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The other day the Queen of Egypt came to me to ask me whether the rumour was true, whether I was truly writing my memoirs. “Of course not,” I replied, smiling, and offered her the type of Macedonian unmixed wine it was too early for at a midday visit. Berenice recognized the gesture for what it was; she has always been sharp. And could hold her drink, the way most Macedonians only think they can. She accepted, then poured some of the water I had reserved for myself into her cup anyway.
“Dear Thais,” she said, “what a shame. You’d have so much to tell.”
“So would you,” I replied, “and I would bet anything that you’ll never write a word.”
She regarded me carefully. The choice of word is not accidental on my part, my dear. Since she married Ptolemy, Berenice doesn’t look at you; she very regally gazes at or regards you. I don’t mean that as cattily as it sounds. She took to the role of Queen and living goddess in a way I never would have done and in fact refused to, and in a way her niece, poor, hapless, Eurydice, was absolutely hopeless at during the few years she was Ptolemy’s only wife. Which is why Eurydice is in Milet with her awful son, I remain in my very nice but decidedly not regal house, attending to my rose garden and the occasional visitor, and Berenice lives and reigns at Ptolemy’s side in the ever growing palace in our ever growing city by the sea that bears your name. As so many things and places do.
“I never took you for the gambling type,” Berenice replied, and I laughed.
“I left Athens, where I was the most sought after hetaira in the most cultured city of Greece, and became a part of the baggage train of a Macedonian army which could have been wiped out before the year was out.”
It could have, you know. I am aware that you never believed that, and neither did my dear Ptolemy, who despite his professed caution and discipline did have a wild streak mixed in his nature, but your victory was not inevitable. No, I am not slighting your military prowess. But armies can be wiped out by illness as well as by opposing generals. Or just by bad luck in the form of crocodiles. Ask the unlamented late Perdiccas.
“Ah, but that wasn’t a gamble, was it?” Berenice replied, lightning fast. As I said: she’s sharp.
“What else could it have been?” I asked, to test whether she really knew me as well as she thought she did.
“An escape,” she replied, and I knew I had to really watch my every word with her. I still have my secrets. And one of them must never, ever be shared with anyone but the dead. Which is why I am talking to you.
I was eighteen years old when you and Ptolemy first came to Athens. The fact I knew my exact age was somewhat unusual in my circles. Not that many families bothered counting the years with girls, being content to take the time they started bleeding as a signal they could now be bartered away. Being a woman in Athens never was that much better than being a slave, no matter how rich or poor you were, except for one type of woman, and one type only. You had better believe I was proud of being a free hetaira. Free to choose among the men seeking my favour, free to manage my own property instead of being property, and free to debate with Athenian philosophers and Macedonian soldiers alike… up to a point. A truly successful hetaira has to be aware when to stop jesting or refuting her visitors’ arguments. Or else they and their money won’t return. Men can be such fragile creatures. They want to be challenged, absolutely. Truly challenged, hence the importance of an hetaira having at least a passing knowledge of history, of poetry, of philosophy. But what they absolutely can’t stand is being truly defeated.
“Well, isn’t that true for any human being?” Ptolemy asked me when I trusted him enough to share that thought with him. “Don’t tell me you enjoy losing an argument, Thais.”
“Of course not. But I had to learn how to do it anyway if I want to keep my freedom and my money.”
“Believe me,” Ptolemy said, “there are plenty of men who have to learn how to lose if they want to survive. How to be mediocre, how to be just competent enough not to be regarded as a failure but never in any way interesting enough to be a challenge.”
I looked at him and realised two things: he was talking about himself, and he wasn’t lying. He hadn’t yet told me about the fact your mother, always on the hunt for anyone who might be a danger to you and her, suspected him of being your father’s bastard son, and would have arranged for his early demise if she ever thought he’d become someone capable of making a play for the throne. But that was of course what he was referring to then, and even if I did not yet know the details, I sensed he truly did know what he was talking about, that he did know what it meant to survive by treading that fine balance of shining just enough to please but never more than that, never enough to extinguish another’s fire. I saw him, and he saw me, and it might have been that moment when I first suspected I could be in love.
Why yes, that was long after I had already joined the baggage train and left Athens. We were in Egypt then, too, I think, but it must have been before you had the Oracle at Siwa tell you that you really, truly, were the son of a God.
Men can be such fragile creatures, indeed.
Not Ptolemy, though. When he first asked me to come with him, I laughed and asked him whether he took me to be a lovesick girl. By that time I was twenty years old, and felt very worldly and positively ancient.
“I enjoyed our time together. But do you truly believe I would leave Athens behind, and my house that I’ve earned, just to keep you company on the road? Go from being a hetaira to being a soldier’s moll just because I find you so irresistable?”
“No,” he replied mildly and without flinching, as most other men would have, “but I think you would do it to see the world as you will never get a chance to do otherwise. I think you will do it because you are not truly free here in Athens. I think you feel trapped here, and you want to escape.”
They call me Thais the Athenian if they don’t call me some far more unpleasant names. And if there is one story everyone seems to know about me, it is the one in which I talked you into burning Persepolis down in revenge for what the Persians did to Athens a century before my birth. An argument could be made that my love for Athens is the one thing that no one ever doubts about me. Not even my children, despite the fact they know me a bit better than most, and must have noticed that I never suggested to any of them they should make the journey to Athens once they were in a position to do so.
Demosthenes would laugh if he knew. He called me a traitor the last time I saw him. His own reputation these days is twofold among the young men who flock to the Museion here in Alexandria, the library that may be Ptolemy’s greatest creation, and certainly the one I love best. Some call Demosthenes the greatest orator who ever lived, and the last true Athenian, the defender of Greek liberty against Macedonian tyranny, and others an evil demagogue who slandered the great Philip and the divine Alexander and repeatedly managed to mislead not just Athens but other Greek cities into sharing his blind hate.
Me, I would call him a man hopelessly in love with the past, and specifically a past he himself never experienced. My long life has taught me that this is not an affliction unique to him. For example: Many people who never knew you share it these days. “Ah, Alexander,” they sigh, and talk about how you changed the world, and how all that followed seems so mediocre and little by comparison.
“There can be no true peace with the Macedonians,” Demosthenes said during a meal when I and three other hetairas were the only women present, and I the only one who’d been invited as herself rather than as her current protector’s companion, “because they do not want allies. They want to rule, and they want us as their servants, bowing to them and amusing them with our Athenian wit, and teach their sons how to declaim Homer. Their pets, at best. The stool on which they wipe their feet, at worst. And all it would cost us is what makes us Athenians: our pride, our independence, our history.”
It was clear to me that when he said “us”, he meant rich men born in Athens without a single non-Athenian in their ancestry, but of course I couldn’t say that, given that I derived my income from just such men.
“But how can there be true peace without the Macedonians?” I retorted. “Their army has become the most powerful in Greece. Every attempt to defeat them has failed. Do you think they will simply go back to Pella if you dissect all the vices of their King in speech after speech?”
“If the cities of Greece ally together as they did against the Persians, they will prevail. But I do not expect a woman to understand that. Giving in and surrendering is in your nature.”
This was one of these moments that divided a good from an unsuccessful hetaira. If I had said what I thought, I would have lost the room. So instead, I replied with a jest that was barbed but solely against Demosthenes – who never would have been a client anyway – and was inviting them to laugh with me. I said: “How very right you are, oh Demosthenes. It is in our nature as women. Luckily along with some discernment as to whom to surrender to, or else we might end up with a man so cheap that he and we would have to share the same boy.”
This was an allusion to a rumour making the rounds about Demosthenes and his wife, and was vicious enough to distract everyone from politics and towards mocking each other’s private lives. Demosthenes glared at me amidst the snorts and giggles and did not deign to speak with me again until the end of the meal, and then he just said „the only thing worse than a whore is a traitor you don’t have to pay“ before wandering off.
What I had thought, and never spoken out loud, was this: Demosthenes – and most of the company that evening, though not necessarily in the same way – were stuck in endless imitations of what they believed to have been the glory of our ancestors. They kept thinking the same thoughts, repeating the same ideas. The Athens they constantly conjured up in their words was the Athens of the past, not of the present, where we had hardly any allies left and none of the previous territories outside of Attica, and just as they refused to imagine a future for the city which was not that of the past, they could not imagine altering their personal behaviour from that which had served their ancestors well.
The Macedonians might be Barbarians talking in a dialect that hardly sounded Greek, but they were constantly thinking new thoughts. They were seeking out new ways to be. And here I was, having gained most of what a woman could in Athens. My future was as set as everything else in this city. A few more years during which beauty and wit would allow me to live as I wanted, and then decades of fading into the background, reliving my youth and hearing the same conversations again and again from old and new acquaintances alike. Truly, we were all the shadows in Plato’s cave, and none of us ever questioned it or dared to try and turn around.
Athens was a beautiful trap.
Chloe, who wasn’t born yet when Persepolis burned, is the only one of my children who point blank asked me whether the story was true. Chloe, of course, knows how easy a legend takes flight. I raised all my children as sceptics, but growing up as they did in countries full of miracles made it difficult for them to maintain this attitude.
“Why, do you think it might not be?” I retorted. I was very glad to see her on that particular day, and just a tad sentimental; she’d only started to go out in public again after the birth of my first grandchild. In Athens, of course, a lady of high status would never have done so, not even a hetaira, but Chloe is a child of the baggage train, and in this new city we’re all living in, younger than I or her father are, a city full of people from all nations, Athenian rules wouldn’t apply anyway. Feeling happy about this and about seeing my daughter glowing with health and not a bit damaged by childbirth, I felt mellow enough to consider telling her the truth.
“It is not in Father’s history,” she said. She was referring to Ptolemy’s book about your campaigns. I was amazed she managed to read it in its entirety. One of the things the young people in the Museion complain about is that there hasn’t been a Homer yet to compose an epic about your life, and that those who did write about it, such as the Living Horus of Egypt, managed to make it sound dry, despite having lived through it.
“Firstly, your father was writing a military history, with an emphasis on strategy and battles. Secondly, he might have felt it doesn’t put the mother of his children in the best light towards a part of his loyal subjects. Let’s not forget Persians form a part of your father’s army. Seleucos didn’t get them all.”
“You didn’t answer the question”, Chloe said, proving, not for the first time, that she can’t be distracted as well as her brothers.
“Tell me exactly which story you’ve heard, and I shall tell you which part of it is true, dearest.”
Chloe sighed and looked at me with your eyes. I really wish you and Ptolemy did not share a father. You’ve been dead for decades now, and I still find it disconcerting to have your eyes look at me from the face of my daughter.
“Did you say that celebrating in the palace of the Persians made up for all the hardships of wandering across Asia, but that it would be an even greater pleasure to burn the palace of Xerxes who burned Athens? Did you throw the first torch and make everyone else dance behind you and throw torches as well? Even Alexander?”
“Believe me, Alexander never needed encouragement to destroy something”, I said before I could stop myself.
Chloe frowned. “But – but didn’t he honour the family of Darius when he captured them, instead of turning them into slaves? Didn’t he treat his new Persian subjects so fairly that the Macedonians frowned? Didn’t he want to be a good ruler to all?”
“All this is true,” I said, and thought that between her father and her husband, a kind soul who is also prone to sigh and murmur “Ah, Alexander” now and then, there was no way Chloe would not believe the best of you. “And it is equally true that Alexander wanted to be a good ruler of Greece and promised to honour the past of the city states. This did not stop him from destroying Thebes for allying with Athens against him. There was no stone left standing except for the house of Pindar the poet, because he wanted to make a point about not being a barbarian. Six thousand Thebans died when he took the city, and he sold the remaining thirty thousand into slavery. There is no more Thebes now, only ruins. Except for the house of Pindar. Do you really believe he needed me to suggest burning Persepolis?”
“You still haven’t denied saying it,” Chloe returned, tilting her head like you had done.
There are some things I regret, of course there are. But never the fact I left Athens to join Ptolemy as part of your quest to conquer the world. Even though at that point, you claimed it was all about revenge, both for the campaigns against Greek cities in ages past and your father’s death. Mind you, to this day it’s hotly debated who was ultimately responsible for your father’s murder, but the one thing everyone agrees upon is that the Persians had nothing to do with it. Your mother and yourself, on the other hand…
Never mind. I did not know where your quest would end when I joined, but I did know that Ptolemy had been right when he said this was my one chance to see the world. And if I had not been prepared for quite how much of the world I would end up seeing, well, I think no one was, perhaps not even yourself. I do not regret a single mile. Well, I don’t now, as an old woman living very comfortably in what just might be the world’s richest land. On the other hand, when I had just traded in my Athenian existence for swallowing a lot of dust every day, getting thoroughly shaken by every turn of the wheel in a wagon I was sharing with some women who threw up all the time until Ptolemy taught me how to ride a horse… of course there were moments where I wondered whether I had lost my mind. But then I heard and saw and smelled the world as no free Greek woman had ever done. The roses I grow here in Alexandria are Persian in origin, and among the stories my son-in-law tells to my grandchild are those from India. I have heard men reason about the origin of the world in languages even the wisest of my teachers in Athens did not speak. Truly, it was a life full of miracles, and you made it possible. I would never have left Athens and Ptolemy would have ended his days in Macedon if you had never been born. As for my children, most likely they would not exist, and no other children, either, for it took me years before I decided to risk a pregnancy, risk giving birth to a child. I had to learn not just how to love Ptolemy but to trust him first, and to overcome the fear that once I had a child, I had given a hostage to fortune who would be in danger every day. I don’t think I could have done this in Athens.
Yes, I am grateful. But we weren’t harmless travellers, were we. And the sounds and sights and smells also included the corpses. The poorer women in the baggage train, the ones who weren’t having an affair with one of the King’s bodyguards, quickly learned how to plunder them along with their menfolk, and how to get rid of the bloodstains in that fine Persian silk.
Then there were the screams. Your gallantry towards the mother, wife and daughters of Darius became justly famous, and you kept your soldiers under control in Babylon and Susa. But in Persepolis, you cut them loose. We were there for three months before Xerxes‘ old palace burned. There is a reason why I had not left the damn palace during all that time. Any woman found in the streets was fair game to be raped. A great many of the boys as well. You could hear them everywhere.
„It has to be done, now and then,“ Ptolemy told me. „You can’t tell an entire army they’ll punish the Persians, put them through years and years of campaign, and then forbid them to sack all Persian cities. Especially if you want them to continue following you on more campaigns. Besides, we can’t afford the Persians thinking us soft because of the mercy they got before. Otherwise we might wake up to find our collective throats cut.“
I could see what he meant. I also had grown up with stories about the Persian wars, about Salamis, about Marathon, about the battle of Thermopylae. But I still kept hearing the cries, the keening wails.
Do you want to know the true reason why I spoke up during on that day, dared you to burn the palace down, threw the first torch? It wasn’t about Athens at all. I just wanted the army to move on, away from the walking dead of Persepolis, and I knew it would once the palace was no more. You would never have remained among ruins.
The Queen of Egypt has graced me with another visit. This time to invite me to move to the palace. Now obviously if I had wanted to live in the palace, I could have done so back when it was built, and Berenice knew that. As I said: she is anything but foolish. She also isn’t given to petty gestures, so this couldn’t be about demonstrating that she had the power and confidence to issue such invitations to her husband’s former concubine. Which left one reason.
„How sick is Ptolemy?“ I asked, and was surprised how heartsick I myself felt. He must be over eighty years old now. This was hardly unexpected.
Berenice regarded me gravely and told me the Pharaoh, who was already sharing the burden of his office with her son, was ready to join the gods soon, and it seemed fitting he should do so in the company of those he loved.
„Your daughter Chloe is already in the palace, as is Lydias, and their children,“ she said, „and I have sent for both of your sons.“
My sons, neither of whom will ever be candidates for the throne, thank you, Gods of all people I ever encountered. Presumably Berenice had not sent for Eurydice’s son, who isn’t nicknamed Keraunos – Thunderbolt – without reason, and who just like Berenice’s son was born the son of a King with his legitimate Macedonian Queen.
If I had ever doubted I did the right thing when declining Ptolemy’s proposal to marry me, all those years back in Susa, I didn’t once I saw royal children and their mothers dropping like flies everywhere in Alexander’s former empire. I like my independence and I have my pride, but the most important reason why I said no was that I knew that no matter how high Ptolemy would manage to rise, the bastard-born children of a hetaira would never, ever qualify as royalty.
„That is very kind of you,“ I said to Berenice.
„Then you will come?“
I couldn’t ask her whether she had asked Ptolemy first, or how sure she was that I still qualified as someone he loved. She would have assumed I was jealous. After all, there was a big difference between Berenice and the other two women Ptolemy married. The Persian princess Artakama, he’d wed because you had ordered him to, along with more than eighty other Macedonian officers, all paired with Persian brides as a part of your project to unify the people you ruled. And Eurydice, daughter of Antipater whom you had left as regent in Macedon, he married in order to form an alliance with Antipater against Perdiccas in the struggle among your generals and successors that was engulfing the world. But Berenice? Berenice who’d come with Eurydice as her aunt and chaperone? Her, he married because he’d fallen in love.
I would be lying if I claimed I did not care, that I did not mind, either because I was generous and wanted my beloved to be happy, or because our love was a thing of the past. I minded, but the truth was that we had lost each other before the day Ptolemy wed Berenice. And it had nothing to do with another woman. It was about the past, about a man. It was, inevitably, because of you.
When I was young, the famous Macedonian capacity for drinking inspired most people I knew to a mixture of awe and ridicule. Certainly no one worshipped Dionysos so thoroughly. But as with everything, you went over the top even for a Macedonian. It took your men far longer to notice, not least because they got drunk right along with you, but I never lost the habit of watering my wine. And once you made Ptolemy your bodyguard, it was his duty to pay attention to all threats around you, so he watered his as well, teased as he was for this.
He was sober enough the night you and Cleitus got into an argument to drag Cleitus out of the room once Cleitus mentioned your father, but not sober enough to stop him from freeing himself and running back. Not sober enough to stop you from running Cleitus through with a spear. Now I hadn’t liked Cleitus all that much, and he certainly between chastising you for calling yourself the son of a God while showing no gratitude to your actual father, Philip, and ranting about the Persian customs you were adopting was certainly trying his best to provoke something. Yet no one among the men present that night, all of whom were experienced killers, had even remotely expected for you to kill one of them. I was present as well, and the shock on everyone’s face struck me as sincere. Drunk men aren’t good liars.
You were horrified, and remorseful, very publicly so. It didn’t stop you from getting drunk again when you were angry, this time about the poet Callisthenes, who was to be your Homer, composing the epic your exploits surely needed to inspire. Sincere admirer of Homer that you were, you had of course been thoughtful enough to bring a famous poet with you before leaving Greece. But there is no grand epic of Alexander penned by Callisthenes in the Museion, where Ptolemy wants to collect every book that was ever written or will be, just the meagre first draft of a description of your first campaigns. There isn’t more, because Callisthenes, just like Cleitus, went on a rant about Persian customs, specifically the prostration before the King you were accepting from your Persian subjects and were contemplating demanding from your Greek ones. You didn’t throw a spear at him, no.
But the next time there was an attempt on your life, this time by a couple of pages, you blamed Callisthenes for it. Even though not a single page had accused him, and you had ordered those boys tortured. Ptolemy’s face was grey that day. None of them had been children anymore, but they weren’t yet men, either. He knew them. I knew them. The one who’d alerted Ptolemy to the conspiracy, Eurylochos, even had had something of a crush on me.
They were tortured and killed, as was Callisthenes, whom no one had accused of being involved but you, for you could not forget that he, who was to be your Homer, had turned into your Thersites instead.
„They’re not innocent,“ Ptolemy insisted. „They did want to kill their king. It was hotheaded idiocy by some young fools who listened too much to those tales about the prostation being worse than death, but a young fool with a knife is no less dangerous than a seasoned man.“
I barely kept from asking whether your famous mercy had disappeared into your cup of wine, along with your famous honour, for what was honourable about shutting up the poet who critiqued you by a false accusation? Ptolemy, like I said, was sober. He knew all this anyway, and he was hurting for it, for he loved you still, as did most of your men.
There were other reasons why I didn’t go with you to India. For starters, Chloe had just been born, and while my pregnancy had proceeded very well and I was not suffering from fever, I did not want to risk either bringing a newborn on a long journey or leaving my baby behind. But there was also this: what if one day, my self restraint broke, and I did make such a remark in your present? You liked me, I believed, but you used to like Cleitus, who had saved your life during a battle. You were usually amused by my quips, but then, Callisthenes had been amusing you once upon a time as well.
You still might not have harmed me when sober. But you were sober less and less.
It is finished now, the great tomb for the God Alexander in Alexandria. They know how to build temples to dead kings and to Gods in this country. I haven’t visited since they moved your body here from Memphis. Now it seems I won’t be able to avoid it. Ptolemy will be buried here with you, as will, I suppose, his and Berenice’s son one day. I don’t want Ptolemy’s funeral to be the first time I see your sarcophagus again, and I don’t want to be at Ptolemy’s deathbed with all these things unsaid in my heart. So here I am, talking to you. Alexander, the son of Philip. The son of Ammon, as the Egyptians would have it. The son of Olympias, a woman able to scare several generations of men until one of them decided to have her stoned. I never met her, but the fear and respect she evoked from nearly everyone talking of her was unmistakable, and I can’t think of another woman in my lifetime in all the countries I travelled through who provoked such a reaction in so many men. I do believe the people – including Ptolemy – who called Olympias a ruthless murderer. But then, you were one, too.
When Ptolemy returned from India with you, Chloe was five years old. There had been messages, of course, but still: five years in Susa, during which I had a lot of time to think, and to live without the fear an unpredictable ruler evokes who might kill you as easily as take a torch from you to burn down a palace. Five years with many months to wonder whether Ptolemy was alive or dead until the next message, and to contemplate the prospect of yet another campaign after India, because if I had learned one thing about you, it was this: you never knew when to stop.
I was still curious and wanted to see and learn more of the world myself. But did it have to be to the sound of endless battles?
And then Hephaistion died. That was truly when something in you broke that could not be fixed again, not even to briefly restore outward appearances. You had the unfortunate doctor who was treating Hephaistion crucified. You, who had been so consistent in embracing Persian customs, to make the Persians accept you as their ruler by affection as well as by conquest, ordered their sacred fires quenched to honor Hephaistion.
„He loved him,“ Ptolemy said, „more than any other.“
Yes, I thought, and now he’s punishing the world for his loss. How far will he go?
I don’t think I saw you sober again, ever, in the time between Hephaistion’s death and your own. Not that I saw you all that often. You were married to three women by then, to two daughters of the late Darius and to Roxane, who reminded Ptolemy of your mother but who unluckily for her turned out not to have your mother’s ability to command. You also had Bagoas the Eunuch as your chamberlain and favourite, so one would think you were amply distracted if you wanted to be. And yet: one day, in Babylon, there was a messenger ordering Thais the Athenian into the presence of the Great King.
You were in the bath house. With another man, it would have caused me to assume you wanted sex. Which would have been somewhat unexpected – I had left my thirtieth year behind by then, and you’d known me for a decade without ever behaving as if you desired me - , but grief at times manifests itself in strange ways. Yet a look at you was enough to convince me you were well and truly past any desire of the flesh.
„Will you drink with me, Thais?“ you asked, and I knew better than to refuse.
Hephaistion’s doctor Glaukos had been married, not that you ever asked. While you were burning Hephaistion’s body in a ziggurat over two hundred feet tall, Glaukos' widow begged me to get permission to take his poor broken and rotting body down so she could bury him.
When I looked for a jug of drinking water to mix the wine with in the cup you handed me, you laughed.
„For once,“ you said, „for once, drink like a real person.“
According to Glaukos the doctor or rather his widow who told me, sobbing, Hephaistion had drunk half a gallon of chilled wine on the day he died, in the middle of a fever and against the doctor’s advice. I wondered how painfully you would kill me if I pointed out that most likely Hephaistion, as ever your other self, had drunk himself to death. But then you had to know that. Wasn’t that what you were trying to do now?
Still, I wasn’t suicidal. So I drank unmixed wine, Macedonian style.
„Do you remember Persepolis?“ you asked abruptly. „That’s what I should have done. Building a tower for him to be burned on wasn’t enough. This palace is old, Thais, so very old. So many shadows here, and blood of murdered Persian kings. I think it would welcome cleansing fire.“
My children were in that palace. Chloe, and little Lagos, whom she called Bunny, the joyful result of my and Ptolemy’s reunion.
That was the moment, I believe. The moment when I decided that waiting for you to drink yourself to death or go on another campaign was too risky. What if all of Ptolemy’s caution wasn’t enough, and he, who as one of your bodyguards was with you so often, would earn your ire and be the next one to get speared? And if you somehow miraculously recovered enough to live for years longer, what if my sons served you as pages, as surely they would, and got tortured and killed?
And pushing all considerations of the future aside: what of the here and now? When you were talking about burning down the house my children lived in?
„My King,“ I said, „I do remember Persepolis. When you let me inflict a harsher revenge for Greece than any of her male heroes on land or sea ever took on the Persians.“
During the years alone, I had become something of a gardener. I had learned quite a lot about flowers and other plants. Including which of them were poisonous. And because the life in your wake ever since those three months at Persepolis full of cries of other women had taught me I might need a quick way to die at some point, I had taken to wearing the essence of one of them around my neck.
You laughed. „Some of them didn’t like that a bit, but they still followed.“
Cleitus and Callisthenes included. Did you remember that as well? Could you, in this state? One must never, ever underestimate Alexander, I told myself. It was so hot and humid in the bathhouse that the sweat which began to drop off me came naturally.
„We know all about that, don’t we,“ I said in my best pert hetaira voice. „Making the disgruntled follow regardless. Had you been born a woman, my King, it would have been a waste for you to be married off to seal some treaty as a princess. You’d have made such a wonderful hetaira.“
It was a gamble, but not a lie; lying I couldn’t risk with so much at stake. Ptolemy had told me about the mutiny in India. Yet how had it all ended? With the soldiers begging Alexander to love them again. He knew how to charm people, just about anyone if he truly put his mind to it. Still: two thirds of the men I knew would have taken it as a grave insult and not as a compliment – to be compared to a woman, and a hetaira at that. And this was a man so far past any type of rationality that even counting on knowing his sense of humor might leave me adrift.
You stared at me with Chloe’s grey eyes. Tilted your head. Then threw it back and laughed. Laughed so much that you ended up hiccupping, closing your eyes and coughing. By the time you got your composure back again, it was done. What I had been wearing around my neck was poured into your cup.
„You’re a treasure, Thais, you truly are,“ you said and drank.
Ptolemy, in his quiet, patient and thorough way is one of the cleverest people I ever met. And yet it took him years to even guess. Mostly because of what followed your death: the mad struggle for the succession. He got me and the children out of Babylon as fast as he could, and by the time he joined us in Egypt, the satrapy he’d demanded and won in that struggle, there were other concerns. It was only after Perdiccas had been defeated and slain by his own men, after Ptolemy had decided to finally emerge from the background where he’d survived since his childhood and make himself King, not regent, of this land, that there was quietness enough and time for him to contemplate the past.
And that was when we lost each other.
Consider it your revenge, if you want one. He did love you, not as Hephaistion had done, but as a brother, and he loved you first, before he ever met me. And once he had figured it out, he could not look at me anymore without seeing your painful death. By the time Berenice decided she didn’t just want to be the Queen’s aunt anymore, I had already realized that I had lost him, and why.
Love can die in unspoken words as well. And unwritten ones. No one will find me in the history he wrote about your campaigns. And anyone else devoting some sentences to me in their accounts only knows the rumors and legends. Thais the Athenian, who once talked Alexander into burning down the palace of Xerxes in Persepolis, who bore general Ptolemy three children and went with him to Egypt where he became Pharaoh and started a new dynasty. But not with her.
I said I did not want to be a Queen, and I don’t think this is a lie. Queens and their children live a dangerous life; you must know this best, now that all your wives, children and even your mother were slain by your own successors. Given Eurydice’s son and Berenice’s son hate each other, I fear Ptolemy’s royal children will not avoid that vicious cycle, either. My children are well out of this, and safe, and for that, I am happy.
But I fell in love only once in my life, and by my own hands, I did what ended this love. I had my reasons. Then again – so did you. As do all killers.
Tell me, Alexander: when I leave your tomb behind and go to see Ptolemy one last time, will there be peace between us, or will the air bristle with unspoken recriminations? Will there be, worst of all, indifference? Or will he tell me that he loves me, as Berenice has indicated he still does?
I have no idea. Yet you and I do have things in common, and one of them is this: we never back away from a challenge. I’ll leave you now, but not for long. One way or the other, I shall see you again soon.
