The Macedonian

by Nicholas Guild

  The laughter at this witticism was general and immoderate, for the Lynkestians understood what was due to their king. Philip, as the dog’s brother, was allowed to scrape by with a polite smile.

  “Alexandros should watch that one,” the king said, lowering his voice and leaning confidentially toward Philip, who sat at his right hand. “The Lord Ptolemy is the sort of friend a man of prudence keeps close to him—and never trusts. How is my sister, by the way?”

  Menelaos kept his face studiously neutral, but Philip knew perfectly well what he meant. So. Even in Lynkos they knew that the Lord Ptolemy neglected his wife’s bed in favor of her mother’s.

  Philip, however, merely nodded as if acknowledging the most ordinary of courtesies. “Very well, so far as I know. I have been away and have heard no news of Pella since the beginning of winter.”

  There was no reason why Menelaos should have looked surprised, for how could he have failed to know of the recent exchange of diplomatic prisoners, which had taken place practically at his doorstep? He merely smiled—the cold, dangerous smile one only sees on the lips of men who know the power of life and death.

  “How did you find the Illyrians?” he asked as if this too were known to him already. “Are they the savages you imagined?”

  For just an instant, as a thing that registered itself in the tiniest movement of his eyes, the king of Lynkos betrayed that the answer he received was not, for once, what he anticipated.

  “Yes. They were everything I had imagined.”

  * * *

  Philip was eager to be on his way—and, indeed, Uncle Menelaos was not very pressing in offers of hospitality—but it was full ten days before his leg was healed enough to allow him to sit a horse. Still, as soon as he was able he was once more on the road south.

  By late afternoon the mountains were behind him and he had entered the vast plains of Macedon. Pella was still a day and a half away, but already, riding through the waist-high grass, he felt himself to be home.

  He spent that first night with shepherds who, in exchange for one of his small silver coins, were willing enough to share their dinner and to offer him a place in their stone hut to spread his sleeping rug but who were too proud of being Macedonians to treat him as anything except an equal. To them he was simply a youth with a fine horse and a full purse—valuable things in themselves but conferring no special dignity. They did not inquire as to his parentage, or even his name, and neither did he volunteer them. Philip half suspected it would have made no difference if he had. His own people, he thought with a certain pleasure, were no one’s slaves.

  Still, because hospitality was a duty to the gods and because everyone welcomes a compatriot, they were amiable enough. He asked after the news from Pella.

  “You know Pella?”

  The question suggested a certain wariness, but no more than might be considered usual before a stranger—Pella, after all, could only mean one thing—and the man who put it, even if his rock-hard countryman’s face never changed expression, managed to imply that he wondered by what right his young guest concerned himself with the doings of the king.

  “I have family there,” Philip answered, rather pleased with himself for having avoided an actual lie. Then he smiled and shrugged his shoulders as if admitting to some kind of fault.

  The shepherd, who was in the middle of life and looked somehow as if he might once have been a soldier, appeared satisfied with this. He cleared his throat and spat into the fire, frowning as he listened to it hiss.

  “Seen your family lately?” he asked. When Philip shook his head, the shepherd nodded, giving the impression he had expected no more. “Well, they will tell you that we have a new king. Old Amyntas died this summer—in his bed, may the gods be thanked. The son, so I hear, is already off in the south, making war.”

  His disapproval, though unstated, was perfectly plain, yet when someone laughed he looked nettled and turned on the man with real anger.

  “If you think the king does ill, Duskleas, then go and tell him so to his face. That is your right, if you have the bowels for it, but I will not sit here and listen to you snickering about the Lord Alexandros behind his back.”

  “Yes, Kaltios, we all know that…”

  But whatever Duskleas might have said died on his lips when he saw the scowl on the face of the man called Kaltios.

  “I know how much respect is due the king of the Macedonians, that is all. That is all a man needs to know if he would not shame himself before the deathless gods.”

  There was no answer to this, and for a long time the men around the shepherds’ campfire abided in a comfortless silence.

  At last, feeling that the obligation lay with him, Philip hunted around for something to say.

  “The king’s war does not prosper, then?” he asked.

  For a moment Kaltios looked at him as if wondering whether he too might be offering an impertinence, but at last he turned his face away and stared sullenly at the fire.

  “How long has it been, I wonder, since Macedonian arms have prospered? And how long before they do again?”

  * * *

  It was nightfall when Philip reached the walls of Pella. The bonfires were alight beside the city gate, and the captain of the watch had to raise his torch to see his face.

  “Then it’s really you, my young Lord? So the Illyrians haven’t killed you after all—but then perhaps they thought that black demon of a horse would save them the trouble.”

  Philip felt his bowels turning to ice, but he laughed along with everyone else.

  “Is the king still in Thessaly?” he asked.

  “You have heard of that, then?” The captain shook his head as if embarrassed. “Yes, he is still there. The Thebans have taken the field, and one hears rumors that they are demanding stiff terms before they will accept a peace.”

  “Is it Pelopidas who commands them?”

  “The very same.”

  Philip made no reply, but urged his horse through the opening gate. Pelopidas the Invincible, the Champion of Thebes, considered by many the greatest general in the world—it was almost a relief. To be defeated by Pelopidas carried no disgrace.

  And defeated Alexandros certainly would be if he was fool enough to let the Thebans tempt him into battle.

  Even after dark the city was a busy place. Winter was nearly over, but the weather was still dry and that most sociable of people, the citizens of Pella, filled the streets to buy and sell, to argue, haggle, and gossip. There were stalls with cloth awnings where anyone with a few coins in his purse could find wine, roast meat, figs, live ducks, green melons from Lesbos, swords, and body armor from Phrygia, Thracian horses, manuscripts from Athens and Ionia. The whores were out and enjoying a decent trade. A fair number of the men were already a little drunk, and there was much laughter.

  This was the city in which Philip was a prince of the Royal House of the Argeadai, yet his homecoming was perfectly ordinary. Here and there someone who knew him might shout his name and wave, and a few people stared, as if he were a curiosity, but for the most part he was unregarded. As he rode through the crowded, narrow streets, his presence among this busy multitude struck no one, least of all himself, as in any way remarkable.

  People were too preoccupied with their own lives to give much heed to princes—the king was far away, ruining himself in foreign wars, yet this too might go unheeded.

  It was only when he entered the royal quarter, where the streets were cobbled, that Philip noticed the heavy, foreboding silence of defeat. Yes, here the news from Thessaly had made itself felt.

  He left Alastor with the grooms at the royal stable.

  “Is the king’s steward anywhere within?” he asked in the kitchen—from long habit he had entered the palace of his fathers through the servants’ wing.

  “At home, I expect,” replied one of the cook’s helpers, a woman who had treated Philip to bits of apple when he had been barely able to walk. He noticed now the way she glanced at her fellows, as
if they were all privy to some secret, but he said nothing.

  “Then I shall look for him there, Kinissa. I thank you,” he answered this woman, whom he had known all his life.

  As soon as he turned the corner and entered the street where he had played as a child, he knew what that glance had meant. When he looked up at the roofline of Glaukon’s house he was seized with an odd kind of panic, as if all at once he no longer recognized the place.

  There was no smoke coming from the chimney. The hearth fire, which Alcmene had kept alive since the day she had entered this house as a bride, had been allowed to flicker out.

  Philip opened the door soundlessly, with almost a robber’s stealth, and stepped inside. The first thing he saw was Glaukon, sitting on a stool beside the hearth, his arms resting dejectedly on his knees. He looked as if he had not slept in days.

  When at last he noticed Philip’s presence, he looked up.

  “Your mo—” He stopped himself and then swallowed hard, as if to cleanse his mouth of some bitter taste. “Alcmene is dead.”

  10

  The king of Macedon seemed to encompass in his own person all the weaknesses and follies of youth—he chose the wrong favorites, he would not listen to advice, and he grotesquely overestimated both his strength and his talents. Long before he had time to outgrow them, these faults, combined with a disposition for war, would result in the destruction of his country. The recent disaster in Thessaly had left Ptolemy convinced that, his personal ambitions aside, he would have to find the means of displacing Alexandros. It was virtually a duty to arrange his assassination.

  Opportunities were not meant to be squandered, and in Thessaly Alexandros had been very close to achieving a significant hedge against the threats of the southern powers. Jason of Pherae had marched on Larissa and expelled the Aleuadae, who, as everyone knew, were as vicious and untrustworthy a family of brigands as had ever set themselves up to plunder their neighbors—the Larissans doubtless had been delighted to see them go. But then Jason had been assassinated and his successor poisoned, and the Aleuadae had called upon Alexandros to restore them to power.

  Alexandros had been right to agree: Pherae was in chaos and, once the ruling family there stopped murdering each other and settled on a new tyrant, it would have put a useful check on her power to have the Aleuadae back in Larissa as Macedonian clients. And there was no denying that Alexandros’s capture of Larissa had been a soldierly piece of work. The difficulty was that the young fool did not have the least conception of when to stop.

  He should, upon achieving his little victory, have simply withdrawn. But no, that didn’t square with his notions of what was due to a great conqueror, so he had started establishing garrisons all along the line of the River Peneos—didn’t the idiot realize that he had no forces to spare, that the northern borders, which were where the real danger lay, had already been stripped bare for this little adventure, that there was neither any necessity nor even the required soldiers to fortify the south? Hadn’t Ptolemy, his kinsman and friend, who had killed his first man ten years before Alexandros was even born, pointed this out to him? Yes, of course—endlessly. But the king had ears only for those who told him that he was Achilleos reborn and was destined to stride the whole of Greece like a colossus.

  Well, the garrisons had achieved nothing except to unite all of Thessaly against the “northern invaders” and to give Thebes an excuse to intervene with a force headed by no less a figure than the great Pelopidas. Within two months of marching south, Alexandros found himself back across the border, only this time with a hostile Boeotian army operating on Macedonian soil.

  But at least Alexandros had finally grasped the full scope of his folly. After two days of sulking in his tent, too depressed in spirit even to come out and face his own soldiers, he had sent Ptolemy off to Pelopidas’s camp to inquire concerning his terms for a withdrawal.

  The Thebans had the advantage of numbers, but they knew enough to be cautious in hostile territory and so their mounted patrols intercepted Ptolemy a good hour’s ride from their outer perimeter. They seemed surprised to find a man alone, but he had decided against an escort—it did not strike the right chord of humble supplication, and, besides, he preferred that no version of this meeting except his own should find its way back to Alexandros.

  He brought his horse to a halt and allowed the Theban cavalrymen to surround him.

  “I am an emissary from the king of Macedon,” Ptolemy said, glancing around at them in that slightly annoyed manner that is the diplomat’s natural defense against fear. “I come to treat with the Boeotarch.”

  No one answered him—they were only soldiers, and in their eyes he was merely another prisoner. One of them, whose manner more than his uniform distinguished him as the captain of the patrol, rode close enough to take the reins of Ptolemy’s horse from his hands. The king’s emissary submitted to this in silence and allowed himself to be led back to the Theban encampment.

  Along the way there was plenty of time to consider the appalling humiliation involved in being brought in this manner before a man like Pelopidas—Pelopidas, who, with hardly any weapons except his own daring and the help of only a few like-minded friends, had come out of exile to deliver his city from the conqueror’s yoke and had gone on to crush, apparently forever, the might of Spartan arms. What must such a man think of Alexandros, the boy-king of Macedon, who ruins himself and his country in a fit of adolescent vanity? With what contempt must he view this king’s ambassador?

  That he had forced Ptolemy into this mortifying position was yet one more grievance to be tallied against Alexandros. Yet there was some comfort in remembering that the account between them would be settled one day. And that day was not far off.

  But in the meantime it was still necessary to decide how the present part might best be played. Whom would the Boeotarch be expecting? The northern rustic, faithful as one of his lord’s hunting dogs? Or the intriguer, ready to strike an advantageous personal bargain behind his king’s back? Or some combination of the two, since, as the bright gods knew well enough, the rest of the world tended to regard Macedonians as devious simpletons?

  Or perhaps merely the gray-bearded statesman, the senior member of his dynasty, whose loyalties are to the state, the royal house, and the king, in that order. A man who feels the tug of hereditary allegiances but has not let them blind him to the painful truth. A patriot. Yes. All things being equal, Ptolemy thought he might find that role the most congenial.

  Yet finally the choice would have to be left to Pelopidas himself. Let him see whatever he wished to see.

  The Theban camp was a masterpiece of defense. The walls were of earthwork with wooden towers every forty or so paces, and these were surrounded by a double ring of ditches, the outer ring rather shallow but fortified with sharpened stakes and the inner ring astonishingly deep—if a man did not tear his belly open on the one, he was likely to find himself buried alive as he attempted to scramble up the steep, crumbling slopes of the other. Even if he had the necessary forces, Alexandros could easily wear out a couple of months trying to force a breach, by which time Pelopidas would have cut him to shreds. And this virtually impregnable fortress had been thrown together in perhaps three days.

  But such was the character of the Theban army, which ranked as probably the best the world had yet seen. They fought with inhuman courage and efficiency, and they left nothing to chance.

  The camp’s sole entrance was a drawbridge leading to a timber gate. Inside there was a marshaling field and, beyond that, row after row of white linen tents. In the center of these, set apart but only slightly larger than the rest, was one guarded by a pair of spearmen and flying the pennant of the Boeotarch. Ptolemy and his escort came to a halt before it.

  The tent flap came up, and a man walked out into the sunlight. He was about fifty and wore a plain homespun cloak that might once have been brown or black but had faded to no particular color at all. The man did not even carry a sword, yet he had the b
earing of one long accustomed to command. At first he did not speak. His pale blue eyes, as pitiless as a hawk’s, studied Ptolemy’s face with something like amused curiosity.

  “I am Pelopidas,” he said at last. “And you, I should imagine, are the Lord Ptolemy. Come inside—I fear all I can offer you is some rather indifferent wine…”

  * * *

  “The king your master shows a becoming love of glory,” Pelopidas said after he had refilled his guest’s wine cup. “I think, however, that in this one instance a little caution would have been even more becoming. Certainly he realizes that he has overextended himself.”

  “If he does not, it is not for want of being told.”

  Ptolemy shrugged and avoided looking the other man straight in the face. It was a gesture he hoped would suggest the right quality of embarrassed diffidence, for it would not do to appear to criticize Alexandros directly.

  The Boeotarch responded with a clipped syllable of laughter, as if to say, “Yes, we are both men who have seen something of life, are we not? And we know what boys are like when they grow too full of themselves.”

  What was there to do except to frown and to make some show of wounded dignity?

  “The king has a generous and heroic nature,” Ptolemy said in a tone that implied the rebuke was directed more to himself than to Pelopidas. “And the Aleuadae have long enjoyed the patronage of our royal house.”

  In the silence that followed, during which Pelopidas’s cold, measuring eyes never left his face, Ptolemy entertained the uncomfortable suspicion that this man could look straight into his mind. You are not what you would appear, those eyes said. You have no secrets I have not guessed.

  “The Aleuadae are a race of scoundrels,” the Boeotarch replied at last, a faint smile playing across his lips. “And they impose upon your master’s good nature. Yet they may keep Larissa—for the present. I am prepared to make this concession because I admire the king of Macedon and would be his friend.”

  “My king has need of friends.” Ptolemy returned the smile, since he felt a returning sense of safety, as if once more he understood what the conversation was about. “And the goodwill of My Lord Pelopidas is not to be despised. Yet may one inquire what the Boeotarch, whose impulses are not those of a private man but who above all else cherishes the interests of his city, will expect as the price of such generosity?”