Lord of the Two Lands (5 page)

He shrugged, boylike, tilting his head at that angle which was his and no one else’s. “I don’t make war on women.”

“Then,” she said with bitterness that was shocking, coming out of so calm a face, “you will not be fighting any longer against my son.”

He did not seem surprised. “There are men in his army,” he said. “They deserve a chance at honor.”

“Perhaps,” said Sisygambis.

He patted her hand where it lay in his. “I have to go, unfortunately. But I’ll come back, if you’ll receive me.”

“I will always receive you,” she said.

“Good!” said Alexander with every evidence of delight. “I hope you’ll be more at ease now. You’re in no danger as long as I have you in my keeping.”

“I am no longer afraid,” said Sisygambis, “now that I know what you are.”

Alexander rose, laying her hand in her lap as gently as if it had been a new-hatched bird. “Good day, mother. May the gods protect you.”

“May Ahuramazda and the good gods defend you,” said Sisygambis, “my lord king.”

“That,” said Thaïs, “was pure theater.”

Meriamon was dizzy with her lungs full of clean air after the scented closeness of the harem, and silly with the freedom of sky over her head and clean earth under her feet.

Sekhmet nipped her ear, bringing her back somewhat to herself. She glanced at Thaïs. “The king meant every word he said.”

“Of course he did.” Thaïs stepped round a soldier who had had a little more wine than was good for him. He grabbed for Meriamon, got Sekhmet’s lightning-swift rake of claws for his pains. “That doesn’t mean he didn’t know what it looked like. Or the old queen, either. Isn’t she impressive? She should have been king. Then we wouldn’t be here, celebrating a victory.”

“I for one am glad that she is a woman.”

Thaïs laughed. “I could tell, even when you were being civil. Was it so bad in Egypt?”

“Yes.” Meriamon wrapped herself tighter in her mantle. She did not want to speak of it, to be compelled to remember. “I should go back to the hospital. There are things I left undone.”

“Not yet,” said Thaïs. “They’ve put you with Philippos’ boys, haven’t they?”

“Yes.”

“Not any longer. I’ve a bigger tent than I need now: Ptolemy gave me a present after the battle. It even has rooms, like the Great King’s. You’ll be quite comfortable in one.”

“But—” said Meriamon.

“You also need clothes. And a place to keep them. Philippos should have you on the rolls and drawing rations; if not, you’d best speak to him. We all earn our way here, and draw our pay for it.”

Slow heat crawled up Meriamon’s cheeks. Mercifully Thaïs was not looking at her.

“I’ll show you where my tent is,” said Thaïs. “Phylinna is my maid, she’ll look after you, too; she won’t mind. She’s always complaining that I don’t give her enough to do.”

There was no stopping her once she had set her mind on a thing. Meriamon found herself in a tent that was large enough for a tradesman’s house in Thebes, divided into rooms: one in front, one in the middle, three small ones in the back. The furnishings must have belonged to a minor lord. There was even a chest full of clothing, plain stuff but beautifully made.

“His wives must have worked hard and long over these,” said Thaïs, running a hand over an embroidered coat.

“Not his wives,” said Meriamon. “Ladies of the Parsa never spin and weave. That would be beneath them. His slaves would have made these; or he bought them in the market.”

“How odd,” said Thaïs. “You aren’t going to wear these, are you?”

Meriamon held a coat against her and laughed. “Hardly! It’s big enough for three of me. But I do need a change of clothes.”

“I can see to that,” said the maid Phylinna. She was a little older than her mistress, and she did not act at all as one might have expected a slave to act. She said what she thought, and seemed to fear no reprisal. “What can we put you in? It’s hardly proper for you to dress like a Persian, and a male at that. But a woman’s gown might bring you trouble in the camp. Men,” she said, “being what they are.”

“And I can’t wear what I wore at home,” Meriamon said. “I’d freeze.” She thought about it. “I suppose I’ll have to go on being improper. At least until it gets warmer. Does it ever do that in this part of the world?”

“It’s a furnace in the summer,” said Phylinna. “Trousers, then. And a gown for when you want to dress up. Shall I see to it, mistress?”

“Do,” said Thaïs. And when she had gone: “I should like to see you in a dress. I think you would be very pretty.” Her hand reached to touch Meriamon’s hair. “Such hair. And those eyes. Would you like a bath?”

Meriamon was growing used to Thaïs’ quicksilver shifts. “I would give one of my souls to be clean.”

“Then you shall be,” said Thaïs.

o0o

Phylinna was only the chief of the hetaira’s servants, and Thaïs seemed able to call on a fair few of soldiers as well. She had a great bronze basin brought in—more of the Persian plunder—and water for it, and everything else that one could possibly want for a bath. For the first time since she left Khemet, Meriamon shed her swathings of clothes down to the last bit of linen, and sank into steaming water scented with herbs and sweet oil, and felt deft servant-hands scouring away the weeks of her journey.

Sekhmet, disgusted by the unnatural human obsession with water, took herself away from it. Even Meriamon’s shadow was quiescent, sunk in the fragrant water.

It was cruelly hard to come out of it, even when it had begun to cool. Still harder to face her reeking and dirt-stiffened clothes with her skin singing
clean, clean, clean
.

Thaïs had gone out while Meriamon bathed. Now the hetaira came back, and her arms were full. She spread her booty on a table. “It’s not perfect, of course. We’ll need a little time for that. But will this do?”

Some prince must have brought his son with him. No grown Persian would be so small, and the quality of the garments was better even than what lay in Thaïs’ box. Undergarments of linen so fine that it must have been woven in Khemet, soft trousers of crimson wool to tuck into doeskin boots, coat of silk the color and sheen of lapis lazuli, embroidered with a frieze of lions, its belt inlaid with silver and clasped with lapis. There was a cap with it, rich green embroidered with silver. It all fit remarkably well, and it was warmer than what she had had, even without a cloak.

“Someday you’ll have to tell me how you happened to come here in Persian clothes, with no baggage to speak of,” said Thaïs.

“That’s simple enough,” Meriamon said. “I had a horse and a mule, and they carried me up from Egypt, and at good speed, too, with the gods’ help. Then I met a riding of the Parsa, somewhere south of Tyre. They decided that I owed them tribute. They took me by surprise, and they were too many for me to fight. I gave them most of what they wanted. They would have taken more, but something scared them off.”

Something, she did not say, had killed one of them as they fled, the one who had wanted more; and gained her her disguise. It was warmer than the thin linen she had had, and somewhat safer.

“You came all this way alone?” Thaïs was incredulous.

“Not... precisely alone,” said Meriamon. She could feel her shadow behind her, rousing from its somnolence.

“I’d call you rash, if you weren’t so obviously here, and no harm taken.”

Meriamon shook her head a very little. Her shadow subsided unwillingly, but she was stronger than its wariness.

o0o

The hospital was much as she had left it. Two of the worst wounded had died. One was the giant whom they called Ajax—his given name, she gathered, was something else altogether. The prick of tears surprised her. She had never known him, and yet he had, in his way, belonged to her.

Nikolaos was very much alive. They had moved him from his solitary eminence and set him closer to the door. He had a book balanced on his knees, and read from it by the light of a lamp; some of the men near him listened.

She did not recognize the verses—for they had to be that, melodious as they were, in a dialect that was not Attic, nor yet Macedonian.

“Immortal Aphrodite of the elaborate throne,

wile-weaving daughter of Zeus,

I beseech thee:

Vex not my soul, O lady,

with love’s sweet torments.”

He had a beautiful voice when he was not using it to complain. A surprising taste in poetry, too. Meriamon wondered whom he was thinking of as he dwelt on the liquid words.

Sekhmet’s coming barely made him pause. He opened his elbow for her to slip between, and finished out the poem. Then he rolled the book and bound it, one-handed, with impressive competence. For a moment his face seemed almost pleasant, though his brows knit soon enough.

“If you keep that up,” Meriamon said, “you’re going to have a furrow deep enough to plant a row of barley.”

“Then you can harvest it and make beer out of it,” he said. His tone was nasty. “That is what you do with it, isn’t it? Make beer?”

“Bread first,” she said, “then beer. What was it that you were reading?”

“Sappho,” he said. “She was a poet. She came from Lesbos—from Mytilene.”

Mytilene was where Barsine’s husband had died. Meriamon did not think that he would care to know that. “She wrote beautiful verses.”

“It’s my brother’s book. Thaïs gave it to him. He lent it to me, to give me something to do.” Since, he made it abundantly clear, he was not allowed to do anything else.

“He did well, then,” said Meriamon. “I’m going to tell the servants to let you have a little wine. I don’t think it will harm you; they’ll put something in it to help the pain.”

“I don’t need anything to help the pain.”

“Of course you don’t,” said Meriamon. “But the others might when you wake up screaming in the middle of the night.”

“It doesn’t hurt,” he said stubbornly.

“Have you tried to walk about yet?”

He flushed. “No. They won’t let me. Damn it, it’s not my leg that’s broken!”

“Tonight,” she said, “for a little while, you may get up. But not now. Drink the wine when they bring it, and eat what they give you.”

“Pap,” he muttered.

“I shall be interested to see,” she said, “what you are like when you’re not exerting yourself to be unpleasant.”

“I’m not—”

She patted him on the head. “Hush, child. It’s for your own good, you know that very well.”

If he could have bitten her, no doubt he would have. She was still laughing when she left him.

o0o

In a Persian bed in a conquered Persian tent, with Thaïs entertaining her patron at two rooms’ remove and Sekhmet purring on her middle, Meriamon rested as she had not since she began her journey. She had her solitude, she was full of wine and meat and barley bread, in the morning she would have duties that she was glad of. She would have liked a proper headrest instead of these smothering cushions, and the blankets smelled faintly of horses, but she was comfortable, stroking the cat, half-dreaming in the nightlamp’s flicker.

Her shadow moved softly about the room, part in time with the lamp, part in rhythm with her breathing. It wanted to be freed, simply to go its own way, apart from her.

“No,” she said to it, barely to be heard. “Not among strangers.”

It reared up, a tall slender shape, upright like a man but longer-limbed, more sinuously supple. For an instant as it turned its head toward her she saw a long muzzle with a glint of fangs, sharp pointed ears, bright beast-eyes that gleamed in the dark.

“If that is the shape you wish,” she said, “then you certainly may not go out. The Hellenes have killed or conquered all the Parsa. There’s nothing left to hunt.”

Not hunt, the eyes said. Walk. Run. Fly. Be free. Sun’s rising would bring it back. That was its word. Would she doubt it?

“I don’t doubt you,” she said. “I fear for you.”

It would take care that no one caught it, or even saw it.

She was wavering. She firmed her will. “Tomorrow night. Maybe. If all is well.”

It strained, resisting. After a moment, when she did not yield, it subsided. Its mood was so much like Niko’s that she laughed, which pleased it not at all. Yet, like Niko, for all its sulks and sullenness it was obedient. As she opened her will to sleep, her shadow came and stood over her, guarding her against the night.

o0o

On the third day after the battle, the king summoned Meriamon. He gave her time to prepare; to finish what she had been doing in the hospital, to run to the tent, even to manage a hasty toilet. Thaïs was there to help her, barely awake after a late night but alert enough to play lady’s maid.

She insisted that Meriamon wear the peplos Phylinna had just that morning finished, folds of soft cream-colored wool with embroidery round the hem. The mantle that went with it was purple—true Tyrian, and where Thaïs had got it, or how she had been able to pay for it, Meriamon was afraid to ask.

Not that she was given time. Thaïs had paints in plenty for lips and face and eyes, and she was determined that Meriamon use them.

It was strange to be a woman again, to look at herself in the little bronze mirror and see the Meriamon who had sung before the god in Thebes, but in the dress of a Greek lady, in wool that no priest would wear because he reckoned it unclean.

She had lost that compunction on the road south of Tyre. Still, she would have preferred a dress of fine Egyptian linen, a wig to cover her hair, and jewels to make her splendid. They would have been armor and banner before this alien king.

Thaïs could remedy that, somewhat. The earrings were Persian booty, beryl and carnelian set in soft pure gold. The necklace was from Athens, a collar of golden flowers. The bracelets were from somewhere far in the north, heavy gold with a dance of horsemen round a fabulous beast like a winged, eagle-headed sphinx.

“There,” said Thaïs, stepping back to survey her handiwork. “You look like a lady of quality.”

“Will that shock the king, do you think?” Meriamon asked.

Thaïs laughed. “Nothing shocks Alexander! Now go, you’re keeping him waiting.”

o0o

Even before Meriamon came into the king’s tent, she could hear the raised voices. To her considerable surprise, the guard not only admitted her, he sent a man along with her, a dour Macedonian whose beard showed a sprinkling of grey.

The anteroom was full of people, not all Macedonian by any means, and few of them soldiers. Their expressions ranged from squirming discomfort to unabashed curiosity. Not that they could have understood much of what went on within: the discussion was heated but the words indistinct.

Her guide led her past them to exchange words with the guard at the inner flap. The guard looked dubious, but he said, “Alexander told us to send her straight in.”

Her guide nodded with a touch of impatience, as if the other was belaboring the obvious. “I’ll take her, and answer for her if I have to.”

She bit her tongue. This was no time or place to object to being discussed as if she were not there. Maybe it was her gown. Not only did she look like a woman, she looked respectable.

The king and his animated discussion—she would not say quarrel, not quite—were not immediately within. There was another antechamber, a table covered with what looked like maps and dispatches and rolls of accounts, men sitting at it, busy and apparently unperturbed by the noise.