A Choice of Destinies

by Melissa Scott

  The king nodded. The woman in question was an old, dirty, terrified slave, probably nurse to at least one generation of some noble family. A couple of Ptolemy’s men—probably looking for loot if the truth were told—had rescued her from the cellar of a half-burned mansion, and in gratitude for her rescue she had babbled out some story of terrible things that were happening, or would happen, in the Byrsa. The troopers had brought her to their officer, and he in turn sent her on to the king. Alexander had listened to her story, but the woman was incoherent with age and fear, and the king had been able to make no sense of it. “All she said that made sense was that there was some trap being set in the Byrsa—though from her talk you’d have thought it was directed against her own people, not us.”

  “So we’ll be careful,” Craterus muttered.

  Alexander nodded and stretched painfully. “Do that, all of you. Is everything clear, then?” He went on without really waiting for the others to nod agreement, “Polyperchon has the perimeter? Then let’s get some sleep while we can.”

  The second day was no easier than the first. The Macedonians were awakened before dawn by an attack on the perimeter, which Polyperchon’s exhausted men were barely able to contain. It took a good two hours’ hard fighting before the Carthaginians were driven back again and the Macedonians regained the initiative. Craterus pressed forward grimly at the head of the Foot Companions, and finally, shortly after noon, made contact with Perdiccas and Cassius. The Carthaginians sallied a final time and were beaten back. By mid-afternoon, Alexander and the hypaspists had fought their way through the city proper to the base of the Byrsa wall, and Charias brought up the rams. The wall was a thin curtain of stone, with only alight palisade; the engineer, bleeding along his cheek where the stones from a falling house had grazed him, promised he could have it down in an hour. The hypaspists, who had suffered enough in the bitter house to house fighting, manned the ram willingly.

  Alexander stared up at the Byrsa. He could not see any soldiers along the long wall, or on the tops of the buildings, but the sporadic flights of arrows, the occasional thrown spear, proved that they were there. There would be other people, too, in the citadel’s buildings, women and children. As the last wall began to fall, he held back his men, waiting for the inevitable surrender.

  There was no signal from the wall, no appearance of the Hundred, and the king shrugged, motioning the hypaspists forward. There would be good looting in the inner treasury of Carthage: the troopers pushed eagerly through the breach, elbowing each other a little in their excitement.

  Then Theodatus shouted from the rear, “It’s on fire. They’re burning the city!”

  Alexander turned rapidly. Great plumes of smoke were rising from the Byrsa, and others from the twin harbors, smoke that rose so quickly that the fires had to have been deliberately set and extravagantly fueled: the trap the old woman had spoken of. “Neoptolemus,” the king shouted, “Get our men out of there.”

  Even as he spoke there was a shout from the citadel, and the Carthaginian troops plunged forward again. The hypaspists, distracted by their thoughts of plunder, were slow to respond, and a hundred men died before Neoptolemus and his officers could rally their people. They retreated then, in good order, and the Carthaginians, following recklessly, were cut down to a man.

  The buildings of the citadel were well afire now. Alexander shaded his eyes, staring at the flames that already broke from the roof of one low building, and thought he saw, through the smoke a line of figures with raised arms silhouetted against the fire. He blinked, and the picture was gone, swallowed by the flames. The wind was from the sea, a strong, steady wind that would carry the fires well out into the suburbs; it was more than time to be gone.

  Runners passed quickly along the Macedonian line. By the time the last one returned to the king, it was clear that the city was gone. The Macedonians withdrew cautiously, wary of further traps. One Roman century and a battalion of Perdiccas’s Foot Companions pulled back along the length of Cape Carthage to protect Nearchus’s waiting ships, the rest of the army fell back toward Hephaestion’s men. As the army pulled apart, Carthaginian troops sortied for the final time, turning on the smaller group moving along the cape. Perdiccas held back, expecting them to ask for mercy, and so lost the initiative. The Carthaginians smashed into his hastily formed lines, driving him back in disarray. Cassius brought his own men up to reinforce the Foot Companion lines, and they held.

  Alexander heard the sound of fighting even before a runner reached him from the rearguard; he took personal command of the hypaspists’ spearhead battalion and two battalions of Ptolemy’s Foot Companions, and turned back to take the Carthaginians in the rear. Outnumbered and surrounded, the Carthaginians still refused to surrender, fighting grimly until their officers were dead. Only then did the survivors dare to shout for mercy, and the Foot Companions, sickened and angered by the slaughter forced upon them, were not inclined to grant it. Only Alexander’s personal intervention saved the last seventy or so Carthaginians for the slave markets. Perdiccas took them in hand.

  The wind from the sea had carried the smoke and sparks from the burning citadel well inland, and parts of the suburbs untouched by the earlier fires were beginning to burn. The orderly Macedonian retreat became disorganized, the troopers first walking quickly, then jogging, and finally running hard to join up with Hephaestion’s men before the fires cut them off. Alexander, in personal command of the rearguard, kept his men to a walk, making a final nightmare passage between two burning villas. Then at last he was back in the cleared space behind the broken inner wall, and Hephaestion came forward to meet him, escorting two unarmed strangers.

  “These are the mercenary commanders who held the wall,” the cavalry commander said steadily, his voice giving no hint of the relief he felt. “They wish to surrender, Alexander.”

  The king nodded. “Very well, we’ll discuss terms later.”

  Hephaestion backed away, herding the mercenary officers with him. Alexander turned to stare up at the burning city. He had known since the night before that this was the last campaign, but it had seemed unreal then, less solid than his visions of Zeus Ammon. Now the reality of it was all too apparent, and he let that grief wash through him. This was the end of his dream of a world-empire. Now there was other work to be done, the less glorious task of melding all his disparate peoples into a common, lasting empire. Philip had excelled at that, had had the knack of government as well as the gift of command. Alexander took a deep breath. He had surpassed his father as a commander; he would set himself to be a better king as well. He shook himself, and walked back toward Hephaestion, framing the terms of the mercenaries’ surrender as he went.

  Epilogue:

  Alexandria-in-orbit, summer (Loios), 1947 imperial (1591 A.D., 2344 A.U.C.)

  The crew’s quarters was a long cylinder, with sleeping bags suspended by a complicated system of elastic lines along its sides. Hector son of Amyntor flipped himself through the circular hatchway, aligning himself in the lack of gravity so that his feet pointed back toward the hatch, and pulled himself along the line of sleeping men until he reached the last one. Alexander Maiorian hung comfortably asleep, face turned into the bag’s netting. One arm had worked free of the sleeping bag, and drifted limply in the faint current of air from the main compartment. Hector anchored himself to the nearest handhold and reached across to shake the drifting arm. Maiorian stirred, opening his eyes, and Hector said, “The commander wants you. Transmission in fifteen minutes.”

  Maiorian groaned and fumbled for the snaps of the bag. He freed himself in a single convulsive gesture and drifted out into the middle of the cylinder, wearing only the long underwear in which they all slept. Hector caught him as he drifted toward another sleeper. Maiorian muttered something that might have been thanks, caught a handhold, and spun to reclose his sleeping bag, then hung in the center of the cylinder.

  “Transmission?” he asked.

  “To Alexandria—to your uncle the emperor,�
�� Hector said, patiently. Maiorian was not at his best immediately on waking. “It’s Foundation Day, remember?”

  Maiorian grunted. It was a sound that could mean either comprehension or complete rejection of the idea, and Hector eyed him dubiously, waiting for some more positive sign. Then Maiorian shook himself and pulled himself along the row of handholds toward the crew’s private lockers. Hector watched his friend pull on the coveralls badged with the Air Companions’ winged star, calmly retrieving the various belongings that threatened to drift away in the lack of gravity. Then Hector followed him into the second of the three main compartments that made up Alexandria-in-orbit.

  About half of the station’s staff was already there, floating in the central space among the panels that monitored the experiments that were the primary function of the station. Most panels bore the scarab-and-wreath stamp of the Universities of Alexandria-in-Egypt, but some carried the fasces of the Roman School of Engineering, and a few were marked with the symbols of schools in Hausa, Africa. A narrow band of bare metal encircled the middle of the cylinder and four thick portholes were spaced at equal intervals along it. Asander son of Proexes, the station’s commander, drifted within easy reach of the grab bar beneath one portal and lifted one hand in lazy greeting.

  Maiorian returned the gesture, pushing himself farther out into the chamber, and Asander asked, “Are you ready, then?”

  Hector murmured, “Are you awake, that’s the question.”

  Maiorian gave his friend a quick, malevolent glance, and said to Asander, “As ready as I’ll ever be.” He snagged the bright-red guide rope that stretched across the compartment and flipped neatly to a stop, upright in relation to the commander. “Below” him, Stasanor of Augaea, the chief technician, finished making the final adjustments to the station’s hand-held camera, and spun it expertly toward Lucius Mancinus, waiting by the hatch to the forward compartment. The younger technician caught it easily and hooked a foot through the nearest grab bar, using both hands to adjust the lens.

  “Ready, Your Highness, sir?” he called.

  Maiorian made a face—there were some thirty princes of the blood throughout the empire, enough to make any such title seem faintly ridiculous—but made no other response to the too-familiar teasing. “Go ahead.”

  Mancinus’s face changed, and he said soberly, “Filming—now.” Behind him, Stasanor flipped a series of switches, and a bank of lights flashed from yellow to green: the transmission was being beamed directly to Egyptian Alexandria, and from there to the borders of the empire and beyond.

  Alexander Maiorian took a deep breath, looking directly into the camera lens, and began to speak. He was the first of his line to go into space, and part of the first crew to inhabit Alexandria-in-orbit; on this, the anniversary of the empire’s foundation, he spoke of his own pride and responsibility, and of his desire—shared by the rest of the crew, and the emperor, and many others—to see this new Alexandria grow and prosper, as had the other Alexandrias, the cities of the great Alexander himself.

  Hector, listening from the hatchway, felt a stirring in the air behind him, and moved aside to let the others of the crew float silently into the second chamber. They were as caught up in the words as he: somehow, despite a Hausa mother and a German grandmother, despite the generations that separated Maiorian from his great ancestor, the gift had not been lost. Wrapped in his own desire, he could transmit that longing to others, binding them to his own plans: not of conquest, this time, but of exploration. As long as Alexander Maiorian spoke for it, this newest Alexandria would prosper, and form the basis, perhaps, for a further empire in the stars.