by Judith Tarr
The trees ended suddenly. The light was blinding bright, the wind breathtaking, cold as it was and strong, tunneling down the narrow gap in the mountain. Up against the wall of it, set high on a dais of stone, stood the temple.
In Sidon they built, as in Khemet, for the ages. Huge blocks of pale stone piled one on another to form walls that rose up against heaven. There was an air of Khemet in the angling of them, and more of Persia in the winged bulls that stood atop them, but the crimson that shaded them was Phoenicia purely, the purple land, the place where all peoples met and mingled.
Twin pillars stood on either side of the gate, one bright gold, the other bright crimson. The gates themselves stood open on a wide columned courtyard brilliant with paint and gilding, alive with carving and limning and, somewhat drab among the images, a gathering of crimson-clad priests.
Their heads and faces were shaven as in Khemet, startling in this country where men wore their hair long and grew their beards to their breasts. Their robes were thin and must have been cold in the winter chill, even with the sun imparting its whisper of warmth; caps on their bare skulls and stoles over their left shoulders did a little to warm them, Meriamon supposed, shivering in her heavy coat and her Persian cap.
There were women behind them, ranked and silent, and boys with softer faces than one saw in the city, fat and sleek, which was reckoned beauty here. What they did for the god, Meriamon did not need to ask. The body’s pleasure was a kind of healing.
There were people to take their horses, others to offer ceremonial water for washing, wine for drinking. Each of them dipped his fingers in the bowl, sipped from the cup. When cup and basin had gone round, one of the priests came forward and addressed Alexander as lord and king.
Alexander was gracious. Seducing these people as he did everyone, with a word, a gesture, a flash of those remarkable eyes. Of course he would do honor to the god; of course he would tour the god’s temple; naturally he was delighted to meet the priests, one by one and by name, and the priestesses, too, and the boys down to the least and shyest, a little dark thing who had not yet grown sleek with ease and good feeding. Alexander smoothed the blue-black curls with a light hand and coaxed him into a smile; then, with a word, into laughter. When Alexander turned away, his light lingered, shining in the boy’s face.
“Whoring for the god,” Niko muttered under his breath. “A good tumble in the grass, with both sides willing—that’s rite and sacrament enough. This is disgusting.”
“In Babylon they do it out in public,” said one of the others—Peukestas, Meriamon reminded herself. The handsome one with the elegant hands, who was not at all as languid as he looked. “Right out in the sacred grove, where anyone can see. This is as circumspect as a Persian harem.”
“Have you been in one, that you’d know?” Nearchos looked about. “Interesting work here. Is that Egyptian, there?”
“And Persian next to it,” said Meriamon. “Everyone has been here at one time or another, and left something to show for it.”
“That’s like the Phoenicians,” Nearchos said. He linked arms with Peukestas and wandered off, as most of the others were doing, as if by consent. The king was still occupied with the priests, getting ready to go into the sanctuary. Hephaistion was with him, of course, and Ptolemy, and after a little, Peukestas and Nearchos and the black-bearded Kleitos and one or two of the others.
Meriamon had meant to go in with them. Now she did not want to. The god’s image would be a Phoenician image, with maybe something of Khemet in it, or maybe not. The hand of the Parsa was heavy here. She did not want to see a Persian face on Sidonian Eshmun.
She wandered instead. Niko followed her. The temple was a simple enough place, porch and hall and inmost sanctuary, but a city had grown about it, shrines and chapels, courtyards, colonnades, houses for the priests, granaries and treasuries, groves and gardens and, bound to the river by a stone-lined channel, the pool and fountain of the god. There the pilgrims came when there was no king to grace the temple with his presence; there they found healing, or not, as the god willed.
The fountain was surprisingly simple. A spout and a basin, that was all, with water bubbling into the basin and spilling over into the pool. The pool was big enough to swim in. There were weeds in it, and a flicker that might have been a fish, or maybe a coin cast in as an offering.
“Do you wish healing?”
Meriamon started and almost fell in. The person who had spoken to her must have been there all the while, sitting quiet near the fountain, the crimson robe faded to brown, blending into the shade of the wall. It was a woman by the voice, but old enough almost to be sexless, with white hair bound tightly under the faded veil.
Meriamon drew a long breath. Her heart stopped hammering. She bowed low, as low as if this had been a priestess of her own gods. “Holy one,” she said.
“No holier than you,” said the priestess. She moved slightly, into the light. Her eyes were on Niko. “No, priestess from the Two Lands. I spoke to this one.”
He looked surprised, as if it had never occurred to him to connect his splinted arm and the god’s healing. “Lady,” he said. “Holy one. I don’t know—”
“Of course not.” The priestess was tiny, even standing: she hardly came to his breastbone. Even Meriamon was taller than that. She tilted back her head, birdlike, and fixed him with a bright hard stare. “Do you want to be whole?”
“Yes,” he said, barely above a whisper. “Yes.”
“So,” said the priestess. “Sit down.”
Meriamon thought that she should say something. Do something. But the god had brought them here, surely; and this priestess had been waiting for them.
Whatever else she was, she had a surgeon’s eyes. She made Niko take his arm out of the sling—his lips went white as he moved it: whiter than Meriamon had seen them in days—and rest it on the curbing of the pool. Then she unwrapped the bindings. Meriamon moved closer, alert, but did not interfere. The gnarled hands were deft, sure of themselves.
It was not pretty to look at. The long muscles were shrinking with disuse, the flesh pale and withered, the stitched wound healing into a livid scar. The bone looked to have set straight, at least, and of late he had had some movement in his fingers, though the thumb was twisted still.
Niko’s eyes were shut. He was hardly squeamish: he always insisted on watching when Meriamon changed bandages. She should not have let him ride so far.
Eshmun’s priestess bent over the curbing, dipping water in her cupped hands. Her lips moved. Prayer, maybe, or incantation. She poured the water over the wounds.
He gasped. His eyes snapped open. His arm jerked; spasmed. His face went grey.
“Be still,” said the priestess, soft, but there was iron in it.
“It’s cold,” he said.
“It’s winter,” said the priestess. She filled her cupped palms again, washed his arm again. And yet a third time.
“I don’t feel anything,” said Niko.
Nor did Meriamon.
Or—no. Something. It was faint, so faint that her shadow barely quivered. It was not the wind-rush of power that she knew in herself, nor the blaze of fire that was Alexander. It was almost not there at all.
The priestess dried Niko’s arm gently with the edge of her veil. When it was dry she began to wrap it again, tight in its splints.
He could hardly resist her, with pain stiffening every move he made. But he said, “I see no miracle.”
“No.” The priestess was calm.
“I suppose,” he said, “your god doesn’t see fit to favor me.”
“That is his privilege,” the priestess said. She finished the binding, tucked in the end of it, arranged the sling about his neck. “Eshmun bless,” she said, “and keep you.”
That was a dismissal. Meriamon obeyed it without question.
Niko, whose eyes were full of questions, followed her perforce. He was neither awed nor comforted. He was angry. “Mummery!” he said.
“No,” said Meriamon. “It’s not.”
He glowered at her. He was tired, he hurt, of course he was cross. He would be blaming her for letting him do what he had wanted to do. If he had had his miracle, he would have been doubting it. He was a Hellene. That was the way he was.
She was very tired, suddenly, of Hellenes. She turned from the way back to the temple, to a gate that opened on a little court. A man of stone stood in the center of it, solid, foursquare, and unmistakably of Khemet. His name was carved on the plinth, and his titles, and the rest of his immortality, preserved in this alien place.
She stopped in front of him. He was stone, not flesh to shiver in this alien cold; he strode out in his pleated kilt, clasping crook and flail to his breast, head raised under the crown of the Two Lands, eyes fixed beyond the horizon.
Her finger smoothed the carved oval that bound his name. Nekhtharhab. Nectanebo. The face was not a bad likeness: a face of Upper Egypt, long-eyed, broad-nosed, full-lipped. He had looked far more the Ethiop than she, whose mother had been born in the Delta.
Tears pricked, sudden and unwelcome. They said that he had fled to his kin in Ethiopia, running like a coward from the Parsa and their power. Parsa lies. He had died in the fall of Thebes, his last great working broken by the massed power of the Magi, no magic left in him, but strength enough to die under a Persian sword. His body lay in the Red Land in a secret tomb, strong-warded against thieves. His spirit was long gone under the earth.
She was his inheritance. She had a little learning, a little power. She dreamed dreams. She was never the mage that he had been. She would never wear the Double Crown. She was eyes and a voice, and a flicker of memory.
“Your father?”
She did not turn. She had felt his coming like a fire on her skin.
“My father,” she said.
Alexander stood behind her. Looking up, no doubt, into the face of the man who had willed him into existence.
That was the gods’ doing. She kissed the cold stone feet and moved away from them, letting the wind dry the tears on her face.
There was no one with Alexander. He had come here alone, led as she was led, by chance or the god.
“You weep for him,” he said.
“I weep for myself.”
“That too,” he said.
“He was hardly ever there,” said Meriamon. “He was always away, being king, being a mage, being our shield against the night.”
“He was your father.”
“Yes.” She looked up again at the carven face. It had never been so still in the living man, nor ever so serene, even amid the great magics. He had been—formidable, yes. But quick, too; nervous in his movements; gifted with sudden laughter. He loved to ride his horses, and to laugh about it, saying that he was as bad as a Persian.
“Yes.” She looked up again at the carven face. It had never been so still in the living man, nor ever so serene.
“He couldn’t sing at all,” she said. She did not know where the words came from. “He couldn’t carry a note. It used to startle him that I couldn’t not carry one. Even when, for laughter’s sake, I tried. Gods-gifted, he called me. Amon’s sweet singer.” Her throat wanted to swell shut. She swallowed hard, a little painfully. “I can’t sing at all now. I haven’t sung since I left Egypt.”
“You miss it so much?”
“It’s more than that. Homesickness—you Hellenes have a word for that. Do you have a word for the heart that can’t live anywhere but in its native country?”
“We know it,” he said. “Exile is a bitter punishment, even for us who wander the world at will.”
“But I’m not in exile. I wanted to come. I wanted to see another sky, and look on other faces. Only, when I did it, the music went away.”
“Maybe it will come back.”
“It will,” she said, “when I go back to Egypt.”
“Soon, then, for your music’s sake.”
She shrugged. “I am where the gods want me. The music is outside of it.”
“Not if you’re robbed of it.”
“Are you robbed of anything,” she asked him, “for being so far from Macedon?”
“I am Macedon.” He said it simply, without even arrogance. “The land—that is where it is, and what it is, and when the time comes I’ll go back to it. But not now. Here’s all the world in front of me, and victories enough to give me wings; and yet I’ve scarce begun to fly.”
“Will your army fly with you?”
“They’ll follow me wherever I go.”
They would. She had seen it. “Where?” she asked him.
Her heart was beating. This was what she had wanted; this was why she had come. To speak that one word.
He did not answer at once. She looked at him. He was looking at her father’s image, as if he could find an answer in its face; as if, so strong the will he bent on it, it could stir and wake and speak. But there was no magic in him, not for him to use, whose whole self and kingship were the gods’ doing.
He did not need it. He could see farther than any soothsayer, if he but thought of it.
“I have to secure the sea,” he said after a while. “That’s only wise, since Persia has always been strong there. So I take Phoenicia, whose ships fight for the Great King. After that, there will be Darius. He’ll give me a fight—his princes won’t let him do otherwise. From the sea, then, with my people ruling the cities at my back, I can turn inland and take the revenge my father meant.”
“There’s more to the sea than Phoenicia,” Meriamon said, “and more to the empire than Asia.”
Someone else spoke. Niko. She had forgotten him; and he was right by her, standing in her father’s shadow. “You mean Egypt, of course.”
“Of course,” she said.
“But,” said Niko, “if we take Egypt, what happens to Persia?”
“It waits,” she said, “and after a while grows tired of waiting, and thinks that the barbarian has stomach only for the edges of empire. Egypt has always been rebellious. What matter if it rebels again? Time enough later to bring it to heel.”
“Darius would think like that,” said Alexander. “He was brave once—they made him king on account of it. But he’s grown soft, and used to his comforts. He’d give up the sea, I think, if that were as far as I wanted to go.”
“And Egypt?”
“Do I want Egypt?”
She stiffened. He was smiling. Testing her. She showed her teeth in what could have bean a smile. “You want Egypt,” she said. “Your strength is there.”
“My strength is in Macedon.”
“Is that why you left it?”
Now it was he who went stiff, who met her smile with tightened lips and glittering eyes. “The tree grows high from a deep root.”
“Deep,” she said, “and wide. Who are you, Alexander? Who was your father?”
“Do you speak dishonor of my mother?”
Deadly, deadly. Her smile warmed and widened. “I least of any woman in the world. My father saw your begetting, clear in the water of seeing. But a god can wear many faces.”
She was aware, almost too keenly, of Niko: of how he listened, taut and silent.
Alexander’s stillness was deeper, but there was a quiver in it, the quiver of the flame that even motionless, still burns.
“Remember Tyndareus,” said Meriamon, “and Herakles your forefather.”
“No,” said Alexander, barely above a whisper. “She told me once—more than once—but that was rancor. He could never hold to one woman alone. Even her. Especially her. She was always too fierce a fire.”
“Fire calls to fire,” said Meriamon. Soft, as soft as he. Her voice, and not her voice.
“No,” he said. “No god sired me. None has ever claimed me. I’m Philip’s get, and no one else’s,”
“No?”
He seized her in hands that were cruelly strong. “Then where was the god when I needed him? Where was he when they beat me and starved me to break me to their will? Wh
ere was he when my father took woman after woman, flinging shame in my mother’s face, and laughed when she railed at him? Where was he when my father mocked even me with his bastard get, and cast me out for demanding what was mine? Where was he when my father died?”
Love, she thought in that bitter grip. Love, and hate so deep it twisted full round to love again, soured with envy, sweetened with pride. Great men so seldom begot great sons; and there was Philip, and here was Alexander, and which of them had ever endured a rival?
“They say that you killed him,” she said, clear and calm and perfectly sane.
He did not snap her neck. Nor did he strike her. That was ingrained in him from his mother’s teaching: never to raise hand against a woman.
He let her go. He drew back a step, breathing hard. He said, “I could have killed him. I wanted to—gods, more often than you can imagine. But not that way. Not through such an instrument.”
“A fool,” said Hephaistion. He had come to stand behind them, and clearly he had been listening for a while. “That was an honest idiot, lady. He thought himself scorned for a younger and prettier boy; he chewed on it for years, till there was nothing left but hate.”
“He was mad,” Niko said, like an echo of the king’s friend. But his voice was his own, and his solidity at Meriamon’s back. “There was nothing left of him but rancor. No, lady. Macedonians have always been inclined to kill their kings, it keeps the line strong. But not that way.”
“I know it,” said Meriamon. And if she had not, she would have known it when Alexander cried out to her of his father’s death. His father in the blood. There was never any doubt of that. But his father in the spirit... “You are not flesh alone, Alexander. But gods have their own ways and their own times. Maybe you were tested, and tempered in the forge. Maybe you were meant to find your own way.”
“Then why are you here?” he demanded of her.
“To guide you,” she said. “Perhaps. If it is your choice.”
“Do you mean I have one?”
His mockery made her smile. “I’ll not blast you if you refuse me.”
“No. You’ll wear away at me till I give in.”
She shrugged a little. “I can be very stubborn. It’s a flaw in me.”
