323 BCE, Babylon
The fever has returned and I can feel them positioning. Not the physicians, whose bustling serves only to disguise how little they understand, but the generals, the officers, the satraps with their couriers already stationed at the gates, all of them adjusting their weight like men shifting on a wall before the charge. Perdiccas was in the corridor an hour ago speaking to Ptolemy in a register too low for the words to carry but too deliberate for the conversation to be innocent. Seleucus visited at dawn with a question about the Arabian expedition that did not require my answer and was therefore not really a question. Roxana sits near the window with her hand on her belly, watching each face that enters, and I can see her calculating which of these men will protect my child and which will find the child an obstacle easier removed than honoured. The lamps burn too often. The basin smells of herbs and stale water. My body has begun to refuse me in intervals, and intervals are all ambitious men need. I am thirty-two years old and the empire I assembled from the Hellespont to the Hydaspes is already being divided in whispers while the man who built it lies on damp sheets trying to keep his hand steady enough to grip a pen. If I do not fix the account now, they will fix it for me, and what they fix will serve their succession, not my legacy. This is not reflection. This is a tactical engagement conducted from a sickbed. The terrain has changed. The objective has not.
