by Mary Renault
“Eurydike, come, hurry.” A little group, some of her court, had found its way to her. Wiping her eyes, she saw they were not defiant but afraid; marked men all of them, old allies of Antipatros, who had thwarted Olympias’ intrigues, had intrigued against her, had crossed her will and wounded her pride and helped drive her out of Macedon. “Quickly,” they said. “Look, that cavalry there, those are Molossians, they’re heading this way, it is you they will be looking for. Quickly, come.”
She galloped with them cross-country, cutting the corners of the rutted road, letting her horse pick its line over the heath; thinking how Nikanor had said that he was doing as he knew his brother would wish; remembering Kassandros’ red hair and inflexible pale eyes. No messenger from her had fallen among thieves; he had had her cry for help, and decided she was expendable.
On the shoulder of the next hill they stopped to breathe their horses, and looked back. “Ah!” said one of them. “That was what they were after, to loot the baggage train, There they are at it; so much the better for us.” They looked again; and there was a silence which no one liked to break. In the distance they saw, among the wagons, a single tent with men surrounding it. A small far-off figure was being led outside. Eurydike realized that from the moment when Olympias had appeared and her army melted, she had forgotten Philip entirely.
They made their way east towards Pella, avoiding the look of fugitives as best they could, using for hospitality the mesh of guest-friendship that webbed every Greek land, excusing by their haste their lack of servants. They kept ahead of the news, pretending that a treaty had been signed upon the border, that they were hurrying to Pella to call Assembly and confirm the terms which the army in the west had agreed to. In this way they lodged for several nights, and left each morning aware of a cloud of doubt.
Nearing Pella, she glimpsed the tall keep of her father’s house. With unbearable longing she remembered the quiet years with Kynna, the small boyish adventures and heroic dreams, before she entered the great theater of history, to enact a tragedy in which no god came down at last from the machine to vindicate Zeus’ justice. From her childhood on she had been given her role and taught her lines and shown the mask she must wear. But the poet was dead, and the audience had booed the play.
At Mieza, they passed an old manor whose overgrown gardens scented the warm air with roses. Someone said that this was the schoolhouse where Aristotle had taught many years ago. Yes, she thought bitterly; and now his boys were ranging the earth to pick up the leavings of their schoolfellow, who, grasping at power to serve a use beyond it, had put his stake upon love and swept the board.
They dared not enter Pella. They had only traveled at their own horses’ pace; a courier with remounts on the way could have been there long before them, and they could not be sure of the garrison after the news from the western army. One of her suite, a certain Polykles, was brother to the commandant of Amphipolis, an old stronghold near the Thracian border. He would help them to get away by sea.
Henceforward they must try not to be seen. Their arms discarded, wearing homespun bartered for with peasants, they nursed their weary horses, skirting the great timeworn road that had carried Darius the Great towards Marathon, Xerxes to Salamis, Philip to the Hellespont and Alexander to Babylon. One by one, pleading sickness, or just disappearing in the night, her small company fell away. On the third day, there was only Polykles.
From a long way off they saw the great keep of Amphipolis, commanding the mouth of the Strymon River. There was a ferry there; troops were there also. They turned inland to seek the nearest ford. But at the ford, too, they were awaited.
When they brought her into Pella, she asked them to untie her feet, which were bound under the mule she rode, to let her wash and comb her hair. They replied that Queen Olympias had ordered her brought just as she was.
On the low hill above the town stood what looked at first like a thicket of stunted trees, laden with birds. When they came near, ravens and crows and kites rose, angrily cawing, from the branches. It was Gallows Hill, where the corpses of criminals were nailed up after execution, like vermin in a gamekeeper’s larder. Philip’s murderer had hung there once. The present corpses were no longer to be recognized—the scavengers had fed well—but their names had been painted on boards nailed at their feet, NIKANOR SON OF ANTIPATROS, one board said. There were more than a hundred crosses; the reek almost reached the town.
In the audience hall, on the throne where Eurydike had heard petitioners and envoys, Olympias was seated. She had changed her black robes and was dressed in crimson, with a gold diadem on her head. Beside her on a chair of state sat Roxane, the young Alexander on a stool at her knee. He stared with round dark eyes at Eurydike when she was led in, unkempt and dirty, with fetters on her legs and wrists.
The irons had been forged to restrain strong men. Her wrists with their dead weight hung down before her. She could only walk by sliding each foot in turn along the floor, and every step chafed her ankles. To keep the fetters from tripping her, she had to walk with an ungainly straddle. But she held her head high as she shuffled towards the throne.
Olympias nodded to one of the guards. He gave Eurydike a hard shove in the back; she toppled forward, bruising her chained hands. Struggling to her knees she looked up at the faces. Some had laughed; the child had laughed with them, but was suddenly grave. Roxane was still smiling. Olympias watched under dropped lids, intently, like the cat that waits for the caught mouse to move.
She said to the guard, “Is this slut the woman who claims to be Queen of Macedon?” He assented, woodenly. “I do not believe you. You must have found her in the harbor stews. You, woman. What is your name?”
Eurydike thought, I am alone. No one wishes me courage or will praise it. Any courage I have is for me, alone. She said, “I am Eurydike, the daughter of Amyntas son of Perdikkas.”
Olympias turned to Roxane, and said conversationally, “The father a traitor, the mother a barbarian’s bastard.”
She stayed on her knees; if she tried to rise, her weighted wrists would pull her over. “And yet, your son the King chose me to marry his brother.”
Olympias’ face tautened with an old anger; the flesh seemed to grow dense. “I see he did well. The trull is well matched with the fool. We will keep you apart no longer.” She turned to the guards and for the first time smiled. Eurydike could see why she did it seldom; one of her front teeth was black. The guards seemed to blink before they saluted. “Go,” she said. “Take her to the marriage chamber.”
When she had toppled twice trying to rise, the guards set her on her feet. She was led to the rear courts of the palace. Dragging her fetters, she passed the stables, and heard her horses whinny; the kennels, where the deep-voiced hounds she had hunted with barked at the foreign sound of her weighted footsteps. The guards did not hustle or harry her. They walked awkwardly at her dragging pace; once, when she tripped over a rut, one of them caught her to keep her from falling; but they did not look at her or speak to one another.
Today or tomorrow, or soon, she thought; what matter? She felt death present in her flesh, its certainty like a sickness.
Ahead was a low-walled stone hut with a pointed roof of thatch. A stink came from it; a privy, she thought, or perhaps a sty. They steered her towards it. A muffled sobbing sounded from within.
They lifted the crossbar from the rough timber door. One of them peered into the fetid gloom. “Here’s your wife, then.” The sobbing ceased. They waited to see if she would go in without being forced. She stooped under the low lintel; the roof inside was hardly higher, the thatch pricked her head. The door closed behind her, the crossbar clattered back.
“Oh, Eurydike! I will be good! I promise I’ll be good. Please make them let me out now.”
By the light of a foot-square window under the eaves she saw Philip, in fetters, hunched sideways against the wall. The whites of his eyes glittered in the tear-stained dirt of his face. He gazed at her pleadingly and held out his hand
s. The wrists were rubbed raw.
The room was furnished with a wooden stool, and a litter of straw like a horse’s. At the further end was a shallow pit, reeking with excrement and buzzing with great blue flies.
She moved to the space under the high roof-peak, and he saw her fetters. He wept again, wiping his running nose. The smell of unwashed flesh repelled her as much as the privy. Involuntarily she drew back against the far wall; her head met the roof again and she had to crouch on the filthy floor.
“Please, please, Eurydike, don’t let them beat me again.”
She saw then why he did not sit with his back to the wall. His tunic was stuck to his skin with dark stripes of clotted blood; when she came near he cried, “Don’t touch it, it hurts.” Flies were clustering on the yellow serum.
Fighting back her nausea she said, “Why did they do it?”
He gulped back a sob. “I hit them when they killed Konon.”
A great shame filled her. She covered her eyes with her chained hands.
He eased his shoulder against the wall, and scratched his side. She had felt already the tickle of insects around her legs. “I shouldn’t have been King,” he said. “Alexander told me I shouldn’t be. He said if they made me King someone would kill me. Will they kill me?”
“I don’t know.” Having brought him here, she could not refuse him hope. “We may be rescued. You remember Kassandros? He didn’t help us in the war; but now Olympias has killed his brother and all his kin. Now he must come. If he wins, he will let us out.” She sat down on the stool, holding her wrist-chains in her lap to ease their weight, and looking at the window-square, whose patch of sky was edged by a distant tree. A gull, seeking the pickings of the kitchen-midden, floated across from the wide free waters of the lagoon.
He asked her unhappily for permission to use the pit. When necessity drove her there, the flies flew up and she saw their crawling maggots.
Time passed. At length he sat up eagerly. “Suppertime,” he said, and licked his lips. It was not only squalor that had changed him; he had lost several stone. A tuneless whistling was coming towards the hut.
A grimy, broken-nailed hand appeared in the window-hole, grasping a hunk of black bread smeared with greasy dripping. Another followed, then a crock of water. She could see nothing of the face but the end of a coarse black beard. The whistling receded.
Philip seized his bread and tore at it like a starving dog. It seemed to her she would never eat again; but her captors had fed her that morning. She had no need to ask if he had eaten that day. She said, “You can have my piece today; I will eat tomorrow.”
He looked at her, his face illuminated, radiant. “Oh, Eurydike, I’m so glad you’ve come.”
Afterwards he told her, rambling, the tale of his captivity. His sufferings had confused his mind, he was often hardly coherent. She listened dully. Far off and muted, as they might reach a sickroom, came the sounds of early evening, the lowing of cattle, horses returning from the stables, dogs barking, peasants hailing each other after work, the stamp and rattle of the changing guard. A cart lumbered near with a heavy load; she could hear the oxen straining, the driver cursing and beating them. It did not pass by, but creaked to a halt, and, rumbling and rattling, tipped its load. She listened dully, aware that she was exhausted, thinking of the crawling straw. She propped her back to the wall and fell into an unsleeping doze.
Footsteps approached. Is it now? she thought. Philip was stretched out and snoring. She waited to hear the bar withdrawn. But there came only the indistinct sounds of peasants at heavy work. She called, “What is it? What do you want?”
The mutterings died into silence. Then, as if a stealthy sign had been made, the stirrings began again. There was a kind of patting and scraping against the door, then a thud, and another.
She went to the little window, but it did not overlook the door. All she could see was part of a heap of rough-dressed stone. She was tired, and slow to understand, but suddenly the sound came clearly: the slap of wet mortar, and the scraping of a trowel.
Kassandros was walking his siege-lines on the damp Arkadian plateau under the walls of Tegea; thick, dark, mossy, impacted brick, stuff that would only dent under a ram that could have loosened ashlar. The town had a perpetual spring inside; it was a slow business to starve them out. They had told his heralds that they were under the special patronage of Athene, who had promised in some oracle of remote antiquity that their city would never be taken by force of arms. He was resolved to make Athene eat her words.
He did not hurry to meet the courier from Macedon; it was sure to be another appeal from Eurydike. Then as he came near he saw the face of disaster, and took the man to his tent.
He was a servant who had escaped the massacre of the Antipatrids. To the tale of death he added that Olympias had had the tomb of his brother Iollas battered down and his bones scattered for beasts to eat, claiming that he had poisoned her son in Babylon.
Kassandros, who had listened in rigid silence, leaped from his chair. There would be a time for grief; all he could feel was a blazing hate and rage. “That wolf-bitch! That Gorgon! How did they let her set foot in Macedon? My father warned them against her with his dying breath. Why did they not kill her on the border?”
The messenger said, without expression, “They would not fight the mother of Alexander.”
For a moment, Kassandros felt that his head would burst. The man looked with alarm at his staring eyes. Aware of it, he fought for composure. “Go, rest, eat. We will speak again later.” The rider went off, not wondering that a man should be moved by such a slaughter of his kin.
When he had come to himself, he sent an envoy to make terms with the Tegeans. He excused them from allegiance to himself, if they would merely agree not to help his enemies. Face-saving formulae were exchanged; the siege was lifted; the Tegeans went in procession to the old wooden temple of Athene, to bring her thank-offerings for keeping her ancient promise.
Behind the walled-up door, time passed like the days of a slow fatal illness, bringing misery by small additions; more stink, more flies and lice and fleas, more festering of their sores, weakness and hunger. But still the bread and water came every day to the window-hole.
At first Eurydike had counted the days, scratching with a pebble on the wall. After seven or eight she missed one and lost count, and ceased to make the effort. She would have sunk into blank apathy, broken only by fighting with the insects, but for Philip.
His mind could not hold the sum of disaster long enough to be capable of despair. He lived from day to day. Often he would complain to the man who brought the food, and he would sometimes answer, not cruelly but like a sulky servant unjustly blamed, saying he had his orders and that was the end of it. She scorned to utter a word to him; but as time passed he grew a little more forthcoming, bringing out old saws about the ways of fortune. One day he even asked Philip how his wife was. He looked at her and answered, “She says I’m not to tell.”
She drowsed away half the day but could not sleep at night. Philip’s snores were noisy, the vermin as tormenting as her thoughts. One morning early, when they were awake and already hungry, she said to him, “Philip. I made you claim the throne. It was for myself I wanted it. It is my fault you are shut up here, my fault that you were beaten. Do you want to kill me? I do not mind. If you like I will show you how.” But he only said with a whine like a sick child’s, “The soldiers made me. Alexander told me not to.”
She thought, I need only give up my bread to him. He would take it gladly if I gave it, though he will not rob me. I would surely die quickly, now. But when the time came she could not bear her hunger, and ate her share. To her surprise, she was aware that the portion had grown larger. Next day there was still more, enough to save for a frugal breakfast.
At the same time, they began to hear the voices of the guard outside. They must have been told to keep their distance—her record of subversion was well known—their comings and goings had been only measures of
time. But discipline was relaxing, they talked and gossiped carelessly, weary perhaps of guarding a place without an exit. Then one night, as she lay watching through the window-hole a single star, there was a soft approach, the click of leather and metal; the opening was darkened for a moment, and when it lightened, there were two apples on the sill. The mere smell was ambrosia.
After that something came every night, and with less stealth, as if the officer of the watch were himself conniving. No one stayed to talk at the window, no doubt a hanging matter; but they talked to their relief, as if they meant to be heard. “Well, we’ve our orders, like it or not.” “Rebels or no, enough’s enough.” “And too much is hubris, which the gods don’t like.” “Aye, and by the look of it they won’t wait long.”
Well versed in the tones of mutiny, she sensed something else. These men were not plotting; they were talking openly the common talk of the streets. She thought, We are not that woman’s only victims; the people have sickened of her. What did they mean by the gods not waiting long? Can it be that Kassandros is marching north?
There had been cheese and figs in the night, and the jug had had watered wine in it. With better food her listlessness had left her. She dreamed of rescue, of the Macedonians staring with pity at their filth and wretchedness, clamoring for retribution; of her hour of triumph when, washed and robed and crowned, she resumed her throne in the audience chamber.
Kassandros’ sudden departure for the north had left confusion behind him; his forsaken allies in the Peloponnese had to face alone the Macedonians led by Polyperchon’s son. When their desperate envoys overtook his column, he only said he had business that would not wait.
Democrat Aitolians had manned Thermopylai against his passage. Such challenges had no romance for him. More practical than Xerxes, he commandeered everything that would float in the busy strait between Euboia and the mainland, and bypassed the Hot Gates by sea.