by Judith Tarr
She felt light, empty, neither joyful nor afraid. Eyes, no more, and when the time came, a voice.
She knew that there was more to her than that. But the solid center, the knot of fears and joys and confusions, was in part buried deep, in part left behind in the Great House, in the keeping of a certain Macedonian guardsman.
Now she must be all Khemet, all priestess. This had walked up out of Thebes. This had come to the field of Issus, and found the king whom the gods had chosen.
Such a little thing, she had been. So pure in her emptiness. So unformed, like clay before the potter shapes it.
Her journey had been the shaping. Alexander—king, god’s chosen, but man and friend besides—was the fire that had made her strong.
Alexander, and his friends who had become hers. And Nikolaos.
She stood on the terrace between the Great House and the temple of Min, no longer a shape of air and darkness, but earth and flesh, with life burning in it. The sun was coming. And with it, the king.
He left the palace as the sky flushed bright with dawn. He came as Lord of the Two Lands: no Hellene king mounted on a horse, but pharaoh borne high on the shoulders of princes, under a canopy of gold, and before him the princes of Khemet, and behind him the lords of the Two Lands, and behind those the foot and the chariotry, to the sound of drums and trumpets. Two priests walked ahead of them all in a cloud of frankincense, and between them a lone priest chanting the processional.
As the king left the Great House, the procession of Min left the god’s dwelling, the god borne as the king was borne, on the shoulders of a score of priests. The god’s white bull walked before, and the long line of priests behind, carrying the panoply of the king and the images of the gods. They for this day suffered Min to stand preeminent, but their presence was strong, blessing the rite with their mingled power: Amon and Mut and Khonsu, Ptah and Sekhmet and Nefertem, Horus and Osiris and Mother Isis, Khnum, Sobek, Set, Hathor, Thoth and Bastet, and all the gods who were in Khemet.
They met upon the terraced square, wide it seemed as a city, just as the sun rose. A shout went up from the priests and the people. In its aftermath, the air still throbbing from the force of it, Min’s priest stepped out into the center of the square, looking small and yet strangely potent in the empty space.
Priests followed him bearing cages. One by one he opened them, brought forth a flapping, protesting goose, and flung it into the sky. The birds floundered, steadied, beat their way upward.
“Bear word,” the priest cried to them in a voice as thin and clear itself as a bird’s, “to the four realms of heaven, that Horus the son of Isis and Osiris takes the two crowns, that the son of the living gods receives the White Crown and the Red Crown over the land of Khemet.”
Meriamon, on the edge of the square, lowered her eyes from the birds to the glitter that was the king. Her souls knew him, always. Her sight saw a stranger.
He had put on the kilt. He looked well in it, was built for it with his wide shoulders and his graceful compact body, though his fair skin was odd, given as it was to going red and peeling when sensible skin went bronze-dark. He wore the headdress with its lappets over the shoulders and its twisted tail behind, striped blue and gold. They had not succeeded in painting his eyes—no Hellene would suffer that, reckoning it a thing for barbarians and women—but the face under the headdress, at this distance, was a royal mask. What he was thinking, only the gods knew.
When the priests took off the headdress, there was no mistaking the bright-gold mane, or the way, perhaps forgetting himself, he shook it out and back. A murmur ran through the gathered people. Wonder, surprise. A full mane on a king, and yellow at that: astonishing.
Min’s priest frowned slightly. The murmur died.
Alexander’s face did not change at all. His eyes were lifted, fixed on the horizon. They remained so as the priests vested him with the regalia of the Great House: crook, flail, even the false beard. As the priests approached with the crowns, his gaze focused.
Meriamon felt it in her bones. A gathering. A swelling of power. An awareness in the earth, that here at last, after far too long, a true king stood again in the heart of the Two Lands. She sank to her knees, unmindful of anything but the earth beneath. She laid her hands flat on the stones. Men had quarried them, shaped them, set them here, but they were Khemet too, under the sky of Khemet, before Khemet’s king.
He was as still as ever, but his feet were braced a little apart, as if against the rocking of a ship. As the joined crowns touched his brow, he stiffened. His eyes were wide.
He felt it at least as strongly as she. White heat. Pure raw power, centering in him. For this moment, from this moment, he was Khemet. His heart was her heart, his life her life. As he prospered, so must she. If he failed, so would she fail, unless an heir be found to restore the power.
Across the sun-shot stretch of paving, his eyes met Meriamon’s. The light in them was terrible, and yet it did not blind her. Had it been so, she asked him with the voice of the soul made strong by the power that was here, when he was made king in Macedon?
He answered her, soul to soul. Alike, he said, yet different. A darker earth, a younger power, milder, weaker, less fiercely potent. He showed it to her. It made her think of water from a rock, and of a ram upon the altar, offering its throat for the sacrifice.
This was nothing so gentle. It was the eye of the sun, ancient and terrible. And yet he was master of it. As willingly as the ram, it offered itself to him.
He took it. He held it as he held the crook and the flail: shepherd’s rod, master’s whip, persuasion and force matched and balanced.
“For you,” he said in the voice of the heart. “For you I do this. Because you want it so badly.”
“I?” she asked him silently. “Not you?”
He was motionless in the center of the square, an image of a king. But inside her he laughed, and that was all Alexander. “Well. I too. But I’d have done it Greek-fashion, and never mind the rest of it.”
“Then you would have been a foreign king,” she said, “no better than Cyrus or Cambyses, and no more truly king in Egypt. This makes us yours. And you, ours.”
“For a while,” he said.
“For always,” said Meriamon.
o0o
Alexander gave himself to Khemet and accepted Khemet in return, and the Two Lands were glad of him. An hour after, he put on a chiton and bound his brows with a garland of Nile lilies and went to his Greek games; and that was all for his Hellenes.
Meriamon could not have gone to the games in any event, since she was a foreigner, and worse than that, a woman; but she did not miss them. She could never understand what pleasure these people found in hour after hour of watching naked men running and leaping and fighting.
The horse-games might have been a little more interesting, and the contests of music and dance, though she would rather not have had the judges giving prizes. Were they not all showing the best that they had?
She said as much to Niko. She was sitting with Thaïs in one of the courts of the Great House, listening to a flute player who had taken a second in the competition—an Egyptian, and he should have been more sensible, but he had imbibed enough of the Hellenes’ silliness to be dismayed that he had not won. Niko, who had come looking for his brother, accepted a cup of wine from the servant’s hand and seemed inclined to linger.
“What is this about choosing the best?” she asked him. “Can’t anyone be happy to be what he is?”
“No,” said Niko. Then, before she could snap at him: “The best is what every man should strive to be, or what’s the worth in anything?”
“And if he can’t be? What then? He gnaws himself in silence, and wishes he were dead?”
“He tries harder,” Niko said.
She frowned al him. “You won the races again. Ptolemy told us. Don’t you get tired of winning?”
He laughed, which made her frown the more blackly. “Never! I love to win. Typhon lives for it. Aren
’t you proud of us?”
“I don’t understand you,” she said.
“What, are we a mystery? And you an Egyptian.”
“We’re not mysterious at all.”
“No?” His hand took in the whole of it: the court with its trees and fountains, the walls that the Hellenes called the work of gods or giants, the sky the pure deep blue of lapis; and beyond, to the mind if not the eye, Black Land and Red Land and the inscrutable tombs of the old kings.
“This country is like nothing else that ever was. The size of it—vaster than anything in the world, and older, and stranger, with its myriad gods. And you can’t understand why we look for the best, and reward it when we find it?”
“We don’t need to look. We are.”
Ptolemy came back then, and none too soon in Meriamon’s mind. Niko was grinning. Incorrigible.
o0o
She left soon after that. Her temper had cooled somewhat. She could—should—have been in Amon’s temple with her own people. Lord Ay was there. But she was not minded to face them. She was the one who had gone away. She had spoken with the gods; she had become a stranger.
“I am home,” she said to herself. “I am.”
And so she had been till she saw the awe in Ay’s face. Till she knew that she had changed.
The land was still her own. The people had gone strange. Narrow dark faces, long black eyes; light and small and quick, their language like the rattle of the sistrum.
She could walk among them, and no one stared, or reckoned her a foreigner. It was the other whom they gaped at, striding to catch her, big fair Macedonian with his improbable eyes.
She was not as alien as he was. Neither was she one of them. She walked between the worlds.
She always had. That was what it was to be born royal and gifted with magic.
The streets were thronged. They could not have walked side by side if Niko had not been so much larger than anyone near, and so determined to breast the flood. She walked in the lee of him, and no one jostled her.
A suspicious bulge in his mantle wriggled and became Sekhmet, treading the breadth of his shoulders to spring lightly down into Meriamon’s arms. The cat looked highly pleased with herself. As well she might, who had escaped from standing guard over Meriamon’s chambers.
Beyond the Great House, past the avenues of the temples, vast sky-roofed halls with their ranks of sphinxes, the city of giants became a smaller thing. The streets narrowed to human width. The houses shrank and dwindled until they were no more than huts of mud and palm-trunks, with dogs and big-bellied children playing in the dust in front of them, and women chattering as they fetched water from the cistern. Someone was baking bread, someone else was brewing beer. Children’s voices rang in unison from a little temple, reciting a lesson. Under an awning a potter plied his trade.
From here one could not see the temples or the palace, or the White Wall that had been raised about it when the world was young. This was another Egypt, less wonderful to see, but more truly itself.
“Now this I could learn to like,” said Niko, stepping over a dog that had lain down in the street and had no mind to move. He grinned at a child who stared at him from a doorway, thumb in mouth, eyes black and round and shiny as olives. “Temples and palaces—they’re pleasant to look at, but they aren’t much good for living in.”
“I’ve never lived anywhere else,” said Meriamon. “Except in tents, following the king.”
“Could you learn?”
It was such an odd question, and asked so simply, that she stopped. He went on a stride or two, halted, turned on his heel. She was aware of him, but her eyes were on the rest, the small mean houses with their bright paint on doorpost and rafter, the dog and the child and the gaggle of women at the cistern, whispering and giggling and darting glances at the foreigner.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I never thought of it.”
“No,” said Niko, and all the brightness had gone out of him. “You couldn’t. You belong in the temples and the palaces. I belong here.”
“You are a nobleman,” she said.
“I am a shepherd’s son, a breaker of horses. My feet knew the feel of earth before they ever walked on marble.”
“Carpets,” she said. “We walk on carpets.”
“The only carpet I ever knew was grass where the sheep had grazed it.”
“I’ve walked on grass,” said Meriamon. “It’s very strange. Here it’s sand, and mud in season.”
His expression was odd. After a while, and not happily, she recognized it. Pity. “They never let you set foot in it, did they? You were always in a litter, or on a horse.”
“I used to play in the garden,” she said. She was not going to be angry, or to defend herself. To him least of all. “There was a pool, with lilies. I was always falling into it.”
“Or jumping in?”
A smile tugged at the comer of her mouth, for all that she could do. “I wasn’t supposed to. But if I went too close to the edge, and once I had got wet... what use to come out until I’d had my fill of it?”
“We had a pool,” said Niko, “out by the mares’ pasture, where the river cut through a bank. We all swam in it. It was ghastly cold, and there were fish that liked to bite at dangling toes and fingers. We thought it was the best thing in the world.”
Meriamon’s smile broke free. She began to walk again. He walked with her past the women with their laughing, knowing eyes. One of them said something that brought the blood rushing to her cheeks.
He did not see it. Maybe. And he knew no Egyptian.
She walked faster. He lengthened his stride, easily, humming to himself. Blessed innocent. If he lived here, he would have them all falling in love with him.
She was long lost. She could not even stay angry with him for being Nikolaos.
o0o
When the games were over, Alexander took a company of friends and Companions and, escorted by a small army of priests, rode out of the living city into the city of the dead.
This was the Red Land, the dry land, and yet it was not lifeless. The city of tombs was full of shrines, and each shrine had its priests, greater and lesser in the degree which the dead had endowed. Roads ran through it, wide and level and smoothly paved, scoured clean by wind and sand and sun.
There was no grief here. Only awe, and the fields of monuments to the immortal dead. On the far edge of it down an aisle of sphinxes, huge man-headed lions crouching forever on guard, lay Apis’ temple and tomb.
The king had seen Apis-on-earth in the city of the living: the black bull with the star on his brow and the image of an eagle astride his back. He had his temple and his harem, his priests who served him and offered him sacrifice. Alexander had paid him reverence, and he had accepted it, bowing his great homed head and suffering the king to touch him.
Here was the tomb of the bulls who had been Apis, dug deep and walled strong amid a cluster of shrines and temples. There, wrapped like a king and laid to rest, was that Apis whom Cambyses had killed.
“He took the city,” said Apis’ priest, standing in the dim echoing chamber under the weight of stone and years, “and woke in the morning to hear, not wails and lamentation, but laughter and rejoicing. A god was born, his captives told him. A child of heaven had come to earth and blessed his city.
“‘And does it matter nothing that his city has fallen?’ the king demanded of them. They only laughed and sang with all the rest, even when he tormented them. Then he was struck with wonder, and although he was a Persian and his Truth was inviolate, he yearned to see for himself what face a living god would wear.
“‘Bring the god to me,’ he bade his servants. And they obeyed, and brought him the god. Damp yet from its birth, wobble-legged, bawling for its mother: a black bull-calf with a white forehead.
“Cambyses laughed aloud. ‘This is your god? This you worship? See how I give it reverence!’
“He swept out his sword, and before any could stay him, thrust it into the
rump of the calf.
“It died of the wound, and the Great King gave it to his cooks, and that night he feasted on it, he and his princes. Such,” said the priest, “was Cambyses’ reverence for the gods of Egypt.”
“And Ochos,” said Meriamon. “He too, when he had slain my father: he slew the Apis and dined on its flesh, for he was not to be outdone.”
“No wonder you hate them,” said Ptolemy. The others, even Alexander, had looked at the dead thing in its wrappings and its reek of grave-spices, and retreated rapidly.
Ptolemy regarded it with something very like reverence. “Poor thing, to die so young. Was it born again quickly?”
“Soon enough,” said the priest. “Apis is always reborn: always to a cow who conceives of fire from heaven, who bears no young after. We reverence the Mother of the Apis as we do her son.”
“I saw her in the temple,” Ptolemy said. “A fine creature, that. I can see that a god would favor her.”
Meriamon watched him after that. He was no different than he ever was, and yet something about him had changed. It was she—she was seeing him anew. He was interested in what was here. He wanted to know. He walked with the priest, and asked questions, and listened to the answers. The echoing gloom, the dry scent of death, seemed not to trouble him. He seemed almost to be at home here.
More than she. She was glad to leave the tombs, to walk in the sun again. Time enough and more when she was dead, to walk these passages. Now she would live, and breathe the clean air, and turn her face to the fire of Ra.
Twenty-Four
Arrhidaios loved Egypt. “Colors,” he said. “And all the warm. And people laughing.”
Thaïs grimaced. No one, it was clear, had warned her that beauty lingered longest in a serene face. Hers was mobile always, and more of late, as her belly swelled with the child.
She caught her breath now. Arrhidaios stopped talking and stared at her. Meriamon poised, alert.
“It moved,” said Thaïs. “It kicked me.”
Her surprise was pure. No joy in it, but no anger either, simply astonishment.
