Free The Shepherd Kings by Judith Tarr

buildings
all over the summit of that high hill. Ariana knew it as Kemni had known the
thickets of reeds outside his father’s house, every twist and complex turn of
it. She led him unwavering though he was all turned about, to a house among the
many, set amid a garden. There was a pool to bathe in, and servants to wait on
him, and a bed to rest in if he should be so minded. There was even a wonder,
water that flowed into basins at the turning of a lever, to wash in or to
relieve oneself: remarkable, and a great game, to watch the water flow and
stop, flow and stop.
    She left him there alone and made it clear that he was not
to follow. But she had promised to come back for him. He clung to that, here
where there was nothing that he knew, and nothing that was his own. Everything
of his was still on the ship, as far as he could tell.
    If this was a plot, a conspiracy to separate him from his
own people, catch him alone and so destroy him, it had succeeded admirably. He
could huddle in a corner, stiff with fear, or he could let himself be waited on
by these deft and bright-eyed servants. They were all young, youths and slender
maidens, dressed alike in a scrap of kilt, with their long hair caught up in a
scarlet fillet. They were not slaves—that much he could tell, as bold as their
eyes were, and their commentary as they cleaned and shaved and made him
presentable. They did not, perhaps, know that he understood their language, or
if they did, they did not care.
    In Egypt he was reckoned good to look at, though he had
never reckoned himself a beauty. Here they cared less for perfection, and more,
as they averred, for the whole of a man’s self. For some reason beyond his
fathoming, perhaps only because Ariana found him beautiful, they were delighted
with him. They loved the warm red-brown of his skin, so different from their
olive darkness. They were a little taken aback at his hair, cropped short for
comfort under a wig, but they marveled at his long dark eyes. They marked the
shape of him, how he was not so wide in the shoulders or so narrow in the
middle as they, but wide enough and narrow enough to be pleasing. And they had
a great deal to say of his manly organ, which he had never reckoned to be
anything remarkable—but they did not crop the foreskin here for cleanliness and
for sacrifice to the gods. They pointed and stared and giggled, and one bold
creature took it in her hand and fondled it as if she had every right in the
world.
    He could grow angry if he tried, or if they persisted. But
they went on to other wonders, dried him and wrapped him in a kilt after the
Cretan fashion, and put tall boots on his feet—more marvels there, as narrow as
those were. Elegant, they said. That was the word they repeated to one another.
He was elegant, as if that were a great virtue.
    He did not feel elegant. He was clean and dressed and tidy,
but he felt oddly rumpled and annoyed. He was not accustomed to servants who
spoke so frankly over a lord’s head—or over his nether parts.
    They invited him to rest in the wide bed, in a room full of
the song of the sea—strange, that, for the sea was rather far away, out of sight
if not of scent and sound. But he was not minded to do their bidding in that.
He went out instead into the garden.
    On that side a parapet walled it. Kemni found himself atop a
high terrace, looking down a steep descent to the rocky defiles and brief levels
of inland Crete. It was a wild prospect, strange and not particularly
hospitable, and nothing at all like his own country.
    He shivered. He had not been truly warm since he left the
Delta of Egypt. Here, even in the sun, the wind was chill. It sang from the
sea, and the sea’s cold heart was in it.
    Soft warmth fell about him. He spun, startled, to find
Iphikleia standing behind him, and a mantle around his shoulders, wool the
color of sea and sky, lined with cream-pale fleece.
    She was even more forbidding after the bright memory of
Ariana, and even less