The Conqueror's Wife

by Stephanie Thornton

  “I see.” Timoclea smiled. “While I don’t doubt that you could show an old widow like me a new trick or two, I have my daughters to care for.”

  I’d expected her rejection, yet it still stung. However, I could have my pick of pretty chariot drivers and camp women eager for a roll in my tent, one of each even. Or perhaps I’d seek out Alexander tonight.

  “Thank you,” Timoclea said. Then she stood on tiptoes and brushed her lips to my temple. “May the gods protect you, Hephaestion of Macedon.”

  I gave her a cheeky grin, then mounted my waiting horse to follow Alexander. “Actually, I don’t think the gods know quite what to do with me.”

  Her laughter followed behind me. Timoclea would return to her estate and raise her girls to sass their future husbands. And I would follow Alexander, as I’d always done.

  • • •

  We continued on our way after Thebes to Delphi to consult the oracle of Apollo before heading for fabled Troy and, beyond that, Persia, where Alexander hoped to lure Darius, King of Kings, into open combat.

  We arrived at Delphi on one of the season’s unlucky days, at odds with the stunning vault of winter blue sky overhead and the crisp smell of cypress in the air. Yet Alexander had been in a foul mood even before we started marching.

  “I don’t care for prophecies,” he said, approaching the famed Temple of Apollo, nestled like a hidden treasure at the base of rocky Mount Parnassus. The rest of his guards craned their necks to catch a glimpse of the fabled mountaintop. “I’d gallop right past Delphi if I could.”

  “Prophecies are just words,” I said. “They can be twisted to suit your liking.”

  “Tell that to Oedipus,” Alexander muttered. “Or my father.”

  He was right of course; the power of words had ruined—and saved—many a man.

  One glance at the homely woman waiting on the steps of Apollo’s temple and I was certain Alexander would have whatever prophecy he wished from her dry, cracked lips.

  I, of course, was wrong.

  “We’ve just marched from conquering Thebes.” Alexander wore his famous smile as he approached her after dismounting, the one that made everyone—even me—eager to do his bidding just for a chance to bask in its warmth.

  “It matters not if you marched from Egypt itself,” the priestess said, crossing her arms over her board-flat chest. There was no doubt that we were addressing the Pythia, Apollo’s oracle, draped and veiled in sumptuous cloth of gold to honor the god of the sun, although surely even Apollo would have shuddered to behold her face. “There shall be no divining on so unfortunate a day.”

  “Ah, well,” I said to Alexander, wrinkling my nose against the temple’s otherworldly, sulfurous scent. “You’ll have to wait until tomorrow for your prophecy.”

  Alexander scowled at the Pythia. “You would refuse to scry for Alexander of Macedon?”

  “That’s exactly what she said,” I answered for her. The priestess looked down her hooked nose at us, the effect marred by her pockmarked face and misshapen lips. It would have cost a fortune to muster the dowry to make up for her lack of Aphrodite’s graces, so it was likely that her family had married her to Apollo instead. Still, the cold fire that burned in her blue irises might have shriveled the manhood of any potential bridegroom.

  “I command you to divine for me,” Alexander said, his hand on the hilt of his sword.

  “There shall be no divining on the unlucky days,” the priestess said. “So Apollo has decreed and so it shall be.”

  But Alexander was accustomed to both men and gods scraping to do his bidding, Apollo and his sun chariot be damned.

  “You dare refuse the descendant of both Heracles and Achilles?” Alexander asked, his eyes narrowing dangerously.

  “No man can command the oracle at Delphi,” the priestess said. “Lest he wish to incur the wrath of the twelve Olympians.”

  And with those words, the Pythia instead incurred Alexander’s wrath. Deflecting Zeus’ lightning bolts would have been less painful.

  “The gods favor me,” Alexander said, grabbing the priestess by an arm and dragging her into the temple. “And you will prophesize for me today.”

  I heaved a sigh. “Bar the entrance,” I ordered Ptolemy, the lone guard not gaping over his shield. It wouldn’t do for word to get out that Alexander had manhandled the most famed priestess in all of Greece.

  Of course, the Pythia realized this.

  “Unhand the oracle,” she cried, her voice reverberating off the ancient temple walls. I hurried after them, cursing the heavy armor I wore, and found the priestess on her knees before Alexander, his sword pointed at her moon-pale neck. Assorted offerings lay piled against the walls: golden coins and yellowing knucklebones, ivory flutes and bronze figurines in an assortment of animal and human shapes, all given to the god of light, music, and oracles. Somehow I doubted whether Apollo would approve a sacrifice of his priestess’ blood.

  “I will have a prophecy of victory against Persia,” Alexander threatened. The cool light from the entrance mingled with that of the flaming orange torches on the walls, the smell of sulfur stronger here. “If I have to carve it from your throat.”

  I wanted to drag Alexander from the temple as he’d done the priestess and knock some sense into his thick skull, yet I recognized his tone and knew that his words were no jest. Only the night before, our two heads on the same pillow and our bodies slick with sweat, he’d murmured his dream to me.

  “I shall surpass even my father, Hephaestion,” he’d said, staring up at the canvas ceiling of his traveling tent. “He only conquered Macedon and the Peloponnese, but I shall vanquish Persia, and beyond to the endless sea. Even the gods shall sing my praises into eternity.”

  It was an improbable dream, but if any man could do it, it was Alexander.

  Although murdering Greece’s most famous oracle might hinder those plans.

  I gestured to the Pythia’s cedar and ivory throne, an ancient gift from the renowned King Midas, elevated over a crack in the ground that seeped foul-smelling vapors. Bug-eyed male figurines guarded the relic, their stone hands resting on the heads of tamed lions. “Might the oracle of Delphi make an exception for Alexander, descended as he is from the great Heracles and Achilles?” I asked. “Do we not head to Troy in the morn, Alexander, to vanquish the Persian king and offer his riches to Apollo and all our gods?”

  “We do, and we require a fortunate prophecy to rally our men for our long campaign there.” Alexander’s sword didn’t move, and the oracle swallowed hard, raw hatred in her eyes. Then she turned and walked to her elevated chair, regal as a queen approaching her throne. She took her time arranging the folds of her golden peplos. With a final venomous stare at Alexander, she closed her eyes and breathed deeply, as if trying to gather Apollo’s wisdom from the very air. A trace of a smile lifted her lips; then her eyes snapped open and she stared straight through the man before her.

  “The lion of Macedon is invincible,” the muleheaded priestess said, her voice smoother than the clearest honey. “As was Heracles before him. So Apollo has decreed and so it shall be.”

  I rubbed my forearms to ward away the chill that rolled down my skin, for everyone knew that Hydra poison had killed Heracles despite his supposed immortality, eating away his skin and exposing his bones. I’d rather fall on my sword than watch Alexander suffer such a gruesome death.

  “There, now,” Alexander crooned, oblivious to the prophecy’s double meaning as he sheathed his sword. “Was that so difficult?”

  He strode toward the entrance without a backward glance, but the priestess still looked down on us from her throne, her face mottled with rage.

  “I shall ensure that Alexander leaves the god of light a sizable offering,” I said, but received only a yellow gob of spittle heaved in my direction as thanks.

  “Apollo shall not soon forget this,” sh
e growled. “No one in the history of this temple has dared treat the oracle in so foul a manner.”

  Apollo should have been glad his Pythia still possessed a beating heart, but I doubted whether the god or his priestess would view that as a boon after being insulted. Gods’ memories are perilously short regarding all the sacrifices made in their name, yet long when it comes to slights, be they real or imagined.

  It made me ache for an amphora of wine—or maybe an entire krater—just to think about it.

  I grumbled a prayer to Ares and Zeus and any god that would listen that Alexander would vanquish Persia, although I doubted whether even all of King Darius’ gold would placate Apollo.

  And I wondered whether Alexander even cared.

  CHAPTER 3

  333 BCE

  Issus, Persia

  Drypetis

  “Perhaps Ahura Mazda will send a plague that will turn Alexander’s bowels to brown water and make his pretty face erupt with oozing boils,” I said, standing on stiff knees as the red-robed priest extinguished Ahura Mazda’s sacred flame and packed away the barsom, a twined bundle of myrtle and pomegranate twigs used to purify our prayers. I doubted whether the god of light and wisdom would hear my prayer, but at least it interrupted my mother’s latest tirade against the famed Macedonian and his invasion, namely its inconveniencing us from our seasonal palace rotation. Right now we should have been in Nebuchadnezzar’s famed palace in Babylon, but instead we were encamped on the stark plains of Issus. One might have thought we were in the deepest depths of hell instead of ensconced in a silken pavilion with eunuchs serving silver platters of sliced cucumbers and freshly curdled goat cheese while we were massaged, bathed, and doused in rose oil. I supposed the lack of saffron stems with which to paint my mother’s cheeks was an affliction too terrible to be borne.

  My father was Darius III, the mighty King of Kings of the entire Persian Empire. He would win this battle against Alexander and we’d soon return to our dozen palaces. My mother would be happy then, but I might die of boredom.

  “I told your father he should offer a reward of gold bullion for the heads of Alexander’s guards,” my mother said, pursing her plump lips as the priest departed and a servant rubbed swan fat onto her hands. I refrained from pointing out that the grease would have been better suited to oiling the bowstrings of my father’s archers. “Ptolemy and Hephaestion—how a barbarian and a catamite managed to save him at Granicus I’ll never understand.”

  Alexander had driven his cavalry into our troops at Granicus and received an ax blow to the head; he’d been saved from feeding the vultures only by the stubborn metal of his helmet and his bodyguards who dispatched his attacker, Spithridates. My mother had proposed minting coins with Spithridates’ profile, but my father had contented her with promising to kill Alexander himself.

  “Alexander’s bodyguards are sworn to protect him.” My sister, Stateira the Younger, glanced up from her charcoal sketch, this one taking the form of our grandmother. Our father’s mother, Sisygambis, was either 70 or 170 years old, and she sat in a corner with her wrinkled eyes closed, shrouded by winter’s early darkness. Too refined to snore and unable to rest while her eldest son battled for his empire, she’d spent the morning in private prayer and now I guessed that she feigned sleep to avoid this conversation—and the beauty regime—altogether. I wished I’d thought of that tactic first.

  “The yona takabara”—a Persian slur meaning “the Greeks who wear shields on their heads”—“should die a thousand deaths for daring to invade our shores.” My mother lifted her head from her tasseled pillow and managed to sip lemon-infused water from the lacquered bowl held to her lips by another servant. As everyone from here to Babylon knew from all her grousing, her back had ached and her stomach had been sour these past days with her fresh pregnancy. A battlefield was no place for a mother and an unborn babe, but she had refused to tell my father of her condition after so many stillbirths and miscarriages.

  Memories of another blue-lipped boy came unbidden. That terrible day still lived as fresh in my mind as if I were five again instead of seventeen.

  “Persia is the most cultured civilization on earth,” my mother said to me, “and your father shall remain its King of Kings until his hair has gone white and his back is bent like a crone’s.”

  But war had already aged my father and there were streaks of gray at his temples when he’d kissed us and ridden out that morning, flush from a fortuitous dream that the Macedonian phalanx was spread before him in flames, a sure sign of the Persian victory soon to come. So certain of his triumph was he that he’d seen no reason to discontinue the practice of allowing his royal wives, children, and imperial concubines to accompany him despite the close proximity of the battlefield. It seemed to me that he had chosen poor ground on which to engage the enemy, for the sea, the mountains, and the river Pinarus would force him to divide his army. When I’d mentioned it this morning, he’d only tugged the end of my long braid underneath my favorite hat, a gift from him for my seventeenth naming day, hewn from the gray hide of an old war elephant.

  “A battle isn’t one of your machines to tinker with, Drypetis,” he said. “It’s made of men, not cogs and wheels, and men are capable of miraculous feats.”

  So too were swords and the fearsome Macedonian pikes, shield bearers, and mounted archers, at least if the corpses from Granicus were any indication. That defeat smarted, but my father hadn’t led our troops at Granicus, so I held my tongue even as he winked and whispered in my ear. “Your mother wants Alexander’s head, but I’ll bring you back a Macedonian sarissa. You can examine it at your leisure, see how those wily Greeks reinforce the tips with silver.”

  Mithra’s eyes, but I worshipped my father and wanted nothing more than to believe he was invincible. Yet I was no longer a child and recognized the very real possibility that today might end in disaster.

  “They say Alexander claimed Midas’ chariot after unraveling the riddle of the Gordian knot by cutting through the cords of the cornel tree,” I said, searching for some topic to fill the encroaching silence.

  “Only a brute would consider cutting the rope itself,” my mother said. “I swear that upstart Macedonian will never rule more than the backwaters of Greece.”

  I resisted the urge to argue, biting my thumbnail, which was already ragged from the sleepless night I’d spent toying with a terra-cotta pot rigged with a copper cylinder and an iron rod. The contraption was rumored to conduct some strange current when the pot was filled with wine or lemon juice. I’d discovered nothing save that lemon juice stung the myriad cuts on all my fingers, while I worried about my father riding into battle this morning.

  Fifteen thousand brave Persians had been slaughtered at Granicus and thousands more had been bound in fetters and sent as slaves to Macedon, and I feared many others might meet similar fates this day. Alexander’s army was a sort of machine with no room for weakness, despite what my father said, for on our travels toward Issus, we’d encountered hundreds of Macedonian soldiers who’d been abandoned for being sick, wounded, or simply unable to march at their leader’s commanded double pace. It was an appalling show of Alexander’s barbarity and callousness toward his own men, but in celebration, my father had cut off their hands and burned them on a pyre in an offering to the fire god.

  My grandmother cleared her throat. “You forget, Stateira, but that upstart Macedonian already rules the entire Greek peninsula,” she said with her eyes closed. “I’d scarcely call that a backwater.”

  “Stop gnawing on your thumb like a starving rat, Drypetis,” my mother said, ignoring my grandmother. “And take off that hideous hat.”

  My elephant hat was hardly hideous, but I knew this battle was one I’d never win, at least not without my father at my side.

  My mother pulled herself to sitting and beckoned to my sister with one elegant hand. She wound a lock of Stateira’s ebony hair around her finge
r and rubbed it with her thumb. “More almond oil,” she ordered to a waiting servant. Our women were nobles chosen from Persia’s illustrious Seven Families for the honor of serving the King of Kings’ wife and daughters, yet for the way my mother treated them, they may as well have been slaves dragged in from slinging dung onto the empire’s wheat fields. “And more whitening cream for Drypetis’ fingers.” She scowled at me. “I thought I told you to leave that water wheel alone.”

  That morning after the troops had moved out, she had forbidden my examination of the nearby irrigation karez, but hadn’t said a word about the spare chariot that my father had left behind. Having abandoned the terra-cotta pot experiment and needing something to keep my hands busy and my mind off the nearby battle, I’d tackled changing the chariot’s draft pole, which had given me a devil of a time, and then contented myself with polishing the white holly-wood axles. Then I’d uncovered an abandoned box of bronze scythes. The long bronze blades were an awkward length for one person to hoist and mount onto the axle ends, but the project had successfully distracted me, although by the time I was finished, my hair was disheveled and my hands were raw.

  I extended my hands to the waiting servant with a wan smile and allowed my palms to be slathered with the whitening mixture of ground lentils, barley, and powdered deer antler. It smelled wretched, but afterward my hands would be as soft as a child’s. No amount of rose oil or salt from the Dead Sea would ever make me as beautiful as Stateira, but my mother was determined to die trying, and I often enjoyed the results. Although my mother never said it aloud, there was no doubt that I was the greatest disappointment to her, the plain-faced second daughter of Persia’s most renowned beauty. It was said that my father had swooned with love when he first saw my mother among the limestone towers of Cappadocia, that the very breezes themselves were heartsick from her perfumes. Yet I was plain and wiry as a field mouse during a seven-year drought, and my nose had acquired a decided ridge last year after I’d tinkered with an elevating winch and received a wad of lint shoved up my broken nose as a reminder to secure winch lines properly. Fortunately for the house of Darius, Stateira possessed all the grace and beauty that I lacked. My mother had even shared her name with my sister, while I was named after a mottled brown butterfly. Although a caterpillar might transform itself, a butterfly never would.