By the third morning she was impatient even of ambition, which had no outlet. The day stretched before her, empty and flat as the land. Why should she endure it? She remembered the locker in the wagon which contained her arms. Her man’s tunic was there as well.
She was the Queen; Perdikkas should have sent reports to her. If no one would bring her news, she would go and see.
All she knew of the expedition she had heard from Konon, who had many friends in the camp. Perdikkas, he had said, had started out without telling anyone his objective, neither the camp commandant nor the senior officers who were going with him. He had heard there had been spies about the camp. The officers had not liked it; Seleukos, who commanded the elephants, liked to know how they would be used. Konon kept to himself much more than he had told; they were saying in camp that Perdikkas was far higher-handed these days than Alexander ever was; Alexander had known how to talk you round.
He had confided, however, to Eurydike that with the stores and remounts they’d taken, he reckoned they would not be marching above thirty miles. And that was the distance to the Nile.
Eurydike changed into her tunic, clasped on her tooled-hide corselet, laced down the shoulder-pieces, put on riding-boots and greaves. Her breasts were small and the corselet hid their curve. Her helmet was a simple, unplumed Illyrian war-cap; her grandmother, Audata, had worn it on the border. The drowsy servants never saw her go. Down at the horse-lines the grooms took her for one of the royal squires, and at her imperious order led a sound horse out.
Even after three days, the spoor of the troops was plain: the plowed-up grass, the bared dust, the horse and camel droppings, the trampled banks of the irrigation canals, the leaked water caking in the little fields. The peasants laboring to mend the dikes looked up with sullen hatred of all destructive soldiers.
She was only a few miles out when she met the messenger.
He was riding a camel; a dusty, drawn-faced man, who stared at her angrily for not making way for him. But he was a soldier; so she wheeled round and overtook him. Her horse shied from the camel; she called, “What news? Has there been a battle?”
He leaned over to spit; but his mouth was dry, and only the sound came out. “Get out of my way, boy, I’ve no time for you. I’ve despatches for the camp. They must get ready to take the wounded … what are left of them.” He switched his mount; it bobbed its scornful head and left her in its dust.
An hour or two later, she met the wagons. As they came nearer, she guessed their freight from the groaning, from the water-carriers on their donkeys, and the doctor leaning under one of the awnings. She rode down the line, hearing the humming flies, a curse or a cry when a wagon jolted.
The fourth of them had men talking and looking out; men with disabled limbs, not too weak to be alert. She saw inside a familiar face; it was the veteran who had first taken her part on the Sardis road, when her mother died.
“Thaulos!” she called, riding up to the tailboard. “I am sorry to see you hurt.”
She was hailed with amazement and delight. Queen Eurydike! And they had taken her for some young blood in cavalry! What was she doing here? Had she meant to lead them into battle? A daughter of the house—her granddad would have been proud of her. Ah well, lucky she had been too late for yesterday’s work. It did one good to see her.
She did not understand that it was her youth they found endearing; that had she been thirty instead of fifteen they would have made a barrack-room joke of her for a mannish termagant. She looked like a charming boy without having lost her girlishness; she was their friend and ally. As she walked her horse beside the cart, they poured out their discontents to her.
Perdikkas had marched them to a place on the Nile called Camel ford. But of course the ford was guarded by a fort across the stream, with a palisade, a scarp, and the wall of the fort on top. Perdikkas’ scouts had reported it lightly manned.
A younger veteran said resentfully, “But what he forgot was that Ptolemy learned his trade from Alexander.”
“Perdikkas hates him,” said another, “so he underrates him. You can’t afford that in war. Alexander knew better.”
“That’s it; of course the fort was undermanned. Ptolemy was keeping mobile, till he knew where the stroke would be. Once he did know, he came like the wind; I doubt Alexander would have been much quicker. By the time we were half across, he was in the fort with a regiment.”
“And another thing I’ll tell you,” Thaulos said. “He didn’t want to shed Macedonian blood. He could have lain low, and fallen on us as we crossed; for he’d come up out of sight. But up he stood on the walls, with a herald, and his men all shouting, trying to scare us back. He’s a gentleman, Ptolemy. Alexander thought the world of him.”
With a grunt of pain, he eased himself over on the straw to favor his wounded leg. She asked if he needed water; but they were all in need of talk. The desperately wounded were in other carts.
Perdikkas, they said, had made a speech calling upon their loyalty. It was he who was guardian of the Kings, who had his appointment direct from Alexander. This they could not deny; moreover he was paying them, and their pay was not in arrears.
Scaling-ladders had been carried by the elephants; and it was they, too, who had torn down the palisades on the river-bank, as their mahouts directed them, plucking out the stakes like the saplings whose leaves they fed on, their thick hides making little of javelins from above. But the defenders had been well trained; the glacis was steep; the men dislodged from the ladders had rolled down the broken palisade into the river, where the weight of their armor drowned them. It was then that Perdikkas had ordered the elephants to assault the walls.
“Seleukos didn’t like it. He said they’d done their stint. He said there was no sense in a beast carrying two men up where they’d be level with a dozen, and exposing its head as well. But he was told pretty sharply who was in command. And he didn’t like that either.”
The elephants were ordered to give their war-cry. “But it didn’t scare Ptolemy. We could see him up on the wall with a long sarissa, poking back our men as they came up. An elephant can scare any man down on the ground; but not when he’s on a wall above it.”
The elephants had labored up the scarp, digging their heavy feet into the earth, till Old Pluto, the one the others followed, started to pull at the wall-timbers. Old Pluto could shift a battering-ram. But Ptolemy stood his ground, threw off the missiles with his shield, reached out his long spear and got Old Pluto’s eyes. The next elephant up, someone picked off the mahout. So there were these two great beasts, one blind and the other unguided, pounding and blundering down the scarp, trampling anyone in their way.
“And that,” said one man, “is how I got a broken foot. Not from the enemy. And if I never walk straight again, it’s not Ptolemy I’ll blame for it.”
There was a growl of anger from every man in the cart. They had seen little more of the action, having been wounded about this time; they thought it had gone on all day. She rode by them a little longer, offering sympathy, then asked them the way to Camelford. They urged her to take care, to do nothing rash, they could not spare their Queen.
As she rode on, a dark moving bulk appeared in the middle distance, coming slowly from a palm-grove that fringed a pool. As it drew near, she saw two elephants in single file, the smaller going first, the bigger one holding it by the tail. Old Pluto was going home, led as he had been by his mother forty years ago in his native jungle, to keep him safe from tigers. His mahout sat weeping on his neck; his wounded eyes, dropping bloody serum, seemed to be weeping too.