by Judith Tarr
She shivered a little. The boy’s tongue ran independent of the rest of him, for all that she could see. But he was no fool, and he had a clear eye. She bent over the man on the pallet. “Be ready with the salve,” she said.
o0o
Alexander was mortal enough. He was walking stiff; she heard a man whisper that he had got a sword-thrust in the thigh, and ridden right on through it, and got merry hell from Philippos the surgeon for it afterward. “And he still half-staggering from the fever he got from swimming in the Kydnos,” the man said. “Cold as Hekate’s dugs, that was. But he doesn’t stop for much, even for fever.”
Meriamon suspected that he did not stop at all. Most of his followers had left, bored or called to duties. The tall man was there still, but as she watched, he said something to Alexander. Alexander smiled: a startlingly sweet smile.
The tall man seemed dazzled by it. He turned away without obeisance or any mark of respect, but he needed none; it was in everything he did.
“That’s Hephaistion,” said Kleomenes. “His best friend in the world. They call one another Achilles and Patroklos. Gods know, they’re as close as that. Closer.” He sighed. “I saw them at Troy, sacrificing at Achilles’ tomb. We all wept, it was so beautiful.”
“I can imagine,” Meriamon said. Her voice was dry.
Children, she thought. Dreamers and children. And they wanted to conquer a world.
Did they know it yet? Even he, whose soul was fire—did he know what it was that he wanted?
o0o
He came round to her in his course. She did not try to avoid him. The man she tended was as besotted as any of the others, and he got his reward: a clasp of the hand, a word of praise for his bravery, a bit of banter to keep him smiling. There was nothing false in any of it.
One could not quite call him beautiful, even if one were a Greek. That full-lipped face with its flat cheeks and its firm jaw; the long strong nose growing straight out of the heavy brows; the broad forehead; the hair growing from a peak, lion-like, and falling as it would: they were too odd for beauty, too purely themselves. But the eyes were splendid. They were as restless as he was, and piercingly bright, yet they could still utterly, fixed far and dreaming on a horizon that only he could see. What color they were, she could not tell. Grey, blue, grey-blue, green, grey-green. One was darker than the other. Or was that the angle of the light?
He shifted, and his eyes were clear grey, looking her up and down in curiosity and dawning mirth. “What in the gods’ name are you?”
He asked it as simply as a child, with a child’s arrogance, and a child’s certainty that he would not be punished for it. She could not help but smile. “My name is Meriamon,” she said, “and I was a singer in the temple of Amon in Thebes.”
He frowned a little. She could see the swift mind flicking from thought to thought; his eyes changed with it, grey to green to blue to grey. “‘Was’?” he asked.
“Now I am here,” she said.
“Why?”
Direct as a child, too, but that was no child’s mind, weighing her, measuring her, taking in everything she was.
“To serve you,” said Meriamon.
His head tossed a little, impatient. Of course she had come to serve him, the gesture said. He was Alexander. He said, “You came a long way to wait on a barbarian king.”
“My gods brought me here,” she said.
“Why—” He paused. Someone was calling him, urgent, refusing to be ignored. He muttered something brief and shockingly vulgar, and grinned at her expression. “Mariamne”—his tongue did odd things to her name—”I have an army to look after and dead to bury, and a victory to celebrate. After that I’ll talk with you. Will you come and see the rites of the savage Hellenes?”
No savage, this one, barbarian or no. She grinned back. “You Greeks are such children.”
He laughed. “So we’ve been told. You’ll come, then?”
“I’ll come,” said Meriamon.
Three
Fool. Idiot. To forget this of all Hellene savageries.
They buried their dead. Oh, yes. But first they burned them. They marched in a vast glittering procession, every cuirass burnished, every spearpoint gleaming, horses in their finest panoply, chariot teams snorting and prancing and tossing their plumes. They circled the field of Issus; they massed in formation, wheeled, swung down the long broken level like one great shining creature, and halted in their ranks before the face of the king.
He wore his golden corselet, his lion helmet. He sat on the back of his little black horse that was as much a legend as he was, and took their roar of acclamation and gave it back in the splendor of his smile.
And then they massed themselves round the tower that they had built of wood and flesh, and performed their sacrifices, and watched the priests pour oil over the pyre. The king cast the first torch. It arced high against the grey vault of heaven, crested and curved and fell, and caught on the summit of the pyre. Others came after it like a fall of stars. Then, so suddenly it singed the beards of those who lingered closest, it erupted into flame.
Meriamon could not watch the bodies burning. The wind carried the smoke away from her, or surely she would have disgraced herself. What would their souls do now? How would they cross the land of the dead, what judgment could they hope for, with no earthly home to anchor them?
People were wailing. It was part of the rite. She clamped her jaw on her own cry. So many bodies, so many souls lost—gods, how could they do it?
There were people near her on the slope. Most of them were silent.
One spoke beside her. “Did you lose someone in the battle?”
It was a woman’s voice, and anything but Persian. Its owner seemed calm, dressed as a Greek woman with a veil over her hair and half-hiding her face.
Meriamon took refuge in the sight of her—a curl of bronze-gold hair, a smooth ivory brow, a pair of great dark eyes. They were level on her, with sympathy in them, and curiosity: a peculiarly Greek expression. Her accent was as pure as any Meriamon had heard.
“How can they do it?” Meriamon asked. “How can they destroy the dead?”
“It sets their souls free,” the Greek woman said. “Then we bury the bones, and they can rest.”
“Is that rest? To destroy them?”
The Greek’s brows drew together. They were strong, and elegantly arched. “If the soul is to be freed to cross the River into Hades, the bones must lie under the earth.” She shivered in her fine blue mantle with its embroidered hem. “How horrible, to be fettered to the rotting flesh and forbidden passage to peace.”
“Our faiths are very different,” said Meriamon, thin and tight.
“You’re Egyptian, yes? I heard that there was an Egyptian woman in the camp.”
“I’m supposed to be a boy,” Meriamon said.
“Someone has been chaffing you, then.” said the Greek. “Believe me, a woman is safer than a boy where Hellenes are.”
Meriamon looked at her. “Did some of the generals bring their wives with them after all?”
The Greek laughed, sweet and high. That was art, that swoop of mirthful notes; art worn to instinct. “Wife? I? Aphrodite forbid! No, my lady of Egypt, I am a camp follower, a hetaira they call me, which is a courtesan. Haven’t you heard of Thaïs?”
“No more than you have heard of Meriamon.”
Thaïs let fall her veil. She was not the raving beauty that Meriamon had expected. Her eyes were magnificent, and her skin was flawless. But her nose was long even for Greek taste, her mouth wide and somewhat overgenerous, her chin a shade too definite.
Character. That was the name of it.
Meriamon had never spoken with a hetaira before. Concubines—men had those in Khemet. And there were women who sold their bodies for men’s pleasure. But someone who seemed to glory in it, whose title meant “companion”—that was a Greek thing, and strange.
“We’re a necessity, you see,” said Thaïs in that bright, brittle voice. “Fo
r some men, boys are not enough, and their wives are good for little but spinning wool and bearing sons. We give them what their wives are hardly trained to give, and what boys lack altogether. We earn the title they give us.”
“In Egypt,” said Meriamon, “such women are called wives.”
“Happy Egypt,” said Thaïs. She half-turned, half-raising her veil, lowering her handsome eyes.
Meriamon had seen the man who came toward them. He had been with the king this morning, and he had ridden in procession with the men closest to the king. He was older than some of them, probably nearer thirty than twenty, with a strong bony face; long and loose-built, wide-shouldered, big-handed, but graceful as a fighting man has to be.
He greeted Thaïs with courtesy, as if she had been a lady. Thaïs kept her eyes down like a modest woman and returned his greeting in her pure Attic accent. “Ptolemy,” she said, “do you know the Lady Mariamne?”
He inclined his head to her: greeting, courtesy, a flicker of—amusement? “The king has been talking about you,” he said.
Meriamon raised a brow.
“He’s fascinated,” said Ptolemy. “Did Philippos really let you walk right into his hospital and start working miracles?”
“About the letting,” said Meriamon, “I don’t think he had much choice. But I’ve worked no miracles. Plain field-surgery is all I know.”
“It’s more than most of us do.” Ptolemy rocked back on his heels. He grinned suddenly. “Herakles! I wish I’d seen his face when he saw you were a woman.”
“It takes a bit of seeing,” Meriamon said dryly.
“It does not.” He was definite about it. Indignant, she might almost have said. “You’ve got a pup from the family litter in your lot. All he can howl about is that he’s been cast into the hands of a female.”
She narrowed her eyes. Loose bones, big hands, bony face. “That wouldn’t be Nikolaos, would it?”
“Niko,” said Ptolemy, “yes. Mind you now, he’s a good soldier. Could be better, he’s spoiled rotten and has been since he was a brat, but get him in a fight and he remembers his manners.”
“He’s polite about killing people?”
Ptolemy laughed. “Alexander said you had a tongue on you. So,” he said, “did Niko.” He sobered suddenly. “The doctors say he ought to have lost the hand. Now they say he’ll likely keep it. If that’s not a miracle, then what do you call it?”
“It wasn’t as bad as it could have been,” said Meriamon. “He lost a lot of blood to the rest of his wounds—that’s why we’ve kept him down. Besides the pleasure of watching him sulk.”
“Still,” said Ptolemy. Then he grinned. “I like it, too, seeing him rolled up in bed and the doctors sitting on him. Time something slapped the nonsense out of him.”
“I wouldn’t care to wager on that,” Meriamon said.
People had begun to scatter. The first fierce flame of the pyre had died to a long smolder. A shift in the wind brought the stink of it to her nostrils. Fire, burning, a sweet-savory roast-meat scent that brought the bile flooding.
The hands on her were a woman’s hands, deft and cool, smoothing the hair out of her streaming face, holding her while she retched into the grass. Thaïs spoke over her, voice as cool as her hands. “This is no sight for an Egyptian. Whose fault is it?”
Meriamon gasped it out for herself, furious at her weakness. “Mine. I should have remembered—I should have known—”
“So should Alexander,” said Ptolemy. And as her head came up, eyes wide with shock: “Yes, I heard him. Sometimes he just doesn’t think.”
“He is the king!”
“So he is,” said Ptolemy. “But there—you don’t elect your kings, do you? You make them gods.”
“They are gods,” she said, “and sons of gods.” Her stomach had settled a little. She drew herself up from her knees. She kept her eyes averted from the pyre; tried to breathe shallowly, though the wind had turned again and was blowing off the sea. “No. It was I who didn’t think. I pay the price for it.”
She looked up. He was looking down, frowning as if he strained to understand. His eyes were blue, startling in the bronzed and weathered face. For an instant her shadow flexed. Seeing—wanting—
He looked away. The moment passed. He helped her up with careful courtesy. “The king will want to see you later. Will you be in the hospital?”
“She will be with the women,” said Thaïs. They both stared at her. “Lady Mariamne, I was going to speak with the Persian women. They may be glad of a woman’s voice, even if it belongs to an enemy.”
Meriamon stiffened. “I have no love for the Parsa,” she said.
“Who does?” Thaïs drew up her veil. “Still, they are women, and probably they’re terrified.”
“I thought they were left alone,” said Meriamon.
“That would make it worse.” Thaïs slid a glance at Ptolemy. “Do we require a guard, my friend?”
Or, thought Meriamon, it might be my love. It was the same word.
“I’ll send a man over,” Ptolemy said. “It’s quiet enough by now, I think, but let’s not take chances.”
One would never know that they were lovers. Or would one? They did not touch and their eyes seldom met, but there was a subtle tension in them.
It stretched taut, snapped. Ptolemy went back to his soldiering. Thaïs turned to go down the hill, walking as a dancer walks, erect and consciously graceful. It was a moment before Meriamon realized that she was speaking. “I met him in Athens when Alexander was there on embassy from his father, before he was king. I was a child then; my breasts were barely budded. My guardian thought Ptolemy a plausible prospect, Macedonian or no. I liked him myself: he was always pleasant, and he didn’t either blush or act the bravo. Then he left, and I became a woman, and found patrons who would teach me in return for what I could give. Last year, when I heard that Alexander would cross into Asia, I decided to go with him.”
“Not with Ptolemy?” asked Meriamon, walking in her wake.
“Certainly with Ptolemy. We met again, we were amenable, we sealed a bargain.”
“Did your... guardian have any say in it?”
“My guardian was dead. It’s not allowed in Athens for a woman to live for herself, free from a man’s hand. My guardian’s heir and I were not congenial.”
“So you left.”
“So I applied judicious pressure in the proper places, and was allowed to leave. I’ll not go back soon, I don’t think. I like this, this wild hunt against the Persians.”
She was no tame thing herself. Trained, trammeled, shaped and pruned like a tree in a pharaoh’s garden, still she was her own creature. She would not ride in battle like a man, she would hardly find that fitting, but she would watch with eager eyes and reckon every stroke. And when her man came back she would be waiting, a crown for his victory.
They walked wide round the funeral pyre. On the other side a soldier met them with crisp deference and his commander’s compliments, and fell in behind them as they crossed the battlefield.
It was empty, the earth torn and trampled but no body left to tempt the birds. The Greek dead were bones on a pyre. The Persians were gone to the care of their own people for rites that were no whit less horrible than burning, which they reckoned a pollution of sacred fire: set on high for the vultures to devour, then cast into a pit of nameless bones.
Meriamon felt the change as they forded the river, the guard walking ahead now and Thaïs kilting up her fine skirts and recking nothing of the water’s bitter cold.
The water was a barrier. The other side was the Persians’, even in Macedonian hands. Their camp sprawled city-wide across the plain and up into the hills, with no order or reason in it that she could see, quite unlike the squares and straightways of the Macedonians.
What her shadow felt, what her heart saw, was a world both strange and familiar. The musk of their perfumes, the spice of their cookery, the hisses and gutturals of their language had ruled for far too long in
her country. Even reft of its fighting men, reduced to slaves and the sick and the royal women, this could never be anything but a camp of Persians.
Her nose wrinkled at a scent which she knew above all others. Faint yet distinct, like burning metal; a touch of heat on the shadow’s skin, a suggestion of fire in the heart’s eye.
The Magi had fled with their coward of a king. But their power lingered wherever they had been.
A sleek sand-brown shape sprang ahead of her, pouncing on shadows. Sekhmet, wise cat, had stayed away from the marching and the burning. She wove sinuous circles around Meriamon, startling passersby, winning an exclamation from Thaïs. “What in Hades’ name is that?”
“Sekhmet,” said Meriamon. She held out her linked arms. Sekhmet sprang into them and mounted to her shoulder, riding there with practiced ease. She was purring. Her incantation, Meriamon called it; guarding them both against the enemy’s magic.
“Your cat?” Thaïs asked. She sounded bemused.
“Sekhmet belongs to herself,” Meriamon said. “She chooses to go where I go. Mostly. When she has nothing better to do.”
Sekhmet sank claws in her for that, but briefly, barely drawing blood.
“Remarkable,” said Thaïs. She recovered herself quickly. “That should give the Great King’s women something to talk about.”
“Do you speak Persian?”
“Not a word,” Thaïs said. “But we’ll make do.”
o0o
The Great King’s tent was immense, a palace of silk and gold, so wide and so high that a hill rose inside it. Its walls were silk, and could be moved to make this room larger, that one smaller, or to make the whole one vast hall. Its floor was spread with carpets like meadows full of flowers. Its furnishings were gold and silk and jeweled furbelows, wagons’ worth in every room, and none less than the best to be had.
Darius would not have liked to see them now. No one had looted them or damaged them unduly, once Alexander claimed them. But there were Macedonian soldiers where only princes had been allowed to come, lounging on the priceless couches, threatening the fragile silk with their armor.
