Lord of the Two Lands (15 page)

The mare strained against the bridle. Meriamon slipped the bit from its mooring and hobbled her with a bit of old rein and let her go. She set promptly to grazing, like a sensible beast.

Niko’s gelding followed her soon enough, hobbled likewise and freed of his bridle. Niko came up beside Meriamon where she sat on a stump, with bread and a bit of cheese and more of the wine.

They ate in companionable silence, listening to the calling of birds in the wood and the cropping of horses in the meadow. Meriamon was tired, but it was a good tiredness, with wind in it, and sun, and her troubles left far behind. The sun was still high, warm on her face, warm enough that she pulled off her cap and unbuttoned her coat and let the wind cool her skin.

Niko got up after a while and went down to the river. He stooped to drink from it, and stayed there, trailing his hand in the swift water. He would not be mad enough to swim in it, surely. It was snow-cold.

He stood straight and let his cloak fall. Meriamon opened her mouth to shout at him, but he stayed on the bank, clasping his right arm to him as he often did, staring down at the rushing water. Sekhmet wove about his ankles. He gathered her up. She was almost the same color as he was.

Meriamon dragged her eyes back to the horses. They grazed side by side, peacefully, tails switching, now one, now the other. It was not, Meriamon thought, as if she had never seen a man before. And yet there was something about him standing there, that made her insides clench.

He was not handsome. He was, in fact, rather unabashedly homely. He had a nose like a ship’s prow and a jaw like an outcropping of granite. But he was well made, if one liked them long and lean, and he moved like a good horse. He was a pleasure to watch.

It was spring, and she was lately come back from a long sickness, and her body knew very well what it was for. Nor did it care that Niko was the last man in the world who would want the likes of Meriamon. He was male, was he not? And young and strong even with his scarred and twisted hand, and good to look at, there in the sun, with the cat on his shoulder.

He came up from the river and stood by her. His cloak was in his hand. He said something. “What?” she said.

“Nothing,” said Niko maddeningly. He spread the cloak on the ground and sat on it. He hardly looked at her. He could stare at her till her skin crawled, when he decided to be obvious about being on guard. When she would have liked him to notice her, he was oblivious.

“Kleomenes notices me,” she said.

He glanced at her then, sharp with ill temper. “What?”

“Nothing,” she said.

He slapped at a fly. It had bitten him. He rubbed his shin, muttering.

It was not the fly he was muttering at. “That puppy. What finally inspired you to chase him off?”‘

“He’s been shirking his work,” said Meriamon. “Philippos is a hard man as it is; Kleomenes doesn’t need to make him harder.”

“He could use a good tanning.”

“Oh, come,” Meriamon said. “He’s not as bad as that. I’ve been teaching him as much as I can. He’s a good pupil. Just... persistent.”

“Pestiferous.”

“I’d think you’d like him,” she said. “He’s clever enough, and he wants to do well.”

“He moons after you like a lovesick calf.”

His voice was venomous. Meriamon looked at him in surprise. He glared at his foot, which he had freed of its shoe. There was nothing at all wrong with it.

“I suppose,” said Meriamon, “he is a little exasperating. Young things are. They do grow out of it.”

“Not that one,” Niko said.

“Why, what’s he ever done to you?”

“Nothing.” Niko pushed himself to his feet. Sekhmet chose that moment to leap down from his shoulder. He stumbled over her; his foot turned.

He did not fall on his bad arm. Not quite. But he fell hard; hard enough to knock the breath out of him.

Meriamon did not even remember getting up. She was on the ground beside him, reaching for him.

He had not harmed himself. The bone was all but mended; muscle had withered as muscle did round a broken bone. It was not a pretty thing, but it was beautiful to eyes that knew what it had been.

She laid his arm in her lap, working her fingers into the bleached and whitened skin. He gasped. His hand twitched. Stiffly; barely to be seen. But it moved. She bent the wasted fingers one by one, carefully, easing when his breath caught.

He was staring at it. His lips were set tight; sweat ran down his face. Pain. And he had not made a sound. He never did.

“It’s healing,” she said.

He turned his face away, refusing what that healing meant. A withered arm. A twisted hand.

“No,” she said, firm enough to bring his head about. “You’ve let it wither so that the bone can knit. Now you’ll make it strong. It’s going to hurt,” she said. “I don’t deny it. But you’ll have two hands again.”

“One and a half,” he said.

“More than that,” said Meriamon. “It will never be as strong as it was before, that’s true enough. It won’t be useless, either. How strong does it have to be to carry a shield?”

Hope leaped in his eyes, but he knocked it down and sat on it. “Philippos said I’d be invalided out.”

Her breath hissed between her teeth. “He said
what
?”

“He said I’d heal enough for light work, if I didn’t force it. But I won’t do any more fighting.”

“When did he say that?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes!” she snapped.

“Somewhere back there,” Niko said.

“Before Sidon?”

He shrugged. “I suppose.”

“And he hasn’t said a word since?”

“He hasn’t needed to.”

Meriamon wanted to spit. “That—maddening—man! You, too. Both of you. He’s got eyes as good as mine. He can see what I see.”

“Scars.”

“Miracles!” She struck his shoulder with her fist. “Don’t you remember Eshmun’s temple?”

“That was nonsense. It didn’t do a thing.”

“It did,” said Meriamon. “Look at this! This should have rotted and come off. It’s healing. It’s mending where only a god could cause it to mend.”

“If a god did it,” said Niko with a curl of the lip, “why didn’t he do it all at once, instead of dragging it on and on?”

“Maybe he wanted to teach you patience.”

He glared. She glared back.

Why she did what she did next, she would never in her life be able to explain. It was the sun in her, and the green smell, and the heat of temper sparking between them. She bent down. She kissed him hard.

He tasted of wine and cedar. He smelled of himself: horses, wool, clean sweat.

She straightened. Her cheeks were burning hot. His were scarlet. All the way down to the neck of his chiton.

His arm was still in her lap. He reclaimed it. Carefully.

He would not look at her. She could hardly look at him.

He disliked her intensely; he had made that clear long since. Now he would hate her.

Her guardsman was supposed to fall in love with her. Not she with her guardsman.

He stood. He could not get into his cloak as easily as he had got out of it. She had to help him. The shame of it thinned his lips and pinched his nostrils tight.

She started to turn away, looking toward the horses. He caught her. She stood stiff and still.

“Why?” he asked her.

Her throat had locked shut. She drove words through it. “I don’t know.”

His hand did not let go. She could break his grip easily enough if she tried. “That’s not an answer,” he said.

“It’s all I have.”

She waited for him to say something more. He did not. He let her go. She went to catch her mare.

As Alexander’s causeway drew near the walls of Tyre, the Tyrians roused to defend their city. They had catapults on the walls, and armament in plenty for them, and galleys that could row to within bowshot of the mole and harry the men who labored there.

Bolts and arrows were bitter. Fire arrows were deadly, catching in the timbers, flaring into wildfire. Then in the balance of the equinox a storm blew out of Hades and gnawed great gaps in the mole, that needed long days to mend.

“At least,” said Alexander, “we haven’t got the towers up, to be blown down again.”

Towers indeed. They were Alexander’s inspiration—divine madness, people said, but he and his engineers built two of them out of wood from the forests and walled them with raw hides against fire. There had been siege-towers before, but never like this: as high as Tyre’s walls, twenty fathoms and five, so high that men who climbed them came to the summit winded and reeling, and looking down felt as high as eagles.

If they had time to look down. Men who mounted the dizzy height went up to man the catapults against the engines in Tyre, and to shoot across the dwindling stretch of sea, every day a few lengths smaller, a few lengths closer to the frown of the walls. Men below manned catapults against the ships and held them off, while the workers on the mole widened and lengthened it and made it strong enough to last, Alexander said, until the world’s end.

There had never been such siegecraft. But Tyre had its own arts in war. The Tyrians, seeing the towers rising level with their own, prepared a counterstroke.

They took a horse-transport, a wallowing big-bellied tub of a ship, and they fenced its decks with dry timber and filled it with tinder: broken branches, shaved wood, sulfur and pitch. They lashed yardarms to its masts and hung from them cauldrons filled with naphtha. Then they weighted the stern until it sank deep in the water and the bow lifted high, high enough to rise over the causeway.

Alexander’s men saw it coming, towed by galleys. Catapult shot, bowshot, took a toll of the crews, but there were too many, too well protected. The ship’s own crew grinned and jeered from the shielded decks.

The galleys paused just within catapult-range, as if to gather their strength. Then, with a shout, the oars flew up; paused; swept down. The galleys leaped forward. The ship lurched in their wake. A torch flared high on the foredeck. Others kindled from it. The men on it scattered, dipping, darting. A handful shinned up the masts and out across the yardarms, and dropped their torches into the cauldrons. One caught with a rush. The sailor above it dropped, plunging into the sea. The other cauldrons, slower, burned with a steadier fire, their kindlers diving as the first one had, but smoother, swimming hard for haven.

The crew below dropped over the sides one by one. One lingered longest: the captain, he would be, with his long plaited beard and his arms heavy with gold. The many scattered fires sputtered, wavered, seemed to ponder. All at once and all together, they leaped up.

The captain poised on the rail. It was smoldering; sparks sprang thick about him. He leaped, cutting a clean arc, sleek as a dolphin.

Even as he struck the water, the ship struck the causeway at the foot of a tower. Men on the mole sprang forward with spears, timbers, anything that came to hand.

Arrows rained about them. Tyre had unleashed a fleet, boats like cockleshells but full of armed men, running up the mole, springing into battle.

On board the fireship, one of the yardarms broke. The cauldron tumbled down, spraying fire. Then another; then another.

Someone had the sense to bolt for shore, to gather buckets and bails and cauldrons, to muster a rank of men to quench the fire. But the Tyrians had overrun the causeway.

One of the towers was alight. As the line of Macedonians charged down the mole, the other sparked and smoldered and caught. Men boiled out of it, full into the army of Tyrians. They, massing, had fallen on the palisade that protected the towers, and torn it down.

Alexander’s voice rose high above the uproar. Gathering his men, driving them forward, cursing the enemy with inventiveness that won grins even in the heat of the fight.

He drove the Tyrians back into the sea. But they had won their purpose. His towers burned like torches. All his engines, the timbers drawn up for the last stretch of the mole, the tools and the devices and far too many of the builders, smoldered into ashes.

o0o

“I’m not giving up now,” said Alexander.

He was filthy, covered with soot, and smarting with burns, but that was nothing to the anger that burned in him. He would not have let himself be looked after at all, but he came to the hospital carrying one of the worst wounded, and Meriamon caught him before he could escape.

“I won’t give up,” he said. He was not talking to her at all. He was burning, and yet his fever was all of the spirit. Rage. Outrage. Mere men had dared to thwart Alexander.

“They burned my towers,” he said. “They destroyed my engines. They killed my men. They dared. They
dared
—”

Meriamon got his chiton off. It was half burned to bits, and the other half was torn and tattered. He had not even had armor on. He had been on the shore when the attack began, contriving something intricate with his chief engineer.

He had had his sword—no Macedonian would go anywhere without one. And, fortunately for his mobility, he had been wearing solid shoes, a bit of sense that he had learned from hard experience, taking splinters and worse from scrambling over rough-cut timbers. The soles were scorched almost through, but they had held.

The high color of his face was not all temper. He had burned it, more on one side than on the other, and singed his eyebrows. Blisters were rising along his neck and shoulder. His hands were burned, not badly, but when he came to himself he would hurt.

“I built those engines once,” he said. “I’ll build them again. I’ll build them higher, harder, stronger. I’ll show those sons of dogs what it is to make war against Alexander.”

Meriamon set to work with cool cloths and salve. One of the wounded men was shrieking. He had come in among the first, a charred and writhing thing, faceless and handless but not, yet, voiceless. Naphtha had rained down on him and scoured his flesh away. The gods had not seen fit to take him.

“They shall pay,” said Alexander. “They shall pay in blood.”

She salved his hands and wrapped them in soft bandages. He did not see her. His anger was all that there was, a fire hotter than any that had burned on his causeway.

Pride had driven him to build it, but wrath ruled him now, and would rule him after. If he could ever have withdrawn from this madness, that hope was gone. The Tyrians had burned it with his towers.

o0o

“Stubborn,” said Meriamon. “Stubborn
fool
.”

She waited to say it, though it rose up in her till she thought she would burst. She did all that she could for the wounded. She looked after the simply sick, and the odd mishap. She put Kleomenes to bed, doing it bodily, while he protested that he was perfectly able to keep on working—nodding even as he said it. Niko tripped the boy neatly and dropped him into the blankets, and sat on him until he fell asleep.

She exchanged bared-teeth grins with the one of the other boys whom Kleomenes’ racket had managed to wake, and ducked through the tentflap. It was almost dawn. The camp was as quiet as it ever was, no hammering and singing from the causeway, no sounds of revelry from the tents. Somewhere over toward Old Tyre a cock crowed.

She was bone-tired, but there was no sleep in her. Sekhmet came, a shadow out of shadows, and wove about her ankles. She gathered the cat in her arms and turned to glare at the looming bulk that was the king’s tent. “Stubborn, obstinate, pigheaded idiot.”

“Who, Kleomenes?”

She directed her glare at Niko. “You know perfectly well who it is.”

Niko shrugged. She heard it more than saw it: a rustle of cloth, a creaking of leather, a clinking of metal on metal. He was wearing his corselet, had put it on when word first came of the fight, and not taken it off again. They could do that, these Macedonians; live in armor, and never admit to noticing how it itched and chafed.

“Alexander is Alexander,” Niko said.

“You’re all as blind mad as he is.”

“Probably.”

She hissed, sharp and impatient. What had happened under the cedars had not changed anything. He was still Niko: stubborn, obstinate, pigheaded, and given to sulks. For all the difference it made, she might never have kissed him at all.

It was a mercy, she supposed. He could have fled from her, demanded another posting, gone back to Macedon, even. Instead he stayed, and was her guardsman, and was no different than he had ever been.

She walked. She did not much care where. Niko followed where her shadow had been. Once. Before sickness took all the magic from her.

No. Not all of it. Only that part of it which made her more than a minor priestess of a foreign god. She was still a healer of sorts, still a companion to the Bastet-on-earth who purred in her arms, still a pharaoh’s daughter.

Dawn lightened as she walked through the camp. It touched the edges of the mountains; it spread long across the sea.

In a little while the king would come out to make the morning’s sacrifice. Then the crews would go down to the causeway and set to work again, making nothing of fire and death and the enemy’s assault.

Alexander would have thought of something new to protect them, a new wall, a new shield, a strengthened guard. Alexander was always thinking of new ways to win a battle. He was like a god in that, or like a madman. Or was there any difference?

Meriamon paused on the eastern edge of the camp. The splendor of the morning was in her suddenly, filling her so full that she staggered. Strong arms caught her. One was stronger than the other, but not so much now, not so evident.

She did not look at him, did not try to free herself. The boat of the sun lifted above the horizon, far and far behind the mountains’ wall.

The shadows withered and fled. All but one. Running long and low out of the wake of the sun, sulfur-eyed, laughing with jackal-jaws agape, rising man-high, Macedonian-high, weaving and dancing about her, her shadow, her lost magic, coming with the sun to make her whole again.

As whole as she could be when she was not in Khemet.

The long light of morning spread about her. She stepped out of Niko’s grasp. He did not try to hold her. Nor had he dropped her, or thrust her away. She could admire him for that.

“You’re shining,” he said. “Like a lamp in a dark room.”

“Am I?” she asked him.

His eyes drifted toward her shadow, danced warily back to her face. “Why?”

His favorite question. This time she could answer. “The gods willed it.”

“Why now?”

“The gods know.”

“You,” he said, “can be infinitely exasperating.”

She laughed. She had not done that in much too long. “Then I’m a match for the rest of you.”

“We don’t—” He did not finish it. Wise man. “It’s easy to forget,” he said. “What you are.”

She did not say anything to that.

He shook himself, rattling his armor. “Well. You’re still human enough. Are you hungry?”

Her stomach answered for her, loudly. That made him laugh. “Come on, then. Let’s go badger the cooks.”

o0o

Hellenes. She would never understand them. Stark awe one moment, laughing mockery the next, and an explanation for everything.

Niko explained her to herself over bread sopped in honeyed wine, sitting in front of Thaïs’ tent, with Sekhmet making her own breakfast of a fresh-caught mouse. “It’s obvious what it is,” he said. “You needed a sign that you haven’t failed with Alexander. The gods want him here. So... that... came back to you.” He paused. Even he was not ready to put a name to her shadow. “Shouldn’t that make it easier to bear the waiting?”

“No,” she said.

He was not listening. “I wonder what Aristotle would say? Not that I studied much with him, but Ptolemy used to tell me about their lessons, and the king is always talking about them. Reason and logic are everything to Aristotle. He’d even impute reason to the acts of the gods.”

“Gods don’t need to be reasonable,” Meriamon said.

“But they are,” said Niko. “We just don’t see it, because our sight is too limited. If we could comprehend the mind of Zeus, we’d be Zeus ourselves.”

“That’s hubris.”

He widened his eyes at her.

“I know what that means,” she said. “Is your Aristotle that proud of his intelligence, that he’d claim to know the mind of a god?”

“Aristotle says that the world is a rational thing, and reason is the chief faculty of a man.”

“Not of a woman?”

“Women,” said Niko, “are the offspring of a flawed seed. Having no reason of their own, they submit to the rule and reason of the male.”

Meriamon laughed aloud. “Aristotle says that?”

“Aristotle is the wisest philosopher in Greece.”

“Ah,” she said. “A philosopher. Wisdom’s own sweet friend. I’m sure, if he used his eyes instead of his reason, he’d see what a fool he is.”

Niko glared. “If Alexander heard you say that—”

“Alexander is a fool, too,” said Meriamon. “All men are fools. The world is reasonable? The world is logical? Not that I’ve ever seen.”

“You are a woman and a foreigner. How do you know what you can see?”

“I have eyes,” she said.

“But do you understand what they tell you?”

She looked at Aim. Simply looked. His eyes shifted and wavered and dropped. But he said, “You’re not a philosopher. You don’t understand.”

“And you are?”

“Well,” he said. “No. But it’s a Greek thing. We Macedonians are Greeks, when it comes down to it. That’s why Alexander took so well to Aristotle’s teaching. He’s got the mind and the temperament for it.”

“I haven’t,” said Meriamon. “I wouldn’t want it.”

“Why should you?”

She thought of throwing the dregs of her wine in his face. Arrogant, muleheaded Hellene. She set down her cup instead and said, “I want a bath. You might think about one yourself.”