Men of Bronze

by Scott Oden

  Lysistratis hauled on the reins, his horses disrupting the flow of traffic along the Saqqaran Road like a stone dropped into a fast-moving stream. Egyptians scrambled aside as the Spartan's whip cracked above their heads.

  Phanes openly leered at several of the women on the street, their linen skirts sheer, their bare breasts slick with sweat. "I'll not miss this slag-heap of a land, Lysistratis, but I will miss its women. Egyptian women are so … liberated."

  "I've heard the women of Persia are more beautiful." Lysistratis raised his voice to be heard over the clatter of the chariot's wheels. "Think Cambyses will share his seraglio with us?"

  Phanes grinned. "We give him Egypt, and I imagine he'd let us rut his sisters out of gratitude."

  From the Saqqaran Road, they crossed the broad, redpaved Square of Deshur at the western entrance of the Mansion of Ptah, where the Alabaster Sphinx glowed in the setting sun. Around this recumbent image, the evening market swirled. Men and women employed by the wealthier households bustled between stalls selling produce, bread, meat, and beer, haggling over prices, and arranging delivery to their masters' kitchens. Priests of the temples stood aloof as their factors inspected lambs and sheep, seeking those of the finest quality to serve as the next morning's offering to the gods. One such priest turned his head as Phanes' chariot passed; the Greek was unsure whether the sneer curling the priest's thin lips was intended for him, or for the bleating lamb his agent held between his knees.

  Phanes' eyes narrowed. "No matter what the oracle's answer may be, it's time we started culling the herd," he said, indicating the Egyptians with a nod of his head. "Use the Arcadians. Leon's men. But keep them under strict discipline, Lysistratis! I don't want a repeat of last summer's little orgy of violence. We're not the krypteia, and these aren't helots we're terrorizing."

  The Spartan glanced sidelong at his commander. He had been responsible for giving Leon's men a free hand during last summer's troubles, and though he found their methods deplorable — whole families executed to the last child — they were effective. The Arcadians were experts at rooting out discontent among the populace. "Where should they start?"

  "I leave it to you."

  The chariot rattled over a stretch of broken pavement before plunging down the great north-south avenue, called the Way of the Truth of Ptah. Lysistratis said, "There's a gaggle of wealthy men, old bureaucrats for the most part, who have been trying to get letters through to Pharaoh. Petenemheb showed them to me. Mostly, they complain at great length about the `arrogance of the Hellenes', and beg Pharaoh's intercession. I suspect they would organize any resistance the Egyptians might mount against us."

  "Who leads them?"

  "Most of the letters came from a man called Idu, son of Menkaura. A merchant, of all things," Lysistratis said, with a moue of distaste. His Spartan heritage gave him a healthy disdain for those who made their lives off the needs of others. "A dealer of wine."

  Phanes grunted. "Menkaura?"

  "You know him?"

  "There was a general from Memphis in the army of old Pharaoh Apries, during the Cyrene campaign. They called him," Phanes barely suppressed a grin, "the Desert Hawk."

  "If he's the same man, then his son does not share his martial pretensions," Lysistratis said. The chariot passed beneath the twin colossi of Pharaoh flanking the gates leading into the fortress enclosure of Ineb-hedj, the White Walls. Hoplite sentries snapped to attention, their spear-butts grinding against the flagstones. Bronze flashed in the fading sunlight. Ahead, on a manmade acropolis, the citadel walls reared above the city it professed to guard.

  "Use this Idu as an example," Phanes said, his face diabolical in the thickening shadow. "Menkaura, too. I want these Egyptians to bleed for me as I bled for them, Lysistratis. I want them to fear me before I pillage their peaceful little world."

  Callisthenes of Naucratis paced in a tight circle, his stubby fingers twittering with a finely carved jasper scarab that lay on his breast. Lamplight gleamed on his shaven skull, and the green malachite outlining his eyes — an Egyptian trick to lessen the sun's harsh glare — gave Callisthenes a sinister cast incongruous with the colorful linen robes draping his fleshy frame.

  The antechamber of the throne room at Memphis recalled the glory of an age long past, an epoch when Pharaoh's shadow stretched across the known world. Under incised and painted murals depicting the battle at Qadesh, dark bearded emissaries of the Hittite king would have felt outrage at the portrayal of their lord as coward. Dark-skinned Nubians, accounted the tallest men on earth, would have been made to feel small and inconsequential beneath the mammoth columns that supported the ceiling, their shafts like stalks of papyrus hewn from cold white limestone. Messengers from Palestine would have found the bound figures etched into the stone tiles to be a source of distress: at every step, they would grind their captive ancestors beneath their bare feet. The effect the chamber had upon foreigners who came to Memphis, whether a tribute bearer or princely ambassador, was to remind them of their place by reinforcing the splendor and majesty of the Lord of the Two Lands.

  An effect wasted on the two hoplites standing nearby.

  They were part of the squad tasked with holding inviolate the inner throne room. In rotating shifts they ground their spears outside the sealed gold-sheathed doors, bronze statues who would spring to murderous life should an intruder dare even to touch jamb, threshold, or lintel. Unlike their brothers walking sentry on the ramparts, the door wardens' vista never changed: cut and fitted stone, painted plaster, gilt, leaf, and inlay; a landscape of opulence that jaded their senses. Callisthenes stalked past them, lost in thought.

  "Slow down, lad," said the elder of the pair, a tough shank of whalebone, his face seamed by sun, wind, and the indelible march of time. He spoke a rough patois, Ionian Greek leavened with words drawn from Egyptian and Persian. "You're making my head ache. Take a seat and rest. The general's coming as quick as he can."

  Callisthenes ignored him. He stopped and stared at the life-sized statues of ancient pharaohs lining the walls, their stony faces in sharp relief: the powerful visage of Ramses the Great; hawkish Thutmoses, savage warrior-king who brought Palestine to its knees; stern Horemheb, who was general before he was pharaoh. The olden kings stared back with cold, accusing eyes.

  Beneath their gaze, Callisthenes experienced a sense of loathing for his Greek heritage. How could his own people engender such revulsion in him? His Hellenic cousins possessed a fighting spirit without equal, but they cheapened it through an overweening sense of pride. Kings could buy their loyalty like a prostitute's wares, and still they called others barbarians.

  Callisthenes was a child of two cultures, two philosophies, two religions; as drawn to the quiet precepts of the sage Ptahhotep as he was to the blood and thunder of Homer's epics. Among his countrymen at Naucratis, he was anathema, a traitor to his people; at Memphis, he was an interloper, a Greek masquerading as an Egyptian. To whom did he owe his allegiance? A complex question, and one that, since departing for Delphi four months ago, had never left the forefront of his mind.

  Callisthenes' journey to central Greece for Phanes of Halicarnassus came at the behest of his father, a merchant and politician of Naucratis. Old Rhianus could smell a chance for profit the same way a hound smelled blood. "Egypt is rotting," he would say to Callisthenes on his infrequent trips home. "A cancer is gnawing away at Pharaoh's guts, and when he dies the country will die with him." Rhianus wanted his son in a position to benefit from Egypt's illness; never had he asked Callisthenes what he wanted. Perhaps that was a godsend, since his desires were nebulous, hazy. The only thing Callisthenes knew for certain was the world at large should let his adoptive homeland alone. Let the Egyptians go about their business; let the Nile rise and fall as it had for a thousand generations.

  Red-orange light flooded the antechamber as an exterior door opened and shut again, bathing the room in the brilliant gleam of dusk before plunging it back into artificial night. The hoplite guards snapped erect.
A mask of politesse slipped easily over Callisthenes' face, impenetrable, flawless, transforming him into a young man so taken by tales of valor that he would do anything to be viewed as an equal in the fraternity of war.

  Phanes strode across the antechamber, the Spartan in his wake calling for one of the hoplites to fetch water and a robe for their general. Callisthenes flashed an amiable smile. He inclined his head and was preparing to launch into a litany of greeting when Phanes shattered decorum by sweeping the merchant up into a rib-splintering hug.

  "Zeus Savior! You are a welcome sight, Callisthenes! Waiting for your return smacked of the punishment of Tantalus, and I've found it not to my liking! Great gods of Olympus! I am pleased to see you!" Phanes grinned as he loosed Callisthenes. The merchant staggered and righted himself with as much dignity as he could muster.

  "And I you, general. Forgive my delay. We had unfavorable weather after reaching Athens. We were forced to sacrifice to Uadj-ur and the four winds before we could make good our departure by sea."

  Phanes eyed him critically. "I imagined a trip to the heart of Hellas would have broken you of this Egyptian affectation. Still, Delphi seems to have agreed with you. How fared Naucratis in the Pythian Games?"

  The merchant smiled. "Half the world, it seems, turned out to see my own cousin, Oeolycos, take the prize of valor in the pentathlon; the other half came to see the new temple of Apollo. A splendid structure. Your donations were well spent." Callisthenes stroked the scarab hanging around his neck. "Forgive me for being brusque, general, but I am weary. Shall we finish this?"

  A servant bustled up, bearing a bronze ewer of water and a linen mantle. Phanes waved him away. The general vibrated with suppressed excitement — his eyes were glassy and bright, feverish, as if the juice of the opium poppy surged through his veins. "On to business, then."

  From inside his robe, Callisthenes withdrew a tube carved from a branch of olive wood, its surface burnished from years of use. Lead sealed its ends, the metal impressed with the symbol of the oracle at Delphi. "I gave your original inquiry to the prophetai and left it in their care. When I returned after the proscribed time, I received this. I pray it provides you the insight of Apollo." Callisthenes made to leave, but a gesture from Phanes forestalled him.

  "Stay," he said. The general savored the moment, as a groom on his wedding night eager to make that first taste of pleasure last. Accepting Lysistratis' knife, he used it to pare away the seal at one end of the tube, then handed it back. Phanes removed a small roll of vellum, opened it with trembling fingers, and read aloud:

  "Many are the dreams of the Hellene, as grains of sand on the beach, And their passions and hatreds run deeper than the depths of Oceanus. Take heed, child of Halicarnassus! Take heed, for long have you toiled In sand and sea for a master cold as stone. Yet despair not, for guile, craft, And bronze are the tools by which thrones are toppled. "

  Phanes looked at Lysistratis and grinned.

  "Oracles," Lysistratis said, shaking his head. "Can they never answer plainly? What does it mean?"

  "It means the gods favor us in this. `Despair not', it says, `for guile, craft, and bronze are the tools by which thrones are toppled'." Phanes handed the vellum to the Spartan, who only laughed.

  "If you say so, then it must be. I think wine is in order, a libation to Apollo."

  "Do not celebrate our victory just yet," Phanes said, his brows furrowed. "We'll proceed as planned. Instruct the polemarchs to be ready to deploy in Memphis by week's end. As of now I want campaign discipline. No carousing, no fraternizing. I want the men ready to pull out in an hour's notice."

  "I'll see to it personally." Lysistratis bowed and took his leave.

  "What of me?" Callisthenes said. "I've been away for months; there's no telling what damage that half-wit Akhmin has wrought in my absence. Am I to be privy to your plans now, or will you discharge me like a servant who has reached the end of his usefulness?"

  "You wound me, Callisthenes," Phanes said. "I promised Rhianus you would be kept safe and well-cared for. War is coming; it is as certain as the rising of the sun at dawn. Unlike the Egyptians, we have the luxury of deciding what stance to take — to rise or fall, to side with the victors or be counted among the slain. We're going to give Cambyses what he wants, and in return he'll give us what we want."

  The warm blood flowing through Callisthenes' veins turned sluggish, a glacial brine. Despite this, the merchant's face remained neutral. "If war is, as you say, a virtual certainty, then only a fool would want to be on the losing side. How can you be so sure Cambyses and his Persians will conquer Egypt? The Assyrians tried, to the ruin of their empire."

  Phanes smiled, a gesture lacking compassion or humor. "The Assyrians didn't have a phalanx of Greeks at their disposal. When the time comes, we will strike right here, in Egypt's heart. We'll raze Memphis, then fade away into the Western Desert to raid the oases there. We will hand Cambyses the jewel of his empire. You are welcome to come along, of course."

  Callisthenes, his fingers stroking the scarab at his throat, resumed pacing. "Not every Greek is receiving this courtesy, are they?"

  "No. Only an elite few."

  "Why me?"

  "Because," Phanes said, his tone matter-of-fact, "you understand these Egyptians. You know what they fear, what moves them. You're a master at gathering social intelligence — at dissecting their circles and cliques and defining who moves in and out of them. It is information Cambyses will need. Beyond that, you have wisdom, Callisthenes," Phanes gripped the merchant's shoulder, "and that is a rare gift these days. I sleep better knowing you serve with me, rather than against me. We will talk more of this later. Go, rest and see to your business." With that, Phanes turned and vanished through an interior door, servants flocking around him like a covey of sparrows.

  Callisthenes watched him go, the mask of politesse sloughing away like a snake's skin. His eyes glittered dangerously in the wan light. Blood throbbed at his temples, filling his ears with the whirr of kettledrums, the clash of bronze. He glanced up at the statue of great Ramses, Ozymandias of legend, warrior, conqueror, statesman. Granite eyes flashed in imperious wrath at what his stone ears had overheard.

  To whom did he owe his allegiance? "Pythian Apollo be damned! " Callisthenes hissed in Egyptian. Stopping Phanes would be a deadly game, the merchant reckoned, one pitting both sides against the middle, and his life would be forfeit should he lose. Still, he knew full well how Egypt would fare under the heel of a foreign tyrant. Egyptians should rule the Nile valley. The statues lining the antechamber's walls, the images of the pharaohs of old, appeared to nod in unison in the flickering lamplight.

  Now, Callisthenes thought, gathering his robes about him, all I need is an ally

  South and east of the fortress of Ineb-hedj, along the banks of the Nile, lay the district of Perunefer. A bustling naval yard in ancient times, Perunefer diminished over the years into a small and insular enclave of fishermen. Even so, signs of its former glory abounded. The canting beams once used to support the hulls of Pharaoh's warships now served as drying racks for hundreds of nets. Stone stelae, their commemorative hieroglyphs faded by time and neglect, paved the grassy sward where each day's catch was gutted and strung for drying. Middens rose at every hand, artificial hills of fish bones, scales, and entrails towering over the drab huts of the fisherfolk. A rutted dirt path wound through this festering maze. It descended through stands of palm, willow, and sycamore, following the natural slope of the shoreline until it dead-ended at a quay of age-blackened limestone. Water lapped against the hulls of skiffs tied to corroded mooring rings.

  Overhead, twilight hastened into night. Stars flared to life, casting their thin light on the dark waters of the Nile. The two men who walked along the quay had no need of other illumination; their business was best concluded without it. Flakes of stone crunched underfoot as the smaller of the pair, his weight resting on a gold-shod staff, turned to his companion and hissed, "Are you positive it was him, Esna?"


  The man called Esna nodded. He wore a kilt of muddy brown linen and a broad leather belt, trimmed in copper scarab and ankh amulets that clashed with each step. One long-fingered hand rested lightly on the ivory hilt of a knife. "Beyond doubt, lord," Esna said. "The Phoenician is no easy man to forget. I saw him at Sile once, perhaps three years ago. Then, this afternoon, I saw him again on the road from lunu, leading a train of camels and men. A score of them, foreigners all. I hurried back as quick as discretion allowed."

  Music filtered through the trees, from Perunefer, the sound of flute, sistrum, and lyre punctuated by crude laughter and snatches of song. Esna glanced up toward the tree line, aware of how exposed they were here on the quay. His companion, though, was oblivious, his brows knitted in a look of brooding consternation.

  Ujahorresnet, First Servant of Neith in Memphis, tapped the butt of his staff on the stones, a metronomic rhythm that kept time with his thoughts. The priest was small for an Egyptian, thin to the point of emaciation, with shoulders unbowed despite the sixty-four years that weighed upon them. His skull was shaven and his blunt features concealed a mind sharper than the claws of Amemait, the Devourer. "What business has he here?"

  "Of that I have no knowledge, lord," Esna said.

  "He has few allies in Memphis, and none among the Greeks. I want to know his movements, Esna. Have your people locate him, keep him in sight at all times. Also, set a man to watch the house of the Judaean, ben lesu. He has served as the Phoenician's informant in the past."

  "Your will shall be done, lord." Esna bowed deeply and withdrew.

  Ujahorresnet remained still. He stared into the rippling waters of the Nile, lost in thought. The Phoenician. He had spent the last twenty years watching him from afar, chronicling the highs and lows of his career, cataloguing his countless sins against the lady Ma'at, until he knew the man better than he knew himself. The Phoenician was, above all things, a creature of habit. Rarely did he leave the windswept deserts of eastern Egypt; rarer still did he travel to the populous heartland of the Nile valley. What prompted this visit? The priest did not chide himself for not placing a man inside Sile, among the Medjay. To do so would have meant relying on a foreigner. A foreigner! The thought was like bitter oil on the priest's tongue. Never again!