The Shepherd Kings (11 page)

“You hope for a great deal,” said Minos. “Much relies on
fate, and on the element of surprise. Apophis may not believe when he hears of
twin fleets sailing against him—but if that disbelief passes too quickly, we
could lose the war.”

“Victory is never absolutely certain.”

“Indeed.” Minos regarded Kemni with a level dark stare. Just
then, and vividly, Kemni saw Ariana in him. “Tell us what we stand to gain from
this. What Egypt gains is obvious. Why should Crete shed its blood for Egypt’s
sake?”

Kemni did not answer that at once. He needed to find the
words, and then to frame them with care, so that this king would hear and
understand. He had not been having great difficulty with this language—Naukrates
and Iphikleia had taught him well—but he had to be certain that the words he
chose were the right and proper ones.

At length he said, “Egypt gains more. That I cannot argue.
But for Crete, there is the friendship of the reunited kingdoms, and the
wealth, and the great power that Egypt holds. My king is prepared to offer you
portions of his own tribute, shares in his mines of gold and copper and
precious silver, and a part of his trade with the nations of the world. Crete
has great power on the sea, riches and strength that all the world knows—but
Egypt has more, on land and on the water. My king offers you a part of that.”

“Tempting,” Minos conceded. “Very tempting indeed. Still,
gold may be poor payment for the lives of all our young men.”

“That is a risk you take,” Kemni said. Probably he should
not have said it, but he never had been able to prevaricate.

“So,” said Minos. “Go now, and take your pleasure as you
will. I make you free of the palace and the kingdom. Whatever you ask, it shall
be given you. I have so commanded it.”

As dismissals went, it was thorough and strikingly gracious.
Even if Kemni could have mustered arguments against it, he was not inclined to
try. He bowed as if to a great prince of Egypt—though not quite as to his
king—and did as he was bidden.

An envoy’s task was to wait, even more than to speak for
his king. Kemni waited, he thought, with reasonable patience. He played as he
had before, danced the dance of courts, and took the freedom of the island.
Everything was as it had been, but the king’s word eased his way remarkably.
All doors were open to him, and people gave him anything that he asked. If
there was a delicacy he favored, it was given him without his asking. He had
his mornings with the chariot, and his nights with what seemed an inexhaustible
succession of Arianas. In between, he found ample to amuse himself, if he was
minded to be amused.

The thing that Naukrates had come back for, the great
festival of the Bull, came at the time of the new moon. Perhaps preparations
had been in train since Kemni arrived, but he had not known to look for them.
But there was no escaping the sudden inrush of people into city and palace, the
gathering of ships in the harbor, and the burgeoning of the market to fill, it
seemed, every square and corner of the city.

Three days before the festival, they brought in the bulls.
Priests and priestesses had gone out days since, found the herds where they
wandered amid the tumbled hills and crags of inland Crete, and called on the
gods and on the Mother Goddess to choose the best and the most holy. Those,
they had separated from the herds, brought together and driven down toward the
sea.

People had been waiting for them since before dawn. The way
that they ran was old, and had been hallowed to the bulls since the first king
sat his throne in Crete. All along it, people waited, dressed in festival
finery, with garlands and banners, music and song and the sound of laughter
that seemed, more than any other, the truest music of this kingdom.

Kemni came down into the city in a great crowd of the
younger courtiers. They had insisted that he keep them company—for luck, they
said laughing, because he was a foreigner and a king’s messenger, and the gods
would bless them for his presence. He had his doubts of the gods’ care for his
mere and mortal self, but he was eager to see the bulls. He was glad enough to
be led and danced and cajoled out of the palace and toward the city, and thence
to the far side, where a steep and winding road made its way down from a rocky
height. It seemed rather too narrow and ill trodden to support the coming of
the great bulls of Crete, but everyone was waiting along it, and fully
expecting the bulls to appear.

His companions vanquished a flock of rival lordlings to
seize a coveted place: where the road began to level, just before it entered
the outskirts of the city. The city wall was farther on. Here were little
fields and farmsteads, taking advantage of what tillable ground there was. They
were set well to either side of the narrow road, with ample room for crowds to
gather—and for the bulls to run.

Kemni had seen on the way there, how wise people kept to the
roofs and balconies of the houses. But here there was no high ground. They were
all level with the road, and Kemni was in the front, thrust there in the
passage through the throng.

He wondered, briefly and unbecomingly, if this might not be
a plot: to dispose of the Egyptian king’s emissary at the horns and hooves of
the sacred bulls, and so free King Minos from the need to consider his
proposal. But that was not like anything Kemni had heard of Minos. The Cretan
king was a wise man, and just, and as honest as a king could afford to be.

It seemed a long time before Kemni felt a shaking underfoot.
He thought little of it at first, until the hum of conversation faded, and
silence spread in a long wave through the gathering of people.

Now he could hear it: a low rumbling, and a sharp cry that
must be one of the drovers urging the bulls onward. With breathtaking
suddenness after so long a wait, the first great shape breasted the hill. Its
horns were vast, nigh as long as a man. Its hump loomed against the sky. It
plunged down the slope, a white bull patched with red, like foam shot with
blood. Its brothers thundered in its wake.

Any man of sense would have stayed well back from the herd
and let it pass unhindered. But there were fools in every crowd, and sacred
idiots. These were young men, and sometimes a slim bare-breasted girl, running
alongside the bulls, leaping to touch their sweating sides, to tug at their
tufted tails. When one touched a bull, he cried out—or she: “Gods’ blessing!
Gods’ blessing on all my kin!”

Kemni was not a fool. He was not mad. He was not even
Cretan. And yet, as the leader of the bulls passed him in a great pounding of
hooves, in snorting and in the strong musky reek of his hide, Kemni was
running, running like a mad thing, light as air and too utterly terrified to
stop.

The bulls took as little notice of him as they had of anyone
else. And yet those horns were as sharp as spears, and those hooves could
trample a man to a bloody pulp. All he needed was to slip, or to misjudge his
step.

Still he ran. The first of the bulls had passed him. He was
in the middle, and in their midst, running between two great snorting beasts,
one spotted with red, one with black. The wind of their passage bore him up. He
could run, he thought, forever, sustained by the strength of the bulls.

He reached out easily, because it seemed to be time. His
hand brushed a hot damp hide. The bull did not flinch or shift away. He let his
hand rest there, running light, running easy. He said nothing. The gods’
blessing lay on him like the sun’s warmth.

It came to him, distantly, that he was trapped, surrounded
by bulls. While he ran with them, he was safe enough. If he flagged or
faltered, they would not stop for him, nor move aside.

He must run, then, and trust in the gods to protect him.
They had brought him here. They could keep him safe.

He had passed into the city, through the gate with its
echoes and its sudden dimness. The throngs were thicker here, hanging from
roofs and balustrades, sometimes dropping among the bulls, and always leaping
to touch, or to run with them.

But only Kemni had run so far, or stayed with the bulls so
long. The walls of houses closed in, then drew away again: a square of the
city, narrowed and thick with people, but the sky was wider overhead.

His breath sobbed in his throat. His lungs were afire. His
knees dared not buckle.

A new madness struck him, a thought that he almost feared to
think. But it pricked at him. It tempted him. His eye slid toward the great
ivory sweep of a horn, and toward the swell of a hump. This was not a
horse—there was no level place to rest.

Iphikleia had done it. She had chosen a gentle heifer. This
was a wild bull. And yet . . .

Just as he had entered the herd, he watched his hand reach
out, grasp a horn, let the force of the bull’s advance swing him onto the neck
behind the heavy head. There was room there, just, between hump and horns, a
place to rest if one were truly mad.

And so he rode the whole long way from the city to the
palace of Minos on the neck of a black-spotted bull, no more or less unwelcome
than a bird perched on that vast swell of back. People stared, he supposed. He did
not try to see.

Then at long last the world went still. The bull stood,
sides heaving, in a wide court.

Kemni slid from his neck, staggering as his legs found their
strength again. The bulls were not all motionless. Some fretted, tossing their
horns, stamping, uneasy to be confined within walls.

He walked away from them unscathed. There were people, of
course there were. He did not want them to stare so, or to murmur; only to let
him pass, find a quiet place and collapse and find his breath where he had long
since lost it.

But that grace was not granted him. He had committed
sacrilege, he supposed. Could they put to death a foreign king’s envoy?

The eyes on him, once he gathered his wits to notice, did
not seem appalled. They were more—speculative? Curious? Amazed?

Some of them he recognized. Iphikleia, of course. Ariana—the
Ariana, and an escort of bright-eyed wicked girls whose faces he remembered
rather well. Kemni did not forget a face, particularly if it had hovered close
to his through the whole of a night.

Ariana looked him up and down. “Beautiful man,” she said,
“you do know how to make an entrance.”

“I suppose I’ll die for it,” he said.

“No,” she said. “If the bulls chose to let you live, it’s
not for any human creature to question.”

Kemni felt the breath rush out of him, and most of his
strength with it. Firm small hands held him up: Iphikleia, no more gentle than
she ever was, but blessedly there. She kept him from shaming himself. She knew;
she had done it herself. “Go and rest,” she said. “When you wake up, maybe
you’ll be sane again.”

“I’m sane now,” he said. “Whatever I did—the gods—”

“The gods, yes,” she said. “Now go.” She sent two of the
Arianas with him, “And not to keep you awake, either. Mind you sleep. Do you
understand?”

“Perfectly, great lady,” he said.

She made a sound of disgust. “Oh, go. Go!”

~~~

Iphikleia was as salubrious as a dash of cold water in the
face. But she had commanded that he sleep, and sleep he did; nor would the
Arianas suffer him to dally with them before he slept. They bathed him—teasing
him unmercifully—and dried him and tucked him in bed, and left him there,
already more than half asleep; though his manly parts would gladly have roused
the whole of him to quite another occupation.

He dreamed of bulls, a great heaving herd of them. Bulls
running. Bulls grazing. Bulls mating, mounting the smaller, gentler cows,
driving home their seed, dropping sated to the trampled grass. He dreamed that
he was a bull; that he courted a fine speckled cow; that she ignored him, but the
way of her disregard invited him to pursue her.

It was a hotter passion than men knew, and swifter. A man
could linger, could draw out the pleasure. A bull knew no such thing. Once he
had mounted, the rest was irresistible: thrust and thrust, and the burst of it,
all at once, with force that emptied him of thought or will or self. There was
nothing in the world but this. There could be nothing, nor ever would be.

~~~

He woke with a start. The light was all wrong, the shadows
twisted. Somewhere amid confusion, he found memory.

It was evening, the sun not yet down but near to it. He had
slept much of the day away. His body ached: his legs in particular, but his
nether parts, too. He had joined in wild passion with the coverlets.

He rose stiffly, cleansed himself and dressed, and reflected
that, come morning, he should ask the servants to shave him. But he would do,
for a while longer.

He peered at himself in the disk of polished bronze that lay
on a table near the bed. He never did that; he trusted servants to keep him
looking presentable, and women’s eyes to assure him that he looked well enough
for the purpose. This evening he had an odd desire to be certain that the face
he wore was his own; that he had not grown the horns and muzzle of a bull.

It was much the same face he had last seen reflected in
bronze. There was nothing remarkable about it. It was Egyptian: narrow,
long-nosed, full-lipped. His eyes were long and dark, painted with kohl and
malachite against a sun that did not shine here; but habit was strong, and
fashion inescapable.

After so long in Crete, looking at rounder, softer faces,
and seeing every man and woman with a waist-long curly mane, this crop-headed,
sharp-featured face was strange. He did not see the beauty in it that all the
women claimed to see. There were handsomer faces in Egypt, and great beauty
among the women.

But he was content with it. It was his face, and not the
bull’s head that he had half feared to see. With a sigh and a shake of the
head, he went in search of a congenial dinner.