Lord of the Two Lands (21 page)

She stared at him. “Are you offering me marriage?”

“I am telling you why I cannot.”

“That,” she said, “is the most presumptuous thing I have ever heard.”

“Yes,” he said tightly.

She wanted to shake him. She often did. It was becoming a habit. “That’s not what I meant! How dare you presume what is and is not suitable for me? I am my own woman. You are your king’s man. If I ask him, he will do no more and no less than give you to me.”

“No!” He was shouting. He lowered his voice. “Mariamne. Mari—Meriamon. Don’t ask him.”

“You don’t want me.”

“I do want you!” He forced calm again, forced softness. “It’s that... you keep him safe. In a way. While you’re here, and Egypt is there, the ones who want him married off are less likely to press him.”

“There’s Barsine,” said Meriamon.

“What, and Memnon’s brat? Even Arrhidaios can count on his fingers, and anyone who knows babies can tell you that’s no newborn. Two months, is he? Three?”

“Two,” she said. She drew a slow breath. “Yes,” she said. “I suppose it’s true. Egypt needs me. Alexander needs me. I can’t bind myself to anything until that is done.”

“You can’t.” he said.

“But,” said Meriamon, “outside of binding, where the heart is, there I am free.” She came out of the water, advancing on him. He stood his ground. She set her palms flat on his breast, over his heart. “Not now,” she said, “but soon, I shall claim you. Will you let me?”

His chest heaved. He was trembling. But then, in a breath’s pause, he steadied. That was the splendor of him: that courage to face what he was most afraid of, and overcome it. “Maybe,” he said.

She hit him. He caught her. She hooked his knee and spilled him into the sand.

He had let her, knowing she would do it. That was answer enough. She dusted her hands and gathered her skirts and went back to the camp. Whether he followed, or when, she did not need to know.

He had her mark on him. The gods would look to the rest.

Alexander’s army marched from Tyre in the full heat of summer, traveling in the cool of the morning and in the cool of the night, and resting in the day’s heat. The mountains of the Lebanon fell away with their snows that cooled the eye even as the sun battered it blind. The green uplands, the little rivers, faded and shrank. Dun earth, dust and flies, and heat that would not relent for any wishing, and no blessed green: harvest was over where any water was, the fields stripped bare, and only here and there the relief of an oasis. This was desert, the Red Land indeed though far from Khemet, and it had no mercy on any who would invade it, whatever his right to it.

They marched beside the sea, cool glorious blue that no man could drink; its salt was cruel to fair Macedonian skin seared raw by the sun. The fleet sailed in it, keeping close to shore and putting in with water, wine, bread and meat and daintier things. Hephaistion had command of it, received as calmly as he did everything that mattered, and managed with admirable competence.

Nikolaos sailed with him. It was a sore choice between the ships and the horses, but the ships won the toss.

Meriamon, for her part, would not leave the land. Not for fear of the great water or of the ships that sailed on it; but Alexander marched with the army, and she wanted to be with Alexander.

If Niko was fleeing her by taking to the sea, then so be it. He still came in every night, beached his ship and slept on the sand with his men. She sat with them sometimes near the fire that kept the flies at bay, and heard their songs and stories, and told her own, as much as she could with no song in her. That had not come back, not even yet, though Khemet’s nearness rose in her like a tide.

There were cities along the coast, and villages in the green places, huddled about a spring or a river now thinned to a trickle or gone dry. The people there worshipped a god who was one alone, and owed their allegiance to a city of priests in the inland hills. The temple there, people said, was like the temple of Melqart in Tyre, and built by the same hands, but the god in it wore no earthly form, nor allowed one to be ascribed to him.

The Macedonians thought it very strange. Meriamon thought it rather like Amon, who in his chief semblance was hidden and had no face that mortal eyes could see.

The cities received Alexander with welcome or at the least without resistance. He bought what he needed from them, of water little for they had none to spare and he had ships conveying it from the rivers of Syria, but of their harvest whatever they would offer. That grew less as he marched southward, and his ships supplied more, sailing by night as well as by day to meet the army’s need.

At last they came to Gaza. They had had warning as far north as Tyre that the commander of Gaza, Batis the Babylonian, was not minded to surrender to Alexander. They found the city locked and barred and its people as defiant as if they had never known the lesson of Tyre.

“I’ll break you,” Alexander said to their envoys. “Gaza is no Tyre. It can’t stand against me.”

“We can try,” said Batis’ men. The chief of them, squat heavy-bodied Babylonian like his commander, looked Alexander up and down and said, “You’ve never lost a battle, have you? Maybe it’s time you learned.”

Alexander’s face was burned scarlet by the sun; it could hardly have reddened more. His eyes in it were almost white, like the sun in the merciless sky. “Do you dare delay me?”

“We’ll stop you if we can.”

“Then try,” said Alexander. “Try and be damned.”

o0o

Tyre had been pure frustration. This was maddening: the city squatting in its sandpit, the army drying to leather outside of it, and no hope of moving while Batis was there to raise the country against them. Behind was retreat more bitter than Alexander ever meant to endure. Beyond was desert as bitter as any in the world. Seven days—seven marches through the furnace of the gods to the gateway of Egypt.

Batis was as stubborn as his enemy, and as deaf to reason. He would hold or he would die. What had befallen Tyre cost him not a moment’s hesitation.

There was malice here. Not in Batis, perhaps; Meriamon saw him on the walls, and he was as any other man, light and darkness mingled, and a black root of obstinacy informing all that he did. The seed from which it sprouted, the source which gave it its strength, was no part of him at all.

And yet there was no temple here, no circle of priests working power out of sacrifice. There was nothing that she could see. Only the dark thing, the quiver in the senses, the pervading, numbing hostility. The land itself might have spawned it, or the air, or a god whose name she did not know.

Melqart, no; he had never wished ill to Alexander, whatever his priests might have done. She had not seen him at all in his city, as if he had withdrawn from it, left his priests and his descendant to settle their quarrel as they would.

This was different. It was both more real and less, more solid and less certain. A will set against him. A mind, or minds, that would destroy him if it could.

Arrhidaios knew about it. In Tyre his keepers had kept him close, and he had gone with Alexander to Sidon. On the march they had relaxed their vigilance, perhaps because he could hardly go far in that country, or want to.

In Gaza he took to following Meriamon about, helping her as he could, fetching and carrying when she was in the hospital, or making a looming second to her shadow when she walked abroad in the camp. Her shadow rather liked him. He could see it; he talked to it, easily, a child’s prattle in his deep rumble of a voice.

Even before she was fully aware of what was beneath the earth, she heard him say to her shadow, “Do you feel it, too? It’s all dark underneath. It doesn’t like us at all.”

“‘It?’“ she asked, pausing in her stride.

Arrhidaios shrugged and looked guilty. “Nothing,” he said. Nor could she coax any more out of him, though she cursed the Greeks who had taught him. “It’s bad,” was all he would say.

She let it go. He stopped telling her shadow about it, almost stopped talking at all, walking hunched and low, like a dog with its tail between its legs.

She found herself walking the same way, and shooting glances over her shoulder. The shadow behind her was always her own, sulfur-eyed, jackal-grin, but more and more it was no grin but a snarl. Its ears lay flat against its head; its hands, human-fingered but tipped with claws, flexed and eased, flexed and eased.

Even a fool could see sense if she had her nose rubbed in it. Meriamon rose up on a day out of count, brazen sky, hammer of sun, and Alexander’s army burrowing like desert rats; and Gaza on its rock, a ship in a sea of sand.

He was in the front as he always was, as filthy and sun-scorched and water-starved as they, and in a towering rage. That he had been in it for the greater part of a month, and no end to it that anyone could see, had done nothing to lessen it. Quite the contrary. The glare he turned on Meriamon was actual white pain, so sudden and so fierce that she gasped. Her shadow glided forward against all logic of sun or shade, ears flat, teeth bared, the ghost of a growl in its throat.

Alexander regarded it as he would have done Peritas, who, being a sensible creature, had taken refuge in the shade of the engineers’ tent. Meriamon’s shadow was neither sensible nor an earthly creature. It barred the way between Meriamon and the king.

“Down,” he said to it. “Peace. I won’t harm her.”

It subsided slowly. He looked from it to Meriamon, then about him to the struggle of the siege.

Abruptly he signaled his trumpeter. “Call a rest,” he said, “and water—double ration. You,” he said to Meriamon, “come with me.”

She went with him. It was hardly cooler under the king’s canopy, but one of the king’s pages was there with a jar of water, and wine to mix in it, and a soldier’s ration of wine and fruit. Peritas’ tail thumped the ground, raising a puff of dust. Alexander knelt to ruffle his ears.

Meriamon waited. Urgency was fierce in her, but patience nested in it, allowing him this moment’s indulgence. She gained time to measure his mood.

The bright power that had sailed out of Sidon was darkened now. Wrath stained it, and the long rankling of siege piled upon siege. What was in the earth here was little enough in itself—a small malice, a feeble resentment, a touch of the old dark that had been before the gods. But his souls were open to it, ripe for its taking. It was soft, supple, creeping round the walls of his spirit, pouring cold over the fire that was his strength. It would not break him but subvert him. Not lightning out of heaven but a serpent in the heel, subtle and deadly.

She sat down abruptly. Her knees had given way.

Arrhidaios squatted by her, brown eyes worried. “What is it, Meri? Are you sick?”

“No,” she managed to say. “It’s the heat, that’s all. May I have a cup of water, please?”

He went eagerly as she had hoped, to fetch a cup and fill it. She tucked her feet under her. She was no woman of the desert, to scorn the weakness of chair or stool, but the chair that was closest was too great a height to scale.

In a moment she would try it. She leaned against its leg. The carved and gilded wood was cool, cooler than her cheek. She closed her eyes.

She knew when Alexander came to stand by her. She would always know where he was, however far he went, however feeble her strength. He crouched as his brother had, but lightly, without the audible grunt and creak of bones. “Something’s wrong,” he said.

She opened her eyes. His face filled her vision. His nose was peeling. She said so.

He rubbed it. His eyes were clear grey, the color of flint; one was perceptibly darker, odd to meet from so close. The white light seemed to have gone from them, but she could feel it beneath.

Tyre had done that. Gaza had deepened it. Where great light was, was greatest dark. Where the highest god walked, the god of the netherworld paced after. And Alexander would not be thwarted. His spirit would not endure it.

She shivered, though the air was as hot as she could ever have wished. She who was a king’s daughter knew what a king was. This one knew gentleness, knew mercy. But that was the work of his will, of long teaching at strong hands. If he loosed the bonds that constrained him, if he opened himself to the fullness of his power, to the dark as well as the light, then all that he had wrought, he could destroy. And Khemet would know a tyrant worse than any out of Persis.

Her heart hardened. It would not happen. The gods would not let it. But what was here, what he tried to do—that was deadly dangerous.

“Alexander,” she said, “do you feel the ill-will that is here?”

“I could hardly miss it,” he said.

“No,” she said. “Not Gaza. Not Batis and his soldiers, though they share a part of it. They’ve called up something else. Waked it, brought it with them—it doesn’t matter which. It means you no good.”

“No more did Melqart’s priests,” Alexander said. “They gave way easily enough, and there was more to them than I’ll ever see here.” He smiled and helped her up. “There now. You’re heatstruck, that’s all, and half mad as we all are with another siege so hard on the heels of the other. It will be over soon; we’ll bring you home to Egypt. Did you know I’ve had embassies from Mazaces the satrap? He’s minded to let me in without a fight. Wise man, Mazaces.”

“The Parsa are not always fools,” she said. “Or cowards, either.”

Alexander set her in the chair, as solicitous as if she had been a queen, and smiled down at her. It was a bright boy-smile, with no shadow in it. “They aren’t, are they? I’ve liked the ones I’ve met. Very much, some of them. Queen Sisygambis is more of a man than most of the men I’ve seen; and Artabazos is a philosopher. It used to drive Aristotle wild when I said as much, but I meant it. I still do.”

Meriamon heard him out. He was talking around her, and he knew it as well as she. When he finished she said, “I think you should forget this siege and go on. It’s ill for you. It turns your mind on itself and gnaws it to pieces. Better to leave it behind, and find your strength in Egypt.”

“I can’t do that,” he said much too reasonably. He should have been furious that she should see a weakness in him, and speak of it so clearly. “With Persia rising like a wave in the east, and the sea-cities barely subdued, I can’t leave one to think it’s thwarted me. Others will follow once they see what one can do, and I’ll have the whole war to fight again.”

“Not if you die here.”

There. She had said it. It was cold and hard in her heart, and true, a seer’s truth.

He laughed. “Oh, come! You’ve been listening to my soothsayers. Mutter, mutter, mumble, mumble, and dark days lie ahead, and things worse than dark, but they know and I know what they mean. There’s the danger. If I’m made to think I’ll die, so I will, and the enemy will have his way.”

“I haven’t listened to anyone,” she said, “but the gods who are in me. I see death for you here. What is the word the Greeks use? Hubris. I see it in you.”

His eyes went wide and pale. “Lady,” he said with careful control. “Mariamne. You are what you are, and I grant you fair indulgence. But you are not Alexander.”

“Nor are you,” she said, “when you speak so. There is a god in you, I have no doubt of it. But even gods must acknowledge their limits.”

“I’m not a god,” he said. Quickly. Fiercely. “I am a king. I do as a king must. Hellas calls me to this war, Egypt waits for me, Asia cries out to me. Tyche—Tyche who is Fate—commands all that I do.”

“Even your Tyche, who is like and unlike our Ma’at, allows a choice. If you leave now, you can come back with all Egypt behind you and scatter this city to the winds.”

“If Persia will let me, or Phoenicia stay subdued.” Alexander’s face was firm, set against her. “I thank you for your trouble. You mean well, I know. But I won’t change my mind.”

She stood. He had to retreat quickly or be overset. Arrhidaios stood behind him with a cup in his hand, staring at them both. She took the cup with as much of a smile as she could muster, and drank it down. “Thank you,” she said.

Arrhidaios’ eyes shifted away from her. “You should listen to her, Alexander,” he said. “She sees the bad thing, too.”