Hindu Kush
Morning Spring 329 BC
Overnight the ground had grown hard as well as cold. Even through the skins and furs that lined the floor of the tent. The pillows and cushions not in direct contact with flesh had a stubborn cold settled into them. The body of the young man underneath fur-lined blankets was also draped in a personal layer of fur. When he woke he instinctively reached out from the nebulous world of dreams to feel for the body he perceived should be lying next to him, though no one was there. The searching hand recoiled from the unwarmed bed beyond and those fingers roughly combed the hair away from the still half-asleep face, just before glass-blue eyes opened and took in the still darkling morning near the top of the world at Hindu Kush. Sleep was quickly dismissed from the mind of the young warrior as he listened for signs that the camp had already started its morning drills. A few moments listening disgorged silence from without. He sat up, pushed away his covers, and pulled on the fur-lined boots beside his bedding. The heat his body had worked to generate all night bled into the cold air of the region unmourned. The man then stepped the few paces across the tent and exited through the tent flaps. Without much thought he made his way to the largest tent in the encampment, tapped the guards' shoulders and passed between them inside the king's tent.
The young king stirred a little in his sleep--his mop of blonde hair made vary small noises against the richly embroidered pillows. The rest of his head was hidden under innumerable coverlets of fur and cloth. The man who entered barely disturbed the air around him as he moved despite being twice as wide as usual under the layers of winter robes. With a sudden lack of regard for the unrelenting cold, he stripped his body of the fur and garments that enshrouded him and lay down in the middle of the pile of furs that was the resting place of the conqueror-king. The fire that had burned in the brazier in the middle of the tent had been allowed to go cold; Alexander endured, as always, the same afflictions and challenges of nature as did his army.
The sudden appearance of someone else in his bed, stripping away the layer of heat that surrounded him did not upset the king. He blindly pulled the body close to himself though he did not open his eyes. His heart knew who it was. The two settled, the contours of their bodies aligning perfectlyand presentlyincreasing the temperature. Alexander wrapped his fingers around the other man's. The cold he found there was new to Alexander, all things were in the pre-dawn hours.
"Hephaistion, your hands are frozen."
Hephaistion pressed his lips close to Alexander's ears, "Not frozen, they simply missed you."
Alexander pressed the Hephaistion's fingers flat onto his own chest. Though quite nude, the king was warm beneath the fine and copious furs.
Their temperature had become the same. They had started to breathe in time together. They seemed to feel the entirety of their skin against flesh, fur, and the coming dawn. The moments had lengthened in intensity and shortened in pleasure. The two remained laying there Alexander's back to Hephastion's frontquarters until at length the king broke the silence.
"Have I done wrong to bring us here? The trees do notclimb so high and neither did my father."
"But perhaps Zeus did, dragging Prometheus behind him."
"If Herakles had not freed him, I would journey through the mountains until I found him."
Again Hephaistion's breath came as a warm wind into his ear, "Your greatness is that you do not merely dream when you say such things."
The two smiled, Alexander being held and Hephaistion holding him close. The moments lenghtened again. "Philalexandros," said the king, "you have not answered my question."
"You simply misheard me then," Hephaistion burrowed his nose into the golden hair, "You bring us with you through misery into greatness and glory. There is nothing wrong in that."
Outside the troops had begun marshalling in the meantime--the signal to the men in the royal tent that their time together was drawing to a close, as the moments quickly contracted in the pleasure that would linger long in their minds as the day wore on.