The Shepherd Kings (39 page)

That stranger ate and drank everything that was set in front
of her, or seemed to; and encouraged the boy, eagerly, to match her cup for cup
and bowl for bowl. Kemni, forgotten, ate sparingly and drank less, but was not
fool enough to refuse it all.

Iphikleia relaxed greatly as she ate and drank. As she
relaxed, her mantle slipped, till it had fallen to her waist. The ugly
necklace, which would have looked well enough on a great bull of a Nubian,
gleamed over her breasts. Jubal could not take his eyes from them.

Perhaps he had not seen such a sight since he was a child at
his nurse’s breast. Women of the Retenu lived hidden, and as far as Kemni knew,
spent their lives wrapped in robes and cloaks and veils. Iphikleia, utterly
easy in herself and well aware of her body’s beauty, must be a revelation to
this child of robes and modesty.

A revelation and a growing obsession. Kemni had determined
already that there were weapons in the tent, and seen where some of them were.
In his own pack was a sword and a dagger—and if the Retenu found those, the
questions would be difficult, to say the least.

He could only sit poised, ready to leap, and hope that
Iphikleia knew indeed what she was doing. Jubal had a look that Kemni did not
like. Young bulls had it, and young stallions. There was nothing of
intelligence in it.

He lunged suddenly. Iphikleia giggled. He crouched blinking,
baffled. She sat just out of his reach. He groped toward her. “Oh, no,” she
said. “You have to ask.”

“I don’t—”

“Yes, you do,” she said sweetly. “What would you like to
touch?”

“I want to—touch—your—”

“This?” She held out her hand, turning it, making it a
dancer’s gesture. It circled and swooped like a bird in flight, until it settled,
oh so softly, on the curve of her breast. She stroked it, long and slow.
Jubal’s eyes were rapt.

Kemni had not known that those robes could show anything of
the body beneath. But this was a man of noble proportions after all, or a boy
so engorged that he must be in pain. Almost Kemni pitied him. He was no match
for this priestess from Crete; no mere man was.

She began to sing, low and honey-sweet. It was a wandering
song, wordless, moving as her hand moved, round and round. Her body swayed with
it. Supple as a serpent, alluring as no serpent had ever been: white breasts,
round hips, dark secret place that Kemni knew—oh, very well indeed. And this
child wished to know it, too; dreamed of it, yearned for it.

She dared him to dream. She dared him to hope for what was
no man’s to take, and only hers to give.

Kemni set his teeth. She was weaving a spell. He had not
even noticed that Jubal’s guards were gone. When had they left? He was alone
with Iphikleia and the boy in that dim and airy space, lit by a lamp that
seemed brighter than it had before. The sun was setting beyond the tent’s
walls. Night was coming.

Iphikleia swayed toward Jubal, and then away. He swayed less
gracefully after her. She brushed the fingers of her free hand against his
face, ruffling the patchy young beard. He quivered. She drifted away again. He
gasped. She swayed closer than before, brushing his breast with her breasts. He
looked ready to faint.

This time she did not withdraw. She hovered, just touching.
Her song had sunk to a murmur, but sweeter, more enchanting. She stroked his face,
long and slow, as she had stroked her breasts. His eyes had shut. His head fell
back. She brushed his lips with a kiss. He collapsed with a sigh and lay still.
On his face was an expression of pure amazement.

Iphikleia rose from her knees, sought her mantle, wrapped it
close. “Come,” she said. “Before anyone catches us.”

Kemni could hardly be startled at the restoration of her
usual self, but she had caught him off guard. He could only think to ask, “Is
he dead?”

“Of course not,” she said impatiently. “Quick! Do you want
them to find us here?”

“No, but I—”

“He dreams,” she snapped. “He thinks—you know what he’s
thinking. You think it yourself often enough, but I suffer you to do it awake
as well as sleeping.”

Kemni plunged to the heart of that. “You
enspelled
me?”

She dragged him out, pack and all, under the back of the
tent and into merciful darkness. There were no guards here, and lights were
few.

Kemni’s own feet carried him once he had begun. Escape was
all his world; escape, and the shadow in front of him.

These merchants watched closely for any who might seek to
come into the camp. They never looked for two who sought to go out. Iphikleia
slipped behind a guard, almost close enough to touch, and ghosted out into the
desert, a shadow upon shadow, all but invisible under the stars.

Kemni followed Iphikleia because he was only half a fool,
and because he could think of nothing better to do. They traveled in silence
even after they had left the oasis behind in its fold of the barren hills. When
Kemni stopped to relieve himself of what little wine he had drunk, she did not
pause. He had to stretch to catch her again. After a long while he shattered
the silence with a word. “Iphikleia.”

She did not pause. He did not know if she heard. But if she
had, she would hear the rest of it, too. “Iphikleia, you laid a spell on that
child. And if you did it to him . . .”

“Are you telling me I shouldn’t have done it?”

“No! I’m telling you—”

“You’re telling me I did the same to you. I did not. The
gods did that, man of Egypt. Your gods and mine.”

“Can I believe you?”

“I don’t lie,” she said. Her voice was flat.

Kemni bit his lip. The going was deep, a long slope of sand.
For a while he needed all his breath for that. But his mind raced on, a
churning in his belly.

Past the hill of sand they paused. It was deep night, and
chill. Kemni wrapped himself in his blanket, sipped water from the skin that he
had filled at the oasis, and let his body rest for a little. It ached. His eyes
were gritty, and not only with sand. The caravan had robbed him of his sleep.

Maybe he dozed for a while. He woke with a start. Iphikleia
sat near him, a shadow against the stars.

“Tell me why you did it,” he said. “Why did you torment that
child?”

She started, which gratified him. But her voice was cool,
unruffled. “He might not call it torment. As far as he will ever remember, he
had great pleasure of our meeting. Then I left, because the night was calling,
and my kin were waiting for me. Would you rather I had let us be known for what
we are?”

“Now we’re known,” he said. “They’ll remember our faces.”

“The faces of peasants,” she said.

“The face of a sorceress.”

She laughed, as clear and cold as only Iphikleia could be.
“Whatever that child remembers, it won’t be a Cretan priestess and her Egyptian
companion. His father bade him take his pleasure and dispose of us. As far as
he knows, he did exactly that. There’s no more he need remember.”

“Pray the gods that’s so,” Kemni said. “But that
necklace—how could you let him give you such a thing? His father may not care
for us, but he will come after us for that treasure.”

“He will not,” said Iphikleia. She turned so that he could
see her in the starlight. There was a necklace about her neck: blue beads, dark
in the night. No gold. No massive amber.

“But where—”

“It’s in the child’s hands,” she said, “where it will catch
him trouble enough, but nothing that need concern us.”

Kemni subsided reluctantly. She had always got the better of
him; she always would. He was a fool to think otherwise.

Then she did a thing that melted his anger altogether. She
slipped into his arms, warm and solid and blessedly real. “Beautiful man,” she
said, “someday I may ask another man to love me, because it’s needed or because
my heart calls to him. But not tonight. Not that child. I gave him dreams.
He’ll never have more.”

“Do I have more?” Kemni asked a little bitterly.

“Stop that,” she said, but without temper. “You’re very
pretty when you sulk, but it wastes time. Wouldn’t you rather have this?” Her
kiss was long, deep, and dizzying. He took it as an answer: all the answer he
needed, and all the proof of what was his.

~~~

They came down out of the Red Land into Memphis, just as
the river crested in its flood. From the desert it seemed that all the green
land was becoming a sea, and men had taken to it in boats, or sought refuge in
houses set apart from the water.

The city in flood season, before the heat and damp and
stinging flies had frayed everyone’s patience, was one long festival. Time was,
when the Two Kingdoms were whole, that the king himself had come down the river
to serve as priest at the rite of the river’s cresting. Now the king of the
Retenu made an excursion out of it. What the priests of Ptah thought, none of
them was saying. The river brought its blessing no matter who sat the throne of
the Lower Kingdom. In that, no doubt, they took such comfort as they could.

The city hummed with joy. But there was a frenetic quality
to it. Tempers were brittle. Drinking bouts ended in battles. Packs of young
Retenu prowled the streets, hunting whatever prey presented itself. The women
who sold themselves for riches were worn ragged. Those who sold themselves for
less, or simply to eat, had more custom than they could handle; and sometimes,
if they were unfortunate, they died.

Kemni and Iphikleia came into this hive of men on the day of
the flood’s cresting. Even as they made their way through drunken throngs, the
Retenu king stood beside the priests of Ptah as they measured the river’s
height, marked it in the book of years, and blessed it with the great rite.
Kemni had no desire to see that great bearded outlander next to the shaven
priests, nor to hear him speak the ancient words in his guttural accent.

Iphikleia was leading him. For lack of greater inspiration,
he let her. They looked of even less account than they had before the caravan:
after so many more days in the desert, they were filthier, more redolent, and
even more ragged.

He kept an eye alert for a face he recognized, whether from
long ago or from the caravan. But they were all strangers, all those people who
jostled one another amid the white walls and the walls of mudbrick, between the
river and the desert.

She was leading him through a quarter he knew, though not
well, nearer the river than the palace, where traders had their houses, and
foreign embassies, and travelers from abroad. The streets were a little quieter
here, the throngs less excitable. The markets were shut, the shops closed to
the world, in honor of the holiday. Those who were out and about seemed intent
on business nonetheless, or simply on being seen.

He, who had no interest in that at all, shrank and slunk and
tried to keep to shadows. But Iphikleia was walking with her head up, albeit
wrapped in her mantle, nor showing any great concern for secrecy.

Just as he was about to remonstrate, after she had been all
but run down by one of the packs of half-grown conquerors, she turned abruptly
down a side way, then down another. That one led to a small square, hardly
larger than a courtyard in a minor lord’s house. There was a cistern in it, and
a trough for watering animals. The house that faced it was like every other
house in the city: blank walls, barred gate. All its light and life, if it had
any, would be within.

She set hand on that tall and forbidding gate, and slid a
bar that he had not seen. A smaller gate opened within the larger one. She
slipped through. He hastened to follow before it shut in his face.

He had expected a house like that in Thebes to which Gebu
had taken him, when he first dreamed of dancing the bull. That had been poor
and rather small beside this one, and deserted; but here were flocks of
servants, Cretans all, and masters who kindly let the newcomers be until they
had been scoured clean and rendered fit for decent company.

Kemni had forgotten what pure luxury was in a bath. Hot
water, scented oils, strong skilled hands scraping away the filth and the
accumulated vermin. They shaved him as he asked, all over, as if he were a
priest going into the temple. There was no other way to be truly clean; and it
was a sort of consecration, a beginning of—who knew what.

Clean, then, and tingling—and yes, stinging where the razor
had gone too deep—he rested a while on a couch covered with soft rich weavings.
There was a kilt waiting for him, a wig, and eyepaint, and ornaments if he
wished. Maybe he did. He pondered it, lazily.

While he pondered, he dozed. It was cool in that room, and
dim. It invited sleep.

A shadow bent over him, a waft of scent. He blinked up into
Iphikleia’s familiar face. Familiar not from days in the desert, but from the
time in Crete, when she was lady and priestess, and one of the great beauties
of the island. Her hair was washed and combed and piled on her head in the
fashion of a Cretan lady; her face was painted, and her beautiful breasts. She
wore the many-tiered skirt and the embroidered vest that were so wonderfully
alluring to Egyptian eyes.

She looked down at him in—dismay? “What did you do to your
hair?”

He ran his hand over his shaven skull. “Lice,” he said. “It
will grow back.”

“I do hope so,” she said tartly. “You look—” Her eyes
narrowed. “You don’t look terrible. But you look . . . strange.”

“Clean,” he said. He stretched again, and yawned vastly.
“Ah, lady. Whatever I hoped for in Memphis, it was never such a wonder as
this.”

“What, were you thinking to find a gutter somewhere, and beg
us a loaf of bread?”

“Not as bad as that,” he said. “I’ve a little silver. We
would have been in reasonable comfort.”

“This is better.” She sat beside him, demurely as she must
in those clinging skirts, and began, still demurely, to run her hand down his
clean smooth body. His manly organ rose to meet her. She smiled. She teased it,
running her finger round the base of it, and up, barely touching, and yet the
touch rocked him.