Her emotions seesawed wildly between dispirited foreboding and exhilarated anticipation. She occupied an ambiguous position at court since her son’s departure. On the one hand, she was the mother of a popular king and a formidable figure in her own right; on the other hand, she had little doubt that, if her son ceased to be king, her own fortunes were likely to decline precipitously. Her chief antagonist was the man chosen by her son to act as regent in his absence, Antipatros, and the regent’s malign son, Kassandros, but in truth she had managed to turn almost everybody at court into an enemy.
“Iphitos, what news?” she yelled as she ran around the ornamental pool in the center of the courtyard.
Iphitos reached into a satchel fastened over his shoulder and extracted two rolls. After examining them both, he handed one to Olympias. “From Alexandros, queen mother.”
“Tell me!” she urged as she struggled to break the seal. “Is he alive?”
“Rejoice, your highness, and read the letter.”
Olympias let loose a wild shriek at the word ‘rejoice’ and thus didn’t hear the rest of Iphitos’s sentence. She continued to struggle with the letter, her shaking hands proving unequal to the task of unrolling the balky papyrus. Iphitos took pity on her, retrieved the letter from her hands, unrolled it, and handed it back.
Olympias drank in the words like a parched wayfarer handed a jug of water after crossing a wide, desolate desert. Her frosty pale blue eyes, usually cold and hard, melted into tears. Her narrow, gaunt, haunted face softened into a smile. Her angular, arrogant cheekbones grew more rounded and approachable. Dimples broke the haughty cast of her cheeks. At forty-three, she was still a strikingly beautiful woman.
“I knew it,” she said softly, fighting back sobs, when she had finished reading. “He’s destiny’s darling, beloved of the gods.” She paused, struggling to regain her composure. “And he’s my son,” she added, wonder mingling with triumph in her voice.
“Yes, ma’am. He’s that.”
“I knew it. I felt it in my heart all along. The gods love him,” Olympias shook her head as she reread the letter. Then she reached for the second roll. “Here, give me the other one!”
“That one’s for Antipatros, ma’am.”
“Yes, I know. I’ll give it to him.”
“I was told to place it directly in the regent’s hand.”
“Listen, Iphitos ...”
“... by your son.”
“Exactly. So let’s have it.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am.”
“You think you’re sorry now.” Olympias laughed. The dimples disappeared; her eyes regained their chill. Fortunately for the messenger, several men emerged from the reception hall and the queen mother chose to desist. Iphitos was escorted into the armory, where Antipatros and Kassandros were engaged in an animated conversation. Olympias entered close on the messenger’s heels.
Antipatros looked up and quickly assessed the situation. He accepted the proffered roll and motioned with his head and eyebrows toward Olympias. Three guards, stationed by the door, approached the queen mother and attempted to usher her out of the room. They knew better than to touch her, though, and she refused to budge.
Antipatros shrugged and turned his attention to the letter. In his sixty-four years, he’d seen it all before. The tall, bearded, aristocratic regent was already one of King Philippos’s trusted generals when a twenty-year-old Olympias first arrived at the Macedonian court as Philippos’s fourth wife. He rose to become Philippos’s foremost diplomat, one of his two (along with Parmenion) most trusted generals, and occasional regent. When Philippos was assassinated, Antipatros smoothly transferred his allegiance to Alexandros and was rewarded for his loyalty by maintaining his position as regent of the realm when Alexandros departed for Asia. He had been dealing with Olympias for twenty-three years. He took another skirmish with her in his stride.
Alexandros’s letter, on the other hand, was creating a more difficult dilemma for Antipatros. The young king wanted more troops, oblivious to reports recently received by Antipatros that clearly indicated rising discontent among Macedonia’s ostensible allies in the Hellenic League. Sparta, which was not a member of the League, was wasting little time, now that Alexandros had crossed the Hellespont, trying to foment uprisings among the allies.
“What’s he say?” Olympias wanted to know.
“He wants more troops.”
“Then he shall have them. All these soldiers lolling about Pella are not doing us any good.”
“It’s not that simple, madam,” Antipatros replied. “Here, read this.” He handed her the document he had been discussing with his son when Iphitos delivered the letter from Alexandros. It was a decoded version of a report received from one of their spies in Sparta. It made for bracing reading.
“Doesn’t matter.” Olympias shrugged, having reviewed the report. “My son wants more troops; we will send more troops.”
“We will not do anything, madam. I will consider the situation and I will advise you what I have decided to do. Now, perhaps madam would consider letting me get on with my work.”
Olympias walked out of the room, chin disdainfully upturned, accompanied by a couple of the guards. “Once my son is back, that old bastard will get his comeuppance,” she muttered under her breath, not particularly concerned who might overhear her comment.
When the door to the armory closed, Antipatros turned to his son. “Don’t worry, when Alexandros is gone, she’ll get her just deserts. Now, what shall we do about this request?”
*******
I was sitting in the weeds at the margin of the road, waiting – with some empathy – for Alexandros to make up his mind. In a sense, I was at a crossroads as well.
Kleitos sat down next to me. “Which way d’ya think we’ll go?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“I’m sure he’ll decide to go straight for Ephesos,” Kleitos ventured after a moment.
“Why?”
“Didn’t he send us, the day after Granikos, on that wild goose chase after Memnon? He was livid that the traitor got away. Now that we know where he is, he’s got to go get him.”
“He didn’t go get him last time, did he? He sent us to get him. And besides, that mission was not about getting Memnon. It was mostly about getting me killed.”
“Now you’re starting to sound paranoid.”
“You could be right.”
I left it at that. How could I explain to my friend the weight of isolation and uncertainty that were my daily companions? I had spent nine years cut off from the place where I grew up, from my friends and family, from my own time, from any sense of belonging. And now I’d somehow acquired a malignant enemy to boot. All I wanted to do was go home.
According to an adage I’d learned at my mother’s knee, time heals all wounds. Yet, somehow it didn’t work in my case. Instead of a balm, for me, time was a barrier. As the days and weeks of my exile turned into months and years, my memories of what I’d left behind didn’t fade. Like Zeus’s eagles, the ordinary challenges of survival pecked away at my reveries each day but, like Prometheus’s liver, my longing for home seemed to regenerate every night. No matter where I woke, a sense of loss greeted me each morning. As my recollections decreased in definition and nuance over time, the pain of loss became sharper, more persistent, and more torturous. In my case, the saying “absence makes the heart grow fonder” might have been more apt.
I resolved anew to continue to struggle, to strive, to live for that elusive dream of repatriation. Alas, if all went well, it would be another fourteen years before I could return home. What made it worse was that, for most of the past nine years, I’d had a clear plan for getting to the escape hatch and thence back home. The unexpected outcome of the Battle of Granikos had knocked my plans into a cocked hat. I should have been in the Persian world by now, slowly making my way toward Egypt, I thought, instead of being stuck in the middle of this pointless campaign to “liberate the Greek cities of
Ionia.”
How could I tell my friend that I was sitting there, just then, contemplating the possibility of deserting to the other side? But the inescapable truth was that Persia controlled Egypt and therefore, if I wanted to get to Egypt, I would have to enter Persia sooner or later. Timing is everything, I reminded myself ruefully.
“How long does it take?” Kleitos asked, as if reading my mind. “We’ve been sitting here since dawn.”
I shrugged. “It’s a tough decision.” I wasn’t sure whether I was answering Kleitos’s question or my own thoughts. “There may be reasons why he might need to go to Sardeis first.”
“What reasons?”
Based on some thought process known only to him, perhaps having to do with my status as an outsider, Alexandros had chosen to confide in me from time to time. As a result, I was aware of his financial straits and Kleitos, along with the rest of the army, was not. I was not inclined to betray the confidences that Alexandros had reposed in me. “I have no idea,” I said.
“So what the hell are you talking about, then?”
“Oh, I’m just talking.” A new thought struck me: Deserting Alexandros’s army is worse than betraying his confidences, isn’t it? “You have to weigh the arguments on both sides,” I added after a moment.
“What arguments? We want to capture or kill Memnon. Memnon is in Ephesos. We go to Ephesos. End of argument.”
I said nothing. I was busy weighing the pros and cons in my own mind. There was no rush to do anything; I had fourteen years to get to Egypt. On the other hand, the trip was long and uncertain. The sooner I got going, the better my odds of being in the right place at the right time. Besides, getting bogged down in this conflict in faraway Anatolia could have unforeseeable consequences. It’s a lot easier inadvertently to violate the Prime Directive as a soldier caught up in a war than as an inconspicuous pilgrim traveling anonymously through a placid, slumbering land. On the other hand, I hated to betray my friends and comrades. But they’re trying to kill you, I objected. Not all of them.
My objectives floated to the forefront of my mind: Stay alive; comply with the Prime Directive; get back home. These had been my goals since the day I realized I was marooned and would need to get back on my own. In a way, my quest had almost settled into a routine. Unfortunately, the unexpected turn of events at Granikos had upset not only the patterns of my quotidian activities but my subconscious thinking as well. I still had plenty of enemies and was certainly still an outsider but now I had friends and comrades and new allegiances. My perspective on the Prime Directive was changing somehow. And I was slowly getting a little more used to the daily uncertainties of a violent and competitive world, even if I still found the notion that I had no idea of what would come next quite disconcerting.
It’s all very confusing, I thought. The only rational course was to defect at the earliest opportunity and get as far from this war, and as close to Egypt, as I could. But I had gotten to know these people and even liked some of them. I didn’t know anybody in the entire Persian Empire and what I had heard about them was not flattering. And then there was the wait, the interminable wait. Will it still be ‘home’ by the time I get back? I found this last thought particularly depressing.
*******
My musings were interrupted by a sharp command from Alexandros. “We’re marching on Sardeis.”
“Exactly what the auguries indicate, sire,” Aristandros hastened to put in.[10]
Chapter 6 – Liberation
Alexandros rode in the van as usual. Aristandros somehow ended up riding right next to him. As a result, most of us in the king’s personal bodyguard found ourselves in a loose formation around both of them.
I maneuvered my horse between Kleitos and Seleukos, riding just behind our leader and his seer. “Since when did we become the protection detail for that charlatan?” I muttered under my breath, perhaps more loudly than necessary.
Everyone within earshot of my stage whisper pretended not to have heard, except for the charlatan himself. For an old man he had remarkably good hearing. He didn’t say anything but brought his mount to a stop, causing the three of us to overtake him.
When we were abreast, he smiled at me amiably. “Is this better, Metoikos? Now you’re not protecting me. Instead, all four of us are protecting the king.”
I looked the other way.
Aristandros continued undaunted. “Beautiful day for a ride, isn’t it?”
I couldn’t ignore him any further. “Don’t you have to check with the king first, before making such a bold pronouncement?”
The soothsayer laughed. “Now, now. Let’s pretend to be friends, shall we?”
“Or at least butcher a couple of goats before going out on a limb?”
Seleukos, being a lot more sensible than I, jumped in before I made a complete fool of myself. “Yes, it is. And the air is so fresh.”
He was joined in his rescue mission by Kleitos. “It must be the sea breeze. How far are we from the coast?”
“It’s just beyond those hills,” Seleukos assured him.
Aristandros took a deep breath. “Ah, the Greek sea.” I thought I detected a note of sarcasm in his voice but it was probably just my imagination. “Homeros called the Aegean the wine-faced sea,” he continued.
“But it’s blue,” Kleitos objected.
“Well, he was blind.” I was still in a peevish mood.
“It depends on the weather and the depth of the water,” Seleukos said. “Sometimes it seems blue and sometimes it’s turquoise and sometimes, if the wind picks up, it turns a deep, angry, foaming purple, embellished with racing whitecaps.”
Aristandros patted his mare to keep her in step with our steeds. “Homeros’s eyes might have been sightless but he more than made up for it with his second sight.” All I could do was groan, which the seer pointedly ignored. “In his mind’s eye, the brilliant cerulean splendor of the Greek sea reminded him of the savory oxblood of fine Pramnian wine. Or perhaps he was simply alluding to the deep, luxurious sensory delight triggered by both.”
“Why do you keep calling it the Greek sea?” Kleitos interrupted. “I thought it was the Aegean.”
The great soothsayer nodded his head, relaxed in his seat, and smiled sagely. “Greek-speaking peoples have been sailing the Aegean for thousands of years. Long before the Trojan War, hordes of Sea People, speaking various Mycenaean dialects, washed up, like the incoming tide, on the shores of Anatolia, the Levant, Egypt, Greece, and all the islands in between, clashing against the native Hittites, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and all the rest. In the most fertile, and therefore most densely inhabited, areas of the eastern Mediterranean, their settlements ebbed, under the weight of armed resistance, and eventually disappeared. But on the rocky, inhospitable shores of mainland Greece and on some of the Aegean islands, their strongholds took root and grew into established hamlets, ports, and principalities.”
Kleitos shook his head in amazement. “How do you know all this?”
I was as astonished as my friend. The old goat certainly knew his stuff but I was damned if I was going to let him trump me. So I jumped in, heedless of the consequences. “That’s all true, Aristandros, but there was one area of the Aegean basin where, despite the determined opposition of the native kings and potentates, the Mycenaean migrants clung tenaciously to a narrow strip of land along the seashore. This patch of contested land comprised the western shore of Anatolia, which is where we happen to be marching right now. In this region, no matter how often their settlements were attacked, and even destroyed, they returned again and again, driven by the unrelenting demographic dynamo of their ancestral Central Asian homeland. It was here, on the western coast of Anatolia, near the Hellespont, that the Mycenaeans fought the Trojans in a long, costly, epic war. Despite that war, and many others, their settlements on the coast of Anatolia survived, prospered, and grew into established cities.”
The contented, satisfied grin on Aristandros’s face should have stopped me the
n and there. But I, as is my wont, obliviously forged ahead.
“Perhaps a century after the Trojan War, new waves of marauding seafarers came, speaking a different, Dorian dialect. To the Mycenaeans, these uninvited and unwelcome cousins seemed to be primitive savages. However, they were vigorous, desperate savages, and they displaced the earlier immigrants, plunging the Greek world into a temporary dark age. The Greek-speaking cities on the Anatolian coast declined, lost their cultural attainments, changed their dialect, and reverted to primitive village life, but mostly they survived.”
By now, Kleitos was rolling his eyes but that didn’t stop me either.
“When the light of civilization dawned once again across the Hellenic firmament, a couple of hundred years later, it found the Greeks still plying the wine-faced sea. One group, speaking what came to be known as the Ionian dialect, sailed in the opposite direction, from the Greek mainland eastward, across the Aegean, toward Anatolia. They returned to this thin sliver of land, located in the middle of the western coast of Anatolia, a couple hundred miles to the south of where Troy had once stood. They co-opted the Greek-speaking primitive villages, raised them into prosperity once again, and turned them into enlightened beacons of progress. They called their new homeland Ionia.”
Aristandros clapped his hands. “Amazing, Metoikos! For an ignorant foreigner, you sure weave a pretty tale. Please tell us more.”
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