The Shepherd Kings (25 page)

Jerubaal did not stand on ceremony with the man whom he had
first known as a naked, toddling child. It was he who had caught the very young
Khayan on the day he decided, all on his own and eluding his nurses, to visit
the horses. Khayan had gone in among the mares and played for a long while with
the foals, and fallen asleep with his head on the shoulder of an equally tired
colt. The first face he had seen when he woke was Jerubaal’s, younger then and
much less grey, but as narrow and humorous as ever. “So, little prince,” the
man had said then. “Chosen your stallion already, have you?”

Today, a good score of years since, Jerubaal sat beside
Khayan and poured himself a cup of wine. He would have been in the stable at
this time of day, when it was too hot to work the horses: mending harness,
trimming hooves, grooming horses. He seemed glad enough to have been called
away; he did not ask why, nor trouble Khayan with chatter. Like his horses, he
had the art of silence.

Khayan basked in it for a while, sipping the last of his
wine and regretting, somewhat, that last honeyed cake. He was almost sorry to
have to break the silence; but the day was slipping away. “So,” he said, soft
in the stillness. “Tell me about the Mare.”

“Ah,” said Jerubaal. He took his time with the rest of it,
savoring a sip of wine, a spiced nut. “So. You saw.”

“I saw,” Khayan said. “Who is she?”

Jerubaal shrugged. “Gods know. Not one of ours.”

“I think you know,” Khayan said.

“Well,” said Jerubaal. He toyed with his cup, turning it in
his long gnarled fingers. “She’s a slave in this house, but time was when she
was a lady in it. She’s the rebel’s daughter—the old lord who was killed
fighting for the southern king.”

“Is she?” Khayan did not trouble to berate himself, but he
paused to be rueful. He should have discovered who the girl was the day he came
here, when he found her the center of so much attention. Of course a mere
slavegirl would not be granted the gift of the Lady Nefertem’s regard.

“Jerubaal,” Khayan said, out of that thought. “Is she the
daughter of the woman who fancies herself lady here?”

“So I’ve been told,” said Jerubaal. Which meant that he had
discovered it to be the truth.

Khayan sat back against the cool stone of the wall, running
fingers through his beard, tugging at it. The small pain kept him on edge;
helped him to think. “Does my lady mother know?” he asked at length.

“Not from me,” Jerubaal answered.

Perhaps therefore she knew it from no one. And surely, if
she had, he would have known it. “When did you first see her with the Mare?”

Jerubaal frowned, counting on his fingers. “Well, my lord.
Four—no, five days ago. She came wandering in among the horses, scared half out
of her wits but walking like a woman bewitched. The Mare found her.”

Khayan sat bolt upright. “The Mare? The
Mare
found
her
?”

Jerubaal nodded. He poured another cup and drank it down, as
if he needed what courage was in the wine. “She came to the horses, but I’d
wager it was a summons. The Mare went right up to her, touched her and herded
her where the Mare had in mind to go. She didn’t have the look of one who does
such a thing of her own will.”

“Was she afraid?”

“No,” said Jerubaal. “Not of the Mare.”

“The Mare called her,” Khayan murmured. “Gods. My mother is
going to be appalled.”

“It is irregular,” Jerubaal said.

“Irregular.” Khayan snorted. “It’s absolutely unheard of.
This is an
Egyptian
.”

“So what will you do about it?”

“I don’t know.” Khayan sprang to his feet, unable to bear
another moment’s stillness. He paced in and out of the sun, from welcome shade
to searing blaze and back again.

“This is a women’s thing,” Jerubaal said from the sanctuary
of the arbor. “Why not leave it to the women?”

He spoke wisdom, as he usually did. But Khayan was oddly
reluctant to do the thing that would free him from the whole affair. He had
done as his mother had asked; he had inquired of the Mare, and received an
answer. He had only to send word to her, and the rest was in her hands.

So simple. And so difficult. He stopped and spun. “Tell no
one of this until I give you leave. See that your men do the same. Will you do
that for me?”

“For you,” said Jerubaal, “I’ll do it.”

Khayan nodded. Jerubaal drained his cup of wine, belched
appreciatively, and took his leave.

Khayan lingered, though the day was dwindling. He had never
kept a secret from his mother before, or from any woman.

It was strange. It might anger Earth Mother. But not, he
thought, Horse Goddess.

She had her reasons. What those were, were not for a mere
man to know.

But he could certainly do his best to discover them.

~~~

In the morning Khayan rose before dawn, harnessed his
horses with his own hands, and slipped out through a gate guarded only by a
yawning young recruit. The recruit leaped to attention when the guttering torch
showed him his lord’s face, but Khayan bade him be at ease.

It was almost cool at this hour, when the stars had just
begun to fade, and the very first of the light woke on the eastern horizon. The
Egyptians had a god for this most mysterious of hours, the god of the first
dawn: Khepera, Ra of the Horizon, who wore the face of the dung beetle, rolling
the burning ball of the sun into the sky.

The earth was waking about him: birds calling, fish leaping,
a riverhorse bellowing from the middle of the river, echoing over the water. He
thought then and poignantly of first dawn among his mother’s people, wind in
the sea of grass, and a clear eerie voice rising over it: the Mother of the
tribe, waking first as she did every morning, and going out to sing the sun
into the sky.

Her song came to him as he drove his horses into the waking
morning, words so old that all meaning was forgotten, and music ancient beyond
human memory. He could not sing it aloud—that would be blasphemy. But it hummed
through him. It sang in the reins, in the lightness with which his stallions
took their bits, and caught the rhythm of the wheels over the uneven ground.

The horses were in their morning clusters, grazing where dew
had fallen. He found the Mare’s people down near the river, and the Mare
grazing with a handful of her sisters. The youngest of those was a still a
yearling and inclined toward silliness, but the rest forbore to encourage her.

Khayan hid his chariot in a bed of reeds, unharnessed his
stallions and hobbled them apart from the herds. They would do well enough, if
Horse Goddess was kind.

He had brought wherewithal for a day of lying in ambush, but
of weapons only his short sword and his bow and quiver. He was not hunting to
kill. Simply to see what he might see.

~~~

She came just at full morning, striding as all these
Egyptians did, even on the pavements of palaces: the gait of a people who had
trusted to their own feet from the dawn of the world. Among Khayan’s people,
only the lowest walked so; and among his mother’s people none did at all. They
were all riders and charioteers.

Now that he knew who she was, he tried to see something of
her mother in her. Apart from slenderness and a certain grace, which most
Egyptians had, there was little. She was good to look at in her way, but not as
the Lady Nefertem was—not a glorious and luminous beauty. She favored her
father, perhaps.

She was rather unexceptional, truth be told. A girl or young
woman of the conquered people, naked and sleek as a fish, with a blue bead on a
string about her middle, and painted eyes. And yet as she came, all the Mare’s
people lifted their heads, and some whickered, welcoming her. She stroked necks
and shoulders and rumps as she passed through them, fearless of them as she was
not of other horses. Them she knew. Them she trusted.

The Mare waited for her on the herd’s edge, too proud to
mingle with her sisters and aunts and cousins. The girl seemed unsurprised by
that. They met somewhat as lovers meet, in a kind of breathlessness.

The Mare lowered nose into the girl’s palm. The girl rested
her head against the Mare’s neck. And so they stayed, for a while, until the
Mare remembered herself and went back to her grazing.

Khayan watched them the whole morning long. They did nothing
of great interest, nothing wild or striking or magical. They lingered in each
other’s company, that was all.

At noon, as the sun touched the zenith, the girl bade the
Mare a reluctant farewell, and walked back over field and hill to the house.
She had never seen or sensed Khayan at all, though the Mare was well aware of
him. The girl lacked a hunter’s instinct, or a horse’s. She was a simple mortal
woman, that was all. Nothing more, if nothing less.

~~~

Still he did not seek out his mother, or his sisters either.
He was outraged, that was it. Appalled, and somewhat blackly amused. For the
Mare to choose a foreigner, that was unheard of. But such a foreigner. No
beauty, no brilliance, no royalty of lineage. Her ancestors had never known the
Mare’s people, had never known horses at all.

In the evening he asked that the Lady Nefertem’s daughter
wait on him. The one whom he asked, one of the understewards, rolled his eyes
rather like a startled horse, but did not muster the courage to contest his
lord’s command.

The girl, however, was another matter. When the wine came round,
she who brought it was a lissome Egyptian beauty, but she was not the one who
went out every morning to keep company with the Mare.

Khayan endured the daymeal with less than his usual patience.
Nor was he assisted by the boisterousness of his brother’s following. They had
got at the wine well before they came into the hall, having mounted a raid on
the storeroom that would not, he swore grimly to himself, be repeated. Those
who fell over face-first in the roast duck were bearable. The rest bade fair to
raise a riot.

Khayan left them to their folly—and bade the guards secure
the entrances. Any that had in mind to wander off would find himself confined
till morning. Or perhaps even longer, if Khayan happened to forget that he had
shut the lot of them in the hall. With, he could not help but note, a dwindling
supply of wine, but enough bread and meat to sustain them for a respectable
while.

Maybe he would simply leave them there. It would be
inconvenient for banquets, but for peace in the house, it well might be worth
the sacrifice.

~~~

A lord did not usually make it his business to know every
cranny of his house. But Khayan was not the usual sort of lord. He knew where
the servants slept, and where they took what ease their duties left them. It
was a useful thing to know when one was lord of a conquered country.

The girl, whose name, he had discovered, was Iry, had a room
of her own. It was tiny and airless and boasted few comforts, but it signified
much. A mere serving girl should not have her own place—no more than a fallen
lord’s wife should rule over the women’s house as she had done when her husband
was alive. They were all rebels here, subtle but unmistakable.

He brought a lamp with him from the hall to illumine the
darkened passages. As much as he knew of the house, he had not walked often in
the servants’ corridors. They were narrow and dark, and their walls were of
plain mudbrick without adornment. No march of painted Egyptians here, no beasts
or birds or thickets of papyrus, no strange-faced gods watching over those who
passed. When a door stood open, the light of his lamp showed a bare box of a
room, and sometimes a huddle of bodies in it, servants sleeping in a heap like
puppies, men together or women together or, once or twice, a man and a woman
wound in one another’s arms.

He trod silently as a hunter will. He had left his robe
outside the hall, and kept only the tunic beneath. His feet were bare. He
stalked his quarry to its lair, and found it—waiting?

Sitting on a bed that, though utterly without elegance, was
more than most servants could claim. A lamp burned on a table beside the bed.
She looked like one of the images that Egyptians so loved to set in tombs:
cross-legged and utterly still, with eyes as dark and flat as stones.

He paused in the doorway. The room was tiny; if he entered
it, he would fill it. She regarded him in silence, with neither surprise nor
fear.

He saw then how she was like her mother. She had that same
air of pride that nothing could break, and obstinacy that nothing could shift.
Whatever she did, she did of her own choice. No one had ever compelled her, or
ever truly would.

He smiled faintly. Indeed; how like the Mare.

It was still an outrage. He glared at her. She stared coolly
back. “You were not in hall tonight,” he said.

She did not speak. Her shoulder lifted just visibly: the
suggestion of a shrug.

“Are you not my slave?” he demanded of her.

“I do not choose to be,” she said.

“Have you always been so defiant?”

“No,” she said.

“Then why?”

Another shrug, a little clearer this time. “You’re softer
than your father was,” she said.

“You think so?”

“He’d have had me brought to him by force, and made me kneel
and beg his pardon.”

“Ah,” said Khayan. “I did think of that. But it’s such a
usual thing for a lord to do. I try not to do the usual.”

“You are soft,” she said.

“And you are your mother’s child.” He paused. “I gave her to
my mother. What would you do if I did the same to you?”

She neither paled nor flinched. “I would do whatever seemed
wise.”

“Even if that were to serve her?”

“I might,” she said. Her head tilted. “Are you going to take
me before you send me there?”

“Why? Do you want me to?”

For the first time he saw a flicker of emotion. What it was,
he could not be sure, but there was no mistaking it. Had he startled her?
Amused her? Even dismayed her? “You are a strange man,” she said.