The Shepherd Kings (80 page)

Iry shuddered. “Yes. I do remember that.” She glanced at the
Egyptian lord.

He nodded. “That’s wise enough. We’ll keep them, then. Can
you spare enough men to look after them?”

“Those we have should be enough,” said Iry.

The lord looked pleased, after the fashion of lords. He
wandered back around the edge of the herd. All the others followed, and Iry at
his side.

Khayan walked behind them, with a stallion on either side of
him. Sadana he had lost somewhere; he could not see her.

It had begun to dawn on him who this slightly slack-bellied,
unpretentious man must be. The flock of people about him, the way they glanced
at him, and no one spoke to him but Iry, who was as easy with him as she was
with everyone: this must be the Great House of Thebes, the Pharaoh.

Khayan was a little disappointed. The Pharaoh, he had always
heard, lived his life as a priest in a ritual, from waking till sleeping,
without respite ever. He was always crowned; he always carried the crook and
the flail that marked his office.

Ahmose, it seemed, had not heard that he was supposed to
conduct himself perpetually like a king. He was as easy with Iry as she was
with him, taking transparent and almost childlike pleasure in the horses. So
much, Khayan thought, for the Egyptian hatred of horses and their long-eared
cousins.

Still, Ahmose was the king. He could only linger so long
before his duties called him away. When he left, he took with him the crowd of
his followers, and left Iry and a handful of men who must be the herders of
horses, and Khayan.

Iry gave way then, and briefly, to the slackness of
exhaustion. Almost as quickly as she had succumbed, she mastered herself. She
straightened her shoulders, took a breath. Her eyes narrowed as they came to
rest on Khayan. “You! You’ve been hurt. You should rest.”

“Not before you do,” he said.

“I can’t do that. There’s too much to do.”

“Just for an hour.”

Her head shook. “I can’t—” She seemed to come to a decision
of sorts. “I can’t now. This is all mine to look after. The one whose charge it
was—he’s . . . indisposed.”

“Wounded?”

“To the soul,” she said.

“He has no second-in-command?”

“Yes, but—”

“So send for him,” Khayan said. “You need to rest.”

“You are not my master!” she flashed at him.

He flinched. She saw. Her eyes did not soften, but her
body’s tautness eased a fraction. “I’ll send for Seti. Though he may not—”

“He’ll come if you command that he come.”

She nodded. She was not accustomed to giving orders, even
now; it was a habit, he supposed, that took time to set in the bone.

Whereas he could not get out of it. Even shamed and cast
down, he had still been commander of a hundred. It was a long, hard fall from
even that lowly rank to the lot of a slave.

She commanded, and the man came: yet another wiry Egyptian,
this one more insouciant than most, with the usual raking glance at Khayan, and
a gratifyingly abject one at Iry. Khayan doubted that she was aware of it, but
this man adored her.

“Seti,” she said. “How is he? Is he—?”

Seti’s eyes went dark; the mockery vanished from genuine and
soul-deep grief. “He’s the same, lady. He hasn’t changed.”

She sighed. “I suppose it will take time. Did you leave him
under guard? Did they find any more knives?”

“The men are watching him—and there’s nothing with an edge
that he can get his hands on. Or rope or cord, either.”

“Good,” she said. “I’m leaving you in command of the horses
and the chariots. Just for a little while. Until I’ve rested a bit.”

“Lady,” Seti said, “we’re all yours, always. But there’s no
need for you to wear yourself out with taking your cousin’s place. I’ll do it
in your name. You go rest.”

She might have shaped a protest, but Seti waved her away.
“Go,” he said. “It’s done, and will be well done. My word on it.”

~~~

She let herself be led away then, with a docility that
spoke to Khayan of a night, and perhaps several nights, without sleep, and the
weight of weariness crushing her down.

Khayan’s curiosity was keen enough to cut, but he was not
inclined to weary her further with questions. Her cousin? It seemed the man was
in great distress, though as to why, Khayan could not imagine. Who knew what
drove an Egyptian to extremity? Perhaps it was only the shock of having, late
in life, been flung into the heat and blood of battle.

He settled her in the tent in which he had awakened, found
someone who could bring wine and bread, though the jar when it came was full of
the inevitable beer, and saw that she ate and drank at least enough to keep a
bird alive. She who had never been richly fleshed was almost gaunt. “They’re
working you to death,” he muttered.

“And you care?”

Ah, he thought. Anger. “You may quarrel with me all you
like,” he said, “but not until you’ve rested.”

“I’ll do it now,” she said.

He sat on the floor at her feet and made himself
comfortable. She stared at him. Maybe, after all, she had never seen him
sitting except in chairs in palaces. She had not known him when he lived among
the Mare’s people.

“You left me,” she said, a little distracted, as if she was
not quite done with scrambling her wits together. “You went away. You never
said a word.”

“I sent messages,” he said. “Several of them. The door was
shut. You were not to be disturbed.”

“I never—”

“No,” he said. “But my mother would. And, I’ll wager, did.”

Her teeth clicked together. “Did she—does she know—”

“She might,” he said, “though I doubt it. She was keeping
you safe, that was all.”

“I’ve been hating you,” she said. “I’m not going to stop.
What you did to get cast out—”

“I didn’t.”

“I’m sure you didn’t do that. But you let her trap you. I
thought better of you than that.”

“Everyone did,” he said. The pain was dull with age and use.
He was more wry now than shamed. “I’ve paid for it, don’t you think? I’d say
I’ve paid rather high.”

“You chose it for yourself,” she said.

That startled him into laughter. “You really don’t intend to
forgive me, do you?”

“Is it forgivable?”

“I—” He stopped. It struck him, terribly late, that as thin
as she was, as worn, and as determined in her anger, she was still surprisingly
pleasing to the eye. Not beautiful as her mother was, but something perhaps
better than beauty. She was . . .

Beloved. That was not a thought he had expected. And yet, it
was the truth.

That was what he had run away from. And yes, he had run.
First because the king commanded, then because he could think of nothing else
to do. Straight away from her—and straight into her arms.

Which were not at all welcoming. And yet she had taken him
away from the grim labor to which he should have been condemned. She must feel
something besides anger.

“I think,” he said out of all of that, “that you might give
me leave to make amends.”

“What amends can you make?”

“I can serve you,” he said, “since the gods have seen fit to
lay me at your feet. We all serve the Mare’s servant, after all.”

“Your sister said the same,” Iry said. “Is it as easy as
that for you?”

“It’s the hardest thing in the world,” he said from the
heart.

“Then I’ll accept it.”

Such an odd person she was. What he offered her, he would
have given no one else—no, not ever.

“I think I understand,” he said, “why the Mare chose you.”

“Why? Because I’m too stubborn for words?”

“That,” he said, “and because you don’t think as other women
do. The goddess sings in you.”

“Is that what it is?”

“Could it be anything else?”

“I could simply be very, very obstinate.”

He laughed. “That, too. But didn’t the goddess make you? And
shape you? And choose you?”

“It seems she did.”

“So,” he said. “I forget—you never knew your predecessor.
She died untimely; she hadn’t yet chosen her acolyte. The Young Mare was
already born and growing into her power, which should have been a warning, but
no one elected to heed it.”

“No one wanted to,” said Iry. “They told me: when the Mare
goes her own way, the world is changing. That’s never something people want to
see.”

“I brought her back, you know,” he said. “Or she brought me.
I would have stayed in the east if I could. But she left it, she and her kin.
The priestesses appointed me her guardsman until she came where she wanted to
go.”

“Here,” Iry said. “The Lower Kingdom.”

“She was looking for you.”

“Yes.” Iry grew tired at last of standing. She sat on her
heels beside him, calm and contained as she almost always was. She reached and
touched him—brushing his cheek with her hand.

The touch was strange, nor did it grow less so with use. He
kept looking for the beard that had shielded him so well against the world.

“It will grow back,” she said, reading him as easily as she
always had. “Will you let it?” She tilted her head. “I think you look very
well, if rather odd, without it. Surely it’s cooler. You must grant it that.”

“It is very much cooler,” he admitted. “But I don’t—”

“You’ll accustom yourself to it.” She sighed, and yawned.
But her attention was on him. “And here you are wounded. You must be out on
your feet.”

“I don’t feel anything,” he said. It was mostly true. His
side twinged if he moved too quickly, and his head ached with dull persistence.
But he had had worse after a hard night in the banquet-hall.

She was still watching him, regarding him narrowly. Horse
Goddess alone knew what thoughts ran behind those long painted eyes.

She touched him again, this time more lightly, letting her
fingers trail down his cheek to his neck and shoulder. She looked as if she
were trying to remember something she had all but forgotten. “I was hating
you,” she said. “It was very satisfying. Until I saw you again.”

He did not know what to say to that. Except: “I never hated
you.”

“Why would you? You never even thought of me.”

“I thought of you every day. I could hardly help but think
of you.”

“Prove it.”

His wits were slow. He did not, for a long moment,
understand what she was asking. Just as she began to remember her anger, he
knew. “You don’t—”

“I’m not going to force you,” she said. “Nor will I command
you. This you must choose. If you don’t, I’ll not punish you. I swear that by
my name.”

“Iry,” he said. “Iry. Iry.”

“And thrice Khayan,” she said. “Your power for mine, and
mine for yours.”

“Yes,” he said. He took her in his arms. She stiffened.
Foolish woman: had she expected that he would choose to spurn her? He could
never do such a thing.

She eased slowly, till they lay together on the heaped
carpets that shielded the tent against the raw earth. He was weaker than he
should have been, but she was weary. It freed them, in its way. It let them
explore one another with lips and hands, and learn one another’s bodies. She found
the spot under his ribs that made him collapse, helpless with laughter. He
found one down her spine that reduced her to a limp puddle of pleasure.

She rose over him, sitting astride him as if he had been a
stallion she had a mind to tame. She seemed enraptured with his face. She
framed it in her hands and kissed it, slowly, thoroughly, from brow to chin.

His hands cradled her hips and the sweet curve of her
buttocks. She shifted, coiled, took him inside her with a motion so smooth that
surely—oh, surely—

Yet she seemed as startled as he, as if her body had acted
without her willing it. She held very still, till he began gently to rock: like
a boat on a slow swell, or a horse at an easy canter, long rolling strides over
an undulating field. She rode it as she would have ridden the Mare, all of her
given up to it, letting herself become the long slow easy motion.

He, who was not so gifted, filled his eyes with her body
above him, the slender frame, the firm young breasts. Her head had fallen back.
Her eyes, he was sure, were shut.

She drank the whole of it, every drop of pleasure. His
pleasure was all mingled with hers. He had never known such a thing before: to
take as he gave, exactly, moment for moment. To set her pleasure entirely
before his. To be—to become—a part of her.

It was strange. As strange as being stripped of his lands
and lordship, shorn of his beard, and robbed of his freedom. And yet this
strangeness was wonderful. In becoming the mirror of her pleasure, he became
pure pleasure.

The gods laughed, surely, as he found his way to the summit,
and found her there. Her eyes were open wide. She was astonished. “I never
knew,” she said, “that this could be.”

He kissed her into silence. Time enough after to tell her
that he had not known it, either. It was a rarity, a gift of the gods. Of the
goddess—Horse Goddess, who had chosen this woman to be her servant.

Did that mean that he was chosen, too? No; that was too
overweening of him. If he was anything to the gods, he was their plaything. Not
their beloved, whom they had taken for their own.

The enemy’s fortress was broken down, its rubble ground
into the earth. The king, well satisfied, gave the order then. By the river
road, and by the river itself, they marched upon Avaris.

They met with little resistance. The people who had lived in
this land since the beginning either fled at their coming or welcomed them as
kin. The foreigners who had conquered them made no stand against them. For
warriors who had brought the terrible swiftness of the chariot into Egypt, they
were remarkably enamored of their high stone walls and their guarded cities.

“It’s Egypt,” Iannek said. “Egypt changed us.”

He had kept his bright spirit remarkably well, but even he
had gone dark as they came in sight of Avaris. The choices that he had made
must trouble even that light and foolish heart.