Lord of the Two Lands (14 page)

It was Niko who understood. He got rid of the shade, if not the servant. He set himself in the woman’s place, still without a word. Meriamon was glad of him. He was an anchor in the turning of the world, even with a scowl on his face.

The wind was cold but it was clean, once they came to the sea. She breathed it in, drinking deep. She felt a little stronger; as if, almost, she could get down and walk. Maybe when she came to the bridge she would.

While she was sick the camp had moved south toward Old Tyre, setting itself between the town and the shore opposite the island. It was a fair distance for Kleomenes, farther than she had expected, but he managed it. He was sweating in the cold and breathing hard as they followed the sounds of hammering and sawing and the beating of drums to the king’s bridge. Men were shouting and some were singing, and there was a startling amount of laughter.

That was Alexander. He was in the middle of them in nothing much but a hat, lending a hand wherever they needed one. He seemed to be everywhere at once. Now far down the road urging on the team of mules that dragged in yet another great fallen cedar, now on the shore with a handful of his engineers, drawing with a stick in the smoothed sand, now out on the mole itself, clambering over the stones and timbers, perching at the very end with the water lapping his feet. It was a fair few furlongs already, though wider as yet than it was long, a blunt finger pointing toward Tyre.

Wherever Alexander was, people smiled wider, moved faster, worked harder. He warmed them like a hearthfire, just by being with them.

Kleomenes set Meriamon carefully on the sand, out of the way of the men but close enough to see what they did. He flung himself beside her and occupied himself with simply breathing. The others, after a moment’s pause, wandered off toward the bridge.

Except Niko. He stayed on his feet, spear in hand, on guard. Sekhmet rather spoiled the picture, draped as she was over his shoulder.

Meriamon watched Alexander’s men build Alexander’s bridge. So great a labor already, and so little of the whole; and the city waiting, silent behind its walls, haughty and impregnable. They would fight when the time came. Ships were running in and out of the harbors, the Sidonian north of the mole’s line, the Egyptian south of it: bringing in provisions for the siege. Often their sailors mocked the men on the shore, laughing and jeering and even, more than once, relieving themselves in long arcs over the bows.

“We piss on you!” they shouted in gutter Greek. “Come up to the walls and see! Right in your faces, bully-boys. Right in your kinglet’s eye.”

“Want to bet on it?” That was Alexander’s voice, high and sharp and unmistakable; and he was laughing.

“Surely,” one of them yelled back. “What’s the stakes?”

“Your hide,” said Alexander, “and your city thrown in.”

The ship had come far in in its captain’s bravado, so far that it nigh ran aground. He had to scramble back out to deeper water, with the Macedonians jeering him on. No one thought to shoot, though it would have been a fair spearcast, or an easy shot with a bow.

Not yet, thought Meriamon. They would remember soon enough. Then the blood would flow.

She was very tired, but she had no desire to sleep. She lay in her nest of sand. Sekhmet stalked a flock of seabirds, sand-colored cat against sand-colored shore.

She closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, Alexander was striding toward her, windblown and ruddy-faced and sheened with sweat. He should have been reeking. There was no scent on him but salt and sea and clean wool. He looked as if he wanted to pick her up and hug her, or maybe shake her for daring so much so soon.

The strength of him was almost more than she could stand. It rocked her where she lay.

He dropped down beside her, boylike, half grinning, half frowning. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“No,” she said.

The grin conquered the frown. “Of course you had to do it. I would. I did when I got sick swimming in the Kydnos. Philippos was beside himself.”

“I’m not afraid of Philippos.”

“Nor was I.” said Alexander. “I should have been. I got sicker the first time I tried anything. But then I got stronger.” He eyed her. “I’ve seen you looking better.”

She laughed. It was weak, but it was honest mirth. “I look like creeping death. I don’t mind. Much. I never had any looks to lose.”

“Don’t say that,” said Alexander.

“Why not? It’s true.”

“I’ll never understand modesty,” Alexander said. He stretched out, propped on his elbow. He was fully at his ease, but he could see everything that happened where his men were. His eyes never rested, no more than his mind.

“You were there,” she said. “When I was sick.”

“Once or twice,” he said. “You had us worried.”

She took no notice of that. “You were in the light. I didn’t know it was you; and yet I did. Do you know how strong you are?”

She did not mean in body. His eyes narrowed a little; his brows drew together. “I prayed,” he said. “I made sacrifice. I didn’t think your Imhotep would mind that I called him Asklepios.”

“Or Eshmun?” she asked.

He shrugged a little. “I sent to the temple in Sidon. The priests said that you had your own gods, and your own power against sickness.”

“So I do,” said Meriamon. She turned her eyes from him toward the work he had begun. “It seems you have forgotten them.”

“No,” Alexander said.

“This is not forgetting?”

He was still. His voice was soft. Not as it had been with the Tyrian embassy, not quite. But it was not a voice that one could argue with. “When I slept, the night before I came to Tyre, I dreamed. A man came to me. He was a big man, but not so big as I might have expected. He carried a club; he wore a lion’s skin.

“Of course I knew his name. ‘Herakles,’ I said. ‘Do I dream you, or is this a sending?’

“‘If you know my name, you know the rest of it,’ he said.”

“That made me laugh,” said Alexander, “which was hardly respectful, but he laughed with me. “‘You know what you have to do,’ he said. ‘This city is yours; I name you my heir.’

“‘Even if I have to take it by force?’ I asked him.

“‘Even so,’ said Herakles.”

Alexander paused. Meriamon did not say anything. “You see,” he said. “I dream, too; and I dream true. This I have to do. When it is done, I shall go on to Egypt.”

She could argue with a god if she thought he needed it. “How long will that be? How many days, Alexander? How many months wasted because you took a vow in anger?”

“I was angry,” he said. “I was hardly out of my wits. Tyre is strong enough to break me, unless I break it first. And Tyre serves the Persian king.”

“Tyre refused to give you what you wanted.”

“So it did,” he said lightly enough. “It will pay for that. But even if it hadn’t earned a drubbing, I wouldn’t want it at my back. That’s necessity, Mariamne, and soldier’s sense. Even beyond a god’s will.”

“It holds you back from Egypt,” she said.

“Not forever.”

“Long enough.”

He tossed his hair out of his face. He was a boy, after all, however brilliant, however much a king. “I’m going to take Tyre,” he said.

“Or Tyre will take you.”

“No one will ever conquer me,” said Alexander.

“No man,” Meriamon said, “maybe. There are still the gods. There is still, at the end of them, death.”

No cloud shadowed the sun, but it dimmed for a moment, and the wind bit cold. Then Alexander laughed, sharp and short. “Death comes for every man. I’ll live while I can, and hold my honor, and keep my word. When Tyre is mine, I’ll follow you to Egypt.”

The slow days turned from winter into spring. Alexander’s causeway stretched toward Tyre. Meriamon was an emptied thing: a woman without a shadow, a priestess without her gods, a mage bereft of her magic. She was all winter, and no spring in her, though her body healed and grew strong again.

And yet, like winter in this stony country, she kept in her a memory of spring. Alexander would not speak to her, nor move, nor do anything but lay siege to an impregnable city. She would not pine for that. She was too stubborn. Since death did not want her, she would cling to life, and get back her strength, and wait.

Someone else was waiting, and in far less calmness than she. Meriamon could see that for herself, summoned to Barsine’s tent and let in without even a judicious hour’s delay.

She had not gone willingly. Her memory of waking there, sick to death and wild beyond reason, could still trouble her in the dark before dawn. Trapped, suffocating, surrounded by enemies—no matter that they had meant her well. Her head knew that. Her heart knew only that they were Parsa, and they had taken her and held her.

Still, when the messenger came, the same young eunuch who had fetched her first from the surgeons’ wagon, back before Sidon, Meriamon bent her head and followed him. Barsine was no enemy except by blood; and Alexander loved her in his fashion. No woman would ever be the other half of him. That was given long ago, and to Hephaistion. But she had known him since he was young, she pleased him, maybe he even reckoned her a friend.

Barsine’s tent was as Meriamon remembered it: dim, shadowed, laden with the scent of Persian unguents. No light ever came there, unless it was lamplight. There was a new thing here and there, a box carved of cedar, a lamp bright with gilding, a vase with a frieze of women weaving and spinning. That was not a Persian thing; it came, maybe, from Athens. Thaïs had one like it, but on hers the women were dancing to the music of flute and tambour.

Barsine had been sitting in the shadows. As Meriamon paused, half-blinded, trying to breathe in the heavy air, Barsine rose and came to embrace her. She had not expected that. She stiffened; eased with an effort, returned the embrace.

Barsine stood back, hands still on Meriamon’s shoulders. “You’re well again,” she said. “But thin. Are they feeding you enough?”

Meriamon laughed. “They all say that,” she said. “Alexander, too. Yes, they’re feeding me. Too much. You’d think they were fattening me for the pot.”

Barsine smiled. She led Meriamon to a chair and saw to it that she had wine and sweets as was proper. Meriamon had to eat and drink a little under those grave dark eyes. She was hungry after all; she drank most of the cup of wine and ate a whole cake, and nibbled on another, for the taste.

As she nibbled, she considered Barsine. The lady was even more beautiful than Meriamon remembered, and yet it was a different beauty. Her face seemed fuller, her eyes gentler. Her body, that had been nigh as slender as a boy’s, was richer, softer.

What had caused it, Meriamon knew very well. She had known it the moment Barsine embraced her. “I suppose,” she said, “that I should offer felicitations.”

Barsine lowered her eyes. Her hand went to the swell of her belly. “You miss very little,” she said.

“I could hardly have failed to notice this,” said Meriamon. She paused. There was no delicate way to say it. “It is his?”

Barsine did not look up, but her eyes glittered under the long lashes. “You doubt it?”

“I can count,” said Meriamon. “You’re slim and you carry small, but you’ve been carrying since summer, or I know nothing of childbearing. This one was conceived in Mytilene, if certainly no earlier. Does Alexander know?”

“Yes,” Barsine said. “He has promised to take up the child, even if it is a boy.”

“As his heir?”

Barsine looked up then. Her eyes made Meriamon think of, of all people, Thaïs. The same clarity of purpose; the same spirit, startling in the Persian face. “Parmenion has come back. He hounds my lord without mercy. If my lord can offer him a child of my body, then my lord may have a little peace. For a while. Until he gets one of his own.”

“If I can count,” Meriamon said, “what makes you think that no one else can do as well?”

“You are a woman,” said Barsine.

“And a man wouldn’t notice?” Meriamon sat back. The second cake was gone; she had eaten it without noticing. She wiped her fingers with the cloth the servant offered, dipped in warm water scented with citron. “Maybe he wouldn’t, at that. As close as you keep yourself, as quiet as you can be, you can conceal the child until the time is ripe, and bring it out, and let people decide whose it is.”

“Precisely,” Barsine said. “And my lord can let it be known that I am bearing. He can come more seldom for it, and stay more briefly.”

She said it calmly, but Meriamon saw the pain behind it. And knew it for what it was. “He’s known from the beginning.”

“I told him.”

“Then—he never really—”

“He did,” said Barsine, soft and fierce. “That first time. He did. But I had to tell him. I had lied enough in keeping silent and letting him love me once.”

“And a Hellene won’t touch a bearing woman,” said Meriamon.

“He was angry,” Barsine said. “But he forgave me. He loves to forgive, as he loves to give. He saw wisdom in what I had done.”

Meriamon had her doubts of that. No doubt Barsine needed to believe it. “So he keeps coming back to you, and keeps up the pretense. He won’t need to do it much longer.”

“Unless he wishes.”

There was a silence. Meriamon let it stretch. After a while she said, “You wanted me to know. Why?”

“I used you,” said Barsine. “I lied, a little. I let you think that I was free to accept him.”

“You were talking yourself into it,” Meriamon said.

Barsine smoothed her skirt along her thigh, long, slow, focused on it. She had done much the same when she played the bashful beloved.

Parsa, thought Meriamon. Parsa, always, no matter that all her men had been Hellenes.

Slowly Barsine said, “I wanted to see what you were.”

“And what was that?”

“His friend.”

“And now?”

“You are still. You could be more. If you would.”

Meriamon was calm. She should not have been, maybe. But this was too fierce a battle to fight in anger. “Are you asking me to do that?”

“No,” said Barsine. Still smoothing her gown with those long fingers; still centered on it, eyes lowered, profile cut as clean as a carving in ivory. “He may not go to Egypt now. Will you do anything to force him?”

“If I can,” said Meriamon, “yes.”

“I could help you,” Barsine said.

“Why?”

Barsine could not have expected that, even from Meriamon. For a moment she looked up; for a moment her eyes met Meriamon’s. “I mean no treachery.”

“No?”

“I love Alexander,” Barsine said.

Truth. But what was truth to a Persian?

“He admires you greatly,” said Barsine, “even when he curses you for a stubborn fool. He means to do what you ask, when his pride has salved itself in Tyre. But if he dies here—”

“If he dies here, Persia is safe.”

“I am Alexander’s now,” Barsine said. “Persia is no part of me.”

“Persia is all of you.”

Barsine’s breath caught. “How you hate us!”

“Yes, I hate you,” said Meriamon. “I hate everything that you are. You marched out of Persis. You trampled my country under your feet. You murdered our kings; you mocked our gods, or strove to make them your own.”

“You are as proud as Alexander,” said Barsine. “And no more sensible in it.”

“I am of Egypt. No foreigner has ever ruled my people in peace.”

“Yet you would make Alexander your king?”

“Alexander, we choose. Alexander rules by our gods’ will.”

“We rule by the will of Ahuramazda.”

“That is no god of Egypt.”

“That is the Truth.”

And there, in the ringing silence, was the heart of it.

“Your Truth is one,” Meriamon said, “and unyielding, and unforgiving. Ours is many; it shifts, it changes, it takes new shapes as the world grows.”

“There can be but one Truth. All else is the Lie.”

“No,” said Meriamon.

“Yes,” Barsine said.

“You are Persian,” said Meriamon. “You will never be aught but that. As I will never be aught but Egyptian. Alexander... he is always Alexander, and only Alexander, but that is as endlessly varied as the faces of my gods. Cambyses, Darius, Artaxerxes the accursed, Ochos who drove my father to his death—they came in their Truth, and laid its yoke on us, and wondered that we hated it, and through it hated them. Alexander will be our king, our pharaoh, our Great House of Egypt.”

“If he succeeds in taking Tyre.”

“If he does that,” said Meriamon.

“Can you protect him?”

There. At last. Meriamon swallowed a sigh, a curse on Persian indirection. She could barely protect herself. But she said, “The gods watch over him.”

“You are a sorceress,” said Barsine. “You are very powerful, they say. Will you guard him against harm?”

“He is guarded,” Meriamon said. Not knowing if she spoke the truth. A good priestess, she told herself, should trust the gods to look after their own.

She rose. She needed the sun and the clean air. “Guard yourself,” she said, “and the child you carry.”

o0o

Kleomenes was waiting outside of Barsine’s tent, trying to look as if he had just happened by. Niko was glowering at him, as usual. Niko did not approve of her lapdog, as he called the boy.

Meriamon walked past them both. Niko fell in behind her. He had the sense not to say anything. Kleomenes, who was younger, stretched to keep up, for she was striding swiftly. “What happened?” he wanted to know. “You look furious. Has somebody been at you?”

She did not answer. There were too many words in her; they fell over one another.

“It was Barsine, wasn’t it?” he said. “She’s jealous of you, everybody knows it. The king thinks too much of you to suit her. What did she say? I’ll give her what for.”

Meriamon stopped short. Kleomenes went on past her, caught himself, scrambled back. “Kleomenes,” she said. She kept it gentle, but there was iron in it. “I know perfectly well that you’re running out on Philippos. Even if there is nothing much to do in the hospital now.”

He looked like a whipped pup, all droop and wounded eyes. “But there
isn’t
anything to do,” he said.

“You are still Philippos’ apprentice. He won’t love me for luring you away from your duty.”

“But—” said Kleomenes.

“Go,” said Meriamon.

He went. He dragged his feet, he looked back often, he even shed a tear. She hardened her heart and her eyes. He heaved a mighty sigh and turned his back on her.

She had no pity to spare. She turned from the way he had taken and went to the horselines.

Her mare was there, accepting a grooming with queenly condescension. The Thracian grinned at Meriamon and bobbed his untidy head.

One way and another they had both acquired names. The groom was Lampas, which was not the name his father had given him, but he liked it, and answered to it. The mare was Phoenix. Meriamon said their names to herself, anchoring herself with them, inclining her head to the groom and laying a hand on the mare’s neck. Lampas grinned even wider. Phoenix snorted and shook her head.

“You ride?” Lampas asked.

“I ride,” said Meriamon.

It did not matter where. Phoenix wanted to run. Meriamon let her.

o0o

Niko caught them not far from the Leontes, and that because Meriamon had stopped to let the mare graze. He was riding the bow-nosed gelding, which had no speed, but was almost the mare’s match for endurance. He had a pack with him, and a full wineskin, and Sekhmet riding in the fold of his cloak.

Meriamon eyed him askance. He did not say anything. He was armed, she noticed, with sword and spears. He at least, it seemed, was prepared for a journey.

She shrugged. Why not? She twitched the mare’s head up. The river ran loud and high, leaping down from the mountain. Snow lay thick on them amid and above the deep green of cedars. Alexander’s men were up there, cutting down the great trees for his causeway. Meriamon touched the mare into a canter, toward the cedars and the snow.

o0o

The long ride and the clean air did much to restore Meriamon to herself. She was still a woman without a shadow, but there was no pain in it, or none that mattered.

As the way grew steep, the river forged its path through thickening trees, outriders of the forests of the Lebanon. The ground was deep with their castings, the air dizzying with their scent, strong and pure and green. The trees were small here, but small in a cedar of the Lebanon was as high as a tower, and great branches spreading wide like outstretched arms.

“They pray to your Zeus,” Meriamon said, halting under one of them.

“Maybe they have their own gods,” said Niko. He tilted his head back, measuring the tree with his eye. “Titans, maybe. These are trees the way giants are men.”

“We don’t have anything like them in Egypt.”

“No one has anything tike them.” Niko swung his leg over the gelding’s neck and slid to the ground. He had taken to riding with a smooth bit as Meriamon did, kinder by far than the monstrosities that the warhorses endured. The gelding seemed to like it; he browsed happily enough around it while Niko unslung the wineskin and held it out to Meriamon.

She drank and handed it back, holding the wine in her mouth, letting it go down slowly. It was good wine, well watered: as good as the king had.

She dismounted, stretching stiffened muscles. She was thinner still than she needed to be; her bones jutted in uncomfortable places. She rubbed one that ached particularly, trying to be discreet about it. Of course Niko saw. The corner of his mouth twitched. She set her jaw and rubbed harder. He shrugged out of his pack and squatted to rummage in it, with Sekhmet offering advice.

Meriamon wandered a little, leading Phoenix; or maybe the mare led her. And wisely: the hill moderated its slope, and the trees paused suddenly, opening on a broad cleared space that rolled down to the river. Cutters had been there, but not for a season or more. Grass had grown over the stumps; from one sprouted a young cedar, no taller than Meriamon’s knee, no thicker than her finger.