by Judith Tarr
She clung to calm against the easy panic, the easier and far more frightening tears. “We’re still in Tyre?”
“Still.”
She sighed. Her heart ceased its hammering. Her eyes cleared. She looked about. “I’m in Thaïs’ tent.”
“You wouldn’t stay in Barsine’s.”
Clearly he had no sympathy with that. She could not imagine why he would. Sekhmet stretched purring along her side, welcoming her back to the living. In a little while she would stroke the cat. She was too tired now. She would sleep, she thought. Real sleep, healing sleep, with no dreams in it.
o0o
It was slow, learning to live again. Sometimes she wondered why she bothered. Here was Alexander, and there was Tyre, and neither would give in to the other, though the stars fell. Alexander would never come to Egypt. He would live here and he would die here, because all men died, even men who were begotten of gods.
But life, having won its way with her, was not about to let her go. She slept, and sleep healed her. She ate, and strength came back. She learned to walk again, slow stumbling steps, leaning on Nikolaos or Kleomenes or Thais.
The hetaira had been there in the dark, too, but not so often and not so strong as the others; healing was not at all her gift. Living was, and laughing, and making Meriamon remember both.
She was the one who saw to it that Meriamon had a real bath, well before anyone else might have allowed it, and salvaged her hair. “They wanted to cut it,” she said. “but I wouldn’t let them. Men. They’d never think of anything so simple as a pair of braids. They’ve got to hack and cut, and never mind the consequences.”
Meriamon would not have minded if they had. Her hair was filthy, and even braids had not kept it from knotting. Why it had not acquired a nest of vermin, she could not imagine. It was pleasant, she admitted, to lie in the warm water and be stroked like a cat, and then to lie in a soft robe while Thaïs and Phylinna between them combed out her hair.
Wet, it came halfway to her waist. She was surprised. It had grown. The sickness had dulled it; it would probably come out in handfuls, and then she would have to cut it off in spite of Thaïs.
She rested her cheek on her arm. In spite of the effort of getting up and having a bath, she was not extraordinarily tired. Before Phylinna came to help Thaïs with the combing, she had opened the tent’s flap and tied it there, letting in sun and a bit of breeze. It was warmer than Meriamon had expected. There was nothing much to see outside but the tent across the way, and a dog or two asleep in the sun, and now and then a soldier or a servant. Those might have lingered if her guardsman had not appeared, looming, saying nothing, but encouraging them to go about their business.
One of them came and did not retreat. He was almost as tall as Niko but even narrower, rawboned and gangling, coming in right over Niko’s spear, and grinning down at Meriamon. “Now I know you’re well,” said Kleomenes. “You’ve taken a bath.”
“Was I so repulsive?” Meriamon asked.
“No,” he said, taken aback. “Oh, no. Not at all.”
She swallowed a sigh. She did not know that she was ready to be adored, even by Kleomenes. Fortunately for her peace of mind, he sat with every appearance of ease, ignoring Niko’s lowering looks, and considered her with a physician’s eye.
“You’ll do,” he decided. “I won’t tell Philippos you got wet. You know what he would say.”
Meriamon did. “Did he send you?”
“Well,” said Kleomenes. “Yes. In a manner of speaking. He wanted to know how you were. I came to see. You’re looking very well,” he said, “considering.”
Considering that she looked like a years-old corpse.
There was no flesh on her bones at all. She had not tried to find a mirror. She would be all eyes and cheekbones.
“You should see what the king is doing,” Kleomenes said. He had been talking for a while; she had slipped off, as she still sometimes did. It did not seem to trouble him. “He’s going to take Tyre, you know. He’s sworn it. He’s got a whole army of workers out there, people from Old Tyre and people from the villages, and his engineers, and every soldier he can spare from guard duty.”
She did not want to know. But she asked, because she could not help herself. “Why?”
“People say he’s out of his mind,” said Kleomenes. “Tyre is an island. Well enough, he says, but not when Alexander is done with it. He’ll build a bridge. He’ll make it a leg of the land. Then it will have to surrender like all the rest of this country, and be a part of it.”
Meriamon closed her eyes. Mad, indeed. Obsessed.
Thaïs spoke over her. “He won’t have much trouble on this side. But the water is deep out toward the island, and the Tyrians won’t sit still to wait for him.”
“He’ll do it,” said Kleomenes, whose adoration of the king was older and even stronger than his worship of Meriamon. “He’s got crews out in the mountains, cutting down trees, and people tearing down Old Tyre for its stones—they’re huge; they must have been laid by giants. You can already see what his bridge will be, from the beginning he’s made.”
“Show me.”
At first Meriamon did not think that anyone heard her. Then Kleomenes said, “What?”
“Show me what he’s done,” she said. “Take me to the bridge.”
“Maybe in a few days,” said Kleomenes. “When you’re stronger.”
“Now,” said Meriamon.
o0o
She had her way. Kleomenes was not happy, but there were uses for adoration. Thaïs shrugged, Phylinna fretted, but to no purpose. Niko said nothing. He glared at the boy, the worse for that Kleomenes had to carry her. Niko’s arm was hardly strong enough for that yet, if it would ever be.
They made a fair procession, with Sekhmet in the lead, head and tail high, and the rest of them following. Meriamon was wrapped like the dead, as thick and almost as tight. One of the servants had a sunshade, which she did not like at all; she wanted, needed, that warmth on her face, that brightness in her eyes, though they burned and teared with the strength of it.
It was Niko who understood. He got rid of the shade, if not the servant. He set himself in the woman’s place, still without a word. Meriamon was glad of him. He was an anchor in the turning of the world, even with a scowl on his face.
The wind was cold but it was clean, once they came to the sea. She breathed it in, drinking deep. She felt a little stronger; as if, almost, she could get down and walk. Maybe when she came to the bridge she would.
While she was sick the camp had moved south toward Old Tyre, setting itself between the town and the shore opposite the island. It was a fair distance for Kleomenes, farther than she had expected, but he managed it. He was sweating in the cold and breathing hard as they followed the sounds of hammering and sawing and the beating of drums to the king’s bridge. Men were shouting and some were singing, and there was a startling amount of laughter.
That was Alexander. He was in the middle of them in nothing much but a hat, lending a hand wherever they needed one. He seemed to be everywhere at once. Now far down the road urging on the team of mules that dragged in yet another great fallen cedar, now on the shore with a handful of his engineers, drawing with a stick in the smoothed sand, now out on the mole itself, clambering over the stones and timbers, perching at the very end with the water lapping his feet. It was a fair few furlongs already, though wider as yet than it was long, a blunt finger pointing toward Tyre.
Wherever Alexander was, people smiled wider, moved faster, worked harder. He warmed them like a hearthfire, just by being with them.
Kleomenes set Meriamon carefully on the sand, out of the way of the men but close enough to see what they did. He flung himself beside her and occupied himself with simply breathing. The others, after a moment’s pause, wandered off toward the bridge.
Except Niko. He stayed on his feet, spear in hand, on guard. Sekhmet rather spoiled the picture, draped as she was over his shoulder.
Meriamo
n watched Alexander’s men build Alexander’s bridge. So great a labor already, and so little of the whole; and the city waiting, silent behind its walls, haughty and impregnable. They would fight when the time came. Ships were running in and out of the harbors, the Sidonian north of the mole’s line, the Egyptian south of it: bringing in provisions for the siege. Often their sailors mocked the men on the shore, laughing and jeering and even, more than once, relieving themselves in long arcs over the bows.
“We piss on you!” they shouted in gutter Greek. “Come up to the walls and see! Right in your faces, bully-boys. Right in your kinglet’s eye.”
“Want to bet on it?” That was Alexander’s voice, high and sharp and unmistakable; and he was laughing.
“Surely,” one of them yelled back. “What’s the stakes?”
“Your hide,” said Alexander, “and your city thrown in.”
The ship had come far in in its captain’s bravado, so far that it nigh ran aground. He had to scramble back out to deeper water, with the Macedonians jeering him on. No one thought to shoot, though it would have been a fair spearcast, or an easy shot with a bow.
Not yet, thought Meriamon. They would remember soon enough. Then the blood would flow.
She was very tired, but she had no desire to sleep. She lay in her nest of sand. Sekhmet stalked a flock of seabirds, sand-colored cat against sand-colored shore.
She closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, Alexander was striding toward her, windblown and ruddy-faced and sheened with sweat. He should have been reeking. There was no scent on him but salt and sea and clean wool. He looked as if he wanted to pick her up and hug her, or maybe shake her for daring so much so soon.
The strength of him was almost more than she could stand. It rocked her where she lay.
He dropped down beside her, boylike, half grinning, half frowning. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“No,” she said.
The grin conquered the frown. “Of course you had to do it. I would. I did when I got sick swimming in the Kydnos. Philippos was beside himself.”
“I’m not afraid of Philippos.”
“Nor was I.” said Alexander. “I should have been. I got sicker the first time I tried anything. But then I got stronger.” He eyed her. “I’ve seen you looking better.”
She laughed. It was weak, but it was honest mirth. “I look like creeping death. I don’t mind. Much. I never had any looks to lose.”
“Don’t say that,” said Alexander.
“Why not? It’s true.”
“I’ll never understand modesty,” Alexander said. He stretched out, propped on his elbow. He was fully at his ease, but he could see everything that happened where his men were. His eyes never rested, no more than his mind.
“You were there,” she said. “When I was sick.”
“Once or twice,” he said. “You had us worried.”
She took no notice of that. “You were in the light. I didn’t know it was you; and yet I did. Do you know how strong you are?”
She did not mean in body. His eyes narrowed a little; his brows drew together. “I prayed,” he said. “I made sacrifice. I didn’t think your Imhotep would mind that I called him Asklepios.”
“Or Eshmun?” she asked.
He shrugged a little. “I sent to the temple in Sidon. The priests said that you had your own gods, and your own power against sickness.”
“So I do,” said Meriamon. She turned her eyes from him toward the work he had begun. “It seems you have forgotten them.”
“No,” Alexander said.
“This is not forgetting?”
He was still. His voice was soft. Not as it had been with the Tyrian embassy, not quite. But it was not a voice that one could argue with. “When I slept, the night before I came to Tyre, I dreamed. A man came to me. He was a big man, but not so big as I might have expected. He carried a club; he wore a lion’s skin.
“Of course I knew his name. ‘Herakles,’ I said. ‘Do I dream you, or is this a sending?’
“‘If you know my name, you know the rest of it,’ he said.”
“That made me laugh,” said Alexander, “which was hardly respectful, but he laughed with me. “‘You know what you have to do,’ he said. ‘This city is yours; I name you my heir.’
“‘Even if I have to take it by force?’ I asked him.
“‘Even so,’ said Herakles.”
Alexander paused. Meriamon did not say anything. “You see,” he said. “I dream, too; and I dream true. This I have to do. When it is done, I shall go on to Egypt.”
She could argue with a god if she thought he needed it. “How long will that be? How many days, Alexander? How many months wasted because you took a vow in anger?”
“I was angry,” he said. “I was hardly out of my wits. Tyre is strong enough to break me, unless I break it first. And Tyre serves the Persian king.”
“Tyre refused to give you what you wanted.”
“So it did,” he said lightly enough. “It will pay for that. But even if it hadn’t earned a drubbing, I wouldn’t want it at my back. That’s necessity, Mariamne, and soldier’s sense. Even beyond a god’s will.”
“It holds you back from Egypt,” she said.
“Not forever.”
“Long enough.”
He tossed his hair out of his face. He was a boy, after all, however brilliant, however much a king. “I’m going to take Tyre,” he said.
“Or Tyre will take you.”
“No one will ever conquer me,” said Alexander.
“No man,” Meriamon said, “maybe. There are still the gods. There is still, at the end of them, death.”
No cloud shadowed the sun, but it dimmed for a moment, and the wind bit cold. Then Alexander laughed, sharp and short. “Death comes for every man. I’ll live while I can, and hold my honor, and keep my word. When Tyre is mine, I’ll follow you to Egypt.”
Twelve
The slow days turned from winter into spring. Alexander’s causeway stretched toward Tyre. Meriamon was an emptied thing: a woman without a shadow, a priestess without her gods, a mage bereft of her magic. She was all winter, and no spring in her, though her body healed and grew strong again.
And yet, like winter in this stony country, she kept in her a memory of spring. Alexander would not speak to her, nor move, nor do anything but lay siege to an impregnable city. She would not pine for that. She was too stubborn. Since death did not want her, she would cling to life, and get back her strength, and wait.
Someone else was waiting, and in far less calmness than she. Meriamon could see that for herself, summoned to Barsine’s tent and let in without even a judicious hour’s delay.
She had not gone willingly. Her memory of waking there, sick to death and wild beyond reason, could still trouble her in the dark before dawn. Trapped, suffocating, surrounded by enemies—no matter that they had meant her well. Her head knew that. Her heart knew only that they were Parsa, and they had taken her and held her.
Still, when the messenger came, the same young eunuch who had fetched her first from the surgeons’ wagon, back before Sidon, Meriamon bent her head and followed him. Barsine was no enemy except by blood; and Alexander loved her in his fashion. No woman would ever be the other half of him. That was given long ago, and to Hephaistion. But she had known him since he was young, she pleased him, maybe he even reckoned her a friend.
Barsine’s tent was as Meriamon remembered it: dim, shadowed, laden with the scent of Persian unguents. No light ever came there, unless it was lamplight. There was a new thing here and there, a box carved of cedar, a lamp bright with gilding, a vase with a frieze of women weaving and spinning. That was not a Persian thing; it came, maybe, from Athens. Thaïs had one like it, but on hers the women were dancing to the music of flute and tambour.
Barsine had been sitting in the shadows. As Meriamon paused, half-blinded, trying to breathe in the heavy air, Barsine rose and came to embrace her. She had not expected that. She stiffened
; eased with an effort, returned the embrace.
Barsine stood back, hands still on Meriamon’s shoulders. “You’re well again,” she said. “But thin. Are they feeding you enough?”
Meriamon laughed. “They all say that,” she said. “Alexander, too. Yes, they’re feeding me. Too much. You’d think they were fattening me for the pot.”
Barsine smiled. She led Meriamon to a chair and saw to it that she had wine and sweets as was proper. Meriamon had to eat and drink a little under those grave dark eyes. She was hungry after all; she drank most of the cup of wine and ate a whole cake, and nibbled on another, for the taste.
As she nibbled, she considered Barsine. The lady was even more beautiful than Meriamon remembered, and yet it was a different beauty. Her face seemed fuller, her eyes gentler. Her body, that had been nigh as slender as a boy’s, was richer, softer.
What had caused it, Meriamon knew very well. She had known it the moment Barsine embraced her. “I suppose,” she said, “that I should offer felicitations.”
Barsine lowered her eyes. Her hand went to the swell of her belly. “You miss very little,” she said.
“I could hardly have failed to notice this,” said Meriamon. She paused. There was no delicate way to say it. “It is his?”
Barsine did not look up, but her eyes glittered under the long lashes. “You doubt it?”
“I can count,” said Meriamon. “You’re slim and you carry small, but you’ve been carrying since summer, or I know nothing of childbearing. This one was conceived in Mytilene, if certainly no earlier. Does Alexander know?”
“Yes,” Barsine said. “He has promised to take up the child, even if it is a boy.”
“As his heir?”
Barsine looked up then. Her eyes made Meriamon think of, of all people, Thaïs. The same clarity of purpose; the same spirit, startling in the Persian face. “Parmenion has come back. He hounds my lord without mercy. If my lord can offer him a child of my body, then my lord may have a little peace. For a while. Until he gets one of his own.”
“If I can count,” Meriamon said, “what makes you think that no one else can do as well?”
