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.