Empire of Dust (34 page)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

MOST WRITERS—MYSELF
included—are for the most part solitary souls, hammering away at their craft in silence all hours of the day and night. But one of the real pleasures I have had as an author is working with such an incredible team of talented, fun, and supportive people, without whose expertise I would not be writing the Blood of Gods and Royals series.

At PaperLantern Lit, co-founders Lauren Oliver and Lexa Hillyer and editor Kamilla Benko will have my eternal gratitude for believing in me and teaching me so much. Seriously, if any of you ever needs a babysitter on New Year's Eve, someone to clean up after a violently sick pet, or money to bail you out of jail, just call me. Thanks also to Tara Sonin, marketing manager extraordinaire and a true Aristotle of social media, who taught this old dog the new tricks of facetweetogramming.

I am grateful to my agent Stephen Barbara of Inkwell Management for all his hard work selling and supporting the Blood of Gods and Royals series, and to Jess Regal of the Foundry Literary Agency for all those exciting foreign sales.

At United Talent, thanks
to Jason Richman and Howard Sanders for selling the Blood of Gods and Royals series to the WB Network. Let's keep our fingers crossed that hellions and Pegasi will be flying into millions of American homes via their TVs soon!

At Harlequin Teen, I want to express my gratitude for the warm support of my editor Natashya Wilson, especially for all her
Oohs!, Aahs!,
and
No, she didn't!s
in the margins of Track Changes. A heartfelt thanks to Natashya's editorial assistant, Lauren Smulski, to marketing manager Bryn Collier, and to my fabulous publicists Siena Koncsol and Shara Alexander.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

ALL WRITERS ARE
, in a sense, weavers, threading words and ideas into a story. Authors of historical fiction work on a special loom, where the weft is history and the warp fiction. We must shuttle fictional action and character development around facts, tightening the threads and creating engaging patterns.

Alexander the Great's life, however, was so extraordinary that even the facts read like fiction. As
Empire of Dust
starts to explore the burning question of whether Alexander the Great's real father was a god, the reader might wonder if I made this up. I swear I didn't. In his youth, legends swirled around the prince of Macedon that he was not the son of King Philip but sprung from divine stock. According to ancient writings, on the eve of the consummation of her marriage to Philip, Alexander's mother, Olympias, dreamed that her womb was struck by a lightning bolt, causing a flame that spread “far and wide” before dying away. Many believed that the lightning bolt, symbol of Zeus, indicates that the king of the gods was Alexander's true father.

Some ancient commentators reported that Olympias told Alexander of his celestial parentage, instilling him with the belief of his own grand destiny—which, perhaps, turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Later, when King Alexander of Macedon visited a sacred shrine in Egypt, the oracle confirmed that his father was indeed a god. The rest of his life, Alexander either believed it, or pretended he did, as it was the best PR a young warrior king could get at the time.

Regardless of the nature of Alexander's genetic relationship to King Philip, the prince was greatly influenced by him. Alexander went with him on campaign and watched him ignore serious wounds as he flattened the enemy. The prince of Macedon grew up not just wanting to emulate Philip's battle tactics, but to outdo him wherever possible, hoping his divine blood would give him that needed extra boost.

It's not easy bringing to life one of the most influential people of all time as a teenager. Luckily for me, many ancient historians have written about Alexander, dropping plenty of important clues about his character. Plutarch wrote that Alexander's ambition “kept his spirit serious and lofty in advance of his years,” a quality I have tried to endow him with in this series.

It seems that Alexander's intellectual abilities took precedence over his physical desires. While Alexander had an extremely close relationship with Hephaestion, there are no stories of the prince pursuing girls or boys the way most young men of his age and class did at the time. He had great self-restraint in “pleasures of the body,” according to the ancient historian Arrian, and little interest in marrying and siring heirs. Many princes were married early—at sixteen or seventeen—because illness and battle culled them young, and when they died they needed to have heirs of their own old enough to wield a sword. But Alexander didn't take his first wife until he was twenty-nine.

According to ancient writers, Alexander could be stubborn at times and heartily disliked his father ordering him around (what sixteen-year-old does not?). Yet he was always open to reason. Though he could have brief outbursts of temper, usually he was calm, insightful, and shrewd. He loved reading, philosophy, science, and foreign cultures.

Alexander's interests must have been shaped by the man who taught him from the age of thirteen to sixteen, another of the most influential people in world history, the philosopher-scientist Aristotle. I greatly enjoyed bringing Alexander's teacher to life, if only for one chapter. If all brilliant people tend to be a bit eccentric, Aristotle, one of the most brilliant ever to walk the earth, must have been shockingly so.

Aristotle not only studied almost every subject possible at the time, but made significant contributions to most of them. He was, in some ways, the world's first great scientist, exploring, experimenting, teaching and writing about zoology, anatomy, embryology, physics, geography, meteorology, geology, astronomy, and botany. He was the first known writer to notice changing landscapes—dried-up lakes, shifting rivers, tectonic upheavals—and came to the shocking conclusion that the earth doesn't stay unchanging forever but, in fact, is always changing, something the ancients hadn't considered. In his spare time, he wrote about ethics, economics, logic, political science, foreign cultures, education, literature, and poetry.

I hope that I have captured the timeless mystery of Egypt in Kat and Heph's journey down the Nile. Egyptian civilization was already thousands of years old when the Greek city states emerged. A land of ancient traditions and unimaginable wealth, Egypt was a multicultural economic powerhouse. Its harsh deserts were home to gold, amethysts, emeralds, iron ore, and many other valuable minerals. The rich black earth left behind by the annual Nile flood made it the breadbasket of the ancient world, the place all other nations flocked to for grain when their own harvests failed.

Empires and dynasties rose and fell; Assyrians, Persians, and Nubians—and later Greeks and Romans—conquered Egypt and were driven out—but the Nile never seemed to notice, and the animal-headed gods still ruled serenely over the land of hot sand, abundant crops, and roiling flood waters. Because of its antiquity, young men from all over the known world traveled to Egypt to complete their education at the hands of its priests, considered the wisest men alive. In Kat and Heph's Egypt chapters, I wanted to make sure the reader knows they aren't in Kansas anymore—or Macedon—but in a vastly different place where most of what they know has little or no relevance.

I enjoyed digging a bit more deeply into the coldly glittering Persian Empire in the characters of the Great King Artaxerxes and his nephew, Darius. At its height, the empire comprised some three million square miles, from the Aegean Sea—uncomfortably jostling elbows with Greece—to the borders of India. But Persia was more than military might. It needed an extensive government bureaucracy to administer all those kingdoms. It was also the center of a rich and thriving culture boasting sophisticated poetry, music, art, and architecture.

Unfortunately, very few Persian records of this time have come down to us, though we do know that Artaxerxes, aged eighty-five in
Empire of Dust
, was a wily, still youthful ruler who murdered eighty of his brothers in a single day to win the throne, personally strangling infants in their cribs. In Alexander's Greece, the word
Persian
was synonymous with poison, double-dealing, and effeminate luxury while Persians themselves thought Greeks were dirty, smelly, ignorant, and barbarous.

Every novel on Alexander the Great must include a breathtaking battle scene. In Alexander's attack on the Aesarian fortress of Pyrrhia, I have taken several tactics from ancient military history. I was inspired to have Alexander burn smoke-belching green wood to hide his men from Aesarian archers by stories I read about the Theban general Epanimondas, who died in 362 BC. He was famous for obscuring his army's maneuvers by burning green wood on top of dry, causing an enormous haze.

Siege warfare—an army attacking a walled city—often involved digging tunnels under the walls for the invaders to enter. As a city's defenders did everything in their power to stop a subterranean assault, many pitched battles were fought in dark tunnels. I was excited to write a tunnel battle and researched many that took place in the ancient world.

I modeled Alexander's burning of feathers on tactics used in 190 BC by the Greek city of Ambracia. Fending off the Roman army which had dug tunnels beneath their walls, the Ambracians brought portable ovens into the shafts where they burned feathers—apparently the world's most noxious stench!—and used bellows to pump the fumes toward the invaders who turned tail and fled. Nor did I make up the part about bees being drafted into the army. Mithridates VI (134–63 BC), King of Pontus (northern Turkey these days), lobbed hives of furious bees at attacking Romans in tunnels.

As an author of historical fiction, I always remind myself that human nature never changes, only the props do. The people of Alexander's time wore different clothing than we do, lived in different houses, and rode horses instead of driving cars. But every individual in this beautiful, frightening, and tumultuous world of ours—past, present, and future—experiences hope and worry, love and despair. Every one of us expresses anger and jealousy, courage, self-doubt and self-sacrifice. Every one of us climbs out of bed in the morning wondering what the day will bring and hoping it will be good. This is the most enduring and most magnificent thread in literary weavings both old and new—the indestructible bond of our collective humanity.

QUESTIONS
FOR
DISCUSSION

1. Prophecy was important to the ancient Greeks and to their mythology and literature. In
   Empire of Dust
   , Heph thinks, “The power of prophecies is not always in what they say, but in the fact that people go to such extremes to either avoid or fulfill them. Prophecies, real or false, are incredibly dangerous.” Do you think he is wise to hide this prophecy from Kat and Alex? How might believing in a prophecy make it self-fulfilling? Discuss how the characters might act if they knew about the prophecy.
   
2. When Jacob realizes that he is an Earth Blood and is the source of the magic that causes the Hemlock Torch to explode, he decides to hide his true nature and make himself invaluable to the Lords. Would it be better for him to embrace his true nature even if it meant being an outcast and possibly hunted by the most powerful warriors in the known world? Or is it better to hide who and what he is to fit in? Why? Discuss in both the context of the world in the book and if Jacob were in a similar situation today.
   
3. Olympias ages significantly during the time frame of
   Empire of Dust
   . Is what happens to her fair? What different choices might she have made, and what might have been the result? Give your group extra credit if your discussion examines her character development from the ebook novella
   Voice of Gods
   , through
   Legacy of Kings
   , to
   Empire of Dust
   . Compare and contrast Olympias's situation with that of Princess Laila. Consider Zo's goals and what Olympias's and Laila's actions and the consequences of those actions might predict about Zo's journey.
   
4. In literature, symbols have power and can evoke emotions in readers, sometimes without our being aware of that power. How does the author use water in
   Empire of Dust
   as a symbol of her characters' journeys and situations? How does she contrast the situations of the characters on or near water to those who are encompassed by land? Point to specific elements in the book to support your answer.
   
5. Kadmus is a classic example of an enemy turned potential ally. His mission to spy on Prince Alex becomes a double-edged sword as he comes to admire and ultimately love the prince. Based on what you have learned about Kadmus, do you think it is wise for Alex to not only forgive him, but to conscript him to be a double agent? What other enemies-turned-allies inhabit the book and in whose interests do you predict they will ultimately act? Point to evidence in the book to support your answer.
   
6. During his attempt to root out the traitor, Alex believes that his actions show his strength as a leader and will make his people respect him. Later, his mentor, Aristotle, tells him, “They fear you. That is different.” What does Aristotle mean, and what does Alex learn about power over the course of the story? How does his view change? What is Aristotle's role in the book, and how does his character impact your view of power?
   
7. Why does Jacob help Cyn to escape, and what does Cyn choose to do with her freedom? Why will or won't she be successful in her goals? Compare and contrast Cyn's experience with captivity to Zo's. Why did each woman bond with her captor, and how, if at all, did each character—Cyn, Jacob, Zo, Ochus—change from the experience? How might those relationships inform how countries treat prisoners of war today?
   
8. King Artaxerxes wants peace. The Persian Assassins' Guild wants war. How does each go about seeking this goal? Based on the events in this book, do you think it is possible to attain peace when someone is determined to start a war? It is said that if we do not learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it. What comparisons can you draw between the conflicts mentioned in
   Empire of Dust
   , which are true to history, and later wars such as World Wars I and II?