The Shepherd Kings (50 page)

Kemni had been rather appalled. But if that was all Sadana
had known . . . “No wonder you’re so angry,” he said.

She was tight, closed in on herself: worse even than before.
He regretted that he had said anything. Although he knew that she would clench
against him, he brushed her breast lightly, lightly with his finger. The nipple
tightened. She shuddered just visibly.

A terrible thought came to him. It must have come from a
god, or from a dark spirit creeping about in the shadows behind the light.
Iphikleia had told him of that, too: how a woman could learn to hate a man’s
loving, to shrink from it even when she longed for it.

It could not be true, surely. Sadana was a strong woman, a
warrior, a rider and a hunter. She knew the arts of bow and spear and sword.
What man would venture—what man would dare—

A man might, if he were of a certain kind. If strength in a
woman offended him, if he could only endure it by breaking and destroying it—he
well might.

“Someone forced you,” he said slowly. “Someone tried to
break you. You’ve never been loved as a woman should be loved. You’ve only
been—”

She fell on him without warning, without sound. Even naked
and unarmed, she was a strong adversary, and dangerous. He did nothing to stop
her, only guarded himself against her blows. They were hard and they were
strong. They rained on his head and his uplifted arms.

Just as he began to fear that she would batter him down, she
stopped. Abruptly, breathing hard, breath sobbing in her throat. Her face was
stark white. He had never seen such eyes as hers were then, not even in a
falcon gone mad in confinement.

“Sadana,” he said: knowing that her name could send her into
madness indeed, but trusting—praying—that it would touch the true heart of her.

Names were power. She blinked. She came back, a little, to
herself. She stared at him as if he were an utter stranger.

“Sadana,” he said again. Her head shook a fraction. But he
had done it. He had touched her. “Sadana,” he said a third time.

She struck him, one hard, backhanded blow. He dropped like a
stone.

She stood over him. He lay with ringing ears and throbbing
cheek. “How dare you,” she said in a terrible voice. “How dare you know me?”

He had no answer for that.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, someone tried to break me. Someone
thought he succeeded. I never told anyone. Not even my mother—not even my
sister. And above all, not my brother. How could you know? How could you see?
What are you?
”

That he could answer, but he did not choose to. She dragged
him to his feet. He staggered, but she held him up. She was little smaller than
he, and nigh as strong. “It was a man in the court. A man the king loved, a
great power in the kingdom. He laid an ambush for me. He fell on me, and did—did
what he pleased with me. That would teach me, he said. That would show me what
the gods think of a woman who rides and fights like a man.”

She had never told anyone. Of course she had not. Her
brothers would have wanted to kill the one who did it, but they would have
punished her, too, for the dishonor to their family. She would have gained
nothing, and lost all the pride she had left.

“You killed him yourself,” he said.

“They thought one of his enemies had caught him,” she said.
“I killed him with his own sword. I hewed his head from his shoulders. I hacked
off the organs that had violated me, and fed them to him, dead as he was. They
said it must have been someone whose wife or sister or daughter he had
dishonored—for he was a great raper of women, that one. They never thought that
it might have been one of those women.”

The words had flooded out of her. When she stopped, she was
breathing hard, as if she had run a race. Her eyes on him were wild. “What are
you? Are you a magician? What spell have you laid on me?”

“No spell,” he said gently. “I’m only a man. I have no arts
or powers.”

“You have great arts,” she said. “Tell me who taught you!”

“Women,” he said. “They’re like horses, you know. Gentle
them, they come sweetly to hand. Beat them, they fight back. Ride them as they
best like to be ridden, and they give joy in return.”

“Your people know nothing of horses,” she said.

“I learned,” said Kemni—daring perhaps too much, but she was
intent on him. “Horses are new in this country, but women have been here for
many times a thousand years.”

“Our men know horses, but they know nothing of women.”

“The more fools they,” Kemni said.

She reached to touch him: a great thing for her, and a gift.
Her hand was cold and a little unsteady. “What if I want to keep you? What will
you do?”

His belly clenched. “My lady might object to that,” he said.

“I’ll ask her to give you to me.”

“And if she refuses?”

Her lips went tight. “She has everything, doesn’t she? Every
good thing.”

“Don’t hate her for it,” he said.

“I hate her with all my heart,” said Sadana. “But she is the
Mare’s servant, the priestess, Horse Goddess’ own. Never think I’d harm her.
Never even dream of it.”

“I didn’t think you would,” he said. “You have great honor.
And great beauty. I pray you find yourself a lover you can keep.”

“Will you refuse me, then, if I ask again?”

That was the first utterance he had ever heard from her,
that was empty of anger. There was only longing in it, and a touch of sadness.

“While I can,” he said to that sadness, “while my lady
allows, I’ll never refuse you.”

“Every night?”

“Unless she needs me.”

Sadana did not like that, but neither did she let slip her
temper. She could accept what she could not change. And she could recognize a
gift when it was given. How great a one it was, that perhaps she could not
know. But she had no need to know.

“What in the gods’ name did you do to her?”

They had left that house at last, ridden out at dawn in
their train of carts and chariots and people afoot, making their somewhat
leisurely way toward Avaris. Iry had the luxury of private conversation with
Kemni, since he was her charioteer.

He seemed much as always, but Sadana had been riding like one
in a dream. She kept pausing—and almost smiling. And that was unheard of.

“What did you do?” Iry demanded. “Did you lay a spell on
her?”

“She asked me that, too,” Kemni said. He was very busy with
the horses, though they were quiet, offering no impudence.

“So did you?”

“I have no magic,” he said. “I told her that.”

“Did she believe you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing at all extraordinary,” he answered with a touch of
impatience. “Except to her. She didn’t know a man could be gentle. Could give
her pleasure.”

Iry heard what he had not quite said. Her breath hissed
between her teeth. “So they’ll even do it to their own.”

“Have they done it to you?”

She smiled faintly at his leap to her defense. “No, of
course not. Not, sometimes, for lack of trying. But I was in my own house. I
knew the ways better than those invaders did. And Mother protected me, before—”

“Before the Mare came.”

She let that suffice. She had meant to say, before Khayan
came; but they were the same. More or less. Maybe.

“I’m glad you were safe,” he said. “These men, they’re
brutal.”

“Not all of them.”

“Enough,” he said.

He was angry. He hid it well, but his shoulders were tight,
and his lips. Strange for a man to care what other men did to women. He must
have had teaching of a sort that few men ever had. And from where?

“You went to Crete,” she said.

He glanced at her. “How did you come to that conclusion?”

“Would you understand if I told you?”

“Probably not.”

He probably would, but she was not inclined to go to war
with him over anything so small. “That’s where you’ve been, isn’t it? The
Retenu say Cretans are strange people, old people, who’ve been there for long
and long.”

“They’re kin to the eastern horsemen,” Kemni said. “Long ago
and far distant, but they worship the same goddess. Women rule them. They
remember, dimly, when they were all one, before some went away and heard the
call of the sea. Sea of water, sea of grass—it’s much the same in the end. Even
ships and horses, they told me.”

“You went there for the king.” She found that pleasing,
somehow. He was her cousin. He had risen in the world—higher, she thought, than
he might seem, as he played charioteer in a foreign lord’s following.

“He needed someone quiet, who could do what needed to be
done, and keep the secret from those who might betray it.” Kemni glanced about.
Iry knew already that there was no one near. The leaders were well ahead, the
bulk of the procession well behind. The Mare ran between, white tail streaming.
She had been fending them all off, granting Iry this freedom to say whatever
she pleased.

The Mare, as Iry had been thinking more often of late, had
intentions that the Retenu would not like at all if they knew. In choosing an
Egyptian, it seemed she had chosen Egypt. She had encouraged this, and not so
that Iry might betray her own kin.

Maybe the gods of Egypt had made common cause with the
goddess who lived in the Mare. The conquerors were not horsemen, after all.
They were donkey caravaneers, whose chosen beasts of burden were long-eared
asses. Horses were rare among them. But Egyptians—some of them at least—found
in themselves a potent fascination with horses. Kemni had it, Iry had it. Pepi
and the boys he had brought into the stables—they all had it.

What a thought, that Egypt could take horses from the
conqueror, and conquer him with them. It made her smile.

“Listen,” she said to Kemni, “when you go . . .
back there, tell him there’s one here who may find ways to help.”

“I’ll tell him that,” Kemni said. “If you would do something
in return.”

“If I can,” she said.

“Sadana,” he said. “She needs gentleness, and a man she can
trust. I can’t stay for her. Once I come to Avaris, I’ll be called to what I
should have been doing long since. Can you help? Will you?”

Iry had had no expectations, but this— “You want me to
procure a lover for Sadana?”

He flushed faintly under the bronzing of wind and sun. “You
don’t have to be that blunt. Just . . . help her find someone to
be gentle to her.”

“In
Avaris
?”

“Maybe the lord knows someone. Or your other guardsman.”

“Kemni,” Iry said with great and careful patience, “can you
honestly imagine that I would ask men of the Retenu to find a lover for their
own sister?”

“They might surprise you.”

“Khayan might,” Iry admitted. “But I think not. I can try to
do this, somehow, if you insist. I can’t promise to succeed.”

“If you try, it will be enough.”

“Well then,” Iry said with a sigh. “I’ll try. Because you
ask it, mind. And because she is easier to endure when she’s less tight-drawn
upon herself.”

“Good,” Kemni said. “Good. The gods will love you for this.”

“I only hope they won’t hate me,” said Iry.

~~~

They came to Avaris in the morning, having camped for the
night not far outside of it. The walls seemed low in the wet shimmer of the
Delta’s heat, but as they drew closer, the city loomed larger, till it showed
itself both lofty and forbidding.

It was a fortress, a strong holding within a conquered
country. And it was vast. It was the greatest city in the world, the Retenu
boasted. Larger than Thebes, larger than Byblos or Tyre, larger than Ur or
Babylon. Larger than any of them, and vaunting in its strength.

It stood on the eastern edge of a tangled skein of river and
land, on that branch of the great river of Egypt which flowed toward Pelusium
in the east of the Lower Kingdom. It guarded the eastward gate of the kingdom,
and stood athwart the best of the ways on both water and land, both to and from
the sea. Its harbor was crowded with ships. Its walls were packed tight with
houses, men living on top of one another, spreading out where they could, but
clinging to their walls and defenses.

So dense were the throngs living within, Iry had been told,
that the dead had no place of their own. Any who died in that city was buried
in the court of his house. How his kin and descendants bore it, Iry did not
know. At night, when the dead walked, the city must be even more crowded than
in the light of day.

Khayan’s caravan of chariots and carts and servants on foot,
with or without laden donkeys, was granted the privilege of the processional
way, the wide street that directed itself toward the loom of Baal’s temple and
the lesser and battlemented loom of the king’s palace. Lesser folk kept that
way clear, so that high ones could come and go unhindered. Iry could see the
common people down side ways and in sudden squares, a seething throng of them,
like an anthill opened suddenly to the sun.

So many people. And so many Retenu. The few Egyptian faces
that she saw belonged to ragged and sharp-boned creatures who must be slaves,
or even beggars. Though why any child of the Lower Kingdom would wish to beg in
Avaris, she could not imagine.

Kemni was motionless beside her, except for such movement as
the chariot or the horses forced upon him. She felt the tension thrumming in
him. As steaming hot as the air was, and reeking with it, his body’s warmth was
not entirely welcome, but she was glad of his presence nonetheless. She needed
an Egyptian face amid these alien walls. Already they were closing in upon her,
and she had not even come to the great fortress and prison that was the palace.

She came terribly close to ripping the reins from Kemni’s
hands, turning the chariot about, and bolting back the way she had come. But
even apart from the fact that the bulk of the lord’s following filled the road
behind, she was not enough of a coward—not prudent enough, or sensible enough.
If she had been, she would have refused to leave the Sun Ascendant at all.