Authors: Stephanie Thornton
“You are a foul, murdering bitch!” Thessalonike reached for her sword, but her belt was empty. I laughed then, a high-pitched trill of delight. Thessalonike’s blade had stolen my brother’s life; now Mithra’s justice would be served as she watched her own brother die before her very eyes.
“Restrain yourself or I shall have you removed,” Olympias commanded her calmly. “Then your bastard brother will die alone.”
“And little Alexander Aegus shall rule alone,” I said to myself, a warm feeling spreading to
my
fingers and toes. “As he was meant to.”
But Arrhidaeus ruined my moment of exultation with his blubbering.
“I don’t want to die,” Cyclops said, his fat lower lip trembling. “I want to stay with you, Nike, you and Adea. I love Adea.”
“Arrhidaeus!” Thessalonike fell to her knees next to her brother, tears pouring down her cheeks in a touching display.
“My legs won’t move,” he said, his mouth opening and closing like an ugly fish’s. “Why is it so cold?”
“Give him a blanket!” Thessalonike yelled, swallowing her sobs as she pushed shaggy curls away from his face.
“Here,” Olympias said, unpinning the snake brooch at her shoulder and removing her linen
himation
. She let it fall to the tiles in a puddle of fabric. “You may use this.”
Thessalonike yanked it up and wrapped it around her brother. The thin fabric scarcely covered his heaving chest.
“The venom will soon reach his heart,” Olympias informed her as if commenting on the movement of the clouds outside. “Then he will be gone.”
“I’m scared, Nike,” Cyclops said. A vein throbbed in his neck, like a tiny snake trapped beneath the skin.
“You’re so brave,” Thessalonike told him, her tears splashing his face. “Just like Heracles. Would you like me to tell you the story of Heracles and the lion? It’s still your favorite, isn’t it?”
Thankfully, it didn’t take long for the venom to do its work, although we were forced to listen to Thessalonike blubber her way through the story of Heracles and the Nemean Lion. Still, it was the clean and easy death that Olympias had promised, more than the man-child deserved.
“Remove the body,” Olympias commanded to the waiting soldiers. “Arrhidaeus shall be buried alongside his father.”
“Don’t touch him!” Thessalonike shrieked as the guards moved closer, the sound sending the snakes slithering to the corners of their cages. “How could you? Arrhidaeus was no threat to anyone!”
“Surely even your feeble mind can understand that so long as your brother lived, he was a rallying point for Cassander’s faction,” Olympias said. “And now you shall remain with us here in Amphipolis, lest Cassander decide to wed you and strengthen his supposed claim to the regency.”
“The gods shall curse you for this,” Thessalonike roared. “Both of you shall writhe in the abyss of Tartarus for all eternity.”
“Seize her,” Olympias directed the waiting guards, a look of smug satisfaction settling on her features as Alexander’s sister struggled helplessly against the soldiers. “I have no need to listen to you or your worthless prattle.”
Thessalonike continued crying as she was dragged away behind her brother’s body, leaving a blessed peace in her place. Slaves removed the tray of pomegranate husks and shuffled off. To any outsider, this might have been an ordinary day spent among women, no hint of execution by poison.
This wouldn’t be the last time that Olympias awed me with her cunning.
“An impressive gift,” I said to her.
“Ah, here we are.” Olympias smiled as a messenger arrived wearing a staid expression. “Now we shall find out what fate young Adea has chosen for herself.”
“Will you keep her imprisoned here?” I asked.
“Not precisely,” Olympias answered, crossing one ankle over the other in the posture of a perfect queen. “I left three gifts for Adea in her chamber: a noose of silken rope, a vial of hemlock, and one of her mother’s old swords.” Olympias folded her hands in her lap as she addressed the messenger. “Which did she choose?”
The man cleared his throat. “The lady Adea thanked you for your generosity, but said that she preferred none of them.”
“Perhaps you didn’t understand my orders,” Olympias said, her eyes narrowing to slits. “You were not to come to me until the scheming sow breathed her last.”
“As she has,” the man hurried to amend. “Adea, daughter of Cynnane and Amyntas, breathes no more. She hanged herself with her own girdle instead.”
Olympias stared for a moment, then gave a little chortle. “She inherited her mother’s stubborn streak. It’s unfortunate she didn’t put the trait to better use.”
It was my turn to smile, a gesture mixed with awe and appreciation. “Several moves well played.”
Olympias shrugged and sipped her wine. “Adea and Arrhidaeus were very small players upon a very large stage.”
Then she turned and issued orders for poached red snapper to be served that evening, commanding extra garlic and preserved lemon to flavor the fish. Slaves armed with buckets of hot water and horsehair brushes entered to wash the pomegranates’ scarlet stains from the mosaic floor; the crimson marks would require enough scrubbing to strip the skin from their work-hardened hands.
And while Olympias’ back was turned, I palmed the vial of fresh viper milk and tucked it into my girdle.
I might learn much from Olympias of Macedon. And guard myself against her while I was at it.
• • •
T
he deaths of Arrhidaeus and Adea prompted Cassander to besiege us with renewed vigor, so that Thessalonike crowed with vengeful delight from the confines of her chamber until I considered slitting her throat myself just so I wouldn’t hear her cackles echoing down the corridors. Months passed until Cassander’s relentless siege forced Olympias’ household to move from Amphipolis to the drab little village of Pydna-on-the-Sea, a far cry from the palace I’d envisioned as my new residence when I first set out for Macedon. I told myself to be patient, but the chipped mosaics of the drunken god Dionysus underfoot cut the delicate skin of my feet, the drafty rooms made me shiver, and the frescoes of frolicking satyrs might have been painted by a bare-bottomed child still shitting himself. I refused to succumb to such travails and daydreamed during the siege reports of ordering a barrage of slaves to stitch me a wardrobe of different silk robes for each day of the year, all while planning to enlarge my own entourage to befit a woman of my station. Until then, I would cultivate patience here in miserable little Pydna. Olympias claimed it to be a better vantage point from which to best Cassander at his game of cat and mouse, yet she confided to me in private the true purpose of the move.
“As to be expected, Cassander is enraged at Arrhidaeus’ death,” she said. “He plans to attack us, to make a final stand and end this once and for all.”
“Naturally,” I said, clapping as little Alexander crawled away from his nervous nursemaid and toward me, his head held proudly as his bottom bounced in the air. I picked him up and rubbed my nose to his. “You don’t need ugly Cassander to help you rule when you have your mother and grandmother to do it for you, now, do you, my little lion cub?”
Olympias afforded us a tight smile and handed me a fresh parchment, its seal recently broken. “He sees the futility of this engagement and turns to pen and ink instead of swords.”
I continued to bounce Alexander, but scarcely glanced at the letter with its indecipherable scribbles. “And what does he say?”
I didn’t care to parade my total ignorance of Greek—or any written language—before Olympias, lest she think me too dim-witted to help my son rule.
She refolded the message, then held it over a burning candle of twisted rag and sheep fat. “He offers me protection if I surrender. Yet he makes no mention of you or my grandson.”
I fingered the golden necklace at my throat, her words a rope around my neck. “And will you accept?”
“I don’t think that’s necessary, do you?” she answered.
And so it was in far-flung Pydna-on-the-Sea that Cassander surrounded us with both his ships and his infantry. Olympias mustered all her available resources against him, even the war elephants that Alexander had sent from Persia before his campaign into India. The gray animals trumpeted and threw their gleaming tusks into the air as they were led out to fight. They returned relatively unscathed, but fewer and fewer of Olympias’ Macedonians and Thracian mercenaries survived. I’d never learned to do figures, but as the months dragged on, even I could tell that we’d lost too many men. No food came into the city and Cassander’s men scavenged our fields, leaving us to starve.
There was no grain for the elephants and so they were fed on sawdust. Then they were butchered, and the beleaguered villa was heavy with the smell of boiling elephant, without even an onion or a head of garlic to season the chewy meat. I cried tears of salt when Olympias thrust my bowl at me that first night, the gray at her temples starting to show through without the regular washes of wood ash and goat tallow.
“Cease your sniveling,” she snapped as a slave approached and fell on one knee, the hollows beneath her cheeks turning her face skeletal in the quivering lamplight. She wore a red
peplos
with Macedon’s customary eight-pointed suns along the bottom, but the stark shade leached her complexion of its color. “What is it?” Olympias demanded of the slave.
“A messenger from Cassander’s camp requests an audience.”
“I’ve endured far too much whining this night,” Olympias said, waving a hand at the slave while casting me a withering glance. “I refuse to hear Cassander’s latest terms for my surrender, not when we may well have to flee from him come high tide.”
The slave’s eyes darted to me and back in a way I didn’t relish. “The messenger swore that she had information you would wish to hear, especially regarding the mother of Alexander Aegus.”
Olympias followed his gaze to me and her eyes narrowed. “Do you know about this?”
My mind raced and my hands went clammy under her stare, akin to a freshly sharpened blade against my throat, but I only shook my head. “Not at all.”
And I had no idea which of my secrets this messenger claimed to know: my true parentage, the depravities I’d committed as the Whore of Sogdian Rock, or the truth of Stateira’s murder.
Olympias scowled, then rose and followed after the scurrying slave. And so I set down my portion of elephant and watched Olympias go, feeling as if a horned
daeva
was clawing my stomach. I sniffed, then bashed a girl slave about the ears as she tried to refill my wine cup.
I would not be cowed by Olympias, for
I
was mother to Alexander’s only legitimate son, regardless of the crimes I’d committed. Little Alexander was my treasure, my jewel that I would never part with.
And without Alexander Aegus, Olympias was nothing more than an old woman who had once tasted power and lost it. I’d see that she didn’t forget it.
• • •
I
awoke the next morning with breasts aching and hard with milk, for Alexander Aegus hadn’t woken during the night and demanded to suckle. I’d fallen asleep to the sound of his even breathing after much tossing and turning, finally resolving to demand that Olympias move Alexander Aegus and me to Pella, where we might live in some semblance of comfort. But when I went to pick up my son from the twisted willow branch cradle, I found it empty, not even his goat-shaped clay rattle left behind.
I screamed then and ran into the deserted corridor, grabbing the nearest slave by the neck. “Where is Olympias?”
“She is gone,” she blubbered, scratching at my hands. “So is everyone else.”
I released her, my palms falling open at my sides. “What do you mean?”
“She left before dawn.” She dragged her bare arm across her nose, hiccuping between her words.
The tides had turned before dawn. Olympias had fled, and taken my son with her.
She’d left me behind.
I screamed in impotent rage, shaking the slave girl so hard that her neck threatened to crack until she managed to shake me off. She ran down the corridor, blustering like a simpleton without sparing me even a final glance.
Olympias had escaped and taken my son—my shield—but there was one woman that I wouldn’t allow to elude me, the unnatural harridan who might give me the leverage I needed to sway Cassander to my side.
But Thessalonike’s apartments were emptier than a tomb.
I overturned a polished mahogany gaming table, sending the abandoned glass playing pieces scattering across the floor mosaic. “Piss and shit!” I yelled, letting my voice echo as I fell to my knees and pounded the floor with my fists until the knuckles bled.
I didn’t have long to wait before Cassander’s men came for me.
My nerves screeched louder than the long-legged vultures in a Tower of Silence when the set of perfectly matched military footsteps finally approached. I’d returned to my chamber and dressed for the occasion, trying in vain to ease my swollen breasts before robing myself in turquoise silk embroidered with peacock feathers. Alexander’s gold lion brooch was pinned at my shoulder and a head scarf sewn with tiny bells fell like a waterfall to my waist.
“Roxana of Balkh,” called out a thick-necked soldier while his companions—at least ten of them, all armed with swords and Macedon’s golden sun shields—filed into my chambers. “We have been ordered to seize you and bring you to justice before Cassander,
basileus
of Macedon.”
My throat tightened with panic as they bound my wrists with iron manacles streaked with fingers of rust and what might have been dried blood. I followed the guards, spewing curses with every step and expecting a gloating Cassander outside the dilapidated villa, but the soldiers prodded me off the grounds to Pydna’s decrepit market square, its cobbles emptied of merchants hawking toasted melon seeds, hide-wrapped cheeses, and copper bowls so tarnished that not even a two-obol streetwalker would piss in them.
Cassander stood in the center of the square surrounded by his many supporters, their assorted shield sigils claiming the entirety of Greece and Persia. Yet there were those other than soldiers assembled: men who appeared from their dress to be merchants or artisans, old men missing half their teeth, and even a scattering of women. I had eyes for none of the faceless crowd, only for the two women who flanked Cassander, one clad in mud brown silk and the other outfitted like an unnatural soldier.