by Judith Tarr
It was cold, frost-cold. Meriamon huddled in the soldier’s cloak that Niko had got for her before they left Rhakotis. Sekhmet was a warm weight in a fold of it. Fortunate cat: she could ride when humans had to walk.
Meriamon’s shadow strained at its bindings. She loosed them. It wandered a little distance but came back, bristling, teeth bared in a soundless snarl. It was almost solid, she noticed. It dropped to all fours and paced behind her. A Companion who wandered sleepily out of his place in the line shied away from it, muttering something about “bloody great dogs.”
The stars faded. The wind was blowing in their faces: brief hard gusts, a sting of sand. The sun rose as it had set, in blood. The light it cast was strangely dim, and dimming.
“We’re going to get it,” Ptolemy said. He was walking with his brother, just behind Meriamon.
Word came back down the line. “Push on as far as you can before it hits. Then barricade yourselves—behind a camel, if you can. Watch the camels! They know what to do.”
A march of Hellenes was never a silent march unless they were mounting an ambush. Even in dry desert someone was always singing, and everyone was talking. Now the sound of voices sank away. The wind was growing stronger, the sting of sand fiercer.
The camels walked on, each beast seeming made up of half a dozen disparate parts, and every one moving in a different direction. For once no one commented on it. While the camels walked, they were safe. Some of them made a litany of it and marched to its rhythm.
All at once the camels stopped. The beast in the lead raised her head on its improbable neck and turned it from side to side. The drover shouted and struck her with his goad. She took no more notice of him than of the flies that’s warmed on her hide. With great and deliberate care she folded her legs beneath her, joint by joint. First one, then another of the caravan followed her. Their backs were to the south, Meriamon noticed, and their faces to the north.
The horses were shirting about uneasily. Phoenix, wise to the desert, was sweating. Her eyes rolled white as Meriamon approached, and she shied from the hand on her bridle. “Go on,” Meriamon said to the groom. “I’ll look after her.”
The Thracian set his jaw. “No,” he said. “You go.”
Meriamon got a firmer grip on the bridle and half dragged, half coaxed the mare toward the nearest of the camels. The company had gone to ground already, except for those with the horses.
Boukephalas was quiet, almost alarmingly so. Alexander had his bridle, was stroking his neck, talking to him.
Meriamon called out. The king threw up his head, remarkably like a horse himself. “Here!” she cried.
After a moment he moved toward her. She forgot him and set to work persuading Phoenix to lie in the lee of the camel. The mare knew what she was supposed to do; was glad to do it. But the air was full of thunder. The earth was throbbing like a heart. It was more than a horse could reasonably be expected to endure.
The sun was a feeble flicker. The sand was thickening. A shape loomed out of it—two shapes. Alexander; Boukephalas.
The stallion lay down willingly beside Phoenix, and greeted her with a flutter of the nostrils. She flattened her ears and snaked her head. He offered no presumption. Her trembling quieted.
“Where’s Niko?” Meriamon asked. Shouted. The wind was rising.
She tried to get up. Alexander pulled her down. “Not now, idiot! He was back there the last time I looked—with Ptolemy. Hephaistion, too.”
There was nothing of mind in what she wanted. To go, to find him. But Alexander was in her way, and he would not move. She subsided slowly. “Mother,” she prayed. “Mother Isis, look after him.”
If the goddess heard, she had keener ears than anything living. They were in the mouth of the furnace.
One moment there was wind and sand and a crackle of lighting. The next, a lake of fire, a blast of heat, sand to scour the flesh from bones even through a soldier’s cloak. Every drop of moisture sucked from skin and mouth and eyes. And howling like every voice of every torment that had ever beset man or beast or demon below.
It was a paean. A song of triumph. That they were taken. That they would be destroyed.
o0o
“No,” said Meriamon.
Not precisely said. She had no voice to say it. It was burned out of her. But she willed it.
There was more than earthly malice in that wind, and more than earthly destruction in the storm. Her souls were flayed raw. What it had done to the simple magicless Macedonians, she could not think; dared not, or she would despair.
She could not move. There was a weight on her. It was alive; it breathed. It was shielding her.
Alexander. She knew the bright heat of him. A different heat: welcome. It was barely touched at all.
It offered itself for what she must do. She shaped the words with her souls’ tongue. She made the wall, stone by stone, word by word of shaped and focused power. Half of them the storm scoured away. Half it haltered against, blow on blow.
But they held. Patiently she heaped them one on the other, making a ward against the storm, raising it over the small trapped souls, men, beasts, even a desert mouse cowering under a stone. The flesh that housed them could perish even yet, drowned in sand. But they would escape uneaten.
There was little of her left when the wall was made. She had just strength enough to set the last stone and curl up behind it, and wait.
o0o
Silence.
She had gone deaf. Or dead.
Something moved. A voice spoke in her ear. “Herakles!”
Sand sifted down, hissing. The weight scrambled off her. She got an elbow in the ribs.
She was definitely not dead, unless the dead could hurt.
A hand got a grip on her, heaved her up. Light blinded her.
Alexander looked like nothing human, covered in sand from head to foot, and his eyes staring out of it, blazing pale. He shook like a dog. Sand flew.
The world had changed. What had been a bare stony valley with a bit of scrub for the camels to graze on, was a sea of sand, great undulating dunes stretching to the horizon. North was a haze of storm, shot with lightnings. South was a still clear blue.
One of the smaller dunes heaved. A camel rose out of it, shook itself as Alexander had, and looked about with an air of vast disgust.
“My sentiments exactly.” said Alexander. He sounded a great deal calmer than he looked. He eyed the hillock nearest him, and began to dig.
Meriamon burrowed already where her bones told her to burrow, no mind in her at all, only a madness of fear.
Niko was coiled in a knot, death-still. She gasped. Her mouth was full of sand. She dragged him out bodily.
He struggled, unknotting, coughing hard enough to knock him flat, and Meriamon with him. Her hands were locked on his arms. He tore free, rolling to all fours, and coughed himself into shaking silence.
He was ghastly to look at, sand caked in his hair and brows and clinging to his skin, and sweat plowing furrows in it. He was quite the most beautiful thing Meriamon had ever seen.
He tasted of salt and of sand, and of himself. His shaking stopped. She stumbled to her feet, drawing him with her. Other mounds sprouted their crop of men and beasts, snorting and blowing and shaking off clouds of sand.
o0o
They had lost no one, and every one of the animals was safe. One or two of the camels had strayed, but those came back on their own as the company took count of itself. The worst casualty was a man who had got a stone in his eye.
He would keep the eye, Meriamon judged. She did what she could to stitch and bind the cut above it. No one else had more than a bruise or two, and a few unfortunates had had the skin scoured from exposed portions of their anatomy.
“That will teach you to stick your arse out in a sandstorm,” Alexander said to the worst wounded of them; but he had a smile for the man after, and that was as good an anodyne as anything Meriamon could muster.
They had a sip of water each—not
quite all of it, but there was a fair distance to go yet, the guides said. Once they had shaken the worst of the sand out of clothes and hair and seen to their packs and their animals, they took the road again. Even as parched as they were, their spirits were high. The storm was gone. The sky was serene. By night they would have water enough for all of them, man and beast.
It was hard going. The sand was deep, and could be treacherous. The curve of the dunes lured them away from the straight path. The sun sank, slowly at first, then with breathtaking swiftness.
“Soon,” the guides said. “The oasis is close. Soon we come to it.”
Each rise of sand invited the certainty that water lay on the other side of it. Each downward slope looked only to another dune. Red sand, dun sand, blue sky. No green at all. Not a bush, not a leaf, not a blade of grass. And of water, nothing. Not even the shadow of it.
The guides were moving more slowly now, pausing more often to confer with one another. Most of the Companions were too tired to care about anything but putting one foot in front of the other.
So should Meriamon have been—she perhaps more than any, for the wall that she had built of magic and her souls’ substance, to guard them all in the midst of the storm. But she was past exhaustion in a white fierce clarity.
She knew in her skin that Niko was beside her. She was aware of Sekhmet riding on his shoulder, of Phoenix stepping delicately behind, of Alexander working his way up from the rear, a flare like a torch in a dark night.
When he passed, she fell in beside him. His glance acknowledged but did not forbid her.
The guides had stopped again. The chief of Alexander’s scouts was with them, addressing them in a fierce low voice. “You what?”
“We know which way is south,” one of the guides said, just as low and just as fierce. “It’s only—”
“Only what?”
They whipped about. Even the scout looked suddenly, horribly guilty.
“What don’t you know?” Alexander asked again.
None of them would answer.
“It is only,” Meriamon said, “that there is a whole world to the south of this place, and Siwah is a very small portion of it.” She fixed the chief of the guides with her stare. “How long have you been lost?”
“We are not lost,” the man said, “lady. We know where we must be.”
“Are we anywhere near water?” Alexander demanded.
There was another silence.
The scout could not spit: he was too dry. He managed to look as if he had done it. “They’re lost, Alexander. Don’t you doubt it. They’ve been lost since we dug ourselves out of that sandpit.”
“The storm changed everything!” cried the youngest of the guides. “How were we to know that it would make a new world?”
“Sandstorms do,” Alexander said mildly. He looked about. There was nothing to see but sand. “I don’t suppose it will be any better at night? Navigating by the stars, or however you do it?”
“We go by the land,” the chief of the guides said, “lord king. There is always something that never changes: a shape under the sand, or a turning of the hills.”
“How much time do you need to find it?”
“We have been looking,” the man said. “Nothing is as we remember.” He threw up his hands. “Nothing! Never in all my years have I seen it so. The very earth has shifted, I swear by the gods.”
Meriamon shivered.
Alexander did not hear the truth that she heard, or did not care. “In a word,” he said, “you’re lost. And so, therefore, are we.”
“We are not—” The guide snatched off his headcloth and scratched fiercely at his swarm of lice. “Lord king, we are not lost. We are here, and Siwah is there, to the south. We have only to walk until we come to it.”
“Or,” said Alexander, “until we die of thirst.”
“The gods will provide,” said the guide.
“Then you had better pray,” said Alexander. “Or better yet, find a landmark that you recognize. We’ll camp here while you go about it.”
The guides stared at him. He smiled his sweet terrible smile, and went back down the line.
Thirty
By morning the water was gone. The wine without it was deadly stuff, nor could the beasts drink it even if there had been enough.
The guides had not found the oasis. They knew where Siwah was, they insisted on that. Their insistence had an air of desperation.
Alexander shrugged. He was as dry as anyone else. Someone had tried to save out a flask of water for him. He had smiled, thanked the man, and passed it round the man’s company. Now he said, “We’ll go on. What’s a dry march or two to the likes of us?”
His men cheered. He flashed them his brightest smile and took his place at the head of the line, and led them out of the camp.
He was carrying them with his strength. And yet they were tough, these Macedonians. They marched behind their king, erect under the weight of packs and armor, and their eyes were bright and their faces were firm and they knew nothing of defeat or despair.
They did not feel what Meriamon felt: the malice under their feet, the ill-will in the sky. It had them, and it would kill them. And they laughed at it.
She walked as straight as she could, slipping and scrambling in sand. She kept her head as high as it would go. She worried about Phoenix, but the mare was lively enough. They all were.
And for how long? Four days at least to Siwah, the guides said. The camels were irritable already, trying to wander off, biting their handlers when they were dragged back.
They wanted water. In four days they would do worse than want it. They would be dead for lack of it.
She stumbled and went down. She stayed there on hands and knees, shaking her head. There was a darkness in it. Trap. Trapped. Thirsty—thirsty—
“Meriamon!”
Niko. Always Niko.
Her head spun. He lifted her, shook her. She tried to push him away. It was like pushing at a wall.
He slapped her. She gasped. She could see again. He looked furious.
Not as furious as she. “Put me down,” she said through gritted teeth.
He kept on holding her, and he kept on walking. She struggled. He did not even trouble to tighten his grip. She lay in his arms, glaring.
Anger was a power. It cleared her mind. It named what had felled her. Enemy.
The sky was still dark. Grey. She tried to banish it, to bring back the blue. A wind brushed her cheek. She shivered. It was cold.
The marchers halted. They were all staring upward.
Alexander’s voice rang out, seeming to echo in the empty spaces. “By the dog! It’s going to rain.”
“In the desert?” someone said.
“Taste the wind,” said Ptolemy. “That’s rain.” He paused. His voice sharpened. “Quick, everybody. Get out your tents, your waterskins—anything you’ve got. If the gods are with us at all—if they’ve ever listened to a prayer we’ve said—”
“Zeus’“ cried Alexander. “Skyfather! Did you hear that? You’ll have a hecatomb of fine bulls when I get back to Memphis, if you give us rain now.”
There was no sudden stillness. No listening pause; no silence of awe. The men ran to do as Ptolemy bade them, some muttering, some speaking aloud of madmen and desperation.
But they ran. They unfolded tents, skins, cloaks, hauled out pots and jars.
The wind blew harder. It was a water-wind as the khamsin had been a fire-wind. It massed clouds above them. It gave them nothing that they could drink, not a drop. Already there was light on the far side of it, dry naked sky, pitiless sun.
“Zeus!” cried Alexander, high and peremptory. “Father Zeus! Can you hear us?”
He was standing on the summit of a dune. A long shaft of sun caught him, striking fire in his hair. He spread his arms wide.
Meriamon’s feet were on the ground again. She almost leaped back into Niko’s arms. The earth was humming. It was Alexander—not working power, but being
power; drawing it up from the deep places and down from the sky.
He did not know what he was doing. He would call it prayer, if he called it anything. Making the gods listen. Taking no notice at all of the Enmity that beat upon him.
The sky shattered.
Meriamon raised herself on her hands. Whether she had flung herself flat, or been flung, she would never be sure.
She drew a breath, and choked. It was like breathing a river.
Rain. Hard, driving, relentless, miraculous rain. Alexander’s madmen were whooping and dancing in it, trying to drink it as it fell, gagging and half drowning themselves, and laughing all the while. But they were gathering it in everything they had.
Alexander egged them on. He was whole, grinning, sopping wet. Not even a scorched eyelash after the bolt that surely had struck through him into the earth.
The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The silence was enormous. The clouds thinned and paled and scattered, blowing away southward. The thirsty sand drank the last of the wet, glistening in the new-washed sun.
They were all wet to the skin, men, horses, camels. They looked at one another. Then at the full waterskins; the jars brimming over; the pools made of tents, with camels drinking from them in long noisy draughts.
No one said the word that they were all thinking. Miracle. Gods’ gift. Four days’ worth, by the quartermaster’s measure.
o0o
They took time to make sure their armor and weapons were dry. By the time they marched, they were only a little damp around the edges. There was water in them, pure sweet rainwater, and they went the swifter for it.
The desert was coming to life about them. Dried branches put forth leaves. Flowers seemed to spring beneath their feet. Small creatures came out of hiding to feed on the new bounty, or simply to revel in it.
“Water is life,” said Niko. “I never knew it before as I know it here.”
“Desert is very close to the truth of things.”
Meriamon was weak still, and sometimes she was dizzy. Her eyes did not seem to want to see very far, but what was close was bitterly, painfully clear. Niko’s face, now. Peeling where the sun had burned it. Raw on one cheekbone from the scouring of sand. Rough with fair stubble. His hat shaded it, cutting a sharp line across it, part in sun, part in shadow.
