Shan Sa - Alexander and Alestria

"Then comes the pain of seeing all those ashen faces. Then comes the dizzying agony of driving your sword into a friend's heart to spare him a slow death. Then comes the regret of ever having been Alexander, just one man alive among the dead…"

It was dark, and I did not move, barely even breathing. Alexander's words tormented me, and my limbs turned to ice in the long silence that followed them.

"War is man's madness!" he went on, his voice mournful. "And I, Alexander, am the flame of that madness. I am the one writing this tragedy that men will still sing about in a thousand years' time. I am a madman suffering this chronic illness and elected by other men like myself. War is an appointment kept by those who thirst for atrocities, an opportunity for them to indulge their longings… When I was twenty I held feasting that went on for days after every battle. I drank to forget death and its fetid smell. I drowned myself in pleasure to rediscover life. At thirty, instead of intoxicating me, these banquets make me sadder still. I would rather shut myself away in my tent alone, far from drunken revelers…"

Without a word, I took my husband to our bed. He undressed and huddled in my arms while I gently stroked his back, scored with so many scars it felt like a tortoise's shell.

"I don't want you to know war," he said hoarsely. "You are the best of me. When I am with you I forget the horror of it, I think only of you. War no longer exists, and I am back to the Alexander I once was, the little boy full of dreams."

I kissed his hair, his forehead, his eyes.

"You must not know the dead. They take the shape of flames, dancing before you and laughing at you. You must close your eyes on the madness of this lowly world. Men make war as women make life. I shall take you to the sun itself without your sullying your hands or feet. And some days I want to be alone, hiding in my tent. No one must see me on those dark days when I am afraid and cold. I shiver and wait for the despair to pass, for hope to bloom again, for courage to return. Alestria, I beg you, let me leave as a conqueror and return as a victor. Let me play the role of a warrior who knows no cowardice or suffering. Let me play the role of a king venerated by every people on earth, a king who lends his fine face and well-proportioned body to sculptors from every land to represent the gods. Courage, honor, greatness, and glory are just empty words. Wars are dirty, conquests merely illusion. Those who back away and flee are just as worthy as those who keep on advancing and embrace death. Despair and hope, fear and temerity, reason and madness, are all twins. Only our love is unique."

My husband's last sentence swept aside all the horrors he had told me about himself. Although still reeling from what he had admitted, I could feel the warmth with which Talaxia and Tan-kiasis had healed my body, battered by the cold and by wounds. I, Alestria, the woman whom my husband had met away from time itself and away from war, I loved him because he was my destiny.

I accepted his madness, his murders, his greatness, and his woes-I accepted them with my eyes open.

"Stop suffering," I told him. "Everything you have just told me will be thrown into the lake that rests deep within my heart. I shall pray for the dead who have finished this life. For them to be born again as birds, free as birds, in the next."

My words soothed Alexander. He pressed his cheek against my breast.

"Sleep, my love. Sleep, my warrior. We are two pilgrims on the road to the glacier. You met me, and I found you. With you in front and me behind, we shall join forces and we will reach the summit."

Alestria had lost her bloom. Her cheeks were no longer rounded, and her eyes had a strange gleam to them. Against her pale face her pupils had become dark stars lit by black flames. I never suspected her condition-for Alexander destroyed everything he touched-until the day I heard two women whispering behind a sheet hanging on a line: "The queen is with child!"

Alestria with child! I burst into her tent. She was sitting before her mirror, pinning up her hair.

"Is it true that you are with child?" In the mirror her eyes avoided mine. "Are you with child?"

She lowered her head and said nothing. I left her tent, smacking the door closed behind me.

Alestria had gone mad; there was no other explanation. Bewitched by Alexander's words, she had decided to renounce our ancestors and put her life in danger for him.

"The queen is with child!" The rumor did the rounds of the city, spreading along trade routes and propagated all over the Indies. I did not believe it: Alexander had invented this to encourage his army to advance, Alestria had imagined it to satisfy a husband increasingly impatient for an heir. It was all just a conspiracy conjured by men who, thanks to this good news, hoped to win back the trust of their soldiers and incite them to fight.

The king arrived, radiantly happy. I greeted his happiness with a heavy heart and an icy expression. Unaware of my anger, the king congratulated me, saying I was to become an aunt. How could Alestria's frail body carry a child? How could that slender silhouette, those narrow hips, deliver a life? How could anyone cheat the curse of our ancestors? I did not understand my queen's smile, or the king's joy. She was going to die: they should have been weeping, but they were laughing!

Alexander ordered three days and three nights of banqueting all over the empire. In our encampment a huge gathering of generals, commanders, soldiers, workmen, seamstresses, and sandal makers swarmed around the fires to drink to the thousand-year reign of the future prince. Alexander was drunk, beating a drum while his monkey-an even more ridiculous creature than the eunuch Bagoas-plucked the strings of a lute. Alestria kept having to withdraw to be sick. I watched the whole devastating spectacle without a word. My queen had betrayed me, but I said nothing to reproach her; I sulked in silence. I continued to serve this woman who had led us into betrayal and captivity, because she was my queen and my sister. To each their own war. To each their own brand of madness. While Alexander fought beyond the frontiers of the known world, Alestria overstepped forbidden boundaries and advanced toward an unknown fate.

She had violent headaches, and still she grew thinner. Unlike some women who grow more beautiful in pregnancy, Alestria grew plain. Brown marks appeared at her temples, her cheeks became gaunt, and her forehead looked disproportionately tall and ponderous. But her husband had regained all his lust for life. Alestria was dying, and Alexander was thriving. He talked loudly, jubilantly, took the queen in his arms, patted her stomach, and boasted about how beautiful she was.

"Look how beautiful my Alestria is!" he exulted, calling me as a witness. Then, not waiting for any remark from me, he added: "Ania, you shall watch over my child! I spent thirty years looking for a queen," he confessed with tears in his eyes. "I rode all the way to Asia to meet her. I survived injury, poisons, the cold, sunstroke, evil spells, and exhaustion to reach the happiness I have today. My god has blessed me, how lucky I am!"

I said nothing. All I could read on my queen's blotchy face were suffering and death. I slipped out of the encampment to stray through the forests. Despite the soldiers' warnings I felt no fear: no tigers or boa constrictors, no ape-men or speaking parrots, could frighten me. Armed with my two daggers forged by the People of the Volcano, I walked on and sat down at the foot of a tree to shed a few tears. Why had my life changed overnight? Why had the vastness of the steppes become the torments of the jungle? Why had the simplicity of the earth and sky become the labyrinth of this forest teeming with smells and colors and sounds? I no longer knew where to find good and where to find evil. I could no longer distinguish between beauty and sadness. Had I lost my mind? Was I, too, haunted by spirits? Where were they taking me? Toward the light or toward the shades?