blinking into starlight and wan moonlight and
the bustle of the ship getting under way. The moon rode low, casting deep
shadows over the westward bank of the river. The old tombs of kings rose there
like mountains sheathed in silver.
No one ever sailed at night, unless he had strong reason.
Kemni made his careful way toward the captain’s place on the deck.
Naukrates was not there. His niece Iphikleia stood where he
was accustomed to stand, ordering the sailors with the perfect presumption of
authority. They obeyed her without a murmur.
“Where is he?” Kemni demanded of her. He was still more than
half asleep, or he would have been more circumspect. But he was rather fond of
Naukrates. “You can’t be leaving him behind!”
She ignored him. Even in his half-dream he could sense the
urgency, see how the sailors labored to ready the ship and cast it off.
“What is this? Why are we going at this hour?”
Still she paid him no heed. He was not fool enough to strike
her, or to shake her till she looked at him. He squatted at her feet, where she
must step over him if she moved, or fall.
The anchor slid up, hand over hand. Softly, almost silently,
the oars slid out. Iphikleia raised her hand. The oars poised. Her hand
dropped. The oars bit water. Dancer trembled like a live thing, shook herself, and leaped suddenly ahead.
Kemni clung to the deck at Iphikleia’s feet. He was waking
now, roused by the movement of the ship and the wind in his face, damp and
almost cool in this hour before the sun’s coming. He was aware, rather sharply,
of her presence; of her body in the tiered skirt and the scrap of vest; and
above all, that she must not know where his dreams had taken him.
He drew up his knees and clasped them, and hoped that that
would be enough. One thing the woolen robes of the Retenu were good for:
concealing a man’s more rampant moments. The Egyptian kilt had no such
capacity.
Dancer was moving
quickly now, riding the strong slow current of the Nile. The oarsmen had not
slackened once they reached the middle of the stream. This was urgency, as if
they fled something.
“What?” Kemni asked suddenly. “What are we running away
from?”
He had more than half expected to be ignored again, but
Iphikleia answered him without taking her eyes from the oarsmen. “Questions,”
she said.
Kemni considered that. When he had considered it adequately,
he said, “It may get interesting, if we have to traverse the whole of the Delta
with . . . questions on our heels.”
“That is what my uncle is doing,” she said. “Assuring that
questions are answered, or never asked.”
“And dying for it?”
“One hopes not,” she said.
And he heard that austere tone, looked up at that still
face, and remembered her warmth in his dream, and the sound of her laughter.
This waking woman never laughed. He was sure of it.
~~~
Sunrise found them a respectable distance downriver from
Memphis. They relaxed a little then, shipped oars and raised the faded sail and
traveled in more leisurely fashion. If foreign eyes looked on them, there was
nothing to remark on, no urgency to be seen. But the men were never far from
weapons, and the woman who had taken the place of captain did not step down, or
even sit.
She was waiting for something. Battle? Somehow Kemni did not
think so.
The river’s traffic thickened as the day brightened, till
the rising heat and the sun’s glare drove all but the most determined to
shelter on the bank. A wind had caught the sail. There was little for anyone to
do but keep the sail trimmed, and snatch what rest he could.
At the height of noon, when the air was like hammered
bronze, and even the stinging flies had gone in search of refuge, a small boat
pushed off from the bank. One man stood in it, a slender brown man in a scrap
of loincloth, with another scrap wound around his head.
Kemni would have recognized a Cretan even in ignorance of
this one’s name and face. The wide shoulders, the