The Shepherd Kings (57 page)

But Iphikleia had caught him as he stumbled in somewhat
earlier than usual, having managed to bed down the latest boatload of recruits
with no more than half a dozen greater mishaps or half a hundred lesser ones.
He had nothing on his mind but sleep; though her presence gave his body
somewhat else to think of.

She lay beside him without inviting him to do more, propped
on her elbow and regarding him steadily. Her face was as drawn as his must be,
hollow with exhaustion, but her eyes were clear. “You’re troubled,” she said.
“You’ve been half among us for days.”

“I’ve been doing the king’s duty for days,” Kemni said a
little crossly.

“More than that,” said Iphikleia.

He was not going to tell her. There was nothing to tell. But
his tongue had a mind of its own. It told her what Seti had told him, every
word of it, as preposterous as it was, and as perfectly and manifestly false.

She listened in silence, without change of expression: no
surprise, no horror. When he had finished, she did not speak at once, but
narrowed her eyes a little, as if deep in thought.

He had nearly slid into sleep when she said, “No wonder you
look as if something with sharp teeth has been gnawing your liver.”

He started awake. “It’s not true. Nothing he has ever done
or said has betrayed a sign of it.”

“And yet it eats at you.”

“It can’t be true.”

“Have you dreamed anything?”

He shook his head hard. “Nothing. Not one thing.”

“Ah,” she said, and was silent for a little while. Then:
“You could ask him,” she said.

He stiffened. “Are you mad?”

“You would know if he lied,” she said, “or if he told the
truth.”

“I can’t do that,” Kemni said. “He would be well justified
in killing me for accusing him of such a thing.”

“Still,” said Iphikleia, “if he loves you as a brother,
he’ll forgive you.”

“No,” said Kemni. “He’s guilty of nothing except, maybe,
keeping ill company. I don’t doubt that a good number of the lords and princes
would be pleased to stop the war, or that some of them might even be conspiring
with the Retenu. But not Gebu.”

“Whether he is or he is not,” Iphikleia said, “if there is a
conspiracy at all, the king should know of it.”

Kemni lay very still. If he moved, he would cry aloud. Fool
and worse fool. Of course she had the right of it. And he, blind to everything
but Gebu’s innocence, had never thought of the danger—of what it all signified.

“You should tell Ariana,” Iphikleia said. “She’ll get word
to the king.”

“Yes,” Kemni said. “Yes. In the morning, before I do
anything else. I’ll tell her.”

“Good,” Iphikleia said.

~~~

He slept well, better than he had in a long while. Out of
sleep he emerged into a dream, a harsh and vivid light like the light of noon
in the Red Land. There was desert all about him, stark stone, bare sand, and at
great intervals, a brown and shriveled thing that once had been green.

It was not the plain on which they had shown the king their
chariotry, but a dream-image of it. There were the stark hills, the level land,
the descent to the river. And there was the camp, both smaller and larger than
in life, with the king’s pavilion gleaming like a sun come to earth.

Kemni knew in his bones where the dream would take him—and
he did not want to go. But the dream, or the gods, ruled him. He flew like a
falcon against the blue heaven, spiraling down and down, till at last he came
to earth within the king’s camp.

He must be standing where Seti had stood, concealed by the
corner of a tent; able, if he peered, to see the circle of men passing the
winejar round, and able to hear them clearly. They were oblivious to him—fools,
with such things as they were saying, such enormities as they professed to
contemplate.

He did not want to look. He did not want to see. But it was
laid on him. When he resisted, he was again a falcon, or perhaps his own
ba
-spirit, hovering in the air above the
heads of the gathering.

There were perhaps a dozen of them. He knew them all,
some—those who were princes—rather well; others by name or face. They were not
the greatest lords of the court, nor the highest of the princes. They were sons
of lesser wives, followers of the great ones, even a man whom Kemni had seen
close by the chancellor of the Upper Kingdom. No one of them held great power,
but together they could muster a remarkable amount of influence.

The leader, the one they all looked to, the one whose words
began and ended the circle, was hidden in a darkness of dream. But Kemni was
not to be given mercy. He knew the voice. He knew the face when it was brought
before him in that bitter light.

He knew the lines of it, the set of the brows, the long
nose, the square chin; the body stocky for an Egyptian’s, though slender enough
if he had been Retenu. But the expression, the way in which he said the words,
Kemni had not seen before. This was a stranger wearing Gebu’s face, a man whose
spirit had gone hard with old anger and old fear. When he spoke of the throne,
his hands twitched, fingers opening, closing, as if to clasp the crook and
flail of the Great House, the Pharaoh.

“King of the Upper Kingdom is half a king, some would say,”
he said, “but my father looks to be king of nothing, if he forces the Retenu
into a war. They’ll kill him and set up a vassal king, one of their own—give
him a name of our people, a royal seal, all the trappings of the office, but he
will still and always be Retenu.”

“Unless one of us can win them over,” said the chancellor’s
servant. “There is that. Let the king lose the war, or let us lose it for him.
Put us all out of our misery. They might even be glad of a vassal who comes of
the old king’s blood. The people will accept him, and he’ll owe them too much
to betray them.”

“Maybe,” Gebu said. “I would rather not be a vassal king.
King unchallenged of a kingdom that, though halved, is extraordinarily rich—I
would prefer that. Let us stop the war, then. Let us do whatever we must do.”

“Even to . . . remove the king?” the
chancellor’s servant asked with a twist of distaste. But no fear; no horror. He
had thought the unthinkable, and found it less than difficult.

Gebu, too. Gebu nodded, with no visible reluctance.
“Whatever we must do. Send a messenger to the Retenu. Then let us see what we
will see.”

They all nodded, every one, as conspirators must. None
shrank from it, or protested. It was decided. It was done. The king was
betrayed. The war . . .

Maybe not yet. Kemni knew how difficult it could be to pass
undetected into the Lower Kingdom. These traitors would not use Cretan
ships—that way was not open to them. How, then? A fisherman, again? Another
ruse?

The dream swirled and shifted about him. He had soared up
again, far into the sky, till the plain was shrunk to nothing below him, and
the river wound serpent-supple through the narrow ribbon of the Black Land.

He hovered at the zenith of heaven. As a god might, as Horus
of the noonday sun, he saw all below both remote and close, high above it and
full within it. There was the north of the Upper Kingdom, the Black Land narrow
still, but ahead of it, the broad green branches of the Delta, and the Red Land
held far at bay. The Lower Kingdom was a different world, a world of wet and
greenery, tangled skeins of river, great beds of reeds, grasses, fields planted
thick with barley and wheat, onions, lettuces, green things both pungent and
savory.

He had wandered far afield. His flight brought him circling
back to the harsher land south of the great surging sprawl of Memphis and the
loom of the old tombs. There were boats in the river, many of them, and caravans
on the roads, and an endless train of people on foot.

The eyes that he had been given, the eyes of a god, fixed on
one of all the multitudes below. One man, nondescript, trudging beneath a
laborer’s burden. But inside the bundle, wrapped deep in noisome rags, was gold:
a collar of honor, that was his passage to the conquerors’ king. The symbols
graven on it, shaping words of praise, were a message also, subtle perhaps
beyond the wits of a foreigner, but the messenger would be instructed, surely,
to make them clear to him.

The messenger’s progress was slow, as it must be. He was
some considerable distance still from Memphis, and far yet from Avaris. He was—

By all the gods. He was close by the Bull of Re, on the
stretch of road no more than a day’s journey south of it.

The gods had given a gift. If it was true. If it was not his
own wishing shaping the dream.

This was a true dream. The light in it, the inevitability of
it, convinced him of that.

He could wake. He must wake. He must take chariot and ride.
He must find that single man among all the men on the roads.

He clawed his way out of sleep into the dark of deep night.
Iphikleia slept beside him in a tangle of hair. Her arm lay heavy across him.
He slipped from beneath it, taking great care not to disturb her.

She started awake in spite of him, glowering as she always
did on first waking, but sharply and fiercely alert. “You dreamed,” she said.

Kemni glared back at her. “You, too?”

She shook her head. “But I can feel it in you. The air is
full of gods’ voices.”

“Ill spirits walk the night,” he said.

“Surely. But these are gods.” She rose, raking hair out of
her face. “Where are we going?”

“You are staying here,” he said. “I am going out.”

“We are going out,” she said. She rummaged in the
clothing-chest. Mostly it was his, but she had left a garment or two there, by
chance or design. One was the tunic she wore for riding in her chariot, and the
fillet with which she bound her hair.

She was dressed before he was, though he had less to put
on—a kilt only, and sandals. Almost he forbore to put on his eyepaint, but
habit was strong, and some vestige of sense. As dark as it was now, come
morning the sun’s glare would be fierce. So too its heat, though the chill,
now, made him shiver even in that closet of a room.

Iphikleia dropped his Cretan mantle about his shoulders and
said, “I’ll fetch bread and beer. You go harness the horses.”

He could do worse than to obey her. The stable was dark, but
he had brought a lamp, which though dim was enough to see his way to his
stallions’ stalls.

Falcon was awake and alert, Lion curled in sleep, but he
roused as his brother trod softly out to be fed a bit of fodder while he was
brushed and harnessed. Falcon went on with his breakfast, calmly, while Lion
underwent his own toilet.

When both were ready, Kemni led them out to the court of the
chariots. The chariot they usually drew was heavy, a war-chariot; but Kemni
sought out Ariana’s, which was lighter and therefore faster. Lion and Falcon
snorted and champed the bits at the feel of a different chariot behind them,
tugging at the reins, eager to run.

Just as Kemni knew that he could hold them in no longer—and
was ready to let them go, so that when he came back he would protest to
Iphikleia that he had tried, he had really tried, to wait for her—she appeared
with two bundles wrapped each in a cloth. One was smaller, round and soft. The
other was long and narrow and hard. It looked like a bow in a case, or two, and
a quiver of arrows; and possibly a sword.

They were weapons, indeed: they clattered to the floor of
the chariot. The other must be the bread she had promised, and she carried a
jar, which she laid carefully between her feet. “I had to wait for the bread,”
she said.

It was warm against Kemni’s foot, even wrapped in its cloth.
He gave the horses their heads, and let them find their own way out of the
court. The outer gate gave them pause, but the sleepy guard would not defy
Iphikleia or his own commander. He opened the gate for them.

It boomed shut behind them. The road stretched ahead in the
grey dawn. Kemni let Lion and Falcon find their own pace, which was steady
enough once they had run out the excitement of the lighter chariot and the
strange hour and his own thrumming urgency.

Iphikleia was silent behind him, leaning lightly against
him, which she need not have done, but he was glad of it. The air was cold in
this hour before sunrise, blowing fresh in his face. If his dream was true, and
he was not pursuing the track of a shadow, he was some distance yet from the
princes’ messenger. The man would have found a place to hide and sleep; when
the sun rose, he would rise with it and go on.

If there was no messenger, if Kemni had come on a fool’s
errand, then he would be glad. Need all his dreams, after all, be true? Might
he not dream a mere dream, but as vivid as life?

He did not turn back for that thought, nor for any of those
that galloped on its heels. There was truth to be found on this journey,
whether his own or Seti’s or another altogether.

The road bore him through villages still asleep, but some in
them had risen and set to baking the day’s bread. The warm scent of it followed
him. The nearer morning he came, the stronger the scent grew, till it mingled
with the sharper one of beer. Children were up by then, running about in the
half-light, stopping to gape at the chariot as it passed.

It dawned on him, much too late, that these people had seen
neither horses nor chariots. All that passed to the Bull of Re had come through
the Red Land, or hidden in boats on the river. No charioteer had ridden openly
through the villages as Kemni in his madness was doing.

But if he turned aside, if he sought the desert, he might
not come to his destination in time. He had to risk the stares and murmurs, and
hope that the children’s tale would be disregarded as whim or fancy.

He was close now. So too the sunrise. But not, thank the
gods, any town or village. In his dream the messenger had taken shelter in the
ruin of a house—a farm abandoned long ago, when the river’s flooding shifted
and left it in a corner of the Red Land without the yearly renewal of black
earth that made a farm rich.