Empire of Ashes: A Novel of Alexander the Great (24 page)

“It cannot be denied,” proclaimed the historian, “that if we imagine a square with a side length of one unit, the diagonal of that square will be the square root of two. Try as we might, we cannot find a fixed unit of any length that will evenly divide both into the side length or the diagonal. They are, as the Pythagoreans call it, incommensurable.”

“Short of trying every possible common unit, I cannot understand how you can know that,” I told him.

“Your opinion is shared by others,” Thais said. “The man who first proved the existence of irrational numbers was expelled from the order of the Pythagoreans. His colleagues gave him a funeral and a tomb, as if his suggestion amounted to intellectual suicide.”

“And yet Hippasus was correct,” added Callisthenes.

Alexander shook his head. “I take the soldier’s part, and agree with Machon. No one can claim to know no common factor exists unless he tries them all.”

“Then why don’t we try here, now?” asked Thais. With that, she untied her girdle and knelt on the floor. The mosaic in the center of the room had a pattern that seemed close to perfectly square. Folding the girdle into a length equivalent to the side of the figure, she first showed that the diagonal of the square was almost half again as long as the side. As she demonstrated this fact the men were not watching the girdle at all, but the casual exposure of a breast as firm and unshriveled as a virgin girl’s.

No matter how many times she folded the girdle, from one-half to one-quarter to one-eighth the length of the side, no number of whole units fit into the diagonal. There was always some material left over. (A dark aureole likewise insisted on presenting itself, standing free of her folds.)

“So you see, they are incommensurable.”

“A most revealing demonstration!” applauded Callisthenes.

“Revealing, yes, but no demonstration,” said the King. “I can imagine units much smaller than we can make with a piece of cloth. How do we know none of these may factor evenly into both lines?”

“We know, because it is a matter of mathematical proof.”

The argument went on for some time with neither side convincing the other. But as competent as Thais was on matters geometrical, she took over the room as the wine flowed and the men grew tongue-tied. She picked up the cithara and played a romantic air, then played it again with racy lyrics she made up on the spot. Verses from Homer, Hesiod, and Pindar tripped lightly from her tongue, but especially lines from Euripides, for she had done her homework. And she danced, creating music in the men’s minds by the swaying of her hips, hiking up her gown to show her upper thighs.

By the climax of the evening all of us were gazing at her with our aspirations plain, including the King, who blushed like a lovesick boy with his pleasure of her. But before any propositions flew, she suddenly turned the conversation to matters of politics, and of history.

“Mine was a wealthy family,” she said, “before the Persians came to Attica. We had farms near Dekeleia, and a townhouse. My ancestors drew liturgies—they ran at the battle of Marathon, commanded ships at Salamis. There was a tripod dedicated to a first-place finish at the Festival of Dionysus. It was destroyed when Mardonius burned the city on his second occupation…”

As she said this, all hint of titillation went out of her manner. She was intimate, confessional, showing far more than just arms and thighs. Who was she speaking to? We all thought it was to ourselves alone, her deference to Alexander notwithstanding. As she spoke of the fires of Mardonius, the flames of the braziers shone in her eyes. A stray lock of hair, so fetching as it came loose in her dance, was threaded back behind her ear, like that of a windblown child standing at the foot of the burning Acropolis.

“My family never recovered from the Great King’s predations. To survive, my mother was forced to board her children to different houses around the city. What ‘boarding’ meant was not hard to understand: for a fee, we were placed in the power of unscrupulous men with little regard for our age. I was sent into the service of a man named Bitto, who owned a house not far from the Whispering Hermes. On pain of beating, I was forced to cooperate with his criminal enterprise: having been blessed—or
 
cursed—with a pretty face, I was obliged to show myself to the male passersby in the street. When the inevitable insults came, I was to let them into the house, and let them have their way with me. This would go on until Bitto contrived to ‘surprise’ us in the act. Pretending to fly into a rage over the insult of his only daughter, he would lock the men in the house and declare that he would return with others of his family, so that they could together seek the justice they had coming. Naturally, the dupes promised any sort of payment to avoid their fate.

“With this blackmail, and by my ruin, Bitto attained quite a high style of living. That none of the victims suspected that I was no longer innocent I put down to my age—just ten years old—and the foolishness of most men regarding the anatomy of women. With experience, I was able to fool most of them by offering my anus instead, or even a chance to rub themselves between my thighs, so ignorant were they! Yet as the months passed I fell more into despair, for there seemed no way for me to escape the power of this Bitto. And so with my hopelessness I lost my fear, and swore before the gods that I would live to turn the tables on him.

“My opportunity came when I took into my bed an older man named Evaces. This fellow was very pleasing to me, for he was courteous, and wore nice clothes, and seemed to have few vices except for a weakness for young girls. When Bitto sprung his trap, I therefore told Evaces not to concern himself with his rantings, but to trust me instead. When Bitto threatened to get his brothers, I instructed Evaces to call his bluff. Enraged, Bitto tore open the door and pointed a knife at Evaces. At that point, in front of many witnesses on the street, I proclaimed
 
‘I am Evaces’ daughter, not Bitto’s.’ Bitto sputtered and fumed, but could say nothing when the men in the crowd demanded he prove his relation to me; he barred the way for us to escape, but backed down when Evaces threatened to summon a deputy of the Eleven.

“And so I came into the house of Evaces, in which I lived as a concubine until my sixteenth year. When Evaces died of sickness, he made certain to leave three minas to his brother toward the cost of my maintenance. He honored his dying wish for several months, but reneged on his responsibility by claiming that as a freeborn woman I was the responsibility of my family, none of whom I had seen in many years. So instead of returning to the relatives who had sold me into disrepute in the first place, I took what I could from Evaces’ house and went to Corinth. There I learned the finer arts of the only profession left to me.

“Sitting here with you, I know what you must think of me. Yet you should know that I would have had a different fate, had the gods been willing! I think of the girls of Athens today, safe in the strength of your protection, dear King. They will have no need for the arts of women like me. They will never know these depths…”

At this all the men, including myself, leapt to console her, to deny her degradation was permanent. We were lying, of course, well aware of
 
the only real use to which she had availed herself. All of us, that is, with the possible exception of Ptolemy, whose depth of foresight we can only imagine. Did he see her as his queen even then?

“No, it cannot be denied. My future has been sealed by my past—it is too late for me. But I did come here with a thought in my mind, O King, that would go some way toward healing what has been broken. I dare not utter it…”

“Go on, speak,” said Alexander, who could not help but adopt the humility in her tone.

“I look around me,” she said, “and think of the majesty of those who built this place, and of their arrogance, believing that free Greeks would ever bend knee before them. I look, and I think, what an irony it would be, if one of the children they dispossessed took ultimate revenge on their works! A girl of Athens, for instance, with just a torch, could erase the mighty Xerxes from the memories of men. Is that not a thought?”

In an instant, her eyes were back to promising all sorts of diversions, and we men, whipped between desire and pity, were ready to grant her anything. Ptolemy rose from his couch and declared that the time had come to avenge the violation of the temples in Athens and Delphi. Why should it not be a woman who ignites the flames, added Craterus, igniting a guttural belch to punctuate his question. And I must confess, as I looked at Thais sitting there, chewing her lip with girlish anticipation, her eyes softening as they peered through the smoky lamplight, that yes, her suggestion was a thought indeed.

But the only opinion that counted was Alexander’s, and he said nothing. Seeing this, Thais sought to please him with a feat of entertainment even we experienced symposiasts had never seen before. For instead of delivering the usual show—frigging herself, for instance, or blowing a slave—she commenced her tour de force by approaching Bagoas.

The eunuch had been quiet so far. At her display of skill he seemed only to be taking mental notes; at her approach he looked bemused, as if she was wasting her time. That was my assumption, after all! But as she descended to put her lips on his, the act was done with such a tender deliberateness it was like the kiss given in the spring of new love. And it went on, her tongue drawing forth the tongue of Bagoas, her hands leading him to her breast, now miraculously exposed. As their clinch tightened, Bagoas responded as if he were a real man, pulling her chiton off her shoulders, clutching and clasping her. And when she felt the moment had arisen, Thais pulled herself off his lap, and pulling his tunic aside, showed the engorged fruit of her genius.

The rest of us cheered, exclaiming that yes, the divine Thais had indeed aroused a eunuch! And Bagoas, who seemed to see or hear nothing but her, seemed to be speaking to no one when he said, “The Palace of Darius must burn.”

Alexander, awed, drunk, nodded.

Our labor began in the Hall of One Hundred Columns. Torches appeared, and the party stood before the throne and gold-spun tapestries enclosing it. Alexander gave a brand to Thais, invited her to throw it on the cushions. Wisely, she declined.

“To the conqueror goes the honor,” she declared.

The King, who was barely able to keep his feet, threw the first torch. It missed the throne, clattering on the marble floor. With that, Thais rushed forward, retrieved it, and set the tapestries alight. We all cheered again, raising our cups to the conflagration as it climbed the fabric, consumed the canopy, and bit into the painted cedar rafters.

The party had to move when the room filled with smoke. In the courtyard, we saw the Macedonian soldiers running up from their camp with bags of sand, thinking the place had caught fire by accident. But when they saw us standing there, laughing and toasting our handiwork, they rushed off to contribute more fuel. Soon the inferno reached an intensity that the entire terrace was uninhabitable. Darius’s palace went up so fast that Alexander didn’t have time to retrieve his own belongings from the room where he had been sleeping. This was among the many things Alexander regretted about that night, for he lost all his copies of Euripides’ plays in the fire. The ancient armor of Achilles was, alas, saved. But ironically, this was not thanks to any Macedonian or Greek, but to the quick thinking of a Persian slave boy.

This, then, was how the most important city in Asia was destroyed.

XII.

We saw two kinds of settlements as we marched on through Persia. Near the rivers we found villages built out of reeds, ringed with fields of grain, rice, and indigo. These places were often recently abandoned, though whether this was due to the army’s approach or the seasonal travels of the people was difficult to say. In the arid places there were settlements of baked brick that appeared, from a distance, much the same ashen color as the land around them. On closer inspection, however, these villages were full of gardens, cooled by date palm and pipal, their walls shimmering with reflected light from half-shaded pools of sweet water.

Alexander’s army had grown to such a size it filled canyons and passes from end to end. It consumed the miles ahead of it and sloughed back feces, smoke, and Greek-speaking satraps. Anyone could see it coming days ahead, a plume of trail dust hanging over it, and watch it recede for days after, thousands of marching feet laying down long scourges in the earth.

With each parasang beyond Persepolis, beyond Media and the high Zagros, the army had reached territories few Greeks or Macedonians—traveler, soldier or slave—had ever seen. Aristotle’s geographies proved worthless. Ignorant and frightened, the Macedonians glimpsed surpassing weirdness in everything around them. They saw the natives bathing in cow urine and believing themselves clean. They saw men worshipping flame as they wore cloths before their faces, honoring the dead by feeding dogs, holding marriages by firelight that ended with eggs being tossed on roofs.