‘Let them come forward,’ ordered Alexander and instinctively he ran his hand through his hair, as though to tidy it up a little. ‘Perhaps we really are in the land of the Amazons.’
In the meantime the beautiful warrior had come nearer and dismounted, and her companions followed suit. Some distance away others could be seen pitching a tent. One single tent in the midst of that immense expanse of land.
The King moved forward to meet her, flanked by Hephaestion and Craterus, while from behind them came a buzz of amazement as the news ran through the ranks of the soldiers and among all the people in the King’s entourage. Word reached Callisthenes and he elbowed his way through; even Leptine had moved up close, intrigued by this strange event.
The warrior Queen and the King were now face to face and she took off her headdress – a sort of conical helmet made of leather with cheek protectors – and thus she revealed her stunning hair, black and shining, gathered into a long plait that almost reached her waist.
She seemed to be about twenty years of age and was very different from the images of the Amazons they all knew, which they had seen represented gloriously naked in the reliefs sculpted by Bryaxis and Scopas in the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus or painted by the brushes of Zeuxis and Parrhasius in the ‘Decorated Portico’ of Athens. Apart from her fine olive-coloured face, no part of her body was visible. She wore trousers of blue wool embroidered in red and above it all a strange leather tunic, tight at her waist and wide below her knees. She had a sword hanging from her waist together with a water bottle and a bow and arrows across her shoulders, weapons considered traditional for the Amazons, but she was not carrying the half-moon-shaped shield.
She looked at him with her big dark eyes and said something that no one understood.
Alexander turned to Oxhatres. ‘Did that mean anything to you?’
The Persian shook his head.
‘And you Scythians?’
Oxhatres exchanged a few words with them, but they too explained that they had not understood anything.
‘I do not understand you,’ said Alexander with a smile and he was deeply sorry to find himself there before one of the mythological creatures who had peopled his childhood dreams without being able to say a single sentence that she might understand.
The young woman spoke again, returned his smile and tried to help with some gestures, but to no avail.
‘I understand her,’ came a voice suddenly from behind Alexander.
The King turned in surprise because it was a woman’s voice – ‘Leptine!’
The girl moved forward, and to everyone’s amazement she began speaking with the young woman warrior.
‘How can this be?’ Callisthenes asked, astonished by this remarkable event. Alexander, however, recalling a far off winter’s evening he had spent with Leptine at Aegae, in the ancient palace of his ancestors, remembered that she had spoken in a strange, incomprehensible tongue and there had been that tattoo on her shoulder, identical to the image on the golden pendant on the Amazon’s necklace – a crouching stag with its long branch-like horns.
‘Such things happen,’ said Philip the physician. ‘Xenophon recounts of a similar episode he came across in Armenia, when a slave suddenly recognized the language of the Calybeans, a people he did not know at all.’
Leptine was speaking in the meantime, initially somewhat hesitantly, and then with greater confidence, even though her words seemed to come out reluctantly, one by one, as though emerging from some great abyss in her memory. Alexander moved towards her and uncovered the tattoo on her shoulder, showing it to the young Amazon Queen. ‘Do you recognize this?’ he asked.
The woman’s astonished expression showed clearly that not only did she recognize it, but the image had some extraordinary significance for her.
The two women spoke once more in their mysterious language, and the Amazon held Leptine’s hands as she stared into the eyes of the young King from far away. Then she moved back towards her tent.
‘What did she say to you?’ Alexander asked as soon as she had moved away. ‘You are one of them, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ replied Leptine, ‘I am one of them. I was taken by a group of Cimmerian warriors when I was nine years old, and they must have sold me to a slave merchant in some emporium in the Pontus. My mother was Queen of a tribe of these women warriors and my father was a noble from among the Scythians who live along the Jaxartes.’
‘A Princess,’ murmured Alexander as he now held her hands. ‘That is what you are.’
‘That is what I was,’ Leptine corrected him. ‘Those days are gone now, for ever.’
‘This is not true. Now you may return among your people, you may take up the position that is yours by rights. You are free and I will grant you a rich dowry – gold, livestock, horses.’
‘My position by rights is at your side, my Lord. I have no one else in the world and for me those women are nothing but foreigners. I will go with them only if you reject me and force me to.’
‘I will not force you to do anything you do not wish to do, and I will keep you with me for the rest of my days, if this is what you want. But tell me, why did that young woman come here? Why has she pitched her tent down there?’
Leptine lowered her eyes as though ashamed or embarrassed, then she finally replied, ‘She said that she is the Queen of the women warriors who live between the Oxus and the shores of the Caspian Sea. She has heard that you are the strongest and most powerful man in the world and she thinks that only you are worthy of her. She awaits you in that tent and she invites you to spend the night with her. She hopes . . . that you will accept the invitation and that she will have a child by you: a boy or even a girl, who one day will receive the sceptre from her hands.’
Leptine covered her face with her hands and ran away in tears.
47
ALEXANDER LOOKED AT THE solitary tent that was just visible now in the semidarkness of the prairie while Leptine’s quiet sobbing barely reached his ear. He was much moved when he thought of the double miracle that this land had worked: the appearance of a group of Amazons in a place so far from the River Thermodon, which flowed, as legend had it, along the borders of the women warriors’ territory, and then the discovery of Leptine’s origins and her recognition of her native tongue. He thought of how many things there were to be discovered in the world, how many mysteries to be resolved, and how many unknown lands to be explored in the brief day of a human life.
He would have liked to help Leptine who was so upset by the tumult and the emotions of the two such contrasting lives that had now suddenly clashed in her being, but Alexander’s dominant concern was to get to know the mysterious woman who awaited him down there in the midst of the dark night of the steppe. He mounted his horse and headed off towards the solitary tent, armed only with his sword. Hephaestion saw him and nodded to some men of the Vanguard to move forward. ‘Take up position around that tent without being noticed,’ he ordered, ‘and at the slightest sign of anything suspicious, run to help the King. Take Peritas with you – if there is any danger he is much faster than anyone else.’
The men obeyed and they moved off in the dark, spreading out into a fan shape to surround the tent. One of them, the one who was holding Peritas, moved closer than the others and squatted down in the grass alongside the Molossian, but the night passed by peacefully and Peritas slept right through, lifting his ears and his nose only when he smelled some wild animal passing by in the silence of the steppe.
No one ever learned what happened that night nor whether Alexander planted a child in the belly of that Queen of endless solitude, a child who would grow up like a wild horse, running possessionless and free across that limitless territory, under the eyes of the sun and on the wings of the wind.
The King returned before dawn with an intense, febrile light in his eyes, as though he had just descended from Olympus.
*
They set off on the march westwards until they came to a river. Alexander wante
d to travel down it to see how far it went and discover if it led towards the northern Ocean, but after three days’ march the steppe had become a desert and the river had dried up among its burning sands. They pressed on again towards the west in a series of four stages, each lasting five parasangs until they came to another watercourse and started moving down it, but it too was soon swallowed up by the cracks in the thirsty earth.
Ptolemy moved alongside the King, who was anxiously surveying the horizon, obscured as it was by the heat haze, and he put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Let’s go back, Alexander, there’s nothing down there, apart from noonday spectres. If the earth here swallows up its rivers before they reach the sea, there must surely be some terrible reason that we are unaware of. Could a mother ever devour her child after having given birth to it?’
Even Callisthenes looked on that disturbing phenomenon with deep concern in his eyes. His knowledge of physics and philosophy suggested rational answers that were immediately quashed by the irrational fears that rose from the depths of his soul.
‘I would like to find answers to these questions, Ptolemy,’ said the King without turning round. ‘If our energies were sufficient, I would like to follow these noontime heat demons, the spectres that inhabit the horizon. Ulysses, tied to the mast of his ship, was indeed a lucky man to hear the song of the sirens, but he never revealed to anyone what that song said. The secret died with him in a remote, hidden place, there where Tiresias’s prophecy led him, the much-longed-for destination of his final journey . . .’
They once again took the road leading towards the south and day by day, as they approached the Margianian highlands, they came across more and more water and vegetation, plants and animals. On the banks of a river the King founded another city and called it Alexandria of Margiana, peopling it with the semi-nomadic tribes that lived in the surrounding area and some of the men and women from his entourage. He left a garrison of five hundred men – Macedonian, Greek and Thessalian soldiers, all those who had set up families with the Asian women who continued to follow the army with incredible stamina and perseverance. He established those men who seemed to have forgotten the families they had left behind back home such a long time ago, a time that seemed infinitely farther than it was in reality.
They reached Bactra towards the end of the autumn with the intention of spending the winter there and it was while here that Alexander gave orders for Bessus’s trial to take place, following Persian procedure. Oxhatres assembled the council of the eldest judges and had the prisoner dragged before them. The mutilations he had suffered that dark night in the countryside around Kurushkhat had healed now, but this gave his tormented face an even more disturbing appearance, like a living skull.
The trial was over extremely quickly, and when he was asked if he wanted to defend himself against the charges, Bessus said nothing at all. He stood in silence before his enemies with all the dignity of a man who had sought to redeem the honour of the Persian Empire, humiliated by the cowardice of Darius, the King who had twice fled from the battlefield. The dignity of a man who had sought to lead an uprising against the invader.
The sentence was passed – the worst imaginable one, the one inflicted on those who assassinate the sacred person of the King of Kings and who usurp the throne of the Achaemenids – dismemberment.
Bessus was stripped and led to an open space that had been made ready for the sentence to be carried out. Two tall and slender willow trees, very close to one another, had been bent to the ground until they crossed and their tops had been fastened with a rope tied to a stake hammered into the ground. A sort of pointed arch was thus created by the two trunks and the prisoner was led there and tied by the ankles and the wrists to the two uprights as high as possible, so that he was left hanging above the ground by about five cubits. The Persians and local inhabitants were not the only ones to witness this barbarous rite; Macedonians and Greeks were among the crowds as well. Princess Stateira had come from Zadracarta specifically, impatient to see vengeance meted out for Darius, the father she had buried and mourned over for a long time in the royal necropolis of Persepolis, now abandoned. She sat there pale and motionless alongside Alexander.
At a simple nod from the supreme judge, the executioners moved towards the ropes brandishing their axes. At a second nod they both let fly with synchronized blows – straight blows that cut through them cleanly. The two trunks immediately straightened and for an instant Bessus’s powerfully muscled body tightened in the impossible strain of the tension, then he was torn apart. The left-hand section, from his shoulder to his groin, remained attached to one of the trunks, while the other, with his head and his guts, hung from the other tree, and there was still some shadow of life in Bessus’s eyes when the birds of prey, ever vigilant in that place of punishment, came down to feed on his tortured flesh.
Alexander remained at Bactra with Stateira and the court for the entire winter, spending a lot of time with Eumenes writing to the satraps of his provinces: to Antigonus, known as ‘One-eye’, who governed Anatolia, to Mazaeus in Babylon, and even Artabazos in Pamphylia. He asked how Phraates was, if he had recovered from the grief of losing his near and dear ones and if he was living a quiet life in his palace on the sea. He had given orders for his blacksmiths to make a little carriage and to send it to Phraates as a gift together with two Scythian foals.
He also received a letter from his mother, Olympias, and from Cleopatra who told him all about her life in the palace at Buthrotum and all about her homesickness:
News of your deeds reaches me somehow diluted and deformed by the distance and it seems to me to be impossible that I, your sister, cannot see you, that I cannot know when you will return, when you will call an end to this interminable expedition.
I suffer because you are so far from me and I suffer in my solitude. I beg you to let me come to you as soon as possible, so that I may see the wonders you have achieved, the splendours of the cities you have conquered.
I thank you for the gifts you send me continually, which make me most proud, but the greatest gift would be to be able to embrace you once again, it matters not where – the frozen wastes of Scythia or the deserts of Libya. I beg you, call me to you, Aléxandre, and I will fly to you without delay, over stormy seas and against the strongest winds. Take good care.
Alexander dictated his reply, affectionate but inflexible, and he concluded with these words:
My empire is not as yet fully under control, my dearest sister, and I must ask you to wait for some time still. When everything is completed, I will call you to me so that you may participate in everyone’s joy and witness the birth of a new world.
Then he turned to Eumenes. ‘Cleopatra’s prose improves with each letter she sends – she must be taking expensive lessons from some excellent teacher of rhetoric.’
‘That’s true,’ said Eumenes. ‘Yet, behind her flowery speech, behind the rhetorical ornament, there is sincere affection. Cleopatra has always loved you, she has always been a shield for you against your father’s wrath. Don’t you perhaps miss her?’
‘Terribly,’ replied Alexander. ‘I miss those days, but I cannot let myself indulge my memories: the task I have set myself keeps coming back and demanding attention, like some imperative to which everything must be sacrificed and from which I cannot escape.’
‘From which you have no wish to escape,’ replied Eumenes.
‘Do you really think I could, even if I wanted to? The gods put dreams in the hearts of men – dreams, desires, aspirations that are often much bigger than they are. The greatness of a man corresponds to that painful discrepancy between the goal he sets for himself and the strength nature granted him when he came into the world.’
‘Like Bessus.’
‘And Philip.’
‘And Philip,’ said Eumenes, lowering his eyes.
They both fell silent, as though the spirit of the great assassinated King were somehow present in that place, evoked suddenly out of the silence and the oblivion.
Then Alexander dedicated time to maintaining contact with the cities he had founded in the farthest flung provinces of the Empire, the cities that carried his own name. He wrote personally to the military leaders and the magistrates of those small communities, encamped on the edges of inhospitable and unknown lands, and he wrote to Aristotle, describing the statutes and the constitutions of these cities, documents that would enrich the philosopher’s collection.
Occasionally he also received missives from those remote outposts, written in very poor Greek or in Macedonian dialect; almost always they were requests for help against enemy attacks, against sieges from other peoples, all of them ferociously protective of their identities. Spitamenes’ rebellion was spreading everywhere. Handing over Bessus had only cleared the way for the new leader who was now holed up in the snowy foothills of the Paropamisus.
Alexander had the same reply for everyone: ‘Hold on. We are assembling more troops, we are waiting for new reinforcements to help you, to pacify the lands on which you are raising your children.’
The whole winter went by in this way. When spring returned, fresh troops from Macedonia and Anatolia arrived, and the army set off on its march once more. On entering Bactriana, Alexander realized that the rebels had spread out into a great number of fortresses and castles and he decided to split up his forces in order to inflict a series of attacks, each aimed at a particular centre of resistance. However, when he communicated this strategy to his generals and his Companions, he found that almost no one agreed.
‘Never divide your forces!’ exclaimed the Black. ‘As far as we can gather, Alexander of Epirus, your uncle and brother-in-law, was overwhelmed by the barbarians in Italy precisely because he was forced to split up his army. To do this same thing out of one’s own free will . . . it seems like madness to me.’
Alexander (Vol. 3) (Alexander Trilogy) Page 30