The Conqueror's Wife

by Stephanie Thornton

  “You should have this scrubbed with vinegar,” I said to Alexander as he threw himself into the chair. “What a foul creature.”

  But Antipater sang a different song. “This may be interpreted as an ill omen, especially as everyone has heard by now of Babylon’s sacrifice for you of the ox with the deformed liver. Perhaps you should have allowed the flea-bitten mongrel to rule in your stead during the summer months.”

  “Livers without lobes and now this,” Alexander muttered, his face still dark. “I’ve no patience for these ill omens or the whispers they cause.” He raised a hand and snapped his fingers at Cassander. “This night calls for more wine and revelry,” he said, thrusting out his goblet. “Much more.”

  The heat from all the bodies and the cup of wine I sipped made my eyelids heavy, but I dared not excuse myself as Alexander commanded everyone’s attention so he might give a recitation. I preened to realize he was playacting Perseus fawning over Andromeda, chained to a rock by her father and waiting to be devoured by a sea monster. I recognized the guise, for I knew a thing about daughters being wronged by fathers, and raised a hand over my breast, making to stand and allow Alexander to adore me, even if it was in the guise of Andromeda.

  That is, until Alexander bent his knee to Bagoas, praising his beauty above the silvery nymphs of the sea.

  In that moment I wanted Bagoas to suffer as I’ve never wanted anything in my life, for a pox to disfigure his pretty face or for him to become a leper so his talented hands, which had taught me so much, would wither into worthless lumps of flesh like his lost prick.

  I didn’t hear another word of the performance over the roar in my ears, but at its end Alexander raised his massive rhyton and drank a toast to one illustrious guest after another until I ran out of fingers to count them.

  Admiral Nearchus attempted to strike up a conversation with me, but I was ready to excuse myself—not that any of these barbarians would notice the departure of their queen—when there was a thud to my left and Alexander’s great goblet clattered to the ground.

  I whirled about, expecting to see him passed out drunk and itching to overturn my goblet of wine on his face, but he had fallen to his knees before his throne and clutched his abdomen as if there were a demon gnawing at him from inside. He cried out and curled into himself, but thankfully there was no blood, no weapon. Only a man who had drank too much.

  Bagoas moved to help him, but I blocked his path. “Stay back,” I snarled at the eunuch under my breath. “What is it?” I asked Alexander, kneeling at his side.

  “It feels as if I’ve been shot in the liver with an arrow,” he gasped. “Like in India.”

  My scar-riddled husband certainly knew pain, but surely this episode was only the result of overindulgence. After all, no man was meant to swill wine as he had tonight without being visited by a sour stomach.

  A man cleared his throat and Antipater stood behind me, his spine straighter than if a spear had been run through it. “Perhaps my son and I might be of service in removing the king to his chambers,” he said. “We’ve experience with this, especially after Alexander’s recent debauchs since Hephaestion’s death.”

  “Of course,” I said, thinking fast. “I shall accompany you.”

  Alexander swayed unsteadily between them, his head lolling from side to side, and stumbled with every step. “I imbibed too much,” he rasped, his fingers fluttering although his eyes remained screwed tightly shut. “Only Hephaestion could ever rein in my lust for life.” I stiffened at the mention of his dead pederast, but he didn’t notice.

  We approached his chambers to find oil lamps left burning for his return. Antipater and his baboon of a son helped lay Alexander upon the bed, his limbs heavy and his pallor increased to a startling paleness.

  “He needs to empty his stomach,” I said to Cassander, but he only shrugged.

  “This is the warrior who scaled Sogdian Rock and massacred all of Thebes. He won’t allow a cup of fermented grapes to lay him low. He’ll recover, though I doubt he’ll have learned his lesson.”

  I dismissed the men with a curt nod, then settled stiffly onto the bed beside my snoring husband so that mine would be the first face he saw when he awoke.

  I’d imagined my days as queen to be filled with entertaining elegant satraps who would flatter my beauty and wit while I chose which robes would best impress the envoys sent from all corners of the empire. The reality was far less glamorous, being insulted by my husband’s bed companions, tromping through India with its mosquito-infested swamps and mountains, and now playing nursemaid to my sour-smelling husband.

  Alexander moaned in his sleep and rolled over, throwing an arm over my chest, his foul breath like a wind of curdled wine.

  He owed me an empire of cities named Roxania, all filled with towering statues of me in my golden glory.

  And I would make him give them to me.

  • • •

  But Alexander was in no mood to grant boons, name new cities, or commission statues when he finally woke at sunset the next day.

  He hobbled like a hunchbacked old man to a hammered copper basin to void his bladder, and I cringed at the acrid smell of his waters clanging against the metal. “What are you doing here?” he growled at me, raking a trembling hand through his lank hair. He looked like a band of dark-winged daevas might have stolen him in the night and tossed him between them in a child’s game of keep-away.

  “You required assistance yesterday evening,” I said. “It appears you still do.”

  “Leave me, woman,” he said as he stumbled across the floor. I was at his side in an instant, linking my arms around his waist to steady him. His entire body burned with fever, evidence that this was no simple case of overindulgence.

  Fever might fell Hephaestion, but I vowed it would not claim Alexander.

  “I won’t leave,” I said. “Not until you’ve rested and recovered.”

  “A king has no time to rest,” he argued.

  Despite his protests, I called for Parizad, not trusting the other physicians. My brother listened to Alexander’s heart, smelled his breath, and felt his burning forehead until Alexander ordered him away. Ignoring Parizad’s recommendation that he rest and eat only cool foods, that night Alexander insisted on traveling by boat across the Euphrates to Nebuchadnezzar’s second summer palace, where he somehow managed to play dice and talk with his men. The next day, still wan and feverish, he deigned to be carried on a goatskin stretcher to make his customary sacrifices to Ammon and the other gods while planning the Arabian campaign from his sickbed.

  “It would be a kindness to kill me,” he wheezed as Ptolemy and Admiral Nearchus filed from his room, both casting worried glances over their shoulders. “Or at least let me fall on my sword.”

  “Don’t speak so,” I snapped. “It isn’t fitting for a king.”

  I expected him to rail against me for daring to reprimand him, but he only closed his eyes and turned onto his side, offering me his back in response. After that, I ordered all the weapons removed from his chambers.

  To my growing horror, over the coming days he weakened as if every labored breath stole a piece of his vitality. Stateira and Parysatis visited, as did Thessalonike with her slack-twisted idiot of a brother and surly Amazon of a sister, but after they departed, I ordered the guards to keep them away, at sword point if necessary. The woman who received the credit for nursing him back to health would be me, not his lesser wives, unnatural warrior sisters, or other outcast siblings.

  “He is young for this malady to linger so,” Parizad whispered to me on the fourth night. The earthy scent of the chamomile and comfrey, yarrow, and thyme he mixed did little to mask the stink of Alexander’s stale sweat as my husband tossed and turned in a fitful sleep. “I fear he may never recover fully, not after all the wounds he has sustained.”

  I shook my head, refusing to entertain such thoughts.
“He will recover,” I said. “And you will see that he does.”

  Worry flashed in Parizad’s eyes before he bowed his head over his herbs, pouring them into a painted hydria depicting Heracles dragging Hector’s corpse behind his chariot. “I will do my best.”

  “Is it possible this is something else?” I asked, my fingers tapping on my forearm as I paced the length of the chamber. “Perhaps he’s being poisoned by someone who wishes to remove him from power?”

  Parizad glanced up sharply from his tincture, nearly upsetting the cup. “To poison a god is no small crime,” he said. “I can’t imagine that any mortal would attempt such villainy.”

  But Alexander was no god, only a man. And smaller men had been killed for much less.

  On the fifth night I awoke to utter silence and feared for a terrified moment that the destructive god Ahriman had claimed Alexander while I slept. Instead, his bed was empty. I ran to the open doorway on unsteady legs to find a lone guard with the first fuzz of manhood on his upper lip and a breastplate polished to near blinding brightness standing at attention.

  “Where is Alexander?” I demanded.

  The boy pointed down the corridor, averting his eyes from my disheveled state. “That way,” he said. “He forbade me from following.”

  “And you listened to him?” I shrilled. “He might fall off the ramparts or expire in the hallway from his fever. If he does, I’ll have you impaled on a stake outside the palace!”

  The soldier snapped a salute, the only thing he knew how to do properly. “He said something about the river.” Fresh panic made his eyes wide as moons. “And meeting Hephaestion.”

  I ran, clutching my swollen belly and gasping for breath.

  Parizad had told me far too many tales of Greek idiot-heroes who preferred to end their lives rather than linger in dishonor, their wits and strength fleeing in the face of death. Foul Hephaestion sought to ruin me even from his grave, beckoning Alexander to the afterlife with promises of Elysium.

  Alexander would not die. I wouldn’t let him.

  I found him on the banks of the river that ran through the Hanging Gardens, crouched on all fours at the water’s edge as in the story of golden Narcissus, admiring not his reflection but the promise of a quick death.

  “Alexander!” I screamed. Some benevolent god carried my voice to him and he turned, his face warped with anguish.

  I closed the distance between us, falling beside him. “You poor, stupid idiot,” I sobbed. “What are you doing?”

  “You rob me of my glory, wife,” he said through clenched teeth. I could only guess at the agony that had driven him here. “I thought to ease Hades’ task.”

  “You fool,” I said, hysterical tears running unchecked down my cheeks at how close he’d come to abandoning me. “Let Parizad wrap you in poultices and brew his herbs for you. You’re a warrior; fight Hades with every last bit of strength you possess, if not for yourself or your empire, at least for your son.”

  Alexander managed a meager smile at that. “I fear it shall be a poor fight.” He cast one last lingering glance at the water, but allowed me to help him slowly to his feet.

  And so, for the second time in days, I helped Alexander back to his chambers and into bed. And I swore I wouldn’t sleep until he was recovered.

  • • •

  Rumors of Alexander’s illness raged faster and hotter than wildfire until whispers claimed that Hades had reaped his soul days ago and that I kept his corpse hidden away out of madness, as Alexander had done with Hephaestion.

  “He still breathes,” I snapped at Ptolemy, Antipater, and Cassander, flinging the door wide so they might see their king, his sweat-slicked face barely visible above the sheepskin throws that had been piled upon him in a vain attempt to keep him from shivering to death. It had been ten hellish days since the terrible banquet and my eyes stung from lack of sleep, my breath was stale, and the child within my womb kicked my ribs with a ferocity that made me wince. “Despite the vultures that hover about waiting for him to die.”

  “The men need proof,” Antipater said, ignoring my insult to fold his hands serenely before him in the hallway. “Perhaps they might be allowed to see him with their own eyes?”

  “What do you propose?” I asked. “That the entire army file past his sickbed?”

  “That would be acceptable,” Ptolemy said, glancing over my shoulder to where Alexander lay. “Seeing Alexander alive—even in this state—will instill much faith in his men.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Gather the men. Alexander’s chambers shall be opened at the twelfth hour so they may see that their true Queen of Queens has been nursing him, not hiding his dead body.”

  And so it was that I dressed in my finest silks, doused myself with spikenard water, and donned the queen’s diadem, watching as Parizad propped up Alexander in bed. My husband’s beard had grown in the week he’d been ill, the burnished gold making him appear even more haggard.

  “Shave him,” I commanded, then thought better of it. “Ready a ewer and a blade. I’ll shave him myself.”

  “You have a gentle hand, wife,” Alexander rasped when I lathered his cheeks with warmed almond oil and scraped the blade across his skin.

  “I used to shave Oxyartes’ whiskers as a girl,” I said.

  “I know so little of your past,” Alexander said, closing his eyes even as his chest moved in what had become his customary shallow breaths, the only ones that didn’t leave him gasping with pain. I finished shaving him and set the bowl and blade aside.

  “All you needed was to ask,” I said, tears stinging my eyes. Memories came to me unbidden then, of the lionlike man who watched me dance, winked at me over our marriage vows, and laughingly tumbled me into bed.

  Perhaps things might have continued that way if I’d opened my bruised heart to him, or perhaps if he’d been a less complex man.

  But then, he could be no less than Alexander, and as the Whore of Sogdian Rock, I knew better than to truly love any man.

  “I’d like the stories of your childhood to usher me to my dreams tonight,” he said, managing a wan smile.

  Stories embellished to ignore our relative poverty and Oxyartes’ whip.

  Alexander reached up with a clawed hand to touch my hair. “You are so beautiful, Roxana. You shall make a good mother to my son.”

  He fell silent as the doors opened and his Companions and shield bearers, horse archers, and infantry began to file past. They paused to pour him libations from a flat bowl of glazed pottery stamped with my husband’s royal portrait. Alexander raised a hand and waved silently to each one, but the effort cost him dear. By the end he was paler than milk and shaking like a man afflicted with the falling sickness.

  I kept my promise then, banishing everyone from the room and sitting by his bedside, telling him of Parizad and me hiding in the stables to avoid my father, of pretending that we were the children of a great satrap who gifted us with new litters of puppies and kittens every day, and of Parizad singing me to sleep when thunderclouds rumbled overhead.

  Then, as Alexander finally slept, I prayed that night as I’d never prayed before, beseeching Ahura Mazda and the shade of Alexander’s father, Philip, and all of Alexander’s immortal fathers to spare him. I was so desperate that I even begged Hephaestion’s shade to shield Alexander from death, to spare not just the golden god but my husband and the father of my child, the man who had warmed me in bed.

  Then I made plans just in case the fathers, the gods, and the false hero turned a deaf ear to my woman’s pleas.

  The gods gave Alexander eleven days after that fateful banquet. Then, without the fanfare, cheering crowds, and cascades of rose petals he so loved, Alexander the Great died quietly in the darkness of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace, the dry rattle that had become his breath finally ceasing and leaving a roaring silence in its wake.

  And so, the gre
atest conqueror the world had ever known died the most ordinary of deaths, a final cruelty inflicted by the fickle gods.

  I closed Alexander’s eyes and bent to kiss his warm, dry lips. “You’ve failed me, my lion,” I whispered, my beringed thumb lingering on his lower lip. “And for that I can never forgive you.”

  Abandoned again, just as Bessus had abandoned me. But I was more than a grasping whore in a stone garrison this time. Yet I knew what had happened to the lesser wife of Alexander’s father when he had died, and knew that it wouldn’t be long before the vultures came for me, and for my unborn son.

  I was Alexander’s queen, and my son would be a king.

  And I’d kill anyone who threatened otherwise.

  CHAPTER 25

  Babylon, Persia

  Drypetis

  A never-ending wail shattered my dream of Hephaestion into tiny fragments, leaving me disoriented as I returned unwilling to the land of the living. I’d dreamed that Hephaestion and I were arguing over whether the Song of Ilium or the Avesta was the more important work, each of my successful arguments for the Avesta earning me a tantalizing kiss, but now the remembrance of my husband’s touch and the sound of his laughter faded into the harsh morning light.

  I’d fallen asleep at the table where I’d sat polishing the precious Damascus ax he’d given me as a wedding present. I was lucky I hadn’t shorn off my own ear; my cheeks were smeared with polishing sand and goose fat. The wail grew so loud I covered my ears, but then I leapt to my feet at the realization of what the sound must herald. I scrubbed my face with my palms, wincing as the stubborn flecks of sand scratched my cheeks until I finally gave up and splashed my face with stale water from a ewer, then rushed down the corridor.

  Death had stalked us from Ecbatana to Babylon like a black-winged Harpy, circling overhead to finally land and prowl the walls of Nebuchadnezzar’s ancient palace while Alexander wasted away before our eyes. He had been ill for days, and without him, the empire would plunge into chaos. Yet the sight that greeted me outside his chambers already heralded the tumult yet to come.