Alexander and Alestria

by Shan Sa

  “Alestria, I love you! All of these are proof of that. Wherever Alexander’s army goes, the most wonderful gems, the most beautiful animals, the most fragrant flowers, and the most dazzling jewels are all for you, the queen of my heart. On the eve of battle, I shut myself in my tent to sort through your gifts, arrange them, choose them, and wrap them myself! In this warrior’s life you are an oasis of peace. I only have to think of you for the tumult of battle to stop haunting me and for happiness and peace to return.

  “Alestria, I put my thoughts, my dreams, your smiles, and your happiness into each of these things. Here are a pair of crickets I asked to sing for you. At night their song reaches into your dreams, spreading the words of love I taught them. Here is a feather for you to write your poems and send them to me. I want to go to sleep with your voice telling me that, in spite of the distance, you will always love me. Here is a star of crystal that promises us eternal life. Here is a heart-shaped ruby, it is my own heart, which needs to beat close to yours. However ridiculous they may seem to you, these gifts are me! I am all over this tent, and even when I am away I watch over your well-being. You are not alone, Alestria. When you wear these jewels, when you wrap yourself in these tunics, it is me kissing you and holding you in my arms.

  “When I die someday, when my god decides to take me from my queen, you will realize that all these things contain a little part of me. And you will have a treasure from me: my eyes, my mouth, my hair, my tears. You will see that I am still there living beside you, all around you, protecting you, loving you even more than in life. For when I am dead, I shall no longer be a warrior. Freed from my earthly duties, I shall devote my days and nights to loving you, to breathing your presence and you breathing mine, to sleeping inside you, waking beside you, living in your eyes, your mouth, your body, and your soul.”

  In spite of my hatred of Alexander, I, Ania, was moved by his words. Standing by the door to the royal tent, listening in secret, I shed a few tears.

  But Alestria, impassive, remained silent.

  Alexander fell at her feet, bathing his wife’s tunic with his bitter tears.

  “You no longer love me, then! You want to leave me for this young man who has not fought! Alestria, forgive me for being away. Don’t abandon me!”

  My queen’s body made a small movement. She took Alexander’s face in her hands and stared him right in the eye.

  “I want to go into battle! I want to make war by your side. I do not want to be Queen of Asia. I want to defend you and to die for you!”

  Alestria’s words made me quiver with joy: my queen no longer wanted to live confined to the city. She had deliberately made Alexander jealous of an anonymous soldier—it was her strategy to force her husband to take her into battle.

  The king leaped to his feet.

  “Never,” he cried, “never!”

  Alestria pushed him away violently.

  “Why not me?” she cried, even more loudly than him. “Why not Alestria, who can fight better than your men?”

  “Because you are my queen. A queen is the heart of the empire; she should bear the king’s heir,” bellowed Alexander. “A queen is someone people venerate. Like a goddess, people whisper her name but do not know her face. You should be an Eastern Athena, inspiring strength, courage, and the union of our peoples.”

  “I am not some divinity!” Alestria shouted again, trying to be heard by a husband who was deaf to her desires. “I am a warrior who rides faster than any man. Take me with you, Alexander! Disguise me as a man. Ania will agree to take my place and wear my veil. No one will know it is not me. I am leaving with you; I want to stay with you day and night. I want to protect you from arrows drawn to the front, to the left, and to the right. I want to fight with you. Together we can force back the shadows and reach the sun.”

  My heart leaped: I, Ania, would not wear her royal veil either. I was a warrior, and I had my pride as an Amazon. I would not bury myself alive in this city that supported hordes of eunuchs and women with no muscles, bland dishonest creatures constantly discussing petty intrigues. I too had aspirations to blood, purity, and a glorious death. I would follow Alestria and fight the ape-men, snakes, and crocodiles. I would never be a veiled queen!

  But Alexander understood nothing about women. Alexander was so full of his masculine power that he wanted no woman by his side. He did not want his queen to triumph where he had been defeated. He did not want to give Alestria an opportunity to conquer the world with him, for him. He did not love my queen. He looked down on women and thought of us as domestic animals. He threw himself at Alestria and took her in his arms, telling her to stop making these childish requests. He called her his little girl and said he would come back to her more often. He tried to undress her, smiling and telling her that if she loved him she should not die for him but give him a child.

  I, Ania, was incensed. Was this love: hiding away a woman as capable of fighting monsters as himself? Was this love: making an Amazon die of boredom and wealth and powerless power? Was this Alexander’s love: putting a bird of the glacier in a cage and leaving it there to wither and fade?

  Alestria, always so calm and well behaved, was suddenly furious. Interpreting her fury as hysteria, Alexander initially spoke like a patient, indulgent father. But, rather than consoling her, his words only humiliated her further. An Amazon’s anger is a fearful thing: she screamed and wept and threw his gifts on the ground. She wanted to go back to the steppes. Having no more clever lies up his sleeve, Alexander too became angry. He blocked the queen’s way and roared at her. She took him by the wrists and elbowed him in the stomach, launching him to the ground. He clutched hold of her ankle, tripping her up, then threw himself at her, shouting angrily. She grabbed his throat, but he knocked her out with a powerful clout from his head.

  I, Ania, thought with delight that they no longer loved each other and would now part. But their anger was already eroding, the storm was passing, and after the turmoil came the cool, silent night. Alexander took Alestria in his arms and whispered poems of love in her ear.

  I wandered through the forest, my heart laden with sorrow as the undergrowth was weighed down by rain. Up in the sky the moon was in its zenith, and the stars had disappeared in its bright light. My queen was like that pure detached moon, forgiving, still shining, still radiant for Alexander, offering him the last of her light.

  I kicked out at a tree, and a shower of dew fell from it. Thousands of moons slithered from its leaves and fell, flattened, on the ground.

  MY BELOVED BLEW on my forehead. I stroked his cheek where it was scratched. He looked at me so searchingly.

  “Alestria, you who want to fight,” he said with a smile, “do you know about war? You know about wielding weapons, about the smell of blood and the squeals of injured horses, but you do not know war. I don’t want you to know it. I don’t want you to know the madness of men. You who are pure and transparent as tourmaline sown on the ground by the dawn, I have brought you on my journey, but you must not come into my world. You must not know the world I come from.”

  I said nothing, listening to him.

  “War is hundreds, thousands, of men and horses lined up in icy silence. When the horns sound, they throw themselves at each other. Feathers, arrows, lances, shields, everything becomes confused. Arms fly off, thighs are cut open, feet severed. Heads roll and bellies spew out blood. Men in combat are more ferocious than starving animals devouring each other. Striking blows with lances, axes, hammers, and sabers, they mutilate their enemies and send them to their deaths. While some fall, others march over their bodies and fight on. Then silence, the ground strewn with corpses while fresh blood showers over dried blood. Dying horses tremble till their teeth chatter. Survivors wander among the dead, stealing anything of value. Scavengers are drawn from far and wide to enjoy this feast that will ensure their survival. Flies swarm down from the sky, settling on every excrescence of life: white spilling from open heads; green and yellow tumbling from abdomens; red seeping f
rom chests. They cluster on motionless hands still holding weapons, they cloak rigid feet, feet with broken toenails because they have done too much marching. They lick greedily at a hairy ankle, a thigh speared by an arrow, a torso without a head, and wide-eyed heads without torsos.

  “Then comes the pain of seeing all those ashen faces. Then comes the dizzying agony of driving your sword into a friend’s heart to spare him a slow death. Then comes the regret of ever having been Alexander, just one man alive among the dead…”

  It was dark, and I did not move, barely even breathing. Alexander’s words tormented me, and my limbs turned to ice in the long silence that followed them.

  “War is man’s madness!” he went on, his voice mournful. “And I, Alexander, am the flame of that madness. I am the one writing this tragedy that men will still sing about in a thousand years’ time. I am a madman suffering this chronic illness and elected by other men like myself. War is an appointment kept by those who thirst for atrocities, an opportunity for them to indulge their longings…. When I was twenty I held feasting that went on for days after every battle. I drank to forget death and its fetid smell. I drowned myself in pleasure to rediscover life. At thirty, instead of intoxicating me, these banquets make me sadder still. I would rather shut myself away in my tent alone, far from drunken revelers…”

  Without a word, I took my husband to our bed. He undressed and huddled in my arms while I gently stroked his back, scored with so many scars it felt like a tortoise’s shell.

  “I don’t want you to know war,” he said hoarsely. “You are the best of me. When I am with you I forget the horror of it, I think only of you. War no longer exists, and I am back to the Alexander I once was, the little boy full of dreams.”

  I kissed his hair, his forehead, his eyes.

  “You must not know the dead. They take the shape of flames, dancing before you and laughing at you. You must close your eyes on the madness of this lowly world. Men make war as women make life. I shall take you to the sun itself without your sullying your hands or feet. And some days I want to be alone, hiding in my tent. No one must see me on those dark days when I am afraid and cold. I shiver and wait for the despair to pass, for hope to bloom again, for courage to return. Alestria, I beg you, let me leave as a conqueror and return as a victor. Let me play the role of a warrior who knows no cowardice or suffering. Let me play the role of a king venerated by every people on earth, a king who lends his fine face and well-proportioned body to sculptors from every land to represent the gods. Courage, honor, greatness, and glory are just empty words. Wars are dirty, conquests merely illusion. Those who back away and flee are just as worthy as those who keep on advancing and embrace death. Despair and hope, fear and temerity, reason and madness, are all twins. Only our love is unique.”

  My husband’s last sentence swept aside all the horrors he had told me about himself. Although still reeling from what he had admitted, I could feel the warmth with which Talaxia and Tankiasis had healed my body, battered by the cold and by wounds. I, Alestria, the woman whom my husband had met away from time itself and away from war, I loved him because he was my destiny.

  I accepted his madness, his murders, his greatness, and his woes—I accepted them with my eyes open.

  “Stop suffering,” I told him. “Everything you have just told me will be thrown into the lake that rests deep within my heart. I shall pray for the dead who have finished this life. For them to be born again as birds, free as birds, in the next.”

  My words soothed Alexander. He pressed his cheek against my breast.

  “Sleep, my love. Sleep, my warrior. We are two pilgrims on the road to the glacier. You met me, and I found you. With you in front and me behind, we shall join forces and we will reach the summit.”

  CHAPTER 10

  A lestria had lost her bloom. Her cheeks were no longer rounded, and her eyes had a strange gleam to them. Against her pale face her pupils had become dark stars lit by black flames. I never suspected her condition—for Alexander destroyed everything he touched—until the day I heard two women whispering behind a sheet hanging on a line:

  “The queen is with child!”

  Alestria with child! I burst into her tent. She was sitting before her mirror, pinning up her hair.

  “Is it true that you are with child?”

  In the mirror her eyes avoided mine.

  “Are you with child?”

  She lowered her head and said nothing. I left her tent, smacking the door closed behind me.

  Alestria had gone mad; there was no other explanation. Bewitched by Alexander’s words, she had decided to renounce our ancestors and put her life in danger for him.

  “The queen is with child!” The rumor did the rounds of the city, spreading along trade routes and propagated all over the Indies. I did not believe it: Alexander had invented this to encourage his army to advance, Alestria had imagined it to satisfy a husband increasingly impatient for an heir. It was all just a conspiracy conjured by men who, thanks to this good news, hoped to win back the trust of their soldiers and incite them to fight.

  The king arrived, radiantly happy. I greeted his happiness with a heavy heart and an icy expression. Unaware of my anger, the king congratulated me, saying I was to become an aunt. How could Alestria’s frail body carry a child? How could that slender silhouette, those narrow hips, deliver a life? How could anyone cheat the curse of our ancestors? I did not understand my queen’s smile, or the king’s joy. She was going to die: they should have been weeping, but they were laughing!

  Alexander ordered three days and three nights of banqueting all over the empire. In our encampment a huge gathering of generals, commanders, soldiers, workmen, seamstresses, and sandal makers swarmed around the fires to drink to the thousand-year reign of the future prince. Alexander was drunk, beating a drum while his monkey—an even more ridiculous creature than the eunuch Bagoas—plucked the strings of a lute. Alestria kept having to withdraw to be sick. I watched the whole devastating spectacle without a word. My queen had betrayed me, but I said nothing to reproach her; I sulked in silence. I continued to serve this woman who had led us into betrayal and captivity, because she was my queen and my sister. To each their own war. To each their own brand of madness. While Alexander fought beyond the frontiers of the known world, Alestria overstepped forbidden boundaries and advanced toward an unknown fate.

  She had violent headaches, and still she grew thinner. Unlike some women who grow more beautiful in pregnancy, Alestria grew plain. Brown marks appeared at her temples, her cheeks became gaunt, and her forehead looked disproportionately tall and ponderous. But her husband had regained all his lust for life. Alestria was dying, and Alexander was thriving. He talked loudly, jubilantly, took the queen in his arms, patted her stomach, and boasted about how beautiful she was.

  “Look how beautiful my Alestria is!” he exulted, calling me as a witness. Then, not waiting for any remark from me, he added: “Ania, you shall watch over my child! I spent thirty years looking for a queen,” he confessed with tears in his eyes. “I rode all the way to Asia to meet her. I survived injury, poisons, the cold, sun-stroke, evil spells, and exhaustion to reach the happiness I have today. My god has blessed me, how lucky I am!”

  I said nothing. All I could read on my queen’s blotchy face were suffering and death. I slipped out of the encampment to stray through the forests. Despite the soldiers’ warnings I felt no fear: no tigers or boa constrictors, no ape-men or speaking parrots, could frighten me. Armed with my two daggers forged by the People of the Volcano, I walked on and sat down at the foot of a tree to shed a few tears. Why had my life changed overnight? Why had the vastness of the steppes become the torments of the jungle? Why had the simplicity of the earth and sky become the labyrinth of this forest teeming with smells and colors and sounds? I no longer knew where to find good and where to find evil. I could no longer distinguish between beauty and sadness. Had I lost my mind? Was I, too, haunted by spirits? Where were they taking me? Toward th
e light or toward the shades?

  I wept again and again until all the despair was emptied out of me and hope filled me once again. Then I wiped away my tears and went back to the tented city, to Alexander and Alestria. Although lost in my own distress, I knew that the God of Ice had not abandoned me. He was making me tackle a slope where the north wind blew hard and night seemed to go on forever.

  In the past Alestria had led the troop of Amazons, and I, Ania, had galloped behind her without a care in the world.

  Now my god had separated me from my queen.

  With no guide, with no friend, alone, I had to climb the glacier.

  IN THE LAND of the Indies night was dark and the moon icy. The river Hydaspe whispered in the distance while a Persian soldier played the flute nearby.

  I had seized the Birdless Rock that resisted Hercules in ancient times. This conquest was a more dazzling exploit than the twelve labors accomplished by the son of Zeus. From now on no hero and no mortal could act as an example for Alexander.

  I was slipping into the infinity of the universe, oppressed and yet comforted by solitude. I could still hear Philip’s howls and Olympias’s weeping. I could still hear my own impassioned speeches and the bustle of soldiers marching toward Persia. But they were now merely the feeble echo of previous lives. Countless battles had raised me to the world of the night and sparkling lights. Far from earthly fates, up in the star-filled sky, I had no friends anymore, no troops. I heard neither their calls nor their cries. I was accompanied by silence, sometimes threatening, sometimes soothing. Death had never felt so close, but I was less hostile to its company. It was once a constant threat, but now I saw it as the accomplishment of my person, as release for my army. I trusted the gods who had granted me the time to wage war, and I waited for the final day when death would make me immortal.

  Alestria’s belly was growing. I had an heir! The thought of it worried me and filled me with joy. Would I be a good father? Would I have my mother’s patience and Aristotle’s wisdom? Would I be able to make of him a courageous and well-reasoned prince? How could I bequeath him this vast empire I myself had never succeeded in governing?