The Enchanter Completed

The body that I had believed must be waiting for it was still asleep beside me in the horror of Gedrosia. No soul came to fill it; no living spirit to fill her emptiness with splendor.

I had no tears, but still I wept. My queen was dead, gone, lost forever. I sprang up, staggering with the effort. But where would I go, what path would I take, that I had not set foot upon already? My horse was dead; my body clung to life by sheer will. I could go no faster, nor drive myself harder.

There was nothing I could do but sink down in my burrow of sand, and give myself up to mourning for my kinswoman, my beloved, my queen.

We survived Gedrosia, Etta and I, and Alexander whose spirit was unconquerable. Every step of that journey after my dream had come and gone, I yearned for my people and my country, my tribe without a queen. But when we had come to the end, to water and blessed green and relief, at last, from thirst and hunger and furnace heat, I dreamed again.

She came to me, my queen, as I had seen her in life, with her bow in her hand and her sword at her side. She smiled at me as she had so often before, that smile I would have followed to the ends of the earth?and for which I had let her leave me, and bound myself to follow a man, a mere king. "Selene," she said in an accent I had half forgotten, the accent of our people. "Dear cousin. Are you happy?"

Strange question for the dead to ask. I answered honestly. "How can I be happy? I live in exile. And you, my queen, are dead."

She laughed as if my grief were a splendid jest. "Oh, yes!" she said. "I am dead. Is that why you creep about in such gloom? That's foolish. I'm with the Goddess now, in the land of everlasting."

"You should be here," I said in unslaked bitterness, "in this body that waits for you."

She frowned slightly, though her lips still smiled. "Body? Waiting? It's not my time to be reborn."

That startled me; it left me in confusion. "And yet?you said?your oath?"

"I swore that she would be queen after me," she said. "And so she will. That is as true a vision as it ever was."

"How can she be queen? The Goddess made her, but never finished her. She was never given a soul."

"One waits," said the queen. "Wait, and see. It's not long now. The time is coming."

"I am coming," I said, "to the plains where I was born."

"Wait," said the queen. "Be patient. Protect my heir. She is safer by far here than she ever would have been among the tribe. They go to war, cousin; my loyal friends, my warriors, my priestesses, fight against those who would proclaim a queen. If you bring her there, as she is now, she will die?and you with her. And she will never be reborn, for only souls may take flesh again, and she, as yet, has none."

I heard her in a kind of despair. The urgency in me to be gone, to go home, flared into ash.

She laid her hand on my head, both blessing and comfort. "Soon," she said. "The time will come; you will know. Wait, and see."

I waited. I guarded my charge, who was now, little though she was fit for it, my queen. I watched Alexander in the dregs of his great war of conquest. The fire in him was overwhelming the flesh at last. He was still young; he was barely come to his prime. Yet he had begun to fade.

Etta still followed him with unswerving devotion. The more he faded, the more devoted she seemed to be. When his dearest friend died, the lover who had been with him from his childhood, he would suffer no one else to see his grief. But she, his silent shadow, and I who was hers?we saw. She could offer no comfort but her presence. I had none that he would accept. I knew the pain that was in him, the anguish of loss; for I too had lost one whom I loved. Time had barely blunted the blow.

He never recovered, no more than I; but he learned to endure. The heart was not quite gone out of him. He was still Alexander; he still ruled the world. That gave him a little joy, even yet. In time, everyone murmured, he would remember his old bright self; he would be strong again, and lighthearted again, as he had been before.

They had no prescience. If he had reached the stream of Ocean, perhaps that would have cooled the fire of him. But his army had refused to go so far. The fire of his spirit had shrunk to an ember, and that was growing cold.

Alexander was dying. He lay in his golden bed in the palace of Babylon, in the hot and steaming summer of that country, and burned with fever. The ember, I thought, had flared. When the flame was gone, only ash would remain.

Etta would not leave him. She crouched at the foot of the bed, as motionless as one of the carved lions that upheld it, and her eyes, clear and empty blue, fixed on his face. The servants had long since grown accustomed to her. The great ones who came and went, some weeping, others narrow-eyed as they weighed their chances once the king was dead, eyed her askance but did not move to dislodge her. Even the most arrogant of them had learned long since to let her be.

I stood in shadow, silent and forgotten. As the long hours of the king's sickness stretched into days, I remembered my training long ago, fasting and cleansing the flesh so that the spirit could see more clearly. The heaviness of earth dropped away. Through the shadows of it, I saw the dim candles of men's souls, and the blazing fire that was Alexander. Etta I could not see. She had no substance here.

Alexander burned without measure or restraint. His consciousness hovered on the edge of dissolution.

He was nearly free of the flesh. It crumbled about his spirit, swollen with fever, racked with wounds, full of old pain.

The physicians gave up hope long after I knew that this fever would not pass. It was fear for their lives, I suppose, and a degree of wishful thinking. Many of them did love him; they wept as they tended him.

My queen came to me in the night, after I had stopped reckoning time and merely lived from day into darkness. I had fed Etta when servants brought bread and possets which the king was too far gone to eat. I was empty even of hunger. When she came, I was waiting for her, standing guard over the gates of the dark.

She was not as pale as I was then, nor as far removed from living will as Alexander. She looked, indeed, as she had in the prime of her life: young, strong, beautiful. She stood over Alexander, looking down at the wreck of him. Her face had the remoteness of a cloud, or of a god.

I did not move or speak, but she turned to me. Through her I could see Etta sitting where she had been since he was laid in this bed, insubstantial as an image in water.

My queen held out her hands to me. I knew better than to touch the dead, but I met her eyes. They were dark and endlessly deep. "Help me," she said.

Old vows, old dreams bound me. I had sworn oaths to this shade of a queen, on behalf of her shadow of a daughter. Now they all came down upon me. I must see this thing done; must bear witness to it when the time came, before the council and the warriors of the tribe.

My queen laid her insubstantial hand on the husk that now barely housed the spirit of Alexander. It was more than human, more than mortal. What god had chosen to inhabit this flesh, I did not know, nor did it matter.

I took Etta's limp cool hand in mine. My free hand reached across the burning body of the king.

Never touch the dead. My old teachers' voices echoed in my skull, throbbing with urgency. They rose to a roar as my fingers closed about my lady's.

Her hand was cold. It had substance, which I had not expected. Chill wind gusted through me; I caught the scent of graves, and glimpsed, for an instant, a light so bright it came near to blinding me.