The Shepherd Kings (22 page)

One such duty was presented to him the day after he spoke to
his mother. His summons there had put him in mind of that other house, the
women’s house proper. He remembered all too vividly how he had gone into that
house that first day, fresh with the delight of his bright new lordship, and
found a huddle of Egyptian women around one of their own who was ailing. That
one had flung a cup at his feet, full of something perfectly foul; most sane
and sensible of her, he had thought then. She had done well enough since, he
had undertaken to discover. She had served him wine that very night, though not
on the nights thereafter.

She was but one of the slaves. But the one who had made
herself the center of that room—that one was no more a slave than she could
well bear to be. Teti would not speak of her unless pressed, and then in tones
of barely muted awe.

The Lady Nefertem. She had been the lady of this house while
it was an Egyptian holding, wedded to its lord who had died in a rebellion
against King Apophis. She had been enslaved as was proper, but that fact had
never impinged upon her consciousness. She had kept her house, her place, her
servants.

Khayan’s father had not been a weak man, but he had had a
weakness for strong women. And beautiful women. Khayan remembered well the face
turned to him in the dim light of the sickroom, the ivory pallor of it, the
lines as pure and clean as carving in white stone. There was beauty such as he
had never seen, exquisite in its perfection. It knew itself completely,
accepted itself utterly. It did not even trouble to be vain.

Khayan could not see that it was reasonable for a lord of
his people to live in a house still half in Egyptian hands. Particularly since,
if certain rumors were true, the winds of rebellion were blowing strong again.
It was enough that the steward of the estate was a native man: that needed one
who spoke the language, and who could make the slaves and servants and the farmers
in their fields work for their lord. There was no need and no sense in
suffering the women’s house to remain an outpost of the enemy.

Therefore, between his morning’s travels out and about and
his afternoon’s sojourn in the hall of judgment, Khayan turned toward the
women’s house.

He was not stopped, no more than he had been on the first
day. But his coming this time was no surprise. He found the hallways open to
him, the guards submissive. And in the heart of that brilliantly colored and
strikingly bare house, he found her.

She was sitting in a chair of carved ivory, an ivory image
herself, sheathed in the translucent gauze that Egyptian women called clothing.
Her wig was severe in its simplicity, straight black hair cut to frame her
face. It shone like a jewel in that setting. One almost forgot the body so
barely hidden by the gown, the breasts rose-tipped and half bared, the dark
triangle in the curve of her lap.

Almost. Every fingerbreadth of her was exquisite. The face
merely crowned it, still and cold in its perfection.

She did not acknowledge him, though he stood in front of
her, towering over her. He was huge in that place, outsized, looming and
awkward. Her maids cowered away from him. She did not even seem to see him.

“Nefertem,” he said.

The sound of her name should have roused a flicker at the
least. But she was lost in her own strange world.

He did a thing he would never have done if she had seemed
even slightly aware of him: he reached and took her chin in his hand and tilted
it up. It moved like a child’s toy, with lifeless obedience. The eyes so lifted
to his were blank. She might have been carved in stone, for all the life or
soul he found there.

Again, if she had seemed alive, he would not have done what
he did. He swept her off her chair. She resisted him not at all. Her maids fled
shrieking; none even tried to fend him off.

There was, in the pattern of such houses, a room beyond this
one, and a bed on a platform, draped in gauzy veils. He let her fall to it. She
made no move to protect herself, simply lay as he had cast her. Save that she
was warm, and her breast rose and fell as she breathed, she might have been a
dead thing.

Khayan stood over her in a kind of despair. A proper man of
his people would take her now, take her and master her, and make himself truly
lord of this place.

Khayan was his mother’s son. He had grown to manhood in the
east, in a tribe ruled by women. He could not master a woman in such a fashion.

Almost he turned and walked away—fled, to give it its honest
name. But he had his own kind of stubbornness. Rape he would not—could not—commit.

So let it not be rape.

Carefully and with deliberate slowness he put off his robe
and his tunic and his loincloth. She never moved. He resisted the temptation to
arrange her limbs, to make her more comfortable.

He lay naked beside her. He was fiercely, almost painfully
aware of his height, his breadth, his pelt of black curly hair—all so alien to
that ivory slenderness. What she thought of him, if she thought at all, she
betrayed no sign.

But of course. His father had had her. That had been made
clear to him. Cold as a fish, she must have been. But the old man had had no
such foolish compunctions as Khayan had. He would take a woman if he reckoned
she needed taking.

Khayan would take her, too, but in the way that suited him
best. Gently, barely perceptibly, he stroked his hand down that still and
lightly breathing body. It did not quiver. Nor did he retreat. He stroked her
as if she had been a filly he wished to tame, over and over, gentle, steady,
and perfectly persistent.

However far away a woman’s mind might wander, her body could
not ignore forever the persistence of touch. Her skin warmed under the drift of
gauze. Her nipples tautened. Did her breath quicken? Of that he could not be
certain.

He rose over her. She was as remote as ever. Her wig had not
moved in all this while. Was it perhaps, after all, her own glossy black hair?

The paint masked her face in odd ways: made her eyes long
and strange, shaped her lips into a perfect bow. It was like kissing a painted
image, and yet the flesh beneath was warm. “Lady,” he said in her own language,
breathing the word. “Lady, you are beautiful.”

Beauty without life; without living response. He would rouse
it. He made a vow to himself. She would wake and see him, and know him for her
lord.

Arrogance. He laughed suddenly, dropped to the bed beside
her and propped himself on his elbow and said, as if she would respond, “My
father never touched you, did he?”

To his astonishment she replied, “He never dared.”

“So,” said Khayan. “You’re not a lifeless thing.”

She did not move, did not glance at him. But her words were
clear enough. “You will never master the Two Lands.”

“I’ll be content to master you, lady.”

“You may try,” she said.

“Did he talk to you, too?”

“In his own language,” she said.

“Did you answer?”

“Sometimes.”

“Are you sorry I can understand you?”

“They say you were far away, living among a people we never
knew. Where did you learn to speak the language of the one true people?”

“I was born in Memphis,” he said. “My nurse was Egyptian.”

“Pity,” she said.

“It did corrupt me,” he said.

How strange to be lying here naked beside the most beautiful
woman he had seen in his life, and she not moving, not a muscle, except to
speak in that soft, clear voice. He had gathered, from words dropped here and
there, that her beauty masked a mind of no particular acuity or wit. Lying
here, listening to her, he rather doubted it. It was not a mind like other
minds—but it was keen enough.

She moved suddenly, taking him off guard. She rose over him
as, a little before, he had risen over her. Her hair hung down, hovering just
above his cheeks. Her white breasts swayed. Her eyes were alive, glittering
like the eyes of the cobra that to these people was sacred.

The cobra was a goddess. She protected her people. Some she
devoured—but that was the way of divinity.

The Lady Nefertem raked long painted nails down his cheek,
his throat, his breast. He lay utterly still.

She kissed him. Her kiss was fire. Songs sang of such
things. He had never believed in them. Kisses were wet, warm, and yes,
arousing. But fire?

This was fire. It licked his limbs with pleasure close to
pain. It brought his rod springing erect, so sudden and fierce that he gasped.

Her fingers closed about it. Bands of heated bronze, holding
it close, not tight, but with a hint, a glimmer of cruel strength.

She smiled. Her smile was sweet, remote, and not a little
mad. “Now who is master here?” she asked him.

“Why, you are,” he said, and not terribly unwillingly,
either. “But out there, where the world can see, I am. For that world’s sake, I
can’t let you rule in this house. I hope you can understand.”

“What is there to understand?” Her fingers tightened on his
rod. He set his teeth. She began to stroke him, slowly, with skill to find each
separate point of pleasure or pain.

“You are not my master,” she said. “You are not master in
the Two Lands. We will cast you out, foreigner: you and all your kind.”

“I could have you put to death for that,” he said—gasped, for
she was doing marvelous, terrible things with those clever fingers.

She laughed. It was true laughter, sweet and achingly pure.
“You? You could never harm a woman.”

“But certain of my men could.”

“Surely,” she said. “And you would never set them on me.
Your heart is soft, foreigner. You have no cruelty in you.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know you very well indeed,” she said. Stroking, stroking;
sending ripples through his body, till he was near convulsed—just on the edge
of bursting, but never, quite, past it.

A woman could still, after a fashion, think, even in the
midst of this oldest of dances. With what little was left of his wits, Khayan
regretted that part at least of being a man. He was entirely in this woman’s
power, and well she knew it.

Maybe she thought to break him so. If he had been as other
men of his people, so might she have done. But he was his mother’s son. He had
learned these arts in the arms of women more skilled and colder-hearted than
this one could begin to be. As they had taught him, he gave himself up to it;
he let himself be mastered. So he protected his spirit; so he kept his heart
whole, though she did with his body as she would.

At last she let him go—a release so welcome that he groaned
aloud. She laughed at him, sweet rippling laughter like water running.

He astonished her: he laughed with her. She fell silent,
staring. He would dearly have loved to collapse into sleep, but that would not
be wise at all. He rose—staggering slightly, which he hoped but doubted she
would not see—and smiled at her. “You are rather skillful,” he said. “For an
Egyptian.”

He gathered up his clothing, shrugged into the robe and
bundled the rest under his arm, and left her there. What she was thinking, he
did not know, nor overmuch care.

When Khayan had bathed and put on fresh garments, he summoned
Teti the steward. The man came with reasonable dispatch, as he should have
done: he would have been waiting with the rest in the hall of judgment for
Khayan to begin the day’s deliberations.

Khayan would do that, oh yes. But first he had a task for
his steward.

Teti was a small man as all Egyptians were. Unlike some who
seemed to bake and dry in the desert heat till they left little for the
embalmers to do when they died, he was in good flesh, firm rather than soft,
with a solid belly and broad bull’s shoulders. He walked with authority, and
carried himself as one who matters in the world.

There was in fact a remarkable lack of servility in this
place. The Egyptians called it the house of the Sun Ascendant, a grand name for
a minor lord’s holding. Certainly its people conducted themselves as if they
believed in it.

Khayan sat in the chair that he had made his own,
conspicuously at his ease, and regarded the steward of the Sun Ascendant.

The steward waited patiently. He had served three lords now,
two of them foreigners, and remained alive, unmaimed, and in full possession of
his office. He had well learned the virtue of silence.

“Teti,” Khayan said. “You will do a thing for me.”

The steward bowed his head in its heavy wig. His collar
glittered. It was a massive thing, made all of beads, blue and white and green
and red, and here and there a gleam of gold.

“You will go,” said Khayan, “and take the woman Nefertem,
and conduct her to my lady mother. This is a gift, you will tell her, to do
with as she pleases.”

Teti had been still before, but not as still as this. His
cheeks had gone grey. Khayan saw well his heart’s trouble. He was servant to
this master, had accepted this lordship and therefore bound himself in
obedience to it. And yet he had an older loyalty, and a deeper awe.

Khayan had no intention of sparing him this. A lord could
not be a lord without his people’s obedience. That lesson he had learned from
his childhood.

“Go,” he said. “See that it is done.”

Teti bowed again, so low that Khayan could not see his face
at all. He backed out so, as if from a king.

Khayan pondered briefly the wisdom of sending one of his own
men to be certain that the Egyptian obeyed. But that would confess to weakness.
He rose instead, stretched the knots and stiffness out of his body, and went to
judge whatever disputes had need of his judgment.

~~~

Teti came into the hall while Khayan was in the midst of a
lengthy, tedious, and profoundly confusing debate between two farmers over the
value of an ox. It was not that either of them actually owned the ox, so much
as that they appeared to share it with a third farmer, who was present but not
involved in the dispute. As far as he could understand, they were perfectly
agreed as to who had the use of it at which time and for what purpose. The
disagreement seemed to have something to do with who was to feed the ox, and
who was to repair its stable, which was in need of a new roof. But it was all
tangled up in a great number of other things, from the marriage of one man’s
daughter to the shrewishness of their neighbor’s wife.