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her country. Even reft of its fighting men, reduced to slaves and the sick and the royal women, this could never be anything but a camp of Persians.
    Her nose wrinkled at a scent which she knew above all others. Faint yet distinct, like burning metal; a touch of heat on the shadow’s skin, a suggestion of fire in the heart’s eye.
    The Magi had fled with their coward of a king. But their power lingered wherever they had been.
    A sleek sand-brown shape sprang ahead of her, pouncing on shadows. Sekhmet, wise cat, had stayed away from the marching and the burning. She wove sinuous circles around Meriamon, startling passersby, winning an exclamation from Thaïs. “What in Hades’ name is that?”
    “Sekhmet,” said Meriamon. She held out her linked arms. Sekhmet sprang into them and mounted to her shoulder, riding there with practiced ease. She was purring. Her incantation, Meriamon called it; guarding them both against the enemy’s magic.
    “Your cat?” Thaïs asked. She sounded bemused.
    “Sekhmet belongs to herself,” Meriamon said. “She chooses to go where I go. Mostly. When she has nothing better to do.”
    Sekhmet sank claws in her for that, but briefly, barely drawing blood.
    “Remarkable,” said Thaïs. She recovered herself quickly. “That should give the Great King’s women something to talk about.”
    “Do you speak Persian?”
    “Not a word,” Thaïs said. “But we’ll make do.”
    o0o
    The Great King’s tent was immense, a palace of silk and gold, so wide and so high that a hill rose inside it. Its walls were silk, and could be moved to make this room larger, that one smaller, or to make the whole one vast hall. Its floor was spread with carpets like meadows full of flowers. Its furnishings were gold and silk and jeweled furbelows, wagons’ worth in every room, and none less than the best to be had.
    Darius would not have liked to see them now. No one had looted them or damaged them unduly, once Alexander claimed them. But there were Macedonian soldiers where only princes had been allowed to come, lounging on the priceless couches, threatening the fragile silk with their armor.
    The women were not here, they said. That was another tent behind this one. They offered, with much grinning and nudging, to guide the seekers to it.
    Thaïs withered them with a glance, and went where they were pointing. That was out of the great tent across a courtyard walled in silk.
    No one lingered there. There were guards on the door, men who did not take their duty as lightly as their fellows seemed to. It might have been distaste, or it might have been the presence of another guard in Persian dress. A giant, a Nubian; and by virtue of his presence here, and his beardless face, a eunuch.
    “We have come,” Thaïs said in her clear uncompromising voice, “to speak with the royal ladies.”
    “The king said no visitors,” said one of the Macedonian guards.
    “The king wanted no men here.” Thaïs’ impatience was audible. “Come now, you know me. Would I rape or despoil a king’s daughter? Even a Persian?”
    The guard wavered. No one offered to back him. He shrugged. “All right. But if there’s trouble, I’ll say you were the start of it.”
    “So you should,” said Thaïs. “Come, Mariamne.”
    o0o
    Here still, unlike the Great King’s tent, was Persia unsullied. No Macedonian faces here; no male at all who was not a eunuch. The silence lay heavy, punctuated at intervals by a smothered sound: a woman’s weeping, a child’s cry. The scent of mingled perfumes was overpowering, a thick, trapped scent with no strength in it to mask the stink of fear. The air did not move here, the light did not change. Always the same air, the same lamplit half-gloom, the same endless, monotonous sameness.
    “Even a bird in the cage can see the sky,” said Meriamon.
    Thaïs made a sound. It might have been laughter. “It’s a richer prison than Athenian wives and daughters know. These walls are silk, and the