by Judith Tarr
“Typhon is perfectly safe,” said Niko.
“I wouldn’t bet on it.” Alexander exchanged glances with the stallion. His eyes narrowed. Meriamon moved to catch him before he tried the beast himself, but he stayed where he was. His glance shifted to Niko. “Tell me, Niko. If I asked you to ride with me, would you ride another horse?”
Niko stood frozen-still. His voice was almost too low to hear. “Ride where?”
“To the mountains,” said Alexander. “To start with.”
Niko drew a great sobbing breath. His whole heart was in his eyes. But he said, “You gave me another duty.”
“So I did.” Alexander looked at Meriamon. “Can you spare him, lady?”
“Do I need to?”
Alexander’s head tilted.
“You have other Companions,” Meriamon said. “Why do you need this one?”
“He seems to need me,” said Alexander.
He did. But she said, “What if I need him?”
“That’s for you to say.”
Niko had not moved a muscle. What he wanted, she could see with her eyes shut. What she wanted...
“Take him,” she said. “He belongs to you.”
Fifteen
“I don’t have to go,” Nikolaos said. He had drunk enough at dinner to make him say it very carefully, but he was steady—mostly—on his feet. And he was not where Meriamon would have expected him to be, with the King’s Companions, making himself one of them again. He had been there for a while, but then he came to Thaïs’ tent.
The hetaira was gone, taking dinner with her lover and the rest of the king’s friends. Meriamon was there alone as she liked to be, quiet with Sekhmet and her shadow, trying not to think of what the day had done.
Niko loomed over her as he had the first time she saw him, enormously tall and enormously foreign, in a cloud of wine and flower-scent. He had a garland on his head. He carried a jar of wine cradled in his weak arm, and a pair of cups. He looked down at her and said what he must have come to say. “I can stay,” he said. “If you need me.”
“I don’t need you.”
He sat down on the couch beside her. Sekhmet promptly established herself in his lap. She did not mind that he reached around her to fill a cup and hand it to Meriamon. He filled the other, set the jar on the table.
Neither of them drank. There was an ell-broad stretch of couch between them. It could have been as wide as Alexander’s causeway.
“Why aren’t you with your friends?” she asked him.
“Why weren’t you having dinner with the king?”
“I wasn’t hungry.”
“You never are.”
She frowned at the cup in his hands. There was a sphinx painted on the bottom, glimmering darkly through the wine. “I ate. Phylinna ate with me.”
“Good.”
She raised the cup to her lips. The wine was strong, the way the Macedonians liked it: dark and sweet and barely watered.
“The Persians have a saying,” Niko said. “If you make a decision, first consider it sober. Then consider it drunk. If it’s the same in both conditions, it’s the right one.”
“I thought it was the other way about. First drunk, then sober.”
“As long as you do both, it doesn’t matter.”
“I have precious little head for wine,” said Meriamon.
“I can drink for three of you.”
He proceeded to do it. She caught his hand as he lowered the empty cup, and captured the cup. “I think you already have,” she said.
“I’ll stay if you need me,” he said.
“I told you I didn’t.”
“Then who’ll look after you?”
“Who looked after me before the king inflicted me on you?”
“He didn’t—”
That was a lie, and he knew it. Meriamon laid aside both cups, the full and the empty. “Why don’t you go? You have things to do, preparations to make. You’re riding before sunup. You know how the king is. If you’re late, he’ll leave you behind.”
“I won’t be late.”
“So go.”
“No,” said Niko.
She got a grip on him and pulled. He was set like a stone.
She stamped her foot. “Get out of my tent!”
“No,” he said.
He was laughing at her. And Sekhmet in his lap, little whore, yawning in her face.
“I don’t need you!” she shouted at him. “I’ve got Kleomenes.”
That stopped him.
He was jealous.
She laughed.
He stood. Her head came to his breastbone. She sneered up at him. “What kind of Greek are you, turning down a fight to stay with a woman?”
That did it. His mouth opened, shut. There was everything to say, or nothing. In the end he said nothing. He took his wine with him. He left the cups.
Meriamon picked up the one that was full. The wine’s fumes dizzied her. She drained the cup.
o0o
The king rode out before dawn. Meriamon did not see him go. She had given Niko back his pride. She did not need to watch him take it.
“He didn’t take Typhon,” said Kleomenes, who had been there, yearning after the king’s cavalry as only a young thing could. “He had one of the king’s mounts, the big grey.”
Meriamon took a breath. She was seeing to the dressings of a man who had been burned when the fireship came. He was the last of the worst wounded, the only one who had not died. She mustered a smile for him. He had no smile to return. The bottom of his face was melted and seared, but his eyes were warm. “You’re doing well,” she told him, “with the gods’ help.” She patted his unburned shoulder and went on to the next man.
Kleomenes followed her, chattering happily. “Amyntas is in bliss. He gets to ride Typhon while Niko is away. Everybody was betting that Niko would take the horse and be damned. Except me.”
“Why?” asked the man whom Meriamon tended. He had got a bolt in the thigh; for all that she could do, it had begun to fester.
“Alexander said he couldn’t,” Kleomenes said. “Even Niko listens to Alexander.”
Meriamon snorted. Neither of them noticed. The wounded man yelped. “Hold still,” she snapped at him. He held still, though his hands were knotted in the blanket.
Her temper cooled a little. “There,” she said, lightening her hands. “There now. It’s done.”
She could as well have said it to Niko. He was gone. His own world had taken him, his war and his king. He would come back, if the gods were merciful, but not to Meriamon. What need? He had only been her guardsman because he could do nothing more deserving of his place. Now he was whole again.
As was she, with her shadow gliding in her wake, and her purpose undiminished though Alexander held to his lunacy of taking Tyre. There was no place in her fate for a great sullen oaf of a Macedonian.
o0o
Word came back quickly enough. Alexander had swept down on the Tyrian bandits like the wrath of heaven, broken their will and ended their raids and gone on to Sidon. There, the couriers said, he had found a fleet, and sworn it to his service. There were ships building, ships fitting, ships massing in the harbors from Arados to Cyprus. Scores of galleys, the messenger said, gathered in Alexander’s name.
Meriamon was in the hospital when the man came. He had a festering sore in his foot, which troubled him little enough when he rode, or so he said, but Parmenion had sent him to the physicians once his message was delivered.
Even then he would not have said anything, but she gave him wine with poppy to keep him quiet while she lanced his foot, and after he had finished screaming he babbled out the whole of his message word for word. Not loudly, for a mercy. If Tyre had spies—and who knew but that one of the men in the hospital was in Tyrian pay?—it would give gold to know what force Alexander could muster against it.
If anyone could take the city, Alexander could. Even Meriamon had never doubted that.
Alexander’s messenger d
id not know anything of a certain one of Alexander’s Companions. There were so many to remember, after all, and Niko was hardly the greatest of them. Merely a rider in the cavalry, no officer nor prince, nor Personal Companion as his brother was and thus well known to anyone who knew Alexander.
Meriamon could not have expected otherwise. She left the hospital when it was time, and went as she had taken to doing, to look in on Barsine. It never grew easier. It did become less unbearable the more often she did it.
Barsine was close to her time. She would be glad to be rid of the burden. Not that she said it; it was not her way to complain. No more would she dress other than in swathings of modest robes, although summer was well and fully come to Tyre, in heat that was almost enough to please Meriamon.
Meriamon left the stifling closeness of Barsine’s tent, certain that it would be only a day or two longer. The women had gathered what was needful; they knew to summon Meriamon wherever she was, as soon as she was needed.
But not before morning. She went to the market in search of cooler clothing than she had, fine Egyptian linen, coarser weave from looms in Asia, a single mad extravagance: a bolt of Tyrian purple, deep-dyed, the merchant said, and fit for a royal lady. Gods knew, he wanted enough for it; but she bargained him down to a little less than a queen’s ransom, and found a servant who would carry the whole of it for an obol and a flask of wine.
Thaïs was not in the tent. She seldom was. Not that she entertained other lovers than Ptolemy while he rode with the king, but she had friends among the hetairai, who liked to keep one another company.
Meriamon ate her solitary dinner. Even Sekhmet had left her to hunt in the shadows. Her own shadow was farther yet, prowling among the cedars. For a moment Meriamon caught the strong green scent, felt the softness of leafmold under her feet.
She did not miss Niko’s presence. Of course not. His sulks and his tempers. His patent yearning to be elsewhere.
What did she need a guard for? If she wanted someone to sleep across her door, Kleomenes would do it happily enough. He had offered more than once, but she had never needed him that badly.
It was quiet in the lamplight. The servants were all gone to sleep, except Phylinna, who was with her mistress.
The silence closed in. The noises of the camp came muted through the tent’s walls. The flap was open, the veil down against the hordes of stinging and biting things, but no breeze blew. No air stirred at all.
Days were easy. Meriamon could fill them with light and occupation, could pretend that there was anything beneath but echoing emptiness.
It was not Niko’s absence. Or not only that. Without her shadow to guard her, without Sekhmet to weave spells about her feet, she was naked to the night.
She rose from her couch. Her robe was thin, but in the still heat even it was more weight than her body needed. And yet she shivered.
There was another veil like the one that kept out the flies. Meriamon draped it over herself. She looked like a Persian lady, she thought somewhat wryly, or like a shrouded spirit.
She walked through the camp. What precisely she hunted, she did not know. An emptiness; an echo in the heart of things. Where people were, they almost filled it. But even they seemed thin somehow, stretched tight.
It was the siege, that was all. Five months of it, stretching toward half a year, and no end to it that any but Alexander could see. That had a price. Men’s souls, men’s courage, men’s strength to face the enemy. Tyre suffered little enough, with its fleets to keep it fed. Alexander’s army was nuisance only, a boy’s bravado, brag and boast and nothing more.
Her hands were cold, but they were warmer than her heart.
What profit for her or for Khemet in this endless, bootless siege? Alexander would never have his way with Tyre. He would camp here until he died, and died mad, for a city he could not conquer.
Cold waves lapped her feet. She started back. Somehow, without knowing it, she had come to the sea. The causeway was a darkness across the starlit water. Torches flickered along it; guards paced, now in shadow, now in light.
The towers at its end were dark. They had touched the wall at last, only the day before, and Tyre had done nothing to stop it. Why trouble? Nothing in the towers or on the mole was strong enough to break those walls.
The city too was dark. Sometimes there were lights along the wall or shining from towers. Buildings were tall in Tyre: its people lived in towers, one atop another, like bees in a great clustering hive.
Meriamon swayed on the sand. Here, between the water and the sky, the emptiness was as vast as all heaven. Nothing below her feet but void. Nothing above her head but sky. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
“Mother Isis!”
Her voice was thin in the immensity. And yet it anchored her. It, and the name that had flown out of her. She was Amon’s priestess; but it was the Mother whose presence came strongest to her: warm breast, soft voice, a wall against the emptiness.
“Magic,” Meriamon whispered.
Magi.
Yet...
She had quartered the camp. The Persians’ tents were quiet, no malice upon them, no hatred, not even enmity. Alexander had won them with his mercy and his smile. Their priests worshipped their Truth in peace. They worked no magics against the king.
They were not, for once, the enemy. Bitter as that was, as bitter as their own Truth.
Meriamon looked toward Tyre. Its enmity served Persia. Its resistance served itself. It would accept an overlord; but not within its walls.
“So,” she said to the loom of it. “Your priests are mages, too.”
It was aware of her, dimly, as a beast is of a gnat upon its hide. How long had it been adding this power to the rest? Had it done so from the first, or had it waited until Alexander was gone? Without the light and potency of his presence, his siege was a frailer thing. His will informed it still, his men went on unwearied with their labors, but the bright edge was gone.
This had taken the heart out of her. This had caught her when she was sick and driven her nigh down into death. For this her shadow had hunted, and gone so far that it could not find her again, until the sun and the king’s presence and her own waxing strength had guided it back.
She staggered and almost fell, to know so much, so fully, to be so naked to it—no shadow, no Bastet-on-earth, no strength at all but what was in her body and her shrinking mind. She was no warrior. She was singer, seer, voice of the gods. She was eyes and a tongue, not a sword.
She was all that there was. Alexander’s priests, his soothsayers, his wise men and his philosophers: they had no magic. They had talked it out of their world. It hid in their deep places among the women and the mysteries. Wine freed it. Alexander embodied it. But not here.
It had ridden in the fireship. It made itself one with every man and woman and child of Tyre, set the will of the city against the one who would conquer it. What bred it, what fed it...
Sight opened before her. The water at her feet stilled although the waves rolled elsewhere as before, stilled and smoothed and rounded as in a basin. Light welled within it, torchlight and firelight. Voices chanted in a tongue nigh as old as that of Khemet, so old that none now remembered the meanings of the words, but shaped them for sound alone. They were power purely, now the deep voices of priests, now the high voices of priestesses. Shadows moved: robed figures, cowled, their faces in darkness.
Tall pillars rose about them. A curtain stirred in a wandering air. The lamps and the torches flickered. A shape loomed, a gleam of gold, a dark sheen of bronze, a glitter of carven eyes.
“Melqart,” Meriamon breathed. Naming it. It was huge and heavy, man-shaped, thrice man-high; like the Hellenes’ Herakles it bore a club and wore for a cloak a lion’s skin. But no god of the Hellenes had ever had such a face, broad and thickset, with a great braided beard and a nose like a ship’s prow; nor squatted as this one did, half kneeling, half crouching, with its hands outstretched.
One of the priests stirred from among the
rest, and moved toward the god’s feet. His hands were lifted. Something wriggled in them: something small and pale, raising its voice in a sudden lusty cry. The priest paused, rocking and soothing it: eerie to hear a croon like a mother’s from an old man’s lips. The child quieted.
It was a boychild, well-formed, so plump that its limbs broke into rolls of fat. The priest smiled down at it, tenderly.
The god’s hand was broad and curved like a bowl. Gently the priest laid the child in it. The chanting had ceased. In the silence, the sound of metal sliding on metal was startlingly loud. The child wriggled in its strange bed. Below it, the fire opened.
The chant began again, low and slow, but rising in long cadences like the sea, until it thundered to the roof. At the summit of it, the god’s hand dropped. The child fell. The fire leaped to embrace it.
o0o
Meriamon knelt in the sand. Her throat was raw. Had she screamed? She could not remember. The scrying-basin was gone, the waves curling and falling, sighing as they withdrew.
She raised cold and shaking hands to her cheeks. They were wet, and not with spray. The power—the power that was in blood, human blood, blood of a child—
She dragged herself to her feet. Horror had sunk deep. Below it, beyond it, above it rose wrath. It was not the sun-bright anger of the king. It was darker, deeper. It was as implacable as the Nile in its flood.
“No,” she said to the city and the night, and to the priests in their temple, in their reek of blood and burning, and their terrible gentleness. “No.” She raised her fists and her voice, crying aloud. “No!”
In that word she set ail her rage and her pity and her horror of any god who would demand not only blood but blood burned in fire. She made of it a spear. She thrust it with all her strength into the heart of the power.
It raised its force against her: arms as strong as iron, hands of bronze, buffeting her. She swayed under the force of them. Braced. Thrust deeper yet, though the power writhed like a live thing, battering her, rocking her on her feet. “Gods,” she whispered. “O my gods. Amon, Osiris, Horus upon the throne of the horizon—Ra-Harakhte, O defend me. Isis—Mother Isis—if ever you loved your child—”
