by Judith Tarr
One way and another the king made his sacrifice. But the omen was given. Aristandros the seer spoke it as the ram’s flesh roasted on the altar. “You will take the town, my king,” he said, “but look to yourself. This day for you is perilous.”
Meriamon was close enough by then to see Alexander’s face. It was as pale as the mask of the god, and as still. He moved abruptly, took off his garland and laid it on the altar.
“I’ll remember,” he said.
He passed her as if she had not been there. She almost reached, almost stayed him. But something held her back.
Her eyes met Aristandros’. The seer’s were as dark almost as an Egyptian’s, and wise. “He listens to you,” she said.
The seer shrugged slightly. “As much as he listens to anyone.”
They watched him go, walking steadily as he always did, and yet managing to touch and be touched, speak and be spoken to, win his army all over again as if he were its lover and it his beloved.
“He is mortal,” Meriamon said. “Pray the gods he remembers it.”
o0o
Foot by straining foot the engines mounted Alexander’s hill to the southern wall of Gaza. Bolts and arrows and stones rained down on them from the city.
Some of the arrows were fire arrows, but the engines had known such at Tyre, and overcome them. Alexander’s archers did what they might, but it was ill shooting from below, and the catapults no use until they should rise to the summit. First one, then another wavered and slowed and halted as its crews fell, or scrambled for cover.
Batis, seeing them so beset, loosed his sortie. A stream of howling Arabs poured out of the southern gate, swarming over the hill, attacking the siege engines with fire.
Alexander had been holding back. He stayed out of range of bolt and arrow, and therefore of the fight, though he paced and fretted and made his pages miserable. When Batis’ sortie overran his engines and bade fair to drive his men down off the hill, he could bear it no longer. He shouted for his Shieldbearers.
They looked at one another, and at Hephaistion. He looked into Alexander’s eyes and saw nothing there to touch.
Fate, he thought. Gods. Madness. His belly clenched. “Alexander—” he began.
Alexander was past hearing him, or any voice but the one in his own soul. Hephaistion breathed a word—prayer, curse, he did not know which—and braced to leap into the fight. The others fell into ranks behind. Alexander bolted ahead of them, into the thick of the battle.
There was no mistaking him, however fierce the press. He was all blood and gold and fiery temper, hewing a path through the enemy. He had no fear at all. The god was in him.
The Arabs had their own gods, and their own madnesses. He hewed one down and leaped over the body, springing at another.
Hephaistion saw the flash of a blade. “‘Ware behind!” he shouted.
Alexander half-spun. A knife plunged toward his corselet, bent and slipped and snapped, the man who wielded it sinking down dead with Alexander’s blade in his vitals. Alexander laughed, sharp and short, and swung his shield edge-on.
A swath opened before him. For a moment they stood alone, he and Hephaistion, an island in a sea of shouting, screaming, struggling men. Alexander did not speak, or glance at his friend. He was oblivious to anything outside of himself.
Hephaistion knew better than to grieve for what he could not change. He took the time to breathe, to wipe the sweat from his forehead, to take in what he could see of the fight. It was going well. Even as he watched, a clump of men—some in Arab dress, some in Persian—broke and ran for the gate. A company of Shieldbearers sprinted to catch them.
Alexander stirred, looking about for an enemy to fight. It was raining missiles still—a stone larger than Hephaistion’s head thudded to earth within his arm’s reach, bounced and struck another and shattered. A shard stung his thigh between tunic and greave.
He raised his shield, firmed his grip on his sword. Two robed Arabs with knives had brought down a Macedonian. Alexander sprang to even the odds, too quick for Hephaistion to follow. There were men in his way, swords, spears, bodies innumerable. Hephaistion struggled, fighting blindly like a stag caught in a thicket, antlers snared, hounds snapping at his belly.
He saw it beyond him, out of reach or help or hope. A god helped it, maybe, or the dark thing that was in the earth of Gaza. As Alexander leaped, danger from the sky forgotten, eyes only for the man who had fallen, a bolt fell from the walls.
In the last instant he saw it. His shield flew up. The bolt pierced it. Pierced his corselet; pierced his shoulder.
He stopped, swayed. His face wore no expression but surprise.
He firmed his feet, gathered himself, went on. Hephaistion, trapped still, hacking at a man without a face, cursing endlessly and helplessly, saw the blood trickling down, scarlet on gold.
The faceless one fell. The way was clear.
Alexander was no longer in it. His sword rose and fell, cutting through the thicket of the enemy, pressing toward the walls. Hephaistion knew as clearly as if a god had spoken, what was in that mad brilliant mind. He had an army to lead, a battle to win. Pain was nothing, a wound—however deep—an irrelevance. It was a price. He had paid it. Now he would take Gaza.
o0o
He was conscious when they brought him out of the fight. Bled out, white with shock, and cursing them for taking him from the battle. “I’ve paid the price,” he said. “The city’s mine for the taking. Aristandros said it. Let me up. Let me get back. Didn’t you hear? Batis thinks I’m dead. Let me go back before my men think the same!”
Meriamon’s hands stopped him. She had no strength to match his, but her touch brought him up short. Philippos had come in with the others, having followed the battle as he always did, as mad in his way as his madman of a king. He had got the corselet off on the field and cut the bolt out, but the bleeding that came after, once begun, would not stop.
Nor would Alexander. He had lost an ungodly lot of blood. It weakened him enough to slow him down; when he collapsed, they carried him to safety.
Meriamon had needle and thread to hand, and an iron will to go with it. She set to work sewing him up.
He fought her. Her shadow laid itself on him and held him still, and opened the gates of sleep. He struggled, but the pain was beyond even his endurance. It overcame him, and darkness with it, and blessed relief for the surgeons.
o0o
It was a bad wound, and it did not want to heal. As quickly as it closed, he opened it again, insisting on being taken in a litter to the siege, and then refusing to stay put, getting up to point out a new angle for the sappers or to order the shift of a catapult.
Even wine with poppy could not keep him down. He refused to drink it, or he drank too little to matter. He had them mining the walls, and he had to be there, he said. “You know what they did when I went down,” he said to Meriamon, not for the first time. “They won the skirmish for me, but they didn’t storm the walls. They thought I’d been killed. They have to see that I’m alive and fighting, or the whole siege will collapse.”
“That might not be a bad thing,” she said.
He struggled up on his couch. She had got him to allow that much: a couch under a canopy, well out of range of the enemy’s fire, and runners to carry his orders to the sappers and the crews on the siege engines.
She propped him with cushions, though he gave her no thanks for it. He was going to get up and prowl again. She knew the signs.
“There are drugs,” she said, “that can keep a man down for as long as they must. I am not above using them. The wound is festering now—it could kill you.”
“It won’t,” he said.
She would not hit him. It was not fear of striking a king. It was fear of her own temper; that she would not be able to stop.
She stood over him, looming as much as woman could: a small woman in a great towering mantle of shadow. “I see now,” she said, “what a mistake I made, letting you think that you might be
the son of a god. You are still mortal flesh. You can still die.”
He looked at her with clear pale eyes, seeing shape and shadow both, and showing no fear of either. “I know,” he said. “I know that I am mortal.”
“You do not.”
He touched the bandages that bound his shoulder. There was pain: his lips were tight, his face waxen under the flush of temper. “This tells me so.”
“You don’t listen.”
“Am I supposed to turn coward, then,” he snapped, “and slink out of Gaza with my tail between my legs?”
“Gaza hates you. The stones themselves are turned against you.”
He struck the couch with his fist. It shook him: he gasped. He would not let her touch him. “That is nonsense!”
“It is not.”
He pushed himself to his feet. He stayed by the couch, face to face, fury to fury. “Listen to me,” he said. “Yonder is Egypt’s gate. This is its gatehouse. If we leave the enemy in it, we trap ourselves beyond. We must have Gaza. We must not allow it to hold against us.”
“Then take it,” she said, “and have done.”
She had caught him off balance. “You won’t let me—”
“You can stay where you are. Your generals can do the fighting. Take it and put an end to it.”
“I have to be out there,” he said. “They need me.”
“Why?”
“I’m the king.”
“They need you alive and whole and able to rule them.”
“A king rules from the front.”
“So can he die in the front.”
Alexander sat down rather abruptly. It was not weakness, not all of it. His eyes were almost black. The mood that hung on him was blacker yet.
Meriamon drew back softly. She had said all that it was wise to say. He was what he was: king, and Alexander.
He was also, for all his brilliance, no more than a boy. One tended to forget it. He was adept at looking younger and smaller than he was, and seeming harmless, but that was his own deception, for his own ends.
She thought of the god in the terrible, beautiful play. It had been strange afterward to meet and speak to the man who wore his mask, and find him neither young nor mad: a soft-spoken aging man with a shy smile. He was like herself, she had thought then. The gods spoke through him. He had no part of them.
Alexander was more than a voice. The god who had wielded Thettalos, Dionysos lord of Asia, was in the king: in his way was the king. But even Dionysos had worn mortal form, was bred of mortal woman. The madness that was in him was divine madness, but it took shape in mortal flesh, and suffered mortal frailty.
Alexander had never had to think of it before. He knew battles, and death’s bloody face. He had shed blood enough of his own. But that he was mortal, that he could die: that had not come home to him.
It did not, often, when one was male, and young, and king, and beloved of the gods. This pain that was in him, this wound that festered and would not heal, edged everything he did with a new intensity.
He spoke suddenly, startling her. “‘Better, say I, to delve the earth as a peasant’s slave, than be king of the weary dead.’
“And yet,” he said, “when the gods gave Achilles to choose, whether long life without glory or glory beyond all others and death before his time, he chose glory. He chose death. He died young.”
Meriamon shivered.
“I am of Achilles’ line,” said Alexander, “as I am of Herakles’. If I choose to live all my life in a moment, who are you to allow or forbid?”
“Nothing,” she said. “No one. But my gods have need of you.”
“Your gods,” he said. “Not mine.”
“They are all one.”
He fell silent again. That was Greek, to talk in poetry and name old names and look for excuses. So did children do, dreaming children’s dreams. But this man-child dreamed like a god, with the world for his plaything.
“Aristandros said that I would take Gaza,” he said.
“Then you shall,” said Meriamon. “Through your generals.”
“I can fight. A lighter corselet—a horse under me—Boukephalas knows not to toss his head—”
“Boukephalas will toss you if you insist on being an idiot.”
He glared. “You wouldn’t.”
“We get along, he and I. He has a liking for Phoenix. If you come out of this alive, I may be inclined to consider a breeding. He sires good foals, Niko says.”
“Bribery.”
“Certainly,” she said. “Your men are going sour here. Water is increasingly hard to come by. And there is still the desert to pass before we come to Egypt.”
“You don’t call this desert?”
“This is green and fertile country in any but the driest season. Desert is the Red Land. Desert is the road to Egypt.”
“You’re trying to talk me out of it.”
“No,” she said. “Send for your generals. Tell them what you want done. You can trust them to do it. Or can’t you?”
“I have the best army in the world,” he said hotly, “and the best generals anywhere.”
“So use them,” said Meriamon.
He held her glare for a long moment. Then he spun away from her. Shouting for Nikanor, for Philotas, for Krateros, for the rest of his generals and his council of war.
o0o
Alexander had heard her. Heeded her. He wielded his army from a judicious distance, commanded from Boukephalas’ back. He resisted the lure of the fighting.
But it was too much for him. The harder his engines labored, the more the walls trembled, the closer he came.
The walls crumbled and fell, eaten away below by the sappers, above by rams and hurled stones. When they went down, Alexander went over them.
He left his horse with the pages, safe as he was not. He was on his feet, running as lightly as any of them, leading his troops from the front as a madman must. His high voice rang above them, urging them on.
Once it broke. He rocked and nearly fell. A stone had struck him in the thigh. He steadied. His voice went up again. He went on, limping, leaning on his spear, but fiercely, determinedly afoot. His wrath was the color of blood.
He took Gaza. The city that had defied him, that had wounded him twice and all but killed him, suffered more terribly than Tyre ever had. Its defenders died to the last man, valiant in despair. Its women and children fell prey to the victors, who killed them or kept them, raped them and sold them, and knew no mercy.
And he did not stop them. They brought Batis to him, bound and naked and bloodied and yet alive.
Alexander looked at the man who had come closest to any to defeating him; at whose command he had been wounded, in whose cause he now could barely stand, with a great throbbing bruise on his thigh and only the gods to thank that the bone had not broken: a little thick hairy man with a big belly, who reeked like a goat. Alexander said to him, “Do you regret what you have done?”
Batis spat in his face.
Alexander stood with the spittle running down his cheek. His men leaped with swords drawn. He stopped them. His eyes were wide and fixed, the color of water, which was no color at all. Meriamon, watching, staggered. It was as if the earth heaved; as if the darkness rose, enveloping him.
“Take him,” said Alexander softly. “He would be Hektor to my Achilles. Let him be so. Do to him as Achilles did to Hektor,”
Some of those near him gasped. Most grinned wide and white and vicious.
“What will he do?” Meriamon asked the man next to her, one who looked horrified. “What is he saying?”
The man would not answer. There was no one else to ask: the rest who could hear her were cheering the king, a sound like lions’ roaring, deep and deadly.
Batis did not begin to scream until they drove the spike through his heels and threaded the ropes on it. He did not stop when they bound the rope to a chariot and whipped up the horses, and drove horses and chariot and screaming, tumbling, writhing man round the walls o
f Gaza.
He screamed for an appallingly long time. Even after he stopped, the sound went on, as if the earth had taken it up and the wind become a part of it.
o0o
“Hektor was dead,” said Niko. “Achilles killed him before he dragged him.”
He sounded quite calm about it. Not appalled; not revolted. But he said it, and in Meriamon’s hearing.
She had seen worse under the Parsa. They were as cruel as cats; lives mattered little to them, particularly the lives of foreigners.
“There has to be a lesson,” Niko said. “Tyre was not enough. Gaza has to be the end of it—defiance, resistance. They have to know better than to stop Alexander.”
She walked away from him. He followed. She was aware of him like a hand on her back. She ignored him.
Alexander had gone away when Batis stopped screaming. His charioteer dragged the body for a while, making sure that it was dead. She did not see that there was any doubt. What tumbled behind the chariot and sent the dust up in clouds no longer looked anything like a man.
She was not thinking of Batis. Appalled—she was that, but distantly. Surprise had no part of it. Alexander was Philip’s son, and Philip had been no weakling. Myrtale was his mother, Myrtale who had been given the name Olympias. The ram and the serpent. Deep earth and red fire. The warrior and the sorceress. She wielded the wild magic that roiled on the edges of things, far from the stately power of Khemet. Chaos was her realm, and blood her mystery.
Alexander who dreamed of Herakles, who mounted sieges that no sane man would have ventured, who took cities that could never be taken—Alexander was no tame thing. He had the lion in him: Sekhmet, goddess and destroyer.
Meriamon walked softly on the torn and bloodied earth. It was quiet now. Truly; wholly. The darkness was gone out of it. Alexander had taken it into himself, and transformed it into fire.
She found him deep in the city, sitting on a fallen column. He had a child on his knee. It was filthy, it was bone-thin, but it smiled at the man with the bright hair, and played with something that shone: the brooch of his cloak. “Clear the city,” he said to the man who waited by him, “and round up the prisoners. We’ll ship them off to Tyre.”
