The Shepherd Kings (23 page)

Khayan would dearly have loved to halt the proceedings, send
the fools away, and hear Teti’s news, if there was any. But that was not a
lordly thing to do. However long the disputants driveled on, he must hear them
out. Then he must, as best he could, issue a judgment.

Teti had taken his proper place beside and somewhat behind
Khayan’s chair, which by accident or design set him just out of Khayan’s sight.
Khayan could feel him there, the heat of his presence; hear the soft hiss of
his breath.

The dispute went on and on. The sharing of the ox and the
repair of its stable had delayed the wedding of one of the farmers’ daughters.
Why that should be so, was still not entirely clear. It seemed she did not wish
to marry while her father was embroiled in a quarrel with the uncle of her
intended.

Khayan’s head had begun to ache. As feuds went, this one was
remarkably bloodless, but it was also remarkably complicated. And the shadows
marched across the floor of the hall, growing longer and ever longer. He
thought he could catch a hint of fragrance: meat roasting, bread baking for the
daymeal.

At last, as the light shifted over toward the mellower gold
of sunset, Khayan struck his staff on the floor. The babble of argument barely
slowed. He rose. He did not lift his voice, but he made certain that it could
be heard. “I have heard enough.”

He held his breath. They could ignore him, easily. But
something in his voice brought them up short and stilled them, so that they
turned all in a gaggle and stared at him.

He let his breath out slowly. “Very well,” he said. “You
will continue to divide the use of the ox according to your older agreement.
You will feed him on alternate days. You will both repair his stable. And,” he
said, “your children will wed on the next day of good omen.”

“But that is tomorrow!” one of them gasped—the girl’s
father, Khayan seemed to recall.

Khayan smiled. “Then you had best get to it, had you not?”

That rid him of them, and handily. Any others who waited
must wait another day; it was far too late to hear them. Khayan beckoned to
Teti. “You come,” he said. The rest he left behind, all but the one of his
young fighting men whose turn it was on guard.

On most days Khayan would have gone back to his rooms to
prepare for the daymeal, but he had had enough for the moment of roofs and
walls. He went to the stable instead.

That might not have been the wisest choice of places to take
an Egyptian—they hated horses, and feared them unreasonably—but Khayan’s mood
was too contrary to care. There in the open sandy courts, in the smell of
horses and cut fodder, he could breathe; he could think.

He went in among his own horses, his team of duns that he
had bred and raised and broken to the yoke himself. They whickered at his
coming, there in the space that they shared, crowding together to take the bits
of barley cake that he had brought. He smoothed forelocks, rubbed broad brows,
murmured into ears that cocked to catch his words. The language he spoke to
them was the language of an older people than his father’s, the language of the
eastern tribes.

Almost he forgot the Egyptian hovering in the doorway and
quaking when the horses glanced at him, but waiting doggedly upon his lord’s
pleasure. He turned in the embrace of his stallions, and saw himself for a
moment as an Egyptian must see him: surrounded by monstrous creatures and nigh
overwhelmed.

The vision made him smile. “So tell me,” he said more warmly
than he might have done in other company. “Did she go quietly?”

Teti’s lips were tight. He was angry, and taking care that
Khayan knew it. “Yes, my lord,” he said. “She went quietly.”

“Tell me,” Khayan said.

A more taciturn man might have set his lips and refused, but
Teti had no such gift of restraint. He hated to speak to this foreigner, he
made it clear, but speak he did. “She made no protest,” he said. “She bowed her
head and did as you bade her through me.”

“And when she came to my mother?”

“I did not go in,” Teti said severely. “I sent her with your
lady mother’s guards.”

Khayan’s teeth clicked together. Ah: revenge. It was petty,
but it must be sweet.

Let him enjoy it. Khayan would go later, and see how that
haughty lady fared among women of her own ilk, if not of her own tribe and
nation. “You’ve done well,” Khayan said to Teti. “You may go.”

The man departed with visible relief. Khayan lingered in the
warmth of his horses’ regard. Moon had a tangle in his mane; Star had cut his
foot. Khayan tended them with care and without haste, for the simple pleasure
of it.

But his mind could not stop spinning. He was born in this
country, under this immensity of sky. He loved it. He had yearned for it in his
years away, for all the beauty of the eastern lands, for all that they had bred
his mother and her mothers before her. When he came back to Egypt, he had wept
for joy.

Its people hated him and all his kind. A hundred years they
had been in Egypt, and Egypt had never forgiven, never forgotten. No foreign
king had ever sat the throne of Egypt, until Salitis of Retenu. Every king
after him had been hated the more.

“And yet we are solid here,” Khayan said to his stallions.
“We’ve taken root. We belong here.”

They who had been foaled in the broad grasslands of the east
had no care for such things. Horses did not take root. Horses went where the
good grazing was, and where their master wished to be. The grazing here was
good indeed, and he was here. In the way of horses, they were content.

~~~

Khayan did not, that night, go to his mother or inquire
after the welfare of his gift. Let them settle with one another, he reflected
as he sat to the daymeal with the men of the house. There was a guest this
evening: one who greeted him with a whoop and a rib-cracking embrace.

“Iannek!” he said when he could speak again. “When did you
come here?”

His brother grinned at him. “Just now,” he said, “and yes,
the king let me go. He was tired of my moping about, he said. He told me to go
somewhere where I’d learn to smile again.”

“Here?”

Khayan must have sounded more dubious than he knew. Iannek
slapped his shoulder, not lightly, and laughed. “What can I say, brother? I
missed your somber glower, your foreboding frowns, your—”

“So,” Khayan said. “Who was she this time?”

Iannek’s face fell, betraying him, even as he said, “Who was
she? What makes you think it was a woman?”

“Because I know you,” Khayan said. “If you could keep it
sheathed even half of the time, you’d be a much happier man.”

“I’d rest better,” Iannek admitted. “But happier? No,
brother. Not that.”

“So who was she?”

Iannek ducked his head and mumbled it. But Khayan’s ears
were keen. “Prince Kastan’s seventh wife. But,” he was swift to add, “he hadn’t
even looked at her since their wedding was over, and his other wives were cruel
to her, and—”

“You were cuckolding the king’s favorite brother?” Khayan
could not say he was surprised. What did amaze him— “And you were allowed to go
away free and unmaimed?”

“Well,” said Iannek. “I left quickly. If you take my
meaning.”

“You were encouraged to make yourself scarce while the king
pretended to be unaware of you.” Khayan sighed. “He must love you. He’d never
do this for another man.”

“It’s my charming smile,” Iannek said. “He says I remind him
of himself when he was younger.”

“He was never that bad,” Khayan said, with a growl in it.
“So now he’s inflicted you on me. What does he want me to do with you, besides
clip your wings?”

Iannek shrugged. “Ignore me? I’ll behave myself.”

“Swear to it.”

“Well,” said Iannek. “I’ll try.”

“Swear,” said Khayan.

Iannek wriggled and muttered and fussed, but Khayan was
unrelenting. At last the young fool said, “I swear.”

“Good,” said Khayan, no doubt to his brother’s great relief.
“Come, dinner is waiting. Sit by me; tell me all the gossip from court.”

Iannek eyed him sidelong, maybe looking for further signs of
lordly sternness, maybe incredulous that Khayan of all people should care for
court gossip. Khayan did not, not really; but a lord had to know who was
feuding with whom near the king. That much he had learned while he was himself
at court.

Whatever he thought of the matter, Iannek was willing enough
to share roast ox and stewed duck, and more than willing to chatter on about
this lord and that, this feud, that alliance, so-and-so married into
thus-and-so’s family, some young idiot dead in a knife-fight in the streets of
Avaris, and now half the young idiots at court were hot to follow his example.

“Delightful,” Khayan said to that. “They’ll kill each other
off, and spare the rest of us the trouble.”

“Oh, no,” said Iannek. “They’re not killing one another.
They’re hunting Egyptians. Egyptians killed Samiel. So now everybody’s out to
get revenge.”

“I’m surprised they aren’t hunting in native coverts,”
Khayan said dryly.

“Oh, they’re doing that, too,” Iannek said. “But mostly they
go to the towns, or even down to Memphis. Some of them are bringing back the
right hands of their kills, like old Egyptian warriors.”

“What, not their rods, too?”

Iannek stared.

Khayan shook his head. “They all must be as ignorant as you.
The old Egyptians would bring back the right hand and the rod—so that the king
knew it was a man indeed that had been killed, and not a woman.”

“That’s barbaric,” Iannek said.

“Yes,” said Khayan.

Iannek was immune to subtlety, or to irony either. “Well,
and a hand is enough, these days. It’s quite a fashion in some circles. Not
mine,” he was quick to add. “I’m not a great one for hunting men.”

“That’s well,” Khayan said. “Nor am I. War is one thing.
This—the Egyptians hate us enough as it is. This will tip them straight over
into rebellion.”

“Ah,” said Iannek with a tilt of the head, “rebellion.
They’re always rebelling. We’ll put them down, we always do. Even the time they
took Avaris. That will give us a nice war.”

Khayan shook his head. There was no reasoning with a mind as
simple as this, and little profit in trying. He applied himself to his cup and
bowl and plate, while Iannek chattered on, wandering mercifully away from tales
of Egyptians hunted like animals, toward the safer ground of yet another family
feud.

~~~

Khayan’s men were not in fact any older than the pack of
young rowdies that ran with Iannek, but they were horribly dull in comparison.
Khayan had chosen them for their sobriety and self-discipline—not easy virtues
for any young horseman—and for their skill with horses. If he was to increase
his herds, and that on Egyptian land, with Egyptian labor as much as might be,
he needed men who could conduct themselves with restraint.

No such requirement accompanied Iannek’s following. Most,
from what Khayan could gather, had attached themselves to the young lord for a
lark, or because, like him, they had reason to vanish for a while from the
king’s city. They were a restless, troublesome lot, idle and fond of brawling.

When they discovered that the wine was not free for the
taking, and the beer was handed out at the kitchen door by a large and
humorless personage who was immune to every threat, from pleading to outright
force, they howled like dogs. They actually tried to storm the storehouses—only
to find themselves face to face with grim men and sharp spears.

None of the maids was safe from them. Khayan had, as soon as
Iannek was well settled, seen that they were moved into his mother’s house of
nights, but these young rakehells were at them from dawn till dusk. Never an
hour passed, it seemed, but that he heard a shriek and a scuffle, and saw a
bruised and tousled girl running from a bellowing male. Or he would walk around
a corner and stumble into a pair of them going at it with good will, maid as
well as man. That he never tried to stop; but the other roused his temper, sometimes
to an injudicious degree.

He had to make order in this house, if he was to continue
ruling it. And had he not thought the same of the Lady Nefertem? He had hardly
dealt with her when this new plague of disorder fell upon him.

Maybe she had cursed him, at that. Egyptians were great
masters of magic, everyone said so. Not that he had ever seen anything more
wondrous than a charlatan in the market of Memphis, turning staves into serpents
and water into wine. Still, he had not been in the temples or seen the great
rites of which people whispered. Who knew what that lady might have done? Her
will was as remarkable as her beauty, and she hated his kind with a perfect
hate.

If that was so, then she was laughing at him now. He could
not cast these ramping fools into his mother’s clutches, no matter how he might
be tempted. He could send them away—but Iannek was his brother, and his burden
as lord of the house.

He would bear the burden somehow. He pondered it as he rode
out of a morning—could it be a mere hand of days since he spoke with his
mother? It seemed a great deal longer.

He had intended to ride out past the horses’ fields, to ride
the eastern border of these lands and visit the village that sat between this
estate and that of the Oryx, which belonged still to an Egyptian lord. That one
kept to himself, Khayan had been given to understand, and did not either vex or
commune with his overlords. He had beautiful daughters, it was said, and sons
even more beautiful, and they were all kept as close as royal ladies.

One day Khayan would visit this lord and see if the tales
were true. Tomorrow, maybe, unless his house found better order in between. He
might even, he thought a little wildly, inflict himself on his neighbor for a
day or three, taxing that lord’s hospitality as his brother’s following taxed
his own.