Lord of the Two Lands (33 page)

Silence. Her shadow paced without pausing. Edjo’s serpents slithered on either side.

She looked over her shoulder. Her eye caught Niko’s. He smiled, sudden warmth, a surge of pure strength.

Alexander was beyond him. He had been down the line, keeping company with the singers. Once away from them, he lost his air of lightness.

He knew.

She waited for him to come level with her. As she waited she sang softly, little more than a croon. “I am the hawk of the desert. I am the cat soft-footed in shadow. I am the sand across the empty track. I walk unseen. I walk defended. No demon touches me.”

She stopped. Alexander was beside her.

“You see them, too,” said Arrhidaios before Meriamon could begin. “You do, don’t you, Alexander?”

Alexander patted him on the shoulder. When he spoke, it was to Meriamon. “What are they?”

“Watchers,” she said.

“Armed?”

“It’s their way,” she said.

He frowned at the three who led them. “Tell me,” he said. “Tell me that that is a Nubian in a mask. And that those, back there, are more men who like, for reasons best known to themselves, to wear the heads of animals and carry naked knives and follow strangers through the dry land.”

“They’re not men,” she said. “But the rest is true enough.”

She saw him shiver. “What... do they do?”

“They watch.” That did not satisfy him. She said after a moment, “They judge. But that is in the hall. This is the open land.”

“Is it?”

She glanced upward in spite of herself. If that vault was the vault of a ceiling, and about her walls as vast as a world, and under her feet not sand but smoothed stone...

Stone of every kind that was in the world, laid in patterns that lured the eye, and having won it, netted it and drew it down and down. Pillars like tall fans of papyrus or like the trees of the Lebanon, inlaid with gold and precious things, lapis and carnelian and malachite. Vault the color of the sky at night, or perhaps the sky on the verge of morning, when all was darkest, and day a dream to which there was no waking.

“No,” she said. “It is the desert of Libya, and tomorrow we will come to Siwah.”

“What do they judge?” Alexander asked her, pitiless as a child, and as innocently persistent.

“Souls,” she answered him.

“We’re alive, I think,” he said.

“We are,” she said. “This is the land of the living. This is the sun that rises in the morning and sets at evening. Those are the stars that rise and set.”

Each word came with the weight of a world. Here the worlds met. Here, if she slackened, or if she failed to name each name as it was given in the morning of the worlds, the world she built would crumble and fade.

“This is sky,” she said. “This is the sun, that is the boat of Ra, that sails on the sea of the million years. This is sand. Red Land of the west, desert beyond the green fields of Egypt. This is life.”

Her foot turned a stone. She picked it up. It was sharp-edged; it tried to bite her hand as it had bitten her foot.

She smiled at it. Pain was life. Pain was real. Pain was power in this shifting, wavering place.

The desert melted into mist. The hall stretched before her. She knew its name. The Hall of Twofold Truth. And in it, moving from behind her to take their ancient places, six sevens of Watchers. Man-formed, now man-high, now as vast as giants, with the faces of hungry beasts. Their knives glittered in the pitiless light. Their teeth gleamed.

One that wore a jackal’s smile met her eyes with eyes the color of blood, and sketched what might have been a bow.

She shot a glance over her shoulder. Her shadow kept its place as it always did, and its eyes were as clear as the living sky of Khemet. And yet it too was of this place.

The Watchers closed in slowly. Beyond them swayed a balance. Her shadow’s image stood beside it, ears pricked, alert. In his clawed hand, stirring with the airs that moved in the hall, lay a feather. Its name was Justice.

Below the balance crouched a Beast. Its jaws gaped. Its eyes gleamed.

Hungry.

Meriamon’s souls quailed. They knew its name; none better man they. Eater of Souls.

Something—someone—wavered before the balance. Dead soul, woman’s it might have been, slender and afraid. Behind her rose a throne, and on the throne the lord of this place, dead god wrapped in cerements and crowned with the Two Crowns.

The crowned head bent. Its face was a mask, the mask of the dead. In the pits of its eyes was the darkness between stars.

The Guide laid the feather in one arm of the balance. In the other he laid a beating, crimson thing: a heart, and in its essence a name, the name of the soul that waited upon the judgment.

The balance quivered. If the heart proved the weightier, the stronger in truth, then the soul was free, and freed to enter the lands of ever-living. If the heart were the lighter, the feebler in justice, it would fail, and the soul would fall, and be devoured. The soul stretched out her hand, as if she could sway the balance, send her heart swinging down under the weight of her will.

The feather dropped. The heart flew up. The soul wailed.

Watchers caught her before she could flee, bound her with cords of night and sorrow. They took no heed of her struggles, or of her keening that was like the cry of a bird. They cast her into the waiting maw.

“Zeus Pater!” Alexander’s oath rang among the pillars. No god came to it, no flare of levin-light in the dimness of ages. Nothing of Hellas had power in this place.

Alexander sprang past Meriamon. His hand was on his swordhilt, the blade half-drawn. She seized his wrist with both hands and held, though he dragged her nearly off her feet.

He halted. His eyes were wild. “That thing,” he said. “Those things—”

They circled. Eyes, fangs, ill-will so strong that it choked like a stench. Living flesh, living blood, cold steel in this place of all places in all the worlds—

Death was the penalty for walking living here. Cold blades would pierce their flesh that was so warm and solid, cut out their hearts that dared beat where all hearts were stilled, sunder their souls and cast them into the maw of the Devourer.

Alexander had never been afraid of anything, in the world or out of it. He laughed in their faces.

“Walk,” Meriamon said. Her voice was thin with strain. “For the love of life, walk!”

He walked. He left a trail of light. The hall trembled in it like an image caught in water.

Meriamon’s magic, quelled and cowed as it had been, found strength it had not known it had. It willed another image, another world, a world of light and the living.

She built it of the light that was her king. She made it grow about her. She made it strong, she made it real, she fixed it with the power of the word and the will and the name.

The hall of the dead was gone. They walked in the world of the living. Living sand under their feet. Living sky over their heads.

The sun was westering, but it was high still. And the night ahead of it; and morning that would bring them to their end. Siwah. Or, if they failed the test, the Hall of Twofold Truth, and six sevens of Watchers, and the Eater of Souls with jaws opened wide to devour all that they were.

“Sun,” she said. “Sky. Earth. Sand. Stone.” Over and over. No elegance in it after a while. No fine turn of phrase. It was not the elegance that imparted power; it was the name, and the will behind the name. To make the world real. To hold the Watchers at bay. To bring night and not everlasting day; stars that changed and set, and not stars that could not die.

Her body, or her ka’s body, walked in the wake of the shadow and the serpents. A white light walked with it. In the sun, a second sun. In the night, a beacon.

“Alexander,” she said. The name resounded through all the levels of the worlds. The name that his father had given; that, nonetheless, the gods had willed.
Alexander
.

Sometimes Meriamon’s soul was her body’s image, walking as her body walked, with a stone clutched in its palm. Sometimes it was a bird with a woman’s head, fluttering through a changeless sky, under stars that did not move.

Whatever it was, it knew what it followed, the serpents and the Guide; and what it followed them to, the presence beyond the horizon. A place of living green, a forest in the heart of the desert, and the temple in the midst of it, the halls and the courts, and the fountain of the Sun from which the rest of it sprang.

There were others who followed her. Shadows, but shadows with faces, and about them, in some greater, in some less, a shimmer of light. Deep earth and green silences and a tang of iron: Nikolaos her guardsman and her beloved, guarding her without fear in this most fearsome of places. Earth too but with a sharpness that was fire, a suggestion of brimstone: Ptolemy, near kin to Niko, and kin likewise to the rioting fire that was Alexander, less than he by far but potent enough in his souls’ center. And with them one who was all earth shot through with light, now blurred and dimmed and muddied, now shining forth as clear and pure as a star out of clouds in Hellas.

Arrhidaios in the souls’ shape, bred of Alexander’s blood and kin, with a beauty and a strength in him that caught her unawares. It did not weaken her spell, but made it stronger, broadened and deepened it and held the world to its solidity.

Greater than any of them, so bright that he cast shadows in the shadowless land, was the one who walked closest behind her. He was coming to a destiny. Whether it was the one he wanted, or whether he would be given another altogether, the gods were not telling.

“If I am,” she heard him say to the shadow beside him. “If I really am—but if I’m not—”

“The god will tell you,” the shadow said. Cool softness like water, a chill that was iron, a glint of sudden brilliance: Hephaistion walking close behind his king, guarding him as Nikolaos guarded Meriamon.

“But if I’m not the god’s son,” said Alexander, “if I’ve let myself believe it because I want to, and claimed all the rest in the name of a lie, then how will I live with myself after?”

“I don’t think it is a lie,” said Hephaistion. “You have to live inside yourself. The rest of us can see what you are. You’re blazing like a torch in the dark, did you know that?”

There was a pause, as if Alexander looked down at himself. “I look just the same as I always have.”

“Exactly,” said Hephaistion.

“But,” said Alexander all over again. “If I’m not—’

She did not see what Hephaistion did to silence him. It was something subtle, she supposed. The others would have laughed and cheered them on, else.

Doubt was the Enemy. She had suffered from it once, when her souls and she were one creature. She would again, very likely, when they were reunited.

If they were. Her bird-soul liked the freedom of the sky, even under stars that did not change. Her ka was comfortable walking the track behind its guides. Her body did what it did. The place it was going to was close now. It could see the shimmer on the world’s edge, the blessed, impossible green.

Some of the trees were in flower, sweet scent, fragile blossom; others in fruit, green or glowing ripe. After so long in the red land and the dun land, the sight almost broke its heart.

Not it alone. The shadows of men came up behind it and streamed past it. Whether it had slowed or they had begun to run, she did not know.

The guides were ahead of them still. She had no need of them. That was neither trick nor deceit, the place that opened before them. It was real in every world. The god’s house, the place of his prophecy. Siwah.

“Meriamon.”

The name spun a cord, thin as spider silk and as strong. It netted the bird-soul in its wandering. It looped round her ka. It wound them together so quickly that even the winged thing had barely moved before it was done.

Flesh was leaden heavy after so long in the spirit. The sun was brazenly bright. She blinked in it.

“Meriamon,” said the taller of the two shapes in front of her.

“Meri,” said the other. “Meri, look. You almost got lost.”

In more ways than one. She stared stupidly at the track she had been on. It led past the oasis and out into the desert.

Her body would have followed it, blind and unguided, until sun and thirst struck it down. Her souls would have gone past the Lake of Fire and the Lake of Flowers, and entered the high hall, and seen the Watchers with their knives and their hungry eyes, and the Eater of Souls under the golden scale, and the dead king upon his throne.

A thought, a word, a turning of the will, and she could go. They would weigh her heart against the feather of Justice, and find it sufficient or find it wanting, and grant her dissolution or life everlasting. She need only speak. Or not speak. For one of her blood and her power, it was as simple as that.

“Meriamon!”

Real fear, that. And temper. “You’re always calling me back from edges,” said Meriamon.

“And I’m tired of it, too,” Niko said. “When are you going to stop mooning and dreaming and act like a sensible woman?”

“I can’t,” she said. “It isn’t in me.”

“You can try.”

He was perfectly unreasonable. He had also brought her fully to herself.

She had expected to be much more tired than she was. Her feet were sore, which was hardly surprising: she had walked an ungodly way. She was thirsty. And hungry. She was very much in the flesh.

“I could have been comfortably dead,” she said.

“Not while I have anything to say about it.”

“You think you do?”

“I know I do.”

She glared. He glared back. Suddenly she began to laugh. So, after a moment, did he. And Arrhidaios, making no effort to understand them, simply being glad that they were glad.

o0o

For all the eternities that she had been soul-lost, the world of the living had advanced no more than a drip of the water clock. Alexander’s Companions were only now come through the wood—a forest of tangled branches, a track dim to darkness after the glare of sun on sand, then sudden sun and open space and the temple’s gate.

The priests came forth in a wailing of pipes and a rattling of sistra, the high voices of women and the deep voices of men, and a whirl and sway of dancers. “Welcome,” they sang. “Welcome, lord of the Two Lands!”

The serpent-guides were gone. Meriamon’s shadow was in back of her again, a shape without substance. Alexander stood in front of his Companions, dusty and wayworn: disheveled boyish man in a purple cloak much stained with travel, no height to boast of, too much brow and nose and cheek for proper beauty, his face red and his nose peeling and precious little dignity about him. Then he moved, and one forgot everything but that he was Alexander.

The eyes. They ruled the rest of him, and the world with it.

Meriamon was beside him. Someone had moved to give her room. Ptolemy. She bent her head to him. He dipped his own in acknowledgment.

The crowd of welcomers had halted and spread in ranks along the wall. A man came down the aisle which they had made. He was neither old nor young, neither large nor small, neither beautiful nor ugly: a brown shaven man in a robe of white linen.

He wore no ornament but one, but that was enough, a heavy collar of gold and lapis and carnelian. He carried a staff of dark wood, very old, and its head was a carven serpent. Meriamon felt the stir behind her as the Macedonians saw what it was.

The high priest of Amon’s temple at Siwah advanced toward Alexander. Alexander waited, standing lightly, no sign of the tension that was in him; unless one knew him, and saw the way his hand clenched and unclenched in a fold of his cloak. He looked, Meriamon thought, like a warhorse on the edge of a battlefield. Alert, upheaded, not quite quivering.

The priest paused at several paces’ remove. He was of a height with Alexander. His dark eyes met Alexander’s light ones. They were keen, measuring.

Alexander lifted his chin a fraction. It was not for him to speak, the gesture said. He was the guest. Let the master of the place give him greeting, or refuse it.

The high priest smiled very slightly. He bent his knee; slowly, with the grace of one who surely had been a dancer, he went down in obeisance. His voice went up in clear if accented Greek. “I give you welcome,” he said, “son of Amon.”

Alexander’s body snapped erect.

The priest went on. “Protected of Horus, face of Ra in the world of the living, child of the god who dwells in the wood and the spring. Great House of the Two Lands: welcome, welcome, welcome!”

The last he sang in the tongue of Khemet, and the choir of women echoed him, sweet eerie voices ringing from wall of stone to wall of trees and up into the sky. Amid the torrent of sound, he took Alexander’s hand. Alexander made no effort to resist him. “Come with me,” he said, soft and breathtakingly ordinary after the priestesses’ chant.

His Bodyguard stirred uneasily. He was rapt; enspelled, one might have said. But he mastered enough of himself to turn. “I’ll go,” he said. “I’m safe. No one will harm me here.”

They did not like that, but his eyes were on them. Nor could any meet them.

Except Hephaistion. As the priest led Alexander away, he moved to follow.

Alexander paused again. “No,” he said. Hephaistion stopped. His face was perfectly still.

Alexander smiled. There was all the love in the world in that smile, and all the regret. “If I could share,” he said, “I would. Only this, sweet friend. Only this of all that we’ve ever done or had or been...”

“I can never be king,” Hephaistion said, soft and calm. “Nor would I want to be.”

Alexander touched his shoulder. Hephaistion stood stiff. Alexander seized him suddenly in a strong embrace and held him till his arms came up, a fierce, hard grip more like war than love. As abruptly as it had begun, it ended.

They stepped apart. Alexander’s face now was as still as Hephaistion’s, as whitely, blankly rapt.

The high priest was waiting. Alexander turned to follow him.

o0o

Meriamon went in behind them. She did not ask. She was not invited. No more than Hephaistion did she want to be a king, but she was royal born, and the voice of the gods. They were in her again.

That, maybe, was what it was to be pregnant: that swelling fullness, that sense of a life inside one’s body, part of yet apart from one’s own. Pregnancy filled the belly. This filled the heart and the head.

They took Alexander to the inner temple. She went where her feet led her, past the door through which he had gone, into a broad pillared hall open to the sky.

There the choir of priestesses had come. There were the strongest of the priests, a full four score of them, ranged for all the world like the Macedonians’ phalanx, and in the center of the square a great gilded thing like a ship yet on shafts like a litter.

On its deck rode the image of the god. In Thebes he was most like a man, but ram-horned. Here he wore no human shape at all. He was a strange squat thing, a dark stone studded with brighter stones, and brightest of them all a great emerald.

The power in the stone rocked Meriamon to her foundations. Every god gave a part of himself to his image, and his worshippers gave what they had, the force of their worship. This was old, old and strong, its green stone like an eye, transfixing her, stripping her soul bare.

She had nothing to fear from it. Doubt was a failing even of gods; or why had Osiris died and been brought to life again? She had seen his realm, its beauties and its terrors. Dissolution she did not fear while her name endured. Nikolaos remembered it. Alexander knew it. Mother Isis herself had spoken it in the deeps of Meriamon’s dream.

Here in Amon’s temple, it seemed not at all amiss that her heart should go out to the Lady of earth and heaven. Or that she took her place in the ranks of priestesses among those whose voices were deeper yet purer, and sang as they sang, the hymn of praise to the god.

The high priest came out of the inner shrine. Alexander was not with him. The king would be sitting in the small dark room, alone with his thoughts and his god. His father, he would be thinking. Hoping. Dreading.

The hymn reached the highest of its high notes. The priests bent, all eighty as one, and set their shoulders beneath the shafts of the Sun-boat. As the hymn spiraled down into a deep clear note like the song of bronze on bronze, the boat rose up. It was a mighty weight even for fourscore priests.

As they stood erect its power focused. The priestesses’ voices wove about it. The priests’ strength bore it up. It rode upon them both as on a sea of sound and light.

The god within it came awake.

The high priest spoke no word. The hymn itself shifted, changed; became a croon, a shape of pure sound. What it asked, what it wished, Meriamon knew in her bones.

The boat began to sway. The priests swayed with it, not as men who moved it, but as men moved by it. Holding to it like sailors in a swell, bracing against the oars, struggling to hold their boat steady.

The high priest watched. His eyes were intent, glittering. Reading each movement as a captain reads the shifting of wind and sea.

Who am I?
Alexander asked.
What am I? What is meant for me?
And more perhaps that she could not see; the wishes of his heart, beyond her perceiving.

The god answered. Answered gladly. Answered long and clear, and never a word in it.

Then he was still. The priestesses’ song died away. The litter bore down on the men who carried it. They bowed beneath it, lowering it to the ground.

The high priest bowed low and kissed the stone of the paving.

As he rose, his eye caught Meriamon’s. She started, stiffened. In that glance was everything she would have asked, and everything she might have answered. Doubts faced and stared down. Dreams understood. Purpose, choices—decisions she had never known she would make, until she had made them.

And under it she thought, how strange. He was a man and no eunuch, and yet in that moment his face seemed to her to be a woman’s face, his body a woman’s body, his hands a woman’s hands, giving her greeting, blessing her with a goddess’ graciousness. And he—the goddess—smiled.