War therefore is an act of violence
intended to compel our opponent
to fulfil our will.... War is a mere
continuation of policy by other means.
Their tread was like the pacing of a giant, some ten thousand men marching in perfect unison, making the air quiver and the ground shake with the weight of each booted step.
They were coming straight toward us, the heavy long sarissas of their front ranks pointed at our eyes, those in the rear still held upright. It looked like a forest of spears advancing upon us.
"Steady," yelled our phalanx commander. "Let them tire themselves out marching toward us. Hold your places."
We stood at the crest of a modest rise in the stony, bare ground. Hardly a blade of grass was growing here. The morning sun was already hot, the sky so bright it almost hurt to look at it. On the other side of the rocky hills before us stood the besieged city of Perinthos; we were here to lift the siege.
I was in the tenth rank of our twelve-deep phalanx, on the right end of the row, with no man's shield to protect my right side. The officers were up front, of course, except for the quarter-file and end-file commanders, who had stationed themselves on the left ends of their ranks. I was bigger than most of the other hoplites and could handle a twelve-foot spear easily. But the army we faced had those sixteen-foot-long sarissas and a reputation for winning their battles.
Their right wing was the heavy one, as usual. At least sixteen ranks deep; it was hard to tell because they were kicking up a fair amount of dust as they advanced across the open ground toward us. Behind them and to our left, off by the scrawny trees that dotted the hillside, I could see their cavalry shuffling nervously, waiting for the order to strike. We had no cavalry, and I feared that once the fighting began the Perinthians' own hoplites would quickly turn tail, leaving us to be butchered. They were civilians, after all, citizens of the city we had been hired to help protect. I doubted that they could stand up before the professional army advancing upon us.
"Steady," our commander repeated. He was a tough old vulture, his bronze breastplate and shield dulled and dented from many a battle, his arms covered with white puckered scars. Diopeithes, the leader of our mercenary band, was mounted on a lovely white steed well to the rear, ready to run all the way back to Athens if the going got bad. He was more of an opportunist than a soldier; I doubted that he had ever led his men against trained professional troops.
I worked a finger through the chin strap of my helmet. I was sweating, and not merely from the hot morning sun. We were professional soldiers, mercenaries, but we were badly outnumbered and forced to fight at a time and place of the enemy's choosing. The politicians of Perinthos may have known how to govern their city, but they made poor generals. Their biggest mistake was to expect that Athens would fight for them. The Athenians had not even paid Diopeithes; or so he told us. We were forced to live off the land, which hardly pleased the Perinthians we were supposed to be defending.
The distance between our spear points and theirs was shrinking steadily. Our commander stepped out in front of the phalanx and bellowed, "On my word—forward!"
We started marching toward the advancing enemy, each one of us stepping out with his left foot, spears levelled, shields raised. I felt exposed on the right end of our rank, with no shield to protect my right side, though I knew I could take care of myself once the fighting started. Yet, as I marched in step toward the advancing enemy, my thoughts churning, I found I could remember nothing about the battles I had fought. Nothing at all. My brows knit in puzzlement. My memory was as blank as a newborn baby's. I could remember nothing earlier than a few hours ago, when we had picked up our weapons and formed our ranks.
This was no time for soul-searching. Skirmishers appeared from behind the files of the advancing phalanx, firing arrows into us, pelting us with stones and javelins. Someone screamed and went down with an arrow in his neck. A fist-sized stone banged off my shield. They wanted us to raise our shields against their missiles, or, better yet, break ranks. Then their phalanx would hit us at the run and shatter us completely. We were trained to ignore the skirmishers and close ranks whenever a man went down. I knew that but I could not remember when or where I had learned it.
Their cavalry off in the woods started to move. Horsemen could never attack a solid phalanx; our spears were like the spines of a hedgehog, and the horses shied away no matter how much their riders urged them. But cavalry could swing around our flank and attack us in the rear. And once a phalanx is broken the cavalry enjoys riding down individual soldiers. More men are slaughtered in the flight after the battle than during the battle itself.
The skirmishers melted away like the annoying insects they were. The bare stony ground between us and the enemy was shrinking rapidly. Our pace quickened. So did theirs. Trumpets on both sides blared and we yelled as loud as we could and broke into a run and the two phalanxes smashed into each other with a thunderous bloodthirsty roar and the screeching, clanging, terrifying clamor of iron spearpoints against shields and bronze breastplates—and flesh.
The world seemed to slow down for me. Time stretched out like an elastic ribbon. Everyone around me began to move in sluggish, torpid slow motion, as if they were all underwater or in a labored blood-soaked dream. I saw the men in our front ranks go down under those sixteen-foot-long sarissas, skewered or pummelled or just shocked off their feet before their own spears could reach the enemy soldiers. Men were trampled underfoot as the two phalanxes ground into each other, each still advancing despite the shredding of our front ranks. Spears snapped, men howled with anger or pain or blood-lust, shields split apart under the tremendous impact of collision.
I reached over the men in front of me and drove my spear into one of the enemy hoplites. I saw him raise his shield as my point came toward him so I hooked the edge of his shield with the rear barb of my point, jerked the shield aside, then rammed the point into his throat. He looked surprised and then his gushing blood spattered me as he began to fall and I wrenched the spear point free.
Our front ranks had collapsed under the enemy's impact and I was suddenly shield-to-shield with them, shoving and struggling, pushing against the men in front of me as I jabbed with my spear. It was too long for this close-in work and out of the corner of my eye I saw their skirmishers sneaking around our right flank, firing arrows and javelins into our exposed side.
I ducked an arrow as it flew in lazy slow-motion toward me, then rammed my spear through the shield and breastplate and body of a hoplite. The battle was becoming a chaos of screaming, bloodied, falling men; all order gone among our side. My rank was being shredded by the enemy. I saw a javelin coming at me. Leaving my spear in the falling body of the man I had skewered, I batted the lighter javelin aside and then reached for my sword before the two hoplites in front of me could react in their dream-like slow motion. I cut them both down but there were more of them moving with mechanical discipline, spearing, stabbing, using their shields to knock men off balance, moving forward in an unstoppable tide.
There were too many of them and they were too well led, too disciplined, for us to overcome. My fellow mercenaries fought well, but we were clearly outmatched. We did not turn and run because we knew that would be sure death. But we were cut off from the Perinthian citizen troops, separated from what remained of their phalanx and driven backward across the field toward the trees. Sure enough, the Perinthians broke and fled. And, even surer, the enemy's cavalry came thundering out of the woods, shrilling their exultant battle cries, and started to cut them down without mercy. The cavalry leader could not have been more than a boy, golden hair streaming in the wind as he bent eagerly over the mane of his magnificent black charger, sword held high and eyes intent on the fleeing men who had foolishly thrown down their shields and helmets in their frenzy to escape.
There was hardly more than a handful of us left as we retreated slowly, grudgingly, up the slight slope toward the trees. Our phalanx had been slashed to ribbons; there were only a few knots of individual men fighting now. Still, everything seemed to be moving as slowly as a beetle trapped in honey. Sword in hand, I could see the moves my enemies were going to make by the shifting of their eyes, the knotting of muscles in their legs or arms. I ducked under one of the long sarissas and drove my sword point through the man's leather cuirass into his belly. He shrieked and I wrenched his long spear from him with my left hand.
And saw that I was alone now, my back to a tree, sarissa in one hand and sword in the other. A dozen wary soldiers ringed around me, eyes ablaze, armor smeared with blood, watching me, waiting for an opening. Most of them had lost their sarissas and were gripping swords. They were veteran troops; they intended to take no chances against a man who had killed so many of their own. But they were not going to let me escape them, either. The best I could hope for was to take as many of them down with me as I could before they finally did me in. Then I saw one of them signalling to a handful of archers. They were going to take no risks at all.
"Hold!" called a gruff-voiced man on horseback. He rode up and stopped at the edge of the ring facing me. His armor was white with gold filigree, but caked now with dust. His helmet was topped with a white horsehair plume, and he had unfastened the cheek flaps so I could see his face. A bristling black beard, streaked with what looked like crusted blood on one side. Then I saw that he had lost the eye on that side of his face long ago. It was half closed, and beneath its drooping lid I could see the blank whiteness of dead flesh.
He was obviously one of their generals. The men backed away from me slightly, but none of them lowered their weapons. Another general rode up and I realized that both of them were mounted on powerful chestnut brown horses, but had neither saddles nor stirrups, only a pad that seemed to be made of layers of blankets.
"There's been enough killing," said the black-bearded one. Some of his men nodded. To me he raised his voice, "I have need of good soldiers. Would you accept employment in my army?"
I looked around. My companions were either dead or prisoners. I did not have much of a choice, but at least he was offering me something better than being sold into slavery or slaughtered outright.
I thought it over for all of a half-second. "Yes," I replied. "I would like to be on the winning side, for a change."
He threw his head back and laughed. "Very well, then! How are you called?"
"My name is Orion."
"From where?"
I started to reply, then realized that I did not know. I could not remember anything more than a few hours ago.
"From the North," I temporized.
"Must be a Scythian, from the size of you. I'd recognize those gray eyes anywhere. But where's your beard? Why are you shaved?"
I hadn't the faintest idea. "A beard gives your enemy a handhold to grab," I heard myself answer.
He tugged at his own thick beard. "Does it, now? You sound like my son." Then he turned and called to one of the soldiers standing closest to him, "Nikkos, take him into your troop. I don't think he'll need much training. Looks to me as if he already knows how to use a sarissa."
He pulled at the reins and trotted off, grinning, the other officer riding beside him.
That was my first sight of Philip, King of the Macedonians. The golden-haired boy who led the cavalry turned out to be his son, Alexandros.
We camped at the battlefield that night, to burn the dead and then rest after the long hard day's exertions. Nikkos, to my surprise, was a Thracian, not a Macedonian at all.
"In my father's time we raided into Macedon and stole their horses and cattle," he told me as we sat by a crackling wood fire and chewed on roasted mutton. "And their women, too," he added with a leering wink.
He could not have been thirty. His hair was dark brown and wild as an untamed forest. His black beard was smeared and sticky with mutton drippings. About a dozen of us were sitting around the fire while a physician from far-off Corinth went around applying salves and bandages to men's wounds.
"And now you serve the Macedonians," I said.
He gulped at his goatskin of wine, splashing much of it over his beard and chest. "You bet we do! Old One-Eye has changed everything. When he became king he beat the shit out of us. And everybody else around him. Struck us in the winter, in the summer. Made no difference to him. He never lost a battle. He knows how many beans makes five, he does."
"Philip conquered your people," I murmured.
Nikkos shook his shaggy head vigorously. "No. Not conquered. We still have our own king. He just showed us that we'd be better off allied with him than fighting against him."
A diplomat, I thought. Then I realized that Philip had done the same thing to me this day.
"Now all the country tribes are allied with Macedon," Nikkos went on, "and Philip even makes war against Athens."
If Nikkos was unhappy with this situation he did not show it. Indeed, he seemed to be quite pleased with it all.
Then he leaned closer to me. "D'you know what I think?" he asked in a low voice.
His breath was foul and I could see things crawling in his beard. "What?" I asked, trying to keep the distance of a flea's jump between us.
"I think it's her that's done it."
"Her?"
"The witch. Philip's wife."
"The king's wife is a witch?"
He lowered his voice even more. "Priestess of the Old Cult. Worships the Snake Goddess and all that. She's a sorceress, all right. How else can you explain it? I was already big enough to help my father tend his flock when Philip pushed his brother off the throne. Macedonia was being sliced up by all the tribes around it. Not just us, but the Illyrians, the Paionians—all of us. We raided and plundered every year."
"Philip put a stop to that?"
"In the blink of his one eye, or so it seems. Now all the tribes serve him. It must be that Molossian bitch of his; that's the only way to explain it."
I glanced uneasily at the other men sitting around the fire.
Nikkos laughed. "Don't worry, I can't say anything about the witch that Old One-Eye hasn't said himself. He hates her."
"Hates his wife?"
Several of the men nodded agreement, grinning.
"If it weren't that she's the mother of his son and heir he would have sent her packing back to Epeiros long ago."
"He can't do that," said one of the others. "He's afraid of her."
"She can cast spells."
"Spells my ass. She poisons people."
"Not poison. Magic."
"Look what she did to the other son, the one by the Thessalian woman."
"Arrhidaios? The idiot?"
"He was a healthy baby. She fed him poison that made him feeble-minded."
"Or cast a spell to make certain her own son would be Philip's heir, even though he's a couple of years younger."
The men fell to arguing over whether the king's wife was a poisoner or a sorceress. I listened with only half an ear. The men around me, the battle we had gone through, this chill, dark night with the black bowl of the heavens strewn with brilliant glittering stars—all of it was strange and new to me. I had no memory of anything farther back than that morning. Each of the men around me had a family and clan and tribe, each of them could recall their kings and histories from generations back.
I had nothing. A blank where my memory should have been. The men spoke of the gods they worshipped; their names meant nothing to me. Until one of them mentioned Athena, the warrior goddess, the patroness of Athens.
"She's more than a warrior goddess," said Nikkos grudgingly. "She's the goddess of wisdom. Or at least, the Athenians think so."
"They should," one of the others said. "She gave them the olive tree, didn't she?"
"And the spinning wheel."
Athena. A picture of her formed in my mind: tall and slim and incredibly beautiful, with lustrous dark hair and solemn silver-gray eyes.
"We're all playthings for the gods," Nikkos was saying. "They pull the strings and we jump."
"I don't believe that," said the man next to him. "I live my own life; nobody pulls my strings."
But we are here to do the gods' bidding, I thought. At least I am. I felt certain of that. Yet—what did the gods want me to do? Who was I, really, and why was I here? There was no answer in my mind, no message from the gods to enlighten me.
The fire sputtered low and the men began to wrap themselves in cloaks or blankets and stretch out for sleep. I had nothing but the grimy, skirted chiton of sweat-stained linen that I was wearing. My bronze breastplate and greaves and helmet rested on the ground beside me. Yet as soon as I realized that the night wind was chilling me, I clamped down on my peripheral circulation and consciously speeded my heartbeat to raise my body temperature enough to compensate for the cold.
I did that almost without thinking about it. But then I began to wonder how I could control my body so minutely. And how I knew what I was doing. Somehow I realized that this was far beyond the capabilities of other men. In the battle I had been able to fight and kill without being scratched. I could see everything in slow motion, yet my own reactions were always faster than anyone else's.
Who am I? I wondered as I laid myself on the hard ground and closed my eyes. Where am I from?
For hours I lay on my back staring sleeplessly at the gleaming stars wheeling majestically above me. I recognized the two Dippers, and Cassiopeia on her throne. Nearby her daughter, Andromeda, chained to the rock with Perseus the hero beside her. My own constellation, Orion, was still below the horizon, although I could see the Dog Star blazing like a sapphire just above the rim of the hills.
At last I closed my eyes in sleep. Or was it sleep? I seemed to be transported to another place, in some other world far removed in time and distance from the battlefield near the walled city of Perinthos.
This is a dream, I told myself, even though I did not truly believe it. I stood on a grassy hillside dotted with wildflowers beneath a warm summer sun. Below me on the plain was a magnificent city shimmering in the day's heat, lofty towers and mighty monuments lining stately broad avenues. And beyond the city was the sea, dazzlingly blue-green in the bright sunshine, waves marching up onto a white sand beach in tireless procession.
The city seemed empty, dead, yet perfectly preserved. I began to realize that the shimmering I saw was some sort of protective dome over it, thin as a soap bubble, pure energy.
My life was tied to that city. I knew that with an absolute certainty. Yet I could remember none of it. Nothing except the concrete conviction that my life began with that city. And my love, as well. The woman I loved, the goddess who loved me, was part of that dead, empty, abandoned city.
When I tried to walk down the hill toward the city I found that my feet would not obey me. I stood rooted to the spot. In the distance, so far and so faint that I could not be entirely sure of it, I heard someone laughing sardonically. Almost crying, so bitter was the laughter. A man's twisted laughter, I thought, although I could not be altogether sure.
With all the force I could muster I tried to break free of whatever held me immobile and start on the way down the hill toward the city.
Only to wake up on the threadbare grass of the stony battlefield outside Perinthos with the first rays of the sun glinting over the rugged hilltops.
Who am I? The question echoed in my mind. Then another question arose to haunt me: Why am I here?
That morning we marched to Perinthos, where the main body of Philip's army was camped outside the city's wall. It was embarrassing to realize that Philip had used only a small part of his army to defeat my mercenary troops. Most of the Macedonian forces were besieging Perinthos, while still another contingent of his troops was marching swiftly toward Byzantion, on the narrow strait of Bosporus that separated Europe from Asia.
The city was no great affair. I could not see much of it, huddled behind its wall and locked gates, but it seemed small and cramped to me. The main wall was rough and uneven; crenelated towers stood by each of its two gates and only a few buildings inside were tall enough to rise above the wall's top. It sat at the edge of the water, where the rocky plain that descended from the distant hills met the Propontis, the sea that lay between the narrows of the Hellespont and the Bosporus.
Yet there was something familiar about the city, something that tugged at my memory. When I tried to recall what it was, though, I struck a blank wall much more obdurate than the city wall of Perinthos.
Philip's camp lay sprawled on the threadbare plain, almost within an arrow's shot of the city wall. I sensed an edginess in the air. The camp reeked with a restless, disgruntled mood, the kind of irritation that arises when soldiers have been sitting too long in one place with neither the comforts of their home base nor the prospect of getting home any time in the near future.
The siege was going badly. Perinthos was a seaport, so it could stay behind its locked gates and defy the Macedonians while ships brought in fresh supplies and, occasionally, reinforcements from Athenian allies such as Byzantion. Philip, supreme on land, had no navy. It must have been sheer madness for the Perinthians to try to relieve the siege with the handful of mercenaries that Athens had sent. Philip had made short work of them, but now that the battle was over, the siege went on and the city remained defiant.
The horses kicking up clouds of dust in their corrals seemed to be more active than the soldiers. Men loafed about as we marched into the camp. I saw that they had been here long enough to have built log huts for themselves with well-trampled paths between them. Mules brayed as slaves led them past us, their backs piled high with fodder and stacks of firewood.
The only soldiers who seemed busy were the engineers swearing and sweating over a massive catapult, yelling at a quartet of bare-chested slaves straining to load a heavy iron bolt onto it while another squad of half-naked slaves sat waiting to start the mules pulling the thick ropes that would cock the catapult's arm. I saw that someone had scratched onto the dark iron bolt the words, From Philip.
I heard the thump of another catapult being fired and, turning, saw its missile tumbling high into the morning sun. It cleared the wall and disappeared behind it. Then came a thunderous crunching boom as it hit. Voices wailed, a woman's high-pitched shriek cut through the air as a cloud of dust rose above the wall like a dark blot against the sky. From Philip.
Troy. Vaguely I remembered another siege of another city, long ago: Troy. Had I been there, or had I merely heard tales about it? My right hand pressed against my thigh and I felt the dagger that I kept strapped beneath the skirt of my chiton. What had it to do with my faint recollection of Troy?
Nikkos directed our phalanx to a relatively clear area of the camp, as far from the smell and dust of the corrals as possible. I saw that Philip's army was much larger than the Macedonians could field by themselves. He had added troops from all the tribes allied to his kingdom, such as Nikkos' Thracians, and still hired mercenaries, as well.
"See those gilded lilies there?" Nikkos prodded my ribs with his elbow as we were unloading our equipment from the mule train that had followed us into camp.
I looked in the direction he was staring. A troop of men in identical polished armor and helmets of gleaming bronze was forming up in well-ordered ranks under the flinty eyes of a trio of officers. Their breastplates were molded to look like a well-muscled torso; their helmets were plumed with horsehair dyed red. They seemed to sparkle in the sun.
"Argives," said Nikkos. "Fresh meat from the Peloponnesos."
"More mercenaries?" I asked.
He nodded and spat into the dusty ground. "Look at 'em. All prettied up in their fine bright armor. I bet they've never done anything more than parade around and tell tall tales. They must think they can get the Perinthians to swoon at the sight of 'em."
I had to laugh, especially when I looked down at my own battered armor, dented and scratched and caked with dust. But then I had to wonder: armor like that cost a great deal of money. Where did I get it? What other battles had I fought, to dent and scratch it so? Where was I from?
Philip and his generals seemed to understand full well that soldiers with little do to begin to rot from the inside. We were drilled every day, trained in the close-order formations of the phalanx until handling our sixteen-foot-long sarissas seemed as natural as using a soup spoon. The mercenaries loafed and laughed at us while we of the Macedonian phalanxes marched and wheeled and turned and charged at the bawling commands of our unit leaders.
It was dull, sweaty work; endless repetition. But I had seen how Philip's machine had ground up my mercenary phalanx like a meat chopper with ten thousand arms and one brain. I went through the drills without complaint and ignored the jeers of the mercenaries.
Most of the tribesmen served not as hoplites in a phalanx but as peltasts, archers or slingers or javelin throwers, light infantry that could skirmish against the heavier-armed phalanxes and dash away before the hoplites could close with them. The mercenaries were all hoplites, of course, heavy infantry.
"The country's full of mercenary troops," Nikkos told me. "Any poor boy who wants to make something of himself joins a mercenary troop and goes off soldiering. Every city in the land grows soldiers nowadays. Except Athens, of course."
"What do they grow in Athens?" I asked.
"Lawyers." And he spat again.
Some of the other men near us laughed. I let it pass.
The men fell to arguing over which city produced the best soldiers. Some felt that the Spartans were the bravest, but most agreed that Thebes had an even better reputation.
"Especially their Sacred Band," said one of the men.
"The Sacred Band aren't mercenaries," Nikkos pointed out. "They fight only for Thebes."
"And damned well, too."
"They're all lovers. Each man in the Sacred Band is part of a pair."
"The philosophers say that makes the best kind of soldier, a man who's fighting alongside his lover. They'll never let each other down."
"Fuck the philosophers. The Sacred Band's the best damned bunch of soldiers in the world."
"Better than us?"
"Better."
"We have a better general!"
"But they're not mercenaries. As long as we don't make war against Thebes we don't have to worry about them."
"There are plenty of Theban mercenaries, though. Even the Great King, over in Asia, hires mercenaries from Thebes."
"The Great King?" I asked.
Nikkos gave me a peculiar look. "Of Persia," he said. "Don't you know anything?"
I could only shake my head.
Nikkos did not trust the newly-arrived Argives. He kept calling them "pretty boys" who would be next to worthless in a real battle. For their part, the Argives swaggered through the camp as if they were each personally descended from Achilles, and laughed at our constant drilling.
"Why doesn't the king send them against the wall?" Nikkos grumbled. "Then we'd see what they're really made of."
But Philip apparently had no intention of attacking the city wall. The army sat outside and did little more than drill—and fire a few missiles into the city each day. The Perinthians sat tight and cheered each time a ship sailed into their wall-protected harbor.
Our phalanx was camped next to the strutting Argives, and there was plenty of bad blood between us. It was natural, I suppose; if we were not allowed to fight the real enemy we fought each other. There were rows and fistfights almost every night. The officers on both sides sternly punished the men involved; Nikkos himself took ten lashes one morning while we were all made to stand at attention and watch. One of Philip's generals, Parmenio, threatened to stop our wine supply if we did not behave.
"We'll see how belligerent you are on water," he growled at us. I had heard that Parmenio was a wine lover, and he looked it: heavy and red-faced, with broken blood vessels splotching his cheeks and bulbous nose.
The Argives were punished by their own officers, of course, but it seemed to us that their punishments were much lighter than our own.
I tried to stay out of the squabbling. Without quite remembering the details I recalled how another army had been almost destroyed because of a quarrel between its leaders. Was that at Troy?
Then came the night that changed everything.
"Where is Troy?" I asked Nikkos that evening, as we reclined on our blankets in front of the dinner fire.
He furrowed his brow at me. "Who knows? Maybe it's only a story."
"No," said one of the other men. "It's on the other side of the Hellespont."
"It's still there? I thought it was burned to the ground."
"That's where it was."
"How do you know? If it ever existed it was so long ago—"
"In the time of heroes."
"Heroes?" I asked.
"Like Achilles and Odysseus and Agamemnon."
Odysseus. That name rang a bell in my mind. Was it he who gave me the dagger I kept strapped to my thigh?
"What do you horse thieves know about Agamemnon?" shouted one of the Argives, barely a stone's throw from our fire.
"He was one of the leaders of the Achaians at Troy," I answered.
"He was an Argive," said the mercenary, stepping into the light from our fire. "King of Mycenae. Not some shit-footed farmer from the hills like you bunch."
I got to my feet. The Argive was big, and wearing his muscled cuirass plus a short stabbing sword at his hip, but I was taller by half a head and wider across the shoulders.
"I am of the house of Odysseus," I said, half-dreaming. "I remember that."
His jaw dropped open, then he laughed and planted his fists on his hips. "You've taken one too many blows on your head, Scythian. You're crazy."
I wondered how he knew that I was believed to be a Scythian.
Another Argive stepped up beside the first one. He too was armed. Nikkos and several others of my band scrambled to their feet.
"Odysseus has been dead for a thousand years," said the second Argive. He had a nasty sneer on his bearded face. "If he ever lived at all."
"He lived," I said. "I was with him."
"At Troy, I suppose."
They both laughed at me. Then the second one stepped close and looked up into my face. He barely came to my shoulders.
"You're crazy, all right," he said.
"Or a champion liar," said the first Argive.
I could feel Nikkos and the other men behind me stiffen with tension.
"No, look," I said, reaching for my dagger. "Odysseus gave me—"
The Argive jumped back and pulled the sword at his belt. "Trying to knife me!"
"No, I—"
He lunged at me. I parried with the dagger and punched him in the jaw with my left hand. He went down like a slaughtered ox.
And the camp around me erupted into violence. Men were punching, kicking, biting, wrestling each other onto the ground. I stood in the midst of it, the dagger still in my hand, while the fight swirled around me.
Feeling dumbfounded, I backed away, out of the firelight. At least they weren't using weapons, I thought. The one man who had drawn his sword lay unconscious by the fire.
Officers were bellowing in the night. I sheathed the dagger and stepped back into the fray, trying to separate the fighting men.
Philip himself rode up on a chestnut horse, bareheaded, without armor, his one good eye blazing with anger.
"Stop this at once!" he roared. And we stopped. The authority in his powerful voice was unmistakable.
For a moment everything was quite still. Men stood or knelt or lay stretched on the ground, all of us covered with dust, some of us bloody. Nikkos, his shirt torn and the welts on his back still livid, had one knee on the chest of an Argive and his teeth clamped on the man's bloody ear.
Before Philip could say another word a stone came hurtling out of the darkness and struck him squarely on the back of his head. It sounded almost as loud as one of the catapult bolts landing. Philip's head snapped forward, he slumped and fell off the horse. An Argive ran up with a spear in his hand and I saw that about a dozen of the Argives had formed a ring around Philip's prostrate body. All of them had swords in their hands.
I charged forward, head down, and bulled through the ring of armored men, grabbed the spear and wrested it from the Argive's hands before he could plunge it into the unconscious king.
Battle fury seized me again and the world slowed down around me. Holding the spear like a quarter-staff I smashed its weighted end into the face of the man I had taken it from. He fell like a stone. Then I stood over Philip's body, my back to his nervously stamping horse, ready to protect the king. The circle of armed Argives looked stunned with surprise. Beyond them Nikkos and the others of my troop seemed just as shocked and frozen into immobility.
Then a fresh commotion erupted out in the darkness beyond the firelight. A man's rough voice choked off in a bloody gargle, others shouted, and suddenly young Alexandros burst upon us, golden hair glowing, eyes wild, the sword in his hand bloodied.
"The king!" he shouted, pushing men out of his way and advancing upon me.
"I think he's merely stunned, sir," I said.
He stared hard at me, then turned to the ring of Argives who still held their swords. "Take them," he snapped. "All of them."
Nikkos and the others disarmed the Argives and led them off into the darkness.
"You saved my father's life," said Alexandros to me.
Parmenio and other officers came rushing up now and knelt beside Philip.
"I want those assassins hanged," Alexandros said into the night air. "But not until they tell us who paid them."
No one seemed to be listening to him. He fixed his blazing eyes on me. "Go with the king. I will join you presently."
And he stalked off into the darkness. If ever a man had murder on his face, it was Alexandros at that moment. It was difficult to realize that he was scarcely eighteen years old.
An hour later Philip was still woozy. I had followed the officers who carried him to his cabin, a rough log hut with horse blankets covering the dirt floor. I stood at the open doorway, the Argive spear still in my hands. The officers had carried Philip to his cot with a tenderness I had seldom seen. Several physicians and generals crowded around the king. A frightened-looking slave girl brought a flagon of wine to the cot.
Philip regained consciousness slowly. Although the physicians urged him to remain on the cot, he insisted on sitting up. His officers helped him to a folding camp chair. He gripped its arms weakly.
A scream of agony ripped through the night. Philip looked up sharply. Another scream, longer and more tortured than the first.
Philip gestured to one of the generals, who bent his ear to his king's lips. Philip spoke, the general nodded and strode out of the hut, past me.
The physicians bustled about. One of them bathed the back of the king's head. I saw that the cloth came away bloody. Another seemed to be preparing some kind of ointment in a shallow bowl over a candle flame. It smelled of camphor.
"Wine." It was the first word I had heard from him since he'd been felled. "More wine."
The girl's eyes lit up. She smiled with relief. She could not have been more than thirteen or fourteen.
A few moments later I saw a small parade approaching the hut. I recognized the general that Philip had sent out, a big, burly, hard-faced man with a beard blacker than Philip's own and outrageously bowed legs. Antipatros was his name, I learned later. Beside him strode Alexandros, his face white with anger or something else, his eyes still ablaze. And behind Alexandros marched a half-dozen other young men from his chosen Companions, all of them clean-shaven as Alexandros himself was. It made them look even younger than they were.
The Companions stopped at the doorway. Alexandros went through, followed by Antipatros.
Alexandros went straight to his father. "Thank the gods you're all right!"
Philip grinned crookedly. "I have a thicker skull than they thought, eh?"
If they were father and son they did not look it. Philip was dark of hair and swarthy of skin, his beard bristling, his arms thick and hairy where they were not laced with scars. Alexandros shone like gold; his hair was golden, his skin fair, his eyes gleaming. I thought of someone I had once known, a Golden One, and for some reason the hazy memory made me shudder.
"I'll find out who's responsible for this," Alexandros said grimly.
But Philip waved a hand at him. "We know who's responsible. Athens. Demosthenes or some of his friends."
"They bought out the Argives. I'll hang every one of them."
"No," said Philip. "Only the ones who had weapons in their hands. The rest of them had nothing to do with it."
"How can you be sure? Let me get the truth out of them."
"The truth?" Philip's face twisted into sardonic laughter. "Hold a man's feet in the fire and he'll tell you whatever you want to hear. What kind of truth is that? Is that what Aristotle taught you?"
Before Alexandros could reply, Parmenio spoke up. "This man saved your life." He pointed to me.
Philip fixed his good eye on me.
"When you were down and they were about to spear you, he broke through them and wrestled the spear away from the assassin."
Philip frowned, trying to remember. At last he said, "Orion, isn't it?"
"Yes, sir," I said.
He beckoned me to him. "What troop are you with?"
"Nikkos' phalanx, sir."
"Nikkos, eh? Well, since you've done such a good job of protecting me, you're now part of my personal guard. Tell the quartermaster to outfit you properly. Antipatros, show him where the guard is camped, eh?"
Antipatros nodded curtly. "Come with me," he said.
He led me outside the hut. "Scythian, eh? I suppose you can ride a horse," he said.
"I think so."
He gave me a sour look. "Well, you'd better."
Thus I became one of Philip's bodyguards.
My new companions of the royal guard were almost all Macedonians, most of them sons of very ancient and noble families, although there were a few newcomers and foreigners, such as I. I quickly learned that a true Macedonian nobleman learns to ride a horse before he learns to walk. At least, that is what they told me, and it seemed true enough. They were born riders. My first morning as a guardsman I spent watching the others mount their powerful steeds and ride galloping along the bare earth where they exercised the horses.
Before the sun was at zenith I had learned what I needed to know. With neither saddle nor stirrups, a man had to clamp his knees tight against the horse's flanks and grip the reins in his left hand to keep the right free to hold a lance or sword. That seemed simple enough. I told the wrangler in charge of the corral that I was ready to ride. He trotted out a dun-colored stallion while several of the other guardsmen stopped what they were doing to watch me.
I swung myself onto the back of the stallion and, gripping with my knees, off I went. The horse had ideas of his own. It broke into a frenzied bucking, kicking and twisting, trying to throw me off its back. The men back by the corral were slapping their thighs with laughter. Obviously they had given me the nastiest beast in the corral, to initiate me into their company.
I leaned forward against the stallion's neck and, gripping his mane, said aloud, "You can't shake loose of me, wild one. You and I are a pair from now on."
I clung with every ounce of strength in me and, after several very rough minutes, the stallion settled down and trotted to a stop, snorting and blowing, flanks heaving. I let it rest a few moments, then urged it forward with a nudge of my heels. We flew like the wind, off toward the distant hills. I turned it around and we cantered back to the corral where the other men stood open mouthed.
"Good horse," I said. "What do you call him?"
"Thunderbolt," one of the men said, almost sullen with disappointment, as I slid to the ground.
"I like him," I said.
The wrangler's weatherbeaten face showed an expression halfway between disbelief and amusement. He shook his head at me. "Haven't seen anything like that since the Little King tamed old Ox-Head."
The Little King was Alexandros, I knew.
"Well, if you like him that much," said the captain of the guard, Pausanias, "he's yours."
I thanked him and led Thunderbolt off to where the slave boys were rubbing down the horses after their exercise.
The siege of Perinthos ended a few weeks later. The city still defied Philip from behind its wall, and still received supplies from the sea. Philip gave the order to break camp and head back to Pella, his capital.
"I don't understand it," I said to Pausanias, the highborn Macedonian who headed the king's guard. "Why are we leaving without either taking the city or being driven away?"
Riding beside me, Pausanias gave a bitter little chuckle. The captain of the guard may have been born to the nobility, but there was something dark and festering in him. The men made jokes about him behind his back that I did not understand, jokes that had to do with stableboys and too much wine.
"There are more ways to win a city than by storming it or starving it out," he told me as we rode. "The king has a thousand tricks, one more devious than the other."
"Why did he want Perinthos in the first place?"
"It's allied to Athens."
"And why make war on Athens?"
Pausanias had a handsome face, with a well-kept light brown beard. But that grim moodiness showed through the humorless smile he was giving me.
"Why not ask the king? I'm only one of his distant nephews." And he pulled his horse away from mine, tired of my endless questions.
A short time later Alexandros came dashing up on Ox-Head, his powerful midnight-black charger, almost breathless with excitement.
"We're turning back!" he shouted to the group of us. "The king wants us to go back!"
"Back to Perinthos?"
"No, but to the coast. Quickly. Follow me!"
We turned and followed. Up ahead I could see Philip with others of his guard and a clutch of officers urging their horses into a swift trot. Something was up.
I rode with Pausanias and the rest of the royal guard, following Philip and his generals. Alexandros led the remainder of the cavalry behind us. The sun was high and hot by the time we slowed to a walk and nosed our mounts through a thin screen of trees and shrubbery atop the low ridge that lined the seashore. Alexandros rode up to his father's side, leaving the main body of the cavalry down at the bottom of the ridge.
Down on the beach below us a great flotilla of boats had been pulled up on the sand. There must have been two hundred and more of them, fat round-bottomed cargo carriers for the most part, although I saw more than a dozen sleek oar-driven war galleys among them.
Pausanias smiled wickedly as we sat astride our horses, stroking their necks to keep them calm and silent.
"You see?" he said to me, in a low voice, almost a whisper. "There is the Athenian grain fleet, ripe for the taking."
Men were lolling around the ships, dozing on their decks in the midday sun. A few of the grain carriers were keeled over on their sides while teams of slaves daubed hot pitch on their hulls.
"The gods know who he bribed to get them to stop here," Pausanias muttered. "The One-Eyed Fox has more tricks than Hermes."
I knew he meant the king, Philip. From the little I had gleaned of the situation, it appeared that this fleet was carrying the grain harvest from the rich farm lands of the Black Sea, beyond Byzantion and the Bosporus, the annual harvest that fed the land-poor city of Athens.
"The Athenians don't work the land," Nikkos had told me one evening. "They don't work at anything any more. They live on a public dole and bring the grain in through the Bosporus and the Hellespont. That's why Old One-Eye wants the seaport cities like Perinthos and Byzantion. The Athenians have the finest navy in the world, but it won't do them any good without ports to tie up in each night, will it?"
Obviously the grain fleet had been afraid to put in at Perinthos, with Philip's army besieging the city. So they had beached for the night here, nearly a day's ride below Perinthos, thinking themselves safe. Philip must have had spies along the coast—perhaps even among the sailors of the fleet, if Pausanias' wry comment had any truth in it.
Philip backed us away from the wooded ridge line, down to where the rest of the cavalry waited, hidden from the beach. We were ordered to feed and water the horses and to take a cold midday meal of preserved strips of goat's meat and water. The meat chewed like leather.
Presently I saw a long line of soldiers winding along the trail that led toward us. Peltasts, not the heavily armored hoplites, trotting at an easy gait. This was going to be a fast strike, and the lighter-armed peltasts would be more useful than the clanking heavy infantry.
With Pausanias' permission I crawled up to the ridge line to join the handful of scouts already lying on their bellies, keeping watch on the enemy. The Athenians had not even posted any guards! I saw a few armed men standing near the war galleys, but otherwise their camp was as undefended as air.
The sun had swung behind us and was heading for the rugged bare hills at our backs when Philip gave the order to mount up. I was dressed and armored exactly like all the others of the king's personal guard: a bronze cuirass molded to resemble a man's well-muscled torso, leather windings to protect my lower legs, and a bronze Corinthian-type helmet with cheek flaps. I bore a lance in my right hand and a sword in its scabbard against my hip. I also had my ancient dagger strapped to my thigh beneath the skirt of my chiton.
We did not charge. The word came from the king that we were to ride slowly down from the ridge toward the beach, ready to break into a gallop if the trumpets so ordered. It was not necessary. The sailors froze where they stood at the sight of more than a thousand of Philip's cavalry ambling out of the woods toward their beached boats. As I rode toward them, my lance upright in my hand, I saw the shock and terror on their faces. The peltasts came in at either end of the curving beach, javelins and bows ready. The sailors were trapped against the sea.
There was no fight in them. They surrendered meekly and the entire year's grain harvest became Philip's prize. There would be hunger in Athens this winter. Or so I thought.
Philip was in high spirits as we rode toward Pella, his capital. He had failed to capture Perinthos, and had done little more to Byzantion than throw a scare into its citizens. But he had the grain harvest. An army of slaves had loaded it all onto creaking ox carts and then we had burned the Athenian ships, every last one of them. The black smoke rose like an offering to the gods and stained the crystal blue sky for days. The Athenian sailors he sent home on foot, despite the urgings of Alexandros and several others to enslave them.
None of us was disappointed that we had won the grain without a fight. Except for Alexandros.
"The young hothead thinks he's a new Achilles," grumbled Pausanias as we rode toward the capital. "He wants glory and the only way he can get it is by bloodshed."
"How young is he?" I asked.
"Eighteen."
I made myself chuckle. "It's understandable, isn't it? Didn't you want to be a hero when you were eighteen?"
Pausanias did not reply to my question. Instead, he told me, "A few years ago, while we were campaigning in northern Thrace, Philip left Alexandros in Pella, to govern while he was in the field. Gave him the ring and the seal and everything. That's when people started calling him the Little King. He couldn't have been more than sixteen."
"He was left in charge at sixteen?" I marvelled.
"Antipatros was left with him, of course, to steer him by the elbow, but Alexandros took himself very seriously, even then. One of the hill tribes, the Maeti, stirred up some trouble. They're always raiding one another, those cattle herders, or trying to get away from paying the king's taxes."
"Alexandros went after them?"
Pausanias nodded. "Left the capital in Antipatros' hands, and he and his boyfriends went galloping out to deal with this miserable handful of cattle thieves."
He broke into a sour grin, the closest I had seen Pausanias come to laughter. "The Maeti ran off to the hills, of course, and left their pitiful little village empty. So Alexandros sent back to Pella for a dozen or so Macedonian families, resettled them in the village, and changed its name to Alexandropolis."
I waited for the rest of the story. Pausanias gave me an exasperated look.
"No one is allowed to put his name to a city," he explained impatiently. "Only the king."
I said, "Oh."
"Do you know what Philip said when he heard about it?"
"What?"
" 'At least he might have waited until I'm dead.' "
I laughed. "He must be fond of the boy."
"He was proud of him. Proud! The little snot slaps him in the face and he's proud of it."
I looked around us. We were riding at the head of the group but there were others of the guard close enough to overhear us. It was not wise to call Alexandros names.
"Don't worry," Pausanias said, seeing the concern on my face. "None of my men will inform on us. They all feel the same way."
I wondered if that were true.
Pausanias went silent for a while and we rode with no sound but the soft padding of the horses' hooves on the dusty ground and the occasional jingle of metal from their harnesses.
"It's his mother, if you want to know where the fault lies," Pausanias muttered, almost as if talking to himself. "Olympias has filled the boy's head with crazy tales ever since he suckled at her breast. She's the one who's made him think he's a godling. Made him believe that he's too good for us, too good even for his own father."
I said nothing. There was nothing that I could say.
"All those tales that Philip isn't his true father, that he was sired by Herakles—that's Olympias' twaddle, for sure. Sired by Herakles! She would've loved to have Herakles plow her, all right. But she settled for Philip."
I recalled that Nikkos had called Olympias a witch, and the other men had argued about her supernatural powers. And her reputation as a poisoner.
For my part, Alexandros seemed like a typical teen-age lad—albeit a teen-age boy whose father was king of Macedonia; a teenager who had already led cavalry in battle a half-dozen times. To me he seemed eager to show the men around him that he too was a man and no longer a boy. And even more desperate to prove himself in his father's eyes, I thought. He was heir to the kingdom, but his accession to the throne was apparently not all that certain: the Macedonians elected their kings, and if anything happened to Philip, young Alexandros might have a difficult time convincing the elders that he was ready for the throne.
He had his Companions, though: the lads he had grown up with, mostly the sons of Macedonian noble families. He was their natural leader, and they seemed almost to worship him. Four of them seemed especially close to him: smiling Ptolemaios, gangling Harpalos, the Cretan Nearkos, and especially the handsome Hephaistion vied with one another to shine in Alexandros' eyes. In battle they rode together, each trying to outdo the other. They even shaved their chins clean, as Alexandros did, although the word among the guards was that Alexandros hardly needed to shave at all.
"He's effeminate that way," Pausanias told me, more than once. He seemed to take pleasure in saying it. I wondered if he realized that my own beard grew so slowly that I shaved only rarely.
There was something in Alexandros' eyes, though, that disturbed me. More than ambition, more than an avid quest for glory. His eyes seemed to me far older than eighteen. Something glittered in those golden eyes that seemed ageless, timeless. Something that seemed faintly mocking whenever the Little King looked my way.
As the days passed, my memory did not improve. It was as if I had been born, fully grown and dressed in a mercenary hoplite's armor, just a few days earlier. The men around me took me for a Scythian, since I was tall and broad of shoulder, and had gray eyes. Yet I understood their language—the various dialects and even the outright foreign tongues that some of the men spoke.
I tried to remember who I was and why I was here. I could not avoid the feeling that I had been sent here purposely, dispatched to this time and place for a reason that I could not fathom.
The dagger strapped to my thigh was a clue. It had been there for so long that even when I removed it the straps and sheath left their imprint against my flesh. I had not shown it to anyone since the night the Argives had tried to assassinate Philip.
But on the trail back to Pella one night I removed it from beneath my skirt and one of the other guardsmen noticed its polished onyx hilt glint in the firelight.
"Where did you get that?" he asked, eyeing the beautifully crafted dagger appreciatively.
From Odysseus, I started to say. But I held my tongue. No one would believe that. I was not certain that I believed it myself.
"I don't know," I said, letting him take it from my hand and examine it closely. "I have no memory beyond a week or so ago."
Soon the other members of the guard were admiring it. They began to argue over its origin.
"That's a Cretan dagger," said one of the men. "See the way the hilt is curved. Cretan."
"Pah! You don't know what you're talking about. Take a good look at the design on the hilt. You ever see a Cretan design that used flying cranes? Never!"
"All right, hawkeye, where's it from, then?"
"Egypt."
"Egypt? You've had too much wine!"
"It's an Egyptian piece, I tell you."
"So's your mother."
The men nearly came to blows. Pausanias and I had to push them apart and change the subject.
But the following night the armorer of the guardsmen asked to see my dagger. It was becoming famous, which worried me. I had always kept it hidden so that I could use it in an emergency when all else failed. If everyone knew about it, how could I use it as a surprise weapon?
"That blade," said the armorer admiringly. "I've never seen work like that. Nobody makes an iron blade like that. It's a damned work of art."
The flying cranes were the symbol of the House of Odysseus, I knew. Somehow I had received that dagger from Odysseus, king of Ithaca, in the Achaian camp outside the walls of Troy.
A thousand years ago.
It could not be, yet I seemed to remember it. I could see in my mind's eye those high thick walls and the single combats between heroes on the plain before the city. I could see valiant Hector and fiery Achilles and stout Agamemnon and wary Odysseus as clearly as if I were with them now.
When I stretched myself out on the ground beneath my guardsman's cloak that night I clutched the dagger in my hand, determined to dream a dream about it, and about who I was and why I could remember a war from a thousand years in the past yet could not remember anything from a month ago.
I dreamed.
It was a confused, troubling dream, whirling and moving and filled with half-hidden faces and voices I could not quite hear.
I saw Alexandros, golden hair streaming in the wind as he galloped on his midnight steed over a stark desert made of human skulls. His face changed ever so subtly, still the golden-haired intense face of that royal youth, yet now he was someone else, someone mocking and scornful who laughed as he rode roughshod over living men, crushing their bodies beneath his horse's hooves.
Everything shifted, changed, melted like hot wax into a different scene where Philip slumped drunkenly against a dining couch, wine cup in one hand, his good eye glaring balefully at me.
"I trusted you," he mumbled at me. "I trusted you."
He was not drunk, he was dying, blood spurting from a sword gash in his belly. In my right hand I held a bloodied sword as I backed away from Philip's throne.
Someone laughed behind me and I turned, nearly slipping on the blood-slicked stones of the floor, and saw that it was Alexandros. Yet it was not him, but a different person, the Golden One, age-old yet ageless, youthful flesh with eyes that had seen the millennia pass by. He laughed with a bitterness and scorn that chilled my soul.
And beyond him stood a tall, regal, utterly beautiful woman with flowing red hair and skin as white as alabaster. She smiled at me grimly.
"Well done, Orion," she said. And she stepped past the Golden One to put her hands on my shoulders and then slide her arms around my neck and kiss me full on the lips.
"You are not Athena," I said.
"No, Orion. I am not. You may address me as Hera."
"But I love—" I was about to say Athena, then I realized that that was not her true name.
"You will love me, Orion," said flame-haired Hera. "I will make you forget about the one you call Athena."
"But..." I wanted to tell her something, but I could no longer think of what it was.
"Go back to the timeflow, Orion," said the Golden One, still smirking. "Go back and play out the role we have written for you."
His eyes were on the dead form of Philip as he commanded me. The bloodied sword was still tight in my grip.
I awoke in the camp with Philip's other guardsmen, still clutching the ancient dagger, sick at heart at my dream.
We resumed our march along the rocky trail through the coastal hills back to Pella. Following along behind us was the long, long train of wagons bearing the grain harvest that we had taken. Already there was talk in the camp each night that Philip would sell the grain harvest to raise more troops and then attack Athens. Or sell the grain to Athens in exchange for Perinthos and Byzantion. Or store the grain at Pella in preparation for an Athenian attack on the capital.
If Philip expected an attack on Pella, however, the city certainly did not look it. My first glimpse of Philip's capital, on the morning when we finally rode into sight of it, impressed me. There was no wall around the city. It sat on the rolling plain by the high road, a sizeable city of stone buildings, as open and defenseless as the Athenian grain fleet had been.
"We are its defense," Pausanias said. "The army. Philip fights his wars in the enemy's territory. They never get the chance to threaten his cities."
Pella was a new city, Pausanias explained to me. "The old capital, Aigai, up in the mountains, it's got walls around it, all right. Built to be a fortress, Aigai is. But Olympias hated it there, so Philip moved his capital here, by the high road, just to please her."
The city was still being built, I saw as we rode closer. Houses and temples were being constructed from stone and masonry; before us as we approached was a large theater carved into the hillside. Up on the highest ground stood a cluster of columned buildings of polished granite: Philip's palace, Pausanias informed me.
"It's big," I said, meaning the palace.
"The biggest city I've ever seen," said Pausanias.
"You haven't seen Athens," came a voice from behind us.
Turning on my mount I saw it was Alexandros, golden hair shining in the morning sun, eyes aflame with inner passion.
"Athens is built in marble, not this gray, dull granite," he said. His voice was sharp, high-pitched. "Thebes, Corinth—even Sparta is more beautiful than this pile of rocks."
"When were you in Athens?" Pausanias asked icily. "Or Thebes. Or Corinth. Or—"
Alexandros shot him a glance of pure fury and darted past us, his black Ox-Head kicking dust in our faces as he galloped away.
Pausanias spat. "To hear him talk, you'd think he's been around the whole world in a chariot."
Half a moment later Alexandros' Companions dashed past and we got more dust in our mouths.
When we stopped for the noon meal Pausanias made us clean up our gear. Grooms brushed our horses, slaves polished our armor. We trooped into the city bright and shining, and the citizens of Pella came out into the streets to welcome us with flowers and warm shouts of victory. I did not feel particularly victorious, and my dream still troubled me. I wondered if there were anyone in the city whom I could trust to interpret the dream without denouncing me as a traitor for even dreaming of slaying the king.
Philip rode in our midst, and the people showered him with flowers and cheers. From what I had heard among the soldiers, when Philip had become king, less than twenty years ago, Macedonia was being carved up by its neighbors. Now Macedonia had either conquered those neighbors or forced them into alliances. Philip was so successful that his capital needed no wall around it. Now he was struggling to make himself master of all the region, from the Illyrians along the Adriatic Sea to the Byzantines on the Bosporus, from wild northern tribes along the Ister River to the mighty cities of Thebes and Corinth and even Athens herself.
There was even talk of invading Asia, once the issue with Athens was settled, to free the Greek cities of Ionia and pluck the beard of the Persian High King.
Up the wide main thoroughfare of Pella we rode, enjoying the crowd's welcome, until we passed through the gates of the palace wall. At home now, Philip prodded his horse to the front and thus was the first to arrive at the steps of the palace.
Standing at the top of the gray stone stairs, proud and regal, her flame-red hair tied up in spirals that made her seem even taller than she was naturally, her royal gown purest white with shimmering crimson borders, her incredibly beautiful face haughty and imperious, stood the woman from my dream who had called herself Hera.
I gaped at her.
"Close your mouth, Orion," whispered Pausanias harshly. "That's the queen you're staring at: Olympias."
It was Hera.
And she recognized me. She looked past Philip, who was stumping painfully up the stairs. I realized for the first time that in addition to all the other wounds he had suffered, Philip was nearly crippled. But that is not what stunned me. It was Olympias. Hera. She looked straight at me and gave me an icy shadow of a smile. Her blood-red lips moved ever so slightly, mouthing a single word:
"Orion."
She knew me. My dream had not been a dream, after all.
Somehow I was not surprised when I was told that the queen commanded me to appear in her presence.
Most of the royal guard were young Macedonian nobles; once we were relieved of duty they quickly dispersed to their homes and families. Only those few of us foreigners or men who had no house in Pella remained in the barracks.
We were quartered in one of the buildings adjacent to the palace, where slaves of all ages and both sexes bustled about to make us comfortable. Our quarters were almost luxurious, for a barracks. There were good beds in a wide room with strong rafters holding up a wooden ceiling. Plenty of room for us to stretch out. The room was well-aired, too, with windows that looked out on the parade ground.
I saw that the men knew these household slaves well. Several of the women, and some of the younger boys as well, seemed to be lovers of certain of the guardsmen.
A messenger informed me of the queen's command as I was bathing in the spring-fed pool outside the exercise yard. The water was icy but I did not mind it, nor did I care that some of the men laughed at me for washing myself.
"It will rain soon enough, Orion," called one of them from the stone benches lining the yard.
"What are you, one of those Athenian dainties who has to take a bath every month?" jeered another.
But when the queen's messenger arrived they quickly fell silent. To them it must have seemed as if I had known the queen would summon me. Or as if the queen had magically made me wash so that I would be sweet-smelling in her presence.
So I followed the messenger, a smooth-cheeked youth who smelled of perfume, through the many rooms of the palace to the queen's audience chamber.
She was Hera, the flame-haired, imperious beauty who had told me in my dream that I would love her. It had to be a dream, I told myself as I walked from the entrance of her audience room to her throne and bowed low before her. How could it be otherwise? Men sometimes glimpse their futures in dreams. And she recognized me and knew my name because she had been informed by messengers from Philip's camp. Messengers—or spies.
That could explain how she recognized me, I thought. Yet how could I explain that the Hera in my dream looked exactly like the Olympias, queen of Macedon, who sat before me on a throne of polished ebony? I had never seen her before, except for my dream.
Two guards in handsomely burnished armor stood behind her throne, staring stonily into infinity. Several women sat off in a corner of the large room. The floor was polished wood. Her throne was flanked by tall red-figured vases filled with vibrant flowers.
"Your name is Orion, I am told," she said to me.
"Yes, Your Majesty," I replied formally, thinking that she knew perfectly well what my name was. Then a new thought surfaced in my mind: Perhaps she knows more than my name; perhaps she knows who I truly am, why I am here, everything!
"I am told that you saved the king's life."
"I did what any loyal man would have done," I said.
Again that ghostly smile animated her lips briefly. I realized that if Philip had been assassinated, her son might now be king.
"Olympias, Queen of the Macedonians, offers her thanks to you, Orion."
I bowed again.
"What reward would you have?" she asked. "Speak freely."
I heard the words on my tongue before I had a chance to think about them. "I have no memory, Your Majesty, beyond a few days ago. If it is in your power, I would like to know who I am and why I am here."
She arched an eyebrow at me, as if half-amused, half-affronted by my request.
But she smiled once more and murmured, "Come to this room at midnight, Orion. Come alone and tell no one. Do you understand?"
"I understand."
"Until midnight, then."
I hurried out of her audience chamber. Come alone and tell no one. That sounded dangerous. What would the king think if he learned of it?
As it turned out, the king was also thinking about my lack of memory. The messenger who had conveyed me to the queen's chamber was still waiting outside in the anteroom when I left Olympias. He told me that Parmenio wanted to see me now.
It was difficult not to like red-nosed Parmenio. He was an older man, probably almost fifty, his hair and beard grizzled with gray. He was built like a boar, low to the ground, thick in the chest and arms. Blunt as a boar, too; there was not a trace of dissemblance in him.
"The king wants you to talk with Alexandros' teacher," he said once I was ushered into his quarters. It was a sparse, spare room in the palace. If he had a family and a real home, they must have been elsewhere.
"Alexandros' teacher?" I asked.
"He's heard about your lack of memory and he wants to see you. His name's Aristotle. Fancies himself a philosopher, although he's from these parts—Stagyra. Spent some time in Athens, though; that must be where he got all the weird ideas he's always mumbling about."
I was getting a good tour of the palace and its surrounding buildings. I followed the same perfumed young man out of the palace, through the gate we had ridden past earlier in the day, and down one of the noisy streets of Pella to the house of Aristotle the Stagyrite.
The air in the streets seemed thick with dust—whether from all the construction that seemed to be going on everywhere, or blown in by the cutting wind from the plain beyond the city, I could not tell. The city was raucous with the sounds of hammering and yammering, builders and vendors and street hawkers and housewives and men of business all conducting their affairs at the top of their lungs. I saw a slim young girl, hardly into her teens, leaning against the freshly plastered wall of a new house, fiddling with one of her sandals. She was a pretty little thing, her long brown hair done up nicely, her short-skirted blue dress slipping over one bare shoulder. Then I realized that she was applying ink to her sandal. Wherever she stepped she left an advertising imprint for the brothel of Dionysia of Amphipolis. I laughed: Dionysia must have a high-class clientele if she expected new customers to be able to read.
The house that Philip had furnished Aristotle was large and spacious, although not imposing. Some of the new houses I had passed, and others still under construction, seemed much grander, with fluted columns and impressive staircases fronting them. Most of them were set well back from the street, separated from the traffic by low walls and flower gardens.
Everyone who was anyone, it seemed to me, was pouring into the capital. Men whose fathers had been horse-thieving hill-clan leaders were now vying with one another to build the most impressive house and lavish garden. These new noblemen had left their ancestors' homes in the hills to be in Philip's capital and to serve the king.
Aristotle's house was low and wide, with a newly-timbered roof the only sign that anyone cared about it. The garden in front of it had gone to weeds. The gravel path was also weed-choked and obviously had not been raked in months. The shutters on the windows were unpainted, cracked with age; a few of them were dangling lopsidedly.
Yet once I was ushered inside everything changed. I had thought the house much too large for one man, since I had been told that the philosopher lived alone. I saw that I was wrong: the house was barely large enough for him, because he was far from alone in it.
The house was a museum, a library, a repository for every kind of book and specimen and drawing and sample of all the myriad kinds of things that interested the Stagyrite's far-ranging mind. The pretty young messenger left me at the front door, after it was opened to me by a bright-eyed servant with a ragged sandy brown beard and thinning hair. His chiton was clean but seemed very old and frayed.
I stepped from the untended garden into a room that had originally been an entryway. Now its walls were lined with shelves and the shelves were crammed with book scrolls, all of them well-worn. Down a hallway narrowed by more bookshelves I was conducted by the balding servant until we came to the back of the house where Aristotle stood bent over a long table covered with seashells. No two of them were alike.
He looked up, blinked at me, and then dismissed the servant with an abrupt flick of his hand.
Aristotle looked almost like a gnome. Short and lean almost to the point of emaciation, his head was large and high-domed, dominating his tiny, shrivelled body. His hair was thinning but still dark; his beard neatly trimmed. His eyes were small and he blinked constantly as if they pained him.
"You are the one called Orion?" he asked, in a voice that was surprisingly deep and strong.
"I am Orion," I said.
"Son of?"
I could only shrug.
He smiled, showing ragged yellow teeth. "Pardon me, young man. That was a trick. Four times before I have seen men who have lost their memory. Sometimes an innocent question brings an answer before they can think about it and the memory returns. Or at least part of it."
He sat me on a stool next to his worktable and examined my head in the afternoon light streaming through the long windows.
"No scars," he muttered. "No sign of a head wound."
"I heal very quickly," I said.
He fixed me with those burning eyes. "You remember that?"
"No," I replied truthfully. "I know it. Just as I know that my name is Orion."
"You remember nothing that happened to you beyond a few days ago?"
"It is as if I were born as an adult. The first thing I remember is marching with the mercenaries of Diopeithes on the plain of Perinthos, little more than a week ago."
"Born fully-formed, with shield and spear in hand," he said, half smiling. "Like Athena."
"Athena? You know her?"
"I know of all the gods, Orion."
"I dream of them."
"Do you?"
I hesitated, wondering how much I could tell him. Would he consider me insane? Would he consider it treason against Philip to dream that Olympias, the queen, was also Hera the goddess? And that she intended that I should slay the king?
"What does Athena look like?" I asked.
He blinked several times. "Usually she is portrayed in armor and helmet. Phydias' great statue of her shows her bearing shield and spear. Often she has an owl with her, the symbol of her wisdom."
"But her face," I insisted. "Her form. What does she look like?"
Aristotle's eyes widened at my question. "She is a goddess, Orion. No one has seen her features."
"I have."
"In your dreams?"
I had blurted enough, I decided. So I merely replied, "Yes, in my dreams."
Aristotle considered this a moment, his large dome of a head tilted slightly to one side on his frail shoulders. "Is she beautiful?" he asked at length.
"Extremely beautiful. Her eyes are silver-gray, her hair as black as the midnight sky. Her face..." I could not find the words to describe her.
"Do you love her?" he asked.
I nodded.
"And she loves you? In your dreams?"
She loved me in the barren snowy wastes of the Ice Age, I knew. She loved me in the green forests of Paradise. We had loved each other through a hundred million years: in the dusty camps of the Great Khan, in the electric cities of the industrial world, on the shores of the methane sea of ringed Saturn's largest moon.
All this I kept to myself. He would think me a raving madman if I told him a hundredth of it. So I answered merely:
"Yes. In my dreams we love each other."
He must have sensed that there was much I was holding back from him. We talked until the sunlight faded from the windows and slaves entered the room softly to light the oil lamps. The balding major-domo who had admitted me to the house came and whispered in his master's ear.
"You are wanted back at your barracks, Orion," said Aristotle to me.
I got up from the stool, surprised that we had been talking for so long that my joints popped when I stood up.
"Thank you for your time," I said.
"I hope I have been helpful."
"Yes. A little."
"Come see me again. I am almost always here and I will be happy to see you."
"Thank you," I said.
He walked with me around the long table toward the door to the room. "I think that perhaps the key to your memory lies in those dreams you described. Often men dream of things that they do not think of when they are awake."
"The gods use dreams to give us messages," I suggested.
He smiled and reached up to pat my shoulder. "The gods have other fish to fry, Orion, if they actually take any interest in human affairs at all. They are far too busy to meddle in our dreams, I fear."
His words sent a shock through me. Somehow I knew he was right, and I wondered how he knew so much about the gods. Yet, at the same instant, I knew he was also wrong. The gods' principal interest is to meddle in human affairs.
I had been recalled to barracks because I was assigned to duty that evening. Most of the royal guard had gone off to their homes scattered through the city, so the handful of us who lived in the barracks got the chore of standing like statues through the king's long, loud, wine-soaked dinners.
Pausanias was one of the few Macedonian nobles who actually did his guard duty that night. Sour-faced and grumbling, he complained that he should be reclining on a dinner couch with the others rather than standing around in armor and helmet while his fellow nobles drank themselves into a stupor.
"I'm as good as they are," I heard him growl as he inspected my uniform. We were all decked out as if we were marching into battle. We even carried our shields with us.
My post was by the main entrance to the dining hall. It was a big room with a huge fireplace at one end of it, roaring hot although no cooking was done on it. Even in summer the Macedonian nights could be chill. The food was brought in on long trays by sweating servants and set down on the dinner tables, while the dogs, lolling by the fireplace, watched silently with hungry eyes that caught the flickering of the flames.
Philip reclined on a couch at the front of the hall, raised up on a two-step dais, beneath a strikingly vivid mosaic of a roaring lion done in colored pebbles. Flanking him along the table were his generals Parmenio and Antipatros, and Antigonos, gray and lean as an old wolf. Like Philip, Antigonos had lost an eye in battle long ago.
The dinner guests sitting below them were all male, of course. At first. There were plenty of women servants, most of them young and slim and smiling as the men ogled and pawed at them. The boys among the servants were treated much the same. Even Philip pinched buttocks without regard to gender. Wine was poured liberally, and the laughter and rowdiness rose with each gulp.
I saw that Alexandros was not present, nor any of his young Companions. This was a dinner for the king's friends and companions-in-arms. And for relatives, close and distant, such as Attalos, a fat and beady-eyed clan leader who owned, it was said, the biggest house in Pella and the richest horse ranch in Macedonia.
Attalos also had a fourteen-year-old niece who was being dangled as bait before Philip's eyes, according to the barracks gossip.
"Philip likes 'em young," one of my barracks mates had told me while we were suiting up for duty. "Girls, boys, makes no difference."
"How old was Olympias when he married her?" I had asked.
"Ahh, that was different. That was a state marriage. Brought the Molossians and all of Epeiros over to Philip's side with that marriage."
"He was mad about her, though," said one of the other men.
"Bewitched by her, you mean."
"Well, whatever it was, it wore off as soon as she bore him Alexandros."
"Doesn't matter; the old fox casts his one good eye on anything with smooth skin."
They all laughed approvingly, wishing they had the kingly prerogatives of Philip.
As the dinner stretched into a long drinking bout I wondered if I would be able to keep my midnight appointment with the queen. Philip looked half-unconscious from the wine he had drunk, yet he had a boy of ten or so pouring still more into his gold goblet. Some of the dinner guests were drowsing on their couches; those who weren't were fondling the prettier servants.
Then the hetairai were admitted into the dining hall and the servants scampered away, many of them looking grateful. These professional women were older and looked quite sure of themselves. It seemed to me that they picked out the men they wished to be with. No one argued with their choices. And the men's behavior actually improved. The lewd jokes and roaring laughter quieted down as one of the courtesans pointed to the musicians who had been sitting idly in a corner. They struck up their lyres and flutes and lovely soft music filled the dining hall. The stench of spilled wine and vomit still hung in the air. But now the perfumes of distant lands began to make the room more pleasant.
In less than an hour the dining hall emptied out. No one could leave before the king did, of course, but soon after the hetairai appeared he lumbered off with one of the serving boys, leaning heavily on the lad's shoulders, dragging his bad leg. One by one the other men went off with their female companions until at last the hall was emptied of all except the servants, who wearily began cleaning off the tables and throwing scraps to the dogs who had been waiting by the fire all evening long.
At last Pausanias strode past my post at the entrance. "Dismissed," was all that he managed to say.
I hurried back to the barracks, took off my armor, and rushed back to the palace to find Olympias' audience chamber.
The queen was not in her audience chamber. But a sloe-eyed maid with flowing dark hair and a knowing smile was waiting for me. Holding a clay oil lamp in one upraised hand, she guided me through the upper levels of the palace, a dizzying labyrinth of stairs and corridors and rooms. I thought she was deliberately trying to confuse me.
"Is the queen's room in a hidden place?" I asked, half joking.
She looked up at me in the yellow light of the lamp, her smile full of secrets. "You will see," she said.
And I did. Soon we came to a low wooden door at the end of an otherwise blank corridor. I could hear the night wind moaning even though we had passed no window. We must be up high, I reasoned.
The servant scratched at the door and it swung inward on silent hinges. She went through and beckoned me enter. I had to duck to get through the arched doorway. The servant slipped behind me and went out again, closing the door behind her.
It was dark inside. Blacker than the darkest moonless night, a darkness so deep and all-engulfing that I felt as if I had stepped into oblivion, an emptiness where nothing at all existed. Dark and cold, frigid, as if I had been plunged into the void where warmth and light could not exist. My breath froze in my throat. I stretched out my arms like a blind man, reaching for some reference point in this stygian abyss, searching sightlessly while my senses told me I was falling, tumbling through a nothingness where neither time nor space existed. Panic rose within me as I struggled to breathe.
Then I saw the faintest, faintest glow of a distant light. Like the flicker of the first star of evening, so tenuous that I could not be certain it was there at all. Gradually, though, the light brightened. I heard a slithering of bare feet, the faintest suggestion of distant laughter. I could breathe again. My fear subsided. I stood immobile, silent, waiting for the light to brighten further, my right hand resting gently on the dagger strapped beneath my skirt.
Slowly, lamps came aglow, low and guttering at first, then gradually brightening. I saw that the room I stood in was immense, impossibly long and wide, its vast ceiling lost in shadows, its floor polished white marble, massive columns of green marble marching in rows along either side of me.
At the far end sat Olympias—Hera?—on a throne of ivory inlaid with gold. She glowed with splendor. Snakes slithered on the dais of her throne, on the steps of the marble platform, on the high back of her throne itself. Some were small and deadly poisonous. Others were huge constrictors, their eyes glittering in the lamplight.
This colossal opulent room could not possibly have been part of Philip's palace. Somehow I had passed through a gateway into another world, another universe. This was witchcraft, I realized, beyond anything that Philip's rough soldiers could imagine.
"Come to me, Orion," Olympias called. Her voice was low and melodious, yet it carried the distance from her throne to me as if she had been standing at my side.
I walked as if in a trance. It seemed to take hours. I heard nothing but the clacking of my boots against the marble floor. I watched the snakes watching me with their glittering eyes.
At last I stood at the foot of her throne. Olympias wore a copper-red robe that matched the color of her hair and left her shoulders and arms bare. Its slitted skirt revealed her long smooth legs. Bright jewelry bedecked her throat, her arms and wrists. She looked down on me and smiled a cruelly beautiful smile.
"Do you fear me, Orion?"
"No," I replied truthfully. One of the pythons was entwining its mottled body of brown and green around my leg, climbing me as if I were a tree. And I stood immobile as a tree, unable to turn away, unable to run, unable even to move my arms or fingers. Yet I felt no fear. I was truly under her spell.
Olympias leaned back in her throne as a sleek cobra slithered over her bare shoulder and across her bosom.
"Do you love me, Orion?"
"No," I said. "I love—Athena."
Her smile turned cold. "A mortal man cannot love a goddess, Orion. You need a woman of flesh and blood. You love me."
"I mean no offense, but—"
"You will love me!" she snapped. "And no other."
I found that I was unable to speak. The python had coiled itself around my chest. Its head rose to my eye level and its flickering tongue touched my face. I stared into its slitted yellow eyes and saw nothing, no purpose, no reason. It was being controlled just as I was.
"You will love me," Olympias repeated. "And you will do my bidding. Not merely here, but wherever and whenever I command you."
It was if my body did not belong to me, as if it were a machine under someone else's control. I could think, I could feel the massive strength of the python's muscular coils gripping me tightly, feel the tingling jabs of its tongue on my face. I could hear Olympias' words and see her leaning forward on her throne, her eyes as glittery as the snakes'. But I could not move. I knew that if she willed it, my heart would stop.
The cobra glided across her lap and down the leg of the throne. I saw that what I had at first thought to be a bright metal armband was actually a small snake that she now removed from her forearm and considered silently for a moment.
Then she got up from her throne, holding the little coral snake in both hands, and came down the three steps of the dais to me.
"You will love me," she repeated, "and do whatever I command you to do."
She held the snake to my throat. I felt its tiny fangs penetrate my flesh and a hot surge of flaming agony raced along my veins with the speed of an electrical shock. I realized why Olympias had made the python coil around me. Without it I would have collapsed to the cold marble floor.
I never lost consciousness. The pain passed and my body felt frozen, totally numb. Yet when Olympias commanded me to follow her, I found that the python had slid off me and I could walk almost normally. She led me to a bedchamber that seemed suspended in emptiness. I felt a solid floor beneath my feet, but when I looked down I saw nothing but tiny pinpoints of light winking in swirling clouds of cold mist that billowed pink and blue and golden yellow.
We reclined on a bed as soft and yielding as the gentle swells of a becalmed sea, stars gleaming out of the darkness all around us. Olympias unfastened her robe; her body was magnificent, perfect skin glowing in the darkness, a form as divine as a goddess.
"Do you like what you see, Orion?" she asked as she knelt beside me.
I could not help but answer, "Yes."
She took my clothes off me, clucking her tongue slightly at the dagger strapped to my thigh.
"The gift of Odysseus," I explained. "At Troy."
Wordlessly she unstrapped the dagger and tossed it off into the darkness surrounding our bed.
"Now you are mine, Orion," she murmured.
We made love, slowly at first but then with increasing ardor. Every time she climaxed she screamed, "You're mine! Mine!"
In the lulls between times she asked, "Who do you love, Orion?"
I could not answer. I could not say her name, and her control of my body would not permit me to speak the name of Athena. Then we would begin anew and the passion would surge in us both as we thrashed and tumbled and sweated wildly. "Did she ever do this for you?" Olympias would ask. "Did she ever make you do this?"
How long we spent coupling was impossible for me to reckon. But at last we lay side by side, staring into the infinite sea of stars, panting like a pair of rutting animals.
"Speak the name of the woman you love, Orion," she commanded me.
"You will not like what you hear," I replied.
I had expected anger. Instead, she laughed. "Her hold on you is deeper than I had expected."
"We love each other."
"That was a dream, Orion. Nothing more than a dream of yours. Forget it. Accept this reality."
"She loves me. Athena. Anya."
For long moments she was silent in the darkness. Then, "A goddess may take on human form and make love to a mortal. That is not love, Orion."
"Who am I?" I asked while her control over me was relaxed. "Why am I here?"
"Who are you? Why, Orion, you are nothing more than any other human creature—a plaything of the gods." And her laughter turned cruel once more.
I closed my eyes and wondered how I could escape this evil woman's grasp. She had to be the goddess Hera that I had seen in my dream. Or was she merely the witch Olympias, controlling me, bewitching me, with the power of her dark magic? Were my memories of Athena and the other gods and goddesses merely vivid dreams hatched by my own longing for a knowledge of my origins, my own yearning for someone to love, for someone who could love me? Was Olympias' powerful magic truly witchcraft, or the superhuman abilities of an actual goddess? I fell asleep trying to fathom the mystery.
When I opened my eyes again early morning sunlight was filtering through the beaded curtain of a window. I was lying beside a naked woman in a rumpled bed. The makeup smeared across her face told me that she was one of the hetairai who had attended Philip's dinner the night before.
I sat up slowly, not wanting to wake her. In the milky early light she looked older, tired.
Softly I rose from the bed and gathered my clothes, which had been neatly piled on a curved chair in the corner of the bedroom. Even my dagger was there, at the bottom of the pile. I dressed, ducked through the curtained doorway of the bedroom, and bumped right into Pausanias.
"You've had a busy night of it," he growled.
I had no idea of how I had gotten here, so I said nothing.
"Damned Thais just picks out whoever she likes, like a man," said Pausanias as he led me down the corridor toward a flight of stairs. We went down to the ground floor and out into the street. It was still early, quiet outside.
"How did you get there?" Pausanias asked grumpily, jerking a thumb back toward Thais' house. It was a modest two-story building, but well kept, with flower boxes blooming brightly beneath every window.
With a shrug that I hoped was convincing, I replied, "I don't really know."
"If you can't hold your wine you shouldn't drink."
"Yes, you're right."
We marched along the empty street, heading uphill toward the palace.
"Trouble is," Pausanias said, "that young Ptolemaios has his eye on her. And she taps you on the shoulder instead."
Ptolemaios was one of Alexandros' Companions, I knew. Rumored to be a bastard son of Philip, as well.
"Perhaps she's merely trying to make him jealous," I half-joked, still wondering how I did get into Thais' house. And bed.
"That kind of jealousy leads to murder, Orion. And blood feuds."
I shrugged light-heartedly. "I have no family to carry on a blood feud after I'm gone."
"Thank the gods for small favors," he muttered.
As we neared the palace wall a question popped into my mind. "How did you know where I was?"
Pausanias fixed me with a surly glance. "One of the queen's servants woke me before cock's crow and warned me of it. Said I'd better get you out of there before Ptolemaios finds out about it."
"And how did this servant know?"
"I told you she was one of the queen's servants. The witch knows everything that happens in the palace—sometimes before it even happens."
The air of the palace seethed with intrigue. The king was conducting one military campaign after another along his borders while at the same time negotiating with delegations from regions as far-flung as the Peloponnesus and Syracuse in Sicily, as well as receiving ambassadors from the Great King of Persia.
No one seemed to know what Philip was aiming at, what his goals were. There was no dearth of opinions on the subject, however. I heard as many different guesses as there were men speaking on the subject. Philip wanted to rule all of the Greeks, said one. He wanted to conquer the Persian Empire, said another. No, he wanted to be dictator of Thebes, the city where he had spent several of his younger years as a royal hostage. No, he wanted to humiliate Athens and hang Demosthenes by his scrawny neck. Nonsense, said still another, his real intention is to expand Macedonian colonies northward into the backward, bickering tribes of the Balkans, but to do that he must safeguard the kingdom's southern borders, where the great cities of Thebes and Athens and the others are waiting for him to turn his back.
I was one of the guards standing behind Philip's throne the afternoon that the Persians were presented to the king. They were exotic in their long silk robes of many colors, bedecked with sparkling jewels. They brought magnificent gifts of spices and incense from their new king, Dareios III. Philip accepted them as if they were his due and gave in return a hundred cavalry horses: all geldings, I learned later. The other guardsmen laughed themselves sick over Philip's trick.
The king himself was not even smiling after the Persians left his court.
"Spies," he said grimly to Parmenio and Antipatros, after the Persians had left. "They're here to see how strong we are, how well we're getting along against Athens."
"I'll bet they're heading straight for Athens now, to tell Demosthenes everything they learned here," said Antipatros.
"And to pour more gold into his hands," added Parmenio.
There were other intrigues, as well, much closer to the court. Attalos was pushing his young niece, Kleopatra, as a fitting bride for Philip. I knew that the king had taken several wives, mainly as diplomatic gestures, and he had a powerful sexual appetite: male or female did not much concern him as long as they were young and pretty.
Kleopatra was such a common name among the Macedonians that many of the nobles at court referred to the fourteen-year-old niece of Attalos by an honorary name that Philip had bestowed on her: Eurydice, the name of the supernally beautiful wife of legendary Orpheos. Orpheos had voluntarily descended into Hades to recover his dead love. I thought that Olympias would rather see Philip in hell before she would accept his marriage to Kleopatra/Eurydice.
Olympias was scheming constantly. She had driven all of Philip's other wives out of the court, although she resolutely refused to sleep with him, according to the palace gossip. She wanted to make certain that her son, Alexandros, would be the only possible heir to Philip's throne. That meant that there must be no new marriages and no new legitimate sons. I knew that all the tales about her powers of witchcraft were more than true, and that she could somehow command me at her whim. What she planned for me I did not know, and after that first wild night of lovemaking she did not so much as glance at me.
For his part, Philip was also scheming. A marriage into the house of Attalos would benefit the throne. So would an advantageous marriage of his daughter by Olympias, who was also named Kleopatra. Even younger than Attalos' niece, and painfully shy, Philip's daughter was a very valuable pawn in the game of nations.
And that game went on without cease. Ambassadors and couriers arrived at the court almost every day. From my post as one of the king's guards I saw that Philip could be tactful, generous, flexible, patient, a good host, a firm friend, a reasonable enemy ready to make peace even when he had the upper hand. Especially when he had the upper hand.
But I began to see, also, that he was implacable in his pursuit of one goal. No matter how generous or flexible or reasonable he was, each agreement he made, each objective he sought, was aimed at making Macedonia supreme, not merely over the surrounding tribes and the port cities along the coast; Philip wanted supremacy over the major city-states to the south—Thebes, Corinth, Sparta, and especially Athens.
"Demosthenes rouses the rabble down there against us time and again," Philip complained to a visiting Athenian merchant. "I have no reason to fight against Athens. I revere the city of Perikles and Sokrates; I honor its ancient traditions. But the Athenians think they are the lords of the earth; they are trying to strangle us by cutting us off from the sea."
The merchant had been sent to negotiate for the year's grain harvest that we had seized. Philip wanted Athens to cede control of Perinthos and the other port cities along the Bosporus.
"All the port cities?" gasped the Athenian. "But that, most honored king, would put your mighty hands at the throat of our people. Macedonia would be able to shut off the grain supply whenever you chose to."
Leaning an elbow on the withered thigh of his crippled leg, Philip looked down at the white-robed merchant from his throne. "It would make us friends, Athenian," he said. "Friends trust one another. And they do not rouse their people to make war against one another."
"You speak of Demosthenes."
"None other."
The merchant tugged at his beard for a moment, then smoothed the front of his robe. At last he replied, "Athens, sir, is a democracy. In the past, our city was ruled by an oligarchy. Even earlier, by tyrants. We prefer democracy."
Patiently, Philip said, "I have no intention of ruling Athens. All I want is for Athens to stop making war on us."
"I shall so inform the Assembly when I return."
"Very well."
Philip traded the grain for a promise that Athens would no longer support Perinthos against him. Nothing was said about Byzantion.
Philip saw the merchant off with full diplomatic honors. The royal guard was lined up at the palace gate for him. Unfortunately, it was in the middle of an autumn storm, and cold driving rain made everything gray and miserable. Philip limped back to his rooms with me and three other picked guardsmen following close behind him. The cold raw weather must have bothered his bad leg intensely.
His three chief generals were waiting for him in his work room, together with slaves bearing pitchers of strong red wine. It was a smallish room, dominated by a heavy trestle table on which a large map of the Aegean coast was held down by heavy iron paperweights.
"The agreement means nothing," Parmenio grumbled as he put down his first goblet on the edge of the sheepskin map. "The Athenians will keep their word only as long as they choose to. In the meantime they get the grain."
"And their navy can strike anywhere along the coast, unhindered," Antigonos pointed out.
Antipatros agreed vigorously. "You should have held onto the grain. Let them feel hungry for a while. Then they'd be more reasonable."
Philip took a deep grateful draught of the wine. Then he said, "They'd get hungry, all right. And blame us for it. Then we'd just be proving what Demosthenes has been telling them for years: that I'm a bloodthirsty tyrant intent on conquest."
"Tyrant," spat Parmenio. "As if you rule all by yourself, without the Council or the elders to account to."
But Philip was hardly listening. His mind was already spinning out the next move. I stood guard at the door until it was dark, when I was relieved. When I got to the barracks Pausanias told me that the queen had sent for me.
He eyed me suspiciously. "Why is the queen interested in you?"
I returned his gaze without blinking. "You will have to ask her, captain. She has summoned me; I didn't ask to see her."
He looked away, then warned, "Be careful, Orion. She plays a dangerous game."
"Do I have any choice?"
"If she says a word against the king—even a hint of a thought against him—you must tell me."
I admired his loyalty. "I will, captain. I am the king's man, not the queen's."
Yet, as I made my way through the deepening shadows of night toward Olympias' rooms in the palace, I knew that she could control me whenever she chose to. I was hopelessly under her spell.
To my surprise and relief, Alexandros was with her. A slave woman met me at the door to the queen's suite of rooms and guided me to a small chamber where she sat on a cushioned chair talking earnestly with her son. Even in an ordinary wool robe she looked magnificent, copper-red hair tumbling past her shoulders, slender arms bare, lithe body taut beneath the light-blue robe.
Alexandros was pacing the small room like a caged panther. He radiated energy, all golden impatience, pent-up emotion that made his smooth handsome face seem petulant, moody.
"But I'm his only legitimate heir," Alexandros was saying when I was ushered into the room.
Olympias acknowledged my presence with a glance and gestured for the servant who had brought me to depart. She closed the door softly behind me and I stood there, silent and immobile, waiting to be commanded.
Alexandros was no taller than my shoulder, but he was solidly built, with wide shoulders and strong limbs. His golden hair curled down the back of his neck. His eyes glowed with restless passion.
"There's no one else," he said to his mother. "Unless you count Arrhidaios, the idiot."
Olympias gave him a pained smile. "You forget that the Council may elect whom it chooses. The throne does not automatically pass to you."
"They wouldn't dare elect anyone else!"
She shrugged. "You are still very young, in the eyes of many. They could elect Parmenio or—"
"Parmenio! That fat old man! I'd kill him!"
"—or they could appoint a regent," Olympias continued, unshaken in the slightest by her son's outburst, "until you are old enough to rule."
"But I'm old enough now," Alexandros insisted, almost whining. "I've already served as regent while the king was off at his wars. What do they expect of me?"
"Vision," said Olympias.
"A vision? Like an oracle?"
"No," she said, in a slightly disappointed tone. "The kind of vision that excites men's souls. A goal for the future that is so daring that men will flock to you and follow wherever you lead them."
He stopped his pacing and stared at her. "What are you talking about?"
"You must lead the Greeks against the Persian Empire."
Alexandros frowned at his mother. "By the gods, Philip has been talking about fighting the Persians for ten years or more. There's nothing new or daring in that."
Olympias gestured to the chair next to hers. I saw that her fingernails were long and lacquered blood-red.
Alexandros sat.
"Philip talks about fighting the Persians. You will speak of conquering the Persian Empire. Philip uses the Persians as an excuse in his drive to bring all the Greek cities under his dominion. You will tell all the Greeks that no Greek city can be free as long the Persian Empire threatens us."
"That's what Aristotle told me—"
"Of course he did." Olympias smiled knowingly.
"But the Persians aren't threatening us," Alexandros said. "Their new king is struggling to hold his empire together. They have no intention of invading us."
"Little matter. People remember the tales of their grandfathers, and their grandfathers before them. The Persians have invaded us in times past; they all know that. Even today the Persians control the Greek cities of Ionia and interfere in our politics, paying one city to war against another, keeping us weak and divided. Only by crushing the Persian Empire can cities such as Athens be truly free."
Alexandros gaped at her. At last he said, "You could be a better orator than Demosthenes himself."
Olympias smiled and patted her son on his golden curls. "Philip has an army. Demosthenes has a cause. You can have both."
"To conquer the Persian Empire." Alexandros breathed the words, inhaled the idea like heady perfume. "To conquer the world!"
Still smiling, Olympias turned to me. "Orion, I have a command for you."
I knew that I must obey.
"This is my son," she said. "You will protect him at all times against all his enemies. Including the man who believes himself to be his father."
"Against Philip?" I asked.
"Against Philip and anyone else who would stand in his way," Olympias said to me.
"I understand."
Abruptly she turned back to Alexandros, still sitting there musing about conquering the world. "Be patient. Learn from the One-Eyed Fox himself. Bide your time. But when the moment finally comes, be prepared to strike."
"I will, mother," said Alexandros fervently. "I will."
Olympias dismissed me as soon as Alexandros left. I went to my barracks bed that night with my thoughts in a swirl. I owed my allegiance to Philip, yet Olympias had commanded me to protect Alexandros even against Philip himself. What did she fear? What did she plan?
I forced myself to sleep, willed myself to dream. Once again I found myself on the sunny hillside overlooking the magnificent city by the sea. It sat beneath its glittering dome of energy, looking totally empty, completely abandoned.
The woman I loved had lived there once. The woman I knew as Athena. Anya was her true name, or as true a name as any of the Creators possessed. They were far beyond the need for names, even the need for words. They were as far beyond mortal human form as the stars are beyond my reach.
The Creators. I remembered the word, the concept. One of them had created me. Hera had called me a creature, a being created by—by the Golden One, Aten. I remembered that much. My memory was slowly returning. Or were the Creators merely allowing me to remember some things so that I could serve them better?
Determined to learn more, I started walking toward the glowing city.
Only to find myself in my rumpled bed in the barracks at Pella, sunlight beaming through the high windows and roosters crowing in the distance.