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I would remain the daughter of Oxyartes of Balkh, even if it threatened to kill me.

And yet, I wondered what he stood to gain from sending me to the ends of the empire.

I crossed my arms beneath my breasts. “I refuse to go.”

One corner of Bessus’ lips tilted in a half smile and he placed a finger on my lips. “I’ve always admired your tenacity, Roxana, but you have no say in the matter. Truth be told, I’ve become attached to you and would be quite inconvenienced if anything were to happen to you.”

I held perfectly still, stunned by his announcement. I harbored no tender feelings for Bessus, but it occurred to me then that there were two sides to the king before me, that beneath the conniving powermonger who had left my brother to die was also the man who had seen fit to relieve me from my father’s house after he’d discovered my whipping and now claimed to care for me. “You leave in the morning,” Bessus continued, “but the eunuch Bagoas shall accompany you. No man shall touch you until I return to claim you.”

“And you
will
reclaim me?”

“Of course.” He stood and pulled me toward him, one fat finger tracing the top of the leopard fur along my breast, his finger darting beneath to jab my nipple. “Now let’s see that beautiful body of yours one last time before you leave.”

I let him push the fur away, his member stiffening once again from within its tangled nest of dark hair, but my mind had already flown to Sogdian Rock.

The fortress was a veritable city reputedly balanced on sheer rock three miles in the air, impenetrable to all who tried to scale its walls. The marauding Greeks would never take the mountain citadel, and I’d have to fight Bessus’ third wife for the queen’s diadem.

Oxyartes had made his move. He might have won this battle, but somehow, I would win the war.

•   •   •

I
’d have rather stayed in a cavern filled with snarling cave bears than in Sogdian Rock.

We were removed on our desolate mountaintop in the sky, isolated from all things save the ever-howling wind that threatened to drive us all mad. Few dared make the ascent up the narrow trail to the citadel’s single set of iron gates, so high that the clouds obscured the world below. I’d have been richer than a queen if I had a copper coin for every perfumed refugee who whimpered that she would never leave this place alive. The only contact with the outside world was the occasional far-off groan of a wagon at the base of the cliffs, bearing another
satrap
’s wife or the rare letter from some noble to his wife or children, its news of the campaign against Alexander shared aloud by a eunuch, as none of us women or even the soldiers knew how to read.

Bessus never wrote. As the days turned to weeks and the weeks to months, I no longer knew what I was. I was fifteen, no maiden but no wife, neither daughter nor mother, only the discarded and neglected mistress of the King of Kings.

“The daughter of Oxyartes,” Bessus’ fat wife had announced when I’d arrived. Her hair was the stark black that came from countless rinsings of
amla
and black walnut hulls and her cheeks were jowly as that of a gray-snouted bitch. I’d prepared for the meeting at least a hundred times in my head, how I’d look down my nose at her and throw my hair over my shoulder, letting her jealousy take full root as she saw for herself my pert breasts and trim waist, the sheen of my glorious hair and my plump lips. Instead, the rain had lashed my face so I squinted from the rivulets of water running from my bedraggled hair, and I could hardly straighten from the stitch in my side from the climb up the cliff, leaning on Bagoas like a cane as I finally hobbled inside the torchlit citadel. “I’d expected my husband to have better taste,” she had said, “but it appears he’ll rut with anything that moves these days. This one still has the stench of a brothel about her.”

Before I could answer, she turned and walked away, leaving her attendants to follow like a gaggle of dumb goslings after a waddling goose while I sputtered with rage.

“Ignore her,” Bagoas murmured. My pretty eunuch removed a musty-smelling shawl from my lone chest and wrapped it around my shivering shoulders. “The gift of your beauty sets you apart. Men may love you for it, but other women never will.”

I glared after them but said nothing, for Bagoas was right. Let them hate me, for I’d ensure that they rotted away here on this godforsaken rock when I was the Queen of Queens.

Still, had Bessus’ wife not been such a hateful bitch, we might have lived in a silent truce, ignoring each other’s existence. Instead, she exerted her influence to ensure that none of the other women would speak to me save to call me jade or whore, Astarte’s daughter, or a she-wolf. The soldiers were simple creatures deprived of physical relief for too long and at first, believing I was for sale, they pulled me into darkened doorways for a quick grope and asked how much I charged for a tumble. They sang a different song when Bagoas presented them with an imperial seal from Bessus, claiming me as his own and ordering that I be housed with all the comforts the fortress had to offer.

Meager comforts they were, what with the frigid drafts that blew between the door cracks and meals of gray sludge that had once been barley and dried meat, probably horse.

If Bessus lost on the battlefield . . .

He couldn’t lose.

We had news that Alexander was on the move. I prayed for someone to stab, spear, or behead him so Bessus would reclaim me and I could once again travel in my holly-wood palanquin and drape myself in rippling silks and shimmering gold. Here I had only Bagoas for companionship and I spent the endless days allowing him to brush my long hair and massage almond oil into my hands.

“Your beauty is wasted on this godforsaken rock,” he said with a sigh one afternoon as he coiled a plait around my head. The length and the thickness of my hair were too much for me to manage alone, so Bagoas sewed my hair into place each morning. All the love and adoration I’d showered on Parizad I now gave to my secondhand eunuch, recognizing in him the loneliness I felt every time I thought of my twin. I’d even allowed Bagoas to sleep next to me on my mattress stuffed with musty old hay, the warmth of his back pressed against mine reminding me of Parizad when we were children.

Bessus had claimed that no man could touch me while I was at Sogdian Rock, but Bagoas was no man, castrated in his youth so his voice trilled as high as a girl’s, while his face remained as smooth as an infant’s. And while Bagoas could never truly be my lover, one night his warm hands caressed first the small of my back and then my breasts, my thighs and then the damp cleft between my legs, making me feel an exquisite, trembling pleasure I’d never known existed.

And I wanted that pleasure. I
ached
for it.

I could well understand why Darius had kept Bagoas as a pillow slave, as he’d teased me until my back arched and I wrapped my legs around him, yearning for him to fill me as he never truly could and gasping when his fingers slipped inside me instead. It was he who taught me how to caress the insides of a man’s thighs and make him moan with pleasure, how to trail my tongue along his earlobe in a way that sent him shuddering.

My beauty was like ambrosia, so sweet a nectar that not even a eunuch could avoid its heady allure.

“If Bessus doesn’t hurry and win this fight, I might well die of boredom,” I said to Bagoas as he finished sewing the last of my braids into place with his nimble fingers. “The soldiers are growing bolder; the ones who think Bessus will lose ogle me like a naked slave on the auction block.”

“The men here are common soldiers who spit and defecate like animals,” Bagoas said with a sniff. “We aren’t meant for such beasts.”

I knew that one soldier in particular—a man set to guarding Bessus’ queen—had treated Bagoas worse than a beast, bending him over and using him as a woman while his friends cheered him on. I’d bullied the story from Bagoas after he limped to my dark room with his normally pristine robe askew. If it had been any other soldier, I might have stormed out and threatened retribution when Bessus came to reclaim me, but my threats would be worthless against Bessus’ wife. Instead, I’d lain with Bagoas in the dark that night and sang to him as Parizad had sometimes done to comfort me, but after that, Bagoas had lost what little of his smile he still possessed.

“Save your beauty for Bessus,” he said. “At least for now.”

“And if Bessus loses?”

Bagoas tilted my chin so he could kiss my forehead. “Pray that he doesn’t. It won’t be long either way.” He pinned my veil so that the ebony of my hairline showed in perfect contrast to the orange silk. “There’s word that Alexander has swung north into Bactria, ostensibly chasing Bessus. He set fire to his wagons of spoils in order to travel faster and ordered his men to cast off all their loot, although he was benevolent enough to allow them to keep their Persian concubines. Satibarzanes of Aria rebelled, but Alexander used naphtha to set aflame the wooded hill where the Persians camped, burning the soldiers alive before marching onto Satibarzanes’ capital of Artacoana, slaughtering and enslaving the town. Of course, the new town built on its remains will be called Alexandria Ariana.”

I listened with only half an ear, for Bagoas often chattered and gossiped about the war like a girl twittering about a well-muscled stableboy. I knew nothing of Alexander’s movements, nor did I care. Instead, I plaited three scarlet ribbons together to add as a trim along the neckline of my robe.

And then a wail of grieving rent the air like an eagle’s talons.

The hair on my arms stood on end and a tremor of foreboding trailed down my spine, but I shook off my unease. Messengers often delivered unwelcome news of some noble’s death in combat.

But this time countless mouths picked up the mourning wail so that it grew and echoed throughout the stone citadel until I could scarcely hear my own thoughts. I dropped the ribbons, but Bagoas was already at the door. “I’ll see what happened,” he said, slamming it before I could argue.

If Alexander was dead, it would mean that Bessus would soon reclaim me. But no one here at Sogdian Rock would caterwaul in such a manner for the Macedonian lion. If Bessus was dead—

I’d have better luck hurtling myself from the ramparts than facing the soldiers outside.

Bagoas returned before I imagined too many versions of half-starved Persians pushing me into corners. He slammed the door behind him and my heart plummeted when he slid the feeble lock into place.

“Which brave Persian has fallen in battle this time?” I asked him, feigning cheerfulness as I picked up the scarlet ribbons with trembling hands. “He must have been well loved to cause such a racket.”

“Bessus has been captured,” Bagoas said evenly. “He is being put on trial for his crimes against Darius.”

“What? How can the King of Kings be put on trial?”

“His own men abandoned him as Alexander approached. They left him naked and bound to a wooden collar on the side of the road for the Macedonians to find.”

“Alexander will kill him,” I said with grim awareness.

Bagoas nodded slowly, as if he was afraid that admitting the truth might somehow cause me to shatter. “He may have already done so.”

The scream built at the back of my throat and exploded like an eagle’s shriek. My hairpins went flying and I ripped my perfectly coiled braids loose from Bagoas’ careful stitches, falling to my knees and beating the cold flagstones with my ineffectual fists. I raged and sobbed for all I had lost, for with Bessus would die my dream of being queen, of being anyone other than the bastard daughter of no one knew whom, abandoned by my dead brother and unwanted even by hunchbacked Oxyartes of Balkh.

Only once I was spent did Bagoas lift me from the floor and spread me on my poor excuse of a bed. I let him undress me and soothe me with his caresses, tears still seeping from the corners of my eyes until his lips kissed them away. “Your life isn’t over, Roxana,” he murmured, his voice like the purr of a dove as he lay down beside me. “We are survivors. No matter what happens, we keep our head above water.”

“Like rats on a sinking ship,” I said, feeling his chuckle reverberate up my spine.

“Like rats on a sinking ship,” he agreed.

CHAPTER 14