The Shepherd Kings (45 page)

That was a little presumptuous, but Pepi did not seem to
care. Nor did Kemni. His eyes had lit. So, Iry thought: he found horses
irresistible, too. “I doubt anything could sate me, there,” he said. “Yes, that
would do. That would do very well indeed. Or will I be the only Egyptian who dares
do such a thing?”

“There are a few of us,” Pepi said. “One more won’t be too
noticeable.”

“Pepi has been master of the stables here,” Huy said in the
sweet, vague way he could affect when it suited him. “The new lord brought his
own man to do that, but as with the lord’s cook, he found other occupation.”

“Truly?” Kemni laughed, a little incredulously perhaps, but
in admiration, too.

“Truly,” said Huy. “We’re all rebels here, though the Retenu
think they rule us.”

“How marvelous,” Kemni said. “How strangely wonderful.”

Pepi shrugged. “It’s the way we do it here. Why, did you
think we’d tamely submit?”

“Most people have,” said Kemni.

“Ah,” said Pepi. “Well. They can’t help it, I suppose. But
this is the Sun Ascendant.” He said it as if that answered everything. No doubt
it did.

Kemni sprang up. “Take me, then. Take me to see the horses.”

Pepi might have liked to linger over his second jar of beer,
but Iry caught his eye. He sighed and consented. Kemni did not seem to notice.
He was wonderfully eager.

After Pepi had taken him away, Iry sat with Huy for a little
while in silence. Then Huy said, “You didn’t tell him.”

“There wasn’t time.”

Huy shrugged, and sighed as Pepi had. “He’ll find out. I don’t
suppose he’ll be very angry.”

“Does it matter if he is?” Iry demanded.

“Probably not,” said Huy. “He’s not the lord here, nor ever
was. But what you are, what the Retenu have made you . . . that
might give him pause to think.”

“I am still myself,” she said. “I am still of the Two Lands.
Nothing will ever change that.”

“I know, child,” Huy said in his gentle old voice. “I do
know that. But—”

“Dear old friend,” Iry said. She bent over him and kissed
his brow. “I’ll talk to him again. I promise. Will that make you happy?”

“It doesn’t matter if
I’m
happy,” said Huy. “Now go, child. They must be hunting high and low for you.”

“I’m sure they are,” she said. She was deeply reluctant to
go, to leave this place that had been a sanctuary since she was small. But she
could not stay. She kissed him again, patted his dry old hand, and left him in
his private darkness, with his dreams and his stories, and his soul that saw so
clearly and so well.

Kemni had not intended to linger in the Sun Ascendant. It
had been his plan to creep in, discover what he could discover, then withdraw
before anyone knew he was there, and make his way to Avaris where Iphikleia had
gone to confer with her own people.

But when the gods brought him over the wall at his cousin’s
feet, some god or spirit had possessed him. To find her alive and so well, unharmed,
and so evidently free of the house, struck him strangely. Then to learn that
the master of horse here was not only an Egyptian but Pepi, his old friend and
sometime ally—it seemed like the hand of a god.

This was not at all as he had expected to find a holding
under the conqueror’s heel. The house was crawling with Retenu, yes. They
stalked about in their robes and their arrogance, fancying that they ruled the
world. But they did not rule this house. The kitchens, the stables, the
servants’ quarters—every one looked to an Egyptian. Even the steward of the
estate was the same as he had always been, Teti with his broad shoulders and
his brusque manner. His wife Tawit, his daughters the five Beauties—all much
the same as Kemni remembered.

Not that Kemni made himself known to them. He had risked
enough with Iry and Pepi and the scribe Huy, now sadly blind and terribly aged,
but as keen of wit as ever. The stable-lads did not seem to know him. They were
content to be told that here was a young kinsman of Pepi’s, come in from
Memphis after some infraction that no one quite referred to, keeping his head
low and doing as he was told, and waiting till it was safe to go home again.

That was true, or as true as it needed to be. The fabric of
his fancied life, like one of Huy’s stories, spun itself more intricately, and
bound him more tightly, with each hour that he spent in that house. When hours
stretched to days, Kemni found that he could not tear himself free. There were
things that people were not telling him. Glances exchanged, conversations
broken off. He had to know—he had to be certain of what went on here, before he
could go away.

At least one of the things that people whispered of had to
do with the Lady Nefertem. That he determined soon enough. She had been ruling
in the women’s house, and had not permitted the lord’s women to live there—not
permitted it, as if she had never yielded her rank even to the conqueror. But
something had happened. The new lord, the man whom Kemni had foolishly called
soft on first hearing of him, had sent her to his mother. And that one, that
lady from beyond the eastern horizon, was no soft creature at all.

“She’s greater than a queen,” Pepi said that first night, as
they shared yet another jar of beer, a loaf and a basket of onions, in the
scent of horses and cut fodder. Pepi lived and slept in the stable, as one
would expect. Kemni his supposed kinsman would share those lodgings, nigh under
the feet of the lord’s horses.

Pepi went on to speak of the lord’s mother. “She has great
power. She’s a sorceress, they say. For certain she rules like a king, and
commands men. The Retenu are terrified of her.”

“And the Lady Nefertem?” Kemni asked. “Has she been harmed?”

“Oh, no,” Pepi said. “Not she. But the lord thought to pull
her claws, making her his mother’s servant. Since, you see, he couldn’t make
her his concubine.”

“He couldn’t?” Kemni wanted to laugh, but he doubted Pepi
would approve of that. He well remembered his aunt, his mother’s sister—her
striking beauty, which his mother had had in lesser degree; her air of queenly
distraction, and her startlingly strong will. She seemed as empty-headed as she
was beautiful, but she was not that at all. Not in the slightest. It was an
artifice, like the paint that could not heighten, only illumine her beauty.

“Well,” said Pepi, “no, he couldn’t take her if she didn’t
want him, which is a point of honor with the tribe his mother comes from. But
they say she tried to rule him, and that he wouldn’t have. So he gave her to
his mother. The women’s house was in an uproar for days. If you want your
rebellion, lad, there’s the start of it. They’d happily rise up and strike the
lord down, for taking their lady away from them.”

“A rebellion of women,” Kemni said. “Now that would be a
marvel for the world to exclaim at.”

“Don’t laugh,” Pepi said. “Those ladies are angry. And the
Lady Nefertem . . .” He paused as if to seek the words that
would serve him best. “The Lady Nefertem is someone you should talk to. But how
to do it, now she’s held captive—let me think. Let me think.”

Pepi subsided into his beer and his thoughts, nor did he
emerge that night. Kemni went to sleep while Pepi was still pondering, slept
deeper than he had ever intended, and woke to the morning tumult of horses
being brought out, harnessed, prepared for the day’s work. When he had roused
fully and come out, he understood that the lord had gone as he did every
morning, on some errand that duty laid on him. And Kemni had ground to recover:
these good servants took a dim view of a newcomer who lay abed till full
morning. Small wonder, they muttered, that he had been driven out of his former
service, if he was so monstrously lazy.

Kemni found himself compelled to prove the accusation false.
He had never labored as he labored here, hard and backbreaking work, and no end
to it, either. By sundown he was ready to fall headlong into his bed of hay.

~~~

But Pepi was waiting for him. “Come with me,” the old man
said.

Kemni suppressed a groan. He was allowed a bit of bread and
a sip of beer, but the rest he had to put aside for later. This was no summons
that he could refuse, and truly, except for exhaustion, he should not want to.

He had known the house well when he was young. Some parts of
it had changed. There was a new house where one of the old gardens had been, a
house that was, he had discovered during the day, built by the first foreign
lord for his women, because the Lady Nefertem would not let them past the gate
of the house that she ruled.

That house was quiet tonight, its women nowhere in evidence,
though the halls and courts were clearly still inhabited: lamps were burning,
and there were wafts of unguents. Through a door that was ajar, he saw a drift
of veil abandoned on a chair.

Pepi led him deep within, to a courtyard open to the flowering
of stars. The trees planted in it were sweet with blossom. The pool in its
center was home to bright fish: one leaped as he paused to get his bearings.

Two figures waited by the pool. One stood, looming vast and
dark: a Nubian, a shadow on shadow, save for eyes that gleamed upon him. He
dared hazard a guess as to who that might be. “Nefer-Ptah,” he said.

The Nubian inclined her head. “Young lord,” she said in her
deep sweet voice.

The other, she who sat in silence, was smaller, much
smaller, yet regal and erect. The lamp that Pepi had brought to guide them
through the dark corridors, set on the pool’s rim, cast a faint and flickering
light on a face that had changed not at all in the years since Kemni marched
away. He had seen beauty in plenty, seen queens and royal concubines, great
ladies and great courtesans, and beauties of lesser rank across the Two Lands
and on the island of Crete. And yet, beside this, even Queen Nefertari, even
Ariana of Crete, paled to a shadow.

It was beauty almost too much to bear, as if she had been a
goddess and not a mortal woman. He knelt in front of it, the better to look
into her eyes, but in homage, too.

She never smiled. It would have marred that beauty. But her
eyes were warm, resting on him.

“Why, child,” Nefer-Ptah said above their heads. “You look
just like her.”

Kemni started, and flushed. Was that laughter in the Lady
Nefertem’s eyes?

Her finger brushed his cheek. “You are lovely,” she said.
“Do the ladies love you, away in the Upper Kingdom?”

He did not know where to look. She tilted his chin up, so
that he had to meet her eyes again. “There, child. We’ve embarrassed you. We
are glad to see you—heart-glad. We had thought you lost long since amid the
Field of Flowers.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have sent word.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But that’s done. Now tell me. What news
do you bring? Will there be war?”

“Soon,” he said. “We have allies on the sea: Crete will come
when it’s time, and sweep the enemy up the river as we sweep down it. But we
need help. Can the people of this kingdom fight for us? Will they?”

“Crete?” she said, as if she had heard only that. “Crete
will fight for us?”

He nodded.

“Why?”

“For gold,” he said, “and for spices. And for a royal
marriage.”

“Of course,” she said. “And yet—of all they hope to gain, is
it worth what they may lose?”

“They think so,” Kemni said. “It gives them great wealth,
and the freedom of Egypt. And makes one of their princesses a queen.”

“The queen you serve.”

“Yes. She’s brought us horses and chariots. She’s given us
the enemy’s weapon.”

“That’s a great gift,” said the Lady Nefertem.

He nodded. “That’s why I came here. I heard that there were
horses.”

“You’re not going to steal them.”

“No,” he said. “But when the war is over—I want them.”

“That would be a great prize,” she said.

“And a great defense against conquest hereafter.” He sat on
his heels, comfortable now, if not precisely at ease. “But first, we have to
win the war.”

“Yes.” She folded her hands in her lap. “I am trammeled
here, as I am. But what I can do, I will do. When the armies of the Great House
come to the Sun Ascendant, the people will be ready.”

“And other holdings round about? Will they be ready as
well?”

“If they can be,” she said.

He bowed his head as to a queen. “That will please the Great
House.”

“And you?”

“Very much,” he said.

“Good,” said the Lady Nefertem.

~~~

Kemni could leave then. He had done what he came to do.
But he stayed: first because he had no wish to travel at night. Then, in the
morning, the order came in to the stable: that the horses and asses be readied,
and the chariots, and the great ungainly thing that the Retenu called a wagon,
in which the lord’s mother and certain of her women would travel. For they were
going, the lord’s man said, to Avaris, to answer the king’s summons.

Kemni needed to be in Avaris. How simple then, and how
gods-given a gift, to go as one of a foreign lord’s following. Someone after
all must look after the horses.

As he set to work among the horses, another of the grooms
brought out the lord’s pair of dun stallions. They had been gone the morning
before—on the lord’s errand, whatever that was. Kemni, curious, found occasion
to be in the courtyard as the lord came out.

That was the first Kemni had seen of Khayan, lord and
conqueror of the Sun Ascendant. He was Retenu, no more or less: big, bearded
man in the leather tunic that they wore for riding in chariots. Kemni could see
nothing but that he was as they all were, detested and detestable. The one
strangeness about him struck as he turned, and Kemni had a glimpse of his eyes.
They were startling, golden like a lion’s or a falcon’s.

Then another came out from the colonnade, a figure in a
white robe, with plaited hair, and Kemni forgot that there was anything odd
about the lord of the holding.