“I never disliked you,” said Alexander sullenly.
“Oh, no!” in a tone half between a laugh and a sob. “Oh, no!” more quietly.
“No, never,” said the king stolidly, and he went and sat on the fallen log.
“I’m not through,” said his friend mildly. “Do you know what you `missed?” He leaned over the seated man. “For one, your wife’s sweet little tongue that I tasted some four hours ago.” Alexander said nothing. “Ah, you don’t care? You have glory?”
“I do,” said the monarch.
“Yes, like the sunset, I suppose. All the color and light that belong to nobody belongs to you. Names! What else do you have: love?”
“We don’t deal in that commodity,” said Alexander with a flash of teeth.
“Ah! there you speak like your father. Your father, whom your mother poisoned with the poison they use to drive rats mad, and who died blubbering over a servant girl who was the only one in the palace foolish and brave enough to give him a drink of water.”
“One can avoid being poisoned,” said Alexander, grinning again.
“Yes, one can,” said his friend, “and I daresay if you avoid being poisoned or assassinated or stabbed in a mutiny-and you have been pretty successful so far-you will live to be an old man.”
“You tire me out,” said Alexander, rising.
“Ah! but wait-can you get by, do you think, at the end?”
“You’ve shot your bolt, man!”
“No, wait-listen-there’s my wife. I think about her all the time, about the colors of her face and hair and the remoteness she had for me, and how I liked her the better for that, I think. Oh! don’t you wander about when you’re dead, remembering things like that!”
“I can remember what I’ve done,” said Alexander, laughing, , “which is more than you can manage, I think. Now! Let me go. I have no time for any more.”
“No, no,” said his friend softly.
“Ah, yes!” answered the king, as softly.
“Try,” said the dead man. The king drew his sword. “Try.” His friend was smiling charmingly; he stretched forth his neck as if to offer it to the knife. “I can keep you here,” he said. “That’s one ‘` thing I can do.”
“For what!” harshly.
“You’ll see.”
The king began to laugh. He walked about the clearing, roaring with mirth. The moonlight struck sparks from his sword hilt and a line of silver blazed along the blade; he whirled his sword above his head like a boy going into battle for the first time; he struck the trunks of trees with it and laughed.
“I have something to show you,” said the dead man quietly.
“What?” gasped the king, “what?” half out of breath.
“Something, dear, boy.” Alexander could not stop laughing. He sat on the log and roared, rocking back and forth. The moon must have gone behind a cloud, for the little glade grew darker and darker; in the gloom, in the midst of the indistinct mass of confused shadows, sat Alexander laughing. He looked up and found, .to his surprise, that his dead friend had come up behind him and now held him by the shoulders in a grip so strong and yet so light that he could not break it. He was forced to turn to one side; he tried to turn back and could not; he struggled impotently under the dead man’s grip while his friend’s face, so close to his own, moved not an inch, showed not by the slightest alteration in its expression that to control the warrior of the age was any effort for him, a soft and an always soft living man.
“Look,” he said, “look ahead,” in a voice almost like love, and changing the position of his hands so that he held the king’s face (that king whose arms now hung uselessly at his sides), forced him to turn his gaze.
Alexander gave a scream like the scream of the damned, like the yell of a hurt animal that has nothing to restrain it: no discretion, no prudence, no fear. He would have fallen to the ground if the dead man had not held him.
“There, there, there!” said the dead man in a soft, enthusiastic, urgent whisper, his eyes glittering. “There, look! look!” He grasped the king’s shoulders with a vehemence that left marks; he shook him. “There’s glory for you!” he whispered, and finally letting him go, retreated across the clearing, never taking his eyes off him, never moving his rigidly spread hands, blending into the stippled shadow and the uncertain light until one looking after him would never have known that there was any such person.
Alexander sat drooping on the fallen log as the old philosopher had before him. The moon was setting; morning was near. His soldiers, horribly frightened at losing hire in the middle of the night, would find him at last, though he would not speak to them. He would raise his handsome face and say nothing. They would bring his wife to him (she had gotten worried and had sent a messenger back to the camp in the middle of the night) and he would look at her, say her name in a tone of surprise-and faint. Two days later the army, the Persian queen’s handmaids, the king’s philosophic retinue and the royal couple themselves would pack all their gear and start on the return march to Babylon, now called Heliopolis.
The rumors were started by an Egyptian professor whose cataloguing system for the library at Egyptian Alexandria was . summarily rejected by the emperor. Alexander, he said, was mad and had been shut up. He was drunk all day. He alternated wintry ‘ midnight swims with bouts of fever. His wife had left him. “No, no,” said Aristophorus heatedly, “the truth is-”and hurried away .. to attend to something else.
Egyptian Alexandria, Babylonian Alexandria, Alexandretta . one room of the palace at Heliopolis had a replica (about seven feet ‘ high) of a monument Alexander had caused to be built to the memory of his dead friend as soon as he (Alexander) had returned to that city. The monument was a bronze tower, eighty feet high, ; with a platform at the top-”for jumping,” Alexander had said disingenuously, watching Aristophorus twitch. He drank for hours at the foot of the replica, in a desultory way. He talked to it once in a while.
One afternoon in that part of late winter when a stone house- ‘ even in the Babylonian climate-becomes a place to freeze the ‘ living and preserve the dead, Aristophorus found his master asleep at the foot of the monument.
“You’re drunk, my lord,” said he sadly and disapprovingly.
“You’re middle-class,” said Alexander.
“That monument ought to be destroyed,” said Aristophorus, weeping.
“It has charm,” said Alexander.
“It’s graceless!” weeping harder.
“It’s necessary.” Alexander rolled over and fetched himself up . on a step, blinking like an owl. “We want to honor our dead friend, Aristophorus.” He discovered a wineskin under a heap of outer garments on the step. “Bravo!”
“My lord, my lord!” wept the old philosopher.
“My lord, my lord!” mimicked- Alexander. He lay in the heap of ‘ clothes, idly. “You think I’m drunk but I’m not.” He sighed. “I haven’t got properly drunk for years. I’m too used to it.”
“Oh, my lord!”
“Bah! get out of my sight!” and when he was left alone, his face settled into an expression of perfect vacancy. The stone hall was covered with stately, patterned hangings that gave the walls a spurious, slightly ridiculous dignity. There was one uncovered window. Alexander ambled tiredly over to it. It gave on a small court and a garden; someone was hoeing. As the king watched he closed both hands unconsciously; the sight of anyone working always affected him. The slave outside bent himself double, clearing and pulling; then he straightened and rubbed his back. A faint, disorganized sound, of which he was not aware, came from the king’s throat; he lifted the wineskin to drink and halted halfway. He remembered, with satisfaction, wresting a cup from the old philosopher when the man would drink from it in a dramatic, despairing show that he too would sink to the king’s dreadful level: Alexander laughed. “I’m sick,” he said. He leaned on the stone windowsill, watching the sky and shivering. He thought The words they use for drunkenness. Smashed. Stoned. Blind. Hit yourse
lf over the head with a rock. Ah!-to fall- His shivering increased. He thought again, with pleasure, that he was sick. Wipe it out, he thought. He leaned his head in his hands. They worried him about his wife; who would protect her? they said. Yes, that was right . . . . Slipping to his knees, he leaned his back against the clammy stone wall with a kind of comfort. The dead man had said once what had he said? “Comfort, above all.” But that had been when he was alive.
“My dear lord,” said someone. Alexander opened his eyes. “Go away,” he said.
“My lord, my lord-”said the old philosopher.
When he opened his eyes again he saw that Aristophorus had gone. He knew that he was sick and it alarmed him. He dragged himself to his feet and started toward the monument. “Oh my dear, my dear,” he said passionately to nobody in particular. “My dear, my dear, my dear . . .”
The late afternoon sunlight, wintry and wan, came through the uncovered window and made a square on the floor. He lay on the floor. He opened his eyes for the third time (when the drowning man goes down) and saw the face he had expected to see.
“You’re dying,” said his friend, and there were tears in his eyes Alexander said nothing, only lay on the stone floor with his mouth slightly open and his eyes vacant. His breathing was quick and shallow. “Clown,” he managed to say. “Jackal. But I kept you around.”
“I’ve kept you around. Doing nothing. For the last four years.”
“AM-ah!” cried Alexander, for the floor was sinking and bellying under him. “Help!” he cried. Crouched over him, his nurse’s son, his harpy, his old friend watched him intently. “Courage, man!” he cried, “courage! It only lasts a moment! Keep your head clear.”
“Call my wife,” said the king, with an effort. The dead man shook his head.
“Oh yes,” said Alexander grimly. “Oh, yes.”
“Never,” said the other. “I don’t share.”
“Roxane!” cried Alexander, and then before his friend could stop him, “Roxane!” so that the walls re-echoed with it. There was the sound of light steps in the passageway. “You cruel fool!” whispered the dead man angrily, and he rose to his feet and darted to her, barring the way. She carried her eight months’ pregnancy in front of her like a basket, hurrying along the hall with little breathless steps.
“My dear,” he said, “my dear, it’s nothing, nothing. Go back. Please go back.”
“Good heavens, it’s you,” said she matter-of-factly.
“Yes, love, go back,” he said, “go back. Go rest.” He held out his hands, smiling tenderly.
“Oh, no,” said the queen wisely, “there’s something, 1 can tell,” and she pushed past him. She began telling her husband that he really must go to bed; then she stopped, puzzled, and then a little intake of breath announced that she had seen the dying man’s face. The dead man trembled; he stood at the window where the king had stood, but saw nothing. At his back the princess gave a little scream.
“My dear,” said the dead man, turning round (she was kneeling at Alexander’s side) “my dear, he’ll be quite well, I promise you,” (but she seemed not to hear him) “my dear, I promise you-” but she rushed out, crying different names out loud. She stopped at the doorway, looking right past the dead man as if she were looking through him. Her face expressed nothing but surprise, although she was wringing leer hands.
“My dear,” he said calmly, “what you see’ is a delusion. The man is not suffering. At the end fever is not unpleasant, I assure you; the body sinks but the mind floats like a piece of ash, and you will only make your husband’s last moments needlessly unhappy if you cry and wring your hands and behave in an unconsidered and haphazard way.”
“Aristophorus!” screamed the princess, “Aristophorus!” and she rushed out of the room.
I am beginning to fade, the dead man thought, going back to Alexander. His attack of trembling hit him again and he knelt by the dying man, taking the unconscious face in his hands.
“King,” he whispered urgently. “King.” Alexander opened his eyes. “Listen to me.”
“No,” said the dying man. His friend, cradling the conqueror’s head in his hands, smiled with a radiant and serene joy; “Live,” he whispered. “Live. Live.”
“Can’t,” said Alexander brusquely, trying to shrug. He closed his eyes. Gently the dead man let his friend’s head down onto the floor; he stood up; he moved away. Roxane had come back in with friends, philosophers, doctors; they crowded round the emperor while his friend (whom nobody saw) wandered out of the room into a passageway and down that passageway into another. In the garden (he looked out of a window) the gardener still hoed and weeded last year’s dried stalks. The dead man had carried Alexander’s wineskin with him and a cup he found near it; he poured himself a drink and sat down on the floor by the window where the pale sunlight came in. Then he stood up. “You butcher!” he shouted, “you bully, you egoist, you killer in love with your own greatness!” and then he said “How I loved you, how I admired you!” raising the cup in one hand and his other empty hand to the ceiling in an attitude of extreme and theatrical grief. His arms sank; he sat again on the floor. Now 1 die too, he thought. He thought, with a certain amusement, of that night in the Indian forests near the river and what he had shown the great Alexander. Like the demons in the old stories he had shown him all the world; he had shown it filled with Alexandrias and Alexandrettas as numerous as the stars, with carved pillars set up in the East as far as the kingdoms of Ch’in and Ch’u, farther than Han, satraps ruling the undiscovered continents on the other side of the globe, tablets commemorating Alexander in the lands of the Finns and, the Lapps, in the lands of the Alaskan Eskimos, empire up to the Arctic Circle and down into Africa, over the Cape and through the other side, Alexanders here, Alexanders there, a fulfilled empire, . a safe empire, a satisfied dream. And then two words: What then?.
Legend has it that great Alexander wept because there were no more worlds to conquer; in truth, he bellowed like a bull.
No one, thought the dead man, feels more despair than a man who has been robbed of his profession. Luckily I never had one. A sound from the room he had just quitted hit him and made him . catch his breath. How terrible to die, he thought, how terrible! He ; took a drink from the wine cup and noted that his hand was . shaking. From the next room came a sharp cry, little Roxane wailing for her man. The dead man, whose heart seemed to have stopped, sat motionless while his face became clear of all expression, taking on the beautiful, grave melancholy of all faces whose owners are absent, temporarily or otherwise. Gently and carefully ‘‘ he put the wine cup down on the damp, stone floor, with the E concentrated gentleness of all the times he had picked things up only to put them down-cups, flowers, jewelry, paintings and women’s hands. He thought of all the things he had touched and never owned, of all the women he had liked and avoided. The one man he had admired so passionately and so passionately envied: was dead. Nothing was left. He thought, as if thinking of a picture, of his wife-a dissatisfied Sappho who had written verses and left the court to live with some businessman. He doubled over, not in laughter this time, but as if Alexander’s blade, that had long ago stabbed through his vitals, once again tore him. The dead forget nothing. The blade had ripped apart the intricate webs that kept him alive, it had startled and hurt him, it had broken his heart. Silently he bent over and fell to the floor. He stretched along it with a kind of sigh, as if going to sleep, and the moment he closed his eyes he disappeared. The wine cup stood alone on the floor. An attendant who had heard the news of the king’s death ran excitedly through the room and out into the garden.
“Something has happened!” he shouted to the gardener. The gardener threw down his hoe and the two talked together in low whispers.
“It’ll be hard on us,” the gardener said, shaking his head. The attendant clapped him on the back. “Don’t forget,” he said, “we stand together.” He added generously “I don’t forget my relatives.” The gardener nodded solemnly. He picked up
his tools, the attendant helping him. Together they disappeared into another part of the court. The sun (for it was now late afternoon) moved a little; the square of light on the floor altered its position somewhat and touched the standing wine cup with a spark of gold. Nearby lay the wineskin, on its side but closed by some considerate hand-or so it seemed, for the floor remained clean. Nothing moved. Everything remained as it was. It was exactly as if nothing had happened.
* * * *
NOTE ON “POOR MAN, BEGGAR MAN”: It is riddled with inaccuracies. Cleitus the Black was one of Alexander’s generals, whom Alexander actually did kill in 328 B.C., as Cleitus became incensed at the proskynesis (Asiatic knee-crawling) Alexander demanded of his associates. Alexander was drunk at the time, Cleitus’ sister had indeed been his old nurse, and from that day on Alexander exempted Macedonians from the Persian court etiquette of proskynesis.
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