Alexander chuckled. ‘Not so fast,’ he whispered. His hands roamed over my body, his mouth followed. I moaned softly and closed my eyes, savouring the gentle caresses. He knew me too well. He knew all the places that made me shiver, that tickled, that delighted. I tried to wriggle away but he held onto my waist, not letting me move. When I was breathing in shuddering gasps, he rose up on his elbows and then lowered himself onto me.
I wrapped my legs around his hips, urging him on. My head was spinning. When I opened my eyes, I saw only shadows. There were faint cries coming from my throat. I tried to stop, to slow down, but my hips were moving of their own accord.
He grasped my hips and pulled me even tighter, thrusting deep with each movement. His breath was coming in short gasps, I felt the room tilt as he rammed into me. There was a brief moment when we both froze. Then the throbbing began and I let myself dissolve into my husband’s body. The fire flickered and went out, but I was secure in Alexander’s warm arms. My whole body felt as if it were wrapped in a golden cloud. I fell asleep with a smile on my face.
That night Alexander had one of the nightmares that made his dreams unbearable. He hadn’t had one in so long, I had almost forgotten the trembling that woke me. Confused, I opened my eyes. There was a faint red glow from the fireplace, but otherwise all was darkness.
Alexander was sitting upright, his eyes open, seeing nothing but his own demons. His lips were drawn back in a grimace of fear. In the reddish light his hair was copper and his eyes black pools.
I knew that to touch him would only exacerbate his horror. Whatever it was that he saw in the dark corners of his mind, only he could overcome it. I shrank away from him, waiting until his consciousness took over enough for me to pull him out of his sleep.
It didn’t take long. Sweat appeared on his brow, and he thrashed his legs in the covers. A low moan in his throat grew into a harsh cry.
Millis was instantly awake. He raised his head, and I saw his eyes glowing in the light of the embers. His face grew tense. I shook my head at him, motioning him down with my hands. Millis sank back onto his pallet. He had seen Alexander’s phantasmagorias before. He knew that there was nothing to be done except wait.
I took Alexander in my arms. I had to grip him tightly. While I held him I felt his heartbeat slowly return to normal, and his body stopped shaking. Soon his head dropped onto my shoulder, and he took a deep breath. When he could open his hands, he placed them on my thighs. I could feel them trembling.
‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered.
‘Don’t be.’ I stroked his back, calming him. I hesitated then asked, ‘what was it this time?’
‘Does it really help to talk about it?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. Only if you want to.’
‘It was Tyre.’ When he said the name his whole body shuddered.
I was silent. I hadn’t known him when he’d taken the island of Tyre. The siege had lasted four months. Thousands had died. The people had put up a bloody, desperate fight before falling to Alexander’s army. He had built a causeway sixty metres wide from the mainland to the island. Then he’d leapt from a siege tower onto the wall of the city, brandishing his shield and his lance.
His army swept into the town, burning buildings and slaughtering anyone that put up resistance. They spared anyone who had taken refuge in the temples. The city had fallen, and he was master of Tyre.
However, I didn’t think that the memory of that battle would cause him so much distress. That was part of his warfare. He planned his attacks with care and accepted the consequences. No, most of his nightmares were about his family, or the death of his friend Cleitus, whom he’d killed in a fit of rage.
I didn’t say anything though; I just tightened my arms around him and put my cheek against his.
Alexander stirred restlessly. ‘ I saw my brothers and sisters in the fortress. They were waving at me from the ramparts. They kept asking me if I recognized them, and I said “Yes, of course I do.” Then they started shouting and told me I was lying. “How can you recognize us? Your mother killed us when we were just babes!” But I knew who they were; they looked just like me. The men and the women looked just like me.’ He shivered. ‘I told them to go to the temples where they would be safe. But they just laughed at me. They yelled back that the gods had long ago stopped caring what happened to them. I wanted to save them, so I told them again to go to the temples. They looked at me, and all of them had two-coloured eyes. They said, “We can tell you where your soul has gone.” Then arrows fell like rain upon them.’
‘Oh, Alex,’ I murmured. ‘It was just a dream, nothing more.’
‘Dreams are messages from the gods,’ he said, his voice muffled in my neck.
‘No they’re not. We’ve had this discussion before.’ I took his face in my hands and smoothed his cheeks with my thumbs. They were wet with tears. ‘Remember what I told you about the unconscious, the subconscious and the conscious? I told you that dreams were a sort of safety valve that lets off excess stress. Anything that your unconscious can’t handle is turned into nightmares. It gives you a good scare, gets your adrenaline pumping, and you learn how to deal with what’s frightening you.’
‘You also told me stories of people who couldn’t bear to sleep any more because their dreams were too awful, and how doctors had learned to stop their dreams. Do you think you can make me some of that medicine?’ His voice was hopeful.
‘I don’t know. Are your dreams so horrible then?’
He shuddered. ‘I feel as if they tear me apart.’
‘I wish I could help you.’ I kissed his mouth, nibbling on his lips. He smiled, and I gently licked his upper lip, taking it between my teeth. ‘Does this help?’
He chuckled weakly. ‘Mmm. Maybe.’ He kissed me back and I tasted the sharpness of fear.
‘I think that there must be something you need to face. Something that you’ve been avoiding. If you finally got it out in the open it might cease to torment you.’ I chose my words carefully. Alexander was a strange combination of strength and fragility. He was opposing forces brought together.
I knew that, in his youth, he had thought of himself as a descendant of Achilles. His mother had told him that he was directly descended from Zeus. His mother also worshipped Dionysus, the most mortal, most terrible of the gods. Worshipping Dionysus meant living on the very edge of folly. His adepts would often drink themselves blind and make bloody sacrifices before abandoning themselves to huge orgies.
Unfortunately, the edge of madness is not a place to live if you’re the least bit vulnerable. Alexander’s mother, Olympias, had given her son his own Achilles heel. Olympias was mad. She had killed eight of Alexander’s stepbrothers and sisters. It was rumoured she’d had a hand in her husband’s murder, and that she’d forced his new wife with her infant son onto the funeral pyre.
I had no idea how far Alexander was implicated in his father’s murder, but judging from his nightmares, I thought he was in rather deep. But he never spoke to me about it. Even in allusions. So all I could do was hold him closely when he awoke from his nightmares.
He listened to my words but wouldn’t answer. Instead, he made love to me as if he wanted to chase away all his dreams with my body. Afterwards, he pretended to sleep, but I always knew when he was awake.
Chapter Nine
Dawn came, eventually. Alexander hardly ever showed the effects of a sleepless night. His face was unlined, his skin fresh. He went to the window and opened the shutters, looking with clear eyes out into the morning mist. ‘I forgot where we were,’ was his only comment.
We ate breakfast in the common room. Paul and Axiom were already there; Cerberus sprawled at Paul’s feet like a shaggy grey rug. He lifted a twitching muzzle and watched us closely as we arrived, but he knew us, so just sighed and put his nose back on his oversized paws.
Breakfast in Gaul consisted of bacon, porridge with honey, scalded milk with chicory, eggs, and a delicious sausage made of leftover wild boar fr
ied with spices. I stuffed myself. The food was wonderful.
Frost lined the windows that morning. It was February, the month of Dionysus. The month Alexander hated the most. It was the month he’d killed Cleitus, the month he’d destroyed Persepolis, and the month he’d nearly died in India from an arrow wound. It was the month of all his nightmares. I watched him closely. He only appeared to eat, pushing his food around his plate, not even tasting anything.
The Romans came to eat their breakfast. They were heading toward Lutetia, which I knew as Paris, and wanted to leave right away. Since we’d elected to travel with them, Alexander went to town and bought a small farm wagon pulled by two solid-looking brown ponies. We put our meagre belongings in it, and I had the dubious honour of sitting in the back with Cerberus, who was still too little to walk very far without tiring. Too little? I stared at the beast as he lay with his head on my leg. Already he was nearly as long as the wagon was wide. I reached over and scratched his head. He beat his tail on the wooden floorboards hard enough to raise a cloud of dust. I sneezed. With a sigh I leaned back and tried to get comfortable. The men walked ahead of the wagon. Axiom drove the horses. Paul walked just behind the wagon; his head tilted to the side, like his father’s, his eyes lost in his own daydream. Sometimes he’d stumble. Then he’d grin sheepishly at me and trot to catch up.
The sun rose high in the sky, and just after noon we stopped at a stream to eat our lunch.
The Romans were a garrulous bunch. They were going north to sell a load of fine wine. The amphorae were carefully packed in straw and filled three large farm wagons. They had guards and slaves with them. The slaves wore brass torcs engraved with their master’s name. They slept in the wagons with the wine and drove the horses.
I was interested, because the Romans were the new ‘up and coming’ people. They would soon take over the entire Mediterranean and push north to the British Isles. Well, they were certainly pushy. To them, everything Roman was wonderful, and anything else was quaint. A bit like the Athenians, I decided.
They started telling us about their city, making it sound just incredible.
‘As if we’ve never heard of sewers or running water,’ said Alexander to me.
I laughed. ‘Ask them if they have central heating. No, I’m just kidding,’ I said, tugging on his sleeve. However, it was too late.
‘How do you heat your houses?’ he asked, and we were obliged to listen for another hour about hypocausts and how the Romans had invented central heating. I mouthed ‘I told you so’, to Alexander, but he seemed genuinely interested.
‘I’ll have to get Roman architects to come to Alexandria and build the baths. Did you hear, Ashley? They have heat coming up from the floor, and they have an amazing new system where the hot water circulates all through the house.’
‘Amazing,’ I said, grinning.
‘Don’t be sarcastic,’ said Alexander.
‘Who, me?’ I raised my eyebrows. ‘By the way, Rome will soon be the big guy on the block, so we’d better be nice to them. They’ll conquer all this land, and all the way north to the islands I showed you on the map.’
I’d brought my map with me and we looked at it every evening to see how far we’d gone. Maps, back then, were very rudimentary, so mine was like a television. Nearchus and Axiom would ask me questions for hours. The men and Paul would pore over it, tracing routes with their fingers, asking about the different mountain ranges and deserts.
Alexander frowned. ‘I could have conquered that,’ he said haughtily.
‘That would have been interesting,’ I said reflectively. ‘I’m not sure it would have changed the Europe as I knew it. The Romans are very like the Greeks in many ways, but it would have spread Persian civilization much further. I wonder …’
‘What?’
‘I was just wondering how that would have changed the story of Jesus.’
‘Do you mean the man who died when he was my age? Who changed the world even more than I did? And who never led a single army, nor killed a single man? That one?’
‘That’s him. He was born in a country under Roman occupation, and the Romans were less tolerant than you were about religion and things. They will try and force their gods on everyone else, and the Christians will become martyrs, thrown to the lions and all that.’
‘Ah yes, the entertainment.’ He tilted his head to the side. ‘Do the Romans invent television as well?’
‘No, you’re getting your history mixed up.’
‘It’s not history yet,’ he told me.
I made a face. ‘You’re right. What else do you want to know?’ He was so curious that once he got started on his questions, he could go on all day. ‘Why don’t you come with me in the wagon?’ I asked him.
‘All right. I want to find out more about these barbarians.’ Alexander had picked up the Greek habit of referring to anyone who didn’t speak Greek as a barbarian. It was a form of antique snobbery.
That afternoon, Alexander and Paul rode in the wagon with me, and we talked about the future. I was in charge of Paul’s future education, and Alexander took care of his reading, writing, and history. Axiom helped him with arithmetic, and Nearchus gave lessons in navigation, geography, and astronomy.
Millis loved to listen. As a slave, he’d never had any schooling. I was astounded that one of Darius’s sons could be treated so badly: enslaved, castrated, and made mute. Persians had their own terrible rules applying to their royal family. Poor Millis, his father had been one of the most powerful men in the world, but his mother had been a lowly slave. Babies of slaves were slaves, no matter what.
All afternoon, we travelled down the dirt road. The horse’s hooves made a clinking sound every time their iron shoes struck a rock. The iron wheels of the cart had no shock absorbers, so we kept getting out to walk and rest our sore backs. It was chilly enough to make walking attractive.
The Romans were sociable and they would often drop back to chat. They loved to complain, and criticized everything they saw.
‘Look at that,’ said Marcus Quintus Caius, the head of the Roman expedition. ‘We travelled twice as far as necessary because of the loop. If we had gone straight, back there, we could have shortened the route by ten leagues.’
‘There was a big ravine,’ said Paul.
‘It would have been easy to cross,’ said Marcus, waving his hand airily. ‘A Roman bridge builder would make short work of that.’ Then he frowned and looked up at the sky. ‘Perhaps we’ll get some snow.’ The temperature had dropped, and we were wrapped tightly in our woollen cloaks.
‘Are you from Rome itself?’ I asked.
‘No, I come from Po, just to the north of Roma. It’s a lovely place. I can’t wait to go back and be buried there.’
I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly. ‘Pardon me?’ I asked. ‘Did you say, buried there?’
‘Why, yes. The only way to have a decent house is to be in the necropolis. The houses for the dead are all made of stone or brick. They’re very nice. The living have to make do with shacks.’
‘How odd,’ I said, making a face.
‘No, not if you think about it logically.’ His voice held a note of triumph in it. ‘Think. How long do you live?’
‘Well, that depends,’ I said cautiously.
‘No, no. I mean, in general – about sixty years for a man and fifty for a woman. And how long are you dead?’
‘Is this a trick question?’
‘You stay dead for ever!’ he crowed.
‘So the houses of the dead are built to last them all their, uh, deaths?’ I asked.
‘Exactly. See? We Etruscans are very logical.’
Alexander saw me talking to Marcus Quintus and came over. He took my arm and drew me back. ‘Don’t mingle with that man,’ he said in English – I’d been teaching him English for four years now and he could speak it fairly well.
‘I’m not “mingling”,’ I corrected him. ‘I’m talking.’
‘Don’t talk to him. He’s a
Lydian.’
‘He told me he was an Etruscan.’
‘They call themselves the Rasenna.’ His voice was low and mysterious.
‘So?’ my curiosity was piqued.
‘They believe that the dead walk among them like the living. They build great cities with streets and houses, and even temples, only for the dead.’ His voice was still low.
‘Why are we whispering?’ I asked him.
Alexander frowned. ‘You can’t be too careful with Lydians. They’re very strange. They seem to think that they’ll be better off dead.’
‘Whatever it is they think, they won’t be able to understand English, I promise. It won’t be spoken for a few more centuries at least.’
‘Marcus Quintus isn’t his real name,’ Alexander said.
‘No? What is it, and why did he change it?’
‘His real name is Marce Tarquinius Iolaus. He’s related to the actual king of Etruria.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘They wrap their dead in linen.’
‘Get to the point, Alex.’
‘If they really like you, they kill you.’
‘That’s a good reason not to get friendly with him.’ I looked at Alexander. ‘Are you speaking the truth or are you just jealous that I’m talking to another man? You’re not going to get all Persian on me now. I’m not locked up in a harem any more and I intend to stay free.’
‘Nearchus is growing a beard, did you notice?’ He changed the subject.
‘How could I miss it? It’s very thick and curly,’ I said. ‘Now tell me the truth, who are these Lydians, and why don’t you like them?’
‘Oh, they’ve been warring with Greece for ages. They are a very rich people, and they have been fighting over an island in the Inner Sea that is full of iron ore,’ he explained. ‘Aristotle told me their towns were full of music, they play flutes for every occasion, even kneading bread. However, it’s true about the necropolises. They really do think the dead walk around on earth. How bizarre.’
Chants to Persephone: The Future of the World Hangs on a Knife's Edge - and Only a Human Sacrifice Can Save It Page 6