The Shepherd Kings (58 page)

The lie of the land was as the dream had shown him. He could
see where the river had shifted, eating into the farther bank, carving a steep
descent, but here the Red Land had crept in, a field of sand and stones where
must once have been wheat and barley. The ruin stood far back in it, too far to
run water, though there were remnants of old channels eaten away by the wind of
years.

A man on foot, with a need to hide, could walk there easily
enough, and conceal himself through the night. The walls of mudbrick still
stood, though the roof had tumbled in.

Kemni left the horses near the river, dropped the stone
weight like an anchor that would keep them from wandering with the chariot, and
unwrapped Iphikleia’s larger bundle. There were two bows and a sword, as he had
suspected, and a quiver of arrows. She took a bow and the quiver, leaving him
the rest. Without a word, soft on her feet as a hunter should be, she made her
way toward the ruin.

Kemni followed somewhat belatedly but with equal softness.
The sun was close now. The eastern horizon had flooded with light. A wise messenger
would have left long since, but this one was weary and perhaps ill. He had been
coughing in the dream, as he trudged bent under his burden.

The ruin was silent, not even a bird to rouse it to life.
But as Kemni drew near, he heard a sound like the clatter of a stone falling—or
the hard dry cough that someone had once, in Kemni’s hearing, called the song
of Egypt. This was no simple fever. This was the lung-rot, the cough that
killed.

But not quickly, not, sometimes, for years. Foolish to send
a man so ill on such a journey, but then, if he had hopes of surviving till his
message was delivered, he could die thereafter and so keep his secret. It was
an odd, cruel choice of messenger, but not altogether improbable.

There was more to the ruin than Kemni had thought. It had
been less a peasant’s farmstead than a small holding. It must have belonged to
a man of substance in the region, a man wealthy enough to own a house with half
a dozen rooms and a small courtyard, and an orchard now parched and dead, and a
byre and granary fallen in upon itself but the lines of it still clear to see.
There were touches of beauty in it: a painting on a wall of cattle and a
herdsman, a lotus pillar holding up the fallen lintel of a door.

Just as the sun climbed above the horizon, Iphikleia slipped
into the darkness of the house. Kemni was hard on her heels.

It was dark within, but enough light slipped through the
doorway that Kemni’s eyes, after a brief struggle, came slowly into focus. The
room was empty. So too the one beyond that. Past that was the court, pale gold
with morning light, and in it, again, nothing.

But as Kemni raised his foot to cross the court and search
in the rooms beyond, the sharp bark of a cough brought him about.

What he had taken for a corner of deep shadow was a man. He
might have hoped to remain in concealment, but his sickness had betrayed him.

Kemni altered his step to move toward the man. He surged up
and bolted.

Iphikleia was there, braced to catch him. She was not as
strong as a man, but he was wasted with illness. She held him long enough for
Kemni to reach them both, to seize him and haul him away from her—and none too
soon. A knife gleamed in his hand, stabbing at Kemni. Kemni struck the hand
aside, caught the wrist and wrenched hard. The man gasped. Kemni swung him
about and against the wall. He crumpled down it in a renewed spate of coughing.

“I,” said Kemni, “would have sent a man in better health.”

He dragged the messenger out into the court, the better to
see his face. It was the one he had seen in the dream, thin and nondescript,
the face of any man in Egypt. He blinked in the light, peering up at Kemni.
“Sir,” he said. “I regret—you woke me—I didn’t mean—”

Kemni frowned. “You know me?”

The man nodded. As his eyes cleared, he stood a little
straighter, and eased visibly. “Yes, sir, my lord. He sent you, didn’t he? He
said someone would come from the holding. Have you brought the things that I
was to carry?”

Kemni’s mind had begun to race. That the messenger should
pass this way—yes, he would have had to pass by the Bull of Re, though not
near, not except by design. But that meant . . .

Not now. He must not tangle himself in denials. The
messenger had mistaken him for a messenger himself. “Yes,” Kemni said, “I was
sent.” Never mind by whom. “I’ve nothing with me, but they’re at the holding.
I’ll bring you back with me.”

He held his breath. But the messenger did not seem
suspicious. He nodded. Kemni kept a grip on him as he retrieved the bundle that
he had carried so far, and left the house and went back down to the chariot.
Iphikleia followed in silence. She had her bow strung, an arrow in her hand.
Her face was white and set.

Kemni dared not speak to her lest he betray them. The
messenger seemed to have judged her harmless, though he eyed her a little
oddly. As indeed he might, if he thought Kemni one of the circle of traitors.

The chariot, ample for two riders, held three only with
difficulty—and with the messenger’s bundle, it was impossible. Iphikleia, still
silent, sprang calmly onto Falcon’s back. He shied a little and rolled an eye
back at her, but she stroked and murmured to him until he quieted.

“So it is true,” the messenger said. “There are women who
ride on the backs of horses.”

“And carry weapons,” Kemni said, “and fight like men. Yes.”

“Marvelous,” said the messenger. His eyes on Iphikleia were
hungry, the eyes of a man who had not had a woman in much too long.

Kemni would have loved to strike those eyes out of his head,
but he was too valuable alive and unmaimed. When the chariot started forward,
he clutched wildly at the sides, just as Kemni had done the first time. With
somewhat of evil intent, he let the restive horses choose a fast pace, not back
the way he had come, but round and into the Red Land as he should have done
when he began. The messenger asked no questions. He was too busy holding on,
and, from the look of him, refraining from shrieking aloud with terror.

This was a mad thing that Kemni did, but all of it was mad.
Iphikleia riding Falcon ahead of him, perched amid the traces. The messenger in
his arms, because it was safer there than behind him and able to leap out. The
thing he did in letting the man believe he was—yes, that he was Gebu’s servant,
and part of the conspiracy.

He went back to the Bull of Re, for lack of better
inspiration. He did not know what he would do when he came there. The way he
took led to the valley in which the horses were hidden, passing out of sight of
the holding, and indeed of any habitation.

It was well on in morning now, and fiery hot. The messenger
had gone limp. Asleep, Kemni hoped, and not unconscious or dead.

There were men among the horses: Seti and some from his
wing, capturing colts to be broken to harness. And, with them, Ariana in a
tunic with her hair bound up, just as Iphikleia’s was.

The gods had ordained this. Kemni was sure of it. He rode
straight through the herds out of the Red Land, having descended the steep
narrow cleft with little memory of how he had done it, and halted before
Ariana. “I brought you a gift,” he said. And flung the messenger out of the
chariot at her feet.

Seti, bless his quick wits, was on the man before he could
come to his senses and bolt, binding his hands with a rope meant for one of the
horses, and holding him fast.

And that was well, because Ariana was not looking at him at
all. Iphikleia had slid from Falcon’s back and fallen lifeless to the ground.
Much, much too late, Kemni saw the dark stain on her tunic, the blood that had
flowed and then dried, but had begun to flow again, seeping through the leather.

She had said no word. Not one. Kemni had thought that he had
deflected the knife; but he had been too slow.

He leaped toward her, but there were others there before
him, Ariana foremost. They would not let him through.

“Fetch Imhotep,” Ariana said. Her voice sounded remote and
very cold.

Imhotep, whose name was in fact something else altogether,
was the king’s best gift, in Ariana’s estimation: a physician trained in the
high arts, and reckoned worthy to serve the king himself. He was a personage of
no little consequence; for him to be fetched, rather than for the fallen to be
fetched to him, did not bode well at all.

Indeed, Seti protested. “Won’t it be faster if we take her
to him?”

“She’s ridden enough,” Ariana said. “You—you—you. These
horses are exhausted. Set them loose and harness another pair. Now! Quickly!”

Lion and Falcon were let loose to drop and roll and make
their way eagerly toward water. A different team, a pair of chestnuts whom
Kemni vaguely recognized, were harnessed in their place. Then one of the men
sprang into the chariot and drove them off at a gallop.

Silence fell. Seti stood guard still over the captive, who
was alive and awake—Kemni saw his eye roll white. Kemni bent down to him. “If
she dies,” he said, “I will hang you from the wall with spikes.”

The man did not speak. Kemni would have smitten him silly if
he had tried.

At last they would let Kemni near Iphikleia. She was not
dead. He saw her breast rise and fall. He dropped on his knees beside her. “I
did this,” he said. “I did this to her.”

“Stop that,” Ariana said, so like Iphikleia that Kemni
gasped. “Now. Tell me what this is.”

There was no brief way to tell her. But they had time. It
would be some little while before Ay came back with the physician.

He supposed he should be careful, should not speak where so
many could hear, but he could not make himself care. Either they could be
trusted or they could not. If they could not, he would kill them.

“This is a messenger,” he said, “from a gathering of princes
who have in mind to stop the war. We caught him upriver from here, and
surprised him. He had a knife.”

“I can see that,” Ariana said. “How did you know where to
find him?”

“The gods told me,” Kemni said. In front of so many people
he said it. “I dreamed that he was coming, that he was on his way to the Lower
Kingdom with messages and tokens for the king there. The bundle beside
him—there is gold in it. Open it and see.”

Seti was already moving to do it, cutting the cords that
bound it, folding back the reeking rags that Kemni had seen and smelled in the
dream, freeing a flame of gold.

It was gold of honor, yes; a massive plated collar graven
with symbols, enameled in red and green and blue. Only a prince could have
ordered such a thing. Even a lord had no such resources, or the power to
command goldsmith or scribe. The smith might have been allowed to live, but
Kemni could not imagine that the scribe had.

“There are other things,” Kemni said in a voice that
sounded, to his own ears, very far away. “He was coming to the Bull of Re, to
fetch them.”

“Here?” Ariana frowned in puzzlement. “Why would they be
here?”

“Because,” Seti said—daring greatly, and he should pay for
it, save that he had spared Kemni the need—“the master of the conspiracy is
here.”

“Gebu,” Ariana said. She said it without hesitation, and
without surprise.

Seti did not seem astonished that she knew. He, like the
rest of the men, was in awe of her, and madly in love. If she had sprouted
wings and soared up to heaven, he would have reckoned it no more than proper.

“Shall I fetch him, lady?” he asked.

“No,” she said. She went on kneeling beside Iphikleia,
stroking the pale brow. “No. Wait.”

Seti opened his mouth as if to protest, but he clearly
thought better of it. Ariana smiled at him, casting him into confusion. “Good,”
she said as if he had done something worth her praise. “Good.”

There was nothing to do then but wait, and pray. One of the
men had found Kemni’s Cretan mantle among the baggage cast out of the chariot,
and fashioned a canopy propped on spears. It offered a little shade, enough to
keep the sun from Iphikleia’s face.

She seemed unaware of it. She was deathly pale, breathing
shallowly. Kemni would not, could not think of where the wound was, how it had
pierced her belly. That was the worst of wounds, save only a stroke to the
heart.

The gods must protect her. They had brought her to this
place. They could not take her. Not so soon, or for so little cause.

It seemed a very long time before Ay returned in the
chariot, with yet another fresh team, and Imhotep the physician clinging grimly
behind him.

Imhotep was not what one might expect of so august a
personage. He was young, not greatly older than Kemni, with a long, pleasant
face and a crooked smile, with which he was rather generous.

There was no sign of it now. Even before the chariot had
rolled to a halt, he had sprung from it, stumbling but keeping his balance, and
waving away the hands that reached to support him. He had no eyes for anything
but the figure lying on the ground, supported in Ariana’s lap. Then one could
see the gift that the gods had given him, the utter and perfect concentration
of all his souls, his body and his mind, in the art of healing.

He knelt beside her, and paused for a moment, taking in what
there was to see. Kemni wanted to howl at him. But he would not be hurried.
Blood had dried and bound tunic to undertunic, and undertunic to flesh. With
exquisite care he worked them all free of one another.

There had been a terrible lot of blood. The wound itself was
narrow, and had gone in low in the belly. Imhotep frowned at that, and murmured
to himself, words that Kemni could not catch. They were an incantation,
perhaps, or a prayer to the gods.

The wound bled still, a slow seep of blood. Iphikleia’s skin
was the color of milk, with a grey cast beneath. Her lips were blue.