The Macedonian

by Nicholas Guild

  “Then perhaps you are tired from riding.”

  “Someone told you about the horse.”

  “Does that surprise you?”

  “Nothing about you surprises me anymore,” he said, conscious of lying and of being a trifle offended that the insult seemed to have so little effect. The Lady Eurydike hardly even appeared to have heard.

  “I would warn you to beware of how you trifle with Philip’s horse,” was all she said.

  “Philip is far away,” he answered before he could stop himself—why did he sound, even to himself, as if he was afraid? “He will be in Thebes for a very long time, and thus it cannot matter to him what I do with his horse.”

  “Everything about you matters to him, and distance is not safety. Yet I was not thinking of Philip. Please do not suppose my aim is to defend the rights of my son.”

  She was standing in almost the precise center of the tiny bedroom, turned slightly away from him so that he could see only a little of her face. Who could say what she felt about her son, whom she said she hated and yet was her flesh, an intimacy that can sometimes be more important than love.

  “Then what am I to suppose?”

  She moved her head, as if to look back at him over her shoulder, and he thought it likely he would never forget her expression. She was afraid, but not in the usual way. It was as though she could see into the future as clearly as if time were no more than a window. There was a kind of awe mixed in with her fear that made it terrible to behold.

  “Suppose nothing,” she said at last. “Believe only that I wish selfishly to preserve your life. Stay clear of Philip’s horse. As you would fear to put yourself in his hands, fear his horse. Understand, husband, that there are limits to what you may safely dare—trifle with Philip and he will destroy you.”

  “It was my impression we were speaking about a horse.”

  Ptolemy picked up the wine cup from the floor and drank off what was left. His throat was oddly constricted. He preferred to think it was merely because he was annoyed.

  “Are you so blind that you cannot recognize that they are both part of the same thing? The gods have shown you the instrument they have chosen to destroy you—can you not see it?”

  When she spoke again, a weariness had come into the Lady Eurydike’s voice. “I am a wicked woman, and the gods will punish me for it,” she said. “They punish me already, through every hour of my life. And still I have not yet known the worst.”

  * * *

  At the banquet that night the regent decided he needed the consolation of old friends about him, so he invited Lukios to sit at his table. As a general rule, the Lord Ptolemy found more than a few minutes of his company irritating. Lukios’s conversation was generally about nothing except his horses and his food, and since the death of his wife the previous year even these topics tended to disappear into the vast, wine-soaked silences to which he was increasingly prone. Yet at least it could be said for him that Lukios was a man empty of both talent and ambition and was therefore perfectly safe. Besides, they had known each other since boyhood.

  By the midpoint of the evening Ptolemy began to suspect that he might be drinking too much, for at one point he discovered himself actually bragging to Lukios about his exploits with Philip’s stallion.

  “We give horses too much credit,” he found himself saying. “Everyone talks a lot of rubbish about their spirit so that we almost imagine them breathing fire through their nostrils, but I tell you I have known women who have more spirit than any horse that ever lived. This black demon of my stepson’s is a fine enough animal, but I broke him to my will in a single afternoon. I think I may use him as a hunter—I do not think he really has the stomach to make a proper warhorse.”

  “What you say about women is both wise and true,” Lukios answered, nodding in heavy agreement. “Some women are very fine.”

  “I was speaking of horses, you dolt.”

  “Yes, of course you were.”

  “Perhaps you should marry again,” the regent said with a pang of contrition—Lukios, after all, was very far gone in wine so that it was a miracle he was even listening.

  “Perhaps I should.”

  “What sort of wife would you like?”

  “A young one—beyond that I am not particular.”

  “Very well. I shall ask Eurydike to look about for you.”

  “You were always a true friend, Ptolemy,” Lukios said with considerable emotion. His eyes brimmed with tears and then, suddenly, he appeared to forget all about it. He seemed on the verge of falling asleep.

  “There are some who think I am unwise to hazard myself with the horse,” the regent continued, not quite sure what kept drawing him back to the subject of Philip’s stallion. “What do you think?”

  Lukios belched, which one gathered had the effect of clearing his brain.

  “I think if a child can ride him, you can. It is easier to mount a horse than a woman.”

  He laughed immoderately at this, until Ptolemy fetched him a clout on the side of the head, and then he was silent.

  “Your seed is going rancid and curdling your wits,” Ptolemy announced, with the air of one administering a reproof. “Have you no servant girls upon whom you can relieve yourself?”

  “My wife was of a jealous disposition and filled the house with old women.”

  “Oh. That is a great misfortune.”

  “Yes. Especially as now she is dead.”

  “Have you seen Philip’s stallion?”

  “No.” Lukios turned his head to look at Ptolemy and then blinked as if startled by a light. “Why do you keep going on about Philip’s stallion? You sound like my wife when her mind was full of maggots because I had looked at some other woman. Can you be jealous of the boy?”

  In wine there is truth, Ptolemy thought. This drunken clod has seen into my soul.

  He considered making some sharp answer but decided against it. A quarter of an hour later, Lukios was quietly asleep, his head lying across his folded arms.

  When the banquet was over, before finding his own bed Ptolemy strolled over to the royal stables. For some reason he thought he would sleep easier if he saw the stallion one more time, perhaps if only to remind himself that a horse is, after all, only that.

  What he found there was not peace of mind but a blanket spread out over the floor, covering what was obviously a human form. What he found was the stunned silence that always accompanies death.

  “Alastor killed one of the stable lads,” Geron told him. “The horse was restless, and the boy went to see if anything ailed him.”

  “He went in the stall with him?”

  “Yes, he was a new boy, just in from the countryside. He was probably accustomed to dealing with plow oxen. It is a great pity. The Lord Philip will be very upset when he learns we have had to destroy his stallion.”

  Ptolemy looked down at the corpse beneath the blanket. From the quantity of blood that had soaked through, the horse must have kicked the boy’s head into pulp.

  “I forbid you to destroy him,” he said before he knew he had intended to say anything. “It was the boy’s fault, not the stallion’s. We will not sacrifice a good animal only because a stable hand was careless.”

  Walking through the darkened courtyard toward his own quarters, the Lord Ptolemy felt a terrible pain clutching at his bowels. When he discovered that he could not go on, he dropped to the ground and retched violently.

  In the moment, on his knees in the darkness, trembling and sweating with the weakness that overcomes a man when he has emptied his stomach after a night of drinking, he felt horribly afraid.

  “Why did I not have the stallion destroyed?” he asked himself. “Why, except that I did not dare?”

  He got to his feet as quickly as he could, lest someone discover him in that posture, and hurried away to find the oblivion of sleep.

  16

  Philip very quickly discovered that his friendship with Philoxenos was destined to be short-lived. The bulk of
the Macedonians in Thebes had been drawn from among the families of the Lord Ptolemy’s supporters—after all, the time spent as a diplomatic hostage was considered to be an important episode in a young man’s life—and none of them were ignorant of Philip’s hostility toward the regent. Besides, no one could be sure that this regency was not simply the prelude to another royal murder and Ptolemy’s direct assumption of the kingship. For both of these reasons it was considered wise to adopt an attitude of subtle hostility toward the king’s younger brother. For Philoxenos, who had never been noted for originality, it was no more than a matter of falling in with the prevailing atmosphere, which he alone might have had the prestige to dispel. Thus very quickly Philip found it more agreeable to pass his time among Thebans than among his own countrymen.

  This did not distress him very much since, although he was a prince of the royal house, Philip had never felt particularly at ease among the Macedonian aristocracy. He preferred the company of soldiers and stable hands, of artisans and merchants and scholars—of men who, as he had once put it to his brother Perdikkas, “knew something besides how to pick their teeth.” His mother always claimed that his taste for lowborn friends resulted from his having been raised by the king’s steward, and it was even possible she may have been correct, but Philip’s was a restless, probing intelligence, not easily satisfied with the smug contemplation of his ancestry. He wanted to understand the world and all its arts, and he took his lessons where he could. In Macedon he had learned about politics and commerce from listening to his foster father, Glaukon. Old Nikomachos had taught him the rudiments of medicine. From the stonemasons, carpenters, and other craftsmen who worked on royal building sites he had gleaned a knowledge of mechanics. And he had absorbed all the poetry that came his way. In Thebes he set himself to learn the secrets of war.

  The campaigning season was then at its zenith, but Thebes suffered from the inconvenience of being temporarily at peace. So her armies vented their ferocious energy by staging elaborate drills on the plains of Boeotia, drills that were distinguishable from war itself only by the absence of the slain.

  These Philip watched from the city walls. No one prevented him—Pammenes was amused by his interest. Philip became so familiar to the soldiers of the watch that they often shared their midday meal with him, and he would sit at their feet and listen to their stories of battles long since fought.

  But it was the drills that chiefly fascinated him. At first he found them perplexing, for they were infantry drills and the Macedonians were a nation of horsemen—their own foot soldiers were little more than a rabble. Yet the Thebans had won great wars through the valor of their hoplites, who were considered the finest fighting men in the world, better even than the Spartans. Philip was hard pressed to understand how foot soldiers could be used with such effect.

  One day he discovered he was not alone at his favorite observation post above the city gates. He had not heard anyone approaching on the narrow stone stairway that led up to the arch—he simply turned and discovered that there was standing behind him a tall man with a scar running down his left temple and into his beard, which was beginning to show a few threads of gray among the black. His mouth was creased and frowning, and his eyes, which were unfathomably dark, seemed to glitter with anger, but Philip quickly grasped that the expression was habitual and not directed at him. Indeed, his gaze was fixed on the plain below, where the army that had forced Alexandros to sue for peace was disposed in three long columns of men, like three fingers from the same gigantic hand.

  “I had heard the Macedonians had sent a spy among us,” he said, without even troubling to glace at Philip. “It is a climb up to this vantage point—I thought I would come and see what you find so worth the trouble of looking at.”

  “The logic of the thing is more apparent from up here. The battle order appears as it must in the commander’s own mind.” But by then Philip already knew to whom he was speaking, and he was determined not to let his embarrassment show. “Why has Epaminondas strengthened his left wing to a depth of fifty men?”

  “Because the Spartans always put their best troops on the right. Then they wheel in to the center like a gate opening and roll over the opposing army. I wish them to be crushed against a wall, so I fortify my left side.”

  Something like amusement showed in the face of the man who three years earlier had conquered Kleombrotos at Leuctra.

  “Pammenes warned me that you would be full of intelligent questions. What else do you want to know?”

  “Those in the front and center of the left wing—their uniforms are different. Who are they?” Philip asked.

  “Those are the Sacred Band,” the Boeotarch replied, his eyes narrowing slightly as if to pick out the faces of individual men. “You do well to remark them, for they are the backbone of our forces. When they perish, Thebes will be lost.”

  “Sacred—why are they called that?”

  “Because they have taken an oath to conquer or perish. New recruits join in twos and are chosen from among pairs of lovers. They fight shoulder to shoulder so their courage in battle is the tenacity of men who are protecting that which is most dear to them.”

  “And they do not retreat?”

  “They never have.”

  “Such courage could well become an expensive luxury for a commander.”

  Epaminondas seemed for a moment as if he were about to become displeased. Then he seemed to change his mind. Then he laughed.

  “I can predict you will be an interesting acquaintance, young Philip of Macedon. You have a rare gift for seeing beyond the obvious.” He put his hand on the young man’s shoulder. “You are quite right, of course. When the struggle goes against one, it is an advantage to be able to break off and live to fight another day. Yet it is an advantage of which we Greeks have tended to avail ourselves rather too freely. That is why I called the Sacred Band our ‘backbone’—they stand firm and shame us into following their example. Many a battle has been lost because of too great an eagerness to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.”

  His eyes once more returned to his army, with a look as soft as a caress. For a long time he did not speak.

  “Would you like to come down from this lofty vantage and see how the army of Thebes looks at close range?” he asked finally. “The first thing a spy should learn is that there are no secrets—except the secret of the men themselves.”

  By the time they climbed down from the city gate the drill had already been broken off and troops of the Theban infantry were sitting about on the ground. A few of that vast number propped their shields up with their lances to make a little shade in which to take a nap, and many busied themselves with repairing their sandal straps or sharpening their short, broad-pointed swords or performing any one of the hundreds of little tasks with which soldiers busy their hands. As Epaminondas led Philip among them, some watched their commander with expressions of weary curiosity but most ignored him. They had seen him before.

  “It is not the same in Macedon, I would guess.”

  With his right arm Epaminondas made a gesture that took in the whole field. There was the merest trace of a smile on his lips as he spoke, as if he were displaying some costly possession which he expected to be coveted.

  “No, it is not. The Macedonians are horsemen.”

  “Ah, yes, I see your point,” he answered. It seemed to amuse him that he had nettled Philip. “But cavalry is useless against disciplined troops, and the soil of Greece is so full of stones that horses are forever going lame.”

  “Discipline is not perfect even in Greek armies, and I have heard it said that Pelopidas uses cavalry to great effect. Besides, Macedonian horses are bigger.”

  Epaminondas seemed to consider the matter for a few seconds, and then he reached down and picked up one of the huge hoplite shields that littered the ground and handed it to Philip.

  “Here—take this as well,” he said, giving Philip a spear that was half again as tall as he was. “Now, if you were a horse
man, would you charge a wall of men thus armed? That shield is four layers of oxhide, strapped with bronze. It would turn aside an arrow like a straw in the wind, and there is hardly a javelin thrower alive whose arm is strong enough to pierce it. How would you attack it from the back of a horse? How would you keep from being impaled?”

  Feeling a fool, Philip put his left forearm through the loops on the back of the shield and tested its weight. Out of his wounded pride he had answered back one of the greatest soldiers in the world, and now Epaminondas must think him a callow boy without the brains of a peacock.

  Truly, the man who could carry such a shield throughout the long course of battle was no weakling.

  “I see your point,” he said, clearing his throat to hide his embarrassment. “A phalanx of such men must be as impregnable as a turtle.”

  At first he could not understand why Epaminondas was laughing.

  “Young Philip of Macedon, I believe there is in you the makings of a commander, for you have seen in an instant what the Spartans have been unable to grasp in three hundred years. As impregnable as a turtle, yes, and every bit as ponderous.”

  * * *

  Epaminondas was quite explicit about the limitations of hoplite infantry: “They are so heavily armed that, really, they cannot fight at all except on level ground, so for as long as anyone can remember, battles between Greek armies have been little more than shoving matches in which one side tries to overpower their opponents, shatter their discipline, and force them to flee. Possession of the battlefield itself was all the victory a commander could hope for because pursuit is difficult for men weighted down with body shields and full armor. And that meant your enemy could always hope to regroup and fight another day. Nothing was ever permanently settled, and therefore no one was ever genuinely safe. Victory and defeat were alike in their unreality. The whole business, as you can easily imagine, took on the character of a child’s game. It has been the business of my life to make of warfare something decisive.

  “An army is not genuinely defeated until it is destroyed as a fighting force—until it has been hunted down with sufficient slaughter that it will never again pose a threat to anyone. This is where the lighter-armed peltast infantry prove their worth, for they are capable of pursuit. They can maintain formation at a run and roll over a panicked enemy like a millstone crushing grain.”