The Shepherd Kings by Judith Tarr Read Free Book Online

light of morning.”
    Almost he challenged again her right to say what was and was
not done on this ship; but she was, after all, the owner of it. “You must be a
very great lady in Crete,” he said.
    “And you are a lord of little enough note in Egypt,” said
Iphikleia.
    He laughed. It did not take her aback as he had hoped, but
it did lessen a little the twist of scorn in her lips. “And that, princess, is
truth. But I do serve my king. That much you can believe.”
    “I do believe it,” she said.
    ~~~
    She let him go then. He would have liked to imagine that
he had left her, but when he walked out of that place of light into the dark
and odorous night, he did it because she allowed it. He stumbled below and fell
into the bunk that had been given him, and lay unmoving, but still wide awake.
Not even in front of the king in Thebes had he been pressed so to his limits,
or been wrung so dry.
    This was not a king. This was something perhaps more than a
king. And a woman, and young, and gods, it had been a long and barren while
since he tumbled that pretty maid in Thebes.
    The god Atum, some said, had begotten the world and all
creatures in it, one night when his wife denied him her body. Kemni could have
done no more or less than a god might, if he could have moved at all. His whole
body felt as if it drifted under deep water, his mind wound with confusion like
a riverbed with weed, and thoughts darting through it, too quick to catch.
    He knew that he was dreaming. It was not prophecy, not this;
no god sent it, nor goddess either. And yet it was as vivid as the living
daylight—a paler light than was in Egypt, fully as clear and yet far softer.
Light in Egypt was white, so bright it blinded. This was mellow gold. It illumined
a great work of hands, a white palace that sprawled and stretched over a
strange green country girdled with the sea. Every tower and summit was
surmounted with the image and likeness of the bull, his horns that clove the
blue-blue sky.
    Kemni flew above them, high as the falcon against the sun.
This was his dream-soul, his bird-soul, the ba that would endure past the body’s death; that could fly free when his body
slept, and seek out new places, strange places, places that he had never been
in waking life. He soared through the blue heaven, looking down on the horned
towers; and indeed, from so high, they seemed a great herd of snow-white
cattle, jostling and lowing amid the craggy summits of their island.
    Then as one may in dreams, he had plummeted to earth, and
somewhere cast off his wings, and become that other face of his soul, the ka , immortal image of his mortal self.
He walked through the courts of that white palace. Cold courts, empty courts,
courts bereft of life or warmth. On every wall was painted a single image: the
double axe that, like the bull’s horns, was sign and seal of royal Crete.
    Round and round he went through that maze of courts, deeper
and deeper. There seemed no end to them. Labyrinth, they called that palace:
House of the Double Axe. That was not an ill word for a maze, or for paths so
convoluted and turns so numerous that the mind, dizzied, lost all sense of
where it was or where it had been.
    And yet he persisted, because this was his dream, and he had
a great yearning in his belly to see the end of it. That end, when it came, was
as he had somehow expected: a great and echoing hall, a forest of pillars, and
a march of images in bronze and silver and bright-gleaming gold: great-horned
bull, double axe, taking turn on turn down the length of the hall.
    But Kemni was not to pause there. His dream drew him with
winged ease past the bulls and the twin-bladed axes, toward the great golden
throne, and then past it, through a door cunningly hidden behind the tall
chair.
    And there was the heart, the center of the Labyrinth. It was
a room of some little size, though small after the hall without. The walls were
painted, not with bulls, not with axes, but with men and women,