by Judith Tarr
The silence was abrupt, and to Meriamon, terrible.
Parmenion broke it, roughshod. “Of course you can give them. There’s not much to you, but what there is is sound, and young enough to bear a whole troop of sons.”
“No,” Meriamon said again. “There will be no sons for me. Nor daughters. No children at all. This that I am”—her hand gestured to her shadow where it lay watchful—”and this that I do, in speaking for my gods—it has a price. That price is my hope of children.”
“For always?” Alexander asked. His voice was soft, almost gentle. “For ever?”
“For always,” said Meriamon. Her eyes were burning with unshed tears. “It never mattered. Much. I had so much to learn; so much to do. Then there was the shock of leaving Egypt, and the shock, almost greater, of coming back. It seemed little enough price to pay for Egypt. Others have paid more. Others have died.”
“Was I worth so much?” asked Alexander. Soft still. But no pity. If she had not loved him before, she would have loved him then, and known him for her king.
Her answer did not come at once. She said slowly, “I had thought so. It was only a dream that I was losing: a hope of children who might never be born, even if I hadn’t given them in sacrifice. And in return, all of Egypt was gaining its king. But what I did for it—am I any better, after all, than the priests in Tyre, giving their firstborn children to the gods?”
“They gave living children,” Alexander said. “You gave children who had never been conceived.”
“That is so,” she said. “And it is better to be doomed to barrenness than to be condemned to virginity. But I am not the woman to give you the sons you need.”
They stared at her, all of them. She drew herself up. “The grief is old,” she said, “almost as old as I. I am sorry that I cannot be what you need me to be. There will be a queen for you, Alexander. And sons. My gods have promised me that.”
Twenty-Five
Meriamon felt swept clean. She had left the three of them in the chamber of the birds, speechless all, and even Niko had not tried to follow her.
There was pain in that, but no surprise. She should have told him the truth from the beginning. If he hated her now, she had only herself to blame for it.
She went down to Amon’s temple. It was smaller by far than the great temple in Thebes, but great enough for a stranger to marvel at.
She hardly saw its splendors. They welcomed her there, glad enough that she knew a pang of guilt: she had been neglecting them shamefully. When she put on the vestments and bound her hair beneath the heavy wig and sang the god’s office, she made herself pure prayer.
Or as pure as she could be with a small cold knot of pain in her heart. And all for a pack of Hellenes. What were they to her? This was her place and this was her world. She had left it for a while. She would never leave it again.
o0o
The old ways closed in about her, and the old, close-walled existence. If she was restless, if she remembered too much and too often, if her dreams were strange again, as if she had not done all that she was sent to do, then that was only to be expected. The tamed cat of the temple had been loosed for a time to be a hunter. Now she must be the god’s again, and live within his walls, and bind her days with the cords of his worship.
Sekhmet was not with her. The cat had let herself be taken to the temple in Meriamon’s cloak, but the next morning when Meriamon woke she was gone. A hunt through the temple yielded nothing. There was no use in hunting through the city, not as large as it was and full of cats, though Meriamon did enough of that. Sekhmet belonged to no one but herself. She would come back, or she would not.
It was much the same with Meriamon’s shadow. It had not abandoned her: it came and it went. But it hunted every night, and Meriamon had no will to restrain it.
It was not hunting in the city. It had promised her that. In the days it slept, waking only to startle a novice with keener eyes than most, who happened to be staring at it when it opened lambent eyes and yawned.
o0o
“I’m a fallow field,” Meriamon said to Lord Ay. She had been in the temple for a hand of days. She was settling, she thought, not badly. All things considered. “I’ll never bear fruit in children. I’ve done what I was born to do. What’s left for me now but a round of empty days?”
Ay regarded her gravely enough, though there was a glint in his eye. “Those are grim words for one so young,” he said.
“Not as young as that,” said Meriamon.
“Oh, you are ancient,” he said, “and weary and wise. You brought us a king. Do you think there is nothing greater that you can do?”
“Isn’t there?”
He shrugged, coughed. His young priest tensed, clean cloths in hand. Ay waved him away. “Nothing greater in the world’s eye,” he said, “maybe. But small things have their own splendor. Now that the gods have freed you, you can be simply Meriamon, as you have never allowed yourself to be.”
“But what is Meriamon?”
He looked at her. His eyes were dark, but there was a brightness in them. “What would you like to be?”
“Happy.”
When he smiled, all the lines of his face seemed to curve upward. “Surely that is simple enough.”
“It’s the most complicated thing m the world.” Meriamon was sitting on a stool at his feet. She clasped her hands between her knees, frowning ahead of her. “I thought I knew what I was going to do. Go out of Khemet, however terrifying a thing that was, and bring back its king. And I did it. It took longer than I’d ever expected, and cost me both more and less: more in time and comfort, less in courage. Then, I thought, I would come back to Amon, and be what I was before. Nothing would have changed.”
“Except that the Parsa were conquered.”
“But that was simply part of it. The world would be all different, and I would be exactly as I was before—except that the old hate was gone.”
“Old hates leave great gaping holes in one’s heart,” said Ay, “when they are gone.”
Meriamon sat very still. “Yes,” she said slowly. “Yes. But it’s not gone. It’s simply... vindicated. There are still Parsa faces in Khemet. They still weigh down the world with their Truth. Now it’s simply another truth, and our gods are come into their own again.”
“Would you wish them to be destroyed?”
“No,” she said, surprising herself a little. “They have their place, and their purpose in the gods’ eyes. But not in Khemet.”
Ay inclined his head. “Wise indeed.”
“I still hate them,” said Meriamon, “for what they did to us. That won’t change. What has... I thought I could be happy if I came back to my own kind. They—you—are still that. And I’ve done everything that I was sent out to do. But it’s not enough.”
“Maybe you have not done all that the gods intended.”
Meriamon sat upright. “But I have! Alexander is king in the Great House.”
“Will he stay there?”
“Khemet has had warrior pharaohs before. Even foreign pharaohs.”
“None like this,” said Ay. “He is as restless as a fire, and as little inclined to linger.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Meriamon said. “He has done what needed to be done. “If he goes away, if he makes war against the Parsa in their own country, Khemet is still free.”
“But are you?”
She met his eyes. Something in her was quivering, coming awake. Something that she had not known was there, or had not wanted to know. “What more is there for me to do?”
“The gods know.” said Ay.
“I don’t want to do any more. I want to go home. I want to be myself.”
“Maybe your self is in what more you must do.”
She shied at that, like the mare she had left behind with the rest of her life among the Hellenes. She was not wearing a wig. Her many plaits slipped out of the ring that caught them at her nape, and slithered down her back. “What if my self is the wife of a Macedonian soldier?
What then, Father Ay?”
He barely blinked. “Why then, I would wish you happy, daughter.”
She crumpled slowly. “No. You wouldn’t. He wouldn’t have me. I can give him no sons.”
“Did he tell you so?”
Much too shrewd, that one, and much too keen of eye.
“He didn’t need to,” she said. “I know what men are, in Hellas as in Khemet. And I won’t be his whore.”
“I doubt that he would ask it of you.”
“How do you know?”
Her tone was unspeakably rude. Ay only smiled. “If he is the one I think he is, I know that he would have you however you are, and whatever you may do.”
“I wasn’t running away from him,” said Meriamon. “Or even from Alexander.”
“You were not,” Ay said. “You were running away from Meriamon.”
“I can’t run back,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I left,” said Meriamon. “I never said a word.”
“Then you have no words to unsay.”
Except what she had said to Ay. She got up. She meant to stand over Ay, to say something irrevocable. Instead she found herself walking away, back to the duties she had chosen.
They were empty, that once had been all the world. They rang hollow. The singers with whom she sang were not those among whom she had been raised and trained.
They were strangers, and they watched her sidelong, curious and even hostile. They knew what she was. Not all of them forgave her for it. The young priests doing their season’s service in the temple, with the lives of merchants or nobles or even princes behind and before them, had other thoughts than jealousy.
One of them spoke to her, a day or two after her colloquy with Ay. He was a quite presentable young, man, well-spoken and not too bold, but not shy, either. She did not recall what he said, or what she replied. She was too busy realizing that she could like him; he was in awe of her, but overcoming it, and he looked as if he knew how to laugh.
He was slender, and tall for a man in Khemet. His body was shaved smooth as all the priests’ were, but he did not look as if he would be a hairy man: smooth brown limbs and quick grace, the beauties of her people. He ventured a touch, a brush of fingers along the line of her shoulder, ostensibly to smooth her plaits.
Her throat closed. He was quite beautiful and quite charming, and quite suitable for a princess of Khemet. And when he looked at her, she could not see him at all. Long lanky sandy-furred body, face as nearly ugly as made no matter, sulks and scowls and sharp-edged words, and strength that was earth to her air and emptiness.
He did not want her. She did not want him to want her, and so be robbed of sons.
And if he were left out of it, then what of Alexander?
Ay asked her that. She had no memory of seeking him out. She was simply there, in the room in which she had left him. “What of Alexander?” he asked again. “Will you leave him to find his fate alone?”
“We are not mated,” Meriamon said tightly.
“Not in the flesh,” he agreed, serene.
“Nor in the heart, either. I was a messenger, that was all. My message is delivered. My task is done.”
“So you say,” said Ay.
She walked to the wall and back. She was pacing the way Alexander did. It helped him think, he said. It did nothing for her.
She stood over the priest. Her shadow was awake: she felt it behind her. “If I go to Alexander now,” she said, “I may never come back.”
“That is in the gods’ hands,” said Ay. She would never be as serene as he was, though she lived the count of his years thrice over. “How will you know until you have done it?’’
She laughed painfully. “You were never such a tangle of fears and follies as I am.”
“Certainly not. I was worse.”
She embraced him suddenly, careful of his fragile bones. He was stronger than he looked, for a moment, holding her almost painfully hard.
She drew back. Her eyes were pricking with tears. “I don’t want to go.”
“And yet you do.”
“I shouldn’t.”
“You think so?” There was sharpness in his voice now; a touch of impatience. It stung her, as it was meant to. “I think that you have done quite enough brooding over ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t.’ Go now and do what your heart tells you.”
“The gods—”
“Some of us,” said Ay, “are not privileged to speak with the gods face to face. To us they speak through the heart. You asked to be simply Meriamon. Maybe that is the beginning of it.”
She ducked her head. Her cheeks were hot.
“There,” he said more gently. “You’ve won yourself a little indulgence. Now it’s time to be up and doing again.”
“Past time,” she said. Accepting it—and well past time, he would have told her.
She bent again and set a kiss on his brow. It was all the thanks he needed, and all the promise.
o0o
Alexander was getting ready to leave Memphis. Meriamon had had rumors of that even in the temple. She should have known how close he would be to doing it, once he had decided on it.
“Tomorrow,” said the guard at the inner gate. He was not happy about it. “Just the king and the King’s Squadron and a handful of servants. The rest of us are staying here, with Parmenion to look after us.”
Meriamon’s stomach clenched at the name, though she chided it for a fool. Parmenion was neither enemy nor friend. She was nothing to him, since she could not give Alexander sons.
But he was staying here, and Alexander was going away. “Where?” she demanded, a little fiercely perhaps: the guard looked alarmed.
“Maybe you should ask him,” he said.
She could have pressed. But he was only a guard, after all, and Alexander was within. Her heart knew it, and her skin, sensing the force of his presence.
He had found the wrestling court in the princes’ palace, and made good use of it Meriamon heard it long before she came there: shouts and laughter, a sudden hush, a whoop and the sound of hands slapping thighs in approval.
The court was full of men, and not a chiton among them. They wrestled and tumbled in pairs, or stood about, free of themselves as young animals, and cheered the combatants on. The center of their attention was a tangle of oiled limbs, sun-brown but fair beneath. Some of them belonged to Ptolemy. The rest, leaner and longer and yet astonishingly like Ptolemy’s, almost put Meriamon to flight.
Niko was getting the worst of it. He was fast and he was strong, but his brother had the greater weight; and his crippled hand failed him in the holds. That made him angry; she saw the glitter of his eyes. But he was grinning, a predator’s baring of teeth. Even when he broke under his brother’s assault and crashed to the mat, the breath that broke out of him was a laugh. Ptolemy set a knee on his chest and straightened to claim the victory.
Niko twisted. Ptolemy’s knee slipped on sweat and oil. Niko pulled him down.
They lay side by side, knotted like lovers, in a roar of laughter.
Niko was up first, pulling Ptolemy with him. They leaned on one another and panted, wringing wet and gloriously content.
Neither of them saw Meriamon. She had shrunk back among the Macedonians—Egyptians too, now that she noticed, red-dark and small as children in this company, regarding her in curiosity. But then they were properly kilted, and they did not mind that she was a woman. In much too brief a while, the stillness had spread.
She could not be invisible with so many eyes on her, even in her shadow’s shadow. She straightened her shoulders and lifted her chin and put on her most royal aspect. “Has any of you seen the king?”
Throats cleared. Eyes slid sidewise. Bodies shifted, hands rose, chitons appeared as if from air. One splendid young thing blushed scarlet all the way down to the hand over his privates.
“He’s in the baths,” said a voice she knew much too well for comfort. “Shall I take you to him?”
; “I can find him,” she began to say. But Niko was in front of her with his chiton in his hand, covering as much of him as it needed to.
Someone tossed him a cloth. He pulled the garment over his head and belted it, and used the cloth to wipe the sweat from his face. He was already walking, not even a glance to see if she would follow.
She would happily have refused. But a woman in the court was more than Alexander’s men had bargained for. They were going to cramp, some of them, trying to cover themselves without being obvious about it. She took pity on them.
The baths were not far away: through a passage, down a stair. Niko was standing in the passage. It was cool there, and dark after the bright sun of the courtyard. For a moment he seemed as dark as her shadow and no more solid: shape without definition, and a gleam of eyes. Then slowly he came clear.
She stopped. What she wanted to do was perfectly mad.
Well then, so was she. She held out her hands.
He looked at them. Her heart chilled. Her hands began to fall.
He caught them. His grip was warm and much too strong to break. “You didn’t need to run away,” he said.
“Yes, I did.”
“Not from me.”
“It wasn’t you,” she said.
“I’m glad of that.”
There was a silence. Her eyes were on their clasped hands. Hers were so small, and his so big. And yet they fit.
“I was false to you,” she said. “I let you think that there was more of me than there was. That... I could give you what a wife gives her husband.”
“Can a woman be a eunuch, then?”
“You’ll have no sons of me.”
He regarded her steadily. His eyes were clear. No shrinking. Regret, maybe, for what could not be; but none for what he was choosing. “I’m not a king, that I need them.”
“Every man wants them.”
“Not every man gets them.”
“But if you can—”
“There are concubines,” he said. “If it comes to that.”
The purity of her rage astonished her. She pulled him hard, nearly oversetting him. Her arms locked about his middle. His heart beat under her ear. It was not beating nearly hard enough to please her. “If you take me—if you look at another woman—I swear to you—”