Lord of the Two Lands Page 23

  “No,” she said. “Not Gaza. Not Batis and his soldiers, though they share a part of it. They’ve called up something else. Waked it, brought it with them—it doesn’t matter which. It means you no good.”

  “No more did Melqart’s priests,” Alexander said. “They gave way easily enough, and there was more to them than I’ll ever see here.” He smiled and helped her up. “There now. You’re heatstruck, that’s all, and half mad as we all are with another siege so hard on the heels of the other. It will be over soon; we’ll bring you home to Egypt. Did you know I’ve had embassies from Mazaces the satrap? He’s minded to let me in without a fight. Wise man, Mazaces.”

  “The Parsa are not always fools,” she said. “Or cowards, either.”

  Alexander set her in the chair, as solicitous as if she had been a queen, and smiled down at her. It was a bright boy-smile, with no shadow in it. “They aren’t, are they? I’ve liked the ones I’ve met. Very much, some of them. Queen Sisygambis is more of a man than most of the men I’ve seen; and Artabazos is a philosopher. It used to drive Aristotle wild when I said as much, but I meant it. I still do.”

  Meriamon heard him out. He was talking around her, and he knew it as well as she. When he finished she said, “I think you should forget this siege and go on. It’s ill for you. It turns your mind on itself and gnaws it to pieces. Better to leave it behind, and find your strength in Egypt.”

  “I can’t do that,” he said much too reasonably. He should have been furious that she should see a weakness in him, and speak of it so clearly. “With Persia rising like a wave in the east, and the sea-cities barely subdued, I can’t leave one to think it’s thwarted me. Others will follow once they see what one can do, and I’ll have the whole war to fight again.”

  “Not if you die here.”

  There. She had said it. It was cold and hard in her heart, and true, a seer’s truth.

  He laughed. “Oh, come! You’ve been listening to my soothsayers. Mutter, mutter, mumble, mumble, and dark days lie ahead, and things worse than dark, but they know and I know what they mean. There’s the danger. If I’m made to think I’ll die, so I will, and the enemy will have his way.”

  “I haven’t listened to anyone,” she said, “but the gods who are in me. I see death for you here. What is the word the Greeks use? Hubris. I see it in you.”

  His eyes went wide and pale. “Lady,” he said with careful control. “Mariamne. You are what you are, and I grant you fair indulgence. But you are not Alexander.”

  “Nor are you,” she said, “when you speak so. There is a god in you, I have no doubt of it. But even gods must acknowledge their limits.”

  “I’m not a god,” he said. Quickly. Fiercely. “I am a king. I do as a king must. Hellas calls me to this war, Egypt waits for me, Asia cries out to me. Tyche—Tyche who is Fate—commands all that I do.”

  “Even your Tyche, who is like and unlike our Ma’at, allows a choice. If you leave now, you can come back with all Egypt behind you and scatter this city to the winds.”

  “If Persia will let me, or Phoenicia stay subdued.” Alexander’s face was firm, set against her. “I thank you for your trouble. You mean well, I know. But I won’t change my mind.”

  She stood. He had to retreat quickly or be overset. Arrhidaios stood behind him with a cup in his hand, staring at them both. She took the cup with as much of a smile as she could muster, and drank it down. “Thank you,” she said.

  Arrhidaios’ eyes shifted away from her. “You should listen to her, Alexander,” he said. “She sees the bad thing, too.”

  Alexander did not turn on his brother. The softening of his face was never for Meriamon, and his words though gentle had no yielding in them. “So do I. It doesn’t scare me.”

  “It should,” said Arrhidaios. “It’s bad.”

  “Why, what does it look like to you?”

  Arrhidaios knit his heavy brows and pulled at his beard. For a moment he might have been right in the head: a man of the king’s council called on to settle a difficult dispute. Then he covered his eyes with his hands and shrank down shivering. “It’s bad,” he said, sobbing it. “It’s bad!”

  “Hush,” said Alexander, kneeling beside him and holding him tightly. “It can’t hurt you.”

  “It doesn’t want to. It wants you.”

  “It won’t get me.”

  Arrhidaios clutched his brother’s arm, pulling him about, face to face. “It bites you,” he said. “Like a snake. Niko caught a snake. It bit a dog. The dog swelled up and died. Niko killed it, and a dog ate it, and it died too.”

  “I’m not a dog. I won’t die.”

  “It’s bad,” said Arrhidaios. “It’s bad!”

  Alexander’s lips were tight. Meriamon could see the flesh reddening and swelling where Arrhidaios gripped him. How strong the man was, she well knew. But Alexander voiced no protest. “Hush,” he said. “Hush.”

  Soon enough Arrhidaios hushed. He let Alexander go, only to bury his head in his brother’s shoulder. Alexander rocked him, murmuring in Macedonian, brother-words, mother-words, comfort-words.

  Over the rough dark head he met Meriamon’s stare. He did not speak. Nor did she. She left them there, the king and the one who could have been king if he had grown as a man should. Simple earthly sickness, it might have been, that addled his wits in youth. Or mischance: a nurse’s carelessness, a guardsman’s failure to watch over him. Or poison sent awry. Or an ill working, a spell sung in the dark of the moon.

  The darkness was fouling all that she thought of. She fled it as best she could, seeking the nearest refuge.

  o0o

  Thaïs was just out of bed—was it still only midmorning?—and retching into a basin. That was a common enough sight after a Macedonian drinking-bout, but Thaïs did not often succumb to it. Meriamon would have gone by; Phylinna had matters well in hand. But she paused. She was counting, reckoning mornings and frequencies.

  Yesterday, yes. And the day before. Not the day before that, but Meriamon had gone early to the hospital and stayed late, and she had not seen Thaïs at all.

  It was admirable distraction from what beset her. She went to kneel by Thaïs, taking the basin from the servant. The girl was delighted to be relieved of such duty; she backed away.

  Thaïs lay back at last, exhausted. Phylinna wiped her brow with a dampened cloth, clucking to herself.

  Meriamon leveled an eye at the servant, who retrieved the basin and took it elsewhere. To the privies, Meriamon hoped, and not simply to the back of the tent.

  Thaïs sighed. It caught. Meriamon looked about swiftly for another basin, but Thaïs said, “It’s over. Just... a last remembrance.”

  “Does Ptolemy know?” asked Meriamon.

  “Not yet.” Thais seemed not at all surprised that Meriamon had guessed. Meriamon was Egyptian after all, and a physician. She could hardly fail to know what these morning indispositions meant.

  “Will you keep it?”

  The hetaira closed her eyes. After a moment she opened them. They were as old as Khemet. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Do you want to?”

  “I don’t know that, either.”

  “Maybe you should ask its father.”

  Thaïs stiffened at the word. Offended? Startled? “No,” she said. “This child is mine. I’ll do the choosing for it.”

  Meriamon did not say anything. Fathers chose in Hellas, she knew that: to take up the child and rear it, or to expose it on the hillside. But that was a living child. Whether its mother would bear it at all—that was another matter.

  Her hand went to her own middle. No life kindled in it. None would. She had bought power and purpose, and a destiny, and paid in the children she would have borne. Yet she could feel—could imagine—the spark caught, swelling, waxing into humanity.

  It hurt. She had not expected that.

  Thaïs sat up. She wobbled; Phylinna steadied her. She waved the maid away. Color came back to her cheeks. She looked like herself again
.

  The little page whom Ptolemy had given her after Tyre, eunuch already and reared for Tanit’s temple, stood with cup and bowl. Thaïs smiled at him. He blushed and ducked his head. He was a pretty thing, less oily-sleek than most of his kind, and endearingly shy.

  “Do you know what I discovered last night?” asked Thaïs in her bright brittle day-voice. “Thettalos is back.”

  “The Thessalian?” Meriamon had heard the name, but at the moment she could not remember where. “One of the cavalry?”

  Thaïs laughed. “Oh! I forget. You came after Issus. He was gone by then—he wintered in Hellas, and summered there, too, till he decided to come back to Alexander. They’re dear friends. He’s the best tragic actor in Hellas. He has a troupe that he takes everywhere, and they do the plays at festivals. Have you ever seen the tragedy?”

  “Once,” said Meriamon, “or twice, when I was small. We have part-rites of our own. Osiris’ are famous, that are sung in Abydos.”

  “Then you know what it’s like, though no one does it as well as Thettalos. He’s going to do scenes tonight, just for the king’s friends. Will you come? Niko will be there,” said Thaïs, wicked. “He never misses a performance.”

  That decided it. Meriamon would not go. She did not need to contend with the disturbance that he was, with all the rest that beset her. She heard herself say, “I’ll go.”

  Thaïs clapped her hands. “Oh, good! I’ll wear my Egyptian gown. I have a new collar. It’s not as handsome as yours, but I look very well in it. Almost a proper Egyptian.”

  o0o

  Meriamon, improper Egyptian, regarded Thaïs in her finery and smiled. The hetaira would never look anything but Greek, but the sheer linen and the golden pectoral set off her body’s richness admirably.

  She preened in it, shaking her head to make the plaits dance. Her hair did not take well to the hundred tiny braids that Meriamon wore, but she professed herself well content with a simpler fashion, narrow plaits about the face, the rest caught up in a fillet more Greek than Egyptian, but very becoming. Meriamon said so.

  “You of course are exquisite,” said Thais. “What I would give for bones that fine... and those eyes! If you ever tire of being a priestess, you’d make a splendid courtesan.”

  “I’ll remember that,” said Meriamon, trying not to blush.

  o0o

  The king’s friends were gathered in his tent, in the central hall made larger by the removal of the inner walls. A half-circle of couches faced another of the walls, and emptiness in front of it, an absence waiting to be filled. There was wine and a flute player, and a blind man plucking sweet random notes on a lyre.

  Thaïs went at once as she always did, to Ptolemy’s couch. Meriamon could not see one that was empty. Most had two already, man and woman or man and youth. There were a few on which men reclined alone.

  One was Niko’s. Meriamon sat in the woman’s place and took the cup that the servant filled for her. He was massively silent. She slanted a glance over her shoulder. “Good evening,” she said.

  “Good evening,” he replied civilly. “You’re looking very pretty.”

  “And you,” she said.

  His brows flew up. She laughed at his expression. Pretty, no, that was not the word. But his chiton looked new, and seemed—was—heavy raw silk. Its hem was embroidered with gold. He had his good cloak draped over the couch, the one he had taken as booty in Tyre, the beautiful amethyst purple of a lighter dyeing. It was not so highly prized as the deep-dyed royal vermilion, but she loved the color of it. A fillet bound his hair, raw silk again, and a thin strand of gold. She smoothed a lock that was minded to stray. “You’re very pleasant to look at,” she said.

  “I’d rather look at you.”

  “Then we’re both content,” said Meriamon. She considered briefly. No one was looking, nor, on reflection, would she care if anyone did. She stretched out, leaning on her elbow, her back against his front.

  He hardly flinched. Brave man. She sipped her wine and nibbled the dainties that came her way and decided that she liked to have him so close. As close as her shadow, but warmer.

  The king made an entrance as he liked to do, with Peritas on a lead and, somewhat surprisingly, Arrhidaios walking behind. The king’s brother had a clean chiton and an eager expression. He greeted Meriamon with delight. “Meri! You’ll see Thettalos too.”

  “I will,” she said.

  “Sit with me?” he asked.

  Meriamon did not know what to say.

  “Niko won’t mind,” said Arrhidaios. “Will you, Niko? You can sit with Alexander.”

  People were grinning. Niko, for a marvel, did not even frown. “You can sit with the lady,” he said, almost managing not to sound relieved.

  A little man tugged at Arrhidaios’ arm: the chief of his guardians, speaking softly. “Come, my lord. Here is a couch for you, right in front, and a pretty lady to wait on you.”

  “I want Meriamon,” said Arrhidaios.

  She started to rise. Alexander’s voice stilled them all, even the watchers who had begun to laugh. “Go on, brother. Thettalos is coming out soon. Don’t you want to hear him?”

  Arrhidaios’ face clouded. “I want Meriamon,” he said.

  “You may help Meriamon in the hospital in the morning,” said Alexander firmly.

  “Promise?”

  “I promise,” Meriamon said.

  Arrhidaios did not like it at all. His brows knit, stubborn. The servant tugged at him.

  Slowly Arrhidaios yielded. Meriamon sank back to the couch. Alexander’s eyes flashed over her and her companion. His smile was sudden and quite dazzling.

  When she had blinked the brilliance away, the king was at ease on his couch and the servants had dimmed the lamps, all but those which illuminated the space near the wall. They made a half-circle within the half-circle, a house of light amid the crowding shadows.

  The notes of the lyre, present but forgotten through the rest of it, gathered and came together. The flute wove among them. A drum began to beat, blood-beat, pulse-beat.

  He came out of the dark: a slender youth in a purple robe, dancing, swaying, with a golden branch in his hand. His face was white as marble, white as death, the eyes as deep as the darkness behind the stars. The skin of a spotted panther was his girdle and his cloak. His hair streamed down his back, tawny gold, loose long locks like a lion’s mane.

  He sang as he came. His voice was neither deep nor light, neither man’s nor woman’s. Youth’s, maybe, just broken and finding its depth. The purity of it walked cold down Meriamon’s spine. Zeus’ son, he, child of the gods, god become man beside the stream of Theban Dirce: Dionysos in the madness of wine.

  “From Lydia come I,” he sang, “from fields of gold, from Phrygia, from Persia’s sunstruck plains, from strong-walled towns of Bactria, cold-bitter Media and blessed Araby. All Asia have I conquered, and all the salt sea coast, all the fair cities, Hellene, barbarian, all: all mine, all worship me, all know that I am god.”

  Meriamon struggled to breathe, to see what eyes could see. A man in a Tyrian robe, in a worn and tattered panther-skin, his wig a lion’s mane, his mask—his mask—

  She tore her eyes from it. They fell on Alexander’s face. Half was in shadow, half in reflected light. The same face, ruddy to the pallor of the mask, and yet inescapably the same. The same expression, even, half mad, half exalted.

  He knew. He saw the god and the tribute. He took it as his due.

  She must have said something, made some move. Niko’s arm settled over her. His voice murmured in her ear. “Hush. Watch.”

  She watched. There were other people, other singers; or maybe it was only the actor’s skill, evoking them as surely as if they had been living flesh. There was a war of sorts. Women serving the god in a madness of ecstasy. The young king refusing him, denying his divinity—that too a madness, implacable, inescapable. He took arms against a god. His own mother slew him, rent him asunder, and the god, dancing, laughed. “Too late,�
�� he sang, “too late you knew me; too late you spoke my name.”

  Alexander never moved, hardly seemed to breathe. The mask’s strange smile was his own. The mask’s eyes, lightless dark, bore deep within a gleam of fire.

  “Thus,” sang the god, “my father Zeus ordained. So let it ever be.”

  Twenty

  “Hubris,” said Meriamon. She had been saying it too often. She knew that. People had stopped listening. Alexander was the young god, Herakles incarnate, Achilles come again, undefeated and undefeatable. That Gaza resisted him so well and so long—that was outrage, and the town would suffer for it.

  Having made an isthmus of Tyre and bound it irrevocably to the land, he made nothing of raising a hill in front of the mount of Gaza, to set his siege engines level with the walls. But Gaza was not Tyre. Its people knew what they had to hope for if their resistance failed. They had reason to fight, and fight they did.

  On the morning when Alexander’s hill drew level with that of Gaza, the king had his engines ready to begin the ascent, the crews waiting in the cool of the dawn, the priests around him at the altar as he blessed his work with sacrifice. It was the king’s duty to take the first victim. The wreath was on his head—odd to Meriamon’s eye as she watched, to see the green leaves brought from far away, and the king’s hair fallow gold under them, for it was near sunrise, the light of the torches gone pale. A little wind played with the garland, plucked a leaf and sent it spinning. The sacrifice, a fine fat ram, baaed inquiringly.

  Alexander smoothed its head before he raised its chin, the knife in his hand. As the knife touched the woolly throat, he started and staggered.

  A bird. Desert falcon, Meriamon thought, seeing the flash of wings against the sunrise. It had had something in its claws—a stone: someone held it up in a trembling hand.

  People stirred and muttered. Voices cried out against the omen.

  “Quiet!” Alexander’s voice cut across the growing roar.

  The ram blatted and lunged. Two of the priests flung themselves on it. They went down in a flurry of hoofs and robes and tattered garlands.