The Persian Boy (48 page)

One must live, he’d said to me long ago, as if it would be forever, and as if each moment might be the last. He began at once to have the great harbor dug, and the fleet built for Arabia, which Niarchos would command. It was spring now, as warm as a Susa summer. He would ride back? from the new harbor, and make for the royal bath. Nothing in the Palace gave him so much pleasure. He loved the cool walls, the fretted screens glimpsing the river, the great bath with its lapis-blue tiles and their golden fish. He would float there with the water lifting his hair.

But there was always Hephaistion. He was due now for his rite of burning.

The fleet and the new harbor were both in hand. Alexander had time; and soon he had time only for this. He returned a little into his madness. If one woke him, he was sensible; but he would drift back into dreams. Alexander’s dreams were daimons. He conjured them, and they obeyed him.

He had ten furlongs of the city wall knocked half down, and leveled out to a square. Within this he had a platform made of fine tiles, each side a furlong. That was the base of the pyre. From that it tapered up, story upon story; each tier with carved sculptures, as fine in wood as if they’d been meant to last forever. At the bottom, ships’ prows with archers and warriors, larger than life; then torches twenty feet long, adorned with eagles and serpents; then a scene of wild beasts and hunters, gilded. Next above, trophies of arms, both Macedonian and Persian, to show both races had held the dead in honor. Above that I don’t know what, elephants, lions, garlands. Near the top were figures of winged sirens, hollow behind, in which singers would lament before the pyre was kindled. Great crimson flags hung down between the stages. There was room inside for a stairway, to bring him up with dignity.

I thought, No king has gone like this since the world began. He has dreamed it as if it were for himself. I watched his face, his eyes lifted to the pyre in his quiet madness, and dared do nothing, not even touch him.

The funeral car had been escorted by Perdikkas from Ekbatana. Hephaistion lay in state in the Palace, here as there. Alexander went oftener to see him now; he would soon be gone. Medios of Larissa, who had been his friend, had a little bronze likeness of him made, by a sculptor who’d seen him often, to give Alexander. He received it so gladly, that one friend after another, vying in affection or for favor, had small statues made in gold or ivory or alabaster. Soon the room was full of them; he was there wherever I looked. And I had thought that when the pyre was kindled, that would be the end of him.

One day, being alone, I took the best likeness into my hand, thinking, Who were you, what are you, that you can do this to my lord? He came in behind me, and said, “Put that down!” with such anger that I nearly dropped it. I put it back somehow, shaking with fear of exile. He said more quietly, “What were you doing?” I answered, “He was dear to you. I wanted to understand him.”

He took a turn across the room, then said, “He knew me.”

No more. I was pardoned, he meant no hurt. I had asked, he answered.

They had been born in the same month, in the same hills, of the same race, with the same gods; had lived under one roof from their fourteenth year. Truly, when to me we had seemed like one, to how much I had been a stranger.

Time will pass, I thought. They could bear to be parted on campaign; it will come to seem only like that. If there is time.

The day came. In the dusk before dawn, they lined the square about the platform; generals, princes, satraps, priests; standard-bearers, heralds, musicians; the painted elephants. By the steps were the braziers and the torches.

The bearers took up the coffin by the hidden stairs. As they reached the topmost deck, looking small as toys, and laid it on its stand, the hidden sirens sang, faint in the sky. They came down, still singing. The torches were kindled at the braziers.

The pyre stood on palm-wood columns; the space between was piled up with tinder and dry straw. Alexander came forward with his torch, alone.

He was exalted above his madness, into ecstasy. Peukestas, who’d seen him fight on with the Mallian arrow in him, said later that then he looked just the same. The elephants curled back ?their trunks and trumpeted.

He flung in his torch; flames leaped from it. The friends followed; the brands pelted in; the fire jumped through the gratings, into the tier of ships. It began to roar.

The pyre was tinder-filled up its center, through all its two hundred feet. The blaze spired upward, past ships and archers and lions and eagles and shields and garlands. At the top it enwrapped the coffin, and burst in a great peak of flame, against the green sky of sunrise.

Once at Persepolis, that feast of fire, they had looked up side by side.

For a while the high tower stood in its fearful beauty; then tier after tier caved in. An eagle crashed to the platform with flaming wings; the sirens toppled inwards; the coffin vanished. The timbers, the heavy carvings, began to hurtle down, throwing up spark-clouds tall as trees. The pyre was a single torch burning to its socket, by whose light I saw his face alone.

The sun came up. The whole parade stood stupefied in the heat. When nothing was left but red embers and white ash, he gave the order to dismiss. He gave it himself. I had thought they would have to wake him.

As he was leaving, a crowd of priests approached him, robed from all kinds of temples. He answered briefly and passed on. They looked unhappy. I overtook one of the squires who had been near, and asked what it had been about.

He said, “They asked if they could rekindle the sacred fires now. He said not till sundown.”

I stared at him, unbelieving. “The temple fires? He ordered them put out?”

“Yes, for the mourning. Bagoas, you look bad, it was all that heat. Come in the shade here. Does it mean something In Babylon?”

“They do it when the King is dead.”

Silence fell between us. At last he said, “But when he ordered it, they must have told him that.”

I hurried to the Palace, hoping to get him alone. Even to light them now might avert the omen. Had there not been enough, that he must make his own?

But already he had summoned a score of people, and was finishing off plans for the funeral contests. Grave Persian faces showed me that others had tried to warn him. Old Palace eunuchs who had lived to see the fires three times doused were whispering, and rolled their eyes my way. I did not join them. The temples were dark till sunset. Alexander worked on the games all day. There had been nothing much left to do, but it seemed that he could not stop.

They lasted near half a month. All the best artists from all the Greek lands were there. I went to the plays, mostly to watch his face. Only one of them stays with me, The Myrmidons, which Thettalos had done before for Alexander; it’s about Achilles, and Patroklos’ death. Thettalos himself had just lost a dear friend, a fellow actor who had died on the journey down from Ekbatana. He carried it through; he was a professional. Alexander sat as if his mind were far away. I knew the look. He had had it when Peukestas cut out the arrow.

The music seemed to do him good; he looked released from himself when the kitharists were playing. Afterwards he entertained all the winners, saying just the right things to each. Perhaps, I thought, the last of the madness had been seared out of him by so much burning.

He began to go down again to the river, to watch the seamen training; he held races for the rowers, and offered prizes. Then the embassies from Greece arrived.

They were envoys of compliment, to honor his safe return from the world’s end. They brought gold crowns, exquisite wreaths of jewelers’ work, and scrolls of honor. Even the envious Athenians came, full of lying compliments. He knew they lied. But he gave them in return the statues of the Liberators, fetched from Susa, to put back on their citadel. When he made the presentation, he pointed as if by chance to the daggers, and caught my eye.

The last embassy was from Macedon.

It was not like the rest. The regent, Antipatros, whom Krateros was to supersede, had sent his son to speak for him.

During all his years of regency, which went back to King Philip?’s day, Queen Olympias had hated him, my belief being that she wished to govern instead. Knowing of all her slanders, it was perhaps no wonder if he thought they had made their mark, and he’d been sent for to go on trial; for ten years he’d not set eyes on Alexander, to know him better. Even so, one would have thought he’d have had more sense than to send his son Kassandros. That is, if his faith was good.

Whenever Alexander had told me about his boyhood, he’d mentioned this youth, as then he’d been, with detestation. They had disliked each other at sight, and on all through their schooldays; once they had come to blows. The reason he had been left behind in Macedon was simply that Alexander would not have him In the army.

However, he had helped his father put down a rising in southern Greece, and done quite well there; no doubt both had hoped that this would recommend him now. He arrived, after so long, almost a stranger; only this stranger and Alexander hated each other on sight, as they’d done before.

He was an arrogant, freckled, red-haired man, with the old-time Macedonian beard. He was also, of course, a perfect stranger to court life in Persia. One had forgotten such people existed.

No doubt he was mad with envy. The Throne Room had been refurnished, to receive the embassies; about the throne was a great half-circle of couches with silver feet, where the King’s chief friends, Persian and Macedonian, had a right to sit when he gave audience. All the Household would stand behind him. My own place, now we were back among real procedure, was near the throne. I was there to watch Kassandros when he came. While he awaited Alexander, I saw him look at us eunuchs as if we were noxious vermin.

The audience did not go well. There had been petitioners out from Macedon to plead causes against the regent. Kassandros was too hasty, in saying they had come to be well away from all the evidence; I think one, at least, had been sent by Queen Olympias. Only one man had ever been allowed to speak against her to Alexander, and he was dead. Alexander broke the audience off, and asked Kassandros to wait while he saw some Persians.

Barbarians before him! I could see his fury. He stepped back, and the Persians, who were below the rank of Royal Kin, made the prostration.

Kassandros sneered. It is not true, as some say, that he laughed aloud. He was an envoy with work to do. Nor is it true that Alexander knocked his head on the wall. He had no need. .

It is true the sneer was open; I suppose anger made him reckless. He turned to some companion he’d brought with him, pointing a finger. Alexander let the Persians rise, spoke to them, dismissed them; then stepped down from the throne, grasped Kassandros in one hand by the hair, and stared into his face.

I thought, He is going to kill him. So did Kassandros I daresay. But it was more than that. It was more than the kingly power, more even than the word of Ammon’s oracle. He had been through fire and darkness. All he needed was to lay it bare. Kassandros stared as the bird does at the serpent, white with pure naked terror of man for man.

“You have leave to go,” said Alexander.

It was a good way to the doors. He must have known his fear had marked him like a brand, and all we creatures of his scorn had seen it.

Later on, when I had Alexander alone, I said to him, “Hate like that is dangerous. Why don’t you pack him off home?” He answered, “Oh, no. He’d go back and tell Antipatros I’m his enemy; urge him to revolt, kill Krateros when he gets there, and seize Macedon. Antipatros might do it, if he was put in fear of his life. Let alone, he has more sense. If I meant him harm, I’d hardly have his other son as cupbearer. He’s been where he is too long, that’s all. No, till Krateros is in Macedon and Antipatros leaves it, Kassandros stays here under my eye . . . Hephaistion could never stand him, either.”

In earlier days, I’d have begged him to have the man put quietly out of the way. I knew that what he would not own to, he would not do. It is my ?life’s regret I did not take it on myself in secret. It torments me, to think that with one little phial I might have quenched that murderous hate that has pursued my lord even beyond the tomb; his mother, his wife, the son I never saw, who would have given us something more of him than memory.

Summer came on. All Persian kings would have been at Ekbatana. I knew he would never ride through those gates again; I was only glad he had the fleet and harbor to keep him busy. It was four months since the Chaldeans’ prophecy. Except when I saw the new Bel temple going up, I could almost forget them.

Soon we left the city for a while. Down river, there were floods every year when the snows at its source were melting, and the people there, who were of old Assyrian stock, lived poor because of it. Alexander wanted to plan dams and canals against it, and make new farmlands. It was only a river cruise, but it cheered me to have him outside the walls.

He always loved rivers. The ships wound among man-tall reed-beds, the Assyrian pilots conning the channels. Sometimes great shade-trees met above, and we glided through green caves; sometimes we pushed through lily-pads in open pools; the river has many branches there. Alexander would stand in the prow, and sometimes take the helm. He had on the same old sun-hat he used to wear in Gedrosia.

The stream broadened between drooping willows which tossed in a flaw of wind. Among them stood blockish ancient stonework; with figures, worn by time and flooding, of winged lions and bulls, man-headed. When Alexander asked about them, the Babylonian shipmaster said, “Great King, those are the tombs of the old-time kings, when the Assyrians ruled here. This was their burial ground.”

On the words, a gust plucked off Alexander’s sun-hat, and whirled it overboard. Its purple ribbon, the symbol of royalty, was loosened and carried away. It whipped itself round the rushes beside a tomb.

The ship glided on by its own way; the rowers had shipped their oars. All along the craft passed a murmur of awe and dread.