Chapter Text
The Temple of Siwa
There was the heavy smell of expensive incense, overpowering in its pungency. The walls seemed to ripple, their brick of red sand and tan clay obscured by the smoky interior.
A voice boomed. Authoritative. Daring to speak where other men would have been cowed, its accented Greek demanded to know the reason for the visitor.
Shaking through his months-long exhaustion and pain, the general knelt. His tunic was smeared with blood, a strange contrast with his cloak dappled in the noble color of purple and red.
He stated the purpose of his visit. Try though he might to make his voice calm, this commander of armies and conqueror of nations was unused to speaking with humility. His tone was, at best, haughty. At worst, disrespectful. Unimpressed, the oracle refused his request almost as soon as it was asked.
Though his jaw clenched, the general dropped his tone into a more convincing supplication. And he offered more detail. He could tell the story from his youth to his present. He could explain why he sought to create a god.
The oracle nodded. The man spoke. His voice, hoarse from shouting and crying and pleading with the apathetic forces of nature, began his story.
Son of Zeus
Because the gods generally make poor parents, Zeus himself did not raise me. All the same, though, my mother claimed him as my father.
There were some signs of my divinity even before my birth: strange premonitions and dreams. My mother called upon soothsayers and weird women to interpret these happenings, and all agreed that they were auspicious. Far from taking offense at the stories of my parentage, King Philip of Macedon saw no issue in having been cuckolded by a god. There was no shame in having a wife possessing such beauty as to inspire divine lust, and any king would relish the chance to play parent to a child touched by immortality and greatness.
Even if my conception had been without incident, though, the fact that I was born as a healthy and plump son would alone have been sufficient to earn my father’s favor. For he had taken three wives prior to his marriage to Olympias, my mother. And for those three unions to princesses purported to possess wombs as fertile as the kingdoms from whence they came, only pittances had come. He was not a bad father, but he was a military man.
"Priam of Troy had dozens of sons," he would shout and bluster in those days, during the worst of his self-pitying moments. "Where is my Hector? My Paris? I want princes to defend my kingdom."
Instead, though, his wives bore daughters upon countless daughters. He did try to dote upon the first-born ones, even while his patience for them eventually grew thin. But most he saw as unremarkable. Some of my sisters, encouraged by ambitious mothers, sought training and discipline or educated themselves extensively in arts and philosophy. But, regardless of how they tried to distinguish themselves and merit my father’s pride, he would just sigh whenever the midwife hesitantly whispered in his ear of the birth of another princess. In his eyes, each was as uninteresting as the last. Good for alliances once they came of age, but little more than doe-eyed expenses until then. That was the way of things for him.
And then, of course, there was the matter of Arrhidaeus.
He was my half-brother, only a year my senior. At his birth, my father had ordered the celebratory sacrifice of a hundred bulls and a hundred sheep, so long-awaited was a male heir to the Macedon throne.
But, though it only became noticeable with the passing of the months and years, Arrhidaeus was slow. Slow to crawl, slow to walk, slow to speak, slow to mature. My father loved him still, I think, but with the disappointment of a man who wanted more. Quietly, so to cause no shame to himself or his unremarkable prince, my father struck him from any lines of succession.
So, although she was the fourth of Philip’s wives, normally ranked beneath her three predecessors, my birth eventually elevated my mother’s status to the most favored of the queens. But the rumors against her grew as the years went on, attributing her fortune to darker forces than mere prayer and piety.
For my father, though often gone at battle or attending the business of his kingdom, was dutiful to his dynasty. When at the palace, he called all his wives to bed with regularity. That they should bear him only daughters seemed indication of some mischief, perhaps from poisonings or other herbal interferences. With her perpetual guile, my mother became the main suspect.
For the most part, she didn’t mind the rumors. Fear equated respect in her eyes. Though she certainly didn’t lack the cunning to elevate herself at the cost of others, I still looked on her with the love of a child, and I therefore found it hard to believe that she would have been capable of such foulness. But all at court nonetheless saw her with suspicion--most of all those wives with whom she was in competition. There was no mere pettiness to their misgivings. No, they were correct not to trust my mother. She would have danced happily on the graves of any of my father’s wives or their progeny if it ensured my future and, by default, her own.
Despite all that, though, my father’s expectations and my mother’s ambitions, I was happy in childhood.
There are flashes of things from the earliest years. Sparring some mornings with my sister Cynane, known already in youth as the finest warrior of her sex. Bickering incessantly with my sister Cleopatra about politics or governance, though neither of us were old enough to have well-formed opinions of our own. And even with Arrhidaeus, never allowed to be out of eyesight of his nursemaids, I have a thousand memories of pleasant play and mischief. He never learned to swim, but we’d wade in the shallows of the clear gulf waters, watching ships come to port.
"You're happy?" I would ask him, already knowing the answer.
Happiness and joy were the brightest emotions on him, and he would wave his arms and whoop in delight as small minnows swam past his toes. Even as I grew older and more dignified, I would wave my arms and whoop with him. I loved him the most of all my family.
Eventually, though, gentle lessons and play gave way to soldier’s discipline and deprivation. A cousin of my mother, my martial tutor Leonidas was stern. He claimed it was because he saw greatness in me that needed only to be muscled out, but I think it more likely that life had just rendered him hard.
Far from any line of succession, he was a distant noble in a minor kingdom without any great talent for philosophy or the arts to distinguish himself. He’d participated in some military campaigns, but he never earned renown as a warrior. He’d survived smallpox in his youth, and it left its resultant craterous scars lining his face and neck. No woman would ever crane her head for a better look at him. The wife he had managed was plain-featured, his children lackluster. As old age began to near him, his was to be the worst kind of fate: history would render him unremarkable enough to be forgotten within a generation or two.
Citing his discipline and his intellect, my mother announced him as my tutor when I turned eight. And for some years thereafter, I lived a soldier’s life.
Even before I was old enough to comfortably lift a sword, I learned military strategy and positioning. On the hottest afternoons, I marched for hours without a waterskin. And during the deepest of nighttime sleeps, sore and bruised from the prior day’s hardships, Leonidas would drag me from my pallet and force me to spar unexpectedly. I resented him most days, but it only made me want to prove myself all the more. And, eventually, resentment budded into a grudging appreciation. My pudgy and well-nourished childhood exterior soon became lean muscle. No longer a pampered prince, I could sleep comfortably on cold ground and drink graciously from muddy springs.
I was a youth still, lanky and scabby, but I slowly shaped into something more.
My father was pleased. Son of mine, he called me often. Though so simple of a declaration, it was a title he never gave Arrhidaeus. Prince of Macedon, he would say when he gave my brother his tight smile.
On those days when we both were in the palace, my father home from battles and myself returned from military life with Leonidas, I spent the waning hours of evening in his study. Between the close of dinner and the start of his first nighttime summons for lovers to join him in bed, my father relished the chance to know me. Or, at least, know my intellect. He quizzed me on battle tactics, geography, stories of the ancients. And, so too, did he want me to know him. Sitting at his feet, I listened wide-eyed to tales of Macedon military victories through siege engines and phalanx formations. Imagination as vivid as though I myself led the battles, I heard of the once mighty kings who groveled before my father to beg for their lives, of their immaculate palaces looted and razed.
There were too the darknesses. Princesses auctioned off as common slaves, entire cities burned to rubble, young boys slaughtered before they could take up their fathers’ arms. Sparing no detail for respect of my tender age, my father told me all he knew of the world.
But my father’s world was small.
“Why isn’t Macedon bigger?” I declared in surprise when I looked at my father’s map of the known kingdoms.
With elaborate brushstrokes, made by the finest cartographer, it depicted the familiar regions of Thessaly or Epirus as well as the sprawling lands of far-distant Anatolia, Persia, and the lands beyond the Indus. All dwarfed Macedon.
Far from sounding offended at the incredulity in my voice, my father just laughed. “I’ve made it bigger in my lifetime. We have more tributary states than before, more territory to our domain.”
But he looked down at me with his pride beaming. “Perhaps, though, you’ll make it bigger yet. Son of mine, the kingdom welcomes your ambitions.”
I wasn’t old enough to think of legacies or futures, history and its victories, but I did think of Leonidas at that moment. How unremarkable of a man he was, his accomplishments too few to warrant future consideration. I remember wanting to be remembered. I was demi-god already, and I desperately wanted to become more.
That was before I met Hephaestion. Nothing changed after he came into my world, for I still wanted greatness much the same as before. But, he was the voice of my conscience, my thoughts. More than that, he was the voice of my soul.