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When they were students in Mieza, they would visit a village that had a fete four times a year to mark the beginning of each season. Aristotle would allow them to attend the one in summer, though sometimes also spring, and would make them write a report afterward. One time, he made them write an observation about the people. Another time, they had to look at the different things on offer, or how commerce was handled. There were good entertainment and good food to be found there, and they always returned to their dormitories at sundown in good spirits.
One time, Hephaistion found himself separated from Perdiccas, his task partner, when a gaggle of ducks cut through them. The ducks and the harried duck herd had caught his attention, and when he looked up, he could not find his friend.
The sun was barely up in the sky, though, so there would be time for him to catch up. So he decided to amble around, trying to avoid the early morning crowd. He came upon a little tent that looked more like a piece of sheet thrown over sticks, and saw a woman in it, sitting on a finely woven mat in the shade of it. There was a potters merchant to her left, and another tent of unknown wares being put up to the right.
There's smoke and incense coming out of the woman's tent, and she had the demeanor of a soothsayer. When he drew closer, he could see rows of dried herbs and crushed things lining up against one side of the tent and along the back of it. There's a low table on the other side of the tent, with metal vessels on it and underneath it. He hurried past her, as he did not intend to learn about his future at this time. When he first arrived at Mieza, he had promised himself to live for the present.
He ended up sitting in front of her. His back to the market beyond, and his eyes firmly held by her depthless eyes. A few strands of white hair had fallen across her eyes, like a scar from a sword wound.
She introduced herself as a gifted herbalist, and saw that perhaps he would benefit from her knowledge. She knew that he was one of the students of a great philosopher over at Mieza. Would he perhaps like to learn some useful recipes? She didn't have a cup in her hands, merely pointing to the different pots of herbs she had. Mixtures for strength, for fevers, mixtures for wounds, salves that could be diluted for internal wounds as well. She didn't wait for him to take them all down, but knew that he would remember.
Conversationally, she told him that he was very good looking. That either he would be very blessed, or that he would be very cursed. She told him that there's a cup for that too. A mix of herbs that could tell him about his fortunes. He told her that he had not the mind to entertain seers or soothsayers these days.
She laughed at him and told him that she didn't really believe it herself, but it was more of a fun exercise to pass the time. And it would be a very pleasant-tasting cup, which could uplift his spirit, she said all the while picking grains and leaves and petals so quickly he didn't have time to recognize them all.
She poured warm water and rocked the cup side to side and in a circle to mix it well. It indeed smelled quite nice. With a skeptical eye, he sipped carefully and had to admit that she was not lying about the taste. It was very light on his tongue, despite the sheer number of things he saw being put inside it. It was fragrant but not cloying, and it made him think about the wide open pastures and adventures.
In one long take, he drank everything, and the cup had scarcely left his mouth that she snatched it off his hand. Astonished, he watched her overturn the cup with quite a force over a bronze basin that had turned green over time. She tapped the cup once, then twice, and placed it carelessly on the low table next to her. It wobbled a bit, then stilled.
It made an odd sound that made him smile and he saw that she smiled with him. Then she looked down again, and suddenly her smile faded, replaced by a fearful look that sent a cold spear through his heart. What might possibly be wrong?
There was a burgeoning silence, even the market behind him sounded very far away. The way the basin was angled meant that he could not see what she saw. But even if he could, he knew it would just be a mystery to him.
It felt like a long time before she finally looked up, and a smile slid into place again on her face. She took a long look at his pale face and the sighed noisily, "Do not grieve, for love is written for you."
She watched as his face turned rapidly crimson. Ah love indeed. "The love of your heart will become your whole world," she continued, quietly as she studied his face.
"That's nice," he said, in a whisper, almost as though he was speaking to himself. "Why were you so distressed previously? Surely a love that's strong and good is something to cherish!" He breathed it out as any young man in the throes of young love, oblivious to the yawning abyss of all the things that came with love.
"You are doomed to never settle," she said after some hesitation. "You'll travel ocean after ocean, and..."
"Oh!" his exclamation cut her speech. "I know that already. It's so Alexander, isn't it? I know that we'll stray far from home. He wants to go to Persia, you see. And then further forward, even. Farther than his ancestor Achilles had ever gone. We'll see the lands that Dionysus visited, and..."
"You will die, in war." You will die for naught, she didn't say. She saw vultures.
"Then it will be a hero's death," he said with an odd timbre of conviction often only heard from an optimist or a fool. She had heard that they were not just teaching philosophy and herbs up the hill, but also that they would turn boys into soldier-statesmen. "Alexander is always going on about Achilles, that's his ancestor. Achilles and Patroclus. That's how he dreamed us to be. Patroclus died first, you know. And to die for love, it isn't so bad."
She shook her head; her heart distressed. This boy, it seemed, could not be made to understand what a love like his would do to him. She looked down at the scatter of herbs and leaves in the basin. They were already shriveling in the heat, drying out. The omens looked even worse to her eyes.
But the boy... The boy! She sighed. So radiant now as if something had been lifted off his shoulders.
"I was unsure, before, you know," he said, with a wistful voice. "His father had been putting more pressure on him, his mother too. Responsibilities. And everything else that comes with being Alexander. I was doubting my place. Doubting everything."
She really should tell him, exactly what she read. But his happiness was so bright and all-encompassing that she did not want to take away his joy. And hadn't she told him before that the leaves were just a bit of fun? And perhaps he could pray to the Fates and that the gods would be kind.
She thought to try again to warn him but she hadn't the time. The boy suddenly spun around in his seat. She was about to ask what happened when she saw another boy running toward her tent from the far side of the market field.
"That's Alexander," the boy turned back to face her and said with a smile more radiant if possible. "Oh I love him so!" And suddenly like a drunk person, he clambered onto his feet, hand trying to grab onto the money pouch that swayed at his waist.
She looked down to the basin once again and flinched away. The other boy, whose hair gleamed like the sun, was already close to the tent, so swift was his run.
"You don't have to pay me," she said quickly. "Think of it as a gift," she added, weakly and full of guilt. But the boy did not notice, his wide smile grew impossibly brighter.
"Oh thank you! Thank you!" he told her, and he stepped out of the tent into the welcoming light. "Health to you, madam!" he called, body already angled toward his friend. "Oh Alexander! You wouldn't believe what I've been told!"
She watched them walk away, the boy's chatter about the great adventures awaiting the two of them. The boy's friend turned his body around enough to look at her and she found him smiling and nodding at her in respect.
She looked down to her lap, her basin, and the boy's auguries. She hoped that she had interpreted it wrongly, but she knew it was correct and it left her with the bitter taste of guilt.
Perhaps it was fate. One day, she fell in love with a soldier, and she followed him all the way to the East. One day, she remembered the boy she had met a long time ago in a market near Mieza and marvelled at it.
The boy had grown up to be a general, and his Alexander was the King himself.
She witnessed their life unfold, if not with her own eyes, then through camp rumors that reached her ears. What she saw and heard made her remember of her guilt.
There were times when she wondered whether life would turn out differently for the two of them if she had told the whole truth instead of holding back.
She wondered whether the blue-eyed boy would even hear her words, as giddy with idealistic dreams and drunk on newfound love as he had been.
Here, in India, she felt as much removed from that idyllic little village and its sun-drenched world.
She came upon the King by accident, at dawn. It was still dark on the dense forest floor that she didn't even see the Royal Bodyguards guarding the perimeter, and neither did they see her.
Realizing who she almost ran into, she retreated quickly with her basket of washing. Rumors had spread like bogfire through the camp over the night--two generals fighting and the king's great ire.
Though, in this dim light, the king didn't look so angry to her. He looked lost. She thought of shadows playing tricks.
"I remember you," he spoke in a low voice.
She had heard of the King's great memory of people's faces, that he never forgotten a name or a face. "Yes, a long time ago, at a marketplace."
"You told him about the adventures that we would embark on. He was so happy that day." His gaze softened, even as the day grew brighter through the canopy. He looked like his mind was elsewhere, perhaps a sunnier place, a more carefree existence.
India, she had long decided, she would hold no love for. This land of rain and heat felt like a place where dreams came to die.
"It was the happiest I've seen him," he spoke, oblivious to her thoughts. He paused, like he had difficulty swallowing. "Before or since."
"He found love that day, or a confirmation of one. It gave him great joy," she offered lamely, not knowing what he wanted of her.
The king, victor of many battles, even against those great house-sized beasts with tree trunks for legs, looked entirely defeated. He shook his head vigorously. "It seems all I ever give him is grief."
She saw a challenge in his eyes, shining brightly in the dim light. He dared her to defy him, to say that he was wrong, to call him a liar. "I had never seen a cup like his cup," she said, with a lift of her chin. "I had never seen grief that resembled his grief."
"It is not easy, to love a king," she said, in hindsight.
He looked stricken. She pressed on. "He found love that day. Has it left him?"
She looked away from him, not waiting for an answer, nor hoping for one. She cast her gaze down to the soggy, leaf-strewn forest floor. There's a voice at the back of her mind, urging her to tell the King what she had read all those years ago. She ruthlessly shut it down; what she knew, and what she had never told, was not his to know.
She heard a rustling of leaves and frantic footsteps. She fancied that she knew where the King was hurrying to.
When she looked up again, it was truly morning.
The next time she saw the King was in Ecbatana. The King had ordered a grand pyre, a marvel of architecture and vision. And when it was lit, it burned so brightly that she imagined it visible all the way to India, and perhaps beyond.
It took a long time for the flames to die, for the mighty and scorching blaze to turn into stubborn embers.
The king stood alone, as the mourners left one by one now that they had done their duty. She did not dare to approach, merely watched from afar, outside the circle made by the king's own guards.
He turned suddenly and saw her. He strode up to her in such a purposeful manner that fear struck her heart.
She took a step back and he stopped an arm's span from her.
"I remember you," he told her, voice scratchy from smoke, red-eyed, reminiscent of a day gone by.
She nodded stiffly and found that smoke had gotten to her throat too. "Yes, at a marketplace," she replied as she once did. "And in that forsaken jungle." Back then, there were do-overs.
Back then, she hadn't looked him in the eye. This time she stood her ground, though she flinched at the wildness that came alight in his eyes. Perhaps, standing so close to the funeral pyre had heated her blood enough to be reckless. "I had thought it was a mistake at first, but as true as love had been written for him, so too was his doom.
"I told him, his path would never allow him to settle, that his love would be his whole world. That he would travel from ocean to ocean..."
"I remember," Alexander said in a whisper, but she's now too emboldened to care. Back then, it had sounded like an adventure.
"I saw it, I read it, I interpreted it. I thought I made a mistake, but now I've seen it, I know it to be true," her voice went from strength to strength, as she spoke of the terrible truths she had seen in shriveled up leaves and chopped flowers. She saw in his eyes the need to absorb all the things she had glimpsed on that bright morning.
She saw in his demeanor the need to torment himself with the terrible fate love had condemned them to. That he would make her words both his agony and his absolution.
There had been rumors about the King proclaiming his general as himself, that they were one soul in two bodies, and she had dismissed and disregarded it out of hand. Now, she saw something that bloomed like a new revelation. That the general's grief was also the King's own, had always been.
New knowledge had a way to give people reckless motivation. Her words came out like the monsoon-swollen Indus; or the Hydaspes that swept past his defenses and tore down every wall. Truth laid thick, cold and unyielding like the snow-capped peaks of Hindu Kush. Unfettered after all these long years, reality set in unrelenting.
Alexander watched helplessly as a gust of night wind picked up ash, hurrying away with more pieces of his beloved.
With the woman's every word, his dream fell like twigs that snapped and crumbled under the tree-like limbs of Porus's hundred-elephant cavalry. There would be no quarter given, no where to hide, as they had all been under the cruel gaze of the sun over Gedrosia.
Alexander knew it now, as surely as though it was sketched directly upon his flesh, that Eros's arrows had been as painful to Hephaistion as the ones that came to himself in Malli.
Would he have spared his beloved's pain, if he had known back then? He doubted it. Back then, they had felt invincible. Even now, broken and lost, he doubted he still would. He knew he could not.
He beseeched her to end his torment that lay upon his heart like a poisoned cloak.
"He knew all these." She told him a little white lie.
"Yet he still followed you." A prayer.
"Death is worth it, if it's for the one you love."
A cold mistress was Truth, and dawn gave no reprieve.