The Shepherd Kings (88 page)

He answered willingly enough, whatever his thoughts. “These
are lords of the court,” he said. “The citadel must be breaking.”

“Or broken.” Seti halted his horses beside them. His left
arm was bound up in a rag and his cheekbone was split as impressively as
Iannek’s brow, but he was grinning as if he had no care in the world. “Will you
wager we’re winning?”

“Not if they keep coming,” Kemni said. “There’s no end to
them. We’re all there is.”

“There has to be an end,” Seti said. “The citadel’s only so
big.”

“It’s bigger than you might think.” Kemni let himself rest
briefly against the chariot’s side. His legs and feet were aching—the price
every man paid for riding in a chariot. Sadana seemed impervious, but she was
not joining in the conversation, either. All her mind seemed focused on the
horses. They were weary, standing hipshot, heads low. They would need water
soon, and grazing, if they were to thrive.

They all watched a company of footsoldiers overwhelm and
drag down a gilded prince in a chariot more elaborate than their own king’s.

“That’s not Apophis,” Seti said.

“No,” said Khayan. “That’s a man whose wealth comes from
trade, and who bought himself a noble wife. The king won’t come out till the
last.”

“You think he’ll come here?”

Khayan’s face was set. Even what color it had—for he was a
white-skinned man, whiter than a woman—had drained from it. “Not likely,” he
said. “If he surrenders, he’ll do it by the river, as king to king.”

“Unless he means to run and not surrender,” Seti said.

“There is that.” Khayan shook himself, hunching his wide
shoulders, then squaring them so that they seemed as broad as the city’s gate.
“Look, there’s another wave of them. Iannek—”

Iannek had already moved, whipping up the horses, driving
them back toward the battle. Kemni’s bays followed, and Seti’s blaze-faced
chestnuts. They fell on the advancing chariots with almost their full strength,
and bow and spear and sword, and no memory of weariness until the battle paused
again.

Earlier charioteers had taken no particular notice of the
Retenu among the Egyptians. But these were lords—perhaps even Iannek’s old
drinking companions. They took his presence as a personal affront. They, and
those behind them, each of whom seemed richer than the last, struck again and
again for that of all parts of the line. “Keep moving!” Kemni called out.
“Don’t let them trap you.”

Counsel he could well heed himself: after Iannek, the
Egyptian captain won the greatest share of their hatred. If they were not
intent on merely breaking through the line—and these lords of warriors wanted a
toll paid in blood—they struck for Kemni nigh as often as for Iannek.

He fought them off with an arm that grew heavier with each
attack. If Seti had the right of it, and there truly was no end to them, Kemni
would die of exhaustion before he died of his wounds.

He could not think of that. Fight—he must fight. His arrows
were long gone. His spear was broken. His sword had grown dull. And still they
came. The city was emptying of chariots. They were not turning once they had
broken through the line, not going back within the walls. Those that escaped,
escaped northward.

They were coming faster now, and some were wounded, stained
with bright blood. Kemni’s men held—brave fools, every one of them, and the
more beloved for it. He called them off at last, pulled them back, left the way
open.

Their numbers were fewer—grievously so. Empty chariots,
masterless horses, wandered the field. Of foot there were more standing, but
those too had withdrawn from the fight. It was a retreat, they could all see—a
rout.

Avaris was taken from the river and secured from the land.
Apophis came last out of the citadel—but if Seti had been wagering with Khayan,
Seti would have won the wager. Apophis did not surrender to the Great House in
the harbor. He led the last of his armies to the northward gate, and fought his
way out. Even as the Egyptians held back to let him go, his men turned on them,
as a boar at bay will turn on the hounds that would herd him toward the
hunter’s spear.

Kemni rallied his men almost too late, and almost too
feebly. This was death. This, at last, was the end he had been praying for: at
the hands of a prince of the Retenu, after Avaris was taken and the Lower Kingdom
had fallen into Ahmose’s power.

But, for that, he could not let himself be killed. He had to
see it, to know it was so: that the war was won.

Sadana crooned to the horses, who were nigh at the end of
their strength. There had been water for them, the last of the skins, with
little spared for Kemni or Sadana. Either they would drink again within the
city, or they would die.

They moved forward barely faster than a walk, but as they
advanced they found a remnant of speed, enough to meet the king’s riding as it
passed the broken gate. They fell on it from every side that they could, and
the scattered fragments of the footsoldiers among them, so that the ground and
the air were deadly, both, and Apophis paid toll in blood for his use of the
northward road.

Kemni gathered all the chariots that he could, for one last
stroke. He set himself at the head of them and hurled them upon the king and
his royal guard. All the hundred years of subjection, conquest, slavery, made
weary arms strong, and honed their hate. They smote without care for life or
safety, only for an end to the long war.

Apophis’ chariots reeled before that charge. But they were
fresher by far, and they protected their king. They steadied, rallied, thrust
back.

“Take the king alive!” Kemni roared to his men. “For all the
rest—no quarter!”

He would hardly have known Apophis from that night of spying
on Gebu in the garden of the citadel. That quiet, rather ordinary man was
become a warrior king in a golden chariot, crowned with gold. The beard beneath
the helmet was grey, but the shoulders were broad in the gilded armor, the arms
corded, strong, wielding a great sword and a heavy-hafted spear. This king of
warriors had no fear of war, and though he was well protected within his circle
of guards, he thrust past them into the thick of the fight.

Maybe he too taunted the gods, and dared them to destroy
him. Kemni pressed toward him, but there was a wall of chariots between,
bearded men with flat dark eyes and grim faces. Their stallions challenged his,
rearing and striking, daring them to fight as their charioteers did, to the
death.

Kemni had taken advantage of a lull to sharpen his sword, a
moment or a lifetime ago. It hummed as it wheeled and smote. It yearned for the
taste of blood—king’s blood.

The battle narrowed to this one man and this one purpose.
The defenders between were shadows, albeit shadows armed with bronze. Edged
bronze could banish them.

There were others on his right hand and his left. Seti,
indomitable, with Ay for his charioteer—that was not how they had begun; Kemni
would wonder, later, when they had made such a pact. Most likely when Ay’s
chariot was broken or his warrior killed. And on Kemni’s right, Iannek of the
Retenu and his brother Khayan. They hung back by an almost invisible fraction,
but only by that.

They were following Sadana. Kemni might not have thought of
that, except that the chariot lurched over something—fallen warrior, wrack of
the storm—and rocked her briefly against him, and he glimpsed her face. It was
white, set, terrible. It was not that she wanted to die, but that she had no
pressing desire to live.

That, he thought distantly, was a pity. She had beauty and
strength and courage. She should live in joy, and not die in blood.

All the while his wits wandered, his arm rose and fell,
striking and striking again. He did not see whom he wounded, or who was killed.
Only that the way was clear to the golden gleam that was the king.

One more man. One more defender armed with bronze. This one
was fierce in defense of his king, and greatly skilled in the arts of the
sword.

Kemni’s strength was failing. Pain niggled at the edges of
awareness, and weakness gnawed at it. He was wounded, he did not trouble to
determine where.

Take the king alive
.
His own words, echoing in his skull as if a stranger had spoken them. He
reeled, dizzy. He saw the blow come, swayed away from it, but not far enough.
It caught the edge of his helmet and flung him aside, tumbling end over end.
Hooves flew past him. Wheels roared a scant handspan from his head.

He lay on the tumbled earth in a mire of mud and blood. The
battle had passed him by.

He was conscious. His head was remarkably clear. He could
not hear well: his ears rang like smitten bronze. But he could see. He could
even, after a while, sit up.

Apophis was gone, running northward in the diminished circle
of his guard. Kemni’s charioteers had stopped, their horses gasping,
staggering. The men’s faces were blank, flat with exhaustion.

Their own people found them there, footsoldiers and mariners
in service to the Great House of Thebes, striding out of the city that they had
taken.

Kemni by then was on his feet and had found his chariot.
Sadana was still in it. She eyed him oddly and tried to say something, but he
did not hear her.

He leaned against the familiar side of the chariot, as
comfortable as he could ever remember being, even without the Retenu king for
his prisoner. It did not matter greatly that he had failed. Maybe if he had
been Retenu, and had come so close to the enemy’s king, he would have fallen on
his sword.

But he was Egyptian. His gods had a sense of irony, and a
sometimes cruel humor.

There at last was Ahmose, striding on his own feet, in armor
that had seen hard use. He seemed to be looking for Kemni. Kemni tried to offer
obeisance, but he was too dizzy. He clung to the chariot instead and mustered a
smile. “Sire. I regret—I lost—”

“We’ll catch him,” Ahmose said, brisk and cool, just as he
needed to be. He looked about. “You have done well. Very well indeed.”

“We did try, my lord,” Kemni said. Then, because he had a
need to hear it from the king, and from no one else: “It’s done? The city is
yours?”

“The city is mine,” Ahmose said with quiet but enormous
satisfaction.

Apophis had escaped, running north, but he had left people
in the citadel: his queens, his concubines, ladies of the court, and the
formidable lady Sarai, whose children, all
but one, had fought for the Egyptian king. They sued for surrender as they
could not but do, and through the lordly eunuch who was their messenger, begged
leave to follow their lords out of Egypt.

Ahmose received them in the hall of the palace that Khayan
remembered well: the great hall of audience with its throne of gold. His heart
clenched at the sight of that little brown monkey sitting where the great bulls
of Canaan had sat for so long. The throne was too high for Ahmose; his feet
rested on a footstool. He had had his servants set him upon cushions, to appear
less dwarfed by that throne of giants.

He seemed undismayed by that sacrifice of dignity. By some
miracle of servants’ art he was clean, clothed in linen of impeccable
whiteness, with a splendid collar of gold, and golden armlets, and on his head
the Blue Crown of war. People murmured that somewhere, some man of great honor
and skill was making for him what had not been seen since the Lower Kingdom
fell to the conquerors from Retenu: the Two Crowns of the Two Lands, White
Crown embraced within Red. He would wear it, it was said, when he took formal
possession of this kingdom, not here in the conqueror’s city, but in Memphis of
the ancient kings.

But all that was still to come—and Khayan dared still,
however unwisely, to hope that it might not come at all. For this day, Ahmose
was lord in Avaris, and victor in war. He had the royal ladies brought before
him, knowing surely what dishonor it was for them to be seen, even veiled, by
the eyes of men and foreigners.

By the laws of war, they were his to do with as he pleased.
Had he been one of the people, he would have taken them for his own and led
them away into his harem. That he did not do such a thing, that he agreed to
speak to them as if they had been men and kings, was strange and perhaps
ominous.

Khayan might not have come to this place, nor would Iry have
forced him, but he found he could not stay away. He came as what he was, the
slave of an Egyptian.

They were all there, Iannek, Sadana, such of her women as
were alive and well enough to walk. So too the Cretans, those great allies, and
the little princess who had wedded the king. She stood beside and somewhat
behind him, not seated on a throne brought in and set next to his as the Great
Royal Wife was, but close, and in a place of great honor.

She smiled when Khayan, somewhat unwarily, caught her eye.
She seldom stood on ceremony unless it suited her.

She liked the look of a handsome man, or so it was said.
There was a rumor that while she could never in honor bed any man but her
wedded lord, she well might send maidservants in her name, who would give great
pleasure to a fortunate few. Kemni the Egyptian was said to have been a
favorite of hers, until he became her kinswoman’s lover. Now no woman was known
to come to his bed, nor was any wanted there, for he grieved too greatly for
his lost priestess.

Sadana was standing close beside him now, by accident or
design, just as she had appointed herself his charioteer. When this was over,
Khayan would consider the meaning of that.

Now he fixed his eyes on the ladies who came in procession,
a long line of veiled figures, all in black unadorned. But many betrayed
beneath the veils a gleam of gold or the flash of a jewel.

Behind the guards who preceded them and the eunuch who led
them, Khayan recognized the straight back and proud carriage of his mother, and
the likeness of her just behind, his sister Maryam. They must be able to see
him: he was standing on the dais of the throne, as guard to Iry—and still in
Iannek’s armor, too, somewhat to Iannek’s disgust. He did not try to meet their
eyes, which in any event were hidden behind black gauze.