I was crying now, as was he. I simply nodded, incapable of talking. We sobbed in each other’s arms, and then Alexander said, ‘I’m so glad I decided to cheer you up.’
I wiped my nose with the back of my hand and sniffed. ‘I was thinking that I spent too much time crying.’
‘You were right,’ he said, and we burst into tears again. That’s how Plexis found us.
He rode up, swinging off his horse when he heard us crying. ‘Iskander! Ashley! What is it? What happened?’
‘Nothing,’ Alexander wiped his tears away and tried to grin at his friend.
‘But didn’t you tell me that you were going to find Ashley to cheer her up?’ Plexis was confused.
‘I did,’ said Alexander.
‘He did,’ I echoed, wiping away my tears.
‘Oh, well, I’m glad to see that you’re both joyful now,’ he said, looking back and forth at us. ‘So, what was the problem?’ he asked, poking a toe at Alexander’s cloak.
Alexander smiled at me. ‘Ashley wanted to make me scream with pleasure,’ he said, ‘and she didn’t want to do it in the tent, because she didn’t want to wake everyone up.’
‘Oh?’ Plexis looked really interested now. He pursed his lips, and I realized he and Alexander shared many of the same expressions. He cocked his head. ‘Will you let me comfort Ashley next time, then?’ he asked. He dodged a well-thrown rock and got back on his horse. ‘It’s not fair,’ he called back over his shoulder, ‘I was the one who told you she needed cheering up. You get all the fun.’
He rode away, and I lay back on the ground. Alexander lay next to me and we watched the sun setting. ‘I know about you and Plexis,’ he said at last.
I froze, then blushed. His voice held no clue as to what he was thinking. ‘Are you angry?’
‘I was at first. But I love you both so well, I could not stay angry for long.’
I heaved a sigh. Sighing and crying, two things I’d never done in my time. ‘I promise I will never be unfaithful to you again,’ I said, taking his face in my hands.
‘Whatever you do,’ he said seriously, ‘do not make vain promises. If by chance you and Plexis make love again, I will probably kill you both.’
I swallowed. ‘I understand,’ I said in a tiny voice.
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Really? Are people in your time so concerned with faithfulness? I would never kill you or Plexis for that. I would be frightfully jealous, I already was. But I figured you were mad about Barsine, and Plexis always was a horny bastard.’
‘So why did you say it, then?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘To frighten you. I suppose, for a second at least. When I thought you didn’t love me any more, I was frightened. My mother taught me a great deal about revenge.’
‘It would be best if you forgot most of it,’ I said.
‘Doubtless.’ He grinned.
‘So, can I show Plexis how I made you scream?’ I said teasingly.
‘Yes, with me. If you really want to, we can show him.’ His smile showed how well he knew me.
I drew my finger down his forehead, over his nose and across his beautiful mouth. I cupped his face in my hands and I drank his kisses. We made love again as the sky turned violet and gold and the stars started to twinkle above us.
‘There are so many things I want to ask you,’ he said dreamily, ‘so many things, I don’t know where to start.’
‘Start with the stars then,’ I said softly.
‘Are they really suns and planets?’
‘Yes, and further away than you can imagine.’
He propped himself up on his elbow and looked down at me. ‘My imagination knows no limits,’ he said. ‘Absolutely none at all.’
This, I thought, was perhaps the secret behind his success. He knew no limits, and he made everyone around him believe in the impossible.
‘How many people would believe me?’ I asked, kissing him again. ‘Hardly anyone, and even if they did, they would be incapable of understanding me. They would think of me as a goddess. They would strip me of my humanity. You are the only one who could actually comprehend the distance that separates us and still believe we can love each other.’
‘Maybe it’s because nobody in my own time has ever fully understood me.’
‘Nobody in my time understands you, either,’ I said. It was cruel, but I said it unthinkingly.
He looked up and frowned. His pure profile was silhouetted on the night sky like a cameo. He reached up a hand and pretended to pluck a star. ‘I tried not to mind when my father beat me, or when my mother caressed me. I didn’t care if my father called me a coward, or a ninny, or made fun of me. I wanted to read, not fight. I wanted to study the philosophies and become a healer. I loved medicine; does history tell you that? Do the historians say, “Iskander loved to read and wanted to become a philosopher”? Do they tell how I cried when my mother told me my baby brother died? She thought I would be grateful. Do they say how much I love beauty?’ His voice paled and faded. ‘Will you sing me one of your songs? Sing me one for your gods, if you have any left.’
I thought a minute, then sang an old song that was already a few centuries old when I’d learned it: Let It Be. I sang the Beatles to Alexander the Great.
Alexander had not moved, but his mouth curved in a smile. ‘That’s a very wise song,’ he said. ‘Mary. The goddess Mary. Mother Mary. Let it be.’
Night had claimed the sky. There were patches of stars and some low clouds. A small squall blew across the meadow, dropping a light rain upon us. Then the sky cleared again and the stars blazed.
‘Zeus rained,’ he said dreamily. ‘A good omen. I think I’ll found a city nearby, over there, where the rocks are gleaming in the moonlight. I’ll call her Alexandria Margiane. Mary Alexandria. And then we’ll go over the mountains.’ His voice was soft and low, the breeze was cool, and the rain had made the earth and plants release their scent.
We wrapped up in his cloak, two naked humans under Uranus, the vast sky. Two specks of dust upon the face of Gaea, the mother earth. The night birds called to each other, the crickets chirped. Alexander put his face in the crook of my neck and cried. His body shook and I held him still. He was crying for his gods, for his mortality, and for the unfairness of it all. And for the wonder of it all.
‘I always dreamed that I would rule the world,’ he said, after his sorrow lifted. ‘But it was the dream of a child. Now I am a man. I don’t want to rule the world; I will let others rule it for me, my governors or my satraps. I want to know the world. I want to possess it. I want to see everything everywhere, to learn all the languages, speak to all the philosophers, and learn all the secrets the world has kept since the beginning of time.’ His voice swelled and the earth beneath him vibrated with it. He seemed to grow beside me, to change. He was no longer a man, he was something else. He was pure energy, humanity distilled and refined into a single, concentrated essence.
I held him and felt his muscles tighten, as if he wanted to leap to his feet. He was shaking. Then he relaxed, and his arms went around me once more.
‘I want to build a kingdom, I want to destroy nothing. Do your historians say that, when they speak of me?’
I took his face in my hands and I said, ‘All your cities will be like glittering diamonds set in the face of the earth. Everything you touch will be graced with beauty, and your name shall voyage three thousand years into the future. When people say your name, they will say it with respect and awe for what you’ve done. Even if they never know why.’
‘Even though, for me, it is the why that matters the most?’ he said.
‘I’m sorry.’
He looked at me, and his parti-coloured eyes flashed, one light, one dark. ‘Let it be,’ he said, not without humour. ‘Whisper words of wisdom. Let it be.’ Then we kissed.
I could have kissed him all night. But a faint smell of smoke was in the air now and we had to go back to the camp, where sixty thousand men revolved like asteroids and planets around the sun
that was Alexander.
End of Book One
Read on for an excerpt from Book Two
Heroes in the Dust
“As Children learn good manners
As Youth learn to control passions
In Middle Age be just
In Old Age be wise
Then Death shall bring no regrets.”
Delphic Maxim engraved on monuments in the cities founded by Alexander the Great
“One day there shall come into the rich lands of Asia
An unbelieving man
Wearing upon his shoulders a purple cloak.
Savage, fiery, a stranger to justice. A thunderbolt
Raised him up, though he is but a man.
All Asia shall suffer; the earth shall drink blood
Hades shall attend him, although he knows it not.
And in the end those whom he wished to destroy
By them will he and all his race be destroyed.”
Ancient Persian Oracle
Chapter One
Mist obscured the mountaintops. The path I was following rose steadily and was worn smooth by the passage of hundreds of feet and hooves. Taking advantage of a pause, I bent and scraped some snow off a boulder. Next to me, Plexis stopped walking, stretched, then caught sight of my hands. ‘What’s that?’
‘A snowball.’
‘What does one do with it?’
I smiled sweetly. ‘One throws it! Catch!’ WHACK! I threw the snowball as hard as I could, catching Plexis on the chin. His expression of shocked outrage turned to one of an avenging angel. He scooped up a handful of slushy snow and patted it into a snowball.
‘Like this?’ he asked, cocking his head to one side. His clear brown eyes were guileless, his dark brown hair curled in ringlets around his high-cheekboned face. He looked like a Raphaelite angel. Appearances can be misleading.
I giggled and dodged around the side of my pony. ‘Sort of.’ I peeked over the withers and received a faceful of snow. ‘No fair!’ I bent down and tried to make another snowball, but the fine, fluffy stuff was melting as fast as it fell and was starting to turn to rain. I looked up at the sky, soft and grey as the belly of a turtledove just over my head. ‘Well, that was snow,’ I said, licking the last of it off my lips. ‘Haven’t you ever seen it before?’
‘No, I lived in Athens. It never snowed there. Iskander saw snow when he was a child in Macedonia. He was always lording it over me. He made it sound so wonderful.’ His voice was wistful. ‘I never thought it would look like ashes.’
I was startled. ‘Ashes?’ I looked at the snow differently now. The snowflakes, fat and gentle as feathers, did look like wood ash. I smiled. ‘The first time I saw snow I thought it was bits of paper. I was sitting downstairs, and I fancied the maid was throwing torn newspaper out the upstairs window. I rushed to see, but nobody was there. It gave me a shock. I must have been only four years old, but I remember it clearly.’
‘There you go again with your strange stories,’ Plexis teased. ‘I suppose I’ll ask you what a newspaper is and you’ll say, “I can’t tell you,” and I’ll spend another day longing for death.’
I gave a shocked laugh. ‘You don’t really believe in the prophecy, do you? The oracle said I’d answer your questions on your deathbed, but did you ever stop to think that perhaps you’ll be disappointed?’
‘No, and I have a list somewhere – a list of things I’m going to ask you, so you’d better be prepared.’
‘Well, a newspaper is a sort of papyrus with all the daily events written on it, like a journal.’
‘Like the one Onesicrite’s writing?’ He wiped the last bit of snow off his face and pulled his cloak tighter around his shoulders.
‘I don’t know, is he writing one?’
‘He’s sending all the latest news to Athens.’
‘I didn’t realize that.’ I frowned. Onesicrite had arrived a few weeks ago, as puffed up with self-importance as a ruffled chicken. He and Nearchus were always coming into our tent in the evenings. I had wondered why Onesicrite asked so many questions of my husband and wrote everything down on a parchment. I was used to the scribes and historians. I hadn’t thought for one minute there would also be a journalist. ‘I assumed he was just one of Nearchus’s pals,’ I said. Nearchus was the admiral of my husband’s navy.
‘Nearchus is flattered by him. The city of Athens has hired Onesicrite to write about Iskander’s conquests.’ Plexis narrowed his eyes as he stared at the sky. ‘Snow is such flimsy, wet stuff,’ he said, sniffing. ‘I can’t believe Iskander made it sound so marvellous when we were young.’
He called my husband Iskander, as did many people. In time, he would be known as Alexander the Great, but right now he was simply Iskander, king of Macedonia, Greece, Egypt and most of Persia. We were following him over the Hindu-Kush Mountains. The mountains were the Himalayas and we were still on the lowest slopes. It was autumn, and winter was nipping at our heels hurrying us along. We had hired guides to take us through the mountain passes, although we’d been warned it would be difficult.
Alexander marched at the head of his army. With sixty thousand soldiers, it was a formidable fighting machine. It was also a city unto itself, full of men from different countries with different languages and customs, all following Alexander like the tail trailing behind a comet. The army carried along priests and whores, soldiers’ wives and children, cooks, engineers, doctors, scribes, historians, diplomats, lawyers, botanists, astrologers, grooms, messengers, slaves, and – last of all – me.
I was born three thousand years in the future. I used to take a monorail to the city, and here I was on foot leading a pony, with the closest city some three hundred parasanges away. A parasange is a Persian measurement equalling twenty stades, or five thousand fifty metres if you prefer. The city we were heading towards might have a gym, a courthouse, a bakery, a temple, a fountain, and then again, it might not. It might be just a huddle of mud huts near a sullen stream. One thing it would not have would be a Tele-time station to send me home. Home was here and now, early December 330 BC.
Over my knee-length linen tunic and cotton shift, I wore a thick woollen cloak. Sturdy boots replaced my leather sandals for the march over the mountains. I had a knit cap with a jaunty red pompom, and I’d made myself mittens.
While I slogged through wet snow and mud, I daydreamed about the ten-bedroom house I was born in with its five maids and butler, and the cook, Daphne, who made such wonderful scalloped potato pie. Potatoes would make it to Europe in roughly one thousand five hundred years. I did not daydream about my mother, who had made my life hell, nor about my father, who was dead. I hadn’t known him well enough to grieve. I’d seen him at most twice a year until he died of old age when I was ten years old.
My mother had been in her fifties when I was born. I was an accident, and my arrival embarrassed both parents deeply. I spent my life in boarding schools until my mother managed to marry me off to a much older, brutal man. The memory of my parents and my marriage made me glum, and the grey sky was depressing enough, so I tried to think about something cheerful. Like my Brookner Prize. I’d won the coveted journalistic prize when I was still in Tempus University. Unheard of! Then I was chosen to participate in the time-journalism programme, to which most people don’t get invited until they have been journalists for decades. And to top that off, I’d beaten thousands of candidates and was selected to go back into the past.
The smiles I received from my colleagues could have cut glass. Everyone was sure I’d bought my way into the programme, because my mother’s fortune was colossal, I had a title, and my photo was often in the society pages. I didn’t care. I was about to embark on a voyage to the distant past to interview the famous personage of my choice. I had chosen Alexander the Great, a childhood hero, and I would meet him in person.
Time travelling uses an extravagant amount of energy and can only be done once a year. The lights on the entire planet dim for the thirty minutes the magnetic beam is in use
, and twenty-two hours later, when the person is picked up again, the lights dim once more all over the planet. Such is the power of the beam and the renown of the programme. No one can ignore it. The trip is a stomach-wrenching, head-splitting journey. You freeze solid, your bones and blood turn to ice, and you pass out while your atoms are disconnected and spiralled through the magnetic beam into the past. Sometimes they recover cadavers from the beam.
I’d survived. I was unconscious when I arrived in a secluded spot in the past, and I threw up right after I regained consciousness. It was an awful trip. No one had bothered to tell me. I bet they were all grinning, thinking about me writhing and shivering on the ground while my body thawed out and the frost left my veins.
I’d made my way to Alexander’s encampment. I’d met him and made quite a fool of myself pretending to be a temple virgin, asking silly questions like, ‘What do you want to do with your life?’ I had a lot to learn about the people of that time. For one thing, they were incredibly sensitive to sound. They were careful about what they said, because the spoken word was the only way most of them could communicate. I was an enigma. Alexander loved mysteries. He proceeded to kidnap me.
He followed me when I had to leave and saw me being pulled into the frozen magnetic beam. It makes an eerie blue light and the cold is intense. He actually pulled me out of it, and somehow we’d both survived. But I was trapped in the past, and I couldn’t let anyone know who I was. If I changed history in the slightest the time-senders would use the beam to erase me. It was incredibly precise. And so, with that Damocles sword hanging over my head, I lived with Alexander. He married me, which was sweet of him. He also thought I was Demeter’s daughter being taken back to the underworld by the god of the dead, Hades. Everyone believed that. My stupid grass sandals that the Institute of Time Travel made for me, the ones that cut my feet and made me limp, were sitting in a temple in Arbeles being prayed over. I was known as ‘Ashley of the Sacred Sandals’.
Only Alexander knew I was from the future. I had to tell him, we were making each other too unhappy with our secrets. He took charge of telling the scribes and historians not to write anything about me. That way I wouldn’t show up on any ancient scraps of papyrus.
The Road to Alexander Page 32