Life with Drypetis would never be dull.
• • •
I’d hoped to be woken by my wife’s deft hands rousing me to ravage her again, but instead we were wakened by a never-ending wail that threatened to make my ears bleed.
“What fresh hell is this?” Drypetis moaned, burrowing her face into my shoulder. “Did you order a herd of angry goats to be slaughtered?”
I’d already reached for my sword in case of attack, but the racket outside was no war cry. It was mournful, as if someone had died.
And it was coming from the direction of Alexander’s tent.
A surge of energy coursed through my veins and my mouth filled with the metallic taste of fear as I shoved my arms through my discarded wedding robe and burst into the thin spring sunshine. I stopped short at the crowd of veteran Macedonians gathered outside Alexander’s massive red and white striped tent, the majority of whom had taken new wives yesterday.
These were no happy bridegrooms, but the start of an angry mob. Their heads were freshly shaved in a gesture of mourning, so freshly shorn that I could see where a few had nicked themselves with the blade. Alexander was nowhere to be seen, yet a contingent of bearded and unblinking Persians stood guard outside the entrance to his tent.
Guards wouldn’t protect a dead man, unless perhaps that dead man was Alexander of Macedon.
“What’s the meaning of this?” I demanded. “Where’s Alexander?”
One of the soldiers ceased his warbling. “Alexander has replaced us,” the grizzled old warrior said, his voice seething with anger. He and his men were stubborn Macedonians, dressed in the Greek style and with the weather-beaten skin of their jaws shaved clean. “Instead, he plans to conquer the world with thirty thousand oriental dancing boys. We’re soldiers, not old nags ready to be put out to pasture.”
It took a moment for me to realize what he meant, that the thousands of Persian boys left behind in Susa six years ago were now old enough to join our ranks and replace the veterans who’d marched from Macedon more than ten years ago. Veterans like me.
“Alexander is inside?” I asked.
The soldier nodded. “He refused to speak to us after we demanded that he keep us on.”
My panicked surge of energy dissipated, leaving me light-headed. These men were mourning their lost honor, not Alexander.
“Therein lies your first problem,” I said, rubbing a tired hand over my face. “Beseech, beg, or bargain, but never demand anything from Alexander.”
The soldier colored at that. “You’re Alexander’s closest companion,” he said, his flush deepening, for we both knew I was more than that. “Can’t you speak to him on our behalf?”
I stared hard at the striped canvas walls of Alexander’s kingly pavilion. “I won’t disturb any man after he’s taken not one but two brides to his bed.” That was an empty boast, for I knew full well that Alexander would never take Parysatis and her harelip to his bed. “I’ll seek out Alexander before the twelfth hour, if—and only if—your men cease their caterwauling.”
“But we require an answer—”
I held up my hands. “I have a comely and surprisingly flexible young wife waiting in my bed who requires my immediate attention. Go back to your new wives—or a different woman, or a boy, if you prefer—and keep yourselves occupied until I can speak to Alexander.”
To their credit, these men were not so old that the suggestion of a tumble no longer held any allure. Their wails ceased and a few offered crude jokes before most wandered off.
“You swear you’ll see to this?” the leader asked.
“I swear it on Ares’ sword,” I said. “So long as you give me peace and quiet in which to enjoy my wife.”
The man nodded. “You shall have your peace, until the twelfth hour.”
I watched him leave, then turned toward Susa’s main gate, where several dozen vendors had set up bustling businesses to take full advantage of the army’s arrival, realizing that I should probably bring back something for Drypetis and me to eat. I laughed aloud when I spotted an old merchant with a tangle of beard like rotten seaweed hawking paper bags of roasted nuts.
“I hope your almonds are as good as the last time I was in Susa,” I called to him, my stomach growling at the salty aroma. I fished for a coin—I had several of the freshly minted gold staters that bore Bucephalus’ horned head, an honor to old Ox-Head that had made Roxana rant and rave—but the hawker’s eyes sparked with recognition and he handed me a bag.
“You paid for half a harvest last time,” he said, but his smile didn’t reach his eyes. “And that coin of yours meant my wife got to prance about in silken slippers and buy herself a pure white goat kid. Slept curled up to that goat more than me, as a matter of truth.”
“And where is your lovely wife on this fine day?” I asked, popping several nuts into my mouth. They were rich and buttery, the perfect accompaniment to the amphora of red wine I had tucked beneath my bed. I wondered then if Drypetis liked nuts, imagining her soft lips parting as I fed them to her.
The almond hawker cleared his throat and I frowned to see tears gleaming in his eyes. “My wife is dead,” he said. “Died of a fever some months back.”
“You have my sympathies,” I said, daring to reach across and squeeze his shoulder. One would have thought being released from such a woman might have been a relief, but the man snuffled and dragged a sleeve under his bulbous nose.
“You’re one of them soldiers who took a wife yesterday, aren’t you?” he asked.
“I am,” I said. Another soldier beckoned to the nut seller, already digging in his belt for a copper obol or two. “A woman who can never sit still for more than a moment’s time and who possesses a tongue sharp enough to have competed with your late wife’s.”
“Enjoy every moment with your old girl,” the man said, bowing his head to me as he took the soldier’s money, biting it to check its purity. “You never know when it will end, or how much you’ll miss her when it does.”
I nodded my farewell and absentmindedly chewed a few more almonds as I walked back to my tent. I didn’t get far, for a perfumed boy sat like a sentinel outside my tent.
“Greetings, Parizad,” I said, wrinkling my nose against the haze of frankincense that clung to him like a god’s altar, so costly a fragrance that only his sister could have given it to him. “What can I do for you?”
“I just thought . . .” Parizad gestured with a graceful hand toward my tent. “I hoped that you might be interested in a different sort of entertainment now that you’ve done your duty to Darius’ homely daughter.” He spoke quickly, his eyes flicking from my face to the ground and back. “I’ve been retelling the stories of your gods to Roxana, but I’ve run out of new tales. Perhaps you could read more to me, and after that . . .”
I smiled, for I recognized the symptoms of his cow-love and had once been flattered by it. However, it had been months since we’d been together in or out of my bed, for I’d volunteered Parizad for a special duty, guarding Roxana during our miserable retreat from India. I’d scarcely spared a thought for Alexander’s first wife since the morning after Bucephalus’ death, save to hope that she might perish in the snows of the Hindu Kush Mountains. Unfortunately, she was half-spider and had emerged from the ordeal with scarcely a hair out of place.
“My duty to Drypetis extends longer than a single night,” I rebuked Parizad gently. “But I appreciate your offer.”
His face fell even as I squeezed his shoulder. He was young—twenty-two, if I remembered correctly—and would recover from this infatuation as soon as a well-built soldier with dark curls crossed his path.
I ruffled the ears of Drypetis’ yellow dog tied outside my tent and ducked within, a grin spreading across my face to find my wife seated on a dining couch. A tumbled fleece was tucked about her legs and shoulders, her hair loose, as she used the Damascus steel
chisel to whittle a bit of wood that might have once been a drill bore. Mount Olympus would likely crumble to dust before I ever came upon her in a moment of female domesticity, spinning wool or gossiping with her attendants. “The wailing has ceased,” she observed without looking up, biting her lower lip as she concentrated on her carving.
I nodded and offered her the nuts, smiling as she set down her tools and devoured a handful. “So it has. And we have until the twelfth hour before it starts again.”
“Is that so?” She stopped chewing and swallowed hard, as if self-conscious now in the light of day. “And what do you propose we do until then?”
“So many things,” I said, kneeling before her and setting aside the chisel and bore. I kissed her fingers. “Like this.” I trailed my lips up the sensitive flesh of her arm. “And this.”
I took my time, grinning as I pinned her arms above her head and used my tongue to drive her to madness before she mounted me, taking me inside her so we both cried out at the brink of ecstasy, her fingers pressed into my hair and her back arched against me, urging me still deeper. Afterward, she fell atop me on the narrow couch, our bodies slick with sweat and her hair fanned out over my chest. I fingered a few dark strands until she touched her lips to the scar on my forearm.
“You know,” she said, tracing the puckered skin with her fingertips, “I was glad that you didn’t go unscathed at Gaugamela.”
“And I wasn’t too upset that you almost pulled off your own arm. Served you right for trying to escape.”
“You mean my trying to use the battle to my advantage?” she asked.
“You could have gotten yourself killed,” I said, my voice suddenly gruff.
“All these scars of yours tell a similar story,” she said, touching each nick and scratch I’d won by following Alexander. I knew her mind wasn’t still from the impatient thrumming of her fingers against my shoulder. “Will there be much more fighting, do you think?”
“No one can know Alexander’s mind. He may return to India, Macedon, or strike out somewhere entirely new. Only the ends of the earth can contain that man.” I touched her chin so I could see her eyes, a deceptively easy smile on my lips. “Don’t tell me that you’re worried for me now.”
I saw the flash of vulnerability in her gaze just before she rolled from my chest. “I don’t care to be widowed, at least not just yet.”
“We could travel together,” I said, watching her as she sat up and slipped into her robe, tugging the silk tight so it pulled across her breasts in the most tantalizing way. I forced myself to retrieve my Persian shalvar from the floor and shove my legs into them, even though putting clothes on was the last thing I wanted to do.
“Travel?”
“Many of the veterans want to continue fighting,” I said. “But some may choose to return home to Macedon, regardless of where Alexander goes next.”
She cocked her head, eyes widening in disbelief. “You’d leave Alexander?”
I shrugged, unsure of that answer myself. “We march first to Ecbatana and then Babylon. That leaves plenty of time to decide which road to follow after that.”
“You astonish me, Hephaestion of Macedon,” she said. She sat opposite me and bent her legs so her chin rested on her knees. “Tell me something else that will surprise me.”
I clasped my hands behind my head. “There’s not much to tell outside of my deep intellect, dashing good looks, and Herculean strength.”
She nudged my ribs with her toe. “Surely even your deep intellect can manage to think of something no one knows about you.”
“I hate apples.”
She made a face. “And I hate raisins. Better than that.”
I thought for a moment. “I’ve always liked the way your eyes flash when I’ve angered you, like Medusa getting ready to turn me into stone.”
Drypetis rolled those same eyes. “Flattery doesn’t count.”
She uncurled herself and shifted, laying her head in my lap. It was such a simple, trusting gesture that I hesitated, then plunged ahead, uttering a truth known only to Alexander. “I’m afraid of fire.”
She tilted her chin and made a face akin to one I’d seen when she was tangling with a difficult angle for a winch or an obstinate chariot axle. “You, the great Hephaestion, afraid of fire?”
“My Achilles’ heel,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “Ever since Alexander tried to kill me.”
It seemed almost a betrayal of Alexander’s trust, but I recounted the story of the cave at the Precinct of the Nymphs, how I’d scarcely escaped with my life and how to this day the sight of flames made my stomach roil.
“That explains your reaction after Adurnarseh was burned,” Drypetis said. “I thought it odd that a man who has seen such atrocities on the battlefield would be softhearted toward a mere singer.”
“He didn’t deserve such torture,” I said quietly, threading my fingers through her hair to massage her scalp. “And that might have easily been my fate as a boy.”
Drypetis nodded, struck silent for once. “My brother died before he reached manhood,” she said after a long moment, her voice soft and vulnerable. “Drowned in the waters of the Euphrates.”
Fire and water, disease and old age. Such simple things had the power to steal our very souls.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it. “Our lives are ruled by the whims of the three Fates. All we can do is enjoy the time we have before they decide it’s time to cut our lifestrings.”
And with that, I lifted Drypetis from my lap and guided her lips to mine, drinking deeply of the scent of her skin, her cassia perfume, the vibrant life of her.
Little did I know, but the three hunchbacked crones with their single eye and foul breath hovered over us even then, snipping their rusty shears and cackling with glee at a dark future that only they could see.
CHAPTER 21
Susa, Persia
Roxana
I dressed with care the day after the mockery of the Susa weddings, outlining my eyes in thick lines of kohl in the Egyptian style Alexander admired and draping myself in my wedding finery. Timid Stateira might be the daughter of the former King of Kings, but her father was only a pile of dusty bones and I was Alexander’s first wife, despite my empty womb.
Parizad suggested that perhaps Alexander was incapable of siring a child, that Barsine’s sprat, Heracles, might have been sown by another soldier. I was beginning to believe him, for I’d used every trick Bagoas had ever taught me to please Alexander and drunk down countless foul-smelling concoctions to urge his seed to take root. Yet the nights since India had found him most often with Hephaestion and even that treacherous weasel Bagoas, and I had a sneaking suspicion that my husband had bedded his whore Barsine after she’d ridden out from Susa to meet him the afternoon before the weddings.
I knew then that I’d been right to protect my heart from Alexander, to give him my body but never my love.
I refused to be cast aside. No coy princess with the golden blood of kings running in her veins would stop me from conceiving Alexander’s heir and becoming the mother of the future King of Kings. And when I did, I’d force the rest of them to swallow their sly smiles and eat their insults against me.
Parysatis had gobbled up my advice when I’d visited her this morning as the sun rose. The hideous little fool knew nothing about how to please a man, and she’d seen neither hide nor hair of Alexander since yesterday’s ceremony. Of course, no man could be expected to sleep with a woman who constantly slobbered into that veil of hers and could barely make herself understood. It would take more wine than Alexander could ever drink for him to do his duty to his disfigured wife, not that toad-faced Parysatis realized it yet.
Stateira, on the other hand, possessed enough beauty to lure our husband to her bed. She would require a different tack.
Yet I stopped short to see Bagoas outside her pavili
on, its canvas walls fluttering in the meager spring breeze. “What are you doing here?” I sneered at the half man who had supplanted me in Alexander’s bed.
And despite all the heartache and the nights in Sogdian Rock that we’d shared, Bagoas only tucked his arms deeper inside his sleeves and looked down his nose at me. “As her family’s former servant, Queen Stateira requested that I attend her.”
“I didn’t realize that Stateira preferred the company of rats.”
Bagoas dared shake his head at me, a mixture of pity and reprimand. “Alexander prefers his women soft and pliable,” he said. “A lesson it would have served you well to learn.”
I swore that I’d hardened my heart against Bagoas when he’d first betrayed me by letting Alexander into his bed, but his words still stung.
I sniffed. “And you’d have done well to learn that I don’t take kindly to traitors.”
“I did what I had to,” Bagoas said softly, but I ignored him.
He lifted the tent flap and announced me, raising his lilting voice to be heard over the second round of wailing from the Macedonian soldiers outside. The racket grated on my nerves and made me wish someone would slit their throats to save all our ears.
“Roxana of Balkh.” Unruffled, Stateira rose and approached, offering her smooth cheek for the proskynesis kiss that would have marked me as her inferior. Her eyes widened as I clasped her wrists instead and kissed her lips in the gesture between equals.
Her purple blood might have stolen my title, but I’d never bow and scrape like a commoner before her.
I dared motion to her couch. “Please, let us sit and get to know each other.”
“It would be my pleasure,” she said. Her proper breeding was more impenetrable than a Macedonian sun shield, but I caught the spark in her eyes before she quelled it. I gave her my most winsome smile even as I clenched my teeth at the sight behind her: Alexander’s wedding robes, folded into a perfect square at the foot of her bed.
And she moved stiffly, as if she’d been well used last night.
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