The Shepherd Kings (12 page)

~~~

Kemni’s place in the palace had not changed because he had
ridden the bull. He was still the stranger, interesting because he was foreign,
and fashionable because he had the Ariana’s favor. The bull only proved what
they had all been saying: that Kemeni the Egyptian was anything but a dull
guest.

Kemni the Egyptian, doomed to be fascinating, attended the
bulldancing as the Ariana’s guest. She had sent her servant for him—a man,
somewhat to his disappointment, but perhaps that was as well. He did not need
distraction before that of all festivals in Crete.

He had dressed in his best, as if he went before the king;
and after all, it was a god he honored, the great Bull who was the image and
servant of the Earthshaker. In wig and kilt and gold of honor, he followed his
guide through the mazes of the palace, to a part of it that he had not seen
before.

Except in dreams. This was the court in which he had sat so
often in the spirit, the court of the Bull: great open space, and ranks of
benches ascending in tiers, and below them clean white sand, raked level,
waiting for the dancers. He sat where his eyes had been in the dream, just
above the sand, with the wall below and the crowds of lesser watchers above.
His seat was softened with cushions, his head canopied against the sun. Great
lords and princes sat around him.

But not the king. The king sat across the court under his
own golden canopy, with his queen beside him. There were older lords, ladies in
jeweled skirts and tall headdresses, and servants with fans and sunshades and
jars of wine and platters of sweets. Here on Ariana’s side were the younger
folk, the priestesses, the lords’ sons and younger brothers, warm already with
wine, and passing round a gluttonous array of sweets and spiced cakes.

Kemni could not eat or drink. Since he came into this court,
he had felt odd, as if one or more of his souls had wandered apart from his
body.

Ariana was not there. Another priestess sat in the tall
chair of ivory inlaid with gold. It was, Kemni realized with a shock,
Iphikleia. She was clad as if she had been a goddess, even to the serpents
wound about her arms. Kemni thought them the work of hands, until one of them
stirred and lifted its head, questing toward him with a flickering tongue.

He sat still on his scarlet cushion. The rite had begun
below: the mournful cry of horns made of great shells of the sea, and a
processional of priests—men, for Earthshaker was a men’s god, though both men
and women honored him in the dance. They wore the horns and hides of bulls, and
came as bulls would come, stepping slowly, stamping, snorting, pawing the sand.
Behind them came the dancers, slender youths and maidens in kilts wound and
belted tight. These laughed as they passed into the court, spun and wheeled,
leaped and somersaulted, like acrobats in a market in Egypt.

There was a wild joy in their coming, a gladness that Kemni
understood: he had felt it when he ran with the bulls. Today one of them, or
more, might die. Or they all might live, conquer the bull and honor the god.

Three by three they leaped and danced and whirled about the
court, and three by three they paused, first to salute the priestess, and
second to salute the king. With prayers and chanting and moaning of horns the
priests blessed them; and then, abruptly, they were gone. The court was empty.
Servants ran to rake the tumbled sand, to smooth it once more, as if no foot
had ever sullied it.

The court stilled. All the hum and babble of gathered
people, the ripple of laughter, eruptions of song, fell silent. Everyone, it
seemed, drew breath together, and held it.

A drum began to beat. Pipes skirled. Horns sang their
moaning song. The bull came.

Kemni knew him. He was the pied bull who had carried Kemni
into the palace. He seemed even vaster in that court, and far more deadly, as
he loomed in his gate.

The dancers’ gate faced his, opening beneath the priestess’
seat. For a while Kemni could not see them, though he knew they had come out:
the crowd had drawn taut, and the eyes of those on the far side were fixed
below him.

The bull saw them. His head lowered. His ears flicked. He
pawed the sand.

With sudden motion, all three of the dancers leaped into the
center of the court. Kemni had not known that he was holding his breath. But
they were not the dancers of his dream. These were two maidens and a youth,
somewhat pale even at this distance, and intent on their dancing. First they
tempted and tormented the bull, to lure him out of his gate. And when he had
come, slowly, dubiously perhaps, they began the dance proper, the leap and spin
and somersault over those long curved horns.

The bull was placid as bulls went, as Kemni had discovered
when he rode it into the palace. It seemed almost to indulge the dancers; to
spin and circle and gallop massively from end to end of the court, with dancers
leaping weightlessly over and about it. There was a kind of beauty in it, an
ease and almost safety that might have pleased the dancers, but the crowd was
growing restless. When the bull had circled thrice, the dancers joined forces
to drive it through its gate. It went as if it had been a tame thing.

The dancers took their bows and the less than avid approval
of the crowd, and whirled and leaped and tumbled out. Again the servants came
out to rake and smooth the sand. Again there was that breathless waiting: the
sun beating down, the crowd breathing as one, the bull coming forth and the
dancers coming to meet him.

Seven times they danced the bull in that court, seven sets
of dancers, seven bulls for the honor of the Earthshaker. For Kemni who knew
none of the finer points of the art, it grew monotonous. Some dancers won more
approval than others: most often, he thought, because the bull was wilder, his
will more malevolent. For some of the bulls, as with the first, this seemed almost
a game, a thing they did for the amusement of it. But for others, this was
battle. The dancers, tiny leaping things, were like gnats: annoying, then
irritating, then maddening.

At last, when the sixth dance was done, Kemni gathered wits
to ask one of his many questions. He addressed it to the priestess beside him,
but Iphikleia answered from her throne, where she had sat unmoving through all
that long burning morning. “The bull’s anger makes the dance more deadly.
Earthshaker cherishes it the more for that. And if there is bloodshed . . .”

Kemni nodded. “Then if the bull is placid, Earthshaker
withholds his blessing?”

“No,” said Iphikleia. “The dance is always holy, and always
blessed. Blood makes it stronger, that’s all.”

There had been blood already: a dancer in the third dance
had caught herself on a horn and so pierced her hand. But she had spun free and
her fellows had diverted the bull, and she had continued the dance, leaving a
bright trail in the white sand. All the others had escaped unharmed. They were
not, it was clear, expected or even asked to sacrifice their lives to the god.

The last dance began just as the sun reached its zenith. The
court throbbed with heat. It was warm enough even for Kemni, as warm as Egypt.
For the first time since he had sailed past the Delta, he was not shivering
with perpetual cold.

There was a difference in this dance. The drums and horns
seemed louder. Voices joined them, a deep, slow chant like the surge and swell
of the sea. It was Earthshaker’s hymn, invocation and blessing, and a promise
that here, at the end of the dance, he would find his greatest favor.

Kemni had forgotten to breathe again. The light, the heat.
The stillness of the gathered people, the great circle of faces rising up the
sides of the court.

With the inevitability of a dream, the bull came out from
beneath his gate: a great bull, speckled white and red like seafoam flecked
with blood. And the dancers when they came, two youths, a maiden laughing, wild
and eerie-sweet.

Kemni the dreamer had not known her. Kemni the waking
spirit, king’s emissary to Crete, knew her well indeed. The Ariana danced below
him, danced for the honor of the god, dared death to win his blessing for her
people.

In his dream she had lived, but one of her fellows had died.
Kemni could not move to cry warning, though every step unfolded as he had seen
it while he slept, far away in Egypt.

This was not why he had come—to save the life of a boy who
had consecrated himself to a god. And yet this had brought him here. This had
marked him from all who might perhaps better have gone on his king’s errand.

He could only watch, barely breathing, as the dance played
itself out under the pitiless sun. A god could not be gainsaid, nor his
sacrifice denied. No matter how a mortal might dread it, and yearn to stop it.

The boy was one whom he had seen here and there about court
and palace. They might have shared a banquet together, or gone in company on an
expedition to the city. Kemni did not remember his name. There were so many
like him among the youth of the court.

He danced well, but without wisdom. Ariana seemed to care
little for danger or death. And yet her skill was great, her control
remarkable. People murmured at it, marveling—how close she came to those
terrible horns, and how effortlessly she evaded them.

Her taller partner was nearly as skilled—Kemni could see
that, after six full dances. The smaller boy had not danced before, someone
behind Kemni whispered to someone else. He danced well, but he took risks he
should not have taken. He should have left them to the others, hung back
somewhat, protected himself with caution.

But caution was seldom a young man’s virtue. And Ariana
taunted him with her art. She leaped when the bull was nearly upon her, leaped
and whirled and came lightly to rest on the shoulders of the taller dancer. The
bull plunged onward. He was one of the great ones, the ones made mighty with a
terrible anger. The curve of his hump was like the swell of the sea. His hooves
thundered like the crash of waves on the shore.

The boy flung himself as if into the sea, and like the sea,
the bull took him and broke him and cast him up on the sand.

In the dream Kemni had awakened as the boy died. But this
was no dream. He saw the body fallen, the slow seep of blood, the deep and terrible
silence.

It shattered. It burst in a vast wave of sound, a roar from
every throat in that place: men, women, even the bull. But Kemni was silent. He
owed no loyalty to Earthshaker. His gods were of another place and kind.

The sacrifice was made, the victim carried away in great
honor. Those who had watched him die left the court in quiet that partook a
little of grief, but much more of exaltation.

The day after the dancing of the bulls, Kemni was summoned
again into the king’s presence. It was a day of quiet after the great festival,
a day as it were of atonement, of mourning for the one who had died, and
invoking the gods and the great goddess to bless the land and people of Crete.

Earthshaker had blessed them that morning, as the people
thought of it. Kemni had just risen and was reaching for the jar of water
lightly sweetened with wine when the earth heaved and shifted underfoot. The
jar began to topple. He snatched it, too startled yet to be afraid.

The earth had moved. He shook his head, sure that he had
dreamed it; but the spatter of spilled wine belied him.

It was true, then. In this country, on this island in the
sea, the earth itself could shift and stir as if it had been water.

The Cretans had taken it as an omen. Earthshaker was pleased
with his sacrifice. Kemni, more shaken than at first he knew, obeyed the king’s
summons without reflection, and with little expectation of what he might hear
or say.

~~~

King Minos received him this day, not in any hall of
audience, but in the court of the bulls. Kemni hesitated at the entrance to
which his guide had brought him, blinking at the blaze of sun on sand. No blood
sullied it now. All that had been taken away when the sacrifice was done.

The king sat at ease and in little state on a bench that, the
day before, had seated a common man of Crete. A single guard attended him.
There was no other escort, no witness but the servant who had guided Kemni to
this place.

Kemni had learned long ago not to question the whims of
kings. Therefore he was not astonished to be received with such lack of
ceremony. But the place—he could not burst out with the question, however
strong the temptation.

The king knew. His eye glinted as he said, “Come, man of
Egypt. Sit. I trust it’s warm enough for you here?”

“It is very pleasant,” Kemni said. The king seemed
comfortable enough himself, though his brow gleamed with sweat.

Kemni sat on the bench just below the king. Minos gazed out
over the sand. “You dreamed the dance,” he said. “Did it happen as you
remember?”

“Exactly,” Kemni said. “I couldn’t—if I could have stopped
it—”

“No one should ever try to stop what the gods have
ordained.” Minos spoke mildly, but his voice held the hint of a growl.

Kemni bent his head.

“Earthshaker chose you,” Minos said. “And Earth Mother—she
blessed you. It seems they see some profit for us in this venture your king
proposes.”

“Perhaps,” said Kemni, a little unwisely, “they believe that
Egypt and Crete together will be a great power in the world.”

“Perhaps,” the king said. “And is it insult or great gift
that your king sees no threat in us? We could conquer you once we drove out the
conquerors.”

“You might try,” Kemni said.

The king laughed, startling him. “Ah! Well and swiftly
countered. Yes, we might try, but for what? We have no great yearning to rule a
people who despise us. And your river—it is very great, no one denies it, but
never as great as the sea.”

“We cherish our river,” Kemni said, “and admire your sea.”