The Shepherd Kings (9 page)

“We shall see,” said Iphikleia.

Kemni dined alone in the house that, it seemed, he had
been given. Servants waited on him and fed him royally, but none of them was
inclined toward conversation. He thought of demanding company, of asking that he
be shown to Naukrates’ house, or taken to some gathering of the court. But he
was more weary than he had known, with all his travels, and then tramping
hither and yon about the island.

Iphikleia was gone, she had not deigned to say where. She
had simply left him at the door, just at dusk, and gone wherever it pleased her
to go. She had not waited to be invited in, nor given him occasion to ask.

Certainly he could not quarrel with the dinner he was fed,
or the wine that went with it. Both were superb, prepared and served with
impeccable grace. Nor were they excessively strange. Someone perhaps had made
an effort to feed him as he was accustomed to be fed.

When he had eaten and drunk his fill, a servant with a lamp
led him to the bedchamber. The man made to help him undress, but Kemni sent him
away. He could perfectly well shed kilt and belt and boots by himself, and fall
onto the broad expanse of the bed.

It was too broad, and much too soft with cushions and
coverlets. He could not sleep in such luxury; he had never known it.

Something stirred amid the coverlets. He started and
half-leaped to his feet. Light laughter followed him.

There was a woman—a girl—in the bed, tousled and heavy-eyed
as if she had been sleeping, but bright enough, and laughing as she rose up out
of a nest of cushions. She was utterly exquisite in the Cretan fashion, with
her big round eyes and her masses of curly black hair and her waist so tiny he
marveled, even as taken aback as he was. He could see every bit of it. She was
as bare as she was born.

Well, and so was he; and the nether part of him knew what to
do about that. His loftier self scrambled its wits together to demand of her,
“Who are you? What are you doing here?”

“I am Ariana,” she said. “I’ve come to keep you company.”

He glared at her. “You are not Ariana. I know her, and she
is not—”

“I am Ariana,” she repeated. “The Ariana sent me. Therefore
I am—” He shook his head. He had fancied himself well in command of this language,
after so many days under Iphikleia’s tutelage. But this made no sense. “Ariana?
The Ariana? What—”

“We are all Ariana,” she said. “All who serve the goddess in
the Labyrinth. The Ariana bids us come and go. She bade me come to you. Do you
not want me? Will you disappoint her? She so hoped that you would find me
pleasing.”

Kemni struggled with fogged mind and sore distracted body,
to understand what she was saying. “Ariana—is a title? An—an office?”

She nodded happily. “Yes. Yes, a title. The Ariana likes
you. She calls you the beautiful man.” She narrowed those big round eyes, and
tilted her head. “Yes, you are good to look at. Will you come now, and let me
keep you company?”

Kemni had never, in years of dallying with maids and
servants and the occasional, desperately daring lady of quality, been approached
quite so boldly or with such vivid intent. He could not move, nor could he
speak.

The girl—this one of what must be many Arianas—shook her
head and sighed. “The Ariana said you might be silly about this. She told me to
tell you that you can’t have her, it’s not permitted, but you can have as many
of us as are minded to play with you. Would you like more? Am I too few?”

“No!” cried Kemni. “Oh no. I didn’t—I don’t—I’ve never—”

“Ah,” she said. “Poor beautiful man. Come here.”

She said it so imperiously, and yet with such warm and
bubbling amusement, that he could not help but do as she bade. She was almost
child-small in his arms, but no child was so supple or so wickedly skilled. She
teased and tormented him, casting him down and rising above him, just touching
him with lips and breasts, till he arched in a near-convulsion. But she would
not let him spend his seed. Not yet. She gentled him, calmed him, nibbled here,
stroked there, till he lay in a quivering stillness.

He was all helpless against her. She rode him as if he were
a ship on the sea, great waves rolling, lesser ones surging and ebbing, and no
release, though he was ready to groan with the sweet pain. She had him in her
hands, stroking, tugging till he gasped, and laughing all the while. “Oh!” she
said. “Such a great tall man you are!”

He shrank at that, or tried; but she would not suffer that,
either. Her tongue flicked. His body snapped taut.

Then, and only then, she had a kind of mercy. She mounted
him, took him inside of her, hot sweet pleasure, and rode him long and slow,
till he was all one great throb of desire. He had no mind, no will, no self.
Only the heat that was between them, rising and rising, no end to it, no
relief, no consummation. She would torment him until he died. And he was powerless
to resist.

Death. Yes. A little death, swelling till it burst, a great
ringing cry that made her laugh aloud.

~~~

He fell from the summit into sleep that was like black
water, deep and bottomless. If he dreamed, he never afterward remembered it. No
dream tonight of Iphikleia, nor of dancing the bulls, either. And yet, in the
grey interval between sleep and waking, he remembered. He knew whose face
Ariana—the Ariana—wore. He had seen her in the first dream, that dream that had
brought him here, the dream of the bulldancing. She had been the maiden who
danced the bull, for whom one of the youths died, because he could not bear
that she should best him.

And had the youth worn Kemni’s face? He did not think so. It
had been a Cretan, he was sure of it. Not an Egyptian. Not Kemni nor any of his
people.

He took the memory with him into daylight, full morning and
the slant of sunlight across that ridiculously vast bed. Someone, a servant
most likely, had opened shutters on a blue brilliance of sky.

He yawned hugely and stretched. His body ached all over, but
it was a pleasant ache. Even the one below his middle, where he felt as if he
had been pummeled with fists.

There was no mark on him, even there. He might have dreamed
it all, except for the imprint of her body in the cushions, smaller and
narrower than his own, and a faint, elusive scent that spoke of her.

He rose gingerly. All of him seemed to be where it belonged.
He had not been so thoroughly pleasured since—no, not even since Gebu and a
pack of lesser princes had taken him on a grand campaign through the underbelly
of Thebes. He had thought himself a man of skill and wide experience. He had
been a child, a babe at the breast.

He was rising to the memory of her, and gasping with it,
because yes, oh gods, he ached. Chill wind off the mountaintop cooled him
enough to go on with; and there on the windowledge he found a jar of watered
wine and a loaf wrapped in a cloth, and a bowl of olives cured in brine.

He ate perched on the ledge, prickle-skinned with cold but
glad of it. His heart had risen and begun to sing. He was not in Egypt, not at
all, and yet he was glad—to be here, in this place, on this of all mornings in
the world.

~~~

His bright mood clung to him as he dressed and went out,
determined to find the horses’ field and, if it were possible, someone there to
teach him what he wished to know. A god must have guided him. He wandered not
too hopelessly amid the mazes of the palace, turned on a whim and found himself
in a gate that opened on the tumbled hillside. It was a postern of sorts, faced
away from the city. There Kemni got his bearings, took a deep breath and
ventured the road that narrowed to a path, turned and twisted and wound among
the hills and hollows.

And there, as he had hoped, was the herd that he had seen
yesterday, grazing round the bubble of a spring. Someone was there already: a
figure in well-worn leather, harnessing a pair of horses to a chariot.

It was a woman, and no mistaking it. He braced for
Iphikleia’s clear hard glance, but froze as the dark head lifted. It was not
Iphikleia.

Ariana—the Ariana, the mistress and model for them
all—laughed merrily at his expression. “Beautiful man! Are you shocked?”

“Startled,” he said.

“And was she pleasing, the one I sent to you?”

He was blushing. He could not stop it; the more he tried,
the hotter his face grew. “She—she was pleasing. But—”

“I can’t, you know,” she said, light and calm as ever. “I’m
for other uses. But my servants are delighted to take my place.”

“I would never expect a princess,” he said, “to—to—”

“She never said you were shy,” said Ariana. “Come here,
beautiful man. Don’t you want to learn to drive a chariot?”

Her shifts were too quick for him. He could see nothing for
it but to be obedient, since after all she was the Ariana.

A chariot was an odd unstable thing, rolling and shifting
underfoot, lurching as the horses fretted in their traces. Ariana held the
reins lightly with strength that made him stare. She was like a blade of fine
bronze, slender and seeming frail, but fiercely strong.

He had no such strength, and no grace, either. He clung to
the chariot’s sides, rocked more strongly than on any sea. The horses were not
moving swiftly, he knew that, but it felt as if he flew upon the wind.

She rocked against him, warm solidity, and somehow, in the
shifting of the chariot, he found his hands full of the reins. They were a
living weight, the horses tugging, that on the left markedly stronger than the
right. The chariot began to veer. He tugged hard to the right. The chariot
lurched sidewise, and the right-hand horse flung up its head.

Kemni gasped. Ariana laughed. “Straight on,” she said. “Soft
now. Light, but be firm—don’t let go. Yes, yes, that’s so. They’ll go straight
enough, if you but ask.”

He had steered boats enough, balancing the oar with a
mingling of strength and delicacy that had been natural to him since he was a
child. This was somewhat like it. But a boat was not a live thing, though it
might often feel so. Horses had minds of their own, more by far than wind or
water.

It was more difficult than he had ever imagined, and yet he
could feel that, with time, it might become easy. If he had such time. If the
gods gave him the gift.

The horses had dropped to a walk while he struggled in the
tangle of reins. That was a mercy of theirs, and he was glad of it. He found
that he could steer well enough, at that slow pace. He could stop, too, and
make the horses go again, with Ariana’s guidance.

She stopped him then, though he would have gone on and on.
“Enough,” she said. “Tomorrow we go on.”

She would not be shifted. Her will was as strong as that
slender body of hers. Nor was she done with her instruction. The horses must be
unharnessed and rubbed down, the chariot put away in what must have begun its
life as a cave, but had been shaped and built and raised until it was a rather
well-hidden but capacious stable and storehouse. There was much to do indeed,
and when that was done, she took him with her into a palace that, somewhat to
his surprise, had come alive.

Maybe it was only that he had not been taking notice. There
were people everywhere, of every station, on every imaginable errand; and of
course the inevitable idlers and hangers-on, loitering in comfort and
pronouncing judgment on the world as it passed them by. The palace in Thebes
had been much the same. The people here wore different fashions and spoke a
different tongue, but they were indisputably courtiers.

Kemni, in the company of one who was a great priestess and
perhaps a queen, could not but attract notice. He recognized the signs:
sidelong glances, veiled murmurs. Within the hour, he had no doubt, the
intrigues would begin.

People would court his favor. Factions would swirl and shift
about him. He would be expected to play the game as it was played in every
court of the world.

Ariana must know this. Her taking him through these most
public portions of the palace could not but be a signal, and a message that
courtiers could well interpret.

It had begun, he thought: the dance that he had come for. He
drew a breath and straightened his shoulders and did his best to put on a brave
show. He could do no less for his king, or for Egypt.

Kemni, who had spent his first evening all alone amid the
strangeness of Crete, advanced toward his second as the new darling of the palace.
So quickly a man’s standing could change, when a great lord or a queen made him
a favorite.

He knew. He had come to Thebes the battle-brother and
protected friend of Gebu the prince. It seemed to be his fate, to ride the wake
of princes.

Here, that served his purpose well, and would, he hoped,
further his king’s cause. He set himself to be pleasant, and to learn names and
faces, as many as his head could hold. They all seemed to know who he was and
why he was there. So: that was not to be a secret here. He had wondered, when
he was left to his own devices, if he should lie low and take care not to be
seen.

But people were frank in their questions, and remarkably
well apprised of matters in Egypt. They knew of the Retenu, and of the Great
House, and of the need that Egypt had for allies to win back the Two Lands from
the conquerors.

“They have no power on the sea,” said a lord of the same age
and stamp as Naukrates. “All their wars have been fought on land, with
chariots. If a fleet came at them up the river, and another down it, with an
army embarked on each, they might be caught in the pincers. Then Egypt would
belong to its own king again.”

“So my king thinks,” Kemni conceded. “And yours? Would he
agree?”

The lord shrugged. “Minos takes his own counsel. We can only
advise.”

“So it always is with kings,” said Kemni.