Stealing Fire (18 page)

I thought for a moment. “I suppose Artashir's senior wife, Amina. She was raised as a Persian gentlewoman. She might not know how things should be done for a Macedonian, but she ought to be able to fit out a Persian bride and know what to get.” In the old days I could not have spoken to her, a respectable woman and wife of a nobleman, but things had changed in the baggage train and in this new city. I didn't think Artashir would mind if I spoke to his wife and asked her advice.

“That would work,” Bagoas said, and changed the subject.

It was not until I was halfway to Alexandria that I wondered if he had wanted me to ask him to come instead.

E
URYDICE WAS PRETTY
enough, I thought. She looked a good deal like her older brother, Cassander, who I did not like, but that was nothing to hold against her. Her hair was light, like his, and she had a long, straight nose and flat cheekbones, Illyrian or Epirote in features. You could see the fierce blood that had come off the steppes, the same way you could see it in Alexander. But then, his mother was Epirote too. They had married into the noble houses of Macedon quite a lot.

In manner Eurydice could not have been more unlike Cassander. Where he was pushy, always the first horse at the trough, so to speak, Eurydice seemed shy. She was hesitant to speak, more even than I thought natural for a young girl so far from home. But perhaps I had gotten used to the campaign brides, who if they had not been something out of the ordinary wouldn't have been there in the first place.

I was sent with an honor guard to meet her ship and escort her to the palace, and I presented myself in my best chiton and shined breastplate, scrubbed and pretty as possible. When she replied to my offer to place myself at her service, I could barely hear her.

“We are most complimented by your service,” her attendant said, standing behind her. “Very proper.” Her frank brown eyes met mine. “I am Eurydice's aunt, her mother's sister. My name is Berenice, and I have come with my niece to help her in her duties.”

“The Hipparch Lydias,” I said, bowing again. The aunt was thirty or so, plump and dark-haired, with a direct look about her and color in her face from the sea wind. “There are rooms prepared for you ladies, if you would accompany me?”

“Antigone! Magas!” She turned and called, and two children came running from where they had been standing at the ship's rail, watching the sailors make fast, a little girl about eight and a boy perhaps two years younger. “It's time to go ashore! Eurydice, let me fix your himation.”

The children skidded to a halt, poking and giggling, their eyes round at my gleaming steel harness.

Berenice looked around from where she was repinning Eurydice's veil. “My children from my first marriage.”

“What has brought you here?” I asked. Surely a woman with young children would not want to cross the seas.

“Enough of being a poor relation on my former brother-in-law,” she said, but her eyes were laughing. “And I've all but brought Eurydice up. So I thought we'd try something new.”

The girl smiled, and her face was transformed, more like a bride and less like a sacrifice. It came to me that she must be terrified.

I made myself as agreeable as possible. “It is a great honor to welcome you to Alexandria on behalf of Ptolemy. I know that he has been eagerly awaiting you, Lady. I hope that you will find our city and your quarters to your liking. There are no official functions planned tonight, as it was thought that you might like an evening to rest and get your shore legs back before the wedding tomorrow.” I glanced up at the aunt. “I'm afraid we are still under construction, as it were. I have arranged for a noble lady, Amina the wife of General Artashir, to show you your rooms and to help with anything you may require.”

“That is very nice,” Berenice said.

Eurydice looked up at me. “This Amina… is she…”

“Persian,” I said firmly. Her brother, Cassander, had been of the party that objected the most when Alexander took up Persian ways and allowed Persians to serve beside Greeks. I did not know whether these were merely Cassander's opinions, or reflections of his father's. If it were the latter, and Eurydice now came up against all she had been taught, I must be definite that her husband's opinions on the matter were quite different. Ptolemy could not afford a bride who would make trouble with any of his subjects. “We are a city of many peoples, Lady, as Great Alexander's court was. But I assure you that Amina's Greek is quite good, and she will be able to help you communicate with the Egyptian servants, and with the Persian and Bactrian ones.”

“Why not all Greek slaves?” the girl asked.

I spread my hands. “Very few of our servants are slaves, Lady. They're simply too expensive to import, and few Egyptians are slaves and they do not speak Greek in any event. Most of the palace servants that Amina and I have hired are luckless women from the baggage train, the wives of men who have died or who are too crippled to work. They are cooks and laundresses, maids and seamstresses and the like. They work for a wage and bread and board for their children. If they have boys old enough, some of them are working in the stables or doing other work of the house. It is much cheaper than importing slaves from Greece, Lady. And I am sure they do better work too.”

“Very sensible,” Berenice said with a nod. “It's a different world, Eurydice, and we shall have a lot to learn.”

“If you will come this way, ladies?” I suggested.

T
HE NEXT DAY
I stood beside Ptolemy, one of four Companions who stood as kinsmen while he married Eurydice. I thought the wedding went off well enough. The food and the dancing had a very Persian flair, thanks to the management of the redoubtable Amina, who I thought could probably provision an army on the march without breaking a sweat. The bride was all Greek, her pale blue chiton and himation with worked borders looking like a statue of Artemis. Or perhaps Iphigenia.

I poured a quick libation in the corner where nobody would notice, to ward off that thought.

Ptolemy looked grave rather than exuberant as a bridegroom should be, but then he was forty-three, and not prone to display at any time. He sat beside her at the wedding feast, turning to her to talk in low tones.

Of course Thais was not there. He had spared her that.

I was both surprised and flattered to find myself in the position of kin. But I suppose Ptolemy had no real kindred there, and there was value in having myself, Manetho, and Artashir all in prominent positions.

When we had sung the bride and groom to bed, it was our job to make it clear that Ptolemy did not want a crowd outside the door all night, listening and being rowdy, so we cleared them out and sent them back down to the hall for a last round of drinking, and then out into the night.

Amina came up while I stood with Artashir, making sure no one crept back in.

“We survived it,” Amina said.

“We did.” Artashir ducked his head against her shoulder, his forehead against her as she smiled down fondly at him. “Lydias and I should probably stay here the rest of the night, but you could go home.”

“I don't mind staying alone,” I said, and was surprised to find a strange jealousy uncurling in my midst. “You can go on. I'll stay here with the guardsmen until at least the turning of the watch.”

“You don't mind?”

“Not at all,” I said, and watched them leave, two tall, well-matched figures, his arm around her waist.

Would there ever again be someone waiting for me?

ROSES

I
went to see Thais the next day, early in the morning.

They say transplanted roses never bloom, but they did in the garden of Thais the Athenian. She had made a bower on new soil, enclosed by fine stone walls, fig trees, and exotic apricots shading a bench. Or at least they would shade the bench when they were taller. Now they cast fleeting shadows across the sandstone. Roses were trained in the shadow of the wall, rising from a bed that smelled strongly of horse manure.

It made me smile. Without it, I should never know this paradise was earthly.

Thais came forward to greet me, her veil about her shoulders, neither as modest as a Greek woman or as brazen as an Egyptian. She was thirty-five, but the beauty that had captivated everyone lingered still, the firebrand who had burned Persepolis.

“My dear lady,” I said, and inclined my head in greeting.

No doubt she wondered why I had come, and she was not one to play around it. “Lydias,” she said, and her eyes were a little sharp. “Have you come to show me that I am not entirely forgotten?”

“I am here only for myself, not Ptolemy,” I said. “I have no idea where it stands between you, but I am steadfast in my friendships.”

At that she looked surprised. “Come and sit down, then,” she said, and led me to the bench, she sitting at one end and I at the other. There was no one there but us, and a young maidservant digging in a rose bed at the end of the garden. “You are wondering where it is with us.”

“It is not my business,” I said awkwardly. “But I have always liked you very much.”

“And you thought if there were bad feelings you might mend them.” Thais smiled at me and shook her head. “It is a kind thought, if it were need-ful. But this is not the first time, you know. Ptolemy married Artacama, the daughter of Artabazos, in Persia when Alexander commanded it.”

“Yes, but that was by the King's command,” I said. “This was not.”

“It was needful,” Thais said, “if he is to be Pharaoh of Egypt.” I startled, and she raised an eyebrow. “Do you think he has not told me what the gods of Egypt offered him? But I am not a concubine to a pharaoh. I am a free hetaira, as I have been since he came to my door in Athens. I will not live in his palace with his wife, arranging her banquets and taking care of her clothes. I will live in my own house, with my children, and if he wishes to see me he can come here.”

I looked at her in amazement and admiration.

Thais played with a fold of her himation. “Like Aspasia before me, I have my dignity. And if I surrendered that I should not have his love.”

“I believe he loves you deeply,” I said. Certainly there was nothing in the wedding the day before that suggested he had gone to Eurydice with even lust.

“And I him,” she said. “Though it is not true that I have wandered the world for him. Rather that he gave me a way to do what a woman can otherwise not. He gave me my freedom.” Thais put her head back, as if to drink in the blue sky of the Black Land above.

“Freedom is the greatest good,” I said.

She nodded. “And now we will see what comes of it. In time my daughter should have been a hetaira after me, and our sons acknowledged and made soldiers or set up in business. But the only children of Pharaoh are a different matter than the illegitimate children of a general.”

“Yes,” I said, “and perhaps one day there will be some other heir, but for now…” I spread my hands. “I did not know he had agreed to the gods’ bargain.”

“He will agree,” Thais said serenely. “Ptolemy will have no other choice.”

The child I had taken for a maidservant got up, dusting off her hands on the front of her chiton, as if wondering whether to come over or not. “Mother?” she called, and I realized that it was Chloe.

I should hardly have known her otherwise. More than two years had passed since our wild journey from Babylon, an eternity in a girl her age. She was tall like her mother, with Ptolemy's nondescript brown hair. And then she looked at me.

I do not think I had ever seen her full in the face, in daylight. Her eyes were storm gray, irises rimmed in black, wide and colored like tempered steel, like winter skies, eyes Praxiteles had sculpted, eyes no one had ever captured in paint. She had Alexander's eyes exactly.

There had always been the rumors, of course, that Ptolemy was Alexander's brother, that his mother had been Phillip's before Phillip was King. I did not know if they were true or not, and I had doubted all these years that Ptolemy knew. Now I knew that he had. The truth was in his daughter's eyes.

“You see?” Thais said softly. “He is the nearest kin after Alexander's son, brother of the King that was.”

“Alexander must have known,” I said, realizing. “And Bagoas.” And now she trusted me to know this.

Thais nodded. “And Hephaistion. Chloe was an infant when Ptolemy took the road to India. I stayed in Susa. It was supposed to be a short campaign, and I could not take the road east with a baby three weeks old. It was almost five years before he returned.” Thais spread her himation on the bench, and Chloe came and sat beside her with her arm about her waist. She had heard this story before. “I waited almost five years for him in Susa, hoping that he would live and love me still.”

“And he did,” I said, my voice choking. Ptolemy had come out of the desert of Gedrosia to find Thais and Chloe waiting for him.

“Of course when he saw Chloe he knew. She had been a newborn when he left. She looked like any other baby. But when he saw her, he knew. And Alexander knew.”

“That was a very dangerous thing to leave in his hands,” I said. To put in the hands of a childless king a brother with an army at his back and an heir…

“He was Alexander. He said they had promised long ago to behave as brothers should, and there was nothing to change that. When our son was born a year later, we called him Lagos after Ptolemy's stepfather, something that ought to quell rumors.”

“Bunny doesn't look like me,” Chloe said. “His eyes are brown.”

“Yes, darling,” Thais said, pulling an errant leaf from Chloe's hair. “Both her brothers have brown eyes. But that would not stop them from being pawns in the succession.”

I shivered. It all fell into place. Ptolemy had been desperate to get the children out of Babylon before someone noticed. Before Roxane noticed, and thought Chloe was Alexander's. Before Perdiccas noticed and weighed her worth. Before any one of a hundred other men jumped at an opportunity dropped in their lap. He had been desperate enough to entrust them to a plain soldier and a wild ride to Pelousion.

And Bagoas. He knew. I had seen it in his hesitation at Pelousion, when I had scoffed at the rumors. Either the King had told him, or he had seen for himself. Hephaistion would have been told.

I looked at Chloe, and she looked back with those amazing eyes. “She cannot be a hetaira,” I said.

“Twice royal, twice on the wrong side of the blanket, she is too great a prize,” Thais said. “And Perdiccas…”

“Father has to win. For me,” Chloe said, and her face was solemn.

She was a child of the baggage train, not a highborn girl sheltered from every storm. She knew, though she was still a child, not a maiden. She knew what her fate might be.

“Well then,” I said with a smile for her, “we will have to win. For you.”

In a year or two she would be a woman. Already I could see it in the bones of her face, losing the roundness of childhood for her mother's beautiful cheekbones, in her slender hands that were already taking a woman's shape. No doubt beneath her loose chiton her body was changing in other ways as well. She was not so much younger than Eurydice, her father's bride.

“We will win for you, Chloe,” I said.

S
ATI HAD BEEN
seventeen when I had come to Nysa. She was a young widow, and she was begging in the street. Her husband had died of a sickness in the spring, and her husband's family wanted no more of her when it was clear she was not with child, one more mouth to feed in a time of uncertainty and war. Her own parents were dead, and so she had no place to go.

I was twenty-two. Not even a year had passed since Alexander married Roxane, and in that time we had crossed into India and fought a great battle. One of the princes of India, a king named Raja Ambhi, had sent emissaries to Alexander offering to do homage if the King would help him against his neighbor and ancient enemy, Raja Puru. Thus it was that Hephaistion and Perdiccas were sent ahead with their troops to arrange bridging of the mighty Indus River so that the main army might come up. I was in Hephaistion's Ile, and while cavalry had little to do in the business of building a bridge, we were necessary to maintain a screen lest the enemy come upon us unaware. And so I was sent to Nysa.

We had good billets in the small fortress belonging to a kinsman of Ambhi, and our pay was up to date. We arrived just at the onset of the monsoons, and while the engineers swore and bickered and sweated trying to bridge the swollen river, the cavalry had an easy time of it.

The first time I saw Sati she was begging by the gate, the water running in long rivulets down her face, her saffron scarf plastered to her hair. She sat among the old and the covered in scabs, and I could not help but look at her twice. How should someone so young be reduced to so little? I knew well enough, I supposed. There are always winners and losers. But I thought from the proud tilt of her head that she was not quite defeated.

A few days later someone hired some prostitutes to come in after dinner, to dance and to sit on our couches the way hetairae would grace our betters. The girl who played had hard eyes, and the dancers had their professional smiles. Except Sati. Every movement spoke instead of acute embarrassment. I watched her, her great dark eyes the twin of mine, her hair like black silk down her back exactly like my mother's. We could have been brother and sister, so alike were we.

I remembered how she had hated him, my father and my master, how she had come from his bed with marks in her lower lip where she had bitten down, how she had flinched when I put my little arms around her.

When the girls stopped dancing and went to the couches I watched how Sati perched on the end of Glaukos’ couch, hesitantly, as though she were staying as far away as possible.

Laughing, he took her by the arm and tried to draw her in for a kiss, and I saw the fear in her eyes before she yielded.

I hardly knew what I did when I got to my feet and crossed between the couches, giving Glaukos a gentle shove. “This one's mine, my friend.”

“Yours?” Glaukos looked up at me, a few drops of wine clinging to his beard. “You never want one.”

“I want this one,” I said, and took her by the arm. I could feel her pulse hammering in her thin wrist.

“Maybe you don't get her,” he said.

“Maybe I do.”

I was much soberer than he. Perhaps he considered that, or perhaps there was something in my eyes he didn't like. Glaukos sprawled back on the cushions. “Fine then. She's too skinny to be much good anyhow.”

I hauled her out of the hall to the hoots of several of my men, into the little room upstairs that I rated as an officer. She said something half a dozen times, but I did not understand a word. I shut the door behind me, bending because of the low ceiling.

A little light came in blue from behind the shutters closed against the rain. The room was barely the length of a man, taken up almost entirely with my tack and bed. She stood with the back of her knees against the bed, and I saw her swallow.

“You will pay?” Sati said in halting Greek.

“Yes,” I said, and opened my belt pouch, spilling a bunch of coins into her hand, much more than she was worth.

She looked at them and swallowed, her chin lifting. She took off her veil and let it drop to the floor.

“No,” I said, and my voice was rough. “No.”

She knew enough Greek to understand that, and she frowned.

“An old war wound,” I said. “It's left me impotent. I don't want my friends to know, so I pretend to go with women. Just pretend we did it and all will be well.”

Her eyes flicked down my body and up again, and I saw she didn't believe it for a minute. “You are very strange,” she said.

“So are you,” I said. “Why are you here with these women?”

Sati shrugged. “What else is there? I can beg and die, or I can go with soldiers.” Her Greek was better than I had thought. She must have already picked up a lot in the time we had been here.

“Can't you…” I cast about. “Cook and clean or something?”

“Show me the man who wants me for cooking and cleaning,” she said, her eyes sharp. She held out her arms, and I could see the way her clothes draped over her slender body, a bit of pale skin showing at her waist between the drapes. “Show me one who wants only that.”

“I could,” I said and swallowed. Perhaps I would want more, but I was not a beast even if every movement she made caused my blood to sing.

“You could?” She did not believe me, but there was the ghost of a smile on her face. “Because of your old war wound?” She looked pointedly at the front of my chiton.

“Yes,” I said. I took a step back, but my back was against the door. “Why are you doing this?”