The Shepherd Kings (7 page)

The gods had brought him so far unchallenged, and except for
the night departure from Memphis, unthreatened by any who might know his face.
Now he dreamed of flinging himself from
Dancer’s
prow into the river of Egypt, his river, the only river in all the world that
was as great or as blessed.

He could not leave Egypt. Egypt was in his blood, set deep
in his bones. Away from it, he would wither and die.

But his king had commanded him. He must do as he was bidden.

As to the ease with which they had come so far, they were
not thanking the gods yet—not till they had passed the last point of land and
sailed out upon the open sea. They went with care, with weapons near to hand,
and watchers at prow and mast, scanning the green thickets of the banks. The
only sound was the buzzing of flies and the slip of water against the hull, and
far off the lazy roar of a riverhorse.

Kemni kept the place he had been keeping as often as not,
near the captain’s post. He was knotted tight. If he let himself go, he would
spring for the side and leap into the water, and never mind the crocodiles.
Almost he caught himself praying that the enemy would appear, a whole army with
chariots.

And if the enemy did come, what could they do? They might
shoot at
Dancer
, but the ship would
not stop for them, nor slow. They had no fleet of their own.

Kemni could look for no such rescue. The land of Egypt
slipped away behind them, swifter it seemed, the nearer they drew to the sea.
Then, as if between one breath and the next, it was gone. The great slow swell
had taken them. The sky had opened, and all the horizon was water. There was no
land. No Egypt. Only the vastness of the Great Green.

It was not green. It was blue; deep pure blue like lapis,
studded with the white of foam. Directly beneath the ship was a memory of the
land: a broad fan of mud-brown, the gift and tribute that the river brought
into the sea. But all too swiftly they sailed out of it into waters both deeper
and purer.

Kemni clung to the deck and fought the urge to howl like a
dog. All about him, the Cretan sailors had eased their vigilance. A certain
grimness that had lain on them was gone, melted away in the sun. They were
home, and free at last.

He had been home, and was no longer. There was an emptiness
in his spirit. He thought, rather distantly, that he could die of it.

A hand fell on his shoulder. He tensed against it, not
caring whose it was, until he heard the voice over his head. It was clear and a
little cold, and unmistakably Iphikleia’s. “Drink the wind,” she said. “Fill
your soul. Remember where you come from. That will never leave you, not as long
as memory endures.”

She was not being kind, or gentle. She was telling him that
he must be strong.

He looked up into her face. She seemed to be taking no
notice of him at all. Her eyes were on the horizon. The sun was in them, and
the wind, and the cold kiss of spray.

“The gods live beyond the horizon,” Kemni said. Where that
came from, he could not precisely have said, but it happened to be true. “The
horizon never changes, no matter where one stands.”

“Yes,” she said.

She offered him nothing more, but nothing less. It was
convenient for her, he supposed, to keep the Egyptian king’s messenger from
running mad and trying to swim back to his own country. And yet he owed her a
debt. She had, with so few brief words, taught him to see clearly, and given
him courage to face the vastness of the world.

It was very great, this world, and very empty, a waste of
water and sky. There was nowhere to anchor, no shore to rest on when the sun
sank and the stars came out over the breast of the sea. These Cretans sailed by
sun and stars, with a fair wind blowing. The sea-gods were pleased, they said,
glad to have them back again after so long on the river of Egypt.

~~~

Naukrates had long since come to himself again after that
wild chariot-ride of his to catch his ship before she left him far behind. The
first night at sea, he played host on the deck to Kemni and Iphikleia and one
or two of the more lordly sailors. Kemni need no longer keep his head low, nor
hide that he was not of these people. He found the habit rather dismayingly
hard to break; but once he had broken it, he felt as if a weight had fallen
from his shoulders. He put on his third-best wig and his second-best kilt and
his collar of gold, and was a lord again, for a while.

Iphikleia had put on finery, too, as they all had, and
painted her breasts as she had her lips, as if to taunt him with what he could
dream of but never hope to have. She maintained her air of cool distance, her
haughty stillness, even with her uncle—though he twitted her for it, and teased
her with stories of her hoyden youth.

“Wild as a gull you were,” he said in the warmth of the
wine, “running where you pleased—even into the king’s high council and among
the priestesses when they sang their rites. But mostly,” he said to Kemni with
a flicker of laughter, “she was out in the hills, chasing the cattle and the
sheep and driving the shepherds to distraction. She heard how people ride
horses, away in the east of the world, and decided that a cow would make a fine
mount for a Cretan child. She fashioned a saddle for it of an old fleece and
bits of leather and strappery, and made a bridle out of knotted cords, and
chose herself not any cow, but the Lady’s own heifer. White as milk she was,
and her horns were like the young moon, and the priestesses fed her the finest
barley and garlanded her with flowers.

“And this child undertook to make a horse of her. The heifer
was as tame as a new lamb, with all the worship she was given—and that was
fortunate, because if young insolence had taken it into her head to tame one of
the bulls . . .”

“I was rash,” Iphikleia said, “but I was never stupid. I
chose the one most likely to be amenable. And she was. She was hardly easy to
sit on, not like a horse whose back is made to hold a rider, but she was
willing enough to suffer me. She would even go where I bade her, and stop, mostly,
when I asked. She was a quite reasonable mount, when it came to it.”

“Until the priestesses caught you,” Naukrates said. “Gods
and goddess, how they carried on! It’s a wonder they didn’t demand your living
heart torn from your breast.”

“No; only my living body to dance the bull.” Iphikleia shut
her mouth with a snap. This, her manner said, touched on things not fit for
strangers to hear.

But Naukrates was not minded to spare her. “Yes, they laid
on you a hard sentence. But you danced the bull with the Lady’s blessing. Then
there was nothing for it but to make you one of her own, to keep the rest of
her cattle safe from your ambition.”

Iphikleia set her lips together. She had no lightness of
spirit, Kemni could see, and least of all when it came to herself. And yet in
childhood she must have been all lightness, all air and wickedness. It was
rather a pity that she had grown out of it, and so completely.

In the night again he dreamed of her, a slender minnow of a
girl with her breasts scarce budded, riding a milk-white heifer. It was a
chaste dream, as his others had not been, and yet when he woke he was aching
with desire. He gave himself such relief as he could, and swore an oath in the
dim closeness of his cabin: when he came to land, he would—oh, yes, by the gods
he would—find himself a willing woman, and love her till she cried for mercy.

~~~

They were five days at sea, and four nights of dreams that
Kemni would sooner not remember. As the fifth day rose toward noon, with a
brisk wind blowing and the sailors stepping lively, singing and dancing amid
the ordered clutter of the ship, the cry rang out: “Land! Land ho!”

It was only a shadow, a cloud on the horizon. But it grew as
the day unfolded and the sun climbed; then as the sun began to sink, even a
stranger’s eye could see the shape of the great island. Rocky promontories
crowned with green, and scattered among them the gleam of white: cities of men,
and palaces, and white temples set high on sheer cliffs. The first one of those
that Kemni saw, he thought it must be the place they were seeking, the sacred
palace, the house of the Double Axe, the Labyrinth of the king of Crete.

But it was a temple—to a god of the sky, Iphikleia said. The
house of the Double Axe lay inland, round the far side of the island. They were
days from landfall after all, must sail full round that mountain in the sea,
before they came to the harbor of Knossos and began their ascent to the
Labyrinth.

“Take pleasure in it,” she said at Kemni’s visible dismay.
“We’ll sail by day, rest by night in villages. Crete will give us its warmest
welcome, with no haste to lessen it.”

Kemni bit his lip and kept silent. Iphikleia knew what he
was thinking: her painted brow arched. But she too held her peace.

~~~

Kemni did his best to do as she had advised him. The days
were brisk with breezes and pungent with salt. The green ascents and rocky
summits of the island drifted past, wafting toward them a rich scent of earth,
so very different from that of the sea. At night, as she had said, they drew up
on shore—blessed land, however stony underfoot. Slender brown people came,
brought food, drink, music and song. Kemni went to sleep to the sound of waves
and the voices of these strangers singing.

They came to Knossos at last on a fair day, with a fair wind
blowing them toward the harbor, and the sun just coming to its zenith over the
steep crags of the island. In sight of her own city, even cold Iphikleia had
warmed a little: eyes wide and bright, red lips parted, yearning slightly
forward where she stood on the deck.

This to her, to them all, was home as Egypt was home to
Kemni. He found it very strange, so stony and yet so green, and cool—almost
cold to his Egyptian blood, like Iphikleia herself. The Cretans were well content
in their kilts and their tall boots. He in his kilt and bare feet was all one
great shiver. The wind whipped the warmth out of him, and the spray kept it
away.

But when
Dancer
had come to land, when it slid up on the shore, he cared for nothing but that
he should stand on solid earth again, and no need in the morning to clamber
aboard ship, no need to sail further, not till he went back to Egypt.

All of his shipmates had leaped down, every one, swarming
over the sides, whooping, singing, dancing on the breast of the earth their
mother. There were people waiting for them, dancing, too, and singing: women,
men, children, what must be half the people of this island, all come together
to welcome them home.

They even welcomed Kemni, caught his hands and whirled him
about and dropped him dizzy to the sand. Kemni minded not at all. He embraced
the earth; he kissed it. He would have made love to it, if he had been a little
wilder.

It was not his own earth, his Black Land, nor yet the Red
Land that bordered it. But it was earth. It would suffice.

Kemni rose at last, well dusted with sand, staggering on
ground that did not rock and sway like a ship’s deck, and found himself the
center of a circle of stares. Every idler and hanger-on in this port seemed fascinated
by his sandy and unstable self.

And there before them all was a woman of beauty to break the
heart. She looked, somewhat, like Iphikleia; but all Cretans looked like one
another. She was smaller, a delicate handful, and her breasts were even sweeter.
He could have circled her waist with his two hands.

Iphikleia he dreamed of, and burned for when he woke. This
was beyond dreaming. This, he would die for.

She must be a goddess, or a goddess’ image. And yet she
regarded him with such a look of pure and wicked delight that he caught himself
grinning like a fool. She laughed, sweet as water bubbling from a spring, and
brushed the sand from his shoulders. “Oh!” she said. “Such a lovely gift the
sea has brought to me. Where do you come from, beautiful man?”

“He comes from Egypt,” Iphikleia’s clear voice said from
just behind him, “and he comes from their king.”

“All the better,” the stranger said. “Come, beautiful man!
Come to the palace with me.”

Kemni did not think he could have resisted, even if he had
wanted to. She had taken him by the hand, easy and trusting as a child, but no
one of all those about looked on her as such. They were as dazzled as he was,
and as helpless against her.

Of all the ways he had thought to come to the palace of the
Labyrinth, this was the least conceivable: walking hand in hand with this most
beautiful of women, listening to her light sweet chatter. He was dimly aware of
a city around him, white walls, streets paved with smooth stones and glimmering
shells, flashes of bright color everywhere his eye happened to glance: a tumble
of flowers down a wall, vivid paint along a portico, a gleam of gold in shadow.
And everywhere there were people, slender, with black ringlets worn long, and
wide dark eyes. But clearest then and always to his memory was her face lifted
to his, for she came only as high as his chin, and her voice running on.

“My name is Ariana,” she said. “I was born up there, in a
high white room that looks out past a spire of stone to the sea. I have the sea
in my blood. Is it true what they say, that Egyptians have sand there, and
river mud?”

Kemni laughed before he thought, half amused, half taken
aback. “That is one way of putting it,” he said.

“You speak our language very well,” said Ariana. “Iphikleia
taught you, I suppose. She’s a fine teacher.”

“She is very . . . severe,” Kemni said.

Ariana’s laughter rippled to the blue heaven. “She likes
people to think that. It comes of being such a scapegrace as a child—she tries
to make up for it by being the most dignified of women. But I know,” said
Ariana, “that she’s really as wild as ever. Did she run about Egypt as she used
to run about here?”