The Shepherd Kings (46 page)

At first, for disbelief, he did not recognize her. And yet
he could not mistake it. That was his cousin. That was Iry in a Retenu robe,
stepping into the chariot, looking as haughty as any of them, and sparing no
glance about her.

The lord handed the reins to her with a smile amid the
shadows of his beard, and spoke words that Kemni did not catch. She answered in
kind, briefly. Then, as if she knew well the way of it, she turned the horses
and sent them trotting briskly out.

Kemni was gaping like an idiot. If he had thought at all, he
had surmised that she performed some service in the women’s house. Where else
might she be? She was safe, that was all he had known.

But this—

Pepi was currying one of the lesser duns who drew the lord’s
chariot when their brothers were indisposed. He greeted Kemni with a glance.

“Iry,” Kemni said. “What—”

Pepi grunted. He smoothed the gleaming gold-brown coat, and
added a scratch of the nape, which pleased the stallion greatly. Then at last,
when Kemni was ready to strike it out of him, he answered the question Kemni
had not quite asked. “He’s teaching her about horses.”

“But—”

“It’s something to do with his mother’s tribe.” Pepi combed
the stallion’s tail with his fingers, keeping his eyes on it rather than on
Kemni, as if there was something more, but he did not want to say it.
“Understand. She would do nothing to betray any of us. But there are more gods
than we know in Egypt, and more powers in the world than some of us ever
imagined. One of them has chosen her to be its servant.”

Kemni frowned. He who dreamed dreams was hardly one to
question such a thing, and yet . . . “What are you saying? Have
the Retenu done something to her?”

“Not the Retenu,” Pepi said.

Kemni was not going to get anything out of Pepi, that was
clear. And it was too late to follow the lord’s chariot.

And yet, was it? If Kemni used his wits, surely he could
find them. They did not go far. The lord had come back before noon the day
before, nor had he looked as if he had been traveling long or swiftly.

It was easy enough after all. Kemni simply asked the guard
at the gate he had seen the lord ride through, “Where has my lord gone? I have
a message for him.”

The Retenu did not even grace him with a glance, but
answered clearly enough. “He is with the horses, as he always is in the
mornings.”

“And that is where?” Kemni asked, holding his breath lest he
had betrayed himself.

The guard pointed him down the road to the eastward. Kemni
followed it with the carefully cultivated air of a servant on an errand. His
back twinged between the shoulderblades, where a spear could drive home and end
all his deceptions. But the guard appeared to have forgotten him.

When this holding belonged to its proper lord, the eastern
fields had been planted with barley. There were still barley-fields along the
road, plowed now and newly planted. The first green shoots gleamed against the
black earth.

Over the hill, where the road curved away from a long
rolling field, Kemni was reminded of what someone had said of donkeys pastured
amid the barley. But these were horses. Hundreds, as Pepi had said. More horses
than Kemni had ever seen together, even in battle. Horses of every color, age,
size.

And horses of a color he had seen only in dream: white or
moon-colored, grazing together apart from the rest. There was movement beyond
them.

Iry was riding a moon-dappled horse—a mare, Kemni saw as he
made his way toward her. He came as a hunter comes, keeping to what cover there
was: groups and clusters of horses, and beds of reeds, for she was riding by an
arm of the river. She rode well, as far as he knew to judge, and with an air of
one who has studied it for some time.

The lord Khayan was standing in the new grass, with a
smoke-colored colt nuzzling his hair. He was giving her instruction, a word
here, a gesture there. He was teaching her to ride the mare.

That was even more preposterous than that Iry should be
riding out with him at all. He, a foreign lord, a prince, was serving as
teacher to an Egyptian slave.

They seemed very amiable. More than amiable, maybe. They had
the ease of two who were, if not friends, then allies: comfortable in each
other’s presence. He addressed her with respect, she with familiarity but no
contempt. The language they spoke shifted between Egyptian and the Retenu
tongue, and sometimes to one that Kemni did not know, that must be that of the
eastern horsemen.

It was a little dizzying, and a little confusing. It was, he
thought, like a secret tongue, such as kings’ spies might choose to speak, or
children with secrets to keep from their elders.

The lesson ended with Iry dismounting from the grey mare and
setting her free. She did not run off as Kemni had thought horses did. She
lingered, nuzzling Iry’s hands, and insisting that Iry rub her neck and
shoulders. The lord Khayan said in Retenu, “I can’t stay. There’s too much to
do before we leave for Avaris.”

“Then go,” Iry said in Egyptian. “I’ll follow when I’m done
here.”

He looked as if he might protest, but after a brief pause he
shrugged and went to catch and harness his horses. They, like the mare, came to
his hand as if they had been dogs: a thing that Kemni caught himself yearning
after. It must be magic. It must. And yet . . .

When the lord had taken his chariot and his stallions and
gone, Iry said in clear Egyptian, “Come out of there, cousin. You don’t need to
hide any more.”

Kemni came out slowly, and a little wryly. “I thought I was
a hunter,” he said.

“The Mare is the hunted,” said Iry. She spoke the beast’s name
and kind as if it were a title, as one would say
Great House
to signify the king. “She always knows what lurks in
the reeds.”

The grey mare—the Mare—seemed signally uninterested in
Kemni. She wandered off as he approached, grazing idly, switching her
moon-white tail at the flies. Except for her color and her undeniable quality,
she seemed mortal enough; but there was more to her than mortal seeming.

“Have I dreamed you?” Kemni asked her.

She ignored him. Iry eyed him a little oddly. He was not
about to explain to her what gift the gods inflicted on him.

It seemed he did not need to. “So,” she said. “You still do
that. You still dream.”

“All men dream,” Kemni said.

“Not like you.” She began to walk back the way they all had
come. He followed her. “You didn’t think I knew, did you?”

“It seems everybody knows,” he said wearily. “Very well.
Tell me what that is, besides a horse of peculiar color.”

“A goddess,” she answered.

“Of course,” Kemni said. “And you are her servant. Pepi told
me that. I don’t suppose it’s intentional.”

“Is it ever, with gods?”

He echoed her sigh. “And is it unintentional that the lord
and conqueror of these lands is waiting on you like a family retainer?”

“He is that,” she said. And when he favored her with a
glance of pure incredulity: “Truly. The Mare’s priestess stands higher than any
man.”

“You are . . .” He laughed, not for mirth,
but because if he did not do that, he would howl. “Aren’t they appalled?”

“Horrified.”

“Why—how—?”

“The gods know.”

Kemni needed time. He needed to think. “We can use this. We
can—”

“You trust me?”

He stared at her. “Why shouldn’t I?”

“Maybe,” she said, “I’ve gone over to the enemy.”

“You? You’d die first.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“As sure as I am of anything,” he said. And he was. He could
not, walking beside her, believe that she would ever be anything but loyal to
her own people. But if she had to choose between her people and this white mare . . .
That would not happen.

“I wish I could be as certain as you,” she said.

“That’s faith,” he said. “Trust yourself. Be strong. There’s
war coming. We’ll win it—and we’ll win it with horses, and with ships from the
sea.”

“Or lose it and die,” she said.

He struck her shoulder lightly with a fist, as he had done
when they were children. “Would you rather never try at all?”

“No,” she said. “But I’m not sure—you shouldn’t trust me.”

“And yet I will do it,” he said.

She shook her head, but she gave up the argument.

They left for Avaris in the morning, the lord and his
women and most of the Retenu that had been in the house; and Iry, and Kemni
among the grooms. He was not the only Egyptian: Pepi went, too, and another of
the men who looked after the horses. Everyone else was a foreigner: bearded man
or, startling to Kemni’s eyes, veilless and half-wild woman galloping hither
and yon on the back of a horse.

It was true. There were women who rode horses. They carried
bows, and short spears. In camp at night they stalked about like warriors, and
no man offered them impudence. Most spoke the language of the east, and that of
the Retenu but poorly, and Egyptian not at all.

They ran in a pack like young men, most often in the wake of
a wild beauty with the same golden falcon-eyes as the lord Khayan. That was his
sister, the lady Sadana. Kemni asked for her name, not to gain power over her
but perhaps to understand her.

She was a fierce, embittered creature. The Mare should have
been hers; had been meant to be hers. But Iry had taken it from her.

Iry declared that it did not matter, that Sadana could not
oppose the Mare’s will. Everyone else watched them when they were near one
another, warily, as armies will watch their commanders before a battle.

That first night as they camped in a field outside a village
that belonged to this Khayan, Kemni had settled to his bread and beer with Pepi
and the other Egyptian groom. He had done well, he thought, in playing the
servant. No one challenged him, or asked him if he was other than he seemed.

He was just breaking the loaf and biting into it when
someone came to stand over him. He looked up into a foreigner’s face: one of
the wild riders, who, afoot and with her weapons laid aside, seemed no more
than a child, and not a large one at that. She was staring at him as if she had
never seen his like before.

He stared back, not caring if it was rude. A smile flickered
across her face: bright and wicked, though she suppressed it quickly. That
smile almost warmed him to her. It made him think of Ariana.

“Pretty,” she said in Retenu, struggling with it a little,
but clearly determined to master it. “She says come.”

Kemni supposed that she meant Iry. Surely she did not mean
Sadana. But he said, “She?”

“Priestess,” the girl said. “You understand? Come.”

“I understand. Priestess—Iry?”

The girl nodded. “Iry,” she said.

Kemni thrust himself to his feet. Yes, this was a small
woman for these people: she was not even as tall as he was. Her eyes were frank
in their admiration of him. He felt himself flushing. It was fortunate that it
was night, and that firelight gave every face a ruddy glow.

She led him through the camp, making no particular secret of
it, and attracting less notice, maybe, than if she had skulked and crept and
tried to conceal him. A few glances flicked their way, but none lingered.

Iry was a person of consequence. She had a tent and a fire
of her own, and a company of riders at ease round about. She also—and that he
had not seen, or noticed—had the Mare. He had not seen that one among the
horses, nor anywhere near Iry as she rode in the lord’s chariot, but there was
no mistaking that pale dappled hide or that air of royal distance. Somehow, perhaps
invisible as gods can travel, the Mare had accompanied her servant on this
journey.

It was strange to think of all this as belonging to an
Egyptian, to his own kin. But maybe it did not belong to her. Maybe she
belonged to it. Maybe she was its prisoner.

She did not seem so, seated in the lamplight in the tent,
with a fan blowing a soft breeze across her, and, somewhat surprising, an
Egyptian gown to cover her, instead of a foreign robe. Had she done that for
him?

She did look well in it. She looked remarkably like her
father, who had been a pleasant-looking man, comely if not beautiful. Her
mother’s beauty had not passed to her. It did not seem to trouble her, nor did
it trouble Kemni. He liked to look at her. He always had, even when she was a
small and outspoken minnow of a child and he was a lordly not-quite-man.

There was no one attending her. No servant, no guard. The
rider had left Kemni at the tentflap and gone to keep her fellows company by
the fire. They were not sitting too close, he noticed. It was a pleasant
evening for this part of the world; but they were fanning their faces and
muttering what must be imprecations against the heat. He was half tempted to
suggest, sweetly, that they dispose of their leather tunics and the garment
called trousers, and be sensible as Egyptians were sensible.

The tentflap fell with the words unsaid. Iry regarded him
unsmiling.

He favored her with his sweetest and most exasperating
smile. “Good evening, cousin,” he said.

“Don’t call me that here,” said Iry.

“Why? None of those wild riders understands a word. There’s
no one else near enough to hear.”

“You don’t know that,” she said. “Sit down.”

He was pleased enough to obey, particularly since she had
bread and cheese and a bowl of something savory, and better beer than he had
been about to drink with Pepi. He greeted that with some surprise. “No wine?”
he said.

“Over there,” she said, tilting her head toward another jar.
“Why, don’t you want beer?”

“Beer is wonderful,” he said. “Beer is delightful. Now tell
me why you had me brought here. Are you trying to taunt our lords and masters
with me?”

“In a way,” she said. “I’ve told Khayan that I want an
Egyptian escort. He suggested you.”