he strained to understand. His eyes were blue, startling in the bronzed and weathered face. For an instant her shadow flexed. Seeing—wanting—
He looked away. The moment passed. He helped her up with careful courtesy. “The king will want to see you later. Will you be in the hospital?”
“She will be with the women,” said Thaïs. They both stared at her. “Lady Mariamne, I was going to speak with the Persian women. They may be glad of a woman’s voice, even if it belongs to an enemy.”
Meriamon stiffened. “I have no love for the Parsa,” she said.
“Who does?” Thaïs drew up her veil. “Still, they are women, and probably they’re terrified.”
“I thought they were left alone,” said Meriamon.
“That would make it worse.” Thaïs slid a glance at Ptolemy. “Do we require a guard, my friend?”
Or, thought Meriamon, it might be my love . It was the same word.
“I’ll send a man over,” Ptolemy said. “It’s quiet enough by now, I think, but let’s not take chances.”
One would never know that they were lovers. Or would one? They did not touch and their eyes seldom met, but there was a subtle tension in them.
It stretched taut, snapped. Ptolemy went back to his soldiering. Thaïs turned to go down the hill, walking as a dancer walks, erect and consciously graceful. It was a moment before Meriamon realized that she was speaking. “I met him in Athens when Alexander was there on embassy from his father, before he was king. I was a child then; my breasts were barely budded. My guardian thought Ptolemy a plausible prospect, Macedonian or no. I liked him myself: he was always pleasant, and he didn’t either blush or act the bravo. Then he left, and I became a woman, and found patrons who would teach me in return for what I could give. Last year, when I heard that Alexander would cross into Asia, I decided to go with him.”
“Not with Ptolemy?” asked Meriamon, walking in her wake.
“Certainly with Ptolemy. We met again, we were amenable, we sealed a bargain.”
“Did your... guardian have any say in it?”
“My guardian was dead. It’s not allowed in Athens for a woman to live for herself, free from a man’s hand. My guardian’s heir and I were not congenial.”
“So you left.”
“So I applied judicious pressure in the proper places, and was allowed to leave. I’ll not go back soon, I don’t think. I like this, this wild hunt against the Persians.”
She was no tame thing herself. Trained, trammeled, shaped and pruned like a tree in a pharaoh’s garden, still she was her own creature. She would not ride in battle like a man, she would hardly find that fitting, but she would watch with eager eyes and reckon every stroke. And when her man came back she would be waiting, a crown for his victory.
They walked wide round the funeral pyre. On the other side a soldier met them with crisp deference and his commander’s compliments, and fell in behind them as they crossed the battlefield.
It was empty, the earth torn and trampled but no body left to tempt the birds. The Greek dead were bones on a pyre. The Persians were gone to the care of their own people for rites that were no whit less horrible than burning, which they reckoned a pollution of sacred fire: set on high for the vultures to devour, then cast into a pit of nameless bones.
Meriamon felt the change as they forded the river, the guard walking ahead now and Thaïs kilting up her fine skirts and recking nothing of the water’s bitter cold.
The water was a barrier. The other side was the Persians’, even in Macedonian hands. Their camp sprawled city-wide across the plain and up into the hills, with no order or reason in it that she could see, quite unlike the squares and straightways of the Macedonians.
What her shadow felt, what her heart saw, was a world both strange and familiar. The musk of their perfumes, the spice of their cookery, the hisses and gutturals of their language had ruled for far too long in