It was bizarre – Alexander had insisted when he first fell sick that all preparations for the invasion of Arabia should continue. In fact, word had trickled down from the generals that he seemed obsessed with continuing the planning, arranging for the ships to take tens of thousands of soldiers from Babylon towards the Persian Gulf, even when he was so sick that his generals had some trouble understanding his words. The date was set – then re-set – then the army was to move and Alexander would follow later when he recovered.

When he recovered.

He had always recovered. He had been seriously wounded at least ten times to the knowledge of his soldiers – struck by catapulted stones, arrows half-piercing his magnificent golden cuirass, dozens of sword slashes to the head and body. An arrow that struck him in the calf and split the bone – and of course, the terrible wound from the Mallians in India, a 3-inch bolted arrow that pierced his chest and struck a lung. He had been sick to dying long ago, when the army had first chased Darius, and he’d swum the river Cydnus in Tarsus for a joke – full of snowmelt, it was - and then was flat on his back for nearly two months. He’d starved with them, nearly died from lack of water with all of them crossing the Gedrosian desert and the mountains of Sogdiana. Everyone in the army remembered one day when some enlisted men brought him a cup of dirty water from a nearly-dry watercourse in a helmet. Alexander poured it in the sand, so his army would know that what they suffered, he would suffer.

Rumor made sure that the entire army knew of those Chaldean priests who had come to Alexander before his return to Babylon, claiming that he must enter the western gate, not the traditional eastern one, because looking west was to face where the dead went. They’d circled the city, but the marshes made it impossible to make it to the western gate. Alexander had smiled and taken them in by the eastern gate. He’d made the appropriate offerings, of course - months had gone by, and all had seemed well.

But there had been rumors. Rumors of the day, sailing down the Euphrates, when the wind actually blew his hat with the royal diadem right off his head into the water. A soldier had recovered it, but . . . The soldiers were intensely superstitious. Omens made them nervous. But it was so difficult to get news. The officers were being very close-mouthed.

By the hundreds, they slipped out when they were off-duty and left their offerings at the Temple asking the gods to protect him, as they always had. If ever a man was beloved of the gods, the King was. But . . .many remembered the sage in India, who had told the son of Ammon that 'You will soon be dead, and then you will own just as much of this earth as will suffice to bury you.'

The crowds at the temple increased.