“Perhaps,” I said. I wouldn’t acknowledge that he was right, at least not out loud. But the air smelled sharper under the dome of stars, and I actually looked forward to tomorrow, a brand-new day with no one to answer to save myself.
“What will you do when we arrive in Babylon?” Cassander asked, tossing another innocent blade of grass into the fire. “I don’t suppose you plan to wait obediently for Alexander to marry you off as Olympias commands.”
I swiveled to face him. “How do you know about that?”
He made a sound that might have been a laugh. “Olympias’ desires are as transparent as water, Thessalonike, as are my father’s.”
There was no arguing that.
I set down Athena’s cage, glancing east. “I don’t know what I’ll do in Babylon. At least not yet.”
“I know what you should do.”
“And what might that be?”
“Marry me.”
I choked, an indelicate sound no maiden should make upon receiving her first marriage proposal, and prayed to the four goddesses that Cassander couldn’t discern the laughter through my coughing.
He scowled and stood, half blocking the firelight with the heft of his shoulders. “I’ll take your mirth as a rejection.”
There was the Cassander I knew: morose, dour, and dull.
“You assume rightly,” I said, looking at the stars overhead to avoid having to blink back my tears of laughter. “But now you can tell your father that you made a valiant effort to ally yourself with my brother.”
“You must marry, Thessalonike, as must I,” he said slowly. “I’m not a golden lion like your brother, nor do women flock to me as they do Alexander and Hephaestion. But perhaps one day you’ll crave a husband who will do his duty by you.”
I snorted. “I’d sooner wed a goat than marry a man who considered me his duty.”
Cassander’s smile this time almost reached his eyes. “Then I wish you and your goat many years of happiness.”
I swallowed a smile, unwilling to allow this rare glimpse of Cassander’s lighter side to disarm me. “I’m to marry Hephaestion upon our arrival in Babylon,” I said with an uneasy sniff, made suddenly self-conscious by Cassander’s humor. “It was Olympias’ idea.”
It was still odd to think of Hephaestion as my husband, but the idea was something I could probably reconcile myself to. After all, Hephaestion wasn’t so old as to be half-dead, nor was he likely to beat me with his fists. In fact, I could probably challenge him to a match or two and win.
“I see,” Cassander said. “I knew you fawned over him, but I wasn’t aware the feeling was reciprocated.”
“That just shows how little you notice,” I retorted, but it occurred to me that my announcement had pricked him, something not even my sharpest words had managed before.
“Then I wish you both many years of happiness.” He bowed and stalked off into the darkness, likely to seek out his father and inform him of his abysmal failure at wooing me.
Cynnane passed Cassander as he retreated, and she arched an eyebrow in his direction as she nibbled a plate of half-eaten barley cakes and cheese, her mess of hair like a tangle of ill-kept brambles. “Did I miss something?” she asked as she sat next to me, handing over the food.
“Nothing at all,” I replied, taking the dented plate and stuffing several barley cakes into my mouth as I watched Cassander disappear into the darkness, feeling almost sorry for him.
Almost.
CHAPTER 19
324 BCE
Susa, Persia
Drypetis
The horn blast was so deafening that the rock crystal slipped from my fingers, sending both the precious stone and its polishing paste of sand and water scattering across the floor.
“Mithra’s eyes!” I cursed aloud. Curled at my feet, my motley dog barked and flicked a yellow ear as if shaking a tiny fist at whoever dared disturb our peace. It had taken me much of the morning, not to mention the sacrifice of several of my fingernails, to grind the crystal to the specifications given by an astronomer from Nimrud. He claimed that, with patience, the stone would turn to magic and enlarge anything seen through the opposite side.
If I could get the cursed thing polished without breaking it.
“Probably another wandering merchant or scraping ambassador coming to pick at the carcasses of worthless royals,” I grumbled to my dog as I stepped over the wet sluice of sand and brushed the stone clean. Seated primly on the bed, Stateira scarcely looked up from her copy of Plato’s Symposium in Greek, her lips moving silently over each word and meaning; no doubt later, I’d be subjected to a philosophical discussion on the finer points of love. Convenient, then, that I felt a headache coming on.
Alexander had deposited us in Susa with orders that we learn Greek, and learn it we had, until we might have debated the Olympians themselves. After all, there was little else for us to do here. Stateira read until it was so dark that lamps had to be lit, while I constructed countless models of ramparts and scaling walls, rebuilt wheelbarrows for the slaves who emptied the night-soil buckets, and did everything in my power to keep from going mad.
We were afforded every luxury, yet forbidden even to visit the palace’s pistachio grove without a full contingent of Macedonian guards. The nearby foothills of the Zagros Mountains with their paths amid the white milk vetch and yellow Jerusalem sage were beyond our reach, as Alexander had decreed that our feet should never pass through the city gates. I ached to explore the nearby domed yakhchal, an ancient subterranean structure that stored and kept mountain winter ice frozen even during the hottest summer, yet even that excursion was strictly forbidden. The one exception to our imprisonment had been when we traveled to Persepolis to lay my father’s ruined body to rest in the Tower of Silence. I’d spent many a dreary day and even more long nights thinking back to the evening I’d spent there with Hephaestion, alternating between heated remembrances of his touch and self-recriminations for such utter foolishness. But then, I’d been a fool in everything where Hephaestion was concerned.
And so we lingered here, pampered and forgotten pets.
I rubbed the rock crystal between my thumb and forefinger, peering through its occluded surface just as our door was flung open with the force of an attacking assassin. My harried grandmother stood there breathing hard, and paused a moment to smooth her white hair as she stepped over the threshold.
For my grandmother to have hurried anywhere meant that the world must be burning. Or worse.
“Dress their hair,” she ordered between breaths to the army of slaves coming into view behind her. Stateira closed her book, her thumb holding her place in Plato’s long-winded rants. “Fetch their jewels and perfumes.”
I knew not what was happening but took one glance at my sandy fingers, ruined fingernails, and stained robe. “Best fetch the vinegar and almond oil too,” I said.
“You mad girl,” my grandmother said, lifting the hem of her robe to step over the mess of sand on the floor. “Your dear mother should have ordered you whipped more often.”
“I fear she found my tongue too similar to yours to chance it,” I said, making my grandmother pinch my chin between her knob-knuckled fingers.
“You’re hopeless, Drypetis,” she said, patting my cheek as our attendants trooped in with more chests of unguents and perfumes. One immediately opened a giant white clamshell incised with a scene of musicians in a palm-filled garden and began slathering some sort of cream onto Stateira’s face. A eunuch set himself to the unfortunate task of plucking the space between my eyebrows with copper tongs that looked better suited to torturing traitors and murderers. “Luckily, your sister has always been more biddable, which is fortunate considering that Alexander has been sighted just beyond the hills.”
Thus solving the mystery of the horns and my grandmother’s frantic state. Alexander and Hephaestion were the only two peopl
e I’d never managed to bend to my will, Alexander because he was as cold as the icy breath of the winged daevas and Hephaestion . . .
Well, because he was Hephaestion.
My grandmother looked to Stateira then, to my lovely sister with her skin that glowed like a ripe peach and her hair that shone like moonlight on a black river. My own hair had grown to my shoulders after the pulley accident just before my father’s death, but I was tempted to chop it all off again just for the freedom it afforded me. She said, “There can be only one reason Alexander returns to Susa now.”
“He’s coming for his pets,” I muttered.
My grandmother ignored me. “Alexander has commanded a massive wedding ceremony to marry his Macedonian soldiers to Persian women.”
I saw immediately the genius of Alexander’s plan, for the children born of these marriages would be loyal to both Greece and Persia, ensuring peace for years to come.
Including any children my sister or I bore him.
After all, it would be foolish to think the unions of his men to Persian brides wouldn’t be crowned by his own wedding to Persia’s two princesses.
Stateira set down her book with a delicate gasp and allowed the slaves to pin back her thick hair for the impending barrage of beauty treatments, but my grandmother’s words rattled in my mind. “Surely Alexander has no need to marry me,” I said. “After all, he already has another Persian wife in Roxana of Balkh.”
A spasm of distaste ruffled my grandmother’s visage as it always did when Roxana’s name was mentioned, despite the fact that we’d never laid eyes on Alexander’s wife. “We shall not speak of that woman,” my grandmother said, the thin wattle of pale skin under her chin quivering with emotion. “Persia is secure, but Alexander cannot leave either of you unwed. He must strengthen his bond with the royal house of Persia, especially after allying himself with the tramp of Balkh.”
“Roxana’s father is noble,” Stateira said, calmly enduring a thick painting of snail mucus and ground fish scales on her face, a foul concoction that left our skin as soft and unlined as newborn babes’. Still, it seemed a pointless sacrifice on the part of the fish considering the fairness of my sister’s skin; one could see the faint web of veins along her hips and breasts when our attendants undressed her each evening. “And Alexander was within his rights to choose whomever he wished to be his bride.”
“Oxyartes is a grasping spider with pretensions at nobility, and Roxana spread her legs for a traitor.” My thin-lipped grandmother spat on the floor at the mention of Bessus, whose name she hadn’t spoken since the day Hephaestion brought us my father’s bones. “Alexander should not have lowered himself to marry into so base a family.”
“They say Roxana is very beautiful,” Stateira said, but she bit her lip. Only I knew of the bitter tears she’d shed into her pillow the night we’d learned of Alexander’s marriage to Roxana. And while once I might have railed against her yearning to become Alexander’s wife, there was no denying after all these years that our stars were yoked firmly to Alexander’s.
“As are you, sister.” I smiled at the pleasure that lit her eyes. Stateira was indeed lovely, and I knew she worried that her twenty-seven years meant she was too old to secure any man’s heart and bear his children. “And Alexander will treasure you.”
“We’ll be together, sisters forever, Drypetis,” she said, waving away the mucus-wielding attendant to clasp my hands. “Alexander will treasure us both.”
I swallowed a chuff of laughter at that. Alexander was a lover of beauty, which I would never have, even if I swam in a vat of snail slime every day. If he did marry me, it was only because he wasn’t brave enough to leave a daughter of Darius unwed as a possible lure for some other man seeking to seize power in Persia. I took solace in the fact that he’d certainly never bed me, not when he had both Stateira and Roxana to slake his desires, not to mention his clutch of other bedmates.
Thus, when I wed Alexander, it would be only because neither of us had any choice.
• • •
Susa’s main square was a haze of gold that I glimpsed through my wedding veil, my every movement accompanied by the jangle of gold coins sewn below my chin. Yet even through the blur of gold, it was plain that Alexander was no longer the mighty lion that had besieged Tyre and delivered us to Susa, but was instead a weather-beaten pelt that had lost its former glory. He moved stiffly, bearded and dressed in an extravagant Persian robe with embroidered flower roundels reminiscent of the first Darius’ famed Robe of Honor. Hard lines from the sun and wind had etched themselves around his eyes, making him look at least a decade older than his thirty-one years. On the lower dais and to his left stood his general Ptolemy, his hair gleaming from what appeared to be a full bottle of olive oil upturned onto his head. My traitorous heart tripped at the sight of the man to Alexander’s right, of Hephaestion in his gray silk robe, slightly thinner after the miserable journey from India but easily the largest commander present. I tipped my nose in the air just as he winked at me so fast that I might have imagined it.
Why did the man have the ability to fluster me even on this, my wedding day?
My proud grandmother stood at the bottom of the dais and across from her was a woman swathed in garish orange and black with so much gold at her wrists and throat that it was a wonder she could still move.
Roxana, Alexander’s first wife and the Queen of Queens.
Her eyes glittered like flecks of obsidian beneath all their sormeh paint, but Stateira and I swept past her to bow before Alexander in a rustle of rainbow-hued silk. Stateira wore the same deep shade of royal purple as a ripe pomegranate, golden bands at her wrists, moon-disks dripping to her shoulders, and a lion pendant draped between her breasts. Her hair had been knotted into plaits to rival the famed knot of Gordius, and our mother’s diadem, a cacophony of golden disks, crowned her like a living goddess.
I fidgeted, for my golden belt and sphinx pendant were so heavy that I feared I’d collapse before Alexander could marry me. I wished for nothing more than to be wearing my favorite brown robe with the tear under the arm, my fingers coated in oil while I tinkered with the magic crystal from Nimrud.
Our cousin Parysatis took her place behind me, a silent girl wearing a king’s ransom of gold and a startling crimson veil that covered her gaping cleft lip. Sadly, the royal blood of the former king Artaxerxes in her veins had done nothing to avert the terrible disfigurement she’d carried since her birth, one that marred not only her face but also her speech. She’d arrived this morning with Alexander’s entourage after he’d gathered her from Persepolis. It seemed that the Macedonian conqueror was determined to wed all the remaining royal daughters of Persia.
Macedonian soldiers in full armor and Persian women dressed in their finest robes packed the square. In years to come, some claimed that nine thousand people attended the weddings, but I know only that I wished I could run into the hills as I faced Alexander.
“Soldiers and wives of Macedon and Persia,” Alexander said from atop the dais. “Today is but the first of five days of weddings and celebrations during which we shall mark the unions of our two peoples. In addition to the bread, wine, and entertainment, I decree that every man who takes a wife here at Susa shall find his debts paid and a dowry provided for his wife from the spoils of our campaigns. Thus his future happiness shall be forever secure.”
The resulting cheers likely deafened faraway Macedon, and died down only as Alexander raised his arms for silence.
In a traditional wedding, the bridegroom sits with his bride beside him before they cut a loaf of brown bread dotted with sesame seeds, a symbol of fertility. Chairs had been placed along the lower dais stretching to the far ends of the square, their size and order meant to dictate the grooms’ prestige. The largest, a throne with gilded lion armrests and an inlaid mother-of-pearl back, waited behind Alexander, flanked by two smaller chairs.
But t
here should be three, for there were three royal brides to wed the Macedonian King of Kings today.
Alexander lowered himself onto his throne like an old man with swollen joints, then motioned to the chairs reserved for his brides.
“Stateira, daughter of Darius,” he said, gesturing to the first, “and Parysatis, daughter of Artaxerxes. I take you both as my wives. From this day forth, Stateira shall be my Queen of Queens.”
Stateira’s eyes mirrored my shock and confusion before she and Parysatis lifted their hems to assume their thrones in a cloud of rose and myrrh perfumes.
However, my sister and I weren’t the only ones stunned by Alexander’s declaration.
Roxana’s fists clenched and a foul storm of fury, hurt, and outrage swirled in her eyes at her sudden demotion to Alexander’s least royal, and therefore least important, wife. I doubted if he’d even had the decency to inform her until this very moment that he planned to give the title of Queen of Queens to my sister. I’d been reared on stories of dangerous harem intrigue and feared for my sister then. We’d need to keep an eye on Alexander’s vulgar little tart from Balkh.
Without even a glance in our direction, Alexander lifted my sister’s veil and kissed her full on the lips to a hailstorm of cheers. He deftly avoided revealing Parysatis’ cleft lip by kissing her through the veil even as my father’s former eunuch Bagoas brought forth a single great goblet filled with sweet wine. Alexander drank first, followed by my sister, but Stateira dared look over the rim of the cup at me, the question apparent in her eyes. Every soldier in the square cheered and raised a smaller goblet filled with golden wine, then drank to the health of the new royal unions.
I remained standing, alone and forgotten. I wasn’t sure whether to be insulted or relieved.
Hephaestion sat in the second groom’s chair to Alexander’s right. I suddenly didn’t like the way he was looking at me, as if he was about to make me the target of some joke. “Drypetis, daughter of Darius,” he said, his voice booming to reach the farthest fringes of the crowd. “I take you as my wife.”
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