Stealing Fire

by Jo Graham

  “We ride through the night,” I said. “Anyone who can't keep up, fall out and come along as you may.”

  By midnight, when the stars were high, I wondered if it would be me. I rode in a waking dream, the pain in my arm throbbing like distant drums. But my horse followed after the others, and as long as I could stay on her I should ride. She, at least, was sound.

  Spirits came beside us. I saw a lean black dog loping along beside the hearse like a shadow, its golden eyes bright as stars. Above, against the distant stars a white ibis flew by night, its wings ghostly under the moon. A lioness paced us, her padded feet silent on the stones, ever watchful, looking behind.

  I saw them by moonlight, and the lioness nodded to me gravely, Her green eyes bright as Bagoas’.

  The gilded hearse glittered palely under the Huntsman rising, Sothis lifting clear of the hills in the sky before dawn. On the roof of the hearse was a hawk, its wings folded and head down, Horus bound to Alexander's body as the gods of Egypt escorted him home.

  “Ride,” I whispered. “Help me ride, Lady of the Desert.”

  The lioness paced beside my horse, Her head at my knee. “I will help you, Son of Egypt. I will walk with you. I will be there when you kindle fire.”

  “Fire,” I whispered. I was made of fire, and the night was made of whispers.

  “The powers of the Black Land rest in your hands,” She said. “Powers of earth and air, powers of water and fire. You guard Horus Undescended, and yours is the strength to wield it.”

  “I do not know how,” I said.

  The lioness looked at me, and I wondered if a cat could smile. “You do,” She said. “You will remember when you need it.”

  THE SKY PALED. Morning was coming. From the high cliffs a hawk lifted calling, spreading his wings in the clear bright air.

  “They are behind us,” I said. I could feel them, as though the ground beneath their hooves was my own body. “They will be here soon.”

  I pulled myself up on my horse. “Glaukos! Send the hearse ahead at all possible speed. We will go to that incline and wait. Get in line to receive cavalry!”

  Glaukos looked startled, as we had not had scouts come in.

  “Hurry!” I shouted.

  Now I saw the incline better. The wadis opened out. Beyond, there was a smooth descent and the green of plowed fields not far away, the lazy line of the Damietta branch of the Nile meandering through. The road turned north again to meet it, toward the pale half-shell line of the sea in the growing dawn. Where road and river and sea met was a dark lowering shape—the walls of Pelousion, now less than twenty miles distant.

  I heard the drivers pushing the exhausted oxen, exhorting them with whips. We formed up. Glaukos took the commander's position, and I stood behind. I could not fight with my useless hand at all. My fingers would not even close about the reins. We stood, and behind us the hearse rattled downhill.

  And then I saw them, halfway across the plain, a dark streak on the road, like a snake against the green land, Ptolemy's phalanx in column, marching toward us at double time. But they were still five miles distant at least.

  The blood thundered in my ears. I stood above all on the breast of the wind, soaring like the hawk over the land. I could see them coming down the wadi at a quick trot, Perdiccas’ cavalry still some eight hundred strong.

  “Stand to receive!” I shouted, feeling myself jolt back into my damaged body.

  Glaukos looked back at me worriedly, as we had so far seen nothing to receive.

  I looked straight back at him. I could feel them riding down the wadi, preparing to go into the wedge the moment they were clear of the confining walls.

  “Stand to receive!” Every man did so, six hundred or a bit more.

  The game was up, I thought. Even if they overwhelmed us, the infantry would catch them in a day once they were burdened with the hearse, and they'd never stand against a thousand heavy infantry.

  Whether I lived or died, I had already won.

  “Ready to charge!” I shouted. We would not receive. We'd charge them in column before they were clear.

  Horses stomped, each man falling into position, Glaukos on the point.

  The sun rose from behind the wadis before us, glittering on my sword point and on the distant sea.

  Fire, and the memory of fire.

  It seemed I could shape it, craft it like a lance. The first rays of the sun blazed off the Victory that adorned the hearse, rattling down the hill behind us.

  “For Ptolemy and Egypt!” I shouted.

  At that moment the first cavalry came clear of the wadi and checked. They had expected to come down on our rear as we hurried away, not to meet a charge.

  We stood like an arrow to the bow. The air trembled around me, waiting for the word forward.

  I raised my sword and fire ran down the blade. To kindle fire, She said. To throw it like fear, like a lance into their hearts. The power of Egypt ran through me, blue and gold, licking along the edges of the blade, as though I were nothing but a channel for the mighty flood.

  My horse stamped. If I swept the sword forward, I would loose the arrow. The wave would break. We would charge as one man.

  The fire ran through me, light and clear and painless as water. Ptolemy and Egypt.

  And they checked. They stopped at the mouth of the wadi.

  Before them we waited on the road, six hundred strong, ready to charge on their first cohorts. Beyond, the hearse labored. And beyond that, coming closer every minute, the infantry at their best pace, sun glancing off the bright points of their sarissas.

  I saw Polemon. And I saw what he saw. He had already lost.

  His eyes met mine, and he nodded gravely, one Companion to another. And then he wheeled his horse around and kicked it, cantering back into the wadi. His men followed.

  “Stand to receive!” I heard Glaukos shout, changing our formation in case they changed their mind.

  It was the last thing I heard before I slipped from my horse insensible.

  HOT EMBERS

  I woke inside the walls of Pelousion, in the great Persian bedchamber I had occupied before. I felt strangely disoriented, as though I could not quite order my thoughts, and my mouth was dry. I tried to speak.

  “Here,” a voice said, and a pair of hands lifted cool water to my lips, supported my head so I could drink. “Just take a little. You are still feeling the opium, I expect.”

  The water splashed on my lips, and I got some in my mouth. I swallowed. “Opium?”

  “For the pain so that the doctor could set your hand.” The voice belonged to Bagoas, who bent over me, his chiton clean and his hands washed, not dusty from the road. We must have been in Pelousion for some time. “He said there were ten bones broken in your hand and wrist and left unset for days so that the swelling made it hard to attend to. He gave you opium to ease the pain while he worked.”

  “Ten bones,” I whispered. Ten little tiny bones that all must work together.

  “He's bound it tightly and will check in a few hours to make sure none of the bindings have shifted. You must keep it still for a long time.”

  I looked down at my arm where it lay against the covers, the wrappings making it twice its normal size. A stick ran from the back of my hand up my arm nearly to the elbow, making sure I could not bend my wrist, while other wrappings bound my thumb and first two fingers to smaller sticks, only the ends of the last two emerging.

  I could not feel any pain. But then I could not really feel my feet either, and there was nothing wrong with them.

  “The opium probably makes you sleepy,” Bagoas said. “You can sleep. Ptolemy is here and the hearse is within the walls of Pelousion. You have fulfilled your duty. You do not need to worry anymore.”

  “Ptolemy is here?”

  “Yes,” he said, and laid a damp cloth to my brow, easing me back on the pillow. “Ptolemy has already been to see you, but you were still resting. He will be back in the morning, I expect.”

  �
�Night?”

  Bagoas nodded, his long dark hair swaying where it was held back by a clasp. “It's late the same night we came out of the desert. It is all one day. Ptolemy and his men came up after you fell, and we brought the hearse into the fortress. The doctor set your hand, and you have been sleeping since nightfall.”

  “So tired…” I whispered. All those sleepless days on the road, night blurring into day in a blaze of fire.

  “Rest then,” he said. “I will stay with you.”

  “Why?”

  Bagoas settled down on the side of the bed, his back against the carved headboard, sitting beside me. “I owe you a good turn, don't I?”

  “I suppose,” I said, and closed my eyes to the waiting dark.

  Well, I thought as sleep claimed me, that is another thing that was Alexander's that I have had. I have slept beside the eunuch Bagoas.

  WEDDINGS ALWAYS BRING out the worst in people, and of all weddings that was most true of Alexander's wedding to Roxane. If he had married a princess, it would not have been the same. Indeed, when later he married Stateira the daughter of Darius who had been Great King of Persia, only the most diehard traditionalists scoffed, but Roxane was not a princess. She was the daughter of a hill chief in Sogdiana, a beauty sixteen years old who any other warlord would simply have taken as a prize and who might have held his favor for a few years if she were lucky.

  But Alexander could never do anything in the normal way. He saw her, he wanted her, and by all the gods of Olympus, he meant to marry her. He was the King, and no one could stop him no matter how unseemly or inappropriate she might be.

  Of course she was beautiful. That went without saying. She had long, curling dark hair, black as a raven's wing, as dark as he was fair, and pale skin like milk with a touch of honey. Her eyes were hazel shading to green. She was tiny and fine-boned, a head shorter than Alexander, who was not tall. Perhaps he was moved by her beauty. He would not be the first man to lose himself thus.

  And so they were married in a feast fit for a bandit chief, on the cliffs of Sogdiana in a mountain stronghold lately taken, with slaughtered cattle for the wedding feast roasted plain over the fire.

  For my part, it was a feast like any other, except that the wine was rawer and more potent. If there were no sweets for the feast, at least there was plenty of wine. There were bridal torches and braziers of incense to give scent and light to the feast, the sweet smell of the meat mingling with myrrh of Nabatea carried at vast expense to give honor to the gods. Inside the hall, the air was thick before the proceedings were half ended, before the procession sang the King to bed with bawdy dances and shouts in Macedonian of what he should do when he finally got her dress off her, stiff with embroidery and covering her from fingertips to ankles.

  Roxane did not blush. I suspect it was because she didn't understand a word of it. Her head was high and proud, her cheeks clear as alabaster. It was Alexander who blushed and called back, trying to answer jest for jest.

  I admit that I was already a little drunk.

  Four years had passed since Gaugamela, when I became a soldier and a man. In those four years we had conquered Persia. From the mountains of Macedon to the cataracts of the Nile to the steppes that bordered the Caspian Sea all that had ever been claimed by the Great Kings was ours, the largest empire the world had ever known.

  I was twenty-two, and the boy Jio had long since been left behind. Lydias of Miletus was born a cavalryman, a Companion of Hephaistion's Ile, veteran of ten fields. I served at the command of a man I respected above all, Hephaistion son of Amyntor, the boldest and most loyal of all Alexander's men.

  Which is not to say that he was all bluster. I watched, and saw how he brought the Persian lords who had not supported Bessos over to us, how careful of their honor and pride he was. I watched while he chose a just man to rule over Sidon at Alexander's order, picking a man only distantly related to their past kings but who had the reputation of being a laborer both honest and clever. If I knew anything of governing, it was learned from Hephaistion. There was greater gain in not setting a conquered people on edge when it was not needful, in not driving men to the verge of rebellion in our rear. There was greater wisdom in adopting the customs of those governed to some extent, for useful things may be discovered by all peoples.

  Of course most people did not agree, not even most of the Companions. Krateros and Parmenio and many others kept to the old Macedonian ways, and thought it shameful to wear trousers like a Persian, or eat duck roasted in pomegranate sauce rather than plain over the fire as their mothers had made. They did not mind the spoils of Persia, women and treasure and good things, but that was all it was—treasure to bring home that would make them men of consequence in Macedon.

  Half Carian and half Greek as I was, raised in Miletus under Persian rule, I had been given always to understand that Greek was best, and that the rest of the world but a pale and imperfect imitation of the way things were done in Attica. I myself, half Greek, should never be as good as if I were whole, myself a pale copy of the man I might have been if I had not been so flawed.

  Now, I wondered. Carian was not such a terrible thing to be. There had been cities in Caria for a thousand years, and Miletus was older than Athens. Millawanda it had been, a Hittite city with massive walls, before Athens was founded. And Egypt was older still, ancient as the dawn of time, and Babylon with her mighty walls was only the latest of the citadels of the peoples who had ruled that land. It was a fine thing to be Greek, but as I saw more of the world I thought that it was not the only fine thing to be. Truly the world had many marvels in it, and Persia had its share.

  Besides, if Hephaistion son of Amyntor thought it no disgrace to dress like a Persian noble, how should I? If he clasped Oxathres to him in friendship, what dishonor did I court by acknowledging that my mother was Carian? If I, nothing but a half-breed castoff, sold as a slave without a backward glance, could be given a man's place and a man's honor as Companion, then why should not any man aspire to such? Indeed, my heart whispered in the night, what heights might I myself aspire to?

  All this was because of General Hephaistion, lover of the King.

  In my worship of my hero I thought him very old, but at that time he was only twenty-nine, if past the full beauty of his youth. He had recently let his red hair grow in the manner of the Persian nobles rather than the Greeks, and he was clean-shaven, with frank brown eyes and a rather high forehead. In his boyhood he might have been classically pretty, but even without the fresh young looks the Greeks prefer he was a handsome man. It seemed that the King thought so too, for he never had another lover.

  Of course there was the eunuch Bagoas who was a royal favorite, but that was not the same thing at all. First of all, a slave is not a lover, and secondly a eunuch can hardly be reckoned a man. The Greeks do not understand this at all, but raised in Miletus as I was, I did. Eunuchs are a third sex, neither man nor woman, but more like to women than men in that they do not bear arms and concern themselves primarily with domestic labor. For Alexander to have a favorite from the harem that had belonged to Darius was nothing to Hephaistion, and not even to be mentioned in the same breath with him, a lover who commanded armies, a companion who stood forever at Alexander's right hand, Patroclos to his Achilles.

  However, royal favorites had attained power before, counselors and governors for kings who spent more time in hunting and feasting than in the less amusing aspects of being king. Bagoas was not to be entirely discounted.

  I was surprised, then, to see him at the wedding feast. I remember that I wondered at the time if Alexander had honored him to soften the blow of the wedding, and thought it odd that Alexander should have him at the tables like a man and a Companion. Perhaps I would have spoken to him, but by the time the crowd had begun to sing and dance outside the bedroom doors I had lost sight of him and did not see him again.

  Indeed by that part of the evening most of the guests were as drunk as I. Only Ptolemy seemed marginally sober among the me
n of rank, and he was flushed and loud. My head spinning from the wine and the incense, I pushed my way outside away from the music and the shouted songs. The cool air would clear my head.

  Outside, the night was welcoming. A cold moon was rising away over the mountain peaks, and Orion the Hunter struggled up the sky with his belt of stars. Below, the valley fell away in crags and defiles to the thin band of the river reflecting the skies like a fillet of silver. I walked some way, away from the shouts and torches. My head was pounding, and I vaguely hoped I wouldn't be sick. Perhaps if I sat down somewhere quiet…

  Hephaistion was sitting on a stone that jutted out from the parapet wall, a cup in his hand while the light glittered off his white chiton, his feet dangling over a drop of a hundred feet. The slow, careful way he lifted the wine to his mouth told me he was very drunk indeed.

  Maybe, I thought, it was a bad idea to drink on the edge of a hundred-foot drop.

  Carefully, I climbed out to where he was. Hephaistion looked at me unsurprised, as though we met thus every day. “Oh, hello, Lydias.”

  I sat down beside him, not looking over the edge. I certainly didn't want to fall over. “This isn't a very good place for a drink,” I said.

  “It's a fine place for a drink,” Hephaistion said, and lifted the cup again. “Quiet.” He waved a hand about loosely. “Not all that singing. Do you sing, Lydias?”

  “Not very well,” I said truthfully.

  “That's a shame,” Hephaistion said. His hair had escaped from the clasp that held it, and fell across his shoulders glittering like old copper in the moonlight. “Singing is a good thing.”

  He was very, very drunk. “Don't you think it might be a good idea to come back on the parapet?” I asked.

  “Why?”

  I toyed with saying, because you might fall, but thought that might be taken as a challenge. “Because that's where there's more to drink,” I said.

  Hephaistion threw his arm over my shoulder. “That's an excellent idea,” he said. “You're always on top of supply, Lydias.”