The Ravens of Falkenau & Other Stories (14 page)

Manetho looked around, and I settled into position at Ptolemy's right side, just as I had stood in the tomb at Saqqara all those years ago.
 
Manetho looked little different, save sparer than ever.
 
"We begin," he said.

In those days I had not understood the words.
 
I had not spoken enough Egyptian to follow the phrases of the rites, and I knew little of their customs.
 
Now I understood enough.
 
These were the rites usually performed at a funeral, seventy days after death, to honor the departed and to release their ka to Amenti.
 
They were abbreviated, of course.
 
There was no need to reanimate each sense, sight and hearing and scent.
 
Ptolemy had all his senses.
 
There was no need to open his mouth or give him the breath of life.
 
Ptolemy breathed still.
 
He stood unmoving in his embroidered chiton, grave and solemn, a curious peace about his face.
 
I wondered if he spoke with Horus within.
 
I wondered what he said.

Manetho's voice quickened.
 
"Come forth!" he said.
 
"Come forth, son of Isis!
 
Come forth from the king who has been your host, from he who is now Osiris!
 
Come forth, and dwell within this prince, this man prepared!"
 

Ptolemy let out a long breath, his eyes closing as though in concentration.

To the other side of him I saw Bagoas stiffen, his fine face going taut.

"Now," Manetho said quietly.
 
"Sem-priest."

With the expression of a man about to plunge into water he knows is cold, Philadelphos reached into the open box and took out a dagger of meteoric iron, the same one that we had used so long ago to open the mouth of Alexander.
 
He lifted it out carefully and his eyes met his father's.

"Go on," Ptolemy said evenly.

Philadelphos swallowed, and then lifted the blade so that the very tip touched his father's lips.

There was no sound, and yet it felt like a breath of wind through the room, as though every lamp guttered in a sudden gust.
 
Philadelphos' eyes closed and he swayed as though the wind pushed at him.

And then all was still.

Manetho lifted his voice.
 
"All hail Horus, Lord of the Two Lands!
 
All hail Ptolemy Philadelphos, the Great House of Egypt!"

Philadelphos' eyes opened and he blinked, as ordinary and unassuming as before, himself and still himself.
 
One of his friends let out an exhalation, but he did not know as I did how little it changed a man.
 
And how much, though in ways that could not be seen.
 

Carefully, he laid the dagger back in the box and then raised his eyes.
 
"I am Pharaoh," he said.

"You are, my son," Ptolemy said.
 
He looked shrunken somehow, though he had not moved.
 
Scarcely a quarter hour had passed, and yet without Horus indwelling he seemed smaller, frailer, as though that mighty power had held him up.

Philadelphos nodded.
 
"Right.
 
Then.
 
Pharaoh."
 
He had been bred for this moment, and yet it settled onto his shoulders like a heavy shield.

"Your coronation?" Bagoas prompted.

"My coronation."
 
Philadelphos squared his shoulders.
 
"Let's do this."

"As you wish, my Pharaoh," Ptolemy said.

The reviewing stand had sixty couches and a canopy of pure white linen overhead to keep off the sun.
 
My couch was in the second row, as befitted a veteran of Alexander's army, a retired general of my years who happened to also be Ptolemy's son in law.
 

Chloe was there ahead of me, reclining on her elbow, her hair elaborately pinned up with pins in the shape of butterflies.
 
She looked up pensively as I came down the steps.
 
"How is he?" she asked, and I knew she didn't mean Philadelphos.

"He seems fine," I said, sitting at her knees.
 
"He's not dead, if that's what you mean."

"I was afraid he would be," she said.
 
"Only my father would have his own funeral while he's still alive!"

"He said he didn’t want to miss the party," I said.
 
I took her hand and squeezed it.
 
"Really, he's well."

"And Philadelphos?" she asked.
 
They were not terribly close, Chloe and this half brother young enough almost to be her son.

"He feels the weight of it."
 
I looked out at the parade route, where the first troops were passing the review stand, horse archers in turquoise silk on prancing horses, musicians following them with trumpets and drums.
 
Chloe and I could not have been heard at the next couch over that din.
 
"But he will come to terms with it.
 
He's as prepared as any man may be."

"I hope so," Chloe said, and then speech became impossible as the musicians drew near.
 

Behind them came the first cohort of the Elephant Corps, fine in their embroidered caparisons, and the crowds gave them a cheer.
 
Elephants always make a fine show.
 

The first of the floats followed, Alexander and Ptolemy three times life size, gilded statues enthroned side by side, the founders of the dynasty.
 
Alexander wore ram's horns on his head, and Ptolemy held a cornucopia on his lap like Serapis, pouring out grain.

Once, I thought, far away in a green land on the other side of the sea, there were two brothers born to a mountain chief, one on the right side of the blanket and one on the wrong.
 
And now they sit enthroned as Egyptian gods.

Behind them maidens dressed in white emptied baskets of sweet cakes, tossing them into the crowd adorned with ribbons.
 
Children scrambled to catch them, riches from the wealth of the Ptolemies.

Lest the generative message be missed, the next float was a giant phallus the height of third floor windows, painted gold and tied about with scarlet ribbons.
 

Chloe's eyebrows rose.
 
"Really?"

I leaned close so that no one would overhear.
 
"No one has a bigger one than the Ptolemies?"

"There she is!" Chloe sat up and pointed.
 
Behind the marching hoplites that followed the giant phallus marched the Cities of Asia.
 
Demetria was in the first row, stepping along with a look of concentration probably occasioned by her unwieldy hat.
 
We shouted and cheered for her as any parents would, though of course she could not pick us out in the crowd, but I saw her tip her head as she passed the reviewing stand, smiling upwards as though the sun rested in her face.

And then she was past, down the street toward the temples.
 

"There's Hephaistion," I said.
 
The ephebes had come around the corner on horseback.
 
He was riding smartly, with less hemming and hawing and more staying neatly in line than most of the boys.
 
A better rider, I thought, my heart filling with pride.

A page came up beside me.
 
"General Lydias?
 
Pharaoh…
er
… I mean, Ptolemy, would like to see you."

"Of course," I said, and got up leaving Chloe to cheer for Hephaistion.

Philadelphos sat on the throne, the double crown of red land and black on his head, his face a study in concentration.
 
Ptolemy had the first couch to the right, the place of honor, and a page swept a fan to keep the flies away.
 
"Come sit with me a moment," he said, and I did, aware of the honor.
 
"What do you think of our parade?"

"It's splendid, of course," I said.
 

"And overdue," he said.
 
"Long overdue."
 
He squinted down the street and I saw what he saw, a sight once altogether too familiar.

Alexander's hearse rolled along for the last time.
 
Pulled by forty oxen, it lumbered along, splendid as it had been the first time I saw it on the road from Lebanon, gilded victories at the corners lifting their wreaths to the sky.
 
Splendid and beautiful, but it seemed antique somehow, a little off, as though it belonged to another era from the beauties that surrounded it.
 
As we were.

"The final journey," I said.

Ptolemy nodded, and I saw him swallow the lump in his throat.
 
"He was disembarked in the harbor before dawn," Ptolemy said.
 
"The last stage of the road from Memphis.
 
And now to his tomb in his city."

I had seen it, of course, many times in the last years, many times in the decade it had been building.
 
It was a tomb to rival the famed Mausoleum in Halicarnassus, a confection of marble grander by far than the tombs of the Persian kings, than the tomb of Cyrus at Pasargadae, a tomb to fit Egyptian ideas of the grandeur due to dead kings but made as Greeks preferred, the perfect marriage of styles and splendors, as though the best of the lands Alexander had ruled were all laid at his feet.

Ptolemy smiled.
 
"God, how you hated that funeral wagon!"

I laughed.
 
"I did.
 
It maneuvers like a barge!"

"Some other man's job today," Ptolemy said.

"Thank the gods."

It came closer and I came to my feet as one should in the presence of one's general.
 
Within it, Alexander lay still as he would lie for all time in the city that bore his name.
 
At my side Ptolemy came to his feet too, and a silence swept over the crowd.
 
Here and there within it gray heads bent.

"Most of these children never knew him," Ptolemy said, his eyes bright.

"No, sir," I said.
 
I had not either, not really.
 
Perhaps he had spoken to me half a dozen times, half a dozen anecdotes told and retold.
 
Yet I had marched with Alexander.

We stood, and the hearse passed.

"We have been in such a story," I said.

Ptolemy looked at me sideways.
 
"Tell it, my friend," he said.
 
"I mean to."

I shook my head.
 
"I have no words," I said.
 
"I am not a learned man, and I cannot write this as it was."

"Perhaps in time you will find the words," Ptolemy said, and clasped my arm.
 
"Find the words and tell the story."

The trumpeters played a fanfare.
 
The hearse passed on toward the Soma.
 
Another regiment of hoplites followed, eyes front.
 
The elephants came on, the second cohort leading a float made in the shape of a great ship, Isis on her prow.
 
I stood with Ptolemy under the endless azure sky.

In a way, this is a Hand of Isis story too — about our main character's return to Alexandria many years later, only to find Dion still keeping the flame alight.

We watched them leave the harbor as agreed, ship upon ship of them. The siege was over, and if they wished they could go under safe conduct. For one more day they could go. Whatever was left after that was ours.

In the dawn light we rode into empty streets. Those who were left, the poor, the helpless — they stayed, cowered in cellars and prayed. I rode through empty streets, my horse restive, tossing her head and setting all her bells singing. I rode through white streets wider than buildings, past markets with their shutters nailed closed, past deserted houses, past strange temples with pointed monuments ten times the height of a man, past their churches. I followed my lord '
Amr
ibn
al-As through the city.

I had my orders that afternoon — to find out how the waterworks functioned, that it should continue to bring us water. We always think of water first. When you have never had enough, when you have grown up where water is more precious than gold, the first thing you consider is water, even in this bright place beside the green sea. I had my orders, and quarters in one of the palaces the Byzantines had deserted.

At evening I walked on the terrace. The sea wind kissed me. Below, the harbor made a crescent of blue, as though I stood at the topmost point and watched it curve away to my left. Across, on the island, the mighty lighthouse greeted the dark, taller than anything I had ever seen, a mountain made by men long ago in the dawn of the world. How was it made and how did it work? That was someone else's duty. Mine was waterworks.

Beside me, fig trees in pots as large as a man bloomed in the twilight. Behind, there was a bathing pool. Water, blessed water in such quantities that a man could spend all day bathing, paddling about in a pool of clean white water! On a trellis that separated it from the terrace roses bloomed, their soft perfume scenting the air. The city gleamed white and pink in the sunset.