Alexander stared at me a long moment, then blinked. “Thessalonike? What are you doing here?”
“Your mother ordered me to travel with Antipater, remember? We sent word ahead.” I hoped to draw him into a discussion, although this wasn’t the time to deliver Olympias’ demands that Antipater be deposed, but Alexander shrank back.
“I care little for Antipater, Olympias, or anyone,” he said, drawing a shuddering breath. “Not without Hephaestion at my side.”
My poor, dear, battered brother. His every day had been full of a lust for life, but now he was forced to face the other side of living: grief and pain and suffering. And although my brother had forded rivers as wide as oceans, scaled walls taller than Mount Olympus, and bested impossible odds on the battlefield, I feared he might not be equal to this terrible new task.
“I wasn’t here when he died.” Alexander’s face crumpled, giving me a glimpse of the child he’d once been. “I might have saved him if I’d been here, but instead he died without me. And now they want me to burn him, he who feared nothing in life except for fire.”
“Not even you could slay Hades,” I said. “But you can’t leave Hephaestion as he is.”
Alexander glowered at me and reached for his sword again, as if he might somehow banish his pain with that length of metal. “You’re just like the rest of them, begging me to burn him. Leave me!”
“I won’t,” I said. “For I bring a message from your godly father Ammon,” I said. “To tell you how to best honor Hephaestion.”
He hesitated at that. “What does Ammon require?” Alexander finally demanded, for my brother was impatient even when dealing with the gods. “How may I honor Hephaestion so he might take his place among the gods?”
I cleared my throat and read the letter, hoping Alexander wouldn’t notice when my thumb smudged the fresh ink. “Ammon, the Great Cackler, acknowledges your grief for the shade of Hephaestion of Macedon,” I read. “Hephaestion was only a man of sinew and bone while he walked this earth, but he can be honored so that his name is never forgotten.”
Judging from the thunder that blackened Alexander’s face, we might soon find ourselves greeting Hades if we weren’t careful.
“Hephaestion was like a god to me,” Alexander said, rising like a lion ready to claim its prey. “Is that not enough for my father Ammon?”
I held up a placating hand, improvising. “While Hephaestion lacked ichor in his veins and thus cannot be revered as an immortal god, Ammon recognizes the bravery and sacrifices of such a divine hero and demands that he be celebrated as such.”
“A divine hero,” Alexander murmured, resuming his place alongside the bed. The tension in the room dissipated at Alexander’s nod and my shoulders slumped, accompanied by Drypetis’ audible sigh of relief.
“Patroclus to your Achilles,” Drypetis said to him, stepping farther into the room. “Celebrate him and proclaim his bravery so loudly that even your gods on Mount Olympus shall know his name.”
“I will not expose him to vultures and dogs like you Persians do,” Alexander growled, waving his sword at the parchment. “I’ve forbidden such barbaric practices.”
Drypetis’ hands curled into fists, but otherwise she held herself like a queen in the face of his insult. “Then give him a royal tomb instead, like the great kings of Babylon.”
“You cannot leave him here in this room,” I said to my brother, not allowing him a chance to answer Drypetis’ demands with his sword. “Nothing will bring Hephaestion back, but perhaps his name can be sung alongside yours through the ages.”
“Please,” Drypetis said to him, gesturing to the letter I held. “Hephaestion would want you to do this.”
And we waited with bated breath for my brother’s answer.
“It shall take time to plan such a magnificent showing of games and competitions as Hephaestion deserved,” Alexander finally said, speaking to himself although the madness seemed to have cleared from his eyes. “I shall do as Ammon decrees, but Ecbatana isn’t fit to host such a spectacle, nor shall it have the honor of hosting his tomb for all eternity. We shall fete him in Babylon and then his body shall be sent home to Macedon.”
He leaned over and pressed his lips to Hephaestion’s forehead. “I shall erect a statue of a mighty lion here in Ecbatana in your memory,” he whispered as if they were the only two in the room. “And you will be celebrated in Babylon with its great kings, for you deserve no less and yet so much more.”
He straightened then and strode to the door, pausing to squeeze my shoulder as if suddenly remembering my presence. “It is good to have you here, sister,” he said, once more the golden lion of my childhood, despite his ragged hair and the stink of death that clung to him. Then he was gone, leaving Drypetis and me alone with Hephaestion’s body.
Drypetis fell to her knees. “Thank you,” she said in a quavering voice, looking up at me with eyes that gleamed in the lamplight. “My sister, Stateira, will help me prepare his body, but I’d be pleased if you’d assist as well.”
“I’d be honored,” I answered.
I took Alexander’s chair, its leather still bearing my brother’s warmth. My brother had always burned with the heat of the sun, bringing heat but also the possibility of scalding all that he touched. Hephaestion had tempered him, like water cooling a blazing sword when it’s forged, but now he was gone. I pressed my forehead to his, blinking hard as a pair of tears fell from my eyes.
“Good-bye, Hephaestion,” I whispered. “Rest well.”
Unbeknownst to us, Hephaestion’s death was like my father’s so many years ago, a shorn lifeline that whetted the voracious appetites of the sleeping Fates. In the days to come, their shears would usher countless souls to Hades in a bloodbath that the bards would sing of for generations to come.
• • •
I finally delivered Olympias’ demands for Antipater’s removal once the procession to Babylon was under way.
“My mother’s voice has been loud in my ear since the day I left Pella,” Alexander grumbled. “Now she wishes me to settle her complaints against Antipater while I attend to Hephaestion’s funeral and make plans for our new navy.” He sat atop a sleek brown horse. It jarred me to see him without Bucephalus, as if he’d been abandoned by all his friends of old. He sighed and ran a hand over his shorn hair. “My mother punishes me hard for the nine months she carried me.”
I snorted. “I’m the one who’s had to live with her these past twelve years. You’re the lucky one who managed to run away.”
Alexander chuckled then, the first bit of laughter I’d heard from him since my arrival. With patience, time would heal his grief.
Of course, Alexander had never been a patient man.
And this brother of mine was no longer the laughing youth who had marched out of Aigai but a hardened warrior. Before we left for Babylon, he’d ordered a skirmish against the Cossaeans and massacred every one of their men as an offering to Hephaestion. It was an eerie echo of Achilles’ sacrifice of twelve highborn youths to Patroclus’ funeral pyra.
Drypetis had raged against Alexander when she’d heard the news, howling that Hephaestion wouldn’t have wished to have a whole tribe slaughtered in his name. It had taken both her wan-faced sister and me to persuade Alexander not to punish her for her presumption. I had no wish to see her crucified.
Alexander drove Hephaestion’s funeral carriage halfway to Babylon, the shadows under his eyes growing ever darker as he drove by day and spent the evenings planning both a new navy to conquer Arabia and Hephaestion’s magnificent funeral monument with Dinocrates, a renowned architect from Rhodes. The whip-thin man had been charged with engineering Hephaestion’s seven-tiered pyra, a monument that would never be burned, but would instead stand outside Nebuchadnezzar’s palace for the ages.
During the long weeks of travel I often sought out Drypetis and Stateira. They, along with C
ynnane, were the only women in the empire who didn’t make me want to stuff my ears with hot wax when I sat with them. Stateira was calm and always proper, but Drypetis reminded me of a more refined version of Cynnane, although I didn’t doubt that if the Persians allowed their women swords, Drypetis would have been a warrior to make the Amazons drop their weapons and run screaming for the hills.
I looked forward to seeing Cynnane and Adea again, for we had word that Adea had recovered from her fever and awaited our arrival in Babylon. Sadly, Cassander had also survived Apollo’s plague arrows, which was enough to make me doubt the sun god’s wisdom and aim.
It took extra time to enter Babylon, for the priests of the temple of Esagila sent out messengers with word of a new prophecy that Ahura Mazda forbade Alexander to enter Babylon from the west, claiming that to do so would mean his sun was setting and his reign declining. Inconvenient marshes surrounded the city by all other sides, so Alexander scoffed at their warnings, declaring that the sun could never set on his glorious rule, and entered Babylon through the forbidden western gate. Regardless of the ill omen, the city welcomed him with full pomp, their conquering hero dressed in a well-draped Persian robe and the curled oxhorns of his godly father Ammon. We continued on to Nebuchadnezzar’s palace to find the entire royal court assembled in all their finery. And at the forefront stood Cynnane and Adea.
And Cassander.
“I see you’ve recovered from your illness,” I said to him in a cool voice after hugging Cynnane and Adea in a joyous reunion. Despite her illness, young Adea had grown in the month I’d been gone and after greeting Alexander with a graceful bow, she was now chatting gaily with Arrhidaeus. The tiled floors had been sprinkled with flower petals, and altars on both sides of the throne burned precious myrrh, so the entire room smelled like a heavily perfumed priestess. I wondered if it stung that Alexander hadn’t acknowledged Cassander after their shared days at Aristotle’s elbow, but my brother was already busy ordering a harbor to be dug at Babylon—the better to accommodate the navy he planned to sail for Arabia—and also issuing commands for Hephaestion’s funeral games, which would begin on the morrow. Messengers had run from Ecbatana to Babylon and a staggering sum of twelve thousand talents of gold had been spent, thus ensuring that generations to come would revere these games long after we were all roaming the Fields of Asphodel. Hephaestion may not have been a god, but he was being laid to rest with enough honors to bury Zeus, and I was glad of it.
Cassander ignored my slight alongside Alexander’s. “So it’s true, then,” he said. “Hephaestion is dead and Alexander has come untethered.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I lied, not allowing my gaze to stray to my brother.
“They say he can scarcely breathe without drinking a vat of wine each morning when he rises, and that he’s more dead than alive without Hephaestion,” Cassander murmured, even as Alexander called for a wine bearer. “I believe the decree now that I see him.”
“What decree?” I was weary from our travels and in need of a bathing pavilion. I rarely had time for Cassander’s riddles, but now I had even less patience for them.
“A few weeks ago, after we first arrived in Babylon, a priest from Esagila sacrificed a spotted ox in Hephaestion’s name and examined the entrails. The liver was found to be deformed, created smooth and without a lobe. The priest foretold that death would soon claim Hephaestion of Macedon.”
“It’s simple to prophesize the death of a soldier,” I scoffed. “Death stalks armies and feeds on their men like starved carrion.”
Cassander glanced at me. “That may be, but another ox was sacrificed for Alexander three days ago.” His tone made a chill like the north wind run down my spine, yet he paused as if debating whether to continue the tale.
“And?” I asked.
“The same deformity was found,” he said. “The people whisper that Alexander will never launch his campaign against Arabia, much less return to Macedon with a still-beating heart.”
“A state of affairs which would suit you and your father,” I said, glaring. I gestured to where the Persian women stood to the far side of Alexander’s dais, demure and properly veiled, although Darius’ daughters leaned away from preening Roxana as if she were rotting vermin. I’d already decided I didn’t care for my brother’s first wife, who constantly crowed about the babe she carried and insisted on being transported everywhere in a gilded litter. Fortunately for me, lofty Roxana had condescended to exchange with me only as many words as I had fingers and toes. “Roxana’s womb holds Alexander’s heir. My family’s dynasty is secure.”
“I hope you’re right.” Cassander straightened. “I just made an offering to Hephaestion’s shade in remembrance of our days together at Mieza. I have no wish to do the same for your brother’s shade.” I waved a hand to silence him. The throne room was a veritable sea of Persian robes and men with beards of oiled ringlets, yet Cassander remained in his crisp military chlamys and tunic, a staunch Macedonian down to his unlaughing heart.
I watched as Ethiopians and Libyans, Scyths, and Persians filed in to genuflect and offer their condolences to my brother, bending so deeply that their foreheads brushed the ground as they kissed their fingertips, a gesture reserved only for the gods in Macedon. Next to me, Cassander gave a derisive snort. “The foreigners do worship Alexander, don’t they?” he said. “Perhaps they’ll build him a temple to rival Artemis’ in Ephesus. They’ve already opened all their gates and treasuries to him to avoid being slaughtered, or, worse, burned to death like that singer he doused in naphtha.”
Alexander swiveled toward us and glowered like an angry statue of Zeus. Then he stood and walked down the steps of the dais, coming to stand directly before Cassander. In one fluid motion suited to a battlefield maneuver, he lifted Cassander by the neck of his chiton and slammed him against the wall.
“Don’t you ever insult my satraps,” he growled, eliciting a collective gasp as he banged Cassander’s head repeatedly against a fresco depicting a hunting scene. “You and your family are nothing save a lot of sniveling, grasping snakes and I’ll see you all thrown into the pit of Tartarus before I’m through with you!”
“Dearest brother.” I touched Alexander’s arm, feeling everyone’s attention heavy on my back. “I’ll be the first to admit that Cassander is a terrible bore, but surely this fresco is too fine to ruin with his thick skull.”
Alexander turned to me, his brow furrowing and the fury in his eyes clearing, only to be replaced with revulsion. “I have no qualms with my sister enjoying herself with the men of my court,” he said. “But I’d have hoped you’d have had better taste than to spread your legs for the son of Antipater.”
My cheeks flared and I recoiled at the very suggestion. Me, spread my legs for Cassander, when I might as well have pledged myself to the virgin goddess Artemis? “I’ve never taken any man between my legs, much less Cassander,” I said in a stony voice. “And if you were anyone save my brother, I’d make you regret the very suggestion.”
Alexander loosened his grip on Cassander, whose face had contorted and gone pale. “I knew you had better sense,” my brother said, smiling and chucking me under the chin as if I were a girl of ten again and he hadn’t just thoroughly denigrated me in front of his entire court.
“I believe you have yet to bow to me,” he then said to Cassander, his countenance turning to ice again and making me wonder what had become of my golden brother who seemed to carry the sun under his skin. “Perhaps you seek to rectify your error.”
And so Cassander bent his knees to my brother just as the Persians had done, although a vein in his jaw beat an angry tattoo as he kissed his fingertips.
“Welcome to my court, Cassander, son of Antipater,” Alexander said, turning his back to greet some Persian noble, as if the entire episode had never happened.
“You’d do well not to anger him,” I murmured to Cassander. “For I won’t bar
e my neck for you again.”
Especially as such an intercession might be construed as affection for Cassander and his ugly face.
“He’ll pay for that,” Cassander muttered under his breath, and I waited for him to prattle on about deformed livers again, yet he only clenched his fists. “The gods won’t allow such hubris to go unpunished.”
I sighed. “If I were an Olympian, I’d punish all the men who claimed to know my mind by causing exactly the opposite of whatever they’d prophesized for the future.”
Cassander only frowned at me. “How do you know they don’t already?”
He turned then and departed without another word, leaving me to remember the Pythia’s prophecy that had echoed throughout Greece and followed Alexander since almost his earliest days of campaigning.
The lion of Macedon is invincible, as was Heracles before him.
Yet Heracles had died a brutal death, poisoned by the venom of the very Hydra he’d once slain.
And while Alexander claimed Zeus and Ammon as his fathers and Achilles and Heracles as his ancestors, at thirty-three years he’d already accomplished more than any god or hero. Surely he’d accomplish much more still before the gods granted him immortality in exchange for his labors spent conquering the earth.
I only hoped that the weight of my brother’s labors wouldn’t fell him as they had his ancestor Heracles.
CHAPTER 24
323 BCE
Babylon, Persia
Roxana
I lay sated and wrapped in Alexander’s arms, our flesh still damp as I traced the jagged line of an old scar on his neck. I’d tried counting all the faded pink marks with my lips earlier, but my husband’s demanding hands had distracted me by the time I hit seven. Now those same demanding hands stroked the pale moon of my belly.
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