The Shepherd Kings (41 page)

They came together almost gently, without haste, and without
great urgency. The whole of the night lay before them. She seemed preoccupied,
somewhat, but not so much as to turn away from him. Her touch was gentle, a
little abstracted. Her kisses wandered aimlessly. When she took him into herself,
it was as if she could not help it, but neither was she desperate to end it.
They rocked together, just enough to keep him aroused, but not so much as to
bring it to its summit.

It was peaceful, in an odd way. Quiet. Comfortable—but not,
gods be thanked, dull. There was fire beneath, banked but clear in memory.

She woke it suddenly, startling him, so that he laughed; then
gasped. He had never meant to be taken so completely off guard.

They slept in each other’s arms, or feigned to. Kemni kept
his eyes shut and his breathing slow. He was pondering, still, thoughts without
words, scattered memories, fragments of dreams that he had all but forgotten.
Dancing the bull. Driving a chariot. Standing under a wind-tossed sky in a sea
of grey-golden grass, as a herd of horses grazed and mated and played about
him. He had not seen such horses in the waking world: pale horses, grey or
silver or white. They glowed like the moon in that dream-softened light.

He woke with a start. That was not a dream he had had
before. It lingered, without fear but with a kind of intensity that made
him—almost—groan aloud. The gods were toying with him again.

He would go. He lay beside the soundly sleeping Iphikleia in
the cool of dawn, and knew that he did this for no king, though perhaps for a
god—which god, he did not know. He would go toward Avaris, toward the foreign
king’s city. And if he happened to pause in his own native country, to see what
lord now ruled it—well, and that would serve his king well enough, when all was
considered.

The life of the Mare’s servant was both utterly familiar
and utterly strange. Iry lived as she had always lived, in the house that had
been her ancestors’ for time out of mind. Even that she was enslaved to a lord
of the Retenu: that had become the way of her world. She hated it, but it was
inescapable.

And yet, in a way she barely began to understand, she had
become one of these foreigners, these people from Retenu. She would think of
them in no other way. Names were power. A name remembered conferred
immortality. A name forgotten was a death beyond death.

She would forget the name they called themselves. It was a
petty revenge, and probably useless: she was a slave, after all, and they were
kings. But it gave her pleasure.

These who called themselves rulers of the Sun Ascendant were
foreigners among the foreigners. The lady Sarai and her daughters were of
another blood, blood of tribes far away in the east of the world. They had
great power and great magic. They spoke direct to their goddess of horses, who
was also, to them, all that was of earth. She was somewhat like Mother Isis, but
her rites were older, and wilder.

They were rites of windy grassland and open sky, cold clear
spaces that ran forever into a blue horizon. There were no gods beyond that
horizon. The gods were in the earth beneath and the sky overhead, the wind and
the sun, and the rain that fell out of the sky. Blood was their sustenance.
Life was their mystery, and death its continuance. They ran on the hooves of
horses, and fell with the rain.

And greatest of them all was Horse Goddess, Earth Mother,
the Lady of all that walked and swam and flew. She wore the likeness of a white
mare, among many others. A mare—the Mare—was her living self among mortals. And
the Mare, of her nature, required a servant. That servant, for some incalculable
reason, was Iry.

Iry was not made for the rites of cold and empty places. She
was of Egypt, and Egypt was Red Land and Black Land, desert and rich black
earth, heat like hammered bronze, and light so vivid it seared the eye. Blood
was not its sacrifice. A handful of barley, a garland of flowers, delighted the
Mare far more than blood that made her snort and stiffen, or flesh of sacrifice
that she would not, of her nature, touch.

But these women would not hear such things. Sarai did not
bear alone the burden of Iry’s teaching. Her elder daughter Maryam took on
herself, or was given, the task of transforming an Egyptian slave into a
foreign priestess.

She was there in the morning, the day after Iry came into
Sarai’s power. Iry had been interested to be given, the night before, a room of
her own above the garden, and a small mute maid who insisted on waiting on Iry
as if Iry had been a lady. Which she had been once, but now she was a slave.
She had lost the habit of being served.

In the morning she woke in the rather ample bed, in the
pale-gold light of morning, and looked into a face without beauty of feature,
but with wonderful eyes. They made her think of the Mare’s eyes, dark and
strong and rather wicked. They were not merciful, or kind. But neither did they
bear her any malice.

And that she found fascinating, even half asleep. “You
should hate me,” she said.

“Why?” said Maryam. “What profit would there be in that?”

“Hate isn’t for profit,” Iry said. “And I should not be what
you all think I am.”

“You should not, but you are. The Mare is wise,” Maryam
said, “and a goddess. She cares little for our understanding. Only for our
obedience.”

Iry rose, because it irked her to lie abed with this
foreigner standing over her. The little maid was waiting, and another who must
have come with Maryam. They had orders to bathe her and anoint her and clothe
her as these people reckoned fitting. The robe at least was linen, and
therefore less unbearable than the swathings of wool that Iry had dreaded. It
was simple, without ornament: a votary’s robe. They combed and plaited her
hair, and when she was seemly, delivered her into Maryam’s hands.

Hard hands they were, too. There were no horses for Iry this
day. Khayan, it seemed, was gone, and likewise his sister Sadana, the one who
rode horses and bore arms like a man. The one who should have been the Mare’s
servant, but the Mare had chosen otherwise.

There was a crocodile down the river, and it had been
snatching infants from cradles, and had taken a woman who had been working in
the fields some distance from the water. Very sad, and very urgent, but Iry
could not help but suspect that Sadana had been removed, with care, from Iry’s
vicinity.

Meanwhile Iry was to learn the ways of a woman of the
tribes, ways that often made little sense, but were tradition. The keeping of
the house, which in the east would be a tent; the feeding and ordering of its
people; the weaving and embroidering of robes and all that went with it, from
shearing the sheep to dyeing the wool to spinning the thread: all that, she was
expected to know. And the works and days, the festivals, the rites of each
sunrise, each sunset; the rites of new moon and full moon, shift of the seasons
in a country that knew neither heat nor river’s flood, the great sacrifices and
the lesser, with the choosing of beasts and offerings for each, and the words
one spoke or sang, the music, the dancing, the song . . .

She fell into bed that night in exhaustion such as she had
never known. Her head felt as if it would burst with all that she had been
given to learn. Her belly was knotted as if she had gorged on a feast of
strange meats and stranger spices.

And this was to be her lot every day, for as far ahead as
she could see.

She could run away. The thought tugged at her on the edge of
sleep. Run—where? Thebes? Anywhere in the Upper Kingdom? Oh, indeed, if she had
been a man she would have done it years ago, and died too, no doubt, as her
father and her brothers and her cousin had; but she would have died free.

What then would the Mare do? If Iry fled, would she follow?
That would bring the wrath of the Retenu on the Upper Kingdom, and no mistake.

She was bound here; bound to the Mare. And yes, to her
mother and her people in the Sun Ascendant, though she had seen none of them in
all that day. She could have been shut away in another world, for all she saw
or knew of her own.

She had not been given a choice in the matter. Gods never
troubled with such things. Nor should they; and neither should mortals resist
them. Yet Iry could not help the small stab of resentment.

That resentment must be nothing to what drove Sadana. She
was being kept away. That was evident when, after a handful of days, the lord
Khayan came back without her, but with the crocodile’s head and hide for
trophy. His sister, he said, had gone hunting gentler quarry, she and her
warrior women.

Iry kept quiet. Now that he had returned, she was let out of
the house, away from a teacher who stood over her like a guard on a temple. She
would have gone regardless, because the Mare was calling her; but Sarai had
made it clear: Iry was to go in his company.

What that meant, Iry well knew. The secret was out. There
would be no hiding, and no concealment. Iry would be seen next to the lord, and
marked for what she was.

How that served Sarai or for that matter Khayan, Iry did not
know. Her mind was not deep. She was no master of intrigue, nor skilled in the
ways of courts. She did as she was bidden, because it suited her fancy.

He was waiting for her in the stableyard—a lord waiting for
a slave; how wonderful. Her step caught on something as she came out into the
sunlight—the hem of her damnable robe, surely. He seemed much larger than she
remembered, which was absurd; much broader and more imposing, and yet, oddly,
much less foreign.

His yellow eyes widened slightly at her approach. Of course:
she must look different. Her hair, the garment that had been forced on her—but
no one could compel an Egyptian to forsake her eyepaint, even to be a priestess
of a tribe from beyond the edge of the world.

There were people about. Some were Retenu. More were
Egyptian. They were staring. She quelled the urge to slink and hide and dive
into shadows. There was no shame in this. She could hold her head high, and be
proud of all that she was.

She stepped into the chariot without a word. Nor did Khayan
speak, though he seemed to bite back a word of his own. With a slight shrug, he
took up the reins and urged his horses forward.

This was her world, her Egypt: river and reeds, fields of
black earth growing rich with the new crops, and the sun beating down and the
heat rising up, blessed and familiar. She stripped off the robe once they were
out of the house, let it fall to the floor of the chariot, and let the wind of
their speed cool her body.

Khayan slanted a glance at her. Amused? It seemed so. She
tossed her head like the Mare in a temper, and gripped the chariot-rim, eager
enough, almost, to leap out and run on her own two feet. But the horses were
faster.

Out among the horses, nothing had changed. The Mare greeted
her as if she had been there every day: disappointing, a little, but it suited
the Mare’s humor. It was preferable to a royal sulk, which Iry had been more
than half expecting.

The lesson proceeded as always: chariotry, management of
horses, and at last, saddling and riding the Mare. For that Iry could not go
bare. “You’ll regret it richly,” Khayan said. Was he blushing? No, of course
not. Not that arrogant young lord.

He had brought, among the other things that came with him
every day, a garment such as Iry had seen Sadana and her women wear. It went on
a leg at a time, and fastened about the middle. Trousers, he called it, or
them. “They’re all the fashion among the tribes,” he said.

They were not at all beautiful, were in fact rather well
worn, but they fit well enough. And they were indeed useful for sitting on a
horse. Iry had not expected much of what that was like. To be up high, oh yes,
but there was a living, breathing, shifting weight beneath her. It moved in a
slow and rolling rhythm, a little like a boat on the river.

She was not to clutch and cling. Khayan made that bitterly
clear. She must sit quiet and let the Mare carry her. That should have been
easy, and yet it was astonishingly difficult.

If Khayan was laughing at her, he hid it well. He was
patient as always, but never indulgent. She must do as he asked, exactly, or he
made her do it over and over and over again. She had protested when they first
began, and more than once. Every time, he had said, “I am far more forgiving
than the Mare is.”

That was true. The Mare expected perfection of her servant.
Nothing else was worthy of her.

Iry’s time with her was too brief. All too soon, Khayan
ended the lesson as it had been ending of late, with both of them retrieving
and harnessing the chariot-team. Then when they were in the chariot, he handed
the reins to her.

She had driven often enough, out in the field. He had never
allowed her to drive back to the house. That too was proof that the secret was
secret no longer.

The horses were stronger when their heads were turned back toward
their stable. Stronger and more willful, taking the bits in their teeth,
tugging hard against her hands. She was not their lord, and they knew it.

He had taught her well. She had not his strength, but she
knew how to set her weight, and how to twitch the reins out of clenched teeth,
to slow the team, to master them until they advanced at the pace she chose. She
was too preoccupied to be proud of herself. And yet there was a deep and thrumming
joy in it, in the wind in her hair, and the reins in her hands, and the horses
stretching, eager, toward home.

~~~

They could not keep Sadana away from Iry forever. No more
could they keep Iry from her own people. But they could manage it for a goodly
while, and so they did: long enough that Iry felt herself becoming a foreigner,
growing accustomed to the damnable robe, speaking the language, thinking in
it—gods help her, shaping her thoughts in a language that she hated to the very
blood and bone.