Horses gleaming, troops roused, our war cries rang out. The great army set out upon its earthly route. Some detachments set sail by sea, their mission to plague Persian ships and make them believe our allied armies would attack from the coast.
Begone, the gilded prison where Philip locked me away in his glory and his misery. Begone, kisses from Olympias, who wanted me to be her little girl forever. Begone, Macedonia that gave me life, Aristotle and Homer who watched over me as I grew. I, Alexander, am destined for the mysteries of civilization, for the vastness of this world. I run, I gallop, I fly toward the land of the pharaohs.
Open your arms, Osiris and Isis, gods of my rebirth, givers of life and strength, I am coming with my wound and my nightmares.
The hot wind blew as I watched the sun sink over the ramparts of Memphis. The wind from the Nile-heavy with the smell of wet earth, of reeds and grilled fish-erased Olympias's perfume and the rustling of her tunic. The sun had not yet disappeared behind the horizon; the moon had already risen, pale, transparent, and round.
My soldiers were preparing for a Macedonian feast day in the encampment but, so far from Pella, it did not have the same gaiety, the same feel. Even though the moon of the pharaohs was more majestic than that which rose over Greek soil, Memphis-a bustling trading city-exhaled the same stench of decadence as Athens. I searched in vain for splendors recorded on papyrus. Time continued to trickle through the hourglass, but the Egyptians already had the weary expression of a kingdom that has lived too long in eternity.
Ammon had supplanted Osiris. The god of the sun demanded exclusive adoration and obedience. I considered it essential to appear at his sanctuary if I was to convince the Egyptians to submit to my authority for any length of time. I was told of a desert stretching as far as the eye could see, of hills of flames and nine-headed vultures. I heard of an army of shades advancing as columns of sand blown by the wind, an army that once destroyed the powerful Persian troops. I knew no fear at all. Dangers merely heightened my will.
Four days wandering through that ocean of dunes, four nights of forced marching beneath the stars, I turned a deaf ear to the soldiers' complaints. The sun burned down on me. I shielded my eyes with straw and saw the waves of sand twisting, breaking, and reforming, but never once did I think of retreating. Retreat would mean forever abandoning the sphinx and the pyramids.
In the heart of the oasis Ammon's guards exhausted me with ritual dancing, chanting, and praises, then they let me into the low-ceilinged hut with its roof of palm fronds. The high priest, decked in jewels and bought with my gold, predicted what I wanted to hear: their god appointed me king of kings. He announced that, with his benediction, Alexander would be invincible among men.
We made the return journey without stopping once. Carried by the uplifting oracle, my soldiers braved the desert in jubilant mood. I slept in the saddle astride Bucephalus. I pictured myself back there, facing the disc of the sun. I had asked this question of the high priest: "Why was I born when the end of the world had already begun?" Taken aback, he sat in silence. I was gripped with the urge to laugh, and left the sanctuary lighthearted. The end of the world had already begun because I was born to burn it down, to destroy it.
On the banks of Lake Mareotis I used the point of my lance to draw out a new city on fallow land. I gave it my name.
Alexandria of Egypt, you shall prosper after this ancient world has perished in flames with me!
Chapter 2
They call me Tania. They also call me Talestita. I am tall and slender. I have a pet bird. I gather my hair in two braids and dress in red. I am often seen frowning and thinking-it is what I like best.
Other girls used to make fun of me because I was not happy like them; my body was more fragile. I was the queen's serving girl, and she liked my air of melancholy. She told me I had a more restful presence than the others, who were too playful and chirpy. They all teased me because I have white skin, golden eyes, and fair, curly hair. They laughed and called me "the foreigner" because the elders said I was the daughter of a foreign king and my family had perished in a massacre. A foreigner among girls with dark eyes and black hair, and yet I was the only one my queen trusted as her scribe. I wrote down her words on flat pieces of stone, using tinted water and a reed cut on the diagonal. The ink dried a yellow color for orders and orange for tallies of horses and sheep.
Few people in our tribe could write. We had no books. My mother, a servant to the previous queen, taught me the secrets of written signs. She told me our language had the strength of concentration, and that each of our signs was worth ten words in any other tongue.
In the evenings the queen would lie on the ground and read the stars, telling stories that developed as the stars moved across the sky. She dictated them to me, and I, Tania, wrote them down by the light of a lantern. We hid these pages of stone so the other girls would not find them. The queen told me I should wall up our book in a cave the day she died. At the time I could not know that our lives would be so brief and so intense.
The ink turned white for the stories from the stars.
That year the queen was fifteen years old, in keeping with our customs. I was a little older than her. I may have been melancholy, but I was a stranger to sorrow.
On the steppes we were known as the Amazons, which meant the tribe of girls who loved horses. We reared the swiftest, hardiest horses with the most magnificent coats. Like other nomads, we strayed beneath the skies in search of tall grass and limpid water. We were tough, solitary girls, forging no links with other peoples. No one knew where we came from; no one knew of our divinity; no one knew the Amazons, who kept the secret of their origins to themselves.
Millions of years earlier our ancestors lived on a luxurious mountain called Siberia where the trees blossomed all summer long. They knew how to tame men and horses, and lived in harmony with nature, but one day nature betrayed them and forced them down from the mountain onto the plain. Our ancestors walked and walked and walked. They walked for decades on end before discovering the fertile steppes.
In those far-off days there was a queen known as the Great Queen. She established the tribe's laws and devised its writing. She observed nature: birds in flight, the intelligence of leaves, flowers opening. Inspired by these moving things that gave life its animation, she invented our written language, which looks sometimes like flowers, sometimes like leaves, sometimes like birds twirling in the sky. The Great Queen was the only woman in our tribe to bear children. There was a tribe on the other face of Mount Siberia and she obtained their king's seed. Before their union the two tribes had never met, for the mountain was almost impassable.
The king managed to cross the treacherous pass and met the Great Queen on a mountain path. The queen, who was in pursuit of a boar, lowered her bow. She had never seen a man like him in her forest. She knew nothing of him, his name, his origins, his race. Devastated by his beauty, she decided to capture him in a net. She brought him back along with his followers, and paraded them before her women like trophies. The king was taller than the men our ancestors used as slaves, and in his nakedness, he glowed like the sun itself.