Archive of Our Own

They wed her to a man whose name she cannot pronounce. A great man, they tell her—her hawk-eyed grandmother—her Baba—and her uncle Oxathres—a general, and a noble, and the Grand Vizier. The new Great King’s favourite, says Stateira, and that means greater things, and they will be allowed to stay together. A handsome man, gushes an eunuch, eulogising their husbands-to-be, the handsomest among the Greeks. She nods and smiles through all of it, obedient and modest and everything everyone expects her to be, and seething with a temper that her long-dead father would have been proud to have. They’re marrying her to a soldier, a brute, a barbarian, and she cannot even pronounce his name.

They’re doing the same to Stateira, but nobody—not even she—can guess whether there is any anger beneath her glowing smile; the way she blushes when Alec… Al’sk… the Great King is mentioned, seems real enough. Perhaps it is real and she truly wants to marry the man who took all their father’s lands and wealth and crowns, even if he didn’t take his life. She does not wish to wed his helper.

But she does, of course, and the man who becomes her husband owns a face she would have noticed among her own people, but only for its beauty. But he is still a barbarian, and her hand is cold in his as they leave the tent, and her heart is fast in her breast.

Her maids prepare her, and settle her, like a statue, like a doll, on her bed, and surround her with pillows, and she sits, crouches, there, alone and still, till the door opens and her husband enters her room. Some quick fear—she was nine, at Issos, and the screams of the women less fortunate than she still resound in her nightmares—makes her struggle to her feet, ready for whatever horror faces her.

But he simply stands before her, this tall soldier with blue eyes and scars scoring his arms and no beard to hide his face and prove his manhood. Stands still as one of her father’s Immortals—she was a child, then, and they had not always been still around her—, as if he knows she is as ready to flee as a frightened deer. And slowly, while she watches him and he her, the tension that has stiffened her spine and held her shoulders stiff under her heavy clothes, leeches out and when he holds his hand out to her, she puts her hand in his, ivory fingers curling over the back of his, and feels the warmth of his callused skin heat hers. He draws her to the bed and with the first touch of his skin to hers—large hand cupping her face, his lips on her forehead in a strangely gentle kiss—she grows afraid again, for a man is a man, and what man puts a stranger’s pleasure before his own?

Needless fear, for this man—soldier, brute, barbarian—handles her like he knows how sixteen-year-old virgins must be dealt with, and even the sharpest pain of the night fades away when she wakes to his smile and kiss and whispered greeting. Morning has come and gone, and it is noon, almost, when he slips from her room. Stateira, who has been awake and alone for hours, slips in before she is presentable, and laughs at her confusion.

They stay a month at Susa, the Great King and his men, and she grows used to the man she had not wished to wed. He proves a strange husband—and nothing proper at all, Anahita giggles—he invades her rooms at all hours, treats her eunuchs like men, and terrorises her maids, and scandalises everyone, one afternoon, by shooing away the girl who was dressing her hair—no husband comes to his wife at high noon, it is most improper—and twisting its great length into a deft braid—two elder sisters, he explains later, laughing, and he enough the younger to be ordered around. A very improper husband, who, for all his great care in bed, seem to possess no idea of what a wife is and must be treated like, and merely behaves as he would—she thinks—were she a friend. If there are others at Susa, who, had they seen the small gifts and kindnesses he offers her, would have perhaps told her that he was only echoing—and that imperfectly—what he had done when she was an infant, she does not know them and they do not see it, and she grows, not happy, but content with her husband.

Had Stateira been unhappy, she would have held her tongue easily, and told no tales, and joined her sister in cursing these Greek barbarians. But Stateira, too, is content, and that makes it harder to smile and stay silent, and not say, “My husband is no Great King, but him I would have chosen, were he a Persian lord, and never yours—small and golden and boy-like—and he is not coldly kind, like yours, nor awkward; and wholly mine, and yours has a wife already, my sister, and that eunuch who people say went from our father’s bed to his. I would not have your husband, sister, who must cut your chair short, mine can look me in the eye.” She says nothing, and does nothing, of course, for what man wishes to be unmanned in this thing, or any thing, by his inferiors? But it is hard, nonetheless, to say nothing.

He comes to her the last day—the morning of the last day, not, as she had thought, the night—and says many things of no importance at all, and gives her belly side-long glances, and is civil to her maids till they falter and Anahita glares at her, and picks up ornaments and moves them, and tugs a hanging askew, and finally, when her household is in a frenzy that will take her all morning to calm, asks her whether she can read. Before she can grow indignant—he knows her temper, already, as she knows how deep and threatening his voice can sound—he adds that he wishes to inquire after her Greek, because he will, otherwise, have to re-learn Persian. He would write to her, he says, and wishes no scribe’s interference.

The letters, when they come, are in the Greek his Great King has had taught to Stateira and her, and there is nothing in them that she cannot show, or tell, Stateira or her Baba, and written almost as much to them as to her. He had gone up the Tigris valley to Opis, while Alexander had sailed up the river. There had been trouble, says another letter—in his own hand, no scribe writes this carelessly—there had been trouble with the men, but they had come around, they always did—they loved him, Alexander, and the Queen Mother and Princess Stateira should pay no heed to any rumours that said otherwise—he knew she never would. The Satrap of Media had brought them half-naked women tricked out as soldiers, comes borne in a letter full of things unsaid. An improper letter to write to a wife, and for reasons other than the women, and she hears rumours, whether or not she believes them, and Baba receives a letter from her uncle Oxathres that says her husband the Chilliarch has exchanged no smiling words with his Great King, long days now. One letter speaks only of the conquests the Great King—Al’skander, Stateira says—has planned, and what great things they will do, and what great sights they will see, and how he will be in Babylon soon—they are summering at Ekbatana, as Great Kings should—and she must come to him there. A joyful letter, this, and she knows that the quarrel he has never mentioned must be over.

The next letter, when it comes, is in a scribe’s hand, for her husband—Hephaistion, he had taught her, his mouth on hers—is dead.