Alexander and Alestria (2 page)

The tyrant disappeared for months at a time. Life settled back into its gentle music. I did not want to be a man, to be like

Philip. I liked braids and women's clothes, and learned the disciplines I enjoyed: dance, the lute, poetry, the game of marbles. But the tyrant returned more fiery and brutal, more drunk than ever. Olympias wept. Philip bellowed. I trembled, closing my eyes and blocking my ears. My father's imprecations and my mother's screams as he struck her hammered through my head.

Olympias, your beauty and your origins bewitched Philip. He had your father assassinated and abducted you from your country! Philip the tyrant is not my father. A young Greek warrior loved you, and you conceived me. Olympias, don't cry! I will have our revenge.

When I reached the age of six, my father stole me from my mother. I was driven out of town in a cart and was interned at the Royal School, where I was to learn to fight like every Macedonian man. Still haunted by Olympias's sobs, I walked timidly through that imposing portico. The sons of generals and noblemen kept their distance, eyeing me coldly. I stopped in front of the closest of them. He looked down.

"Are you a girl or a boy?" I asked him.

"A boy," he replied.

"What's your name?"

"Hephaestion."

I liked the way he flushed, the smell of him and his voice. I knew instantly that his friendship would be eternally faithful and protective.

I was the smallest and weakest at school. The boys imitated their fathers' coarse habits and walked with their heads held high.

They made fun of me and deliberately bumped into me. I was flattered merely to exist close to their muscles. I played Olym-pias, the submissive woman, and charmed them with my affable smiles. I took more interest in the beauty of the male body than in athletic training. The world of boys made me forget the unbearable ugliness of lame, mutilated, blinded, and scarred adults.

Philip announced the imminent arrival of a philosopher famous for his moral rectitude. He wanted the man to come to Pella, he explained, to correct the perversities Olympias had instilled in me. Aristotle appeared one spring morning, dressed in a white tunic which left his thin bony arms uncovered. I hid behind an olive tree, refusing to talk to this man who wanted to educate me in keeping with Greek customs. He would find out about my conversations with birds and my girlish ways. He would punish me and torture me. He was here to work on my reason.

Aristotle sat on a bench and called for Alexander. Hephaes-tion dragged me by the hand, then pushed me forcibly. I stood in front of the philosopher with my eyes lowered and my hands behind my back, staring at a column of ants carrying grain toward some bushes. Aristotle's voice rang out. It was the first time I had heard pure Greek, unhampered by any accent.

"Macedonia is just one star in a sky full of stars, do you know that?"

I looked up.

Aristotle drew me in and tamed me with his beautiful words and his soothing presence. He let me feel his body, which was nothing like those of the warriors I grew up with. His status as a philosopher meant he could dispense with all athletic training: his skin was soft, his belly fat, his chest flabby. Aristotle was living proof of the diversity of the world. Other men may be as powerful as warriors. Other towns may be more beautiful than Pella.

In the shade beneath the porticoes Aristotle unrolled his maps. He took an olive branch and traced the roads and shorelines. Country by country, he communicated his passion for geography to me. He smelled good, and his face glowed. No one before him had that phrasing, that way with words, that stringency and clarity. Aristotle was a mason who knew how to build minds. He consolidated the foundations laid down by Olympias, and erected the columns. Mathematics, logic, and metaphysics supported the structure of thought. I grasped that history was not written only by the gods of Olympus or by heroes destined for great exploits. The earth was populated not only with Cerberuses, centaurs, and mermaids. Men had created kingdoms, cities, and governments. Somewhere beyond incantations and witchcraft there was grammar, analysis, and morality. Beyond the art of divination, there was arithmetic, and that quest for a just medium between the failings and qualities of all things, that balancing act, that is called politics.

Phalanxes of the Macedonian army made the very earth tremble. My father advanced at the head of this swaying forest of lances, and never retreated. He returned to Pella only for major feast days. Crowned with laurels and wearing sandals of woven gold, he dominated the world as Zeus did Mount Olympus. His hair was bleached by the sun, his wind-burnished skin obscured by a beard, while his white tunic revealed one shoulder and showed off an arm with bulging muscles scored with lance wounds. And this mighty king publicly ridiculed me: he said I was as thin and stupid as a girl. He grabbed my hand and laid it on his scars, claiming he would teach me about manliness and valor.

Orgies could no longer satisfy his thirst for gratification. He took to keeping lions and releasing captives into the arena with them. The monsters roared and leaped onto these near-naked men. Rare were the slaves who could hold on to their weapons and fight against the lionesses, who were even fiercer than their mates. My father would laugh, standing up and craning his neck when a belly was ripped open. I sat beside him, no longer shaking. Olympias had taught me not to be afraid. She told me that when the storm was in full swing, I had to stay calm and keep my feet on the ground. Because nothing can sway the ground, nothing could destroy it. It is the source of all strength. That was the secret of our ancestor Achilles, who was invincible so long as his feet touched the ground. The spectacle was drawing to a close; my father spat, put his hand through my hair, and waggled my head, roaring with laughter. The sun was setting and the feasting began. The king was soon drunk, and his affection toward me turned to rage. He brandished his goblet and his sword, called me a bastard before everyone, and asked in a booming voice who my father was. The warriors laughed, each claiming I was his daughter.

I had grown up. I no longer cried. I was training myself to withstand suffering. One day a slave would kill the lions. One day Alexander would slay the tyrant.

Having abused her body and debased her soul, Philip neglected the queen who no longer appealed to him. Freed from his pestering attentions, Olympias took refuge in the consolation of women and formed an attachment with a young slave girl she kept in her bedchamber. Olivia was gentle and fair-skinned. When she brushed her garnet lips over my mother's face, she made her forget this life of imprisonment she had never chosen.

One day when he was drunk, the king came across Olivia in the garden and raped her. Bleeding and ashamed, the slave girl drowned herself in a lake. Olympias was demented with grief, resentment, and hatred. She beat her breast, tore out her hair, and cursed the king. She ran barefoot to the top of the ramparts and wanted to throw herself to her death, but the soldiers held her back. The king ordered her to be locked up, and a rumor spread that the queen had gone mad.

I came back from the Royal School for her sake, kneeling before her and calling to her. She did not recognize me but gabbled deliriously, her hair awry and her tunic soiled. I lay my hand on her forehead; she shivered and tried to fight me off. I did not move away but sent her my thoughts through the palm of my hand. A spark appeared in her eyes, and tears sprang up. I drew her to me, and she followed me out of that underground dungeon. She went back to her chamber and lay on the bed where Olivia would no longer join her. Olympias huddled close to me, her tears falling on my breast, but the pain was more bearable now. My muscles were beginning to forge themselves, I had learned to fight with a sword and had my first scar. I no longer knew pity.

Why suffer? Why take pleasure? Why do women and children cry? Why do men get drunk and copulate?

When I asked these questions of Aristotle, he gave me no answers. It was a hot, starless night full of perfumes and the hum of insects.

"You are the star in this starless universe," Aristotle told me.

"You are black, red, yellow, green, purple, white, and blue, the seven colors the Demiurge used to create the world of stars."

I opened my eyes wide and saw mysterious lights in the sky: creatures like butterflies, fireflies, birds, sometimes transparent, sometimes opaque, decked in sparks of light. They brushed past me, settled on my shoulder, then flew away.

My father wanted to make a warrior of me. My mother claimed that I was the son of a god. Aristotle hoped to make a good and just ruler of me. I wanted to become none of these three Alexanders.

Papyrus books had taught me about the pyramids, the Sphinx, and boats with crimson sails. I believed I was destined for oceans and deserts, for forests, mountains, and volcanoes.

Without Homer, the exploits of men would have been scattered on the wind. Without him, kings would not have known immortality. I, Alexander, would give birth to majestic landscapes, grandiose cities, and warriors who exceeded all norms. Their weapons would be exceptional, their horses magnificent, their words unparalleled. Riding forth with furious desire, they would know neither hunger nor thirst, forget rumor and calumny, and ignore the countries and hearts trampled by their steeds. They would conquer the sun. They would steal and compete with each other to advance faster, ever faster, to the very edge of the universe.

I would be a poet.

My body was changing and causing me suffering. Standing naked beside the river, I was intimidated by the soldiers who stopped their horseplay under the waterfall to turn and look at me. I was no longer slender as a little girl: my shoulders, hips, and buttocks were muscled up by Olympian exercises. The brown and black curls of my hair floated about my face, which had lost its childish curves. I threw myself into the water to hide. Hephaes-tion came over and whispered that the commander of the phalanx had asked us to take part in a water fight. I was overcome with shame and indignation, and escaped by swimming downstream. Rushes swayed in the wind, swifts skimmed over the water and flitted up to the trees. There was an inexpressible pain inside me: something was about to happen, and I knew it would bring both fear and joy.

Hephaestion always watched me, growing aggressive when I spoke to other boys. He sulked for days on end, then came back. The tall, brutish adolescents at the school had stopped making fun of me, looking for opportunities to flatter me and allow me to win wrestling matches. In exchange for this servitude they took turns asking me to scrub their backs when bathing. Only Crateros continued to assault me, never hesitating to spit in my face or hurt me in combat. His hostility appalled me: I hovered around him, smiling at him and flashing him burning glances, which infuriated Hephaestion. The two boys fought over everything and anything; they even went so far as to brandish their swords and threaten to kill each other. I leaned against a column and watched them with a feeling of melancholy.

I was beautiful, I realized that. Not like these boys born for massacres; I had only my beauty to protect me and to ensure I was accepted by other men. I wanted to please everyone I met. Pleasing is a means of escape, it is a means of domination.

I realized how much I had changed when I walked out to meet Philip on his return to Pella after yet another victory: the tyrant watched me in silence. At the banquet he seated me beside him and covered me with compliments. He called for Bucephalus, a huge horse with a dazzling white coat, and offered him to me.

He ordered me to pose naked before the royal sculptors. In their deft hands, the clay became a mouth, curls, a torso, thighs. The divine Apollo and I were now but one. Together we would dictate the law of perfection throughout Macedonia and Greece. Philip came to watch, walked round, then left. He came back and stood before the statue, motionless as he contemplated it.

He begged me to let him kiss me, ordered me to open my arms to him. He clambered over me suffocatingly, kneeling before me when I rebuffed him with a scream. My rejection unleashed his desire: his gifts piled up, he summoned me to every celebration, introducing me as the future king of Macedonia, seating me in pride of place beside him, pouring wine for me as eagerly as a woman in love.

His efforts flattered and disgusted me. His passion softened my loathing even as it heightened it. I nurtured a towering contempt for the human body and for those obsessed with the flesh. A new Alexander was burgeoning within me. I could not tell whether he was strong or weak. He told me that my beauty was the rarest of goods: if I learned how to barter, I would become a superior being.

Everything was reduced to trade-offs. I gave only on condition of receiving. Philip, the king who was never refused anything, began to enjoy this game that reversed our roles. I had become his tyrant; he reveled in his servitude. To persuade me to undress, he had to heap gifts at my feet: gold plates, weapons, jewels, all the treasures he had grasped from the Greeks by force and by blood, at the risk of his own life. I soon tired of this accumulation; gold elicited only my disdain. My displeasure aroused him further, and he made dogged attempts to earn my smile.

I asked for every extravagant gift that came to mind: a three-horned bull, an embalmed Egyptian, a shrunken head, a freshly aborted fetus from a slave girl. When I tired of the game and felt satisfied with my offerings, like Apollo consenting to step down from the heavens, I gave myself to him and his companions in pleasure with perfect indifference. He would laugh and put his golden laurel wreath on my head, offering me his throne in exchange for one long kiss. Through all the madness of this capricious behavior, I kept my feet anchored to the ground.

Of all the things he had, I wanted only his strength.