“You said Hellas too, Father.”
“Yes, Majesty. I am aware you are Helenian, but have you not noticed that the lower the morality and dignity among the people, the more the people try to prove their superiority over others by humiliating them? Even such great scholars as Aristotle have excelled in this lowly business. The poison had penetrated that far.”
“Alexander had always opposed Aristotle,” Thais objected.
“And I thank him for that. Do not rush to grieve. Even now the savage separation between people is giving way to the ideas of equality and unification.”
“I know about the stoics, Father.”
“There are more ancient teachers. You shall remember them when you have time to ponder.”
“And our beautiful gods …” the Athenian said.
The priest raised a hand in warning. “I am not touching your Olympians, who were alien to us before, although lately the beliefs of Hellas and Egypt have been converging in common deities. You must not touch them either. Understanding requires many years of thinking and working through old feelings. Hastiness would only lead to one thing: the loss of faith in a man’s life and future. Be careful.”
Thais kissed the old priest’s hand and returned to the waiting carriage.
Preparations for her journey went unnoticed. Still, rumors spread about the queen’s impending journey to her husband in Alexandria. Roykos’ family, well established in Memphis, was leaving with Thais. They were leaving without regret because the head of the family and his first wife could not part with the mistress, and the Finikian was dying to get to the sea. Irana’s nanny was coming too. She was a young, half-Helenian, half-Libyan who was sufficiently educated for the family. She was not a slave, but had become attached to the little girl and had eyes for Roykos’ eldest son.
Prior to their departure, Thais took the still-weak Eris on a boat ride among the blooming lotuses. The boat glided noiselessly across a wide lake, rustling as it cut through copses of blue flowers and large thick leaves.
Once upon a time lotuses had bloomed here as she’d taken a boat ride with Menedem. Was her royal privilege: the luxurious gilded boat, the striped tent, the well-trained Nubian oarsmen better or more enjoyable? Never.
Young people always yearn for a more elevated status, unaware of the price they will pay. They have no idea that youth will eventually come to an end and the time will come when they would be willing to give up all they had acquired so they could return to the happy hours of their outwardly simple, but spiritually deep life and emotions of youth. Perhaps power and wealth would blind them and make them forget the past. That seemed to happen to many people. Just as well, if that made them happy. Presently there was no greater joy than to watch Eris’ thin face livened by the surrounding beauty, and to listen to the happy chatter of little Irana. Thais’ farewell to Egypt would remain beautiful in her memory.
Thais opted to leave at an early hour, to avoid too much notice, and kept the time of her departure secret. Regardless, a huge crowd of Memphis citizens showed up to see Thais off. They were genuinely sad and invited her to come back soon. Hundreds of wreaths made of sacred lotus flew into the water and onto the deck of her ship. Lotus was only allowed to be picked for such exceptional occasions.
The ship undocked quietly, water splashed, and houses, temples and pyramids sailed away. Thais would never see the strange ancient city again, though she had given it so much of her soul and so many years of her life. She would never come back to the philosophers’ retreat, the Neit temple. It was ton eona again. Forever.
Chapter Seventeen. Aphrodite Ambologera
Alexandria impressed Thais with the speed with which it was growing. In the few years she’d spent in Memphis, the city had become larger than the ancient capital of Egypt. It had also acquired a beautiful pier filled with lively and noisy crowds every evening. Many ships were docked at the bay, and the foundation of the gigantic lighthouse at Pharos towered in the distance.
The city was not Egyptian. Thais did find many similarities with Athens, possibly intentional. There was even a wall similar to Ceramic which separated the Amaphontus district from the shanties of Racotis. It too was inscribed with invitations to famous hetaerae, much like in Athens, Corinth and Clazomene. Ptolemy constructed the Museum and the Library more rapidly than had did the other structures, and the two towered over the roofs, attracting the eye with the whiteness of their stone and the majestic simplicity of architecture. Palms, cedars, cypresses and sycamores rose in the gardens and around houses, rosebushes filled the slopes of the elevated portion of the city.
The most beautiful thing was the dazzling blue sea. Fatigue from the monotony of the past few years and anxiety for the uncertain future dissolved in the vastness of its waves. Thais would never part from the sea again.
Holding back her desire to dive into the greenish water near the shore, she walked away from the sea, heading toward the hill with Alexander’s tomb. Thais took off all symbols of royal distinction, and yet passersby still turned to look at the small woman with the unusually smooth and clear face. Her regular features were surprising even here in the land where chiseled, beautiful faces of ancient people of the East and Hellas were commonplace. Something in the way she walked, her coppery tan, the depth of her enormous eyes and the figure outlined through the chiton of the finest Egyptian linen caused strangers to follow her with their eyes. Roykos limped a few steps behind her, shoulder to shoulder with his eldest son, armed and watchful, having sworn to Eris that he would keep an eye on Thais.
Much as she had several years ago, the Athenian approached the manmade hill of sea pebbles, held together with lime and tiled with gray Siena granite. The guard consisted of decearchos and one lokhagos, and was located in a portico made of massive slabs. The bronze doors could withstand a strike of the mightiest siege machine. During the previous visit, Ptolemy had shown Thais a clever mechanism built to protect the tomb. One only had to knock out specific supports and a mass of pebbles would crash down from above, concealing the tomb. It would only take one night to pour in lime and egg solution and cover it up with stone tiles prepared in advance.
Thais showed the lokhagos a signet ring with the royal seal and he bowed to her. Ten soldiers opened the bronze doors and lit the lanterns. The familiar golden sarcophagus decorated with bas-reliefs stood in the center of the tomb. As before, her heart filled with sadness. She took the jug of black wine and a vessel of precious oil brought by Roykos, made an offering to the shadow of the great army leader, then paused in a strange kind of stasis akin to sleep.
She heard the rustling of wings of swiftly flying birds, she heard the splashing of waves and dull thunder as if from the distant hoofbeats of a thousand horses. In these ghostly sounds, Thais imagined she could hear Alexander’s powerful voice in her heart, saying a single word: “Return.”
Return where? To the native shores of Hellas, to Memphis? Or here to Alexandria? The gold of the sarcophagus responded coolly to her touch and she found she could not focus on the past. She glanced one last time at the golden figures of the bas-reliefs, left and descended the hill, never looking black. The feeling of freedom she had first experienced at the Eridu temple had firmly established itself in her mind. She had completed the last thing that that filled her with a sense of incompleteness.
Thais returned to the white house under the cedars. She had received the house from Ptolemy after she had refused to stay at the palace. In full royal regalia, Thais and Eris rode in a carriage toward Ptolemy’s majestic palace. The first thing Thais demanded was a face to face meeting. The king, who was preparing a grand welcome and a feast for her, obliged reluctantly. However, when a Nubian slave brought in and opened the leather package with the gold tack, Ptolemy forgot his displeasure.