Alexander (Vol. 3) (Alexander Trilogy) (40 page)

Hephaestion had a stretcher made and so he was carried, delirious, for another two days. The King lay burning up with fever and thirst, soiled by his own excrement which for lack of water could not be cleaned off, and tormented by swarms of flies.

‘If we do not reach the ford soon, he may die,’ said Oxhatres. ‘I will go on ahead to look for it. Follow my tracks. If you manage to catch any wild game, eat the meat raw. No one must drink anything that the Scythian mercenaries refuse to drink – they know about these things.’

He disappeared off towards the west, together with a group of Sogdian horsemen, the most resistant to the heat and the thirst, while the column of men continued to advance at a walk under the relentless sun. He returned after nightfall and immediately asked of the King, ‘How is he?’

Hephaestion shook his head without replying. Alexander lay on the ground in his own filth, his lips cracked and dried, his breath rattling.

‘I have found the ford,’ said the Persian, ‘and I have brought water for drinking, but not for washing.’

Alexander drank as did all those whose thirst had brought them closest to death, then they set off once more on the march to the Jaxartes after dark. The river came in sight with the first light of dawn. The King’s Companions immediately immersed him in the cold waters and kept him there until his body temperature fell. He regained consciousness slowly and asked, ‘Where am I?’

‘At the ford,’ explained Oxhatres. ‘We have fresh fish here and wood for cooking.’

‘Your Greek is getting better,’ Alexander had the strength to reply.

*

They joined up with the rest of the army near Samarkand, where a nasty surprise was awaiting them. The commanders of the
pezhetairoi
had launched an ill-considered attack on Spitamenes’ troops on the Polytimetus river and had been soundly defeated. Almost a thousand soldiers had fallen and several hundred were left wounded; the funeral pyres burned for days and days, the sky dark and gloomy.

Leptine cried in despair when she saw the King in such a terrible state. She washed him, dressed him in clean clothes and had men with feather fans keep him cool day and night. Philip was soon at his bedside and realized that the fever was still very high – every evening, at sunset, Alexander became delirious. The physician recalled some of the teaching of his master, Nicomachus, and so sent for Hyrcanian horsemen and instructed them to collect snow on the mountains, and he covered the King’s body with it every time the fever began rising while Leptine continued to change the cold cloths on his forehead all through the night. Then he began feeding him with dry bread and sharp apples until his diarrhoea calmed.

‘Perhaps you’ll scrape through this time as well,’ he said to him when he saw him gain some colour, his temperature finally normal, ‘but if you carry on behaving in this way then not even Asclepius himself, who they say can revive the dead, will be able to save you.’

‘I am convinced that you are better than Asclepius,
iatre,’
the royal patient managed to reply before falling asleep again.

As soon as he was able to give orders, Alexander prohibited all the survivors of the battle of the Polytimetus to speak of it with anyone, so as to avoid discouraging any of the men. Then he sent Perdiccas, Craterus and Hephaestion to counterattack Spitamenes’ forces, driving the rebels back towards the mountains. At that stage, however, autumn was already on its way and it would have been madness to set off through the mountains after them. He decided to return to Bactra, where Bessus was being held prisoner, marching westwards along the northern limits of the empire, to affirm his authority in that area and to see if Scythian territory also extended in that direction for such a distance.

They crossed the Oxus again on the bridge of tent-skins and ventured into an area that was deserted for the most part – vast and completely flat, it extended northwards and disappeared into the foggy horizon. Occasionally they met long caravans of Bactrian camels heading westwards, at other times they found themselves being followed at a distance by groups of Scythian horsemen, recognizable by means of their clothes and their decorated trousers, and their characteristic scaled armour. One day, around sunset, just as they were preparing to pitch camp, a member of the advance guard came back with some startling news: ‘Amazons!’

Seleucus grinned, ‘I didn’t realize that one of the solutions to all the drought we’ve been experiencing had been to give undiluted wine to the troops.’

‘I am not drunk, Commander,’ replied the soldier in all seriousness. ‘Right now there are female warriors lined up on that hill opposite us.’

‘I don’t fight women,’ said Leonnatus solemnly, ‘unless that is—’

‘But they are not looking for a fight,’ said the soldier. ‘They smiled at us and the one who looks like their leader is beautiful and . . .’ At this point he turned to show the King where the meeting had taken place and saw that she was now right behind them, less than half a stadium away, escorted by four of her companions.

‘Let them come forward,’ ordered Alexander and instinctively he ran his hand through his hair, as though to tidy it up a little. ‘Perhaps we really are in the land of the Amazons.’

In the meantime the beautiful warrior had come nearer and dismounted, and her companions followed suit. Some distance away others could be seen pitching a tent. One single tent in the midst of that immense expanse of land.

The King moved forward to meet her, flanked by Hephaestion and Craterus, while from behind them came a buzz of amazement as the news ran through the ranks of the soldiers and among all the people in the King’s entourage. Word reached Callisthenes and he elbowed his way through; even Leptine had moved up close, intrigued by this strange event.

The warrior Queen and the King were now face to face and she took off her headdress – a sort of conical helmet made of leather with cheek protectors – and thus she revealed her stunning hair, black and shining, gathered into a long plait that almost reached her waist.

She seemed to be about twenty years of age and was very different from the images of the Amazons they all knew, which they had seen represented gloriously naked in the reliefs sculpted by Bryaxis and Scopas in the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus or painted by the brushes of Zeuxis and Parrhasius in the ‘Decorated Portico’ of Athens. Apart from her fine olive-coloured face, no part of her body was visible. She wore trousers of blue wool embroidered in red and above it all a strange leather tunic, tight at her waist and wide below her knees. She had a sword hanging from her waist together with a water bottle and a bow and arrows across her shoulders, weapons considered traditional for the Amazons, but she was not carrying the half-moon-shaped shield.

She looked at him with her big dark eyes and said something that no one understood.

Alexander turned to Oxhatres. ‘Did that mean anything to you?’

The Persian shook his head.

‘And you Scythians?’

Oxhatres exchanged a few words with them, but they too explained that they had not understood anything.

‘I do not understand you,’ said Alexander with a smile and he was deeply sorry to find himself there before one of the mythological creatures who had peopled his childhood dreams without being able to say a single sentence that she might understand.

The young woman spoke again, returned his smile and tried to help with some gestures, but to no avail.

‘I understand her,’ came a voice suddenly from behind Alexander.

The King turned in surprise because it was a woman’s voice – ‘Leptine!’

The girl moved forward, and to everyone’s amazement she began speaking with the young woman warrior.

‘How can this be?’ Callisthenes asked, astonished by this remarkable event. Alexander, however, recalling a far off winter’s evening he had spent with Leptine at Aegae, in the ancient palace of his ancestors, remembered that she had spoken in a strange, incomprehensible tongue and there had been that tattoo on her shoulder, identical to the image on the golden pendant on the Amazon’s necklace – a crouching stag with its long branch-like horns.

‘Such things happen,’ said Philip the physician. ‘Xenophon recounts of a similar episode he came across in Armenia, when a slave suddenly recognized the language of the Calybeans, a people he did not know at all.’

Leptine was speaking in the meantime, initially somewhat hesitantly, and then with greater confidence, even though her words seemed to come out reluctantly, one by one, as though emerging from some great abyss in her memory. Alexander moved towards her and uncovered the tattoo on her shoulder, showing it to the young Amazon Queen. ‘Do you recognize this?’ he asked.

The woman’s astonished expression showed clearly that not only did she recognize it, but the image had some extraordinary significance for her.

The two women spoke once more in their mysterious language, and the Amazon held Leptine’s hands as she stared into the eyes of the young King from far away. Then she moved back towards her tent.

‘What did she say to you?’ Alexander asked as soon as she had moved away. ‘You are one of them, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ replied Leptine, ‘I am one of them. I was taken by a group of Cimmerian warriors when I was nine years old, and they must have sold me to a slave merchant in some emporium in the Pontus. My mother was Queen of a tribe of these women warriors and my father was a noble from among the Scythians who live along the Jaxartes.’

‘A Princess,’ murmured Alexander as he now held her hands. ‘That is what you are.’

‘That is what I was,’ Leptine corrected him. ‘Those days are gone now, for ever.’

‘This is not true. Now you may return among your people, you may take up the position that is yours by rights. You are free and I will grant you a rich dowry – gold, livestock, horses.’

‘My position by rights is at your side, my Lord. I have no one else in the world and for me those women are nothing but foreigners. I will go with them only if you reject me and force me to.’

‘I will not force you to do anything you do not wish to do, and I will keep you with me for the rest of my days, if this is what you want. But tell me, why did that young woman come here? Why has she pitched her tent down there?’

Leptine lowered her eyes as though ashamed or embarrassed, then she finally replied, ‘She said that she is the Queen of the women warriors who live between the Oxus and the shores of the Caspian Sea. She has heard that you are the strongest and most powerful man in the world and she thinks that only you are worthy of her. She awaits you in that tent and she invites you to spend the night with her. She hopes . . . that you will accept the invitation and that she will have a child by you: a boy or even a girl, who one day will receive the sceptre from her hands.’

Leptine covered her face with her hands and ran away in tears.

A
LEXANDER LOOKED AT THE
solitary tent that was just visible now in the semidarkness of the prairie while Leptine’s quiet sobbing barely reached his ear. He was much moved when he thought of the double miracle that this land had worked: the appearance of a group of Amazons in a place so far from the River Thermodon, which flowed, as legend had it, along the borders of the women warriors’ territory, and then the discovery of Leptine’s origins and her recognition of her native tongue. He thought of how many things there were to be discovered in the world, how many mysteries to be resolved, and how many unknown lands to be explored in the brief day of a human life.

He would have liked to help Leptine who was so upset by the tumult and the emotions of the two such contrasting lives that had now suddenly clashed in her being, but Alexander’s dominant concern was to get to know the mysterious woman who awaited him down there in the midst of the dark night of the steppe. He mounted his horse and headed off towards the solitary tent, armed only with his sword. Hephaestion saw him and nodded to some men of the Vanguard to move forward. ‘Take up position around that tent without being noticed,’ he ordered, ‘and at the slightest sign of anything suspicious, run to help the King. Take Peritas with you – if there is any danger he is much faster than anyone else.’

The men obeyed and they moved off in the dark, spreading out into a fan shape to surround the tent. One of them, the one who was holding Peritas, moved closer than the others and squatted down in the grass alongside the Molossian, but the night passed by peacefully and Peritas slept right through, lifting his ears and his nose only when he smelled some wild animal passing by in the silence of the steppe.

No one ever learned what happened that night nor whether Alexander planted a child in the belly of that Queen of endless solitude, a child who would grow up like a wild horse, running possessionless and free across that limitless territory, under the eyes of the sun and on the wings of the wind.

The King returned before dawn with an intense, febrile light in his eyes, as though he had just descended from Olympus.

*

They set off on the march westwards until they came to a river. Alexander wanted to travel down it to see how far it went and discover if it led towards the northern Ocean, but after three days’ march the steppe had become a desert and the river had dried up among its burning sands. They pressed on again towards the west in a series of four stages, each lasting five parasangs until they came to another watercourse and started moving down it, but it too was soon swallowed up by the cracks in the thirsty earth.