The Shepherd Kings (17 page)

~~~

The new lord had brought a great riding with him, and his
own cooks and servitors, too, which put Rahotep the cook severely out of countenance.
“I share my kitchen with no one,” he declared in the face of the robed and
portly Retenu who would have made himself lord of the hearth and the
bread-ovens. “Find yourself another kingdom. This is mine.”

The lord’s cook retreated in such order as he might. Maybe
he would find a place in the women’s house. Or he would settle to a life of
ease, and take it as a gift of the gods.

Once freed of the interloper, Rahotep returned to what he
had been doing, which was the preparation of a feast for the new lord and his
following. They were all men, he was assured. “But there are women coming,”
said one of the house servants, come in late and breathless and full of news.
“A whole houseful of them.”

“What, are they pausing here on their way to Memphis?” Nefer-Ptah
inquired. She was not one of those whose place was in the kitchen, but everyone
passed through there if she could; all news came there, and every rumor in that
part of the Delta.

“They’re not pausing,” the servant said. “They’re staying.”

“No,” said one of the undercooks, who had finished preparing
a brace of fine geese and set them in the oven to roast, and taken a few
moments’ rest. “What would they stay here for?”

“They’re all staying,” the house-servant said. “The lord’s
making this his chief estate.”

“What’s he doing that for?” Nefer-Ptah demanded, voicing
Iry’s own thought. “This isn’t the least of his holdings, but it’s far from the
greatest, either. Why would he want to stay here?”

The servant shrugged. “That’s what they’re saying. He wants to
live here.”

“He’s mad,” Nefer-Ptah said.

Iry considered taking umbrage, but she rather agreed. If the
lord made his home here—farewell to freedom, and to long easy seasons while the
lord made his home elsewhere. Even if he was out and about his lands, serving
his king, fighting in wars, his women would be here, meddling, giving orders
and treating the servants like—gods, like servants.

It was ill news, all things considered. She frowned as she
pondered it. So did everybody else. It was remarkably quiet in the kitchen
after the house-servant left. Amid the scents of bread baking, meat roasting,
sweet cakes cooling by the hearth, no one spoke more than he must, or lifted
his eyes from his work.

She did what needed doing. She plucked fowl, ground spices,
kneaded bread. She had forgotten the aches in her body, and what they meant,
too. There would be no festival for her now, no celebration of her newborn womanhood.
She was a slave again, and of no consequence.

It did not matter. When she closed her eyes, she saw
moon-colored horses. When she opened them, the world was a dim and shadowy
thing, and the people in it frail and without substance, like souls that had
not quite found their way to the land of the dead.

When at last all was ready, when the feast was laid and the
Retenu brought in to it, Iry’s place was in the procession of maids with the
wine. They all wore garlands about brow and waist, and their long hair free,
and no other garment or ornament.

Iry, the last and tallest, was to wait on the lord as she always
had. That was Teti’s own order, relayed by his daughter Nefer-Maat, with much
giggling and silliness as she did it. “Father says to put on your best manners,
and be charming if you can. This lord’s softer than the other was. He might be
kindly disposed toward you.”

“I know the kindness of the Retenu,” Iry muttered. “I
neither want nor need it.”

Nefer-Maat did not hear, or else she did not understand. Iry
was glad enough of that. Teti was trying to do well by her, in his way. She
could hardly fault him for that.

She took her place at the end of the procession, cradling
the tall pitcher of copper inlaid with gold, and hoping her garlands would stay
in place and not slip down to her eyes or her knees. She had no illusion of
beauty, except what every Egyptian woman had: long dark eyes, fine-boned face,
slender long-limbed body. Her breasts were small and her hips little broader
than a boy’s— though that would change, Tawit had assured her, now she was a
woman.

That was its own inconvenience. The twist of wool that she
had been given felt odd, uncomfortable in its secret place. If it failed, she
would be worse than ashamed. Retenu were peculiar about women’s matters. They
had some notion that a woman in her courses was unclean, and should be kept
apart from men. Which Teti should know—and if he did know it, and if his wife
and daughters had told him of Iry’s condition, then he played a deeper game
than she would have thought him capable of.

No. Teti did not know, or was not thinking. Iry could defy
him, but she was minded to do as he bade her. She wanted to see this new lord.
To know what sort of man traveled with so many horses, and such horses, at
that.

They waited a long time to be given the signal, but that was
as it always was. The passage in which they waited was close and ill-lit and
suffocatingly warm. Iry leaned against the wall and hoped the dizziness would
pass. Her eyes must be clear and her mind unclouded when she entered the hall.
This was her enemy, her new lord and master. If she was to know him, she must
have wits enough to study him.

The other maids chattered incessantly, oblivious to her
silence. They had all been slaves or servants before Iry’s father died. Iry had
little to say to them, or they to her.

They could hear the sounds of revelry beyond the wall,
louder when the door opened for servitors to come and go. Retenu believed in
making a great noise when they feasted—for luck, they said, and to honor the
giver of the feast. Not that they would see Teti as any such. He was a servant,
that was all, a mere Egyptian. Any honor they gave, they gave to the new lord
of the house.

It was time. The babble of voices swelled and faded. Iry
heard the rattle of the sistrum and the beating of the drum, the signal for the
wine to come in. She straightened her wilting garlands and her wilted self, and
raised the heavy pitcher to its proper and elegant angle.

She never did this for the foreign lord. She did it for
herself and for her family. That was older than these outlanders could ever
imagine. And in all that time, it had never, not once, bowed its head to a lord
who was not Egyptian.

She could keep her pride, whatever else she lost. That
straightened her back and squared her shoulders. She walked into the hall that
she knew so well, with its painted frescoes of lords and ladies feasting and
dancing. Burly bearded men sat at the tables now. The scent of flowers
struggled against the pungency of sweat, the lingering odors of roasted meats,
spiced sauces, beer and barley bread.

Some of them at least had had the sense to put on kilts—far
better in the heat than wool and leather. They were not beautiful to see, not
in the slightest. Even their shoulders and backs were black with hair. Iry
could understand, from that, why so many kept their robes. They did look better
clothed, even with cheeks scarlet and beards wet with sweat.

The procession advanced slowly to the beating of the drum. A
semblance of silence had fallen. Surely these Retenu knew the custom; and just
as surely they were inured to the sight of naked maidservants. Still, she
supposed it remained a novelty. Their women did not dine with them, nor walk
about save in robes and veils.

Such a hideous life those women must lead. Iry was glad of
her bare skin in the heavy heat of the hall, glad too of the garlands that
sweetened her nostrils with fragrance. The men at the tables were a blur of
bearded faces, heavy brows, eyes glittering out of the shadows. There was one
in the lord’s place, in the high seat, a black-bearded man like any other. But
when she met his eyes, she almost laughed. Golden eyes. Falcon-eyes.

Oh, of course. Of course that had been the new lord,
invading the women’s quarters, looking on those too of all his possessions. Who
else could it have been?

He would not recognize her. She had been lying abed, rumpled
and snappish; not walking with all the pride she could summon, bearing a
pitcher of the best wine.

And yet as he met her glance, she saw again that sunlit
laughter, and—yes—the spark of recognition. She flattened her own stare against
it.

He was no more dismayed by her intransigence now than he had
been then. She had not her mother’s gift of reducing men to stumbling
incoherence. They only laughed at her.

She bowed to him as if to a king—low to the point of
insolence. He saw that, too. Retenu were not supposed to see such things. With
set teeth and tight-drawn lips, she filled his cup with wine.

He lifted the cup, saluting the hall—but with a tilt that
turned the salute on her. His people cheered and hammered on the tables, and
drained their own cups of wine.

He did not even sip. “Taste it,” he said with a slant of the
eye at Iry.

“What, are you afraid of poison?”

“Should I be?”

“No,” said Iry. She plucked the cup from his fingers and
drank a hearty swallow. It was wonderful wine, the best indeed, sweet and
dizzyingly potent. It made her reel a little as she set the cup back in his
hand, so that her fingers brushed his: a brief touch, with a spark in it, a
crackle that made her recoil.

He caught the cup before it fell. “I asked your name,” he
said.

“I know yours,” said Iry.

“You could hardly avoid that, could you?”

“And why would you care what my name is? You must have a
hundred slavegirls, here and elsewhere.”

“But only one casts a full cup at my feet, and follows it
with the sharp edge of her tongue.” He was grinning at her, a white glint in
the shadows of his beard.

She bared her teeth in return. “So what will you do? Have me
impaled on a spike?”

“Oh, no,” he said. “You’re much too entertaining. Come to my
rooms tonight.”

“No,” she said.

Ah; at last. She had taken him aback. “No?”

“No,” she said—and with beating heart, too, but there was no
unsaying it. She did not want to go to him after the feast was over. No matter
how quick his wit, or how wicked his smile.

He could force her. He was lord and conqueror. She knew
that. He knew it, too: she watched him think of it. But he said, “Someday
you’ll summon me to your bed.”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

He only smiled.

The Lord Khayan took another of the maids to his bed that
night, one he chose at random, Iry rather thought. A man must have a woman in
his bed, after all. She doubted that he was greatly grieved that that woman was
not Iry. She had piqued his fancy, for a moment. Then he had forgotten her.

That was perfectly to her liking. She left the hall once her
pitcher was empty, and went to her bed in a cubicle not far from the kitchen.

That was not exactly a slave’s place, but no one had yet
contested it, nor did anyone dare to try. The room was tiny but it was hers,
and she had it to herself. It was her refuge, the one place where no one
pursued her. She kept her few belongings there, her eyepaints and brushes, her
wooden comb, a little box of odds and ends and bits of treasure, all in a
larger box that stood beside the plain wooden bed with its lashings of worn
leather.

Tonight the sheets were clean, and the lamp newly filled
with oil and burning with a clear yellow light. Nefer-Ptah, who had been her
nurse when she was small, was sitting in the lamplight like an image carved of
black stone. She had the gift of sleeping upright, which served a slave well,
and which Iry had never been able to acquire.

She also had the gift of waking instantly when the one she
waited for set foot on the threshold. Iry stopped there, frowning; not angry yet,
but prepared to be. “What are you doing here?”

“Child,” said Nefer-Ptah, “that’s no way to thank me.”

“What, for this?” Iry demanded, taking in the sheets and the
lamp with a sweep of the hand. “For that I do thank you. But why?”

“Because I wanted to,” said Nefer-Ptah. “And because someone
should remember what day it is for you.”

Iry’s eyes pricked with tears. She was tired, she told
herself, and all her aches were coming back. That was all it was.

“I’m glad it happened as it did,” she said with an edge of
sharpness. “I was going mad with all the fuss. I’d much rather people fussed
over him than over me.”

“Would you really?” Nefer-Ptah did not sound dubious, merely
interested. “He is pretty, isn’t he?”

“He looks like all the rest of them. All hair and vaunting
arrogance.”

“He’s young,” Nefer-Ptah said. “Much younger than you would
expect. He’s not the eldest son by a fair lot of years. It must have been
scandalous when he came back from the east, and his father named him the heir
over all the elder sons who had stayed near him.”

“That’s probably why he did it.” Iry stepped around
Nefer-Ptah and dropped to the bed. “Do you mind terribly? I’m tired.”

“So you are,” said Nefer-Ptah. “Here, roll over.”

Iry glowered, but did as she bade. In a moment the strong deft
hands were kneading and stroking the tightness out of her shoulders and the
ache out of her back. She sighed and wriggled and gave herself up to it.

~~~

She woke much improved, though in dire need of the twist
of wool that waited on the chest beside the bed. She stretched and yawned
hugely and sighed. This being a woman was a nuisance, she could already see.

It was the fate the gods had given her. She sighed and
suffered it, in a house that had come alive again, humming with the presence of
a foreign lord and all his following.

His women came that day, having taken time to settle his
affairs behind him—that, Iry learned later. On that day she only knew that
there was a new hubbub at the gate, more horses, more chariots, armed guards,
and creaking, trundling wagons with canopies both plain and embroidered. In the
wagons behind the teams of oxen rode the conqueror’s women: robed, veiled,
hidden from any eyes that might see.