The Shepherd Kings (62 page)

He nodded. So he had thought. “And the prince. The traitor.
What has become of him?”

She did not rebuke him for the impertinence of so many
questions. “The king has sent him on an errand,” she said, “that will keep him
away from the city and from knowledge of the war until the army is ready to
march.”

“And then?”

“And then,” she said, in a manner that warned him to ask no
more, “it will be as the gods will.”

Kemni bent his head. He could imagine that the gods—among
them the king and the queen, god and goddess—would ordain for the king’s son
who had betrayed his father. There was no sentence for him, in the end, but
one.

~~~

Iphikleia was awake when Kemni came to bed late as always,
for after his audience with the queen he had had duties still to perform, and
things to do that could not wait till morning. It was deep night when he
dragged himself away, yawning and stumbling, to the lamplit room and the wide
and welcoming bed, and her eyes upon him, open and alert as they had not been
since the gods knew when.

He stopped halfway from door to bed, swaying a little on his
feet. “Beautiful man,” she said. “Have you been at the wine again?”

“I’ve been at my work again,” he said. His heart had risen
and began to sing: for her voice, though weak, was her own, a little sharp, a
little wry; and her expression was nigh as vivid as it had always been.

“You look as if you haven’t slept in a month,” she said.

“Maybe,” he said. “I don’t remember.”

“Come here,” she said, “before you fall over.”

He was happy to obey. It was all he could do to lower himself
gently beside her, and not fall flat on his face. Her hand—so thin and so
frail, with a tremor in it—brushed his cheek. “Poor lovely man. You’re working
yourself to death.”

“You’re awake,” he said. “You’re talking. You’re twitting
me.”

“Of course I am,” she said.

“But it’s been so long since—”

Her fingers pressed to his lips, silencing him. “Imhotep
told me. I dreamed . . .” She shook her head. “No. That doesn’t
matter. I’m awake. When I sleep again, it will be a plain and mortal sleep. I’m
going to live, my love, whether it pleases you or no.”

He could not find words to answer that. He gathered her in
his arms and held her, all bird-light bones that she was. She sighed and rested
there, but she was far from asleep.

“Tell me,” she said. “I didn’t dream it, did I? My uncle is
here.”

“Yes. And
Dancer
.”

“The war’s beginning?”

“Soon.”

She sighed again. “Then I have to recover, don’t I?”

It was a moment before he understood. “You are not going to
the war!”

“I am not staying here.”

“You can’t—”

“I do intend to,” she said.

He bit his lip. They could argue it later. That she was
awake, stubborn and contentious and insisting on doing the maddest possible
thing—the joy in him was so piercing that he thought he would die of it.

With the great Royal Wife in residence and the war
approaching with terrible speed, the Bull of Re forsook sleep, and forsook
quiet. The armorers, the harnessmakers, the captive chariotmakers in their shop
that was half prison, labored day and night to prepare for what must come. The
last gathering of recruits found itself pressed to learn more swiftly and more
thoroughly than perhaps human mind and body could bear. But Kemni had no mercy.
He could allow none.

They hated him. Hate could be a good thing. It sharpened the
spirit and strengthened the will. They would learn faster, fight better,
because they detested him so cordially.

It was a different hate he met when he ventured into the
chariotmakers’ workshop. Amid the scents of new-planed wood and fresh paint and
the sharp hot reek of metal shaped in the forge, the captives and their
Egyptian apprentices built chariots for the king. They built well—Ariana made
sure of that, and Iphikleia had done so while she was able to walk about. But
they did not build willingly.

Four of them, in the end, had come back to the Bull of Re
from the Lower Kingdom. The master was not the eldest, but he seemed, for his
rank, to cultivate the longest and most luxuriant beard. Kemni found it
fascinating that he could keep it out of whatever he worked at, nor ever caught
it or stained it.

The others cropped their beards close, and the youngest had
none: a sullen and remarkably pretty boy who spoke the most Egyptian, but
seldom saw fit to display it. Even as young as he was, he labored in the shop
beside his father, and it was he who drove the chariots as they were finished,
to ascertain that all was well.

Although Kemni had not brought them to this place, they
seemed to have decided that he was the lord here, and to have concentrated in
him all their hatred of this captivity. It had a reek like hot bronze, and a
force like a blow whenever he came into their workshop.

And yet he visited often. He found their craft fascinating.
They had perfected a way of building many chariots at once: taking each a
portion—body, axles and wheels, shafts—and overseeing a company of workmen who
completed each part according to instruction. Then the master himself oversaw
the putting together, the completion—and no weakness anywhere, no frail spot on
an axle or a wheel, no flaw in the body so that it would break when its rider
needed it most.

Kemni had asked him why he did not do such a thing. He had
regarded Kemni in utter contempt, and said, “Because I have my pride.”

“Your chariots are worth more to you than the preservation
of your people?”

The man spat. “Don’t twist my words! I build chariots. My
chariots are the best of all. I will not build one that is flawed, simply to
gratify an urge for revenge.”

“Even if it would protect your people?”

“Do you think,” the chariotmaker had asked him with a curl
of the lip, “that half a hundred chariots, however well made, will even begin
to oppose the king’s hundreds?”

“Probably not,” Kemni said. “But even a little is
something.”

This day, a handful of days after Iphikleia woke and came to
herself again, they were completing one of the last of the chariots. There were
guards on all the doors as always, and the apprentices were loyal to the king.
Some of the commanders would have preferred that the master at least be kept
chained, but Kemni would not allow that. It was an insult that would, he knew
in his belly, compel even that proud craftsman to break his word and bolt.

The master, whose name was Ishbaal, greeted Kemni as he
always did: not at all. He was overseeing the painting of the body, frowning as
one of the Egyptian artists painted it in the style of the Two Lands. “Ugly,”
he muttered, still not acknowledging Kemni, but no one else was close enough to
hear.

“It may be ugly,” Kemni said amiably, “but it’s ours. And
how are you this fair morning, sir?”

Ishbaal snorted. “Don’t ‘sir’ me. I’m a slave.”

“You are not,” Kemni said—as he had said often before.

“Then I may go?”

“Of course not,” said Kemni. “We need you.”

“What will you do when I’m done, then? Shut me up in a box?
Kill me?”

“Keep you at work building chariots,” Kemni said. “What else
would we do?”

“Dispose of me,” he said. “I’m difficult. I’m miserable.
I’ve taught these fools everything I know.”

“Not your years of mastery,” Kemni said, “and not your
incomparable eye. Come now, admit it. You’re not miserable. You thrive on this:
despising us all, building chariots day and night, being the first master
chariotmaker in the Upper Kingdom.”

Ishbaal snarled. “You! Fool! Not that way. This way.” And he
stalked off to correct the turning of a spoke for a wheel.

“We could let him go,” Ariana said from beside Kemni,
startling him, for he had not heard her come in. “Once he’s done, he has the
right of it: his apprentices will do well enough.”

“I think not,” Kemni said.

“Have you ever reflected,” she asked him, “that by stealing
him, we might have done great harm to his family? Caused a wife to grieve, or
children to go hungry?”

Kemni bit his tongue on a sharp rejoinder. “This is war.
Would you rather we lost it out of pity for this man’s children—who are no
doubt well looked after, if in fact he has any at all besides yonder glowering
child?”

“How like a man,” she said, “to say such a thing.”

He stared after her as she walked away. She was always odd;
she was the Ariana of Crete. But this was odder than usual.

He lingered only a little longer among the chariotmakers, to
satisfy himself that all was going as well as could be expected; then, as he
turned to go to the next of his thousand duties, he turned a little further
instead, and followed where Ariana had gone.

It was not perhaps a wise thing to do. She was on her way to
confer with the Great Royal Wife. Still, she did not order him away when he
established himself a step behind her. She simply said, “You were slower than I
expected.”

“Sometimes I stop to think,” he said.

“Amazing,” she said.

“Is something troubling you?” he asked before he could think
better of it.

“No,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

He shrugged. “One would think you had regrets about this
war.”

“Hardly,” she said. “Egypt reunited will serve Crete much
better than Egypt half-conquered.”

“But the war itself—you dread it.”

“Don’t you?”

He did not answer at once. “I’m not a coward. I’m loyal to
my king. I want this war, and I want to see it won. I’ll do whatever I must to
accomplish that.”

“But you dread it.”

“No,” he said.

“Men,” said Ariana.

Kemni paused, but quickened his step again before she drew
too far ahead. “What message did the king send you through Queen Nefertari? Did
he command you to stay here when the chariots go out to the war?”

She would not answer. But her expression was clear enough.

“Will you defy him?”

“He’s the king.”

“Will that stop you?”

She stopped, spun, so that he nearly collided with her.
“What is it to you?”

Temper from her was vanishingly rare. Kemni regarded her in
some startlement, not least for how closely, just then, she resembled her
cousin. “Someone has to hold the Upper Kingdom behind us,” he said.

“The Great Royal Wife will do that,” said Ariana.

“Not alone.”

“No, not alone. In the company of a hundred lords and
scribes and priests and servants.’'

“And you.”

She shook her head slightly, not to deny what he had said,
but as if to cast off the thought and the rebellion that it aroused in her. She
never had thought as Kemni expected a woman to think, nor accepted the lot that
was given her sex. Perhaps it came of being from Crete, where the greatest of
the gods was a goddess.

She walked the rest of the way in silence, with Kemni behind
her as before. The Great Royal Wife had been given a house of her own within
the encircling wall, displacing a flock of servants and a handful of the
charioteers, for whom Kemni had had to find room wherever he could.

The guards at the gate would not have let Kemni pass, but
Ariana spoke sharply to them. They subsided, albeit with dark glances and
fingerings of their weapons. They were eunuchs, Kemni happened to notice. Men
entire were not common in Nefertari’s house.

In the courts of Asia, Kemni had heard—and certainly in the
courts of the Retenu—a man who walked in the women’s house without the king’s
leave could be carried off to join the ranks of eunuchs, or actually put to
death. That was not, he hoped, the case here. Whether Ariana was glad of him or
merely tolerated him, she kept him with her even into the elder queen’s presence.

Nefertari was not, for once, waiting for them in hieratic
immobility. She was sitting in a small cluttered workroom with a pair of
scribes, with ink on her fingers, and no more state to her dress or her person
than a noble lady might affect in her own household. It dawned on Kemni that
Nefertari might be regarding this venture as an escape—a brief taste of freedom
from the strictures of court and palace. The king welcomed such escapes. Why
not the first of his queens?

Kemni looked at her somewhat differently then, though with
little less awe. She was still Nefertari.

She looked up from the heaps of scrolls and written scraps
of papyrus, frowning faintly as if she paused to capture and pen a thought
before she turned her mind to her visitors. With a slight shake of the head,
she smoothed the frown, though she did not smile. “Good morning, lady,” she
said to Ariana. And to Kemni: “Commander. Welcome.”

He flushed and resisted the urge to shuffle his feet. He had
not expected to be acknowledged, or to be granted his rank, either.

She rolled a scroll neatly and with the deftness of long
practice, fastened it and handed it to one of the scribes to be tagged and put
away. “It looks better than I thought,” she said, “if not as well as it must.
We must be ready within the month.”

“We will be,” Ariana said, sparing Kemni the need. She sat
in a chair across from the worktable, easily, without asking leave. “Tell me
something.”

Nefertari raised a brow.

“Did you find and root out the whole conspiracy? Every bit
of it?”

“We can hope so,” said Nefertari. “Why? Is there a thing
that we should know?”

“No,” Ariana said. “I was only thinking . . .
what if we told them false things? Let them send a messenger in haste to the
Lower Kingdom, to tell their allies there that we come to the war sooner and in
greater disarray than we actually are?”

“And have them ready and waiting for us when we come?”

“Not likely,” Ariana said, “if we let it be thought that we
begin the war elsewhere than we intend to. Suppose that they’re waiting on another
branch of the river, for a different kind of attack—say that we move toward
Tanis instead of Pelusium, or attack north and west of Memphis instead of round
about Avaris. And that, instead of armies in boats, they expect armies on the
march. And more—that the Cretan envoys in Thebes feign a quarrel and a
departure in dudgeon, with a withdrawal of all their alliance. Can this be
done?”