Lord of the Two Lands Read Online Free PDF

hardly trained to give, and what boys lack altogether. We earn the title they give us.”
    “In Egypt,” said Meriamon, “such women are called wives.”
    “Happy Egypt,” said Thaïs. She half-turned, half-raising her veil, lowering her handsome eyes.
    Meriamon had seen the man who came toward them. He had been with the king this morning, and he had ridden in procession with the men closest to the king. He was older than some of them, probably nearer thirty than twenty, with a strong bony face; long and loose-built, wide-shouldered, big-handed, but graceful as a fighting man has to be.
    He greeted Thaïs with courtesy, as if she had been a lady. Thaïs kept her eyes down like a modest woman and returned his greeting in her pure Attic accent. “Ptolemy,” she said, “do you know the Lady Mariamne?”
    He inclined his head to her: greeting, courtesy, a flicker of—amusement? “The king has been talking about you,” he said.
    Meriamon raised a brow.
    “He’s fascinated,” said Ptolemy. “Did Philippos really let you walk right into his hospital and start working miracles?”
    “About the letting,” said Meriamon, “I don’t think he had much choice. But I’ve worked no miracles. Plain field-surgery is all I know.”
    “It’s more than most of us do.” Ptolemy rocked back on his heels. He grinned suddenly. “Herakles! I wish I’d seen his face when he saw you were a woman.”
    “It takes a bit of seeing,” Meriamon said dryly.
    “It does not.” He was definite about it. Indignant, she might almost have said. “You’ve got a pup from the family litter in your lot. All he can howl about is that he’s been cast into the hands of a female.”
    She narrowed her eyes. Loose bones, big hands, bony face. “That wouldn’t be Nikolaos, would it?”
    “Niko,” said Ptolemy, “yes. Mind you now, he’s a good soldier. Could be better, he’s spoiled rotten and has been since he was a brat, but get him in a fight and he remembers his manners.”
    “He’s polite about killing people?”
    Ptolemy laughed. “Alexander said you had a tongue on you. So,” he said, “did Niko.” He sobered suddenly. “The doctors say he ought to have lost the hand. Now they say he’ll likely keep it. If that’s not a miracle, then what do you call it?”
    “It wasn’t as bad as it could have been,” said Meriamon. “He lost a lot of blood to the rest of his wounds—that’s why we’ve kept him down. Besides the pleasure of watching him sulk.”
    “Still,” said Ptolemy. Then he grinned. “I like it, too, seeing him rolled up in bed and the doctors sitting on him. Time something slapped the nonsense out of him.”
    “I wouldn’t care to wager on that,” Meriamon said.
    People had begun to scatter. The first fierce flame of the pyre had died to a long smolder. A shift in the wind brought the stink of it to her nostrils. Fire, burning, a sweet-savory roast-meat scent that brought the bile flooding.
    The hands on her were a woman’s hands, deft and cool, smoothing the hair out of her streaming face, holding her while she retched into the grass. Thaïs spoke over her, voice as cool as her hands. “This is no sight for an Egyptian. Whose fault is it?”
    Meriamon gasped it out for herself, furious at her weakness. “Mine. I should have remembered—I should have known—”
    “So should Alexander,” said Ptolemy. And as her head came up, eyes wide with shock: “Yes, I heard him. Sometimes he just doesn’t think.”
    “He is the king!”
    “So he is,” said Ptolemy. “But there—you don’t elect your kings, do you? You make them gods.”
    “They are gods,” she said, “and sons of gods.” Her stomach had settled a little. She drew herself up from her knees. She kept her eyes averted from the pyre; tried to breathe shallowly, though the wind had turned again and was blowing off the sea. “No. It was I who didn’t think. I pay the price for it.”
    She looked up. He was looking down, frowning as if