Lord of the Two Lands (32 page)

The guides were moving more slowly now, pausing more often to confer with one another. Most of the Companions were too tired to care about anything but putting one foot in front of the other.

So should Meriamon have been—she perhaps more than any, for the wall that she had built of magic and her souls’ substance, to guard them all in the midst of the storm. But she was past exhaustion in a white fierce clarity.

She knew in her skin that Niko was beside her. She was aware of Sekhmet riding on his shoulder, of Phoenix stepping delicately behind, of Alexander working his way up from the rear, a flare like a torch in a dark night.

When he passed, she fell in beside him. His glance acknowledged but did not forbid her.

The guides had stopped again. The chief of Alexander’s scouts was with them, addressing them in a fierce low voice. “You
what
?”

“We know which way is south,” one of the guides said, just as low and just as fierce. “It’s only—”

“Only what?”

They whipped about. Even the scout looked suddenly, horribly guilty.

“What don’t you know?” Alexander asked again.

None of them would answer.

“It is only,” Meriamon said, “that there is a whole world to the south of this place, and Siwah is a very small portion of it.” She fixed the chief of the guides with her stare. “How long have you been lost?”

“We are not lost,” the man said, “lady. We know where we must be.”

“Are we anywhere near water?” Alexander demanded.

There was another silence.

The scout could not spit: he was too dry. He managed to look as if he had done it. “They’re lost, Alexander. Don’t you doubt it. They’ve been lost since we dug ourselves out of that sandpit.”

“The storm changed everything!” cried the youngest of the guides. “How were we to know that it would make a new world?”

“Sandstorms do,” Alexander said mildly. He looked about. There was nothing to see but sand. “I don’t suppose it will be any better at night? Navigating by the stars, or however you do it?”

“We go by the land,” the chief of the guides said, “lord king. There is always something that never changes: a shape under the sand, or a turning of the hills.”

“How much time do you need to find it?”

“We have been looking,” the man said. “Nothing is as we remember.” He threw up his hands. “Nothing! Never in all my years have I seen it so. The very earth has shifted, I swear by the gods.”

Meriamon shivered.

Alexander did not hear the truth that she heard, or did not care. “In a word,” he said, “you’re lost. And so, therefore, are we.”

“We are not—” The guide snatched off his headcloth and scratched fiercely at his swarm of lice. “Lord king, we are not lost. We are here, and Siwah is there, to the south. We have only to walk until we come to it.”

“Or,” said Alexander, “until we die of thirst.”

“The gods will provide,” said the guide.

“Then you had better pray,” said Alexander. “Or better yet, find a landmark that you recognize. We’ll camp here while you go about it.”

The guides stared at him. He smiled his sweet terrible smile, and went back down the line.

By morning the water was gone. The wine without it was deadly stuff, nor could the beasts drink it even if there had been enough.

The guides had not found the oasis. They knew where Siwah was, they insisted on that. Their insistence had an air of desperation.

Alexander shrugged. He was as dry as anyone else. Someone had tried to save out a flask of water for him. He had smiled, thanked the man, and passed it round the man’s company. Now he said, “We’ll go on. What’s a dry march or two to the likes of us?”

His men cheered. He flashed them his brightest smile and took his place at the head of the line, and led them out of the camp.

He was carrying them with his strength. And yet they were tough, these Macedonians. They marched behind their king, erect under the weight of packs and armor, and their eyes were bright and their faces were firm and they knew nothing of defeat or despair.

They did not feel what Meriamon felt: the malice under their feet, the ill-will in the sky. It had them, and it would kill them. And they laughed at it.

She walked as straight as she could, slipping and scrambling in sand. She kept her head as high as it would go. She worried about Phoenix, but the mare was lively enough. They all were.

And for how long? Four days at least to Siwah, the guides said. The camels were irritable already, trying to wander off, biting their handlers when they were dragged back.

They wanted water. In four days they would do worse than want it. They would be dead for lack of it.

She stumbled and went down. She stayed there on hands and knees, shaking her head. There was a darkness in it. Trap. Trapped. Thirsty—thirsty—

“Meriamon!”

Niko. Always Niko.

Her head spun. He lifted her, shook her. She tried to push him away. It was like pushing at a wall.

He slapped her. She gasped. She could see again. He looked furious.

Not as furious as she. “Put me down,” she said through gritted teeth.

He kept on holding her, and he kept on walking. She struggled. He did not even trouble to tighten his grip. She lay in his arms, glaring.

Anger was a power. It cleared her mind. It named what had felled her. Enemy.

The sky was still dark. Grey. She tried to banish it, to bring back the blue. A wind brushed her cheek. She shivered. It was cold.

The marchers halted. They were all staring upward.

Alexander’s voice rang out, seeming to echo in the empty spaces. “By the dog! It’s going to rain.”

“In the desert?” someone said.

“Taste the wind,” said Ptolemy. “That’s rain.” He paused. His voice sharpened. “Quick, everybody. Get out your tents, your waterskins—anything you’ve got. If the gods are with us at all—if they’ve ever listened to a prayer we’ve said—”

“Zeus’“ cried Alexander. “Skyfather! Did you hear that? You’ll have a hecatomb of fine bulls when I get back to Memphis, if you give us rain now.”

There was no sudden stillness. No listening pause; no silence of awe. The men ran to do as Ptolemy bade them, some muttering, some speaking aloud of madmen and desperation.

But they ran. They unfolded tents, skins, cloaks, hauled out pots and jars.

The wind blew harder. It was a water-wind as the khamsin had been a fire-wind. It massed clouds above them. It gave them nothing that they could drink, not a drop. Already there was light on the far side of it, dry naked sky, pitiless sun.

“Zeus!” cried Alexander, high and peremptory. “Father Zeus! Can you hear us?”

He was standing on the summit of a dune. A long shaft of sun caught him, striking fire in his hair. He spread his arms wide.

Meriamon’s feet were on the ground again. She almost leaped back into Niko’s arms. The earth was humming. It was Alexander—not working power, but being power; drawing it up from the deep places and down from the sky.

He did not know what he was doing. He would call it prayer, if he called it anything. Making the gods listen. Taking no notice at all of the Enmity that beat upon him.

The sky shattered.

Meriamon raised herself on her hands. Whether she had flung herself flat, or been flung, she would never be sure.

She drew a breath, and choked. It was like breathing a river.

Rain. Hard, driving, relentless, miraculous rain. Alexander’s madmen were whooping and dancing in it, trying to drink it as it fell, gagging and half drowning themselves, and laughing all the while. But they were gathering it in everything they had.

Alexander egged them on. He was whole, grinning, sopping wet. Not even a scorched eyelash after the bolt that surely had struck through him into the earth.

The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The silence was enormous. The clouds thinned and paled and scattered, blowing away southward. The thirsty sand drank the last of the wet, glistening in the new-washed sun.

They were all wet to the skin, men, horses, camels. They looked at one another. Then at the full waterskins; the jars brimming over; the pools made of tents, with camels drinking from them in long noisy draughts.

No one said the word that they were all thinking. Miracle. Gods’ gift. Four days’ worth, by the quartermaster’s measure.

o0o

They took time to make sure their armor and weapons were dry. By the time they marched, they were only a little damp around the edges. There was water in them, pure sweet rainwater, and they went the swifter for it.

The desert was coming to life about them. Dried branches put forth leaves. Flowers seemed to spring beneath their feet. Small creatures came out of hiding to feed on the new bounty, or simply to revel in it.

“Water is life,” said Niko. “I never knew it before as I know it here.”

“Desert is very close to the truth of things.”

Meriamon was weak still, and sometimes she was dizzy. Her eyes did not seem to want to see very far, but what was close was bitterly, painfully clear. Niko’s face, now. Peeling where the sun had burned it. Raw on one cheekbone from the scouring of sand. Rough with fair stubble. His hat shaded it, cutting a sharp line across it, part in sun, part in shadow.

They had stopped ahead. Some of them had spears. None of them moved; they seemed hardly to breathe.

Meriamon made her way to them. Alexander was lost amid the taller men, until one of them shifted. She saw what had stopped them.

Two of them, eye to eye with Alexander. His eyes were wide. One was almost black, and the other was almost silver.

Theirs could not be anything but wide, cold and yellow and slit-pupiled. Their hoods were spread. Their forked tongues tasted the air. Tails coiled, long bodies raised and swaying gently, they were as tall as the king.

One of the Bodyguard jerked forward, spear up, face a rictus of disgust. Ptolemy caught him and hurled him back bodily. “You fool! Do you want to kill the king?”

“I’m not going to die.” Alexander’s voice was soft, a little blurred, as if he spoke from a dream. He did not glance at Meriamon, could not have seen her coming, but he said, “Mariamne. Did you ask your gods for guides?”

“I don’t think I needed to,” she said.

The serpents swayed toward her. They were beautiful, all supple length and glistening scales. Their hoods were like the headdress of Pharaoh in his great house.

Very, very carefully she bowed to them. She went low and low, but with an eye always upon them. “Great ones,” she said to them in the oldest of tongues, the language of priests from the dawn of the Two Lands. “Handmaidens of Edjo in the house of the horizon. I bring to you the lord of Upper and Lower Egypt, king from across the sea, son of that one whom you know.”

The nearer serpent hissed. The other dipped its head and flowed along the sand southward and westward. At the length of a furrow in Thebes it stopped, curved round, raised its head again.

“It says,” said Meriamon, “follow.”

Alexander shook himself. For a moment she thought that he would laugh, or say something unfortunate. The serpent that had not moved could strike in an eyeblink. Would. She knew that as she knew the feel of the earth beneath her feet.

But he only tilted his head, looking from her to the serpents. Maybe at last he understood what this was that he did. “Go on,” he said. “I’ll be behind you.”

o0o

Meriamon did not want to lead, but Alexander was adamant. She was a shield of sorts. And an interpreter, though surely it was obvious what their guides wanted of them.

They were allowed to rest at night. The serpents left them then, and they breathed a little easier, all of them, until the fear struck. If they were being led into perdition—if their guides did not come back—

The serpents came back the first morning, and again the second. By the third the travelers were something like comfortable, even the horses, who the first day had been unmanageable until their grooms took them to the rear and kept them there. Horses were on speaking terms with divinity, and often foaled of the wind; but snakes were the Enemy, even snakes who belonged to the gods.

Meriamon spent most of the first day upbraiding herself for doubting that the gods were looking after their chosen king. She had been perilously close to despair, even after the rain.

That was the malice in the earth, working on her weaknesses. It had little enough to do, when it came to that. She had never been perfect in her faith.

This was hardly a sign for her. The gods knew the Enemy—they could hardly escape it. They wanted Alexander in their oracle. Meriamon was but a means to their end.

It was a comfort of sorts, to be insignificant. She walked behind the serpents, keeping the pace they set.

Alexander walked behind her. His Companions walked behind him. The camels kept the outer line, with guards to watch for raiders, and the horses held the rear, just ahead of the rear guard.

The land did not change from day to day. It was the same barren undulation of rock and sand. The same blue infinity of sky. Even the same vulture hovering against it, wide wings, blood-speck of head peering down.

Nekhbet’s eyes, Meriamon thought. As the hawk that flew over them was Horus, winging into the sun. And when night fell, the sky would be the arch of a goddess’ body, the stars the garment that clothed her, and the moon the jewel on her neck.

They were not in the world any longer. That the guides, born and bred to this country, had not known the shape of it after the storm, nor had they known it since—Meriamon had known in her heart, even then, what that meant. Now she let herself acknowledge it.

Where they were...

They taught in Thebes, and likewise in Memphis, that the gods dwelt beyond the horizon. That the horizon of the west, the Red Land between the river and the sunset, was both living earth and land of the dead. That one could walk through a door, or through the words of a spell, or even through the wall of a storm, and come to that earth on which no living creature walked.

It was exactly like the land of the living. The sun rode there, the priests taught, when it was night for living men; and who was to say that Alexander’s company had not somehow turned itself about and entered day-in-night?

She stooped, the morning of that third day, and took up a handful of sand. It was simply sand. Dry, whispering as it trickled from her palm. She had eaten bread before dawn, fresh from baking in a fire of camel dung, and drunk wine thinned with water from the rain. She knew what she had been doing before she had to rise and eat: her belly was warm with it still, and Niko kept smiling to himself in odd moments.

Ptolemy was chaffing him for it; he snapped back, stung. Their voices were living voices, rough-sweet and pleasant to hear at her back as Edjo’s servants slithered in front of her, leading her to the oracle.

And yet there was her shadow. It walked beside her, and it was a man with a jackal’s head, its body as solid as her own. No one looked at it askance, or said anything of the stranger in the mask.

Its name touched the edge of her tongue. She almost said it.
Anubis.
Guide and guardian. Though for her it had always been more the latter; and here their guides were Edjo’s servants.

She was not afraid. That surprised her. There were two of her. Flesh walking in the land of flesh. Ka-spirit walking in this land, the dry land, the land of coming forth by day.

She glanced back. The company held their ranks, marching as they had marched since Rhakotis. They sensed nothing amiss. Now and then one fell out to relieve himself or to shake a stone out of his boot. Someone was singing about a boy with cheeks like a peach.

Her shadow left her side to walk ahead. Edjo’s serpents slowed for it. It came up between them; they went on. Its ears tilted back at her, then flicked forward. Guarding her still.

Someone else took her shadow’s place. It was not Niko, though he was close enough. Arrhidaios watched her shadow with wide interested eyes, and said, “We’re somewhere else. Aren’t we?”

That was one way to put it. Meriamon said, “We’ll be safe.” Or so, at least, she hoped.

“There are things back there,” Arrhidaios said. “Watching. The horses don’t like them.”

Meriamon kept her eyes sternly to the front. “What sort of things?”

“Things,” said Arrhidaios, shrugging. “Like him”—he tilted his chin at her shadow—”but ugly. They just watch. They have knives.”

She stumbled and almost fell. Arrhidaios caught her hand to steady her. “Are you all right, Meri?”

“Yes.” She said it through stiff lips. “They cannot touch us. I know their names.”

If names were enough. If the scribes and the priests had known truly, and not through a veil of lies and guesses.

She was marching through simple desert to an oasis and a temple. There were no demons behind the company.

“I can count them,” said Arrhidaios proudly. “Seven and seven and seven, and three more sevens. Six sevens.”

“Six sevens,” she said. “Yes. That is their number.”

She would not look back. If she looked back, her bowels would melt.

Words came to her. She spoke them, slowly at first, faintly, then louder and stronger. “In truth I walk. In the Hall of the Two Truths I walk. In Osiris’ name, in Horus’ name, in the name of Isis, Mother, goddess, lady of the living and the dead, I defend me. From the bearers of knives, from the eaters of souls, from the Powers that wait upon the day of judgment, deliver me.”