That night he threw a feast. All were invited – even Alexander and his men.
Pausanias rose from his bed in the queen’s wing of the palace and went to Philip to make a formal complaint. He did this before the entire court, two hundred of the most powerful men in Macedon and Thessaly, with fifty more highland noblemen of his own family to listen, most of the royal companions and every one of the pages of his own generation except me.
Alexander ordered me to stay in his rooms. He thought that Attalus would try to kill me if he saw me.
But Pausanias did something incredibly brave. He did what Attalus never imagined he’d dare to – he swore a complaint. He admitted that he’d been raped. In effect, he admitted his weakness, but at high political cost to Attalus, who thought that the man would suffer in silence.
Attalus pretended that nothing had happened, but they watched – I heard this from Nearchus and from Black Cleitus too – as they watched, Philip turned his back on his senior adviser.
Later – an hour later – when Attalus demanded my head on a platter, the king again turned his back on Attalus. He didn’t even respond.
But still later – and very drunk – Philip also dismissed the charges against Attalus, with a weak joke about how everyone knew that Pausanias was prone to exaggerate. The ‘joke’ carried – intended or not – the suggestion that Pausanias had wanted what happened.
Pausanias turned very pale. Nearchus, who was closest to him, said for the rest of his life that Pausanias stumbled as if he’d been struck.
The next day Philip attended the newborn’s naming ceremony. He held the squawking infant high in front of a thousand Macedonians and named him Caranus – the name of the founder of the dynasty, and thus a strong suggestion that he would be King of Macedon. Alexander held his tongue. But he was as pale as Pausanias that night. That part I saw. And the king kept his back resolutely to Attalus, who was forced to accept that the birth of his grand-nephew wasn’t going to save him from the king’s anger.
And that day – almost convenient, the timing was – we received a dispatch from Parmenio, who was already in the field in Asia, saying that he had taken Ephesus, the mighty city of Artemis, without a fight – that they had opened their gates to him – and that he had set up an image of Philip beside the image of Artemis in the great temple.
All the court applauded. Even the ambassadors applauded. Alexander spilled his wine and then apologised for his clumsiness.
But after two more days of it, Attalus gathered his staff and his picked men – and Diomedes – and rode away to Asia with recruits and reinforcements for Parmenio. He was supposed to have had a major role in the ceremonies at Aegae, but he left. I still think that the king ordered him to go. I think it was something of a working exile.
Alexander knew all about the dispatch from Asia, and he knew all about the preparations for the ornate wedding of his sister. He watched those preparations with the same anger he showed over the preparations for war in Asia. He watched the priests gather, watched Olympias arrange for a new gown with new, heavy gold jewellery, watched the musicians practise.
‘The Athenians, at least, will view us with the contempt we deserve.’ Alexander shrugged. He indicated a new statue of Philip in marble with bronze eyes, being loaded on a cart.
‘My father, the god,’ he said.
In fact, Philip seemed to have included himself in the pantheon – a sort of unlucky thirteenth god, but he’d built a small temple at Olympias that could be interpreted as a temple to Philip, and now, in the procession of the gods, he’d included an image of himself. And Parmenio had put his image in the Temple of Artemis. Which seemed to me like hubris.
On the other hand, I was inclined to think that the Athenians would think whatever they were told, at least until they’d rebuilt their fortunes. I had begun to experience that cynicism that comes easily to young people. And to anyone who has anything to do with politics.
We travelled north from Pella to the old capital. Pausanias travelled with us. No one could make a joke near him, but he was alive and apparently unbroken, although pale and subdued. If he had been prone to exaggeration before, now he was merely silent. His hands shook all the time.
We rode up to the old capital in a band, like we were going to war. All the older pages wore armour, and the younger ones too, if they owned any. We didn’t dare go to the armoury, which Attalus virtually owned. I, for one, thought his ‘exile’ was a ruse and suspected he was out in the countryside with a band of his retainers, ready to attack us. There was an agora rumour that he meant to kill the king and seize power.
I was concerned to see that Olympias and her household travelled with us. She was as big a target as we were, and Attalus had apparently stated – in his rage the day after I taught Diomedes a lesson – that Olympias had arranged the whole thing and he’d have her killed. Apparently Attalus told the king – repeatedly, right up until the moment he left for Asia – that Olympias and Alexander were plotting his death.
The glories of Macedon, eh?
But Attalus didn’t come with us to Aegae. And Parmenio, the steadiest of his generation except for Antipater, was in Asia. And Antipater was nowhere to be found – in fact, he, too, was in self-imposed exile, on his farms.
We rode through a summer landscape of prosperity that thinly covered a state in which we were near to civil war – nearer than we had been in fifty years. Rumours were everywhere.
I remember that on the second day out of Pella, we were alerted by Polystratus that there was a column of foreigners coming the other way, and we took up our battle stations – Attalus employed a lot of Thracians, and we were ready for an attack.
These weren’t Thracians, but Athenian traders on their way to Pella, where they imagined the court to be. Nearchus turned them around, brusquely enough, but when we discovered that they had a cargo of swords and sword blades, we asked them to open their bales, and we probably put them in profit on the spot – fifty of the richest young men in Macedon. The Athenians had Keltoi swords from north of Illyria, beautiful swords with long, leaf-shaped blades and deep central fullers – much stiffer and heavier than our swords or Greek swords, but easy in the hand, and the longer blades promised a longer reach on horseback.
One of the traders showed me how the Keltoi held their swords, with a thumb pressed into the hollow of the blade. I bought the sword, and rode north playing with it. It was a foot longer than my xiphos.
But that’s not what I wanted to tell. What I wanted to tell is that Pausanias came alive at the sight of the blades. He was poor, and I loaned him money, and he purchased a beautiful weapon – the size of a xiphos, but with that heavy leaf blade, sharper than a bronze razor and with an African ivory hilt worked like a chariot and a running team. Superb work.
For as long as he was buying the sword, Pausanias was animated and alive. Even his hair seemed to regain its vibrancy.
And then it was gone. And he sank back into himself, and his face went slack, as if he’d taken a death blow.
We reached Aegae about the same time as the Athenian embassy. I looked for men I knew – I had rather hoped to see Kineas or Diodorus. But the Athenians had not sent any of their great men, except Phokion, and he was a guest friend of the king. He was kind enough to remember me. He clasped my arm – warrior to warrior, a nice compliment.
‘Why are you wearing armour, son of Lagus?’ he asked.
‘Difficult times,’ I said, looking elsewhere. Great as was my respect for the Athenian strategos, I was not going to tell him about our internal squabbles.
Indeed, upon arrival at Aegae, we all breathed a great sigh of relief. Aegae was sacred ground – no one would defile it with treason. Alexander and Olympias and Pausanias and I should all be safe, at least for the next fifteen days. Or so we reckoned.
That night, I played knucklebones with Nearchus and Black Cleitus, drank too much, lost at Polis to Alexander. He was withdrawn, even by his own standards.
I offered to g
o and check on Pausanias, and Alexander shook his head and held out his wine cup to have it refilled. ‘Pausanias is with my mother, now,’ he said. He said it in much the same voice as a man might have said that another man had died.
The next day, the festivities began. The scale was unprecedented for Macedon, and had I never been to Athens, I think I would have been thrilled. As it was, I could only wince – our most lavish celebration, when placed next to, say, the Panatheneum, was like tinsel placed next to real gold. Philip’s crass lack of taste was like a physical blow, and the Theban envoys didn’t bother to hide their sneers.
But the Herald of Athens – not a man I knew – announced that all treaties had been ratified, and that any Macedonian criminal to be found in Athens would be handed over – a remarkable concession for Athens to make, and not even something for which we’d asked. It made me suspicious, and what made me more suspicious was that Phokion turned his head away while it was read aloud.
There was a feast that night. Philip let it be known that I was welcome – I put on my best, and my best was as good as the best the Athenians had – and lay on a kline with a Thessalian nobleman who was fascinated with everything from Athens.
Philip got very drunk and said a great many things that made all of us wince. He referred to the cities of Greece with the term we use for sex slaves, and he made slighting references to Athens and Sparta and the Great King of Persia. In fact, he sounded like a petty and insecure tyrant, and he scared me.
What hurt me most was that many of the older Macedonians ate this sort of crap up, as if Philip’s insults actually made Macedon greater or Athens lesser. And it was in looking around that hall that I realised how many of the older, wiser and better nobles were gone. Parmenio was gone, with Amyntas, in Asia. I hated Attalus, but he was the king’s friend, and he was gone. Antipater was present – but not in any place of favour, and none of his own inner circle was there, except me – if I even counted. The king had stripped himself of his closest and best men.
The men he had near him were inferior in every respect, and this crass racism was only the surface of it.
And Alexander watched them the way a hawk watches rabbits. He remained aloof – but it seemed that he might pounce at any moment.
We all drank too much. And Philip ended the evening when he stood up, his chiton open to the crotch, showing his parts, so to speak, and stood by his kline.
‘I am the King of Macedon!’ he said. ‘And this time next year, I’ll be the lord of Asia, and if I want to be a god, I’ll make myself one!’
He tottered away, narrowly missed falling, and two royal companions escorted him to bed.
Alexander may have said something, but his sneer was so palpable that no one needed to hear him. Thebans and Athenians and Thessalians – and Macedonians – noted it.
There were whispers that Philip needed to go. I heard them.
I walked Alexander back to his quarters that night. He was in a large semi-private house, something of a treasury for his family, and it rankled that he was not housed at the palace. It rankled doubly that we had Olympias. She seemed to be awake all the time, and when she wasn’t with Pausanias she seemed inclined to flirt with the pages and Hephaestion.
She was waiting for us, and demanded the story of the evening. Alexander told her, in the pained tones that sons keep for their mothers, and finally forced her to go to bed by refusing to talk any more. He was rude. She was not. She smiled.
‘Tomorrow, you will love me as you have never loved me before,’ she said.
Alexander turned his back on her. Crossed his arms.
She laughed. Then she stopped in front of me, and all the power of those eyes was on me. ‘When you had Diomedes at your feet,’ she said, ‘did his screams please you?’
I looked at the floor.
‘Now, now, my little man,’ she said. This from a woman whose eyes were at my chest. ‘No lies to the queen. Were you disgusted by his weakness? Elated at your own success? Did you force yourself to hurt him in memory of what he did to your poor friend?’ She smiled with real understanding. ‘Or was it delightful to inflict terror and pain on him?’
I stood with my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth.
‘Well, we both know, don’t we?’ she said. ‘Don’t you forget, or grow superior, eh, Ptolemy?’ She laughed at me. ‘Why do you lie to yourself ?’ And walked away, floating on air.
When she was gone, Alexander turned to a slave. ‘Wine,’ he said, snapping his fingers.
The slave, terrified, spilled wine. Alexander looked at the poor boy and he fled.
I picked up the pitcher. A little liquid still sloshed in the base, and I poured a kraterful and handed it to the prince, who poured a libation.
‘To Zeus, god of kings,’ he said.
I had never heard him invoke Zeus so directly.
I must have opened my mouth, because Alexander held up a hand. ‘Ask me nothing. I do not wish to speak, or play a game. I do not even wish to be alive, just now. Please leave me.’
Startled, I took the empty wine cup from him and went to withdraw.
‘Stop,’ Alexander said. ‘I owe you my thanks, Ptolemy. Your attack on Diomedes was brilliant.’
I bowed. ‘It almost went badly. I didn’t plan for everything . . .’
Alexander managed a grim smile. ‘Stop, you sound too much like the cook who always apologises for flaws in the dinner you’d never have found yourself. You humiliated Attalus and put him in the wrong – at just the moment. It all went as Mother said it would,’ he said. And shrugged. ‘She is . . . the very best intriguer I have ever known.’
It hadn’t occurred to me that my brilliant and lucky attack on Diomedes had been part of a larger plan. ‘The queen planned to have Attalus sent away?’ I asked.
Alexander shook his head. ‘You have my thanks,’ he said. ‘Now go away, before I say something I will regret.’
The next day, I had the whole corps of former pages on alert, and Hephaestion said that Alexander hadn’t slept all night. It wasn’t my duty day, but we were all to march in the parade – the ambassadors and all the nobles, led by Philip in a gleaming white chiton and gold sandals. It sounded like bad theatre to me, but we polished our best armour. Those of us who had been to Athens looked like gods. The rest merely looked like Macedonians.
Olympias appeared in white and gold, her dark hair piled in golden combs and strings of pearls on her head like a temple to Nike, who adorned her head at the pinnacle of her hair – and yet she carried it, weight and drama, as if born to it. Philip, despite his steady distaste for her scheming, came over to compliment her. He looked a little silly in his white and gold – but only until you caught his eye, and then he was Philip of Macedon.
But if anyone there looked like a god come to earth, it was she, not he.
He bent down to speak to her, where she stood surrounded by her women. She laughed at him, and he kissed her – just a peck on the cheek. And she laughed again, caught his head and pulled him down – not in an embrace, as I expected, but to whisper in his ear.
He nodded.
I was standing at the head of the former pages. Technically, we were all royal companions, but everyone sill called us ‘pages’.
‘Ptolemy,’ he said.
I bowed.
‘I wish to take Pausanias back into my personal guard,’ he said, and held out his hand.
Pausanias was standing close behind me. I hadn’t realised that he was there.
Philip smiled at him. In that smile, I read that he – a great king – was being magnanimous, and stating – as he could, because he was king – that whatever had happened, he would take Pausanias as a bodyguard. I’ll remind you that he was a forgiving man, when he was sober, and he assumed that the honour would wipe away the stains, and Pausanias – older and wiser – would rise to the occasion.
I could see Pausanias. He paled. And his eyes slipped away to Olympias. And he gave the king an unsteady bow and crossed the long twenty
or so paces to where the king’s own companions stood.
How he must have feared to cross that gap. We were his friends – they were his tormentors. Or that’s how I saw it, because he walked with his head high, but with the gait of a nervous colt.
At the head of the procession, the formal statues on their ceremonial platforms were carried by the strongest slaves – eight slaves to a god. All carved of Parian marble with hair and eyes of pure gold. Aphrodite, decently clothed, and Hera, goddess of wives and mothers; Artemis, effeminate Dionysus, Ares and Apollo and Hephaestos and the rest, and Zeus at their head, a foot taller than the other gods. And next to him, a statue of Philip.
There was a gasp, even from the royal companions.
Philip rode it out and stood like a rooster, inviting compliment.
I admired his brazenness.
The Athenians didn’t. Even Phokion, who seemed to love Philip, turned away.
But the sun was rising, and the parade was ready, and we started towards the new theatre.
And then we stopped. It is the way with parades – they start and stop, and get slower and slower.
But what came back to us was an order from the king. He asked Alexander to come and enter the theatre with him.
Something terrible happened on Alexander’s face, then. His father had shown him no love at all for more than a year – had all but cut him from the succession. But here – all of a sudden – he was invited to walk with his father in the most important ceremonial of the most important two weeks of the year.
He had a difficult time getting his face under control, and twice he looked at his mother.
Then he walked forward, and he walked with the same nervous gait that Pausanias had used.
I thanked the gods for my own mother and father, that I had not been born to the Royal House of Macedon. And I didn’t know the half of it.
As we marched into the theatre, the royal companions entered after the statues and turned to the right, forming their ranks on the sand while the priests put the statues into their niches for the duration of the games. I was bored, and my left shoulder hurt, and I wondered if I would be any good. I had entered the pankration, and I was aware that a win would help restore me to Philip’s good graces. And the pain in my shoulder was a worry.
God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great Page 27