Scott Oden: Men of Bronze

Tjemu peered over the Phoenician's shoulder as he broke the seal. Frowning, Barca drew out a heavy sheet of vellum. Tjemu grunted. The Libyan could not read, but his eyes marveled at the delicate Aramaic script filling the page. "What does it say?"

Barca said nothing for a moment, his eyes sharpening to points. "It's addressed to the commander of the garrison at Memphis. It acknowledges some prior communication and … those sons of whores … it offers terms for their defection to Persia! "

Tjemu whistled. "Amon's balls! "

"Defection? You think it's genuine?" Ithobaal said. The threat of mutiny proved a powerful weapon in the longstanding war between mercenary and paymaster. Soldiers, especially hired swords, were a petulant lot, and only trustworthy while a campaign netted them slaves and spoils. An unhappy mercenary attracted offers from rival generals as a lodestone attracted iron filings.

"The garrison is Greek," Barca said, a snarl twisting his features. "Greeks are fed treachery with their mother's milk!"

Ithobaal shook his head. "Think about it, little brother. A mutiny? In Memphis? Word of such a thing should have spread the length and breadth of the Nile. Rumors would have reached the ears of Pharaoh himself if there were discontent among his pet Greeks."

"True," Barca said. "But, some rumors can be silenced with promises, others with gold. The rest …" Barca trailed off, tapping the hilt of his sword. The Phoenician stood. All around the square, his Medjay cared for their dead. They stripped them of their armor, laid them out with reverence; their shields and personal effects would be taken back to Sile and enshrined in the temple of Horns Sopdu. The Bedouin dead, they ignored. Barca turned to face Ithobaal and Tjemu. "It will take at least three days for a rider to deliver this letter to Pharaoh at Sais. I want to be in Memphis by then, to see how things are for myself. How's the leg, Tjemu?"

"A scratch," the Libyan replied, grinning.

Barca nodded. "Good. Bury our dead, then shepherd the wounded to one of the nearby villages and make for Sais. Let no man dissuade you from giving the letter to Pharaoh directly. Ithobaal, you're with me. Gather those men with the scantiest wounds …"

Ithobaal shook his head, then hawked and spat.

"What?" Barca folded his arms across his chest.

"Our place is guarding the border, not policing the Greeks." The Canaanite was a careful man, calculating and precise — a merchant in the guise of a soldier. "Don't give in to impulse, little brother. In my heart I agree with you: traitors should be run to ground. But instinct tells me this is unwise. If anything, we should make for Sais ourselves, warn Pharaoh, and await his orders. Going off like this, on a whim — "

"Our place?" Barca checked his temper. "Our place is between Pharaoh and his enemies, wherever they may be. This is not an invasion. We'll go quietly, poke our noses where they don't belong, and be away before the Greeks know what happened." Barca started to turn away, stopped. "But if you plan to second-guess me at every turn, Ithobaal, perhaps you should return to Sile. I need men for this, not old women!"

Ithobaal took a step toward his commander, his hand dropping to his sword hilt. "You son of a Tyrian whore! I was fighting Pharaoh's enemies while you were still wallowing in your own shit!"

Barca grinned and tugged the old Canaanite's beard. "There's fire still in your belly, then, Ithobaal? Thank the gods! You had me worried." The Phoenician turned away and held the diplomatic pouch aloft, using it to gesture at the scattered Medjay. "Gather round, brothers! We're not going back to Sile, not yet! "

The sky above Saqqara burned white-hot, baking the sprawling necropolis like clay in the kiln of Ptah, the Creator. Stone and soil absorbed the heat, radiating it back in a dull imitation of the sun. Few things could survive in this waterless waste. Scorpions and beetles crawled through sand thick with yellowed bone, shards of pottery, and scraps of crumbling linen. Jackals slept the day away in the shade offered by the stair-stepped pyramid of Djoser. Falcons soared over the Serapeum in search of prey, riding that same bellow's-breath of air that rattled the leaves of acacias and sycamores yet provided little respite from the intolerable heat.

Through this inferno a runner came.

He was no ordinary man, this runner, but a Greek, born into a cult of personal glory and prowess that elevated him beyond the pale. Failure. Mercy. These were not words he used often, if at all, for to speak them would be to acknowledge them, to give them weight. Phanes of Halicarnassus acknowledged nothing save his own superiority.

Physically, that superiority was plain to see: a perfection of face and form that seemed somehow a blending of mortal and divine. Broad of shoulder with lean — almost feminine — hips, his powerful frame carried a layer of iron-hard muscle forged on the anvil of war. Dark eyes set deep into an angular face glared at the wasteland before him as though it were an enemy ripe for conquest.

He followed a vestigial road past crumbling pyramids, smaller than the monoliths at Giza, to the north, but impressive nonetheless. But if Phanes felt even the slightest twinge of awe at these constant reminders of Egypt's unfathomable age, he did not show it. For him, such glories of architecture, and their appreciation, were better left to the sophists.

Phanes ran with a loping stride that ate up the miles, sweat sluicing down his naked torso, soaking the scrap of cloth twisted about his loins. He darted around a plodding oxcart carrying chunks of limestone down to the stone-cutters' market in Memphis. A grizzled old man and a lad of twelve eyed him as he passed. The boy made to wave, a smile cracking his brown face, but a harsh word from his grandfather aborted the gesture. The old man wore a look of tolerant disgust. They were a proud folk, these Egyptians, Phanes could not deny that. Proud, strong, and courageous, but lacking the all-consuming thirst for freedom that separated Greek from barbarian.

Phanes crested a final ridge, the sun at his back, and beheld the panorama of the Nile Valley below. The sapphire ribbon of the river and the green of the cultivated fields stood in stark antithesis to the naked sand and rock of the desert's edge. More striking, though, was the city rising like a mirage from the Nile's bank.

Memphis. The City of Menes. Situated on a broad plain eight miles long and four miles wide, and protected from the annual Nile floods by a complex system of dikes and canals, the foundations of Egypt's capital were laid even as Phanes' ancestors crept from their caves to ponder the riddle of fire. It was a bustling metropolis before Herakles endured his twelve labors; impossibly ancient on the eve of Ilium's fall. With each successive dynasty, Memphis grew in power and size, earning the appellation Ankh-Tawy, the Life of the Two Lands. By the year of Phanes' own birth, the generations who had lived and died in Memphis could be tallied in the hundreds.

Dominating the cityscape was a sprawling complex of temples dedicated to the gods of the Memphite triad: Ptah, Osiris, and Sokar. According to ancient tradition, it was Ptah, the Egyptian Hephaestus, who created man, conjuring him by thought and word. For that gift, the gift of life, Egypt repaid the Chief Artificer by building for him an earthly palace of unrivaled splendor. The Mansion of the Spirit of Ptah was a collection of open-air courts, shaded colonnades, hypostyle halls, chapels, shrines, sacred groves, and pools. Every pharaoh since the second Rameses — great Ozymandias — felt duty-bound to glorify the Creator by adding another ornamental pylon, another obelisk, another statue, until the whole became as chaotic and jumbled as the Labyrinth of the Cretan king, Minos. North of Ptah's temple, at the end of an avenue of human-headed sphinxes, lay the enclosure of hawk-headed Sokar, protector of the necropolis; south, near the edge of the city, lay the solemn and brooding precinct of Osiris, the Lord of the Dead. Other, smaller temples radiated out from these.