The Shepherd Kings Read online

  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.

  VIII

  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.

  The lord nodded, sighing a little as men did at the ways of those set above them. They parted in amity, each to go his way: the lord on some errand of his own, Kemni to explore the palace further, and to learn the ways and faces of its people. He was not brought before the king, nor did he ask to be. That would come in its time.

  He dined in a hall that seemed half a garden, with a portico that opened on a green and pleasant place. Sweet airs wafted in. Revelers drifted out, then in again, in no order that he could discern. The wine was strong and sweet, the tables laden with wonderful things. Flowers bloomed in painted splendor on the walls, and in scented beauty on the tables and trailing over the portico. One was expected, Kemni saw, to crown oneself with them, and to breathe their fragrance, which held back for a while the dizziness of the wine.

  In Egypt they did as much, and crowned themselves with cones of unguents mixed in fat. And as the evening went on, the fat melted in the heat of the revelry, and released its scent over the revelers’ heads and shoulders. There was no such fashion here. There was no Egyptian but Kemni, no foreigner at all, only the lords and wanton ladies of Crete.

  Oh, so wanton. They had no shame and no shyness, nor any fear, it seemed, of retribution. Kemni had hardly sat to eat before wicked hands crept under his kilt and closed around his manly member. They gripped just hard enough to hold him where he was, and stroked and teased until he was ready to cry aloud, then left him as wickedly as they had come, trembling violently, aching and unsatisfied.

  Nor could he say a word. In Egypt women could be reckless, particularly if they were warm in wine, but there was always the looming shadow of father or brother to keep the young men honest.

  Here there seemed to be no such check on them at all. As far as he could see, a man did not ask a woman for her favors, but waited for her to ask him—and when she did ask, he had little choice but to oblige her. No one seemed concerned for any woman’s honor—not the men, and certainly not the women themselves.

  But Kemni was not a Cretan. He extricated himself as best he might, not without a sense of tearing reluctance, and went in search of the house that had been given him.

  There was someone in his bed. He could not say he was surprised—nor could he deny that he was relieved. She was not the same who had been there the night before, though very like her. She grinned at him from amid the cushions, and informed him with evident satisfaction, “I won the toss tonight. Am I not prettier than my sister?”

  She was certainly pretty. Kemni wondered briefly if he should be annoyed that the sister priestesses were gambling for his favors. It was flattering, in its way, but hardly comfortable to think of.

  “You are Ariana, too,” he said. “Yes?”

  “Of course.” She bounced up out of the cushions, as bare as she was born, with her impudent little breasts and her pointed kitten-face. They did not have cats here—he had seen that. With such creatures as this priestess, he doubted that they felt the lack.

  She was wilder than her sister, and wickeder, too. She did not even wait for him to be ready. She fell on him where he stood, kilt and wig and golden collar and all, and laughed as he rose suddenly and rather painfully to meet her. She was on him and he inside her, her legs wound around his middle, her breasts brushing his breast, each touch of those small hard nipples shocking him as if he petted a cat in the dry desert wind. He fancied he saw sparks between them.

  All his life in Egypt, where the dry wind and the fierce heat were as perpetual as the roar of the sea was in Crete, and he had never played at love with a woman till the sparks flew. She traced his body in little tingling shocks, half pain, half pleasure. Last of all she touched lips to lips with a jolt that wrung a cry out of him, and sent the seed bursting in a hot irresistible stream.

  He sank down panting, struggling not to fall. His knees had turned to water. This Ariana went down with him, still joined to him, though he was limp and shrinking inside of her.

  He slipped slackly free as they tumbled on the floor. Her hair trailed across his face. He gasped, and sneezed.

  She rose above him, laughing. “Dear lovely man. Has anyone told you how delightful you are?”

  He could not see what was delightful about his graceless sprawl on the floor, but he had never
claimed to fathom a woman’s mind. He lay and gasped and took what refuge he might in silence.

  She swooped closer. Her long hair veiled them both. “Remember,” she said. “If a woman asks, always give her what she asks for. But never try to take it from her.”

  “I—had suspected that,” he managed to say, between struggles for breath.

  “Wise man,” she said approvingly. “You’ll do well among us. For a stranger.”

  He was too weak to protest. She was rousing him again, which he would have thought impossible; but Cretan women were great masters of this branch of the magical arts. In a very little while he had no will at all, and no mind for aught but the things that she was doing to his body.

  ~~~

  The days filled quickly, with the horses, with the Arianas, with the court and the palace. Kemni did not pause to reckon the passage of time. One did not, when one waited upon kings. He saw the king once or twice from a distance, and once stood in a doorway and watched him dispense his justice. Minos was a Cretan; that was all he could really see, a middle-sized man, broad of shoulder, narrow of hip, with black hair going grey, and, rare to vanishing among these people as among Egyptians, a black and curling beard. He sat in the hall of justice beside a tiny woman, no larger than a child, but no child had ever possessed so very womanly a body. She could not but be the queen, the lady of the bulls, mother and mistress of this palace and all who dwelt in it.

  Kemni was not summoned before them. He saw other embassies, bearded and robed princes of Asia, wild sea-raiders, coal-black Nubians—and one that made Kemni stare till his eyes were nigh starting out of his head. They were giants, half again as tall as a tall man in Egypt. Their skin was the color of milk, and their hair was yellow as gold; their eyes were the blue of lapis. They came, a servant said, from somewhere far to the north of the world, and their language was as barbaric as their manners.