Stealing Fire

by Jo Graham

  “That is true,” I said. I had thought about that very clearly when I represented him in Upper Egypt, but I had not considered it here.

  “You would not want the Egyptians to think him a parsimonious master who does not pay his men enough to live on,” Bagoas said. “I am not saying that you must keep great state, but a decent house and a few servants is not excessive. He pays you, doesn't he?”

  “Well, yes,” I said. “I suppose he pays me well. But I don't usually draw my full pay. I just leave it in the treasury and draw enough for whatever I think I'll need.”

  “And so Ptolemy gets the loan of your pay at no interest.” Bagoas smiled again. “You will never be a wealthy man.”

  “I have no desire to be,” I said, shrugging. “There's not much I want that money can buy. Can money bring the dead to life again?”

  “No,” Bagoas said, and his eyes were grave. “But is there nothing worth living for?” He gestured around the busy marketplace, the walls of Memphis golden in the sun, the river winding north toward Alexandria and the sea. “Nothing?”

  “No,” I said. “There are things. Keeping faith. That is one thing. And…”

  And how could one wish to die when one stood in Memphis on a blue morning, with a freshening breeze pulling at us and Bagoas watching me with his green eyes? If Death came for me, I should greet her with equanimity, but I did not wish to die. Which rather surprised me. It was not as simple as it had been before I came to Egypt.

  I looked down from the walls and met Bagoas’ eyes. His handsome face was still. I wondered when he had wished to die, and why he had not, but that is not the kind of thing one can ask in a public marketplace. Perhaps it is not the kind of thing one is ever meant to know, but I was certain he had gazed over that brink.

  And in that moment I saw him entirely anew. Alexander's lover, a Persian, a peerless courtier—all those things I had seen, but now instead I saw a man my age at loose ends with nothing before him except the endless service of a dead king, a lifetime of attending to a body in a golden coffin, the walls of a foreign temple closing around him. There should be no more travel, no more mornings in the high mountains when the air paled to silver, no more precious rooms redolent with incense where decisions were made that affected thousands. I might come and go, a trusted officer and sometime diplomat, and while I lived I should not want for things to do or promises to keep. But Bagoas’ story was ended. He had belonged to Darius and then Alexander. And now he was nothing.

  “You have been so kind to me,” I said, as he stood there in the street holding the cloth for the curtains. “I cannot thank you enough for it.”

  He had seen the change in my face, but did not guess the reason. “You are very welcome, Lydias,” he said. “You need someone to look after you.”

  “Maybe I do,” I said.

  IT WAS ALMOST evening when the messenger found me bearing words from Ptolemy. I told Bagoas I should have to leave in the morning for Alexandria, as it was too late in the day.

  “Well,” he said, “putting your room to rights will have to wait. You will have dinner with me again?”

  “I would like that,” I said. He had carefully not asked what Ptolemy wanted, but I told him over dinner.

  “He wants me in Alexandria immediately,” I said. “To help him greet his bride.”

  Bagoas choked on his wine. “Bride?”

  “Bride,” I said. “Antipatros’ daughter, Eurydice. She's eighteen years old, sent out from Macedon as a token of alliance. He's forty-three, and he's been with Thais for sixteen years.” I helped myself to more duck. It was very, very tasty.

  Bagoas spread his fingers. “That has nothing to do with it, does it? Surely he won't treat her badly after so long together.”

  “No, of course not,” I said, thinking of the way Ptolemy had bent over the children when he sent them from Babylon, the way he and Thais exchanged glances as though pages of text were written in a look. “He loves her truly, and they have a daughter and two sons, with the new baby. But surely she must feel it, when he puts a bride in her place. And if the point is to get an heir…”

  “He will have to put a good face on it,” Bagoas said, and did not look up from his meat. “Kings must.”

  Belatedly, I realized what point I had run onto and changed course frantically. “What I can't understand is why he wants me there. I don't know anything about welcoming highborn brides!”

  “Perhaps he wants you there to stand beside him,” he said. “A friend with no other interests in the matter. Is this girl supposed to actually take over the running of the Household?”

  I put my cup down. “I'm not sure there is a Household, not in the sense we had with the King. The last time I was there no one had really gotten around to building a palace yet. More of a stoa. I hope that's changed, as I expect the bride will want four walls.”

  Bagoas put his hand to his forehead. “Rooms? Furniture? Linens? Servants? She can be expected to bring her own clothes and some other things with her, but surely Ptolemy doesn't want her to walk into bare rooms. It looks…”

  “Cheap,” I said.

  “You should see to that before she gets there.”

  “I have no idea what should be done!” I said. “Bagoas, you can tell me but…”

  “Is there no one you could ask to help you?” He raised the pitcher and poured out more wine for me.

  I thought for a moment. “I suppose Artashir's senior wife, Amina. She was raised as a Persian gentlewoman. She might not know how things should be done for a Macedonian, but she ought to be able to fit out a Persian bride and know what to get.” In the old days I could not have spoken to her, a respectable woman and wife of a nobleman, but things had changed in the baggage train and in this new city. I didn't think Artashir would mind if I spoke to his wife and asked her advice.

  “That would work,” Bagoas said, and changed the subject.

  It was not until I was halfway to Alexandria that I wondered if he had wanted me to ask him to come instead.

  EURYDICE WAS PRETTY enough, I thought. She looked a good deal like her older brother, Cassander, who I did not like, but that was nothing to hold against her. Her hair was light, like his, and she had a long, straight nose and flat cheekbones, Illyrian or Epirote in features. You could see the fierce blood that had come off the steppes, the same way you could see it in Alexander. But then, his mother was Epirote too. They had married into the noble houses of Macedon quite a lot.

  In manner Eurydice could not have been more unlike Cassander. Where he was pushy, always the first horse at the trough, so to speak, Eurydice seemed shy. She was hesitant to speak, more even than I thought natural for a young girl so far from home. But perhaps I had gotten used to the campaign brides, who if they had not been something out of the ordinary wouldn't have been there in the first place.

  I was sent with an honor guard to meet her ship and escort her to the palace, and I presented myself in my best chiton and shined breastplate, scrubbed and pretty as possible. When she replied to my offer to place myself at her service, I could barely hear her.

  “We are most complimented by your service,” her attendant said, standing behind her. “Very proper.” Her frank brown eyes met mine. “I am Eurydice's aunt, her mother's sister. My name is Berenice, and I have come with my niece to help her in her duties.”

  “The Hipparch Lydias,” I said, bowing again. The aunt was thirty or so, plump and dark-haired, with a direct look about her and color in her face from the sea wind. “There are rooms prepared for you ladies, if you would accompany me?”

  “Antigone! Magas!” She turned and called, and two children came running from where they had been standing at the ship's rail, watching the sailors make fast, a little girl about eight and a boy perhaps two years younger. “It's time to go ashore! Eurydice, let me fix your himation.”

  The children skidded to a halt, poking and giggling, their eyes round at my gleaming steel harness.

  Berenice looked around from where s
he was repinning Eurydice's veil. “My children from my first marriage.”

  “What has brought you here?” I asked. Surely a woman with young children would not want to cross the seas.

  “Enough of being a poor relation on my former brother-in-law,” she said, but her eyes were laughing. “And I've all but brought Eurydice up. So I thought we'd try something new.”

  The girl smiled, and her face was transformed, more like a bride and less like a sacrifice. It came to me that she must be terrified.

  I made myself as agreeable as possible. “It is a great honor to welcome you to Alexandria on behalf of Ptolemy. I know that he has been eagerly awaiting you, Lady. I hope that you will find our city and your quarters to your liking. There are no official functions planned tonight, as it was thought that you might like an evening to rest and get your shore legs back before the wedding tomorrow.” I glanced up at the aunt. “I'm afraid we are still under construction, as it were. I have arranged for a noble lady, Amina the wife of General Artashir, to show you your rooms and to help with anything you may require.”

  “That is very nice,” Berenice said.

  Eurydice looked up at me. “This Amina… is she…”

  “Persian,” I said firmly. Her brother, Cassander, had been of the party that objected the most when Alexander took up Persian ways and allowed Persians to serve beside Greeks. I did not know whether these were merely Cassander's opinions, or reflections of his father's. If it were the latter, and Eurydice now came up against all she had been taught, I must be definite that her husband's opinions on the matter were quite different. Ptolemy could not afford a bride who would make trouble with any of his subjects. “We are a city of many peoples, Lady, as Great Alexander's court was. But I assure you that Amina's Greek is quite good, and she will be able to help you communicate with the Egyptian servants, and with the Persian and Bactrian ones.”

  “Why not all Greek slaves?” the girl asked.

  I spread my hands. “Very few of our servants are slaves, Lady. They're simply too expensive to import, and few Egyptians are slaves and they do not speak Greek in any event. Most of the palace servants that Amina and I have hired are luckless women from the baggage train, the wives of men who have died or who are too crippled to work. They are cooks and laundresses, maids and seamstresses and the like. They work for a wage and bread and board for their children. If they have boys old enough, some of them are working in the stables or doing other work of the house. It is much cheaper than importing slaves from Greece, Lady. And I am sure they do better work too.”

  “Very sensible,” Berenice said with a nod. “It's a different world, Eurydice, and we shall have a lot to learn.”

  “If you will come this way, ladies?” I suggested.

  THE NEXT DAY I stood beside Ptolemy, one of four Companions who stood as kinsmen while he married Eurydice. I thought the wedding went off well enough. The food and the dancing had a very Persian flair, thanks to the management of the redoubtable Amina, who I thought could probably provision an army on the march without breaking a sweat. The bride was all Greek, her pale blue chiton and himation with worked borders looking like a statue of Artemis. Or perhaps Iphigenia.

  I poured a quick libation in the corner where nobody would notice, to ward off that thought.

  Ptolemy looked grave rather than exuberant as a bridegroom should be, but then he was forty-three, and not prone to display at any time. He sat beside her at the wedding feast, turning to her to talk in low tones.

  Of course Thais was not there. He had spared her that.

  I was both surprised and flattered to find myself in the position of kin. But I suppose Ptolemy had no real kindred there, and there was value in having myself, Manetho, and Artashir all in prominent positions.

  When we had sung the bride and groom to bed, it was our job to make it clear that Ptolemy did not want a crowd outside the door all night, listening and being rowdy, so we cleared them out and sent them back down to the hall for a last round of drinking, and then out into the night.

  Amina came up while I stood with Artashir, making sure no one crept back in.

  “We survived it,” Amina said.

  “We did.” Artashir ducked his head against her shoulder, his forehead against her as she smiled down fondly at him. “Lydias and I should probably stay here the rest of the night, but you could go home.”

  “I don't mind staying alone,” I said, and was surprised to find a strange jealousy uncurling in my midst. “You can go on. I'll stay here with the guardsmen until at least the turning of the watch.”

  “You don't mind?”

  “Not at all,” I said, and watched them leave, two tall, well-matched figures, his arm around her waist.

  Would there ever again be someone waiting for me?

  ROSES

  I went to see Thais the next day, early in the morning.

  They say transplanted roses never bloom, but they did in the garden of Thais the Athenian. She had made a bower on new soil, enclosed by fine stone walls, fig trees, and exotic apricots shading a bench. Or at least they would shade the bench when they were taller. Now they cast fleeting shadows across the sandstone. Roses were trained in the shadow of the wall, rising from a bed that smelled strongly of horse manure.

  It made me smile. Without it, I should never know this paradise was earthly.

  Thais came forward to greet me, her veil about her shoulders, neither as modest as a Greek woman or as brazen as an Egyptian. She was thirty-five, but the beauty that had captivated everyone lingered still, the firebrand who had burned Persepolis.

  “My dear lady,” I said, and inclined my head in greeting.

  No doubt she wondered why I had come, and she was not one to play around it. “Lydias,” she said, and her eyes were a little sharp. “Have you come to show me that I am not entirely forgotten?”

  “I am here only for myself, not Ptolemy,” I said. “I have no idea where it stands between you, but I am steadfast in my friendships.”

  At that she looked surprised. “Come and sit down, then,” she said, and led me to the bench, she sitting at one end and I at the other. There was no one there but us, and a young maidservant digging in a rose bed at the end of the garden. “You are wondering where it is with us.”

  “It is not my business,” I said awkwardly. “But I have always liked you very much.”

  “And you thought if there were bad feelings you might mend them.” Thais smiled at me and shook her head. “It is a kind thought, if it were need‑ful. But this is not the first time, you know. Ptolemy married Artacama, the daughter of Artabazos, in Persia when Alexander commanded it.”

  “Yes, but that was by the King's command,” I said. “This was not.”

  “It was needful,” Thais said, “if he is to be Pharaoh of Egypt.” I startled, and she raised an eyebrow. “Do you think he has not told me what the gods of Egypt offered him? But I am not a concubine to a pharaoh. I am a free hetaira, as I have been since he came to my door in Athens. I will not live in his palace with his wife, arranging her banquets and taking care of her clothes. I will live in my own house, with my children, and if he wishes to see me he can come here.”

  I looked at her in amazement and admiration.

  Thais played with a fold of her himation. “Like Aspasia before me, I have my dignity. And if I surrendered that I should not have his love.”

  “I believe he loves you deeply,” I said. Certainly there was nothing in the wedding the day before that suggested he had gone to Eurydice with even lust.

  “And I him,” she said. “Though it is not true that I have wandered the world for him. Rather that he gave me a way to do what a woman can otherwise not. He gave me my freedom.” Thais put her head back, as if to drink in the blue sky of the Black Land above.

  “Freedom is the greatest good,” I said.

  She nodded. “And now we will see what comes of it. In time my daughter should have been a hetaira after me, and our sons acknowledged and made sold
iers or set up in business. But the only children of Pharaoh are a different matter than the illegitimate children of a general.”

  “Yes,” I said, “and perhaps one day there will be some other heir, but for now…” I spread my hands. “I did not know he had agreed to the gods’ bargain.”

  “He will agree,” Thais said serenely. “Ptolemy will have no other choice.”

  The child I had taken for a maidservant got up, dusting off her hands on the front of her chiton, as if wondering whether to come over or not. “Mother?” she called, and I realized that it was Chloe.

  I should hardly have known her otherwise. More than two years had passed since our wild journey from Babylon, an eternity in a girl her age. She was tall like her mother, with Ptolemy's nondescript brown hair. And then she looked at me.

  I do not think I had ever seen her full in the face, in daylight. Her eyes were storm gray, irises rimmed in black, wide and colored like tempered steel, like winter skies, eyes Praxiteles had sculpted, eyes no one had ever captured in paint. She had Alexander's eyes exactly.

  There had always been the rumors, of course, that Ptolemy was Alexander's brother, that his mother had been Phillip's before Phillip was King. I did not know if they were true or not, and I had doubted all these years that Ptolemy knew. Now I knew that he had. The truth was in his daughter's eyes.

  “You see?” Thais said softly. “He is the nearest kin after Alexander's son, brother of the King that was.”

  “Alexander must have known,” I said, realizing. “And Bagoas.” And now she trusted me to know this.

  Thais nodded. “And Hephaistion. Chloe was an infant when Ptolemy took the road to India. I stayed in Susa. It was supposed to be a short campaign, and I could not take the road east with a baby three weeks old. It was almost five years before he returned.” Thais spread her himation on the bench, and Chloe came and sat beside her with her arm about her waist. She had heard this story before. “I waited almost five years for him in Susa, hoping that he would live and love me still.”