None of them slept overmuch that night. Soldiers learned to sleep wherever they paused to rest, but this was something other than war. They had known that they were deep in the enemy’s country, but it had meant little.
Now they began what they had come to do. If they failed, they failed their king. Even if they succeeded, they could be found and killed, and Ahmose—and his Cretan queen—would not have what they needed to win the war.
Kemni could torment himself with fears. Or he could lie wrapped in his blanket and try not to think of Iphikleia. She slept on the boat as always, a shadow among the shadows of its cargo. Whatever they had said or done at the Bull of Re, it was gone and forgotten here. He was no more to her than any of his men; and less, perhaps, than Gebu the prince.
He lay open-eyed for an eternity of starlit darkness. The town slept. The river was rising: the boat had been drawn up away from the water, but now it lapped just short of the pointed bow. If they did not cast off by full morning, he judged, the river would do it for them.
When his bones felt the first hint of dawn, when the night was darkest, the air full of whispers and unseen passings, he rose softly and walked the edges of the camp. It was a frequent boast hereabouts that neither crocodiles nor lions of the desert dared trespass within the town. Kemni was watchful nonetheless. Not only beasts could be a danger here.
Seti had not come back from watching over the fortress. Kemni hoped that meant the Retenu had not left yet, and not that Seti had been captured or worse. It was quiet round about, no company of guards approaching to take them all prisoner.
He perched on a heap of flotsam just past the camp, clasped his knees and waited for the dawn. Slowly, infinitely slowly, the darkness paled. The east, over the barren hills of the Red Land, came clearer little by little, under a pellucid sky. The stars faded. Away in the beds of reeds, now all but sunk in the river, a bird began to sing.
~~~
They were all up and fed and girded for the day, somewhat before the sun climbed over the horizon. Seti still had not come back. Kemni was half minded to wait for him; but urgency ate at his belly. “Get the boat in the water,” he said to his waiting people. “We’ll fish downstream this morning, and see who rides on the northward road.”
They were glad to obey. All this journeying had been adventure of a sort, but this was what they had come to do. There was a lightness in their movements, an eagerness; even a snatch of song, quickly cut off—till Gebu said, “No, no. Sing. Sing. We’re honest fishermen, setting out to bring in the day’s catch—not spies creeping about by night. Sing!”
They sang therefore as they slid the boat into the water and clambered aboard and set off down the river. Their songs reminded Kemni rather more vividly of a guardroom than a fishing boat, but he doubted the enemy would know the difference.
The river was fractious this morning, the steering oar strong in his hands. The flood was rising fast. He had to hope it would not keep him from the bank when the time came.
For the moment it was well; they needed no oar or sail, simply rode the current, fishing with lines off bow and stern, and pulling in what the lines caught. They watched the east bank, idly, as it might seem.
Boats passed them as the morning brightened into full day. Some hailed them; others were too full of their own importance. None held a cargo of chariotmakers bound for Avaris.
On the bank meanwhile, there was somewhat less coming and going, but enough. Twice, bearded men rattled past in chariots. People on foot came and went—came, mostly, at this hour, walking to market or to business in the town. A noble passed with his retinue, perched aloft in his gilded chair.
That could have been Kemni, and should have been Gebu—if this had been the Two Lands of the old time, or of the new one that Ahmose hoped to begin. Filthy and reeking of fish, unshaven, ragged, and beneath any great one’s notice, they rode the river down toward Memphis.
At midmorning Kemni began to edge toward the eastward bank. The reeds were thick here, bulrushes and tall fans of papyrus. They hid a flock of geese, which fled honking and flapping, and with care, the boat itself. The men, armed with knives and sickles, cut a path through the reeds, those who cut leaning down over the boat’s sides and prow, held tightly by their fellows.
The crocodiles were not hunting here this morning, it seemed; there was no sign of them. Kemni murmured a prayer to the god Sobek, who wore a crocodile’s face, that his children should let them be, for the winning back of the Lower Kingdom.
When the cutting and pruning was done, the boat rested in a clearing in the reeds with its prow up against the riverbank. They anchored it there. No one could see them from the river, or from the land either. They were perfectly hidden.
Kemni slipped from prow to land and ghosted up the bank to be certain. Even before he had emerged from the reeds, the boat and its people were invisible.
He paused on the edge of the thicket. Oh, the gods were kind: the reeds gave way to bare sunburned earth, the Black Land bleached almost white by heat and sunlight. He could see how far the river was wont to rise: where the richer earth of the river’s gift gave way to the sand and stones of the Red Land. There, on the edge between the two, ran the road to Memphis.
There was no one on it just then. Fresh droppings marked the passing of an ox or oxen, a farmer most likely. None of the foreigners’ donkeys had passed by this morning. They were still behind, then—if they were coming at all.
Kemni must trust that they would. He settled behind a screen of reeds, as if he were hunting waterfowl and not men. He was aware that someone had followed him, but he did not look to see who it was. It must be Gebu. No one else would be bold enough to leave the boat without Kemni’s leave.
The other slipped beside him, in under his arm, and said in a voice that was anything but cool, “Oh, you clever man!”
He tensed to recoil from Iphikleia, but his arm tightened around her instead. She turned in the circle of it. Whatever she did, however she did it, she was naked, her mantle spread beneath her, and his loincloth suddenly, magically vanished.
Some part of him snarled at her, and upbraided her for sparing him not even a glance between the Bull of Re and this thicket. And what, he almost asked, of Gebu?
But his body knew no such folly. It fell on her like one starving. She caught at him with sudden fierceness, wrapped herself about him and drove him deep inside her.
He gasped. She was eating him alive. Kisses, love-bites, one after another, everywhere that she could reach. She rode him as if he had been a ship on a high sea, deep strokes and long, drawing him almost—almost—to the summit, but sinking away. She tormented him. She sapped him of wit and will. She conquered him as utterly as the Retenu had conquered the Lower Kingdom.
Then at last, when he was ready to scream at her to end it, she let the tide take him and cast him up gasping on the shore.
When he could breathe again, he said, “I think I hate you.”
“I’m sure you despise me,” she said. She dropped down onto her mantle, arching her back and stretching like a cat. Her body was limned in light and shadow, bars and blades of dark and gold.
Memory struck like a blow. Kemni scrambled to hands and knees and peered out through the screen of reeds.
The road was deserted. He let his breath out slowly.
Iphikleia’s hands smoothed and stroked his back, rubbing away the tightness, winning from him a soft groan. He stilled it quickly. She laughed in his ear, and nibbled it.
He pulled away slightly, coming somewhat to himself. “You never even looked at me,” he said.
“Of course I didn’t,” she said. “Did you want a whole boatload of snickering spectators?”
He could never best her in a war of words. And yet he had to say, “You looked at Gebu often enough.”
“Ah! You’re jealous.”
“Do I have reason to be?”
“No,” she said. She slipped from his back to lie beside him, chin on fists, gazing out at the road. “Mind you, I like him. He’s well-spoken, he’s charming, he’s just as a prince should be. But I don’t dream of him.”
“I’m surprised,” Kemni said.
He meant it honestly. It seemed she took it as such. She shrugged a little, a shift of warm bare shoulder against his. “Would you be happier if I did?”
“No.”
“So,” she said. Then: “Listen.”
He opened his mouth to ask what she meant by that, but his ear had caught it also: a distant sound like the braying of an ass.
She shifted beside him, a small flurry that ended in her being wrapped in her mantle again. He should find his loincloth and put it on, but he paused, listening. Another bray. A murmur of men’s voices. The hollow clatter of hooves on the hard-beaten road; the rattle of wheels.
It could be another party of Retenu on its way to Memphis. Kemni remembered to breathe, to calm himself. He rose then, softly, and wrapped his loincloth and fastened it tightly. A brief flash of vanity regretted that he could not do this thing in a clean kilt and a shaven face; but it would serve him better to be thought a mere brigand. Brigands were not hunted in this country as a lord from the Upper Kingdom would be.
“I’ll tell the others,” he breathed in Iphikleia’s ear. She nodded, keeping her eyes on the road.
His men were waiting. They were not precisely atwitch with eagerness. Most seemed asleep or nearly so. But when they heard the news he brought, they woke abruptly.
There were no orders to give. Those were all given long since. He slipped back to the place where he had been. Iphikleia was gone from it, the gods knew where. Not, he trusted, to betray him to the enemy.
It seemed a long while before the company rounded the curve of the road. When at last it appeared, it was less than Kemni had expected. There were only two chariots, each with two men in it, and a string of laden donkeys, and a handful of men on foot: servants, those must be, and nearly all Egyptian. One of them—
Kemni bit his lip till it bled. Seti. Seti striding briskly with the rest, as innocent as if he had been all he seemed, and no one eyed him oddly or asked him who he was.
And what if . . .
No. They were too calm. No one looked about him, or seemed to care that he might be ambushed. There were guards, but they idled behind, half a dozen on foot and one in a chariot driven by a curly-headed child. Kemni saw and heard no more than that. Nor was there any signal from his men who had been given the charge, that an army waited in hiding.
It was arrogance. Or the Retenu did not believe that Egypt truly could rise up against them.
Whatever the cause of it, Kemni took it as a blessing, and a sending from the gods.
They were level with him now, idling along, laughing and singing. Kemni raised the signal: a clear shrill call like the falcon’s as he stoops for his prey.
There was a breathless hush. Even the Retenu paused a fraction, and their laughter stuttered. Just as it smoothed again, the earth erupted.
Kemni’s men had seemed few enough when he mustered them. But falling on the Retenu from every side, armed with swords and knives and spears, they seemed as numerous as the king’s own armies.
They took the Retenu utterly by surprise. Kemni himself leaped on the captain of the guard, pulled him out of his chariot and wrested his sword from him, and cut his throat before he could muster breath to cry out.
The young charioteer had reined his team to a halt, turning them, whipping them on. Kemni leaped aside, fell and rolled, landed somehow on his feet and within reach of the chariot as it flew past. He leaped as he had once before, saw the chariot pass, knew a moment’s sinking despair before he half fell, half staggered into the lurching, rattling thing.
The child kicked at him. He stumbled against the chariot’s rim.
The child pulled hard on the rein. The chariot veered.
Kemni staggered again, but forward, into greater safety. For a breath’s span he had his balance. He snatched, heaved, thrust the child out; and seized the reins just before they snapped loose.
These long-eared creatures were little like the soft-mouthed horses he had driven under Ariana’s tutelage. Their mouths were like forged bronze. He cursed and hauled them about, with a briefly chagrined reflection that he, a man grown, could barely master them, and that infant had driven them as easily as if they had been made of air.
But they yielded to him at last, and consented grudgingly to turn. The battle was over. All but one of the guards were down. The two chariots stood still, with Kemni’s men at the asses’ heads. Iphikleia stood in one, kilted like a man of Crete, and no mantle to be seen.
It was the sight of her, perhaps, that had astonished the Retenu into immobility. She was a wild beauty, with her black hair streaming over her white breasts, holding her team still with effortless strength.
Kemni muscled his own pair of long-eared demons to a halt beside her. The former passengers lay on the ground, with Kemni’s men standing over them, and a spearpoint resting lightly on each throat.
He had seen them both in the workshop. But the one who had seemed to command them stood in the third chariot. As far as Kemni could see on a face bearded to the eyes, he was deeply affronted and not even slightly afraid. “Take your hands off my bridle,” he said to the man who held his team’s heads.
Gebu smiled at him, sweetly insolent. He did not speak the language of the Retenu—he would not stoop to it—but the tone was clear enough.
This foreigner bridled at the smile, which was indeed provoking. It was the smile of a prince in the face of an upstart underling—and such a prince, filthy, unshaven, and dressed in a scrap of rag. “Bandits! You—slave. Tell them to take that pack-donkey yonder, and let us go.”
The slave he spoke to was Seti, standing amid the scared huddle of servants, surrounded by half-naked and ill-shaven men with bright and well-kept weapons. Seti was as cool as Kemni had always seen him, as well he might be; he had nothing to fear from these brigands.
He did, it was clear, understand what the foreigner had said. “Tell them yourself,” he drawled with wonderful insolence.
The foreigner sucked in a breath of pure outrage. Kemni intervened before he could collapse in an apoplexy; he was, after all, the whole cause and purpose of this venture. “I thank you,” he said in that guttural tongue. His own command of it was rough, but it was serviceable. “We’ll take the donkey—along with the rest.”
“Just the donkey,” the foreigner said, pivoting to face him, speaking slowly as if to an idiot child. “Just one donkey. We take the rest. We belong to the king; we go to him in his city. These are the king’s donkeys.”
“Are they now?” Kemni smiled as sweetly as Gebu had. “Better and better.”
He tilted his chin at his men who were waiting. They were delighted to oblige: falling on the foreigner and his mute, staring charioteer, plucking them from the chariot and binding them and stringing them together on a lead, like a train of asses in a caravan.
Kemni disliked to abandon the chariots and their trained teams, but they could not escape on the road. As difficult as it would be to row and sail upriver against that powerful current, they must do that. And there was no room in the boat for chariots. Nor, for the matter of that, for as many men as they had captured.
The three from the workshop, they must keep. “Kill the rest,” Seti said. Kemni raised a brow. “Were they as irritating as that?”
“Somewhat,” Seti said. “You can’t let them live. They’ll run straight to the nearest foreign lord and set him after us.”
“I don’t think so,” Kemni said. He went to stand over the servants where they had been ordered to sit, all of them huddled together, watching him with wide, frightened eyes. “Listen to me,” he said. “We’re going to leave you here and vanish. We’ll bind you and strip you, as if we were bandits. But we won’t kill you—if you promise one thing.”
They stared at him. Not one seemed possessed of wits enough to speak. “Promise me,” Kemni said, “that you will tell those who found you that bandits ambushed your caravan, killed your masters, and made off with their possessions.”
“That isn’t the truth?” one of them asked.
“It’s what you’ll tell anyone who asks,” said Kemni.
They all nodded vigorously. Kemni eyed them in some doubt still. Slaves would say whatever they thought their masters wanted them to say. But he had taken precautions. None of them had seen the boat, or could know of it. If they told their tale of bandits, men would scour the hills in search of men afoot or in chariots—and never think to look for a boatful of fishermen on the river.
But for that to succeed, the chariots and the caravan must be disposed of. If someone could lay a trail that led into the desert.
Kemni had decided almost before he paused to think. They had thought to capture and abduct a single man, not three of them—four; Gebu had caught and held the young charioteer, who was calling his passenger Father. A son?
A hostage. Even as Kemni formed the thought, Gebu acted on it. He laid the flat of his knifeblade against the child’s throat, and said to the eldest and tallest of the Retenu, “Come with us. Or he dies.”
In whatever language either of them spoke, the gesture and the tone were unmistakable. The foreigner’s face darkened. He nodded sharply.
Gebu smiled. “Thank you so kindly,” he said. He handed child and knife to the man who stood nearest—who happened to be a deeply contented Seti—and as easily, as effortlessly as a prince could do, set about ordering the retreat into the reeds. “And as for the chariots—” he began.
Kemni spoke before he could go on. “I’ll take them up into the hills.”
“But—” said Gebu.
“If we leave them, people will look for us. If we shatter them and sink them in the river, there are still the beasts to think of. They’ll make their way home if they can. I can take them far away, far enough that when they do return, it will be too late to betray you.”
“And then how will you go home?” Gebu demanded. “No, no; best we sink them with the chariots. By the time the flood brings them up, if it does, we’ll be long gone.”
“There’s no time to do all that,” Kemni said. “It’s only the gods’ good fortune that no one’s come down the road since we began. Go quickly, my lord. Take these men back to the Bull of Re. I’ll come when I can, or send word if I can’t.”
Gebu’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, will you? What are you plotting, O my brother?”
“O my prince,” said Kemni, “I’m plotting nothing but to rid us of these chariots, and to go back home as I can.”
“By way, perhaps, of Avaris?” Iphikleia inquired.
Kemni shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe I’ll go where I’m moved to go, and listen, and watch, and see what there is to see. If the Upper Kingdom is ready to cast off its yoke—then so much the better for my king.”
“Brother,” said Gebu, “there is no need for you to—”
“I know,” said Kemni, “that your father is not altogether cut off from this kingdom. But a man known to him, trusted by him, admitted to his lesser councils—how many of these are here?”
“What will you do, then? Raise a rebellion?”
“I might try,” Kemni said.
Gebu shook his head. “No. You’ll get killed.”
“We’ll get killed if we wrangle here. Go, my lord. I’ll come when I can.” Kemni braced to fight again, but his ears had caught what he looked for long before now: the sound of feet on the road. He sprang into the chariot that was nearest, and scrambled up the reins. One of the men tossed him the rope that bound the packbeasts in their long string. He looked with despair on the second chariot. If he could fasten that somehow to the packbeasts’ string . . .
Iphikleia sprang into it. “Go,” she said. “Go!”
Kemni bit his tongue and wound the lead about a post in the chariot’s rim, and whipped up the team. They responded with admirable speed. The packtrain, by the gods’ blessing, saw fit to follow.
They had to cling to the road for some distance. Something flew at Kemni. He ducked. It thudded into the chariot. A—robe? And one of the tall hats that Retenu sometimes wore. He had no beard to go with them, but from a distance, he might pass for a beardless boy. He struggled into the robe, which reeked heavily of old wool and new sweat, and pulled the hat down over his ears.
Iphikleia, behind him, was likewise clothed. If he looked as outlandish as she did, then all their stratagem was of no use.
But no one met them. The passers behind were all on foot, except for one with an ox: farmers and men of the villages, carefully oblivious to the Retenu ahead of them. Gebu and the rest were gone, vanished in the reeds. Kemni prayed to any god who would listen, to keep them safe and bring them back whole to the Bull of Re.
An almost unconscionable distance from the thicket of reeds, the road begot a side way, narrow and rather steep but not impossible for a chariot. Or so Kemni hoped. He urged the team up it. The packtrain scrambled after, and Iphikleia in their wake.
It was brutal going for a chariot, but too narrow and steep to turn back. With every bruising jolt, Kemni prayed that wheels and axle would hold. The team strained, slipping and scrambling, but kept their footing by some miracle of the gods.
The track narrowed even further, and seemed minded to shoot straight up the cliff. But just as he had despaired, when he knew there was nowhere to go—up, down, sidewise, into the sun-shot air—the track breasted the summit and came out on a long level.
Kemni stopped there, content simply to breathe. The packtrain stood with heads hanging, till first one and then another bethought itself to nibble the thorny scrub that dotted the plain.
There was a skin of water in the chariot, and a bag that proved to hold bread, cheese, a packet of dates. The packbeasts were laden with more water, more food, and a gathering of varied riches: tents, bedding, a whole packful of robes and linen tunics.
Iphikleia seemed in better state than Kemni: fresher, and less whitely terrified. “We should go farther,” she said. “A day’s journey. More if we can. If we can find a place with ample grazing, the herd might not leave it for days.”
“I had been thinking that,” he said. “It’s been too many years since I was in this country, but as I remember it, there is such a place at not too great a distance. If we’re not fallen on by bandits, we’ll come to it in a day or two.”
She nodded. She had sipped from a waterskin in her own chariot, but laid it thriftily away after two brief swallows.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he said. He had not meant to say it; he knew it was futile. But it slipped out.
She took no notice of it. She had set her team in motion once more. Up so high and so far from the road, they had no need to run. In a while they would quicken their pace. Now, they walked, chariots and packbeasts, across that high and barren level. No living thing stirred upon it save a vulture circling high against the sun. The heat was stunning, staggering—wonderful. Kemni stripped off the reeking foreign robe and cast the hat on top of it on the chariot’s floor. Soon, if he was wise, he would put on robes and a mantle from the pack of garments. But for a while he reveled in the force of light and heat on his bare shoulders.
Iphikleia had wrapped herself in her ragged mantle once more, swathed like a desert tribesman; and well she might be, with that milk-fair skin. She was not a child of the sun as he was. The sea was her father, and a cold and distant island her mother.
She endured this that must have been as hot to her as a forge, silent and uncomplaining. If he had been a god he would have sent her winging back to the Labyrinth, to those cool airy halls and those blinding white walls, and everywhere the horns of the Bull that were also the horns of the moon.
But he was only mortal, and this was his own country, his Egypt; his Lower Kingdom. The pace he set was swift but not so swift as to exhaust the beasts. He had no desire to kill them; simply to lose them for a while, till Gebu was safe with the prisoners, far away in the Upper Kingdom.
Lose them therefore he did, riding toward the slowly sinking sun, across the barren land and the bare land, the Red Land that was like a sea of stone, endless and waterless. When dark came, they made camp, spreading rugs and fleeces under the stars. The tent they left in its pack, but they brought out a small feast, and likewise the bedding, and a jar of wine fit for a king.
There was even water to wash in, if they were profligate. Kemni washed off the worst of the dust and river mud, and felt almost clean for the first time since he had left the Bull of Re. He ate in great comfort, drank sparingly of the wine.
Iphikleia was silent—had not said a word, now he stopped to think, since the morning. She did not seem ill. He took her in his arms to be certain. She came without resistance. Her skin was cool, her brow unfevered. She warmed for him, and quickly too.
There under the stars, far away from any human thing, protected by firelight and starlight and Kemni’s prayers to the gods of earth and sky, they danced the oldest dance of all. They danced the stars into dawn, and the sun into the sky. And when it was morning again, they went on, westward and ever westward, till memory of green and scent of water were gone.