The Shepherd Kings (16 page)

“As a baby’s behind,” said Tawit, who was not precisely
genteel. Unlike her daughters, she knew it, accepted it, and let it be. She
studied her plump brown hand next to the Lady Nefertem’s slender ivory one, and
sighed. “I swear, my lady, you look younger every year. That’s the gods’ gift,
I’m sure; or I’d be a beauty, too, for all the potions I’ve slathered on my
face.”

Lady Nefertem smiled faintly—the most expression she ever
allowed herself. Smiles, as she frequently admonished Iry, caused wrinkles, and
wrinkles were not to be borne.

Tawit went on robustly, not even slightly deterred by the
lady’s silence. “Ah well, my lady, we’re as the gods made us. These bones can
be content with that.”

Tawit’s daughters were all named for beauty: Nefertem after
the lady, Nefertiri, Mut-Nefer, Neferure, Nefer-Maat. Nefer-Maat, the youngest,
pinched Iry’s arm till she gasped, and said in a tone of great annoyance, “
Iry
! You aren’t
listening
!’’'’

“She is now,” said Mut-Nefer with a little too much relish.
“Iry, haven’t you heard? We have a new lord.”

“Should I care?” Iry wanted to know.

“I’d think you’d want to,” Mut-Nefer said.

Iry sighed in exasperation. “It’s Iannek, then.”

“Oh, no,” said Nefertem-the-younger. “Not hardly.”

“Not hardly,” her youngest sister echoed her, giggling and
clapping her hands at her own wit.

Mut-Nefer rolled her eyes at them both. “No, it’s not
Iannek. He’s much too young. It’s someone else—an older brother. He’s been
abroad, they say. Away far away, beyond even the foreigners’ own country.”

“Really?” In spite of her determination not to be
interested, no, not in the slightest, Iry could not help but state the obvious.
“If he’s been away, how could he have influenced the king and his ministers,
and won his father’s holdings?”

“That’s the wonder of it,” Mut-Nefer said. “And the
foreignness, too. He fought for it.”

“
Fought
for it?”

Mut-Nefer grinned at Iry’s incredulity. “Yes. He came back,
and another brother was claiming the inheritance. But his father chose him, and
the king agreed with it. The other brother challenged, of course—how could he
avoid it? The king had to let them settle it by combat. He won. He killed the
other one and took the lordship.”

“No,” Iry said.

“Oh yes,” said Mut-Nefer. “That’s how they do it.”

“Maybe they’ll all start fighting at once, then, and kill
each other off,” Iry said nastily.

“You are bloody-minded today,” Mut-Nefer said. Her sisters
giggled in chorus.

Silly nits. Iry wished her head would stop pounding and her
belly would stop cramping. As if it could matter at all which of the Retenu
called himself master of this place—and therefore of Iry. They were all the
same. Foreigners. They did not belong in Egypt. They did not, before the gods,
belong in the world.

No wonder that Iry had been so conspicuously ill. At last
and rather excessively late, her woman’s courses had come upon her.

She was first and most powerfully aware of it when she went
to rise from the cushion she had been sitting on, and reeled dizzily. Nefer-Maat,
beside her, let out a little shriek. “
Iry
!
You’re
bleeding
!”

“Of course I’m not bleeding!” she said crossly, till
Nefer-Maat snatched up the cushion and thrust it in her face. Then she could
hardly deny the evidence; it was darker than heart’s blood, a dark and secret
thing, a thing she suddenly—overwhelmingly—did not want.

But there was no denying it. Late, unlooked for, and with an
unwarranted amount of pain and sheer irritability, Iry had become a woman.

If she had had any sense at all, she would have recognized
it when it began, and seen to it before it became the talk of the house. The
new lord was a great matter for speculation, but Iry was an actual, living
presence. Her cherished anonymity and frequent invisibility was, she hoped
briefly, gone.

The women made a great fuss over her, with pads and possets,
petting and pampering. Worst of all, the Lady Nefertem was roused to action. For
the first time in recent memory, she not only recalled Iry’s existence, she
remembered that Iry was her daughter.

The Lady Nefertem as distant, regal personage was more
comforting than not. She sat in the heart of the house as the goddess Isis sat
in the heavens, remote and vaguely benevolent. The Lady Nefertem as mother was
frankly alarming. She hovered. She fretted. She summoned flocks of servants to
stand about and yawn and grin at Iry behind the lady’s back.

Iry wanted nothing more than to crawl into shelter like a wounded
cat and nurse her misery till it was gone. But the Lady Nefertem was having
none of that. She took the place of honor beside her own bed, in which she had
insisted that Iry be laid, and with her own fine white hands applied cooling
cloths to Iry’s brow.

The cloths were clammy, and the herbs and spices in which
they had been steeped were cloyingly potent. Even at that, they were better
than the potion, which, from the taste, must be made of ox-dung and river
water. Iry gagged and flung it across the room.

The cup, her mother’s best one, carved of chalcedony and
rimmed with gold, clattered to the floor but did not—mercifully—break. The
horrid concoction sprayed wide. The great bulk of it found purchase on the hem
of a heavy woolen robe.

The whole roomful of chattering women fell abruptly silent.
A hawk among the pigeons, Iry thought. A lion among the gazelles. A great
broad-shouldered black-bearded man with a sword at his side and a staff in his
hand, and eyes—such eyes—

The Retenu were dark men, bigger and hairier than Egyptians,
but dark-eyed as any human creature should be. This one—she thought of the hawk
again, and of the lion. His eyes were light, almost gold. They were fixed on
her, and she knew that he was perfectly aware of the stain on his hem and the
stench that wafted up from it. But he was, just then, much more interested in
the perpetrator of the stain.

He wanted to kill her, she supposed. Or rape her. Retenu
always wanted to do one or the other. At the moment she was too intensely
annoyed to care. “What are you doing here?” she demanded—forgetting every scrap
of discretion she had learned in ten years of slavery, and forgetting the
audience, too.

He raised a brow. He had a nose like the curve of the new
moon, or like a falcon’s beak. What the rest of his face was like, she could
not tell. His beard was thick, and grew high up on his cheeks. Maybe he was
smiling. Maybe his lips were set in a thin line. There was no way to see.

But his eyes—those smiled. Mocking her. “What am I doing
here?” he echoed in reasonably passable Egyptian. “Serving as a target for
practice, it seems. Shall I move a little closer? Would you like another
missile?”

That pricked her temper even more deeply than before. “Who
are you? How dare you come in here?”

“How dare I indeed,” he said, with a glance that took in the
whole of the room and everyone in it—even the Lady Nefertem mute, staring. At
that one, he paused. Both brows went up. The tawny eyes went briefly, truly
gold, as if dazzled by the sun.

He inclined his arrogant head to her, as he would never have
dreamed of doing to Iry, and said in a voice much softened and gentled, “I beg
your pardon, madam.” As smoothly then as a servant in a palace, he backed
through the door and drew it shut, with him on the other side of it.

Once he was gone, the room erupted. Iry clapped hands over
her ears and buried herself in sheets and cushions. But there was still no
escaping the uproar, or the hands that plucked her out.

They belonged to several of the five Beauties, and every one
of them seemed to be shrieking at the top of her strong young lungs. Out of the
racket, she managed to distinguish one intelligible fragment: “
Iry
! What was that?”

Iry shook herself free and struggled to her feet. Against
such numbers, she needed every advantage she could get. One of those was
height: she was a good handbreadth taller than any of them. “That was one of
the Retenu. What was he doing here? He should have been plaguing Teti, not
ogling the women!”

“The new lord must have sent him,” Mut-Nefer said. “That was
a nobleman’s dress, and a fine sword, too. And that staff—he’s no servant, that
one. Now he’ll be telling the lord what a sharp-tongued slavegirl he has. If
you escape with only a whipping, you’ll be fortunate.”

“Hush,” Tawit admonished her daughter. “Let’s not be
prophesying trouble before it falls on us. If there’s one Retenu in the house,
you can wager there’s a whole pack to follow. We’d best be ready for them.”

That shook them all out of their silliness—though it could
hardly silence them. Tawit gathered them together like a goose her goslings and
herded them mercifully out.

There was still the Lady Nefertem, and those of the maids
who had nothing to do but wait on her. The lady had not moved through all the
fuss and flutter, nor seemed to take particular notice of the invader past that
first, incredulous stare. She had a gift of not seeing what she did not wish to
see. It must serve her strangely in the lord’s bed. It spared her a great deal
of suffering otherwise, as far as Iry could tell.

Iry had no such luxury. She could stay here; her mother
would pamper her and cosset her and drive her mad, but she would not have to
face another pack of invaders. A new lord—the old one had been tolerable only
in his frequent absences. What if this new one was worse?

She had to know. She escaped easily enough, between her
mother’s lingering silence and the maids’ incapacity to do more than stand and
gape at whatever passed by them.

~~~

The house was in mighty disarray. An army of Retenu had
invaded it, with no warning but itself; no messenger had come ahead of it.

That was deliberate, Iry was sure. A truly canny lord would
do such a thing to test his steward; to see what his house was like when he was
not there to oversee it.

Teti could be lazy and he was not entirely honest, but he
kept the house in decent order. It was clean, the storehouses were as full as
they could be in this season, the servants found their places soon enough and
bent themselves to duties that they had hoped to be free of for yet a while.

Iry’s place was between kitchen and banqueting hall,
wherever she happened to be needed. In taking herself to it, she managed to go
the long way about. The men’s quarters were humming, as she had expected; there
were Retenu everywhere, beards and robes and voices speaking their barbaric
tongue. She spoke it, though she did not like to. They were saying nothing much
worth listening to, except the lord’s name: Khayan. And that he was there; he
had not sent them ahead, he had come himself.

And he had horses. A whole herd of them, whom Teti was
beside himself to find housing for. One of the Retenu, as Iry slipped past,
said in exasperation, “Fool of an Egyptian! What’s that field we rode past on
the way in? It will do.”

“That is the eastern barley field,” Teti protested. “If we
lose that, we’ll lose the fifth part of our harvest.”

“Now it is the field for the horses,” the Retenu said.
“Tubal, see to it.”

Another Retenu dipped his head and ran to do as he was
bidden. Teti looked ready to shriek aloud, but clearly remembered where he was
and who faced him. He swallowed the cry, though his face twisted; and turned
his back on the foreigner; and betook himself elsewhere.

So too did Iry. She did not want to see the horses, but
somehow the way she chose brought her to her vantage atop the gate. The herd
had been kept contained just outside of it, warded by men in chariots, and by
something else that she had not seen before, nor imagined: men riding on
horses. Sitting on their backs. Sending them hither and yon as if they had been
hounds on a lead.

She stood astonished in the hard bright sunlight, forgetting
to crouch low lest she be seen. But no one looked up or called out. The
herdsmen were occupied with the horses.

So many horses. The old lord had had a number of them, as
great lords did; but most of the beasts that had come with him on his visits
were asses. Many, many long-eared asses to draw chariots and bear burdens and
walk in caravans.

This new lord had only horses. Some were familiar in color
and shape, red or brown or dun. But those that ran in the center, like a
current of clear water in a mud-sullied river, were the color of clouds and
mist and rare, precious rain: white, silver, grey. Some were dappled like the
moon. Some were dark, but sheened with silver.

They ran together, surging like wind-ripples on the river,
pale manes streaming. Iry had never seen anything so strange, or so strangely
beautiful. She watched them all the way down the road and over the hill to the
eastern field. Even after they were gone, she stayed where she was.

She hated horses. Her cousin Kemni had died under trampling
hooves, broken by the wheels of chariots. She had seen his body when they
brought it back. The embalmers had done what they could, but there was no
disguising how broken his limbs had been, or how his skull had shattered. There
had been no face to bid farewell to, even as shriveled as the embalming would
have made it.

Still she could not forget these horses. Horses of the moon;
horses of cloud and rain. They were not of earth as the others were. They were
of another country. The gods’ country, maybe, though not such gods as she had
ever known.

It was a long while before she came down from the gate. Even
then she might not have left, but she heard rough male voices and the tramping
of booted feet. The new lord was posting a guard on the wall. She slipped around
and down by another way, and came at last to her proper and servile place.