The Shepherd Kings (91 page)

“Does it hurt too much?” she asked him.

He shook his head. “I thought it would hurt more.”

“And you still do it.”

“Am I given a choice?”

“You could have gone with your mother. Or followed Apophis.”

“What, to Sharuhen?” He sighed. “No. You aren’t in Sharuhen.
You won’t ever go to the east.”

“I would let you go. If your heart yearned for it.”

“My heart is here.” He laid his hand on her breast.

She laid her own hand over it. “But every day is pain. Every
day you are humiliated. People call you a slave. Sometimes they spit at you.
When we came here—I saw how they stared, and how they whispered. If I’d let you
go where you wanted to go, to sleep among the servants, they would have
tormented you.”

“I would have seen that they never did it again.”

She recoiled a little, not for revulsion, but for
startlement. More fool she: she had forgotten what, after all, he was.

That pricked her temper. “I should just turn you loose? Let
you fight like a stallion, and win the herd?”

“Why not?”

She sat back abruptly. “Yes. Why not? What if you’re
killed?”

“No one will kill me. I still belong to you.”

Was he bitter? She thought perhaps not.

That was the Mare’s people in him. They could accept what a
warrior of the Retenu might never hope to do.

~~~

The Lady Nefertem summoned her daughter to her on the day
before the full moon. Some of the servants who had attached themselves to Iry
were not pleased: she was the ruler of that domain, and not Nefertem. But Iry
was pleased enough to obey.

She met Kemni on the way there, going about some errand of
his own. He was lingering, she had noticed, as if he could not bring himself to
leave.

She wondered if he knew how much that had to do with his
frequent companion. Sadana might not be aware of it, either: how they were
drawn toward one another. They were not lovers at all; if Sadana had been a
man, people would have called them comrades in arms. They were always out and
about the horses or the chariots or the boys and young men whom they had begun
to train in chariotry. The king needed as many as could be sent on, all the way
into Canaan, to the kingdom called Sharuhen, where Apophis had turned and made
his stand.

But just now Kemni turned on a whim and said, “I’ll go with
you. It’s been a little time since I paid my respects to your mother.”

Iry eyed him a little warily. “Is there something I should
know?”

“No,” he said. “Except possibly that she should be coming to
you. You’re the lord here.”

“My mother has always made the lord come to her,” Iry said.
“Why should I be different?”

Kemni snorted. “Yes, why? The gods made her a queen. Men
have been somewhat slower to get about it.”

Iry stopped. “What are you saying? Should I marry her off to
the king?”

“Would you like to?”

It was not as preposterous a thought as it might have
seemed. Except . . .

“She’d never share him with anyone,” Iry said. “And he has
two great queens already.”

“Then she’ll be queen here. But you can’t let her rule you.”

“I don’t intend to,” Iry said.

~~~

They had come to the women’s house, past the guards who
bowed and smiled—they never could keep their faces as expressionless as they
should, not in these days. It was great joy to them to bow to one of their own
as lord.

She went in to her mother with a daughter’s obedience but a
lord’s heart. Nefertem was occupied as she liked to be, with the accounts of
the holding, and Teti the steward with her. She greeted Iry calmly and Kemni
without surprise—indeed, with pleasure—and sent Teti politely away. He left
without reluctance, with the flicker of a smile at Iry, as if he knew why she
had been summoned, and was much pleased with it.

The Lady Nefertem was determined to make this a proper
occasion, with food and drink and talk of nothing in particular. Iry sighed but
endured. Her mother was not to be hurried, nor could she be compelled to do
anything she was not minded to do.

At length—and long after Iry had promised to meet with
Khayan among the chariots—Nefertem came to the point. “It has occurred to me,”
she said, “that while it is all very well that you rule here in the name of
your father and brothers, it would be much more proper if this holding looked
to a lord of suitable rank and lineage.”

Iry declined to be taken aback. “Lady,” she said. “Mother.
The king himself named me lord here. My office, my position, grant me grace to
be more than a woman.”

“Still, you are a woman. In days past, after your courses
began you would have been matched with a husband. Now the Two Lands are whole
again, and a king wears the Two Crowns. It’s time we returned to the ways of
propriety.”

“The Two Lands are whole,” Iry said, “and the foreign kings
will be forgotten, their names scoured from our earth. But some things have
changed. The king rides in a chariot now. Where cattle grazed and barley grew,
we raise horses for that chariot. Those horses are my charge. The king has said
nothing to me of surrendering them to a man.”

She had not meant to be or to sound so angry. Men ruled this
world, she knew that. It was what was. But she was the Mare’s chosen. In the
Mare’s world, women ruled. And she could not go back. Not for this.

“I am not asking that you give up your horses,” Nefertem
said coolly. “But the rest of it, the lands, the lordship—what can be so ill in
letting a man hold the title? It’s proper, it’s accepted, it may serve you in
court when you go there. You will go there. Did you think that you would not?”

“I know that I will,” Iry said, fighting for calm. “And that
court, Mother, is ruled now by a pair of queens.”

“In the king’s name,” Nefertem said with devastating logic.
“Come, child. If nothing else, you should give thought to the question of an
heir. None but a man can give you that.”

Iry’s belly clenched around what might be, indeed, an heir.
But she was not about to speak of that.

“Do consider,” said Nefertem, “what I have considered. There
are a number of lords who might do. Long ago, when you were a child, your
father and I had spoken of a match that would please him well.”

Her eyes turned to Kemni. To his credit, he looked as
startled as Iry must.

“Yes,” the lady said in tones of considerable pleasure. “I
see you understand. And why not? You two are kin. You were children together.
You hold like rank, and like favor with the king. And you share an office: to
give him horses. What better match can there be?”

Why, thought Iry, if one looked at it so, there was none. The
gods knew, he was beautiful, he was pleasing, he was her dear friend. He was
everything that a woman could want in a husband.

None of which removed the fact that they both knew, but her
mother surely did not: that neither of them had any desire to marry the other.
Iry’s beloved was out among the chariots. Kemni’s heart had died with a Cretan
priestess, though Iry thought it might be coming to life again for a woman who
rode horses and who fought like a man.

She could not say this. Not yet. She rose abruptly, but she
did not care if it seemed rude. “Thank you, Mother,” she said. “I will consider
it.”

~~~

Kemni followed her out, which was as she wished. She led
him toward the bit of garden where they had spoken together, that day when he
came over the wall to spy on the Retenu. It was as quiet now as then, and as
deserted.

She faced him there. He met her gaze and waited for her to
speak: an art he must have learned in Crete, or from Sadana. Men never did such
things in the rest of the world.

“Do you want this?” she demanded.

He lifted a shoulder: half a shrug, as if he had but half a
heart for it. “Do you?”

“Will you be offended if I say that I do not?”

“Maybe a little,” he said.

She shook her head in irritation. “Silly man. You don’t want
me.”

“I could,” he said, “if it were my duty. Just as you could
want me. We were raised to marry as the family bade us. If you don’t accept me,
who knows what sort of man your mother will find for you?”

That made her shudder. “Don’t tell me you don’t know why I
have to refuse this.”

“I know,” he said, “that your mother would be properly
appalled if she knew what keeps you warm of nights.”

“Are you?”

He shook his head.

“And would you be? If we were wedded—would you try to forbid
me?”

“Yes,” he said without hesitation.

“Yet you would take other women if you were so minded.”

He had the grace to flush and lower his head. “It is the way
of the world here. Though if you forbade—”

“What, so that we both could suffer?” Her eyes narrowed.
“Yes, I would do it. And then we would be miserable alike.”

“Maybe not miserable,” he said. “We might get on very well.
We always have.”

“As kin,” she said. “As friends. What then of my beloved?
Must I send him away? I can’t keep him here. Then we truly would be wretched.”

“Send him to the south,” Kemni said, “to the Bull of Re.
He’ll be much needed there, and most welcome.”

“You will consider this,” she said. “You really will.”

He spread his hands. “Won’t you? It’s sensible. It’s useful.
It serves both our purposes. And it will content your mother.”

“Mother must be kept content at all costs.” Iry snapped off
the words. “You can say such a thing? Knowing what I have? Or is that why? If
you can’t have yours, I’m not to have mine? Is that what it is? Is it?”

She had driven him back to the wall. He flattened against
it, not particularly cowed, but wary of her temper.

And well he should be. She stepped back, letting him go. “Go
away,” she said, “and let me think.”

He obeyed her without a word. She caught herself wishing he
had protested. It would have been easier then to stand against this thing.

She did like him. A great deal. Love him? Yes. As a brother,
as her close kin.

That would hardly prevent them from marrying, not in Egypt,
though the Retenu had a horror of it. Was not Queen Nefertari the king’s own
sister?

But when her heart sang, the name it sang was Khayan’s. And
that was altogether impossible. He was a foreigner, a captive. He had been lord
here, and done well, but the people had hated him—still hated him, because he
was Retenu.

Egypt labored already to forget that they had ever been.
Their names, the memory of them, would be scoured away, cut from the monuments,
buried in the sand and in the black mud of the Delta. The captives who
remained, who had not be killed or sold far away, must become Egyptian, as far
as they could; as far as he could, whose face would never be anything but
foreign.

“Lady,” she said to the goddess in the solitude of that
place, “could you possibly have chosen a more awkward man for me?”

The goddess refrained from answering, as well she might. She
had chosen Iry, too—out of all the women of the tribes and the Retenu, she had
turned aside to set her hand on an Egyptian, a stranger to horses, who had
grown up hating them. That she would then bind that Egyptian’s heart to a man
of the Retenu was utterly like her humor.

Now it must end. Egypt must be Egypt again. Iry would take
her cousin as her mother ordained, in marriage that was an alliance of princes.
So had the Ariana of Crete wedded the king in Thebes. It was the way of this
world, right and proper.

She straightened her back and firmed her spirit. She went to
duties that had been waiting for far too long while she contended with this
folly of resistance.

~~~

When those duties were done, she did as Kemni had reminded
her that she should do. She summoned her mother into her presence.

There were others, too. This was not a formal audience, but
what she had to say, she must say in front of everyone who was concerned in it.
Therefore she had established herself in the smaller reception-hall, in the
chair that had been the lord’s for time out of mind.

Kemni was there, and Teti the steward and his wife, and
inevitably his daughters. Sadana also, and Iannek because he could hardly be
kept away, and Huy the scribe, who could remember what he heard, though he
could no longer see to write it. And, of course, since all the rest were there,
Khayan making himself a large and silent presence at Iry’s back.

The Lady Nefertem kept them waiting, but Iry had prepared
for that. There was wine, there were cakes as was fitting. The five Beauties
filled the silence with chatter, sparing the rest the need to do so. They did
not seem to recall that their former lord understood Egyptian; they raked him
over with frank appraisal.

“Such shoulders,” Mut-Nefer said. “Like a bull’s. I
wonder—do you think the rest of him—?”

The others collapsed in giggles. “
Oh
! Oh, I wager!” cried Neferure. “But those eyes, I’m not sure I
like them. They’re too much like a cat’s. Or a hawk’s. Hawk’s eyes are cold.
They’re full of killing.”

“Not these,” said Mut-Nefer. “They’re warm, like amber.”

“I’m sure he’s killed people,” Neferure persisted. “They all
have, all that kind. With those big hands.” She shivered deliciously. “
Oh
! To feel them on me.”

It was fortunate that the Lady Nefertem deigned to appear
just then, in a procession of maids, or Iry would have risen up and knocked
those idiots’ heads together. The lady’s arrival silenced them abruptly and
mercifully. It took a great deal of time to see her settled in the proper
degree of comfort, full in their center, of course, with all of them hovering,
waiting on her eagerly.

All but Iry, and Khayan who never left his place once he had
established himself in it. He was like the Mare. If Iry was there, he cared
little for anything else.