Lord of the Two Lands (34 page)

Meriamon could not help herself. It was presumptuous, no doubt, and yet she did it. She smiled back.

But then, before she was a goddess, Mother Isis was a woman. A woman could understand what even a goddess could not, and share the joy that was in it.

Alexander came out of the temple silent and exalted. Hephaistion was waiting for him, not in the front of those who waited, or even in the front ranks, but a little apart.

Those who wanted an oracle had had one. Hephaistion had not asked. He would not judge it mummery—he had seen enough on the march to Siwah, and he had seen what the Egyptian woman did. Her magic was a quiet thing, no wands or spells, no smokes or stenches or sleights of charlatanry. It was all words, and indomitable will.

He did not want to hear a prophecy. Of those who had, he noticed, few were minded to tell anyone what they had heard. Something about this place discouraged babbling.

Alexander’s coming was as quiet, and yet as potent, as the Egyptian woman’s magic. One moment he was still within. The next, he stood outside the gate, and his men were running toward him.

Moths to the flame, Hephaistion thought. His own heart yearned forward, but he quelled it.

It was pride, he knew that very well. Let the little men flock and bleat. He would go to his lord in his own time.

His eyes had no pride. His eyes fixed on the king in something like hunger.

Alexander was taken purely out of himself. He looked like a man who has seen a god; or who has discovered that he is one. The light that had always been on him, bright as a beacon, seemed both dim and scattered to what was on him now. That had been like sun behind a cloud. This was the sun laid bare.

“He knows what he is now,” Ptolemy said, standing beside Hephaistion.

Hephaistion laughed. It cut his belly like pain. “Was there ever any doubt of it?”

Ptolemy looked at him oddly, but said nothing.

o0o

Alexander would not speak of what the god had said. Not even to Hephaistion.

“I suppose you told the Egyptian woman,” Hephaistion said in the quiet of the night. He had not been asked into Alexander’s tent, but he had gone in spite of it.

Alexander did not cast him out. His welcome was as warm as always, his smile the one he kept for his friend. It did not waver in the face of Hephaistion’s bitterness.

No, Hephaistion thought. Let it bear its proper name. Jealousy.

“No,” said Alexander. “I didn’t tell Meriamon.”

“She knows,” Hephaistion said. “I’d wager gold on it.”

“Maybe,” said Alexander. He had been reading by the light of the lamp. Hephaistion knew the book: his
Iliad
that he had had since he was a boy.

Alexander had risen to embrace his friend. He sat again in the chair, rolling the book and binding it, still smiling faintly. The light of the oracle lingered in his face.

Hephaistion stayed where he was, erect and stiff. Something in him wanted to throw itself down and weep, and flay them both with words.
I am your friend, your Patroklos. Everything that you have, you give to me. Everything that is mine, I share with you.

Everything but the kingship. And this.

He turned blindly.

“Phai.”

The old name, the love-name. It had been a mock for boys once, because it sounded like the name of Socrates’ boy courtesan: Phai, Phaidon. But Alexander had taken the shame out of it.

It stopped him now. It did not bring him about.

“Hephaistion,” said Alexander. “Everything I can share with you, I do. But some things—”

It was like him to know the precise turning of Hephaistion’s mind. “Some things,” Hephaistion said, “are yours alone.” His voice was flat.

“If I could,” Alexander said, “I would.”

He meant it. Hephaistion, turning, saw it in his face. But there was a limit to his yielding, and they had come to it.

It would be very easy to quarrel. A glorious, rancorous fight, with every grief and transgression of years raked up and flung in each other’s face. There was a black pleasure in the prospect of it.

And what would be the use of it? It would not break down the wall of silence. It would not make Alexander any less Alexander, or Hephaistion any less himself.

“It always amazes me,” Alexander said, “how you think yourself out of your tempers—and nothing to be seen of it but a muscle-twitch here, an eyeblink there.”

“Am I as transparent as that?” Hephaistion asked.

“Clear as granite,” Alexander said.

Hephaistion’s teeth ached with clenching. He unlocked his jaw, willed his body to unknot. “I thought I had more pride than this,” he said. “Or more sense.”

“You needed to be sure.” said Alexander. He did not look as if it angered him. “People need that. Even you.”

“Damn you for knowing that,” Hephaistion said, but calmly.

Alexander smiled. It was still his smile. The brightness in it was knowledge, that was all. The god had always been there.

Hephaistion bent his head to the god. He smiled at the king who was his friend: a smile with edges, but real enough when all was considered.

o0o

The king and his Companions lingered a while in Siwah. Alexander was eager to be gone, but his men needed a day or two to rest. They camped in a broad cleared space among the trees, and were given whatever they asked for by way of food and drink and even company. Some of the women and boys of Siwah were intensely curious about these big fair strangers; and the strangers were pleased to assuage that curiosity.

Alexander’s curiosity was of another order. The sheen of the god lingered on him after a night’s sleep, but it was dimming, becoming part of him. He wanted to see the spring that was famous even in Hellas, that was bitter cold at noon, and at midnight hot to boiling.

Or so the tales said. It was cool enough when they went, he and a friend or two and Meriamon, though not exactly icy.

The sun was directly overhead. The tangled branches of trees kept off most of its heat, but where the spring was, was an open space, much trampled by pilgrims’ feet. The water bubbled out of a rock into a little mossy basin, and overflowed into a trickle of a stream that wandered away into a thicket.

There was a flock of crows in the trees, flapping and quarrelling and making a dreadful racket. The priest who guided them made a move to chase the birds away.

Alexander stopped him. “Let them be,” he said. “They belong here rather more than we.”

The man looked as if he would have argued, but after a moment he shrugged. “As you will, lord,” he said.

Alexander smiled at him, melting him where he stood.

Someday, thought Meriamon, he would meet a human creature who was immune to his smile. She doubted that it would be soon.

He knelt by the pool’s edge and dipped in his hand. “Cool,” he said. “Sweet, too. Pure water from the rock.”

“It is the god’s gift,” said the priest

“So is all that is,” said Alexander. He straightened, restless already. As the others came to taste the water and remark at its cool purity, he wandered back to the trees.

They were olive trees. He reached to touch a branch, ruffling the grey-green leaves. “Strange to find olives here in the middle of the desert.”

Meriamon had not gone to the spring with the rest. It was cool in the shade of the trees, and the crows’ clamor was surprisingly pleasant. They were laughing, she thought, taking joy in being alive.

Alexander sat on the ground beside her. Sekhmet, after a moment’s thought, left her lap to occupy his. “I miss Peritas,” he said.

“You’ll see him soon enough,” said Meriamon.

“A week, probably,” he said. “If there are no more arguments from the desert.”

“There won’t be,” she said. “It wanted to keep you from coming here. Now that it’s failed, it will be only too glad to be rid of you.”

He raised a brow at her. “You felt it, too? That the land didn’t want us to be in it?”

“It never did love us of the Black Land. We’re noisy; we’re many. We infest the clean desert, we poison it with water, we make green things grow like a blight across it.”

“I’d think that would be the Nile’s fault,” he said. “Seeing that its floods are what make your land rich.”

“That too,” she said. And after a pause: “You’re going back to Rhakotis, then.”

“And Memphis. And after that, Asia.”

A chill ran through her. It was not entirely unpleasant. “You won’t stay in Egypt?”

“I can’t.” He had said it maybe too quickly. He softened it with a smile, though that did not last long. “I’d like to stay. But there’s Darius and a whole empire on my eastern flank, and a small matter of unfinished business for the League of Hellas. I came out here, after all, to fight Persia.”

“You’ve done that.”

“I’ve begun it. That’s all it is: a beginning. If I’m to make it last, I have to go through with the rest of it.”

“And what is that?” she asked him.

“All of it.” He grinned at her expression. “Hubris again, maybe. And maybe not. There’s a whole world out there. Did you ever think of that? Persia first—Persia is dangerous as long as I let it resist me. Then, who knows? There are lands to the east beyond Persia. There are lands to the west, Italy and Sicily where Greeks already are, and wild places beyond them, and finally the sunset gates, the Pillars of Herakles. He set them up, my ancestor did, or so they say. I’d like to see them for myself.”

“You’d like to do everything a mortal man can do.”

“And a little of what a god can.” He met her stare. Lightning, she thought. Striking at the heart. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know it. You’re me one who led me here.”

“Not I,” said Meriamon, “but the gods who speak through me.”

“It’s all one,” he said.

“Is that what you learned in the god’s chamber?”

He lowered his eyes. She blinked, dazzled. The world seemed very dark here at high noon in the grove of the Sun. He stroked Sekhmet from head to twitching tail, over and over, to the rhythm of her purring.

“I learned...” he said. Stopped. Frowned. “I learned... too much, maybe. It was comfort of a sort, not to know. To wonder if I was mad, or my mother was lying, or everything I did was foolishness. I was never ordinary. I never could be. But when I knew... that changed things. It wasn’t myself, you see. It was always the god.”

“The god begot you,” said Meriamon, “through his chosen instrument. That doesn’t mean he is you, or you are he, any more than any son can become his father.”

“Philip wasn’t ordinary, either,” Alexander said, sharp, almost angry. “Not in the least. They say I got my gift of warfare from him. He was more solid; saner. But he was a brilliant general.”

“Every man is what his life has made him.”

Alexander was not listening. “I’m better in the tight spots. I think faster. I always did. That’s my mother—she’s lethally quick. If she’d been a man, Macedon would have been hard put to seize as much power as it did. It’s as well she was born a woman. Then she could marry Macedon instead of conquering it.”

“Or destroying it in a war.”

“So they would have, both of them. Gods know, they tried hard enough as they were; and she trapped in a woman’s body, and he trapped by every woman’s body he set eyes on. There’s irony for you. Brats by the cartload, and his heir, his king who would be, bastard-bred of a god.”

“Through Philip’s body,” said Meriamon.

“That wouldn’t matter to him,” said Alexander. He parted Sekhmet’s toes to make the claws come out, white and gleaming sharp. “I think I’m happy to know what I am. I know I’m terrified.”

“Of course you are. You’re only half mad.”

He laughed. “And which half would you say that is?”

“The half that makes you do what no one else would do, and do it brilliantly. I’ll never forgive you for Tyre, you know. Even if you did come to Egypt in the end.”

“I had to do it,” he said. “And I came, as you say, where you wanted me to come. Did what you wanted, too. I’m surprised you aren’t trying to make me stay and be a proper pharaoh.”

“Would I tell you if I were?”

His head tilted. He thought about it. “Probably,” he said. “Or I’d know.”

“I’m that transparent?”

“You’re that honest.”

“So,” she said, “are you.”

“Then it’s as well I was born in Macedon, where people aren’t subtle, even when they’re killing one another. I’d not have lasted a week in Persia.”

“In Egypt,” she said, “you might have managed a month.”

“And what of you?”

“I’m god-touched,” she said. “No one else would try.”

He sprang up, light and smooth, hardly jarring the cat on his arm; drawing Meriamon with him, holding her face to face. “I’m almost sorry you don’t want to marry me.”

“There’s plenty of almost for both of us,” said Meriamon.

“Poor Niko,” Alexander said. “I hope you were planning to invite me to the wedding.”

She blushed, so sudden and so fierce that it burned away every scrap of wit. “We were going to tell you.”

“Not ask?”

She stared at him blankly.

“I am, after all, his king. I have some say in whom he marries. Particularly if the lady is a foreigner.”

At least the heat was gone. The cold, perhaps, was worse. “You are my king also,” she said.

“So I am.” His eyes narrowed. “If I forbade you, would you still do it?”

She could not keep her gaze on him. In part because it would have been a glare. In part—in great part—because he was her king.

“Mariamne,” he said.

That was not her name.

“Meriamon,” said Alexander.

Her eyes rose. Glaring.

“Come now,” he said. “You know I wouldn’t stop you from doing what you’ve got your heart set on. Though what you see in him, out of all the men in my army—”

“If you can’t see it, I can hardly explain it to you.”

That gave him pause. Then he laughed. Delighted with her. Damn him. He knew perfectly well what she spoke of. He had Hephaistion.

She should have been appalled. That she could think such things of him. That he could see it.

And if she could not think so, and he could not see, then he would not have been her king. Kings, gods—they thought too much of themselves, too often.

Alexander had a very high opinion of himself, no doubt of that. But he knew it. He could even laugh at it. Sometimes.

He all but dragged her back to the spring, the men waiting there, the eyes and the smiles—greeting, not mockery; little good as that did. She was blushing again. So, she noticed, was Niko. There was something about secrets badly kept; they had a way of mortifying.