Free The Shepherd Kings by Judith Tarr Page B

animals, that was all, engrossed in their own concerns.
    “Could I learn,” he asked with beating heart, “to understand
them?”
    “You could try,” she said.
    “Then I shall,” he said. He spoke with more courage than he
actually had, but he did not try to take the words back once they were out.
Iphikleia’s glance betrayed how well she read him.
    Better she read this than what he dreamed of nights.
    He sighed faintly. She was in among the horses, smoothing
manes, scratching necks, fending off inquisitive noses. He gathered his courage
and plunged in behind her.
    It was difficult. He could not help but remember how he had
known horses, drawing chariots in battle, trampling the bodies of his own
people. His uncle, his uncle’s sons, had died beneath those hooves and those cruel
wheels, crushed and torn till the embalmers were sore taxed to restore them to
a semblance of their living selves. When he found them past the Field of
Flowers, if he should be so blessed, he hoped that they would have been healed;
or their life everlasting would be a poor and tormented thing.
    These were not horses of war. Cretans did their fighting on
shipboard. Their horses were sacred beasts, cherished, pampered, and driven
only in festivals. They were peaceable creatures. They smelled of grass and
sea-salt, clean air and something rather pleasant that was all their own.
    His hands lingered on smooth necks and rounded rumps. Their
manes were thick and tangled. He worked the knots out of one, a dun mare with a
dark colt at heel. The colt nibbled at his mantle, snorting a little at the
scent of wool and fleece.
    “You need less to understand these horses,” Iphikleia said,
“than to master them. Understanding is easy enough. Mastery may be beyond you.”
    “I can try,” he said, “if someone will teach me. Since it
seems I’ll be cooling my heels for a while on this most splendid of islands.”
    Her brows arched. “Ah. After all, you have a courtier’s
speech. Who would have thought it?”
    “Not I,” he said. “Find me a teacher and I’ll let you be.”
    “We shall see,” said Iphikleia.

VII
    Kemni dined alone in the house that, it seemed, he had
been given. Servants waited on him and fed him royally, but none of them was
inclined toward conversation. He thought of demanding company, of asking that he
be shown to Naukrates’ house, or taken to some gathering of the court. But he
was more weary than he had known, with all his travels, and then tramping
hither and yon about the island.
    Iphikleia was gone, she had not deigned to say where. She
had simply left him at the door, just at dusk, and gone wherever it pleased her
to go. She had not waited to be invited in, nor given him occasion to ask.
    Certainly he could not quarrel with the dinner he was fed,
or the wine that went with it. Both were superb, prepared and served with
impeccable grace. Nor were they excessively strange. Someone perhaps had made
an effort to feed him as he was accustomed to be fed.
    When he had eaten and drunk his fill, a servant with a lamp
led him to the bedchamber. The man made to help him undress, but Kemni sent him
away. He could perfectly well shed kilt and belt and boots by himself, and fall
onto the broad expanse of the bed.
    It was too broad, and much too soft with cushions and
coverlets. He could not sleep in such luxury; he had never known it.
    Something stirred amid the coverlets. He started and
half-leaped to his feet. Light laughter followed him.
    There was a woman—a girl—in the bed, tousled and heavy-eyed
as if she had been sleeping, but bright enough, and laughing as she rose up out
of a nest of cushions. She was utterly exquisite in the Cretan fashion, with
her big round eyes and her masses of curly black hair and her waist so tiny he
marveled, even as taken aback as he was. He could see every bit of it. She was
as bare as she was born.
    Well, and so was he; and the nether part of him knew what to
do about that. His loftier self