by Judith Tarr
Alexander’s curiosity was of another order. The sheen of the god lingered on him after a night’s sleep, but it was dimming, becoming part of him. He wanted to see the spring that was famous even in Hellas, that was bitter cold at noon, and at midnight hot to boiling.
Or so the tales said. It was cool enough when they went, he and a friend or two and Meriamon, though not exactly icy.
The sun was directly overhead. The tangled branches of trees kept off most of its heat, but where the spring was, was an open space, much trampled by pilgrims’ feet. The water bubbled out of a rock into a little mossy basin, and overflowed into a trickle of a stream that wandered away into a thicket.
There was a flock of crows in the trees, flapping and quarrelling and making a dreadful racket. The priest who guided them made a move to chase the birds away.
Alexander stopped him. “Let them be,” he said. “They belong here rather more than we.”
The man looked as if he would have argued, but after a moment he shrugged. “As you will, lord,” he said.
Alexander smiled at him, melting him where he stood.
Someday, thought Meriamon, he would meet a human creature who was immune to his smile. She doubted that it would be soon.
He knelt by the pool’s edge and dipped in his hand. “Cool,” he said. “Sweet, too. Pure water from the rock.”
“It is the god’s gift,” said the priest
“So is all that is,” said Alexander. He straightened, restless already. As the others came to taste the water and remark at its cool purity, he wandered back to the trees.
They were olive trees. He reached to touch a branch, ruffling the grey-green leaves. “Strange to find olives here in the middle of the desert.”
Meriamon had not gone to the spring with the rest. It was cool in the shade of the trees, and the crows’ clamor was surprisingly pleasant. They were laughing, she thought, taking joy in being alive.
Alexander sat on the ground beside her. Sekhmet, after a moment’s thought, left her lap to occupy his. “I miss Peritas,” he said.
“You’ll see him soon enough,” said Meriamon.
“A week, probably,” he said. “If there are no more arguments from the desert.”
“There won’t be,” she said. “It wanted to keep you from coming here. Now that it’s failed, it will be only too glad to be rid of you.”
He raised a brow at her. “You felt it, too? That the land didn’t want us to be in it?”
“It never did love us of the Black Land. We’re noisy; we’re many. We infest the clean desert, we poison it with water, we make green things grow like a blight across it.”
“I’d think that would be the Nile’s fault,” he said. “Seeing that its floods are what make your land rich.”
“That too,” she said. And after a pause: “You’re going back to Rhakotis, then.”
“And Memphis. And after that, Asia.”
A chill ran through her. It was not entirely unpleasant. “You won’t stay in Egypt?”
“I can’t.” He had said it maybe too quickly. He softened it with a smile, though that did not last long. “I’d like to stay. But there’s Darius and a whole empire on my eastern flank, and a small matter of unfinished business for the League of Hellas. I came out here, after all, to fight Persia.”
“You’ve done that.”
“I’ve begun it. That’s all it is: a beginning. If I’m to make it last, I have to go through with the rest of it.”
“And what is that?” she asked him.
“All of it.” He grinned at her expression. “Hubris again, maybe. And maybe not. There’s a whole world out there. Did you ever think of that? Persia first—Persia is dangerous as long as I let it resist me. Then, who knows? There are lands to the east beyond Persia. There are lands to the west, Italy and Sicily where Greeks already are, and wild places beyond them, and finally the sunset gates, the Pillars of Herakles. He set them up, my ancestor did, or so they say. I’d like to see them for myself.”
“You’d like to do everything a mortal man can do.”
“And a little of what a god can.” He met her stare. Lightning, she thought. Striking at the heart. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know it. You’re me one who led me here.”
“Not I,” said Meriamon, “but the gods who speak through me.”
“It’s all one,” he said.
“Is that what you learned in the god’s chamber?”
He lowered his eyes. She blinked, dazzled. The world seemed very dark here at high noon in the grove of the Sun. He stroked Sekhmet from head to twitching tail, over and over, to the rhythm of her purring.
“I learned...” he said. Stopped. Frowned. “I learned... too much, maybe. It was comfort of a sort, not to know. To wonder if I was mad, or my mother was lying, or everything I did was foolishness. I was never ordinary. I never could be. But when I knew... that changed things. It wasn’t myself, you see. It was always the god.”
“The god begot you,” said Meriamon, “through his chosen instrument. That doesn’t mean he is you, or you are he, any more than any son can become his father.”
“Philip wasn’t ordinary, either,” Alexander said, sharp, almost angry. “Not in the least. They say I got my gift of warfare from him. He was more solid; saner. But he was a brilliant general.”
“Every man is what his life has made him.”
Alexander was not listening. “I’m better in the tight spots. I think faster. I always did. That’s my mother—she’s lethally quick. If she’d been a man, Macedon would have been hard put to seize as much power as it did. It’s as well she was born a woman. Then she could marry Macedon instead of conquering it.”
“Or destroying it in a war.”
“So they would have, both of them. Gods know, they tried hard enough as they were; and she trapped in a woman’s body, and he trapped by every woman’s body he set eyes on. There’s irony for you. Brats by the cartload, and his heir, his king who would be, bastard-bred of a god.”
“Through Philip’s body,” said Meriamon.
“That wouldn’t matter to him,” said Alexander. He parted Sekhmet’s toes to make the claws come out, white and gleaming sharp. “I think I’m happy to know what I am. I know I’m terrified.”
“Of course you are. You’re only half mad.”
He laughed. “And which half would you say that is?”
“The half that makes you do what no one else would do, and do it brilliantly. I’ll never forgive you for Tyre, you know. Even if you did come to Egypt in the end.”
“I had to do it,” he said. “And I came, as you say, where you wanted me to come. Did what you wanted, too. I’m surprised you aren’t trying to make me stay and be a proper pharaoh.”
“Would I tell you if I were?”
His head tilted. He thought about it. “Probably,” he said. “Or I’d know.”
“I’m that transparent?”
“You’re that honest.”
“So,” she said, “are you.”
“Then it’s as well I was born in Macedon, where people aren’t subtle, even when they’re killing one another. I’d not have lasted a week in Persia.”
“In Egypt,” she said, “you might have managed a month.”
“And what of you?”
“I’m god-touched,” she said. “No one else would try.”
He sprang up, light and smooth, hardly jarring the cat on his arm; drawing Meriamon with him, holding her face to face. “I’m almost sorry you don’t want to marry me.”
“There’s plenty of almost for both of us,” said Meriamon.
“Poor Niko,” Alexander said. “I hope you were planning to invite me to the wedding.”
She blushed, so sudden and so fierce that it burned away every scrap of wit. “We were going to tell you.”
“Not ask?”
She stared at him blankly.
“I am, after all, his king. I have some say in whom he marries. Particularly if the lady is a foreigner.”
&n
bsp; At least the heat was gone. The cold, perhaps, was worse. “You are my king also,” she said.
“So I am.” His eyes narrowed. “If I forbade you, would you still do it?”
She could not keep her gaze on him. In part because it would have been a glare. In part—in great part—because he was her king.
“Mariamne,” he said.
That was not her name.
“Meriamon,” said Alexander.
Her eyes rose. Glaring.
“Come now,” he said. “You know I wouldn’t stop you from doing what you’ve got your heart set on. Though what you see in him, out of all the men in my army—”
“If you can’t see it, I can hardly explain it to you.”
That gave him pause. Then he laughed. Delighted with her. Damn him. He knew perfectly well what she spoke of. He had Hephaistion.
She should have been appalled. That she could think such things of him. That he could see it.
And if she could not think so, and he could not see, then he would not have been her king. Kings, gods—they thought too much of themselves, too often.
Alexander had a very high opinion of himself, no doubt of that. But he knew it. He could even laugh at it. Sometimes.
He all but dragged her back to the spring, the men waiting there, the eyes and the smiles—greeting, not mockery; little good as that did. She was blushing again. So, she noticed, was Niko. There was something about secrets badly kept; they had a way of mortifying.
In the end she would shrug and live with it. And no thanks to his majesty the king, who was getting up a water-fight, and shocking the poor priest into speechlessness. It could hardly be blasphemy, since it was the god’s son who did it; but kings were more staid in this part of the world.
Thirty-Three
The desert let them pass unmolested out of Siwah. Its power was quiescent; if not conquered, then certainly subdued. No gate opened on the other side of a storm. No guide came for them, nor did the way lose itself in front of them. It was quiet, all of it. Quiet to rest in.
At Rhakotis the city was shaping itself. Deinokrates the architect had sent to Memphis for rolls of papyrus and boxes of chalk and crews of men to begin the marking and digging of foundations. It was like old days in the valleys of the kings, but these labored to build not a tomb but a living city.
For far too long the Two Lands had looked backward to a splendor that was gone. Now it would look forward again under a king whose face was toward living glory and not the splendor of the dead.
Their passage to Memphis, rowing up the slow strong stream of the Nile, was a triumphal procession. The army was waiting for them. Like, Meriamon thought, a lover for his beloved. They were that, with Alexander.
o0o
She had the same rooms she had had before in the Great House behind its white walls. She went to the temple to sing the offices, but she did not sleep there, and no one asked it.
Amon’s priests from Thebes had gone, and Lord Ay with them. He had left a message for her. It was written in the most ancient of the tongues the priests knew, drawn and painted as meticulously as the writings on the temple’s walls.
When she held it in her hands, it seemed to stir gently. The eyes of the beasts and birds, the men and women and gods, looked for a moment like the eyes of living things.
Words were power. Words written were the strongest of strong magics.
These were, in the end and after the invocations of the gods and the full forms of his name and hers and the wardings against ill use or misuse, supremely simple. “Do as your heart bids you. May Mother Isis guide your steps.”
She took the message back with her to her rooms. There was dinner to go to: Alexander’s last in Memphis before he took the road to Asia. People were coming who had had far to go, as far as Elephantine in the uppermost of Upper Egypt. All the Companions of Siwah were invited to it, and for the rest of the army there was a banquet laid on in the soldiers’ messes.
It was, in short, an obligation. She was still in the robe of a singer in the temple. She took off the heavy braided wig, running fingers through her hair. Phylinna had the bath things ready, and the other wig, the state wig that was suitable for a royal lady.
Tonight she would be that, every inch of her, even to the scent she wore. She had walked in the land of coming forth by day. She had spoken with the Lady of the living and the dead. She was the daughter of the Great House of the Two Lands, and this was the feast of her victory.
And yet she lingered. She put down the message from Lord Ay, and took it up again. She was following her heart. She had been doing it, truly and wholly, since Siwah. And yet...
Sekhmet came mincing from wherever she had been. She was getting thick about the middle. The gods knew how she had managed that, with all the wandering and hunting she had been doing. She sprang as lightly as ever to the center of Meriamon’s bed and curled in the center, and went calmly to sleep.
Meriamon sat on the coverlet beside her, smoothing her fur. She began to purr.
Phylinna was waiting. Meriamon stood. She was mooning like a girl on the eve of her wedding. Which this almost was; but not for a while. She shook herself and went to the cooling bath.
o0o
The banquet was as splendid as she could have imagined. Alexander looked magnificent in a gold-embroidered chiton and a new purple cloak, with a crown of golden oak-leaves hardly brighter than his hair.
Meriamon might have liked to see him robed and crowned as pharaoh, but his face was turned already toward the east; and he had his army to think of. They wanted to see their own proper king. The princes of Egypt, maybe, needed to see him as he was. They did not look displeased.
The feast itself was as Egyptian as anyone could wish. The Macedonians bore it bravely. They were not compelled to drink beer, which they were glad of. Their opinion of Egyptian beer was, to put it mildly, jaundiced.
“Cat piss,” Niko had pronounced it, magisterially, after a good two jugs of it.
There was wine, and it was quite acceptable. There was goose prepared in a dozen ways, and duck, and dove and quail, and lamb and goat and beef, and oryx and gazelle, and great platters of green stuff, and fruit, and cheeses, and more manners of bread than a Hellene could have dreamed of, with a dizzying array of sauces. All eaten in music and in song, with dancers and players and a whole troupe of acrobats leaping and tumbling among the couches.
Nikolaos was not there. Meriamon had the couch to the right of the king’s, high honor and quite scandalous for a woman, even a royal Egyptian; and two servants to wait on her, and people staring at her. She smiled, and spoke when spoken to, and ate as much as she could stand.
That was not very much. It never was. She drank more than she usually did. The wine was rather more than acceptable. In fact it was good. Very good. Excellent.
Niko was busy. Some people had to get ready for the march in the morning, after all.
He would come in before the night was over, if not to the hall then to her rooms. He had said he would, that morning when he left her, getting up even earlier than she and running off to do something unintelligible. There had been an air about him of suppressed excitement. Of surprises, and of great secrets.
Whatever he was up to, she would know soon enough. What niggled at her was no more than uneasiness on the edge of changes.
He was not waiting for her when she came back to her rooms. Sekhmet was on the bed again, or still. She grumbled about moving to make room for Meriamon, but she was much too lazy to leave the bed. She settled for walking deliberately down the length of Meriamon’s body and then halfway back up again, and coiling herself against Meriamon’s hip.
Meriamon’s body was full of wine. It had been almost too much to sit up while Phylinna washed her, cleansed the paint from her face, plaited her hair down her back.
But her mind was sharply, almost painfully alert. It counted each breath as she drew it. It marked the slow turning of the stars, and the first faint glimmer of dawn upon the horiz
on. It knew the touch of each hair of Sekhmet’s coat as she stroked the sleeping cat.
And made a discovery that shocked laughter out of her. “Sekhmet! You didn’t!”
The cat yawned and stopped her ears with an upcurved paw. She did not want to hear about it.
“I hope it was one of the temple cats,” Meriamon said.
“I think it was the king of the stevedores’ quarter,” said Nikolaos.
Meriamon started. She had not heard him at all.
He was barefoot, with his sandals in his hand. He looked extraordinarily pleased with himself.
“Where have you been?” she demanded of him. Not furiously, no. Of course not. Merely vehemently.
“I do think it was the big he-cat from down by the docks,” Niko said. “He courted her for days. I’d hardly blame her if she gave in simply to shut him up.”
“Maybe she likes great grinning louts,” said Meriamon.
“You’ll never get her to admit it.” He set his sandals in their usual place next to the clothing chest, and unfastened his belt. His chiton was plain and somewhat workworn.
The lamplight did wonderful things to the planes and angles of his body. He paused with his chiton in his hand, frowning at the other, the twisted one, and flexing the stiffened fingers.
They were moving more easily now. He hardly seemed to notice any longer that there was anything amiss. He could ride, he could hold a shield. He could not play the double pipes, but then he had never been much good with them.
“Does it hurt you?” she asked him.
“No.” His voice was abstracted, but peaceful enough. “Sometimes a twinge or two... no. I had Typhon on the Scythian bit again. He likes it. I’m thinking of keeping him on it.”
“What does Alexander say to that?”
“Alexander thinks I’m starting to make sense. Ptolemy says I never did, why should I start now?”
She smiled. He grinned back. Yes, definitely he was keeping secrets.
He had had a bath. He smelled of clean skin and sweet oil. His hair was damp, curling as it dried.
Her body woke for him. But he was not ready, not quite yet. He stretched out beside her. Whatever he was thinking of, he was bursting with it.
