“Was that another one?” the man on the floor asked, sliding about as he tried to climb the table again.
“Most likely. Sometimes the new damned boil up in big pockets from below,” Hephaestion answered through his teeth, correcting his grip on the knife.
“Seems to be happening a lot more than expected.”
“War,” Hephaestion muttered as he continued gutting the body. He reached in under the sternum to slice loose the lungs. “Back above—in Europe. Like no war ever seen before. Tens of thousands dead every day. They call it the Great War.”
“Fucking idiots…”
The three men fell silent as they sliced and severed and scooped the glutton clean, and after many hours’ work, his entire midsection consisted of empty skin, a spinal column, and the limp, red fist of muscle—the heart dangling from its arteries.
After dousing themselves clean with buckets of salty water, the two assistants slid their tunics back on and got their cord and needles ready. Each needle was the length of a finger and thick enough to puncture a cured animal hide.
Ulfric wandered in and leaned against the near wall. Hephaestion, still angry, tried to ignore him, but there was no avoiding Ulfric’s presence. When Ulfric wanted a person’s attention, he got it.
“Give us a few minutes, if you two would?” Ulfric asked of the men. Soon only Ulfric and Hephaestion remained.
Instead of waiting for Ulfric to speak again, Hephaestion dove in. “I’m insane.”
“Lord Almighty, you are.” Ulfric smirked.
“Trying to reason with me on this is a waste of time. Especially now when we’re in the sea with the body right on this table. I’m going down there, and I’m getting Alex.”
“I know…a part of me hoped we wouldn’t find anyone tall and fat enough.”
“You underestimate how delinquent people can be with themselves.” Hephaestion shook his head.
“I hate it when you judge people, Hepher.”
“You hate it when I judge people more harshly than you do.”
“Which is always.”
The two men stared at each other, the remaining fat on the glutton undulating with the ship’s movement.
“I’ve got your kit ready to go outside the door,” Ulfric offered. “But I know I’ll hate myself and always wonder if I don’t make one last plea for you not to do this. Alexander lived a life according to how he wanted, and he is in Hell for it. You followed him and loved him and served him, and somehow that merely got you Purgatory.”
“Not all of us just wake up in Heaven, Ulf.”
“Yet I choose to hang out in Purgatory, helping people like you ascend. Because, well, you know my thoughts on Heaven. But if you go down there, and some devils or monstrous people get a hold of you, they might gnaw on you for all eternity. They’ll pluck your heart out, stick it in a jar, and you’ll never regenerate. You won’t think or remember anything, and only know suffering and imprisonment. Hell, you might get charred into ash and sprinkled to the wind. Maybe something will eat you and shit you out. How long would it take to regenerate from that kind of thing?”
“That’s why I’m going as prepared as possible. And I’ve trained—we’ve trained for this for decades.”
“You may not come back, Hepher.”
“I know.”
“You’re one of the ones worth saving.”
“And I appreciate that. I truly, truly do.”
A shift in Ulfric’s voice filled the cabin with fury. “I wouldn’t have done any of this for Alexander the Great.”
Hephaestion couldn’t meet his friend’s eyes, but he felt their burn.
“But,” Ulfric’s voice eased, “I’d do it for Hephaestion the Good. I’ll miss you.” He crossed the room and smothered Hephaestion in a hug.
“I’ll miss you, too. But you’ll come and rescue me if Lucifer gets me.”
Ulfric jerked with a snicker. “Jackass.” Banging on the wall, Ulfric summoned the two assistants and returned to his spot against the wall.
Naked except for leather greaves, Hephaestion strapped the two separate halves of his hoplon shield to his back, a compact and collapsible design by Ulfric. In the center of the shield was the simple design of a heart. Hephaestion found it fitting that when the shield was whole, the heart was whole.
Next came the three parts of Hephaestion’s dory spear. Each spear segment screwed together, turning three two-foot sections into a six-foot-tall thrusting weapon.
Curling into a face-down fetal ball, head couched in the glutton’s pelvis, Hephaestion placed the spear portions between his knees, along his host’s spine. While gruesome, he’d done many horrible things to many horrible people, and this was not a singular occurrence. Through this body, he would reach his first goal.
He took deep, gasping breaths, knowing that he may not taste air for a possible eternity. “I’m ready. Sew me up.”
The assistants went about their work.
“Remember, Hepher. If you do get through and get your man, you head downward. Just keep going until everything is frozen, farthest from the light of Heaven. Find the Devil’s Spine. Get through there, be worthy, and once out, you’ll see the first two stars man ever saw. Look for those stars.”
Hephaestion nodded as best he could. Soon the loose skin draped over him, slapping against his arched back. The men stitched and swore, and the sound became more muffled to Hephaestion’s ears.
The glutton would regenerate, but with Hephaestion in the way, his lungs and intestines would grow back malformed and entangling, creating a terrible mess. To Hephaestion’s benefit, however, was the fact that without air, Hephaestion would drift into a death-like dream state. It wasn’t uncommon that when a soul wanted to recede into oblivion, they would hang themselves from a tree in Purgatory, a stone nearby chiseled with their request that passersby not cut them down. Hephaestion hoped he could dream, adrift inside a warm body in an ocean of wretches.
With grunts and shouts, Hephaestion felt the body being tugged at and rolled about by rope and pulley. He rubbed his fingers along the wooden shafts of his dory, imagining how glorious it would feel to drive the piercing edge into the heart of whatever beast tormented Alexander. In Earth’s history, there was no power greater than a Greek and his spear.
The ropes twanged, and the pulley’s arm creaked.
So many centuries pining and so many decades planning had all come down to this moment. What if the seams tore? What if Minos detected something amiss while judging the glutton? What if the man he inhabited had greater crimes than gluttony and was sent elsewhere? What if he was a suicide? A suicide would circumvent Minos’s judgment altogether and be cast down into the forest to sprout into a red tree. If that happened, would Hephaestion spend an eternity encased in bleeding bark and moaning wood?
Hephaestion calmed himself once again by thinking of Alexander’s laugh, his vibrant eyes, and his sandy-blond hair…the day they rode Bucephalus together as they marched 35,000 Grecians across Achaemenidian fields of wild flowers, the huge horse sniffing at the blossoms as its powerful weight shifted between their knees.
Rocking back and forth as he was lowered down the side of The Bonny Sweetheart, Hephaestion reached for a peaceful state of mind.
The cries and screams and gargling coughs grew louder and louder.
Clawing fingers tugged at the glutton, and Hephaestion felt like a morsel being lowered to starved dogs.
Alexander’s laugh became harder to hear.
Gravity eased, and water began to seep in through the stitching. Howls and cries and lamentations sounded around him, and Hephaestion tried his best to close the noise out, but their ruckus filled him with terror. The battering eased as the water engulfed him, and soon, he was submerged.
Hephaestion despised the sensation of drowning. A helpless kind of death—no matter how hard one tries to remain
dignified, the soul’s body refuses to go easily. Ulfric had run him through, bashed his head in, and sliced him up during their training sessions to prepare him for this journey. Each death felt like his earthly life was farther away.
Drowning was still the worst. No human in the afterlife needs food, air, or sleep. But very few conquer their desire for them, and rarely does a person conquer all three. Food and sleep were relatively simple, but the lungs’ desire for air remained anchored in the soul—it was by far the most difficult to overcome.
He’d spent decades developing the discipline to suppress his need for air, but it was always a brutal challenge. With convulsions, the salty water ran into his nose and slithered down his throat, into his burning lungs as he clutched his dory as hard as possible, desperately trying to remember that a Grecian with his spear can and will shape the world.
It was his last cohesive thought before he blacked out into suspended oblivion, awash in the sea of angry and terrified condemned.
Chapter 4
Hephaestion dreamt, if that’s what it could be called during death, about the cruel, white-tipped swells of the Hydaspes. The river sat at the farthest east any Greek had ventured, and its rippling current had claimed wagons, carts, horses, livestock, and men.
Tasked yet again to find a way across another brutal river, Hephaestion perched on the bank and stared into its hypnotic swirl. His ears filled with the long, sustained note of the river’s rushing rumble, occasionally punctuated by the staccato of mallets driving stakes into the ground around him. Teams of men pulled ferryboats, wide and flat on the bottom, through cleared paths in the forest, and they sang lyrics of back-bending motivation.
Hephaestion had ordered the construction of several long, slender docks so the boats could load quickly before launching, giving the enemy less time to react in case they were spotted crossing the river. If he could guide as many hoplite and cavalry across the Hydaspes, they could flank the enemy’s ranged troops guarding the far bank to the north, behind which hid the bulk of the army.
For Alexander to charge the river with his Companions would mean absolute death. The water to the north was shallow, and the heavy cavalry made a good show of trying to traverse the river without endangering the men in an effort to keep the Punjabi army occupied. If King Porus and his slingers expected an attack from the south, Hephaestion’s ferryboats wouldn’t get their divisions of foot soldiers, phalanx, and light cavalry across for Alexander to head their attack on the enemy.
Hephaestion wasn’t a strong military tactician. He had always been slow with making decisions, and Alexander had often critiqued his technique as being far too conservative for large-scale battles. But Hephaestion was a logistical master, and no one else could haul twelve ferryboats across seventy miles of land and trees within two weeks. The enemy had no idea and didn’t fathom a river crossing possible since the mouth of the river and the bends farther to the south had villages that never spied so much as a Grecian oar in their waters.
While Alexander possessed the ideas and the battle plans, Hephaestion designed the support.
Everyone had their instructions, and Hephaestion had trained and prepared his underlings so thoroughly that they carried out their duties while he sat back and let the river taunt him.
The boats closest to the water’s edge were raised onto thick tree trunks from trees felled in the night with pulleys and rope. Sailors wheeled hot cauldrons of oil from their fires and smeared the molten grease under each ship’s belly, allowing them to glide in the water with greater ease.
The docks had only been built as of this morning, with each section assembled prior to exact specifications. Their hasty construction was a gamble, but to not move quickly would end the India Campaign’s prospects definitively.
Several men, waist deep in white water and bound by safety cords under their arms, adjusted and positioned the posts for the docks. One of the posts started to buckle, and the men cried out for help.
Hephaestion, up and running in a single motion, raced into the river. Someone threw him a cord, and he wrangled himself into the rope.
Reaching the dock’s weakening boards, Hephaestion added his shoulder to the others. The men held fast. One man’s head sunk underwater, but his hands held firm. Concern for the man’s safety flooded Hephaestion, but such dedication impressed him.
More men came barreling into the water. They clung to each other and called reassurances to their companions as the whole body of men began pushing the dock into a stable position.
The songs from the bank changed rhythm, and the gathering crowd chanted music of empowerment in unison. A surge went through the waterlogged men, and the dock straightened. A cheer went up, but was quickly hushed by prudent reminders from the sergeants. Men with reinforcing stakes bundled to their backs waded into the water with teams of divers to aid in the dock’s repair.
Hephaestion stayed and held his portion of the dock for over an hour. Nearly the last man to let go, his body did not respond to his brain, and he fell limp into the current.
Water flew up his nose and into his throat and everything was a muffled, frigid white. He had no energy, and his limbs flopped about like loose cloth dangling from his body.
He couldn’t tell if he was being towed down river, or even headed into another dock. At the speed the river moved, a post would have cracked open his head, but Hephaestion was too exhausted to care at that point.
“Patty! PATTY!”
And suddenly there was sky. Several men had caught him by the cord, one of which was Alexander, and they hauled him to slower, shallower waters.
Alexander beamed down at him, a wide hand over Hephaestion’s heart. “You know, I told you I’d take you swimming when we get to Shahar, but no, you just couldn’t be patient.”
They dragged Hephaestion out, his lungs more water than air, and pounded his back while he lay on his side. Alexander ordered a fire for him, and Hephaestion sat huddled with several other men to watch the rest of his work unfold. Alexander brought blankets and hot sideritis tea.
They sipped in silence, Alexander’s hand rubbing Hephaestion’s back, giving warmth. The other recovering men kept to themselves in order to give their leaders a moment.
“Thought I lost you there. No more being a hero,” Alexander whispered.
“You charge first into every cavalry advance, and you want ME to not be a hero?” Hephaestion croaked, voice quivering as he suppressed a coughing fit.
“I’ll be a hero enough for both of us. If I die, the army mourns. If you die, the army crumbles and no one gets home.” Resting his head on Hephaestion’s shoulder, Alexander sighed. “Just be careful, all right? I don’t want to worry about you more than I already do. We all need you. I need you.”
Hephaestion snickered. “Is that why you gave me the Companions?”
“They’re the best, and they all have standing orders to sit on you if you are under threat.”
“Fucker.” Hephaestion nudged Alexander in the ribs.
“This is brilliant, Patty,” Alexander said, presenting the docks and longboats with a sweeping hand. “These boats will glide across the water. This time tomorrow, we’ll order the Heavies north and cross here.”
The nickname “Patty” had been Hephaestion’s since their visit at Troy. Alexander was certain of his lineage to Achilles, and therefore he surmised that Hephaestion was his Patroclus.
The battle that came the following day was a brutal one, and Alexander’s losses were great. But he still won. While soldiers buried their dead and wept from the adrenaline withdrawal, Hephaestion coughed the last of the river from his chest. Even now, in the afterlife, Hephaestion had not escaped the river’s ensnarement.
Chapter 5
Yitzhak Isserles avoided making eye-contact with Prior Albrecht. Yitz didn’t fear or particularly dislike the man; rather, Albrecht could talk, and Yitz wanted a
quiet day of spectating and gambling without a constant stream of repeated nonsense pouring into his ear.
But it wasn’t to be. Despite getting to the bidding ring early and his red leather wingback chair half-hiding him, he was still spotted by the awkward and socially inept Albrecht.
“What a good day to you,” the prior greeted.
Yitz pretended not to hear.
A chubby hand landed on his shoulder. “What a good day to you!” the prior persisted.
“Oh, hello, Albrecht,” Yitz replied, eyes transfixed on the wagering paddle in his hands, a tall stick with an icon of a dove on both broad, flat sides.
“Lovely weather,” the prior spouted for the infinitieth time as he took his seat next to Yitz. Albrecht seemed to love that particular joke. Hell’s sky was always the same dark, swirling bleakness that appeared to hang so low, you could reach up and touch it.
The two men had paid a substantial sum for the privileges of their view, but not because of the ashen sky. A tall, stadium-angled ring had been constructed of black volcanic rock, and each seat faced toward its center. Yitz’s chair was not as costly as those closer to the action, but the spot had cost several lifetime’s worth of prudently earned income.
His wife, Adina, had given him an earful about his gambling pastime yet again that morning. He never had a proper rebuttal for her whenever they had a spat, partly because she was far more articulate than he, but also because in the corners of his heart, he was a tiny bit afraid of her.
A pang of regret hit him. He had left Adina at the craftsman’s market to come and lay his wages while being stuck next to an annoying man. She wanted him to skip out of the day’s sin, but Yitz sulked and pouted in his usual manner, and, in the end, after a terse confrontation, he got his way. This gambling event only came four times a year, and he thrilled to ponder his strategy during the days in between.
The point of this gambling event was fairly simple; guess the sin of the sinner before Minos passed their judgment. As a fresh damned was dragged before the court below, everyone craned their necks in their chairs, and then shouted their bets with their icons raised. Sometimes what might appear to be a murderous soul was in fact a sexual predator, and the promissory notes changed hands quickly before the next sinner was presented.
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