Men of Bronze

by Scott Oden

  "Al-Saffah!" he said, wringing the sweat from his eyes. "Ai-Saffah! The gods take you! " At Kadesh, the oasis of the Beni Harith, Arsamenes had warned him about the Medjay and their implacable captain. Warned him, a child of Sinai, that no good could come from tweaking the devil's beard! Why didn't Ilisten? Five-score of his men, his kin, paid for his arrogance, his foolishness. They were dead and Ghazi was trapped, the breadth of Egypt between himself and safety. He could still reach Memphis. From there, he …

  The crunch of a hobnailed sandal on stone shattered Ghazi's reverie. He glanced around, sword ready. The noise repeated itself. Fear-bile welled up in the shaykh's throat. Where? Dust trickled across his face, feathery light. Suddenly, a shadow stretched out before him.

  They're above me!

  Ghazi glanced up. Atop the wall, like one of the Furies in blood-splashed armor, crouched al-Saffah. His features were twisted into a mask of hate, and his slitted eyes burned with a baleful fire.

  "Bastard!" Barca hissed, his jaw clenching spasmodically.

  Ghazi paled. A high-pitched scream burst from his lips as he dropped his sword and bolted for the river. He thought of nothing save the promise of succor to be had in the Nile's muddy swirl. Terror lent his aging limbs speed. If only he could reach the river's edge …

  Pain blossomed in Ghazi's left shoulder. A fist-sized chunk of masonry, hurled with all the strength of Barca's arm, splintered the bone. The force of the blow sent the Arab cartwheeling. He struck the ground hard. Breath whooshed from his lungs, and his agonized shriek choked off in a tide of vomit. Ghazi fought for breath. He fought to drag his body, one arm useless, to the Nile's dark breast. A long shadow fell across him. The Arab craned his neck, eyes wide with panic.

  Al-Saffah leapt from the wall and stalked through the grass, a ribbon of blood drooling from the blade of his scimitar.

  Ghazi wept. "M-Mercy! P-Please, al-Saffah! Please …! "

  Barca's scimitar flashed down, crunching through the old man's shoulder and into his chest. "Did you bargain with the women and children of Habu?" he hissed, hacking at the flailing Bedouin. Again and again he struck until the thing under his blade grew unrecognizable even as human. With its hunger slaked, the Beast relinquished its grip on his body, leaving his limbs cold and trembling. Barca reeled away, his sword falling from his grasp. He stumbled backwards; leather scraped stone as he struck the wall and slid to the ground. He cradled his head in his hands …

  He struck as their moans reached a crescendo, driving the sword point-first between the Greek's shoulder blades. Vertebrae splintered as he leaned on the hilt. Beneath her lover, the young man's wife screamed, a piercing shriek that ended when the sword crunched through the Greek's body and into hers. Blood exploded from her nostrils. Cold, betrayed by his own rage, the young husband fled, leaving the lovers joined forever in death.

  "Neferu," he whispered.

  Tjemu spotted him first, walking through the windrows of the dead like a farmer in the wake of harvest. Barca paused beside knots of wounded Medjay, clapping their shoulders and laughing. In his presence groans ceased; grimaces of pain turned to triumphant smiles. The Libyan nodded to Ithobaal. "I cannot tell who loves him more, gods or men. Look at him. Barely a scratch. You've been with him longer than I have. What's his secret?"

  Ithobaal, who could claim kinship with King Achish of conquered Gath, shaded his eyes with a spade-like hand. Blood spattered his graying beard. At sixty, he was the old man of the Medjay, the voice of temperance and reason, the wise old wolf in a pack of killers. Blood-grimed fingers toyed with an amulet around his neck, a lapis uadjeton a leather thong.

  "Secret?" Ithobaal said, his voice like the tolling of a bell. "He has no secret. When death holds no terror for a man, little brother, what does he have left to fear?"

  Ithobaal watched Barca's mood darken as he approached. In all his years of soldiering, he had never met a man quite like the Phoenician. He had seen his share of veterans humbled by the aftermath of battle. Champions who tearfully thanked the gods for the gift of another day; princes who puked their guts up as fear caught up with them; kings who needed a moment alone to compose themselves. He'd seen men become so overawed by the recognition of one's own mortality that came on the heels of violent confrontation that they would never fight again. But not Barca. Never Barca. Without fail, the captain of the Medjay assumed the air of a man who had been cheated, a man who had been guaranteed a rendezvous with Death only to have it denied him.

  "Wine! " Barca snapped as he strode up to where the two men waited. Ithobaal tossed him a leather flask. He upended it, pouring as much in his mouth as what sluiced down his chin and armor. "How many dead?"

  Ithobaal grimaced. "Twenty-two. Another eight may not make it."

  "Send runners to the villages here about. We'll need supplies." Barca sat on the stump of a column. "These Bedouin were tougher than they looked. Wonder what drove them to strike this deep into Egypt?"

  "Not what, who. Found a dead Persian among them." Ithobaal handed the dispatch case to Barca. "He had this on him. I think the Bedouin might have been his escort."

  The case was a flat satchel of thick dark leather, stiffened with the messenger's blood and battered from innumerable handlings. Thongs held the flap in place, and a bulla of clay, impressed with the dragon-seal of Babylon, insured that its contents remained inviolate. "Escort to where?" Barca said.

  Tjemu peered over the Phoenician's shoulder as he broke the seal. Frowning, Barca drew out a heavy sheet of vellum. Tjemu grunted. The Libyan could not read, but his eyes marveled at the delicate Aramaic script filling the page. "What does it say?"

  Barca said nothing for a moment, his eyes sharpening to points. "It's addressed to the commander of the garrison at Memphis. It acknowledges some prior communication and … those sons of whores … it offers terms for their defection to Persia! "

  Tjemu whistled. "Amon's balls! "

  "Defection? You think it's genuine?" Ithobaal said. The threat of mutiny proved a powerful weapon in the longstanding war between mercenary and paymaster. Soldiers, especially hired swords, were a petulant lot, and only trustworthy while a campaign netted them slaves and spoils. An unhappy mercenary attracted offers from rival generals as a lodestone attracted iron filings.

  "The garrison is Greek," Barca said, a snarl twisting his features. "Greeks are fed treachery with their mother's milk!"

  Ithobaal shook his head. "Think about it, little brother. A mutiny? In Memphis? Word of such a thing should have spread the length and breadth of the Nile. Rumors would have reached the ears of Pharaoh himself if there were discontent among his pet Greeks."

  "True," Barca said. "But, some rumors can be silenced with promises, others with gold. The rest …" Barca trailed off, tapping the hilt of his sword. The Phoenician stood. All around the square, his Medjay cared for their dead. They stripped them of their armor, laid them out with reverence; their shields and personal effects would be taken back to Sile and enshrined in the temple of Horns Sopdu. The Bedouin dead, they ignored. Barca turned to face Ithobaal and Tjemu. "It will take at least three days for a rider to deliver this letter to Pharaoh at Sais. I want to be in Memphis by then, to see how things are for myself. How's the leg, Tjemu?"

  "A scratch," the Libyan replied, grinning.

  Barca nodded. "Good. Bury our dead, then shepherd the wounded to one of the nearby villages and make for Sais. Let no man dissuade you from giving the letter to Pharaoh directly. Ithobaal, you're with me. Gather those men with the scantiest wounds …"

  Ithobaal shook his head, then hawked and spat.

  "What?" Barca folded his arms across his chest.

  "Our place is guarding the border, not policing the Greeks." The Canaanite was a careful man, calculating and precise — a merchant in the guise of a soldier. "Don't give in to impulse, little brother. In my heart I agree with you: traitors should be run to ground. But instinct tells me this is unwise. If anything, we should make for Sais ourselves, warn Pharaoh, and aw
ait his orders. Going off like this, on a whim — "

  "Our place?" Barca checked his temper. "Our place is between Pharaoh and his enemies, wherever they may be. This is not an invasion. We'll go quietly, poke our noses where they don't belong, and be away before the Greeks know what happened." Barca started to turn away, stopped. "But if you plan to second-guess me at every turn, Ithobaal, perhaps you should return to Sile. I need men for this, not old women!"

  Ithobaal took a step toward his commander, his hand dropping to his sword hilt. "You son of a Tyrian whore! I was fighting Pharaoh's enemies while you were still wallowing in your own shit!"

  Barca grinned and tugged the old Canaanite's beard. "There's fire still in your belly, then, Ithobaal? Thank the gods! You had me worried." The Phoenician turned away and held the diplomatic pouch aloft, using it to gesture at the scattered Medjay. "Gather round, brothers! We're not going back to Sile, not yet! "

  2

  Memphis

  The sky above Saqqara burned white-hot, baking the sprawling necropolis like clay in the kiln of Ptah, the Creator. Stone and soil absorbed the heat, radiating it back in a dull imitation of the sun. Few things could survive in this waterless waste. Scorpions and beetles crawled through sand thick with yellowed bone, shards of pottery, and scraps of crumbling linen. Jackals slept the day away in the shade offered by the stair-stepped pyramid of Djoser. Falcons soared over the Serapeum in search of prey, riding that same bellow's-breath of air that rattled the leaves of acacias and sycamores yet provided little respite from the intolerable heat.

  Through this inferno a runner came.

  He was no ordinary man, this runner, but a Greek, born into a cult of personal glory and prowess that elevated him beyond the pale. Failure. Mercy. These were not words he used often, if at all, for to speak them would be to acknowledge them, to give them weight. Phanes of Halicarnassus acknowledged nothing save his own superiority.

  Physically, that superiority was plain to see: a perfection of face and form that seemed somehow a blending of mortal and divine. Broad of shoulder with lean — almost feminine — hips, his powerful frame carried a layer of iron-hard muscle forged on the anvil of war. Dark eyes set deep into an angular face glared at the wasteland before him as though it were an enemy ripe for conquest.

  He followed a vestigial road past crumbling pyramids, smaller than the monoliths at Giza, to the north, but impressive nonetheless. But if Phanes felt even the slightest twinge of awe at these constant reminders of Egypt's unfathomable age, he did not show it. For him, such glories of architecture, and their appreciation, were better left to the sophists.

  Phanes ran with a loping stride that ate up the miles, sweat sluicing down his naked torso, soaking the scrap of cloth twisted about his loins. He darted around a plodding oxcart carrying chunks of limestone down to the stone-cutters' market in Memphis. A grizzled old man and a lad of twelve eyed him as he passed. The boy made to wave, a smile cracking his brown face, but a harsh word from his grandfather aborted the gesture. The old man wore a look of tolerant disgust. They were a proud folk, these Egyptians, Phanes could not deny that. Proud, strong, and courageous, but lacking the all-consuming thirst for freedom that separated Greek from barbarian.

  Phanes crested a final ridge, the sun at his back, and beheld the panorama of the Nile Valley below. The sapphire ribbon of the river and the green of the cultivated fields stood in stark antithesis to the naked sand and rock of the desert's edge. More striking, though, was the city rising like a mirage from the Nile's bank.

  Memphis. The City of Menes. Situated on a broad plain eight miles long and four miles wide, and protected from the annual Nile floods by a complex system of dikes and canals, the foundations of Egypt's capital were laid even as Phanes' ancestors crept from their caves to ponder the riddle of fire. It was a bustling metropolis before Herakles endured his twelve labors; impossibly ancient on the eve of Ilium's fall. With each successive dynasty, Memphis grew in power and size, earning the appellation Ankh-Tawy, the Life of the Two Lands. By the year of Phanes' own birth, the generations who had lived and died in Memphis could be tallied in the hundreds.

  Dominating the cityscape was a sprawling complex of temples dedicated to the gods of the Memphite triad: Ptah, Osiris, and Sokar. According to ancient tradition, it was Ptah, the Egyptian Hephaestus, who created man, conjuring him by thought and word. For that gift, the gift of life, Egypt repaid the Chief Artificer by building for him an earthly palace of unrivaled splendor. The Mansion of the Spirit of Ptah was a collection of open-air courts, shaded colonnades, hypostyle halls, chapels, shrines, sacred groves, and pools. Every pharaoh since the second Rameses — great Ozymandias — felt duty-bound to glorify the Creator by adding another ornamental pylon, another obelisk, another statue, until the whole became as chaotic and jumbled as the Labyrinth of the Cretan king, Minos. North of Ptah's temple, at the end of an avenue of human-headed sphinxes, lay the enclosure of hawk-headed Sokar, protector of the necropolis; south, near the edge of the city, lay the solemn and brooding precinct of Osiris, the Lord of the Dead. Other, smaller temples radiated out from these.

  By the time Phanes reached the outskirts of Memphis, the sun was a ball of molten copper on the western horizon. He slowed his pace, drawing superheated air into his lungs in gulping breaths. The broad, dusty road swarmed with traffic. Men caked in grime trudged home from the quarries. Carts and wagons rattled over the hard-packed earth, laden with produce bound for the evening market in the Square of Deshur. Donkeys brayed and struggled. Oxen stumped along, led by brown-skinned children armed with frayed reeds. All around, flies rose in thick plague-like clouds, seemingly fueled by the combined stenches of rotting fish, dung, and rancid oil.

  This portion of Memphis, abutting Saqqara, was given over to the industry of death, and by Phanes' reckoning it was a thriving industry. His Greek forebears were pious folk, godfearing and mindful of tradition. They buried their dead with dignity, said a few prayers over the graves, and went on with their lives. Compared with the Egyptians, though, his ancestors were a disorganized pack of heathens. Phanes had never seen a society so enamored of death, and their fascination was reflected in the number and variety of merchants lining the street, hawking every conceivable amenity, from incense and unguents to palm wine and cedar resins. Potters sold canopic jars for the deceased's viscera; sculptors turned blue-glazed faience into small ushabti figurines; carpenters crafted coffins of palm-wood and cedar; jewelers worked gold, silver, lapis lazuli, and a whole host of semiprecious stones into amulets and fetishes; weavers made fine linen; scribes offered meticulously lettered copies of the Book of the Dead.

  Phanes passed a public well alongside the road in the shadow of a stand of palm trees. The canopy of green fronds crackled in the light breeze. A Nubian slave, nearly naked in the blistering heat, worked the creaky arm of a shadouf. His efforts filled the basin one bucket at a time. Men and women clustered around the stone-lined pond, some washing off the day's dust, others filling pottery jugs. A toddler squealed as his father splashed water over him. But, as the Greek ambled by, their laughter, their chatter, ceased. Even the children stopped, staring, fearful in the sudden silence. Phanes felt the hostility in their collective gazes.

  They did not hate him for his foreign blood. Indeed, two generations of Greek mercenaries had honorably served the kings of Sais, their heavy armor shaping a political landscape ravaged by years of Assyrian rule. No, they hated him because, instead of serving Pharaoh as mercenaries should, Phanes and his men strutted about like conquerors, taking what they wanted, and who. None were safe. Not the priests in their temples or the merchants in their stalls. Not their daughters or wives. Not their sons. The Greek garrison strangled Memphis with a noose of arrogance and greed, tightening it daily. Phanes sneered at their impotent rage.

  Ahead, a chariot cut through the human sea like the prow of a ship. Pedestrians scurried aside; the driver plied his whip to remove any stragglers from his path. Phanes grinned. The man who wor
ked the reins was Greek, as well, though burned dark as an Ethiop by the relentless sun. His height, combined with lean muscles and a long jaw, gave Phanes the impression of a racing hound, a thoroughbred. He wore a short Egyptian kilt of bleached linen, belted at the waist. Phanes raised a hand in greeting as the chariot drew abreast.

  "A true man," the driver said, curbing the horses, "would have made that run in full panoplia."

  "A true man," Phanes said, "or a Spartan?"

  "They are one in the same."

  "You are Spartan, Lysistratis, yet I see no sheen of sweat on your brow. Did you sprout wings and fly to the Serapeum?"

  "If I did, who then would look after your affairs in Memphis while we're off puttering in the desert?" Lysistratis said. "Come. You've a guest. That fool Callisthenes has returned from Delphi."

  Phanes' grin widened, a wicked gleam in his eyes. He leapt up into the chariot beside Lysistratis. "Praise the gods! That bastard's been away so long I feared he'd made off with our offering."

  "Why you would trust a fat and lazy merchant of Naucratis is beyond me," Lysistratis said. "I would have gone."

  "Only you would suspect good Callisthenes, jolly Callisthenes, of treachery. What was the oracle's answer?"

  The Spartan shrugged. "Wouldn't say. Says her message is for you, alone."

  Phanes expected as much. It wasn't superstition or piety that drove him to seek guidance from the gods, but tradition. Since hallowed antiquity, the Greeks undertook no expedition, nothing, without first consulting the proper oracles. Heroes sought divine wisdom in their dealings. Kings sought answers to thorny problems. Even the lowliest sheepherder beseeched the gods for guidance in raising worthy flocks and worthier sons. With that in mind, Phanes sent offerings to the temples of Zeus at Dodona, Gaia at Olympia, and Dionysus at Amphicleia. Thus far, the answers to his enquiries had been cryptic yet affirmative. The last, and the one he anticipated most, was the answer of the priestess of Pythian Apollo at Delphi.