Lord of the Two Lands Read online

  “In all your race,” said Alexander. “Tell me why I should go to Egypt.” But before she could speak, he held up a hand. “No, don’t give me gods and prophecies. Give me good common sense. What use is Egypt in my fight against Persia? Its satrap is dead; I saw his body. Its lesser overlords will be too caught up in fighting against me to keep your people down. They can rise by themselves and settle matters without me. Why do they need me at all?”

  “For what you are,” she answered. “For what the gods have made you. What do you want to do, Alexander? Do you want revenge, and only that, and assurance that Persia will stay away from Hellas while you live to defend it? You had that much when you left Issus.”

  “I won’t have it as long as Darius is alive to remember his manhood.”

  “Well then. Suppose he does remember; suppose you get him to stand and fight. Suppose you even win. What then? Will you go back home and be king in Pella, and play at archon of the Hellenes? Is that empire enough for you?”

  “It was for my father.”

  “Was it?”

  Alexander’s face was very still. “Are you telling me that I should conquer the world?”

  “I am telling you that you can try.”

  “And Egypt?”

  “Egypt is waiting for you.”

  “I know nothing of that,” said Alexander.

  “Then maybe you should learn,” said Meriamon. “We can teach you, Alexander. Our land is very old, and our power runs deep. We can give you both.”

  “Can you give me the truth about what I am?”

  “If you will come to us,” she said, “we can.”

  “‘We’?”

  “My gods,” said Meriamon, “and my people.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  She smiled “Of course you don’t. You know so little, and yet you could have so much. Do you know anything of oracles?”

  He blinked at the shift, but his mind was quick. “Delphi?”

  “Ah,” she said. “Your bright god. No, I mean your father. He who speaks from your mother’s country, from Dodona of the great trees.”

  “He is not—” Alexander shut his mouth with a click. Opened it again, speaking tightly. “Yes. I know Dodona.”

  “That is one of the world’s ends,” said Meriamon. “There is another. Deep in the deserts of Libya, beyond the horizon of the Two Lands, where the god’s voice speaks out of the sand and the deep water. We call him Amon in my country, hidden god, sky-god, king of gods. He is your Zeus also, and his voice is the voice that speaks from the trees.”

  She had caught him. He leaned toward her, quivering like a hound on the scent. Behind him her father’s image seemed to stand taller, its eyes to glitter. “That place too I know,” he said. “They call it Siwah.”

  “Yes,” said Meriamon. “Siwah. It waits for you, if you will come to it. It holds the truth of all that you are.”

  “But,” he said, testing her even yet, because he was Alexander. “What good is truth, if Persia takes me from behind?”

  “Persia can do nothing to an empire fairly won.”

  His tension eased a fraction. His brows were knit. “And so we come back to it. You want me to conquer the world.”

  “Are you afraid to try?”

  The quick temper sparked. She smiled at it. “Maybe it’s you who should be afraid,” he said. “How do you know what I’ll do with your country once I have it?”

  “That is with the gods,” she said.

  “You’re quite mad, do you know that?”

  “Yes,” said Meriamon.

  He looked at her, at her calm under the gods’ wings, and the shadow of her father slanting long across her. Suddenly he laughed. “Well then, so am I. I’ll do it. I’ll be your king in Egypt.”

  Part Two

  Tyre

  Ten

  Meriamon should have been content. She had Alexander’s promise and his army’s readiness to march out of Sidon. They were going to Egypt. The king was coming to the throne which the gods had ordained.

  Maybe it was the wine she had had at dinner with the king, little as she had drunk of it. She left early and exhausted, but she slept badly, and her dreams were dark. Even her shadow, set on guard, could not drive them away. “I did what you asked,” she cried out to them. “I gained what you wanted. Why won’t you let me go?”

  They returned no answer. Only words she could not hear, promises, commands, remonstrance or reassurance that she could not catch. She rose more tired than when she had lain down, to hear the word that had gone out. Tomorrow they left Sidon. Comfortable as some of the army had been, no one grumbled where she could hear. It was a fine clear day, if cold, with a keen wind off the sea. Good packing weather, and if it held, splendid for marching in.

  She had little to pack, and that was taken care of. Phylinna and the servants had it in hand. There was nothing for her to do but hang about and watch and get in the way.

  In the end she went up on the walls, looking for a moment’s peace. The city was like an anthill stirred with a stick, but it was quiet up there, high over the harbor, with the sea beyond so blue it pierced the heart. Khemet had never been a country for seafarers. Yet here on the height of Sidon, with the wind in her face, she almost understood. No bitter Red Land here, no desert as far as the eye could see, no Black Land ever reborn from the Nile. Only wind and stones and changeful, changeless sea.

  Her shadow did not like it at all. It stretched thin behind her, shivering. Sekhmet, wise cat, had stayed in the house where it was warm.

  She sighed at them both. Niko at least looked happy. He stood apart from her, leaning on the parapet, and eyed the ships as if he had a mind to buy them. She would have to look at his arm later. Eshmun’s priestess had worked no miracle over it, but there had been something there, in the words she spoke, in the water she washed it with. He was in a little less pain today, who by rights should have been in more, what with riding so far and going straight to dinner afterward, and never a thought of resting. Though whether even a god could give him back full use of his hand—

  It was well for him that he was left-handed. His sword-arm was safe. He could fight, even, as long as he could manage a shield, though when it came down to fighting hand to hand, a man with two strong arms had every advantage over a man with one.

  The worst of it, for him, was simple vanity. His face was forthrightly unhandsome, with its strong bones and its heavy jaw, but his body was well made, and he knew it. A scarred and withered arm, however proud a memory of battle, destroyed the symmetry that Hellenes prized so much.

  One thing Meriamon could grant the older Macedonians: they did not hold with Greek nonsense about beauty. Scars were beautiful because they made a man. Scars taken in battle were most beautiful of all.

  She rubbed her own smooth-skinned arm and shivered. The wind was growing no warmer, though the sun was high.

  Niko saw the movement, standing there without sleeves or trousers, with his cloak blowing out behind him. He reached up to his shoulder and undid the sunburst brooch. Before she could stop him, he had wrapped the heavy thing about her.

  It was warm. It smelled of horses and of clean sweat. She would happily have curled up in it and let him grin at her, but he was still her charge. She struggled out of the cloak, which no more wanted to leave her than she wanted to leave it, and made him put it on again. “I won’t be responsible for your death of cold,” she said.

  “But,” said Niko, “if you turn to ice and shatter, my hide is forfeit.”

  “I’m not that fragile!”

  “Oh, you’re as tough as old leather. But you grew up in Egypt. This is a fine balmy day in Macedon.”

  “Gods forbid that I ever look on that country,” she said through chattering teeth.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said. “Wild, and sometimes even we find it cold. It makes us strong.”

  “I should like to see you on a fine balmy day in Thebes, when the sun sends his lances straight down and the sand send
s its heat straight up, and even the desert falcon takes refuge in the shade.”

  He shuddered.

  She reached up and patted his shoulder. “There now. You have something to look forward to.”

  “The king loves heat,” said Niko. “He loves cold, too. Nothing ever stops him.”

  “Except idleness.”

  “Well,” said Niko. “Then he finds something to do. Like conquer the world.”

  She laughed. He had lifted her spirits. Again. He made a habit of that. Not that she would tell him, or he would stop. He was as bad as Alexander about doing anything that anyone else wanted him to do.

  o0o

  The sun was shining when they left Sidon, and the strong wind blowing, making their armor glitter, whipping their cloaks behind them. The horses danced and snorted and flagged their tails. The men sang as they marched. Alexander, up in front of them all, led them in a song that must have reddened ears even in the prostitutes’ quarter. The Sidonians, to their credit, cheered him on his way regardless, and some of them even rode beside him.

  “They’re not horsemen,” Thaïs said, watching them.

  She spoke as one who knew. Her seat on the sand-colored mule was competent, and she would stay there for as long as she needed to, but it was plainly no pleasure.

  “They’d rather be on shipboard,” Meriamon agreed. Her mare was restive, not liking this crawling pace. When they came out to more open country, Meriamon would let her run for a bit. Others would be doing it, too. And Alexander might even try his trick for passing the time on the march: running alongside a chariot, now leaping in and riding, now leaping out and matching the horse’s pace.

  Niko was riding again on the same gelding he had had before. When she met his eye, he stared levelly back. He was not going to walk, it was clear, as long as anyone else was riding.

  As long as he did not look ready to faint, she would allow it.

  She looked over her shoulder. Sidon was no city of hers, but it had housed her for a while. And Eshmun had favored her cause with the king. She offered him a prayer of thanks. He had not healed her of anything that troubled her; but only Khemet could do that.

  She faced forward. South, with the wind at her back. Southward to Egypt.

  o0o

  An hour out of Sidon, Alexander’s cavalry transformed itself into infantry, freed the horses from their bits and returned them to the lines, and swung into the rhythm of the foot-pace. Half a day out of Sidon, the clouds rolled in.

  Well before nightfall the rains came down. Wind drove them. Sleet edged them. Men wrapped their armor in leather and themselves in their cloaks and endured. Beasts lowered their heads and tucked in their tails and pressed on.

  Meriamon, in two wool cloaks and a leather one, was more exquisitely miserable than she had ever imagined she could be. The cold, the wet, the wind, conspired to leach her body of every spark of warmth. The cold sank swiftly into her bones, and there stayed. Nothing that she did could shake it free.

  In camp that night they had the tent, and fire in the brazier, tended lovingly by the servants. It warmed the air a little. It warmed Meriamon’s bones not at all.

  She slept a little, shivering. Her dreams were the same dreams, but for once she welcomed them, because they were warm. She woke to cold and wet and endless rain.

  She ate what somebody gave her, but after a bite or two it gagged her. She found her mare—she would have to give the beast a name; names were everything; but there was nothing in her now but cold.

  She mounted. She rode. There was nothing to see but rain, nothing to hear but wind. She could not feel her hands or her feet.

  Warm. Something was warm. She floated. No, her head floated. Her body was lost somewhere below, poor miserable heavy thing. There was ice in its bones.

  “Mariamne!”

  A name? But it was not hers.

  “Mariamne!”

  Another one. Another voice. Quick. Angry?

  “Mariamne!”

  Three times was power. But not over Meriamon. She laughed at it. It roared back. No words at all. No name. Only wind and falling water, and cold, but so warm, so sweet, so light...

  “Damn it, she’s not made for this!”

  Words. Hurting-loud; piercing-sharp.

  “The fever’s broken.” Someone else, softer, calmer. “She’ll keep on sinking now, or she’ll come out of it. Either one. The gods will decide.”

  “The gods?” Laughter, short and bitter. “You believe in them after all?”

  “I believe that there is more to the world than what I can see.”

  “The king believes every word of them. Greek education or no. And he’ll give me to any one of them who asks, if this woman dies.”

  “Why? What can you do? You’re a guardsman, not a physician.”

  “I shouldn’t have let her get sick.”

  The soft voice lilted with mockery. “Oh, then you could have stopped her? You could have told the rain to go away, and calmed the wind?”

  “I could have made her ride in a wagon with some of the Persian women. They wouldn’t mind. They like her.”

  “Maybe,” said the other. The woman.

  “Maybe that’s still worth thinking of,” the man said. “Their tents are warmer, with all those rugs and carpets; and quieter, too. She’d get good nursing there.”

  “Better than here?”

  Thaïs. That was Thaïs talking. And Niko, rough in her ears, angry.

  Scared.

  No wonder, if he honestly believed that Alexander would punish him for her weakness.

  He said, “She’s too sick for me to look after. You, too; didn’t you just say so? The hospital’s wagon is no place for a sick woman.”

  There was a pause. Then: “I’ll ask Barsine,” said Thaïs.

  “But—” said Niko.

  A pause. A gust of icy air. “The rain has let up a little. I’ll do well enough. Phylinna! Come with me, please.”

  The cold blast stopped. Warmth crept about Meriamon. She opened her eyes, heavy as the lids were, resisting.

  Dimness. A lamp’s flicker. A huge shadow danced and capered. It was not her own. Her shadow was gone.

  Gone—

  Niko caught her and held her down. She struggled. “My shadow!” she cried to him. “My shadow—I can’t—”

  His face was empty of understanding. She could not make him understand.

  Not in Egyptian.

  Greek came back to her, poor stumbling snatches. “I can’t find my shadow.”

  “It’s right behind you.”

  She struggled in his grip. He was cradling her as if she were a child. To him she was no bigger than one. “That’s not my shadow. My shadow!”

  “It’s here,” he said. Not understanding. “It’s right here. Hush now. Rest.”

  “It’s not—” She broke off. He did not know. She clamped her lips shut and lay where she was, trying to breathe. Her lungs were not deep enough.

  “I’m sick,” she said. Startled. Not liking it at all.

  “You’re sick.” Niko kept on holding her. Rocking her, even. His face was never as gentle as his arm was, holding her in its curve, cradling her in his lap. He looked furious.

  “How long?”

  He looked down at her. “You’re not delirious.”

  “I am. Still. A little. Tell me! How long?”

  “Since yesterday.”

  “Since—” Her head fell back against his chest. “Two days. Two—nights?”

  “Just one.”

  A moan escaped her. “Gods. My shadow.”

  “Hush,” said Niko.

  She hushed. Her shadow was gone. There was nothing in her that could hunt for it. No strength. No power at all. The sickness had emptied her.

  After a long while she found another word. “Sekhmet?”

  “Here.”

  Soft paw, prick of claws. Murmur of inquiry: “Mrrrttt?”

  “Sekhmet,” said Meriamon. The cat’s light weight lofted into the nest
that Niko’s arm and lap made of her body. She was not strong enough to gather the cat in. Sekhmet did that herself, butting against Meriamon’s chin, purring.

  Niko was grinning. It died as soon as Meriamon saw it, became his usual scowl. “You are awake. You really are.”

  “For a little while.” Meriamon sighed, coughed. He tensed; his grip tightened to pain. “Please,” she said.

  He stopped hurting her. He did not lay her down. He was sitting on her bed. He looked tired, as if he had had too little sleep for too long.

  “I should look at your hand,” she said.

  “You should not,” he said. “Philippos looked at it yesterday, after you fainted. He said it was mending perfectly well.”

  “Not better than well?”

  He did not understand that, either. She did not try to sigh again, since it scared him so when she did. He was warm, at least. And not in pain, that she could tell. There were worse places to rest her head. Maybe, if she kept quiet, he would sleep.

  It was she who slept, sliding down into the long dreamless dark. And woke to moving and jostling and a babble of voices, someone asking a question and someone answering.

  “Still alive?”

  “Still.”

  “Thank the gods.”

  “Of course I’m still alive!” Meriamon snapped.

  Strangers’ faces stared at her. The voices were long gone. She breathed in the scent of Persian unguents and looked at Persian faces, and thought. No. And, Out. Must go—out—

  They caught her and made her drink wine heavy with spices and thick with sleep, and held her until she succumbed to it. She struggled even then, battling captivity.

  o0o

  “How is she?”

  This voice she would know when she lay in her tomb. This one would call her souls together and make her live again.

  “Sleeping,” said someone female, someone who hardly mattered. “Breathing—better than before, I think. We had to dose her. She went wild when she saw where she was.”

  “Nobody warned her?” he said sharply.

  “Alexander,” the woman said, respectful without servility, “as sick as she is, she would hardly remember.”