Lord of the Two Lands Read online

  “The god will tell you,” the shadow said. Cool softness like water, a chill that was iron, a glint of sudden brilliance: Hephaistion walking close behind his king, guarding him as Nikolaos guarded Meriamon.

  “But if I’m not the god’s son,” said Alexander, “if I’ve let myself believe it because I want to, and claimed all the rest in the name of a lie, then how will I live with myself after?”

  “I don’t think it is a lie,” said Hephaistion. “You have to live inside yourself. The rest of us can see what you are. You’re blazing like a torch in the dark, did you know that?”

  There was a pause, as if Alexander looked down at himself. “I look just the same as I always have.”

  “Exactly,” said Hephaistion.

  “But,” said Alexander all over again. “If I’m not—’

  She did not see what Hephaistion did to silence him. It was something subtle, she supposed. The others would have laughed and cheered them on, else.

  Doubt was the Enemy. She had suffered from it once, when her souls and she were one creature. She would again, very likely, when they were reunited.

  If they were. Her bird-soul liked the freedom of the sky, even under stars that did not change. Her ka was comfortable walking the track behind its guides. Her body did what it did. The place it was going to was close now. It could see the shimmer on the world’s edge, the blessed, impossible green.

  Some of the trees were in flower, sweet scent, fragile blossom; others in fruit, green or glowing ripe. After so long in the red land and the dun land, the sight almost broke its heart.

  Not it alone. The shadows of men came up behind it and streamed past it. Whether it had slowed or they had begun to run, she did not know.

  The guides were ahead of them still. She had no need of them. That was neither trick nor deceit, the place that opened before them. It was real in every world. The god’s house, the place of his prophecy. Siwah.

  “Meriamon.”

  The name spun a cord, thin as spider silk and as strong. It netted the bird-soul in its wandering. It looped round her ka. It wound them together so quickly that even the winged thing had barely moved before it was done.

  Flesh was leaden heavy after so long in the spirit. The sun was brazenly bright. She blinked in it.

  “Meriamon,” said the taller of the two shapes in front of her.

  “Meri,” said the other. “Meri, look. You almost got lost.”

  In more ways than one. She stared stupidly at the track she had been on. It led past the oasis and out into the desert.

  Her body would have followed it, blind and unguided, until sun and thirst struck it down. Her souls would have gone past the Lake of Fire and the Lake of Flowers, and entered the high hall, and seen the Watchers with their knives and their hungry eyes, and the Eater of Souls under the golden scale, and the dead king upon his throne.

  A thought, a word, a turning of the will, and she could go. They would weigh her heart against the feather of Justice, and find it sufficient or find it wanting, and grant her dissolution or life everlasting. She need only speak. Or not speak. For one of her blood and her power, it was as simple as that.

  “Meriamon!”

  Real fear, that. And temper. “You’re always calling me back from edges,” said Meriamon.

  “And I’m tired of it, too,” Niko said. “When are you going to stop mooning and dreaming and act like a sensible woman?”

  “I can’t,” she said. “It isn’t in me.”

  “You can try.”

  He was perfectly unreasonable. He had also brought her fully to herself.

  She had expected to be much more tired than she was. Her feet were sore, which was hardly surprising: she had walked an ungodly way. She was thirsty. And hungry. She was very much in the flesh.

  “I could have been comfortably dead,” she said.

  “Not while I have anything to say about it.”

  “You think you do?”

  “I know I do.”

  She glared. He glared back. Suddenly she began to laugh. So, after a moment, did he. And Arrhidaios, making no effort to understand them, simply being glad that they were glad.

  o0o

  For all the eternities that she had been soul-lost, the world of the living had advanced no more than a drip of the water clock. Alexander’s Companions were only now come through the wood—a forest of tangled branches, a track dim to darkness after the glare of sun on sand, then sudden sun and open space and the temple’s gate.

  The priests came forth in a wailing of pipes and a rattling of sistra, the high voices of women and the deep voices of men, and a whirl and sway of dancers. “Welcome,” they sang. “Welcome, lord of the Two Lands!”

  The serpent-guides were gone. Meriamon’s shadow was in back of her again, a shape without substance. Alexander stood in front of his Companions, dusty and wayworn: disheveled boyish man in a purple cloak much stained with travel, no height to boast of, too much brow and nose and cheek for proper beauty, his face red and his nose peeling and precious little dignity about him. Then he moved, and one forgot everything but that he was Alexander.

  The eyes. They ruled the rest of him, and the world with it.

  Meriamon was beside him. Someone had moved to give her room. Ptolemy. She bent her head to him. He dipped his own in acknowledgment.

  The crowd of welcomers had halted and spread in ranks along the wall. A man came down the aisle which they had made. He was neither old nor young, neither large nor small, neither beautiful nor ugly: a brown shaven man in a robe of white linen.

  He wore no ornament but one, but that was enough, a heavy collar of gold and lapis and carnelian. He carried a staff of dark wood, very old, and its head was a carven serpent. Meriamon felt the stir behind her as the Macedonians saw what it was.

  The high priest of Amon’s temple at Siwah advanced toward Alexander. Alexander waited, standing lightly, no sign of the tension that was in him; unless one knew him, and saw the way his hand clenched and unclenched in a fold of his cloak. He looked, Meriamon thought, like a warhorse on the edge of a battlefield. Alert, upheaded, not quite quivering.

  The priest paused at several paces’ remove. He was of a height with Alexander. His dark eyes met Alexander’s light ones. They were keen, measuring.

  Alexander lifted his chin a fraction. It was not for him to speak, the gesture said. He was the guest. Let the master of the place give him greeting, or refuse it.

  The high priest smiled very slightly. He bent his knee; slowly, with the grace of one who surely had been a dancer, he went down in obeisance. His voice went up in clear if accented Greek. “I give you welcome,” he said, “son of Amon.”

  Alexander’s body snapped erect.

  The priest went on. “Protected of Horus, face of Ra in the world of the living, child of the god who dwells in the wood and the spring. Great House of the Two Lands: welcome, welcome, welcome!”

  The last he sang in the tongue of Khemet, and the choir of women echoed him, sweet eerie voices ringing from wall of stone to wall of trees and up into the sky. Amid the torrent of sound, he took Alexander’s hand. Alexander made no effort to resist him. “Come with me,” he said, soft and breathtakingly ordinary after the priestesses’ chant.

  His Bodyguard stirred uneasily. He was rapt; enspelled, one might have said. But he mastered enough of himself to turn. “I’ll go,” he said. “I’m safe. No one will harm me here.”

  They did not like that, but his eyes were on them. Nor could any meet them.

  Except Hephaistion. As the priest led Alexander away, he moved to follow.

  Alexander paused again. “No,” he said. Hephaistion stopped. His face was perfectly still.

  Alexander smiled. There was all the love in the world in that smile, and all the regret. “If I could share,” he said, “I would. Only this, sweet friend. Only this of all that we’ve ever done or had or been...”

  “I can never be king,” Hephaistion said, soft and calm. “Nor would I want
to be.”

  Alexander touched his shoulder. Hephaistion stood stiff. Alexander seized him suddenly in a strong embrace and held him till his arms came up, a fierce, hard grip more like war than love. As abruptly as it had begun, it ended.

  They stepped apart. Alexander’s face now was as still as Hephaistion’s, as whitely, blankly rapt.

  The high priest was waiting. Alexander turned to follow him.

  o0o

  Meriamon went in behind them. She did not ask. She was not invited. No more than Hephaistion did she want to be a king, but she was royal born, and the voice of the gods. They were in her again.

  That, maybe, was what it was to be pregnant: that swelling fullness, that sense of a life inside one’s body, part of yet apart from one’s own. Pregnancy filled the belly. This filled the heart and the head.

  They took Alexander to the inner temple. She went where her feet led her, past the door through which he had gone, into a broad pillared hall open to the sky.

  There the choir of priestesses had come. There were the strongest of the priests, a full four score of them, ranged for all the world like the Macedonians’ phalanx, and in the center of the square a great gilded thing like a ship yet on shafts like a litter.

  On its deck rode the image of the god. In Thebes he was most like a man, but ram-horned. Here he wore no human shape at all. He was a strange squat thing, a dark stone studded with brighter stones, and brightest of them all a great emerald.

  The power in the stone rocked Meriamon to her foundations. Every god gave a part of himself to his image, and his worshippers gave what they had, the force of their worship. This was old, old and strong, its green stone like an eye, transfixing her, stripping her soul bare.

  She had nothing to fear from it. Doubt was a failing even of gods; or why had Osiris died and been brought to life again? She had seen his realm, its beauties and its terrors. Dissolution she did not fear while her name endured. Nikolaos remembered it. Alexander knew it. Mother Isis herself had spoken it in the deeps of Meriamon’s dream.

  Here in Amon’s temple, it seemed not at all amiss that her heart should go out to the Lady of earth and heaven. Or that she took her place in the ranks of priestesses among those whose voices were deeper yet purer, and sang as they sang, the hymn of praise to the god.

  The high priest came out of the inner shrine. Alexander was not with him. The king would be sitting in the small dark room, alone with his thoughts and his god. His father, he would be thinking. Hoping. Dreading.

  The hymn reached the highest of its high notes. The priests bent, all eighty as one, and set their shoulders beneath the shafts of the Sun-boat. As the hymn spiraled down into a deep clear note like the song of bronze on bronze, the boat rose up. It was a mighty weight even for fourscore priests.

  As they stood erect its power focused. The priestesses’ voices wove about it. The priests’ strength bore it up. It rode upon them both as on a sea of sound and light.

  The god within it came awake.

  The high priest spoke no word. The hymn itself shifted, changed; became a croon, a shape of pure sound. What it asked, what it wished, Meriamon knew in her bones.

  The boat began to sway. The priests swayed with it, not as men who moved it, but as men moved by it. Holding to it like sailors in a swell, bracing against the oars, struggling to hold their boat steady.

  The high priest watched. His eyes were intent, glittering. Reading each movement as a captain reads the shifting of wind and sea.

  Who am I? Alexander asked. What am I? What is meant for me? And more perhaps that she could not see; the wishes of his heart, beyond her perceiving.

  The god answered. Answered gladly. Answered long and clear, and never a word in it.

  Then he was still. The priestesses’ song died away. The litter bore down on the men who carried it. They bowed beneath it, lowering it to the ground.

  The high priest bowed low and kissed the stone of the paving.

  As he rose, his eye caught Meriamon’s. She started, stiffened. In that glance was everything she would have asked, and everything she might have answered. Doubts faced and stared down. Dreams understood. Purpose, choices—decisions she had never known she would make, until she had made them.

  And under it she thought, how strange. He was a man and no eunuch, and yet in that moment his face seemed to her to be a woman’s face, his body a woman’s body, his hands a woman’s hands, giving her greeting, blessing her with a goddess’ graciousness. And he—the goddess—smiled.

  Meriamon could not help herself. It was presumptuous, no doubt, and yet she did it. She smiled back.

  But then, before she was a goddess, Mother Isis was a woman. A woman could understand what even a goddess could not, and share the joy that was in it.

  Thirty-Two

  Alexander came out of the temple silent and exalted. Hephaistion was waiting for him, not in the front of those who waited, or even in the front ranks, but a little apart.

  Those who wanted an oracle had had one. Hephaistion had not asked. He would not judge it mummery—he had seen enough on the march to Siwah, and he had seen what the Egyptian woman did. Her magic was a quiet thing, no wands or spells, no smokes or stenches or sleights of charlatanry. It was all words, and indomitable will.

  He did not want to hear a prophecy. Of those who had, he noticed, few were minded to tell anyone what they had heard. Something about this place discouraged babbling.

  Alexander’s coming was as quiet, and yet as potent, as the Egyptian woman’s magic. One moment he was still within. The next, he stood outside the gate, and his men were running toward him.

  Moths to the flame, Hephaistion thought. His own heart yearned forward, but he quelled it.

  It was pride, he knew that very well. Let the little men flock and bleat. He would go to his lord in his own time.

  His eyes had no pride. His eyes fixed on the king in something like hunger.

  Alexander was taken purely out of himself. He looked like a man who has seen a god; or who has discovered that he is one. The light that had always been on him, bright as a beacon, seemed both dim and scattered to what was on him now. That had been like sun behind a cloud. This was the sun laid bare.

  “He knows what he is now,” Ptolemy said, standing beside Hephaistion.

  Hephaistion laughed. It cut his belly like pain. “Was there ever any doubt of it?”

  Ptolemy looked at him oddly, but said nothing.

  o0o

  Alexander would not speak of what the god had said. Not even to Hephaistion.

  “I suppose you told the Egyptian woman,” Hephaistion said in the quiet of the night. He had not been asked into Alexander’s tent, but he had gone in spite of it.

  Alexander did not cast him out. His welcome was as warm as always, his smile the one he kept for his friend. It did not waver in the face of Hephaistion’s bitterness.

  No, Hephaistion thought. Let it bear its proper name. Jealousy.

  “No,” said Alexander. “I didn’t tell Meriamon.”

  “She knows,” Hephaistion said. “I’d wager gold on it.”

  “Maybe,” said Alexander. He had been reading by the light of the lamp. Hephaistion knew the book: his Iliad that he had had since he was a boy.

  Alexander had risen to embrace his friend. He sat again in the chair, rolling the book and binding it, still smiling faintly. The light of the oracle lingered in his face.

  Hephaistion stayed where he was, erect and stiff. Something in him wanted to throw itself down and weep, and flay them both with words. I am your friend, your Patroklos. Everything that you have, you give to me. Everything that is mine, I share with you.

  Everything but the kingship. And this.

  He turned blindly.

  “Phai.”

  The old name, the love-name. It had been a mock for boys once, because it sounded like the name of Socrates’ boy courtesan: Phai, Phaidon. But Alexander had taken the shame out of it.

  It stopped him now. It d
id not bring him about.

  “Hephaistion,” said Alexander. “Everything I can share with you, I do. But some things—”

  It was like him to know the precise turning of Hephaistion’s mind. “Some things,” Hephaistion said, “are yours alone.” His voice was flat.

  “If I could,” Alexander said, “I would.”

  He meant it. Hephaistion, turning, saw it in his face. But there was a limit to his yielding, and they had come to it.

  It would be very easy to quarrel. A glorious, rancorous fight, with every grief and transgression of years raked up and flung in each other’s face. There was a black pleasure in the prospect of it.

  And what would be the use of it? It would not break down the wall of silence. It would not make Alexander any less Alexander, or Hephaistion any less himself.

  “It always amazes me,” Alexander said, “how you think yourself out of your tempers—and nothing to be seen of it but a muscle-twitch here, an eyeblink there.”

  “Am I as transparent as that?” Hephaistion asked.

  “Clear as granite,” Alexander said.

  Hephaistion’s teeth ached with clenching. He unlocked his jaw, willed his body to unknot. “I thought I had more pride than this,” he said. “Or more sense.”

  “You needed to be sure.” said Alexander. He did not look as if it angered him. “People need that. Even you.”

  “Damn you for knowing that,” Hephaistion said, but calmly.

  Alexander smiled. It was still his smile. The brightness in it was knowledge, that was all. The god had always been there.

  Hephaistion bent his head to the god. He smiled at the king who was his friend: a smile with edges, but real enough when all was considered.

  o0o

  The king and his Companions lingered a while in Siwah. Alexander was eager to be gone, but his men needed a day or two to rest. They camped in a broad cleared space among the trees, and were given whatever they asked for by way of food and drink and even company. Some of the women and boys of Siwah were intensely curious about these big fair strangers; and the strangers were pleased to assuage that curiosity.