The Shepherd Kings (75 page)

“They’re not coming to Sile,” Seti said. “They’re outriders
from Avaris—they’re defending the kingdom’s heart.”

Kemni could not argue with him. As few as the enemy were,
lords set over a foreign land, they could not spend their men in defending the
outer cities. If they would retain their power, they must retain it from the
center, from their strongest places.

The king was not minded to engage them. Not yet. First he
would take Sile. Then he would advance into the south.

Kemni’s outriders had found the foreign king’s army. As
Seti had foretold, they were not attempting to rescue Sile. They had camped two
days south of the city, and set to building what looked like a fort across the
road.

They could not build a fort across the river. Kemni found he
almost pitied them, poor mariners that they were, and not given to thinking of
water as well as land—even after a hundred years.

He went out hunting on a morning when it seemed the siege
was close to ending. He had shot a fine flock of geese, enough to feed a fair
few men, and the men with him had chariots full of fat quarry as well. Time, he
thought, to turn back, though the day was young. If they surrendered their prey
to the cooks, they would have time after that for battle-exercises.

They paused to rest and graze the horses, in a field near
the branch of the river. Some of the men ate and drank, taking their ease,
though they kept their weapons close to hand, nor let their horses stray. One
or two had wandered afield, he supposed to relieve themselves, or to while the
time.

A shout brought him to full alert. None of them ever forgot
that this was war.

He strung his bow and fitted an arrow to the string, but
stayed beside his chariot. His bays had lifted their heads to stare at the
field’s edge. Their nostrils flared. Falcon, who was always the leader, snorted
explosively. Lion pawed the ground. Suddenly, deafeningly, he whinnied.

Seti and one of the others—Ay, that was his chariot, with
the ibis painted on it—drove slowly over the hill. There were others behind
them, men of the fourth wing, Kemni saw, whom he had sent to keep watch on the
enemy. They rode in a circle around something else. Three horses, and three
riders on the horses.

Riders, not chariots. Two of the horses were ordinary
enough, if very fine: golden duns. The third was as pale as the moon.

Kemni had not even known that he was running, till he was
half across the field. The others had not moved. They were all staring, waiting
for Seti and Ay and the fourth wing to come to them.

The riders were captives, they could be nothing else, but
neither they nor their horses were bound. Two were Retenu. One of those two—by
the gods, one was a woman, a tall fierce creature with falcon-eyes. And the
third . . .

“Iry!” Kemni called, and never mind who heard, or what he
thought. “Iry! Cousin!”

She lifted a hand. She was as he remembered her in Avaris,
as calmly self-possessed as ever, until he met her eyes. Then her smile broke
free, wide and white and irrepressible. “Kemni!” she called back. “Cousin! Well
met! Well met!”

Everyone was goggling. They must think these were spies for
the enemy. Kemni could not think how to explain, not in haste. Orders, for now:
“Let them go,” he said. “They’re friends.”

His men did not want to, but the habit of obedience was
strong. He brought Iry and the others back to the rest of the chariots, to
bread and beer and as fine a welcome as he could manage.

The other woman he knew quite well indeed, but she seemed
not to remember him, or to be lost in a kind of dream. The man had been a great
gawk of a boy when Kemni saw him last, and was now a large man and strong, with
great bull’s shoulders and the beginnings of a handsome beard, but there was no
mistaking that wide and deceptively foolish grin. Iannek of the Retenu and his
sister Sadana had followed Iry into the north. Followed, not led. That much he
could well see.

Preposterous. And yet there they were. “You are friends?” he
said to Iry.

She nodded a little impatiently. “Of course we are. Yes, the
others, too. They belong to me. How far is it to Sile?”

“Half a morning,” Kemni answered, letting be for a moment
the thing that she had said, that she was mistress to a lord and lady of the
Retenu.

“So close?” She sighed. For a moment he saw how weary she
must be, and how far she must have traveled. “Thank the gods. I’d begun to
think we’d never come there.”

That too Kemni let be. Time enough to hear it when he had
brought her to the king.

He appropriated a chariot from one of the men, and set Iry
in it with Iannek. Of necessity, Sadana rode with him. The horses followed: the
duns on their leads at the tail of Kemni’s chariot, the Mare free, but keeping
close.

There was much to think of, and much to remember. Kemni had
not seen the Mare so close before. She looked, at first glance and except for
her color, like a rather ordinary, rather heavy-bodied, short-legged mare of a
kind quite unlike the slender-legged stallions that the king had brought out of
Libya. And yet in motion she was splendid, a beauty to stop the heart.

She had eyes for no one but Iry. It was striking, that
intensity; fixed on her servant as if there were no one else in the world.

For the matter of that, the same could be said of the two
humans who followed his cousin. Iannek was as devoted to her as a dog to its
master. Sadana . . .

She had not spoken since she came in front of Kemni. When
Iannek took the second chariot as charioteer, Iry had got in as a matter of
course; and wisely enough, if he might think of escape. Kemni doubted that he
ever would.

That had left Sadana to ride with Kemni. She still had not
acknowledged him, even with a glance.

Was she angry, then? “I’m sorry,” he said as the chariot
left the field for the smoother surface of the road. “I’d not have left you
like that, if I could. But—”

“That’s what you were doing,” she said, abrupt as if she had
chosen to enter into the middle of a conversation. “You were spying.”

“Yes,” he said.

“You’re not a servant at all. I thought so. You put on too
many airs for a slave.”

“Not a few slaves in this kingdom have been born to rank and
station.”

“And what is yours?”

“Commander of the king’s chariots,” he answered, not without
pride. “King’s charioteer. But before I was that, I was heir to the Golden
Ibis, not far from the Sun Ascendant.”

“And her cousin.”

Kemni glanced at Iry. “Yes. Our mothers were sisters.”

“Where I come from,” said Sadana, “that would make you as
close as brother and sister, and bind you together from birth till death.”

“That’s almost true,” he said. “I used to run wild with her
brothers. She followed us when she could, though she was so much younger. She
was just the same then as she is now, only smaller.”

“I imagine she was a very self-possessed child,” Sadana said
coolly.

“She was that.” Kemni let the horses go on for a while. Then
he said, “You’re angry at me.”

“Why do you think that?”

“I left you.”

She laughed, a brief, sharp sound. “How like a man! So you
think that one night’s pleasure has made you the center of my world?”

“Not at all,” said Kemni. “But I never went back. And I
never spoke to you.”

“You had to go,” she said. “Spying.”

“Spying,” he said a little wearily. And something else, but
he was not about to speak to her of that. Iphikleia had been waiting for him.
He could hardly tell a woman that he had left her for another, or that he had
barely thought of her since, in the light of that other’s presence.

Sadana did not speak again. Nor did she touch him except as
the chariot’s motion compelled her.

He wondered if Iry had been able to find her a lover who
could stay with her and be gentle to her. Probably not. It had been a
ridiculous thing to ask, and impossible to accomplish. None but Sadana could
find a man who loved her. If Sadana did not want him, or did not want to find
him, then that was her choice.

She would hate him if she knew what he had asked Iry to do.
It smacked of pity, and of condescension. And she deserved neither.

He almost apologized again. But that would gain him nothing.
He drove in silence instead, back to the plain and the city, and the king in
his great camp amid the hammering of the siege-engines.

The gates had buckled. Soon they would fall. Kemni found the
king just behind the great ram, seated under a canopy with a flock of his lords
and generals, and a fair company of priests who had been invoking the gods’
names with each blow. They had, when Kemni came, run through the Ennead of the
Two Kingdoms and begun on the lesser deities.

Between the priests’ chanting and the thunder of the ram,
there was no lull in which to speak. But Ahmose did an unwonted thing: at
Kemni’s coming, he rose from his golden chair and walked on his own feet into
the sun, and bellowed in Kemni’s ear, “Come with me!”

Everyone was staring. It was a mark of enormous and potent
favor for a mere lord to be approached by the king. But Ahmose was taking no
notice. He led Kemni and his three guests or captives back to the relative
quiet of his tent. The gaggle of followers was shut out, and none admitted but
a single quiet servant.

There, in scented dimness, Ahmose said, “Well met, lady of
horses. Well met at last.”

Iry inclined her head. She seemed immune to the awe of
kingship. “You were expecting me, my lord?”

“I had a foreboding,” Ahmose said with the hint of a smile.
“And my Great Royal Wife . . . she is closer to the gods than
most. She told me that I might expect such a guest. And such an omen.”

“I suppose,” said Iry, “I am that.”

“The White Mare of the conquerors chooses for her priestess
a conquered Egyptian,” Ahmose said. “She suffers that Egyptian to return to her
own people. It might be said that she has, in so doing, shifted her favor from
the conquerors to the conquered.”

“It has been said,” Iry said, “and will be.”

“Then it must be true.” Ahmose’s smile escaped its bonds.
“Welcome indeed, then. Welcome in great joy.”

~~~

There was a great deal to be said for a god-king’s favor.
It won Iry and her two silent shadows a tent of their own, the best grazing for
their horses, servants to attend their needs, and unquestioning—if sometimes
teeth-gritted— acceptance from the king’s people.

It was, as Ahmose had said, a great omen. Greater for that,
even as he spoke with Iry in his tent, the ram broke down the gate of Sile. The
army was caught almost off guard. But they mustered quickly, formed their ranks
and took their weapons in hand and swarmed over the broken timbers into the
city.

City fighting had little room in it for chariots. But Kemni
had been a footsoldier long before he became a charioteer. He found a company
that would be glad to take him, under a commander he had known since he was a
boy. He stormed the city with the rest of them, in a kind of black delight. At
last—at last, reparation for all the years of servitude, for the victories
under Kamose that had turned in the end to defeat, for slavery and humiliation
and the conquest of the Two Lands by barbarians out of Asia.

They fought, and yes, they killed. The enemy fell back
before them. Kemni kept no count of the blows he struck, only of the steps of
his advance, street by street to the center and the citadel.

There he was halted, as they all were. The citadel was open.
Its commander had surrendered in fear of his life.

Kemni came to himself as if out of a dream. Surrender—terms—the
king!

He had not known he had strength in him to run through the
whole of that fallen city, through massed armies, past the broken gate and the
silenced siege-engines to the camp and the king.

None too soon, either. The king’s chariot was almost ready.
Iphikleia was standing by it with a jar that proved to be full of excellent
beer, and a basin and a heap of cloths.

With some, as he drained the jar, she cleansed him quickly
of dust and blood and sweat. The rest resolved itself into a fine new kilt
wrapped about his best ornaments and the wig he kept for festivals. She clucked
her tongue over wounds he had not even known he had, but they were scratches
only. They needed no tending.

The king was ready in his golden armor and his blue crown,
crook and flail held crosswise over his breast, and even the false beard that
he was seldom inclined to trouble with: all perfectly the Great House of Egypt.

Kemni sprang into the chariot and took up the reins. The
horses were fresh and a little headstrong. Kemni was hardly fresh at all, but
the beer had filled his parched and empty spaces, and Iphikleia’s cleansing—and
her presence, and the touch of her hands and, slyly, her lips—had roused him to
life again. He was as ready as he could be, to see the king borne in his
chariot to the citadel of Sile.

~~~

The commander of the garrison surrendered to the Great
House in the courtyard of the citadel. He was not the governor; that worthy was
still absent, and unlikely to return. This was his second-in-command, the man
who, Kemni was sure, had actually ruled the city in the governor’s name: a
gnarled and grizzled soldier, not tall for a Retenu but thickset and strong. He
neither wept nor quailed in front of the king. He handed over his sword with
regret but no hesitation, won freedom to gather his wounded and tend the dead,
and agreed—as if he could have argued with it—that once all that was done, he
would take his men and leave his weapons and withdraw into Canaan.

“On foot,” the king said. “Your chariots and your teams, we
keep.”

That was a blow: the commander flinched just visibly. But he
bowed his head. “Sire,” he said, “I can hardly resist you. But if you would
leave us enough pack-beasts to carry our baggage and our wounded—”