Behind the matrons the bridesmaids clustered whispering. Their song sung, their small rite done of turning back the bride-bed and sprinkling it with perfume, they had nothing to do. Among a little set of sisters and cousins and friends, the tittering began; dying away if one of the great ladies looked round, rustling like a faint breeze in leaves. Eurydike heard it; she too had nothing to do. Then suddenly she knew that the sounds from the hall had altered. Supper-couches scraped along the floor, the slurred singing stopped. They were getting up.
Like a tense soldier released by the call to onset, she summoned up her courage. Soon all these people must go, and leave her alone to deal with him. She would talk to him, tell him stories. Old Konon had said he would not trouble her.
Roxane too had heard the sounds. She turned, clashing her intricate ruby earrings. “Joy to the bride!” she said.
Surrounded and pushed on by laughing, drunken, torch-bearing men, stumbling over his robe on the shallow stately stairs with their painted murals, Philip made his way towards the royal bedchamber.
His head swam, he sweated in his purple robe; he was angry about the dog being chased away. He was angry with Perdikkas for fetching him from the table, and with all the men for mocking him, as he knew they were; they had stopped even pretending. They were laughing at him because they knew he was scared. He had heard the jokes in the hall; there was something he was expected to do with Eurydike, so bad that one must not do it even by oneself, if anyone could see. He had been beaten long ago for being seen. Now, he believed—no one had thought to tell him otherwise—they would all stand and watch him. He didn’t know how, and was sure Cousin Eurydike would not like it. Perdikkas was holding him by the arm, or he would have run away.
He said, despairingly, “It’s my bedtime. I want to go to bed.”
“We’ll put you to bed,” they chorused. “That’s why we’re here.” They roared with laughter. It was like the bad old days at home, before Alexander had taken him away.
“Be quiet.” Perdikkas’ voice, suddenly unfestal, an angry martinet’s, sobered everyone down. They led Philip to an anteroom, and started to undress him.
He let them take off the hot purple robe; but when they undid the girdle of his sweat-soaked tunic, he fought them, and knocked two flying. The rest all laughed; but Perdikkas, looming and awful, commanded him to remember he was King. So he let them strip him, and put him into a long white robe with a gold-embroidered hem. They let him use the chamber-pot (where was Konon?); then there was no more to stay for. They led him to the door. He could hear inside a murmur of women’s voices. They would be watching, too!
The wide doors opened. There was Eurydike, sitting up in the great bed. A little brown slave-girl, laughing, ran before him with a long snuffer, ready to quench the hanging lamps. A great wave of anger and misery and fear built up in him. It hummed and boomed in his head, booom, booom, booom. He remembered, he knew that soon the white flash would come. Oh, where was Konon? He shouted, “The light! The light!” and it flashed, a lightning that struck all through him.
Konon, who had been standing in shadow along the passage, ran in. Without apology he shoved aside the horrified group, shocked sober, which bent over the rigid figure on the floor; pulled from his belt-pouch a wooden wedge; prised Philip’s jaws apart, so that his tongue should not fall back and choke him. For a moment, he looked up at the men with bitter reproach and anger; then his face settled back into the blank mask of the soldier confronted with stupid officers. He said to Perdikkas, “Sir, I can see to him. I know what to do. If the ladies could leave, sir.”
Disgusted and ashamed, the men stood aside to let the women go first. In panic disregard for precedence, the bridesmaids ran at once, their slippers pattering on the stairs. The matrons of middle rank, obsessed all day with etiquette and protocol, clustered helplessly, waiting for the queens.
Eurydike sat in the bed, grasping around her the crimson gold-fringed coverlet, looking for help. She had on only her thin wedding shift; how could she get up in the presence of men; of Konon, who was staying? Her clothes were on an ivory stool, at the far end of this great room. Would none of them remember her, stand to shield her, put something round her?
She heard a sound from the floor. Philip, stiff as a board till now, had begun to twitch. In a moment he was in the throes of the clonic spasm, his whole frame jerking and thrashing, his robe flung up by his kicking legs.
“Joy to the bride!” It was Roxane, looking down over her shoulder as she swept towards the door.
“Come, ladies.” Kleopatra gathered in a glance the huddled matrons, averting her face from scandal. Making for the door she paused, and turned back to the bed. Eurydike saw the long look of contempt, the unwilling pity. “Will you come? We will find you something to wear.” Her eye moved to the clothes-stool; an officious matron bustled over.
Eurydike looked after the widow of Alexander, whose gold embroideries gleamed beyond the door; she looked up at Alexander’s sister, to whom she was like a beaten whore, whose shame must be covered for the house’s honor. She thought, What do I know even of him, except that he killed my father? May the gods curse them all. If I die for it, I will make them kneel at my feet.
The matron brought her himation of dyed saffron, the lucky color of fertility and joy. She took it in silence, and wrapped it round her as she rose. Philip’s tremor was growing weaker; Konon was holding his head, to keep it from striking the floor. Standing between him and the watching faces, she said, “No, lady, I will not come. The King is sick, and my place is with my husband. Please leave us and go away.”
She fetched a pillow from the bed, and laid Philip’s head on it. He was hers now, they were both victims together. He had made her a queen, and she would be a king for both of them. Meantime, he must be put into bed and covered warmly. Konon would find her a place to sleep.
321 B.C.
SOUTH DOWN THE ANCIENT COAST ROAD that followed the eastern shore of the Middle Sea, the army of Perdikkas marched with its long following train: grooms and chandlers, smiths and carpenters and harness-makers, the elephants, the endless wagons, the soldiers’ women, the slaves. At Sidon, at Tyre, at Gaza, the people looked down from the mended walls. It was eleven years since Alexander had passed that way alive, whom they had just seen on his last progress, going to Egypt with a chime of bells. This army was no business of theirs; but it meant a war, and war has a way of spreading.
Flanked by its guard of armed Bactrian and Persian eunuchs, Roxane’s wagon followed the march, as it had followed from Bactria to India, to Drangiana, to Susa, to Persepolis, to Babylon. Each part had been many times renewed as its journeys lengthened, but it seemed the same, smelling as before of the stamped dyed leather that roofed it, of the essences which at each new city her eunuchs had brought for her approval; even now, a drift of scent on a cushion could bring back the heat of Taxila. Here were the heavy turquoise-studded bowls and trinkets of her dowry, the vessels of chased gold from Susa, a censer from Babylon. It might all have been the same, except for the child.