The Shepherd Kings (78 page)

“No,” he said. “No. She needs it whole. For when she passes
into the gods’ country.”

“Then shouldn’t the embalmers see to her, before she rots?”

“She won’t—she won’t be allowed to—” His breath caught in
his throat. “She’s from Crete. They burn their dead. And
priestesses—priestesses are taken away forever, their names, their selves,
everything they were. They’re given back to Earth Mother. The embalmers will
give her to the Cretans. I know they will. Then I’ll lose her. Do you
understand? I can’t lose her!”

“You’ve already lost her.”

“Not if I find a way,” he said. “There must be one. Maybe if
the king commands? But will her spirit know where it was supposed to go? What
if it goes to her own gods’ place? I can’t go there. I don’t even know where it
is.”

“But can you learn?”

His eyes widened. He had not thought of that. He had only
thought of the terrible thing, the thing that emptied him of everything else:
that they could not be together in death. Their gods were different gods. The
life-in-death that she expected was nothing like that to which he had been
raised. And that was unendurable.

“You can learn,” Sadana said. “Let her people take her. Let
them set her on her way as they know how to do. Then let them teach you the
path. When your time comes, you can follow her.”

“It won’t be Egypt,” he said slowly. “It won’t be—”

“It will be with her.”

He looked at her. She was the first thing he had truly seen
since Iphikleia fell, except for Iphikleia’s face. This was a very different
face, with its odd yellow eyes and its fierce bones. That difference gave him
something like comfort—if he could ever know comfort again.

He nodded. His arms loosed their grip. Hands took her from
him, gently, as if she slept and they had no wish to wake her.

He knew how heavy she was. Death weighed a body down, turned
it, as it were, to stone: cold and stiff and still.

She was dead. If she had been Egyptian, he would have had
the threescore days and ten of her embalming to find tears for her. But she was
from Crete. They would build her pyre at evening, and destroy the flesh that
housed her spirit. That set it free, they said. If they left the body whole,
the spirit was trapped inside it, rotting with it, unless it mustered strength
to torment the living.

If he was to follow her, he must learn to think that way. He
did not know that he could.

It was too late to call her back. When he tried to rise, his
knees would not obey him. Not all the blood on him was hers. He was hurt, not
badly, he did not think, but enough to weaken him.

He would not die of it. Which was well. He had to learn. He
had to school himself to go where she had gone. Or else there was no life for
him, in this world or any other.

Sadana had pierced through the madness of Kemni’s grief
and persuaded him to let the Cretan priestess go. That was well, Iry thought.
It was a terrible thing that the enemy had done, and a terribly unwise one.
Ahmose might have been inclined to be merciful toward the captives of this
battle, even to set some of them free. But when their kinsmen attacked his
wounded and killed a great lady among his allies, he sent out the order. All
the worst wounded were to be killed and burned on a pyre with their
dead—terrible retribution for an Egyptian to take. Those who were whole or but
lightly wounded, he had confined without food and with but a little water. They
would be made an example, he said. He would bring them to Avaris, and there
under the eyes of their king and their kin, he would slay them.

His advisors rose up against that. Most would have had him
kill them now, rather than be a burden on the army. A few pointed out that for
men of that nation, to be shorn and whipped and enslaved would be a terrible
punishment, more terrible than death.

“That is true,” Ariana said in the council. She had wept for
her kinswoman, and would again. But as a queen must, she had gathered her wits
and firmed her will to face what must be faced. “It is true—for them, there’s
honor in death, but slavery is the worst dishonor. Strip them of the hair
they’re so proud of, and the beards that mark them as men; flog them till they
scar; and set them first to disposing of their own dead, and then to the most
menial labor you can think of—and they’ll wish to all their gods that they had
been fortunate enough to die.”

Ahmose was more like his great enemy Apophis than he would
ever have wanted to know: affable as kings went, and warmer than most of his
kind were known to be. But today he was a king, as hard as forged bronze,
tempered with anger. His eyes had narrowed as his councillors and then his
queen spoke. They had found the gate into his anger, Iry could see.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. That to them would be worse than
death. If the enemy sees them—some of them his lords, even a prince or two—then
he will know how terribly he has offended against us.”

So it was decided. There was a darkness in the camp, even
through the songs of victory. It was not the death of one Cretan priestess,
though that was a terrible thing. It was that men had waged war against the
wounded and the dying, and their lords had fled like cowards and fools, leaving
those of low estate to rampage at will.

Some of those lords were captured, either because they had
left last, or because their long-eared asses were not as swift as the king’s
horses. They were kept a little apart from the lesser captives, still in their
fine armor, though their jewels and gold were long gone: ripped from ears so
that they bled, torn from fingers and arms and necks.

Iry was there when the king’s command was carried out. They
began with the lords, haughty creatures that they were, braced for death or to
be paraded in chains before the Egyptian king. Those would have been acceptable
fates.

They were shocked, and then appalled, to be taken by strong
men, stripped naked and dragged to the center of the camp, where the barbers
waited with their razors sharpened and gleaming. They were sure, Iry could see,
that this was a new and painful way to die.

Some broke and tried to flee. Some stood taller, brave to
the last, though that was somewhat weakened by the way they all shuffled with
their hands covering their manly parts.

None escaped. They were dragged kicking, fighting, shrieking
into the circle, flung down and pinned, and the barbers went to work.

Then even the brave ones bellowed like bulls. The Egyptians
roared with laughter, mocked them, stripped off kilts and waggled organs in
their faces.

Nor did the barbers stop with hair and beards. They were
under orders to strip the captives utterly, from crown to toe. It was a great
undertaking, as shaggy as these foreigners were, and as persistent in their
struggles. Not a little blood flowed; though one clever barber found a cure for
that: he let his blade slip just a fraction while he shaved a man’s jewels. The
man shrieked as shrill as a woman.

He must have thought he was being gelded. It silenced the
rest, for a while; and that was well, in Iry’s estimation. The Egyptians did
not even pause in their chorus.

At length they were all shorn like strange sheep. Ahmose’s
soldiers dragged them up again, a dozen white peeled wands of men, big men
still and massive, but greatly diminished by the shearing.

It was purely cruel, and a great vengeance. Iry should have
been more pleased with it than she was. Her time in Avaris had changed
her—corrupted her. These were men to her now; some whose names she even knew.
She could not hate them as perfectly as she wished to.

She had been intending to leave when the lords left. Many of
the other high ones did, though the king’s soldiers gathered in even greater
numbers to see men of their own rank brought low by so simple a thing. Nor had
she seen the one she had half expected to see. He was dead, or fled.

No. Dead. Khayan would not run away as the others had. It
was not in him. She should go, search among the dead. Or she should send
Sadana, or call Iannek from the ship where he sulked in furious exile—there was
no safety for him here, where any bearded foreigner was killed or captured on
sight.

But she lingered. She hated Khayan. She did not want to see
him dead.

The lesser men were not shorn completely as their lords
were. There were too many of them, and they were of too little account. The
barbers settled, with them, for stripping them of their garments and shaving
their beards and cropping their hair close, as quickly as could be. It was
still a great shame to them to be made like Egyptian slaves. One or two tried
to trick the barbers into slitting their throats, but the barbers were too deft
with the razors, and too much on their guard.

There was one near the end who drew her eye. He was walking
wounded—surprising; most of those had been killed. Maybe he had concealed it
until he was stripped naked? He was young, and large; no giant but tall enough,
and leaner than some, less bull-broad. He looked—like—

As if she had spoken the thought aloud, he raised his head.
His face was a blank Retenu face, pale arch of nose thrusting from amid the
thicket of beard, but the eyes she knew. No other man of that people had such
eyes, golden as a falcon’s. They were blank now, as if he had gone blind. He
did not seem to see her, or if he saw her, to know who she was.

When the guards took hold of him, he did not resist. His
spirit had gone away. They threw him down and held him as they had the rest, as
casual now as shearers with the sheep. The barber finished sharpening his
razor—ignoring bystanders who encouraged him to do no such thing; to let the
blade go dull, the better to torment the prisoner.

A faint sound escaped Iry as the man set blade to that thick
and beautiful hair. But she did not move, did not try to stop him.

It was over in a few deft strokes. The guards hauled him to
his feet.

He was—very good to look at. Very good indeed. Almost as
lovely as Kemni, and Kemni was the greatest beauty she knew, who was not a
woman. His eyes seemed all the stranger now that they stared out of a face and
not a black shadow of beard.

She spoke then. She moved forward a step. “That one,” she
said. “I’ll take him.”

At first she thought she would be ignored. But everyone knew
who she was. The guards glanced at one another and at their commander. There
was no lord of greater rank here now; even the king had gone to other duties.

“I’ll take him,” she said, “as recompense for what was done
to my kin and my holding.”

Some of the soldiers standing about grinned at one another
and remarked on her taste. “He’s a pretty one,” one of them said with a leer.
“And a fine young bull of Baal, too. You’ll get good use of him.”

Iry had always been able to keep her face cold, even when
the blush flamed inside. It was a gift, and she was glad of it. If any of them
had known what he was to her . . .

What he was no longer. He did not even recognize her. No
doubt, to him, all Egyptian women looked alike: too small, too thin, and hidden
behind their masks of paint.

“You,” she said to the guard who held the rope that bound
his hands. “Bring him behind me. If your captain can spare you?”

The captain bowed low. He was hiding a grin, she could see.
She would exact a price for that—later. At the moment it was enough that he had
given her one of his men.

She had no expectation that Khayan would escape. He had the
look of a man who had retreated into himself, far and far, until he felt
nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing. Beneath the shorn black curls, she thought
she saw a swelling, and perhaps a glisten of blood.

For that, and for the clotted and oozing wound in his side,
she had him taken not to her tent but to the healers. They had begun to recover
from the battle. A new tent had been raised for them, and their instruments and
their boxes of medicines recovered as much as could be, and more brought from
the ships. The dead were taken away, the wounded looked after.

When she came, Imhotep was just finishing with a limp and
unconscious man. Acolytes hastened discreetly away with a bundle wrapped in a
cloth.

The man had lost his leg. Iry shivered and swallowed bile.
Now the embalmers would take it and do what they did, letting that part of him
go before, so that when he died he could be reunited with it.

Imhotep smiled at her. He had taken a liking to her from the
first, for what reason she did not know. Maybe because she knew a little of the
healing arts, and asked to learn more. He did not keep secrets, did that one,
though others of his order frowned to see him instructing her.

His smile faded however as he saw who followed her. She drew
aside to let him see.

Khayan obliged them both by crumpling at their feet. Imhotep
stepped neatly aside to let him fall, then bent down and arranged the long
scattered limbs, frowning as he did it, counting grazes, bruises, and of course
the most obvious wound; but he went on. When he came to the head, he paused.
“Blow to the head,” he said, with a glance at Iry.

She nodded. She had thought so.

The long clever fingers searched amid cropped curls.
“Nothing broken. But the brain might be . . .” The rest subsided
into a murmur.

Iry kept silent as Imhotep sent acolytes for this medicine
and that, and set one of them to cleaning and stitching and binding the gash in
Khayan’s side. Only when Imhotep had drawn back and paused for breath did she
ask, “Is he badly hurt?”

Imhotep shrugged. “With blows to the head, one never knows.
The rest is nothing, unless it festers. I’ve done as much as I may. If you
should be inclined to pray, that would be useful.”

Iry could pray. She wanted this man alive. Not because she
loved him or wanted him happy. She wanted him to suffer.