Empire of Ashes: A Novel of Alexander the Great (41 page)

When he emerged at last Alexander seemed to have aged ten years. His cheeks were sunken, and he held his side as if his Mallian wound was not months old, but fresh. Resuming something of his old decisiveness, he ordered the court moved back to Babylon, where he intended the funeral to be held. He also sent messengers to the sanctuary of Ammon at Siwah, with the request that Hephaestion be deified in death. The King did not wait for the god’s answer, however, offering immediate sacrifice to the memory of his departed friend, and speaking to him in the old, easy style they had known in happier times together.

It is some three hundred miles as the crow flies between Ecbatana and Babylon. Alexander walked the entire distance in his bare feet, with just an old cloak over his head to protect him from the late spring sun. For the journey, Alexander had, according to the advice of his Egyptian ambassadors, placed his companion in a series of five nested sarcophagi, with a golden one closest to the body and a lead vessel outermost.

The Egyptians are known masters of the embalmer’s art. When the sarcophagi were cracked open some weeks later all were amazed to see that Hephaestion’s body was utterly free of corruption. This preservation did not mean that Alexander had abandoned the rites we recognize as Greeks—Hephaestion would have his cremation. The pyre Alexander had in mind, however, would be unique in the history of the world.

But before the King reached the gates of the city another portent darkened his path. A party of Babylonian magi—priests of the Temple-of-the-High-Head, whose reconstruction had not yet begun in the seven-and-a-half years since Alexander promised to restore it—approached him with a warning. Their god Bel had revealed to them that Alexander would meet his death if he entered their city. Instead of marching west, they said, the great Alexander should go to the east, where nothing but victory and good health would be his for the rest of his days.

Still in the depth of his grief, the King had little patience for diversions of any kind. He understood that the Babylonians whom he had freed would prefer to enjoy their autonomy without their liberator’s actual presence. Yet the lands through which his army had marched were already stripped of useable stores—gods notwithstanding, he could not turn east. Hephaestion’s spirit, moreover, was destined to depart this earth from its very capital. No other place would do.

Alexander did his best to accommodate Bel by marching around the city and entering through the Adad gate. In this way it could not be exactly said that he entered Babylon by marching west. The magi seemed unmoved by this logic, until the King facilitated the release of funds for work on their temple, after which they endorsed his acts without reservation. We might even suspect that this was the object of their embassy to him all along—if
 
subsequent events did not prove the worth of their original warning after all.

Other than assuring Hephaestion’s commemoration, few other matters preoccupied the King’s attention in his last days at Babylon. The only blemish on what he considered his ideal capital was her dilapidation under Persian rule; where the Great Kings kept the city a backwater, Alexander planned to bind it to his empire with a massive dredging and enlargement of her harbor. The new facilities would be filled with warships that would carry his rule to Africa and, ultimately, to Carthage, and Italy. To these ends he ordered further explorations of the lower reaches of the Euphrates river and beyond, to the coast of Arabia.

The dredging and the shipbuilding paled in comparison to the titanic construction underway near the west sector of the city’s ring wall. There, Alexander ordered the erection of a pyre as massive as a Gizan pyramid, consisting entirely of the most precious offerings imaginable. Troops swept through the city to accept—or in some cases to compel—donations of rare furniture, statues, vehicles. These were assembled on a series of platforms increasingly set-back as they soared to the summit, where Hephaestion would lie on a gilded couch set inside a gilded room within an entire gilded house.

When it was completed the pyre was more than 200 feet tall; the commissioned elements alone, including the wood and the gilded giants and faux ship’s rams and centauromachies, cost 10,000 talents. This figure does not include the value of all the private donations, or the cost of the funerary games the King held, which included thousands of athletes from as far as Sicily. All these together made Hephaestion’s funeral the most lavish dedication to fraternity in the history of the world.

The time finally came when Hephaestion, dressed in his armor and still as beautiful as the day he died, was borne up to his bier. Four regiments of “inheritors” armed with bows were arrayed opposite each face of the pyramid. At a signal, the archers
 
loosed flaming arrows; the sight of the blazing bolts simultaneously rising to ignite the pyre was unforgettable. The mass of wood, ivory, silver and gold erupted from all sides like a volcano, with a heat so intense it melted the bronze bosses on the wheels of the chariots parked a hundred feet away. The flames reached high enough to daub passing clouds the color of blood.

The historians will forever report that Alexander constructed a pyre the size of Cheop’s pyramid to honor his dead friend, but that is only half the truth. The King made the pyre to honor himself too. Recall that he was fond of saying that “Hephaestion is also Alexander”; the vast, burning museum of treasure that he made for his friend was, in some sense, a way for him to stage-manage his own funeral.

The manner of Hephaestion’s death called for an investigation. Alas, there were as many suspects as grains of sand on the beach. The nature of Hephaestion’s relationship with Alexander, which by its nature was difficult to rival, made him many enemies. That Alexander insisted on placing older, more capable men under the command of his lover built up resentment against him. Hephaestion’s personal qualities, his loyalty, his good-looks, had always attracted envious eyes.

Gossips spoke of a feud between him and Eumenes, Alexander’s personal secretary. But would even a secretary be foolish enough to take action for such a public spat? Others said that Bagoas wanted him dead. Yet Bagoas had long before stolen Alexander’s intimacy, so what more did he have to gain by murder?
 
I would have suspected Perdiccas and Ptolemy had a hand in it, to further assure the succession of either one of them to power. Which is to say, I would have suspected those two, if an incident had not occurred that convinced me, in this case, of their innocence.

On the night the great pyre burned I was standing next to Rohjane. Her mood was as buoyant as I’d seen it in months. With the rest of us, she watched as the lights were extinguished in the temples, and the stars appeared with a brilliance rarely glimpsed by the citified Babylonians. I heard her gasp with delight as the conflagration wafted Hephaestion’s spirit to Heaven. But just as the athletic games were about to begin, the Queen excused herself. She complained of a headache. Yet after spending more hours with the woman than her husband, I could sense her insincerity.

“Yes, you should retire,” the King told her with fraternal warmth. “I will come and see you after.”

“Yes, you will,”
 
she replied, the tartness in her voice entirely escaping him.

I followed an hour later. Her apartment was in a remote wing of the palace, as far as possible from the nuptial beds of Barsine and Parysatis. When I found Rohjane, she was lying on a drinking couch opposite Youtab. There was an open brazier beside them, bread and eel on a table between them, and drinking cups in their hands.

“Is this some barbarian custom, to make a celebration at the time of a funeral?” I asked.

“Pah! Who invited sourpuss?” cried Youtab.

The Queen laughed, stretched her arms. “We are having a symposium! Or haven’t you ever seen a drinking party just for women?”

“The premise, milady, is absurd.”

“Oh, stop being the tutor! Yes, there is a funeral on, and yes, Hephaestion was a fine fellow. But the innocent suffer all the time, don’t they Youtab?”

“They suffer particularly.”

“Yes, particle…partickle…particularey…by the gods, what
is
in these cups!”

Then the women laughed in that way I had seen so often among Alexander and his companions, when the craters were running low and there was nothing very funny to laugh at. I crossed my arms and waited for their attention.

“It has always been my intent to help the Queen understand her responsibilities in the Greek style,” I said. “And so I must tell you now that this behavior is entirely inappropriate. To retire to your tent is perhaps understandable…but to carouse in this way? I think not.”

“Isn’t it funny how he speaks of what a wife should do, but never the responsibilities of the husband?” Rohjane asked Youtab, as if I was not standing there.

“Maybe he means that you should consider yourself lucky to be dishonored by a husband like the great Alexander,” answered Youtab.

“You mean, dishonored by a god?”

“Reduced to an ass!”

“Ravished by a swan!”

“Seduced and abandoned!”

“On a beach on Naxos!”

“The very son of Zeus!”

“Lord of the mountaintops!”

“Master of the backcountry!”

They leaned into their pillows in their hysterics, until Youtab raised her head and cried through her laughter, “Oh, that’s too much. Too much! I’ve wet myself!”

I turned to leave them. Rohjane called after me.

 
“Machon, only friend, come drink with us!”

“Yes, come back! Just watch what you drink from around here!”

I again call your attention to Youtab’s words: “watch what you drink from.” This seemed rather a morbid thing to say, given the circumstances of Hephaestion’s death. Of course, it doesn’t constitute evidence that Rohjane or her servant was responsible. It may have just been a bad joke. Nor was any poison ever found, in the dead man or anywhere in the palace. But I can tell you that Rohjane was not over the insult of Alexander’s other marriages, which occurred just a few months before Hephaestion’s death. Youtab’s choice of humor—and the poor timing of their “women’s symposium”—were suspicious.

It is true that Alexander sent a request to the Ammon temple in Siwah that Hephaestion be accepted as a god in his own right. All of us—his advisors, his family, the priests of Ammon—indulged him this, taking it as a harmless, if somewhat indiscreet, testament to his love. What was not so easy to excuse, though, is a letter the King sent to Cleomenes, his governor in Egypt. Remember that this was the same Cleomenes who, upon taking control of Egypt in Alexander’s name, cornered the grain market in that country. I am told this raised the price of bread tenfold here in Athens. I submit a copy of this letter into evidence, with the magistrate’s permission.

“The clerk will read the letter,” said Polycleitus.
When the recitation was done, Swallow, Deuteros and the rest of the jury were stunned.

This is the exact text of Alexander’s letter. I was there when he dictated it, and obtained my copy from Eumenes. Yes, Alexander orders Cleomenes to construct a marble monument to Hephaestion in Alexandria, and promises that if the construction pleases him, he will pardon all of the governor’s past malfeasance—his expropriation from the temples, his looting of the public treasury…and the famine he caused here and elsewhere in Greece. What is more, Alexander also promises to ignore
any future crimes
.

You heard that right. Can you imagine such a promise coming from a man you all agreed to take as a god? Indeed, that it could be bestowed on a creature so villainous, so reprobate, that not even Ptolemy could stand him? The latter, as you recall, had him killed soon after he arrived in Egypt. Yet it seems that a pardon was exactly what Alexander gave to Cleomenes.

I will say no more about Alexander’s letter. There is no need to gild that lily—memories of the pain of your empty stomachs, and the cries of your underfed children—shall be emphasis enough. But out of curiosity, how high did the price of wheat go in the market just a few feet from where we sit here, Aeschines? Three drachmas for a capithe? Four?

“Higher!” someone cried from the back of the room.

Higher still! But we must forgive Aeschines his ignorance, for he was not here to suffer with you. Nor was I, for that matter. The difference, I submit to you, is that I am not here extolling the virtues of the man—I mean, the
god
—who offered pardon to a man who brought famine to this city, or promised to look the other way when a villain like Cleomenes committed any other crimes that might have entered his head.