The Conqueror's Wife

by Stephanie Thornton

  “Stateira,” I said, my nails biting into my palms. “I came to offer my apologies.”

  Her flawless mask of calm slipped a fraction. “Your apologies?”

  “It pained me to no end yesterday to watch a woman of your stature herded among the cattle to be married. Surely you deserved a wedding of your own, such as Alexander afforded me.”

  Stateira smiled, although the gesture didn’t reach her eyes. “Please don’t worry yourself on account of me.”

  “My dear,” I said, patting her hand. “As Alexander’s first wife, it’s my responsibility to worry.”

  She didn’t answer as Bagoas served us cups of watered wine in strange silver vessels, carved to resemble the heads of hunting dogs.

  “I presume that you are an animal lover,” I said, taking a sip from the top of the beast’s head. Drab little cups in terrible taste; I’d have expected more from the daughter of Persia’s king.

  “My father kept many dogs to assist with his lion hunts,” she said. “The cups belonged to him.”

  “And now he is dead as well,” I said, relishing the flash of shock in her eyes. Now I knew that her sun shield could be cracked if struck at the right angle.

  I might have taught her a trick or two about hardening her heart, but I would be otherwise engaged in the coming days, ensuring that her usefulness to Alexander reached its speedy conclusion. He had his marriages that bound him to Persia’s royalty, but they were the past.

  I would be his future.

  I flicked my hair behind my shoulder, silently celebrating the fact that the copper highlights of my long tresses far outshone hers. “One of the first things I learned when I married Alexander is that a camp of men is a lonely place for a woman. It is my most ardent wish that we be friends.”

  She swallowed, hard, and offered me a terse smile. “I’d like that very much.”

  We sat in silence for a moment, sipping our wine and glancing at the stark white walls of her pavilion. Voices approached from outside and I stood. “This has been a lovely visit,” I said, setting down the distasteful dog cup. “And I look forward to many more pleasant interludes in the days to come.”

  The darling’s nose actually wrinkled, but she caught herself as she rose carefully to her feet. “As do I,” she said, although her tone claimed quite the opposite.

  The tent flap opened and, unannounced, in barged Darius’ second daughter. I took a step back in disgust, for the addled half-wit was dressed like a farmer’s wife in a plain silk robe with her dark hair loose around her face. It was no wonder that King Darius had fled the battlefield not once but twice, and then allowed himself to be stabbed to death. This family of his was ill prepared for anything save the basest of manual labor.

  I paused, waiting for Drypetis to sweep to her knees and kiss her fingers in the proskynesis of an utter inferior, but she hesitated only long enough to press a kiss to my cheek. I recoiled before she could touch the other side.

  “Dearest Roxana,” she said. “You’re looking well this afternoon. Will you stay and visit with my sister and me?”

  “Sadly, no,” I said, dabbing my cheek with the hem of my sleeve. “I have much to do to prepare myself for this evening. Alexander will surely visit me as he does almost every night.”

  It was a bit of a lie, but they needn’t know that.

  “Marvelous,” Drypetis said, and then the little beast dared to pat my arm. “We all pray that you’ll soon conceive.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “Of course you know that the empire worries that your womb is too parched to quicken.”

  “Drypetis!” her sister exclaimed, but neither of us paid her any attention.

  I hadn’t expected the worthless second daughter of Darius to challenge me, but my hackles rose at the provocation, like those of the snarling dogs I’d sometimes watched Oxyartes bet our bread money upon.

  “You just can’t stand it, can you?” I snarled. “It galls your illustrious family to no end that Alexander chose me. That he discarded you here in Susa and married me.”

  “A situation he rectified with his weddings yesterday.”

  I’d have slapped her then, or worse, but Bagoas suddenly stepped between us. “It’s time for you to go,” he said to me.

  I ignored him. “The gods shall bless my womb when the time is right,” I growled over his shoulder at Drypetis. “And while Hephaestion surely did his duty and plowed your dreary field last night, your snatch will shrivel and fill with cobwebs soon enough.”

  “And thus, the Bitch of Balkh’s true colors are revealed,” Drypetis said, folding her arms and looking down her bent nose at me so I felt suddenly small and inconsequential. I hated these two haughty Persian bitches then, for making me feel every bit like the filth under their feet. I was the one who had to secure my place at Alexander’s side lest I be cast out again, whereas they’d been born and would die pampered princesses. “In case you came here breathing lies and professing friendship for my sister, now we all know where we stand.” She tsked under her breath. “I spoke to Parysatis already. She may be disfigured, Roxana, but she’s not an idiot. Did you really think she’d follow through with all the depravities you suggested, just to capture Alexander’s attention? You’ll leave our cousin alone, just as you’ll leave us alone.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” My voice rose slightly, for perhaps I had suggested Parysatis act out a few of the tricks I’d picked up as the Whore of Sogdian Rock, perversions I knew would repulse even Alexander. How was I to know the little twit would see through my ruse? “My visits today were done with goodwill,” I said, gaining control of myself, “which I see is not reciprocated. I shall not trouble myself in that manner again.”

  And with that, I swept from Stateira’s pavilion, thankful to see Parizad skulking outside Hephaestion’s tent. A yellow mongrel dog was tied outside and growled a threat, but I grabbed my brother by the forearm and dragged him to my tent.

  “Begin tonight,” I commanded as we entered its dark interior, the comforting scent of spikenard perfume soothing my ragged breathing. I dabbed more on my neck from an alabaster elephant bottle with shaking hands. “One at a time—Stateira first. Then we shall deal with the rest of them.”

  “You sound like our father.”

  There was a crack like a whip as my palm slapped the side of his face. He reared back. “What’s wrong with you?” he howled, clutching his face like an injured child.

  “Don’t ever compare me to Oxyartes of Balkh. I do this for us. We do this for each other.”

  He rubbed his cheek and lifted gleaming eyes to mine. “Hephaestion rebuffed me, Roxana,” he said, his lower lip trembling. “I need him.”

  Piss and shit, but I wanted to slap him again.

  “Don’t snivel,” I said, instead caressing his smooth cheek, which was already flushing with the outline of my hand. My beautiful brother, like a mirror into my own soul. “It doesn’t become you. Your lust for Alexander’s plaything has made you weak.”

  “But I love him.”

  I scoffed at that, for how could my brother love that catamite? Of all the people on earth, Parizad and I had only ever loved each other and I refused to share him with Hephaestion of Macedon any longer.

  Everyone I might have ever loved—my mother and father, Bagoas, and now Alexander—had betrayed me. I’d forgiven Parizad for abandoning me in the desert with Darius, but I’d never let him leave me again.

  He was all I had left.

  I embraced him, and kissed the angry handprint on his cheek. “You shall soon have Hephaestion on his knees, weak with gratitude for your love.”

  “You swear it?”

  “On my very breath.”

  He pulled back. “And if we’re caught?”

  “We won’t be,” I said. “Everything shall be as we will it.”

  In the end, only one of Alexander’s queens
would remain at his side.

  Me.

  CHAPTER 22

  Susa, Persia

  Drypetis

  We remained in Susa for five weeks after the weddings and then embarked on the tedious procession toward Ecbatana, a journey that would take many months due to the sweltering summer heat and the impressive baggage train. Hephaestion and I learned to further appreciate each other’s tastes both in and out of bed, and we stayed up long into the night arguing the merits of Greek writers, often reading to each other while naked over glasses of chilled wine and sweetmeats. I’d had plenty of practice with Greek literature after Stateira’s moonings over Plato’s droll treatises—dry enough to put even a dead man to sleep—but Hephaestion introduced me to the heady verses of Anacreon and especially Sappho.

  Now my heart, paining my bosom,

  Pants with desire as a maenad

  Mad for the orgiac revel.

  Now under my skin run subtle

  Arrows of flame, and my body

  Quivers with surge of emotion.

  Those particular verses he’d murmured line by line while dropping kisses along my neck. I didn’t care to think of what emotion I felt toward Hephaestion now, for it was easier to insult him than to ponder how my feelings were transforming. He did make me pant and quiver for him each night, and many mornings too, which was certainly something.

  My evenings might have been spent enjoying Hephaestion’s tutelage in bed-sport, but I soon spent my days in the dark interior of Stateira’s traveling cart, as I tended to my sister and her mysterious new malady.

  Stateira grew listless and her stomach gave her trouble several days after our departure from Susa, a fact that the camp greeted with secret smiles and conspiratorial whispers, believing that Alexander had so quickly fathered a child on her. Even he swaggered about like a man who had sired twenty boys in so many years.

  And then Stateira’s moon bloods came.

  Still, her stomach remained sour and she struggled to keep down even ox broth. Then, after a few days, she would recover, and her cheeks would blossom with their rosy glow, only to succumb to the illness again.

  “I wish our grandmother were here,” I said one night as I spooned watery barley ptisan into Stateira’s mouth. She swallowed obediently, no mean feat, as the gray sludge wasn’t fit for feeding mules. “I hate seeing you suffer like this. If you were a broken chariot axle or winch line . . .”

  “Then you’d already have mended me.” Stateira gave a wan smile as I dabbed the corner of her lips with a clean cloth. “You’re so smart, Drypetis, smarter than I’ll ever be.”

  “Hush,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I may be able to measure angles and mix tar, but I’ve always looked to you for guidance in everything else.”

  She flushed. “Then perhaps you should pretend I’m one of your machines. I weary of this illness.”

  I pursed my lips at her feeble complaint. I’d have been far more useful if my sister had been a splintered battering ram or a goat cart with a broken wheel that I could fix. Our grandmother Sisygambis would have known what to do, but she had remained in Susa, claiming that her old bones were too weary to traipse to the ends of the empire. I’d craned my neck as our wagons left for Babylon, watching through bleary eyes until the speck of our indomitable grandmother disappeared into nothingness, knowing it would likely be the last time I saw her. Now Stateira was left with only me to bathe her forehead with damp linens while moth-eaten physicians consulted one another.

  “Queen Stateira suffers from dyscrasia, an imbalance in the four humors. Her first digestion is inhibited, thus prohibiting the second, third, and fourth digestions,” the senior physician proclaimed that same night. Glaucus was as thin as the snake-entwined staff of Asclepius, the patron god of Greek physicians. “She possesses too much yellow bile, likely a result of the excitement of her marriage and the passion that ensued.”

  Stateira moaned in pain and mortification. Her tent was freshly erected but already smelled of stale sweat and bile despite the slave girl’s having left to empty her befouled pail.

  “The pain in her bowels comes from her overindulgences in hot foods,” the fattest of the physicians added, his three chins wobbling as he spoke. “I recommend withholding food during the paroxysms and introducing a diet of cucumbers, cold chickpeas, and a well-watered ptisan of barley for at least a week once the disease gives way.”

  Another moan from Stateira. I couldn’t blame her, for the idea of barley gruel made my gut churn.

  Alexander delayed our procession several times to better accommodate his Queen of Queens, but it was impossible to halt the journey altogether. Despite Stateira’s stubborn illness and our slow progress, we arrived in Ecbatana during the month Ābān, the time of waters or, according to the old calendar, the season of wolf killing.

  It was there that the illness seemed to spread.

  The city contained seven concentric walls all painted in different vivid hues and into those walls poured three thousand artists, actors, and singers from the greatest cities in Greece. Thus, Alexander plunged the entire army into an array of spectacles, each grown more extravagant than the next. Hephaestion dragged himself from his poetry and I from my schematics so we could be seen at bardic recitals and feats of sportsmanship. One night we returned from a display of Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata, a performance that had made me laugh so many times I lost count as the Greek women—masked actors dressed as women, of course—attempted to strong-arm their men into surrender by withholding sex during the Archidamian war between Sparta and the Athenian Empire.

  “Perhaps something can be learned from Aristophanes’ little satire,” I said on our way back from the theater, smiling to myself as I kicked a rock and watched its trajectory before it hit the city’s third wall, painted the same scarlet as a whore’s lips. Come to think of it, the shade was exactly the same color Roxana had recently taken to wearing.

  From the third wall we still had to pass beneath the blue, orange, silver, and gold battlements in order to reach Ecbatana’s palace and our new chambers. “If all the women of Persia had risen up, we might have stopped Alexander at the Gates of Ishtar. Of course, that would have also meant that the Persian women would have missed out on the joys of the Lioness on the Grater.” I’d been reading Philaenis of Samos and her studies on sexual positions and aphrodisiacs—much to Hephaestion’s delight—and the position mentioned in Lysistrata involved bending forward on all fours like a lioness crouched and ready to spring. I gave Hephaestion a sly smile. “Perhaps we should experience its joys ourselves tonight.”

  I expected him to chuckle or expound the virtues of the position, but his brows were knit together and his face was pale against the torchlight.

  “I know Aristophanes isn’t your favorite playwright,” I said, nudging him in the ribs, “but surely Lysistrata wasn’t so terrible.”

  “Lysistrata was palatable, although the women were worse rascals than even you,” he said, but then he swayed on his feet. I yelped when he stumbled, halting his fall by grasping him around the waist. “I feel as if I’ve poured out all my blood on a battlefield.”

  He panted as I pressed my palm to his forehead and frowned at the fire burning there. “You’re ill.”

  “I’ve never been ill a day in my life.”

  “There’s a first time for everything. It’s to bed with you as soon as we reach the palace.”

  He rubbed his temples with one hand and gave a weak smile. “It seems you’re always trying to get me into bed.”

  At least he wasn’t so ill he’d lost his sense of humor. I gave him an evil grin. “You’ve created a bit of a monster.”

  He pulled me close and nuzzled my hair. “Sadly, I fear the Lioness on the Grater may have to wait.”

  I let him lean on me for balance and gave a rather dramatic sigh. “I suppose I’ll grant you a reprieve. At least until tomorrow mo
rning.”

  Laughter rumbled in his chest and once we reached our new extravagant chambers in Ecbatana’s citadel, I sent a eunuch to fetch a physician and helped Hephaestion into bed myself. The leather thongs beneath the feather-stuffed mattress groaned with his weight and I piled blankets on him to ward off his shivering.

  “You poor beast,” I said, tucking a fleece over my husband’s chest. My meager skills at nursing had improved slightly with Stateira’s recent bouts of illness, and I stoked the coals burning in the brazier to heat the room as Glaucus entered.

  The aging physician made a great show of opening his portable medical box, an ingenious contraption with bronze doors and an immaculately organized collection of scalpels, ointments, drills, and hooks that I’d already riffled through once while he’d examined Stateira. He palpated Hephaestion’s chest and limbs, smelled his breath, and felt for his heartbeat, all the while ignoring my husband’s bellows to leave the blankets on before he froze to death. Finally, he straightened.

  “Your pulse is sluggish,” he said to Hephaestion. “And you burn with a fever because you have too much yellow bile. You must drink an infusion of holly, partake in a diet of only cold foods, and consume plenty of ptisan until your temperature stabilizes.”

  This time it was me who groaned at the familiar diagnosis and treatment. Stateira’s chambers smelled so of the foul barley sludge, I feared that all her silks would need to be burned and replaced. Now it was my room that would smell worse than a sickbed.

  “I’ll arrange a tray for you,” I said, dropping a kiss on Hephaestion’s still-flaming forehead.

  “A perfect opportunity to poison me,” Hephaestion muttered.

  “How do you know I’m not already?” I asked, offering him my sweetest smile.

  He gave a wry chuckle, then winced. “Because I’d wake with an ax of Damascus steel in my back if you were trying to kill me. Although it feels as you’ve already plunged it into my skull.”

  Glaucus pledged to return in the morning and an attendant entered with a tray of the prescribed and utterly tasteless foods. Hephaestion took one look and waved them away with a grimace. “I’d sooner starve,” he said.