Lord of the Two Lands (29 page)

The baths were not far away: through a passage, down a stair. Niko was standing in the passage. It was cool there, and dark after the bright sun of the courtyard. For a moment he seemed as dark as her shadow and no more solid: shape without definition, and a gleam of eyes. Then slowly he came clear.

She stopped. What she wanted to do was perfectly mad.

Well then, so was she. She held out her hands.

He looked at them. Her heart chilled. Her hands began to fall.

He caught them. His grip was warm and much too strong to break. “You didn’t need to run away,” he said.

“Yes, I did.”

“Not from me.”

“It wasn’t you,” she said.

“I’m glad of that.”

There was a silence. Her eyes were on their clasped hands. Hers were so small, and his so big. And yet they fit.

“I was false to you,” she said. “I let you think that there was more of me than there was. That... I could give you what a wife gives her husband.”

“Can a woman be a eunuch, then?”

“You’ll have no sons of me.”

He regarded her steadily. His eyes were clear. No shrinking. Regret, maybe, for what could not be; but none for what he was choosing. “I’m not a king, that I need them.”

“Every man wants them.”

“Not every man gets them.”

“But if you can—”

“There are concubines,” he said. “If it comes to that.”

The purity of her rage astonished her. She pulled him hard, nearly oversetting him. Her arms locked about his middle. His heart beat under her ear. It was not beating nearly hard enough to please her. “If you take me—if you look at another woman—I swear to you—”

“You would,” he said. Not even a flicker of fear. “You could do it, too.”

She bent her head back to glare at him. “How can you be so calm?”

“I talked to the old priest,” he said. “The Lord Ay. He told me what I was bargaining for.”

“Obviously you didn’t believe it.”

“I believe it,” he said. “I know you. You’re not like our Macedonian witches. Your power is real.”

“So is theirs.”

“Not like yours. Theirs is wild magic—it comes and goes; more often than not it fails them. You have all the magic of Egypt in you.”

“A few tricks. A shadow with eyes.”

He laid his finger on her lips. “Stop it. You said you were going to claim me. I’m ready to be claimed.”

“Even by the likes of me?”

“You should have thought of that when you put your mark on me.”

She hid her face in his chiton. It was not a logical thing to do, not in the least. The wool pricked her cheek, washed to softness in Nile water and dried in the sun. It smelled of that, and of clean sharp sweat, and a suggestion of leather and horses.

His heart beat no faster than it had from the first. His breaths came deep and even. Her ears, trained to catch every nuance of a body’s working, found in it no flaw or frailty.

Damnable arrogant Hellene. She pulled away from him. “I don’t want to be protected. Or sheltered. Or watched and guarded like a child that can’t leave its mother.”

“A queen should have a guard,” he said. “Kings do. Even Alexander.”

“A guard,” she said. “Not a nursemaid.” She pulled free, though he did nothing to hold her. “I have to see the king.”

He stepped aside. The comer of his mouth was—almost—turned up. Laughing at her.

“You are horrible,” she said.

He grinned and sketched a bow. “At my lady’s pleasure.”

She swept past him. He fell in behind.

o0o

There was a war on in the baths: a party of Companions, with Hephaistion for commander, behind an earthwork of benches and towels, and the king mounting a siege with half a dozen pages and a troop of bemused Egyptian servants.

Not that bemusement kept them from the game. They had amassed an armory of sponges, and somewhere they had got hold of a basket of onions, with which they kept up a steady barrage. The price of death or captivity was to be hurled into the bathing pool, which was already full of grinning, yelling bodies.

Alexander raised a shout and flung his army on the barricades. They poured over it, toppling the whole length of it, and swept it all into the water.

The king emerged dripping and triumphant, ducking a last fusillade of onions. Meriamon held out a towel that was almost dry. He shook the water out of his eyes and started. “Mariamne!”

He looked so much like a boy caught with his hand in the honeypot that she laughed. “Meriamon,” she said, “yes, and that was a noble victory.”

“Wasn’t it?” He took the towel and wrapped it very deliberately about his middle. Gravely she handed him another. Just as gravely he dried himself with it, eyes sliding toward the melee in the pool. “I think your countrymen are shocked.”

“No Persian satrap would ever do such a thing,” she agreed.

He laughed aloud. “Oh, Herakles, no! Can you see Mazaces getting his beard wet?”

“Mazaces has a beautiful beard,” she said.

Alexander rubbed his chin. She knew why he made his Companions go shaven: one less handhold for an enemy in a fight. But she doubted that Alexander could have raised much beard in any event. He grinned at her as if he could read her thought, and said, “I’m a wretched excuse for a Persian.”

“I should hope so,” said Meriamon.

He went in search of his chiton. By the time he found it the battle had splashed and tumbled to a halt, and the combatants were climbing out of the pool. Most of them avoided Meriamon’s eye as the young men had in the court.

Hephaistion smiled at her, so perfectly at ease with himself and her presence and so unconscious of his own beauty that she forgot to breathe. He said something; she mumbled something in reply.

Niko shifted his feet. The hot blood flooded Meriamon’s cheeks. “Like a bitch in a pack of hounds,” she muttered under her breath.

Niko arched a brow. Devils take him: he had heard her.

Alexander spared her the humiliation of Niko’s reply. He strode up to her, shining clean in a fresh chiton, combing his hair back with his fingers. He shook his head; the bright mane fell into its lion-sweep. He smiled at her. “I’ve missed you,” he said.

She almost broke down at that. By me time she found her tongue, Alexander had taken her hand and led her out of the bath. His pace was quick as it always was, but not too quick for her to follow. “I’m going out of Memphis,” he said. “But I suppose you know that. Did you come to talk me out of it?”

“That depends on where you’re going,” she said.

“Siwah,” he said.

The word rang empty in her brain.

“The oracle,” he said, “of Zeus Amon. Your god and mine both.”

Her wits scrambled themselves together. She was in worse case than she had thought, if she did not know that of all names he could have spoken. “You’re going all the way to Siwah?”

“From Dodona to Siwah, you said to me. Did you think I’d forgotten? I have dreams, too, Mariamne. This one bade me seek out the voice in the sands.”

“And then?”

“And then the god will speak. Or he will not. That’s in his hands.”

“What will you ask him?”

“Come with me and see.”

She stopped so suddenly that Niko nearly collided with her. Alexander, still holding her hand, was brought up short. “You want me to go to Siwah?”

“I can hardly command you, can I?”

“You are king in the Great House.”

“You are a king’s daughter,” he said, “and the gods’ own.” He paused. His eyes searched her face. One was dark and one was light, as if he could not decide what he felt. “Do you want to go?”

“Yes,” she said. She had not known it until she said it. “I want to go to Siwah.”

Light flooded his face. “Now I know my dream was true.”

“You doubted it?”

“No,” said Alexander. “But two certainties are better than one. Especially when the other is yours.”

She let him draw her onward. “Parmenion will be disgusted,” she said.

“What? That I’d take a woman on a pilgrimage?”

“That it’s such a perfect trap for his hope of your dynasty, and I’m such hopeless bait.”

“Poor Parmenion,” said Alexander. There was something like compassion in his voice. “Someday I’ll do my duty. But not here, and not yet.”

Her tongue quivered. Words had come to it, from the gods perhaps. Or perhaps not. A page was running toward them from the baths, and an older man from the palace, and someone was calling down the well of a stair, hunting for the king. What Meriamon would have said was lost in babble and confusion; nor could she get it back.

Alexander sailed out of Memphis in much less state than he had sailed in, with but the Royal Squadron and his personal Companions and their beasts and their servants crowded into a handful of ships, and a few others who would come with him as far as the Nile’s mouth.

One of those was Thaïs, in spite of her swelling belly. She did not say why she came. Meriamon did not need to ask. A hetaira, Thaïs had said often enough, was not well advised to fall in love with her patron. It was bad for business. But Ptolemy, like his brother, was a very difficult man to resist, once he had got under one’s skin.

Another of the followers was Mazaces who had been the satrap. He sailed with remarkably little escort for a Persian, no more than a handful of guards, a troop of servants, and the one of all his women who, having been born a Scythian, had no objection to travel. She went swathed to the eyes in veils and surrounded by wary eunuchs, but she seemed to thrive on the journey. Probably she had not known such pleasure since she was taken captive.

Meriamon might have liked to talk to her, and the eunuchs could hardly have prevented it; but the woman knew little Persian and no Greek at all, and Meriamon knew not a word of Scythian. The best that they could do, the first evening when the fleet had moored and the company made camp, was a civil greeting and an exchange of glances in what might, in other circumstances, have become friendship.

When Meriamon would have tried for more, Mazaces came down from the low eminence on which he had pitched his tent, haughty as all the Parsa were even under a barbarian master, and put an end to it with his presence.

Meriamon turned her back on him. That was rude, she knew it perfectly well, but she could not help herself.

“Wait,” the Persian said.

She might not have obeyed him. But the woman was watching, and something in her eyes made Meriamon pause. There was no hate in them, and no fear. Only pride when she looked on the man who owned her.

He was not ill to look at. Persian noblemen seldom were. They bred themselves like their horses, for size and for beauty, and he had a sufficiency of both.

Meriamon would have liked to see what his face was like under the beard that hid it from just below the eyes to just above the breastbone. What she could see of it was cleanly carved, with a nose like the arc of the new moon.

What he saw when he looked at her, she could imagine. Too small, too plain, and much too shameless in Egyptian linen, with the shape of her body clear to see.

She met his eyes boldly. They lowered. Persian courtesy, never to meet one’s stare direct: shiftiness, one might think it. “Does it trouble you,” she asked, “that if your king catches you, you will die a traitor’s death?”

“My king is Alexander,” Mazaces said.

His Greek was accented, but fluent enough. Better than hers had been when she came to Alexander’s camp. “You are Persian,” she said.

“You are Egyptian,” said Mazaces.

“He is the king we chose,” she said.

“So was he mine,” he said, “when I came to know him.”

“And what of your Great King?”

“My Great King,” he said, and his voice though soft was deeply bitter, “left me to make what peace I could in a province rent with war and rebellion. There was even a fleet of Macedonian pirates looking to carve a kingdom outside of their king’s reach. Did you know that?”

“It came to nothing,” she said.

“Because I fought it,” Mazaces said. “If the king goes on as he has begun, he will take Persis as he took Asia and Egypt. Then he will be Great King. What will you do then? Will you rebel against him?”

“He will be our Great King,” said Meriamon.

“Just so,” Mazaces said.

Meriamon frowned at the blaze of the sunset.

“Surely,” said Mazaces, “you who can comprehend many truths, can foresee an empire in which both Persis and Egypt dwell at peace.”

He was smiling. Mocking her, a little, but gently. And not as an enemy will.

She must have said it aloud. He said, “I am not your enemy. Nor is any who calls Alexander king.”

That was more than she could contemplate in comfort. She turned away again. This time he did not try to call her back.

o0o

She wandered slowly to her tent. It was the same one in which she had lived for so long with Thaïs, more honestly home than anywhere she had been since she left Thebes. Thaïs was out, no doubt with Ptolemy.

Niko was in, coaxing a smile and a plate of sweets out of Phylinna. A sleek tawny shape uncoiled in his lap and greeted Meriamon in tones redolent of impatience.

“Where was I?” Meriamon demanded of the cat. “And where, pray, were you?”

Sekhmet yawned, baring each pearl-bright tooth. She left Niko’s lap to coil about Meriamon’s ankles, marking her. Meriamon swept her up. She was purring thunderously.

“She moved in with me,” Niko said, licking honey from his fingers. “And a fine companion she’s been, too. She nags like a wife.”

“I don’t nag,” said Meriamon.

“You don’t,” Niko agreed sweetly. “You let your eyes do it for you.”

“When have I ever—”

He laughed. “Sit down,” he said, “and have a honey-cake. They’re good.”

Meriamon sat, but she was not hungry. “You’ve had Sekhmet all this time and you never said a word? I was half frantic.”

“Well,” he said, “and so was I, when you went away and never said a word. Fair’s fair, Mariamne.”

“Meriamon.”

“Mariamne.”

She sighed, sharp with temper, and gave it up.

He divided the last cake in half. “Here, eat. You never do eat enough to keep a bird happy.”

“Have you ever seen a bird eat? Pigs are ascetics beside them.”

“You are quite impossible,” he said, grinning and feeding her the cake, till she must eat or have her face smeared with honey. It was good, she granted him that. He downed the other half all at once, and sat smiling at her.

“Why do you look so smug?” she demanded.

“Wouldn’t you, if you were going to marry a princess?”

“Who said that I would marry you?”

“You did,” said Niko. “I told Ptolemy. He was enormously pleased.”

“And Alexander? Did you tell him?”

“Well,” Niko said, “no. Not yet. We thought it might be politic to wait a bit. Seeing that you wouldn’t have him, and it pricked his pride. I’d hardly want to flaunt my good fortune in his face.”

She sucked in a breath. She would never have believed his impudence—except that he was Nikolaos. “So I’m bought and paid for, am I?”

“You have a dowry. Lord Ay assured me of that. He’ll be talking with Ptolemy when we get back from Siwah. Do you want to be married in Memphis or in Thebes?”

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Realized that she was not breathing.

“Memphis might be better,” said Niko. Cheerful; infuriating. “Then Alexander can be sure to come. He isn’t going to Thebes, I don’t think. Once he’s been to Siwah, if the god favors him, he’ll be turning back toward Asia. Darius is still alive, and he’s still Great King. It’s time he had his comeuppance.”

“He hasn’t already?” Meriamon asked faintly.

“This is only a beginning. Of course,” Niko said, “for you it’s all there needs to be. Egypt is free. What’s the rest of the world to that?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Everything.”

“Exactly.” He leaped up, pulling her with him. Sekhmet had just time to spring to his shoulder before she was spilled on the carpet. “Come to dinner now, and stop scowling. It won’t be so terribly long till the wedding. Unless...” He paused. “If you’d rather...”

“Not till the king knows,” she said.

“Then we’ll wait.” He sounded perfectly happy about it.

Mad, she decided. And maddening. And irresistible.

o0o

They followed the westernmost arm of the river, bearing west as it divided in the mists and marshes of the Delta. This was the broad lotus-blossom of which Upper Egypt was the stem, rich land and fertile, spreading wide on the shores of the sea.

At the mouth that was called Canopus they left the ships and mounted their restive horses and turned west, away from the Nile. The land narrowed to along spit of sand: the sea on the right, Lake Mareotis on the left, blue water and blue water, and the sky more blue than they.

On the point of land between the lake and the sea was a traders’ town. Rhakotis, its people called it, good Egyptian name though they were more Greek than not, merchants and travelers who moored their ships in the broad sweep of the harbor with its wall of island. If Pelusium was the easternmost gate of the Two Lands, then this was the gate of the west: much lesser and weaker, but lovely in its setting, and the land about it, though narrow, was rich.

Alexander took a boat on the lake with a handful of friends, and Meriamon because she had been in sight when he came down to the water. He was in high good humor, dressed in an old rag of a chiton that must have driven his bodyservants to distraction, and a broad-brimmed hat with a purple ribbon tied about it. Sekhmet batted at a dangling end.

“She doesn’t mind boats at all,” Hephaistion said, offering to scratch her under the chin. She thought about it for a while, then regally deigned to allow it.

“That’s an Egyptian cat for you,” said Alexander. He leaned on the rail. A gust of wind tugged at his hat; he caught it before it could take flight, and let it drop to hang by its cord about his neck. His eyes were on the ragged line that was the town, and the shape of the island beyond it. “Look at that,” he said.

Everybody was looking who was not needed to sail the boat. “It’s pretty,” someone said.

“Good land, too,” said someone else. “And very good climate. Not too warm as Egypt goes, with wind off the sea. Less fever than you’d expect—no marshes on the lake’s rim to breed sickness in summer. The river drowns them before they can begin.”

“Good harbor up yonder,” said Niko, down the rail with Nearchos. “Did you see how the island makes a wall against the open sea, and the harbor inside it, with reefs to break the waves? I’m surprised the Phoenicians didn’t grab it ages ago and make one of their sea-cities out of it.”

“Greeks kept them out,” Nearchos said. “We’re sea-people too, don’t forget.”

“Egypt had somewhat to say in it besides,” said Meriamon.

“I could build a city here,” Alexander said.

His voice was quiet. People kept talking up and down the boat, taking no notice of him. But for Meriamon the world had gone suddenly still. Niko was listening too, she noticed, and the black-curled Cretan, and Ptolemy who had come up beside Niko.

“I could build a city,” Alexander said again. “Here, in this place, between the lake and the sea. A gate for all of Africa; a gate to the riches of Egypt. Egypt has always looked inward from Memphis and Thebes. Now I say it should look outward to the world.”

Meriamon clung to the rail. The ship rocked gently on the waves; but she felt as if it rode in a storm. Her shadow was wide awake. Sekhmet crouched on her shoulder. The gods were listening: a tautening of awareness in water and sky.

This alone was not what she had come for. And yet it was part of it. This place, this time, this new voice speaking softly, shaping a city that would be.

It was not Alexander’s voice. Ptolemy, solid imperturbable Ptolemy with his feet on the earth and his mind on practicalities, was dreaming aloud. “And a wall there, and of course we’d have to build a bridge between the island and the mainland, and if ships are to find their way in, we’ll have to put something, some marker, on the rock at the island’s head. A tower, maybe. White. You can see a white tower a long way away. And on top of it, all night long, a light....”

“A city,” said Alexander, sharp and painfully clear, “to rule the world.”

“We can do it,” Ptolemy said. “That’s one thing a king does, after all, to make his mark on the world: a mark that lasts longer than most. A city founded in his name.”

“Alexandria,” said Alexander. “I like the sound of that.”

“Alexandria,” said Meriamon. Naming it. Making it true.