The Shepherd Kings (36 page)

Kemni had thought to go himself. But he did not need
Iphikleia’s long look to understand that he could not both spy on the fortress
and set his men in order. He bent his head toward Seti. “Eat,” he said, “and
go. And the gods protect you.”

None of them slept overmuch that night. Soldiers learned
to sleep wherever they paused to rest, but this was something other than war.
They had known that they were deep in the enemy’s country, but it had meant
little.

Now they began what they had come to do. If they failed,
they failed their king. Even if they succeeded, they could be found and killed,
and Ahmose—and his Cretan queen—would not have what they needed to win the war.

Kemni could torment himself with fears. Or he could lie
wrapped in his blanket and try not to think of Iphikleia. She slept on the boat
as always, a shadow among the shadows of its cargo. Whatever they had said or
done at the Bull of Re, it was gone and forgotten here. He was no more to her
than any of his men; and less, perhaps, than Gebu the prince.

He lay open-eyed for an eternity of starlit darkness. The
town slept. The river was rising: the boat had been drawn up away from the
water, but now it lapped just short of the pointed bow. If they did not cast
off by full morning, he judged, the river would do it for them.

When his bones felt the first hint of dawn, when the night
was darkest, the air full of whispers and unseen passings, he rose softly and
walked the edges of the camp. It was a frequent boast hereabouts that neither
crocodiles nor lions of the desert dared trespass within the town. Kemni was
watchful nonetheless. Not only beasts could be a danger here.

Seti had not come back from watching over the fortress.
Kemni hoped that meant the Retenu had not left yet, and not that Seti had been
captured or worse. It was quiet round about, no company of guards approaching
to take them all prisoner.

He perched on a heap of flotsam just past the camp, clasped
his knees and waited for the dawn. Slowly, infinitely slowly, the darkness
paled. The east, over the barren hills of the Red Land, came clearer little by
little, under a pellucid sky. The stars faded. Away in the beds of reeds, now
all but sunk in the river, a bird began to sing.

~~~

They were all up and fed and girded for the day, somewhat
before the sun climbed over the horizon. Seti still had not come back. Kemni
was half minded to wait for him; but urgency ate at his belly. “Get the boat in
the water,” he said to his waiting people. “We’ll fish downstream this morning,
and see who rides on the northward road.”

They were glad to obey. All this journeying had been
adventure of a sort, but this was what they had come to do. There was a
lightness in their movements, an eagerness; even a snatch of song, quickly cut
off—till Gebu said, “No, no. Sing. Sing. We’re honest fishermen, setting out to
bring in the day’s catch—not spies creeping about by night. Sing!”

They sang therefore as they slid the boat into the water and
clambered aboard and set off down the river. Their songs reminded Kemni rather
more vividly of a guardroom than a fishing boat, but he doubted the enemy would
know the difference.

The river was fractious this morning, the steering oar
strong in his hands. The flood was rising fast. He had to hope it would not
keep him from the bank when the time came.

For the moment it was well; they needed no oar or sail,
simply rode the current, fishing with lines off bow and stern, and pulling in
what the lines caught. They watched the east bank, idly, as it might seem.

Boats passed them as the morning brightened into full day.
Some hailed them; others were too full of their own importance. None held a
cargo of chariotmakers bound for Avaris.

On the bank meanwhile, there was somewhat less coming and
going, but enough. Twice, bearded men rattled past in chariots. People on foot
came and went—came, mostly, at this hour, walking to market or to business in
the town. A noble passed with his retinue, perched aloft in his gilded chair.

That could have been Kemni, and should have been Gebu—if
this had been the Two Lands of the old time, or of the new one that Ahmose hoped
to begin. Filthy and reeking of fish, unshaven, ragged, and beneath any great
one’s notice, they rode the river down toward Memphis.

At midmorning Kemni began to edge toward the eastward bank.
The reeds were thick here, bulrushes and tall fans of papyrus. They hid a flock
of geese, which fled honking and flapping, and with care, the boat itself. The
men, armed with knives and sickles, cut a path through the reeds, those who cut
leaning down over the boat’s sides and prow, held tightly by their fellows.

The crocodiles were not hunting here this morning, it
seemed; there was no sign of them. Kemni murmured a prayer to the god Sobek,
who wore a crocodile’s face, that his children should let them be, for the
winning back of the Lower Kingdom.

When the cutting and pruning was done, the boat rested in a
clearing in the reeds with its prow up against the riverbank. They anchored it
there. No one could see them from the river, or from the land either. They were
perfectly hidden.

Kemni slipped from prow to land and ghosted up the bank to
be certain. Even before he had emerged from the reeds, the boat and its people
were invisible.

He paused on the edge of the thicket. Oh, the gods were
kind: the reeds gave way to bare sunburned earth, the Black Land bleached
almost white by heat and sunlight. He could see how far the river was wont to
rise: where the richer earth of the river’s gift gave way to the sand and
stones of the Red Land. There, on the edge between the two, ran the road to
Memphis.

There was no one on it just then. Fresh droppings marked the
passing of an ox or oxen, a farmer most likely. None of the foreigners’ donkeys
had passed by this morning. They were still behind, then—if they were coming at
all.

Kemni must trust that they would. He settled behind a screen
of reeds, as if he were hunting waterfowl and not men. He was aware that
someone had followed him, but he did not look to see who it was. It must be
Gebu. No one else would be bold enough to leave the boat without Kemni’s leave.

The other slipped beside him, in under his arm, and said in
a voice that was anything but cool, “Oh, you clever man!”

He tensed to recoil from Iphikleia, but his arm tightened around
her instead. She turned in the circle of it. Whatever she did, however she did
it, she was naked, her mantle spread beneath her, and his loincloth suddenly,
magically vanished.

Some part of him snarled at her, and upbraided her for
sparing him not even a glance between the Bull of Re and this thicket. And
what, he almost asked, of Gebu?

But his body knew no such folly. It fell on her like one
starving. She caught at him with sudden fierceness, wrapped herself about him
and drove him deep inside her.

He gasped. She was eating him alive. Kisses, love-bites, one
after another, everywhere that she could reach. She rode him as if he had been
a ship on a high sea, deep strokes and long, drawing him almost—almost—to the
summit, but sinking away. She tormented him. She sapped him of wit and will.
She conquered him as utterly as the Retenu had conquered the Lower Kingdom.

Then at last, when he was ready to scream at her to end it,
she let the tide take him and cast him up gasping on the shore.

When he could breathe again, he said, “I think I hate you.”

“I’m sure you despise me,” she said. She dropped down onto
her mantle, arching her back and stretching like a cat. Her body was limned in
light and shadow, bars and blades of dark and gold.

Memory struck like a blow. Kemni scrambled to hands and
knees and peered out through the screen of reeds.

The road was deserted. He let his breath out slowly.

Iphikleia’s hands smoothed and stroked his back, rubbing
away the tightness, winning from him a soft groan. He stilled it quickly. She
laughed in his ear, and nibbled it.

He pulled away slightly, coming somewhat to himself. “You
never even looked at me,” he said.

“Of course I didn’t,” she said. “Did you want a whole
boatload of snickering spectators?”

He could never best her in a war of words. And yet he had to
say, “You looked at Gebu often enough.”

“Ah! You’re jealous.”

“Do I have reason to be?”

“No,” she said. She slipped from his back to lie beside him,
chin on fists, gazing out at the road. “Mind you, I like him. He’s well-spoken,
he’s charming, he’s just as a prince should be. But I don’t dream of him.”

“I’m surprised,” Kemni said.

He meant it honestly. It seemed she took it as such. She
shrugged a little, a shift of warm bare shoulder against his. “Would you be
happier if I did?”

“No.”

“So,” she said. Then: “Listen.”

He opened his mouth to ask what she meant by that, but his
ear had caught it also: a distant sound like the braying of an ass.

She shifted beside him, a small flurry that ended in her
being wrapped in her mantle again. He should find his loincloth and put it on,
but he paused, listening. Another bray. A murmur of men’s voices. The hollow
clatter of hooves on the hard-beaten road; the rattle of wheels.

It could be another party of Retenu on its way to Memphis.
Kemni remembered to breathe, to calm himself. He rose then, softly, and wrapped
his loincloth and fastened it tightly. A brief flash of vanity regretted that
he could not do this thing in a clean kilt and a shaven face; but it would
serve him better to be thought a mere brigand. Brigands were not hunted in this
country as a lord from the Upper Kingdom would be.

“I’ll tell the others,” he breathed in Iphikleia’s ear. She
nodded, keeping her eyes on the road.

His men were waiting. They were not precisely atwitch with
eagerness. Most seemed asleep or nearly so. But when they heard the news he
brought, they woke abruptly.

There were no orders to give. Those were all given long
since. He slipped back to the place where he had been. Iphikleia was gone from
it, the gods knew where. Not, he trusted, to betray him to the enemy.

It seemed a long while before the company rounded the curve
of the road. When at last it appeared, it was less than Kemni had expected.
There were only two chariots, each with two men in it, and a string of laden
donkeys, and a handful of men on foot: servants, those must be, and nearly all Egyptian.
One of them—

Kemni bit his lip till it bled. Seti. Seti striding briskly
with the rest, as innocent as if he had been all he seemed, and no one eyed him
oddly or asked him who he was.

And what if . . .

No. They were too calm. No one looked about him, or seemed
to care that he might be ambushed. There were guards, but they idled behind,
half a dozen on foot and one in a chariot driven by a curly-headed child. Kemni
saw and heard no more than that. Nor was there any signal from his men who had
been given the charge, that an army waited in hiding.

It was arrogance. Or the Retenu did not believe that Egypt
truly could rise up against them.

Whatever the cause of it, Kemni took it as a blessing, and a
sending from the gods.

They were level with him now, idling along, laughing and
singing. Kemni raised the signal: a clear shrill call like the falcon’s as he
stoops for his prey.

There was a breathless hush. Even the Retenu paused a
fraction, and their laughter stuttered. Just as it smoothed again, the earth
erupted.

Kemni’s men had seemed few enough when he mustered them. But
falling on the Retenu from every side, armed with swords and knives and spears,
they seemed as numerous as the king’s own armies.

They took the Retenu utterly by surprise. Kemni himself
leaped on the captain of the guard, pulled him out of his chariot and wrested
his sword from him, and cut his throat before he could muster breath to cry
out.

The young charioteer had reined his team to a halt, turning
them, whipping them on. Kemni leaped aside, fell and rolled, landed somehow on
his feet and within reach of the chariot as it flew past. He leaped as he had
once before, saw the chariot pass, knew a moment’s sinking despair before he
half fell, half staggered into the lurching, rattling thing.

The child kicked at him. He stumbled against the chariot’s
rim.

The child pulled hard on the rein. The chariot veered.

Kemni staggered again, but forward, into greater safety. For
a breath’s span he had his balance. He snatched, heaved, thrust the child out;
and seized the reins just before they snapped loose.

These long-eared creatures were little like the soft-mouthed
horses he had driven under Ariana’s tutelage. Their mouths were like forged
bronze. He cursed and hauled them about, with a briefly chagrined reflection
that he, a man grown, could barely master them, and that infant had driven them
as easily as if they had been made of air.

But they yielded to him at last, and consented grudgingly to
turn. The battle was over. All but one of the guards were down. The two
chariots stood still, with Kemni’s men at the asses’ heads. Iphikleia stood in
one, kilted like a man of Crete, and no mantle to be seen.

It was the sight of her, perhaps, that had astonished the
Retenu into immobility. She was a wild beauty, with her black hair streaming
over her white breasts, holding her team still with effortless strength.

Kemni muscled his own pair of long-eared demons to a halt
beside her. The former passengers lay on the ground, with Kemni’s men standing
over them, and a spearpoint resting lightly on each throat.

He had seen them both in the workshop. But the one who had
seemed to command them stood in the third chariot. As far as Kemni could see on
a face bearded to the eyes, he was deeply affronted and not even slightly
afraid. “Take your hands off my bridle,” he said to the man who held his team’s
heads.