Stealing Fire (5 page)

“No,” I said.

She looked up again, as though she drank in moonlight, her pale eyes filled with it.

“Still,” I said, “you should be wary.” She was alone in this place with me and my men, with none of her own except the children. She did not know me, nor any who served me, except that Ptolemy had trusted me. I was not sure I would have.

Thais looked amused. “I have traveled with the army for ten years now,” she said. “I think I know the look of men I should trust and those I should not.”

“Can it be ten years?” I blurted. “You must have been a child when you came out.”

Thais laughed, a clear, crystal sound. “I was twenty,” she said, “and you flatter like a gentleman.”

“I do not mean to flatter,” I said rather stiffly, uncertain whether she meant it or not.

“I see that you don't,” she said, and her voice took on another tone entirely. “I was eighteen when Ptolemy came to Athens with Alexander, you see. He came to see me on a bet. Someone had bet him that he would not seek out an Athenian hetaira, trained to arts of love and philosophy alike, that such would shut her door in his rude Macedonian face.”

“I take it you did not,” I said.

Thais gave me a rather piercing look. “Ptolemy studied with Aristotle and he did not waste his time,” she said. “When Alexander's father hired a tutor for his son he did bother to hire someone of some note.”

“And Ptolemy was one who shared in those studies.” I had known of course that the prince's friends shared his tutor, that the prince might learn disputation properly and nobles be honored by their sons’ inclusion. But Ptolemy must have been too old. Nearly nine years Alexander's senior, he would have been a young man when the prince was a youth.

Of course there had always been the rumor that Ptolemy's mother had been King Phillip's lover when they were both very young, that his seed had taken in her before she was married off to Lagos, a country gentleman known for his mild temper and loyalty to the throne. But perhaps there was nothing in it. Certainly she had borne Lagos children, and there had never been a whisper of any impropriety. But this oldest son, her firstborn—why had Phillip sent him to the schoolroom when he must have been twenty-two? Was it mere courtesy to Lagos for his years of good service, or the only thing he could do for a son he could never acknowledge?

I expected that Ptolemy himself did not know. And how could one ever know the truth of what had passed forty years ago between people now dead?

“I came out to Asia with Ptolemy,” Thais said, and she smiled. “My friends said I was mad to leave the beauty of Athens to take to the road with a wild Macedonian who would like as not abandon me in some strange city.”

“He is not that sort of man,” I said, thinking of the way he had bent over the child in Babylon, her arms around his neck in farewell.

“He is not,” she said. “I knew that then, and I know it now. If he has entrusted us to you, then he is certain what you are made of.”

“Then he knows more than me,” I said, “for I do not know what I am made of.”

“Do you not?” Thais looked at me curiously. “Do you have a family of your own?”

I swallowed, but my voice was still rough. “My wife and son died in Gedrosia. He was just learning to pull himself up. He had not yet taken his first steps when…” I stopped, swallowing again.

Thais’ face was white in the moonlight. “I am so sorry,” she said. “I did not mean to remind you.”

“I do not want to forget,” I said, looking up at the dark sky. “His name was Sikander. He had black hair that curled over his brow, and the most beautiful laugh, just like his mother's. I do not want to ever forget.”

“I am so sorry,” she said.

I closed my eyes. “My wife, Sati, believed that we are all reborn somewhere in the world, in circumstances that reflect the life we have lived and the good we have earned. If that is so, then I may know that they are somewhere in peace and plenty, and it is only my selfishness that I mourn them. Instead I should celebrate that they are escaped from suffering and live instead in some quiet land that has never known war.”

“I am not sure there is any place like that,” Thais said gently.

“I know,” I said.

Thais shifted, and I thought for a moment she meant to touch me, but of course she could not do that.

I swallowed again, my face stretched toward the stars. “But I cannot help but wonder when I look into the face of every young child I see, if it is Sati or Sikander. If they are here, still standing in the dust of armies.”

“I understand,” she said quietly.

I opened my eyes. “I will see you safe to Pelousion. I have given Ptolemy my word.”

Thais nodded gravely. “And what will you do then?” she asked.

“Hold the fortress for Ptolemy until he comes,” I said. If he comes, I thought. If he is not murdered in Babylon as he expects to be. But he will face that more bravely knowing he has got his woman and children clear.

“We will wait in Pelousion for Ptolemy,” Thais said. Her eyes met mine, and there were no tears there. “He's harder to kill than you might think.”

W
E CROSSED INTO
Egypt by night. No one bothered us, but then even in the wadis and dangerous places where bandits were known to lurk, none would attack so large a group of armed men. At that time there were no markers at the border, but I knew where it was nevertheless. We rode between cliffs that did not quite overshadow the road. It was rock, not sand here, red, not golden in the sun. It would be easy to lose one's way. One rock looked like another.

And yet I knew when we crossed into Egypt. The fine hairs on the back of my neck stood up as though we were being watched. Our horses grew more restive.

At last, I saw something gleaming pale as bone in the moonlight, a sphinx the size of a small horse half buried in dirt, strange words and symbols graven upon it. It stood beside the road, a broken plinth on the other side showing where its mate had been.

“Halt,” I called.

I dismounted and walked forward. Its empty carven eyes regarded me. Perhaps in an ancient day it had marked the triumph of some pharaoh, or had stood guard over this stretch of road, a silent sentinel at the edge of Khemet.

I took out a skin of good wine and poured a generous libation into the dust before its feet. “Guardian of Egypt,” I prayed aloud so that my men might hear, “we cross into your lands not as enemies, but in the service of the Divine Alexander, whom you welcomed at Siwah as the son of Amon. Let us pass, we pray, and guide our steps true to Pelousion.”

I inclined my head. The night wind brushed past me like a great cat, stirring my cloak against my legs. I almost thought I heard it whisper,
Pass, Lydias, and know you shall be changed.

Well, I thought, that is not such great peril.

I lifted my head. “We ride,” I said, and mounted up again.

KHEMET

T
he first time I came to Egypt it was as a stable boy. A little more than a year had passed since I had run away from Miletus and joined Ghost Dancer in the service of Hephaistion son of Amyntor, but it seemed a much longer time. It was the time in which I turned from boy to man. To be sure, I was still not quite seventeen, but a year and more with the army had changed me though I had not yet seen battle. The boy Jio was long gone.

I had crossed mountains and plains, trundling along in the baggage train with the spare horses and tents, and seen the dreadful wounded of the Battle of Issos. I had sat months before Tyre as we besieged it and watched the slaughter after, the apportioning of captives. There had been no cities sacked before in this campaign, only the genteel occupation such as there had been in Miletus, but Tyre had resisted for many months. And so for the first time I heard the shrieking of the women, saw the frightened children hurried into lines for the slave markets of Damascus and Apamea. I understood, then, why Tehwaz had said it could be worse.

I learned other things as well. I tried my hand with a bow and found it more difficult than it looked to shoot a waterbird on the wing for our dinner. I learned to use a sword. I was terrible, no doubt, but when the day was done, particularly during the long months we sat outside Tyre, some of the grooms and servants got up games, wrestling or pretend bouts with a sword, aping the recreations of our betters. I did not have my full height yet, but I was tall enough and lethal quick. A sword weighed less than the shovels and rakes I had been handling, and was better balanced too.

Thus when I came to Egypt, I was like a colt on the edge of adulthood, broken already to ride, but not yet steady, not yet at his full weight.

In Egypt, there was no slaughter. The Egyptians hated the Persians, who had conquered them again after a brief period of independence only eleven years earlier, and rather than resist they greeted us with celebration. Even for us in the baggage train, there was something rather spectacular about entering Memphis in procession, riding Ghost Dancer at the end of the line, while people threw flowers down upon us and girls blew us kisses. Ghost Dancer pranced, his head held high.

I might have preened a little myself. When a girl broke from the lines along the street and ran out to give me a flower, her face upturned like a rose in the sun, her dark eyes lively with laughter, I could not understand a word she said, but I saw the movement of her breasts beneath her white shift and felt myself in that moment a man indeed. Egyptian women do not go veiled like the women of Miletus, and they may talk to anyone they choose. I found it disconcerting—so much beauty so close at hand. I did not know what to say. The world of the stable is a male world, and I had not so much as spoken to Tehwaz's daughters. To do so would have been to deserve a beating.

As for Memphis, what can I say? It was grander than Tyre and older still, the great pyramids standing guard in the desert nearby, already incalculably old. Her temples, her streets, the great walls along the river that stood seven times the height of a man wrought of golden sandstone that glowed in the sunset—what may I say of Memphis that has not been said a thousand times by every traveler who has passed through her gates? I thought her the most beautiful city in the world, and to enter thus, with song and trumpet, even the servants’ brows bound with victory wreaths, was a wonder unimaginable. I came to Memphis like a child coming home.

Now I came to Pelousion not as a child or as a servant, but as a soldier.

Artamenes, the governor, was a Persian gentleman in middle age who had been confirmed in his post by Alexander, who had heard nothing ill of him. He heard me out with some trepidation.

“Now see,” he said, “how am I to know that these orders are legitimate?”

“Ptolemy has been confirmed as Satrap of Egypt by the Regents, and he is one of their number. He will be here himself soon, after the Lady Roxane is delivered of her child.”

Artamenes stroked the end of his beard. “And if the child is a girl?”

I spread my hands. “That is in the hands of the gods,” I said piously. “If they meant for Alexander to have a son, it will be.”

“And if not?” he asked.

“Then no doubt the King's brother Arrhidaeus will be crowned, since he should be the next heir.” I hoped he had not heard that Arrhidaeus was feebleminded. I certainly had no doubt that if it came down to Arrhidaeus on the throne of Great King in the absence of any other heir, Persia would revolt.

“I see,” Artamenes said, and I struggled to keep my face bland. Just a common soldier, who had no idea about politics.

“That's as it may be,” I said, “but all I know is that Ptolemy is the new satrap, and he's given me orders to join you here at Pelousion and to cooperate with you in all ways. I hope that my troops may be of some assistance in whatever challenges you face.” As though, I thought, they answered to anyone but me.

Artamenes nodded. “There is the issue of Cleomenes in Memphis. You probably do not know that I had written to the King several times about him. He lives like a king himself on the taxes of Egypt, and does not do what is needful. He does not repair the roads and makes excuses when grain is sent for.”

“I had not heard,” I said. “Is he also Persian?”

“Greek.” Artamenes frowned. “I suppose he was some friend of someone's to be appointed to this position, but I tell you he fleeces the Great King in a way that is unseemly.”

I looked grave. “I shall be certain to tell the new satrap, General Ptolemy, all that you say.”

Artamenes raised his chin speculatively. “Are you close in his confidence, then?”

“Should he have entrusted his harem to me otherwise? His chief concubine and his children?” That was not the way it had happened in Babylon, of course. And Thais would no doubt be incensed to be described as a chief concubine, rather than a free hetaira, but I had been raised in the Satrapy of Sardis, not in Greece.

“That is true,” Artamenes said contemplatively. “One might only trust one's brother with such, or a bosom friend whose loyalty is beyond reproach.” I saw his estimate of me going up. “We shall make you welcome in Pelousion, then, that the new satrap may know that whatever Cleomenes’ doings we are loyal here. The women's quarters will be made ready for the Satrap's harem, and there will be rooms for you and your men in the fortress proper, that you may convey to General Ptolemy that all has been done in accordance with his wishes.”

I inclined my head courteously, the little half bow of one nobleman to another, not to a superior. After all, we were brothers in Ptolemy's service, and knew what was due one another. “I am grateful for your courtesy. And if it is not too much of an imposition on your time as a busy man, I should appreciate being shown the administrativa of Pelousion—where you draw your taxes from, the roads and navigational hazards and the disposition of the port—those things that a conscientious servant should make it his business to learn.”

“It would be my pleasure to show you those things, Hipparch,” he said, and so we came into Pelousion.

M
Y QUARTERS WERE
far and away the grandest I had ever had, with fretted screens of carved wood letting in light and air from an inner courtyard made up as a bower. A fountain played. There were no statues, just clean beautiful lines, and fig trees shaded a little garden of flowers. My room had a gigantic heavy bed, two chests of fine cedar wood, and a desk and chairs in the Persian style. If I had not known I was in Egypt, I should have thought myself in Persia.

I did not rest easily. Perhaps it was being in a strange place, or perhaps that the bed smelled vaguely musty, but I tossed and turned for a good while before at last sleep took me.

I dreamed, and in my dream I stood on a plain of sand under the full moon, dunes retreating from me, ridge after ridge of them marking the trackless desert. In the distance glimmered the walls of a city, cold as death in the moonlight, and I thought that it reminded me of some city I had known, rendered still and nacreous as a city of the dead.

The night wind whirled around me, kicking up dust devils, speaking to me with haunted voices. Bone and night, old spirits haunted the darkness before there was fire, whispering creatures made out of wind. They toyed with me, lifting my hair and tugging at my clothes, speaking of despair and silence, of lying down on the cool sand to die beneath the moon. There was somewhere I needed to go. There was something I needed to do, only I could not remember what.

With a rush like a breath of wind they slid away like shadows at the sound of her coming, and I looked up to see the Sphinx. She was no longer stone, but tawny-furred like a lion, padding toward me on great paws, her human face strangely beautiful.

“You have returned to Egypt, Lydias of Miletus,” she said, and her voice recalled not that of a woman, but the pure tones of a eunuch. “Beware, for it is a perilous time to be abroad, either in the Two Lands or their analogies in dreams.”

“Why?” I asked, shivering. “I did not feel anything bad here before, and I have done no wrong in Egypt.”

“They are loosened,” she said, her voice sounding like bronze. “All the spirits of the Red Land that should be bound. Pharaoh's death has unbound them, and more besides. Here and elsewhere they are abroad, and death walks the night.”

“Why?” I asked again. “Where did they come from?”

“They were made by people,” she said. “All the dark spirits and Furies, all the hags and spiteful cursed things. You made them. You imagined them, and thus brought them into being. You gave your fears flesh of a kind and set them free in the world.”

“We made them?”

“Yes.” She nodded. “People made them. It is easy for people to imagine monsters, to give them power. It is easy to imagine guilt and fear and pain in tangible form. And when you do, you make them real. In Egypt they were long ago bound to the Red Land by Pharaoh's power. Alexander could hold them, as pharaohs have for a thousand years, but he is dead and they are freed. His heir must take on the responsibility and bind them.”

I lifted my eyes to hers under the stars of this heaven, where even their patterns were strange. “There may be an heir. But if so, his heir is a baby. We don't even know if Roxane carries a boy or girl.”

“Alexander's son will never rule the Black Land,” she said, and her eyes were blue, blue as faience. “Egypt must have a pharaoh, not a disinterested overlord who will not see to what is needful. With Pharaoh's death, all is released and they roam through the world. Do you not see that all will be taken by the Furies? Do you not see that all the creatures of your mind will feed on blood and grow strong unless they are called to order and returned to the bindings that should hold them?”

“What must happen?” I asked, though I felt that somehow I already knew.

“Horus must bury Osiris in all honor and come forth by day as Egypt's champion,” she said.

“Lady, those are riddles,” I said. “Cannot you tell me plainly what you want me to do?”

“Bring the King to Memphis,” she said. A cloud passed over the moon, veiling her, and as it passed I woke.

I sat upright in the big Persian bed. It seemed stifling hot and close in the room after the cool desert I had dreamed. I got up and went to the window, looked out over the garden. The moonlight limned every leaf, every bud.

“Egypt,” I whispered. “Khemet.” I did not quite know what she wanted of me.

I
T WAS ONLY
a few days before we had a strange visitor. Artamenes and I were sitting in his study while he showed me the maps of the roadways that led through the Delta, to Tanis and Pi-Ramesses and other places where it was not possible to go directly by river without going far south out of one's way, when a messenger entered.

“Lord Artamenes,” he said, “there is a priest here come downriver from Memphis who says he has come to speak with the Companion Lydias.”

I straightened. “I do not know a priest,” I said.

Artamenes’ eyebrows rose. The Persians and the priesthood of Egypt had not been on good terms. Some matter of killing sacred animals, I thought. But as far as I knew, we had not offended the priesthood in any way.

“He says his name is Manetho and he is a priest of Thoth,” the messenger said. “Lord, will you see this man?”

I thought that Artamenes would refuse, but I got to my feet first. “I will come,” I said. “Perhaps he has some news of Cleomenes it would be useful to receive.”

Artamenes nodded. “Perhaps that is politic, then.”

I nodded pleasantly and went down.

The man standing in the courtyard of the fortress looked as though he had just stepped off the wall of a temple or a tomb. His head was shaven, and he wore an elaborately pleated linen skirt. His brown shaven chest was crossed by a cheetah skin, which he wore over one shoulder. He did not bow at all.

“I am the Hipparch Lydias,” I said, and came out to him. “You wanted to see me?”

“I did,” he said. “I am Manetho, and I have come from Memphis to speak with you. Is there some private place where we may walk?”

“There is,” I said, and led him toward the inner garden. The fountain should make us difficult to overhear, and I did not really fear that he would try to knife me. I could take my chances with that. “But you must have left Memphis more than a week ago. How could you know I would be here?”