☆ ☆ ☆
The report was read in the convention hall, the room where the constitutional convention was meeting.
Slowly, Thaïs rose to her feet and just stood there. The room was in an uproar, people blaming Arrhidaeus, others blaming Eumenes, some even blaming Ptolemy, who was neither on the ship nor anywhere near the battle. They blamed baby Alexander for being a baby, and his father for being dead. They blamed Philip for being an idiot, and Eurydice for failing to kill Antigonus One-eye. They would, if any of them had thought of it, no doubt blame the moon for being full or the stars for being bright in the night sky.
And through it all, Thaïs just stood there.
Finally, gradually, there was quiet.
And then Thaïs said, “I’m tired.” She paused, took a deep breath, expanding her already reasonably expansive chest, and looked around the chamber. “I am not speaking for Ptolemy in this. Just for myself. I knew Alexander the Great, and I knew his dream. I have seen the wars to make that dream real, and the wars that followed his death, and I am tired of the killing.
“We need a government. We need something to get the generals under control. We need to stop the wars. In that other history, the ship people history, these wars continued for another century. And by the time it was done, there was little left of Alexander’s dream. And Macedonia, all the Greek states, were easy meat for the Romans. Even Egypt fell to Rome. Carthage was destroyed, sown with salt.
“We need another way. We need to find an agreement that we can live with.”
It was a moving speech and spoken with all the skill Thaïs had learned as a hetaera and all the real passion she felt on the matter.
It left the room quiet and contemplative.
She sat down and it was a few minutes before the arguing started up again. And when it did start back up, there was, it seemed, a greater willingness to find a compromise. They made real progress that day and the next, and managed to set aside the lawmaking to focus on the structure of how the laws would be made.
By October 25th, they had a tentative constitution. It wasn’t anything that the ship people approved of. It had little in the way of democracy and while it didn’t enshrine slavery, it didn’t forbid it either. It didn’t even specify where the government of the empire would meet, leaving that up to the representatives to sort out. But it did have a system for making laws and creating money, both of which would be respected throughout the empire. It provided a structure for a government that would be able to make laws, declare and fight wars. Try cases in a system of courts. And do all the things that governments by rights do.
☆ ☆ ☆
Eumenes looked out at the Mediterranean Sea. The constitution was written and pursuant to it, the queens-regent had appointed him strategos to the empire, under civilian oversight, with a budget and, at least in theory, an army. He had learned something of the ship people’s ways of war.
Now it was simply a question of whether he could put those lessons into practice before the empire collapsed.
CHAPTER 30
Amphipolis, Macedonia
October 25
Cassander rode over the hill and looked out at the valley leading to Amphipolis and smiled with satisfaction. The sons of the great houses had followed Alexander, many to their deaths. But other sons had stayed home to secure the kingdom and serve their fathers. It was those sons who had rallied to his side. He looked to the hilltop where the lookout would be stationed as the first of his army crested the hill.
☆ ☆ ☆
“Oh, crap!” The lookout just stared for a moment as the rising sun lit the rank upon rank of soldiers marching on Amphipolis. Then he turned and started shouting.
Amphipolis was a port. In fact, it was Alexander’s main naval base in Macedonia, from which he had launched his campaign into Persia. It had a modern port—at least by third-century BCE standards—and lookout posts on the surrounding hills. It was also thoroughly tied into the network of signal fires and dispatch riders that tied Alexander’s empire together. Even though it didn’t have one of the ship people radio stations, it still had good communications with the rest of the empire.
That army could not be there. Amphipolis would have gotten the news.
☆ ☆ ☆
Word reached the palace at Amphipolis, where Olympias had been running things since Polyperchon had taken half the army off to defend Abdera.
“How did they get here?” Polyperchon’s general demanded, sounding querulous to Olympias, who had just gotten the news and come straight here.
Olympias laughed. “Did it never occur to you that Cassander knows where the signal fires are as well as you do? He knows where the dispatch riders get their remounts too. He was in charge of setting up the remount stations for his father.” With great drama, Olympias raised her eyes and hands to the sky. “Oh, my son, why did you have to take all the competent officers off to Persia and leave me with dolts?”
“We have been getting reports all along! He can’t have cut our communications.”
“No, he didn’t cut the communications links. He corrupted them. That’s why Cassander seemed to be massing his forces everywhere but here. And why Polyperchon has run off to Thrace with half my army.”
Tactical surprise on a hilltop fort was the next best thing to impossible to achieve. But strategic surprise…that could be achieved with skill and subterfuge.
Cassander, the black-hearted murderer, had both. Olympias didn’t need more than five minutes to examine the massing army from vantage point of the palace tower to realize that Alexander’s favorite city in Macedonia was going to fall. The question was what to do about it.
Of one thing she was determined. Her son’s city would not be given to his murderer.
Amphipolis, Macedonia
October 27
The walls were holding for now, but it wouldn’t be all that long before they fell. Olympias poured the ergot extract into the amphora of wine and mixed it. Then she took two gallons of distilled wine, and added it to the amphora as well. It was the wine she would give to her household slaves as she freed them.
Once it was mixed, she went to the door and called in two of her slaves to carry the amphora, and then she called everyone together.
“I will not give you to Cassander, so you must either die or be freed. Those who would be made free, come and drink this wine. And with the wine, take your liberty.”
Then she watched as most of her slaves came up and took the wine. She made sure that each drank the full draft. There were only three who had decided to die rather than be freed, and it was those three she would take with her down to the docks. The rest would have strange and exciting dreams before they were freed from life.
“Burn with your liberty, my children, and burn the town as well.” She turned, sweeping her cloak, and slipped from the dais. It would seem almost as though she had disappeared.
It would take a while, and they would raise quite a fuss before the potion took them. The noise and the fires would help mask her escape.
☆ ☆ ☆
Cassander noted the smoke from the city. Then, as the sun faded in the west, he could see the fires. “What has she done?”
“Olympias?” asked his brother.
“Yes. See the fires?” Cassander considered, but not for long. “We have to get into the city now.”
“It’s night, or it will be in minutes. Certainly before we can organize an assault.”
“There’s no choice. Order the men to form up.”
It was, as it happened, precisely the wrong move. Olympias hadn’t been able to poison the whole garrison, just her own household, and they would have been suppressed by the garrison soon enough. But with Cassander massing his army just outside the walls, the garrison couldn’t be spared to fight the fires or restrain the drugged-out followers of Dionysus.
☆ ☆ ☆
Four figures crept out onto the docks and made their way to the trireme that waited for them.
CHAPTER
31
Queen of the Sea, Athens port at Piraeus
November 2
The phone rang and Dag felt Roxane’s elbow in his chest as she scrambled up. “Ouch. It’s just the room phone.” He reached over and answered it. “Hello?”
Roxane, meanwhile, pulled up the covers as if whoever was calling could see.
“Dag? Is Her Nibs there?” asked Doug Warren.
“What’s up, Doug?”
“We have a ship coming in. It’s a galley, one of those big ass ones with three rows of oars, and it’s headed this way under full sail.”
“Right. But I’m not on wa— Wait. Why do you want Roxane?”
“Hell, Dag, I don’t know. Heraldry on the flags it’s flying. Marie Easley said we should warn Roxane. She’s talking to Cleopatra.”
“Look, Doug, could you route the video to channel fifty-two?” The ship had its own video network, and that included dedicated channels that could show movies or direct feeds from cameras on the ship. Channel fifty-two was a normally empty channel that was used as needed.
Dag grabbed the remote, turned on the flat-screen TV across from the bed, and switched to channel fifty-two. He could see the ship. “Doug, you want to zoom in on the sail so we can see the heraldry?”
Roxane stared at the screen and dropped the covers.
When Dag managed to look at her face, the look on it drove all thoughts of warm embraces from his mind. “What is it?”
“Ahura Mazda! It’s my mother-in-law.”
“Doug, zoom in on the people standing in the bow.” Dag peered more closely at the image on the screen. “That’s funny, she doesn’t look like Angelina Jolie.”
“And I don’t look much like Rosario Dawson and Alexander certainly didn’t look like Colin Farrell! So what? That whole movie was ridiculous. Oliver Stone is—was—will be—whatever—an idiot.”
The Queen had an extensive collection of movie recordings. By now, Roxane had watched many of them. Certainly more than Eurydice, though not as many as Philip.
Roxane, widow of Alexander the Great and now in a relationship whose nature was still undetermined with a certain Norwegian Environmental Compliance Officer, glared at the image on the screen.
“Don’t let her on board,” she commanded.
Dag made a face. “We can’t do that, and you know it. If we start refusing sanctuary aboard the Queen to prominent political figures, everything will start unraveling. A good part of the reason the Convention voted to establish the USSE even though most of the delegates were skeptical it will work is because they figure if worse comes to worst they can always take refuge here.”
Roxane glared at him. “She is the most evil witch in the world. She’ll poison us all.”
“Oh, that hardly seems likely.”
☆ ☆ ☆
Elsewhere on the ship, Alexander IV, co-ruler in name if not yet in reality of the newly established United Satrapies and States of the Empire, came to a momentous decision.
“You can be my first wife,” he solemnly informed Dorothy Miller.
The imperial bride-to-be looked up from her coloring book. With equal solemnity, she pondered the proposition.
“Okay,” she said. “But you have to promise never to call me ‘poopy head’ again. And I get to pick the ice cream flavors.”
“That’s not fair!” the emperor protested.
Solemnly, Dorothy pondered that proposition as well.
“Okay,” she said. “You can pick them on Monday and Tuesday.”
“Poopy head!”
Cast of Characters
Abrahamson, Benyamin—Rabbi, passenger on the Queen of the Sea
Ahmose—Foreman for Atum Edfu
Alcetas—Officer under Eumenes, brother-in-law of Attalus
Alexander IV—Son of Alexander the Great and Roxane
Antigonus (“One-eye”)—Satrap
Antipater—General for Philip II and Alexander
Argaeus of Macedonia—One of Roxane’s Silver Shields
Arrhidaeus—General for Alexander the Great
Artonis—Persian wife of Eumenes
Attalus—Satrap
Atum Edfu—Merchant of Alexandria
Beaulieu, Elise—First Officer, Navigation, Queen of the Sea
Carruthers, Jane—Hotel manager, Queen of the sea
Cassander—Eldest son of Antipater
Clarke, Romi—Crewman on the Queen of the Sea
Cleisthenes—Merchant in Triparadisus
Cleopatra—Sister of Alexander the Great
Crates of Olynthus—Designer of the sewers of Alexandria
Dahl, Anders—Staff Captain (Executive officer), Queen of the Sea
Dinocrates of Rhodes—Chief Architect of Alexandria
Easley, Josette—Passenger on the Queen of the Sea; Marie Easley’s daughter
Easley, Marie—Historian; passenger on the Queen of the Sea
Epicurus of Samos—Greek philosopher
Eumenes—General of Alexander; loyal to the royal family
Eurydice—Wife of Philip III
Evgenij—One of Roxane’s Silver Shields
Floden, Lars—Captain of the Queen of the Sea
Gorgias of Thrace—One of Ptolemy’s generals
Hewell, Lawrence—Baptist minister; passenger on the Queen of the Sea
Ithobaal—Captain of a galley out of Tyre
Jakobsen, Dag—Environmental Compliance Officer, Queen of the Sea
Jones, Jason—Passenger on the Queen of the Sea
Josephus—Hellenized Jew, guard captain of Atum Edfu
Karanos—Silver Shield; Eurydice’s bodyguard
Katsaros, Panos—Crewman on the Queen of the Sea
Kinney, Eleanor—Chief Purser, Queen of the Sea
Kleitos—Commander of Roxane’s personal guard
Koinos—One of Roxane’s Silver Shields
Kugan, Joe—Captain of the Reliance
Lacula—Trader from up the Orinoco river
Lang, Daniel—Chief Security Officer, Queen of the Sea
Laomedon—Satrap of Syria
Lateef—Atum Edfu’s wife
Menander—Satrap
Menes—Greek soldier
Metello—Carthaginian commander of naval units under Attalus; effectively an admiral
Miles, Laura—Chief Medical Officer, Queen of the sea
Miller, Amanda—Aide to Congressman Al Wiley
Mosicar—Carthaginian minor nobility, husband of the owner of the better part of Formentera Island
Nedelko—Commander of the Greek forces in Tyre
Olympias—Mother of Alexander the Great
Pascual, Bayani—Crewman on the Queen of the Sea
Peithon—Satrap
Philip III—Half-brother of Alexander the Great; husband of Eurydice
Philippe—Crewman on the Queen of the Sea
Plistarch—Son of Antipater
Polemon—Officer under Eumenes
Polyperchon—Satrap of Macedonia
Ptolemy—Satrap of Egypt
Roxane—Widow of Alexander the Great; mother of Alexander IV
Scott, Adrian—Second officer, Navigation, Queen of the Sea
Seiver, Keith—Crewman on the Reliance
Seleucus—Satrap of Babylon
Sonnenleiter, Jon—Assistant Engineer, Queen of the Sea
Thaïs—Hetaera; mother of Ptolemy’s children
Trajan—Commander of Roxane’s Silver Shields
Tyrimmas—One of Roxane’s Silver Shields
Warren, Douglas—Apprentice Deck Officer, Queen of the Sea
Wiley, Allen (“Al”)—Congressman from Utah
Yaseen, Ali—Crewman on the Queen of the Sea
Eric Flint, The Alexander Inheritance
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