On her third attempt, turning right where she’d gone left, left where she’d gone right, she was pleased to see the crowds thinning out again—but this time, the street below her feet was rising upward and simultaneously widening before it abruptly opened up into one of the wide, perfectly straight and paved streets of Alexander’s design: a hundred paces wide, built atop an intricate network of aqueducts and sewers that she’d once heard her mother describing as the city beneath the city. Selene had never been down there, but it nevertheless had a hold on her imagination. Even walking now, she wondered if a person standing in the waters somewhere below her—and she was certain that people lived down there, probably hiding from someone or something—could hear her steps as they echoed down through the stones. They probably could, she decided. They could probably even tell by the lack of weight in her steps that she was just a girl.
Not just a girl, she corrected herself. A queen.
Her steps faltered then, and she nearly tripped. Would they care that she was a queen? Or would they only take her for a helpless girl, and do things to her that men did with girls? Or, worse yet, would they care that she was a queen but hate her for it? Would they take her away and parade her through a Triumph like Helios and Didymus had talked about? Would they strangle her then?
Pulling her stolen shawl close, Selene hurried her steps onward, deeper into Alexandria.
* * *
No sewer-people attacked her, and by the time she’d turned west along the Canopic Way, mingling with the streams of people and chariots and wagons, Selene was feeling more confident and relaxed. No one was giving the little girl in the slave’s shawl the slightest second glance. No one knew who she was. And, unlike at the docks, she felt a kind of relief in the fact.
It helped that she also knew exactly where she was now. Two hundred paces wide, the Canopic Way was the longest, broadest, and most famed of Alexandria’s streets, running from the Sun Gate on the east side of the city to the Moon Gate on the west, from the road to the city of Schedia on the Nile to the pathways and gardens of the City of the Dead. The parades her mother had enjoyed holding—like the parade after Antony had made everyone in the family kings and queens by donating so many lands to her and Helios and Philadelphus and Caesarion—were always held on the Canopic Way or its north-south counterpart, the Sema Avenue. She’d been carried down these wide streets in litters, on elephant-mounted platforms, in boats on wheels, pulled by slaves. She knew them well. Still, she’d never walked one before, and she thought it was interesting how different it was from the ground.
Her meandering path through the Emporium had taken her a little farther east than she’d intended, a fact made clear when she walked past the beautiful porticoes lining the gymnasium, more than a stadium in length. The home of athletes stood beside the Canopic Way, however, so she needed only to turn right and continue walking to reach her destination.
Everything seemed much bigger from the ground, without the pressing throngs of cheering people. The Canopic Way was busy with all manner of traffic on foot, horse, litter, or chariot, but it was wide enough still to seem relatively open. Buildings, too, seemed larger.
Selene didn’t feel hurried as she walked down the street between the high walls of buildings fronted by columns, arches, hanging banners, and statues of gods and goddesses, kings and queens. A few of the statues were of her brother Caesarion, she noted with a smile. He would hate that.
There weren’t any statues of her yet.
The heart of Alexandria, without question, was the great plaza of the intersecting main avenues that Selene soon saw opening up before her. Here, on the four corners of the plaza, surrounded by magnificent minor palaces, temples, theaters, and gardens, stood four massive structures. The first, which she began to pass on her right, was the grandest of the city’s resplendent temples to the goddess Isis—to her mother, Selene supposed. The second, to her left across the Canopic Way, was the pyramid-topped mausoleum of Alexander the Great, where the body of the mighty conqueror was displayed in a crystal coffin. Opposite these structures, on the other side of the plaza, stood the imposing temple to Zeus-Ammon on her left—fitting, Selene always thought, given that this two-horned god was supposed to have been Alexander’s father—and the enormous complex of the Museum on her right. It was in the latter, amid the many structures dedicated to the Muses, that she would find the Great Library, Didymus, and her stepbrother.
But because she had time, and because she was enjoying seeing the city from the perspective of her people, she didn’t walk directly to the grounds of the Museum. Instead, she carefully dodged across the busy Canopic Way, feeling bolder and more grown-up with each step, and then bounced up the swept granite steps, between high pillars and the trinket men plying their wares there, and into the gaping shadowed mouth of the mausoleum.
Alexander’s resting place was quiet this early in the morning. Other than the echoes of a few distant footsteps inside, and the quickly receding noise of the city outside, she heard nothing as she passed through the scores of pillars of the great gallery. She’d walked the length of this hall many times before, but always there were crowds to wade through, duties to perform. She’d never actually slowed down to look at anything. Doing so now, she saw that the pillars were wrapped with scenes carved in intricate, meticulous relief. Here she saw Alexander solving the riddle of the Gordian knot by cutting it apart with his sword. There she saw him on horseback during the battle of Issus.
Farther on, close to the end of the gallery, she stopped beside one of the last columns, one showing Alexander in distant India. Walking around the pillar, the tales of his adventures in that strange, far-off land wound out before her sight: the defeat of Porus, the refusal of his army to continue east toward the unknown edge of the world, the terrible battle in which Alexander was struck with a spear arrow in the chest. The wound was so grave, so deep, that his men thought it might kill the man they thought was the son of the father-god: it was said that it gushed red and frothed like water when the iron point was pulled free. Selene remembered how in the stories Alexander had looked down on his surgeon’s finger pushing cotton into the hole to staunch the bleeding and smiled at the faces around him. “Behold: it is blood, my men, not the ichor of a god,” he’d said.
Somehow, Alexander had recovered. He always did. Despite his many wounds, despite his insistence on being at the front of the line in so many battles, he was invincible. Like a living Achilles, Didymus had once told her and Helios, certainly not unable to be wounded, but just as surely incapable of dying from his wounds. It took poison to kill him in the end.
It was the best way for the conqueror to die, her mother had told her once. The best way for any king or queen to die. Not bloody. Not hard. And poison left the body whole, so that it could reign in the afterlife among the gods.
Selene left the pillar and passed through the narrow portal between the great gallery and the central chamber of the mausoleum itself: a square space wrought of dark stone, sided by free-standing, life-size white marble statues of Alexander and the Ptolemaic dynasty he’d founded in Egypt, her ancestors. Three hallways, at the moment sealed shut by wood and iron, branched off from this four-sided chamber, leading to the tombs of those men and women. In the middle of the chamber, surrounded by the seemingly glowing figures, Alexander’s crystal coffin sat atop three polished white marble steps that gleamed in the light from the tiny arched windows that stood just beneath the pyramidal roof of the chamber. Selene noticed that this morning, in the bright light of a clear day, the light pouring through those arches blurred out the supports between them, giving the roof the appearance of floating. So, too, the marble dais seemed to be set apart: white marble on dark stone, with the clean crystal shape at its summit sending rainbows of color out against the walls and floor.