The Conqueror's Wife

by Stephanie Thornton

  “I would never rename a fallen city after my horse,” Alexander said, rubbing a hand over the golden stubble on his cheeks. For the first time I noticed wisps of lines at his eyes, as if the three fair-haired Horae of time had waved their hands before his face and left their imprint there.

  “You wouldn’t?” Roxana said. “But Hephaestion said—”

  “I am building an entirely new city here, on the banks of the Hydaspes, and naming it after my horse,” he finished.

  “Bucephalia shall indeed be a lovely city,” I said. I needed an infusion of willow bark to calm the pounding in my skull; each blow was like the thundering of Roxana’s shrill voice. And Bucephalia did have a nicer ring to it than Ox-Headia.

  Alexander swept past his wife, the conversation at an end. I stood and picked up my helmet, sniffing it and wincing at the stench of wine fumes. I shook the wine dregs from its interior, remembering that it had worked passably as a cup after I lost my golden kylix last night. I’d have to check Ptolemy’s tent; the man was notorious for making off with things that didn’t belong to him.

  Roxana stared openmouthed as Alexander poured an offering from the last krater onto the remnants of Bucephalus’ pyra, the horse’s white skull and long bones covered in ashes and a few flies, which Alexander kicked with his boot. To her credit, Roxana waited until he’d stumbled out of earshot before she spun on me.

  “This is your fault,” she said, her lovely eyes narrowed into unattractive slits. “You entice him to drink and carouse when he should be spending his nights in my pavilion.”

  “My deepest apologies,” I said, feigning a yawn. “Although perhaps I might offer you some advice regarding Alexander?”

  “And what is that?”

  “You’ve a pretty face, Roxana—more than pretty, actually—but you shriek like a crow and fill our ears with your complaints. Perhaps you should cease your squawking until your belly swells with Alexander’s heir.”

  Her hands balled into fists and she stepped so close that I almost choked on her spikenard perfume. “Perhaps I’d have more of a chance to conceive if Alexander wasn’t always sinking his sword into you and Bagoas!” She actually stomped her foot like an angry child. “I’m the Queen of Queens, yet I’m treated with less respect than a horse!”

  I shrugged. “Perhaps if you proved yourself more useful than a horse, Alexander might name a city after you as well. Last night he claimed he plans to name his next after his favorite female.”

  “Really? When?”

  It was far too easy to goad Roxana. But then, I’d met only one woman whose tongue and wit matched my own, and she was probably harping at some unfortunate soul in Susa’s grand palace.

  “After we cross the Ganges,” I said, throwing the words over my shoulder as I tossed my helmet in the air, my head suddenly clearer after exchanging insults with Roxana. “He plans to name it Peritas, after his favorite hunting bitch.”

  • • •

  The gods had never denied Alexander anything: the whole of Persia delivered to him on a golden platter, Darius conveniently killed by his own cousin, and the wealth of the world counted and stacked in tidy piles awaiting his approval. The tapestry of his life had been woven with thread of gold, but the Fates began tugging at it after Bucephalus died, and not even Alexander could avert the touch of Hades. And then things truly began to unravel.

  The Ganges was a long, sluggish snake of a river, the sun glinting off its green waters like scales, and our men muttered among themselves that the river was more than a hundred fathoms deep. Our scouts returned with reports that more than eighty thousand Indian soldiers and six thousand war elephants waited on the other side to slaughter us. It was there that the generals suggested we turn back, retreat to Persia and then to Greece, leaving the remainder of India untouched.

  I expected Alexander to give a rousing speech or ford the river himself as he’d done at the Hydaspes, but instead his face merely turned black with rage and he stormed into his tent.

  We waited for him to emerge laden with books or maps or battle plans to persuade them of their folly, but heard instead the crash of something heavy and surely expensive. The generals cast shocked looks in the direction of Alexander’s gold-columned tent. The flap flicked open, but it was pretty Bagoas who emerged, his wide eyes darting behind him as his feet kicked up puffs of dust. A fresh laceration on his shoulder marred his smooth skin and his elegant hands shook.

  “The King of Kings is not to be disturbed,” he said to me. I almost pitied the eunuch then—more than I already did for his lost shaft and cods—for he was unaccustomed to the squalls of Alexander’s temper and apparently unwilling to fight back.

  “Return to your men,” I commanded the generals. “Tell them that Alexander is taking their comments under advisement, but that they must prepare to ford the river come dawn.”

  The generals hesitated as if they might protest, but then filed past, still casting furtive glances at Alexander’s tent. “Alexander has won us many battles,” the captain of the shield bearers said to me, his tone bordering on reverence at odds with his tattered Macedonian chiton. “Yet he is a man, not a god. And Tyche is a fickle goddess; a man can only do so much before the blind Mistress of Fortune deserts him.”

  “Tyche is indeed a fickle bitch.” I thumped the captain firmly on the back. “I’ll speak to Alexander.”

  I sent Bagoas for wine and found Alexander cross-legged on the ground of his tent, his chest heaving as he clenched and unclenched his fists. He didn’t even look up at me before roaring like a wronged lion. “Get out!”

  “Is this the Alexander whom the entire world looks to?” I asked. “Throwing a tantrum on the floor like a child?”

  “You forget yourself,” he growled. “I haven’t given you leave to speak so freely.”

  “And you’ve forgotten whom you’re speaking to,” I said. I was grateful that the night we’d spent together after Bucephalus’ death had worn away the thorns between us so I could say my mind to Alexander again. “I’m Hephaestion. I’ve earned the right to speak to you however I wish, and you well know it.”

  I tossed myself into a leather-slung chair, knocking the wax seal off a nearby amphora of wine and drinking my fill before passing the container to him, breathing a sigh of relief when he took it instead of flinging it across the room.

  He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Those men outside and the worthless maggots that follow them have betrayed me with their refusal to march further into India. I’ll have them all killed if they won’t obey me.”

  “Those men have won you many crowns and still more titles.” I leaned down and swiped the amphora from him. “And I suggest you don’t call them maggots in their hearing.”

  “I don’t care if they hear,” he said, jumping to his feet and beginning to pace. “They ask me to retreat, but doing so would mean admitting defeat at the mere threat of being outnumbered.”

  “Severely outnumbered,” I reminded him, but he didn’t hear. “And if I recall, you recently received a letter from Thessalonike. This could be the perfect opportunity to return home in glory, unvanquished, and settle the squabble between Antipater and your mother.”

  “Their feud is a petty grievance, scarcely worth my notice. I will never be vanquished,” he muttered. “Not here. Not ever. Like Achilles, I shall not leave this ground.”

  I groaned inwardly. I’d survived many of Alexander’s recitations of The Song of Ilium and still more of his boasts that he would outdo even Achilles in this life.

  “I will not leave,” he said. “Not until they stand outside my tent and beg me to ford the Ganges, to march with them into the heart of India. Let them rot on their way back to Macedon.”

  “Fine,” I said, for there was no use arguing with him now. Not for the first time and especially after seeing so many crowns placed upon his head, I wondered if Alexander carried to
o much now, if he had in fact become as capricious as the gods he sought to emulate. “Remain in your tent to pout, and then see if they spin epic tales about your leadership and acts of bravery.”

  “They cannot doubt me,” Alexander said so softly that I had to turn to hear. “They must go where I command, Hephaestion.”

  I threw my hands up. “They do. But they’ve grown weary after ten years of fighting in your name. They aren’t gods like you, merely men who miss their homes and families.”

  He walked to me, then laid his hands on my shoulders and pressed his forehead to mine. “Then they must remember that I am their family, just as you are mine. I will go forward into India, or I will stay here and perish on the banks of the Ganges. The choice is theirs.”

  In the end, the generals agreed to cross the Ganges, but I’d known even before then what their decision would be. For what man would dare claim that he turned his back on Alexander?

  • • •

  “Over the top!” Alexander screamed, and we rushed forward in a sea of metal armor and round shields. Despite their renown as the fiercest fighters in the whole of India, the Mallian archers had fallen back and our scaling ladders clattered against their walls like the long legs of some carnivorous insect. Alexander sheathed his sword, his blazing sun shield still strapped to his forearm, and leapt onto the first ladder before practically running up the rungs. I followed, a dagger clamped tight in my mouth as I scrambled to keep up with him.

  “They’ll sing about this for ages!” Alexander called down to me, a maniacal grin splitting his sun-beaten face. The madman was enjoying this.

  The walls were the height of perhaps seven or eight men, and I’d have commanded the main gate broken down before I’d ordered scaling ladders. More men clambered behind us, each adding his own weight to the mango-wood ladder—hastily constructed after we’d pillaged the Mallian orchards—and making it tremble and groan. Arrows rained down at us as more Indian archers from above took aim. A soldier behind me screamed and the ladder wobbled as if released of a man-sized weight, but I dared not look down unless I wanted to join him.

  Above me, Alexander leapt over the ramparts and I followed just as there came a terrible cracking sound below. Angry brown faces shouted down at us and arrows whizzed past so close I could feel them, but I turned to see the ladder bow and then splinter at its midline, shedding screaming men as its middle smashed and then scraped down the stone walls like some giant’s claw struggling for purchase. Armor and swords flashed in the melee before yellow dust enveloped them all. The soldier directly behind me, an old Macedonian veteran named Peucestes, had just made it to the top rung, but now he grasped at stones, his torso and legs dangling over the edge of the wall.

  I hauled him over, then turned, dreading the scene I knew would be worse than what I’d just witnessed.

  We three were alone.

  Well, alone save for the hundreds of armed Mallians facing us.

  And Alexander, fool that he was, lunged into their midst with a bloodcurdling yell.

  I’ll never know what the Mallians thought—whether they glimpsed a god fallen to earth in a blinding flash of silver or whether they realized that their walls would soon be overrun with snarling Greeks wielding swords against their wooden arrows. Whatever it was, the Mallians hesitated.

  But only for a moment.

  Then they fell upon us, screaming like a flock of a thousand eagles. And we fought.

  This was no battle, only a feint from death as we tried to hide from their arrows behind our shields. Deep within their mass of swords, a swarthy Mallian a head taller than the others drew his bowstring.

  And aimed his arrow at Alexander.

  The world slowed even as I slashed with my sword and smashed the skull of a shrieking Mallian with my shield. But that lone Mallian arrow flew forward just as Alexander opened his shield arm to strike another man with his blade.

  The arrow pierced cleanly through his unprotected cuirass, just as Pausanius’ dagger had done to Philip more than a decade ago. Alexander’s eyes bulged, one knee bending so he came to the ground as if bowing before the shrine of some foreign god.

  Or the altar of Hades.

  Then the Mallian archer ran forward, his scimitar drawn over his head to steal Alexander’s life.

  I’d be damned to the farthest depths of Tartarus if I’d let him succeed.

  Peucestes too had seen and together we pushed forward, striking the Mallian so hard that the blow into bone and flesh reverberated up my sword arm.

  But from the melee and dust to our left lunged another snarling Mallian, this one wielding a wooden club. And this time, there was nothing we could do to stop him.

  That club came down on the back of Alexander’s neck with a sickening thud and I reached out in vain to clutch his chlamys and keep him from careening over the wall’s edge into Hades’ waiting arms. The stones caught him just as our men streamed over the rampart from a new ladder.

  “Surround him!” I screamed, and the blessed Macedonians moved to form a protective barrier around their wounded king. “Lift him and cover us!” I commanded, for now that the ladders were in place, we would quickly outnumber the Mallians. Shield bearers and Companions spread their gleaming round shields around us as we carried Alexander from the fray.

  If Alexander died, I’d see every last Mallian put to the sword, their town torched and their fields salted.

  Alexander would not die. He could not die.

  • • •

  The wooden shaft of the Mallian arrow had to be sawed off, so embedded was it in the boiled leather of Alexander’s cuirass and his pale flesh that no amount of cajoling by the surgeons could loosen it. All the while, Alexander lay insensate on the cot, his face the shade of a long-dead corpse. Bagoas had entered once, but I’d sent him away, unwilling to share what might be Alexander’s last moments with anyone else.

  It wasn’t until the surgeons in their bloodstained chitons unstrapped Alexander’s leather breastplate and sought to remove the arrowhead from his ribs that he roused with an animal groan of pain that made his eyes flutter. His pupils were dilated in agony, obscuring the blue irises so that both of his eyes matched for the first time I’d ever seen.

  I willed him to speak, to rage against the Mallians, but he only gurgled and gasped in pain as the butchers dug into his wound with their iron tools, his hands like fetters around my wrists. The arrowhead was three fingers thick and nearly four long, and it took all my willpower not to bash the physicians’ heads together as they debated how best to remove the cursed thing.

  Worthless men masquerading as Asclepius’ disciples. I threatened to have them all impaled on sharpened stakes if they didn’t remove the rest of the arrow. That seemed to get them moving instead of bickering.

  Midway through a procedure that involved opening the wound with scalpels and prying the shaft loose with a long-necked spoon, Roxana arrived. She was dressed in orange silk, her dark hair piled high on her head and a wasp pendant secured between the mounds of her breasts, creating a pull between the silk there that I might have found alluring had I not been drenched in Alexander’s blood. She took one look at Alexander stretched out on the table and swayed on her feet. “By the holy flame of Ahura Mazda,” she said. “Will he live?”

  The physicians ignored her as they poked and prodded at the hole in Alexander’s barely rising chest. “He will if I have any say in the matter,” I said.

  “You,” she said, as if she hadn’t noticed my presence before. “You were with him when he was injured?”

  “I helped kill the bastard who thought his ribs could make good use of this adornment, yes,” I said. “And my sword took a liking to the man who clubbed him over the head.”

  If I’d expected any gratitude, it was only because I’d forgotten to whom I spoke.

  “You imbecile,” she screeched. “It’s your responsibilit
y to protect Alexander! Instead, you may as well have gored him and offered him to Ahriman yourself!”

  I had her arm twisted behind her back before she could blink, smearing her pristine silks with Alexander’s blood. “You will return to your tent until Alexander summons you,” I growled.

  “And if he doesn’t recover to summon me?”

  “Then you’ll stay there and rot.”

  She didn’t flinch as I shoved her away. I waited only until she’d retreated in a swirl of orange to clasp Alexander’s hand, even as the surgeons gently eased the head of the arrow and the remainder of its shaft from his torso.

  “Give it to me,” I said, reaching out my free hand for the ruined weapon.

  They looked at me as if my mind was garbled, which perhaps it was, but turned over the arrow. I watched in silence as they sewed Alexander’s wound with tight stitches of white silk, like spiders weaving a macabre web in human flesh.

  “You may wish to avert your eyes,” one said, and I saw then that he held a knife over the dancing flame of an oil lamp.

  But I forced myself to watch as he pressed the heated blade to the wound, cauterizing it with a hiss of steam so painful that Alexander roused himself to consciousness long enough to scream before falling into blessed oblivion once again.

  Then the surgeons’ deft hands packed the injury with a honey poultice even as they applied a bloody chunk of meat onto his swollen neck.

  “From a freshly butchered ox,” one of the surgeons assured me. “To draw out the ill humors.”

  “Will he survive?” I asked, echoing Roxana’s earlier question.

  The surgeon finished wrapping the meat around Alexander’s neck. “We should all pray to the twelve gods that the wound in his ribs doesn’t turn rancid.” He gave me a neat bow. “Is there anything else you require, chiliarch?”

  I was Alexander’s second-in-command. If he died, I would become the lone commander of his massive armies. Yet I had no taste left for conquering and would trade every soldier beyond the infirmary’s goatskin walls to keep Alexander alive. I shook my head and the surgeons departed, leaving the King of Kings, the conqueror of the world, on a stained military cot, balanced precariously between life and death.