The Shepherd Kings (79 page)

Imhotep sent Khayan away, and Iry and the guard with him.
“Watch him,” the healer said. “If he sleeps too long, if he seems confused, if
he acts strangely—bring him back to me. He should wake in the morning with a
hammering headache, but no more than that.”

“And maybe a little wound-fever?”

“I hope not,” Imhotep said. He had already turned away
toward another who needed him.

She let him go. The guard was willing to continue with his
charge, at least until he was settled in Iry’s tent. As for what she would do then . . .

There was little to do, at least with this captive, aside
from see a pallet spread for him and mount guard over him. Iry sent the guard
away, over his protests—which rather startled her. Even after she had given him
a bit of silver, he wanted to stay.

Odd man. But he had a captain waiting for him, and duties
that had nothing to do with the Mare’s servant or her sudden prisoner.

She mounted guard herself, then, though there were other
things that she could have been doing. Khayan slept uneasily, stirring and
murmuring. His brow was cool; no fever. His face was pale, but so was the rest
of him. He was whiter-skinned than anyone in Egypt, white as milk where the sun
had not touched him.

She hated him. He had bedded her, left her, forgotten her.
Then he had, like a blazing fool, let himself be condemned on that preposterous
charge. No one had believed it, except the woman’s father. And for that, he had
lost his rank and his honor, and now, his freedom.

“Idiot,” she said to him. “
Idiot
.”

He did not hear. She settled comfortably, prepared to wait
for as long as she needed to. Part of her knew that she should leave this task
to a servant and go out to be an omen, and to help as she could. But the Great
House had servants and subjects in rather astonishing number. Khayan had no
one. Not that he deserved anyone, but it did not seem right, somehow, to leave
him to the care of strangers.

She would have to summon Sadana. Eventually. And Iannek,
too, she supposed. They were his close kin. But not until he had got over
whatever horrors he would need to get over, once he woke and discovered what
had become of him.

She did not do it out of concern for his spirit, she told
herself, but out of concern for theirs. He was their brother. Whatever shame
fell on him, to a degree they shared it.

~~~

She slept, perhaps. The day darkened into night. The camp
quieted slowly, though the sounds of singing and revelry went on. The king
would have to pause for a day or two, so that his men could recover.

That would serve her well enough. She roused with a start,
to find that his eyes were open. They were clear—startling, a little. “Don’t
tell me I dreamed it all,” he said.

It was strange to hear that rich familiar voice out of that
stranger’s face. That beautiful and unguarded face. Why, she thought: a man who
had a beard to hide behind might never learn to conceal what he was thinking.

He did not know yet. If he felt strange, maybe there were
too many oddnesses, and to many small and greater pains.

“This isn’t Avaris,” he said, looking about in the
lamplight. “This is—are we in camp? Do I remember—I went to war? Then what are
you doing here?”

“This is a stronghold south of Sile,” she said. “You are in
camp.”

“I remember. . .” He sighed, and gasped: it must have
stabbed him with pain. “There was a battle. I fought. It wasn’t a dream, was
it? I really did—Barukha—”

“Yes.”

“So the king came after all? And brought you?”

“I brought myself,” she said. “This is the Egyptian camp.
You lost the fight. Most of your lords have fled.”

His mouth, which was long and remarkably well shaped,
twisted wryly. “Lords. Never enough sense among the lot of them to come in out
of the sun.”

“I suppose you would know,” she said.

He winced. Then at last he seemed to understand that
something was odd. His hand crept up. She thought briefly of stopping it, but
he had to know. Best to get it over.

His hand explored his face, which surely was as strange to
him as it was to her, and his shorn hair. It lowered slowly. He lay very still.
“I was fighting,” he said quietly, calmly. “Then I woke, and I was here.”

“You don’t remember anything?”

“Nothing. We lost?”

She nodded.

“Then—what—”

That calm was a thin shell over hysteria. She knew. She had
known it herself often enough. “You were wounded. You took a blow to the head.
Then you were captured.”

“And not killed?”

“The king decided to let all the captives live,” she said.

“As slaves?”

“As whatever he needs them to be.”

“Slaves.” Khayan raised his hand again to his face. “You,
too?”

“Oh, no. I’m their omen. I came with the Mare, you see. She
brought me to my own people.”

“Of course.” He should have sounded bitter. He sounded
merely tired. But his wits were quick enough. “I suppose I was your share of
the booty?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just took you and walked away.”

“Why?”

“You’d rather I’d left you where you were?”

“That depends on what you want with me.”

“I don’t want anything,” she said. “You should sleep. Is
your headache very bad?”

“Dreadful.”

“Then sleep. You’ll be better in the morning.”

“I don’t think so,” he said: and that was bitterness. But
his eyes closed, perhaps of their own accord.

~~~

Iry could have left then. But she stayed and watched him
sleep. She was not thinking of anything in particular, though it might be
useful to consider what indeed she wished to do with him. She owned him now as
once he had owned her. His hand on her had been light—that much she granted
him. But whether her own could be as light . . . she did not
know.

Tomorrow, she thought. She would think about it tomorrow.
Tonight she would sleep as he slept. Part of her babbled that he was feigning
it, that once she had fallen into a drowse he would rise and escape; but the
rest knew that he would not. Where would he go? How would he dare to show his
face among the men of his own people? He had already been dishonored. He was
worse than that, now.

No. He would stay. He had nowhere else to go.

The world was a strange and shifting place. Khayan, for
being a fool, had fallen as low as man could fall. He was a captive, a slave.
Far better had he died than be subjected to this.

Others of his people had searched for ways to kill
themselves. One even succeeded: provoked a short-tempered guard into running
him through with a sword. He was cast into the river for the crocodiles to
devour— a terrible fate, if he had been an Egyptian, but no more terrible than
what the Egyptians had done to him.

All of that, Khayan knew. And yet he had no desire at all to
die. One of the most difficult things he had ever done was to walk out of Iry’s
tent into the pitiless glare of the sun, where every eye could see his face
laid naked to the world. He would almost rather have stripped off the kilt that
was given him, than show his bare cheeks.

Still, once it was done, it was done. The Egyptians stared
briefly, then ignored him. A beardless man, to them, was a natural thing, far
less unnatural than the beard he had been robbed of.

He still could not remember that, or anything after he took
a stand with his men near the fort’s wall. They were pulling that wall down
now. Of his men there was no sign. Dead, he supposed, or fled. None of them had
been taken captive; of that, he was certain.

No one tried to prevent him from walking through the camp.
He had waked alone, eaten and drunk what he found beside him—bread and beer and
a bowl of onions—and ventured out before his courage failed him.

He did not know where Iry was. Was she hoping that he would
escape? Did she want him to be killed in the trying?

She was angry with him. He had seen that, though she hid it
rather well. This was her revenge on him, this slavery, and perhaps this
abandonment, too.

The fort that his people had built was coming down in a
great crashing and eruption of cheers. Once it had fallen and been trampled
into the earth, the army would go on. All the dead were tended, the wounded
seen to. The wrack of battle was all but cleared away.

His fellow slaves had been given the lowest of tasks:
digging new privies and burying old ones. More than one bore the marks of the
lash. They had not been washed as he had, fed and given a clean kilt. They were
all naked and filthy.

There at last he was not permitted to go. A guard with a
whip of many thongs interposed himself. The man was half Khayan’s size, but the
whip was convincing. He stepped back out of reach. The man smiled. It was not a
malicious smile, at all. It was as if—

Khayan wandered away, puzzled and uncertain whether he
should be angry. When he sharpened his ears and his understanding of the
Egyptians’ speech—not as easy as he might have thought; the dialect of Thebes
was different from that of Memphis—he heard what made him pause. They all knew
who he was.
Don’t touch that one,
they said.
It belongs to the white
priestess.
For that was what they called her, for the white robe she wore
and the white Mare she served.

To belong to her . . .

Well. They all did, all the Mare’s people. He began to
be—not angry, no. Amused. Even a little wild, as if—no, he could not be happy.
Relief; he would call it relief. The world was a strange place, and yet he was
glad to be living in it.

~~~

He found her where he would have expected, near the
horses. She was speaking with a man in a plain kilt and a short wig, who must
have been a person of rank: he wore a golden collar. There were other people
about, a great number of them, but they were of no account.

Except one. His sister Sadana met his eyes across the
stretch of field. He shrank inside himself and came within a breath’s span of
bolting—but one thing kept him where he was. What in the gods’ name was she
doing here?

She strode toward him as no woman of his father’s people
did, with pride and confidence that were given only to men. But she was of the
Mare’s people, and warrior-trained.

She stopped in front of him and looked him up and down,
taking her time about it. He set his teeth and suffered it. Her brow rose.
“You’re even prettier than you were when you were small. I think I rather like
it.”

He rubbed his chin, which rasped already with stubble. “I
suppose I know why you’re here. But why is she?”

“The Mare called her,” Sadana answered.

Khayan sighed faintly. He had not seen the Mare when he
came, but as he stood there, a herd of duller creatures shifted, and she was
there, her moon-pale coat gleaming.

There were others beyond her. Khayan forgot Sadana, forgot
even where he was. He advanced a step, set fingers to lips, loosed a piercing
whistle.

His dun stallions, his beauties, his beloved, flung up their
heads and whinnied back. Moon stamped his foot. Star tossed his head till his
black mane flew. They wheeled together and galloped toward him—straight through
the crowd of Egyptians.

The little brown men scattered, some with severe loss of
dignity. Only the one beside Iry held his ground as she did, and the duns
veered around them, as they would have done if any of the others had stood
where he was.

They checked as they came up to Khayan, eyes rolling,
snorting. He laughed: laughter that was half a sob. “My poor beautiful
brothers. You don’t recognize me, do you?”

They snorted again, explosively, and approached in delicate
steps. He held out his hands. Their soft noses brushed his palms, blowing into
them. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, it’s I.”

But they had to be certain. They nosed and sniffed him all
over, licking, offering to nip until he halted them with a rebuke. He stroked
their heads and necks and shoulders, rubbing their napes were they loved to be
rubbed, and combing tangles out of the thick manes. They wrapped themselves
around him, shutting him off from the world, so that all there was to see was
golden hide, black mane, and the roll of a bright eye.

It was only with great regret that he ended the greeting and
looked past them. Sadana was laughing at him. Iry was smiling. So too the man
beside her, a man past his youth and somewhat soft, but who carried himself
with a certain loftiness that marked a lord.

Iry’s smile faded. Khayan felt as if a cloud had gone across
the sun. It was with difficulty that he made sense of the lord’s words, which
were addressed not to him but to Iry. “So. This is your Retenu?”

“I do own him, don’t I?” Iry said. “Yes, that is the one I
took from among the captives. Do you want him back?”

“No,” the man said. “You may keep him. Only see to it that
he behaves himself.”

Khayan bridled. Even the memory that he was a slave could
not keep him quiet—but Iry’s glance clove his tongue to the roof of his mouth.

“Come here,” she said. “Tell us something.”

He left his stallions reluctantly. The Egyptian lord
regarded him with calm curiosity—measuring him as if he had been a stallion
himself. He set his teeth and ignored the man, and bowed to Iry.

“We’ve captured a number of horses,” she said, “and many
more asses. The asses we’ll set to carrying baggage. The horses we’re very glad
of—but we’re lacking charioteers. Should we send them north, do you think? And
keep them where they’ll be safe, until we win back the whole of this kingdom?”

“You may not win it at all,” Khayan said, not wisely. He
could have been flogged for it, but as he had thought, they were not interested
in punishing him for too free a tongue. They ignored that and listened to the
rest. “If the decision were mine to make, and I know well that it is not, I
would take them with the army. You’ve not met the full force of our chariotry
yet. When you do, you may find you need all the remounts you can muster. Our
men are trained, you see. They strike for the horses.”