that. And
there was no room in the boat for chariots. Nor, for the matter of that, for as
many men as they had captured.

The three from the workshop, they must keep. “Kill the
rest,” Seti said. Kemni raised a brow. “Were they as irritating as that?”

“Somewhat,” Seti said. “You can’t let them live. They’ll run
straight to the nearest foreign lord and set him after us.”

“I don’t think so,” Kemni said. He went to stand over the
servants where they had been ordered to sit, all of them huddled together,
watching him with wide, frightened eyes. “Listen to me,” he said. “We’re going
to leave you here and vanish. We’ll bind you and strip you, as if we were
bandits. But we won’t kill you—if you promise one thing.”

They stared at him. Not one seemed possessed of wits enough
to speak. “Promise me,” Kemni said, “that you will tell those who found you
that bandits ambushed your caravan, killed your masters, and made off with
their possessions.”

“That isn’t the truth?” one of them asked.

“It’s what you’ll tell anyone who asks,” said Kemni.

They all nodded vigorously. Kemni eyed them in some doubt
still. Slaves would say whatever they thought their masters wanted them to say.
But he had taken precautions. None of them had seen the boat, or could know of
it. If they told their tale of bandits, men would scour the hills in search of
men afoot or in chariots—and never think to look for a boatful of fishermen on
the river.

But for that to succeed, the chariots and the caravan must
be disposed of. If someone could lay a trail that led into the desert.

Kemni had decided almost before he paused to think. They had
thought to capture and abduct a single man, not three of them—four; Gebu had
caught and held the young charioteer, who was calling his passenger
Father
. A son?

A hostage. Even as Kemni formed the thought, Gebu acted on
it. He laid the flat of his knifeblade against the child’s throat, and said to
the eldest and tallest of the Retenu, “Come with us. Or he dies.”

In whatever language either of them spoke, the gesture and
the tone were unmistakable. The foreigner’s face darkened. He nodded sharply.

Gebu smiled. “Thank you so kindly,” he said. He handed child
and knife to the man who stood nearest—who happened to be a deeply contented
Seti—and as easily, as effortlessly as a prince could do, set about ordering
the retreat into the reeds. “And as for the chariots—” he began.

Kemni spoke before he could go on. “I’ll take them up into
the hills.”

“But—” said Gebu.

“If we leave them, people will look for us. If we shatter
them and sink them in the river, there are still the beasts to think of.
They’ll make their way home if they can. I can take them far away, far enough
that when they do return, it will be too late to betray you.”

“And then how will you go home?” Gebu demanded. “No, no;
best we sink them with the chariots. By the time the flood brings them up, if
it does, we’ll be long gone.”

“There’s no time to do all that,” Kemni said. “It’s only the
gods’ good fortune that no one’s come down the road since we began. Go quickly,
my lord. Take these men back to the Bull of Re. I’ll come when I can, or send word
if I can’t.”

Gebu’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, will you? What are you plotting,
O my brother?”

“O my prince,” said Kemni, “I’m plotting nothing but to rid
us of these chariots, and to go back home as I can.”

“By way, perhaps, of Avaris?” Iphikleia inquired.

Kemni shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe I’ll go where I’m moved to go,
and listen, and watch, and see what there is to see. If the Upper Kingdom is
ready to cast off its yoke—then so much the better for my king.”

“Brother,” said Gebu, “there is no need for you to—”

“I know,” said Kemni, “that your father is not altogether
cut off from this kingdom. But a man known to him, trusted by him, admitted to
his lesser councils—how many of these are here?”

“What will you do, then? Raise a rebellion?”

“I might try,” Kemni said.

Gebu shook his head. “No. You’ll get killed.”

“We’ll get killed if we wrangle here. Go, my lord. I’ll come
when I can.” Kemni braced to fight again, but his ears had caught what he
looked for long before now: the sound of feet on the road. He sprang into the
chariot that was nearest, and scrambled up the reins. One of the men tossed him
the rope that bound the packbeasts in their long string. He looked with despair
on the second chariot. If he could fasten that somehow to the packbeasts’
string . . .

Iphikleia sprang into it. “Go,” she said.
“Go!”

Kemni bit his tongue and wound the lead about a post in the
chariot’s rim, and whipped up the team. They responded with admirable speed.
The packtrain, by the gods’ blessing, saw fit to follow.

They had to cling to the road for some distance. Something
flew at Kemni. He ducked. It thudded into the chariot. A—robe? And one of the
tall hats that Retenu sometimes wore. He had no beard to go with them, but from
a distance, he might pass for a beardless boy. He struggled into the robe,
which reeked heavily of old wool and new sweat, and pulled the hat down over
his ears.

Iphikleia, behind him, was likewise clothed. If he looked as
outlandish as she did, then all their stratagem was of no use.

But no one met them. The passers behind were all on foot,
except for one with an ox: farmers and men of the villages, carefully oblivious
to the Retenu ahead of them. Gebu and the rest were gone, vanished in the
reeds. Kemni prayed to any god who would listen, to keep them safe and bring
them back whole to the Bull of Re.

An almost unconscionable distance from the thicket of reeds,
the road begot a side way, narrow and rather steep but not impossible for a
chariot. Or so Kemni hoped. He urged the team up it. The packtrain scrambled after,
and Iphikleia in their wake.

It was brutal going for a chariot, but too narrow and steep
to turn back. With every bruising jolt, Kemni prayed that wheels and axle would
hold. The team strained, slipping and scrambling, but kept their footing by
some miracle of the gods.

The track narrowed even further, and seemed minded to shoot
straight up the cliff. But just as he had despaired, when he knew there was
nowhere to go—up, down, sidewise, into the sun-shot air—the track breasted the
summit and came out on a long level.

Kemni stopped there, content simply to breathe. The
packtrain stood with heads hanging, till first one and then another bethought
itself to nibble the thorny scrub that dotted the plain.

There was a skin of water in the chariot, and a bag that
proved to hold bread, cheese, a packet of dates. The packbeasts were laden with
more water, more food, and a gathering of varied riches: tents, bedding, a
whole packful of robes and linen tunics.

Iphikleia seemed in better state than Kemni: fresher, and
less whitely terrified. “We should go farther,” she said. “A day’s journey.
More if we can. If we can find a place with ample grazing, the herd might not
leave it for days.”

“I had been thinking that,” he said. “It’s been too many
years since I was in this country, but as I remember it, there is such a place
at not too great a distance. If we’re not fallen on by bandits, we’ll come to
it in a day or two.”

She nodded. She had sipped from a waterskin in her own
chariot, but laid it thriftily away after two brief swallows.

“You shouldn’t have come,” he said. He had not meant to say
it; he knew it was futile. But it slipped out.

She took no notice of it. She had set her team in motion
once more. Up so high and so far from the road, they had no need to run. In a
while they would quicken their pace. Now, they walked, chariots and packbeasts,
across that high and barren level. No living thing stirred upon it save a
vulture circling high against the sun. The heat was stunning,
staggering—wonderful. Kemni stripped off the reeking foreign robe and cast the
hat on top of it on the chariot’s floor. Soon, if he was wise, he would put on
robes and a mantle from the pack of garments. But for a while he reveled in the
force of light and heat on his bare shoulders.

Iphikleia had wrapped herself in her ragged mantle once
more, swathed like a desert tribesman; and well she might be, with that
milk-fair skin. She was not a child of the sun as he was. The sea was her
father, and a cold and distant island her mother.

She endured this that must have been as hot to her as a
forge, silent and uncomplaining. If he had been a god he would have sent her
winging back to the Labyrinth, to those cool airy halls and those blinding
white walls, and everywhere the horns of the Bull that were also the horns of
the moon.

But he was only mortal, and this was his own country, his
Egypt; his Lower Kingdom. The pace he set was swift but not so swift as to
exhaust the beasts. He had no desire to kill them; simply to lose them for a
while, till Gebu was safe with the prisoners, far away in the Upper Kingdom.

Lose them therefore he did, riding toward the slowly sinking
sun, across the barren land and the bare land, the Red Land that was like a sea
of stone, endless and waterless. When dark came, they made camp, spreading rugs
and fleeces under the stars. The tent they left in its pack, but they brought
out a small feast, and likewise the bedding, and a jar of wine fit for a king.

There was even water to wash in, if they were profligate.
Kemni washed off the worst of the dust and river mud, and felt almost clean for
the first time since he had left the Bull of Re. He ate in great comfort, drank
sparingly of the wine.

Iphikleia was silent—had not said a word, now he stopped to
think, since the morning. She did not seem ill. He took her in his arms to be
certain. She came without resistance. Her skin was cool, her brow unfevered.
She warmed for him, and quickly too.

There under the stars, far away from any human thing,
protected by firelight and starlight and Kemni’s prayers to the gods of earth
and sky, they danced the oldest dance of all. They danced the stars into dawn,
and the sun into the sky. And when it was morning again, they went on, westward
and ever westward, till memory of green and scent of water were gone.

When Kemni had almost despaired, when he was certain that
he had lost them beyond hope, the line of hills struck his memory. There, two
close together like plump sisters, and a long slope of sand and scree, and
wonder of all wonders, a glimmer of green. The spring that he remembered was
there where the two hills met, pure water bubbling from the rock. It trickled
into a pool, overflowed and tumbled down a narrow headlong bed into an oasis in
the desert.

It was, if one were honest, a poor and barren place; but in
this wilderness it was rich. It had water; grass, sere now and dry but ample
for the beasts; and even a bit of shelter, an overhang of rock that was not
quite deep enough to call itself a cave.

They turned the beasts loose there and let them graze on the
yellowed grass. The packs and chariots they hid under the rock, all but the
little that they would take: food, clothing, water for the journey. It would be
a long way back afoot, long and perilous.

Before they embarked on it, they rested. A day; two. Three.
There was no time here, no urgency; no press of the world and its troubles.
They were out of the world, and out of time, as if they had been taken away
beyond the horizon into the land of the dead.

And yet they were still vividly and fiercely alive. Kemni
rose from proving it, the third morning—and never mind what it did to his body
to be so suddenly deprived of its pleasure. “We have to go,” he said.

She did not frown or stiffen or protest. She rose, much more
steadily than he had, and washed in the stream, and put on the robes that she
had set aside days since. Then, while Kemni scrambled belatedly to follow suit,
she set her pack at her feet and waited.

He would hate her, when he had leisure. Three days’ bliss,
and she conducted herself as if they had never been.