Lord of the Two Lands Read online

  They had stopped ahead. Some of them had spears. None of them moved; they seemed hardly to breathe.

  Meriamon made her way to them. Alexander was lost amid the taller men, until one of them shifted. She saw what had stopped them.

  Two of them, eye to eye with Alexander. His eyes were wide. One was almost black, and the other was almost silver.

  Theirs could not be anything but wide, cold and yellow and slit-pupiled. Their hoods were spread. Their forked tongues tasted the air. Tails coiled, long bodies raised and swaying gently, they were as tall as the king.

  One of the Bodyguard jerked forward, spear up, face a rictus of disgust. Ptolemy caught him and hurled him back bodily. “You fool! Do you want to kill the king?”

  “I’m not going to die.” Alexander’s voice was soft, a little blurred, as if he spoke from a dream. He did not glance at Meriamon, could not have seen her coming, but he said, “Mariamne. Did you ask your gods for guides?”

  “I don’t think I needed to,” she said.

  The serpents swayed toward her. They were beautiful, all supple length and glistening scales. Their hoods were like the headdress of Pharaoh in his great house.

  Very, very carefully she bowed to them. She went low and low, but with an eye always upon them. “Great ones,” she said to them in the oldest of tongues, the language of priests from the dawn of the Two Lands. “Handmaidens of Edjo in the house of the horizon. I bring to you the lord of Upper and Lower Egypt, king from across the sea, son of that one whom you know.”

  The nearer serpent hissed. The other dipped its head and flowed along the sand southward and westward. At the length of a furrow in Thebes it stopped, curved round, raised its head again.

  “It says,” said Meriamon, “follow.”

  Alexander shook himself. For a moment she thought that he would laugh, or say something unfortunate. The serpent that had not moved could strike in an eyeblink. Would. She knew that as she knew the feel of the earth beneath her feet.

  But he only tilted his head, looking from her to the serpents. Maybe at last he understood what this was that he did. “Go on,” he said. “I’ll be behind you.”

  o0o

  Meriamon did not want to lead, but Alexander was adamant. She was a shield of sorts. And an interpreter, though surely it was obvious what their guides wanted of them.

  They were allowed to rest at night. The serpents left them then, and they breathed a little easier, all of them, until the fear struck. If they were being led into perdition—if their guides did not come back—

  The serpents came back the first morning, and again the second. By the third the travelers were something like comfortable, even the horses, who the first day had been unmanageable until their grooms took them to the rear and kept them there. Horses were on speaking terms with divinity, and often foaled of the wind; but snakes were the Enemy, even snakes who belonged to the gods.

  Meriamon spent most of the first day upbraiding herself for doubting that the gods were looking after their chosen king. She had been perilously close to despair, even after the rain.

  That was the malice in the earth, working on her weaknesses. It had little enough to do, when it came to that. She had never been perfect in her faith.

  This was hardly a sign for her. The gods knew the Enemy—they could hardly escape it. They wanted Alexander in their oracle. Meriamon was but a means to their end.

  It was a comfort of sorts, to be insignificant. She walked behind the serpents, keeping the pace they set.

  Alexander walked behind her. His Companions walked behind him. The camels kept the outer line, with guards to watch for raiders, and the horses held the rear, just ahead of the rear guard.

  The land did not change from day to day. It was the same barren undulation of rock and sand. The same blue infinity of sky. Even the same vulture hovering against it, wide wings, blood-speck of head peering down.

  Nekhbet’s eyes, Meriamon thought. As the hawk that flew over them was Horus, winging into the sun. And when night fell, the sky would be the arch of a goddess’ body, the stars the garment that clothed her, and the moon the jewel on her neck.

  They were not in the world any longer. That the guides, born and bred to this country, had not known the shape of it after the storm, nor had they known it since—Meriamon had known in her heart, even then, what that meant. Now she let herself acknowledge it.

  Where they were...

  They taught in Thebes, and likewise in Memphis, that the gods dwelt beyond the horizon. That the horizon of the west, the Red Land between the river and the sunset, was both living earth and land of the dead. That one could walk through a door, or through the words of a spell, or even through the wall of a storm, and come to that earth on which no living creature walked.

  It was exactly like the land of the living. The sun rode there, the priests taught, when it was night for living men; and who was to say that Alexander’s company had not somehow turned itself about and entered day-in-night?

  She stooped, the morning of that third day, and took up a handful of sand. It was simply sand. Dry, whispering as it trickled from her palm. She had eaten bread before dawn, fresh from baking in a fire of camel dung, and drunk wine thinned with water from the rain. She knew what she had been doing before she had to rise and eat: her belly was warm with it still, and Niko kept smiling to himself in odd moments.

  Ptolemy was chaffing him for it; he snapped back, stung. Their voices were living voices, rough-sweet and pleasant to hear at her back as Edjo’s servants slithered in front of her, leading her to the oracle.

  And yet there was her shadow. It walked beside her, and it was a man with a jackal’s head, its body as solid as her own. No one looked at it askance, or said anything of the stranger in the mask.

  Its name touched the edge of her tongue. She almost said it. Anubis. Guide and guardian. Though for her it had always been more the latter; and here their guides were Edjo’s servants.

  She was not afraid. That surprised her. There were two of her. Flesh walking in the land of flesh. Ka-spirit walking in this land, the dry land, the land of coming forth by day.

  She glanced back. The company held their ranks, marching as they had marched since Rhakotis. They sensed nothing amiss. Now and then one fell out to relieve himself or to shake a stone out of his boot. Someone was singing about a boy with cheeks like a peach.

  Her shadow left her side to walk ahead. Edjo’s serpents slowed for it. It came up between them; they went on. Its ears tilted back at her, then flicked forward. Guarding her still.

  Someone else took her shadow’s place. It was not Niko, though he was close enough. Arrhidaios watched her shadow with wide interested eyes, and said, “We’re somewhere else. Aren’t we?”

  That was one way to put it. Meriamon said, “We’ll be safe.” Or so, at least, she hoped.

  “There are things back there,” Arrhidaios said. “Watching. The horses don’t like them.”

  Meriamon kept her eyes sternly to the front. “What sort of things?”

  “Things,” said Arrhidaios, shrugging. “Like him”—he tilted his chin at her shadow—”but ugly. They just watch. They have knives.”

  She stumbled and almost fell. Arrhidaios caught her hand to steady her. “Are you all right, Meri?”

  “Yes.” She said it through stiff lips. “They cannot touch us. I know their names.”

  If names were enough. If the scribes and the priests had known truly, and not through a veil of lies and guesses.

  She was marching through simple desert to an oasis and a temple. There were no demons behind the company.

  “I can count them,” said Arrhidaios proudly. “Seven and seven and seven, and three more sevens. Six sevens.”

  “Six sevens,” she said. “Yes. That is their number.”

  She would not look back. If she looked back, her bowels would melt.

  Words came to her. She spoke them, slowly at first, faintly, then louder and stronger. “In truth I walk. In the
Hall of the Two Truths I walk. In Osiris’ name, in Horus’ name, in the name of Isis, Mother, goddess, lady of the living and the dead, I defend me. From the bearers of knives, from the eaters of souls, from the Powers that wait upon the day of judgment, deliver me.”

  Silence. Her shadow paced without pausing. Edjo’s serpents slithered on either side.

  She looked over her shoulder. Her eye caught Niko’s. He smiled, sudden warmth, a surge of pure strength.

  Alexander was beyond him. He had been down the line, keeping company with the singers. Once away from them, he lost his air of lightness.

  He knew.

  She waited for him to come level with her. As she waited she sang softly, little more than a croon. “I am the hawk of the desert. I am the cat soft-footed in shadow. I am the sand across the empty track. I walk unseen. I walk defended. No demon touches me.”

  She stopped. Alexander was beside her.

  “You see them, too,” said Arrhidaios before Meriamon could begin. “You do, don’t you, Alexander?”

  Alexander patted him on the shoulder. When he spoke, it was to Meriamon. “What are they?”

  “Watchers,” she said.

  “Armed?”

  “It’s their way,” she said.

  He frowned at the three who led them. “Tell me,” he said. “Tell me that that is a Nubian in a mask. And that those, back there, are more men who like, for reasons best known to themselves, to wear the heads of animals and carry naked knives and follow strangers through the dry land.”

  “They’re not men,” she said. “But the rest is true enough.”

  She saw him shiver. “What... do they do?”

  “They watch.” That did not satisfy him. She said after a moment, “They judge. But that is in the hall. This is the open land.”

  “Is it?”

  She glanced upward in spite of herself. If that vault was the vault of a ceiling, and about her walls as vast as a world, and under her feet not sand but smoothed stone...

  Stone of every kind that was in the world, laid in patterns that lured the eye, and having won it, netted it and drew it down and down. Pillars like tall fans of papyrus or like the trees of the Lebanon, inlaid with gold and precious things, lapis and carnelian and malachite. Vault the color of the sky at night, or perhaps the sky on the verge of morning, when all was darkest, and day a dream to which there was no waking.

  “No,” she said. “It is the desert of Libya, and tomorrow we will come to Siwah.”

  “What do they judge?” Alexander asked her, pitiless as a child, and as innocently persistent.

  “Souls,” she answered him.

  “We’re alive, I think,” he said.

  “We are,” she said. “This is the land of the living. This is the sun that rises in the morning and sets at evening. Those are the stars that rise and set.”

  Each word came with the weight of a world. Here the worlds met. Here, if she slackened, or if she failed to name each name as it was given in the morning of the worlds, the world she built would crumble and fade.

  “This is sky,” she said. “This is the sun, that is the boat of Ra, that sails on the sea of the million years. This is sand. Red Land of the west, desert beyond the green fields of Egypt. This is life.”

  Her foot turned a stone. She picked it up. It was sharp-edged; it tried to bite her hand as it had bitten her foot.

  She smiled at it. Pain was life. Pain was real. Pain was power in this shifting, wavering place.

  The desert melted into mist. The hall stretched before her. She knew its name. The Hall of Twofold Truth. And in it, moving from behind her to take their ancient places, six sevens of Watchers. Man-formed, now man-high, now as vast as giants, with the faces of hungry beasts. Their knives glittered in the pitiless light. Their teeth gleamed.

  One that wore a jackal’s smile met her eyes with eyes the color of blood, and sketched what might have been a bow.

  She shot a glance over her shoulder. Her shadow kept its place as it always did, and its eyes were as clear as the living sky of Khemet. And yet it too was of this place.

  The Watchers closed in slowly. Beyond them swayed a balance. Her shadow’s image stood beside it, ears pricked, alert. In his clawed hand, stirring with the airs that moved in the hall, lay a feather. Its name was Justice.

  Below the balance crouched a Beast. Its jaws gaped. Its eyes gleamed.

  Hungry.

  Meriamon’s souls quailed. They knew its name; none better man they. Eater of Souls.

  Something—someone—wavered before the balance. Dead soul, woman’s it might have been, slender and afraid. Behind her rose a throne, and on the throne the lord of this place, dead god wrapped in cerements and crowned with the Two Crowns.

  The crowned head bent. Its face was a mask, the mask of the dead. In the pits of its eyes was the darkness between stars.

  The Guide laid the feather in one arm of the balance. In the other he laid a beating, crimson thing: a heart, and in its essence a name, the name of the soul that waited upon the judgment.

  The balance quivered. If the heart proved the weightier, the stronger in truth, then the soul was free, and freed to enter the lands of ever-living. If the heart were the lighter, the feebler in justice, it would fail, and the soul would fall, and be devoured. The soul stretched out her hand, as if she could sway the balance, send her heart swinging down under the weight of her will.

  The feather dropped. The heart flew up. The soul wailed.

  Watchers caught her before she could flee, bound her with cords of night and sorrow. They took no heed of her struggles, or of her keening that was like the cry of a bird. They cast her into the waiting maw.

  “Zeus Pater!” Alexander’s oath rang among the pillars. No god came to it, no flare of levin-light in the dimness of ages. Nothing of Hellas had power in this place.

  Alexander sprang past Meriamon. His hand was on his swordhilt, the blade half-drawn. She seized his wrist with both hands and held, though he dragged her nearly off her feet.

  He halted. His eyes were wild. “That thing,” he said. “Those things—”

  They circled. Eyes, fangs, ill-will so strong that it choked like a stench. Living flesh, living blood, cold steel in this place of all places in all the worlds—

  Death was the penalty for walking living here. Cold blades would pierce their flesh that was so warm and solid, cut out their hearts that dared beat where all hearts were stilled, sunder their souls and cast them into the maw of the Devourer.

  Alexander had never been afraid of anything, in the world or out of it. He laughed in their faces.

  “Walk,” Meriamon said. Her voice was thin with strain. “For the love of life, walk!”

  He walked. He left a trail of light. The hall trembled in it like an image caught in water.

  Meriamon’s magic, quelled and cowed as it had been, found strength it had not known it had. It willed another image, another world, a world of light and the living.

  She built it of the light that was her king. She made it grow about her. She made it strong, she made it real, she fixed it with the power of the word and the will and the name.

  The hall of the dead was gone. They walked in the world of the living. Living sand under their feet. Living sky over their heads.

  The sun was westering, but it was high still. And the night ahead of it; and morning that would bring them to their end. Siwah. Or, if they failed the test, the Hall of Twofold Truth, and six sevens of Watchers, and the Eater of Souls with jaws opened wide to devour all that they were.

  “Sun,” she said. “Sky. Earth. Sand. Stone.” Over and over. No elegance in it after a while. No fine turn of phrase. It was not the elegance that imparted power; it was the name, and the will behind the name. To make the world real. To hold the Watchers at bay. To bring night and not everlasting day; stars that changed and set, and not stars that could not die.

  Her body, or her ka’s body, walked in the wake of the shadow and the serpents. A white light w
alked with it. In the sun, a second sun. In the night, a beacon.

  “Alexander,” she said. The name resounded through all the levels of the worlds. The name that his father had given; that, nonetheless, the gods had willed. Alexander.

  Thirty-One

  Sometimes Meriamon’s soul was her body’s image, walking as her body walked, with a stone clutched in its palm. Sometimes it was a bird with a woman’s head, fluttering through a changeless sky, under stars that did not move.

  Whatever it was, it knew what it followed, the serpents and the Guide; and what it followed them to, the presence beyond the horizon. A place of living green, a forest in the heart of the desert, and the temple in the midst of it, the halls and the courts, and the fountain of the Sun from which the rest of it sprang.

  There were others who followed her. Shadows, but shadows with faces, and about them, in some greater, in some less, a shimmer of light. Deep earth and green silences and a tang of iron: Nikolaos her guardsman and her beloved, guarding her without fear in this most fearsome of places. Earth too but with a sharpness that was fire, a suggestion of brimstone: Ptolemy, near kin to Niko, and kin likewise to the rioting fire that was Alexander, less than he by far but potent enough in his souls’ center. And with them one who was all earth shot through with light, now blurred and dimmed and muddied, now shining forth as clear and pure as a star out of clouds in Hellas.

  Arrhidaios in the souls’ shape, bred of Alexander’s blood and kin, with a beauty and a strength in him that caught her unawares. It did not weaken her spell, but made it stronger, broadened and deepened it and held the world to its solidity.

  Greater than any of them, so bright that he cast shadows in the shadowless land, was the one who walked closest behind her. He was coming to a destiny. Whether it was the one he wanted, or whether he would be given another altogether, the gods were not telling.

  “If I am,” she heard him say to the shadow beside him. “If I really am—but if I’m not—”