by Jo Graham
The boy groom shouted, and I saw one of the King's squires turn around.
Slowly, so slowly as though we all moved underwater, I saw Sati lift her head, saw her brows knit together.
I ran. I always ran. In this dream as in life I ran so slowly, so endlessly slowly.
She dropped the pot, the precious lentils spilling on the ground. I saw her scoop Sikander onto her hip, saw his mouth open in a startled wail.
I ran. I ran toward them, straight toward the wave high as temples that crashed down, tossing horses in the picket lines like straws, tents and men and all. I ran straight toward the wave and Sati ran toward me, Sikander on her hip.
My arm closed around her and the baby, and the wave broke, her mouth open in a soundless scream.
The water tore me loose and threw me hard against something, the weight of my steel breastplate holding me down. Holding me underwater. Holding me underwater.
I WOKE GASPING for breath stretched beside Bagoas and struggled up from covers and pillows.
I sat on the side of the bed and buried my face in my hands.
Bagoas said nothing, just put his arm around my back, and when I said nothing began to stroke the back of my neck. I wondered how often he had done this before, and for whom.
“I can never get there any faster,” I whispered. “No matter how many times I do it, I never get there any faster.”
“You never will,” he said.
“I know,” I said. Even in my dreams I would know that was not true. “They were burned on a pyre with the other dead, their ashes scattered to the desert winds.” I bent my head. “I should have died. I should have died too.”
“You were simply lucky,” Bagoas said. “As was I.” He had been there too. But he was not a child and he could swim.
“I am not sure that I am lucky,” I said. “I am not sure I would have wanted to live.”
“If you had not, who would remember them?” Bagoas asked.
Tears fell from my eyes. “No one,” I said. Who in all the world would mourn the passing of a bad-luck bride, of a baby who lived ten months under the sun, who was nothing to anyone except me, because he was my son? Who would ever remember them?
“Their memory would blow like their ashes except for you,” Bagoas said. “So you must live and remember, and perhaps one day tell another son of his brother that was, that he may pour a libation too.”
“I will never have another son,” I choked. “I will never marry again.”
“You should,” Bagoas said, his hands working gently on the back of my neck. “You need someone to take care of you.”
“I do not,” I said.
Bagoas chuckled. “Yes, you do. You should find a good woman to take care of you. You are meant for a family.”
“And you?”
Bagoas shrugged. “What has that to do with us?”
“I know it's usual, but it seems so very complicated.” I lay back down at his urging, and he leaned across my back, his long hair brushing my shoulders. Most men had a wife and a lover both, but I had no idea how I would find the energy. It seemed hard to manage both at once without bad feeling and neglecting one or the other. It was on the tip of my tongue to mention Alexander and Roxane, but I thought better of it.
“I am not looking for a patron,” Bagoas said, stretching. “I don't want that.”
“I know,” I said. Like Thais, he had his pride, and would come and go as he pleased. Like Ptolemy, I respected that.
I did not suppose he had ever had the choosing of it before, to say yes or no as he wished. I could not imagine that the King had been unkind, but he was the King, and one does not say no.
“Perhaps Ptolemy can find someone for you,” he said. “I imagine he would if you asked him.”
“I'm not about to ask Ptolemy for a bride,” I said, but I wondered. Who but me should remember, and should I be the last? Did I have any love left to offer a young woman, a new baby? I would not want to marry and give her nothing except memories and bitterness.
“Maybe something will come up,” Bagoas said. He pressed his lips to my shoulder.
“Maybe it will,” I said. It seemed less wrong to put those things on Bagoas, who understood sorrow, and who was anything except young and innocent. If he could bear my scars, I would bear his.
In truth, we did not fit badly. If he found me mild and yielding, he did not complain of it. Rather he seemed to enjoy leading instead of following, playing the lover rather than the beloved. It has always been my nature to yield rather than conquer, much to the amusement and pleasure of Sati, who was at first amazed that I was not done in ten minutes, but barely begun. Bagoas, slower to pleasure by virtue of his situation, did not seem to find it amiss either.
“Don't worry so much,” he said, and ruffled my hair. “You have plenty of time for all of that.”
“I suppose so,” I said, and wondered if I did. I had grown used to never counting the days ahead. What would happen if I did count them again, if I did say to myself, I shall do such and such in the spring? If I began to imagine a future in which the seasons turned and I were still living? Months, even years, might pass and I might live.
I laid my head down against the pillow. I did not know if I could begin that.
“Perdiccas will not come for many months,” Bagoas said. “Did you not say that yourself?”
“I did,” I said.
“Well, then.” He lay beside me, his arm about my shoulders. “Then you have so long and you know it. Nothing will happen until then.”
“That is true,” I said. A few months. I could decide to live until Perdiccas came. I turned, and took him in my arms.
IT WAS TEN days later, on a day when Ptolemy had no need of me, that I found my way to the temples of Memphis again. This time I did not go the Temple of Thoth, but along the walls of the city where they rose forty feet from the surface of the river. To the west I could see the temples at Saqqara, on the edge of the desert above broad cultivated lands, lush and green with date palms. There was a lake there as well, fed by irrigation canals, where the white birds sacred to Ptah lived. A little ferry boat was at midstream, running back and forth as it always did across the expanse of the Nile. The river was deep and swift opposite the city, though upstream there was an island where the waterbirds nested.
The walls of Memphis were high at this point, and gave a good view. Just a little farther along was the Temple of Sobek, where they kept the sacred crocodiles.
There was a broad rail high as a man's chest carved with warning signs, but I could lean on it and look over at the monstrous animals in the temple pool below that gave through a grate on the Nile. Beneath the green water, scales and snouts broke the surface. One monster drew himself up on land to bask in the sun on the sandy bank provided for them. He was at least three times a man's height in length, but not slow for all that.
“They are the avengers,” a voice said behind me, and I turned.
Manetho had come up, and he stood looking over the rail beside me. He looked very young for his pleated white linen, his serious expression.
“The avengers?”
“Sobek is the god of justice,” Manetho said. “They are dangerous, of course. Justice is dangerous. It is a sword with two blades, and may cut the man who wields it as well.”
I nodded gravely.
“You go here,” Manetho said, “not the brothels or taverns? Instead you come to temples?”
I shrugged. “Why should I spend my time in brothels or taverns?”
“For the same reasons most men do.” Manetho's face was mild.
“Everyone seems so concerned with finding me a woman,” I said.
Manetho laughed. “What is it that you want, then?”
“Nothing you can give me,” I said.
He nodded slowly. His eyes were a priest's eyes, calm and impenetrable. “Perhaps the Black Land can give you something, Lydias of Miletus. Perhaps it is Isis whose gifts you need, the Lady of Amenti with Her mercy.”
/> “I don't know,” I said, and looked down into the pool of crocodiles. I wondered if he could tell me what it meant that I had wielded the powers of Egypt on the road, that I had seen the Dead City. But I did not know if I could trust him yet.
Manetho pushed back from the rail. “Tell Ptolemy that the gods will not wait forever. He must decide.” And with that he strode away, his shaven head gleaming in the sun.
WE DID NOT have much time at all. It was only a few days later that a messenger came to Memphis with all haste. He had slipped out of the port of Tyre at night on a fishing boat belonging to his brother, hoping for vast rewards. He got them, as Ptolemy needed his news badly.
Perdiccas was in Tyre with his army.
Ptolemy rubbed his brow and laid it out, while I and Artashir and Nicanor and several others tried to read the dispatch upside down. “Ten thousand infantry. Two thousand cavalry. Forty elephants. A thousand horse archers.”
I caught Artashir's eye and saw him grimace. He commanded fifty, all that we still had. With the losses I had taken stealing the hearse, even with our wounded who were recovering, I didn't think we could field more than seven hundred cavalry, and perhaps not quite that. Our infantry phalanxes were in better condition. We had eight thousand. And no elephants.
“We're going to have to wear him down a little bit at a time,” Ptolemy said. “Use our natural defenses.”
“The river,” I said.
Ptolemy nodded. “He'll have to come by road to Pelousion if he wants to cross the first branch of the Nile. And the fortress at Pelousion guards the crossing and the river mouth.”
“If he has to besiege Pelousion he has a problem,” Artashir said. “It doesn't matter how much he outnumbers us in elephants or cavalry or horse archers. They're not going to be any use to him.”
“The defenses of Pelousion are good,” I said.
Ptolemy nodded again. “And that's where we're going to meet him. Artashir will go to Camel's Fort, halfway up the Nile from Pelousion to Memphis, as our rearguard. The rest of us will go on to Pelousion. Lydias, you have the cavalry.”
I opened my mouth and shut it again, my maimed hand plain on the table.
“It doesn't matter,” Ptolemy said, and his brown eyes were calm. “Put Glaukos in the front of the charge if you must. But you have the cavalry.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, and blinked lest I tear up.
Though what cavalry should do behind the walls of Pelousion I didn't know. Scouting, I presumed. We would be the eyes and ears of the army.
I REJOINED MY command at Pelousion at the beginning of the summer, when the crops were in and the Inundation still weeks away. The Delta steamed under the midday sun, the river running slow and sluggish, shrunken by the season. When Sothis rose again in the dawn sky, so the river would rise.
Glaukos took one look at my hand, still withered and twisted-looking. “Well, you fucked that up pretty good!”
“I did,” I said and came and pounded him on the back. “How've you been? Up to a tangle with Perdiccas?”
“Is it true we're outnumbered three to one?”
I shook my head. “No, you know how rumor is. Not even two to one, though he's got elephants.”
Glaukos cursed long and fluently. “I hate elephants. Did I tell you about the time that Alexander sent me to get some?”
“Yes,” I said quickly. “You did. So how are we looking?”
“Six hundred and ninety-six men mounted and well. Ninety-seven, counting you.” He looked at my hand again dubiously.
“You're taking the point,” I said. “I can't ride and use a sword at the same time yet. But Perdiccas isn't going to wait for me!”
At that he laughed as I'd meant him to. “Well, I suppose we can manage. All the real work for me, of course.”
“But with my brains and your brawn…” I grinned.
“We'll get by,” Glaukos said. “Of course we're probably going to all get trampled by elephants. You know that, right? When Perdiccas was in Babylon he couldn't get a bunch of the old Macedonians to go along with his plans, so he had three hundred of them rounded up and trampled to death by elephants. Put the rest of the army on notice, it did.”
I'd missed that story, being in Memphis on leave and with Ptolemy rather than in the hotbed of army gossip. “That helped morale a lot, I expect.”
Glaukos laughed. “It shut them up, anyway! He's a hard man to serve under. Always was.”
“That's not how you bind men to you,” I said. “Alexander never did it.”
“Oh, Alexander,” Glaukos said. “Alexander never had to.”
Three years, I thought. It had been three years since Glaukos and I had ridden from Babylon, from Alexander's bier. Had we changed so much in so short a time? Now we faced one another, Companion against Companion.
A GREAT ARMY cannot conceal its passing, and Perdiccas did not try to. From the time they passed Gaza we knew exactly where they were, and how many miles they were making with each day's march. We could guess to a day when they would appear at the opening out of the wadis, looking across the great floodplain of the river delta to Pelousion.
“They'd have more trouble if the river were up,” Glaukos said gloomily.
“The river won't rise for a couple of weeks,” I said. We waited while they came ever closer, but I knew that road all too well. They would come to us long before the Nile could swell. “Besides, they still can't ford it here.” The Nile might be broken into several main branches in the Delta, but the great eastward branch that flowed into the sea at Pelousion was never shallower than a man's height, even at the peak of the dry season. It could not be forded except at Pelousion, where the pharaohs of old had built causeways and bridges. And the fortress guarded those passes.
In that day the walls of Pelousion were thirty feet high, and though they were built in an antique style they were stout. They were not quite vertical, but had a slight beetling, each course of stone set slightly out from the one beneath it, so that if a man attempted to scale it he would be overtopped by the wall above. It also made things much trickier for scaling ladders, as the bases must then be set some distance out from the walls and would have no stability at the bottom, as they would only touch the wall at the top. These were by no means inconsequential obstacles.
The weak point was the gates, which were exceptionally wide and held with bronze doors bound with iron. But there was only one set of them. There were no inner courtyards or series of walls and gates—just the main gate that gave into Pelousion. It was there that we must concentrate our men defending it, just as that must be the point where Perdiccas would seek an advantage.
Fortunately, there were strong flanking towers, and we had some Egyptian bowmen who, while not the speedy Persian horse archers Perdiccas had, were very competent soldiers though they could not possibly withstand a charge or a marching phalanx, clad as they were in linen and armed only with bows. From the walls of a fortress they could still do considerable damage. It was for that reason that Ptolemy had sent some of them south with Artashir to the fort at Camel's Fort, as that was the next fordable place along the river. We had to guard our backs as well.
We waited and we waited. Each day my scouts reported in. Perdiccas was closer. I knew it in my bones the day he passed the boundary stones, the day he entered Egypt. I thought, from the edgy way he seemed at dinner, that Ptolemy knew too. The gods had offered him a bargain. Was it now too late? Had he decided to reject it?
I thought not. I thought that Ptolemy was cautious, and he would try this first by his own strength of arms, resorting to any other power only if that failed him.
Some of our scouts, the cleverest men, were given special instructions to slip into Perdiccas’ camp at night and pass among the fires listening to rumors and spreading some of their own. It was true, they said, that Ptolemy had offered a bonus to any of Alexander's men who would leave Perdiccas and come to him—a year's pay and a house of their own in Alexandria, the same terms his men had been offer
ed. No hard feelings. If they came to Ptolemy they would be welcomed as brothers with no questions asked.
One of our scouts mistakenly tried this among the Silver Shields, Alexander's oldest veterans, and was killed for his pains, but another came back with twenty men.
They had a great deal of news. I sat at Ptolemy's council when they told it out. Perdiccas had brought Roxane and the child with him.
“He is afraid to leave them in Babylon,” the man said. “They are the focus of so many plots and upheavals. He didn't dare to leave them while he marched on Egypt, so he has brought them with him, the King's mother and the baby king.”
Ptolemy nodded gravely, but I saw his jaw clench. He must be two and a half now, this baby boy Alexander had never seen, Ptolemy's nephew, cousin to Chloe and Lagos and Leontiscus. The most valuable blood prize in the world.
And his mother, who had murdered Queen Stateira before Alexander's body was cold.
“No one is to touch them,” Ptolemy said. “Is that clear?”
I nodded. “Surely Perdiccas will keep them well back from the fighting. They are too important to him.”
“If we had the boy and his mother…” one of the men began.
“Then we would have what?” I asked. “A deadly woman we must keep prisoner while she plots?”
“Why keep her?” Glaukos asked, scratching his chin. “It's the boy that matters.”
“And would we win the loyalty of a child by killing his mother or keeping her from him? Would that not result in raising a sovereign who would hate us, and who eventually would wield power in his own right against his jailers?” I snapped back.
Ptolemy held up a hand. “Peace,” he said. “Gentlemen, this debate is fruitless. Perdiccas is the Regent, not I. And Roxane is his ally, not his prisoner. There is no point in beating this about.” Yet I saw he was troubled.
As we left the meeting Glaukos walked next to me. “If we win he's got to kill the boy,” Glaukos whispered. “Anything else is too dangerous.”
