Because of course Pleuratos had no motive of his own which could have justified the risks—someone had bribed him to have Philip murdered. And the bribe would have had to be considerable.
What could it have been? Money? Power? No. A man who is almost ruler of the Dardanians does not commit such an act for something as trifling as money, and the only person capable of increasing Pleuratos’s power was Bardylis. No matter how many times Philip turned the matter over in his mind, he could not arrive at a motive for Bardylis to set this plot in motion and then betray it. That left only territory.
Who would offer the Dardanians territory to effect the death of an obscure prince? Only someone among the Macedonians. And among the Macedonians, who was in a position to make such an offer? Only Alexandros and his agent in the negotiations, Ptolemy. That Ptolemy was involved, Philip never even troubled to doubt. But Alexandros? His own brother?
Well, it wasn’t as if such things had never happened before.
If Alexandros wanted him killed, then Philip’s only chance of survival was to go into exile and never come back. It was a bitter thought.
But was such a thing possible? Alexandros? He loved Alexandros. He would gladly have laid down his life for him. And Alexandros knew it.
No, he could not bring himself to believe that Alexandros would have been guilty of anything so pointlessly base.
Then was it possible that Ptolemy, for some reason known only to himself, had acted alone?
It occurred to Philip that he hardly knew the Lord Ptolemy, that his cousin and brother-in-law, with whom he had been acquainted all his life, was the sort who remains an unreadable mystery, even to those closest to them in blood and feeling. He liked Ptolemy—Ptolemy was charming and easy to talk to—but he could not make the slightest claim to understanding him. Some men had no intimates. Some minds are as impenetrable as stone.
Yes. It was possible. All at once, and with the force of revelation, Philip saw that anything was possible.
Sitting there in the freezing darkness, he suddenly felt giddy with dread. And at the same time he was conscious that all fear—at least that purely individual terror that paralyzes the soul—had left him. The dangers facing him, his family, his king, and his nation were of a magnitude to render his own personal survival a matter of little importance, even to himself. Perhaps no one else in the whole world suspected the truth.
He had never known what it was to be so alone.
And then, somewhere in the distance, he heard the hoot of an owl, reminding him that he was not utterly deserted.
“Mother of Battles,” he whispered, “Virgin Goddess, Lady of the Gray Eyes, hear my prayer.”
At first, he was not even sure for what he should pray. Perhaps it did not matter, since if She heard She would understand.
“Lady Athena, Wise Goddess, protect me now as you did once my ancestor, the divine Herakles. Lend me something of your strength and your cunning.”
Merely to speak the words made him feel better. He allowed his heart to be comforted.
* * *
In the first gray light of morning, he was surprised and a little frightened to discover that he had fallen asleep. At least the cold hadn’t killed him—or had it?
He couldn’t seem to feel his feet at all. And then, as he began wriggling his toes, the sharp stabs of something that was not quite pain convinced him that he was still alive.
He had to get away from this place, he thought, or the blessings of life might be somewhat temporary.
Alastor snorted indignantly as Philip untethered him and slipped on his bridle. They picked their way carefully over the short, rock-littered path that led back to the main trail, since it was still perhaps a quarter of an hour before dawn.
Would his pursuers sleep a little longer? Would they make themselves breakfast before they set out again? Would they trouble to build a fire? Philip knew that his life might hang on such trifles.
Two hours after setting out, he realized that he no longer knew precisely where he was. Yesterday the way had been unmistakable, but today the countryside did not look the same as it had three months ago. And the trail kept branching off, so that it was like trying to negotiate a spider’s web.
Perhaps that was for the best. Philip knew that so long as he kept to a generally southeastern direction he could not go far out of his course, and the men behind him would be slowed by the difficulty of tracking him. The wind had blown the snow into drifts, leaving long stretches of his path bare, so that his horse’s hoofprints would be difficult to find on the frost-hardened ground.
He looked over his shoulder, beginning for the first time to feel safe, and his eyes immediately settled on a pile of steaming horse droppings about thirty paces back on the trail.
“Alastor,” he muttered, “exercise a little discretion.” And then, suddenly, he had an idea.
He dismounted and, using a broken-off section of bush, managed to sweep the horse droppings into his sleeping blanket, folding them up into a tidy package. A few minutes more and Philip was able to obliterate all trace of his passage.
“May one hope that you will remain continent for yet a little longer?”
It would be easy enough to lay a false trail. He would not be able to use that trick more than once, but it might purchase him an extra hour—besides, if these men were really going to kill him, which seemed likely, there was no reason to deny himself the satisfaction of tormenting them a little.
And, as for spending the next night in a blanket smeared with horseshit, if he lived to suffer the inconvenience, he would imagine himself blessed among men.
At the next fork, he dismounted and left Alastor with his reins trailing on the ground, measured off about fifty paces down the righthand trail, dumped out his bundle and went back to continue on to the left.
By late afternoon Philip had reached a small valley, perhaps two hours from side to side, that was choked with forest. There was plenty of shade, and the evergreens broke up the wind, so the snow lay more heavily on the ground. There was no chance of disguising his passage over such terrain, so he did not try. He simply rode on, hoping to get through before the light failed.
When he made the rim, and the ground was once again hard under his horse’s hooves, he looked back and noticed that the valley was open from several directions. He knew that by now his pursuers could not be more than an hour or two behind him, and if they were worth anything as trackers, they would know it too. They would not push on any farther tonight—why should they, when time was so obviously on their side? And, besides, they would want to overtake him in daylight. They would camp tonight in this valley, in the comforting shelter of its forest.
Philip decided he was weary of this game. He would go over to the offensive. An idea was beginning to take shape in his mind.
He made sure that his trail was obscured and then dismounted and led his horse over the stony ground until he discovered another path into the valley.
Just before dark he found a small clearing in the forest where a few yellowing shoots of grass were visible in the patchy snow. He tethered Alastor and took the bit out of his mouth.
“I will return for you,” he murmured, stroking the horse’s glossy black neck. “A few hours, and I will be back. Perhaps, after all, there is a way out of this trap.”
The Dardanians were not hard to find—why should they try to conceal themselves when they were the hunters? Philip merely followed the main trail, and then the smell of woodsmoke, and then the light from their campfire. He crouched in the underbrush, staying downwind and out of sight, and watched them cook dinner.
There were four of them, lumpy shadows huddled around the fire. He was close enough to hear them complaining about the wretchedness of their lot, so far from the comforts of home, their voices floating through the darkness like phantoms.
“I spent half of my share from last summer’s plunder on a slave woman, and after but five days in which to pleasure myself with her the Lord Pleuratos sends us
on this chase.”
“Never fear—she will doubtless find someone to keep her amused during your absence.”
A few syllables of laughter, followed by a dangerous silence, followed by the sound of someone clearing his throat.
“I saw that woman the day before she was sold—you paid a hundred and twenty drachmas for her? She has a mole on her belly as big as my thumb, and in three years her breasts will hang like empty wineskins. You are a fool, Bakelas. That slave dealer has robbed you.”
“You have not lain with her,” Bakelas answered, sounding injured. “I gave the fellow two drachmas on account and told him I must know what I was getting before I would agree to his price. She squeezes the seed from a man as if her thighs were a date press—I am hard as iron this very minute, just from thinking of her. And any man who worries what a slave woman’s breasts will look like in three years’ time is a bigger fool than I ever was. By then the Lord Pleuratos will probably be king, and we will each have enough to buy ten new whores every winter.”
“Well, you will never get home to Wartbelly if we do not catch this boy, may the gods curse him. The Lord Pleuratos will have our heads if he cannot have Philip’s—”
“We will catch him, probably tomorrow. Those tracks in the snow couldn’t have been more than two hours old. He does not know the terrain, and he is only a boy. Tomorrow we will catch him, cut off his head, and go home.”
They talked for a while longer and then, one after the other, they stretched out to find their rest. They did not even trouble to post a guard. It was almost insulting.
Philip was disappointed they had seemed to bring no wine with them. He had a half-formed idea he might wait until they were all wine-fogged and snoring and then sneak into their camp, steal a knife, and cut their throats, one at a time, while they slept. He had no scruples about such a deed—they meant to kill him, did they not? Life had very suddenly ceased to be a game.
Nothing of the sort would be practical now, however, for he would be a dead man if one of them woke up. And one of them was sure to wake up. There was nothing to do except to wait an hour or so, until he could be certain none of them would be on the watch, and then sneak away into the darkness.
Still, it was worth something to have seen his enemies. They were men now, finite in number, and he had learned to hate them.
So the next morning, standing in a dense clump of trees, stroking Alastor’s nose that he might not betray them with a whinny if he smelled their horses, Philip watched his pursuers head out of the valley. He would give them a start and then he would begin to track them—it might take them the rest of the day to figure out that they had lost all trace of him, and longer than that before it occurred to them to double back. He might have thought of something by then, and at least it would be one more day of life.
The countryside quickly flattened out, becoming more open and offering fewer places of concealment—yet, if they caught sight of him, the chances of escape were slightly better than they would have been on a narrow mountain trail. Philip was careful, however, and followed his pursuers’ progress with the greatest caution.
Every few hours he would allow himself a glimpse of them. Once he watched as they fanned out over a little network of trails, trying to find some sign of him. They regrouped after a bit and went on. They never gave any sign of retracing their own steps, as if it hadn’t occurred to them that he would do anything besides run before them like a startled rabbit. After all, it was only a boy they were chasing.
Toward nightfall they reached a meager jumble of twenty or thirty stone huts, a farming community that looked poor and precarious but might have stood on that same spot for four hundred years, and stopped to question the inhabitants.
Philip had passed two or three such little settlements in the past few days and had always avoided them, knowing that the people who lived there would have no choice but to betray him—why should they do anything else when they were defenseless and accustomed to fear the Dardanians?
He dismounted and watched from the protecting shadow of a cliff face as Pleuratos’s men interrogated a peasant with a gray beard, who was probably the village elder. The other villagers formed a wide and submissive circle around them. Philip couldn’t hear anything, even though the men seemed to be shouting, but he saw enough to have a sense of how Bardylis and his warriors kept their vassal peoples properly cringing and docile.
They bullied the old man, pushing him and even slapping at him with the flats of their swords, as if they would cut him to pieces if they did not care for his answers. Clearly he had reason to fear for his life.
Finally, when they seemed satisfied that there was nothing he could tell them, they let him go and sat down around a cooking fire over which a pot hung from an iron tripod. They began to eat, occasionally shouting what must have been demands for something to drink because the villagers brought them out eight or ten jars—probably every drop so poor a place contained.
They will stay here for the night, Philip thought. Why should they not, since in an hour the light will be gone? They will welcome the chance to be at their ease. One can hope the local people know how to brew strong beer.
Night began to fall and Philip, when he was sure it would cover him, began to work his stealthy way in toward the little cluster of buildings. Passing soundlessly from one place of concealment to another, he could hear others moving around him in the darkness as, singly or a few at a time, the villagers began sneaking away, to hide themselves until the morning, when these intruders would once more leave them in peace.
Some were not so lucky.
A couple of the village women, not very pretty, perhaps, but young and full of terror, were huddled beside the cooking fire. They served Pleuratos’s men and waited, not daring to run away. One of them was quietly sobbing to herself, her face hidden in her hands. Philip was close enough by then to hear her quite distinctly.
The Dardanians appeared to find her distress amusing—one of them kept picking up the hem of her tunic with his sword point, laughing when each time she flinched and tried to snatch it away.
“You can see what her legs look like soon enough, Bakelas. Have a little patience and finish your dinner.”
All four of them laughed at this.
By then Philip was crouched behind a pile of wood that had been stacked beside one of the village dwellings. He had found the broken handle of an ax, a slender shaft of wood not as long as his arm, but probably the best weapon he could hope for in such a place. All he lacked was the opportunity to use it.
Everything depended on surprise. His opponents were armed with swords, and there were four of them—men who would afford him not an instant of mercy. It was well to remember that.
Kill them, he thought. Kill them, quickly and quietly and with no shrinking. Wait in patience until you can catch one of them alone.
He did not have to wait long.
“Don’t be shy, girl. Let us see if your backside is fit for anything except sitting on.”
He sounded drunk. Good. One could hope that his companions were not more temperate.
Philip heard laughter and then whimpered pleading, and watched a shadow passing high up on the stone wall of the hut opposite—a man half dragging a woman by the wrist.
“Come along, girl. Which one of these hovels is yours? I don’t fancy having you on the cold ground.”
The woman’s voice, just a high, hysterical murmur, reached him in snatches. “Please not … Please not.” She couldn’t fight, or even resist. She could only beg.
Philip waited until they had passed by, and then followed.
The hut did not even have a door, just an old blanket fastened to the lintel to keep the wind out. The Dardanian dragged his captive inside, in his haste yanking the blanket loose from one of its nails.
“Now let’s have a look…”
There was the sound of tearing cloth, followed by a short, sobbing scream and then, for a few seconds, only silence.
It was har
d, but Philip decided to give this pig a moment or two to rut in the mud—leave him alone until this business had his full attention.
He couldn’t hear the woman anymore but, after a while, he heard the urgent, satisfied grunts of a man taking his pleasure.
Enough—more than enough. He pushed the blanket aside and stepped over the threshold, letting a slash of pale moonlight fall across the floor. He almost stepped on the Dardanian, who was crouched on all fours, his tunic hitched up and tucked into his belt, so intent on quenching his lust that he seemed to hear or see nothing.
All Philip could see of the girl were the soles of her feet.
“Bakelas…”
The Dardanian’s head jerked up, and he began to twist about to discover who had spoken. The heavy end of Philip’s ax handle caught him directly on the temple, and from the sound it must have broken his skull. He pitched over with a groan so that he fell on his back, naked from the waist down, his eyes open. From the expression on his face, one might have thought he was merely embarrassed. Philip knew at once that he had killed him.
The woman was lying on her back, her breasts and belly shining in the moonlight, her legs still wide apart, as if she expected Philip to throw himself down in Bakelas’s place. She was surprisingly young, hardly out of her girlhood—hardly older than Philip himself. She was also terrified. Too terrified, fortunately, even to cry out.
Philip raised a finger to his lips, commanding silence, and then reached down to pick up the woman’s tunic, which was torn almost to pieces. He held it out and she grabbed it to her, covering herself as best she could.
Then, quietly, she began to sob. It was no good trying to stop her, so Philip left her alone.
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