Lord of the Two Lands (22 page)

Alexander did not turn on his brother. The softening of his face was never for Meriamon, and his words though gentle had no yielding in them. “So do I. It doesn’t scare me.”

“It should,” said Arrhidaios. “It’s bad.”

“Why, what does it look like to you?”

Arrhidaios knit his heavy brows and pulled at his beard. For a moment he might have been right in the head: a man of the king’s council called on to settle a difficult dispute. Then he covered his eyes with his hands and shrank down shivering. “It’s bad,” he said, sobbing it. “It’s bad!”

“Hush,” said Alexander, kneeling beside him and holding him tightly. “It can’t hurt you.”

“It doesn’t want to. It wants you.”

“It won’t get me.”

Arrhidaios clutched his brother’s arm, pulling him about, face to face. “It bites you,” he said. “Like a snake. Niko caught a snake. It bit a dog. The dog swelled up and died. Niko killed it, and a dog ate it, and it died too.”

“I’m not a dog. I won’t die.”

“It’s bad,” said Arrhidaios. “It’s
bad
!”

Alexander’s lips were tight. Meriamon could see the flesh reddening and swelling where Arrhidaios gripped him. How strong the man was, she well knew. But Alexander voiced no protest. “Hush,” he said. “Hush.”

Soon enough Arrhidaios hushed. He let Alexander go, only to bury his head in his brother’s shoulder. Alexander rocked him, murmuring in Macedonian, brother-words, mother-words, comfort-words.

Over the rough dark head he met Meriamon’s stare. He did not speak. Nor did she. She left them there, the king and the one who could have been king if he had grown as a man should. Simple earthly sickness, it might have been, that addled his wits in youth. Or mischance: a nurse’s carelessness, a guardsman’s failure to watch over him. Or poison sent awry. Or an ill working, a spell sung in the dark of the moon.

The darkness was fouling all that she thought of. She fled it as best she could, seeking the nearest refuge.

o0o

Thaïs was just out of bed—was it still only midmorning?—and retching into a basin. That was a common enough sight after a Macedonian drinking-bout, but Thaïs did not often succumb to it. Meriamon would have gone by; Phylinna had matters well in hand. But she paused. She was counting, reckoning mornings and frequencies.

Yesterday, yes. And the day before. Not the day before that, but Meriamon had gone early to the hospital and stayed late, and she had not seen Thaïs at all.

It was admirable distraction from what beset her. She went to kneel by Thaïs, taking the basin from the servant. The girl was delighted to be relieved of such duty; she backed away.

Thaïs lay back at last, exhausted. Phylinna wiped her brow with a dampened cloth, clucking to herself.

Meriamon leveled an eye at the servant, who retrieved the basin and took it elsewhere. To the privies, Meriamon hoped, and not simply to the back of the tent.

Thaïs sighed. It caught. Meriamon looked about swiftly for another basin, but Thaïs said, “It’s over. Just... a last remembrance.”

“Does Ptolemy know?” asked Meriamon.

“Not yet.” Thais seemed not at all surprised that Meriamon had guessed. Meriamon was Egyptian after all, and a physician. She could hardly fail to know what these morning indispositions meant.

“Will you keep it?”

The hetaira closed her eyes. After a moment she opened them. They were as old as Khemet. “I don’t know,” she said.

“Do you want to?”

“I don’t know that, either.”

“Maybe you should ask its father.”

Thaïs stiffened at the word. Offended? Startled? “No,” she said. “This child is mine. I’ll do the choosing for it.”

Meriamon did not say anything. Fathers chose in Hellas, she knew that: to take up the child and rear it, or to expose it on the hillside. But that was a living child. Whether its mother would bear it at all—that was another matter.

Her hand went to her own middle. No life kindled in it. None would. She had bought power and purpose, and a destiny, and paid in the children she would have borne. Yet she could feel—could imagine—the spark caught, swelling, waxing into humanity.

It hurt. She had not expected that.

Thaïs sat up. She wobbled; Phylinna steadied her. She waved the maid away. Color came back to her cheeks. She looked like herself again.

The little page whom Ptolemy had given her after Tyre, eunuch already and reared for Tanit’s temple, stood with cup and bowl. Thaïs smiled at him. He blushed and ducked his head. He was a pretty thing, less oily-sleek than most of his kind, and endearingly shy.

“Do you know what I discovered last night?” asked Thaïs in her bright brittle day-voice. “Thettalos is back.”

“The Thessalian?” Meriamon had heard the name, but at the moment she could not remember where. “One of the cavalry?”

Thaïs laughed. “Oh! I forget. You came after Issus. He was gone by then—he wintered in Hellas, and summered there, too, till he decided to come back to Alexander. They’re dear friends. He’s the best tragic actor in Hellas. He has a troupe that he takes everywhere, and they do the plays at festivals. Have you ever seen the tragedy?”

“Once,” said Meriamon, “or twice, when I was small. We have part-rites of our own. Osiris’ are famous, that are sung in Abydos.”

“Then you know what it’s like, though no one does it as well as Thettalos. He’s going to do scenes tonight, just for the king’s friends. Will you come? Niko will be there,” said Thaïs, wicked. “He never misses a performance.”

That decided it. Meriamon would not go. She did not need to contend with the disturbance that he was, with all the rest that beset her. She heard herself say, “I’ll go.”

Thaïs clapped her hands. “Oh, good! I’ll wear my Egyptian gown. I have a new collar. It’s not as handsome as yours, but I look very well in it. Almost a proper Egyptian.”

o0o

Meriamon, improper Egyptian, regarded Thaïs in her finery and smiled. The hetaira would never look anything but Greek, but the sheer linen and the golden pectoral set off her body’s richness admirably.

She preened in it, shaking her head to make the plaits dance. Her hair did not take well to the hundred tiny braids that Meriamon wore, but she professed herself well content with a simpler fashion, narrow plaits about the face, the rest caught up in a fillet more Greek than Egyptian, but very becoming. Meriamon said so.

“You of course are exquisite,” said Thais. “What I would give for bones that fine... and those eyes! If you ever tire of being a priestess, you’d make a splendid courtesan.”

“I’ll remember that,” said Meriamon, trying not to blush.

o0o

The king’s friends were gathered in his tent, in the central hall made larger by the removal of the inner walls. A half-circle of couches faced another of the walls, and emptiness in front of it, an absence waiting to be filled. There was wine and a flute player, and a blind man plucking sweet random notes on a lyre.

Thaïs went at once as she always did, to Ptolemy’s couch. Meriamon could not see one that was empty. Most had two already, man and woman or man and youth. There were a few on which men reclined alone.

One was Niko’s. Meriamon sat in the woman’s place and took the cup that the servant filled for her. He was massively silent. She slanted a glance over her shoulder. “Good evening,” she said.

“Good evening,” he replied civilly. “You’re looking very pretty.”

“And you,” she said.

His brows flew up. She laughed at his expression. Pretty, no, that was not the word. But his chiton looked new, and seemed—was—heavy raw silk. Its hem was embroidered with gold. He had his good cloak draped over the couch, the one he had taken as booty in Tyre, the beautiful amethyst purple of a lighter dyeing. It was not so highly prized as the deep-dyed royal vermilion, but she loved the color of it. A fillet bound his hair, raw silk again, and a thin strand of gold. She smoothed a lock that was minded to stray. “You’re very pleasant to look at,” she said.

“I’d rather look at you.”

“Then we’re both content,” said Meriamon. She considered briefly. No one was looking, nor, on reflection, would she care if anyone did. She stretched out, leaning on her elbow, her back against his front.

He hardly flinched. Brave man. She sipped her wine and nibbled the dainties that came her way and decided that she liked to have him so close. As close as her shadow, but warmer.

The king made an entrance as he liked to do, with Peritas on a lead and, somewhat surprisingly, Arrhidaios walking behind. The king’s brother had a clean chiton and an eager expression. He greeted Meriamon with delight. “Meri! You’ll see Thettalos too.”

“I will,” she said.

“Sit with me?” he asked.

Meriamon did not know what to say.

“Niko won’t mind,” said Arrhidaios. “Will you, Niko? You can sit with Alexander.”

People were grinning. Niko, for a marvel, did not even frown. “You can sit with the lady,” he said, almost managing not to sound relieved.

A little man tugged at Arrhidaios’ arm: the chief of his guardians, speaking softly. “Come, my lord. Here is a couch for you, right in front, and a pretty lady to wait on you.”

“I want Meriamon,” said Arrhidaios.

She started to rise. Alexander’s voice stilled them all, even the watchers who had begun to laugh. “Go on, brother. Thettalos is coming out soon. Don’t you want to hear him?”

Arrhidaios’ face clouded. “I want Meriamon,” he said.

“You may help Meriamon in the hospital in the morning,” said Alexander firmly.

“Promise?”

“I promise,” Meriamon said.

Arrhidaios did not like it at all. His brows knit, stubborn. The servant tugged at him.

Slowly Arrhidaios yielded. Meriamon sank back to the couch. Alexander’s eyes flashed over her and her companion. His smile was sudden and quite dazzling.

When she had blinked the brilliance away, the king was at ease on his couch and the servants had dimmed the lamps, all but those which illuminated the space near the wall. They made a half-circle within the half-circle, a house of light amid the crowding shadows.

The notes of the lyre, present but forgotten through the rest of it, gathered and came together. The flute wove among them. A drum began to beat, blood-beat, pulse-beat.

He came out of the dark: a slender youth in a purple robe, dancing, swaying, with a golden branch in his hand. His face was white as marble, white as death, the eyes as deep as the darkness behind the stars. The skin of a spotted panther was his girdle and his cloak. His hair streamed down his back, tawny gold, loose long locks like a lion’s mane.

He sang as he came. His voice was neither deep nor light, neither man’s nor woman’s. Youth’s, maybe, just broken and finding its depth. The purity of it walked cold down Meriamon’s spine. Zeus’ son, he, child of the gods, god become man beside the stream of Theban Dirce: Dionysos in the madness of wine.

“From Lydia come I,” he sang, “from fields of gold, from Phrygia, from Persia’s sunstruck plains, from strong-walled towns of Bactria, cold-bitter Media and blessed Araby. All Asia have I conquered, and all the salt sea coast, all the fair cities, Hellene, barbarian, all: all mine, all worship me, all know that I am god.”

Meriamon struggled to breathe, to see what eyes could see. A man in a Tyrian robe, in a worn and tattered panther-skin, his wig a lion’s mane, his mask—his mask—

She tore her eyes from it. They fell on Alexander’s face. Half was in shadow, half in reflected light. The same face, ruddy to the pallor of the mask, and yet inescapably the same. The same expression, even, half mad, half exalted.

He knew. He saw the god and the tribute. He took it as his due.

She must have said something, made some move. Niko’s arm settled over her. His voice murmured in her ear. “Hush. Watch.”

She watched. There were other people, other singers; or maybe it was only the actor’s skill, evoking them as surely as if they had been living flesh. There was a war of sorts. Women serving the god in a madness of ecstasy. The young king refusing him, denying his divinity—that too a madness, implacable, inescapable. He took arms against a god. His own mother slew him, rent him asunder, and the god, dancing, laughed. “Too late,” he sang, “too late you knew me; too late you spoke my name.”

Alexander never moved, hardly seemed to breathe. The mask’s strange smile was his own. The mask’s eyes, lightless dark, bore deep within a gleam of fire.

“Thus,” sang the god, “my father Zeus ordained. So let it ever be.”

“Hubris,” said Meriamon. She had been saying it too often. She knew that. People had stopped listening. Alexander was the young god, Herakles incarnate, Achilles come again, undefeated and undefeatable. That Gaza resisted him so well and so long—that was outrage, and the town would suffer for it.

Having made an isthmus of Tyre and bound it irrevocably to the land, he made nothing of raising a hill in front of the mount of Gaza, to set his siege engines level with the walls. But Gaza was not Tyre. Its people knew what they had to hope for if their resistance failed. They had reason to fight, and fight they did.

On the morning when Alexander’s hill drew level with that of Gaza, the king had his engines ready to begin the ascent, the crews waiting in the cool of the dawn, the priests around him at the altar as he blessed his work with sacrifice. It was the king’s duty to take the first victim. The wreath was on his head—odd to Meriamon’s eye as she watched, to see the green leaves brought from far away, and the king’s hair fallow gold under them, for it was near sunrise, the light of the torches gone pale. A little wind played with the garland, plucked a leaf and sent it spinning. The sacrifice, a fine fat ram, baaed inquiringly.

Alexander smoothed its head before he raised its chin, the knife in his hand. As the knife touched the woolly throat, he started and staggered.

A bird. Desert falcon, Meriamon thought, seeing the flash of wings against the sunrise. It had had something in its claws—a stone: someone held it up in a trembling hand.

People stirred and muttered. Voices cried out against the omen.

“Quiet!” Alexander’s voice cut across the growing roar.

The ram blatted and lunged. Two of the priests flung themselves on it. They went down in a flurry of hoofs and robes and tattered garlands.

One way and another the king made his sacrifice. But the omen was given. Aristandros the seer spoke it as the ram’s flesh roasted on the altar. “You will take the town, my king,” he said, “but look to yourself. This day for you is perilous.”

Meriamon was close enough by then to see Alexander’s face. It was as pale as the mask of the god, and as still. He moved abruptly, took off his garland and laid it on the altar.

“I’ll remember,” he said.

He passed her as if she had not been there. She almost reached, almost stayed him. But something held her back.

Her eyes met Aristandros’. The seer’s were as dark almost as an Egyptian’s, and wise. “He listens to you,” she said.

The seer shrugged slightly. “As much as he listens to anyone.”

They watched him go, walking steadily as he always did, and yet managing to touch and be touched, speak and be spoken to, win his army all over again as if he were its lover and it his beloved.

“He is mortal,” Meriamon said. “Pray the gods he remembers it.”

o0o

Foot by straining foot the engines mounted Alexander’s hill to the southern wall of Gaza. Bolts and arrows and stones rained down on them from the city.

Some of the arrows were fire arrows, but the engines had known such at Tyre, and overcome them. Alexander’s archers did what they might, but it was ill shooting from below, and the catapults no use until they should rise to the summit. First one, then another wavered and slowed and halted as its crews fell, or scrambled for cover.

Batis, seeing them so beset, loosed his sortie. A stream of howling Arabs poured out of the southern gate, swarming over the hill, attacking the siege engines with fire.

Alexander had been holding back. He stayed out of range of bolt and arrow, and therefore of the fight, though he paced and fretted and made his pages miserable. When Batis’ sortie overran his engines and bade fair to drive his men down off the hill, he could bear it no longer. He shouted for his Shieldbearers.

They looked at one another, and at Hephaistion. He looked into Alexander’s eyes and saw nothing there to touch.

Fate, he thought. Gods. Madness. His belly clenched. “Alexander—” he began.

Alexander was past hearing him, or any voice but the one in his own soul. Hephaistion breathed a word—prayer, curse, he did not know which—and braced to leap into the fight. The others fell into ranks behind. Alexander bolted ahead of them, into the thick of the battle.

There was no mistaking him, however fierce the press. He was all blood and gold and fiery temper, hewing a path through the enemy. He had no fear at all. The god was in him.

The Arabs had their own gods, and their own madnesses. He hewed one down and leaped over the body, springing at another.

Hephaistion saw the flash of a blade. “‘Ware behind!” he shouted.

Alexander half-spun. A knife plunged toward his corselet, bent and slipped and snapped, the man who wielded it sinking down dead with Alexander’s blade in his vitals. Alexander laughed, sharp and short, and swung his shield edge-on.

A swath opened before him. For a moment they stood alone, he and Hephaistion, an island in a sea of shouting, screaming, struggling men. Alexander did not speak, or glance at his friend. He was oblivious to anything outside of himself.

Hephaistion knew better than to grieve for what he could not change. He took the time to breathe, to wipe the sweat from his forehead, to take in what he could see of the fight. It was going well. Even as he watched, a clump of men—some in Arab dress, some in Persian—broke and ran for the gate. A company of Shieldbearers sprinted to catch them.

Alexander stirred, looking about for an enemy to fight. It was raining missiles still—a stone larger than Hephaistion’s head thudded to earth within his arm’s reach, bounced and struck another and shattered. A shard stung his thigh between tunic and greave.

He raised his shield, firmed his grip on his sword. Two robed Arabs with knives had brought down a Macedonian. Alexander sprang to even the odds, too quick for Hephaistion to follow. There were men in his way, swords, spears, bodies innumerable. Hephaistion struggled, fighting blindly like a stag caught in a thicket, antlers snared, hounds snapping at his belly.

He saw it beyond him, out of reach or help or hope. A god helped it, maybe, or the dark thing that was in the earth of Gaza. As Alexander leaped, danger from the sky forgotten, eyes only for the man who had fallen, a bolt fell from the walls.

In the last instant he saw it. His shield flew up. The bolt pierced it. Pierced his corselet; pierced his shoulder.

He stopped, swayed. His face wore no expression but surprise.

He firmed his feet, gathered himself, went on. Hephaistion, trapped still, hacking at a man without a face, cursing endlessly and helplessly, saw the blood trickling down, scarlet on gold.

The faceless one fell. The way was clear.

Alexander was no longer in it. His sword rose and fell, cutting through the thicket of the enemy, pressing toward the walls. Hephaistion knew as clearly as if a god had spoken, what was in that mad brilliant mind. He had an army to lead, a battle to win. Pain was nothing, a wound—however deep—an irrelevance. It was a price. He had paid it. Now he would take Gaza.

o0o

He was conscious when they brought him out of the fight. Bled out, white with shock, and cursing them for taking him from the battle. “I’ve paid the price,” he said. “The city’s mine for the taking. Aristandros said it. Let me up. Let me get back. Didn’t you hear? Batis thinks I’m dead. Let me go back before my men think the same!”

Meriamon’s hands stopped him. She had no strength to match his, but her touch brought him up short. Philippos had come in with the others, having followed the battle as he always did, as mad in his way as his madman of a king. He had got the corselet off on the field and cut the bolt out, but the bleeding that came after, once begun, would not stop.

Nor would Alexander. He had lost an ungodly lot of blood. It weakened him enough to slow him down; when he collapsed, they carried him to safety.

Meriamon had needle and thread to hand, and an iron will to go with it. She set to work sewing him up.

He fought her. Her shadow laid itself on him and held him still, and opened the gates of sleep. He struggled, but the pain was beyond even his endurance. It overcame him, and darkness with it, and blessed relief for the surgeons.

o0o

It was a bad wound, and it did not want to heal. As quickly as it closed, he opened it again, insisting on being taken in a litter to the siege, and then refusing to stay put, getting up to point out a new angle for the sappers or to order the shift of a catapult.

Even wine with poppy could not keep him down. He refused to drink it, or he drank too little to matter. He had them mining the walls, and he had to be there, he said. “You know what they did when I went down,” he said to Meriamon, not for the first time. “They won the skirmish for me, but they didn’t storm the walls. They thought I’d been killed. They have to see that I’m alive and fighting, or the whole siege will collapse.”

“That might not be a bad thing,” she said.

He struggled up on his couch. She had got him to allow that much: a couch under a canopy, well out of range of the enemy’s fire, and runners to carry his orders to the sappers and the crews on the siege engines.

She propped him with cushions, though he gave her no thanks for it. He was going to get up and prowl again. She knew the signs.

“There are drugs,” she said, “that can keep a man down for as long as they must. I am not above using them. The wound is festering now—it could kill you.”

“It won’t,” he said.

She would not hit him. It was not fear of striking a king. It was fear of her own temper; that she would not be able to stop.

She stood over him, looming as much as woman could: a small woman in a great towering mantle of shadow. “I see now,” she said, “what a mistake I made, letting you think that you might be the son of a god. You are still mortal flesh. You can still die.”

He looked at her with clear pale eyes, seeing shape and shadow both, and showing no fear of either. “I know,” he said. “I know that I am mortal.”

“You do not.”

He touched the bandages that bound his shoulder. There was pain: his lips were tight, his face waxen under the flush of temper. “This tells me so.”

“You don’t listen.”

“Am I supposed to turn coward, then,” he snapped, “and slink out of Gaza with my tail between my legs?”

“Gaza hates you. The stones themselves are turned against you.”

He struck the couch with his fist. It shook him: he gasped. He would not let her touch him. “That is nonsense!”

“It is not.”

He pushed himself to his feet. He stayed by the couch, face to face, fury to fury. “Listen to me,” he said. “Yonder is Egypt’s gate. This is its gatehouse. If we leave the enemy in it, we trap ourselves beyond. We must have Gaza. We must not allow it to hold against us.”

“Then take it,” she said, “and have done.”

She had caught him off balance. “You won’t let me—”

“You can stay where you are. Your generals can do the fighting. Take it and put an end to it.”

“I have to be out there,” he said. “They need me.”

“Why?”

“I’m the king.”

“They need you alive and whole and able to rule them.”

“A king rules from the front.”

“So can he die in the front.”

Alexander sat down rather abruptly. It was not weakness, not all of it. His eyes were almost black. The mood that hung on him was blacker yet.

Meriamon drew back softly. She had said all that it was wise to say. He was what he was: king, and Alexander.

He was also, for all his brilliance, no more than a boy. One tended to forget it. He was adept at looking younger and smaller than he was, and seeming harmless, but that was his own deception, for his own ends.

She thought of the god in the terrible, beautiful play. It had been strange afterward to meet and speak to the man who wore his mask, and find him neither young nor mad: a soft-spoken aging man with a shy smile. He was like herself, she had thought then. The gods spoke through him. He had no part of them.

Alexander was more than a voice. The god who had wielded Thettalos, Dionysos lord of Asia, was in the king: in his way was the king. But even Dionysos had worn mortal form, was bred of mortal woman. The madness that was in him was divine madness, but it took shape in mortal flesh, and suffered mortal frailty.

Alexander had never had to think of it before. He knew battles, and death’s bloody face. He had shed blood enough of his own. But that he was mortal, that he could die: that had not come home to him.

It did not, often, when one was male, and young, and king, and beloved of the gods. This pain that was in him, this wound that festered and would not heal, edged everything he did with a new intensity.

He spoke suddenly, startling her. “‘Better, say I, to delve the earth as a peasant’s slave, than be king of the weary dead.’

“And yet,” he said, “when the gods gave Achilles to choose, whether long life without glory or glory beyond all others and death before his time, he chose glory. He chose death. He died young.”

Meriamon shivered.

“I am of Achilles’ line,” said Alexander, “as I am of Herakles’. If I choose to live all my life in a moment, who are you to allow or forbid?”

“Nothing,” she said. “No one. But my gods have need of you.”

“Your gods,” he said. “Not mine.”

“They are all one.”

He fell silent again. That was Greek, to talk in poetry and name old names and look for excuses. So did children do, dreaming children’s dreams. But this man-child dreamed like a god, with the world for his plaything.

“Aristandros said that I would take Gaza,” he said.

“Then you shall,” said Meriamon. “Through your generals.”

“I can fight. A lighter corselet—a horse under me—Boukephalas knows not to toss his head—”

“Boukephalas will toss you if you insist on being an idiot.”

He glared. “You wouldn’t.”

“We get along, he and I. He has a liking for Phoenix. If you come out of this alive, I may be inclined to consider a breeding. He sires good foals, Niko says.”

“Bribery.”

“Certainly,” she said. “Your men are going sour here. Water is increasingly hard to come by. And there is still the desert to pass before we come to Egypt.”