The Macedonian

by Nicholas Guild

  Ptolemy responded by letting his gaze settle upon the playing field, where the footraces were shortly to begin. Alexandros, stripped, his perfect body glistening with sweat and oil, was crouched on the ground with his head almost directly between his knees in some odd ritual of preparation. He would win this race, and he gave the impression that he knew it, and knew as well that his victory would be no fawning tribute to rank but his own, an entirely personal triumph, for he could run with a speed and unresisting grace that made it seem as if his feet hardly touched the earth.

  The contrast between Macedon’s new king and his ungainly, apprehensive brother could not have been more striking.

  “Now that he is king, Alexandros should show you more favor,” Ptolemy said. He turned his head and, without warning, broke into one of his blinding, unfathomable smiles. “He does not accord you the dignity he might—it is both wrong and foolish of him.”

  The footrace began. Alexandros quickly surged into the lead. The crowd roared its approval, but the three of them seemed isolated in their own silence. They might not even have been in the same place but somewhere of their own making, conscious of no one but each other. Ptolemy was still bathing Perdikkas in the entangling warmth of his notice, while the boy, almost blushing with pleasure, tried to think of some appropriate answer. It all seemed so playful and harmless they might have been lovers.

  Eurydike felt a stab of cold go through her heart as she looked at them, her favorite son and this man who was more to her than the breath beneath her ribs, and tried to discover the snare in that baffling, irresistible smile.

  * * *

  Philip would not be denied. He was still too young to compete in his father’s funeral games, so he decided to stage his own. He would hold a horse race, with himself, Arrhidaios, and the reluctant Aristotle as the competitors. Then there would be wrestling, then archery, then a poetry recitation, since Aristotle, who seemed to have the whole of Homer committed to memory, must be allowed to win something.

  But the horse race was the real soul of the scheme. Philip would of course win—on his new stallion, how could he possibly fail to win?—but victory was almost unimportant against the pleasure of the ride itself: galloping over the vast, empty plains beyond the capital, the wind flowing like water over one’s naked body, in one’s ears the hypnotic beat of the horses’ hooves against the earth. He could forget everything that had happened over the last several days, during which life had seemed as coiled as a serpent. He could forget all that and become once more simply a boy riding a fast and dangerous horse. Surely the race alone was prize enough.

  There was a grove of oak trees about half an hour’s walk north of the city gates. It would serve as a goal and they could hold the other contests there, safe from the observation of Alexandros and his friends—Philip had conceived a certain horror of his brother’s mockery. Then they would come home, where Alcmene would give them a victory dinner. Perhaps she would even leave the wine sufficiently unwatered to allow them to grow drunk.

  For the soldiers at the north gate it was a little respite from the boredom of guard duty. They laughed and offered to place bets on the outcome, and one of them agreed to give the starting signal. He stood about twenty paces in front of the three young riders, holding his sword aloft. When he brought the point down, Philip touched his heels to the stallion’s black flanks and jolted instantly ahead.

  In those first few moments he always had the sensation that the air was being sucked out of his lungs—there was nothing that could prepare one for the speed of this animal. The landscape blurred before his eyes; the only sounds he could hear were Alastor’s fierce hoofbeats. Philip let the reins go loose and bent forward until his face was almost touching the stallion’s neck, and he experienced once more the odd sense that horse and rider had somehow merged into a single being, as if he could feel with its body and it were thinking with his mind. He was filled with a wild, chaotic joy.

  After the first surge, the stallion’s gallop settled into a rhythm that left him free to return to himself. He knew that his companions were far behind—Arrhidaios’s dappled gelding was no match and Aristotle, who was not even a Macedonian, hardly knew what a horse was—so he pulled in a little on the reins.

  “Alastor, you will kill us both someday,” he murmured, and at once the stallion dropped its head and slowed to a gentler pace.

  Philip could already see ahead to the little grove of oak trees that marked the end of the race.

  By the time he reached them, the stallion was lathered with sweat. Philip galloped a short way into the grove, where the sun filtered through to make hand-sized patches of light on the ground, and then he pulled the stallion to a halt and walked it around in a tight little circle until they were facing back the way they had come. He had been careful not to push his mount too hard over such a distance, but he was gratified to see that he had left Arrhidaios some two hundred paces back and Aristotle another hundred paces behind that. They were both still at a gallop and closing fast.

  In a sudden burst of high spirits, he raised his arm and shouted a war chant, goading Alastor forward to a canter.

  It happened just as he left the grove behind him and broke once more into the sunlight, and it happened with an awful suddenness. Philip glanced up, and in the same instant a terrible, feral cry shattered the air. His heart seemed to turn to ice as he saw swooping down at him a huge owl.

  He saw its terrible eyes, full of death. He saw its claws, its talons long and tapered. It was coming straight for him, dropping through the empty sky like a stone. Philip had never felt so helpless. He could not even raise his arms to defend himself. He was transfixed with dread.

  And then, at what must have been the last possible moment, the owl spread its great wings so that they seemed to blot out the whole of existence. Philip felt it brush against his face, felt a sudden twinge of pain, and then … nothing.

  He did not even remember falling. All at once he was simply lying on the ground, staring up at the sky, watching the owl rise on its great wings. It wheeled about in one vast turn and then disappeared.

  4

  “One only has to look to see the meaning of this,” Glaukon said after he had heard the story. “There is the surface of things, which sometimes conceals the truth, and then there is the truth itself. In this case, the one is merely a version of the other.”

  Philip and his friends had ridden straight back to Pella. After so bizarre an event none of them had any heart left for games. Besides, the wounds left on Philip’s face by the owl’s talons were deep enough to require the services of a physician.

  Yet it was not these that made Glaukon look so grave while Nikomachos painted over with a yellow salve that stung worse than nettles the two long parallel cuts on Philip’s jaw.

  “The owl, as everyone knows, is sacred to Athena, and now the goddess has marked you for her own—whether for good or ill she will reveal in her own time. She is full of wisdom and cunning and, for all she is a virgin, loves men of valor. She was the patroness of Herakles himself.”

  “And of Odysseus,” Philip announced. “‘The goddess, gray-eyed Athena, smiled on him, and stroked him with her hand.’”

  “‘And said to him, “He must be sharp and full of cunning who will surpass you in guile, you who are so devious and full of tricks.”’

  Aristotle grinned—he and Philip had been playing his game of capping each other’s quotations almost since they had first learned to read. His father merely grunted and went on with dressing Philip’s wounds.

  “Perhaps she means to be your patroness as well,” Glaukon continued as if no one had spoken. “Or perhaps this was a warning that you have somehow incurred her displeasure. Go to the temple, My Lord, and make sacrifice to the goddess. Offer prayers that you may know her will.”

  “This is good advice.” Nikomachos frowned at his son as if to keep the boy from making an objection. “Caution is a great virtue where the gods are concerned. And remember to reapply the salve
every twelve hours—birds are filthy creatures, whether they come from the gods or not.”

  “Nothing is lost by offering prayers—even if it was only a frightened owl startled awake by your noise and blinded by the sunlight. The natural and obvious explanation is usually best; nevertheless, prayers do no harm.”

  Apparently feeling that he had taken sufficient revenge, Aristotle lapsed into an innocent silence, glancing about his father’s surgery as if he had never seen it before.

  But in matters of religion Philip was not encumbered with his friend’s skepticism, so that afternoon, before he returned to Alcmene’s hearthside to face her anxious and loving inquisition, he walked to the temple district.

  Athena was not an important goddess to the Macedonians, so the shrine devoted to her worship was a humble business, little more than an altar with a few columns to mark out the precinct and a wooden roof to keep the rain off. Except that she did not like her offerings burned, Philip did not even know the rituals of her cult, so he left her an oat cake and a few cuttings from his hair and hoped that these would not give offense—like everyone else, the gods were full of singular preferences. He then sat down on a little stone bench just inside the entrance and tried to compose a suitable prayer.

  His face itched where the owl had torn him, and he felt awkward, as if he were trespassing. Suddenly he was conscious of being very young and very unimportant. He could think of nothing he had done that might be displeasing to the gods, and the idea that he should have been singled out for divine favor struck him as preposterous. Who was he, after all, but a minor prince who would grow up to fight as a soldier for the king his brother? Why should any god, even Athena, imagine that he might be worth the trouble? What could she possibly want of him?

  He looked at the statue of the goddess that stood in a niche behind the altar. It was a small but exquisitely made statue of a woman who was handsome rather than beautiful, with a silver breastplate over her long blue tunic, from beneath which one sandaled foot emerged. She was holding a spear.

  “What would you have to me, Lady?” he murmured, a little surprised by the sound of his own voice. “What may I do to find your blessing?”

  There was no answer, of course. He would have to wait for some sign of favor—if, indeed, he was to be favored—and then hope that when the time came he would know the goddess’s will.

  Beginning to feel a trifle foolish, he went outside again.

  There was a procession of maidens coming out of the temple of Hera, and he waited for them to pass. One turned her head to look at him as she walked by. She smiled, and Philip realized that he knew her: she was some sort of cousin, just the same age as himself, and her name was Arsinoe. It struck him all at once that she was the most perfect creature he had ever seen.

  He had not even presence of mind enough to smile back, and she turned her eyes away as if at a rebuke.

  “You are an idiot, Philip,” he said to himself. “Is that really her?”

  Yes, it was. He could remember playing with her when she still wore a short tunic and had dirty knees. Had that been so long ago? She hadn’t seemed very remarkable then.

  He wondered what her knees were like now.

  “Did the goddess reveal herself to you in there?” It was Aristotle—Philip hadn’t even noticed his approach. “You have the look of one who has been privileged to glimpse the divine.”

  Philip turned to him and smiled, putting both more and less into the smile than he felt.

  “I have, but the Lady Athena was not involved.”

  * * *

  Alexandros had grown up believing that the king of Macedon must be the happiest and most fortunate of men, but his father had not been dead many days before he began to realize the proportions of his mistake. As prince and heir, he had understood with perfect clarity what would be expected of him once he ascended the throne, and he had never doubted that he would be a good king and do his duty, which was, after all, a perfectly simple business. The king should dispense justice to his subjects, favor to his friends, and death to his enemies. The king lived under the blessing of the gods, who made him virtuous in peace and terrible in war. The king was the darling of fortune. It had all seemed so straightforward and obvious. Now he felt as if nothing would ever be obvious again.

  He had not understood how weak a nation he was to rule and how completely it was hedged about by enemies. The northern provinces of Lynkos and Orestis were in a more-or-less open state of rebellion. Athens was allied to the Chalcidian League, which threatened Macedon’s access to the Thermaic Gulf. And now the Illyrians were demanding assurances that the new king would honor the treaties agreed to by his father.

  The ultimate solution lay with the army, which Amyntas had neglected. Alexandros knew how to be a soldier, knew precisely what needed to be done. In the end Macedonian valor would overcome every difficulty.

  And Macedonian valor could be restored, he felt certain, if only his nobles would stop intriguing and leave him in peace to reform the army. All he needed was time, just a little breathing space, but this, it seemed, he was not to be allowed.

  No one else seemed concerned about the army. All anyone talked about was the succession.

  This, Alexandros realized, was to some degree his own fault. He did not really care for women and had put off choosing a bride. His father should have insisted—it was really Amyntas’s fault—but for the last several years his father had been too busy preparing for death to think about anything else. Thus there was no son to follow him, and both of his brothers were still in their minority, which would mean a regency if he died within the next few years. Nevertheless, either Perdikkas or Philip would have to be designated as the heir.

  The choice should have been obvious, since Perdikkas was the elder. But Perdikkas was a weakling and unpopular. Philip would be a more approved choice, especially since …

  No, he could not bring himself to name Philip the heir. In truth, he was beginning to grow a little afraid of Philip.

  To be king, Alexandros had discovered, was to be constantly trapped in seemingly insoluble difficulties. He must either wage a war with Athens that he knew he could not win or accept a peace that would gradually strangle the nation. If he defied the Illyrians, they were likely to begin raiding the northern frontiers, but if he acknowledged the existing treaties, King Bardylis, the old bandit, would take it as a sign of weakness and press him all the harder. He must choose either Perdikkas or Philip, and neither was safe. Life had become a snare in which he found himself ever more entangled.

  The only escape was in revelry, and even that was beginning to fail. More and more, at the nightly banquets with which he celebrated the beginning of his reign, Alexandros found himself morosely drunk, watching his barons pelting each other with wine cups and greasy, half-gnawed beef bones, wondering how he could stand the company of such filthy brutes. A month before he had been one of them and happy, yet to be a king, it seemed, was to forfeit every illusion. The gods must truly have laid a curse upon the House of the Argeadai, for to be lord over the Macedonians was to be a swineherd.

  “My Lord finds no pleasure in this?”

  Like a man startled awake by a loud noise, Alexandros did not immediately recognize the voice—in fact, for just an instant, he wondered if it could have been his own. Then he turned his head and saw Ptolemy, who had sat down at his right hand, on the bench where by custom no one ever sat except at the king’s express invitation.

  Ptolemy was his near relation and his friend. Ptolemy was like an elder brother, except cut off from the direct line of succession and therefore no threat. He wanted nothing for himself. Indeed, since he had been a great favorite of the late king’s and stood well with his successor, what could he want that he did not already have? He was a man Alexandros found it impossible not to trust and his presence made him feel better—willing, even, to overlook the presumption.

  “They are little better than cattle,” Alexandros murmured, making a guarded gesture that nonet
heless took in the whole room.

  “And it is just as well, for cattle are very easily led.”

  Ptolemy smiled and although Alexandros found the smile unaccountably disturbing he found the idea comfortable enough. Yet he frowned anyway, since that seemed safer.

  “Not these. Every one of them imagines himself the cowherd—or at least the principal bull.”

  Alexandros threw back his head and laughed. And then he stopped, suddenly realizing that he was more drunk than he had thought.

  He glanced at Ptolemy, wondering if he had made a fool of himself, and saw the same unreadable smile on his lips, as if it had been carved into his flesh.

  “I try to lead them, these cattle who are my subjects,” the king of the Macedonians said, almost as if to himself, “but at every crossing they lower their heads and scratch at the earth with their hooves, wanting one path while I direct them to another. It is not even disobedience—not yet—only perversity.”

  “It is the art of kingship never to seem to direct to one path or another, but to create the illusion that there is only one path. Most men are only confused by choices. They are always happier for not realizing any exist.”

  Ptolemy allowed the smile to die away, and his voice dropped to that of a lover whispering a confidence.

  “Do we speak of the same thing, My Lord?” he asked. “Do we speak of the succession—and of your brother Philip?”

  Alexandros was too taken aback, by both the boldness of the question and the eerie sense that Ptolemy had somehow read his very thoughts, to do more than nod.

  “It is as I suspected.” Ptolemy looked grave now, like a physician discovering the first symptoms of illness. “A new king always sits uneasily upon his throne, particularly when he has no son. He fears his subjects as if they were a giddy woman who may sweep him aside if some new man takes her fancy. Philip is still a boy, but the signs of greatness cluster around him—it is even whispered that the old king understood the gods’ will in his last moments, that had he lived another hour he would have displaced you as his heir and named your brother.”