Work Text:
Roxane
With malicious baited breath they told her of his death, looked sidewards under swept down lids as though to gauge her grief, to add credence to their supposition of fault.They clothed the feet that had danced for him in her father's house, thrust rings on the hand he had claimed his own, veiled the heart that he had never managed to seize. He had been a brave man, as it was measured, she supposed, and a measure of that lived on through her pleasure, alien land claimed within her, ceded through right of conquest - never granted. The mountains were harsh, every daughter born knew her duty. It had not been to him that she had bent the knee, she wept not now for bargains gone awry, a body used as a bartering piece and at last reclaimed. Grief she painted on, a nod to decorum. Around her lamentation sounded - she could not tell the true from the false and did not know if the flaw was in her - the same full throated roar given as an acknowledgement and a sorrow.
Olympias
Ever after she felt in the secret place of her heart, that she had known the moment he had expired. She carried that secret close and well - as she had carried him for nine scorned months that he had accounted reckoned for with jewelry heaped at her feet and power hard-won, hard-kept that she had hoarded for him, greedy for her son. She felt it like a piercing wound, a mirrored birth from which death crawled forth, a formless horror that devoured her sleep. Yet, part of her triumphed - she had endured beyond his death, the well had not run dry. If Alexander had died, so too had the last of Phillip - into the fire had gone what he had claimed was his, that which he had stamped with his stamp - tried to claim what had belonged to her, and the god who'd touched Alexander with the strange sacred burden that she'd sought to carry at his side. If inside her, a wound had been torn, she would not mourn with weak show of frailty, but stand tall and show once again the antecedents of his birth, secrets stoppered up in her silent mouth.
Stateira II
Her mother grieved they said, shut herself up in halls of the gold that Alexander had gifted her as though in recompense for the unsung bridal price with which Stateira had been sold into his keeping. Grief she had mouthed, and even felt, a slow, creeping thread of fear - the grief of a woman who, seized in pride as a piece upon a gameboard, had accepted her fate. She mourned in him, the lost buried days of love that he had taken to the grave, the disappearance of hope. She had played her part, he had played his, could she look on him as other than a man who had played at love and died for it as well. This at least she did mourn - that he had died in a manner unbefitting. She, who with numb wondering hands had traced the broken strange skin of a soul housed too close to the world could have hoped for him who had stolen her first death, an end that would have satisfied the unquenchable urge to glory that he had had, and yet rendered unto her the tithe of blood that in the depths of her she claimed as her own - the payment for the marriage sheets.
Sisygambis
They said of her that she loved Alexander like a son. She had borne sons and seen them die - life and blood were not so precious, it seemed to her who had lost too much. When they called him her son, she thought of what she raised those children to be. Not for death in battle, nor ignonimous defeat, a cloak covered face before the horde, but a living breathing king. She buried first one, then the other, and set her hopes in the rising sun, not the setting. But all trust put in idols was doomed to fail, and this one she had gilded gold like the lion they said was stamped upon his mother’s womb. She had raised him high and he had caught the last rays of light, and she had dared to hope to find in him, the virtues lacking in the sons of her body. If she could, by fierce will have kept the terror of death from his animated soul-lost corpse, she would have called it fair to set her own life in that balance, knowing then what came. The death of Alexander the King, she grieved for the kingdom, at the death of Alexander she set her face to the wall, knowing this her last child of conquered name had fallen, and that darkness waited beyond these walls.
Unwritten inscription of an unknown woman.
I did not know him, I had no cause nor will to love him. The gold they say he was touched with was bought with blood as such gold always is. He trod this soil or at least some length of it - they say he passed by here on this road, and indeed I saw it. I knelt in the dust that his black horse raised, in the dry sandy soil - arid and old, it raises little but the people who tend it. The taste was bitter in my mouth and the water polluted where they passed, the springs muddied and fouled from where they drank, and their horses walked.
The names of those who went with him are forgotten now, swallowed by memory. It has been long enough that I forget the faces of my sons, I forget even the sounds of their names in my mouth. I forget if they followed or faced him. The borders are weak, time fades remembrance. Did they die with his name as a battlecry? Or was it wrenched from them as an acknowledgement of defeat. I do not mourn him.