The Shepherd Kings (86 page)

She was more foreign even than the foreign kings. He knew a
little of what she was, from things that Iry and others had told him. He did
not understand her at all.

It did not matter, when he thought about it. There was an
ease about her presence, a not quite pleasure in her company. As if they were
kin, in some odd way.

He found that he could contemplate sleep, even the dreams it
brought, without quite so much dread as before. After a while he rose and bade her
good night. She nodded, making no move to rise herself.

He paused. “Won’t you sleep?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t sleep much. I never did.”

“But if there’s battle tomorrow—”

“I’ll be awake, aware, and as strong as I ever am.” She
tilted her head up, peering at his face above her. “Stop fretting. I’ll sleep
in a little while.”

“Promise?”

“Promise,” she said solemnly.

He decided to be content with that. But as he slipped into
his tent, he paused, and looked back. She had returned to her contemplation of
the fire. It was almost as if she stood guard—but over what? Kemni?

Foolishness. He let the tentflap fall, and groped through
familiar darkness to his bed.

The ships went on battering Avaris from every branch of
the river, till the city was laid waste some distance inland. The Retenu had
built a wall of rubble against the unrelenting invasions. It was slow work,
tedious and exhausting, fighting for each hand’s breadth of land, against
enemies who flatly refused to yield.

The chariots began at last to have somewhat to do. Outlying
lords had gathered their forces and marched on the city. They were a great
army, harried by uprisings among the Egyptians until Ahmose had sent out word:
Let them come. Let them think us weaker than
we are.

He had, meanwhile, divided his forces on the land and sent
some of them out as if to forage—and that they did; but their chief duty was to
seem to have dissipated his strength around the landward walls of the city.
Only a token few companies of foot, and his chariots, remained in evidence
there.

It was a trap, neatly laid, and Kemni’s chariots were the
bait. Iry saw them on the day she rode the Cretan flagship, out of curiosity
but also to be a banner for the war. The admiral from Crete had thought of
that, and the Cretan woman who was one of Ahmose’s queens. They believed, for
whatever reason, that Iry’s presence would hearten the fighters, and perhaps
bring them victory.

She had ridden in boats, of course, all her life. But never
on a ship built to sail the sea. It was larger and higher, and it was made of
hewn wood, which was precious-rare in Egypt; here, boats were most often made
of reeds, or of bundled papyrus.

She had wandered all over it at first, to the manifest
amusement of the crew: slender laughing men with long curling hair, who seemed
for some reason to find her delightful. They called her by a name that, Ariana
the queen said, meant
beautiful lady
,
and brought her gifts when she had settled under the canopy on the deck: a
necklace of translucent shells, a fish carved of bone, an odd silvery pearl
that looked, if she held it just so, like the Mare when she pranced and snorted
and tormented the stallions.

It seemed that Ariana and the admiral had seen clearly: she
was more than welcome here. And she was safe, as safe as anyone could be in the
midst of a war. The flagship kept well back, overseeing the fight. The rest of
the ships, greater and lesser, were ranging up and down the river, hurling
missiles from the decks, and dispatching companies of fighting men to rampage
through the city.

“We’ll win through to the citadel soon,” Naukrates the
admiral said beside her. He never stayed in one place for long; he was up and
about, up and down the sides and the prow and the stern, sending messengers in
small swift boats or ordering that signals be sent to this ship or that, or to
the whole of the fleet. He had paused just then, peering under his hand at the
rise of those massive walls. “Yes, we’ll surround it; then we can take it.”

“If the Retenu will let you,” Iry could not help but say.

He grinned at her. He was not a young man, but he could be
as lighthearted as a boy—they all could, these dancers and sailors from Crete.
“Oh, they’ll let us. We’ll sweet-talk them and croon to them and make love to
them with our spears and our swords, till they’re begging us to have our will
of them.”

Khayan laughed behind her. He had been remarkably light of
spirit himself since they came back from the citadel. She might have expected
him to be sunk in sadness, but he had been conducting himself as if a great
weight had been lifted from his heart. She had not asked him why; it did not
seem a question she should ask.

He had also proved surprising in another way. Warrior and
horseman and charioteer as he was, he was also at ease on the water. That was
not like the rest of his people. But then he had been born in Memphis, and his
nurse had been Egyptian. He was more like her people than anyone liked to
admit, even Khayan himself.

He stood at her back as he undertook always to do, more at
ease here than he was in the camp—maybe because these too were foreigners, and
kin from long ago. He was a kind of prince to them, as she understood it, both
because he belonged to her, and because he was the son of a great queen of the
tribes beyond the eastern horizon.

Even more than that—here, he would actually rest a hand on
her shoulder, a light touch, familiar, and blessed in it; but he would never
have done such a thing in front of her own people. She leaned very slightly
into it, just enough that he would know she was glad of it.

Khayan and the admiral were peering under their hands now,
but not at the citadel; at the sky. It did have an odd look: dark along the
horizon, and streamers of cloud overhead. Clouds were not as rare here in the
Lower Kingdom as in the desert realm of the Upper Kingdom.

Still, these were not like any she had seen before. If they
had been closer to the Red Land, she would have wondered if there was a
sandstorm coming toward the river.

She opened her mouth to ask what such a thing could be, but
Naukrates spoke before her. He spoke not to either of them, but in a voice
pitched to carry. “Signalers! To me.”

They came from all around the ship, at such speed as they
might, for his tone was urgent. “Halt the battle,” he said. “Call in the fleet.
Have it put to shore beyond the city, as near as is practicable, but far enough
to be safe; then batten the ships. Beg the Pharaoh’s indulgence, and ask that
his ships do the same. Quickly.”

“Why should he do that?” Iry asked.

Naukrates looked as if he would snap at her, but remembered,
almost too late, who she was. He muttered in his own language, shifting
somewhat belatedly to Egyptian. “Yes, he’ll argue, too; he’ll not likely know.”

“Tell the Great House,” Khayan said to the messenger who
went most often to the king, “that a storm is coming. It were best his ships
were beached and battened before it strikes.”

“A storm?” said Iry. “But there are no storms in this
country. This isn’t the sea, or your steppe. This is the Lower Kingdom of
Egypt.”

“All the more reason to protect against it,” said Khayan.
“In other countries, people know what to do. Here, no one knows. Few of you at all
have seen water fall from the sky.”

“But it can’t be—”

They were not listening. Naukrates was turning about,
testing the wind. His frown deepened the longer he went on. Khayan with his
heavy brows and his strong face looked even more forbidding. “If you were at
sea,” he said, “you could run ahead of it. But this . . .”

The oars were out, the ship beating its way down the river
amid the gathered fleet. The enemy on the shore had stopped their fighting.
Some even clambered to the top of their barricade to stare. A few had raised a
ragged cheer. They thought, perhaps, that the fleet was retreating.

So it was—but not before them.

Word had gone to the army. As the flagship passed the
southward edges of the city, Iry saw the tents fall, the men racing to pack and
secure them. The chariots had come in from the field. They guarded the rear as
the army began to march. They would join with the fleet downriver, and take
what shelter the beached ships could offer, since the city’s walls were still
closed to them. The siege-engines they left, in some despair; but the Cretan
captains were agreed. There was no time.

Iry wondered if the king doubted what he had been told, that
there was a storm coming, and a deadly one. If it failed to come, they might
indeed find that they had lost the city and the war. It could even have been a
plot far more clever than the one for which the prince Gebu had died.

But no. She could see the wall of cloud now, advancing from
the west: blue-black and shot with lightnings.

The city’s gates had opened—astonishing, unlooked for. An
army marched out, regiments of foot strengthened with a great force of
chariots. Did they not see the storm? Or did they believe that their gods had
brought it? Baal was a storm god. This could be his, this wrath of the heavens.
Their priests might even have summoned it, in extremity, at the threat to their
citadel. Had not Apophis said that Set would destroy his enemies?

The presence in the heart of Iry’s spirit, the bright warmth
that, she had been assured, was the great goddess, was still. The Mare was
gone; she lived, but Iry did not know where.

Iry had believed implicitly that the Two Lands would be one
again; that Ahmose would have the victory, and Egypt would be whole. But now,
in a fleeing ship, with a storm like the gods’ own wrath pursuing them and the
army of the Retenu speeding before it, her faith wavered.

The wind had begun to blow from the west, lightly but distinctly.
Naukrates bade his sailors run up the sail, but wait on his command; when the
wind freshened, he said, they must drop it again. For the moment the wind was
their ally, bearing them swiftly down the river. All about them the ships, both
Cretan and Egyptian, had done the same. The golden flagship, clumsy thing that
it was, rode somewhat in the rear of the fleet, but it was well warded by
smaller, quicker craft.

They ran downriver till the city was out of sight, till they
had found a place that the pilots knew: a bend in that branch of the river, and
a landscape of fields, stripped now by the harvest, and a string of little
villages. The people had come running out to see the ships, crying in dismay:
“Defeat? Is it defeat?”

“Take cover!” the men on the ships roared back. “Take cover
and pray. The wrath of Set is upon us!”

The villagers wailed and scattered and fled. The ships ran
up on the banks, their crews battening and stowing and securing as they went,
pulling down masts and sails where they could. Fighting men ran to mark the
edge of a camp, to surround it and hold it with the weapons that they had, and
with the chariots as they came up. It was a madness of haste in a rising wind,
a breath of cold such as Egypt seldom knew, damp cold that made Iry think of
deep water.

The army on foot was still running, the enemy closing in
behind. Kemni’s chariots turned in a great arc and bore down on them. A hundred
chariots, that had seemed so many in the war’s beginning, proved to be
distressingly few against the enemy’s strength. And yet, from the shelter of
the ships, neither the captain nor his charioteers seemed afraid. Sadana’s
mounted warriors were riding amid the chariots, not far behind the commander,
like a guard of honor.

The wind blew strong now, lashing the reeds and the
marsh-grasses beyond the fields. Most of the ships’ crews had taken shelter
behind or beneath careened hulls.

The servants and the baggage came up, staggering with
exhaustion—they were not made to run so fast or so far. Those in the rear were
wounded, some of them, by the enemy’s arrows. He had not caught them, but their
rearguard had turned at bay behind the wall of chariots. It was a thin line,
perilously thin. It was all they had.

Iry made her way through a freshening gale to the king’s
ship, where the king was sheltered, and not happily, either. Even as she came,
his lords and his queens were remonstrating with him. “I will summon my
chariot,” he said against them. “If I am to lose the war for this ill choice,
then let me lose it from the thick of a battle.”

“You haven’t lost it yet,” Iry said.

It seemed a terribly obvious thing to say, but everyone
regarded her as if she had proposed a thing unheard of. Their eyes were rolling
white. The sky’s darkening even before the sun had come to noon, the wind’s
howling, the flash and flare of the lightning and the roll of thunder, had reft
them of their wits. Even as she stood swaying in the gale, lightning leaped
across the sky, branching like the river in the Delta, stream upon stream upon
stream, till with a hiss it died. Thunder snarled in its wake, mounting to a
roar.

Iry spoke above it, pitching her voice as she had been
taught, as priestesses learned to do. “The war is not lost. My lord, stay.
Wait. Trust the gods.”

That steadied him, somewhat. He still champed and snorted
like a stallion shut in walls, but he had stopped insisting that he fling
himself into the battle. He was needed here, where the army could see him, and
where the runners could come, seeking his commands or his counsel.

But having given him that wisdom, she undertook to slip away
herself, only to meet a large and living wall. Iannek and Khayan together stood
in her way. She had not known that they were the same size exactly. It was like
looking at two images of the same man, one shorn and dressed in the Egyptian
fashion, the other all Retenu from his crown of battle-plaits to his booted
feet.

They kept her there, as trammeled as the king. She tried to
thrust past them. It was like throwing herself against stone.