The Shepherd Kings (67 page)

“Why? Is Crete contemplating treachery?”

“Of course not,” she said, nor did she seem offended. “But
we have our own ways and our own gods. They’ll listen to me where they’d argue
with your king.”

“I hope he believes that,” said Kemni.

“Are you going to drag us in front of him tonight?”

Kemni would dearly have loved to, but after all he had a
little sense. “Not tonight,” he said, “but sooner than Sile. He’d best know
where you are before he begins the battle.”

“Why? So that we can distract him?”

“So that he can keep you safe.” Kemni sank down to a floor
that was rather richly carpeted—part of the concealing baggage, he supposed—and
took a moment to simply stare at his queen and her priestess. Iphikleia seemed
determined to ignore him. Why she should be angry at him, when she had
deliberately flouted the king’s own command, Kemni could not imagine. It was a
woman’s thing, surely. It was always a woman’s thing.

But there was a man’s thing amid all this, an affair of
Kemni’s own command. He fixed Seti with a hard stare. “You have earned yourself
a whipping for this,” he said grimly.

Seti winced, but he shrugged. “So I have, my lord. May I ask
that you be a little gentle? You do need me to keep your charioteers in order.”

“There is nothing gentle about the rod,” Kemni said.

“A few strokes,” said Seti, “for those I’ve earned—but the
men will want to know why. Surely you won’t—”

Clever, wicked Seti. Of course the men would ask why their
commander had flogged his second with right and proper severity; and if Kemni
answered, he would betray the women. Which he should very properly do, but he
knew that he would not.

So too did they. Ariana smiled at him. Iphikleia turned her
eyes upon him at last, and that warmed him even more than Ariana’s smile. He
should not be so easily subdued, but there was no help for it. No hope, either.
Nor could there ever be. He was too utterly hers.

Iry had thought her time in Avaris would be brief, but it
seemed that once the king had got hold of a thing he was reluctant to let it
go. Khayan and Iry between them delighted him immoderately. They were, Iry
realized, favorites.

She would much have preferred to be disliked intensely—for
if she had been, she would have been sent away long since. As it was, she was
trapped here in this great mountain of worked stone, in the palace of the
conqueror king.

She had not even the solace of the Mare. The Mare, like any
sensible creature, had refused to enter either city or fortress. She was
somewhere amid the fields and marshes of the Lower Kingdom, waiting for Iry to
be freed from this captivity.

There was some diversion at least in remembering her promise
to Kemni to find a lover for Sadana. Iry was no courtier, least of all of this
court, but as the Mare’s priestess and the king’s favorite, she could go
wherever she pleased. If that was to walk among the young men at their drinking
and fighting and dancing, so be it. She might have gone among them at their
whoring, but they were too shy for that.

She had no honest expectation of finding what she looked
for. Sadana was not likely to thank her even for the search. But it was
preferable to sitting in the room she had been given, going slowly out of her
wits with boredom, or else suffering Sarai’s less than tender instruction in
the arts she believed the Mare’s servant should know. That had not stopped or
abated simply because Iry was in Avaris.

But the rest of it, the lessons with Khayan, the instruction
with Sadana, had stopped: Khayan’s because the Mare was gone, and Sadana’s
because the warrior woman had not been in evidence since Kemni vanished. No one
knew where she was. Iry hoped that she had not gone looking for him—or, gods
forbid, found him and discovered what he was.

She must trust that he had escaped, that he had returned to
the Upper Kingdom with all that he had discovered. His disappearance had
attracted notice, but not too much; people believed, or said that they
believed, that she had sent him back to his kin in Memphis, though Iannek would
have liked to know why.

“He didn’t stay long,” he said soon after Kemni’s departure.
“Was it that easy for everyone to forget whatever he did?”

“Evidently,” Iry said in her most dismissive tone.

But Iannek was not to be dismissed. “Don’t you find it
strange? That as soon as he came here, he went away again? Is there someone
here he didn’t want to see?”

“That’s possible,” said Iry.

“It’s inconvenient is what it is. I don’t suppose anybody is
going to take his place?”

“Should anyone?”

That gave Iannek pause. “Someone’s got to protect you.”

“Why, from what?” Iry asked. “From myself?”

Iannek shrugged uneasily. “You don’t know what people here
might do. Not everyone’s happy to see an Egyptian so close to the king. And
since you insist on tramping about, everybody sees you.”

“Everybody sees me and grows accustomed to me,” she said a
little sharply. “Isn’t that to my advantage? I’ve become familiar. I’m no
longer anything to marvel at.”

“But you might still be something to dispose of.” Iannek
sighed gustily. “I suppose there’s no hope for it. I’ll have the servants
spread a pallet tonight in front of your door. It’s not what my rank calls for,
but it is the safest thing.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Iry said. “There are guards
everywhere in this part of the palace, especially at night.”

Iannek set his jaw and looked obstinate. “You don’t know
whose guards they may be. And my brother commanded me—”

“Your brother saw a simple way to keep you out of mischief,”
Iry said.

“Isn’t it succeeding?” said that maddening creature. “Maybe
he only did it to rein me in, but who’s to say you don’t need me?”

Iry threw up her hands. “
Oh
!
You’ll drive me mad.”

“But you’ll go mad in safety,” said Iannek.

~~~

Sometimes Iry thought she truly would forsake her wits;
that she would break and run screaming in search of something, anything, that
was not Retenu; that was plain and honest Egyptian. She had the run of that
palace, but she could not pass the outer gate.

She did try. The guards politely, respectfully, but firmly
denied her escape. She was a captive indeed, for all her rank and her freedom
within the walls.

At that she stopped. Simply stopped. Sat in her chamber and
refused to rise, to eat, to dress, to move. If she was not to claw the walls,
she would do nothing. Whatsoever. She would not answer Sarai’s summons to her
daily lessoning. She would not attend the king when he asked. She would not do
anything at all.

People tried to vex her, but for once Iannek proved useful:
he kept them out. Not without excessive vexation of his own, but she was inured
to that. She could ignore it.

She did not know how long she sat in that dim room. After a
while her stomach stopped asking to be fed. She would drink a little water, if
her mouth grew parched.

It was rather peaceful, once Iannek began to hold visitors
at bay. She lost count of those, nor cared who they were. Iannek said once that
even the king had come, but had been turned away. “And that won’t endear me to
him, you can be sure,” he said.

She shut the door on him then, and barred it. Then she was
blessedly alone.

For a while. Of course these people would not leave a woman
to her sulks. They began to hammer at the door, to call out to her, and worse,
to consider coming in through the window, even as high and small as that was.

She clapped hands over her ears and buried herself in the
coverlets of her bed. It did little good, but it was something to do.

When the door came down, she was half in a dream in which
the Retenu had never taken the Two Lands, and her father was alive, and her
brothers; and she was the lady of her own household. It looked a great deal
like the Golden Ibis, and the man who stood beside her in the dream looked a
great deal like Kemni. Except that he was much larger. And no Egyptian had ever
had such a face, carved as if with a blade, or a nose like the arc of the new
moon.

He did not, in fact, look like Kemni at all, except in being
young and male. He looked very much like the face that hovered over her as she
started out of her dream, if that face had not been thick with black curly
beard.

The door was open behind him, the bar broken. There was no
one else with him, not even Iannek. Iry blinked at him. “What did you do to
your brother? He only did what I asked.”

“I sent him on an errand,” Khayan said.

“To repair the door?”

“Among other things.” Khayan reached in among the coverlets,
got a grip on her, lifted her as easily as if she had been a child, and set her
wobbling on her feet. He held her there, which was well, or she would have
fallen. “Now tell me. What’s the cause of this?”

“Walls,” she answered.

He frowned, but not with incomprehension. “They won’t let
you out?”

“Not past the outer gate.”

His frown deepened. He lifted her suddenly, startling her
into immobility, and carried her out with a long and purposeful stride.

Just before she had made up her mind to struggle, she saw
where he was taking her: to the baths of the women’s quarters. They were not
empty. Iry saw a blur of faces, none of which she could put a name to, and
heard the shrieks of alarm.

“Out,” Khayan said in his deep voice. It would not have
swayed Iry, but these creatures of veils and confinement obeyed as they had
been trained to do, and fled.

When they were gone, totally without ceremony, he dropped
her into the pool. She sank like a stone in her Retenu robes. The water closed
about her. She struggled wildly, thrashing, bursting into the air, blessed air,
gasping and choking and spitting water. She lunged at Khayan in pure mindless
rage.

He caught her wrists as she clawed at him, pinned them, and
set his free hand to the damnable robes. She stopped struggling to glare at
him, but did not resist as he stripped her out of all the wet and clinging wool
and linen. She had no modesty to constrain her, and no love for these robes,
either.

Free at last, and clean, she stood in the pool and still,
implacably, glared at him.

His eyes did not waver from that or from the sight of her
body. “I could have you flogged for this,” she said.

“Surely,” said Khayan. “But it woke you up. And you are much
pleasanter to the nose.”

“I was not—”

“Oh, not so bad, no,” he said amiably, “but this is better.
Will you come out?”

He held out his hand. She glowered at it. It did not fall.
She reached for it, but not quite far enough. He leaned to meet her own hand.
When he was as far as he could go, she caught hold, and pulled hard.

He tumbled headlong into the pool. Just as she had, he
thrashed and struggled and came up gasping. But he was laughing.

She only wanted to wipe the laughter from his face. With
grim intent she gripped his robes and tore at them. The wool was strong, but
the fastenings gave way. As he had done to her, she stripped him, and left him
standing in a puddle of water and wool and linen.

His laughter died, but not into the horror she had hoped
for. He was as beautiful as she remembered, a beauty that was nothing like
Egyptian beauty.

He let her look at it. He made no move to cover it.

The plait of his hair had fallen over his shoulder. She
unbound it.

That made him shiver. Someone had told her, somewhere, that
no one touched a man’s hair among these people but a servant or a lover.

She was not his lover. It could be said that she was his
servant—or he, perhaps, hers. She stroked the heavy locks out of the plait,
which was as thick as his wrist. Thick and curling and night-black, but with a
faint, ruddy cast. Her fingers loved the touch of it.

His eyes closed. He was doing nothing to stop her. Why?
Because he dared not? Or because he had no desire to?

A man, like a stallion, cared little who a woman was, if
only she was a woman. Iry bade her hands thrust him away in disgust. Somehow
they ran down his breast instead, raking lightly through the crisp curling
hair. He shivered, with pleasure it seemed. Certainly his manly member thought
so. It was a magnificent thing, small enough beside a stallion’s, but for a
man’s, more than ample for the purpose.

“If I asked you,” she said to him, “would you?”

His eyes opened. They were always a little startling under
those black brows: amber gold, sun-clear when one expected the dark of deep
water. “Do you know,” he said to her, “that legend says that when the Mare’s
servant first rode out of the dawn into Earth Mother’s country, she asked that
same question of the great queen’s son?”

“What did he answer?” Iry asked.

“He answered,” said Khayan, “that if she had chosen him, he
could do no other than accept.”

“But did he choose her?”

“It’s said he did,” Khayan said, “and did everything in his
power to persuade her to choose him.”

“Is that how it’s done in the east of the world?”

“Yes,” he said.

“And you? Are you like that? Or are you like the rest of the
Retenu?”

“If I were like the rest of the Retenu,” he said, “I would
have taken you that first night in the Sun Ascendant, and had my will of you.”

“Even though I proved to be the Mare’s servant?”

“I didn’t know that then,” he said. “If I had, it might have
slowed me, but not for long.”

“You could be killed for that.”

“A man of the Retenu, doing what a woman clearly asked for?
A foreign woman without kin and therefore without honor, even one whom a
goddess has chosen? I might be flogged for it, or sent into exile, but no
more.”

Such words should have wrought cold distance between them.
But as they spoke, they moved imperceptibly toward one another, till they were
almost touching.