The Shepherd Kings (85 page)

She drew him to her. Her fierce eyes searched his face—much
as Iry loved to do, but never so tender. “So. The world changes. Are you
content?”

“I—” Khayan would have said that he was not. Except that his
eye caught Iry, standing quiet as she best knew how to do; and the sight of her
made him dizzy with joy. Even here, on the raw edge of pain.

“The goddess gives where she wills,” Sarai said, “and
chooses whom she will.”

Khayan looked down. He was blushing again. He blushed a
great deal of late.

His mother laid a cool palm against his burning cheek. She
was smiling, maybe. Beneath the veil, it was difficult to tell.

“It would be better,” he said, “if you cursed me and cast me
out.”

“Easier,” she said, “for you, perhaps? How could I do that?
You belong to the goddess.”

“I am thinking,” he said, “that if I had not grown from boy
to man among your kin, I would have flung myself on a sword a good while
since.”

“And you reckon yourself a coward because you did not.” She
shook her head. “Child, a coward takes refuge in death. A brave man lives the
life his gods ordain.”

“So they teach among the eastern tribes.” He sighed. “Lady,
Mother, this is a war. We are on opposite sides of it.”

“Surely. And we intend to win.” She spoke without doubt or
hesitation.

“Even with such an omen as we are?”

“The Mare goes where she goes,” Sarai said. “And the people
are the people. This kingdom has belonged to them for a hundred years. Should
they simply let it go?”

“They are besieged. The river is blockaded with their ships.
No reinforcements can come from Asia. The lords away from here—”

“They are still a great people. They were born here—just as
you were. This is their country. If they are driven out of it, where can they
go?”

“Back to Asia,” Iry said levelly. She had come to stand
beside Khayan. “Your time here is ended. We offer you freedom to go, with all
your goods and chattels, and even such wealth as you can safely carry.”

“We have no desire to carry it away,” said Apophis. “We rule
here. We intend to remain.”

“The Great House will destroy you,” Iry said. “He lives in
spite of the plot against him. The gods of this kingdom love him, and wish you
gone.”

“Our priests say,” said Apophis, “that Baal, who is Set,
will defend us, and crush the armies that march against us.”

“Set is a destroyer,” Iry said. “Those whom he chooses as
his playthings, he dandles and fondles, until he casts them down.”

“Are you a priest of Set, that you know such things?”

“I am the Mare’s servant,” Iry said. “I know what the
goddess permits her to know.”

“We will not yield,” Apophis said. “No, lady; not even for
you.”

“Even for wealth and life and freedom, and the avoidance of
war?”

“War is pleasing to the gods, and to Baal their king,” said
Apophis. “Blood is their sacrifice. We will give them their fill, and so win
back our kingdom.”

Iry stared at him as if he had astonished her. Maybe he had.
Egyptians, Khayan had come to know, were not warriors, nor did they make a
virtue of war. Quite the opposite. Iry could not understand a man for whom war
was not a threat but a promise; who had been born and bred to fight in battles.

“You would fight,” she asked, “even if you knew that you
could avoid it?”

“Avoid it? How? By surrender? No,” Apophis said, “I would
not do that even if my people would allow me. Even for you, lady—even for your
goddess. I cannot.”

“You will not,” she said, soft and a little bitter.

“That, too,” he agreed.

“Then will you hold me here, and make me a hostage?”

“No,” he said. When her eyes widened in disbelief, he went
on, “I will let you go. It might serve some small purpose to hold you prisoner,
but I see no great profit in it.”

“This mercy will not help you, if you lose.”

“I never expected that it would.” He smiled at her. “This is
a praiseworthy thing you do, and brave—braver perhaps than you know. It will
gain you admiration among our young men. But no surrender. That would be
unthinkable.”

“We can think of it,” she said.

“Ah,” said Apophis, “but you are Egyptian.”

“I don’t understand you,” she said.

“No.” He took her hands in his, and bowed over them.
“Understanding is not necessary. Only acceptance. When we win this war, my
lady, if you choose to come back to us, there will be no punishment; no
retribution. It is understood that the Mare does as the Mare pleases.”

“I won’t come back,” she said.

“We shall see,” said Apophis.

When Iry came out of the city, the battle had already
begun. Ahmose had ordered it before she went in, nor delayed it by more than a
little for the embassy she had taken on herself. He left that gate alone and
the siege-engines silent, but his ships had closed in from the river, battering
the city where it could raise no defense.

That was no fight for chariots. But once Iry had come out,
white-faced and wordless, and let herself be taken away to safety, the king
called out his chariotry to be a wall of living bronze about that side of the
city.

Kemni was ready for the summons. All of him that had been
given up to grief was given now to war. When he went to fetch his chariot, he
found it ready, the horses harnessed, and a charioteer waiting.

“I mean to fight alone,” he said—foolish words, and weak,
but they were all he had.

“No one fights alone here,” Sadana said. “Why? Am I
objectionable?”

“No, but—”

“Ah,” she said. “I’m a woman. I’m not ill luck, man of
Egypt. Trust me in that.”

“I never said you were,” he said. “But—”

“Get in,” she said. “The king wants us out there now, not in
a day or three or six.”

That was true, and the rest of the chariots were waiting for
his signal. Kemni sighed hugely and stepped up beside her.

That was the signal they had looked for. The trumpeter blew
the call to advance. The line of chariots rolled forward toward the city. They
were not to go in too close. Along the edges, by the river, Sadana’s women rode
on their light fast horses. There would be no escape from Avaris, except into
death.

The ships attacked the soft underbelly of the city, the
riverbank and the canals that ran into the city itself. The enemy was waiting.
He might have fled here, he might have given Ahmose the north, but he had no
intention of letting go this city.

It was a river-battle now, the enemy’s chariots shut up
within his walls. Kemni had little to do but ride up and down and watch and
listen, and see the ships’ crews do battle with men on land. Sadana’s women
swooped in and out along the river’s edge, darting toward the wounded and the
dying and bringing them out as they could, whether toward the ships or toward
the open land.

Kemni could have done such a thing, but the king’s orders
were precise. The chariots were not to be spent wantonly. They would circle and
look threatening, and wait. When the king was ready, he would summon them.

There was some small challenge in eluding arrows from the
walls, and once they caught a handful of Retenu in flight—men of low rank and
less courage, fleeing like rats. Like rats they died and were flung into the
river, fed to the crocodiles.

Sadana seemed content to drive the horses up and down,
making a show of force but offering none that was real. She was not given to
idle conversation. Kemni had been once, till grief changed him. It was almost a
comfortable silence, the silence of those who saw no need to fill the air with
chatter.

~~~

Near sundown the king sent them a summons, but it was not
to battle; it was to rest. The morrow would be the same, and the day after
that, as long as the Retenu resisted Ahmose’s war.

The river-fighters were full of vaunts that night,
brandishing the right hands of enemies whom they had killed, and some flaunting
the gold of valor that was given only to the best of them. The land-fighters
huddled by their tents and snarled. Their time would come—but it was not likely
to be soon.

“I don’t call it a victory,” Iannek declared by Kemni’s
campfire. He had appeared not long after dark, as pleased with himself as ever,
and looking somewhat happily battered.

“You got onto a ship,” Seti said. His envy was palpable.
“How in the gods’ name did you manage that?”

“I got on board,” said Iannek. “It wasn’t hard. The man
who’s named after the king, si-Ebana—they’ve made him a captain of marines. I
asked him if he needed an extra hand. He allowed as how he did.”

“It couldn’t have been that simple,” Seti said.

“Things with Iannek are always simple.” Sadana startled some
of them, if not Kemni: he suspected that they had not seen her sitting just out
of the fire’s light, knees drawn up to breast, never moving. Until she spoke;
then it was impossible to ignore her. “Iannek lives the life of the blessed
idiot. Wherever he goes, people take him in.”

“I wouldn’t call myself an idiot,” Iannek said, aggrieved.
“Si-Ebana can fight! He took a hand from a dockside lord, and wounded a dozen
more. He said they used to take more than the right hand, but in these days the
old customs have worn thin.”

“Those are your own people you’re fighting,” Seti said.

Iannek shook his head, beard and heavy braids and all. “I’m
fighting where the Mare is.”

“And they cast you out.” Seti prodded the fire till the
sparks flew. “They say you’re a good man to have at one’s back. Would you fight
at mine, if I asked you?”

“If you could give me a battle,” Iannek said.

“Someday we may,” Seti said with a sigh. “I’m thinking I
should have stayed with the boats.”

“You men,” said Sadana. “It’s always about fighting. I
thought Egyptians were peaceable people.”

“Not when there’s a war to fight,” Seti said.

Sadana snorted in disgust, but did not add to it.

After a while the two boys—for they must have been near the
same headlong age—wandered off. Kemni stayed where he was. He was not so very
much older than either of them, and yet he felt as old as the world.

Sadana was still sitting in the shadows, gazing at the
campfire’s flames. “Tell me something,” she said after a while.

Kemni raised a brow.

“Are you like them?” she asked. “Do you live to fight?”

“I think I did once,” he said.

“Ah,” she said. “Until you discovered that men are mortal.
And . . . women.”

The pain was so sharp and so sudden that he gasped.

“So now you live to die,” she said, seeing far too clearly
for his comfort. “Has it occurred to you that if she knows this, wherever her
gods and her faith have taken her, she well may be grieving that you grieve so
much?”

He surged to his feet in a flare of sudden rage. “What do
you know of this? What do you know of anything that is between men and women?”

He had struck to wound, and wound he had. Her face was white
in the firelight. Yet she spoke calmly, without the fierce temper that he would
have expected. “I know,” she said, “that death is a terrible thing, and death
untimely is the worst of all. Yet I also know that she was a great lover of
life. She would want you to live, and live in joy.”

“There is no joy without her.”

“Not even in memory?”

“Memory.” He spat the taste of it out of his mouth. “Memory
is a cold companion in the nights.”

“Just so,” she said.

He stood speechless. She rose to face him. She was as tall
as he, if not actually taller. Her body was all sharp lines and spare angles,
its curves somewhat too subtle for his taste. He could, if he let himself,
remember how surprisingly sweet they could be.

Never as sweet as the one who was gone. There would never be
another like her.

“I think,” Sadana said, “that you are wallowing. It
surprises me rather. I had always taken you for a man of sense.”

“What sense is there in death?”

“Very little,” she said, “which is why we wrap it about in
ritual—and none more so than you Egyptians.”

“She was not Egyptian. She had her own rites.”

“Ah,” said Sadana.

“Yes, that was pain! But it’s past.”

“Is it?”

He would dearly have loved to strike her for what she was
doing to him. But he found he could not raise his hand. He knew how deadly she
was, like a finely honed blade, trained in all the arts of war and the chase.
And yet when she stood before his face, she seemed as slender as a grass-stem,
and as likely to break.

That was a weapon, and surely she was aware of it. “What
would you have me do?” he demanded of her.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Don’t lie to me.”

“Truly,” said Sadana. “I want nothing of you but what I
would want of any man. That you live; and that you conduct yourself with some
semblance of common sense.”

Laughter startled itself out of him. “Gods! Dear gods. You
sound just like her.”

“Then she was a sensible person.”

“She could be like a cold dash of seawater in the face,” he
said, “or like the wind blowing across the pinnacles of the island where she
was born. She had no patience whatever with what she considered to be nonsense.
Which was most of what men did.”

“Most men make very little sense,” Sadana said.

“And women are different?”

“Profoundly.” The fire was dying. She knelt to rouse it,
feeding it with bits of grass and dried dung. Her concentration on the task was
wonderfully complete.

He could have walked away, and he suspected that she would
not have stopped him. But he stayed. He had nowhere else to go but his bed,
where the dreams would come crowding in, and the black grief.

When the fire was burning strong again, she straightened,
sitting on her heels. Her plait had fallen forward over her shoulder. It was
inky black in this light, but in the sun, he happened to remember, it had a
ruddy cast quite unlike the blue-black of his own people, or of Iphikleia’s.