by Mary Renault
Her father, she was sure, would have seen to it that the Warden was put to death. But the satrapy conferred on him by the King was on the Indian frontier; by the time she could hear back from him, her son would have been born. The thought appeased her. She said to her Bactrian ladies, “Let her come, this great tall flagpole from Susa. The King cannot abide her. If he must do this to please the Persians, what is that to me? Everyone knows that I am his real wife, the mother of his son.”
The ladies said in secret, “I would not be that child, if it is a girl.”
The King did not come, and Roxane’s days hung heavy. Here, at what was to be the center of her husband’s empire, she might as well be encamped in Drangiana. She could, if she wished, have entertained the concubines. But these women had been living for years in royal palaces, some of them since she had been a child on her father’s mountain crag. She thought with dread of assured Persian elegance, sophisticated talk tossed spitefully over her head. Not one had crossed her threshold; she had rather be thought haughty than afraid. One day however she found one of the ancient crannies; it passed the time to lay an ear to it and hear them talking.
So it was that, when Alexander had been nine days down with marsh-fever, she heard a palace chamberlain gossiping with a harem eunuch. From this she learned two things: that the sickness had flown to the King’s chest, and he was like to die; and that the daughter of Darius was with child.
She did not pause, even to hear them out. She called her Bactrian eunuch and her ladies, threw on a veil, brushed past the stunned Nubian giant who guarded the harem, and only answered his shrill cries with, “I must see the King.”
The palace eunuchs came running. They could do nothing but run after her. She was the King’s wife, not a captive; she stayed in the harem only because to leave it was unthinkable. On the long marches, out to India and back to Persia and down to Babylon, wherever the King pitched camp her baggage wagons had unpacked the wicker screens which had made her a traveling courtyard, so that she could leave her covered wagon and take the air. In the cities she had her curtained litter, her latticed balconies. All this was not her sentence but her right; it was only whores whom men displayed. Now, when the unprecedented happened, to lay hands on her was inconceivable. Guided by her trembling eunuch, her progress followed by astonished eyes, she swept through corridors, courtyards, anterooms, till she reached the Bedchamber. It was the first time she had entered it; or, for that matter, his own sleeping-place anywhere else. He had never summoned her to his bed, only gone to hers. It was the custom of the Greeks, so he had told her.
She paused in the tall doorway, seeing the high cedar ceiling, the daimon-guarded bed. It was like a hall of audience. Generals, physicians, chamberlains, stupid with surprise, stood back as she made her way to him.
The heaped pillows that propped him upright gave him still the illusion of authority. His closed eyes, his parted and gasping mouth, seemed like a willed withdrawal. She could not be in his presence without believing that everything was still under his control.
“Sikandar!” she cried, slipping back into her native dialect. “Sikandar!”
His eyelids, creased and bloodless in sunken sockets, moved faintly but did not open. The thin skin tightened, as if to shut out a harsh glare of sun. She saw that his lips were cracked and dry; the deep scar in his side, from the wound he had got in India, stretched and shrank with his laboring breath.
“Sikandar, Sikandar!” she cried aloud. She grasped him by the arm.
He took a deeper breath, and choked on it. Someone leaned over with a towel, and wiped bloody froth from his lips. He did not open his eyes.
As if she had known nothing till now, a cold dagger of realization stabbed her. He was gone out of reach; he would no longer direct her journeys. He would decide nothing, ever again; would never tell her what she had come to ask. For her, for the child within her, he was already dead.
She began to wail, like a mourner over a bier, clawing her face, beating her breast, tearing at her clothes, shaking her disheveled hair. She flung herself forward, her arms across the bed, burying her face in the sheet, hardly aware of the hot, still living flesh beneath it. Someone was speaking; a light, young voice, the voice of a eunuch.
“He can hear all this; it troubles him.”
There was a strong grasp on her shoulders, pulling her back. She might have recognized Ptolemy, from the triumphs and processions seen from her lattices; but she was looking across the bed, perceiving who had spoken. She would have guessed, even if she had not seen him once in India, gliding down the Indus on Alexander’s flagship, dressed in the brilliant stuffs of Taxila, scarlet and gold. It was the hated Persian boy, familiar of this room she had never entered; he, too, a custom of the Greeks, though her husband had never told her so.
His menial clothes, his haggard exhausted face, conceded nothing. No longer desirable, he had become commanding. Generals and satraps and captains, whose obedience should be to her, who should be rousing the King to answer her, to name his heir—they listened, submissive, to this dancing-boy. As for her, she was an intrusion.
She cursed him with her eyes, but already his attention was withdrawn from her, as he beckoned a slave to take the bloodstained towel, and checked the clean pile beside him. Ptolemy’s hard hands released her; the hands of her attendants, gentle, supplicating, insistent, guided her towards the door. Someone picked up her veil from the bed and threw it over her.
Back in her own room, she flung herself down in a furious storm of weeping, pummeling and biting the cushions of her divan. Her ladies, when they dared speak to her, implored her to spare herself, lest the child miscarry. This brought her to herself; she called for mare’s milk and figs, which she chiefly craved for lately. Dark fell; she tossed on her bed. At length, dry-eyed, she got up, and paced to and fro in the moon-dappled courtyard, where the fountain murmured like a conspirator in the hot Babylonian night. Once she felt the child move strongly. Laying her hands over the place, she whispered, “Quiet, my little king. I promise you … I promise …”
She went back to bed, and fell into a heavy sleep. She dreamed she was in her father’s fort on the Sogdian Rock, a rampart-guarded cavern under the mountain’s crest, with a thousand-foot drop below. The Macedonians were besieging it. She looked down at the swarming men, scattered like dark grains upon the snow; at the red starry campfires plumed with faint smoke; at the colored dots of the tents. The wind was rising, moaning over the crag. Her brother called to her to fit arrowheads with the other women; he rebuked her idleness, and shook her. She woke. Her woman let go her shoulder, but did not speak. She had slept late, the sun was hot in the courtyard. Yet the wind soughed on; the world was full of its noise, rising and falling, like its winter voice when it blew from the immeasurable ranges of the east … But this was Babylon.
Here it died down and there it rose, and now it came close at hand, the high wailing of the harem; she could hear now its formal rhythm. The woman beside her, seeing her awake, at once began lamenting, crying out the ancient phrases offered to the widows of Bactrian chieftains time out of mind. They were looking at her. It was for her to lead the dirge.
Obediently she sat up, dragged at her hair, drummed with her fists on her breast. She had known the words since her childhood: “Alas, alas! The light is fallen from the sky, the lion of men is fallen. When he lifted his sword, a thousand warriors trembled; when he opened his hand, it shed gold like the sands of the sea. When he rejoiced, it gladdened us like the sun. As the storm-wind rides the mountains, so he rode to war; like the tempest that fells great forest trees, he rode into the battle. His shield was a strong roof over his people. Darkness is his portion, his house is desolate. Alas! Alas! Alas!”
She laid her hands in her lap. Her wailing ceased. The women, startled, stared at her. She said, “I have lamented; I have finished now.” She beckoned her chief waiting-woman and waved the rest away.
“Bring my old traveling-gown, the dark-blue one.” It was f
ound, and dust shaken out of it from the Ekbatana road. The stuff was strong; she had to nick it with her paring-knife before it would tear. When she had rent it here and there, she put it on. Leaving her hair uncombed, she ran her hand over a dusty cornice and smeared her face. Then she sent for her Bactrian eunuch.
“Go to the harem, and ask the lady Badia to visit me.”
“Hearing is obedience, madam.” How did she know the name of Ochos’ first-ranking concubine? But it was clearly no time for questions.
From her listening-place, Roxane could hear the fluster in the harem. Some were still wailing for the King, but most were chattering. After a short delay for preparation, Badia appeared, dressed in the mourning she had put on for King Ochos, fifteen years before, smelling of herbs and cedar-wood. For Darius she had not worn it.
Ochos had reigned for twenty years, and she had been a concubine of his youth. She was in her fifties, graceful once, now gaunt. Long before his death she had been left behind in Babylon while younger girls were taken along to Susa. But she had ruled the harem in her time, and did not forget.
Some minutes were passed in orthodox condolences. Badia lauded the valor of the King, his justice, his bounty. Roxane responded as was proper, swaying and keening softly. Presently she wiped her eyes, and made a few broken answers. Badia offered the immemorial consolation.
“The child will be his remembrance. You will see him grow to rival his father’s honor.”
All this was formula. Roxane abandoned it. “If he lives,” she sobbed. “If Darius’ accursed kindred let him live. But they will kill him. I know, I know it.” She grasped her hair in both hands and moaned.
Badia caught her breath, her lean face shocked with memory. “Oh, the good God! Will those days come again?”
Ochos had achieved the throne by wholesale fratricide, and died by poison. Roxane had no wish to hear reminiscences. She flung back her hair. “How can they not? Who murdered King Ochos when he lay sick? And the young King Arses and his loyal brothers? And Arses’ little son, still at the breast? And when it was done, who killed the Vizier his creature, to stop his mouth? Darius! Alexander told me so.”
(“I used to think so,” Alexander had told her not long before, “but that was before I’d fought him. He’d not spirit enough to be more than the Vizier’s tool. He killed him after because he was afraid of him. That was just like the man.”)
“Did the King say so? Ah, the lion of justice, the redresser of wrongs!” Her voice rose, ready to wail again; Roxane lifted a quick repressive hand.
“Yes, he avenged your lord. But my son, who will avenge him? Ah, if you knew!”
Badia raised sharp black eyes, avid with curiosity. “What is it, lady?”
Roxane told her. Alexander, still sick with grief for his boyhood friend, had gone before, leaving her in safety at Ekbatana, to purge of bandits the road to Babylon. Then, weary from the winter war, he had stayed to rest at Susa, and been beguiled by Queen Sisygambis; that old sorceress who, if truth were known, had set on her son, the usurper, to all his crimes. She had brought to the King the daughter of Darius, that clumsy, long-legged girl he had married to please the Persians. Very likely she had drugged him, she was skilled in potions. She had got her grandchild into the King’s bed, and told him she was with child by him, though who was to know the truth? And, since he had married her in state in the presence of the Persian and Macedonian lords, what could they do but accept her infant? “But he married her only for show, for policy. He told me so.”
(Indeed it was true that before the wedding, appalled by Roxane’s frenzy, deafened by her cries, and feeling remorseful, Alexander had said something to this effect. He had made no promises for the future, it being a principle of his to keep the future open; but he had dried her tears, and brought her some handsome earrings.)
“And so,” she cried, “under this roof she will bear a grandchild to Ochos’ murderer. And who will protect us, now that the King is gone?”
Badia began to cry. She thought of the long dull peaceful years in the quiet ageing harem, where the dangerous outside world was only rumor. She had outgrown the need of men and even of variety, living contentedly with her talking bird and her little red-coated monkey and her old gossiping eunuchs, maintained in comfort by the wandering, distant King. Now there opened before her dreadful ancient memories of betrayal, accusations, humiliation, the waking dread of the new day. It had been a cruel rival who had displaced her with King Ochos. The peaceful years fell from her. She sobbed and wailed; this time for herself.
“What can we do?” she cried. “What can we do?”
Roxane’s white, plump, short-fingered hand grasped Badia’s wrist. Her great dark eyes, which had cast their spell upon Alexander, were fixed on hers. “The King is dead. We must save ourselves as we best can.”
“Yes, lady.” The old days were back; once more it was a matter of survival. “Lady, what shall we do?”
Roxane drew her near and they talked softly, remembering the crannies in the wall.
Some time later, quietly by the servants’ door came an old eunuch from Badia’s household. He carried a box of polished wood. Roxane said, “It is true that you can write Greek?”
“Certainly, madam. King Ochos often called on me.”
“Have you good parchment? It is for a royal letter.”
“Yes, madam.” He opened the box. “When the usurper Darius gave my place to one of his people, I took a little with me.”
“Good. Sit down and write.”
When she gave him the superscription, he almost spoiled the scroll. But he had not come quite ignorant of his errand; and Badia had told him that if Darius’ daughter ruled the harem, she would turn all Ochos’ people out in the street to beg. He wrote on. She saw that the script was even and flowing, with the proper formal flourishes. When he had done, she gave him a silver daric and let him go. She did not swear him to silence; it was beneath her dignity, and Badia would have seen to it.
He had brought wax, but she had not sealed it in his presence. Now she drew off a ring Alexander had given her on their wedding night. It was set with a flawless amethyst the color of dark violets, on which Pyrgoletes, his favorite engraver, had carved his portrait. It was nothing like the royal ring of Macedon, with its Zeus enthroned. But Alexander had never been conventional, and she thought that it would serve.
She turned the stone in the light. The work was superb, and though somewhat idealized had caught a vivid look of him. He had given it her when they were at last alone in the bridal chamber; something to serve them in place of words, since neither could speak the other’s tongue. He had put it on her, finding a finger it would fit at the second try. She had kissed it respectfully, and then he had embraced her. She remembered how unexpectedly pleasing his body was, with a warm freshness like a young boy’s; but she had expected a harder grasp. He should have gone out to be undressed and have a wedding shift put on him; but, instead, he had just tossed off his clothes and stood there stark naked, in which state he had got into bed. She had been too shocked at first to think of anything else, and he had thought she was afraid of him. He had taken a good deal of trouble with her, some of it quite sophisticated; he had had expert tuition, though she did not yet know whose. But what she had really wanted was to be taken by storm. She had adopted postures of submission, proper in a virgin; for anything livelier on the first night, a Bactrian bridegroom would have strangled her. But she could feel he was at a loss, and had a dreadful fear that there would be an unstained bridal sheet for the guests to view next morning. She had nerved herself to embrace him; and afterwards all was well.
She dropped the hot wax on the scroll and pressed in the gem. Suddenly a piercing memory came to her of a day a few months ago in Ekbatana, one summer afternoon by the fishpool. He had been feeding the carp, coaxing the old sullen king of the pool to come to his hand from its lair under the lily-pads. He would not come in to make love till he had won. After, he had fallen asleep; she remembered the
fair boyish skin with the deep dimpled scars, the soft margins of his strong hair. She had wanted to feel and smell him as if he were good to eat, like fresh-baked bread. When she buried her face in him, he half woke and held her comfortably, and slept again. The sense of his physical presence came back to her like life. At last, alone, in silence, she shed real tears.
She wiped them soon. She had business that would not wait.
In the Bedchamber, the long days of dying were over. Alexander had ceased to breathe. The lamenting eunuchs had drawn out the heaped-up pillows; he lay straight and flat in the great bed, restored by stillness to a monumental dignity, but, to the watchers, shocking in his passiveness. A dead man, a corpse.
The generals, hastily called when the end was plainly coming, stood staring blankly. For two days they had been thinking what to do now. Yet, now, it was as if the awaited certainty had been some mere contingency with which their imaginations had been playing. They gazed stupefied at the familiar face, so finally untenanted; feeling almost resentment, so impossible did it seem that anything could happen to Alexander without consent of his. How could he die and leave them in this confusion? How could he throw off responsibility? It was quite unlike him.
A cracked young voice at the outer door suddenly cried out, “He’s gone, he’s gone!” It was a youth of eighteen, one of the royal body-squires, who had been taking his turn on guard duty. He broke into hysterical weeping, which rose above the keening of the eunuchs around the bed. Someone must have led him away, for his voice could be heard receding, raw with uncontainable grief.
It was as if he had invoked an ocean. He had blundered, sobbing, into half the Macedonian army, gathered around the palace to await the news.
Most of them had passed through the Bedchamber the day before; but he had known them still, he had remembered them; they, most of all, had good cause to expect a miracle. Now a huge clamor rose; of grief, of ritual mourning; of protest, as if some authority could be found to blame; of dismay at the uncertainties of the shattered future.
