Authors: Stephanie Thornton
An asset insomuch as Oxyartes had appeared out of thin air after Roxana’s marriage and convinced Sisimithres, the commander of the Rock of Chorienes, to surrender without a fight, claiming that no fortress could stand if Alexander decided to take it. Sisimithres had opened his gates and his larder, filling our men’s stomachs with fresh flatbread, dried ox flesh, and decent vintages of wine. Of course, Sisimithres was a man who had married his own mother, so there was no guarantee that he wouldn’t have capitulated without Oxyartes’ prodding. Alexander had rewarded Oxyartes handsomely, but strangely, Roxana rarely acknowledged her father. I’d hoped that Alexander would deposit both Roxana and her father in some far-flung citadel, but it was quite likely that our new Queen of Queens would remain with us far longer. She was a symbol to all of Persia of Alexander’s goodwill, a cease-fire of flesh and blood with the promise of a permanent treaty that might one day drop from her fertile womb.
“How long shall it take for us to reach the court of King Taxiles?” Roxana asked. She fiddled with the silver stitching on the sleeve of her cloth-of-gold traveling robe. I’d made up my mind that she was a grasping siren when she’d complained that surely Darius’ wife had owned more than one crown, prompting Alexander to commission several more to outdo his predecessor, including the new diadem Roxana now wore. It would be a kindness to supply her attendants with tufts of wool with which to stuff their ears.
“Alexander plans to reach the court of King Taxiles by the end of summer,” I said.
“The end of summer?” Her pupils widened beneath the black
sormeh
powder she’d used to line her eyes. I thought I even detected a faint dusting of pale white powder to lighten her skin, a trick most practiced whores used. “Piss and shit,” she whispered under her breath.
Ah yes, our vulgar guttersnipe of a queen.
“Surely you jest,” she said to me.
“I wish I did,” I replied, although truthfully I wouldn’t have minded if the journey took three years instead of three months. “In fact, today I ride ahead to oversee the building of a bridge across the Indus River, the better to ease our travel. I’m sure Alexander will keep you in great comfort in the long months to come.”
“My husband is indeed a generous man,” she said. “Yet it pains me to see you ride a stallion more magnificent than his. Is it seemly for you to outshine your King of Kings?”
I forced myself to smile. “Alexander prefers to ride Bucephalus, and whichever other beasts please his fancy. In fact, I hear he’s taken a liking to that eunuch of yours.”
“Bagoas would never dare such a thing,” she said, but I reveled in the unsettled glance she cast in the eunuch’s direction. If she thought to play at being queen, she’d have to learn to temper her emotions, or at least disguise them. “How dare you insinuate such a thing?”
“My apologies,” I said, baiting her. “I assumed you knew of Alexander’s varied tastes.”
It was clear from Roxana’s expression that she’d had no idea. Surely she hadn’t believed that Alexander would be faithful to her, not after he’d bedded her and done her the unthinkable honor of making her a queen.
Yet as her mouth worked to form words and her face darkened, I could see that impossible dream was precisely what she’d expected. I almost pitied her then. She’d thought Alexander would be an easy conquest, further proof that she didn’t understand or deserve him.
“Parizad,” I barked, turning about. “Guard your sister. Enjoy the long journey to India, Queen Roxana.”
I kicked my horse’s ribs and galloped forward, thankful that I had a bridge to build to ferry Alexander’s troops into the heart of India.
After all, attacking a regiment of Indians armed with tusked elephants would be preferable to speaking to Alexander’s new wife again.
• • •
I
crossed the Hindu Kush Mountains with a contingent of men and oversaw the construction, reveling in the sound of hammers and smiling to myself as I heard in my mind a woman’s familiar voice questioning the spacing and the thickness of planks as we sank piers into the riverbed and lashed the beams atop. I wondered what Drypetis was doing then, whether she had somehow found contentment in Susa.
I chuckled to myself at the thought, for I had yet to witness Drypetis’ contentment with anything this world had to offer.
I enjoyed the quiet freedom of the work, but too soon, the rest of the army rejoined us. Alexander commended the bridge and together we continued to cut a swath of destruction through India, beckoned by the lure of lands reputed to be lusher than Egypt, where the air was filled with the scents of saffron and cinnamon. The red earth was parched, its pine trees lifting their branches like hands beseeching the sky for rain. This was a land rumored by the historian Herodotus to be populated not by humans but by giant ants, and while we encountered plenty of foul, oversized insects, so too did we meet dark-skinned people on our way to what Alexander claimed was the sea at the end of the world. I’d encountered Indians as mercenaries only on the battlefield at Gaugamela, but these Indians were slim and foreign creatures who carried parasols against the sun and dyed their beards white, red, purple, or green. We passed their bald-headed holy men along the road, sitting or lying naked in various postures. I considered stopping to discuss philosophy with them, knowing Aristotle would berate me for missing such an opportunity, but Alexander continued doggedly on.
And I followed, as I always did, Aristotle be damned.
Some of the Indian inhabitants begged us via gestures and gifts of precious spices to leave their cities in peace, while others attacked and forced us to litter their streets with corpses rancid with the stink of death. Our men grew wearier with each step of the march that took them farther into this foreign land, but now there was the promise of new riches as we faced off across the Hydaspes River against the general Porus, who was famed for being as tall and as wide as one of his many cavalry elephants. There were so many of the gray beasts on the other side of the swollen river that we could hear them stamping and trumpeting while the rains lashed down upon us, pouring from the rims of our helmets and threatening to rust our swords where we stood. I spared a wry smile to think of pampered Roxana attempting to weather this belligerent storm, even as our men let fly the Macedonian war cry and beat their shields in an attempt to strike fear into the hearts of the Indians.
Lightning strikes flashed from the clouds and shattered the curtains of rain that obscured my vision. Zeus’ favored weapon felled some unlucky bastard—one of our Persian recruits—not far from where I stood, burning his flesh and rendering him mute.
An ill omen, by any man’s standard, and one that reminded me of Adurnarseh.
Yet Alexander ordered his generals to provide distractions while the main force of our army traveled upriver to cross. Under the cover of night and lashing rains, Alexander waded into the raging brown river dressed in full battle armor before hauling himself into one of the newly constructed straw and oxhide floats. Muttering and cursing all the while, I bellowed over the clamor for the Companions and cavalry to follow in the rest of the skiffs.
The blood-warm river and incessant rains overturned several of the rafts, and we emerged on the other side stinking of wet leather and panting like dogs.
Artemis’ tits, but I was sick of being cold and wet and exhausted.
Unable to fully see us in the storm and falling for the distractions we’d arranged downriver, Porus had split into two his army of javelin throwers and archers armed with strange Indian bows as tall as a man. His fatal error allowed us to flank both his regiments. Alexander had prepared three thousand shield bearers with axes to slash at the elephants’ legs and tusks. The beasts screamed their retreat even as their blood joined that of their riders, turning the muddy river to a sluice of red as if the veins of the earth had been slit open as the waters churned in violent death throes.
The rest of the battle passed in fits and starts, hours reduced to fragmented images of an Indian soldier being brained by the broadside of a Macedonian sword, horses screaming in terror, and Alexander roaring orders, his men moving like a living extension of his arm.
“We’ve got him,” Alexander said to me as the fight neared its end, his face alight. “The great Porus himself shall bow and scrape before me.”
“Like so many other kings and generals,” I said.
“And I shall never grow tired of it.” Alexander grinned and clapped me on the back. “Come with me to receive him.”
For once, the rumors were true, for Porus was so large that when he was brought to us upon his largest elephant, he seemed a normal man astride his horse. His hair was gathered into a topknot in the Indian style and he wore a light cotton cloak over a massive leather cuirass that might have covered half a newborn elephant. He rewarded Alexander with a rare hunting bitch rumored to share the blood of tigers, thousands of four-horse chariots, lizard skins and tortoiseshells studded with beryl and onyx, and crates of fragrant cardamom, balsam, and sweet rush. Yet Alexander was so impressed with Porus’ daring and the tenacity of his men that he named him
satrap
over the tribes of his remaining Indians.
It was a victory, followed by a tragedy.
A horse handler found me just as Alexander finished negotiating with Porus, the servant’s eyes darting to our king while he wrung his hands.
“What is it, man?” I asked. “You look as if Porus’ elephants have stampeded all of our geldings into the Hydaspes.”
“Almost as bad,” the handler stuttered. “Worse, perhaps.”
I wiped the sweat and grime from the back of my neck. My sword arm throbbed and my shoulders ached as the thrill of the battle slowly leaked from my bones. I was fast approaching my thirtieth summer, certainly not yet old, but no longer the brash, invincible idiot I’d been when we first left Aigai almost ten years ago. We used to drink hard and carouse even harder to celebrate our victories, but tonight I craved nothing more than a cup of spiced wine and my copy of Aeschylus’
Seven Against Thebes
.
I snorted. Perhaps I
was
getting old.
I motioned again to the tongue-tied handler. “The skies could rain blood and Alexander wouldn’t notice after a victory such as this. Spit out your news.”
“It’s Bucephalus.”
“Ox-Head?”
He nodded, then bit the tip of his thumb. There was a welt of blood there already, as if he’d gnawed the unfortunate digit all the way here. “The king’s horse, well, he was almost thirty summers old. . . .”
The same age as me.
The handler looked up, pulling a sliver of thumbnail from between his teeth, and flicked it to the ground. “I kept Bucephalus penned with a trough of sweetgrass, just as Alexander ordered, but the horse lay down and died just after the rains began. It was fatigue and old age—I swear it—not negligence on my part.”
Artemis’ tits. I’d hated Ox-Head with his ridiculous horned helmet, but it was no wonder that the poor handler looked ready to jump out of his bones every time his gaze skittered to Alexander.
“Go and prepare the beast: Brush the black demon and weave flowers into his mane.” The man’s panic twisted into confusion. “No flowers,” I amended. “Just make him look like the hell-horse he was, carrying Alexander to eternal glory. I’ll break the news to him myself.”
The handler scurried away before I could change my mind. I waited until Porus lumbered off to his new illustrious posting; there was no need for the new
satrap
to see his conqueror rage, or more likely weep, over a dead horse.
“A glorious victory, is it not, Hephaestion?” Alexander asked, rising and gesturing to the plain choked with mounds of corpses like freshly turned earth. A mist of rain still fell as he paused to squeeze the shoulder of a dazed and shivering shield bearer. The man stuttered his thanks, yet another soldier who would tell his children and grandchildren of Alexander’s largesse and the way the sun seemed to follow him.
“It is indeed,” I said, counting to ten to give him a few more moments to enjoy his triumph. His bronze cuirass was stained with blood and he stank of hard-earned sweat, but he grinned like the boy I’d known in Aristotle’s Mieza. “Yet I fear the day is not done.”
“What do you mean?” His brows knit together as if he were finally seeing me, and not some battle map in his mind.
“Bucephalus is dead,” I said. “He breathed his last before you crossed the river.”
Alexander didn’t speak for a moment, then let out a thunderclap of a curse, drew his sword, and flung it like a discus away from him. I thanked the gods there was no unfortunate soul standing in his path to be gored by the blade. From his shattered expression I might have been delivering news of the death of Olympias or Thessalonike, rather than a mere horse.
“I loved that horse,” Alexander said to me, his blue eyes shining brighter than usual, his visage that of a gutted man. “He was the best horse a man could have.”
Ox-Head was a hell-horse fit for Hades and had been since before Alexander had broken him as a boy, but I realized I’d actually miss the cantankerous old beast. Whatever his faults, Bucephalus had been fiercely loyal to Alexander, which was something I could appreciate.
“I know,” I said, wrapping my arm around Alexander’s shoulders and fitting him into my side. Sometimes I forgot how much smaller he was than me, so much space did his energy seem to eat up. “We shall burn him tonight so the crows cannot have him.”
“And let the stars keep us company while we regale ourselves with stories of his victories,” Alexander said, wiping a hand over his face.
So much for Aeschylus’
Seven Against Thebes
.
But I nodded to this man who was a brother and so much more than a brother to me.
“We shall greet the dawn,” I said. “And still have stories left to tell.”
In fact, we might have put our younger selves to shame that night, drinking enough wine to fill the Hydaspes River in honor of that black demon horse. Ptolemy and Craterus and the other generals joined us to sing dirges of dead gods and ditties extolling the ripeness of a maiden’s breasts, so that together we spilled enough wine to make offerings to all twelve Olympians and their countless offspring. We played
kottabos
until our sword arms threatened to fall off
,
the inane drinking game that involved flinging wine dregs at a copper disk target floating in a basin of water. Finally, the others drifted away and took their songs with them, Ptolemy to seek out one mistress or another, while Craterus passed out with an empty
amphora
tucked under each arm.