by Judith Tarr
“Tell me,” she said.
His eyes were wide. He played a very poor innocent. “What’s to tell?”
“You know better than I.”
He bit his lip. He was trying not to grin.
She measured him with a surgeon’s eye. “I happen to know,” she said, “that if I touch you here”—and she did—”and there”—and she did that—”you howl.”
He did. He bolted halfway out of bed. She wrapped arms and legs about him and trapped him. “Tell,” she said.
“Under torture?” he asked, affronted.
She straightened her best finger. She threatened his most sensitive rib.
“I’ll tell!” he cried. He was laughing like an idiot. She had to wait for him to stop.
“I’ve been talking,” he said at long last. “To the king. And to Ptolemy. And Mazaces—did you know he’s going to stay in Egypt? Alexander is keeping him on. He knows the place, after all. And he’s not too badly hated, for a Persian.”
“He won’t be satrap again, surely,” said Meriamon. Her lips were tight.
“Not likely,” said Niko. “No; Peukestas will be governor here, and Aischylos of Rhodes. A Macedonian and a Greek. And Egyptians to stand behind them.”
“That’s well,” Meriamon said. She had known about Peukestas, of course. But one never knew. Kings could change their minds.
“I’ve been talking to Deinokrates, too,” Niko said. “He’s down from Rhakotis, getting more men and having a last word with Alexander. They’re calling the place Alexandria already. It looks as if it’s going to stick.”
“Of course it will,” said Meriamon. “The gods have said it.”
“I’m going up there,” he said. “I’m going to help build it.”
“We’re going straight to Tyre,” she said. “There won’t be time to stop by Rhakotis again.”
“I’m not going to Tyre,” said Nikolaos. “I’m going to Alexandria.”
“But—”
And he said, “‘We’?”
There was a pause.
“I’m going to Tyre,” Meriamon said very carefully. “I’m going with Alexander.”
“Of course you aren’t,” said Niko. “You hated it there. You spent every moment wanting to be in Egypt.”
“I was supposed to be in Egypt. He was dallying, building that mole of his.”
“And making the greatest siege m the world,” Niko said.
“It kept him out of Egypt.” She shook herself. She was letting him lure her from the straight track. “He’s king in Egypt now. He has to go and conquer Persia.”
“Of course he does. I’m not going with him. I’m going to help Deinokrates build his city. It’s going to be splendid, Meriamon. All the best of Egypt, and all the best of Hellas. We’ll build temples to our gods, and temples to yours; Amon, of course—”
“Isis,” she said. “Build a temple to Isis.”
“Isis,” he said, obliging. “And a market, Meriamon. A market for everything in the world, and ships to bring it, and a harbor for the ships to anchor in. And a place for philosophers. Alexander was particular about that. Somewhere for them to do their thinking, and somewhere for their teaching, and scribes to copy their books, and a library to keep them in. We’ll have a theater, and festivals to match the ones in Athens. We’ll have a gymnasium. We’ll have the greatest city that ever was.”
“And places for ordinary people?” Meriamon asked. “Will you make room for those?”
“Everywhere,” he said. “Cities aren’t made, you know. Mostly they just grow. Here we’ll learn from their mistakes.”
“So we shall,” she said.
He did not hear the echoes in her voice. His smile dazzled her. He kissed her thoroughly, drew back still grinning, said, “I knew you’d see it. We can be married there. Or if you’d rather, we can go with Alexander as far as Pelusium. It won’t be much of a wedding for a king’s daughter, but he’ll be there, at least, to bless it.”
“I’m going with him,” she said. “To Tyre. And wherever he goes after that.”
The brightness faded from his face. He frowned. “But why?”
“Because he is my king.”
“He’s your king in Egypt. He’s not staying here.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“But,” said Niko. “You wither and fade outside of your Black Land. Your magic is weak. The air is too cold or too wet. The sun is wrong. The sky is too narrow.”
“All of that is true,” she said. “It makes no difference. Alexander is my king. Where he is, my power lies.”
“Does he know that?”
Bless the boy. He was jealous.
Her heart was cold and small and hard. She understood now. What Ay had meant; what he had bidden her to do.
There were gods in it somewhere. They felt very far away and supremely indifferent. Even the Mother of them all. She had seen her beloved slain and rent in pieces, and gone up and down the Two Lands in search of them. She would hardly have pity on a woman whose lover was simply determined to stay in Khemet. Fine good sense, she would reckon that.
“Alexander knows,” Meriamon said. “He’s not displeased. I’ll go back to working with Philippos, and Aristandros might decide to make use of me. There will be other Egyptians with us. And Thaïs, of course. And Phylinna. It’s not as if I’ll be all alone.”
Niko looked blank. Stunned. “But why?”
She drew a deep breath. She prayed for patience. “I have to. The same way I had to leave Egypt in the beginning. Because it’s where I must be. And—” She stopped. Very well: let him know the truth. “I want to. Yes, this is my country. Yes, there is no place like it. But I want to see other places; other skies. There are whole worlds that I’ve never seen. He said that to me, did you know? When we were in Siwah. I know what he meant. I want to see them with him.”
“You should have married him after all,” said Niko, hard and flat.
“No,” she said. “It’s not that kind of wanting. It’s what you want in his city.”
He did not want to understand that. His face was set against her. He was growing angry: his scowl was as black as she had ever seen it.
Her hand tried to creep out, to smooth the scowl away. She clenched it at her side. But never as tight as she clenched her heart, lest she break down and cry. “I love you,” she said. “Don’t doubt it for a moment. When I can come back, I will. I promise you.”
“Will you come back? Will you ever?”
She looked into the grey glass of his eyes. There were visions there. “Yes,” she said. “I will come back. I will die in Khemet, in the Black Land where I was born.”
He shivered so hard that the bed shook. But his temper was stronger than his awe. “Maybe I’ll find another woman. Maybe I won’t care if I ever see you again.”
“Maybe,” she said. The word was soft and cold.
He rolled to his feet. “By the dog!” he cried. “Don’t you even care?”
She looked up at him. Remembering how she had first seen him: a shadow against uncertain light, towering, swaying just visibly. It had been pain then, of his wounds and his exhaustion. It was pain now, and if the wounds were of the heart, they were all the deeper for that.
No deeper than her own. “Your brother will be king in Egypt,” she said. “Did you know that?”
“What?” She had caught him off balance.
“I saw it,” she said. “Your eyes are like a scrying glass.”
He squeezed them shut. “Oh, gods. I wish I could hate you. It would be so much simpler.”
“You’re not even afraid of me.”
His eyes flew open. “Why should I be?”
She crooked a finger. Her shadow reared up. It grinned in Niko’s face.
He grinned back nastily. It shut its mouth, nonplussed.
“Is that your real shape,” he asked it, “or do you have one you were born with?”
It looked at Meriamon. Its eyes were, of all things, laughing.
She did not see what there was to laugh at. Her heart was going to Asia with Alexander. Her body wanted to cling to this beautiful fearless idiot and never let him go.
She went still. She could hardly—he would never—
And why not?
She stood. They towered over her, both of them, shadow and man. She stretched out her hand. She laid it flat over Niko’s heart. She looked him in the eye—eye to eye, and that was a feat. She hoped that he was properly in awe of it. “I am going with Alexander,” she said. “You are coming with me.”
His brows went up. “What if I won’t?”
“You will.”
“How? By sorcery?”
“Because you love me.”
“If you love me, you’ll stay in Egypt.”
“No,” she said.
If he was a fool, he would decide that she did not love him. He would break away, and rage at her, and fling himself out.
He raised his hand. Her shadow tensed. He laid it over hers, closed his fingers, turned her hand palm up. It was scarred still from the stone that had pierced it on the march to Siwah. The mark would not fade, she suspected. It was a reminder, and a remembrance.
“You have will enough to rule a world,” he said.
“That’s Alexander,” she said.
“And you.” He looked angry. Sulking. “What do I have to do to make you see sense?”
“Come with me.”
“Will we come back?”
Her heart leaped. She kept her face impassive. “I’ve told you we will.”
“Well then,” he said. “If we come back, and you promise—on your solemn word—that we will live in Alexandria, and build it, and make it beautiful—”
“And be as kings in it?”
“Plain good citizens will do,” he said. “Will you promise?”
“By my name,” said Meriamon.
“Then I’ll go,” he said. His anger was gone. His smile swelled, bloomed, blazed. “We’ll be the greatest army that has ever been. Our king is the greatest king who ever was. We’ll stride from horizon to horizon. We’ll conquer the world.”
Or at least, thought Meriamon, a goodly portion of it.
She closed her fingers over the memory of pain. She had not seen the last of it. Oh, no. When that day came, she would have come forth into another day than this which brightened the sky of the living earth, and stood in another Great House than this, in the Hall of the Two Truths, and the judges would be weighing the purity of her heart.
She was smiling. Broadly, she noticed. Grinning, for a fact. “We’ll conquer the world,” she agreed. “Tomorrow. Tonight—or what is left of tonight—”
“Tonight,” said Nikolaos, “we conquer Egypt.”
Fair was fair, Meriamon thought. Egypt, after all, had conquered Macedon. And would again; and years to do it in, and worlds to wander as they did it.
Even the Weigher of Hearts would be pleased to call that justice.
Author’s Note
I. Alexander
The life and achievements of Alexander III of Macedon (356-323 B.C.), with the exception of Mary Renault’s trilogy, Fire from Heaven, The Persian Boy, and Funeral Games, have inspired few recent novels in English. There has, however, been a plethora of monographs, biographies, and popular histories. Perhaps the best of the recent crop, with its summaries of prior scholarship and its meticulous recording of dates, events, and sources, is A.B. Bosworth’s Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great (Cambridge, 1988).
Both Bosworth and Renault draw ultimately from the ancient historians of Alexander’s life and times, all of whom are available in English translation: Plutarch and Curtius in Penguin editions (Plutarch, The Age of Alexander, tr. Ian Scott-Kilvert, 1973, and Quintus Curtius Rufus, The History of Alexander, tr. John Yardley, 1984), Arrian’s The Campaigns of Alexander in the translation of Aubrey de Selincourt (New York, 1958), and the histories of Diodorus Siculus (Diodorus of Sicily) in Loeb editions, especially volume 8, ed. and tr. C.B. Welles, and volume 9, ed. and tr. R.M. Geer (Cambridge, Mass., 1963, 1967). It should be noted that, since Renault’s assessment of Curtius as an irredeemably silly man with access to priceless sources, scholars have concluded that Curtius, for all his bombast, is in fact more accurate than Arrian.
There is also, and significantly for this novel, an odd, highly fantastical, and quite entertaining Life of Alexander of Macedon attributed to Alexander’s own chronicler, Callisthenes. Elizabeth Hazelton Haight in her translation (New York, 1955) sets its actual composition at about A.D. 300, but adds that certain incidents have been found on papyri dated not long after Alexander’s death. Here, in the work of the author commonly known as “Pseudo-Callisthenes,” is the story of Nectanebo, last native pharaoh of Egypt, and his attempt to create a savior for Egypt through the offices of the god Amon and the womb of the Queen of Macedon.
This novel adheres closely to actual historical events from the battle of Issus in the autumn of 333 B.C., through Alexander’s journey to the oracle of Zeus Amon at Siwah in the Libyan desert in the spring of 331 B.C. I have made occasional changes in the interests of theme, story, or narrative simplicity.
Although some sources, including Curtius, speak of Alexander’s crowning in Memphis, this probably does not refer to the native rite of accession. Alexander was not at that point interested in taking on the trappings of the country which he had taken. Most likely he held his Greek games, toured the sights (including the Pyramids and the tomb of the Apis Bull) as numerous foreigners had before him, and left promptly for Siwah.
The founding of Alexandria probably took place after his return from the oracle; to avoid an anticlimax, I have chosen to follow the tradition that sets the founding before the journey to the shrine. The story of the sandstorm and the miraculous rain seems to have been commonly accepted by ancient historians, likewise the account of the guides, whether serpents or ravens from the groves of the oasis. Some scholars have proposed that this story was originally told by Ptolemy in his memoirs. Alexander never spoke to anyone of his time alone with the oracle, not even to Hephaistion, who, as Curtius says, was privy to all his secrets.
Although Ptolemy claimed after Alexander’s death to be the king’s illegitimate half-brother, this was probably a political ploy—a means of laying claim to the kingship of Egypt. He died in 283 B.C., having preserved his kingdom intact through the Wars of Succession that followed Alexander’s death. His family ruled Egypt until the suicide of Cleopatra VII and her Roman consort, Mark Antony, in 30 B.C., when Egypt became a province of the Roman Empire.
The Athenian courtesan Thaïs probably did not join Alexander’s army until the siege of Tyre. At Issus the army was still under the regimen of Alexander’s father Philip, who mandated that no women or camp followers accompany the troops. Soldiers were not allowed wagons or large trains of belongings. Each company shared a servant, and each man carried his own possessions and armor as he marched.
After the capture of the Persian king’s women and treasure, the army’s discipline slackened, and it began to swell into the ambulatory city that accompanied Alexander on his journeys through Asia. For a short, thorough, and very useful account of the army and its logistics, see Donald W. Engels, Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army (Berkeley, 1978).
It was Thaïs who, the story goes, persuaded Alexander in the midst of a drunken revel to burn Persepolis. She bore Ptolemy three children, but she never became his wife. When Ptolemy claimed the kingship of Egypt, he took a properly respectable—and Greek—queen.
When Alexander died in Babylon at the age of thirty-two, worn out by fever, wounds, and grief for the death of Hephaistion, Philip Arrhidaios, Alexander’s half-brother, became King Philip III of Macedon. He was murdered in 317 B.C.—a common fate of Macedonian kings, addlepated or otherwise. Precisely what incapacity he suffered is not known, nor is it known whether it was congenital or the result of an accident (whether purely accidental or politically motivated
) in his childhood. He was succeeded by Alexander’s son by the Bactrian princess Roxane, Alexander IV, who was murdered in his turn, at the age of about twelve, in 310 B.C.
His death ended the dynasty. For a good, brief analysis of Macedon’s history in general and Alexander III’s effect on it in particular, see R. Malcolm Errington’s A History of Macedonia, tr. Catherine Errington (Berkeley, 1990).
Likenesses of Alexander were frequent in ancient times. It has been said that he changed the standards of beauty from the austere Classical model to the fuller, lusher Hellenistic image.
A particularly interesting portrait, done from life, has been found in the tomb of Philip II at Vergina in northern Greece, and is reproduced in The Search for Alexander: An Exhibition (Boston, 1980). Manolis Andronikos’ essay in this volume, “The Royal Tombs at Vergina: A Brief Account of the Excavations,” pp. 26ff., despite its good grey title, is an archeological adventure story.
The Getty Museum in Malibu, California, has on display a marble portrait of the young Alexander, and rather more interesting, a likeness that has been identified by most scholars as that of Hephaistion. Likenesses of Ptolemy can be found in any book of classical coins; his lantern jaw and uncompromising nose are unmistakable.
II. Egypt and Egyptian Magic
Meriamon, like Nikolaos, is my invention, as is her mission to Alexander. Her father, however, was in fact a pharaoh of Egypt, Nectanebo II, last of the native rulers, defeated by the Persians in 341 B.C. and driven out, probably to his death. Pseudo-CalIisthenes makes him a great mage. This is true enough, insofar as Pharaoh (the title means “Great House”) was regarded as the living incarnation of the god Horus, the direct intercessor with the gods, by whose health and safety the realm prospered or failed.
Egypt in the fourth century B.C. was regarded as unimaginably ancient and profoundly mysterious. Magic had its source there, and magic pervaded the lives and minds of its people. Its practitioners guarded their secrets jealously, but their purposes were as profoundly practical as the rest of Egyptian culture: magical rituals and practices were designed to obtain specific results through manipulation of natural and supernatural forces.