We kept moving. I needed to pee for what seemed like hours. It was agony. Finally I wet myself. I had no choice; it was either pee or explode at that point. My captors didn’t seem to notice. We just kept going. It was torture. I must have passed out, because the next thing I knew we had come to a stop. There was a loud conversation in a language I didn’t understand, and I was hauled out of the wagon. I had never been a sack of potatoes before, but now I knew how one must feel. I hit the ground and just lay there until someone picked me up again, and with a loud grunt, tossed me into another wagon.
More travelling over lumpy, bumpy ground. More hours of having my body sliding back and forth on a wooden floorboard. I tried to wedge myself into a corner, but that didn’t work very well. I was considering dying when we stopped again.
My body was a mass of bruises and welts. I was filthy, bloody, I stank of sweat and urine, and I was afraid that I was about to be very ill. My breasts hurt dreadfully. Chiron had missed at least two feedings since I’d been taken. I felt feverish.
This time, I was carried to a building and shut inside. The large sack was ripped off my body, and someone kicked me before I could move. Nice. I caught a glimpse of night sky before the door was slammed shut. I found myself in a low-ceilinged hut with an earthen floor and a heap of straw. The straw made a bed. I crawled into it, noticed that it was almost clean, and fell asleep. I was exhausted but didn’t sleep long. I dozed just enough for the shock to wear off. Then I was awake, and there was a spider the size of a kitten on my arm. I shot out of the straw, screaming and shaking my arm, crashed into a wall and knocked myself out.
Well, it was probably the best thing that could have happened to me. The spider wasn’t about to eat me, I was just in its way on its walk from one side of the shed to the other. But I never would have been able to coexist with a spider that size. I would have spent the entire night screaming and dodging. I would have found other nighttime denizens of the hut, equally repulsive, and I would have died of a heart attack long before daybreak.
As it was, I was still unconscious when they came to get me. I’d managed to have a good night’s sleep.
I was awakened when someone tossed a bucket of water over my head. I sat up sputtering and peered blearily around. There were four people standing near me. I opened my eyes and glared. This had the hoped for effect – they backed away. I have a fearsome glare.
There were three men and one woman. They didn’t look like peasants. The woman had a saffron yellow sari trimmed with gold and scarlet. Her hair was long and carefully brushed to a blue-black sheen. The men wore puffy pants made of raw silk, sleeveless linen vests, and unbleached linen turbans. Their beards were dyed blue and red, and they had tattoos on their thin, brown arms. They shouted at me, but I didn’t understand a word they said.
After a few minutes, I tried to get up. I found my legs would carry me, and I walked away. Nobody tried to stop me. I soon found out why. I was in a large pen. There was a high wall, and as I walked along it, I saw I was a prisoner. Well, there would be other ways to escape. The first thing to do was to wash. I returned to the hut and found a basin of water and some fruit. I stared at the bowl of fruit and then cursed. I was being treated like a pet monkey. This would never do. I hadn’t gone all the way around the park, but I was beginning to suspect that it was part of king Musicanus’s domain. The wall was rose-coloured brick.
I washed myself, washed my tunic and my underwear, and hung everything to dry. I went into the hut, dragged all the straw out and spread it in the sun to air. Then I went back inside and plugged up all the holes I found, intending to keep the spiders out.
At noon, when the sun was at its zenith, I put on my dry clothes and walked around the rest of my prison. It was roughly a hundred metres long and fifty metres deep. The hut was in the centre. A path led to a locked gate. The wall was so high, I couldn’t see over it, and I doubted I could climb it. I would have to dig my way out or build a ladder.
I spent two more nights sleeping in the hut, milking myself, cursing in several different languages and imagining all the horrible things I would do to King Musicanus when I saw him. I didn’t sleep well. Huge spiders were only part of the crowd that shared my bed. I found centipedes, millipedes, scorpions, and other things I’d never seen before. Every night I stayed awake as long as I could, only dropping off to sleep out of sheer exhaustion. In the morning, there would be new red welts on my arms and legs where the insects had feasted on my blood. After three days, I thought I’d go mad.
I wondered where everyone was. I hoped Chiron was all right. Every time I thought of my baby, I’d cry. I wasn’t being very brave. Alexander must be frantic with worry. Poor Lysimachus, I wondered if they’d found his body. I kept remembering his scream.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The army found me. I hadn’t been kidnapped by Musicanus; I’d been taken by the Brahmins. They had done it to lure Alexander into battle with them. Actually, to get Alexander to fight, all they had to do was attack. But because of the gold they’d taken from Musicanus, they couldn’t attack first, so they’d decided to capture me. The results surpassed their wildest expectations.
Alexander turned his army around and swept back upriver, burning, pillaging, and generally wreaking havoc. He stormed into King Musicanus’s palace and demanded to see me at once. Of course the poor fellow had no idea what Alexander was talking about, but Alexander didn’t believe him. The Brahmins had done their best to leave lots of clues, and Lysimachus had gotten a good look at my captors.
They had let Lysimachus live so that he could tell Alexander where I was, but in the white heat of Alexander’s rage there was no room for reason. I was gone, Lysimachus said I was taken by Musicanus’s Brahmins, and Alexander was going to kill everyone until he found me.
I never said he was a diplomat or a politician. He was a tactician, a soldier, and a very lethal one. He killed every single one of Musicanus’s Brahmin soldiers; he wiped out his entire army. Then he crucified Musicanus and his advisors in their own citadel.
The army stormed through the park. Alexander was nearly mad with grief because I was nowhere in the palace.
A squadron of the Persian Guards stumbled upon me late in the afternoon. They were led by Oxatres, who was Darius’s half brother. Darius had been absolute ruler of Persia before the whirlwind that was Alexander defeated him. Oxatres joined Alexander’s army in Ecbatana to try and save his brother when Bessus kidnapped Darius. He had stayed with Alexander, bringing with him his own divisions of soldiers. Now he was one of Alexander’s generals.
And he’d found me. I don’t know who was happier; Alexander, Oxatres, or me.
I heard the army crashing through the park, and so I was standing near the door when they broke it down.
‘It took you long enough,’ I said. I was so happy and relieved, I hugged him.
‘My lady!’ Oxatres hadn’t expected to find me. He was staggered.
‘Where is Iskander?’ I asked.
‘In the palace.’ Oxatres grinned, but his eyes were concerned. ‘He’s going to be glad to see you.’
The whole army was worried about Alexander. Usse followed at his heels, trying to get him to slow down, to relax, to rest, but Alexander had gone mad. Oxatres led his horse over to me and boosted me up, then he got on behind me and we galloped off to the palace.
I heard the screaming as we arrived. I felt ill. I hadn’t realized what Alexander had done to get me back. A river of blood running down the white marble steps gave me the first glimpse of the horror. King Musicanus was dead, his family was wailing at his feet, his advisors were all dead or dying, and there were dead soldiers lying everywhere.
The Brahmins had wanted a fight – they got a fight. Alexander was standing in the middle of the citadel, his head tipped to the side, his expression grim. When I called his name he jumped as if struck.
‘Ashley!’ he cried. He ran to me.
‘Alex,’ I whispered, ‘Why? Why did you do this? Couldn’t
you just look for me? You didn’t have to kill everyone!’
He blinked. Nobody ever told him how to fight. He didn’t reply, but his face grew stony. He stared at me with an expression I’d never seen before, his eyes blank. It was like staring into mirrors of pain. For the first time, I noticed how laboured his breathing had become.
I felt worse than awful: I was dirty, I had a fever from my swollen breasts, I was covered in bruises and insect bites, and my head hurt abominably. The screams and the blood made everything seem like a nightmare. ‘Please, take me back to the ship,’ I said, my voice starting to waver.
I must have turned ashen, because Alexander lost his anger. He reached out and touched my arm, and I managed not to flinch. I was horrified by the slaughter, disgusted and saddened, but most of all I just wanted to bathe, hold Chiron to my aching breasts, and sleep. Really sleep; not lie awake with a pounding heart, startling at every rustle in the straw, and whimpering in fear as spiders and scorpions danced across the dirt floor next to me. I laid my head on Alexander’s shoulder. It was still bony, but it was strong. He had saved me, I was still whole, and I was with him again. Finally, nothing else mattered.
I closed my eyes to the massacre and left the city. The wails of the women accompanied me. For a long time, I would hear them on the edge of sleep. The screams and the blood would be part of the price I paid for Alexander’s love. I didn’t want to weigh the consequences. I would learn to live with the nightmares. If he could, I could.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The voyage was calm after that. There were no more battles. The army marched or rode or sailed in peace, and the river started to rise and fall with the tide. We were approaching the mouth of the Indus.
One day, while we were tacking into the wind, the faint odour of salt marsh came to our nostrils. Seagulls flew over the boats, and the air grew cooler. It made a blessed change after the stifling heat. We slung our hammocks on deck and slept under the stars. The army picked up its pace, and the rowers started singing again. ‘Row, row, row your boat,’ echoed across the broad expanse of flat, brown water. The banks of the river started to widen, and Alexander made the decision to bring the eastern half of the army over to the western side of the river.
The boat-bridge was set up again, and the army filed across. The elephants swam.
Once the whole army was together on the shore, the priests made sacrifices to the gods. We had a huge banquet. A bonfire was built, and some soldiers went to the river and came back with bushels of oysters. The Greeks loved oysters. They couldn’t believe there were so many of them. One of the scribes, in a flurry of enthusiasm, described it as: ‘Swarms of oysters, like bees, and if you capture the queen, they all follow.’
I couldn’t figure out exactly what he meant. However, he’d written that after the party – after we’d all drunk prodigious amounts of wine and eaten more oysters than we could count.
We stayed on the boats while the army moved inland. We wanted to see the ocean, so we continued down river. The tides rose and fell, and sometimes they were enormous.
One particularly large tide nearly swamped the whole navy. Nearchus was furious with himself for getting trapped. What happened, was that he had anchored in a calm harbour near the mouth of the river at what he thought was high tide. But during the night, a sudden surge caught everyone unawares. The boats were torn from their moorings and swept inland over the salt flats. The wave ebbed as soon and as suddenly as it had come, leaving many boats stranded on the marsh.
I think there must have been an underwater earthquake or volcanic explosion that would account for the phenomenon, but for the men it was – of course – a sign from the gods that meant, ‘Go back! Take the other branch of the river!’ There was a meeting with the generals while the men and the elephants worked all day in mud up to their hips trying to move the boats back to the river. Other groups of soldiers waded around picking up all the weapons and baggage that had been lost, now lying scattered far and wide. It was a desolate scene.
The boats were fairly light, being made of wood and reeds, so it was easy to haul them back to the water with ropes and pulleys.
The elephants loved the mud. They would stop and roll in it.
The soldiers, who had camped on dry land, mostly made fun of the unfortunate sailors. It was the eternal conflict between army and navy. The insults got nastier, and then someone started throwing handfuls of mud. Soon there was a full-blown mud fight going on, complete with shouting, swearing, and any rocks that could be dug up from the mud.
To loosen things up, Alexander proposed a series of games in the tidal flats. For the next three days, there were wrestling matches and a huge ‘goatball’ game that put more men in the infirmary than all the battles in India. The men were in high spirits. Their voyage was touching its end, the sun was shining, and the mud was really slippery.
We found a low hill, built it up, and made a huge mudslide. Even I had fun on that.
When the boats were all back in the water, and the winner of the wrestling games declared king of the hill and pushed down the slide on his face by the losers, we set off to sail into the ocean.
I had made a promise to Alexander, and now I was going to show him something amazing.
The army waited for us in a place called Karachi. We would join them in a week or so. Alexander and I went sailing with Nearchus. The blond admiral was in his element now. For the first time in ten years I really saw him. The sun turned his skin deep mahogany, his eyes were bright blue, and his hair was bleached by the sun to a pale strawberry blond.
Alexander had told me he got seasick, and I hadn’t really believed him. Poor fellow, while we were on the river he’d been all right, but as soon as we reached the rise and fall of the waves, the swells, the rush up and down – Alexander hung over the railing, retching miserably.
It was better after a few days, but he was never completely at ease on the ocean.
I was in my element. Perhaps Viking blood still ran through my veins; my future ancestors had been explorers and sailors. My hair turned platinum, my skin tanned, and my eyes were chips of sparkling ice.
Alexander said I had never looked better. I’d never felt better. The sea called me; I was an ocean child.
Plexis had stayed on land. His kingdom was horses. He would have liked to accompany us, but he, Ptolemy Lagos, Perdiccas, and Seleucos were in charge of the army. He watched us leave. He waved as long as we could see him. Even when he was just a speck on the shore, I was sure he was waving still, the wind in his brown hair, his legs apart, firmly planted in the sand. His clear eyes full of sorrow.
Since Alexander had nearly died, Plexis had changed. He had always been the most carefree of Alexander’s generals. He had seen the whole adventure as a lark, much more so than Alexander, who saw it as an adventure. Plexis had always been with his hipparchia, riding almost nonchalantly into battle, protected by his gods and his insouciance. I had called him ‘le bel homme sans souci’ one day; the handsome, carefree man. Plexis had laughed at the time and shrugged. ‘Life is too short to be serious,’ he’d said, happily patting his horse on its neck. But since Alexander’s near-death, he’d become mystic, sacrificing to the gods every day, asking the priests for portents and amulets, walking about with his face to the sky, looking for signs.
I tried to talk to him, but his sadness only deepened as the differences between us became more apparent. Plexis was a man of his times. He was a pure product of Athens and Greece. He should have been the happiest of the three of us; he was in tune with the century he lived in. But the times, ‘They were a-changin’, as someone had once said far, far ahead in the future. Everything was quicksilver. The world was changing, and Plexis was sharply conscious that the future was Alexander – and me. I came from the future, and even if he didn’t know that, he sensed it. He sensed that his way of thinking and his way of life were becoming obsolete. Perhaps it was my gentle teasing about his many gods, or perhaps it was Alexander’s evolving attitude t
owards fate. Alexander was starting to believe that he could make his own destiny.
Plexis was bewildered. Most people were oblivious to the changes. Plexis was too sensitive. He saw the difference in me. It chilled him.
I still loved him and he loved me, but there was something between us now that we both felt. It was three thousand years. The gulf widened when Alexander lay near death. Plexis couldn’t understand my refusal to turn towards the gods. And at first, he didn’t understand why Alexander seemed to be changing. Then he realized that Alexander had always been like that. Alexander needed no gods, he was his own god.
Plexis watched as we sailed away. He would wait for us on shore with his horses – his precious horses. I would never tell him that they had been replaced by mechanical monsters.
For two weeks we sailed under a perfect sky. We hugged the shore at first, then sailed out into the great Indian Ocean. I was looking for somewhere specific. I had something hidden under a large sailcloth on deck. Something Alexander looked at eighteen times a day but couldn’t figure out. I wouldn’t tell him what it was. It was a surprise.
We finally arrived at an island. It was a small island but well protected by a wide coral reef and a deep lagoon. It was perfect. We manoeuvred the boat into the lagoon and went ashore. Alexander was relieved to sleep on dry land.
The next day, I unveiled the diving bell. It was a huge glass bell made by the glassmaker in the last village we’d visited. There had been a glassworks making glass buoys, which gave me the idea. I’d drawn what I wanted, the glassmaker had made it, and I’d been as excited as a kid at Christmas thinking about it.
The idea was simple. The bell was weighted and fastened to a huge rope. The rope went along the mast, ran through several pulleys, and could be raised or lowered with a hand crank.
We lowered the glass bell into the water and then I took a deep breath and dived into the clear sea. The bell had a huge air bubble inside, so I just poked my head under the bell and opened my eyes. There was a bar to hang onto and around me was the coral reef in its splendour. The boat floated along slowly, the bell was trailed along beneath it, and we went all around the lagoon that way. It was perfect.
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