No, he had understood nothing. He could see as much in the way the light changed in the man’s eyes. Some souls will remain a mystery, impenetrable, like the will of the gods.
“The interests of Thebes and Macedon are one,” the Boeotarch answered smoothly, as if he were explaining something to a talented child. “Peace and serenity in the northern states. No adventures. No … disturbances. To that end we are prepared to offer King Alexandros an alliance…”
As he rode back across the empty grasslands toward the Macedonian camp, Ptolemy felt in his chest the flutterings of a vague, cold terror, as if Black Death had opened her wings to throw their shadow across his life.
He thought of Philip—dead by now probably, although he had heard nothing. He had been so clever to send that precociously dangerous boy off to have his throat cut, although what they would do now if it came to war with the Illyrians, he couldn’t even begin to guess.
And in his ears he still heard the Boeotarch’s words, like a muttered prophecy of doom. It was as if the gods had decided to destroy him with weapons of his own forging.
“We will expect to receive hostages, My Lord—guarantors of the peace we hope to preserve between us. They will live in Thebes, in the houses of our great men, and they will be treated as allies and honored guests. It will be an opportunity for them, an introduction to the world beyond your own kingdom such as, I daresay, few of your young Macedonian nobles could ever dream of. It would gratify me, My Lord, as a sign of your friendship and trust, if among them you might think to number your own son.”
* * *
The morning after his return to Pella, while the sky was still a pale, silvery gray, Philip went with Glaukon to the burial ground outside the city walls. The grave was unmarked, and Alcmene had been dead for nearly a month, so the earth that covered her funeral urn was already beginning to look worn and windswept. In half a year, when the grass was high, this spot would seem to disappear.
The two men sat down beside it, and Philip rested his hand on the burial mound in a gesture that was almost a caress. He had not slept. His eyes were wet with tears.
“She had not been well since you left,” Glaukon said. “One day she sat down beside the hearth and simply died. Not even Nikomachos can say what killed her, but I think it was grief.”
“I was so glad to go—I feel as if I murdered her.”
But Glaukon shook his head, frowning, as if disappointed that it should not be so.
“It was not your choice but the king’s. And the fault lies with neither of you.” He closed his eyes as an expression of pain crossed his face. “More and more I have come to believe that the gods meant to punish Alcmene for her arrogance.”
Philip began to say something, but the words died on his lips. What, after all, could he have said? He felt, suddenly, that he was in the presence of some great secret that it would be a presumption of challenge.
Perhaps it was best, after all, to be silent and listen.
“Alcmene did not understand,” Glaukon went on, almost as if he were explaining the thing to himself. “To her you were simply the child she had nursed at her breast—no more than that, a creature of flesh and blood, more precious to her than her own. She put you in place of the baby who had died, and she believed that somehow the love she bore you had made you hers. She was wrong to believe it.”
“Was she?” Philip’s voice was so choked with emotion that he could hardly speak. “For all that she was not my mother, I loved her as such. Who in all the dark world had a better claim on a son’s love? The Lady Eurydike? You see how weak are the ties of blood.”
Glaukon looked at him and smiled joylessly, for Philip always spoke thus of his mother—as someone remote and separate.
“I was not speaking of blood,” he said. “You do not belong to your mother the queen, no more than you did to Alcmene—no more than you will ever belong to any living man or woman. You belong to Macedon and to the immortal gods, who hold your life in their keeping against some purpose of their own. They made plain their will on the very night of your birth, which was blessed by Herakles, and there have been signs and portents since—you know yourself that what I say is truth. Thus I knew they would bring you back alive from the land of the Illyrians.”
With an almost imperceptible shrug Glaukon appeared to separate himself from his insight into the miraculous, implying that what was so plain to one such as he could not help but be the truth.
“Alcmene could not see that all was in the gods’ hands,” he went on as if confessing some private shame. “She could not see because her love for you blinded her to all else, and thus she was afraid, and thus her fear killed her. Her fear was both a weakness and a blasphemy, for she should have trusted in the will of heaven.”
* * *
Philip did not know if he believed Glaukon’s words, but they had the effect of clearing his mind. He remembered Ptolemy, and that made him ashamed of having surrendered to a private grief. Alexandros, his brother and king, had yet to be warned.
He went to find Perdikkas.
“I have been named the heir,” Perdikkas said as almost his first words. “And quite properly, as I am next in age.” He smiled, as if at some purely personal triumph. Almost as if he somehow expected Philip to be jealous.
“You may succeed faster than you expect.”
They were in Perdikkas’s bedroom, which adjoined their mother’s private apartments, and Perdikkas was still at his breakfast. He sat, calmly chewing on a piece of bread dipped in wine, listening as Philip unfolded the odd story of his adventure in the north. He did not seem particularly impressed.
“You are like a woman,” he said finally. “You see conspiracies everywhere. If someone wanted to kill you, it is far likelier to have been old Bardylis than the Lord Ptolemy, who is our kinsman and friend. The whole idea is preposterous.”
“There is nothing preposterous about a king of Macedon being murdered by a kinsman. The Argeadai have murdered each other for generations—it has almost the sanction of custom.”
But Perdikkas merely glared at him.
“Come with me,” Philip said at last. “We can leave this morning and reach the king’s camp in two days. We will seek out the Lord Ptolemy and confront him, in Alexandros’s presence. Then we will all know the truth.”
“You would confront him?” Perdikkas was so appalled that he pushed his breakfast away from him and stood up. “You would accuse him of attempting to murder you—and to his face? What if he should…?”
“Should what? Deny it? Of course he will deny it.”
“Then what is the point?” Perdikkas almost shouted.
But Philip seemed for the moment to have lost interest. As if he had suddenly remembered that he was hungry, he reached down to pick up the piece of flatbread his brother had been eating, tore off a large hunk, and stuffed it in his mouth. Then he poured himself a cup of wine and sat down.
“Finish your breakfast,” he said, gesturing toward the chair his brother had abandoned. “We have a long ride ahead of us.”
Perdikkas merely repeated his question.
“What is the point?” he asked, more calmly this time. “If he denies the accusation—and he can hardly do anything else—then you will have gained nothing.”
Philip put down the wine cup, wiped his mouth, and sighed with animal contentment.
“Ptolemy imagines that I am dead by now.” He glanced longingly at his brother’s bed, thinking that the wine had been a mistake, for he was very tired. “If we catch him by surprise, before some idiot puts the news of my return into a dispatch bag, then I don’t imagine his denial will be very convincing.”
“And then what?”
“And then Alexandros will kill him,” Philip answered. It was with some difficulty that he refrained from adding, “Or I will do it myself.”
Perdikkas had not sat down, and when Philip glanced up at him he instantly averted his eyes.
“Alexandros will not believe him guilty. I do not
believe him guilty. I do not care to associate myself with such an accusation.”
“Why? Because you are afraid, should I be right, of how he might avenge himself against you?”
The silence that followed confirmed the truth of what Philip had said only half in earnest.
And perhaps, Philip thought, perhaps Perdikkas is not wrong to refuse. Perdikkas, after all, really was the heir—perhaps it was best if he did not become embroiled in this.
“What will you do?” Perdikkas asked at last. His eyes were almost pleading.
“Do?”
You belong to Macedon and to the immortal gods, who hold your life in their keeping against some purpose of their own. Philip could only smile at the recollection, for truly Glaukon was a credulous old fool to believe such a thing. Yet perhaps it was now necessary to behave as if it were so.
“Do? I shall find our brother, Alexandros. And I shall tell the king of Macedon that he walks about with a serpent coiled against his bosom.”
* * *
The war in Thessaly had entered its diplomatic phase, but diplomacy, in the king of Macedon’s opinion, was the occupation of cowards, nothing more than a method for losing battles without having to take the trouble to fight them. As much as possible, Alexandros tried to avoid the actual negotiations, and it did not occur to him to be offended that they seemed to go on just as well without him.
What he could not avoid was the nagging suspicion that he had somehow revealed a weakness in himself, that control was slipping away from him, that he and everything that mattered to him were gradually becoming irrelevant. This made him both angry and afraid, and both of these emotions he focused on Pelopidas of Thebes.
Nothing made any sense. Nothing was the way it was supposed to be, and no one else gave any indication that they noticed or cared. Pelopidas was supposed to be a great hero, yet the only things that appeared to interest him were proscription lists and the wheat yield. Alexandros was sensationally disappointed, while Pelopidas, for his part, seemed actually to like him, treating him with that mixture of interest and forbearance, which might have characterized the relations between a man and his half-grown nephew. It was maddening.
Every evening the Lord Ptolemy, who showed no distaste for the conference table, came to Alexandros’s tent and explained how things were progressing. The king listened quietly, nodding now and then when some sign of agreement was required of him, wondering in silence, Where is the glory in this?
In silence, because he had come to depend upon Ptolemy and did not care to draw his scorn.
“There must be hostages, then?” he asked when the terms of their capitulation to Thebes were almost settled.
“Yes, My Lord.” Ptolemy nodded gravely, for his own son was to be one of them. “That there must be both hostages and tribute money, this we knew from the beginning. The only question was how much would the Lord Pelopidas demand of each.”
“But not Philip this time, eh? My conscience troubles me about Philip, and I would not have him go on his travels again once we get him back from the Illyrians.”
“Nothing has been said of Philip. I think I can assure you that Philip will not be among those who take the road south.”
There was a look in Ptolemy’s eye as he said it—the look, almost, of a man who has taken his revenge. Yet how could that be? Alexandros might have forgotten it except …
* * *
As always when he was on campaign, the king took his dinner out of the same cooking pot and drank the same wine as the poorest man who carried a spear in his army. Around him might be the great nobles of his realm, but they too lived and ate as common soldiers. These days, perhaps, Alexandros drank a little more, and his companions were never far behind him, but by sunset they had had only enough to take some of the sting out of defeat and, perhaps, to make them a little incautious. There was no other way to explain what happened when Alexandros happened to raise his head and saw the shape of a horse and rider approaching.
I know that horse, he thought, and then, out loud, “I know that horse!”
He stood up. Yes, he was right.
“Little brother … by the bright gods, what are you doing here?”
But Philip just managed a glance and then looked past him. And that look might have gone straight through a man, like sunlight through water, burning itself into his soul.
“My Lord Ptolemy, see who’s…”
Alexandros turned back just a little, but enough to see what his brother had seen—the Lord Ptolemy, his face stretched tight, his eyes glazed with something between fear and resentment, staring at Philip, as if he had just been shown the instrument of his own death.
11
Philip slept that night in his brother’s tent, and when he awoke the next morning he put on a clean tunic and washed his face in water that still smelled of snow. He was to be presented that day to the great Pelopidas, an honor that was intended to console him for not being allowed to kill Lord Ptolemy.
Because Alexandros didn’t believe him either—at least, he had said he didn’t.
“You are afraid of him,” Philip said at last, after their arguments had all been exhausted. “Why? He is only a man, after all. I never thought I would see you afraid of anyone.”
“I am not afraid of him, and he is not a traitor. The Lord Ptolemy, who is, I might remind you, a kinsman, has served this family well since before either of us was born.”
“Yes, he is a kinsman. He is married to our sister and was bedding with our mother even while our father was alive. I am overpowered by these proofs of his loyalty.”
For a moment Alexandros said nothing—he was too angry. The subject of Ptolemy’s relationship with the Lady Eurydike was not one he relished. Besides, he couldn’t immediately think of an answer.
“You shouldn’t have threatened him,” he said at last.
“I shouldn’t have had to!” Philip shouted, stamping his foot like an angry child. “He should already have been dead by then, and by your hand, not mine. Besides, it wasn’t a threat when I said I wanted to see if it was blood or poison in his veins—a threat is something you don’t mean to do, and I meant to kill him. You shouldn’t have stopped me, brother. I can only hope Ptolemy allows you to live long enough to regret it.”
A guard lifted the tent flap and peered in at them. It was impossible to say whether he was more alarmed or embarrassed.
“All is well, Kreon,” Alexandros said quietly. “The Lord Philip is merely throwing a tantrum.”
Philip shot the man a look that made him drop the tent flap as if it had suddenly caught fire.
“You should have let me kill him,” he murmured through clenched teeth.
“You have changed, Philip.” Alexandros looked at him speculatively, cocking his head a little to one side, precisely as if he were trying to judge the age of a horse. “We send you off to the barbarians for a winter, some common bandit tries to kill you—probably with no motive except to rob your purse—and you come back a different person.”
“I have grown up, My Lord. I have put aside my innocence and joined the estate of men. I can recommend it to you.”
For an instant Alexandros looked as if he couldn’t decide whether to be offended or amused. Neither man moved. It could have come to anything. And then the king of Macedon threw back his head and began to laugh.
“Well said, little brother,” he gasped when the fit had left him a little. He threw an arm over Philip’s shoulder, giving the impression that the entire conversation had been forgotten. “I wonder if tomorrow you will have the cheek to be so forthright, when you meet the greatest soldier in the world…”
* * *
The Lord Ptolemy was one of those who witnessed Philip’s presentation, which took place in the Theban camp, when the king and his honor guard arrived a few hours after dawn. As was his custom whenever the king of Macedon honored him with a visit, Pelopidas was waiting at the gate, quite alone, his hands clasped behind his back. He did not bow to Alexandros—n
o one would have expected such a show of respect from so great a man, whose absolute power was probably greater than any king’s—but he did step forward and hold the bridle of Alexandros’s horse while he dismounted. Then they embraced, like father and son, and Alexandros led him back through the ranks of his retainers to where Philip waited.
“It gives me pleasure to introduce to your notice the youngest of my father’s sons,” Alexandros said, throwing an arm across his shoulders. “My brother Philip, who has just returned from a sojourn among the Illyrians and, like the boy he still is, brings home many stories of his adventures.”
Everyone laughed, everyone except Philip and Pelopidas. Philip could only blush hotly, but Pelopidas did not so much as smile.
“Whatever tales he tells, I would encourage you to listen with respect,” Pelopidas said at last—he had the habit of dropping his voice in such a way as to enforce the strictest attention. “His eyes are full of cunning, yet they are the eyes not of a child but of a man. I do not think it would occur to him to brag.”
His words produced a dangerous silence, for everyone there had been a witness to the scene of the night before, when Philip had accused the Lord Ptolemy to his face, calling him a traitor and actually drawing his sword. There would have been bloodshed had not the king grabbed his brother’s arm and wrestled the sword away from him. Even at that moment, in the presence of so distinguished a foreigner, Philip’s hard, pitiless eyes were fixed on Ptolemy, who felt a knot forming in his belly, as cold as iron.
No. They were not a child’s eyes.
Pelopidas made a jest and everyone laughed, easing the tension—had he somehow guessed what was happening? Ptolemy could hardly hear the laughter, because inside his armor he was sweating with fear.
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