Kemni reeled through the rest of that day as if he had been struck a blow to the head. That night he did not dream; his sleep was as dark as deep water.
Until he woke, at some hour between midnight and dawn, to wicked fingers teasing him, coaxing his manly parts to rise and greet this incalculable creature who had made him her own. He was deep in her before his eyes had even opened, savoring the scent and touch and taste of her, and her presence here, waking, in his bed.
They said that a new-plucked maidenhead was more pain than pleasure; and that a woman had to learn the first steps of the dance before she knew what joy it could be. Iphikleia had known it in the spirit long before she knew it in the flesh. She took an honest delight in it. She even laughed, soft and rich, as she tried a twist and stroke that made him cry out. “Ai! Woman, you’ll kill me.”
“Maybe someday,” she said. “But now I want you alive.”
She wanted him more than alive. She wanted him inexhaustible and insatiable. But he was not a woman, to be so blessed of the gods. He gave her what he could, and she professed herself satisfied with it.
When there was nothing left of him but a limp rag, she held him in her arms and kissed him softly, and said, “Ariana is sending you to steal a chariotmaker from the Retenu.”
He had known that. Of course he had. But—“You tell me that now?”
“When should I tell you?”
He opened his mouth, but he was not a perfect fool. Instead of the rush of protest, he asked simply, “When?”
“As soon as you may.”
She was cool, calm. Another woman would have wept, or tried at least to seem sad. But this was Iphikleia.
“I suppose she’ll want to see me in the morning,” Kemni said after a while. Then: “Does she know?”
“There’s little my cousin does not know.” Iphikleia played with his hair. “Are you ashamed of me?”
He looked up startled. “I should be asking you that.”
“No,” she said. “I’m a foreign woman. My rank and where I come from matters little here. And you are the king’s trusted servant.”
“I’m not—”
“Stop that,” she said. “It’s not fitting for a man to imagine himself less than he is. You were born to a lesser lordship. You’ve grown to more. Do you think the king will let you slink and hide, now he’s discovered how useful you can be?”
“Probably not,” Kemni said a little ruefully. “I am convenient. And I do take orders well.”
“And fulfill them well.”
He shrugged. “You,” he said, “should flaunt yourself at the king’s son. He’s pleasant, charming, and completely to be trusted. And he’s of rank to match yours.”
“I like him,” she said, not at all disconcerted by this new shift of his. “He is pleasant. He has no gift for any language but his own, and he’ll never understand horses.”
“He wants to understand them,” Kemni said.
“But he has no gift for it. They cry out to him with every flick of the ear, and he’s as deaf as the earth underfoot.”
“He’ll learn.”
“One can hope so,” she said.
“So,” he said. “While I’m gone, risking death to bring the king a chariot-maker, will you be warming his bed as you warm mine?”
“I don’t have to answer that,” she said.
“No,” he said.
She kissed him. Her lips were fire-warm. They woke him rather thoroughly. He drew her down. She was ready for him, and more than ready.
~~~
Ariana gave Kemni three days to gather his wits and his companions. He could not take an army, but neither could he go alone. A party small enough to escape notice, but large enough to capture and hold a prisoner or, better yet, prisoners—fishers on the river, with a small fast boat and a clutter of nets and cargo. No one noticed fishermen or farmers. They were everywhere, naked sunburned men who knew better than to draw a lord’s eye.
Kemni chose from among his own hundred, men who knew how to wield net and line, and who were wise enough to be circumspect. One of them was Seti. He was wild and he was insolent, but he was a fine sailor, and Kemni thought he might be more sensible than he wanted to seem.
The others were quieter men, wiry-thin even for Egyptians, the better to seem poor fishermen and not king’s soldiers. They stripped naked or wrapped their loins in a bit of rag, took care to go unshaven and unwashed, and embarked on the boat in a fine state of redolence.
There was someone waiting for them. Kemni sucked in his breath. “Don’t begin,” Iphikleia said. “You need someone who knows a good chariot from a bad one.”
“This isn’t a ship from Crete,” Kemni said. “You can’t hide as I hid.”
“I’ll do well enough,” she said. “Now may we go?”
Kemni turned to Ariana, who had come down to the river with them. She spread her hands. “I don’t command her,” she said. “If she wants to go, she goes.”
Nor could Gebu help him. Gebu was on the boat past Iphikleia, somewhat less filthy and unshaven than the rest, but a creditable fisherman nonetheless. He grinned as Kemni glared at him. “I can’t take you both! What if you’re captured or killed? Two kings will be after my hide.”
“Then you’d best protect us, hadn’t you?” said Gebu. “Come, brother. Time’s wasting.”
Kemni’s careful plan was crumbling around him. He had had every intention of sailing in, doing what he must, and escaping unrecognized. With a Cretan woman all too obviously perched in the bow of a fishing boat, and a royal prince less than perfectly hidden among the crew, Kemni would be as difficult to notice as an ibis in a flock of geese.
He was bound to go. He had given Ariana his word. And she would not order these interlopers off the boat.
With a deep sigh, he bade farewell to his Cretan queen and lent his shoulder to the rest of those that slid the boat from the bank into the water. He was the last to clamber aboard, drawn up by eager hands, just ahead of a crocodile’s sudden snap.
That was omen enough to begin with. Kemni chose to regard it as hopeful, in that he had escaped unharmed. The crocodile, cheated of its prey, lashed its tail in temper and vanished beneath the water.
The boat rocked in the wave of the crocodile’s passing, but steadied as the men aboard it dug in the oars. They rowed out into the middle of the river, raised the sail to catch the bit of wind, and let the current carry them downstream.
Kemni had taken the steering-oar. It was easy work, needing no thought. The wind was almost cool, the sun fierce, but he was born to that. Iphikleia, he saw, had sunk down in the curve of the prow and drawn a mantle over herself. She looked, even from so close, like a bundle of nets.
As much as he disliked to admit it, it was possible they would escape undetected. Neither Iphikleia nor Gebu was a fool. And yet . . .
He shut the thought away. It was some while before they would need to creep and hide. They were still in the Upper Kingdom here. For the game’s sake he had determined that they should be fishermen indeed, and wield net and line as they went. What they caught they would eat, or if there was enough, they could trade in the villages for bread and beer and other, more varied provisions.
It was not like sailing on the Dancer of Crete. This was a smaller boat, cramped, with few amenities. Every finger’s breadth of space was put to use.
At night they drew up on the bank, set up camp and a watch and slept as they could. The weapons they concealed in bits of baggage and folds of net were not the weapons of simple fishermen—Kemni had yielded to sense in that much; they carried the swords of warriors, short spears and hunting lances, and bows with arrows set ready to hand.
But, except for those, they lived and camped as what they seemed. There were no elaborate pavilions, no flocks of servants. Even Gebu had to fend for himself. People were willing to wait on him, but their numbers were too few and their duties too many.
He insisted that he did not mind. “It’s a grand lark,” he said to Kemni, the third night downriver from the Bull of Re. They were traveling slowly, but not as slowly as Kemni had feared. The river’s current had grown swifter. It was coming to the flood early this year.
In a day or two or three, they would pass into Lower Egypt. Then they must be more circumspect, and pray the gods that what they looked for could be found soon. Kemni half feared that they might have to sail as far as Avaris.
But that was ridiculous. There were strongholds of the enemy much closer than the royal city. In one of them, there would be makers of chariots.
Iphikleia professed to know where some might be. “How did you know that?” Kemni inquired.
“This way and that,” she said. She was not fond of Egyptian beer, but they had brought no wine. Fishermen did not drink it. She sipped, grimaced, began to set the cup down.
Gebu caught her hand, held it. “No,” he said. “No, lady. Wine, one sips. Beer, one drinks down as quickly as one can. Here: shut your eyes and drink deep.”
She did not at all appear to mind that he had touched her. She did as he advised, screwed up her face and squeezed her eyes shut and drained the cup in a swallow. She gagged, gasped, coughed, but opened her eyes and said in somewhat breathless surprise, “It’s not so bad!”
“You see?” said Gebu. “It’s not a taste to linger over. But taken quickly, without pause to think—it’s rather splendid.”
“It. . . does grow on one,” Iphikleia admitted. She went back to gnawing at her share of barley bread.
Kemni watched them narrowly. Gebu was sitting close to her, as someone had to; it was a tight circle round the fire, well back from the river with its threat of crocodiles. Kemni had found a place somewhat apart from them, between Seti and a tongue-tied young man who regarded Iphikleia in awe. Gebu the prince affected him not at all, but Iphikleia in her shabby mantle and her redolence of fish was an object of veneration.
She was suffering Gebu to sit very close. He touched her often, by accident as it seemed, but Kemni knew that art as well as any.
It should not matter. Iphikleia was not Kemni’s possession. She had barely glanced at him since she set foot in the boat—as if what they had had was left behind in the Bull of Re.
And now she favored the prince. Had she lied, then, when she said that it was not Gebu she fancied? Or had she changed as a woman could do, and turned toward him after all?
Fruitless thoughts, and futile here, where every eye could see and every ear hear what passed between any two of them. If he indulged in jealousy, he must do it alone—and know it for folly.
“This is splendid,” Gebu was saying in response to a murmur from Iphikleia. “I’ve never fended completely for myself before. It’s refreshing.”
“I’m glad you think so,” she said.
“Oh yes! Do you know how truly wearing it is to be royal?”
“I never found it wearing,” she said, “but I ran away often. I even sailed in ships. I came to Egypt more than once.”
“You see?” said Gebu. “It dragged at you. You escaped it as often as you could. That gift wasn’t given me—till my battle-brother helped to set me free.”
“He helped you, too?” Her voice was cool. “He’s not happy with his gifts, I don’t think.”
Gebu laughed softly. “No, he’s not. My poor brother. So blessed, and so reluctant.”
Kemni stopped his ears with the rough sack that was all the blanket he had, and tried to sleep. They chattered on through the night, as far as he knew, as friends will, or friends who would be lovers.
It was fitting. They were of like rank. Kemni was markedly lower in station than they, honored of the king or no.
~~~
Such thoughts had no place and no purpose in the burning daylight. Kemni could not keep them away in the dark, and suffered rather too much loss of sleep thereby. But when the sun was in the sky, he fixed on what was his to do: sail the boat, command the men, see that the fishing went on as it should. The river was running even swifter now, and rising higher. The flood was coming, the great Inundation that would spread the water wide across the land of Egypt, and leave behind it the rich black earth that was the wealth of the Two Kingdoms.
He began to think that perhaps he had been less than wise to venture the river in a fishing-boat with the water rising. But it was a sturdy boat, made of reeds bundled together in the ancient way, born on this river and begotten of it. It gave to the surge of the river as a boat of wood might not have done, and rode with it, borne lightly atop it.
There were fish in plenty, though the nets had to drop lower and dredge deeper. Kemni chose to continue trading the catch in towns along the river, though that grew more dangerous the farther north they went. They gathered gossip in that way, and news, and rumors that ran swifter than the river. One such persisted, and grew stronger as they drew nearer to Lower Egypt: that war was coming. The foreign kings and the king in Thebes would meet in battle as they had ten years agone.
“Why would either of them trouble to do that?” Seti drawled in the marketplace of a town not far south of Memphis. Seti had a good ear; he could mimic dialects with ease, though he was not as quick with languages as Kemni was. He managed, at every town, to speak in the accent of the town before that, so that people would think he had come from just upriver. It was wonderfully clever, and well he knew it, too.
“So,” he said in the dialect of a day’s long sail upriver, “tell me why war should come now. It’s been years since the kings fought. Isn’t old Apophis getting on a bit? He’s not the young lion he used to be.”
“Neither is Ahmose,” said one of the idlers in the market, while an assortment of wives and servants haggled over the fish. “They’ve both got grown sons. But that never stopped a king, that I ever heard of.”
Kemni was occupied with a supremely contentious harridan and her even more contentious servant, but he kept half an ear on the conversation, and half an eye on Gebu, who had flat refused to stay with the boat. Days of sun and sailing had given him a rough and suitably common look, but he had lifted his head at his father’s name. Those eyes had never belonged to a simple fisherman.
Seti, whose air of worldly ennui passed here for youthful foolishness—though the women tended to like it; it charmed them—snorted at the king’s name. “Ah! Ahmose. He’s younger than Apophis, but I’d have hoped he was wiser. Why would he fight a war he can’t win?”
“How do you know he can’t?” another of the idlers demanded.
Kemni had sold the harridan a basketful of fish, each one selected with exacting care and endless haggling. He left the next buyer to another of the crew, and busied himself between Seti and Gebu, brushing flies from the fish and shifting the bit of sail that shaded them from the sun.
Seti had stopped even pretending to help with the selling. “So tell me how Ahmose can win a war against the Retenu.”
“By fighting it,” the idler answered, speaking as if to an idiot child. “He sits in his big house away upriver, eats off his golden plates and shits in his golden pot, and wishes he could be lord of Two Lands instead of one. I tell you, man, if he got up and dropped the girl he’s bouncing on his knee, took up his sword and called his armies and got to work, he’d be king of everything before the flood came to the full.”
“That fast?” Seti’s voice was deeply and mockingly awed. “And what about the king downriver in his big house, with his chariots and his herds of asses? Won’t he have something to say about it?”
“Oh,” said the idler. “Him. He’s so busy with his hundred wives, he doesn’t have time to bother with a war.”
“But his two hundred sons,” said Seti, “might find a war well worth the trouble. It’s hard these days, being a king’s son of a warrior people. No women to rape, no cities to pillage. Give them a war and they’ll be glad to take it.”
“Surely,” the idler said, “and so would good Egyptians. I’ve got kin up by Memphis. They’ve been eating ass manure for years, and hating every bite of it. Give them a king to fight and an army to join, and they’re ready to march.”
“That’s not what my lather says,” Seti said.
“Your father’s old, isn’t he? Sure it’s made him wise, but has it made him brave?”
“Bravery’s for young men,” Seti said. “You’re that brave down this way?”
“Braver!” declared the idlers in chorus.
Seti shook his head. “I hope you’ll say the same when the Retenu come to conquer you.”
“They already did that,” the chief of the idlers said. “We wore them out, here. Down the river where they’re still strong—they’ll need a harder hand.”
“We could all be kings,” drawled Seti, “if we were as wise as you.”
“Laugh all you like,” the idler said. “I’m telling nothing but the truth.”
~~~
Gebu told the tale by the fire that night, where they all had come together in the boat’s shadow. He was alight with it. “They will fight. They will.”
“They say they will,” Kemni said. “They’re near enough to the enemy here to feel his breath on their necks. Those who live under his sway may be less willing to endanger themselves and their kin.”
“You were willing,” Gebu said.
Kemni shook his head. “I went because I was bored and I was angry, and I was wild to fight foreigners. My uncle and my cousins were all killed. We were all that had the will to fight.”
“Maybe the years have changed even your people,” Gebu said. “Talk like that in the market—we never heard such a thing before, even when we won this kingdom under my uncle Kamose.”
“We were never simple fishermen before,” said Kemni. “Princes don’t hear what the people talk of. It’s not reckoned dignified.”
“Do you think that of me? That I’ve lost my dignity?”
Kemni laughed in startlement. “No! No, of course not. I only meant—”
Gebu waved that aside. “I hear more than people know. They do sometimes talk when I can hear, or forget how near I am, and tell one another the truth. We learn, we princes, to gather knowledge wherever we may.”
“Such a life,” Iphikleia said. She leaned against the hull, wrapped in her mantle. If it troubled her to spend every day in hiding, she was not admitting to it. She managed somehow to be clean, to keep her hair in order, to look much as she always had.
The sight of her made Kemni’s heart beat hard. She was as oblivious to him as she had ever been. Her eyes were on Gebu, as they so often were. “A palace is a world in itself,” she said. “It’s hard to remember what other worlds there are.”
“Unless one determines to remember,” Gebu said.
“Yes,” she said. She stared into the dark beyond the fire’s light, frowning slightly, as she did when she was pondering matters too deep, no doubt, for a mere mortal man to understand.
When she spoke again, it was to no one of them in particular. “This serves us. When we come back, my lord, it would be well if your father knew; if he sent his men here to muster an army.”
“And north of here?” Kemni asked. “What of the people in the foreign kings’ power?”
“When we’ve seen them,” she said, “and heard what they say to one another, we’ll know.”
“I think you know already,” he said.
She did not answer that. He had not expected her to.