Lord of the Two Lands (20 page)

As the bull’s blood streamed upon the altar, the sun leaped into the sky, turning his hair bright gold. The thighbone of Father Zeus’ bull, wrapped in the fat and laid in the fire, sent its smoke up to heaven; that of Herakles’ bull mingled with it, half savory, half terrible. The king’s men shared the sacrifice, partaking of its strength. They seemed to finish all in the same instant, springing up with a shout and running to the sea.

Tyre was waiting for them. The ramships had gone out in the dawn; the booming and battering mounted with the light, carried on the still air, until surely the dead could hear and wake.

As the king’s men readied to board a pair of ships, Koinos’ company on one, Admetos’ Shieldbearers on the other with the king leaping ahead of them to mount the bow, metal glinted on the city’s wall, and figures moved, gathering. Men ran out on the causeway, reckless of bolts or arrows, but none fell. Tyre had easier prey.

A ship or two of Alexander’s had faltered on the voyage from Sidon, run afoul of Tyrian galleys, and fallen to the enemy. Their crews were up on the walls. There could be no doubt of that. Heralds’ voices rang over the water, proclaiming it.

Even as the echoes died. figures as small as dolls, as effigies, as amulets, spun and wheeled down from the wall. They made no sound. They fell without grace or wit, dead before they left the wall, slaughtered like the bulls upon the altar.

One fell full upon the deck of a ramship. The outcry of its crew reached even to the camp, a raw howl of rage and loss.

Trapped, the Tyrians, and desperate to folly, with their walls falling about their ears, and Alexander’s army struck not to terror but to rage by the death of their fellows. The ramships backed oars from the great ragged gap in the wall and made way for their king. His two ships ran up to the rock. Each bore a bridge, lowering even as it approached, crashing down amid the rubble.

Admetos the commander hardly waited for the ramp to fall before he was on it, up the crumbling treacherous slope into Tyre, full into a Tyrian spear. The men behind him, his men even before they were Alexander’s, saw him fall. They had seen the murder on the walls. Blood for blood and life for life, and sweet revenge for the long siege.

Alexander came behind with the second wave of men. That was never his place, but for once he had yielded to honor and sense, and seen a good man die for it.

He thrust through the ranks and seized the lead. The Tyrian line stood firm before him. His eye swept along it. He raised his sword. He charged, and all his men charged with him, bright shields, long spears, implacable will.

The Tyrians stood while they could. But they had no spear to match the sarissa of Macedon, three manlengths long and wielded from behind a wall of shields. They wavered and broke and ran.

A cry went up from the walls. The harbors were breached, Phoenicians pouring in from the south, Cyprians from the north, and Alexander himself in the center with the pick of his army.

Tyre, beset from three sides, broken and battered and breached, fought as it could. Street bystreet, alley by alley, its fighting men fell back. They held for a while in one of their shrines, that of Agenor near the city’s center, but Alexander broke their line again with his Shieldbearers and drove them out.

Melqart’s temple rose at the summit of the city, its walls of cedar from the Lebanon, its roof sheathed in gold, and before its gate two tall pillars, one of ivory, one of beryl the color of grass. There Alexander halted. There the princes had taken refuge, and the King of Tyre himself, barricaded behind doors of bronze.

Alexander’s men were sacking the city. The fighting had turned to butchery. Blood ran in the streets. Life paid for life, and for resistance that should never have been. Tyre had defied the gods. It paid in all that it was.

Meriamon was there. Her body lay in its tent in the camp with Sekhmet mounting guard over it. Her soul rode in a soldier’s cloak, a wisp of shadow with ember-eyes.

Niko had come in with the Phoenicians, but he had taken a company ahead of the rest and gone straight for the temple, knowing where Alexander would inevitably be. He was close by the king now.

There was blood on his sword. As if he had only now noticed it, he moved to wipe the blade on his cloak.

The king stood in front of the temple’s gate, between the pillars. For all the press of men about him, he was alone. He could not fail to know that his men were slaughtering children, or that they were destroying the city in their anger. Here was the center of it, the heart of the resistance.

To Meriamon’s sight, freed of the body’s constraints, Melqart’s temple was a shape of shadow and light, washed in the blood of sacrifice. The princes huddled in the outer courts and prayed to all their gods and to their king, who had no more courage to face Alexander than they.

The priests held the sanctuary, and their strength was the strength of despair. They called on the god. They wove a mingled magic of will and chant and blood—blood of their own children, that the Macedonians loosed in their fury.

The power grew like a cloud, waxing and pulsing, spitting lightnings. A moment more, a bending of will, and there would be no end to it. Tyre would fall, and Tyre’s conquerors with it, and the sea would devour them.

Meriamon spread her soul’s wings and rose from Niko’s shoulder. He could not have been aware of her presence, but her absence touched him: he glanced about, eyes rolling a little, like a startled horse. She paused in the air above him, hawk-bodied, woman-headed, beating her wings against the force mat came out of the temple.

Alexander felt it. He swayed, braced. She struggled toward him. Each wingbeat battled the weight of a world. Each handbreadth was bought in the soul’s strength.

Within arm’s reach of Alexander, her wings failed. She dropped. A soul could not die, nor could the earth break it, but such power as the priests raised could trap and bind her, and swallow her with the rest in the city’s fall. The bonds closed in about her, the power’s weight heavy upon her, crushing her shadow-body.

She gathered every scrap of strength, every flicker of will. It made a pitifully small spark. She opened her heart to it.

She beat her wings with all her strength. The tips brushed the stone of the paving. But she was rising, driving upward, flinging herself at the king. Just as her strength died, just as she plummeted, her talons seized his cloak.

He saw her. She looked up into a face grown vast to hawk-size, soul-sight. She saw the eyes wide and silver-pale, terrible as the lightning’s fall. “Do you feel it?” she asked him. “Do you see it? What the old sorcerers did to Mu, to Atlantis, they would do to Tyre. To you, Alexander. To all that you would do and be.”

He reached down. To his hands she had substance, if no weight. Gently he freed her claws from his cloak, cradling her in his palms, raising her to meet eye with eye. What the men with him thought he was doing, she could not imagine. Maybe they saw a bird tangled in his mantle. “What can I do?” he asked her.

“Defeat them,” she answered.

“How?”

She tucked her feet under her, folded her wings. His hands enclosed her, warm and solid, ward and wall against the power that rose in the temple. “Will it,” she said.

“Will it? Want it? That’s all?”

“For you,” she said, “yes.”

“But—” He stopped. “Aristotle would howl.”

She laughed. She sounded to herself like a bird twittering.

Alexander looked a little disconcerted. But then he grinned. “This is impossible, you know.”

“Only to a rational Greek.”

He laughed at that. His eyes lifted from her to the gate.

They saw what she could see. The cloud of power. The lightnings growing more frequent, joining, one to one, two to two. When they were all one, then Tyre would fall.

“No,” he said. His voice was quiet. It had no particular force in it, no He walked forward. One hand still cradled Meriamon’s soul-self. The other reached to set palm against the door. As flesh touched bronze, the city rocked.

“No,” Alexander said again. And pushed.

The gates were bolted and barred. Even as strong as he was for his size, even trained from youth in the arts of war, Alexander was neither a big man nor a weighty one. He could not open gates of bronze, bolted with bronze.

“Yes,” he said. “I can.”

The gate moved. The power behind it rocked and swayed. His brows drew together. He was not straining, not yet. He shifted his feet, bracing them. He set Meriamon in the fold of his cloak and brought to bear both hands and all of his weight.

“Your will,” she said in his ear. “Your will is all that you need.”

“It’s all one,” he said, a little breathless. He relaxed suddenly, as if to retreat. But he was only gathering his forces. With suddenness that nearly cost her her perch, he flung the whole of him, hands, weight, will, the god that was in him, all, into one single concerted thrust.

Gate and power held. The earth was uneasy, swaying harder now, hard enough for simple men to sense. Someone cursed, caught off balance, knocked from his feet.

“Be still!” Alexander’s voice, sharp, no smoothness in it.

The earth was still. The power reared up. The gate burst open.

Light flooded through the temple. Alexander rode on it, his men behind him. Priests and power broke and scattered and fled.

But the princes held. Here at the end of things, they found their courage. They made a living wall about their king.

Alexander’s Shieldbearers would joyfully have slaughtered them all. But he said, “No.”

They stopped. They did not lower swords or spears, but neither did they strike.

The line of Tyrians opened. King Azemilk came forward. He was not as tall as Alexander, nor ever as broad: little long-bearded hawk-faced man like all his people. But proud, even defeated.

He went down on his knees, stiffly; then on his face. “Tyre is fallen,” said the King of Tyre, and each word was bitter, bitter. “Alexander is victorious. All hail Alexander, lord of Asia.”

One by one, raggedly, but clear enough, the princes echoed him. “Hail Alexander. Hail the lord of Asia!”

Tyre was fallen. Its king had made his submission to Alexander, and received pardon. But his people, for their resistance, paid in lives and wealth and freedom. Alexander, thwarted, was no merciful creature, and he had been thwarted to the edge of defeat.

He took the city and all that was in it. He sold its men into slavery. He made his sacrifice to Herakles in the temple that had refused him, before the priests who had defied him, and he held games of victory on the shore where he had camped so long.

On the last night of the games, while Alexander’s army in city and camp alike completed their triumph in wine and song, Meriamon walked on the sand by the quiet sea. There was a moon; it gave her shadow substance, and gleamed coldly on the ring in Sekhmet’s ear. Tyre was a darkness against the stars, sparked here and there with light.

The long sad train of its people had gone in the morning, some inland to Damascus, some in ships to Hellas and the isles. New citizens would come after Alexander was gone, people from the villages of the mainland who would fill the city again and make it strong under Alexander’s rule, at the bidding of a Macedonian commander.

That was war. To the victor, everything. To the vanquished, if he was fortunate, his life.

Someone came toward her over the sand. She was not surprised to know that gait, that angle of the shoulders, that lift of the head against the stars.

“Do you know what troubles me most?” she said to him. “I think I like war. Even the grief that comes after it.”

Niko stopped a little distance from her. “I think I hate it,” he said.

It was the dark and the solitude, and neither able to read the other’s face. It opened the gates between them. It turned the walls to air.

“Blood,” she said, “I hate. And slaughter of children. But strong man against strong man, city against invader, king against king—so must the world be.”

“I won’t kill children,” he said. “Or women, unless they’re trying to kill me first.”

“I know. I saw.”

He moved closer, standing over her. She could see his face now, the gleam of his eyes. “That was you. The—thing—that was with me.”

“What did you see?” she asked.

“Something,” he said. “Like a bird, but not. It was you. I thought it might be.”

“It was easier,” she explained. Or tried to. “Knowing you, and knowing you knew me. But you couldn’t see me. The king would have sent me back if I’d gone with him. He could see, you see.”

“I see.” His voice was perfectly flat.

She bit her lip. She wanted to laugh aloud; but that would not have been wise at all. “Do you mind? Terribly?”

“Well,” he said. “No. Not terribly. You could have told me.”

“And been forbidden?”

“Do I have a right to forbid you?”

“Would it have mattered if you did?”

“Probably not,” he said after a while. His hands settled themselves on her shoulders, starting as they touched bare skin under the almost-nothingness of veil. Coming back carefully, as if they could not help themselves. The one that was whole and supple. The one that was remembering, slowly, to be strong.

She did not flinch or move away. Her heart was beating hard. He would shake her now, call her witch and deceiver of men, pay her as she deserved for making such use of him.

He said, “You are more than anyone knows. Even the king.”

“He knows,” she said faintly.

He heard her. “Not all of it.”

“Enough.”

“You seem like such a little thing,” he said. “With those long eyes and that husky voice, and a way about you—now creeping like a brown mouse, now holding your head up like a queen. And showing yourself in clothes that would incite an army to riot, but no army would ever dare, unless you wanted it.”

“You don’t like my dress?”

He opened his mouth. Shut it. Said, “I like it too much.”

“It’s cool,” she said. “And sensible. Thaïs had one made for herself. When winter comes, she says, she might try Persian trousers.”

“Gods!” said Niko. “My poor brother.”

“Why? Because his woman wants to be warm in winter and cool in summer? You Hellenes—you go naked all year round. What can you say of what a woman should wear?”

“Nothing,” he said. He let her go, half-turning from her. “I forget myself. I’m sorry. Lady.”

She pulled him about. Temper burned the silliness out of her; she could see straight enough, and her heart was exactly where it belonged, and not in her throat, or fluttering somewhere about his head. “Oh, come!” she said. “We know each other well enough to be honest, surely. And none of this ‘my lady’ nonsense. I’m no queen or goddess. And you’re not my guardsman. You’re a captain now, with men of your own. I saw you win a footrace today, and a mounted race. What did the king say when he saw you back on Typhon?”

“About what you would have said,” said Niko. “I won, didn’t I? And stayed on, too.”

“And kept him from making a meal of the horse that came up behind him on the final turn. Idiot horse. He could have won by a furlong instead of a length, if he’d kept his mind on what he was doing.”

“I suppose you could have done better,” he said acidly.

“Not at all,” she said. “I yelled myself hoarse. So did everybody else. You’re a favorite in the army. And you think you can play the servant with me?”

“I am nothing,” he said, “and no one, beside you. You could be Alexander’s equal if it suited you to try. You do your gods’ will instead. You bully and cajole and trick him into doing it with you. When are the two of you going to see what a match you make?”

“Not we,” said Meriamon. “He wants no wife.”

“He would if you wanted him to.”

“I don’t.” She was holding his hand, the right, the one that was hurt. She brought it to her cheek. “I don’t want him.”

The stiffened fingers twitched. Straightened: he caught his breath with the effort and the pain of it. Curved to fit her cheek.

He snatched his hand back. “Of course you want the king! He’s the only man who’s fit for you. He’s brilliant, he’s splendid, the god is in him. He finds you fascinating. More than that, he likes you. Trusts you. Loves you, maybe. If either of you could admit it.”

“No,” said Meriamon.

He clasped his crippled arm with his good one, tightly, shaking just hard enough to see. “Then you are both fools.”

“No doubt,” she said.

“If I were Alexander,” he said. “If I were the king, you would know that I wanted you. And so would I.”

“If you were Alexander,” she said, “then I would want him.”

“You should not.”

He said it so firmly that she laughed. She knew better.

She had no mirth in her. It was all anger and incredulity and a white mad joy. He wanted—he wanted—

He did shake her then, until she stopped giggling. “I thought,” she said, gasping. “I thought—you—couldn’t stand—”

“I can’t. What does that have to do with it?”

His sharpness brought her to herself a little. Familiar; bracing. Finding its match in her temper. “Sometimes I wish I did want the king,” she said. “He’s a simpler thing. Fire and willfulness, and a genius for commanding armies. You... I never know what you will do or say.”

“I’m just a trooper in the cavalry. I’m not even anything particular to the king.”

“He knows who you are,” said Meriamon. “And what you are. You weren’t brought up with him as Ptolemy was. But you’re not his father’s son, either.”

Niko started. His hands tightened to pain. “What do you—”

“They’re brothers. I can see that. Did Lagos ever know?”

Niko let her go. He drew away. This time she did not try to stop him. When he wandered down the strand, she followed. “He knew,” Niko said. “From the beginning. He married her knowing that she had Philip’s baby in her belly. Philip wasn’t king, and wasn’t likely to be either, with his brother the king young enough yet and likely to live for a while, and capable enough of siring sons. So she went with Lagos, and when her son was born Lagos took him up and called him his own. By the time Perdikkas died and left a baby to inherit, and Philip got himself named king, Ptolemy was Lagos’ son and that was the whole of it. Except that Philip had a long memory for women—he always kept track of them, the way he kept track of everything else that ever concerned him—and our mother didn’t forget, either. So everybody knows, but nobody talks about it.”

And no wonder. Ptolemy was the elder. He could lay claim to Alexander’s throne.

Niko saw well enough what she was thinking. “He wouldn’t. He’s not that much of a fool.”

“No,” said Meriamon. “Ptolemy has more sense than most. He knows what’s best for himself and for his people.”

“And he loves Alexander.” Niko stopped walking. “We all do. Even the ones who started by wanting someone else to be king—they came round, one way and another. It takes a rare man to resist him.”

“Or woman?” Meriamon waded out into the water. It was neither warm nor cool, lapping gently against her knees, tugging at her skirt. If she opened her senses wide enough, she could find a glimmer in it that had been the Nile, a memory of the greatest river in the world, river of power as of water, rising unknown and unseen in the deeps of Africa and pouring its gathered waters into the’ sea. In that gathering it gave and it took, gave the Two Lands their riches and their power, and took them back, and carried them to the Great Green, the sea at the bottom of the world.

She turned. Niko stood on the water’s edge, dark shape of head and shoulders, white glimmer of chiton. “Your mother refused a king,” she said.

“He wasn’t king yet.”

“But he would be. And when he was, when she had his son to wield as a weapon, she said no word. She kept the life she had chosen. She gave her husband another son who was all his own.”

“That was plain good sense. Alexander was born by then. Everyone knew what he had for a mother.”

“A woman with a mind of her own.”

“A harpy.” Niko shook himself. “Well, no. Maybe she’s not as bad as that. They had a love match, those two, even when he went a-roving. He always came back, or she did, or both at once. It’s not true what they say, that Alexander and Olympias paid off the assassin who killed Philip.”

“I know,” said Meriamon.

“You saw it, I suppose.”

Meriamon did not answer. She did not need to.

“She was wild when he died,” Niko said. “Wild with joy one moment, because he’d got his comeuppance. Wild with grief the next. But cold all through it, and making sure her son got what was his. She’s a terrible woman. There’s a goddess in her, I think; or a Fury.”

“Intelligence, maybe,” said Meriamon, “and impatience with men’s follies. That sours fast, if one isn’t careful.”

“How do you stand us?”

She laughed. “Come here,” she said.

For a wonder he obeyed her. She took his hands in hers. “Don’t ask why,” she said, “or doubt. Just accept.”

“But you are—I’m not—”

She stopped his lips with her hand, reaching high. “I didn’t see, either. Till now. You so tall and so strong, and I so little, and no beauty—”

He lifted her suddenly as if she had been a child, setting her level with him, face to face. “You are beautiful.” He said it as he would command a trooper in parade.

“I am not,” she said. “Pretty, sometimes, when I work at it. For the rest of it—”

“And what do you see in me? I’m a cripple. I’ve got a face like an old sandal. If I had any rank to add to it, or power in myself, or any touch of godhood—”

“You are yourself,” she said. She set her hand against his cheek. It was rough with stubble. The long jaw, the long mouth, the uncompromising nose, would never delight a sculptor, but they were his own. “I would have you exactly as you are Even when you sulk.”

He glowered “You have a tongue like an adder.”

“Surely,” she said “We match, you see.”

“I have no magic.”

“You have eyes.”

They looked hard at her. She curved her arms about his neck.

He held her easily. She did not weigh a great deal more than his armor, which she had discovered for herself when she tried to lift the lot of it. She played with the hair that curled on his neck “And you have very handsome hair,” she said. “Almost as bright as the king’s. Did you get it from your mother?”

“Yes.” It was hard to tell in the dark, but she thought he might be blushing. She laid her cheek against his. Oh, indeed: it was burning hot.

“Poor boy,” she said “I embarrass you.”

“You can’t be any older than I am,” he snapped.

“Oh, but I am. I was born a good half-year before the king.”

“That makes you ancient,” he said, dripping irony. “Three whole years’ worth.”

“All women are as old as time, and I am a woman of Egypt. I was ancient when the world was made. To us, all you Hellenes are children.”

“So,” he said, “I’ve heard.”

She laughed She was aware, not at all unpleasantly, that her body pressed close against his, and that he was warm, warmer than the night.

“My smallest sister is bigger than you,” he said.

“You are enormous,” she agreed.

The heat that rose in him was fierce enough to burn. He set her down abruptly and splashed back to shore.

There he stopped. “Niko,” she said. He did not turn, but neither did he run away. “Niko. Do you want me as much as I want you?”

His voice was very much itself, for all the rigidity that it came out of. “Are all Egyptians that blunt about it?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I never wanted anyone before.”

His shoulders shook. She wondered if she had driven him to tears. “You never—” His voice caught. Laughter. It was laughter. It stopped abruptly. “You aren’t sworn, are you? To take no man?”

“Of course not,” she said.

“But the gods—”

“The gods celebrate life as we do. They would hardly forbid me.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“Nor do I,” she said, “often.”

He turned. She could not see his face. He was a shadow, tall against the stars. “It’s not right, of course,” he said in careful, flawless Greek. No soft Macedonian burr. “You are royal and I am not.”

“Your mother is royal kin.”

“I am not a king,” he said, “nor a king’s son. And I have nothing to give you but a valley in Macedonia, with a hill fort above it, and good grazing for horses. It’s much too cold for you there.”