The Conqueror's Wife

by Stephanie Thornton

  I smoothed the front of my robe, my palms suddenly sweaty. “I have done well.”

  “As well as could be expected,” my father said. “For a whore.”

  That stung more than I cared to admit, but I squared my shoulders. “I have reason to believe that Bessus will soon marry me.”

  He snorted and waved Bagoas away, making the hump of his shoulder even more misshapen. “You’re a fool to think that,” he sneered. “Where is your brother?”

  I looked past him, willing my eyes to stay dry.

  “Dead.”

  A bolt of shock exploded on his face. “No,” he said, shaking his head. And I could see then that, somehow and probably against his will, he’d felt some sort of affection for Parizad, a feeling that had never extended to me.

  I almost reached out to comfort him, seeking a father’s reassuring embrace—even if Oxyartes was a miserable excuse for a father—and wondering what it would feel like to feel his arms around me.

  The fantasy didn’t last long.

  “Give me those bracelets.” His gaze lingered on the golden lynx bracelets and I could well imagine him wiping the drool away with the back of his sleeve.

  “No.” I clutched them protectively. The courtyard had emptied as everyone followed Bessus, leaving me to fend for myself against my spider of a father.

  “You still belong to me without Bessus’ wedding girdle around your waist. And you will obey me when I tell you to hand over your pretty bangles.”

  “So you can melt them down?” I sneered. “Or sell them in the market? Have your foundries not proved as valuable as you’d hoped or have you already squandered all their earnings?”

  My father stared at me. “You may spread your legs for the satrap—”

  “King of Kings,” I corrected him. “May you well remember it.”

  “But you’re still just my mealymouthed daughter,” he said, pointing a grubby finger in my face. “And you’ll obey me or face Mithra’s justice.”

  “I will not.”

  I flinched when his open palm hurled toward my face, then screamed at the unexpected agony in my ear. My hand came away bloodied when I touched the fire in my earlobe, but gold glinted in my father’s hand.

  My dove earring.

  “You filthy, vile whoreson,” I started, but recoiled when he lunged toward me again.

  “You’re a fast learner, Roxana,” he said, grinning to reveal sharp teeth as he tucked the earring into the red kamarband at his waist. “I taught you well, perhaps too well. This little bauble only begins to cover the loss of my investment in you.”

  “I’m not an investment!” I screamed, still clutching my ear. “I’m your daughter!”

  “You still believe that?” my father scoffed, then spat at my feet, the glob of yellow spittle landing on my hem and quivering atop one of my golden bees. “You’re no seed of mine.”

  “What?”

  He grinned, as if he reveled in uttering the words. “Your whore of a mother was born with a barrage of nursemaids to carry away her shit buckets and a pretty betrothal to some pampered noble’s son, but she had fleas for brains and spread her luscious white thighs for some stableboy. No one wanted the soiled dove once her belly began to swell, that is, until her desperate father brokered an agreement that I take the empty-headed idiot off his hands along with her weight in gold. He got the better end of the deal, though, for she shat out you and your brother and then turned up her toes.”

  I sympathized with my mother, for any woman would have been tempted to die at the thought of Oxyartes of Balkh as her husband for the rest of her days.

  I looked at him, really looked at the man I’d always thought to be my father. “There must have been any number of sewers you might have dropped us down, plenty of midden heaps you might have abandoned us on.”

  “I thought you might prove useful once you were grown.” He leered again. “But even your mother’s family knew you for the worthless bastard you are. Your brother might have been something, but you’ve repaid my generosity with treachery and deceit.”

  I stared at him, then burst into laughter, the first time I’d laughed since abandoning my brother. Parizad would have whooped with glee to know we hadn’t been sired by the rotten seed of Oxyartes of Balkh.

  “You beat and whipped us, treated us worse than rabid dogs. You might have been father to the Queen of Queens one day,” I said. “But you’re dead to me now. I hope you die alone, miserable and neglected.”

  He moved as if to rip the other earring from my ear, but I raised my voice. “Guards!” I called, sidestepping Oxyartes of Balkh. I tilted my chin like the Queen of Queens as my men snapped into place around me, forming a protective barrier and forcing the spider to let me pass unscathed.

  The man who was no longer my father gave me one last festering smile. “Misery and neglect are dreams I share for you, Roxana.”

  I stormed from the courtyard with my ear still streaming blood. And I vowed in that moment that from this day forward, I needed no one except myself.

  • • •

  Bessus used me hard that night, bending me over a bed of silks and furs to pound into me until tears squeezed from my eyes and I feared he would tear me in two. Afterward, I wrapped a priceless leopard fur around me with trembling hands, breathing in the scent of animal musk.

  Pain overwhelmed pain. . . .

  “I’m going to miss these little interludes of ours,” Bessus said, scratching the mat of hair on his belly as he sat in a chair near the fire, his shaft shrunken and glistening with the clear scrum of his seed.

  “Miss them?” I asked, doing my best to sweeten my voice as I knelt before him and laid my head in his lap. He often liked to play with my hair and he did so now, threading his fingers through the dark strands. “But I’m not going anywhere.”

  “You’re going to the fortress at Sogdian Rock,” he said. I jerked away, yanking my hair from his hand.

  “What?”

  “My third wife has family nearby and is already there for safekeeping until I’ve dealt with Alexander.” Bessus spread his naked legs and slouched farther in the chair. “Your father suggested that I send you as well.”

  I opened my mouth to inform him that Oxyartes of Balkh was not my father, but promptly snapped it shut. Oxyartes was the poorest of nobles and a worthless man to claim as a sire, but the other option was to admit that my true father had been a callus-handed and manure-footed stableboy. Bessus’ wives were all his cousins with illustrious pedigrees stretching back to at least King Xerxes. A stableboy’s misbegotten bastard could never be Queen of Queens.

  I would remain the daughter of Oxyartes of Balkh, even if it threatened to kill me.

  And yet, I wondered what he stood to gain from sending me to the ends of the empire.

  I crossed my arms beneath my breasts. “I refuse to go.”

  One corner of Bessus’ lips tilted in a half smile and he placed a finger on my lips. “I’ve always admired your tenacity, Roxana, but you have no say in the matter. Truth be told, I’ve become attached to you and would be quite inconvenienced if anything were to happen to you.”

  I held perfectly still, stunned by his announcement. I harbored no tender feelings for Bessus, but it occurred to me then that there were two sides to the king before me, that beneath the conniving powermonger who had left my brother to die was also the man who had seen fit to relieve me from my father’s house after he’d discovered my whipping and now claimed to care for me. “You leave in the morning,” Bessus continued, “but the eunuch Bagoas shall accompany you. No man shall touch you until I return to claim you.”

  “And you will reclaim me?”

  “Of course.” He stood and pulled me toward him, one fat finger tracing the top of the leopard fur along my breast, his finger darting beneath to jab my nipple. “Now let’s see that beautiful body of yours o
ne last time before you leave.”

  I let him push the fur away, his member stiffening once again from within its tangled nest of dark hair, but my mind had already flown to Sogdian Rock.

  The fortress was a veritable city reputedly balanced on sheer rock three miles in the air, impenetrable to all who tried to scale its walls. The marauding Greeks would never take the mountain citadel, and I’d have to fight Bessus’ third wife for the queen’s diadem.

  Oxyartes had made his move. He might have won this battle, but somehow, I would win the war.

  • • •

  I’d have rather stayed in a cavern filled with snarling cave bears than in Sogdian Rock.

  We were removed on our desolate mountaintop in the sky, isolated from all things save the ever-howling wind that threatened to drive us all mad. Few dared make the ascent up the narrow trail to the citadel’s single set of iron gates, so high that the clouds obscured the world below. I’d have been richer than a queen if I had a copper coin for every perfumed refugee who whimpered that she would never leave this place alive. The only contact with the outside world was the occasional far-off groan of a wagon at the base of the cliffs, bearing another satrap’s wife or the rare letter from some noble to his wife or children, its news of the campaign against Alexander shared aloud by a eunuch, as none of us women or even the soldiers knew how to read.

  Bessus never wrote. As the days turned to weeks and the weeks to months, I no longer knew what I was. I was fifteen, no maiden but no wife, neither daughter nor mother, only the discarded and neglected mistress of the King of Kings.

  “The daughter of Oxyartes,” Bessus’ fat wife had announced when I’d arrived. Her hair was the stark black that came from countless rinsings of amla and black walnut hulls and her cheeks were jowly as that of a gray-snouted bitch. I’d prepared for the meeting at least a hundred times in my head, how I’d look down my nose at her and throw my hair over my shoulder, letting her jealousy take full root as she saw for herself my pert breasts and trim waist, the sheen of my glorious hair and my plump lips. Instead, the rain had lashed my face so I squinted from the rivulets of water running from my bedraggled hair, and I could hardly straighten from the stitch in my side from the climb up the cliff, leaning on Bagoas like a cane as I finally hobbled inside the torchlit citadel. “I’d expected my husband to have better taste,” she had said, “but it appears he’ll rut with anything that moves these days. This one still has the stench of a brothel about her.”

  Before I could answer, she turned and walked away, leaving her attendants to follow like a gaggle of dumb goslings after a waddling goose while I sputtered with rage.

  “Ignore her,” Bagoas murmured. My pretty eunuch removed a musty-smelling shawl from my lone chest and wrapped it around my shivering shoulders. “The gift of your beauty sets you apart. Men may love you for it, but other women never will.”

  I glared after them but said nothing, for Bagoas was right. Let them hate me, for I’d ensure that they rotted away here on this godforsaken rock when I was the Queen of Queens.

  Still, had Bessus’ wife not been such a hateful bitch, we might have lived in a silent truce, ignoring each other’s existence. Instead, she exerted her influence to ensure that none of the other women would speak to me save to call me jade or whore, Astarte’s daughter, or a she-wolf. The soldiers were simple creatures deprived of physical relief for too long and at first, believing I was for sale, they pulled me into darkened doorways for a quick grope and asked how much I charged for a tumble. They sang a different song when Bagoas presented them with an imperial seal from Bessus, claiming me as his own and ordering that I be housed with all the comforts the fortress had to offer.

  Meager comforts they were, what with the frigid drafts that blew between the door cracks and meals of gray sludge that had once been barley and dried meat, probably horse.

  If Bessus lost on the battlefield . . .

  He couldn’t lose.

  We had news that Alexander was on the move. I prayed for someone to stab, spear, or behead him so Bessus would reclaim me and I could once again travel in my holly-wood palanquin and drape myself in rippling silks and shimmering gold. Here I had only Bagoas for companionship and I spent the endless days allowing him to brush my long hair and massage almond oil into my hands.

  “Your beauty is wasted on this godforsaken rock,” he said with a sigh one afternoon as he coiled a plait around my head. The length and the thickness of my hair were too much for me to manage alone, so Bagoas sewed my hair into place each morning. All the love and adoration I’d showered on Parizad I now gave to my secondhand eunuch, recognizing in him the loneliness I felt every time I thought of my twin. I’d even allowed Bagoas to sleep next to me on my mattress stuffed with musty old hay, the warmth of his back pressed against mine reminding me of Parizad when we were children.

  Bessus had claimed that no man could touch me while I was at Sogdian Rock, but Bagoas was no man, castrated in his youth so his voice trilled as high as a girl’s, while his face remained as smooth as an infant’s. And while Bagoas could never truly be my lover, one night his warm hands caressed first the small of my back and then my breasts, my thighs and then the damp cleft between my legs, making me feel an exquisite, trembling pleasure I’d never known existed.

  And I wanted that pleasure. I ached for it.

  I could well understand why Darius had kept Bagoas as a pillow slave, as he’d teased me until my back arched and I wrapped my legs around him, yearning for him to fill me as he never truly could and gasping when his fingers slipped inside me instead. It was he who taught me how to caress the insides of a man’s thighs and make him moan with pleasure, how to trail my tongue along his earlobe in a way that sent him shuddering.

  My beauty was like ambrosia, so sweet a nectar that not even a eunuch could avoid its heady allure.

  “If Bessus doesn’t hurry and win this fight, I might well die of boredom,” I said to Bagoas as he finished sewing the last of my braids into place with his nimble fingers. “The soldiers are growing bolder; the ones who think Bessus will lose ogle me like a naked slave on the auction block.”

  “The men here are common soldiers who spit and defecate like animals,” Bagoas said with a sniff. “We aren’t meant for such beasts.”

  I knew that one soldier in particular—a man set to guarding Bessus’ queen—had treated Bagoas worse than a beast, bending him over and using him as a woman while his friends cheered him on. I’d bullied the story from Bagoas after he limped to my dark room with his normally pristine robe askew. If it had been any other soldier, I might have stormed out and threatened retribution when Bessus came to reclaim me, but my threats would be worthless against Bessus’ wife. Instead, I’d lain with Bagoas in the dark that night and sang to him as Parizad had sometimes done to comfort me, but after that, Bagoas had lost what little of his smile he still possessed.

  “Save your beauty for Bessus,” he said. “At least for now.”

  “And if Bessus loses?”

  Bagoas tilted my chin so he could kiss my forehead. “Pray that he doesn’t. It won’t be long either way.” He pinned my veil so that the ebony of my hairline showed in perfect contrast to the orange silk. “There’s word that Alexander has swung north into Bactria, ostensibly chasing Bessus. He set fire to his wagons of spoils in order to travel faster and ordered his men to cast off all their loot, although he was benevolent enough to allow them to keep their Persian concubines. Satibarzanes of Aria rebelled, but Alexander used naphtha to set aflame the wooded hill where the Persians camped, burning the soldiers alive before marching onto Satibarzanes’ capital of Artacoana, slaughtering and enslaving the town. Of course, the new town built on its remains will be called Alexandria Ariana.”

  I listened with only half an ear, for Bagoas often chattered and gossiped about the war like a girl twittering about a well-muscled stableboy. I knew nothing of Alexander’s movemen
ts, nor did I care. Instead, I plaited three scarlet ribbons together to add as a trim along the neckline of my robe.

  And then a wail of grieving rent the air like an eagle’s talons.

  The hair on my arms stood on end and a tremor of foreboding trailed down my spine, but I shook off my unease. Messengers often delivered unwelcome news of some noble’s death in combat.

  But this time countless mouths picked up the mourning wail so that it grew and echoed throughout the stone citadel until I could scarcely hear my own thoughts. I dropped the ribbons, but Bagoas was already at the door. “I’ll see what happened,” he said, slamming it before I could argue.

  If Alexander was dead, it would mean that Bessus would soon reclaim me. But no one here at Sogdian Rock would caterwaul in such a manner for the Macedonian lion. If Bessus was dead—

  I’d have better luck hurtling myself from the ramparts than facing the soldiers outside.

  Bagoas returned before I imagined too many versions of half-starved Persians pushing me into corners. He slammed the door behind him and my heart plummeted when he slid the feeble lock into place.

  “Which brave Persian has fallen in battle this time?” I asked him, feigning cheerfulness as I picked up the scarlet ribbons with trembling hands. “He must have been well loved to cause such a racket.”

  “Bessus has been captured,” Bagoas said evenly. “He is being put on trial for his crimes against Darius.”

  “What? How can the King of Kings be put on trial?”

  “His own men abandoned him as Alexander approached. They left him naked and bound to a wooden collar on the side of the road for the Macedonians to find.”

  “Alexander will kill him,” I said with grim awareness.

  Bagoas nodded slowly, as if he was afraid that admitting the truth might somehow cause me to shatter. “He may have already done so.”

  The scream built at the back of my throat and exploded like an eagle’s shriek. My hairpins went flying and I ripped my perfectly coiled braids loose from Bagoas’ careful stitches, falling to my knees and beating the cold flagstones with my ineffectual fists. I raged and sobbed for all I had lost, for with Bessus would die my dream of being queen, of being anyone other than the bastard daughter of no one knew whom, abandoned by my dead brother and unwanted even by hunchbacked Oxyartes of Balkh.