Stealing Fire (28 page)

The very wind in the trees died. Far overhead, the desert falcon twisted in the air, gyring and diving.

I saw its shadow cross his face, and then he looked up. His plain brown eyes were very bright. The world moved again.

“Hail Alexander, son of Alexander, Great King of Persia.” He reached for Roxane and took her hand, drawing her to her feet. “Lady, you are free to go, you and your son, and such men and servants as wish to accompany you. I have no wish to be Regent, or Great King either. Your son is Great King, as was his father before him, and worthier men than I shall serve as Regent and guard his minority. Though I am sure none shall guard him so well as you do yourself.”

Roxane stared at him, her dirty hand in his. “What?”

“You may leave, Lady,” Ptolemy said. “My men will escort you and your son to the shore, with whatever soldiers and servants pledge themselves to you. You are free to return to Persia or wherever else you desire.”

Seleucus gaped. “You are giving up Persia?”

Ptolemy shrugged with a look around, a look that seemed to encompass draggled date trees and swollen river and sky, and perhaps our white city by the sea as well. “I don't need Persia,” he said. “Egypt is plenty for me.”

He knelt down before the child, who stood beside his mother's skirts. Three years old, I thought, born just after I left Babylon. He had his mother's dark eyes and hair, but in the shape of his face there was Alexander. I knew the look. I had seen it in Chloe and her little brothers.

“And you, Alexander,” Ptolemy said, his eyes searching the boy's face. “I hope that we will meet again, as man to man. I know your father would be very proud of you.”

Seleucus shook his head. “You are giving up the Regency?”

“I am,” Ptolemy said. “I'm sure you and Antipatros and the others will come to some terms. That is, if you're there to do so.” Ptolemy grinned. “If you'd like a way off the island, I suggest you start making deals with the Lady Roxane. I've offered her free passage, not you. And she's probably more amenable to deals than the crocodiles are.”

Roxane's eyes did not leave him. “Why?”

For a moment I thought he would give an easy answer, but he did not. “Because we must be better than our worst selves.”

She shook her head. “I don't understand.”

Gently, he placed her hand at her side and let go. “Because it's what Alexander would have done.”

SOTHIS RISING

O
f course it was not so simple. There were wounded to be tended and the dead to be burned. I led a party downriver the next day, looking for bodies carried up on shore by the flood, asking farmers along the river if they had found any cast up in their fields. We found them nearly as far as Bubastis, and there were many we did not find, whether eaten by crocodiles or carried out to sea, or lost somewhere in the quagmires of the Delta to rot. Some we found whole, and some not. The crocodiles of Sobek had eaten their fill.

More than two thousand of Perdiccas’ men were dead. We had lost less than four hundred.

We burned them on pyres before Memphis, and the black smoke went up to the sky. The Egyptians thought it horrible of course, for there is no greater blasphemy to them than to destroy the bodies of the dead, but they knew it was our way. I think they thought Ptolemy very rough indeed, like one old pharaoh on the walls of their temples who had counted his victory in the cut-off foreskins of his enemies.

The Greeks and Persians did not find it so at all. Ptolemy had each man's ashes put in an urn with his name on it to be brought to his family and friends in Persia. Those who we could not name, or those bodies that were incomplete, we burned together and buried at Saqqara with a stone above them that said they had been soldiers of Alexander. I did not think he would mind sharing his resting place with them, or that they could seek greater than to lie with him.

While we would not permit the living to enter the city, we had food brought out to the fields across the river and fodder for their animals. We feasted them as though this were the meeting of dear kinsmen. They ate and drank with gusto, as provisions had been scarce for them. And while they did our men went among them, talking in their own languages and praising the benefits of serving Ptolemy. Yes, soldiering is an uncertain life, but how much less so under such a general? How much less so, when there is ample pay and ample food, friendly territory beneath one's feet, and no long marches to the ends of the earth? How much better, when the pay is good and regular, and there are house lots to be had for free in Alexandria, where one can be a citizen and own something real?

I was proud that in the end all of the Indians stayed. There were twenty-eight elephants surviving, and four more with no drivers. All twenty-eight crews consulted together and decided to stay as a single unit. Home was a thousand miles away, over deserts and mountains, through the heart of an empire at war. Better to stay, they said, and risk their chances here. And so was born Ptolemy's elephant corps.

Nearly six hundred of the horse archers stayed as well. “Do you think,” Artashir asked them, “that the empire will not dissolve into civil war? That we will not see kin pitted against kin?” He stood before them, handsome and well turned out in his archer's silks, and he spoke to them of honor. “I am of the house of Darius the Great. You know that Cyrus found us tribesmen, no more than rude men who warred with one another over every little piece of land. He made us into a great empire, and Darius made us the greatest in the world. What will happen when once again we break along tribal lines? Will you kill your mother's kin, or your father's? Will you go to war against your wives’ brothers, or against your sisters’ husbands? That is the question that awaits us in Persia, for make no mistake the empire is crumbling. You know as I do that to slay your kin is not only dishonorable, but is also a violation of the Truth. What can an honorable man do in these times except step away from it, and in doing so serve the Light?”

I had not quite seen it that way before, but now I saw it was so. Artashir and Amina, his first wife, were of different houses, and their son of both. Who could he serve without wrongdoing besides Ptolemy of Egypt?

Many of them seemed to agree, for almost half of them signed with Ptolemy, to serve beneath Artashir, a nobleman of their own people.

The infantry were a tougher case. Many of them had been long years under their officers and had families in Babylon. Most of them chose to go.

All in all, it was nine days before they marched northward up the eastern bank of the Nile. Artashir and an escort rode with them, ushering them to the ancient boundaries of Egypt.

Seleucus, Polemon, and a Companion named Peithon had sworn their service to Roxane, to support the claims of Alexander son of Alexander above all else. Seleucus and Peithon shared the Regency, until such time as all the other players could meet together and elect a new Regent, as they had the first days in Babylon.

I did not go, as I had far too much to do in Memphis. I found some old abandoned barracks buildings along the river outside the city walls to the south and set about buying the site for the crown. It would be a good place to keep the elephants, though the buildings would need a lot of repair.

From the walls Glaukos and I watched them go, a long column snaking its way northward beside the swollen river.

Glaukos leaned over and put his elbows on the wall. “How long do you suppose the boy will last?”

“I don't know,” I said, looking where the banners at the center of the column marked Roxane and her son. “But longer than he would have a few days ago. Ptolemy's given him a chance. And I wouldn't underestimate his mother.”

Glaukos spat over the walls, then looked down to make sure it hadn't hit anyone below. “The one he ought not underestimate is Seleucus. He shouldn't have let that snake go. Mark my words, there will be trouble from that.”

“Maybe so,” I said. I looked out over the valley of the Nile from the walls of Memphis on a beautiful day in the summer, and it was hard to think of anything terrible. “But we can't foresee all ends, Glaukos.”

Glaukos looked at me sideways, a rather keen expression on his bearded face. “And what do you see?”

I flinched. “See?” I asked.

Glaukos grinned. “Do you think I don't know you're god-touched? Serving under you as long as I have? Do you think I didn't notice? Especially when you did things like tell us to stand to receive before the enemy was in sight?”

I opened my mouth and then shut it again.

Glaukos shrugged. “My old auntie back in Macedon had a bit of it. Could tell you what the weather would be, and whether a babe was boy or girl. It's not so strange as that. So what do you see, Lydias? Come on, man. It's for a friend.”

“It is at that,” I said, and leaned beside him on the wall. I should know better, I thought, than to hold back from old friends. I had done that too much, these past years. I looked out over the river, the sun catching fire like sparks from the surface of the water. The sparkles danced, the memory of fire. I had not tried to do this before, but it was easy. It was simply knowing.

“It's not over,” I said quietly. “We'll fight and fight again. But Alexandria won't burn and Ptolemy won't be Great King. If he had taken the throne he couldn't have held it, and in reaching for more would have lost all we had.”

Glaukos sighed. “Pity. He'd have been a damn fine Great King.”

“Yes,” I said. “But it's like a dice game, Glaukos. There's a time to walk away from the table with your winnings.”

He nodded. “And if you stay too long, you'll be worse off than you started. Myself, I'd rather keep my winnings than gamble on a better pot.”

“Ptolemy too,” I said. “Men will ruin themselves grasping for Alexander's empire. Best not to crave that.”

“And what's to happen to us?”

“I don't know,” I began, but I could see Glaukos then, silver threads in his beard, rushing ashore in a beleaguered town, his men fighting their way through to mine to relieve the siege. I saw the sea before me, white mountains capped with snow, green rolling plains under a golden sunrise, caves beneath the earth in far-off lands. And I knew in that moment that our stories were not over. We stood at the beginning of the rest, not at the end of Alexander's world, but in the beginning of a new world.

“We go home to Alexandria,” I said, and clapped him on the shoulder. “We go home, Glaukos.”

W
E DID NOT
go just yet. There was one more thing to do.

At Saqqara a special temple was erected just beside the tombs of the Sacred Bulls. It would hold Alexander's body for now, until the sea defenses at Alexandria made it safe to bring him there. The gilded hearse was dragged there one last time, and then its wheels removed so that it could remain as the innermost shrine. About the outside plinths were to be erected so that a full circle of the greatest men of any age, Greek, Persian, and Egyptian sages alike, would surround the King.

The statues were not done yet when I walked that circle with Bagoas. Inside, in his golden coffin, Alexander rested, the uraeus still upon his brow. I did not need to open the sarcophagus to see him. He was not there any longer. Wherever he was, in Amenti or the lands beneath the earth, or walking once more behind the eyes of an innocent child, Alexander was not here. No daimon answered any call.

Bagoas seemed tranquil, though there was a hint of sadness in his eyes that he did not speak of. I flexed my hand and rubbed it where it ached.

“How is your hand?” Bagoas asked, a frown between his brows.

I stretched my fingers, still knobbed and bent. “Better,” I said. “But I do not think it will ever be completely whole.”

He put his hand on my shoulder. “I am sorry,” he said. “But it is not as though Ptolemy is going to turn you off. Not with the things you have done. You are not a horseboy anymore, who is worth no more than the work of two good hands.”

I nodded. “I know.” I raised my hand, trying to close it. It did not, quite. “And if this is the price for it, then I am content. Not many men can say that they have stolen a god.”

I heard a step behind me and turned.

It was Ptolemy who stood in the entrance of the tomb. “Oh, Lydias. I didn't expect you here. I was looking for Bagoas.”

“I am here,” Bagoas said, stepping forward. “Do you wish to visit with the King?”

“No, I wanted to talk to you,” Ptolemy said. He hesitated. “I know that I promised you that you could serve the King forever, and that I would never part you from him or from his service. So I am reluctant to ask something as a favor of you, and I will completely understand if you refuse me.”

Bagoas’ face was bland. “What does my Pharaoh desire?”

“Would you be willing to come to Alexandria for a while? I am in dire need of a chamberlain who understands how palaces are run and who can make things work. I would be happy to give you the title of Master of the Palace or any other you prefer, and to pay you well for it. You made Alexander's court run more smoothly. Since I seem to have a court now, I would like you to do the same for mine.”

Bagoas said nothing, apparently struck dumb.

Ptolemy looked almost sheepish. “Of course if you'd rather not, if you'd rather stay here in Memphis with the King, I understand that. I just thought that I would ask.”

Bagoas found his voice. “I will come,” he said. “It will be an honor to serve you.” He glanced at me, then back at Ptolemy. “I can serve my Lord best by making sure he is well remembered, and that those futures he desired do not die with him.”

“Alexander will lie in Alexandria, the city of his founding, when his great tomb is ready,” Ptolemy said. “You only go ahead of him to prepare his place for him, as you did so often in life.”

“And to serve his brother and his nephews who will come after,” Bagoas said. “I will come to Alexandria, Ptolemy of Egypt.”

S
O IT WAS
that we sailed down the Nile in the end of the Inundation, bound for Alexandria. Beside us on both sides of the river the water was receding, leaving a layer of rich brown silt. In the upper fields farthest from the river farmers were planting grain and other things. They stopped and waved as we passed in a great ship painted gold and red, like that of the pharaohs of old. Egypt had a Pharaoh again, this quiet man of forty-four, born in the mountains of Macedon. A strange fate, but it seemed to be working so far.

A new beginning, I thought, watching the first seedlings quicken in the fields. Ptolemy has changed, and so will Egypt. Alexandria will change her forever, Black Land, Red Land, and the City. A thousand strands of the future stretched before us on this morning, a thousand dizzying possibilities of all that could be.

I lifted my head and felt the sun on my face. Egypt had kept her promise to me. When I had crossed her borders she had promised that I too would be changed. I had not feared it, having nothing to lose, but now standing beside Bagoas on the ship I found myself wondering about the future for the first time in years.

“What are you thinking?” Bagoas asked, looking out over the greening land. The wind of our passage teased at his hair, a few strands blowing about his face, beautiful still for all that he was twenty-eight years old.

“That I should find out what number they have put on my lot in the city,” I said. “And find out where it is. I suppose I will need a house.”

B
UILDING ANYTHING WOULD
take time. We came back to an Alexandria full of scaffolding, buildings half raised, the foundations of a few temples laid and the work on the great public markets begun.