The Alexander Inheritance Read online

  “That was clever of Roxane,” Cleopatra said. “Also more courageous than I would have expected of Alexander’s pretty little flower.”

  Eumenes kept his expression bland. Cleopatra was not beautiful, and had a tendency to resent women who were. It could affect her judgment.

  Cleopatra looked at him for a moment, then shrugged in annoyance. “Very well. I will need to consider this. I didn’t think that Antigonus would have me killed. Polyperchon has little to recommend him as satrap of Macedonia, save for his blood lines.”

  “You would have been a better choice,” Eumenes agreed.

  “If it weren’t for the fact that I am a woman, you mean,” Cleopatra said with disgust strong in her voice. She had lived with the Macedonian attitude toward women rulers all her life and that attitude was shared by most of the Greek states, including Thrace, where Eumenes was from.

  Eumenes himself had considerable sympathy for Cleopatra’s situation. He, like her, was banned from ultimate authority. In his case because he was a Thracian and the son of a wagoner, not a Macedonian noble. On the other hand, Eumenes had never wanted the top job. He was by temperament as well as objective circumstances a man who was most comfortable as a lieutenant for someone else.

  “As I said, let me think about this. I will give you my answer in a few days.”

  Eumenes agreed. It was what he expected. In her own way, Cleopatra was almost as cautious as Roxane.

  Camp of Antigonus, Eastern Cappadocia

  November 10

  Paskal of Macedonia rode with a leather messenger pouch slung over his shoulder. When he reached the camp of Antigonus, he was met by an infantry contingent. “I have a message for Queen Eurydice.”

  “The general sees all her messages first.”

  Paskal sat back on his horse, his bronze breastplate proclaiming his rank. “Is she then a prisoner in the hands of a usurper?”

  “She’s a woman and that’s enough.”

  Paskal looked at the group of Macedonian infantrymen and asked quietly, “Can any of you read?”

  “I can,” said a grizzled old veteran.

  “Fine. Then I’ll let you see it and you decide.” He handed over the proclamation from Roxane.

  The veteran looked at the sheet and showed it around to his fellows. Most of these men had seen Roxane, and the picture was an amazing likeness. Then he started to read aloud. He read slowly and haltingly, literate but not highly literate, and struggled with the words, sounding them out. The breaks between words made it easier, and the man did a decent job.

  With every word, the crowd grew larger. Eventually, one of the Silver Shields who had appointed themselves as Eurydice and Philip’s bodyguards joined the crowd. He listened for a moment, then turned and moved away quickly. Soon there were Silver Shields coming back to listen. And they were carrying their shields. While they weren’t carrying their long spears, they were armed.

  By the time the proclamation was read, there was the next best thing to a riot between the Silver Shields who were insisting that the messenger be sent directly to Eurydice, and the Companions Cavalry, who were insisting that the message belonged to Antigonus and Seleucus. One of the infantrymen—not a Silver Shield, just an ordinary Macedonian infantryman—shouted “What are you arguing about? You work for Attalus now! Queen Roxane said so!”

  “Roxane is a woman!” one of the cavalrymen said. “She has no authority!”

  “She’s the mother of King Alexander!” a different infantry man shouted. “You bastards were the ones who insisted that Alexander be co-king with Philip. Live with it!”

  After Alexander the Great’s death in Babylon, a dispute had arisen over the succession between Perdiccas and another distinguished officer by the name of Meleager. The cavalry had supported Perdiccas; most of the infantry, Meleager. Perdiccas had gained the upper hand and executed Meleager and three hundred of his men—the men by having them trampled by elephants, a hideous death which had never previously been used by any Macedonian commander. Resentment over what had happened at Babylon had not faded away, and the split between the cavalry and the infantry was as wide as ever.

  Someone else was passed the proclamation. This was a cavalryman, and he was both wealthier and better educated. He read it quickly and easily, then shouted, “It’s true! Roxane has assigned Attalus as commander of the Companions.”

  “I’m commander of the Companions!” Seleucus roared from the edge of the crowd.

  “Not according to this!” the cavalryman shouted back, holding up the proclamation.

  Paskal faded back and dismounted. He handed his reins to one of the Silver Shields and asked, “Can you take me to Eurydice? I have messages for her.”

  The Shield nodded, motioned to another Shield, and Paskal was whisked away to see Eurydice while the fight over Roxane’s proclamation was approaching full-fledged riot status.

  ☆ ☆ ☆

  Eurydice was watching from her tent. The army was encamped in the countryside and Antigonus had claimed the village buildings for his officers, not granting her one. It was one of the many little slights that Antigonus heaped on her daily to make sure that she, as well as the army, knew her place.

  She recognized Paskal from his armor. The bronze breastplate was in the form of a man’s chest, complete with nipples. The man had paid almost two pounds of silver for the thing.

  “What news?” she asked, and Paskal grinned. He was a bit on the stout side and wore a bushy black beard.

  “Your co-queen sends news!”

  “Come in then.”

  She gestured him into the tent. Philip sat on a camp stool, drawing shapes and writing numbers. Philip looked up, then went back to his numbers without acknowledging Paskal.

  “What does Roxane have to say?”

  Paskal pulled a sheet of papyrus from his pouch and handed it over. Eurydice read the note. Mostly all it said was “Read the butterfly book.” There were a few more comments, and Roxane said she thought Eurydice and Philip would be safer on the Queen of the Sea, but Eurydice wasn’t convinced. By the time she had finished her reading, order had been somewhat restored in the camp and Antigonus was demanding her presence.

  ☆ ☆ ☆

  She stood before him in the headman’s house in the little village, while he sat on a chair that resembled a throne altogether too closely.

  “You will proclaim this to be a false proclamation.”

  “I would look like an idiot,” Eurydice shot back. “It’s a true proclamation, and she wrote it freely.”

  “How could you possibly know that?”

  “Because of this,” Eurydice said, holding up a piece of papyrus. The moment she did it, she knew she had been a fool. The use of the papyrus with Philip’s formula on it as proof of truth was supposed to be a secret shared only by her and Roxane. And she had blurted it out to Antigonus the first time she got a letter. She covered as well as she could. “This is Roxane’s own hand.” But she wasn’t at all sure that Antigonus believed her, even though it was common practice to use the back side of any papyrus.

  “I don’t care if she wrote it. And even if she did, there is no proof that she did so willingly.” Antigonus was scowling at her. At the same time, the room was full of people, Seleucus and Cassander, as well as the commander of her small contingent of Silver Shields. Not that Trajan was likely to back her against Antigonus. He would protect her physically, probably. If the odds weren’t too bad. And his very presence would make any attempt on her life or Philip’s obvious. That was protection in itself, because if Antigonus had her killed, he would have no credibility left.

  “A letter I write with your sword sticking in my back isn’t going to mean much.” Eurydice looked around the small, crowded room pointedly. Then she backed down a little. “I can decline to endorse Roxane’s edicts, especially when it comes to your satrapy, but I can’t claim she didn’t make them. Not and be believed.”

  “Then deny them. All of them—” Antigonus started, then stopped. The
man wasn’t a fool, after all. “No. I will go over Roxane’s proclamation, and have a proclamation made up for you to sign.” Then he dismissed her.

  ☆ ☆ ☆

  The next day, Eurydice received and read Antigonus’ proclamation. It outlawed Eumenes and condemned him to death, in fact. It named Antigonus as regent for the empire, as well as strategos. It made Seleucus satrap of Babylon, and generally undid everything Roxane had done that wasn’t just a continuation of what had been decided at Babylon, with Antigonus in Perdiccas’ place.

  Eurydice gritted her teeth and signed it. She even wrote to Roxane in her own hand that the proclamation was her will. She wrote it on the back of a merchant’s account sheet, but she wrote it.

  Royal Compound, Alexandria, Egypt

  November 10

  Ptolemy looked at the royal proclamation from Roxane, then he looked at Dinocrates. “So, how do they do it?”

  “It’s called printing, Satrap. And they use something on the ship called a ‘laser printer.’ But there were other ways of doing it. The one we can do most readily is probably the mimeograph process, though the movable-type process would be better for when we want to make a great many copies of something. I must tell you that none of the techniques we know will make the coating that is on Roxane’s proclamation. You note that it’s not on the butterfly book or the letter. I’m not totally sure, but I think they coated the paper in what they call ‘plastic.’”

  “Put people to work on both the memio…whatever it’s called, and the movable type.

  “We also have a report of that young officer of theirs—Dag something—using some device at Tyre to kill Kleitos. Kleitos would not have been an easy man to kill, and from the reports, Dag tossed Kleitos a pot of lightning. How could he do that?”

  Dinocrates shook his head. “I don’t have any idea, Satrap. And no one I…” Suddenly Dinocrates stopped and just stared at nothing. He remembered the engines and the use of fire. He remembered that the ones he saw were called turbines and spun in a circle as the fire pressed against the blades. But there had been another kind that pushed a cylinder back and forth with little flames and high pressure. “Maybe I do at least have an idea of what they did. Not how they did it, Satrap. That could take years of study, but the basic form of what they did.”

  Ptolemy had been sitting in a chair and Dinocrates standing before him. But now the satrap of Egypt leaned back and examined Dinocrates. Then he made a gesture and a slave brought in a chair for Dinocrates to sit on. “Very well, Dinocrates. Tell me the form of this thing that Dag Ja…that the boy did.”

  “When you heat air, it expands. When you heat water, it expands even more. That is how their steam guns work. What if you had a clay pot full of water and you were able to heat it all to steam at once? There would be no place for the steam to go unless the pot broke. Then it might strike you, much as lightning might. It might even seem to be lightning.”

  ☆ ☆ ☆

  They talked on, and Ptolemy studied the state of science and the dozens of new things that had been created just from seeing the ship. Alexander would have loved this, he thought, and Aristotle even more. For himself, Ptolemy wasn’t at all sure he was pleased. But the time of the philosophers was upon the world, and Ptolemy was not one to deny reality just because he didn’t like it. What concerned him more was Wiley, and the comments he made about slavery. All the ship people seemed to be fanatical in their opposition to slavery. You might as well oppose the tide, but the ship people didn’t appear to be willing to face that fact.

  The science was scary in its way, but Ptolemy was convinced that when all was said and done, the true danger of the ship people was their political notions.

  CHAPTER 15

  Queen of the Sea, off Trinidad

  November 10

  “We see Trinidad, Reliance,” Doug Warren said over the radio. They’d passed the Reliance en route, but the maritime radios had greater range than the phone, so the Reliance was still in contact.

  “That’s good. What part of Trinidad?”

  “The Dragon’s Mouths. We’re at eleven degrees, one minute forty-five seconds north by sixty-one degrees, forty minutes, thirty-eight seconds west, and we can see promontories on both the Trinidad and the Venezuelan sides of the straits.”

  “Better. We’re on track about a day out from you. We should make the Boca Grande strait tomorrow around noon and La Brea around three.”

  “How are your passengers?”

  “Not happy, but calm enough. They are ready to conquer America, all by themselves. How are yours?”

  “Dag is now in command of the Silver Shields. And Queen Roxane paid the Shields for their former slaves, then officially manumitted the bunch of them. Made a ceremony of it and the slaves seemed to appreciate it.”

  “You think you can trust the Shields now?”

  “I don’t know, but Dag thinks we can and he was with them in Tyre.”

  Doug and Adrian continued their chat, while in another part of the ship Marie Easley and Roxane discussed the politics of what was left of Alexander’s empire. It was an ongoing discussion. Marie had spent thirty years studying this time and the two hundred years that followed it, and Roxane had spent most of her life stuck in the middle of it. They had a lot to talk about. The Greek city states, art and artistry, the future prospects of little Alexander. What Olympias was like in person, what Cleopatra and Eurydice were like. The generals and their wives, many of whom only made it into history as names, if they made it at all. Marie was combining Roxane’s knowledge and hers to try to build a database about the players in the politics of Europe. Roxane wasn’t her only source. She had talked to most of Roxane’s Silver Shields, and most of their wives and former slaves as well.

  To Marie the trip to Trinidad was mostly an unavoidable delay. That wasn’t true for Congressman Al Wiley.

  ☆ ☆ ☆

  “So, Amanda, what do we know about the people here?” Al Wiley asked. It was a set-up question. There were eighty people in the small theater room. Mostly passengers, but a few from the staff side of the ship’s crew and even a couple of the ship side. Also, Evgenij was there representing the Silver Shields, and so was Bilistiche, representing the freed slaves. Bilistiche was one of Roxane’s maids who had decided that she wanted to stay in the colony.

  “Not nearly as much as I would like, Congressman. Mostly, we think—and it’s think, not know—that they aren’t one people at all. There are probably half a dozen different tribes, some that are related to each other and speak the same language, others who have entirely different languages. But all that is speculation, and even at that we are going on very sketchy data. There simply isn’t a lot of information on the ship about this part of the world at this time. We don’t know what language or languages they speak, and we certainly don’t know those languages. The software on our translation apps can’t do much with an unknown language.”

  “That’s going to change, Amanda, isn’t it? Once we get to talk to them and can get a sample of their languages?”

  “Yes and no, Congressman. We can program in sounds and if we learn their word for water or wood, we can add it to the app’s lexicon. With experience, we can work out grammar. But for the foreseeable future, it’s going to be pidgin and gestures.”

  Lacula’s Trading Post, Trinidad

  November 10

  Lacula looked out at the gigantic ship and casually slapped a mosquito that bit his left shoulder. He was barely aware of the mosquito, in part because this was the end of the wet season and the mosquitoes would be thick for another month or so. But mostly it was because of the big ship. The big white ship flooded his mind with a combination of avarice and dread.

  In a different timeline, archaeologists would call his grandchildren Saladoid. Lacula had never heard of the word, and his name for the location that name was based on was not Saladero. It was Tupky. He wasn’t from there, but he had been there several times.

  He had just arrived a few weeks ago beca
use he preferred to be here in the dry season. Fewer mosquitoes. What he was, was a trader. He traded pots to the natives for fish and turtles, birds and deer. He also harvested the tar from the pits and sold it back home. The natives he dealt with here on the island would be called Ortoiroid by those same archaeologists, though in fact they were from five different tribes, spoke three distinct languages, and were generally fighting with each other over something or other.

  The reason Lacula was afraid wasn’t so much because he thought the people from the giant ship would kill him. Oh, he was afraid of that, deeply and profoundly. But the thought that drove the blood from his gonads and shriveled him up to the size of a worm was the pure and certain knowledge that anyone with a ship like that would have pots to put his to shame. A ship that size could carry more such pots than he could carry on his family boat for the rest of his life. The market for pots was destroyed. Even if they were selling something else, the dumb natives would be offering up their goods for whatever those ship people were selling. They wouldn’t have any left for his pots.

  The avarice that brought the blood back to his manhood was the knowledge that that monster ship must be carrying goods that he could sell up the Orinoco River in his homeland. That meant he could buy here and sell at home. And who knew what the ship people might need? There was a whole new possible business, one that might make him rich.

  That was what kept him standing there as the natives ran back into the woods, leaving their flint arrowheads and bone fishhooks, their baskets of crabs and other goods, lying on the sand.

  ☆ ☆ ☆

  The little ship that the giant ship sent out was bigger than his largest canoe. A lot bigger. It was sort of like the catamaran canoes that Lacula was familiar with, but it was all one hull, just shaped like two, and it made its way to shore with no sail or rowers.