Lord of the Two Lands by Judith Tarr

Egypt, and at good speed, too, with the gods’ help. Then I met a riding of the Parsa, somewhere south of Tyre. They decided that I owed them tribute. They took me by surprise, and they were too many for me to fight. I gave them most of what they wanted. They would have taken more, but something scared them off.”
    Something, she did not say, had killed one of them as they fled, the one who had wanted more; and gained her her disguise. It was warmer than the thin linen she had had, and somewhat safer.
    “You came all this way alone?” Thaïs was incredulous.
    “Not... precisely alone,” said Meriamon. She could feel her shadow behind her, rousing from its somnolence.
    “I’d call you rash, if you weren’t so obviously here, and no harm taken.”
    Meriamon shook her head a very little. Her shadow subsided unwillingly, but she was stronger than its wariness.
    o0o
    The hospital was much as she had left it. Two of the worst wounded had died. One was the giant whom they called Ajax—his given name, she gathered, was something else altogether. The prick of tears surprised her. She had never known him, and yet he had, in his way, belonged to her.
    Nikolaos was very much alive. They had moved him from his solitary eminence and set him closer to the door. He had a book balanced on his knees, and read from it by the light of a lamp; some of the men near him listened.
    She did not recognize the verses—for they had to be that, melodious as they were, in a dialect that was not Attic, nor yet Macedonian.
    “Immortal Aphrodite of the elaborate throne,
    wile-weaving daughter of Zeus,
    I beseech thee:
    Vex not my soul, O lady,
    with love’s sweet torments.”
    He had a beautiful voice when he was not using it to complain. A surprising taste in poetry, too. Meriamon wondered whom he was thinking of as he dwelt on the liquid words.
    Sekhmet’s coming barely made him pause. He opened his elbow for her to slip between, and finished out the poem. Then he rolled the book and bound it, one-handed, with impressive competence. For a moment his face seemed almost pleasant, though his brows knit soon enough.
    “If you keep that up,” Meriamon said, “you’re going to have a furrow deep enough to plant a row of barley.”
    “Then you can harvest it and make beer out of it,” he said. His tone was nasty. “That is what you do with it, isn’t it? Make beer?”
    “Bread first,” she said, “then beer. What was it that you were reading?”
    “Sappho,” he said. “She was a poet. She came from Lesbos—from Mytilene.”
    Mytilene was where Barsine’s husband had died. Meriamon did not think that he would care to know that. “She wrote beautiful verses.”
    “It’s my brother’s book. Thaïs gave it to him. He lent it to me, to give me something to do.” Since, he made it abundantly clear, he was not allowed to do anything else.
    “He did well, then,” said Meriamon. “I’m going to tell the servants to let you have a little wine. I don’t think it will harm you; they’ll put something in it to help the pain.”
    “I don’t need anything to help the pain.”
    “Of course you don’t,” said Meriamon. “But the others might when you wake up screaming in the middle of the night.”
    “It doesn’t hurt,” he said stubbornly.
    “Have you tried to walk about yet?”
    He flushed. “No. They won’t let me. Damn it, it’s not my leg that’s broken!”
    “Tonight,” she said, “for a little while, you may get up. But not now. Drink the wine when they bring it, and eat what they give you.”
    “Pap,” he muttered.
    “I shall be interested to see,” she said, “what you are like when you’re not exerting yourself to be unpleasant.”
    “I’m not—”
    She patted him on the head. “Hush, child. It’s for your own good, you know that very well.”
    If he could have bitten her, no doubt he would have. She was still laughing when she left him.
    o0o
    In a Persian bed in a conquered Persian tent, with Thaïs