Shan Sa - Alexander and Alestria

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.