Prologue
When my sister tells this story, she begins with the shepherd’s son standing in the middle of the vast marble floor, preparing to drop his torch, wondering why his face is wet. Rolls of torn papyrus crackle under his sandals. Five minutes ago, he helped his friends rip out the solid gold scroll rods. His share amounts to an even dozen, enough to buy a sizable farm. He’s twenty-three thousand stades from home, surrounded by things he can’t read, and richer than he ever dreamed, and he’s about to burn down the remains of the greatest archive in the world.
The shelves around him have been stripped bare: everything of bronze, gold, or semiprecious stone has already disappeared into his friends’ packs. The royal jewels will reappear in a few months around the throat and wrists of General Ptolemy’s current mistress. The accumulated clay tablets literary, religious, and bureaucratic of thirty generations of Persian kings don’t have the same resale value, so their rubble and scrap has been kicked to the corners of the hall. Through the windows, he can see other fires blooming in the streets. The Macedonians are a barbarous sort of Greek, keener on looting than learning, and tonight they’re doing what soldiers do best: stripping a city to its bones. Wheeling through the smoke overhead, two surviving war griffins of the King of Kings warble for the fallen Persian capital.
The shepherd’s son drops the torch.
If the rolls of papyrus had been raked together any less purposefully, his fire might’ve burned itself out and left the cedar hall standing, a little scorched, certainly quite empty, but still there, for future generations to remember that once, this was the site of the greatest collection of knowledge the world had ever seen.
But a soldier knows how to set a good fire.
His task done, the shepherd’s son turns and runs.
His friends are waiting for him on the portico. They demand to know what took him so long, and his best friend laughs, tells him his eyes are streaming and that’s what he gets for dithering so long with a smoking torch, and throws a wad of silk worth more than both their families’ flocks at him to wipe his face. Behind him, the glow in the window brightens, from sullen deep orange to a brighter, crackling gold. Papyrus burns hot and fast and crumbles to ash. It’s good that it’s quick. It means the screaming doesn’t go on for too long. See, scrolls don’t want to burn. When the flames lick their edges, they all try to talk at once, to be heard one last time. You have to know how to listen. The soldiers don’t.
The papyrus goes quick. The rest of the archive takes longer. It’ll be a full day and night before the fire eats all the way through the joists. When the roof comes down, it’ll come not with a crash but a sigh. Its weight will pulverize the heat-cracked marble flagstones. A month from now, when the hungry denizens of Persepolis dig through the rubble in search of anything that survived, they’ll find little sheltered pockets of wood still smoldering, and many fragments of fired clay.
That’s how my sister Melpomene starts this story. But she’s sentimental like that.
My sister Kleio prefers the kings-and-battles kind of history. She’d start seven years later, with the conqueror on his deathbed.
Welcome to Babylon, city of the cobalt gates. A trellis of greenery over the window keeps this chamber in the summer palace perpetually gloomy. Flowers the size of your hand grow over the sill, their white heads cocked like hearing trumpets. The sweet scent can’t cover up the other smells—sickness and the sweat of soldiers, and if aspiration can be said to have a reek, that’s on the air, too. Alexander lies sweating on a bed so big he could’ve shared it with the Apis Bull. Around him are the seven men who a few years and a few hundred miles ago were his friends, and each other’s, too. But Alexander’s been handing out conquered satrapies like honey sweets, and now they eye each other across the bed, each one of them lord of a conquered province, with a newly acquired taste for face-to-the-floor obeisance. A few of them already think they’re gods.
The man who won the jostle to take the king’s limp hand has a small, pleasant face and a pointed chin. “I swear upon my shield,” he says, “I will protect your wife and your unborn heir with my life.”
This is Perdiccas. Remember him.
You could be forgiven for misplacing the name of the heavily pregnant young woman kneeling on Alexander’s pillow. He’s been acquiring wives at an alarming rate lately. This is the one they say he married for love. Her name is Rhoxane, and as she mops her husband’s sweating brow with a kerchief of silk soaked in myrrh-scented water, you could mistake her anxiety for that of a minor princess swept off her feet by a dashing foreign conqueror, and not a young woman acutely aware that the heir she carries is going to be a threat to the ambitions of every man in the room in about ten minutes.
Two men have given up on the scrum for the place of honor at the dying king’s side. They lean beside the window. It’s the best vantage for watching the others.
“Half a gold talent says the signet ring is on Perdiccas’s finger before Rhoxane dunks the kerchief in the bowl again,” one offers. He’s slightly older, heavy-featured, with deep-set eyes and tiny lips that spend most of their time spread in a grin. Don’t be fooled by the full head of hair on the statues they’ll make of him someday. Meet Ptolemy. He’s better at the looting than the glorious charges. He lost the wrestling match for Alexander’s hand, but he’s good-natured about these things.
“I won’t take that bet,” says the dour man next to him. This is Eumenes, Alexander’s Greek secretary. The lines in his face are grief; I don’t mean to say that no one in the room cares for the man they followed across tens of thousands of stades of enemy territory and brought down an empire for. But Eumenes is no fool. You don’t live this long close to kings by being a fool. “Perdiccas has the largest contingent of soldiers in Babylon. He’s well placed to ensure a… satisfactory transition of power.”
“You’re a Perdiccas man, then?”
“I am Alexander’s man. While he yet breathes, I am his, and when he does not, I am for his line.”
“Yes, but which bit of it? It’ll be months before you know if Rhoxane’s whelp is a son, and in the meantime, who’s in charge?”
“Philip Arrhidaeus is of the royal blood.”
“Philip Arrhidaeus is a sweet fellow, but he’s thirty-three and he cries if you step on a beetle. He’ll need a regent. Incidentally, he’s already in Perdiccas’s men’s custody.”
“How do you know that?”
“Educated guess. At any rate, my men couldn’t find him.”
“What’s that you say, Your Majesty?” says Perdiccas at the bedside. “All of you shut up. Alexander—speak. To whom do you leave your empire?”
Everyone in the room strains to hear the answer.
The lips of the man on the bed move, but no sound comes out. For days it’s been like this. The illness stole away his speech and left these men, his truest friends and bodyguards, to speak for him.
Perdiccas reads his lips. He straightens, the very picture of a grave and resolute man accepting a great burden. “To the strongest,” he reports.
Alexander’s hand falls limp, and if it had been the common soldiery watching this performance, and not the seven most powerful men in these spear-won lands, they might have believed that he had something to do with the signet ring sliding off his illness-wasted finger to remain in Perdiccas’s palm. Perdiccas bows his head. “You do me too much honor, Your Majesty.”
There’s a gentle plash as Rhoxane dips the rag in her bowl of cool water.
Ptolemy murmurs, “Such funeral games we will have.”
Me, though, I like to begin the story two years later, with the thief in Ptolemy’s new coin mint.
Chapter 1
I can’t stand tragedies. For one thing, it’s boring when you know how they have to end. I like to watch the audience instead. It was comprised mostly of Macedonian officers that night, rounded up and herded into the theater to demonstrate that Satrap Ptolemy wasn’t yet completely shorn of support. The rest were Egyptian priests, completely baffled by the performance but there to be polite. Everyone had been terribly polite since Ptolemy put down the last mutiny, including Ptolemy. He couldn’t afford another one. He slouched on his stool—the folding stool of a governor, not the throne of a king, whatever his enemies on the other side of the Mediterranean said about him—while on the stage a princess soliloquized before the canvas walls of Thebes. She’d been going on about duty and burial for longer than it takes to roast a goose and still hadn’t made up her mind. My sisters lounged around Ptolemy’s feet in attitudes ranging from mildly appreciative to somnolent, except for Melpomene, who’d drifted to the rim of the stage and now perched there between the torches, drinking it in greedily. None of the rest of us had fed half so well in days.
A hint of movement against the stars brought my attention back to the stage. It’d been the innovation of a clever and underemployed military engineer to set up an old siege crane in the wings. As far as I was concerned, the arrival of Hades was the only interesting bit of the play, not least because the crane had jammed several times in rehearsal and once tipped off its rickety stand and knocked over Thebes. The theater troupe’s two slaves were working the wheel now, bringing the arm slowly around. The actor on the hook must have nerves of bronze as his feet swung over the set. Although those didn’t look like feet, and the bundle didn’t look like a man, and also, come to think of it, it was thrashing. I glanced at Ptolemy, who wasn’t beyond embroidering on the classics to make a point, but he was watching with suddenly sharpened interest. On the smaller stool beside his, Regent Perdiccas’s hard-faced envoy, who like me had been watching the crowd more than the performance, went rigid. He’d been coiled tight since he set foot on the quay yesterday. Hard to blame him; the first man assigned by Regent Perdiccas to assist Ptolemy’s administration here in Egypt had ended his career face-down in the Nile.
Rope whined, and into the pool of torchlight over the stage descended a wriggling two-headed cocoon that, on inspection, was not a god, but two men, rolled in a spare bit of painted canvas wound around with rope.
I was the first to come to my feet, but the chief of Ptolemy’s bodyguard wasn’t far behind me, and into the baffled silence shouted, “To the satrap!”
The stands around us erupted. Lamps came unhooded, washing the dais in flame, and the light strobed from the polished buckles and peaked helmets of the hypaspists of the Agema, the satrap’s elite bodyguards, as they fell into place around Ptolemy. I had three seconds to decide whether I wanted to be inside the ring of shields or out of it, and I picked outside, where the view was better. I saw a hypaspist interpose himself between Ptolemy and the regent’s envoy, just in case. The second-greatest threat to a friend of Alexander, in these unsettled days, was other friends of Alexander. The greatest, of course, was their own troops, but we’d all seen mutiny up close last summer, and this wasn’t it.
The objects of the panic, the two men dangling upside-down from the arm of the god crane, were twisting back and forth in the salty Mediterranean breeze.
Ptolemy’s battlefield baritone was probably audible all the way from Memphis, and what he was bawling, over and over until it sank in, was, “To the mint! Those are the mint men! Away to the mint!” He leapt onto his stool to make himself visible behind the ring of shields, and I briefly caught his eye and the edge of his exhilarated grin. He knew every one of his men by sight. The names-and-faces bit of generalship didn’t come as easily to him as it had to Alexander, but he’d had two years to memorize them all, and here in the Satrapy of Egypt, the cast didn’t rotate much. “To the mint!” he roared one more time, and drew his curved single-edged kopis to wave over his head. “We’ll catch him this time, boys!”
A hand tugged the hem of my peplos, and I looked down into the confused face of my sister Erato, who as always was two steps behind the rest of us. She said, “What’s happening?”
“Depends who you ask,” I told her cheerfully. “Ptolemy thinks his mint’s being robbed again, the chief of the Agema thinks Ptolemy’s being assassinated, Perdiccas’s envoy’s braced to be regrettably knifed in the confusion—this show has several theaters; take your pick.”
Ptolemy bounded down from his dais, scattering petty officers and confused priests, and began to descend the tiers of seating in great bounds with his hypaspists jostling to keep up. Someone collided with my back and then trod on my heel, and I turned as the newest hypaspist of Ptolemy’s entourage, not a grizzled veteran but the earnest round-faced son of someone important, began to splutter his apologies. He couldn’t figure out which of my sisters was Ptolemy’s mistress, or if we all were. I patted his arm in passing and waited till he was swallowed up by the crowd to take my own shortcut.
There was a time, not so long ago, when I could have crossed the Mediterranean in a stride. I could have cooled my feet in my mother’s river all afternoon, dropped by my father’s palace on the mountaintop for supper, and still left wet footprints across the floor of my half-sister’s Parthenon in Athens before night fell. My world was smaller these days. Ptolemy was the middle of it. But he was headed where I wanted to go anyway, and it took no great effort to fold the world around me like a bit of scenery somebody’d forgot to nail down at the bottom. When my sandal came down again, it wasn’t onto the next tier of theater seating, but a gritty unlit courtyard on the other side of Ptolemy’s half-built palace. I had it to myself for the moment, though I could hear the shouting from here.
The doors of the mint were massive, bronze, twice the height of a man, riveted with bolts the size of my hand, and currently flanked by two little piles of helmets, shields, and greaves that had recently been on the heads and arms and shins of the two guards. The opening and closing of the doors had scraped semicircular indentations in the dirt. Soft lamplight limned the crack between them.
I took another long stride that brought me past them without touching them.
The mint was a spacious workshop, though made cramped by dozens of rickety shelves stretching all the way from the unpaved floor to the rafters. With most of the palace complex still nothing but stakes in the ground, and the city around it not much more than a field encampment grown roots, the mint had been serving all winter as a sort of all-purpose construction storehouse. There was lumber from Cyprus leaning against the walls. Crates stacked almost to the smoke vent in the roof held grain. Piled in the corners were amphorae of wine and olive oil, horse tack, leopard pelts, Persian carpets, paint, statuary pilfered from neglected local shrines, and an assortment of building materials. The minting of coins hadn’t begun yet. That’s the prerogative of a king, and Ptolemy wasn’t calling himself that. Still, he’d lately been stockpiling the materials for it: golden idols, golden wine bowls, a golden ceremonial shield, a whole gilded sarcophagus, enough golden jewelry to deck out three harems. It all glittered in the meager light of the small clay lamp that the thief had perched on the edge of a shelf.
In the dimness, he was only the vague shape of a man, his build obscured by a chlamys clasped with a plain brooch at the right shoulder, exactly the way half the soldiers in Alexandria wore it, and his face deeply shadowed by the broad brim of a felt petasos. He had a bulky bundle awkwardly under one arm, into which he was methodically sliding flattish gold objects too square to be plates. I didn’t know Ptolemy’s hoard so well that I could identify them from the other side of the room; they might’ve been either bits of the gold armor once worn by the bodyguards of the old King of Kings or else the golden tablets with the cuneiform nobody could read.
I wandered over to watch the process. He thrust his oil lamp deeper into the shadows at the back of the shelf, probably in search of anything else sparkly, and succeeded only in illuminating a set of dead amber eyes and thumb-length teeth.
“Don’t ask me where the stuffed crocodile came from,” I murmured.
I hadn’t expected him to hear me, and I was as startled by his sudden whirl as he probably had been by my voice. His lamp gilt the harsh profile of Midas from last month’s play. “How did you get in?” he rasped, in an accent that was definitely Macedonian and probably from the high country above Pella. His free hand flew to something beneath his chlamys, but fell away as he took in my white peplos with its golden girdle, my bright sandals, my soft white arms that were never called upon to carry anything heavier than a cup of wine, and concluded correctly that I was unarmed and not that kind of threat to him. He changed his question to, “Who in Hades are you?”
