Lord of the Two Lands (23 page)

“You don’t call this desert?”

“This is green and fertile country in any but the driest season. Desert is the Red Land. Desert is the road to Egypt.”

“You’re trying to talk me out of it.”

“No,” she said. “Send for your generals. Tell them what you want done. You can trust them to do it. Or can’t you?”

“I have the best army in the world,” he said hotly, “and the best generals anywhere.”

“So use them,” said Meriamon.

He held her glare for a long moment. Then he spun away from her. Shouting for Nikanor, for Philotas, for Krateros, for the rest of his generals and his council of war.

o0o

Alexander had heard her. Heeded her. He wielded his army from a judicious distance, commanded from Boukephalas’ back. He resisted the lure of the fighting.

But it was too much for him. The harder his engines labored, the more the walls trembled, the closer he came.

The walls crumbled and fell, eaten away below by the sappers, above by rams and hurled stones. When they went down, Alexander went over them.

He left his horse with the pages, safe as he was not. He was on his feet, running as lightly as any of them, leading his troops from the front as a madman must. His high voice rang above them, urging them on.

Once it broke. He rocked and nearly fell. A stone had struck him in the thigh. He steadied. His voice went up again. He went on, limping, leaning on his spear, but fiercely, determinedly afoot. His wrath was the color of blood.

He took Gaza. The city that had defied him, that had wounded him twice and all but killed him, suffered more terribly than Tyre ever had. Its defenders died to the last man, valiant in despair. Its women and children fell prey to the victors, who killed them or kept them, raped them and sold them, and knew no mercy.

And he did not stop them. They brought Batis to him, bound and naked and bloodied and yet alive.

Alexander looked at the man who had come closest to any to defeating him; at whose command he had been wounded, in whose cause he now could barely stand, with a great throbbing bruise on his thigh and only the gods to thank that the bone had not broken: a little thick hairy man with a big belly, who reeked like a goat. Alexander said to him, “Do you regret what you have done?”

Batis spat in his face.

Alexander stood with the spittle running down his cheek. His men leaped with swords drawn. He stopped them. His eyes were wide and fixed, the color of water, which was no color at all. Meriamon, watching, staggered. It was as if the earth heaved; as if the darkness rose, enveloping him.

“Take him,” said Alexander softly. “He would be Hektor to my Achilles. Let him be so. Do to him as Achilles did to Hektor,”

Some of those near him gasped. Most grinned wide and white and vicious.

“What will he do?” Meriamon asked the man next to her, one who looked horrified. “What is he saying?”

The man would not answer. There was no one else to ask: the rest who could hear her were cheering the king, a sound like lions’ roaring, deep and deadly.

Batis did not begin to scream until they drove the spike through his heels and threaded the ropes on it. He did not stop when they bound the rope to a chariot and whipped up the horses, and drove horses and chariot and screaming, tumbling, writhing man round the walls of Gaza.

He screamed for an appallingly long time. Even after he stopped, the sound went on, as if the earth had taken it up and the wind become a part of it.

o0o

“Hektor was dead,” said Niko. “Achilles killed him before he dragged him.”

He sounded quite calm about it. Not appalled; not revolted. But he said it, and in Meriamon’s hearing.

She had seen worse under the Parsa. They were as cruel as cats; lives mattered little to them, particularly the lives of foreigners.

“There has to be a lesson,” Niko said. “Tyre was not enough. Gaza has to be the end of it—defiance, resistance. They have to know better than to stop Alexander.”

She walked away from him. He followed. She was aware of him like a hand on her back. She ignored him.

Alexander had gone away when Batis stopped screaming. His charioteer dragged the body for a while, making sure that it was dead. She did not see that there was any doubt. What tumbled behind the chariot and sent the dust up in clouds no longer looked anything like a man.

She was not thinking of Batis. Appalled—she was that, but distantly. Surprise had no part of it. Alexander was Philip’s son, and Philip had been no weakling. Myrtale was his mother, Myrtale who had been given the name Olympias. The ram and the serpent. Deep earth and red fire. The warrior and the sorceress. She wielded the wild magic that roiled on the edges of things, far from the stately power of Khemet. Chaos was her realm, and blood her mystery.

Alexander who dreamed of Herakles, who mounted sieges that no sane man would have ventured, who took cities that could never be taken—Alexander was no tame thing. He had the lion in him: Sekhmet, goddess and destroyer.

Meriamon walked softly on the torn and bloodied earth. It was quiet now. Truly; wholly. The darkness was gone out of it. Alexander had taken it into himself, and transformed it into fire.

She found him deep in the city, sitting on a fallen column. He had a child on his knee. It was filthy, it was bone-thin, but it smiled at the man with the bright hair, and played with something that shone: the brooch of his cloak. “Clear the city,” he said to the man who waited by him, “and round up the prisoners. We’ll ship them off to Tyre.”

“And that one?” somebody asked, cocking his chin at the child.

“I’ll keep him,” the king said. “Queen Sisygambis lost a page to fever, just a little while ago. I’ll clean this young one up and give her a present. Maybe a girl, too, to go with him. See if you can find one who matches him.”

“But—” said someone else.

Alexander took no notice. He patted the child and smiled at it, and said, “You’ll belong to a queen. She’s a great queen, the greatest there is. You’re very fortunate.”

Maybe he was, Meriamon thought. Maybe he would not mind that a male entire could not serve a Parsa lady. He would be alive at least, and given to a just mistress. No one else in Gaza had that surety.

She had not come to say anything to the king, though his glance invited her to speak. She needed to be near him. To see him inside and out.

The dark was gone, the malice burned away. Sekhmet the goddess, Sekhmet of the lion’s head, knew calm as well as wrath. Dionysos was god of wine and laughter. Yet, for that, a god.

o0o

Alexander went to his tent long after the sun had set, when the city was settled and the dead attended to, the wounded and the dying entrusted to the surgeons and the rest of the army fed, warmed with wine, and sent victorious to bed. He went alone as few others did.

Someone was waiting. Not one of the pages, but adept enough in a page’s work, having done his share of it in his time, and not so long ago, either.

He did not say anything. He never needed to. He filled a cup and held it out.

Alexander dropped into the chair that waited for him, took the cup and drank deep of well-watered wine. The restless energy quivered and sparked in him still, like summer lightnings in the sky over Pella. But there was an edge to it, a quiver of exhaustion.

Hephaistion got the chiton off him. The bandage on his shoulder was filthy, stiff with more than sweat. Hephaistion frowned at it. “Shall I call Philippos?” he asked. “Or the Egyptian woman?”

“No.” Alexander’s voice was quiet, no sharpness in it, but it suffered no argument.

Hephaistion would have argued regardless, if it had mattered enough. He shrugged and set to work peeling the bandage from bruised and tender flesh.

The wound, that he could see, was no worse than it had been before. It was healing. Maybe. At last. As for the thigh, with its great swollen bruise...

“The things you do to yourself,” he said.

Alexander did not reply to that. His lips were set tight. He would never give in to pain, no more than he gave into anything else, man, god, or force of nature.

“Someday your muleheadedness is going to get you killed,” Hephaistion said. Not looking at him while he said it; getting fresh bandages from the box by the bed, bringing the padding and the jar of salve that the Egyptian had made: odd little woman, but clever with her arts and her potions. He set to work with them.

“So,” said Alexander when he was almost done. “You think I’m a fool, too.”

“Not a fool,” said Hephaistion.

“Mad, then.”

“Not that, either.”

Alexander shifted. Hephaistion frowned. Alexander stilled, but only for as long as it took to finish off the bandage. Then he was up and prowling.

Hephaistion sat on his heels and watched. There was an odd comfort in it, in doing what he had done for—what, ten years now? Being still while Alexander fidgeted. Being quiet, simply being there.

Alexander stopped and turned on his heel. It caught at the heart, that movement: the grace of it, swift and entirely unconscious, even with the stiffness of bandaged shoulder, bound and bandaged thigh. “I had to do it,” he said.

Hephaistion waited.

Alexander’s voice came quicker, harder. “I had to make an example. That kind of defiance—that kind of resistance—I had to break it. They’re saying I lost my temper; I went too far.”

“Did you?”

Alexander laughed: a strangled sound. “Do you know, I knew you’d say that? After Thebes, you didn’t say anything.”

“There was nothing to say.”

“Thebes was worse. This was a Persian rebellion. A necessity of war. That was Greece, and I destroyed it.”

“I was angry enough myself, then,” said Hephaistion.

“And now?”

“You did what you had to do.”

“What would you have done?”

“Killed him.”

Simple, that. Absolute. Alexander came in a long stride, standing over him; wound fingers in his hair. It was not a gentle grip, but neither was it cruel. Hephaistion let it pull his head back, met the fierce colorless eyes. “Killed him first?” demanded Alexander.

“Killed him,” said Hephaistion, “slowly.”

“That wasn’t slow enough?”

Hephaistion paused, for tact. “It was... convincing.”

“It went too far.” Alexander let him go, went to the bed, sank down onto it. “Gods,” he said. “How he screamed.”

Hephaistion rose. Alexander lay on his back, open-eyed. His face was stark.

There was something to be said for Persian beds. They were wide enough for a troop. Hephaistion lay beside Alexander, not touching him.

“Do you remember what Aristotle used to say,” said Alexander, “of what is right, and what is proper, and what is just? And what he said of kings? That a king must be stronger than other men. That he should be master of himself.”

“A king must also do what is necessary,” said Hephaistion. He set no particular emphasis in the words. He did not need to. Alexander’s glance marked everything that Hephaistion wanted to say.

Alexander said it aloud, himself, as he had to. “Achilles was not a king,” he said. “He was a haughty boy. He did no more and no less than it pleased him to do. And when it came to the end—he died like a fool, from a coward’s arrow. So, almost, did I.” He drew a sharp breath. It hurt, maybe: his body stiffened, then slowly eased. “The gods were testing me. I failed.”

Hephaistion opened his mouth to speak, but closed it again. He opened his arms instead. Alexander seemed not to see; then suddenly he was there, holding hard, with strength that was always astonishing. He wept as hard as he clung, though he did not weep long. He never did. The fire in him burned away tears.

In a little while it had burned away the rest of it as well. He lay in his friend’s arms, quiet as he was after love; sad, one might almost have said, if one had not known him so well. He was never so still as he was now, never so close to peace.

And yet, when Hephaistion yielded at last to sleep, Alexander was still awake. For all Hephaistion knew, he lay awake nightlong, wrapped in his friend’s arms, his mind gone away where none but a god could follow.

The road from Gaza was a testing of fire. But for the ships that followed faithfully along the sea-tracks, the army would have died for lack of water. Even with them, with the sun bearing down and the flies devouring the sweat as it streamed from men and beasts alike, and for each man but a sip at morning and a sip at midday and a bare cupful at evening, it was a bitter march.

The king had no more to drink than the least of his men, nor would he ride, or take his ease on shipboard. What his men endured, he too would suffer; and no matter that he was wounded, limping, unwontedly silent since the fall of Gaza.

It was not a black silence. Grey, rather. Still. A gathering of strength, for what end none knew, perhaps not even himself.

He was still Alexander. In front of his army he had not changed. He marched with them, jested with them, shared the heat and the flies and the choking, clinging dust.

His shoulder healed. Whether the heat did it, or the rigors of the march, or simply the strength that was in him, the wound ceased to fester, began to close.

Or perhaps it was Egypt, reaching out to him across the sand.

Meriamon marched as they all did, foot by foot, parched and sunstruck and caring not at all. Niko tried to drag her on board his ship. She stared him down. “The earth,” she said, “under my feet. I need it.” She knelt on it, set palms to it. “Here, Niko. Feel.”

He eyed her as if she had gone mad; transparently chose to humor her. “So?”

“So!” She set her hands on top of his, pressed them down into the sand. “Do you feel it?”

“I feel sand,” he said. “And a stone. It’s cutting me. Do you mind...?”

It was indeed: the earth drank his blood. She wrapped the cut, regretting the pain; but she smiled at him. “Now your blood is Egypt’s.”

“This isn’t—”

“Soon,” she said. “It surges under us like the sea. My land. My gods. My magic. Soon we’ll pass the gate. Soon I’ll be whole again.”

He understood more than he knew. Poor Hellene; it baffled him. He fled back to his ship.

o0o

Seven days, they marched. Seven days in the forge. Seven days to the gate in the desert, the city on the easternmost mouth of the Nile, the strong fortress called Pelusium.

There, if there should be resistance, Alexander would find it: in walls as strong as those of Gaza, as those of Tyre.

Fleet and land force came in battle order. Mazaces the satrap had promised submission, but Parsa faith was never absolute except among their own. On the last day before the approach to Pelusium, Alexander called for an early halt and doubled rations for his troops.

Their spirits were high, for all that they had suffered. They were Alexander’s men. They had never lost a battle.

Meriamon was dizzy with the nearness of her country. She could have taken her water bottle and her bag of belongings and gone on alone. Would have, if it had not been for Alexander. He was her purpose. She could not be aught but where he was.

She found him with the horses, alone but for a pair of pages: so rare a thing that she stopped and wondered for a moment what was lacking.

Only the flock of his friends. She came forward in the long light. Boukephalas saw her: he raised his head and neighed. She greeted him gravely and offered him the bit of bread that she had brought.

Alexander looked up from examining the horse’s hoof. “Did you know, he’s twenty-four years old? And still going strong. You’d think he’d been romping through a pasture instead of this forge of the gods.”

“He’s good stock,” said Meriamon. “Tough. Like his master.”

Alexander set down the hoof and slapped the stallion’s neck. “He’s got more sense than I have. Always did.”

She did not contest that.

He noticed. He draped his arm over Boukephalas’ back and leaned in seeming ease, but his body was taut. “Tomorrow we’ll be in Egypt.”

“Yes,” said Meriamon.

“You say it will welcome me.”

“As a bride,” she said, “and her beloved.”

“Are you going to bet on that?”

“Certainly,” she said. “I wager the Two Lands.”

He laughed. “Now there’s a stake for a king!”

“It was yours from the womb.”

The mirth went out of his face. He ran a hand down the stallion’s neck. Not uncertain; Alexander was never that. But his mood had gone dark. “Was it?” he asked. “Is it mine without question? Or must I be tested? After Tyre, after Gaza—will your country refuse me because I wouldn’t set it first?”

“Tomorrow,” she said, “you will see.”

His brows lowered. “Is that in the bet, too?”

“Yes.”

“But,” he said. “Can it be so easy?”

“Was Tyre easy? Was Gaza? Have you paid no prices, Alexander?”

“There are always prices,” he said.

“None that you cannot pay.”

“Ah, but will I?” He straightened. “No. Don’t answer that. I’ve been no good to anyone since I left Gaza. That was a comeuppance. You were right in that. Are you pleased to hear it?”

“No,” said Meriamon.

“Then what will please you?”

“The sight of you,” she said, “in the Great House of Egypt.”

“And very odd I’ll look there,” he said.

“It is where you belong.”

“So you say,” said Alexander. Then he raised his head, shifting as he of all men could, catching fire again, finding the god where he had retreated from the testing. “So I’ll see for myself. Will you be with me?”

“It’s for that I came.”

He smiled his sudden smile. “And now you’ll have it. I hope it brings you joy.”

o0o

She went to her bed with a light heart, even though there might be dreams. Tonight she would open her heart to them. If there was darkness, if there was fear—she would face it, and strike it down. Khemet’s power was in the earth beneath her feet. Khemet’s gladness sang in her blood.

Too much, maybe. She was not afraid to admit it. They were not in Khemet yet. But there was no quelling the singing that was in her.

The camp had no water to spare for a bath. She cleansed herself as best she could with sand—a desert expedient, and better than one might have expected, if one did not mind sand in one’s hair. Better certainly than the Hellenes’ rancid oil scraped off with a strigil, that made the camp smell like a kitchen gone bad. As clean as she could be, and shivering, for night in the desert was cold, she sought her bed.

Her shadow stretched out over her. She would have released it to hunt, but it would not go. No more would Sekhmet who came to curl purring at her side. So guarded, with a prayer against ill dreams, she gave herself up to sleep.

o0o

It was the same dream. She had known that it would be. Edjo and Nekhbet loomed over her smallness, serpent and vulture vaster than she had ever seen them. She had come to the gate of their power. It thrummed in the dry earth. It rang in the sky. The stroke of it could kill.

Tonight she had no fear. As when first she dreamed this dream, she found comfort even in its terrors. It was Khemet. It was the Two Lands. She came of the gods’ will, guiding the gods’ instrument.

“Instrument enough,” said a voice above and behind her. A voice she knew: a woman’s voice, soft and heart-stoppingly sweet; but huge as no mortal voice could ever be. “Instrument, and more than instrument. His will is as much his own as any god’s.”

“Yet,” said Meriamon though she could not turn, not yet, not unbidden, “he is a man, and mortal.”

“So even was I,” said the voice with a flicker of laughter. “Mortal flesh, mortal woman. Even as are you.”

“I am no goddess!”

Meriamon’s voice echoed in the dark country. A terrible silence met it.

Even now she was not afraid. She was beyond fear. Much more softly she said, “I am no goddess. That burden is not given me.”

“Is it so you reckon it?”

“I will be Osiris when I am dead, as all the dead are, female and male alike. In this life I am only Meriamon.”

“So,” said the voice. The goddess. Meriamon sensed no anger in her.

“You spoke to me,” said Meriamon when the other did not go on. “Over and over, night after night. I never understood you. You were too far away.”

“Not that,” said the goddess. “It was not time for you to hear.”

“And yet you spoke.”

“Even the gods have their fates and their destinies.”

Meriamon stood quiet in the grasp of the night. It felt like her shadow, narrow god-strong hands, blunt claw-nails; unmoving, but gentle enough. She was aware all at once of Sekhmet’s presence, a warmth spread over her feet, a rumble of purr. The cat was not forbidden to look on the face of the one behind Meriamon, nor was she blinded by it, or struck with terror. She was a goddess herself, a goddess’ image.

“So she is,” said the great one behind. “So is the one you bring to us. He bears a great burden of pride. But he learns. He begins to understand.”

“He could die for it.”

“If such is his choice.”

Meriamon pressed her hand to the coldness in her middle. She knew what the gods were. She had belonged to them for all the days of her life. Still, to speak so, to hear in such a voice what she most feared...

“Child,” said the goddess, and her voice was the gentlest in the world. “Child, look at me.”

The hands on Meriamon eased. She did not turn at once. She needed a moment to draw breath, to firm her will.

It was only a woman. A little long-eyed Egyptian woman in a linen gown, with a wig over her hair. She was beautiful as queens could be, or great ladies, or simple farmers’ wives in the fields by the Nile: elegant oval face, delicate nose, mouth full yet finely molded.

“Nefertiti,” said Meriamon. Not to name her. Simply to name what she was:
The beautiful one is come
.

The beautiful one smiled. “That is a name of mine, and of many of my daughters. And you, beloved of Amon: would you have another name of me?”

“I need none,” said Meriamon. She should have bent down in homage, but it was late for that—even knowing what she knew, now, looking at that lovely mortal face, those dark mirthful eyes. “Mother,” she said, and put it all in her voice. “Mother Isis.”

“Now you know me,” the goddess said.

“But,” said Meriamon. “It should be—it ought to have been—”

“It ought to have been Amon?” The goddess’ brows arched. “Ah, but he has done his duty, and now that it is done...”

“Not all of it,” said Meriamon.

“All of it that matters in this place.” The goddess seemed not at all perturbed. But she had been a woman once, as she herself had said, and a queen; and Meriamon was royal enough when she chose to remember it. It was not as strange as that, to speak blunt words to the queen of earth and heaven.

Mother Isis laughed. “Oh, indeed, we are kin; and it is joy to see a child so fearless.”

“I was always yours,” said Meriamon.

“You are,” the goddess said. “And your king, and all that is.”

“Then... the rest?”

“They, too,” said the goddess. “I am their mother and their queen. My king who died and lives again—his realm is death, and life that comes out of death. Mine is all that is. This that you do, in Amon’s name as you did it, was done for me.”

“And he? The king whom you made?”

“He above all,” the goddess said.

“Then,” said Meriamon, “it was not the others at all. It was you.”

“I, and they by my will. Do you see, child? Do you understand?”

“No,” said Meriamon. “But I will. I’m Amon’s singer. I did as he bade me. This shadow that walks with me—”

“Ah,” said the goddess. Her smile warmed. Meriamon’s shadow grinned with jackal-jaws and bowed to the ground.

“Friend,” the goddess said. “Brother. Anubis my beloved, it is well?”

“It is well,” said the shadow. Its voice was deep, with a growl in it, and a touch of laughter. It turned from the goddess to Meriamon, and she knew. It would leave her. Now that she was returned to her own country. Now that she had no more need of it.

It shocked her, how much it hurt. She had accepted the guardian for need and for obedience, when she took the burden on her of departing from Amon’s temple, of bringing the king to his throne. Its loss in Tyre had been bitter, but her strength had gone with it, and what power she had outside of Khemet. To lose it now should matter nothing. She had come home.

It had become a part of her, living in her shadow, guarding her body and her souls.

It had turned from the goddess to face her. It—he. She would think of him as he was, here where he was more whole than she, more truly real. His ears flattened, then pricked. His eyes were keen.

“You have served well,” said Meriamon steadily, “in stooping so to serve a mortal woman, you who are more by far than mortal creature.”

The jackal-head dipped, assenting. The bright eyes never wavered. There was no resentment in them. Had never been, even at the beginning, when she was new to the power that he lent her, and high-handed with it, because she was afraid.

She drew herself up. Serpent-shadow, vulture-shadow, loomed above her and filled the sky. They were great, but greater still was the woman before her. Who was no image of divinity. Who was goddess wholly.

Meriamon bowed then at last. Bowed to the ground. Stood straight then and faced the goddess and said, “I have done all that was required of me. What little remains I shall do: open the gate of the Two Lands, set the crown upon his head. Then am I freed to go?”

“Do you wish to be?”

The question was not entirely unexpected. It was Meriamon’s dream, after all, and Meriamon’s goddess. Of course she would ask the difficult thing, the one that most needed answer.

“Yes,” said Meriamon. And, “No. I was a guide and a goad. Once that’s done, he’ll need little enough from me.”

“Except your friendship.”

“He has friends in scores.”

“Not as you are.”

“And how is that?”

The goddess did not answer. Not directly. She said, “Look before you.”

Meriamon looked. She saw darkness, and the dry country, and the shadowed sky. But as she looked at it, it shimmered.

She held her eyes steady. Like water in a basin, like wine in a cup, it steadied. She looked in it as in a mirror.

She did not remember all of what she saw. It poured into her, filled her, overflowed. Later, when she needed it, it would come back. But even what she remembered was enough.