Chapter 2

He is nothing but sweat and heat and movement. Sand sprays into his eyes as Hephaestion throws him to the ground, but he catches himself, grit digging into his palms. Alexander quickly flips himself upright. Sitting on bales of hay, their friends Telekles and Phrixos cheer loudly.
As the two boys circle each other in the round, sandy training pit, Alex watches Heph closely, the tightening of his jaw, the set of his shoulders, the slight tilt of his stance. Beyond him is a blur of painted canvas targets for spear-throwing and archery. Heart pounding, Alex takes a few steps toward his right, but now the sun is in his eyes, glinting off the pile of heavy, sweaty armor the boys use for weapons training and long distance runs. Squinting, he circles back, noticing the tension in Heph’s arm, watching for any sudden shift of his position.

Alex and Heph charge at each other head on. Heph quickly gets the advantage, throwing his arms around Alex’s back and squeezing tightly. Then he jerks left, right, trying to throw Alex off balance. Heph, more than anyone, knows Alex’s weak spot, his left leg. For years now, Alex has trained his left leg more than his right, hopping on it until it screamed in pain, tying training weights to it and walking for miles.

Alex instinctively dodges to the right and instantly curses himself, realizing this is exactly what Heph wanted. As Heph tosses him onto the sand, he bites his tongue and the coppery taste of blood fills his mouth. Too fast, he chides himself. I react too fast. Weakness, he has learned, isn’t in the leg or arm or back. Weakness is in the mind.

But if Alex is too hasty in a fight, he knows Heph’s weakness, too…

Heph grins, obviously basking in his triumph. His dark eyes—almost as black as his thick, wavy hair—are half closed like a pleased cat who has just caught a mouse.

There it is: Hephaestion’s greatest fault. Pride. It almost got him killed last summer when they joined King Philip’s campaign against marauding Molossian cattle thieves. Heph, riding out in gilded armor on a fine white horse, assumed that barefoot, filthy men with matted beards couldn’t be dangerous. He took on three of them, who almost skewered him alive. Alex had to rescue him.
In a single fluid motion, Alex leaps up, grabs Heph’s head, and pulls him into a headlock. They struggle, and Heph finally manages to slip out of his grasp.

“Come on, ladies,” growls Diodotus, his crooked nose casting an uneven shadow on his scarred face. “The king wants me to train you in wrestling, not dancing.” His hairy shoulders bulge out of his leather breastplate, making him look more like a mountain bear than a grizzled old soldier.
Telekles jumps up and spins while he calls out, “Heph, you’ll shame us all in the arena. Stop twirling!”

Phrixos claps a large hand on Telekles’s shoulder and yanks him back down.
His face a mask of determination, Heph grips Alex’s shoulders. But then he hesitates. “There’s a messeng—”

Alex takes advantage of Heph’s momentary distraction to twist suddenly, throwing all his weight into the move. His arm locks on Heph’s left elbow; his wraps his free arm around Heph’s opposite shoulder, then lifts him off the ground and swings him in a semi-circle, dropping him face forward on the ground. Then he leaps onto his friend’s back and pins him there to the loud guffaws of their friends.

“You win,” says a voice muffled by sand.
Alex smiles. He slides off Heph, who pushes himself up to sitting position, wipes the sand off his face, and points behind Alex. “I was trying to tell you there’s a messenger,” he says, spitting a wad of sand and saliva, clearly annoyed by his defeat.
Alex turns, swiping his tousled blonde hair out of his eyes—he’s got to get it cut—and sees a page boy of about fourteen staring at him, wearing a look of repulsion. No, not staring at him, staring at the scar on his left leg—the long purple mark that has wound around Alexander’s thigh like a snake since birth. He feels the familiar prickling heat of embarrassment spread over his chest, flooding his face, burning the back of his neck. He yanks down the bottom of his tunic which had become caught up in his belt in the fight. Still coursing with adrenaline, he has half an urge to pummel the boy’s narrow face.

But before he can even reprimand him, Alex catches the messenger’s eyes—and then all sounds are silenced; all surrounding light and colors fade.

It’s happening again. That stirring. That knowing. That power he can’t control.

Suddenly he is disembodied, frozen in place, traveling through a tunnel of white light, pulled forward by an unseen force. It’s like he has left his body completely. At the other end of the white tunnel, a small room emerges—it’s somewhere in the palace. He sees a fire pit and smells the smoke wafting up through a hole in the ceiling. A woman is stirring a pot. The boy’s mother. Of course. The father must have died recently—Alex can tell from the sorrowful bend of the woman’s body and the wrinkles in her brow.

A baby coos in a cradle: the boy’s little sister.
And then, Alex is jolted back from the dark room, returning with violent wrenching speed to the present. He finds himself back in his body with the usual unbearable ringing in his ears. The page boy is watching him strangely.

Alex looks around at Heph, at Diodotus, at handsome Telekles and round-faced Phrixos, at the sunbaked tiled roofs of the outbuildings as if he has never seen them before. Everything seems small, dark, and brittle—an elaborate illusion.
He rubs his forehead, frustrated, then raises his eyes, one dark brown, one gray-blue—the startling combination always serves to make people uncomfortable—and stares hard at the page. “What do you want?” When the boy doesn’t immediately respond, he repeats: “What. Are. You. Here. For?”

In a high-pitched voice, the boy says, “A thousand apologies, Sir. Your father wishes to speak to you immediately.”

Alex nods. “Come on, Heph.” His anger has evaporated and with it, his energy. He is suddenly exhausted.

Telekles and Phrixos spring into the pit, eager for a bout. Telekles, who models himself after the Trojan War hero Achilles, keeps his blond hair unfashionably long and his body perfectly sculpted. He dances and wheels around his opponents, confusing them. Phrixos is heavier, stronger, and slower. Usually Alex would stay to watch this amusing match between opponents that remind him of a mongoose attacking an ox, but he needs to hear what his father has to say to him.
On the side of the wrestling pit, Heph picks up his silver cuff and snaps it around his wrist. He puts his torque of twisted silver carefully around his neck, while Alexander tries to repress his impatience.

As Alex and Heph leave the training ground, they pass the stables, chicken coops, and goat pens. They skirt the barracks, a plain two-story wooden structure with small windows, where the palace guards sleep. Black smoke is rising from the smith’s forge next door, where the smith is loudly hammering armaments into shape. They walk up a winding staircase, and down the narrow, dimly lit corridors in the service wing, emerging on the ramparts overlooking Macedon, Philip’s kingdom—the kingdom that will one day belong to Alex—where they pause, leaning on a low wall.
The sandy town of Pella is spread out at the feet of the palace, a grid of straight roads broken by temple plazas. Thick ramparts and bristling towers encircle the town in a stony embrace. The gray walls, coral roofs and olive-brown landscape used to be all the world that Alex knew, but now the view seems dry and crumbling compared to the lush grottoes and lakes of Mieza.

Mieza’s Temple of Nymphs, where Aristotle trained Alex and Heph in matters of logic and strategy for the last three years, was so different—the landscape there a rich, almost glowing green, the sky deep with purples and blues. About two dozen privileged thirteen-to-sixteen year old boys—including Phrixos and Telekles—spent their mornings there learning and their afternoons wrestling, riding, and hunting. In the evenings they held lively discussions of poetry, philosophy, and history.

Then two weeks ago, shortly after Alexander’s sixteenth birthday, came the messenger from King Philip commanding Alex to return home. Then, as now, demanding that Alex run like a child when the King snapped his fingers.

Down on the street, a man driving an empty cart is cursing bitterly, trying to back up his donkey and cart to make way for another vehicle. That’s how it is, Alex thinks. Someone always has to give in.
But not for long.

He has other plans, plans his father doesn’t know about. And if he succeeds, he’ll be the greatest leader this world has ever known.
***
When Alex reaches his father’s office, the guards lower their spears and stand aside, their faces hidden by red-crested helmets with long nose and cheek plates. He knocks.

“Father,” he says to the door, “you wanted to see me.”

“Come!” thunders a deep voice. Slowly, Alex pushes the door open and enters. Heph stays outside until he hears, “Bring that coxcomb of a friend of yours, if you wish!”

Alex senses rather than sees Heph slip into the room and take his place at Alex’s side but a bit behind him. Out of the corner of his eye, Alex notices Heph straightening his tunic and adjusting his belt. Alex smiles inwardly at his friend’s fastidiousness. Just knowing that Heph is beside him gives Alex the strength to face his father.
The room is nothing like the rest of the royal apartments, most of them decorated by his mother. There are no tasseled, silken cushions here, no chubby cupids and pretty maidens on frescoed walls, none of the gauzy curtains Queen Olympias prefers blowing in the breeze, no delicate ebony chairs inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl.
King Philip’s office is as close to a military camp as it can possibly be. He has a cot with a coarse blanket where he usually sleeps. There are a few crude stools and folding camp chairs and tables. War trophies—swords, axes, spears, and bloody flags—hang from unpainted walls.

Wearing an old blue tunic and a scarred leather belt, Philip stands looking down at a table covered with papers as one of his advisors, Euphranor, a small man with a gray beard, stands nearby to read him the words he cannot read himself. Though the letter in front of Philip is upside down to Alex, even from a distance of several feet he can read out the large heading: From the Aesarian High Lord Mordecai to King Philip II of Macedon, warm greetings. We ride tomorrow to Pella for the games and further discussions on that urgent matter which we hope…

Alex wrenches his gaze away from the letter as he feels the king’s single eye—a glowing, reddish-brown—fix on him. Long ago, before Alex was born, Philip lost the other one on the point of an enemy sword.

A Cyclops, Alex thinks. He looks just like the one-eyed creatures with unnatural strength and brutish intelligence who all disappeared long ago, as so many strange beings had: the flying horses, the women with snakes for hair, the sprites of springs and forests, the bare-breasted sirens who combed their long golden hair on rocks and sang sailors to their death. Olympias insists that Philip wear a black silk eye patch when he is in public, but when he is alone he pushes it off impatiently. Now the empty socket and the lumpy scar that runs through his eyebrow like a lightning bolt are visible.
Philip sits down heavily in a leather folding chair and bangs his favorite mug on the table. It was once the skull of the enemy who speared Philip’s eye. A year after the incident, the king went back, killed the man, cut off his head, boiled the skin off, scooped the brains out, and had the sawn-off skull silver-plated. Amethysts glow darkly from the eye sockets.

A young male slave jumps forward with a pitcher of wine and pours it into the skull. The king drinks greedily, slams the mug down again, and wipes his graying beard with the back of his hand. “Though it has been well over a decade since the Aesarian Lords have visited Pella, they are growing in power. I’ve invited them here for a demonstration of their might. This is our opportunity to show that we refuse to cower to their arrogant threats and fear-mongering about magic.” Here, the king snorts in disgust. “Shortly thereafter, I leave with my army to Byzantium. The oligarchs are not keeping the terms of our alliance. They’re flirting with Persia. They can’t have it both ways. In my absence, you are my regent.”

From the corner of his eye, Alex sees Heph nod. This is what they were expecting when the summons came to return from Mieza.

Alex nods. “As you wish.”

“It is as I wish. But don’t worry.” Philip waves his large hand as if he’s swatting a gnat. “My Council will be in control as they always are when I’m at war. The people will feel safe with my son on the throne. But, Alexander,” he says, fixing his eye on his son, “don’t disappoint me.”

Alex feels the irritation rising despite his best efforts to remain calm. It’s exactly as he feared. No responsibility. An empty honor. A joke. It’s worse than having no honor at all. He completed his three years’ training at the Academy with the highest praise from his teachers—who were notoriously unbiased, even when it came to the king’s son. And yet his father is still treating him like a child. While Philip is off once again botching alliances and having his way with mistresses, Alex will be a puppet on a throne. In that position there isn’t anything he could do to disappoint his father.
It’s because of his weak leg, it has to be. It’s one thing for an accomplished soldier to bear scars, and another for a young man, still green when it comes to battle, to have such a blatant imperfection. He’s worked so hard to hide it, most people in Macedon don’t even know about it. Philip must be worried that people will discover his heir is a cripple, and everyone knows physical deformity is a punishment sent by angry gods. No one wants a regent—or, heaven forbid, a king—despised by the immortals.

He opens his mouth to object but suddenly his mother sweeps into the room on a wave of perfume and rustling purple silks. Alex sees that her slender feet are encased in amethyst-studded sandals of silver leather shaped like meandering snakes.

“My son would never fail at anything,” she says sweetly, “although some of the king’s other children might.” Olympias barely tolerates the many children of palace maidservants, cooks, and laundresses who bear a striking resemblance to King Philip.

Philip’s philandering always baffled Alexander, given Olympias’ beauty. With her silver-blond hair, wide emerald eyes, and perfect white teeth, he understands why his father married her, the dowerless daughter of the shabby king of rocky Epirus. How old must she be now? Thirty-six? Most women that age have run to fat and wrinkles, lost teeth, and have gray streaks in their hair.
Reaching up—it seems to Alex she has gotten shorter in his absence—Olympias runs a bejeweled hand over her son’s head and says, “Did you know we are having a feast tonight to celebrate your regency? It’s a great honor.”

Alex is silent. An honor? More like an insult. He should probably walk away before he tells them what he really thinks about it.

“We’re roasting two cows and three sheep,” she says to Philip. “I’ve arranged to have the magician, the lute player, and the girl acrobats. We’ll open up the best amphorae of Chian wine,” she finishes.
Alex needs to get out of the room immediately. The walls seem to be closing in on him. “With your permission,” he mutters, and turns to go.

“Wait!” Philip commands, and Alex reluctantly turns back around. “I have other news. I’ve made plans for you, my boy.” His wide grin reveals his cracked and missing teeth.

Olympias gives her husband a look. “Not yet,” she hisses. “Now’s not the time.”

The king cocks an eyebrow. “Are you contradicting me?”

She bats her long black lashes caked in kohl. “Please, Philip.”

Philip pauses, then turns to his son. “Very well. You may go,” he booms, making a dismissive movement with his hand.

Alex and Heph walk in silence down black marble hallways to their wing of the palace. Alex can’t stop the powerful sense of urgency pulsing through his veins. He and Heph need to act on their plans. Now.

In the corridor outside their bedroom doors, Alex hesitates. He hates his own room, which his mother has enlarged and redecorated in his absence. His gilded bed is so high he could practically pole-vault onto it, and wide enough to sleep an entire family. He particularly hates the life-sized marble statues throughout the room, gaudily painted with pink skin and gold hair and blue robes, staring at him with unseeing eyes.

“Your room,” he says to Heph. They enter through a small door next to Alex’s large double doors. The minute Alex is inside he feels comforted by the coziness, the simplicity. Heph’s room is small, with a floor of brown glazed tiles and a single square window. The walls are painted ochre; the low bed in the corner has a plump mattress stuffed with straw. The only luxury is the bronze mirror on the wall.

Heph sits down at the small olive-wood table in front of the window. “So,” he says, “regent.”

“It’s hollow,” Alex snaps, joining him at the table. “He made it clear I’ll have no power. Plus, there’s something worse coming, Heph. This other thing he has planned for me…”
Heph looks at Alex curiously.

“I think he’s found me a wife,” Alex says.

Heph bursts out laughing.

“Seriously. They are going to throw some ugly princess into my bed as part of a military alliance. And I can see my mother is already distressed at the idea of competition within the palace.”

“Do you think they’ve picked that lady from Crete?” Heph says, trying to keep a straight face and failing.

“Ah yes, Princess Demetria, shaped like a boulder and sporting such a lovely moustache.”

Heph cracks up again. “Or Princess Thetima…”

“Of Corinth, right. The one who smells like a goat and has the worst case of acne I’ve ever seen.” Alex can’t help but start to laugh, too.

“But maybe it’s Artemisia,” Heph suggests hopefully, allowing the name to linger on his lips.
Alex recalls the tall, blond princess of Samos, the symmetry of her face, the soft curves of her body. Getting stuck with that wouldn’t be so bad. But Alex knows what beautiful women are like—dangerous. The rivalry and jealousy with his mother alone would make palace life completely unbearable. He knows there are whole countries that go to war just so the kings and noblemen can get a break from their wives.

He clears his throat. It’s funny for Heph—because it’s not Heph’s life they’re joking about. “Whoever it is,” he says, leaning forward, “I have no intention of sticking around the palace to be made a fool of, not by the phony regency and not by some ridiculous marriage. We’ll go east like we discussed.” Even as he says it, he knows that it’s what he has to do. “But sooner than we thought. As soon as we can get everything we need for the journey. Where did you put the map?”

Heph immediately gets serious and moves to the bed, kneeling down and counting four tiles from the leg. He removes the tile, thrusts his hand into the darkness below, and brings out a fragile scroll, which he carefully unrolls across the table.
Together they lean over the faded, brittle document, drawn on ancient animal skin. Alex reaches out a hand to touch it, remembering the first time he saw it a few months earlier, when he and Heph were exploring a cave near Mieza. It wasn’t their first; they spent much of their free time in the foothills of the mountains hunting and camping out. They found ancient temples with fallen columns, abandoned villages covered in vines and brush, and other caves littered with bones, broken pottery, and charcoal hearths long cold.

This cave, however, had been different. As they entered, torches held high, they saw an altar of sorts at the far end, and above it a giant painted eye, almond shaped, kohl-lined, the iris shockingly blue. On top of the altar was a vase so ancient it bore no bearded warriors or lithe maidens in swirling skirts, just jagged, primitive lines of paint. It was, Alex could tell right away, a vase from the time when the gods still walked the earth. He had found the scroll nestled inside the vase. Bearing it carefully back into the sunshine, he and Heph unfurled it, frowning at the archaic language. It took some time, but they finally deciphered it.

Now, Alex puts a finger on the ancient lettering indicating Macedon’s capital, and traces the route. From Pella, they would take a ship across the sea and land at Apasa. Then it would be only a few days’ walk inland until they reached Sardis, the beginning of the Royal Road. They’d use it until they got to Cappadocia, where they could veer off the road and swing up into the Eastern Mountains. His finger stops above a faded mark: the Fountain.
Alex stares at the description: Fountain of Youth, Well of the Gods, providing physical healing and spiritual power to all who drink of it.

Heph puts his own finger down on another line of faded writing. “And there, guarding the fountain, are the Spirit Eaters, whoever they are.” Heph glances at Alex. “Whatever they are.”

“Heph, it’s not supposed to be easy,” Alex says. “It’s a quest.” Even the word is exciting. “If it was easy it wouldn’t be meaningful.” He nudges his friend. “Then the poets would never write songs about us.”

Heph moves to the window and looks out over orange glazed roof tiles. “Who will be running Macedon if the regent has disappeared?”

“The same people who always do when Father is off mindlessly killing people: the Council of State and Leonidas, with my mother interfering as much as possible.”

Heph passes a hand through his black hair, turning back to face Alex. “Two Greeks, in the middle of the Persian Empire.”

“We know good conversational Persian,” Alex says, thinking about all those years with tutors learning the strange barbarian language.

“With a thick accent,” Heph counters. “And how will we get the money for travel? I think I’ve got two drachmas to my name, and I doubt you have more than twenty.”

Alex feels a pang of bitterness. Of course he hasn’t forgotten their lack of funds, and he resents that his friend thinks he has. How could he forget Leonidas’s tightfisted ruling over the royal treasury? The old man is convinced that gold is one of the greatest corrupters of young minds, and refuses to give the prince—or any of the other young royals at court—access to the coffers.

But it’s more than that—Hephaestion simply doesn’t need this like Alex does. He doesn’t need the fountain’s healing waters. His body is perfect already. And he doesn’t have the pressure on him that Alex has. He doesn’t understand.

But still, he has a point. Money, even for the prince regent, is always a problem. “Good thing the tournament is in a few days, and we’ve been training the past three years.”

Heph shakes his head. “You actually expect me to win the prize money?”

“You know I would do it if I could.” As a prince, Alex can’t fight in the Blood Tournament himself. He’s supposed to be impartial, supervising the fighting from the royal balcony. “And yes, I do expect you to win. You’re the best fighter I know.” Alex closes his left eye and says, imitating his father’s booming voice, “But Hephaestion… don’t disappoint me.”

Heph laughs. “I won’t,” he says. But his face becomes serious again as he stares at his burgundy wool cloak, which he always keeps neat and free of wrinkles, hanging from a wooden peg on the wall next to the door. Alex knows he is looking at a day long past when he fought a warrior more than twice his size, a day that cut his life in two pieces: before and after.

Alex stands up and puts a hand on Heph’s shoulder. “You did what you had to then,” he says quietly, “just as you will at the tournament.” 

***

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