The Shepherd Kings (89 page)

Such division this war had wrought, and all because the Mare
had chosen a woman of the conquered people. Khayan could not bring himself to
regret the fault that was partly his, for letting himself be prevailed upon to
bring the young Mare into the west when word came that the old one was gone. It
was all as the gods had willed—pain as much as joy.

Sarai halted at the foot of the dais as the guards drew back
on either side. She went down in full reverence. Behind her, all the great
ladies did as she did, however stiffly and unwillingly some chose to do it. It
was as graceful as barley rippling in the wind.

Ahmose inclined his head, a great concession to the captives
of war. “My lady,” he said to Sarai. “Rise and face me.”

She obeyed without servility, rising as a dancer might, or a
warrior. Perhaps she expected that he would ask her to unveil, but he did not
do that. He said to her, “You ask leave to depart. If I grant it, where will
you go?”

“North, great king,” she answered, “into Canaan.”

“You do understand that I will pursue your king?”

“I would expect it,” she said calmly.

“It may serve you to travel with us for a while, if your
companions can endure such speed as we will make.”

Her head lifted a fraction, as if her back had stiffened. “Great
king, I offer no insult, but if we travel with your army, will we not be
captives of it?”

“Say rather that we would be your escort, and that when we
found your king and his people, we would surrender you with full honor. That I
swear to you by my crown and my kingship.”

“That is a great oath,” she said after a pause. “Still,
great king—”

“If you travel apart from us,” Ahmose said, “I can promise
you no safety. I can assure you that you will come to your people late, and
find them perhaps defeated, and certainly embattled.”

“Then you will leave soon,” she said, as if she had not
expected that.

“On the morrow’s morrow,” Ahmose said, “I go. My queens will
do what it is needed for the securing of these kingdoms. For my honor and my
office, I must assure that the Two Lands are never again invaded and never
again conquered. That duty, my gods have laid on me.”

“So they have,” she said, “great king. Very well. On your
oath and for our protection, we will accept what you offer. If, which the gods
forbid, our men are overwhelmed and taken before we can be given back to them,
will you swear me another oath? Will you set us free to find our kin in
Canaan?”

That was great presumption, but Khayan would have expected
no less. Nor, it seemed, would Ahmose. His eyes glinted within their mask of
paint, as he inclined his head.

Sarai bowed low once more. “You are indeed a great king,”
she said, “and a great prince of this world.”

~~~

“And not of the next?”

Iry had lingered only briefly once the ladies of the Retenu
had left the hall. Khayan should have expected that she would follow them,
would wait a little while till they could settle again for the last night but
one in the queens’ chambers of the citadel. Then she went as she had gone so
often, to the rooms that were Sarai’s.

As with the hall of audience, Khayan was not asked or
expected to remain in her shadow, but he could not bring himself to stay away.
It was like a boil: he must lance the whole of it, or see no end to the pain.

Sarai was overseeing the preparations to depart, although
there was a full day yet, and clearly she had been ready for some time. It was
something to do, he supposed: a means to keep the women occupied, and therefore
less inclined to succumb to hysterics.

She greeted Iry as if they had never been parted, and Khayan
with a glance, no more—but also no less. In that brief flicker she set all that
he needed to know, and all that she would give him: every gift, every blessing.

She sat with Iry in a small chamber that had been cleared of
every personal thing, though it remained rather richly furnished. There was
wine. There was bread, and a pot of honey. Khayan declined them, but Iry
professed to be hungry. She ate and drank with her wonted composure.

Sarai shared with her a cup of wine, sipping it slowly.
Here, the veils were gone. Her face was much as always; somewhat thinner
perhaps, and somewhat paler, but as strong as ever.

“You really will go?” Iry asked her after a while.

She nodded. “It’s time,” she said.

“All the way, then? Back to the tribes?”

“Yes,” Sarai said.

Iry sighed a little. “I wish you might stay.”

That perhaps startled Sarai, though not Khayan: her eyes
widened slightly. “Why would you wish that?”

“To teach me,” she said. “To be mother to your children.”

“My children are men and women grown. And you,” said Sarai,
“have gone past me.”

Iry shook her head with a look Khayan knew well: lips tight,
long eyes narrowed. “I had only begun my lessons with you.”

“Everything I taught you, you can continue, or my children
can teach. I should like to see my kin again, and ride the wide sea of grass,
and sleep under the sky.”

Iry bowed to that perforce. But she had not given up yet.
Surrender was not a thing Iry knew the meaning of. “You could go, and stay for
a while, and then come back.”

“I think not,” Sarai said almost gently. “When I go, I go to
live out my life, and then to die. I have no desire to wither in the sands of
Egypt, or to rot in these fens. I would have a clean death, and a long sleep
under the grass.”

“Did you hate Egypt so much?” Iry asked her.

“No,” she said firmly. “No, I did not. I could say that I
loved it. But it was never home to me. You understand that, child. You better
than any, how Egypt may welcome guests, but if they seek to claim it for
themselves, it turns and casts them out.”

“But your children—”

“My younger children were born here. My elder daughter is a
daughter of the steppe.” Sarai paused, caught by Iry’s expression. “What, you
never knew? Yes, Maryam was born among the tribes. She came with me when she
was very young, when the Mare before yours chose her servant and brought her
into Egypt. I was chosen, too, though not to be the Mare’s chief servant.”

“And when you came here, you were given to a lord of the
Retenu.” Iry spoke slowly, as if she needed to understand.

“I gave myself,” Sarai said. “I chose him. He was beautiful
then, and kind. His heir is very like him.”

Khayan flushed.

They laughed at him, but not too cruelly. “So,” Iry said
when the laughter had died, “you will go. I pray you come there safe, and live
long under your eastern stars.”

Sarai bowed low, lower than she ever had to a king. “From
you,” she said, “such a prayer is a thing of great power.”

There was a silence. Iry rose after a while and wandered
off.

Which left Khayan alone with his mother. He was sure that
was their intention—both of them. Women were always conspiring in ways that men
could not understand. Sometimes he was certain that they spoke from mind to
mind, without the interference of mere words.

Sarai regarded him as she often had, with a clear, measuring
gaze. When he was younger he had wondered what she found lacking. Now he was a
man, he still wondered that, but it mattered less. Whatever his failings, she
was gracious enough to forgive them.

“Come here, child,” she said.

He came as she asked, and sat at her feet. She smoothed his
cropped hair and brushed her fingers across his shaven cheek. He shivered
lightly. The wind no longer felt so strange, or his head so light, shorn of its
weight of hair; but at her touch, he remembered vividly how it had been when
first he stood naked before the world.

“My beautiful child,” she said. “You know we’ll never meet
again.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t. I lived in the east. What’s to
prevent me from going back?”

“Why, nothing,” said Sarai. “But I am not young, and you are
very young. And there is much to do in Egypt.”

He opened his mouth to deny that, but he was too
clear-sighted: her gift from the womb, and a curse of sorts. “In Crete,” he
said instead, “they say that the tide of years bears all things away, and
seldom brings them back. I wish that were not so.”

“As do I,” Sarai said. She would never break and weep; that
was not her way. But her eyes were suspiciously bright. “You give me great
pride, my child.”

“Even as I am?”

“Chosen of the Mare’s chosen. You will be a prince again,
Khayan. The stars have told me.”

“I was going to say it doesn’t matter,” he said after a
moment, “but I find it does. I’m male enough for that.”

Her smile had a hint of wickedness that reminded him oddly
of Iry. “You are male enough for any purpose.”

His face flamed again, as it had a habit of doing. She laid
her cool palms against it, and tilted it up till he could not but meet her
gaze. “I give you no wisdom,” she said, “and no advice, either. Except this.
Love her, Khayan. Simply love her.”

“And remember you?”

“If your heart desires.”

“My heart. . .” His throat was tight; he had to force the
words through it. “My heart will grieve to see you gone—but be glad, too,
because you’ve gone home.”

“You always were too wise to be a man.” She set a kiss on
his brow and on each cheek and on his lips. “May the goddess love you and keep
you for her own.”

Ahmose the king rode in pursuit of the fallen enemy,
leaving behind him Nefertari the Great Royal Wife and Ariana the queen and his
allies from Crete; and a great force that had gathered of lords and commons
from the Lower Kingdom. Those would restore the wreck of the storm and the
wreck of the war: a mighty undertaking, mightier than the closing and barring
of the gates of Egypt against the invaders from Canaan, but no more or less
vital to the life of the Two Lands.

Before Ahmose departed, he did three things that would be
remembered. He crowned himself with the Two Crowns. He took again to wife
Ariana of Crete with as much pomp and ceremony as haste and war would allow.
And he gave Iry the lands and lordship of the Sun Ascendant, and bade her raise
horses there, to draw his chariots. With the Bull of Re in the Upper Kingdom,
it would give him a great weapon for all his wars hereafter.

He rode away in a chariot, but Kemni was not his charioteer.
Kemni had walked away from the battle in, he thought, as splendid health as
could be expected, and passed much of that day in the aftermath of battle. But
near sunset he had fallen over.

He did not remember that, or much of the hour before it.
When he woke again, he was in the citadel of Avaris in the rooms of a prince,
and Imhotep the king’s physician was bending over him. So, and more to his
surprise, was the warrior woman Sadana.

At first they did not seem to see that he was awake. They
were frowning at one another as if they had been quarrelling.

“Of course you know nothing of that herb!” she snapped in
her accented Egyptian. “It grows on the steppes of Asia. It gives dreams and
visions, but it also gives healing.”

“And it can kill,” Imhotep said through gritted teeth.
“That, I have heard. You hinted at it yourself.”

“Not in this infusion. And not as I will give it. Can you
put aside your arrogance for one moment, and admit that maybe—
maybe
—there are things you do not know?”

“There are a thousand things I do not know. Medicine is not
among them.”

“The medicine of Egypt. This is not of Egypt. I will give it
to him. Now stand aside.”

Imhotep stood his ground. Sadana raised a hand.

Kemni stirred and tried to speak. Nothing came out but a
strangled grunt.

It was enough. They stared at him, their quarrel forgotten.
He stared back. Words were there, if his tongue would shape them. It felt thick
and unwieldy in his mouth. “I want—I must—where—”

“Thank the gods!” Imhotep said.

But Sadana’s expression did not lighten. “Look at his eyes.
He’s all addled.” She slipped in past Imhotep, cradled Kemni’s head in her arm,
and poured into him a vial of liquid fire.

He gasped and choked. She held his mouth shut till he must
swallow or drown. The potion went down as it had gone in, in a stream of
searing heat.

He lay breathing hard, head and heart pounding alike. But
his thoughts had stopped jangling and steadied. “What in the name of the gods—”

“Something to help you heal,” she said.

“And make me dream?”

“It might.”

He groaned and shut his eyes. Of all the things she could
have given him, he needed dreams the least.

But the fiery stuff had cleared his head, and even, after a
while, made it stop aching. They were both still there, still watching him, as
if they feared that he would die between one breath and the next.

“I’m not as badly hurt as that,” he said to them.

“You had a blow to the head,” Imhotep said, “that came near
to splitting your skull. The king has informed me that if you fail to recover,
my skull will be split in its turn. You are wonderfully dear to the king.”

“Gods know why,” Kemni muttered.

“Everyone loves your pretty face,” Sadana said.

~~~

However that might be, Kemni stood by the gate when the king
departed, leaning on a support which happened, just then, to be Sadana’s large
and amiable brother Iannek. Ahmose had been most clear. Kemni was not to go. He
had been wounded and was still barely able to stand.

The king would drive out the Retenu, hunt them all the way
into their own country, and take it if he could. He was bent on revenge. But he
had not forgotten the kingdoms he left behind him in the care of his queens.

“When you are well,” he had said to Kemni before he mounted
his chariot, “I have a task for you. Will you be my master of horse?”

Kemni was still addled, after all. He could only stare and
say, “Master of horse? But—”