Bring Down the Sun (15 page)

“Amon,” she said. Her voice caressed the name.

“She was his wife,” Erynna said: “that queen. She lay with him in sacred rite, and bore him sons who were destined to be kings.”

“One son would be enough,” Myrtale said. “One sun-bright child. He is the sun, isn't he? I heard that once, long ago. Or maybe in that other life.”

“Sun and father,” said Erynna, “and king besides.”

“So he would be, if his wife were a queen.” Myrtale spoke slowly. She felt as if she had wandered into a dream.

Those strange flat figures, twisted to serve a canon that matched nothing in life, took on shape and strength and substance. The queen lowered her eyes and smiled. The god looked on her with a lover's eyes.

His arms were warm and strong. He smelled not of wool or musk as she might have expected, but of flowers: a heavy scent but oddly pleasant, rich and sweet. His lips were a man's; they tasted of honey.

She opened her eyes and stepped back sharply from the wall. Phila was still reading. However strange or deeply real the dream, it had lasted but the space of a breath.

She stared at all these women who desired to learn magic. Did none of them know that magic was not a thing to be acquired? Either it was in them or it was not. They could learn how to use it—but only if they had it already.

On the edge of dream she could see inside them; she could see who was like a lamp filled with light, and who was dull mortal clay. Erynna did not blaze nearly as bright as Myrtale had expected. Her gift was not to wield magic. It was to teach—and to make mischief.

The rest were clay—all but Philinna. She was a clear white flame, with as pure a heart as Myrtale had imagined.

Myrtale was strong, but she had never been pure. She had too much pride and temper, and too much ambition. She was Philip's match as none of the others could be.

She met Amon's painted gaze. It was blank, unreadable. It would come alive when the time came.

She would wait—but not too long. Gods might have infinite patience, but she did not.

“If you want me,” she said to him, “best take me while you can.”

He did not answer. He was a god; it would have been beneath him. But she smiled. He had heard her.

PART III

Olympias

Nineteen

Philip got his boar. He came home in a roaring crowd and drank till dawn. None of his wives enjoyed his company that night, nor did he go looking for them.

Myrtale lay alone in her not-quite-wide-enough bed and reflected on a great number of things. In the middle night, a much larger serpentine form joined the hatchling beside her. The Mother's guardian had come to her warmth.

It slept all night in the hollow of her side. In the dark before dawn, she half-woke as it slithered away. She sighed for its absence, before sleep took her again.

*   *   *

The days fell into a rhythm remarkable for two things: magic's presence and Philip's absence. Every day the women gathered among the painted Egyptians to learn spells and cantrips, potions and herb-lore. Every night they slept in their own beds, sometimes together with maids or fellow noblewomen and sometimes alone. Myrtale slept with her hatchling and with the Mother's guardian, night after night.

She had not yet learned to fly. That had been an empty lure—rather like her marriage. Philip had not set foot in the women's quarters since the wedding. He had boys, people said, or rather young men, who kept him entertained when he was not making sons for Macedon.

Myrtale was neither angry nor discouraged. For once in her life, she cultivated patience. She studied her magic and the women around her and the ways of the palace and the voices of men that echoed through the halls. She listened and learned. The matters of war and politics that so fascinated men, to which she had paid little enough attention before, now opened themselves like the books of philosophy and poetry and magic that Philip and his predecessors had gathered like spoils of war.

War was everything here. Macedon was one great army; it was always either mustering or campaigning or preparing for the next campaign. This year, as summer mellowed into autumn, Philip rested as much as he ever could, but that meant endless courts and councils and embassies, and hunts and games and drinking bouts that roared and roistered until morning. Then as if that was not excitement enough, he had his troops out day after day, marching and drilling and fighting mock battles. Once or twice they went out on raids, stayed away for a handful of days, then came back full of boasts and the odd bit of booty.

Philinna and Phila coveted that life. As much as they could, they imitated it with arrows and javelins, footraces and chariot races and hunts of their own that brought back more game than the men's hunts did.

For Myrtale that was no temptation. She turned rather toward the books and the Egyptians' room and the bed that Philip did not choose to visit. Myrtale liked to sit in comfort while the world came to her.

She discovered that if she stayed in one place, kept quiet and made it clear that she would listen, people would come—sister wives, ladies and servants, even a few of the younger men if she took the afternoon air on the outer portico. They came and offered gifts—a flower, a delicacy, occasionally a jewel—and told her their names and where they came from and why they were in Pella. As she listened—and truly she did listen; she remembered every word, no matter how trivial—they opened to her. They told her things that she suspected they had not told anyone else.

It was an art as mysterious as magic, but there was nothing arcane about it. In those many and varied conversations, she saw patterns of allegiance and loyalty, alliance and hostility. She learned what factions there were in the court, who danced with whom and who would, but for Philip's strong will acting on them all, have been bitter enemies.

The young men were particularly interesting, and the portico was especially pleasant on those long golden days before winter closed in on the mountains. Myrtale took to spending her mornings with books and magic and her afternoons on the portico. The servants had found a chair for her, and her new friends had brought cushions for it, and a table and a service for wine. As the days grew shorter, they vied to bring her warm mantles to shield her against the wind.

Often she saw Philip riding on the plain or heard him speaking in the hall. She listened as best she could, and remembered what she heard; more than once she moved closer, the better to hear it.

She never went in. That would not be approved of. Nor did he ever come out when she was there, though that would have been a welcome thing. She schooled herself not to mind—and that was harder, the longer she went on.

Philip's young men most surely were not afraid of her. Each day there were more of them. She exerted herself to be charming, with arts that were half learned from her sister and half born of instinct. A smile, she knew, could melt a man's heart, and a well-placed word could make him her servant for as long as it pleased her to keep him.

Erynna thought she was a fool. “You have the knowledge and the spells,” she said. “You know what to do.”

But Myrtale refused. “I won't cast a love spell on any man. If I can't lure and hold him myself, without magic, it's not love, and I don't want it—or him.”

“Love
is
a spell,” Erynna said, “and he's broken the one you laid on him. Now while you sleep alone, the destiny you came for is slipping away. Unless you take it now, it will be too late.”

Myrtale felt a pang at that, a quiver of deep-rooted fear for herself and her choices, but she drove it off with native stubbornness. “I will not trap him with magic.”

Erynna retreated, but Myrtale watched her warily. She had a look about her that said she had not given up.

Still, she left off pressing Myrtale, and as far as Myrtale could tell, she raised no powers either for or against Philip. Instead she went back to teaching the royal women and biding her time.

She had tempted Myrtale sorely, but Myrtale stood fast. The more magic she knew, the more securely she could maintain her place here—but not if she had to wield it against the king. There was deep wrongness in that, and no coaxing or cajoling from Erynna would shake her.

*   *   *

As autumn drew on toward winter, the sun's warmth faded. One morning Myrtale woke shivering. Rain drummed on the roof. The mountains were shrouded in cloud, but when the clouds lifted, she knew the summits would be white with snow.

That day no one left the palace. The men crowded into their hall with wine and dice and willing women. The royal women had their own hall, but most gathered in the room that by now was wrapped in a thick mantle of magic.

It was so thick that the room seemed full of smoke. The lamps were lit as always, and Erynna was brewing a concoction of herbs over which she murmured words of power. It was meant, she said, to warm the spirit and make men brave in battle—a fine thing on this cold and cheerless day.

Myrtale found the smell cloying and the air too heavy to breathe. She took refuge in the women's hall, where a lone servant wielded a desultory broom. Phila, who would have nothing to do with magic, was not there; she was still in bed, the servant said.

She was with child, rumor said, though she had not admitted to it. She often kept to herself of late. Myrtale wondered if all was not well; or maybe she simply did not carry easily.

That was not Myrtale's trouble—as little as she liked to acknowledge it. For all the fire of their wedding celebration, in due time her courses had come to mock her. And Philip had not returned to her bed.

It was time to let go of patience. She stirred up the coals in the brazier that stood on its pedestal in the hall's center, spreading her hands over the radiating warmth. There were shapes in the embers, visions both true and false. She rested her eyes on them idly, asking nothing and expecting nothing.

That was dangerous, but she was not afraid. She saw armies marching, bristling with long spears, the
sarissai
of Macedon. She saw Philip in a plain bronze helmet, then Philip again with his brows bound by a diadem. She saw a city burning—a lovely city of white columns and burgeoning gardens—and a chariot racing on a long course, running far ahead of its rivals.

The embers flared. The sun in splendor, the royal banner of Macedon, rippled in the wind over a golden helmet.

That was not Philip, though he had Philip's foursquare build and slightly bowed legs, and the face had a hint of him: the full cheeks, the firmly rounded jaw. The hair beneath the helmet was ruddy gold; the eyes were grey-green, with such a light in them that Myrtale caught her breath. Either he was divine or he was mad, but he was not a simple mortal man.

He turned as if he had felt her eyes on him, and met her stare. A shiver ran down her spine. It was a pleasurable thrill, but it shook her more than a little.

This one was stronger than she, both for will and power. She had never met anyone of whom she could say as much. Even Philip was her match but not her superior.

The vision dissipated as the embers burst into flame. Myrtale straightened. Her eyes were full of light.

She called for a bath. She demanded perfumes and the finest chiton she had and the jewels she had worn at her wedding. She armed as if for battle, taking her time about it, while the rain drummed down and the wine went round the hall.

*   *   *

Philip hated the rain. It made all the scars ache—damn the things; he was still young, but when the rain kept everyone indoors, he creaked like an old man. The only thing that helped then was a salve he had had from an old witch in Thessaly, worked into the scars by strong young fingers.

He had had to preside in the hall for longer than he liked. He might have had to stay all day and most of the night if he had not managed to distract the horde of guests and petitioners with a troupe of actors from Corinth. Under cover of a roaring chorus from the
Bacchae,
he slipped away to the room where Demetrios and the pot of salve were waiting.

It was not Demetrios sitting naked on the bed with the pot in his hands.
She
was there, decorously dressed and veiled, cradling the clay pot in her lap.

From the moment he saw her in the crowd at the Mysteries, her face had haunted his every dream. Asleep and awake, he could think of little apart from her.

He had fought the spell to a standstill. It had compelled him to send Lagos for her—but after all he needed Epiros; he needed every ally he could muster, and marriages were a simple way to ensure them. The rest of his wives had brought him rich dowries, too, and kings bound to fight with him rather than against him. One had already given him a son, a fine and promising image of himself, who if the gods were kind, would be king when Philip had had enough of it.

Those were mortal women. This was something different. The mask of the Mother had not concealed her in the Mysteries, any more than the Bull's face had concealed his. They had known one another.

She was—not his enemy. He would not call her that. But she was dangerous. She threatened the focus he needed badly, to stay on the throne and keep Macedon strong.

She was already under his skin. If he let himself think of her as anything but the fourth of what he had no doubt would be many royal and politic wives, he would lose his grip. He would care for nothing but her.

Now she was here in his bed, where he had not invited her. He knew better than to be taken in by that demure posture and those lowered eyelids. There was nothing self-effacing about this child of the Mother.

“What did you do to Demetrios?” he demanded.

It was a rough greeting, but she never flinched. Her voice was low and melodious, a pitch she must have studied as a singer will. It resonated in his bones. “I sent him away,” she said.

“It was not your place to do that.”