Lord of the Two Lands (2 page)

He wore a robe, much stained but respectably rich, and a mantle that had been crimson before it faded. He peered at Meriamon, frowning.

His frown deepened to a scowl. “Young woman, is this your idea of a prank?”

Meriamon drew herself up. Nikolaos’ hand dropped. She straightened her coat with a sharp gesture and lifted her chin. “I come from Egypt,” she said, “to serve your king. That service, now, seems best performed here.” She paused. “Have I failed to provide satisfaction?”

“Egypt, you say?” The physician seemed interested in spite of himself. “How did you get in? Who sent you here?”

“I walked,” she said. “These gentlemen brought me. They seemed to think I was a servant. That,” she said, “I am not.”

“So you say,” the physician said. He rubbed his jaw. “We can’t have you here.”

“Why not?”

“Does this look like a place for a woman?”

She considered it. “It’s cleaner than a birthing, mostly. Quieter, too. Have you looked at the man with the broken thighbone yet? I set it, but I could have used another pair of hands, to make sure the bones are lined up properly.”

“You’re the one who did that?” The physician looked her up and down. “You’re no bigger than a kitten.”

She smiled thinly. “I’m stronger than I look.”

“Well,” the physician said, rubbing his jaw again. “Well. If the men can keep their hands off you. and if you know what you’re doing... with Andronikos down with the flux, and Thrasikles, the blasted fool, running off with that boy from Pergamum... Well. I won’t say we can’t use you. Egyptian, you say? Trained in a temple?”

“I was a singer in the temple of Amon in Thebes.”

He eyed her narrowly. She did not look particularly august or terrible, she knew that, but she did not look like a Hellene, either. “I didn’t think,” he said, “that there were healer-priestesses.”

“There aren’t,” said Meriamon. “I’m an oddity.”

“Very odd,” said the Greek. And yet he sounded comforted. A woman in his army—that was appalling. A woman who was a priestess, and probably a witch: that, it seemed, he could understand. It set her outside of normal reckoning, but it named her, too, and gave her a place in his world. Hellenes: they could endure anything, if only it submitted to their categories.

“So then,” he said. “You’ve earned a bed for the night at least, if you don’t mind a tentful of apprentices. Have you eaten?”

The thought made her head swim. She held herself erect by main force. “I... would be glad of a bite or two.”

“You look it,” he said. He raised his voice a fraction. “Kleomenes!”

A boy appeared at his elbow, owl-eyed but alert. Meriamon remembered him: he was the one who had brought her what she asked for, for Nikolaos. She admired his discipline. “Yes, sir?”

“Take this—boy”—the Greek hardly choked on it—”and see that he’s fed. Give him a mat in the ’prentices’ tent. If anybody lays a hand on him, give the fool a thrashing. I’ll see you both in the morning.”

That was a dismissal. Meriamon decided to accept it.

Nikolaos was asleep or feigning it. Sekhmet had vanished. The physician bent to examine the soldier. Satisfied, Meriamon followed her guide into the startling quiet of the night.

Somewhere in the hours of her field surgery, the camp had settled to sleep. There was a little drunken singing still, the odd wail that marked a mourner, a murmur of men coming back late from pursuit or from securing the enemy’s camp. The king was over there, they said, sleeping in the coward’s bed. They did not leer at that as the earlier man had. He was alone, they said. He was odd that way, the night after a battle.

Her guide did not take her far. He roused a sleepy cook in one of the mess-tents, got bread and cheese and a skin of wine, and settled cheerfully to eat most of it. The bread was barley bread, fresh from the baking; it was good. The cheese was rank. The wine, even watered, gagged her with its sweetness.

The boy chattered without regard for her silence; or maybe it was his version of tact. It freed her from the need to speak, let her slide, warm and sated, into a drowse. She started awake when the boy lifted her in his arms. “You Macedonians.” she said distinctly, “are all so big.”

“You Egyptians are tiny,” said Kleomenes. He grinned at her. They all had such splendid teeth. How did they do it? “Go to sleep, little Egyptian. I’ll look after you.”

She would not have trusted him. But her shadow was quiescent, and she so tired. She laid her head on his broad bony shoulder and sighed, and slid down into sleep.

Meriamon was in the surgeons’ tent before the sun was up, with more of the good barley bread inside her, and a swallow or two of the horrible wine. She was clean, too: as clean as she could get without inviting rape. Hellenes did not wash if water was in short supply. They rubbed themselves with oil instead, rancid oil all too often, and scraped it off. She shuddered at the prospect, contemplated the grey and restless sea, shuddered again. But it was water, and she needed it, though it numbed her fingers and set her teeth to chattering.

The tent was warm with crowded bodies. The stink was worse, but she endured it. They were burning something pungent and oddly sweet, perhaps to cleanse the air. It made her think of incense and of temples, and an endless blue vault of sky, and a sun that never wavered or went out.

She swallowed past the ache in her throat. She had a purpose here. Had not the gods themselves ordained it? If she must suffer this alien land, these barbarous people, then that was no more than her duty.

She thrust through the stink, found what needed doing, did it. Sekhmet, little harlot, was over by the wall again with Nikolaos. He lay and glowered and stroked the sleek tawny flanks. Sekhmet rolled coyly onto her back and wriggled.

He took the bait. He stroked the downy softness of her belly; and yelped.

After some considerable interval, Meriamon wandered by. The cat slept placidly beside his hip. Her purring was a distant thunder.

“Love-pats,” said Meriamon, inspecting the wounds. “Not even halfway to the bone.”

“Bitch of a cat,” he muttered.

Meriamon laughed aloud. He was not at all amused. She folded back his blanket—it had the look and feel of a military cloak, and no doubt was. He was not modest, not as a Persian would be, but he was clearly unhappy that she should have appointed herself his physician.

She took note that he was well though somewhat loosely made, with broad shoulders and big hands and feet. He did not have the whole of his growth. What would that make him? Eighteen? Twenty?

A child; and petulant at that. He bore pain well, to be sure; the bandages did not come off easily, but he clamped his jaw and moved when she told him and only then, and the only sound that escaped him was a long slow sigh when the wrappings were gone.

“You have a cracked rib,” she said, “along with the rest. But healing well, that I can see. I’ll strap the rib, and make you a sling for your arm.”

“Then can I get up?”

“No,” she said.

His glance was blistering.

“No,” she said again, “you may not. Not for a while. I want to be sure I’m not missing anything vital.”

“How long?”

She thought about it. “A day, maybe. Two. Then we’ll see.”

“A whole day? All I’ve got is a broken wrist!”

“You’ve got a little more than that,” she said. “And I said two. Maybe. If the rib’s not more than cracked. If the arm doesn’t mortify. What did you do to it?”

He glowered, and he snarled at her, but in the snarl was an answer. “My horse took a fall and threw me. There was a chariot coming. I couldn’t roll fast enough. A wheel went over my arm.”

“Some god loves you, then,” said Meriamon.

He shrugged, one-sided. “It had been raining. The ground was soft. I was up and fighting as soon as it went by.”

Not quite as soon as that, Meriamon thought. He must have been in white agony.

It would be a red agony now, even with the dose she had given him. He was not paying attention to it. He was too busy being stubborn. “It’s only my shield arm,” he said. “I can still do guard duty. I can sling my shield over my shoulder.”

“Not for a good while yet,” said Meriamon.

He glared. “Tyrant.”

She smiled. “I come by it honestly. My father was a king.”

That stopped him. She left him with it, and with the cat, who seemed to have adopted him.

o0o

Meriamon was feeding gruel to a man who had got a spearbutt in the jaw, wishing that she had a barley straw and a boxful of medicaments from Imhotep’s temple in Memphis, when a stir brought her eyes to the tentflap.

People came and went often, soldiers coming in late with minor hurts that had kept them awake, or looking for friends among the wounded, or, now and then, walking away with the jaunty step of a man reprieved from the hospital. These were more than one, and coming in: young clean-shaven men in Macedonian cloaks, gold-bordered purple, and purple tunics. They were not all big men as Macedonians went, but they walked as if they were, with a look about them like lions in a pride. Young lions coming back from the hunt, glossy and sated, holding themselves like princes.

There was one whose cloak was different: purple unbordered. But for that, at first, she would not have noticed him. He was not as tall as the others. Not tall at all, unless in Khemet. His hair was lion-colored, cut like a lion’s mane. He said something to the man nearest him—as tall as the tallest, that one, and darker-haired than most, like ruddy bronze. The tall one’s face seemed carved in marble, so fine was it for a Macedonian face, and so quiet. Then he laughed, and he looked like a wild boy.

The other was more than wild. Even standing still, he seemed to flicker like a flame in a windowless room. He stepped away from the tall man into the light from the open tentflap. The sun caught his hair and flamed in it.

A murmur ran through the tent, rising to a roar. “Alexander!”

Meriamon had known in her bones, even before she heard his name. His presence was a fire on her skin. It drove out the pain that filled this place, lifted the shadows on it, even as it cleared her sight and sharpened it, and showed her the man beneath the king.

He raised a hand. The noise died down. “As you were,” he said. Light, crisp, but laughing a little. His voice was high and rather harsh. He would have to work at smoothing it, Meriamon thought, but it would carry in a battle.

She went on with what she had been doing. The man under her hands was oblivious. His eyes were on the king. His king.

They were all like that. Even Nikolaos. They loved him. They would die for him.

He knew what he was doing. Meriamon was trained to see it; was born to it. But in him the knowing came after the doing. It was what he was. He was as hot as a fire in the forge, damped and gentled now, schooled to infinite patience as he held the hand of a man who would not last the day, and heard how the man had killed a Persian who would have killed his friend. He asked after another man’s lover, traded banter with a grizzled veteran, dried a boy’s too-easy tears with the hem of his cloak. He seemed to be everywhere at once, to speak to everyone at once, but each one reckoned that the king had spoken to him alone.

“He’s something, isn’t he?”

Kleomenes had been trailing after Meriamon for awhile, fetching and carrying and adding an extra pair of hands when she needed them. He had no illusions as to her sex, and apparently no disillusion with it. He handed her the roll of bandage that she needed, without taking his eyes from Alexander. “I remember his father,” he said. “Now that was a man! Best king Macedon ever had, or we thought ever would, till we got a look at Alexander.”

She looked sidelong at the boy. Big as he was, he could not have been more than fourteen. “You remember Philip?”

“Everyone remembers Philip. He was like a hero, people said. Like Herakles, and a king. Alexander... Alexander is like a god.”

She shivered a little. The boy’s tongue ran independent of the rest of him, for all that she could see. But he was no fool, and he had a clear eye. She bent over the man on the pallet. “Be ready with the salve,” she said.

o0o

Alexander was mortal enough. He was walking stiff; she heard a man whisper that he had got a sword-thrust in the thigh, and ridden right on through it, and got merry hell from Philippos the surgeon for it afterward. “And he still half-staggering from the fever he got from swimming in the Kydnos,” the man said. “Cold as Hekate’s dugs, that was. But he doesn’t stop for much, even for fever.”

Meriamon suspected that he did not stop at all. Most of his followers had left, bored or called to duties. The tall man was there still, but as she watched, he said something to Alexander. Alexander smiled: a startlingly sweet smile.

The tall man seemed dazzled by it. He turned away without obeisance or any mark of respect, but he needed none; it was in everything he did.

“That’s Hephaistion,” said Kleomenes. “His best friend in the world. They call one another Achilles and Patroklos. Gods know, they’re as close as that. Closer.” He sighed. “I saw them at Troy, sacrificing at Achilles’ tomb. We all wept, it was so beautiful.”

“I can imagine,” Meriamon said. Her voice was dry.

Children, she thought. Dreamers and children. And they wanted to conquer a world.

Did they know it yet? Even he, whose soul was fire—did he know what it was that he wanted?

o0o

He came round to her in his course. She did not try to avoid him. The man she tended was as besotted as any of the others, and he got his reward: a clasp of the hand, a word of praise for his bravery, a bit of banter to keep him smiling. There was nothing false in any of it.

One could not quite call him beautiful, even if one were a Greek. That full-lipped face with its flat cheeks and its firm jaw; the long strong nose growing straight out of the heavy brows; the broad forehead; the hair growing from a peak, lion-like, and falling as it would: they were too odd for beauty, too purely themselves. But the eyes were splendid. They were as restless as he was, and piercingly bright, yet they could still utterly, fixed far and dreaming on a horizon that only he could see. What color they were, she could not tell. Grey, blue, grey-blue, green, grey-green. One was darker than the other. Or was that the angle of the light?

He shifted, and his eyes were clear grey, looking her up and down in curiosity and dawning mirth. “What in the gods’ name are you?”

He asked it as simply as a child, with a child’s arrogance, and a child’s certainty that he would not be punished for it. She could not help but smile. “My name is Meriamon,” she said, “and I was a singer in the temple of Amon in Thebes.”

He frowned a little. She could see the swift mind flicking from thought to thought; his eyes changed with it, grey to green to blue to grey. “‘Was’?” he asked.

“Now I am here,” she said.

“Why?”

Direct as a child, too, but that was no child’s mind, weighing her, measuring her, taking in everything she was.

“To serve you,” said Meriamon.

His head tossed a little, impatient. Of course she had come to serve him, the gesture said. He was Alexander. He said, “You came a long way to wait on a barbarian king.”

“My gods brought me here,” she said.

“Why—” He paused. Someone was calling him, urgent, refusing to be ignored. He muttered something brief and shockingly vulgar, and grinned at her expression. “Mariamne”—his tongue did odd things to her name—”I have an army to look after and dead to bury, and a victory to celebrate. After that I’ll talk with you. Will you come and see the rites of the savage Hellenes?”

No savage, this one, barbarian or no. She grinned back. “You Greeks are such children.”

He laughed. “So we’ve been told. You’ll come, then?”

“I’ll come,” said Meriamon.