Alexander (Vol. 3) (Alexander Trilogy) (58 page)

When the enormous pyre was completed, the embalmed body of Hephaestion was transported on the shoulders of the
hetairoi
of his battalion, followed by Alexander and the Companions, to the base of the tower. From there it was hoisted up using machines designed specifically for the job and was placed on the catafalque. Then, as soon as the sun disappeared below the horizon, the priests set fire to the structure. The flames took hold immediately, enveloping everything in their roar as they devoured the statues, the sculpted panels, the ornaments, the rich votive offerings.

Alexander watched the terrible, barbaric spectacle without shedding any tears, aware of the stupor he was creating in all the onlookers, among the people, awestruck by this unheard-of manifestation of power, at this most exaggerated of events. Suddenly, while his eyes travelled upwards to look at the top of the tower that was just beginning to collapse with the accompaniment of sinister creaking noises, devoured by the fire, he had a vision of himself as a child once more in the courtyard of the palace at Pella, exchanging a token of eternal friendship with a small friend he had only just met. ‘Until death?’ Hephaestion had asked. ‘Until death,’ he had replied.

His hand moved instinctively to his throat and he searched for the token in its gold mount – the milk tooth. He tore the chain from his neck and threw it into the flames and as he did so he was overcome by an infinite melancholy, by the most profound and harrowing sadness. The first and the dearest of them, of the seven friends united by the same promise and the same dream, had gone for ever. Death had taken him away and his ashes were now being borne off on the wind.

*

Spring came to an end and Alexander once again began pursuing his plans and his dreams of universal domination, while Roxane’s belly grew as the pregnancy progressed. He had a gigantic harbour dug out of the banks of the Euphrates, capable of holding more than five hundred vessels, and together with Nearchus he planned the construction of a new fleet that would take them off to explore Arabia and the coastline of the Persian Gulf. The Phoenicians transported forty disassembled ships as far as the ford at Thapsacus in upper Syria and then they re-assembled them and launched them on the river. They went downstream with the flow as far as the capital, complete with crews from Sidon, Arados and Byblos, all of them ready to participate in this adventure that would take them to the far regions of mysterious Arabia. An entire fleet of two quinqueremes, two quadriremes, twenty triremes and thirty penteconters were transported in two months from the Mediterranean to the southern Ocean – nothing seemed out of the question for the young, indomitable sovereign.

Delegations from all over the world came to him – from Libya and Italy, from Iberia and Pontus, from Armenia and India – to pay homage, to bring him gifts and to ask to be allowed to enter into alliances, and he welcomed them all in his grand palace, among the marvels of Babylon that was readying itself to become the capital of the known world.

One day, towards the beginning of summer, while the Euphrates was in full flood, Alexander decided to sail down the river and to enter the Pallacopas, a canal that was used to drain off the waters so that they did not flood the crops.

The King himself was at the rudder alongside Nearchus and he looked on in wonder at the huge lagoons that opened up here and there along the course of the canal, and out of which emerged, half hidden beneath the surface, the tombs of the ancient Chaldaean kings. Suddenly a gust of wind blew his wide-brimmed hat off, the hat he used to shield himself from the sun and around which a ribbon of gold had been tied, the diadem that symbolised his majesty.

The hat sank, but the ribbon became stuck in a tuft of canes.

A sailor dived into the water straight away, and managed to grab the diadem, but he was worried that he might ruin it by holding it in his hand while swimming towards the ship, so he put it on his head. When he was hauled on board, everyone was struck by this inauspicious event, and the Chaldaean seers who had followed the King suggested the sailor ought to be rewarded for having saved the royal diadem and immediately afterwards put to death in order to discourage any further ill fortune.

The King replied that a good whipping would be enough for the sacrilegious gesture and he arranged the diadem around his head once more.

Nearchus sought to distract him by talking of the great expedition to Arabia, but he saw that there was a shadow across Alexander’s gaze, similar to the expression he had worn during the cremation of Kalanos.

A few days later Alexander was sitting on his throne, watching over the manoeuvres of his cavalry beyond the city walls. At a certain point he stood up to talk with the commanders and suddenly, while they were all distracted by the horsemen and their activity, a stranger passed through the chamberlains and sat himself down on the King’s throne, laughing wildly. The Persian guards killed him instantly, but the Chaldaean priests beat their chests and scratched their faces, this being the worst of all possible omens.

And yet, despite all of these bad signs, his love for Roxane and the desire to see his child let him chase away his most melancholic thoughts.

‘I wonder if he will look more like you or like me,’ he said. ‘My teacher, Aristotle, maintains that woman is only a vessel for the male seed, but in my opinion not even he really believes this – it is obvious that some individuals more resemble their mother than their father. I myself, for example.’

‘Why, what is your mother like?’

‘You will soon know – I will have her come here when my son is born. She was beautiful, but ten years have gone by . . . ten very difficult years for her.’

Rumours of all the bad omens had spread among his friends and they all vied with one another to invite him for meals to keep his spirits up. He accepted them all, never saying no to anyone and spending his days and nights eating and drinking without restraint. One evening, on returning from such an invitation, he felt unwell – his head was heavy, his ears were buzzing, but he paid no heed. He took a bath and went to bed alongside Roxane who was already asleep with the lamp burning in the room.

He had a fever the following day, but he got to his feet nevertheless, despite the Queen’s insistence that he should remain in bed. At midday he went to eat with a Greek friend of his who had joined him in Babylon some time previously, a certain Medius. As evening approached, while he was still at the table, he felt a sudden, sharp pain in his right side, so strong it made him cry out. The servants lifted him up, stretched him out on a bed and the pain seemed to calm down gradually.

A physician was called quickly to examine him, but he did not dare touch the area where the King had felt the knife-like pain. His fever was very high now and he felt mortally tired.

‘I will have you transported to the palace, Sire.’

‘No,’ replied Alexander. ‘I will stay here tonight. I am sure I will feel better in the morning.’

So he stayed at Medius’s home that night, but in the morning his temperature, far from having fallen, was even higher.

On the third day he continued to deteriorate, but he did not seem to be particularly concerned. He called his chiefs of staff and, although Nearchus and his companions realized he was ill, they continued to discuss details of the expedition and the date of their departure.

‘Why don’t we put everything off for the moment?’ suggested Ptolemy. ‘You ought to rest for a while, have yourself looked after, try to get back on your feet. Perhaps you should move away from here – the heat is unbearable, it’s difficult to sleep. Have you never wondered why King Darius spent his summers at Ecbatana, up in the mountains?’

‘I don’t have enough time to go up into the mountains,’ replied Alexander, ‘and I don’t have enough time to wait for my fever to drop. When it decides to relent, it will relent. For the moment I simply want to continue forward. Nearchus, what do you know of Arabia and its extent?’

‘Some say it is as large as India, but I find that hard to believe.’

We will soon know, in any case,’ replied Alexander. ‘Just think about it, friends, the land of spices – incense, aloe, myrrh.’

The Companions feigned enthusiasm, but within themselves these words resounded like some grim portent – the King had just named a series of perfumes that were commonly used in embalming bodies.

Roxane sent for Philip who at that time was in a battalion of the army to the north of the city, taking care of an epidemic of dysentery, but when the Queen’s orderly arrived in the camp he had already set off northwards without leaving precise indications of how he might be found.

For another three days Alexander continued to carry out his duties and attend his engagements, officiating at sacrifices to the gods and meeting with his Companions to organize the expedition into Arabia, but it was apparent to everyone that his condition was still deteriorating.

When Philip was finally found, it seemed there had been some improvement – the fever had dropped and Alexander exchanged a few words with his physician. ‘I knew you would come,
iatre,’
he said. ‘Now I know that I will get better.’

‘Of course you will get better,’ replied Philip. ‘Do you remember that time when you were half dead after going for a swim in that frozen river?’

‘It’s as though it happened yesterday.’

And the note poor Parmenion sent to you?’

‘Yes. The one that said you were poisoning me.’

‘It was true,’ Philip joked and laughed. ‘I was administering a poison that would have killed an elephant, but it had no effect on you! You actually became fitter than you’d ever been, and so what do you think a bit of fever is going to do to you?’

Alexander smiled, ‘I don’t believe you, but it’s nice to hear you say that.’

His condition worsened terribly the following day.

‘Save him,
iatre,’
Roxane implored Philip. ‘Save him, I beg you.’ But Philip shook his head to indicate his impotence, while Leptine wept as she bathed Alexander’s forehead in a vain attempt to give him some relief.

By the following day he could no longer stand up and the fever was truly violent. They carried him on a stretcher to the summer palace where there was some fresh air towards evening, and Philip made sure he was given cold-water baths to bring his temperature down, but all the physician’s efforts proved useless now. Roxane, in utter despair, would not leave him even for an instant and she covered him with kisses and caresses. His Companions watched over him day and night without ever resting, without eating.

Seleucus ran to the sanctuary of the god Marduk, patron of the city, a healing god, and asked the priests to take Alexander into the temple so that he might be healed, but the priests replied, ‘The god does not want Alexander to be moved here.’

He returned disconsolately to the palace and met with the Companions and Philip to report on his mission.

‘You should have killed those priests – if they don’t know how to cure the King, why do they exist?’ exclaimed Lysimachus.

‘I think he’ll pull through this time as well,’ said Perdiccas. ‘Don’t worry, he’s got over much worse than this.’

Philip stared at him with great sadness in his eyes and then entered the King’s bedchamber. Alexander asked for water in a voice that was now almost imperceptible.

On the following day the King could no longer speak.

News had spread among the men that the King was very ill; some were saying he was already dead. Large groups of them appeared before the entrance to the palace and threatened to break down the doors if no one let them in.

‘I’ll go and see,’ said Ptolemy, and he went down to the guardhouse.

‘We want to know how the King is!’ shouted a veteran.

Ptolemy lowered his head. ‘The King is dying,’ he said. ‘If you wish to see him, come up now, one by one, but in silence. Let him have some peace in his last hours.’

The soldiers went up, in single file, one after the other, up the stairs and along the corridors, to the King’s deathbed. They walked before him in tears, saying goodbye with a gesture of their hands. And for each and every one of them Alexander had a look, a nod, a barely perceptible movement of the lips.

His men were all there before him, the soldiers who had accompanied him through a thousand adventures – the men of iron who had tamed the Nile, the Tigris, the Euphrates and the Indus. He saw their faces marked by ice and sun, he saw their bristly cheeks wet with tears and then suddenly he no longer saw anything. He heard Roxane’s desperate crying and Leptine’s sobbing and then Ptolemy’s voice saying, ‘It is over . . . Alexander is dead.’

*

He thought of his mother, he thought of how bitter and vain her wait had proved to be. He thought he could see her, way up in a tower of the palace, shouting and crying as she called him in desperation:
Alexandre
, don’t go . . . come back to me, I beg you!’ That shout seemed to call him back for a moment, but only for a moment. Now those words, those shouts and that face faded away, far away, until they were lost in the wind . . . Now he saw before himself a limitless plain, a flower-filled meadow, and he heard a dog barking, but this was not the dark howling of Cerberus the watchdog – it was Peritas! He was running towards him, mad with joy just like the day when he had returned from exile, and then across the endless prairie came a thunderous gallop and suddenly an echoing neigh. It was Bucephalas running towards him with his mane blowing in the wind, and he climbed astride him just as he had done that day in Mieza. And he shouted, ‘Go, Bucephalas!’ And the steed set off, like some burning Pegasus, in a reckless gallop towards the final horizon, towards the infinite light.