The Shepherd Kings (87 page)

And the world went mad.

~~~

The wind swept down like a monstrous hand. The skies
opened as if an icy river had poured itself out upon the earth. Thunder pealed
and pealed and pealed again. Lightning cracked the sky.

There could be no battle in this, except the battle of earth
and heaven. Even the greatest of them cowered in whatever shelter they had. The
bulk of
Dancer
’s hull barely held off
the torrents of water—and it was made to withstand the sea. Iry saw a man
plucked like a feather from the boat he had been clinging to, and flung far and
hard. She saw lightning strike an upended hull and cleave it in two, and leave
the men beneath it stunned, exposed, and drowning in that terrible rain. It
stripped kilts from men’s bodies, helmets from their heads; wrested weapons
from their hands. It had no mercy, no mind or will but to break and flatten and
destroy.

Iry in her shelter, sheltered further by two large warm
bodies, could only huddle and endure. Strong arms circled her. She would have
loved to bury her face in Khayan’s breast, but she had to see. She had to know:
What this storm wrought. What was coming at her, whether lightning or wind or
rain.

It seemed to go on forever. It lasted perhaps an hour of the
sun, perhaps more, perhaps less. Such storms, the Cretan sailors would tell
her, could last much longer, even for days. But this, for this country, was
enough.

When it ended, the silence was so complete that she wondered
if that last peal of thunder had deafened her. The rain lightened little by
little till it was all but gone. The wind died. The clouds endured, black and
boiling overhead, but the western horizon brightened slowly.

They crept out one by one, great lords and warriors reduced
to frightened children. They were wet, mud-spattered. Many were naked.

They stood in a field of mud and water. The villages were
gone, heaps of rubble and melted mudbrick standing in their places. People
crept about them as about the boats and the battered ships. There were wounded
and dead.

It was a battlefield of the gods. Slowly, out of it, the
army took shape again. It was beaten and battered and white about the eyes, but
it had taken fewer losses than anyone feared. Even the chariots: some of the
horses had broken loose and escaped, and some of the chariots were broken, or
chariots and teams had vanished, but when they had gathered, they were most of
them alive, conscious, and not too badly wounded.

Of the enemy’s army there were few left standing. A wind of
wrath had caught them, and lightning pursued them. Those who lived had fled.

“But they raised the storm,” Iannek said, speaking for them
all.

“It seems their gods were not pleased to be disturbed,” the
king said. He was shaken as they all were, but he had mustered his courage and
firmed his strength. At his command, men gathered what little of the baggage
had survived and made camp, guarding it with such weapons as they had. Others
were set to work taking count of casualties, examining the ships for
seaworthiness, and, not least, offering prayers of thanks to the gods that they
had been spared. A few even went up to the villages— “For these are my people,”
Ahmose said. “If I would rule them, I should protect them.”

~~~

Messengers began to come in before sundown, runners
white-faced with shock, speaking of a storm that had swept the whole of the
Lower Kingdom from Memphis to Avaris and beyond it. Baal the storm-god, Set the
destroyer, had risen in wrath. Avaris in its high walls had suffered less than
some, but roofs were torn away, walls battered, and the gate broken where the
siege-engines had weakened it. Lightning had struck its bindings of bronze and
half burned, half shattered it.

Apophis had not surrendered. “Not yet,” Ahmose said.

He could not travel for what was left of that day. But in
the morning, all ships that could sail would sail, and all of the army that
could march, would march on Avaris. The broken, the hurt, and the stragglers
would stay behind. Ahmose would take Avaris, or he would go down in defeat,
felled by the Retenu as even the gods’ lightnings had not been able to do.

It was a mad thing they did, marching and rowing back
through storm-ravaged country on a river that ran strong and high as in the
flood time. But if they lingered, their retreat would become the truth. Avaris
could restore itself, muster its armies, and repair its gates. And Ahmose would
have no strength to take it. More—if the storm had struck the Upper Kingdom as
well as the Lower, and rumors said that it did, then he would have to turn and
retreat as Karnose had done before him, and go to the aid of his people.

But first, if he could, he would take Avaris. He took the
city by surprise: gates open, people clearing away stormwrack, watchers on the
walls more intent on the labors below than on attack from an army that they had
reckoned fled and then destroyed.

The fleet, such of it as had come whole from the storm, bore
down on them. Ahmose’s army on foot and in chariots drove for the broken gate.
They had one chance, one battle. That, they all knew. If they lost, they lost
the war. There was no strength in them for more, nor provisions, nor weapons to
sustain a new siege.

Desperation drove them. This was the end of it, for victory
or for defeat. When the sun set, there would be one king in the Two Lands—but
it might be Apophis.

Kemni found that he could, after all, care what became of
any of them. He had no desire to be a Retenu slave. Not again.

Iry, who had been both slave and more than queen to the
foreign kings, had found the Mare waiting for her when she woke before dawn,
standing white and glimmering in the last of the starlight. She rode with Kemni
now, for all that anyone could say. Sadana’s women rode as her escort. The two
brothers of the Retenu, Khayan and Iannek, had demanded for themselves a
chariot—and Ahmose had bidden Kemni give them one. Two charioteers marched with
the footsoldiers because of that, and not to his delight, either; but he could
not defy the king.

At least, he thought sourly, if the two of them did not turn
traitor, they were more skilled in chariotry than any of his own men. After a
brief squabble, settled by Khayan’s fist, Iannek held the reins, and Khayan, in
his brother’s armor, stood in the warrior’s place. Iannek’s eye was swelling
already and turning a glorious shade of purple-black. He looked remarkably
cheerful in spite of that, and remarkably odd in an Egyptian kilt.

There was a wild joy in what they did, this last cast of the
bones, win or lose, live or die. The air was washed clean after the storm’s
passing, the sun bright as new gold. Broken houses, shattered villages, lands
flooded long out of season—they were all one with this descent on Avaris.

The Cretan ships had run up their wine-dark sails, riding a
wind that seemed intent on driving them into the city’s heart. The Egyptian
fleet, which had fared less well, followed as it could, the flagship of gold
battered but afloat, and the king standing high on it in his golden armor.

The fleet struck the strongest blows, as it well could. They
who fought on land served chiefly to bar the enemy’s escape and offer battle to
whoever tried to flee through the landward gates. Kemni had the north: that, the
king thought, would be most likely to lure Apophis and his court, since
northward was their own country, and some hope of escape.

Kemni hoped that Ahmose saw truly; that Apophis would not
simply shut himself up in his citadel and hold fast till the Egyptians went
away. But there was a kingdom to restore, and that could not be done from a
citadel in the midst of a siege. Apophis too, Ahmose thought, would wish to get
it over.

The chariots were not to enter the city—that command was
explicit. The companies on foot would drive within if they could, but Kemni’s
men were to hold the open field.

They had groaned on being told that; Ay the headstrong spoke
for them all when he muttered, “What, we stand about again, and wait again, and
lose again all our hopes for glory?”

Not this time. The great gates hung askew. Figures milled
within. Women shrieked, children cried. Men’s voices bellowed orders.

Kemni touched Sadana’s shoulder. She slowed the horses. He
raised his hand so that they all might see and do as he did. They rolled to a
halt in a long line before the gate and the walls, as steady as they could be
amid the wreck of the siege-engines, broken fragments that the camp had left
behind, and the pits of the privies still open and reeking and buzzing with
flies.

The foot-companies pressed on, so that the chariots guarded
their backs. As they neared the broken gates, men began to stream out of it,
bearded men in armor of leather or scale mail.

They met with a clash like two swords meeting. Kemni held
the line, though his men champed and pawed, as restless as their own stallions.
Body collided with body, bronze with bronze.

Kemni watched, alert. Ahmose had been precise as to when the
chariots might drive forward.

There. The line of Egyptians swayed back; hung as if in
midair; then swung strongly forward.

“Now,” Kemni said to Sadana.

His team of bays leaped forward. He clutched the chariot’s
sides before he pitched backwards out of it—ignominious as that would have
been, at the very taking of Avaris. The wind of the stallions’ speed sang in
his ears.

The footsoldiers gave way before the chariots, opening paths
to the enemy. The enemy looked up and saw their death falling on them.

But they had their own weapon—as Kemni had been warned they
would. Their chariots had been hidden behind the rubble of the gate. That was a
flaw in their plan: they had to come out no more than two or three abreast, and
slowly, over broken ground and past the companies of their comrades on foot.

The Egyptian foot closed in behind the chariots, returning
to the fighting with renewed strength. The chariots pressed forward—but not as
far as the gate. They had their orders. They were a wall beyond the wall. The
enemy’s chariots could not flee except through them.

Kemni’s bow was strung—a Retenu bow, which was the strongest
in the world, and needed a strong arm to draw. He set an arrow to the string.

Strike at the
charioteers.
That was the order he had been given, and that he had given
his men. Not the horses—those, they could use. And not the fighting men, until
the charioteers were down.

He raised the bow, aimed, loosed. Even before the arrow
struck home, another was set to string. The chariot rocked and veered
underfoot. He rode with it, keeping the arrow as steady as he might, focused on
the target. Man in leather tunic, beard to the breast. No face to distract him.
Simply the shape of his chest and shoulders, and the surety that the heart was
there, as it was in every man. Kemni loosed, drew another arrow from the
quiver, nocked, aimed.

One more. This one he saw fly wide, the chariot come on,
horses wild-eyed and foaming. The warrior in it had no bow—fool, to trust to a
spear, which needed closer quarters.

The chariot veered suddenly, rocking Kemni against the side.
It half knocked the breath out of him, and let the spear pass harmless where, a
breath before, Kemni’s body had been.

He breathed a prayer of thanks, and flashed a smile at
Sadana. She was grinning like a mad thing, darting among the mingled armies,
setting him free to fight as he could. They had gone as far as they might under
the king’s orders; she turned and sent the horses along the wall.

The rest of his people had done the same. The mounted women
ranged among them, catching the wounded and bearing them behind the lines, and
clearing away the dead. It was a strange duty, the more so for that, if
attacked, they would fight, and fight well. But fighting was not all they did.

Close by Kemni, always, were the Retenu Khayan and his
brother, fighting for the Mare and her servant. They fought with great skill.
They did not, that he could see, regret the bodies they wounded or the lives
they took. They were born to war as no Egyptian ever was.

He must not let his mind wander. He had to know where every
man was, and every chariot. They were only to go so far along the wall, then
they must go back. The gate was their charge. They were not to leave it.

He signaled the return, curving back toward the gate.
Chariots came out of it still, and men. It looked like a wound, the city
draining its blood upon the northward road. The river, they had never had. The
south was Egypt. Where else could they go but north?

They fought harder now. The oncoming ranks were fresh, and
his men were tiring. But they must hold. The king had commanded it.

There was no telling how the fleet fared. The bulk of the
city lay between. Yet it must have driven in hard: among the warriors now were
lesser figures, men unarmed or only lightly armed, children, even veiled women
choosing the terror of the chariots over whatever passed within.

Women and children he let pass. Men died. That was the way
of war. He rode over them, cut them down with spear or sword.

So they all did. No one had forgotten the Retenu who shed
new blood among Egyptian wounded and dying.

He was almost cravenly glad to meet another outriding of
chariots. These were richer than the last, their charioteers gleaming with
gold. They fought harder—for they had more to lose.

“Is it—?” he asked Khayan in a lull in the battle, when they
had drawn up side by side to rest the horses.

Khayan was proof to Kemni’s mind that Retenu grew their
beards not to seem more manly, but to conceal faces that were all too easy to
read. Khayan was as transparent as clean water. His thoughts now were half of
anger and half of guilt—because he reveled in this battle, though he fought
against his own people.