The Conqueror's Wife

by Stephanie Thornton

  And in control of me, at least when she was paying attention.

  We were almost to the doorway when a strong hand encircled my wrist. “Sneaking off again, Thessalonike?” Hephaestion’s voice held an undercurrent of laughter. “I should return you to Eurydice,” he said, popping a stray date into his mouth and chewing it thoughtfully. “I heard her mention an important tapestry, something about a design of Athena’s defeat of Enceladus involving thousands of very complicated and extremely tiny knots.”

  I groaned and fell to my knees on the hall’s black-and-white checkered mosaic. “Please, no. I’d rather you killed me first.”

  “No, Nike,” Arrhidaeus said with an emphatic shake of his head. “No killing.”

  “Is my sister threatening another dramatic death?” Alexander asked as he stepped forward, his shadow falling on me. “What is it this time, Thessalonike? Impaled by Persian swords? Ripped apart by lions? Drowned by Scylla and Charybdis?”

  “Nothing so glorious,” I muttered. “Death by weaving.”

  Alexander, my golden half brother and descendant of both Heracles and Achilles, shared a grin with Hephaestion and laughed, leaving me scowling and Arrhidaeus’ brows knit together in consternation so I had to pat his arm to reassure him that all was right in the world.

  “Are you two going to release me or return me to my doom?” I asked, folding my arms in front of me.

  Hephaestion tapped his chin. “She’s a demanding little thing, isn’t she?”

  “Always has been,” Alexander said. “When her mouth isn’t full of sweetmeats or honey rolls, that is.”

  I stuck out my tongue at him. Some people stuttered in Alexander’s presence, fearing his mercurial temper and the aura of the gods that clung to him, but I’d spent the full ten years of my life in his mother’s household and knew that the man before me had recently been a boy who drooled in his sleep and kept a tattered copy of Homer’s Song of Ilium under his pillow, believing it would imbue him with the power of Achilles.

  “If you’re going to continue insulting me,” I said, “then Arrhidaeus and I are leaving for the arena.”

  “I’m sure that will go over well,” Hephaestion said, glancing heavenward. “Surely no one will notice Philip’s daughter at the men’s games.”

  I narrowed my eyes in speculation. “They won’t care if I’m accompanied by my father’s son and heir.”

  A dark cloud passed over Alexander’s features. I’d forgotten for a moment the talk of Eurydice’s son supplanting him, but the storm passed as Hephaestion threw his arm around Alexander’s broad shoulders. “You,” he said to my brother, “must accompany your father into the stadium, but perhaps Arrhidaeus and I can escort young Thessalonike.”

  Alexander didn’t answer, but he looked past us to where my father entered the courtyard, every guest lifting a terra-cotta skyphos of wine in his honor. Before my birth, the poets claimed that the birds sang of Philip’s beauty, but now a livid pink scar ruined one side of his face, a battle wound from the siege of Methone that had also claimed his left eye as a spoil of war.

  “If you go to the arena, go quickly.” Alexander’s own eyes—one the pale blue of a spring sky and the other the darker hue of an oncoming storm—remained shuttered as he tugged my blond curls, identical to his own. “Your secrets are safe with me, little sister.”

  I shrieked with glee, then grabbed Arrhidaeus’ and Hephaestion’s hands and dragged them from the hall, my blue himation flapping behind me while Arrhidaeus’ chortles of laughter chased us on. Through the palace courtyard with its potted quince trees and then the apricot and pomegranate orchards, beyond the southern Sun Gate and the shuttered agora—its stalls closed in preparation for the glorious spectacle awaiting us—and then to the amphitheater nestled into the base of one of Aigai’s rolling hills, its autumn grasses muted to a dull gold. Crowds of men swathed in furs already jostled for the best view of the naked wrestlers and javelin throwers, but we found seats near the bottom row. My eyes bulged to see my eldest half sister, Cynnane, seated nearby with her husband, Amyntas, a lone woman among a sea of men, her crinkly curls somewhat tamed by a sheen of olive oil and her body dressed not in her customary short chiton but in a refined peplos that flowed all the way to her sturdy ankles. I hadn’t seen her since the birth of her daughter a few months ago, and women weren’t allowed in the arena, but Cynnane wasn’t a proper woman; she’d been instructed by her Illyrian mother in the ways of war, traditions passed down by the chieftains of their family for generations.

  I ducked behind Arrhidaeus, glad for the shield of his hulking shoulders, for although being near Alexander never tied my tongue, I never failed to garble my words in Cynnane’s imposing presence. The meager autumn sun had scarcely climbed over the horizon when the music of lyres and horns proclaimed the arrival of the twelve gods of Olympus.

  Before the athletics could begin, priests dressed in white chitons strained beneath the weight of a sedan chair carrying a life-sized statue of Zeus. The great god of thunder scowled above his marble beard of curls and massive bare chest, poised as if to attack us with the mighty spear clutched forever in his hand. Behind the gods and goddesses of the sun and oceans, death and love, wisdom and war, came a thirteenth statue, bearing a striking likeness to the ruined man of flesh and blood who entered the earthen floor of the arena. The spectators cheered wildly at the sight of my bearlike father despite his lame left leg, dressed in his customary greaves and boiled leather armor, his black beard trimmed to the sharpness of a spearpoint. I shrank back as his good eye scanned the arena, my heart thudding in my chest.

  And, like the gods that surrounded him, my father decided he need not rely on mortals for protection. He raised a hand beneath his white chlamys, dismissing his seven Royal Bodyguards and leaving himself flanked by only Alexander and today’s bridegroom, two princes taking their places behind the battle-scarred warrior who had conquered Macedon and united all the Peloponnese people under his rule.

  My father limped toward the center of the arena, lifting his arms and preparing to speak.

  But a single guard doubled back from the entrance as the others exited, a black-haired man in a scarlet cape whom I recognized as Pausanius, my favorite of my father’s Royal Bodyguards. Pausanius had spent much of his time guarding Alexander’s mother, Olympias, before her exile and had often used his knife incised with spirals and concentric circles to cut my honeyed dates into bite-sized pieces. Now I thought that perhaps he carried some sort of urgent message. He came close to my startled father and embraced him. Then silver flashed in his hand like one of Zeus’ lightning bolts thrown to earth.

  A dagger.

  Philip of Macedon, my indomitable father with a face ruined from battle and a body riddled with sword wounds, gave a deafening roar as he clutched his ribs. Pausanius stumbled back, then ran across the open ground and through the doors of the stadium, the same entrance through which my father had just strode, ready to be enthroned as a god.

  No one moved as crimson stained the ground. It wasn’t until an ocean of red spread from the vulnerable spot in my father’s cuirass and down his chest that the crowd began to scream and my mind made sense of what I’d seen.

  My father had been stabbed and now his lifeblood lured Hades to drag his shade to the underworld.

  In one terrible slow moment he fell to his knees in the dirt, clasping his ribs, as Alexander ran to him and shouts rang out across the arena.

  I screamed, the never-ending sound coming like water from behind a broken dyke, and Hephaestion vaulted the short wall onto the arena floor. “Arrhidaeus,” he commanded over his shoulder, “take Thessalonike back to the palace. Keep her safe.” He called to my half sister with her wild hair even as her husband followed Alexander. “Cynnane, accompany them!”

  I stood, transfixed as my father’s lifeblood poured in a torrent from his chest. I’d watched spotted goats and pristine white
calves being sacrificed in the names of our gods, but never before had I seen a man die. Arrhidaeus slung me over his shoulder, but I twisted and strained for a glimpse of my father as the remainder of his bodyguards surrounded him. Alexander stood over our father, clasping the hilt of the decorated knife that had once cut my sweetmeats and now gleamed with our father’s blood. The air seemed to shift above Philip of Macedon and I knew he was dead then, his psyche released from his body like a tremulous gust of wind.

  “This dagger shall usher one more shade to Hades before the day is done,” Alexander yelled. “Find Pausanius and drag the filthy assassin here so I might bury this blade into his belly as he did my father!”

  He said something more, but I couldn’t hear—the crowd swallowed the sight of my brother, and my ribs slammed into Arrhidaeus’ shoulder as he bounded out of the amphitheater and over the cobbles, dodging children playing with hoops and sticks, gossiping slave girls carrying baskets and drop spindles, and donkeys pulling carts of unglazed pottery. Hot tears clouded my vision, but Cynnane loped after us, a drawn dagger in her hand.

  “Let me go,” I yelled, banging my feeble fists into Arrhidaeus’ back, but he ran on. It wasn’t until we were almost to the city’s Sun Gate that he paused, bent double and his chest heaving. I scrambled down, ready to lambaste him despite my tears, when a flash of color caught my eye.

  A scarlet cape—my father’s Royal Bodyguard. I ignored Arrhidaeus’ bellowed protests as I darted down a side street toward the shrine of Aphrodite, Cynnane yelling behind me.

  The sight of Pausanius’ dark shock of hair made me run faster than I’d ever run before. Ahead at the gate, another man astride a yellow mare held the reins of a second horse while hollering and beckoning wildly for my father’s murderer.

  “Pausanius!” I screamed. I had no sword or spear, but I bent and heaved at his head a handful of pebbles from a potted orange tree, wishing for my slingshot and hoping to blind him if he turned at just the right moment. He turned, but only leered as the worthless stones showered the ground at his feet.

  Yet whatever he saw behind me catapulted his expression into one of sheer terror.

  He ran faster then, arms pumping as the waiting man kicked hard the ribs of the yellow mare and galloped out of the gate. Perhaps Artemis, goddess of the hunt, and Dike, goddess of righteousness, joined together to see justice done that day, for silver flashed from behind me and embedded itself in Pausanius’ thigh. He crashed into the cobbles with a howl of rage, clutching his skewered leg. And then Cynnane was beside me, her hair in ever wilder disarray and her dagger hilt empty.

  “Blades are more effective than stones, little one,” she said with a tweak of my nose. “Remember that.”

  A larger flash of scarlet and silver emerged from the main street and the remainder of my father’s guards hurtled toward Pausanius with their swords.

  “Stop!” I shouted. The men hesitated, blades poised to strike, the bloodlust in their eyes making me recoil in fear. Pausanius cowered at their feet, the trembling mongrel curled into himself. “My brother Alexander commanded you to bring this criminal to him,” I said, gasping for breath even as I raised a hand to halt them. “He, not you, should punish Pausanius.”

  A crowd had gathered, but Cynnane stepped into the fray then, bent, and pulled her dagger from Pausanius’ thigh. She wiped its blood on her peplos and resheathed the blade in her leather belt. “Do as the child says,” she commanded. “Pausanius of Orestis doesn’t deserve a quick dispatch to Hades.”

  “We don’t take orders from a woman,” one of the men growled. “Or a girl.”

  “Then I’ll slit you open from your eyeballs to your asshole,” Cynnane said, grasping the hilt of her dagger once again. “After which Hades himself can give you orders.”

  “You’ll do as Alexander commanded,” I said. “For he is our brother, and your new basileus.”

  No one moved for a long moment, but then the fury in the guards’ eyes banked, albeit grudgingly. “Do as she says,” the commander barked.

  “Drag him through the gutters and hit his head against as many curbs as you can,” Cynnane said. “This one deserves a painful and creative death.”

  Arrhidaeus broke through the crowd then and jogged to us, cringing and covering his eyes as the guards grabbed hold of Pausanius’ ankles and hauled our father’s murderer over the cobbles, leaving a sluice of crimson to mark their path back to the arena. I waited until they were gone, then sank to my knees in the street.

  “Home, Nike,” Arrhidaeus said, shaking my shoulder none too gently. “Hephaestion said to go home.”

  “Give her a moment,” Cynnane said, but her voice was kind. “It takes more than a breath to recover after you’ve first seen men’s blood spilled.”

  Not just any men’s blood. My father’s blood. And his murderer’s.

  I wanted nothing more in that instant than to be in my bed, with my shaggy goat, Pan, curled at my feet and my fat orange tomcat purring on my lap, a plate of honeyed apricots at my elbow and all of this a bad dream already fading into nothingness. Instead, I started to shiver, my teeth chattering as if an icy blanket had been wrapped around my shoulders.

  “Take me home, Arrhidaeus,” I whispered even as he crouched down so I could climb onto his back. “Please just take me home.”

  • • •

  The gods granted Cynnane’s wish for Pausanius’ painful and creative death.

  Tenfold.

  Pausanius had been dragged back to the arena for Alexander to mete out the sentence mandated for a king-killer. Buckets of chilled water were thrown to revive him so he might see himself stripped naked while five iron clamps fixed him to a rough-hewn plank at his ankles, wrists, and neck. The dagger he’d used to stab my father was tied around his neck, both as a reminder of his crime and also to taunt him as he was left to slowly starve to death, unable to seek solace in suicide. Children threw rotten onions at him and wild dogs nipped his bound heels, but he remained on exhibition outside the palace gates, shivering by night and mired in his own urine and feces as the days passed. I did my best to avoid the rotting heap of flesh, staying in my rooms and playing with my goat, my lazy orange cat, and the three-legged tortoise I’d recently rescued. Even still, I heard my slaves whisper that Pausanius lingered so he might greet the woman who ordered his assassin’s act. Yet not even Pausanius could hide from Hades forever. The moldering god of death finally claimed my father’s murderer as dawn streaked the sky with orange on the same morning that Olympias arrived in Aigai.

  The return of Alexander and his mother had each ushered a man’s soul to the river Styx, so that superstitious minds might have wondered if perhaps my brother and Olympias had made a pact with the god of the underworld. My naive child’s mind was foolish enough to believe we’d seen the end of the bloodshed.

  Ignoring the pike that still held Pausanius’ body, I ran to greet Olympias as her procession approached the palace walls, but she scarcely looked at me as she took Alexander’s hand and alighted from her ebony litter. The pleats of her peplos brushed her polished leather sandals, and her burnished copper hair was coiled into flawless ringlets and threaded to frame her face.

  “There is much to talk about, my son,” I heard her murmur in Alexander’s ear, even as her eyes strayed to where Pausanius remained, the crows that had been startled away by her arrival daring to flutter closer. “You must speak to Antipater, convince your father’s general to throw his weight behind you to ensure the army’s support for your claim—”

  “First we carry my father to his tomb,” Alexander reminded her. “Come dawn, I shall speak to Antipater and any other man you suggest.”

  “Of course. And now I would pay my respects to the dead.”

  I thought she meant she’d like to stand vigil with my father, but instead she flicked a wrist and a slave appeared at her side bearing a thin golden diadem on a cushion dyed
with precious Tyrian purple. She placed the crown upon Pausanius’ rotting head and bowed over her hands. “I dedicate the blade you used against Philip to Apollo,” she said to the dead assassin, cutting the dagger free from his blackened neck. “Your praises shall be sung to eternity.”

  I stared openmouthed at her, my mind churning to realize that Olympias approved of her husband’s murder. Even worse, the slaves might be correct in thinking she’d ordered Pausanius to kill my father. “Did you want my father to die?” I blurted out.

  Olympias leveled an iron stare at me and I shrank back, wishing I could catch the words and swallow them.

  “The poor dear is overcome with grief, isn’t she?” Olympias murmured to Alexander. “No, little Nike, I didn’t seek Philip’s death. But his tyrant’s blood has watered the earth. Life must continue.”

  To the handful of gathered courtiers she offered a widow’s watery eyes. “The Delphic oracle once proclaimed to Philip of Macedon that the end was near, the sacrificer at hand. My husband believed this meant the war against Persia would soon be won, but such hubris challenged the gods, and thus, Pausanius merely meted out their justice.”

  But she had praised Pausanius’ corpse. Olympias was the only mother I knew, yet my father’s words after her exile floated to my mind, that she was as slippery as the snakes that she cultivated. And even a venomous adder might sometimes be mistaken for a common grass snake.

  But Olympias was the woman who had gifted me with tiny iron cages for my own menagerie of lizards, toads, and broken-winged sparrows. Surely she mourned my father’s death.

  She slipped her arm through Alexander’s and drew him toward the palace’s main entrance, the rest of us following close behind. “There is still the matter of Amyntas, Eurydice, and her son.”

  “You needn’t worry about Cynnane’s husband,” Alexander said. “But I shall not allow harm to befall a mother and her infant.”