The Novels of Alexander the Great

by Mary Renault

  The Chamberlain, the old survivor, almost as pale as she, was trying not to look at her. Just so someone had looked away when her husband had had his last summons to the court.

  “They have murdered him.” She said it as something evident.

  “This man says the marsh-fever. It is common at Babylon in summer.”

  “No, they have poisoned him. And there is no word of my granddaughters?”

  He shook his head. There was a pause while they sat silent, feeling disaster strike on their old age, a mortal illness, not to be shaken off.

  She said, “He married Stateira for policy. It was my doing he got her with child.”

  “They may still be safe. Perhaps in hiding.”

  She shook her head. Suddenly she sat up in her chair, like a woman thinking, Why am I idling like this, when I have work to do?

  “My friend, a time is over. I shall go to my room now. Farewell. Thank you for your good service in all these years.”

  She read new fear in his face. She understood it; they had both known Ochos’ reign. “No one will suffer. No one will be charged with anything. At my age, to die is easy. When you go, will you send my women?”

  The women found her composed and busy, laying out her jewels. She talked to them of their families, advised them, embraced them and divided her jewels among them, all but King Poros’ rubies, which she kept on.

  When she had bidden them all farewell, she lay down on her bed in the inner room, and closed her eyes. They did not try, after her first refusals, to get her to eat or drink. It was no kindness to trouble her, still less to save her alive for the coming vengeance. For the first few days, they left her alone as she had ordered. On the fourth, seeing her begin to sink, one or other kept watch beside her; if she knew of them, she did not turn them away. On the fifth day at nightfall, they became aware that she was dead; her breathing had been so quiet, no one could be sure when it had ended.

  Galloping day and night, by dromedary, by horse, by mountain mule as the terrain needed, man throwing to man the brief startling news, the King’s Messengers had carried their tidings of death from Babylon to Susa, Susa to Sardis, Sardis to Smyrna, along the Royal Road which Alexander had extended to reach the Middle Sea. At Smyrna, all through the sailing season, a despatch-boat was ready to carry his letters to Macedon.

  The last courier of the long relay had arrived at Pella, and given Perdikkas’ letter to Antipatros.

  The tall old man read in silence. Whenever Philip had gone to war he had ruled Macedon; since Alexander crossed to Asia he had ruled all Greece. The honor which had kept him loyal had also stiffened his pride; he looked far more regal than had Alexander, who had looked only like himself. It had been a joke of his among close friends that Antipatros was all white outside, with a purple lining.

  Now, reading the letter, knowing he would not after all be replaced by Krateros (Perdikkas had made that clear) his first thought was that all south Greece would rise as soon as the news had broken. The news itself, though shocking, was a shock long half-expected. He had known Alexander from his cradle; it had always been inconceivable that he would make old bones. Antipatros had almost told him so outright, while he was preparing to march to Asia without begetting an heir.

  It had been a false move to hint at his own daughter; the boy could hardly have done better, but it had made him feel trapped, or used. “Do you think I’ve time now to’ hold wedding feasts and wait about for children?” he had said. He could have had a half-grown son thought Antipatros, with our good blood in him. And now? Two unborn half-breeds; and meantime, a pride of young lions, slipped off the leash. He remembered, not without misgivings, his own eldest son.

  He remembered, too, a scrap of gossip from the first year of the young King’s reign. He had told someone, “I don’t want a son of mine reared here while I’m away.”

  And that was behind it all. That accursed woman! All through his boyhood she had made him hate his father, whom he might have admired if let alone; she’d shown him marriage as the poisoned shirt of Herakles (that, too, a woman’s doing!), then, when he’d reached the age for girls and could have had his pick, she was outraged that he’d taken refuge with another boy. He could have done far worse than Hephaistion—his father had, and got his death by it—but she could not live with what she’d brought about, had made an enemy where she could have had an ally; and all she’d achieved was to come second instead of first. No doubt she’d rejoiced to hear of Hephaistion’s death. Well, she had another to hear of now, and let her make the best of it.

  He checked himself. It was unseemly to mock a mother’s grief for her only son. He would have to send her the news. He sat down at his writing-table with the wax before him, seeking some decent and kindly word for his old enemy, some fitting eulogy of the dead. A man, he reflected, whom he had not seen for more than a decade, whom he thought of still as a brilliantly precocious boy. What had he looked like, after those prodigious years? Perhaps one might still see, or guess. It would be something suitable with which to end his letter, that the body of the King had been embalmed to the likeness of life, and only awaited a worthy bier to begin its journey to the royal burial ground at Aigai.

  TO QUEEN OLYMPIAS, HEALTH AND PROSPERITY …

  It was full summer in Epiros. The high valley on its mountain shoulder was green and gold, watered from the deep winter snows which Homer had remembered. The calves were fattening, the sheep had yielded their fine soft wool, the trees bent, heavy with fruit. Though it was against all custom, the Molossians had prospered under a woman’s rule.

  The widowed Queen Kleopatra, daughter of Philip and sister of Alexander, stood with the letter of Antipatros in her hand, looking out from the upper room of the royal house to the further mountains. The world had changed, it was too soon to know how. For Alexander’s death she felt awe without grief, as for his life she had felt awe without love. He had entered the world before her, to steal her mother’s care, her father’s notice. Their fights had stopped early, in the nursery; after that they had not been close enough. Her wedding day, the day of their father’s murder, had made her a pawn of state; him it had made a king. Soon he had become a phenomenon, growing with distance more dazzling and more strange.

  Now for a while, the paper in her hand, she remembered the days when, boy and girl with only two years between them, their parents’ ceaseless strife had brought them together in defensive collusion; remembered, too, how if their mother had to be braved in one of her dreadful weeping rages, it had been he who would always go and face the storm.

  She laid Antipatros’ letter down. The one for Olympias was on the table beside it. He would not face her now; she herself must do it.

  She knew where she would find her; in the ground-floor state guest-room where she had been first received to attend the funeral of Kleopatra’s husband, and where she had since remained. The dead King had been her brother; more and more she had encroached on the kingdom’s business, while she pursued through a horde of agents the feud with Antipatros which had made her position in Macedon impossible.

  Kleopatra set resolutely the square chin she had inherited from Philip, and, taking the letter, went down to her mother’s room.

  The door was ajar. Olympias was dictating to her secretary. Kleopatra, pausing, could hear that she was drawing up a long indictment against Antipatros, going back ten years, a summary of old scores. “Question him on this, when he appears before you, and do not be deceived if he claims that …” She paced about impatiently while the scribe caught up.

  Kleopatra had meant to behave, on so traditional an occasion, as a daughter should; to show the warning of a grave sad face, to utter the usual preparations. Just then her eleven-year-old son came in from a game of ball with his companion pages; a big-boned auburn boy with his father’s face. Seeing her hesitating at the door, he looked at her with an air of anxious complicity, as if sharing her caution before the seat of power.

  She dismissed him gently, wanting to hug hi
m to her and cry, “You are the King!” Through the door she saw the secretary busily scratching the wax. He was a man she hated, a creature of her mother’s from long ago in Macedon. There was no knowing what he had known.

  Olympias was a few years over fifty. Straight as a spear, and slender still, she had begun to use cosmetics as a woman does who means only to be seen, not touched. Her greying hair had been washed with camomile and henna; her lashes and brows were lined in with antimony. Her face was whitened, her lips, not her cheeks, were faintly reddened. She had painted her own image of herself, not enticing Aphrodite but commanding Hera. When, catching sight of her daughter in the doorway, she swept round to rebuke the interruption, she was majestic, even formidable.

  Suddenly, Kleopatra was swept by a red surge of anger. Stepping forward into the room, her face like stone, making no gesture to dismiss the scribe, she said harshly, “You need not write to him. He is dead.”

  The perfect silence seemed deepened by each slight intrusive sound; the click of the man’s dropped stylus, a dove in a nearby tree, the voices of children playing a long way off. The white cream on Olympias’ face stood out like chalk. She looked straight before her. Kleopatra, nerved for she could not tell what elemental furies, waited till she could no longer bear it. Quiet with remorse, she said, “It was not in war. He died of fever.”

  Olympias motioned to the scribe. He made off, leaving his papers in disorder. She turned towards Kleopatra.

  “Is that the letter? Give it to me.”

  Kleopatra put it into her hand. She held it, unopened, waiting, dismissive. Kleopatra shut the thick door behind her. No sound came from the room. His death was something between the two of them, as his life had been. She herself was excluded. That, too, was an old story.

  Olympias grasped the stone mullion of the window, its carvings biting, unfelt, into her palms. A passing servant saw the staring face and thought, for a moment, that a tragic theater mask had been propped there. He hurried on lest her sightless gaze should light on him: She stared at the eastern sky.

  It had been foretold her before his birth. Perhaps as she slept he had stirred within her—he had been restless, impatient for life—and it had made her dream. Billowing wings of fire had sprung from her body, beating and spreading till they were great enough to waft her into the sky. Still the fire had streamed from her, an ecstasy, flowing over mountains and seas till it filled the earth. Like a god she had surveyed it, floating on the flames. Then, in a moment, they were gone. From some desolate crag where they had abandoned her, she had seen the land black and smoking, sparked with hot embers like a burned-out hillside. She had started wide awake, and put out her hand for her husband. But she was eight months gone, he had long since found other bedfellows. She had lain till morning, remembering the dream.

  When, later, the fire was running over the wondering world, she had said to herself that all life must die, the time was far off and she would not live to see it. Now all was fulfilled; she could only clench her hands upon the stone and affirm that it must not be. It had never been in her to accept necessity.

  Down on the coast, where the waters of Acheron and Kokytos met, was the Nekromanteion, the Oracle of the Dead. She had gone there long ago, when for her sake Alexander had defied his father, and they had both come here in exile for a time. She remembered the dark and winding labyrinth, the sacred drink, the blood-libation which gave the shades strength to speak. Her father’s spirit had stirred in the gloom and spoken faintly, saying her troubles would soon end and fortune shine on her.

  It would be a long day’s ride, she must set out at dawn. She would make the offering and take the draught and go into the dark, and her son would come to her. Even from Babylon, from the world’s end, he would come … Her mind paused. What if the first-comers were those who had died at home? Philip; with Pausanias’ dagger in his ribs? His new young wife, to whom she had offered poison or the rope? Even for a spirit, even for Alexander, it was two thousand miles from Babylon.

  No; she would wait till his body came; that, surely, would bring his spirit nearer. When she had seen his body, his spirit would seem less strange. For she knew that she feared its strangeness. When he left, he had been still a boy to her; she would receive the body of a man nearing middle age. Would his shade obey her? He had loved her, but seldom obeyed.

  The man, the ghost, slipped from her grasp. She stood there empty. Then, uninvoked, vivid to sight and touch, came the child. The scent of his hair, nuzzled into her neck; the light scratches on his fine skin, his grazed dirty knees; his laughter, his anger, his wide listening eyes. Her dry eyes filled; tears streaked her cheeks with eye-paint; she bit on her arm to muffle her crying.

  By the evening fire, she had told him the old family tales of Achilles handed down by word of mouth, always reminding him that it was from her side that the hero’s blood came down to him. When schooldays began he had come eagerly to the Iliad, coloring it with the Achilles of the tales. Reaching the Odyssey, he came upon Odysseus’ visit to the land of shades. (“It was in my country, in Epiros, that he spoke with them.”) Slowly and solemnly, looking out past her at a reddening sunset sky, he had spoken the words.

  “Achilleus,

  no man before has been more blessed than you, nor ever will be. Before, when you were alive, we Argives honored you as we did the gods, and now in this place you have great authority over the dead. Do not grieve, even in death, Achilleus.”

  So I spoke, and he in turn said to me in answer, “O shining Odysseus, never try to console me for dying. I would rather follow the plow as thrall to another man, one with no land allotted him and not much to live on, than be a king over all the perished dead.”

  Because he did not cry when he was hurt, he was never ashamed of tears. She saw his eyes glitter, fixed on the glowing clouds, and knew that his grief was innocent; only for Achilles, parted from hope and expectation, the mere shadow of his glorious past, ruling over shadows of past men. He had not yet believed in his own mortality.

  He said, as if it were her he was reassuring, “But Odysseus did console him for dying, after all, it says so.”

  So I spoke, and the soul of the swift-footed scion of Aiakos stalked away in long strides across the meadow of asphodel, happy for what I had said of his son, and how he was famous.

  “Yes,” she had said. “And after the war his son came to Epiros, and we are both descended from him.”

  He had considered it. Then: “Would Achilles be happy if I were famous too?”

  She had bent and ruffled his hair. “Of course he would. He would stride through the asphodel and sing.”

  She let go of the window-column. She felt faint and ill; going to her inner room she lay down and wept fiercely. It left her almost too weak to stand, and at last she slept. At dawn, she woke to the recollection of great grief, but her strength was almost recovered. She bathed and dressed and painted her face, and went to her writing-table. TO PERDIKKAS, REGENT OF THE ASIAN KINGDOMS, PROSPERITY …

  On the roof of their house, a few miles inland from Pella, Kynna and Eurydike were practicing with the javelin.

  Kynna, like Kleopatra, was one of Philip’s daughters, but by a minor marriage. Her mother had been an Illyrian princess, and a noted warrior, as the customs of her race allowed. After a border war against her formidable old father Bardelys, Philip had sealed the peace treaty with a wedding, as he had done several times before. The lady Audata would not have been his choice for her own sake; she was comely, but he had trouble remembering which sex he was in bed with. He had paid her attention enough to get one daughter on her, given them a house, maintained them, but seldom called on them till Kynna was of marriageable age. Then he had given her in wedlock to his nephew Amyntas, his elder brother’s child, the same whom the Macedonians had passed over in his infancy, to make Philip King.

  Amyntas; obedient to the people’s will expressed in the Assembly, had lived peaceably through Philip’s reign. Only when conspirators were planning the Kin
g’s murder had he fallen to temptation, and agreed when the deed was done to accept the throne. For this, when it came to light, Alexander had put him on trial for treason, and the Assembly had condemned him.

  Kynna, his wife, had withdrawn from the capital to his country estate. She had lived there ever since, rearing her daughter in the martial skills her Illyrian mother had taught her. It was her natural bent; it was an occupation; and she felt, instinctively, that one day it would be of use. She had never forgiven Amyntas’ death. Her daughter Eurydike, only child of an only child, had known as long as she could remember that she should have been a boy.

  The core of the house was a rugged old fort going back to the civil wars; later the thatched house had been built beside it. It was on the flat roof of the fort that the woman and the girl were standing, throwing at a straw man propped on a pole.

  A stranger could have taken them for sisters; Kynna was only just thirty, Eurydike was fifteen. They both took after the Illyrian side, tall, fresh-faced, athletic. In the short men’s tunics they wore for exercise, their brown hair plaited back out of their way, they looked like girls of Sparta, a land of which they knew almost nothing.

  Eurydike’s javelin had left a splinter in her palm. She pulled it out, and called in slave Thracian to the tattooed boy who was bringing back the spears from the target, and who should have seen they were rubbed smooth. As he worked they sat to rest on a block of stone set for an archer, stretched and took deep breaths of the mountain air.