Lord of the Two Lands (19 page)

“Ten thousand talents?” Alexander tilted his head. “That’s a fair handful of coppers.”

The ambassador drew a long breath. “In addition,” he said, pausing as if he expected Alexander to interrupt. Alexander simply sat and waited, limpid-eyed, half-smiling. “In addition, the Great King, the King of Kings, offers the King of Macedon the half of his kingdom, from the Euphrates to the sea, to be held by him in bond of friendship, in earnest of which, the Great King, the King of Kings, offers the hand of his daughter in marriage, to seal the alliance and to firm the bond of peace between king and king.”

Alexander’s smile was gone. Something else had taken its place; something to which Meriamon could put no name. Glee, she might have thought, except that there was anger in it too, and startlement, and a tinge of disbelief.

Focused, intent on the ambassador and the king, she had not noticed who else was there. There were always people; Alexander was never alone even in sleep. But she saw the one who came forward. He had not been there when she came, nor did she remember when he had come in. For all she knew, he had slipped in through the back of the tent.

Once she had seen him, she could hardly forget him. Parmenion was out of his armor for once, in a chiton that surprised her: it was rich enough for a prince’s. She would hardly have expected it of him.

His words were exactly what she had thought they would be. “Now there’s a fine end to the war,” he said. His voice would never be less than harsh, but he was clearly delighted. “If I were you I’d take it, money, kingdom, girl, and all.”

“If you were I...” Alexander looked from him to the Persians. They stood with eyes cast down, jaws set hard against humiliation.

Alexander looked again at his general. There was a faint line between his brows. “Yes,” he said, “that’s what I’d do if I were Parmenion. I’d take the lot.”

Parmenion smiled.

Alexander smiled more sweetly than the old soldier ever could. “But I am not Parmenion,” he said. “I am Alexander. And Alexander says to Darius: No.”

The Persians stiffened. No more so, for all of that, than Parmenion.

“Why should I take half a kingdom?” Alexander said. “Asia is mine already, and its treasure with it, and Darius’ daughter, too. If I want to marry her, then I will; I don’t have to ask her father’s leave.” Alexander stood. He plucked the cup from the ambassador’s slack fingers and handed it to a page. “Does Darius want kindness from me? Tell him to come himself, and ask for himself. He’ll get nothing from me otherwise.”

The Persian stared at Alexander. He was tall even for one of his people, head and shoulders above the king, his fluted hat raising him higher still; robed like a king himself, with his great curled beard and his air of invincible dignity. Alexander beside him was an upstart boy, a little cock-a-whoop, an urchin playing at being king.

Alexander met the Persian’s eyes. The man did not flinch. He was too much the nobleman for that. But he caught his breath. He bowed again, down to the carpet. Then, with ceremony, he retreated.

His retinue followed him with haste that bordered on unseemly. All but the Magi. They waited for the rest to withdraw, making no move.

They were aware of Meriamon. It was nothing so obvious as a turn of glance upon her, but her presence was marked, her essence known and named. Her shadow raised itself above her head, cobra-slender, cobra-deadly. She felt its swaying in her bones.

The Great King’s sorcerers neither attacked nor fled. There was no enmity in them. No warning. Simply acknowledgment, as of power to power.

The embassy was all but gone. The Magi stirred. They did not bow, did not look at the king at all, but neither did they turn their backs on him. Gliding in their robes, as smooth as if they walked so every day, they backed out of his presence.

With Alexander back and the fleet on guard, the siege leaped from long waiting to labor that was more like war. His causeway was built, his towers raised, but he had another inspiration for breaking down the wall.

He dreamed it, maybe, or a god taught him. He listened to everyone who had an opinion, and studied the city, and went hunting in the hills for a whole long careless day, and came back shouting for his engineers.

Rams. Of course. But rams mounted on ships below the wall, shielded as the towers were against the Tyrians’ fire. They could move where they needed to go, testing the walls, and stop where they chose to stop, drop anchor and batten hatches and hammer at the huge impervious stones.

Nor only were there stones in the wall; stones lay deep-sunken in the water, barring the ships’ approach. Under a hail of bolts and fire arrows, divers bound ropes round the stones, and men on shipboard drew them up with cranes and made channels for the ramships.

It was the maddest thing Alexander had done yet, and it seemed the most useless. People looked at him and muttered about gods and insanity.

Nor had Tyre been idle. Its catapults shot missiles from above. Its galleys, sailing close, cut the cables of the ramships. Alexander armed galleys against them. Tyre withdrew its ships and sent divers with knives. Alexander anchored his ships with chains.

Tyre gave him a day’s grace. Then it caught him napping. Quite literally: he liked to sleep for an hour in the noon’s heat, lying under a canopy to the south of his causeway, while the Cyprians in the north and the Phoenicians in the south moored or beached their ships and took their daymeal. Tyre raised a screen of sails across its northern harbor, gathered its ships, and readied an attack.

Meriamon had seen the sail-wall in the morning when she came to the hospital, and wondered what it was. Something new for the war, she supposed. She came out of the tent into the blazing heat of noon, and the wall was still up, the wind making it belly and flap.

There was no wind, no breath of air. There were men atop the towers that warded the harbor, tiny at that distance, moving quickly.

Niko was standing near the tent, peering toward the city. Meriamon did not pause to wonder at that, or to reflect that he was often about, doing one thing or another. “What are they doing?” she asked him.

“I don’t know.” He shaded his eyes with his hand. “They’re up to something.”

Without thinking about it, she started toward the shore. Niko walked with her, his long strides keeping pace with her shorter, quicker ones. Her eyes swept the water. There was the causeway, looking as if it had been there since the world was made. There was the fleet, moored or beached, one desultory galley stroking landward. The ramships lay at anchor, their scrabbling and thudding stilled for once. Even the sea was still.

She began to run.

Alexander was under his canopy, eating and talking to a handful of people. When he was done, his guards would hurry them out and he would sleep.

The man on guard today was Ptolemy. He saw who she was, and his brother behind her, sweat-streaming both, and both a little wild. He got out of her way. She pushed a great hulk of a Macedonian from her path, slid round another, came face to face with the king.

“Mariamne,” he said, glad as always to see her, raising his brows at the figure she cut. She had forgotten to bring a mantle. Her dress was wet, and it clung; and Egyptian linen, when it was wet and clinging, might have been no garment at all.

“Alexander,” she said, taking too many breaths to say it. Even in Khemet one knew better than to run in the full glare of noon. “Why are all your ships on shore?”

“We always stop at midday,” someone said.

“Tyre knows that,” said Meriamon.

Alexander had turned to say something to the man who spoke. He spun back to face her. He understood. It appalled him. “Zeus Pater!” He was running even before the words were out.

o0o

The Tyrians dropped their wall of sails and loosed their ships and fell on the Cyprian fleet. But even as they closed for the kill, Alexander came, driving hard under sail and oar, circling the city from the south and falling on the Tyrian ships; and none too soon. Moored or beached and empty of crews, the ships were sitting prey for the Tyrian war-galleys.

Even with warning from the city, so swiftly did Alexander come that he caught the enemy’s fleet before it could come about, and drubbed it soundly. He drove its remnants back into the harbor and bottled them there, while his Phoenicians barred the southern haven.

Tyre’s fleet was broken; it would be land-battle now, and shipless siege, until one or the other yielded.

Alexander was in no mood to celebrate his victory. “I made a mistake,” he said. “I slacked off. I could have lost the war for it.”

Meriamon did not argue with him. Other people tried; but he snarled at them until they stopped. He was rising to a rage. Not the anger that had begun the siege; that was mere pricked pride. This was a more terrible thing. Fury at himself.

He had erred. He had almost failed. Because he had not planned for everything. Because he had let himself become predictable.

There was predictability, and then there was predictability. Slackness, complacence—those he would destroy wherever he found them, and in himself most of all. Hot temper and swift movement—those he was known for, and those he would wield, and no matter the cost.

He flung his rams against unyielding walls. He smote again and again, his men catching the fury that drove him, hurling it into stones that chipped and crumbled but would not shatter. Tyre, trapped in its defenses, dropped stones and cauldrons of fire. The stones tumbled wide. The fire sizzled and went out as it struck the shields of wetted hides. Here a man fell, crushed by a stone; there one died when, looking up from pouring water on the hides, he breathed a sheet of flame. They mattered nothing. Alexander was in a rage. Alexander would conquer or die.

Even stone must yield at last, and even Herakles’ walls could not stand forever against Alexander’s wrath. One of his ships found a flawed stone and hammered at it until it gave way, loosening the one beside it, and the one above it, and the rubble within: breaching the wall. Alexander himself was at the ram, his voice a whipcrack, lashing his men, cajoling them, urging them on. The wall shook with the force of the attack.

Someone shouted. The men at the ram scrambled back. A whole length of wall buckled and crumbled and fell, some within, some into the sea. A cheer went up. Alexander’s voice snapped over it. A ramp slid from the ship’s side and crashed down inside the walls of Tyre. Alexander was on it almost before it fell, running mad-alone against the Tyrian army.

His men barely paused. They thundered after him, chanting their paean, which for many was simply his name.

There were too few of them, and too many Tyrians. They fell back. But the wall was breached. Alexander had set foot in Tyre.

And, having done it, he drew back. He left the city with its broken wall, called all but the guards from the ships and the causeway, and went back to camp. Tyre, expecting renewed assault, received nothing. No move. No word.

o0o

The first day after the wall was breached, Alexander whiled the time with his poets and his friends, being Greek. The second day after the breach, he went hunting in what cool the morning had and idled the rest of the day, except for an hour with his generals. He talked particularly to Admetos, who led a company of the Royal Hypaspists, the Shieldbearing Guard, and to Koinos who commanded a battalion of the phalanx. He dined in company that night, awash in wine.

Meriamon was there because he asked, and because the air was so full of power. Her skin rippled with it, the small hairs quivering and rising erect. Her shadow was almost solid. It would not go hunting when she would have let it go. The hunting was better where she went.

She went as what she was: royal Egyptian. She wore her gown of sheerest linen folded into myriad pleats and cut as close as her skin, and over it a broad pectoral of lapis and gold that the king had sent her, knowing that she would wear it; and golden armlets, and rings of gold and lapis on her fingers and in her ears, and a fillet about the many plaits of her hair.

She would have given much for a wig, but there was none that would do; and both Thaïs and Phylinna averred that her own hair was wonderful enough, as black and thick and waving as it was. Phylinna oiled and plaited it and bound the end of each plait with a bead of gold or lapis or carnelian. Meriamon painted her eyes herself with kohl and lapis and malachite, drawing the long lines longer, firming the arch of her brows. Thaïs anointed her with scent that could only have come from Khemet, rich as it was, with a hint of spices, a hint of musk, a suggestion of flowers.

She did not know what she was making herself beautiful for. The king would approve; he liked his friends to look their best. But she would have been happy to be simply Meriamon, and not this princess, this royal lady in her jewels and her unguents, with a lotus flower in her hand.

How that had come there...

Her shadow smiled a fanged smile. She raised the bloom to her face. Its sweetness dizzied her. It smelled of the Nile; it smelled of Khemet. There was power on it, in it.

Tomorrow Alexander would finish what he had begun. He would end the siege. He would take the city, or he would fall. Tonight might be his last upon the earth, his last as the madman who fancied that he could conquer an unconquerable city.

What she could give him, she would give, and be living reminder of what he must fight for. Khemet’s waiting was ended, for better or for ill.

o0o

She remembered little of the king’s banquet. She had a couch to herself near Alexander’s own. She ate, perhaps. She drank. She did not say anything that she recalled. People stared at first, Hellenes astonished or disgusted by her foreignness, hetairai narrow-eyed, measuring the familiar stranger, reckoning her potential as a rival. Phoenicians, of whom there were a few, offered her reverence. They knew what she was.

She was too busy being it to remember what she did. Alexander was her opposite. He did not need to be anything but Alexander.

Sometimes he was everywhere, drawing every eye. Sometimes he was nowhere at all, effacing himself, letting the revel go on without him. He rested in that, talking softly with Hephaistion who had come to share his couch.

No one took much notice. The king lay back against his friend’s breast, half-drowsing, toying with a cup of wine. Hephaistion smoothed his hair. The Companion’s face was still as it often was, like an image carved in ivory, beautiful almost to insipidity, but for the eyes. They held a calm that Alexander had never known, but in which he rested; a peace that was not placidity, a focus and a center, and far down in it a spark of youthful mirth.

Hephaistion was water, deep and seeming quiet. Alexander was fire. Even at rest he could not be still. He turned the cup in his hands, quick eyes darting round the room, catching now and then. More than once he smiled or said a word, bringing its object into his orbit, holding the man or woman there, letting go.

His lover was his lover here, and that entirely. So might Alexander be, maybe, in the inner room, when the lamp was lit and there were but the two alone. But here he was multifold, now king, now friend, now lover, now simple joiner in the feast.

Meriamon’s inward eye saw the woman who sat veiled within a Persian tent, watching as another woman nursed a swaddled child. Barsine was his lover, too, but she would never have what this one had. No woman could. No man either, perhaps, nor boy. Achilles had but the one Patroklos. There could never be another.

Alexander rose. Hephaistion drew up his knee and sipped from his cup and looked not at all abandoned. The king came to sit on Meriamon’s couch, smiling at her. His garland had wilted in the heat; he looked, not ridiculous, but young and rather rakish. She could hardly help but smile back.

“Give me your blessing?” he asked her.

She raised her brows. “Do I have a blessing to give?”

“I think you do.”

“And it matters to you?”

“It matters,” he said.

She thought about it. “There’s a god in you, you know. Nothing else could have brought you to this.”

His eyes narrowed as if against the sun. He was not looking at her now; he saw beyond her, beyond any horizon that she knew.

He blinked, shook himself. He saw her again. His flesh was mortal flesh, his mind a mortal mind, if not quite like any other. He said, “You, too. You even more than I are a god’s child. Why don’t you take the power that’s in your hand, and rule Egypt?”

“That is not given to me,” she said.

“I could die tomorrow.”

She inclined her head.

“You’re calm about it,” he said.

“Would it stop you if I wailed and gnashed my teeth?”

“No,” said Alexander.

“So then,” Meriamon said. “You will do what you will do. May the gods protect you.”

He bowed to that. Not afraid, no, not Alexander. But that bright surety was won at a cost. No peace for him, no moment’s stillness; and the god’s fire in him wherever he was. What he needed of her—she had no worship for him. But she had the gods’ voices in her, clearer maybe than he had ever heard them. She was their instrument. He was one of them. Or would be. If he lived past the morrow.

o0o

The third day after the sortie dawned with a sea like glass, no whisper of wind, no breath of air to stir the water, or lift the pennants, or cool a body risen from a hot and sleepless bed. Alexander’s men were up before the first light, the Shieldbearers and Koinos’ phalanx armed and ready. Their fellows looked on them in varying degrees of envy, even the veterans for whom war held no mysteries.

Alexander changed it. He made it shine, because he was part of it.

He came out just as the sun began to rise, splendid in his scarlet cloak, with his golden lion helmet in his hand. He gave it to a page as he advanced to perform the morning sacrifice—a bull for Zeus this day, and another for Herakles, whose city the king meant to take.