"He comes for your people's dead," said the queen.
"Indeed," said Alexander. "And what am I?"
"Dying," she said. "But with a choice. I bring it from my Goddess, king of men. Would you live? Would you look on the sun again?"
I saw the yearning in him, the longing that twisted his phantom heart with pain. Yet he said, "These things always have a price. What will I pay to be alive again?"
"Remarkably little," said the queen, "all things considered."
"What, my wealth? My titles? Half my empire? All of it?"
"Everything," she said. "Even your name."
He lifted his chin. I had seen that look in battle. He was smiling, but his eye had a gleam of steel. "Then what will I be?"
My queen swept her glance across me to the living shadow beyond. Etta had fixed her stare on Alexander. Even as bodiless spirit, he fascinated her.
I had understood some time since. It had a certain inevitability, and a certain monstrous tidiness, like one of the Greek plays Alexander was so fond of.
He laughed. If I could have killed him for it, I would have; but he was beyond any mortal harm. But he was not mocking any of us. He was laughing in incredulity. "What are you asking me to be?"
"Penthesilea," she said. It had been her name and title. No one now held it, though I had no doubt that some had tried to take it. The one they were all bound to accept as queen, by her own great oath, strained past me, stretching toward the shade that was Alexander.
As unwise as it might prove to be, I let her go. He recoiled, but she was both swift and strong. He was but a shade; his body was sinking from the heat of fever into the cold of death. She was alive, if only as a flower is, mindless and soulless but fixed on the sun.
"When she was born," my queen's voice said, sounding somewhat faint, as if it came from a little distance, "the Goddess gave her no soul. One was in the world for her, that was made clear to me, but it would not come until it had done its duty elsewhere."
"Impossible," said Alexander.
"For the Goddess, all things are possible." My queen was fading; my hand could not hold her, however tightly it clutched. "When first we met, we made a wager. I never asked for payment. I ask it now. Will you take this gift that the Goddess has given you?"
He stiffened, then eased with an effort that I could see. "And if I refuse? If I call the wager void, because you died before it could be paid?"
"You die," she said.
He looked down at himself, then up at Etta, as if she had not been as familiar as one of his dogs. But then, I thought, he had never imagined that this might be the flesh he wore when his own body had burned to ash.
He was a man like no other, but he was Greek enough to find women both alien and a little repellent. And of course there was his mother, who should have been one of us; she was never made for a life of meek submission. She had taught him both to love and loathe her sex.
I knew that he would refuse. He was Alexander; he was as near a god as living man could be. But he could not take this gift, which he would see as a bitter sacrifice.
"I… would rule?" he asked after a stretching pause.
"You would rule," my queen said. She was far away now, and faint.
"I would not be challenged?"
"You would be challenged," she said. "I am too long dead to protect you."
"Have you allies?"
"Selene knows," she said, now so distant that I could barely hear her. "Trust Selene. Listen to her. Take her counsel."
"But I haven't?"
She was gone. He looked from Etta to me, and back again. He looked long at the inert thing that had housed his spirit for nigh on three and thirty years.
I said nothing. He spun back to me. "Tell me there's another choice. I'm not dead. I won't be dead. There's too much to do."
"There is always too much to do," I said. "Your life is ended, king of Macedon. The dogs have already begun to squabble over your bones. This?who knows? You could be immortal."
"I could come back," he said as if it had just dawned on him. "I could take?I could be?"
I waited for him to come to his senses. It did not take long. He knew better than I, what the men of this world would say to such a thing. They would laugh. Then they would rise up in all their numbers, march against our people and destroy them.
He fell silent. Then: "Will I remember? Once I wake up?will I still be myself? Or will it be like being born again?"
I spread my hands. "I don't know," I said. "It has never been done before. The Goddess has never set a body in the world while its soul still inhabits another. Why She did it?who knows why the gods do anything?"
"Maybe She was curious," he said. "Or maybe She needed two of me, and Macedon needed me first."
He had a fine sense of his own worth. But it was very likely true, what he said; I could hardly contest it. When I spoke, it was to say, "You must choose soon?before the fire goes out in the body. Or you will die, and there will be no returning."
I had roused in him no fear, not of death. But of leaving this life?after all the grief and all the loss and all the pain of his wounds of both body and spirit, still he yearned to live.
"Better the lowest peasant in a living field," he said at last, "than king among the dead." He sighed, though he had neither breath nor lungs for it. Without pause, without further word, he strode toward Etta.
With her mother's departure she had faded again, nearly to vanishing. I could barely see her, but it seemed that his eyes were as clear as mine were clouded. As he drew nearer, she became more distinct. She was reflecting the light of him, the moon to his sun.
They stood face to face. I could have sworn that he was the living man and she the formless dead.
She raised her hand. He raised his to match her. They touched.
On the golden bed, the body gasped and convulsed. In the world between the living and the dead, Alexander blazed up like a beacon in the dark. As suddenly as he had caught fire, he winked out.
I fell headlong from world into world. The tiles of the floor were hard; they bruised my knees, and my hands flung out to break my fall. I smelled the reek of sickness, and beneath it, subtly, the sweet stench of death.
There was someone in the room, some strong presence. The skin prickled between my shoulderblades. I turned slowly.
It was only Etta. She had fallen from the bed and caught herself against one of its carved lions. She was breathing hard, as if she had been running. Her body trembled.
She lifted her head. My breath caught. I had expected it, prayed for it, and yet to see it… it was astonishing. Terrifying. Splendid.
There was life in those eyes, expression in that face. Memory?it was there; all of it, as she turned to look on what she had left behind. I wondered if it was a blessing, that she should remember; whether it would have been more merciful to veil her with forgetfulness, and let her be born all new.
It was not my place to judge the Goddess. She had done a great thing, as was well within Her power; a fearful thing, it might be, but as I met those clear blue eyes, I knew that I could serve this one whom She had made.
My young queen smiled at me, with a twist of wryness in it that I knew all too well, and a tilt of the head as she considered what I was now, and what she had chosen for herself. I looked for regret. I found none.
It had been so in all his battles, when Alexander was alive. Once he had set his armies in motion, he never looked back. He fought the battle to its conclusion.
People were coming. The physicians had fled; the servants were gone. These could only be the wolves and jackals, come to gnaw the bones of his empire.
Etta?no, I should not call her that; she was queen now by right of blood and spirit, Penthesilea of the Amazons. Penthesilea hesitated for a stretching moment. Old habits die hard, and she had never been a fool. She knew what must happen now: the wars of succession; the battles over the heirs; the struggle for rule of the empire.