June 323 BCE

The king was dying, and Namtar could not save him.

Not with medicine, anyway. But perhaps with the truth.

He pressed a damp cloth against Alexander's forehead, feeling the furnace heat of the fever through the linen. The king's eyes were half-open, their famous heterochromatic gleam reduced to a dull, wet glaze. Around them, the palace of Nebuchadnezzar hummed with the controlled panic of generals and physicians who understood that the world was about to crack open like an egg.

"Everyone out," Namtar said, in Greek that still carried the thick mud of his Babylonian accent.

Perdiccas, standing nearest the bed with his hand resting on his sword as though death were something he could stab, looked at him with contempt. "You are a gardener."

"I am the royal herbalist," Namtar corrected. "And I have prepared a draught that requires privacy to administer. It is an old remedy. Sacred. The gods will not permit witnesses."

This was, of course, a lie. But Namtar had learned long ago that Greeks, for all their rationality, could not resist the mystique of Babylonian religion. They looked at the ziggurat of Etemenanki and saw sorcery where there was only mathematics. They walked through the Ishtar Gate and felt the dragons watching them, never understanding that lapis lazuli had no opinions.

Perdiccas hesitated, then looked at the wreck of a man on the bed—the conqueror of the known world, reduced to a thing that sweated and mumbled—and left without another word. The others followed. The heavy cedar door closed.

Namtar was alone with Alexander.

He sat on the edge of the bed and opened the leather satchel he carried everywhere. Inside were not medicines but tools: a small copper trowel, seed pouches, a watering vessel, pruning shears. The artifacts of his true vocation. He was, as Perdiccas had correctly identified, a gardener. The last gardener of the Hanging Gardens, to be precise, though that title meant nothing to any of these men. They had marched into Babylon and seen the gardens and called them a wonder of the world, then moved on to the business of drinking and planning the invasion of Arabia.

But Alexander had come back. Alone, one night, three weeks ago, before the fevers began.

---

Namtar remembered it clearly. He had been on the upper terrace, the one that overlooked the Euphrates, pruning the roses that his grandmother had planted sixty years earlier. The irrigation system—the great chain of buckets driven by slaves that the Greeks found so marvelous—had been shut down for the night, and the gardens were silent except for the trickle of residual water finding its way down through the layered terraces.

He had heard footsteps and turned to find Alexander standing among the date palms, alone, without guards or companions, wearing a simple chiton. He looked, for the first and only time in Namtar's experience, like an ordinary man. A short one, at that.

"You tend these gardens?" Alexander had asked.

"My family has tended them for five generations. Since Nebuchadnezzar built them."

"For his wife." Alexander said this with a strange tenderness. "Because she missed the green hills of Media."

"That is the story," Namtar agreed carefully. He did not add that the story was almost certainly apocryphal, that the gardens had likely been built as a demonstration of engineering supremacy rather than love, that Nebuchadnezzar's actual writings about the gardens focused on hydraulic innovation rather than romance. He had learned that powerful men preferred beautiful lies to mundane truths.

Alexander sat on a stone bench between two pomegranate trees. The moonlight caught his face, and Namtar saw something there he had not expected: exhaustion so profound it looked like grief.

"I have conquered everything," Alexander said. "Persia. Egypt. Bactria. India, nearly, before my men refused to go further. I have built cities and burned cities. I have been declared a god." He paused. "And I find I would trade all of it to understand how you make things grow."

Namtar had assumed this was the sort of philosophical posturing that kings indulged in when they'd had too much wine. But Alexander was sober. His eyes were clear, and he was looking at the roses with an attention that Namtar recognized—the deep, patient attention of someone who genuinely wanted to know.

So Namtar told him.

He explained the terracing system, how each level was waterproofed with layers of reed, bitumen, and lead so the moisture would not rot the structure. He explained the soil composition—river silt mixed with composted palm fronds and goat dung, refreshed every three years. He explained grafting, how you could take a cutting from one tree and bind it to the rootstock of another, creating something that was both and neither. He explained the irrigation timing, how different plants needed water at different hours, how the roses preferred dawn and the jasmine preferred dusk.

Alexander listened to all of this with the same intensity he reportedly brought to military strategy. He asked questions that were surprisingly precise. He wanted to know about root systems, about how deep the taproots of the date palms went, about whether the weight of the soil had ever threatened the structural integrity of the terraces.

"Once," Namtar admitted. "Forty years ago. The northeastern corner. My father reinforced it with cedar beams."

"Your father was an engineer as well as a gardener."

"Every gardener is an engineer. Every garden is a war against gravity and drought and time. We simply fight it with patience instead of swords."

Alexander had looked at him then with an expression Namtar would spend the rest of his life trying to interpret. It contained admiration, certainly. But also something like envy. And beneath that, barely visible, the dawning recognition of a man who realizes he has spent his life building the wrong things.

"Teach me," Alexander said.

---

And so, for three nights, Namtar had taught the conqueror of the world how to garden.

They met after midnight, when the palace was asleep and the generals were drunk. Alexander came alone each time, and each time he seemed lighter, as though he were shedding invisible armor. On the first night, Namtar taught him to prune—how to read the architecture of a branch, how to identify where new growth would emerge, how to cut at the correct angle so the wound would heal cleanly. Alexander's hands, calloused from years of gripping a sarissa, were surprisingly gentle with the shears.

On the second night, they planted. Namtar had been propagating a cutting from the oldest rose on the terrace, a deep crimson variety that his grandmother claimed had been brought from the mountains of Persia—Alexander's Persia now, though the roses did not know or care about politics. He showed Alexander how to prepare the hole, how to spread the roots, how to pack the soil firmly but not too tightly.

"It needs room to breathe," Namtar explained. "Like a soldier in formation. Too tight and it suffocates. Too loose and it has no support."

Alexander smiled at the metaphor. "You would have made a good general."

"And you might have made a good gardener."

On the third night, Alexander did not come.

On the fourth day, the fevers began.

---

Now Namtar sat beside the dying king and opened his satchel. He took out a small clay pot, no bigger than a fist, in which a single green shoot was emerging from dark soil. The cutting from the terrace rose, the one he and Alexander had planted together. It had taken root faster than he expected, as though it understood the urgency.

"Alexander," he said softly.

The king's eyes focused, barely.

"I brought you something."

He held the pot where Alexander could see it. The shoot was barely three inches tall, pale green with a reddish tinge at its base, two embryonic leaves unfurling at its tip. It was, by any objective measure, unremarkable. It was also, Namtar knew, the only thing in this room that was truly alive.

Alexander's cracked lips moved. Namtar leaned close.

"It grew," Alexander whispered.

"It grew."

"From the cutting. The one we—"

"Yes."

Something happened to Alexander's face then. The muscles around his eyes softened. The grimace of pain and fever loosened into something that might, in a healthier man, have been wonder. He lifted one hand—the hand that had held the bridle of Bucephalas, that had carried the sword through Gaugamela, that had pushed open the gates of Persepolis—and touched the shoot with one fingertip, with a delicacy that Namtar had never seen a warrior possess.

"It will bloom?" Alexander asked.

"In two years, perhaps. If it is cared for."

"Red."

"Deep red. Almost black at the center. My grandmother's rose."

Alexander closed his eyes. Namtar thought he had slipped back into the fever, but then he spoke again, his voice barely audible over the distant sounds of the palace.

"They will fight over everything. The empire. The armies. The cities. Perdiccas and Ptolemy and Seleucus and all the rest. They will tear it apart." A pause. "They won't think about the gardens."

"No," Namtar agreed. "They won't."

"Promise me."

"What?"

"Keep them alive. The gardens. This—" He touched the shoot again. "Whatever happens. Whatever they do to each other. Keep the gardens alive."

Namtar looked at the small green shoot, then at the dying king, and felt the weight of the request settle onto him like soil filling a grave.

"I promise," he said.

---

Alexander died two days later. The generals, as predicted, immediately began fighting over his empire. Within a decade, the Wars of the Diadochi would consume the known world, and the empire Alexander had built would splinter into fragments.

Namtar kept his promise.

When Seleucus took Babylon, Namtar presented himself and argued for the gardens' preservation with the same patient logic he used on root rot. When funding dried up, he trained his children to maintain the irrigation system with fewer slaves. When earthquakes cracked the northeastern terrace—the same corner his father had reinforced—his son repaired it with techniques borrowed from Greek engineering, a quiet integration that Alexander might have appreciated.

The little rose cutting grew. It was moved from its clay pot to the upper terrace, where it thrived in the spot where Alexander had sat on the stone bench. It bloomed in its second year, exactly as Namtar had predicted: deep red, almost black at the center, with a fragrance that caught visitors off guard with its sweetness.

Namtar lived to be eighty-three. By then, Babylon was declining, the Seleucid capital having moved to Antioch, and the gardens were no longer a wonder but a curiosity, tended by a shrinking family with a lengthening memory. On his last night, his granddaughter found him on the upper terrace, sitting beside the rose—now a substantial bush, thick with blooms—talking softly, as though to someone only he could see.

She did not disturb him.

In the morning, he was gone, and the gardens went on without him, as gardens do, maintained by hands that understood what the conquerors never had: that the most extraordinary thing a person can do is not to take a city, but to make something grow where nothing grew before, and to ensure it outlasts the both of you.

The Hanging Gardens survived another two centuries before the final earthquakes brought them down. By then, no one remembered the gardener, or the three nights he spent teaching a king to prune roses. But the roses themselves had been grafted onto rootstock throughout the region, passed from garden to garden in the way that living things travel—not by conquest, but by gift.

Somewhere in the world, they are still blooming.