by Judith Tarr
She waited for him to say something more. He did not. He let her go. She went to catch her mare.
Thirteen
As Alexander’s causeway drew near the walls of Tyre, the Tyrians roused to defend their city. They had catapults on the walls, and armament in plenty for them, and galleys that could row to within bowshot of the mole and harry the men who labored there.
Bolts and arrows were bitter. Fire arrows were deadly, catching in the timbers, flaring into wildfire. Then in the balance of the equinox a storm blew out of Hades and gnawed great gaps in the mole, that needed long days to mend.
“At least,” said Alexander, “we haven’t got the towers up, to be blown down again.”
Towers indeed. They were Alexander’s inspiration—divine madness, people said, but he and his engineers built two of them out of wood from the forests and walled them with raw hides against fire. There had been siege-towers before, but never like this: as high as Tyre’s walls, twenty fathoms and five, so high that men who climbed them came to the summit winded and reeling, and looking down felt as high as eagles.
If they had time to look down. Men who mounted the dizzy height went up to man the catapults against the engines in Tyre, and to shoot across the dwindling stretch of sea, every day a few lengths smaller, a few lengths closer to the frown of the walls. Men below manned catapults against the ships and held them off, while the workers on the mole widened and lengthened it and made it strong enough to last, Alexander said, until the world’s end.
There had never been such siegecraft. But Tyre had its own arts in war. The Tyrians, seeing the towers rising level with their own, prepared a counterstroke.
They took a horse-transport, a wallowing big-bellied tub of a ship, and they fenced its decks with dry timber and filled it with tinder: broken branches, shaved wood, sulfur and pitch. They lashed yardarms to its masts and hung from them cauldrons filled with naphtha. Then they weighted the stern until it sank deep in the water and the bow lifted high, high enough to rise over the causeway.
Alexander’s men saw it coming, towed by galleys. Catapult shot, bowshot, took a toll of the crews, but there were too many, too well protected. The ship’s own crew grinned and jeered from the shielded decks.
The galleys paused just within catapult-range, as if to gather their strength. Then, with a shout, the oars flew up; paused; swept down. The galleys leaped forward. The ship lurched in their wake. A torch flared high on the foredeck. Others kindled from it. The men on it scattered, dipping, darting. A handful shinned up the masts and out across the yardarms, and dropped their torches into the cauldrons. One caught with a rush. The sailor above it dropped, plunging into the sea. The other cauldrons, slower, burned with a steadier fire, their kindlers diving as the first one had, but smoother, swimming hard for haven.
The crew below dropped over the sides one by one. One lingered longest: the captain, he would be, with his long plaited beard and his arms heavy with gold. The many scattered fires sputtered, wavered, seemed to ponder. All at once and all together, they leaped up.
The captain poised on the rail. It was smoldering; sparks sprang thick about him. He leaped, cutting a clean arc, sleek as a dolphin.
Even as he struck the water, the ship struck the causeway at the foot of a tower. Men on the mole sprang forward with spears, timbers, anything that came to hand.
Arrows rained about them. Tyre had unleashed a fleet, boats like cockleshells but full of armed men, running up the mole, springing into battle.
On board the fireship, one of the yardarms broke. The cauldron tumbled down, spraying fire. Then another; then another.
Someone had the sense to bolt for shore, to gather buckets and bails and cauldrons, to muster a rank of men to quench the fire. But the Tyrians had overrun the causeway.
One of the towers was alight. As the line of Macedonians charged down the mole, the other sparked and smoldered and caught. Men boiled out of it, full into the army of Tyrians. They, massing, had fallen on the palisade that protected the towers, and torn it down.
Alexander’s voice rose high above the uproar. Gathering his men, driving them forward, cursing the enemy with inventiveness that won grins even in the heat of the fight.
He drove the Tyrians back into the sea. But they had won their purpose. His towers burned like torches. All his engines, the timbers drawn up for the last stretch of the mole, the tools and the devices and far too many of the builders, smoldered into ashes.
o0o
“I’m not giving up now,” said Alexander.
He was filthy, covered with soot, and smarting with burns, but that was nothing to the anger that burned in him. He would not have let himself be looked after at all, but he came to the hospital carrying one of the worst wounded, and Meriamon caught him before he could escape.
“I won’t give up,” he said. He was not talking to her at all. He was burning, and yet his fever was all of the spirit. Rage. Outrage. Mere men had dared to thwart Alexander.
“They burned my towers,” he said. “They destroyed my engines. They killed my men. They dared. They dared—”
Meriamon got his chiton off. It was half burned to bits, and the other half was torn and tattered. He had not even had armor on. He had been on the shore when the attack began, contriving something intricate with his chief engineer.
He had had his sword—no Macedonian would go anywhere without one. And, fortunately for his mobility, he had been wearing solid shoes, a bit of sense that he had learned from hard experience, taking splinters and worse from scrambling over rough-cut timbers. The soles were scorched almost through, but they had held.
The high color of his face was not all temper. He had burned it, more on one side than on the other, and singed his eyebrows. Blisters were rising along his neck and shoulder. His hands were burned, not badly, but when he came to himself he would hurt.
“I built those engines once,” he said. “I’ll build them again. I’ll build them higher, harder, stronger. I’ll show those sons of dogs what it is to make war against Alexander.”
Meriamon set to work with cool cloths and salve. One of the wounded men was shrieking. He had come in among the first, a charred and writhing thing, faceless and handless but not, yet, voiceless. Naphtha had rained down on him and scoured his flesh away. The gods had not seen fit to take him.
“They shall pay,” said Alexander. “They shall pay in blood.”
She salved his hands and wrapped them in soft bandages. He did not see her. His anger was all that there was, a fire hotter than any that had burned on his causeway.
Pride had driven him to build it, but wrath ruled him now, and would rule him after. If he could ever have withdrawn from this madness, that hope was gone. The Tyrians had burned it with his towers.
o0o
“Stubborn,” said Meriamon. “Stubborn fool.”
She waited to say it, though it rose up in her till she thought she would burst. She did all that she could for the wounded. She looked after the simply sick, and the odd mishap. She put Kleomenes to bed, doing it bodily, while he protested that he was perfectly able to keep on working—nodding even as he said it. Niko tripped the boy neatly and dropped him into the blankets, and sat on him until he fell asleep.
She exchanged bared-teeth grins with the one of the other boys whom Kleomenes’ racket had managed to wake, and ducked through the tentflap. It was almost dawn. The camp was as quiet as it ever was, no hammering and singing from the causeway, no sounds of revelry from the tents. Somewhere over toward Old Tyre a cock crowed.
She was bone-tired, but there was no sleep in her. Sekhmet came, a shadow out of shadows, and wove about her ankles. She gathered the cat in her arms and turned to glare at the looming bulk that was the king’s tent. “Stubborn, obstinate, pigheaded idiot.”
“Who, Kleomenes?”
She directed her glare at Niko. “You know perfectly well who it is.”
Niko shrugged. She heard it more than saw it: a rustle of cloth, a creaking o
f leather, a clinking of metal on metal. He was wearing his corselet, had put it on when word first came of the fight, and not taken it off again. They could do that, these Macedonians; live in armor, and never admit to noticing how it itched and chafed.
“Alexander is Alexander,” Niko said.
“You’re all as blind mad as he is.”
“Probably.”
She hissed, sharp and impatient. What had happened under the cedars had not changed anything. He was still Niko: stubborn, obstinate, pigheaded, and given to sulks. For all the difference it made, she might never have kissed him at all.
It was a mercy, she supposed. He could have fled from her, demanded another posting, gone back to Macedon, even. Instead he stayed, and was her guardsman, and was no different than he had ever been.
She walked. She did not much care where. Niko followed where her shadow had been. Once. Before sickness took all the magic from her.
No. Not all of it. Only that part of it which made her more than a minor priestess of a foreign god. She was still a healer of sorts, still a companion to the Bastet-on-earth who purred in her arms, still a pharaoh’s daughter.
Dawn lightened as she walked through the camp. It touched the edges of the mountains; it spread long across the sea.
In a little while the king would come out to make the morning’s sacrifice. Then the crews would go down to the causeway and set to work again, making nothing of fire and death and the enemy’s assault.
Alexander would have thought of something new to protect them, a new wall, a new shield, a strengthened guard. Alexander was always thinking of new ways to win a battle. He was like a god in that, or like a madman. Or was there any difference?
Meriamon paused on the eastern edge of the camp. The splendor of the morning was in her suddenly, filling her so full that she staggered. Strong arms caught her. One was stronger than the other, but not so much now, not so evident.
She did not look at him, did not try to free herself. The boat of the sun lifted above the horizon, far and far behind the mountains’ wall.
The shadows withered and fled. All but one. Running long and low out of the wake of the sun, sulfur-eyed, laughing with jackal-jaws agape, rising man-high, Macedonian-high, weaving and dancing about her, her shadow, her lost magic, coming with the sun to make her whole again.
As whole as she could be when she was not in Khemet.
The long light of morning spread about her. She stepped out of Niko’s grasp. He did not try to hold her. Nor had he dropped her, or thrust her away. She could admire him for that.
“You’re shining,” he said. “Like a lamp in a dark room.”
“Am I?” she asked him.
His eyes drifted toward her shadow, danced warily back to her face. “Why?”
His favorite question. This time she could answer. “The gods willed it.”
“Why now?”
“The gods know.”
“You,” he said, “can be infinitely exasperating.”
She laughed. She had not done that in much too long. “Then I’m a match for the rest of you.”
“We don’t—” He did not finish it. Wise man. “It’s easy to forget,” he said. “What you are.”
She did not say anything to that.
He shook himself, rattling his armor. “Well. You’re still human enough. Are you hungry?”
Her stomach answered for her, loudly. That made him laugh. “Come on, then. Let’s go badger the cooks.”
o0o
Hellenes. She would never understand them. Stark awe one moment, laughing mockery the next, and an explanation for everything.
Niko explained her to herself over bread sopped in honeyed wine, sitting in front of Thaïs’ tent, with Sekhmet making her own breakfast of a fresh-caught mouse. “It’s obvious what it is,” he said. “You needed a sign that you haven’t failed with Alexander. The gods want him here. So... that... came back to you.” He paused. Even he was not ready to put a name to her shadow. “Shouldn’t that make it easier to bear the waiting?”
“No,” she said.
He was not listening. “I wonder what Aristotle would say? Not that I studied much with him, but Ptolemy used to tell me about their lessons, and the king is always talking about them. Reason and logic are everything to Aristotle. He’d even impute reason to the acts of the gods.”
“Gods don’t need to be reasonable,” Meriamon said.
“But they are,” said Niko. “We just don’t see it, because our sight is too limited. If we could comprehend the mind of Zeus, we’d be Zeus ourselves.”
“That’s hubris.”
He widened his eyes at her.
“I know what that means,” she said. “Is your Aristotle that proud of his intelligence, that he’d claim to know the mind of a god?”
“Aristotle says that the world is a rational thing, and reason is the chief faculty of a man.”
“Not of a woman?”
“Women,” said Niko, “are the offspring of a flawed seed. Having no reason of their own, they submit to the rule and reason of the male.”
Meriamon laughed aloud. “Aristotle says that?”
“Aristotle is the wisest philosopher in Greece.”
“Ah,” she said. “A philosopher. Wisdom’s own sweet friend. I’m sure, if he used his eyes instead of his reason, he’d see what a fool he is.”
Niko glared. “If Alexander heard you say that—”
“Alexander is a fool, too,” said Meriamon. “All men are fools. The world is reasonable? The world is logical? Not that I’ve ever seen.”
“You are a woman and a foreigner. How do you know what you can see?”
“I have eyes,” she said.
“But do you understand what they tell you?”
She looked at Aim. Simply looked. His eyes shifted and wavered and dropped. But he said, “You’re not a philosopher. You don’t understand.”
“And you are?”
“Well,” he said. “No. But it’s a Greek thing. We Macedonians are Greeks, when it comes down to it. That’s why Alexander took so well to Aristotle’s teaching. He’s got the mind and the temperament for it.”
“I haven’t,” said Meriamon. “I wouldn’t want it.”
“Why should you?”
She thought of throwing the dregs of her wine in his face. Arrogant, muleheaded Hellene. She set down her cup instead and said, “I want a bath. You might think about one yourself.”
She did not wait to hear what he said to that. The servants were ready with the water and the basin, and Phylinna was waiting, as she was every morning, for Thaïs never rose earlier than midday if she could help it.
Meriamon was glad to wash off the dirt and the sweat and the stains of a long day and a longer night; and with them a little of her temper.
It was joy beyond expression to have her shadow back; to reach within and find its presence in place of echoing absence. But in the end it altered nothing. It brought her no closer to Khemet.
o0o
She was not surprised to find who waited for her when she came out, clean and combed and dressed and beginning to feel the tug of sleep. She had been expecting it; avoiding it.
Barsine’s eunuch bowed low, with a slant of dark eyes toward her shadow. It lay quiescent. Where it had been, it was not telling. It would not be leaving again that it knew of.
Meriamon inclined her head and waited.
“Lady,” the eunuch said. “My lady asks...”
Meriamon sighed. “I come,” she said.
o0o
The tent was the same. It never changed. The air never stirred, the women never moved, except to go from bed to outer chamber and back. It was a matter of great moment to step outside and see the sun, a deed of high daring to wrap oneself in veils and go down to the market.
Two of them would not be doing that again, Meriamon suspected. She was almost sorry for them, Parsa though they were.
She did not see them in the outer chamber, in which she waited for
an interminable while. In the inner was only Barsine and, sitting at her feet, the eunuch.
Barsine at least had changed. She was close to her time now, hugely swollen but serene. She looked like an image of a goddess, sitting in the carved and rug-swathed chair, wrapped in a great robe of purple thickly woven with gold.
Her eyes were clear still, regarding Meriamon with grave interest. “You look well,” she said.
“I am well,” said Meriamon.
“So his majesty tells me.”
Jealousy? Meriamon wondered. But there was none that she could see. Only interest, and if not warmth, then something like concern.
“I hope,” said Meriamon, “that my nurses haven’t paid too high a price for letting me escape.”
“The king dealt with them,” Barsine said.
“Mercifully?”
“Very,” said Barsine. “He sent them back with escort to their fathers. There was no place for fools in his army, he told them. Maybe the Great King would have better use for them.”
Meriamon drew a slow breath. “That was no punishment.”
“No? Their fathers might not choose to take them back. They had been captives, after all; and the world knows what barbarians do to the women they have taken.”
“Not Alexander.”
“The world knows him but little yet. They see the barbarian, no more. And he is so young.”
“So is Horus young, and the Hellenes’ Dionysos. They are no less gods.”
“Were they known for gods when their years were few?”
Keen, that mind behind the quiet face. Meriamon acknowledged it with an inclination of the head, even a flicker of a smile. “You know what Alexander is.”
“A blind man could see it,” Barsine said.
“Even a Persian?”
“I am almost a Hellene.”
“No,” said Meriamon. “You are not that.”
The fine brows drew together. “You hate us, then. You truly hate us.”
“Not you,” Meriamon said. “Not for yourself. But for what you are, yes.”
“Why?”
“Need there be a reason?”
“I am Hellene enough for that,” said Barsine.
