by Mary Renault
He rode through the tunneled gateway. The men were following. He turned off into narrow streets where women crushed themselves into doorways to give him room; filthy deep courts between eyeless houses, where huddles of thievish men stared at him dangerously. The pursuit was no longer in sight. Suddenly he came out into the wide Marduk Way, the temple just before him. A hallowed place, to Greeks as well as to barbarians. Everyone knew that Alexander had sacrificed there to Zeus and Herakles. Sanctuary!
He hitched his horse to a fig-tree in the weed-grown outer precinct. Through rank greenery a trodden path led to the ruined entry; from the gloom beyond came the universal temple smell of incense, burnt meat and wood-ash, the Babylonian smell of foreign unguents and foreign flesh. As he walked towards it in the dazzling heat, someone stood in the sunlight facing him. It was Alexander.
His heart stopped. Next moment he knew what he was looking at, but still he could not move. The statue was marble, tinted like life; a dedication eight years old from the first Babylonian triumph. It stood at ground-level, the plinth as yet unbuilt. Nude but for a ted chlamys across one shoulder, grasping a spear of gilded bronze, Alexander calmly awaited the new temple he had endowed. His deep-set eyes, with their smoke-grey enamel irises, gazed out at Meleager, saying “Well?”
He stared back, attempting defiance, at the searching face, the smooth young body. You were lean and sinewy and hacked about with scars. Your forehead was creased, you were drawn about the eyes, your hair was fading. What is that idol? An idea … But memory, once invoked, conjured all too potently the real presence. He had seen the living anger … He strode on into the temple.
At first the gloom almost blinded him after the harsh sun. Presently, by the light of a smoke-shaft high above, he saw looming in shadow the colossal image of Bel, Great King of Gods, enthroned with fists on knees. His towering miter almost touched the roof; he was flanked by winged lions with the heads of bearded men. His scepter was tall as a man; his robe, from which the gold leaf was peeling, glimmered dimly. His face was blackened with age and smoke, but his ivory-inlaid eyes glared fiercely yellow. Before him was the fire-altar, covered with dead ash. No one, it seemed, had told him there was a new King in Babylon.
No matter, an altar was an altar. Here he was safe. Content at first to get back his breath and enjoy the cool from the thick high walls, soon he started to peer about for signs of life. The place seemed deserted; yet he felt a sense of being observed, assessed, considered.
In the wall behind Bel, there was a door set in the dark-glazed tiles. He felt, rather than heard, stirrings of life behind it; but he dared not knock. Authority had drained from him. Time dragged by. He was a temple suppliant, someone should attend to him. He had not eaten since daybreak; behind the ebony door were men, food, wine. But he did not go to tell them he was there. He knew they knew it.
A rusty sunset light lowered in the courtyard. The shadows deepened round frowning Bel, drowning all but his yellow eye-whites. With the dark, he came into possession. The temple seemed peopled with the ghosts of men like stone, treading with stony feet the necks of their conquered enemies, offering their blood to this stone demon. More than for food, Meleager craved for the open skies of a mountain shrine in Macedon, the color and light of a Greek temple, the gracious and human countenance of its god.
The last light-ray left the courtyard; there was only a square of dusk, and, within, thick dark. Behind the door, low voices sounded and went away.
His horse stamped and snorted outside. He could not stay here and rot; under cover of dark he could be gone. Someone would take him in … but those who were safe were dead. Better to leave the city now, go west, hire out his sword to some satrap in nearer Asia. But he must get first to his rooms; he would need gold, he had taken bribes from scores of petitioners to the King … The dusk in the courtyard moved.
Two shadows showed in the glimmering square. They came on, into the broken entry. They were not the shadows of Babylonians. He heard the rasp of drawn swords. “Sanctuary!” he shouted. “Sanctuary!”
The door beyond Bel’s image opened a crack, lamplight bright in the darkness. He shouted again. The crack closed. The shadows approached, vanishing into blackness. He set his back to the unlit altar and drew his sword. As they came close, it seemed to him he knew them; but it was only the familiar smell and outline of men from home. He called their names aloud, recalling old friendships in the army of Alexander. But the names were wrong; and when they dragged back his head across the altar, it was remembering Alexander that they cut his throat.
Stripped of its banners and plumes, wreathed with cypress and weeping willow, the lamenting caravan paced slowly under the Ishtar Gate. Perdikkas and Leonnatos, warned by the forerunners of its coming, had ridden to meet the wife of Alexander and tell her that she was widowed. Bareheaded, their hair still cropped in mourning, they rode beside the wagon train, which had now the air of a cortege. The princesses sobbed, their women keened and chanted ritual threnodies. The keepers of the gate heard wondering these new tears, so long after the days prescribed.
In the harem, the rooms of the chief wife waited, perfumed and immaculate, as ordained by Bagoas two months before. The Warden had feared that after Alexander’s death Roxane would demand them; but to his deep relief she seemed settled where she was. No doubt her pregnancy had quieted her. So far, thought the Warden, so good.
Perdikkas escorted Stateira there, concealing his surprise at her arrival; he had supposed her established in Susa to bear her child in quiet. Alexander, she said, had summoned her. He must have done so without informing anyone. He had done some very odd things, after Hephaistion’s death.
Handing her down the wagon steps to the Warden, he thought her more beautiful than at the Susa wedding. Her features had purity of line, the Persian delicacy, fined down by pregnancy and fatigue, which had put smudges of faint cobalt under her large dark eyes; their lids with their long silky lashes looked almost transparent. The Persian kings had always bred for looks. Her hand on the curtain was long-fingered and smooth as cream. She had been wasted on Alexander; he himself, a good inch taller, could have stepped out with her very well. (His own Susa bride, a swarthy Median chosen for exalted birth, had greatly disappointed him.) At least, Alexander had finally had the sense to get a child on her. It should be certain of beauty, if nothing else.
Leonnatos, assisting Drypetis, noted that her face, though still immature, held distinguished promise. He too had a Persian wife; but this need not keep him from looking higher. He rode off in thought.
An obsequious train of eunuchs and waiting-women led the princesses through Nebuchadrezzar’s devious corridors to the once-familiar rooms. As in childhood, they felt after the space and light of the Susa palace the frowning Babylonian strength. But then they came through to the sunny courtyard, the fishpool where they had floated their boats of split bamboo in lily-leaf archipelagos, or reached shoulderdeep after the carp. In the room that had been their mother’s they were bathed and scented and fed. Nothing seemed changed since that summer eight years before, that watershed of time, when their father had brought them here before marching to meet the King of Macedon. Even the Warden had remembered them.
Their meal done, their attendants dismissed to be settled in their own quarters, they explored, their mother’s clothes-chest. The scarves and veils still released their memory-stirring scent. Sharing a divan, looking out on the sunlit pool, they recollected that other life; Stateira, who had been twelve when it ended, reminding Drypetis, who had been only nine. They talked of their father whom Grandmother would never name, remembering him in their mountain home before he had been King, laughing as he tossed them eight feet in the air. They thought of their mother’s perfect face, framed in the scarf with the seed-pearls and gold beads. Everyone gone—even Alexander—except for Grandmother.
They were growing sleepy when a shadow crossed the doorway. A child came in, with two silver cups on a silver tray. She was about seven years old, enchanti
ngly pretty, with a blend of Persian and Indian looks, cream-skinned, dark-eyed. She dipped a knee without spilling a drop. “Honored ladies,” she said carefully. This, clearly, was all her Persian, learned by heart. They kissed and thanked her; she dimpled at them, said something in Babylonian, and trotted away.
The silver cups were misted with coolness, pleasant to touch. Drypetis said, “She had beautiful clothes, and gold earrings. She wasn’t a servant’s child.”
“No,” said Stateira, worldly-wise. “And if not, you know, she must be our half-sister. I remember, Father brought most of the harem here.”
“I’d forgotten.” Drypetis, a little shocked, looked around her mother’s room. Stateira had gone out into the courtyard, to call back the child again. But she had gone, and no one was in sight; they had told their women they wished to rest undisturbed.
Even the palms seemed bleached in the dazzling heat. They lifted the cups, admiring their chased birds and flowers. The drink tasted of wine and citron, with a delicate bitter-sweet tang.
“Delicious,” said Stateira. “One of the concubines must have sent it to make us welcome; she was too shy to come herself. Tomorrow we might invite her.”
The heavy air was still perfumed with their mother’s clothes. It felt homely, secure. Her grief for her parents, for Alexander, grew dim and drowsy. This would be a comforting place to bear his child in. Her eyelids closed.
The shadow of the palms had barely slanted when pain awoke her. She thought at first that her child must be miscarrying, till Drypetis clasped her belly and screamed aloud.
Perdikkas, as Regent of Asia, had moved into the palace. He was seeing petitioners in the small audience room when the Warden of the harem appeared, unheralded, his clay-grey face and evident terror having passed him through the guards. Perdikkas, after one look, had the room cleared and heard him.
When the princesses began to cry for help no one had dared go near them; everyone in hearing had guessed the cause. The Warden, desperate to exculpate himself (he had in fact had no hand in it) had not waited for them to breathe their last. Perdikkas ran with him to the harem.
Stateira lay sprawled on the divan, Drypetis on the floor where she had rolled in her death-throes. Stateira drew her last gasp as Perdikkas entered. At first, transfixed with horror, he was aware of no one else in the room. Then he perceived that in the ivory chair before the toilet-table a woman was sitting.
He strode across and stared down at her, silent, hardly able to keep his hands from her throat. She smiled at him.
“You did this!” he said.
Roxane raised her brows. “I? It was the new King. Both of them said so.” She did not add that, before the end, she had taken pleasure in undeceiving them.
“The King?” said Perdikkas furiously. “Who will believe that, you accursed barbarian bitch?”
“All your enemies. They will believe it because they wish. I shall say that he sent the draught to me too; but when these fell sick I had not yet drunk it.”
“You …” For a while he vented his rage in curses. She listened calmly. When he paused, for sufficient answer she laid her hand over her womb.
He looked away at the dead girl. “The child of Alexander.”
“Here,” she said, “is the child of Alexander. His only child … Say nothing, and so will I. She came here without ceremony. Very few will know.”
“It was you who sent for her!”
“Oh, yes. Alexander did not care for her. I did as he would have wished.”
For a moment she felt real fear; his hand had dropped to his sword-hilt. Still gripping it, he said, “Alexander is dead. But if ever again you say that of him, when your brat is born I will kill you with these hands. And if I knew it would take after you, I would kill you now.”
Growing cool again, she said, “There is an old well in the back court. No one draws from it, they say the water is foul. Let us take them there. No one will come.”
He followed her. The well-cover had lately been loosened from its seal of grime. As he lifted it a smell of ancient mold came out.
He had no choice and knew it. Proud as he was, ambitious and fond of power, he was loyal to Alexander, dead as alive. His son should not, if Perdikkas could prevent it, enter the world branded as a poisoner’s child.
He returned in silence, going first to Drypetis. Her face was soiled with vomit; he wiped it with a towel before he carried her to the dark hole of the well. When she had slipped from his hands, he heard her clothes brushing the brick till, about twenty feet down, she reached the bottom. He could tell, then, that the well was dry.
Stateira’s eyes were staring open, her fingers clutched the stuff of the divan. The eyes would not close; while Roxane waited impatiently, he went to the chest for something to cover her face, a veil stitched with scarab-wings. When he began to move her, he felt wet blood.
“What have you done to her?” He drew back in revulsion, wiping his hand on the coverlet.
Roxane shrugged. Stooping, she lifted the robe of embroidered linen. It could be seen that Alexander’s wife in her death-pangs had brought forth his heir.
He stared down at it, the four-month manikin, already human, the sex defined, even the nails beginning. One of the fists was clenched as if in anger, the face with its sealed eyes seemed to frown. It was still tied to its mother; she had died before she could pass the afterbirth. He drew his dagger and cut it free.
“Come, hurry,” said Roxane. “You can see that the thing is dead.”
“Yes,” said Perdikkas. It hardly filled his hands, the son of Alexander, the grandson of Philip and Darius, carrying in its threadlike veins the blood of Achilles and of Kyros the Great.
He went again to the chest. A scarf trailed out, stitched with seed-pearls and gold beads. Carefully, like a woman, he wrapped the creature in its royal shroud, and gave it its own journey to the burial-place, before returning to send its mother after it.
Queen Sisygambis sat playing chess with the Head Chamberlain. He was an elderly eunuch with a distinguished past going back to King Ochos’ reign. An expert survivor of countless court intrigues, he played a canny game, and offered more challenge than the waiting-ladies. She had invited him to relieve her boredom, and mere courtesy demanded that she should attend to him. She brooded over the ivory armies on the board. Now that the girls were gone with their young attendants, the harem seemed to have been left behind by time. Everyone here was old.
The Chamberlain saw her lethargy and guessed the cause. He fell into one or two of her traps and rescued himself, to enliven the game. In a pause, he said, “Did you find, when the King was here, that he had remembered your instruction? You said, before he marched east, that he had promise if he would apply his mind.”
She said smiling, “I did not test him. I knew he would have forgotten.” For a moment, reflected from the distance, rays of vitality seemed to surge through the muted room. “I used to tell him it was called the royal war-game, and for my sake he pretended to care who won. But when I scolded him and told him he could do better, he said, ‘But, Mother, these are things.’”
“He is not a man for sitting still, indeed.”
“He needed more rest. It was not the time to go down to Babylon. Babylon has always been to winter in.”
“It seems he means to winter in Arabia. We shall scarcely see him this year. But when he marches, for sure he will send Their Highnesses back to you, as soon as the child is born and the lady Stateira can travel.”
“Yes,” she said a little wistfully. “He will want me to see the child.” She returned to the board, and moved an elephant to threaten his vizier. A pity, he thought, that the boy had not sent for her; she doted on him still. But, as she had said, it was no time to go down to Babylon, and she was turned eighty.
They had finished the game, and were drinking citron, when the Chamberlain was summoned, urgently, by the commander of the garrison. When he came back, she looked at his face, and grasped the arms of her chair.
“It is the King,” she said. “He is dead.”
He bowed his head. It was as if her body had known already; at his first word the chill had reached her heart. He came up quickly, in case she was going to fall; but after a moment she motioned him to his chair, and waited for him to speak.
He told her as much as he had learned, still watching her; her face was the color of old parchment. But she was not grieving only; she was thinking. Presently she turned to a table near her chair, opened an ivory casket, and took out a letter.
“Please read me this. Not the substance only. Word for word.”
His sight was not what it had been; but by bringing it close he could see quite clearly. He translated scrupulously. At I have been sick, and there is ignorant talk that I am dead, he looked up and met her eyes.
“Tell me,” she said, “is that his seal?”
He peered at it; at a few inches, the detail was sharp enough. “It is his likeness, and a good one. But it is not the royal seal. Has he used this before?”
Without speaking, she put the casket into his hands. He looked at the letters, written in elegant Persian by a scribe; his eye caught one ending: I commend you, dear Mother, both to your gods and mine, if indeed they are not the same, as I think they are. There were five or six letters. All had the royal seal, Olympian Zeus enthroned, his eagle perched on his hand. She read the answer in his face.
“When he did not write to me …” She took the casket and set it down beside her. Her face was pinched as if with cold, but without astonishment. All her middle years had been passed in the dangerous reign of Ochos. Her husband had had royal blood enough to be in danger whenever the King felt insecure. Trusting almost no one, he had trusted her and told her everything. Intrigue, revenge and treachery had been daily weather. In the end, Ochos had killed him. She had believed that he lived again in her tall son; his flight from Issos had almost killed her with shame. In the desolate tent, the young conqueror was announced, to visit the family his enemy had abandoned. For the children’s sake, performing dignity like a well-trained animal its trick, she had knelt to the tall handsome man before her. He stepped back; everyone’s dismay made her aware of a frightful error; she began to bow to the smaller man she had overlooked. He had taken her hands and raised her, and for the first time she saw his eyes. “Never mind, Mother …” She had had Greek enough for that.