Lord of the Two Lands (31 page)

“When they don’t have anything to eat,” the traveler’s uncle explained, “they don’t eat, or drink either. When there’s food and water to be had, they make up for lost time.”

Alexander’s face was expressionless. Meriamon suspected that he was trying not to laugh. The house of the rock had turned out to be not quite impossible to find, and its tenant to be a reasonably honest man, as camel dealers went. He was no more disposed to sell Alexander his fine racing beauties than his nephew had been, but he had lesser beasts enough. One of which was doing its best to take Seleukos’ head off.

“Bulls,” said the dealer. “Not the best choice for the use you’re going to put them to. You’ll take she-camels. They’re gentler, and you get milk from the ones in calf. You’ll be glad of that if your water runs out.”

“It won’t,” Alexander said. “Siwah is five days’ march from Apis, no? We’ll take water in plenty, if we have camels to carry it.”

“Five days with good luck and fair weather,” said the dealer, “and supposing you don’t meet raiders. Not that they’ll bother you, I don’t think, unless the young ones have a mind for a little sport.”

“Five days,” said Alexander. “There are three hundred of us, with servants, and a score of horses.”

The dealer frowned. “Horses? Hadn’t you better leave them here? I can see that they’re well taken care of, and at a fair price, too.”

“I think not,” said Alexander with perfect courtesy.

The man opened his mouth. Alexander smiled. He shut it again. He had just discovered, thought Meriamon, that Alexander was Alexander.

He blinked, shrugged. “You’ll do what you’ll do. Now, about those camels...”

o0o

They had their camels, and drovers for them, and saddles, and grain in addition to what the ships brought in, and waterskins now lightly filled. They would see to those more properly in Apis.

Alexander was not displeased with the price he paid for the whole. Nor, much more to the point, was Hephaistion, who did the paying. He was quartermaster here as he had been on the road from Tyre, and he was good at it. He had everything in order and the price haggled down almost within the limits of reason, and the whole caravan on the march by sunup.

They looked like a proper caravan now, men in the fore, camels behind except for the rear guard, and horses in the center, away from the camels. Phoenix did not mind them; she had been foaled among them. The Macedonian horses loathed everything about the great stinking beasts.

Boukephalas would have entered into battle with one of them, had not Alexander hauled him off. He was still prancing on his lead, throwing up his head and snorting in disgust.

“I don’t think he’ll ever forgive me,” Alexander said.

Meriamon slanted a glance at him. He looked like any other man in the company in hat and chiton, cloak and sandals, and a short spear for a walking stick. He carried his own pack though the pages had most of his gear, and swung out as cheerfully as the lowliest trooper. If he sensed what waited in the desert, he showed no sign of it.

“He’d forgive you less,” she said, “if you left him behind.”

“I know,” said Alexander. Boukephalas thrust his nose into the king’s shoulder; he sighed, but he laughed. “I never did have much luck with traveling light.”

“I call this light enough,” she said, “for an army.”

“This is the lap of luxury,” said Alexander. “Light is a knife in your belt and air in your wallet, and one cloak for two of you. Light is hunting down your supper with the knife, and sharing the cloak, and knowing yourself for a rich man.”

“Do you wish it could be that simple?” she asked him.

He did not answer at once. They measured a dozen strides of the road. Then two dozen. Halfway through the third, he said, “Sometimes. This is close, when you come down to it. Even with camels.”

She smiled. He grinned back. “It’s going to get interesting, isn’t it?” he said.

He knew. Better than she, maybe. And he was always one to laugh at fear.

He did not say that she could go back and be safe. For that, more than anything else he had done or not done, she knew that she loved him. Not as she loved Nikolaos, no; of course not. But as a woman could love the man who was her king.

From Apis that was a fleck of green in the Red Land, a huddle of houses against the Great Green, the road bent south and turned its back on the sea. This was the pilgrims’ road to Siwah, a thread strung between the sea and the oracle. It made its way through a land both bleak and unforgiving, red sand and barren rock and the bitter vault of the sky. No rain fell here. No river ran. No Black Land sprouted green to gentle the earth.

The power in this place was alien and enemy. It knew Meriamon for what she was. And more than her, it knew Alexander.

Set was a god, as often ally as enemy. Typhon was far away in windy Hellas. This was Enemy pure, earth that would not be conquered, sky that would not be ruled, even by gods. Khemet’s power had driven it back beyond the mountains of the sunset, and walled itself against it with the tombs of its kings. But here it was whole and it was strong, and it had Alexander’s army in its hand.

On the first day it did nothing. The sky was clear of aught but birds: the desert falcon, the vulture that was holy in Khemet. The way stretched before them. Often there was nothing to mark it among the sand and the stones, but they had taken guides in Apis, men who swore by their names that they knew the way to Siwah.

Alexander would have had them swear on images of their gods, but Meriamon stopped him. “Their names will be enough,” she said. He found that very odd, but he did not quarrel with her.

Trust, she thought. He trusted her to know what men in this land would do. She trusted the land not at all. It was quiescent. Biding its time.

The second day passed. The birds wheeled. Alexander sent scouts to see what interested the vultures. A lion’s kill: a gazelle scoured to bones, and jackals feeding on it.

Aristandros saw no omen in that. Meriamon wondered if she was a fool for thinking it a message.

That night they made a waterless camp. There was an oasis, the guides promised, within the next day’s march. The water in the skins was sweet enough, if redolent of leather. They had provisions in plenty, and the last of the fodder for the horses and the camels. They were comfortable, as travelers in the desert went.

Meriamon sat on the camp’s edge and watched the sun go down. The sounds of the camp went on peacefully in back of her: men talking, horses snorting, camels chewing their cuds. The guides had shown them how to build fires out of camel dung, hardly a necessity now as the day’s heat radiated out of the sand, but later they would be glad of it.

She felt rather than saw Niko squat on his heels beside her. Sekhmet walked from his shoulder to Meriamon’s. Meriamon reached up to smooth the cat’s fur, and started. “Sparks,” she said.

“Air’s dry,” said Niko.

“It’s always dry in the—” She stopped. He was grinning. She had no laughter in her.

There was a wind blowing. Not much of one, but persistent. It picked up a handful of sand and cast it across the top of a rock, and rested; then amused itself in sculpting a dune. It blew from the left hand. South.

The horizon was the color of blood. The zenith was the color of lapis, deep pure blue. She turned her eyes southward.

Blood-red, blood-crimson. Sparks leaped in it. Flickers of lightning.

She drew herself up. Her trousers were full of sand. She shook them out, taking great care. Not that it would matter. But she preferred to be clean while she had the choice.

The guides were already with the king. “You’re sure?” Alexander asked them as Meriamon came up.

The oldest of them did his best not to look offended. “We know the signs, lord king. There will be storms within a day, maybe two. That is the khamsin blowing, the dry wind.”

“It blows out of Siwah,” Alexander said, “and to Siwah I will go. Can we make the oasis if we march through the night?”

“Night is not safe,” the man said, “lord king.”

“Is day any safer?”

The man rubbed at his beard. “Demons walk the night, lord king.”

“The dry wind walks the day, if what you say is true. Should I fear a demon that may growl at me, over a sandstorm that can scour the flesh from my bones?”

“You should not speak lightly of these things,” said the guide. “Lord king.”

Alexander’s blood was up, but his mind was cool enough. He scanned the camp with a swift eye; met Meriamon’s stare. “Well?” he asked her.

“I don’t like the look of the sky,” she said. “If we had water enough I’d say stay, and wait it out.”

“But we don’t,” said Hephaistion. “We have enough for one more round for the men. Barely enough for the horses. Precious little for the camels, even if the men and the horses go thirsty. Camels,” he said, “need a great deal of water, when they need it.”

“They can go longer than you think,” the guide said.

“Horses can’t,” said Hephaistion. “Men shouldn’t. If this storm is bad and we’re held up, we won’t be in good case.”

Alexander paced along the line of them, turned sharply. “We’ll rest half the night. After that, we march.”

o0o

The wind died down near middle night. Meriamon did not ease for that. Alexander, unfortunately, did.

By the time the trumpet sounded the
Wake and Arm
, it was nearly dawn. They had drunk their ration of water and eaten their bit of bread, struck camp and turned their faces toward the southward road, when the sky began to lighten in the east.

It was cold, frost-cold. Meriamon huddled in the soldier’s cloak that Niko had got for her before they left Rhakotis. Sekhmet was a warm weight in a fold of it. Fortunate cat: she could ride when humans had to walk.

Meriamon’s shadow strained at its bindings. She loosed them. It wandered a little distance but came back, bristling, teeth bared in a soundless snarl. It was almost solid, she noticed. It dropped to all fours and paced behind her. A Companion who wandered sleepily out of his place in the line shied away from it, muttering something about “bloody great dogs.”

The stars faded. The wind was blowing in their faces: brief hard gusts, a sting of sand. The sun rose as it had set, in blood. The light it cast was strangely dim, and dimming.

“We’re going to get it,” Ptolemy said. He was walking with his brother, just behind Meriamon.

Word came back down the line. “Push on as far as you can before it hits. Then barricade yourselves—behind a camel, if you can. Watch the camels! They know what to do.”

A march of Hellenes was never a silent march unless they were mounting an ambush. Even in dry desert someone was always singing, and everyone was talking. Now the sound of voices sank away. The wind was growing stronger, the sting of sand fiercer.

The camels walked on, each beast seeming made up of half a dozen disparate parts, and every one moving in a different direction. For once no one commented on it. While the camels walked, they were safe. Some of them made a litany of it and marched to its rhythm.

All at once the camels stopped. The beast in the lead raised her head on its improbable neck and turned it from side to side. The drover shouted and struck her with his goad. She took no more notice of him than of the flies that’s warmed on her hide. With great and deliberate care she folded her legs beneath her, joint by joint. First one, then another of the caravan followed her. Their backs were to the south, Meriamon noticed, and their faces to the north.

The horses were shirting about uneasily. Phoenix, wise to the desert, was sweating. Her eyes rolled white as Meriamon approached, and she shied from the hand on her bridle. “Go on,” Meriamon said to the groom. “I’ll look after her.”

The Thracian set his jaw. “No,” he said. “You go.”

Meriamon got a firmer grip on the bridle and half dragged, half coaxed the mare toward the nearest of the camels. The company had gone to ground already, except for those with the horses.

Boukephalas was quiet, almost alarmingly so. Alexander had his bridle, was stroking his neck, talking to him.

Meriamon called out. The king threw up his head, remarkably like a horse himself. “Here!” she cried.

After a moment he moved toward her. She forgot him and set to work persuading Phoenix to lie in the lee of the camel. The mare knew what she was supposed to do; was glad to do it. But the air was full of thunder. The earth was throbbing like a heart. It was more than a horse could reasonably be expected to endure.

The sun was a feeble flicker. The sand was thickening. A shape loomed out of it—two shapes. Alexander; Boukephalas.

The stallion lay down willingly beside Phoenix, and greeted her with a flutter of the nostrils. She flattened her ears and snaked her head. He offered no presumption. Her trembling quieted.

“Where’s Niko?” Meriamon asked. Shouted. The wind was rising.

She tried to get up. Alexander pulled her down. “Not now, idiot! He was back there the last time I looked—with Ptolemy. Hephaistion, too.”

There was nothing of mind in what she wanted. To go, to find him. But Alexander was in her way, and he would not move. She subsided slowly. “Mother,” she prayed. “Mother Isis, look after him.”

If the goddess heard, she had keener ears than anything living. They were in the mouth of the furnace.

One moment there was wind and sand and a crackle of lighting. The next, a lake of fire, a blast of heat, sand to scour the flesh from bones even through a soldier’s cloak. Every drop of moisture sucked from skin and mouth and eyes. And howling like every voice of every torment that had ever beset man or beast or demon below.

It was a paean. A song of triumph. That they were taken. That they would be destroyed.

o0o

“No,” said Meriamon.

Not precisely said. She had no voice to say it. It was burned out of her. But she willed it.

There was more than earthly malice in that wind, and more than earthly destruction in the storm. Her souls were flayed raw. What it had done to the simple magicless Macedonians, she could not think; dared not, or she would despair.

She could not move. There was a weight on her. It was alive; it breathed. It was shielding her.

Alexander. She knew the bright heat of him. A different heat: welcome. It was barely touched at all.

It offered itself for what she must do. She shaped the words with her souls’ tongue. She made the wall, stone by stone, word by word of shaped and focused power. Half of them the storm scoured away. Half it haltered against, blow on blow.

But they held. Patiently she heaped them one on the other, making a ward against the storm, raising it over the small trapped souls, men, beasts, even a desert mouse cowering under a stone. The flesh that housed them could perish even yet, drowned in sand. But they would escape uneaten.

There was little of her left when the wall was made. She had just strength enough to set the last stone and curl up behind it, and wait.

o0o

Silence.

She had gone deaf. Or dead.

Something moved. A voice spoke in her ear. “Herakles!”

Sand sifted down, hissing. The weight scrambled off her. She got an elbow in the ribs.

She was definitely not dead, unless the dead could hurt.

A hand got a grip on her, heaved her up. Light blinded her.

Alexander looked like nothing human, covered in sand from head to foot, and his eyes staring out of it, blazing pale. He shook like a dog. Sand flew.

The world had changed. What had been a bare stony valley with a bit of scrub for the camels to graze on, was a sea of sand, great undulating dunes stretching to the horizon. North was a haze of storm, shot with lightnings. South was a still clear blue.

One of the smaller dunes heaved. A camel rose out of it, shook itself as Alexander had, and looked about with an air of vast disgust.

“My sentiments exactly.” said Alexander. He sounded a great deal calmer than he looked. He eyed the hillock nearest him, and began to dig.

Meriamon burrowed already where her bones told her to burrow, no mind in her at all, only a madness of fear.

Niko was coiled in a knot, death-still. She gasped. Her mouth was full of sand. She dragged him out bodily.

He struggled, unknotting, coughing hard enough to knock him flat, and Meriamon with him. Her hands were locked on his arms. He tore free, rolling to all fours, and coughed himself into shaking silence.

He was ghastly to look at, sand caked in his hair and brows and clinging to his skin, and sweat plowing furrows in it. He was quite the most beautiful thing Meriamon had ever seen.

He tasted of salt and of sand, and of himself. His shaking stopped. She stumbled to her feet, drawing him with her. Other mounds sprouted their crop of men and beasts, snorting and blowing and shaking off clouds of sand.

o0o

They had lost no one, and every one of the animals was safe. One or two of the camels had strayed, but those came back on their own as the company took count of itself. The worst casualty was a man who had got a stone in his eye.

He would keep the eye, Meriamon judged. She did what she could to stitch and bind the cut above it. No one else had more than a bruise or two, and a few unfortunates had had the skin scoured from exposed portions of their anatomy.

“That will teach you to stick your arse out in a sandstorm,” Alexander said to the worst wounded of them; but he had a smile for the man after, and that was as good an anodyne as anything Meriamon could muster.

They had a sip of water each—not quite all of it, but there was a fair distance to go yet, the guides said. Once they had shaken the worst of the sand out of clothes and hair and seen to their packs and their animals, they took the road again. Even as parched as they were, their spirits were high. The storm was gone. The sky was serene. By night they would have water enough for all of them, man and beast.

It was hard going. The sand was deep, and could be treacherous. The curve of the dunes lured them away from the straight path. The sun sank, slowly at first, then with breathtaking swiftness.

“Soon,” the guides said. “The oasis is close. Soon we come to it.”

Each rise of sand invited the certainty that water lay on the other side of it. Each downward slope looked only to another dune. Red sand, dun sand, blue sky. No green at all. Not a bush, not a leaf, not a blade of grass. And of water, nothing. Not even the shadow of it.