The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi (46 page)

“Like ourselves, sir,” I replied.

“We will be walking in his very footsteps. From Gaugamela, across the Zagros Mountains to Baghdad,” — he paused — “and from there to the edge of the world,” he added.

Which gave me the courage to ask the question that had been on my mind for many days: “And what of our expedition, sir? Will we continue in his footsteps beyond Baghdad?”

“After Baghdad?” You can see eagerness in a man’s eyes as easily as you can see fear or love. Clearly the prospect held more than a little charm for him. He smiled a smile that I can only describe as mischievous. “After Baghdad?” he repeated. “Who can say?”

On that note the interview ended, and I repaired to my tent to spend the night with Arrian, Quintus Curtius, and good old Plutarch — in preparation for my turn as a battlefield guide.

Oh, if Mama could only see me now!

Love,

D.

44

GAUGAMELA

From: Danilo del Medigo at Gaugamela

To: Judah del Medigo at Topkapi Palace

Date: November 3, 1534

Dear Papa:

This day I accompanied the Sultan to Gaugamela to lead him through the events of the battle on the very ground on which it was fought. As always, the Sultan’s baggage train went ahead to prepare a resting tent and an eating tent for him at the battlefield. But no beds. This was a day trip like a day of hunting. But here we were hunting for echoes of the distant past. How best, I wondered, to prepare the Sultan for his return to the world of Alexander? Immediately I thought of Mama’s way of introducing me to history. Why not try to rekindle his interest by telling him a story? So as we rode I told him about the exchange between Alexander and his father’s general, Parmenio, on the eve of the battle at Gaugamela. Old stuff to you, Papa, but it was new to the Sultan and I admit I did enjoy delivering it, making sure, as Mama had taught me, not to burden him with too many facts.

I simply explained that by the time Alexander reached Hamedan, he had overrun Darius’ army at Issus and had seized the great king’s mother, wives, and daughters along with thousands of prisoners. The wealth of these ancient Persians was unimaginable. Even after his army was decimated, Darius returned to the fray from his eastern empire within a few months, leading a full fighting force complete with elephants and scythed chariots.

But first, honor demanded that he rescue his women. Twice, he sent messengers to Alexander to offer money and land in exchange for them. Twice, he was refused. The third time Darius offered Alexander all his territories west of the Euphrates, plus thirty thousand talents as ransom for his women and the hand of one daughter in marriage.

A long-standing member of Alexander’s close council, Parmenio observed that dragging around all the prisoners they had acquired — not to mention feeding them — was a great expense, so why not ransom the lot and have done with it?

“If I were Alexander,” Parmenio concluded, “I should accept the offer from King Darius.”

“So should I,” answered Alexander, “if I were Parmenio. But” — he paused to make his point — “I am Alexander. I need no money from Darius. Nor do I need to receive a part of the country in place of the whole. This country and all its treasures are already mine. If I choose to marry his daughter, I will marry her if he gives her or not. But let him stand warned: Asia can no more support two monarchs than the earth can exist between two suns.”

When Darius received this reply, he withdrew all proposals and began to prepare for battle.

This is the story I told the Sultan as we rode to the plain where the two kings faced each other for the last time. In less than a three-hour ride from Hamedan we were standing in Alexander’s footsteps on the low ridge of hills above the village of Gaugamela. And from that vantage we replayed the battle with me echoing Arrian’s description of Alexander’s crucial victory. Just as the Gordian seer had predicted, Alexander was now lord of all Asia.

Up to this point in the story I had hewn faithfully to Arrian’s narrative. But suddenly, I was overcome by a wish to speak in my own voice. When I first read the ancients’ accounts of Gaugamela and its aftermath, it seemed quite clear to me that although Gaugamela appeared to be a great victory at the time, it turned out to contain within it the seeds of its own defeat. And I somehow found myself expressing my opinion to my master.

“With his victory in Gaugamela, īskender had accomplished his mission,” I informed the Sultan (without acknowledging authorship of my observation). “After seven years away from home, three of those years in the seemingly unconquerable highlands of central Asia, the Macedonian troops felt they had won the right to pack up their share of the booty and begin to enjoy it with their families at home.”

“Even the most loyal of troops reaches a limit at some point,” the Sultan commented with a nod of understanding. Although he is still young in years, he has already chalked up a decade of campaigning and has gained a feeling for the state of mind of his men.

“But īskender’s vision of becoming the king of all Asia overwhelmed his good sense,” I made bold to opine. “It was that vision that drove him to drag his troops past the central Asian frontier from victory to disaster.”

At that point I was prepared to relate the succession of victories that Alexander had enjoyed crossing Central Asia before he was turned back at the Oxus River in India. But now the Sultan’s attention was fixed on my ill-advised remark that īskender’s triumph at Gaugamela contained within it the seeds of his defeat. And he began to pepper me with a series of questions so pressing that, on the return ride, we had to slow down to a languid canter in order to conduct our conversation and ride at the same time. The Sultan is not a patient man. Victories had begun to bore him. He wanted to get to the end of the story, to Alexander’s last days, which, as you know, Papa, became a catalogue of disasters.

“What turned īskender’s last days on the return journey into defeat and disgrace?” he wanted to know. “What elements conspired to give this magnificent conqueror such a sad and dispirited ending?” When no answer was forthcoming, he simply demanded, “Tell me!”

So I was forced into reporting the disaffection of the Macedonian old guard and their belief that Alexander was betraying his Macedonian heritage, that he had “turned Persian”; that he had given all the plum assignments to local Persian dignitaries; that he had encouraged them to prostrate themselves at his feet in a subservient manner which no respectable Macedonian would abide; that he had even begun to dress himself up like the king of kings with a gilded belt that he wore in the style of a woman. I even repeated the gossip that Alexander’s Macedonian generals had poisoned him, though I was careful to add that Arrian says this rumor remains entirely unproven. Even so, that scurrilous morsel proved more tempting to the Sultan than all my careful research on the battle of Gaugamela.

I remember you telling me once, Papa, that the Ottomans have an insatiable appetite for deceit, plotting, and treachery.

“They are Orientals,” you reminded me. “It is a part of their view of the world.”

Well, I saw good evidence of that yesterday. A flush of excitement suffused the Sultan’s pale cheeks at the very mention of poison. And I must admit that, like some compliant Scheherazade, I went on to supply him with a few more bits of scandal and rumor that I had gleaned from my readings. Such as, that by the time they reached the Oxus, the Macedonians were on the verge of mutiny; that Alexander had taken to drinking himself into a stupor every night; that on one such occasion, he had so far lost control that in a drunken rage he had run through one of his veteran captains with his sword. The officer, called Black Clitus, had served under Alexander’s father and had saved Alexander’s own life at the battle at Granicus in the early years of the Persian campaign.

I cannot forget the Sultan’s response to this piece of information. “No great leader kills in a rage, drunk or sober,” he informed me. “I want to know what happened to drive this brave and noble king to such a desperate act. What had Black Clitus done to deserve such a punishment?”

He wanted me to provide Alexander with an excuse — after two thousand years. As the seconds ticked by, I could feel all the good will I had built up at the battlefield melt into impatience and disappointment. Only by luck did my horse, at that moment, toss a shoe, giving me a pretext to drop out of the rank and provide me with an evening to devise a good reason why Alexander the Great, in a drunken rage, should have killed the man who saved his life.

But first, I will sleep. Maybe the answer will come to me in a dream. If not I will at least have a night and a day to bone up on the story of Black Clitus.

Good night,

D.

From: Danilo del Medigo at Gaugamela

To: Judah del Medigo at Topkapi Palace

Date: November 8, 1534

Dear Papa:

Last night I wrote that I would have a day to catch up on the story of Black Clitus. But no! My summons to read arrived with the first prayer, before breakfast — before I had time to prepare. It’s almost as if I had succeeded too well in my effort to revive Alexander. Now the Sultan is so besotted with my tale that he wants his īskender in the morning. Did such a bizarre turn ever happen to Scheherazade?

Today the camp is a jumble of rolled-up tents, supply chests, horses, and camels, as preparation is made for tomorrow’s departure to Baghdad. But no elephants or cannons. They have gone ahead with the Grand Vizier. Still, the camp is in disarray. Not the Sultan’s compound, of course. It, like his
selamlik
, is an oasis of serenity. His slaves will not begin to pack up our tents until we ride off tomorrow morning. His second crew has already left to prepare a camp in the Zagros Mountains for his arrival there tomorrow night. And when I responded to my summons this morning, there he sat, cross-legged on his pillows, calm, unruffled, scowling, intent on pursuing Alexander through the turmoil of eastern Persia. He is completely caught up in Alexander’s turn from triumph into tragedy. How did this paragon of nobility come to end his days as a drunken murderer? He chews on the question like a dog on a bone.

You will be able to gauge the intensity of the Sultan’s passion when I tell you that he could not tear himself away from this feverish pursuit even to respond to the messengers that continued to arrive from all parts of the empire throughout the day. You know the protocol, Papa. These relay riders, who boast that they never fail to complete their journeys in snow, rain, blazing heat, or pitch dark, are, the Sultan once told me, the lifeblood that flows through the veins of the empire. These couriers keep him constantly in touch with goings-on from the Nile to the Indus; they are always admitted to his presence the moment they arrive, no matter how late the hour, and their reports are always read by him the moment they come to hand. Knowing this, you will be amazed, as I was, by the scene outside his tent this morning: three couriers lined up, pouches in hand, awaiting his nod, while he had eyes and ears only for my tale of the tribulations that Alexander underwent a thousand years before the birth of the prophet. If anything, he wanted the story even more eagerly this morning than he did yesterday.

“I still do not have the whole story,” he complained. “Exactly what was it that possessed Alexander to kill a man who had saved his life? What could have driven him to such a dastardly act?”

As you know, Papa, no historian who has turned attention to Alexander has missed out on the story of Black Clitus. Except, perhaps, the one that the Sultan encountered in his nursery. Otherwise, of the lot — Arrian, Plutarch, the Roman called Quintus Curtius — each tells a different story of what happened on that much chronicled night in Marakanda.

Before I could wade into this morass of conflicting evidence, I felt a need to set the scene. With ill-disguised impatience, my master gave a grudging nod of permission. “But make it brief,” he said. Which I did, as follows:

After a brutal year of fighting the border tribes of Bactria without a concrete victory, I explained, the Macedonians were frozen, famished, and worn out. By now, there was a split in the ranks between the old Macedonian veterans and the young Turks. The campaign was going badly. Like the Kurds, the local tribes would not stay beaten. Once pacified, they sprang back into action as soon as Alexander turned his attention elsewhere. In a word, he could not rule the empire he had conquered. And, to complete this litany of obstacles, the water was polluted, which meant that the only liquid fit to drink was the harsh, potent wine of the district.