Lord of the Two Lands (24 page)

“This,” she said as the vision faded and the darkness came back. “This—it’s but a beginning. And what it is—what you are, and will, and will be—”

“—will be,” said Mother Isis. She held out her hands. “Come, daughter. Kiss me as a child ought, and go. What you must do, you will know. What you must choose, you will choose.”

“And if I fail?”

“Even gods can fail,” the goddess said, “if they set out to do it.” That was stern, and Meriamon’s eyes dropped.

Warm fingers touched her chin, lifting it. They were human fingers; no power in them, no awe. They needed none. They simply were. “Child,” said the goddess. “Meriamon. I am with you. Remember that. I was with you from your beginning. I will never leave you.”

Meriamon bit her tongue. She would not say what a child would have said.

But the Mother heard it. She smiled. “I promise,” she said lightly, but with all heaven in it. “Now, child, go. Be strong. And remember.”

o0o

“—Remember.”

Meriamon started awake. Sekhmet glowered from the hollow of her side, and expressed her opinion of fools who talked in their sleep.

Meriamon soothed her with a long rub under the chin. The dream was fading, but its essence was burned deep. What it had taught her...

Not Amon. Not the gods of Memphis or of Thebes, though they had had a part in it. Not simple kingly necessity had brought her out of Egypt and led her to Alexander. That was but a beginning. This that she did was more and greater than she had ever known; and she had thought it the greatest matter in the world.

“It still is,” she said to Sekhmet. “But now I know the size of it. Or I begin to.” She sat up. She knew the feel of dawn, the taste of the air at night’s ending.

As she rose, something stirred in her shadow. She whirled. Sulfur-eyes laughed at her. Jackal-jaws gaped in mockery of her astonishment.

She could not embrace a shadow. But she could grin until her jaws ached, and say in a voice that caught, “You came back. You stayed with me.”

Her shadow showed teeth. Of course it had stayed. It was hers.

“But—”

She broke off. She knew better than to argue with air. Even air in Anubis-shape, daring her to try. She looked at it long, sidelong for it was nothing to stare at direct, and let it know how glad she was. It was not displeased, either.

Heart-whole and shadow-whole and full of the dream’s remembrance, she went out into the rising day.

Pelusium gave itself wholly to Alexander, the strong gates flung wide, its people streaming from it in their hundreds and thousands to meet him as he came. Nor were they the folk of the city alone; they had come from every town and city within a day’s ride or Nile-sail, thronging to look on the king who would set them free.

The Persians made no move to stop him. Mazaces the satrap received him at the gates of Pelusium, graceful in surrender as Persians could be.

“Doesn’t it trouble you?” Alexander demanded of him in Meriamon’s hearing.

“What, lord king?” the satrap inquired with lifted brow and air of innocence.

“This,” Alexander said. “Bowing to me. Calling me king. Knowing that your king is still alive and still king, and could come back to claim you.”

“He could,” the satrap conceded. “I doubt that he will. This province is my trust. I give it over to the one who best can rule it.”

Alexander could hardly argue with that, and Mazaces would not. He had done what he had done. He would live or die by it.

o0o

From Pelusium by ship up the Nile and by land on its banks, Alexander’s army advanced toward Memphis. It was a march of triumph. He had fought no battle, shed no blood. Not in Egypt. The Persians were gone or had surrendered, the weight of them raised from the land, their presence blotted out in sun and sand and black Nile mud.

Meriamon rode in the throng at Alexander’s back, quiet, effacing herself among them. He knew who had brought him here; and she. It was enough.

That Mazaces held the place of honor at his right hand, where by most rights she should have been, and that the crowd of soldiers and servants and hangers-on contained a sufficiency of Persian faces, troubled her less than she might have expected. They were defeated. They had to see Alexander where he was, and the people where they were, shouting Alexander’s name.

It was a bitter blow to their pride. They bore it well, that much she would give them. Better than she could have begun to.

The Nile was quiescent, months yet from the flood, a broad dreaming river flowing from the world’s heart. They marched through the marshes and fens of the Delta, the green thickets loud with birds, tall fans of papyrus and bulrush-spears, the arrow-dart of a crocodile, the roaring of the river-horses in their deep wallows, and round the fleet as it rowed beside them, flocks of the little boats of Egypt.

Every village and town turned itself out to see the king; every city opened its gates. They sang as he came, and sang as he went, songs of the coming of the king.

He drank it like wine. But no less than she.

Her music had come back. It was in her the morning after she came to Pelusium, washed in seawater and water of the Nile, red earth and black earth under her feet and the sun’s boat sailing up over the eastern desert. She stood outside the walls and opened her heart, and the song came to fill it. If there were words in it, she did not remember them. They would be a hymn, the waking of Ra, of Amon, of Khnum the Creator, ram-god, sun-god, lord in the Two Lands.

Her voice was raw, too long unused, but in a little while it remembered its power. She had forgotten what it was to be voice and voice alone, a body of pure song. What had filled the high temple in Thebes and soared over the chants of the priests, now rang through earth and heaven. It raised the sun from the horizon. It brought the day into Khemet.

o0o

“Such a big voice for such a little woman.”

Tomorrow they would be in Memphis. Tonight they were in Heliopolis, the city of the Sun, Alexander within in the royal house, the bulk of his army camped in the broad fields to the east of the river. The Red Land stretched wide and far; the Black Land lay about them in the long light of evening, under the blue vault of heaven.

Meriamon had been singing to herself as Phylinna plaited her hair. There was an Egyptian maid now, and a plenitude of wigs if she wanted any, but tonight she was content with what she had had since Asia. She smiled at Thaïs, who had decided to be Hellene from the modest coil of her hair to the elegant turn of her sandal. “Am I too loud for you?”

“Of course not.” Thaïs cooled herself with a palm-leaf fan. “And this is winter,” she said. “Gods forbid I ever see this country in summer.”

“It’s very cool,” said Meriamon, “for Egypt.” Still, she did not reach for the cloak draped over the back of her chair. Even the chill was blessed, because it was Khemet.

“You haven’t stopped singing since we came to this country,” Thaïs said.

“I’m home,” said Meriamon.

“In every bone and sinew of you.” Thaïs sighed, not for sadness, not for impatience; if anything, for envy. “If I saw Athens again, I would be happy. But not like this. Are you all so much in love with Egypt?”

“It’s ours,” Meriamon said. She held still while Phylinna, frowning, held the mirror, and the new maid painted her eyes. Phylinna did not like to see her place so usurped, but Ashait was more than her match for strength of will.

They were not enemies for all of that, or even for that Ashait was a free woman and drew wages, while Phylinna was a slave. That was a feat of diplomacy which neither went so far as to acknowledge. It was admirable, thought Meriamon, and much more amusing than not.

Ashait smoothed the last stroke of kohl, paused, frowned slightly; added a touch more of lapis. “Now you are beautiful,” she said.

Meriamon rather thought that she was. It was the being in her own country, and the gladness that blazed out of her, even more than gold and paint and royal linen. Tomorrow she would bring Alexander to Memphis—and let Mazaces think that he had done it; she and her gods knew better. He would take the crowns of the Two Lands, the crook and the flail, the rule of the Great House. No power would stop him, no force stand against him. She had sung the wards about him, and the land had welcomed him. He was its renewer, its healer and restorer.

She saw visions in the darkness of her closed eyes. They made her smile. She looked again at the light of evening in this room of a palace in which she had been as a child, at the painted walls and the bright-gilded pillars and the windows looking down into the garden; and, still smiling, at Thaïs making herself beautiful to dine with the king.

Under the full folds of her gown Thaïs was beginning to round with the child. Her morning sicknesses were over; she was thriving, for all that Meriamon could see. But she had not yet told Ptolemy. It never seemed to be time.

If he noticed, he said nothing, or perhaps simply thought she grew plump with the largesse of Egypt. Men could be blind to anything that had to do with women’s matters—and Hellene men worse than most.

Meriamon’s forehead was stiff. She was frowning. She smoothed it away. She had no time now for Niko. She had a king to crown, and gods—a goddess—to serve. If he should find another Egyptian woman, or a hetaira in the king’s following, one of the many who had come upriver from the cities of the Delta—

She would kill him. She would quite simply kill him.

o0o

Colors in Egypt were brighter than they were anywhere else in the world. By day, in the sun, they blinded: red and green and blue and white and gold. By night they glowed in the light of lamps, bright clean colors, sunlight colors, shining joyous against the dark.

Hellenes rolled their eyes at them, not for any lack in their own artistry, but for that every wall was covered with them. A palace could hardly be a palace unless it teemed with painted people, animals, birds and fishes, flowers and trees, gods and demons and beings of the spirit world; and everywhere the march and dance of the scribe’s art, each symbol an image in itself.

To Meriamon whose father had commanded that she be taught to read the old holy writing, every wall and lintel spoke in its own voice. To the Macedonians it meant nothing, but it made them uneasy.

She read a little for Alexander when dinner was done and the wine was going round. It was nothing so wonderful, only the names and titles of the king for whom the hall was made. He had a great many of those.

“He was a braggart,” Alexander said.

Meriamon forbore to bristle. “He said what he had done, and who he was. Would you do any less?”

“I’d give it fewer words,” said Alexander, “and more action.”

She smiled in spite of herself. “Ah, but you are a barbarian from the bottom of the world.”

He laughed, but then he sobered. “I am that.” He rose abruptly from his couch. People stared. Some—Persians, an Egyptian or two—began to rise. He waved them down. “Come with me,” he said to Meriamon.

No one followed but the guard, and the dog Peritas heaving himself up from the foot of the couch. Meriamon went in silence. So, for once, did Alexander.

He took her through passages that she might have known, and across courts that she remembered from long ago. The memory was bittersweet: the scent of her mother’s perfume, the sound of her father’s voice.

Whether this to which he brought her had been the robing room before, she did not recall. Its walls were painted with forests of palm and papyrus, and hunters moving through it armed with bow and lance, and a flock of geese startled into flight. Laid out in it were garments so familiar that she stopped, and for a moment could not go on.

Alexander caught her arm. She had not been aware that she swayed. “Are you ill?” he asked in sudden concern.

“No,” she managed to say. Then, more strongly: “No. It’s only... I’m remembering too much.”

“So you are,” he said. “I didn’t think. If you’d rather not—”

She shook herself. “I’m well enough. What did you want to show me?”

He did not take offense at her tone, though it was sharper than she would have liked. He went to the table on which lay the regalia of the Great House, and took up the false beard. “Can you see me wearing this thing?”

She looked at it. It was absurd, she could not deny that, like a blue braided phallus on a string. “You wear garlands in your festivals,” she said. “They’re hardly more prepossessing.”

“They’re Greek.”

“And this not.” Meriamon touched the robe of linen with its stiff pleats, its armor-thickness of embroidery. She would not venture to lay hand on the two crowns: the White with its lofty peak, the Red like a helmet encasing it, low before, high and narrow behind.

He had no such scruples. He held them up in front of his face, turning them, tracing with a finger the curve of the golden tongue that bound them together. “I know what you want me to be,” he said. “You want me to be Egyptian. But I’m not. I was born and bred in Macedon. What this is, what it means—that’s not the kind of king I am. We’re easier about it where I come from. We don’t keep the kind of ceremony your priests are willing on me.”

“Do you refuse it?”

She did not mean the ceremony. Nor, in his answer, did he. He said it slowly. “No,” he said. “No. But... it has to be different. Do you see?”

“It has been the same for a thousand and a thousand years.”

“And a thousand before that.” He was not smiling. “I know how old this country is. But I am a new thing. If your gods mean me to rule, they must mean that I rule in my way, or they would never have bred me in Macedon.”

“You will have your Greek games still,” she said, “and your festival in the manner of your people. Is it so terrible that you should be crowned in the Egyptian way, in the Great House of Egypt?”

He took time to think about that. While he did it, Peritas came back from sniffing about comers and leaned against him. He set the crown in its place and rubbed the dog’s ears absently, frowning at the table and its burden. “There is courtesy,” he said at length, “and policy. I like your people. They’re odd, I don’t deny that, and as old as their places are, sometimes I wonder if there is anything like a young thing here. But they know how to laugh.”

“Laughter is all that makes the world bearable, sometimes.”

He glanced at her. His frown had not lightened. But there was more in it of reflection than of distaste. He lifted the crook and the flail, shook out the gilded lashes of the latter. They clicked on one another, soft but distinct.

“That is for the master of men,” she said, “and that for the shepherd. To guard and to guide; for justice and for mercy.”

“So the priests told me,” Alexander said. “They also said that I could be crowned with the war-helmet if I wanted it: the Khes—Khep—”

“Kheperesh.”

“Keperos.”

“Kheperesh.”

He could not say it. “It sounds Persian,” he said, “and a fine jaw-cracker that is.”

“It is not Persian,” she said stiffly. “It does not even begin to be Persian.”

He smiled his sweetest smile. “You know I never meant to insult you. But how you can say s—st—” He shook his head, as if with the movement he could shake the stumble from his tongue. “But then the Persians can’t say my name.”

“What, Alexander?” She said it easily enough. “So. Would you wear the Kheperesh, if the two crowns suit you so ill?”

“I thought about it,” he said. “I am a soldier, after all; and I come with an army. But it doesn’t feel right. This is an oddity, and this”—his finger brushed the false beard—”is ludicrous, but it’s not war I’d make in Egypt, nor war that Egypt has given me. It’s had enough of that. Peace is what I would wage here.”

“Egyptian peace? Or Macedonian?”

He paused, frowning again. She could almost see the turning of his mind. “My generals would say that there is no difference. That the peace should be my peace, and therefore Macedonian. So would Aristotle say. Only Greeks are made to be free, he taught me. Barbarians are by nature slaves. But as I come to know those barbarians—even Persians—I wonder. Aristotle is wise, but he hasn’t seen what I’ve seen.”

“We have never been slaves,” said Meriamon, “save under the Parsa. And that, we fought with all that was in us.”

“So,” said Alexander. He faced her fully now, crook and flail held lightly in his hands. There was a new light in his face. “There is the heart of it. That they took away your freedom. That they made you slaves.”

“It took you so long to understand?”

“I had to see. To be told—it’s not enough. You lost a war. More than one. The price was, is, high; but it’s the same price wherever war is. It’s justice, of its kind. But that you bore so deep a rancor for so long, against a race who ruled you well enough by any lights...”