no exception. Thais also had young Antigone, the girl who’d caused Cleomenes and Marsyas to come to blows, living in our cluster of tents. The two officers were perpetually trying to outwork each other – there was an endless amount of guilt they felt they had to expiate. I used it against them shamelessly.
At any rate, she had chairs brought for the women of the taxeis – all the women, Syrian and Jew, Greek and Persian, slave and free. They all had stools on which to watch, and our phalangites, exhausted by the labour of the siege, ran, fought, wrestled and sang, naked, while the women giggled and roared their approval. They were
When Marsyas wrestled Cleomenes, the two stripped in front of us, and Thais rubbed her thumb along my forearm. ‘My, my,’ she said.
I determined to improve my own physique.
We feasted for two days, and then went back to work. My body no longer hurt, and while I did not carry baskets of rock every hour, I made a point to get in several hours a day. Every day.
One day, the slim man ahead of me took his own sweet time dumping his load on the towering rubble pile at the edge of the sea. The idiot had stopped to watch the construction work on the mole with his basket still on his shoulder.
I kicked the back of his knee.
He fell and spilled his load. Then he got to his feet and came after me, face suffused with anger. Of course, working naked, we had no badges of rank.
Which was good, because the sunburned bastard trying to kick me in the nuts was Alexander. I ended up dropping my basket and holding him, and after I yelled my name a few times, he dissolved into laughter. And when the men around us realised what had happened, they stopped betting on the outcome and laughed with us.
Out on the end of the peninsula, meanwhile, Diades had built a framework of heavy timbers – superbly heavy timbers, the roof-trees of the largest houses in Old Tyre and some new-cut cedars. There was a low isthmus of sand and rock just under the sea – we were going to use it as the spine of our mole. And that day, two days after the feast of Olympian Zeus, we started to fill the frames with crushed stone and rubble.
And then the mole seemed to leap forward.
It took almost three weeks for us to use up all the rubble and stone we’d moved forward, but after the Thargellia, the feast of the children of Leo, we saw the mole grow every day – and we carried our baskets straight out to the end of it and dumped them in the frames. If we had doubted, we doubted less, now. The mole crept forward, and the sound of the taunts from the other side grew distinctly more strained.
Alexander grew distinctly more strained, as well. In the heady weeks after Issus, he’d sent Parmenio off to try and take Damascus. It was a gamble – Darius had sent his whole treasury to Damascus before the battle – but the gamble paid off and Parmenio had scooped the entire hoard. As well as all the families of Darius’s senior officers, and the Athenian ambassadors to Persia, the Spartan ambassadors – it was a good piece of theatre, I can tell you.
Parmenio also got Memnon’s wife, Barsines, and her sister, Banugul. They were identical twins, both beautiful, blond and sophisticated. I was there when they were brought from Damascus.
Their arrival set their tone. Barsines rode in an ox cart with screens against the dust, the whole cart painted elaborately with flowers and scenes of the life of Aphrodite. Barsines, as I have said, was Memnon’s wife. And she was said to be the most beautiful woman in the world, although some said her sister was her rival. They were both reputed to be descended from Aphrodite, but in fact their father was the satrap of Hyrkania.
Banugul rode a horse – a Nisean stallion of which she was the master. She rode beautifully – like a Scythian, with her legs well up and her knees bent.
Hephaestion had arranged to meet them as they entered camp. I think it was now part of the king’s policy to heroise his better opponents. Memnon was now praised regularly – now that he was safely dead. And Alexander loved to appear chivalrous.
But I don’t think he’d listened to the gossip, and I know he was unprepared for the sisters.
He stood, looking at Banugul as if he’d been struck by lightning. She was dressed from head to foot as a Persian nobleman, and all the male attire, the loose trousers, the burnoose, served only to accentuate the slimness of her limbs, her athletic build, her straight back and neck – and her breasts, which defied the masculine clothing.
She leaped from her horse, leaving the reins to Tyche, and threw herself down before the king in full proskynesis. We had seen it before, of course, but we’d never seen a woman throw herself in the sand before our king.
She did it with grace, and a complete lack of submission. Somehow, she did it seductively, and yet she didn’t waggle or wiggle. Nothing gross.
The king reached out and took her hand, raised her to her knees and looked into her eyes, and then he kissed her hand.
And the gate to the ox cart opened.
If Banugul was the Queen of the Steppes, Barsines was the Queen of the World. She stepped out of the ox cart as if, rather than travelling all day, she had been lounging in the Lyceum, listening to men recite the poets. She was dressed as a Greek woman, in a white chiton with a perfect Tyrian purple border itself edged in gold. The chiton was linen, and transparent, and the body beneath it was as perfect as the cloth of the chiton and as hard as any phalangites labouring under the walls of Tyre.
And she, too, lowered herself into the dust.
The king was transfixed. And it was as if he had taken two arrows – his eyes went back and forth between the two women.
Hephaestion cleared his throat a dozen times, and I began to wonder if the king might need rescuing.
But he raised her from the dust as elegantly as he had raised her sister, and kissed her hand. He said something, and she smiled – a perfectly genuine smile.
Her eyes were as big as a man’s hand, or so they seemed.
The king took each of the sisters by the hand and led them to his pavilions.
So many women – and men – had tried to set their hooks into the king that we, as his friends, had begun to look forward to watching them fail against his lack of interest. I have said it before – he did not look at women – or men – the way most men do. Beautiful women would come to camp, arrange an invitation to meet the king and end leaving with a small present, and he would shrug and wonder aloud why they wasted his time.
But the twins were different. Was it that he saw them as children of the goddess? As peers? They were witty, engaging, seductive, serious, well read, giggly – they were any woman he wanted them to be, with noble birth and descent from the gods thrown in. But I was there, and he was besotted instantly.
It is worth noting that, at the same time, we had Darius’s wife and her women in camp and she, too, was a great beauty. Alexander treated her with great gallantry – but it became obvious, as the siege went on, that gallantry alone was not holding their relationship together. She was a beautiful, powerful woman who had been deserted by her husband. What could you expect?
Thais lay with her head in the crook of my arm one night, and sighed. She sighed a great deal – it was as hot as the bowl of a helmet being forged, even at night – a horrible wet, sticky hot, that hurt a pregnant woman more than anyone. She had taken to swimming in the sea – scandalising older Macedonians – if only to have relief from the weight of the child and the heat for an hour every day.
So she lay with her head in the crook of my arm, and all the rest of her posed strategically as far from my body heat as she could arrange.
‘Alexander has discovered women,’ she said.
‘Alexander has discovered the siege of Troy,’ I said. ‘And that Helen has an identical twin sister.’
The army speculated endlessly that he was having both of them at the same time, an impractical fantasy that appealed to every Thracian, every Greek mercenary and every Macedonian – every man, and some of the women, too.
A week or so after they arrived, I entered my pavilion to find both of them sitting with Thais, drinking sherbet in the Persian manner. Thais looked beautiful, despite her pregnancy and even because of it – pregnancy enhances some things, and not just breasts – hair, and skin.
Barsines sat next to Thais, and Banugul closer to the door, and a pair of slaves fanned them while Bella, my love’s Libyan, brought food and wine.
