The Macedonian

by Nicholas Guild

  This made Ptolemy laugh. He threw back his head and roared with mirth. By the time he was finished he was wiping tears from his eyes.

  Then he threw his arm across Perdikkas’s shoulder and drew him toward himself.

  “He does not know it yet, but this union has already proved fruitful. The lady is even now quick with child.”

  The regent laughed again and then, when his laughter ceased, they both watched as, across the banqueting hall, the bridegroom cupped a hand over his new wife’s breast and drew his wet, bearded lips across her throat.

  “Your brother, it appears, has sown this field ahead of him.”

  “What! Alexandros?” Perdikkas was genuinely shocked. “I never thought—”

  “Don’t be such a blockhead, my son. Alexandros has been dead for four months. The honor goes to Philip.”

  “Philip?”

  Ptolemy nodded gravely, a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth.

  “Philip. The girl admitted as much to your lady mother.”

  “Philip?” In his momentary confusion of emotions, Perdikkas could not be certain whether he was more surprised, angry, or envious. Philip, after all, was a year his junior—why was it always given to Philip to…? “What will Lukios do when he finds out?”

  “Perhaps, since Lukios is such a fool, she will succeed in convincing him that the child is simply ahead of its time, but if not, what can he do?” The regent pushed his stepson away and then slapped him good-naturedly on the back. “Perhaps he will beat her, if he feels so inclined, but he will not disown either her or her brat. Even Lukios is not that stupid. After all, I arranged this marriage for him, and he will never know who is the real father. He must never know. He will be quiet. But for the moment Lukios feels himself very heavily in my debt.” He laughed again. “It is a rare jest, my son, is it not?”

  All at once Perdikkas could feel a spasm of dread coiling in his bowels like a serpent. This man betrays for the pleasure of betrayal, he thought. If he betrays his friend, would he not betray his wife’s son? Would he not betray his king?

  My son. What weight could a man like the Lord Ptolemy give to the claims of kinship or of sovereignty?

  And in that moment he saw with blinding clarity what he had known all along but had kept hidden from himself, that Philip was right, that somehow or other Ptolemy had contrived Alexandros’s murder. Praxis had never been more than his instrument—which was why he had to die without being given the chance to utter his accomplice’s name.

  And before I come of an age to deprive him of his regency, he will murder me.

  Life, his own life, was slipping away through Perdikkas’s fingers like grains of sand.

  I am a dead man, he thought.

  * * *

  Arsinoe’s wedding night was, at least in some respects, less terrible than she had imagined. By the time they were conducted up to their chamber, the groom was far too gone in drink to claim due possession of his bride—in fact, he had to be helped into bed and soon fell asleep, clutching her right breast in his soft, thick hand and breathing wine fumes into her face. In spite of this failure, he awoke the next morning very well pleased with himself and boasted to his friends, who attended them at breakfast, that he was a little afraid that her screams of ecstasy might have disturbed them during the night. He seemed actually to believe it himself.

  The next night and the next he did not touch her, offering no explanation for his lack of interest, but on the fourth night he managed sufficient show of manly fortitude to actually penetrate, and then promptly fell asleep. As it turned out, the Lord Lukios’s performances of his matrimonial duty usually had this effect so that once he began to snore even before he had heaved himself off her belly.

  Arsinoe quickly learned to regard her husband with indifference. Experience, it is said, breeds tolerance, and his lovemaking, which at least had the virtue of brevity, became after a time only mildly distasteful to her. Besides, he was too old and loved wine too much to be very ardent. She found she was not inconvenienced more than once or twice a month. For the rest she hardly saw him.

  Yet she lived a life of misery. Bitterness consumed her so that it poisoned every hour of her existence. Philip had deserted her, and his family had concocted this ludicrous marriage partly to keep peace with her mother and partly, she was sure, as some sort of grotesque jest. She hated them, but most of all Philip. She wished sometimes that the Lord Lukios was not quite such a jelly so that she could have told him the truth and been certain of his taking his revenge. Even if he had killed her, it would have been worth something to die knowing that Philip was next. But she was married to a supple fool who was no doubt a coward in the bargain, so, when a month had passed and she found it necessary to inform him that she was with child, she did not discourage him from believing that the accomplishment was entirely his own.

  “I am very pleased,” he said. “If it lives and is a son, we shall name him for the lord regent, who is the true author of our happiness.”

  He could not understand it when Arsinoe suddenly turned pale and left the room.

  * * *

  It was the beginning of winter and on the plains north of Pella the tall grass, long since withered brown, was already covered by snow about a handspan deep. Game had been plentiful all year, and the hunting was excellent. The regent and his followers had been out almost every day.

  Usually they did not return until nearly dusk, when they would ride into the central courtyard of the king’s palace, blood-smeared and shouting, and the Lord Ptolemy would summon the chief steward to him to discuss the preparations for that evening’s banquet and, incidentally, to show off some prize stag he had killed. The Lord Ptolemy, who was as much the master there as if he had been king himself, was usually in a fine temper when he came back from a day’s sport.

  But not this day. It was no more than an hour past midday when the regent, accompanied by only a handful of men, came back through the city gates. Although the winter sun was bright, he rode with his cloak wrapped tight around him.

  Glaukon, as the king’s principal servant, made a point of being on hand when the royal hunting parties returned, but today, when the regent returned so unexpectedly early, he was almost too late to pay his respects. It hardly mattered, though—the Lord Ptolemy brushed past him in the courtyard, apparently without noticing his existence.

  “What is the matter? Is he ill?”

  There were none of the companions about, only a few stableboys who were attending to the horses, and Geron, the chief groom, so Glaukon addressed his question to him.

  Geron shook his head. “Not ill,” he said, “merely frightened—for which no man should blame him. He has had a strange experience.”

  “What happened?”

  As Geron told it, it was strange indeed. It seemed that an enormous owl had come dropping down out of the sun, coming close enough to shadow the regent’s face with its wings before it pulled away.

  “It circled three times above the Lord Ptolemy’s head, uttered a dreadful cry, like the curse of a demon, and then flew off. It was a terrible omen.”

  “Perhaps not.” Glaukon frowned, giving the lie to his own words. “The Lord Philip had a similar experience little more than a year ago. The owl even cut his cheek with its claws, and he has passed through many dangers since. Perhaps this time too it is a blessing from the gods.”

  “I think not this time.”

  Geron held out his left hand and opened the fingers. Lying across his palm was a fragment of polished bronze, broken across the broad end and then sharply tapered to a point.

  “It was clutching this in its talons. The owl dropped it before flying off. It fell almost under the hooves of the Lord Ptolemy’s horse.”

  “What is it?”

  “It is the tip of a hunting spear.” Geron looked about him, as if to make sure he could not be overheard. “I would not say this to another living soul, Glaukon, but you and I have been servants together in this house since we were boys.
I believe the Lord Ptolemy has received a warning that death is near. I believe he understands it to be such.”

  For a moment Glaukon looked as if he hadn’t heard. He appeared to be thinking about something else.

  “What horse was he riding today?” he asked finally.

  “Why, the Lord Philip’s,” Geron replied—it was not clear whether he was more astonished by the question itself or its possible implications. “The great black stallion.”

  “Alastor.”

  “Yes. Alastor. The same horse Philip was riding when…”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “And how did he behave? Did the owl frighten him as well?”

  “Anyone would have thought so, but no. The horse was merely still and watchful, as if he understood everything.”

  “Exactly so,” Glaukon said as if to himself.

  He turned and began walking back through the gates leading out beyond the palace compound. The chief groom shouted something after him, but he appeared not to hear.

  When he reached his own house, Glaukon sat down beside his hearth on the stool that had been Alcmene’s—since her death he always sat there when he was troubled in his mind. For perhaps a quarter of an hour he hardly moved.

  “What do the gods intend?” he whispered at last. The sound of his own voice seemed to shock him awake. He stood up and went into Philip’s old bedroom.

  When the prince had been once more hustled off into exile, he had hardly been given a chance even to stop for a few clothes. The rest were all still in his room, in a chest at the foot of his bed. Glaukon lifted the lid and took out the heavy cloak Philip had been wearing when he returned from among the Illyrians.

  Glaukon gathered it up in his arms and carried it away.

  At that hour the stables were almost deserted. There weren’t more than six or seven horses in their stalls and not a groom in sight. In any case, no one would have challenged the chief steward’s presence there.

  He heard the stallion before he saw him, a low, nervous whinny, less a challenge than a warning. Alastor was in the last stall, behind a gate that looked as if it had been recently reinforced—this, clearly, was an animal his handlers treated with respectful caution.

  His eyes rolled when he saw Glaukon, and his nostrils flared with menace. The blow of a hoof against the heavy wooden gate made it tremble as if it were made of straw.

  As a member of the king’s household, Glaukon had lived his entire life around horses. As a boy he had served as a groom and had played his childish games in these very stables, running between the legs of the royal war steeds as if they were as insensible and harmless as so many tables. Horses were familiar, unintimidating creatures, and none of them caused him the slightest apprehension. None, except for Philip’s great black stallion.

  The horse was neighing—a deep, throaty sound, full of menace—and Glaukon watched the huge muscles twitch beneath its sleek black coat and felt on his tongue the brassy taste of fear. There was no particular peril, since the stall was barred with oak timbers as thick as a man’s wrist, but he was afraid anyway. Some creatures, like some men, simply carry with them an atmosphere of danger.

  The cloak Glaukon had taken from Philip’s chest was over his arm. He laid it across the top of the gate and stepped back.

  The effect was immediate. Alastor grew quiet. He took a step forward and touched the cloak with his nose.

  “So you remember,” Glaukon murmured. “You remember your true master. You have not forgotten him.”

  He took an apple from the pocket of his tunic and cut out a piece with his knife. The stallion ate it from his hand. He did not resist when Glaukon stroked his muzzle.

  “He will come back to us one day. And then we will see how the gods’ will is done.”

  18

  “I leave for Athens in the morning. There is a treaty that must be renewed, and I am obliged to make the journey. The Athenians never trust their delegates with any real authority, so one either goes to them or suffers through a thousand delays. Would you care to accompany me?”

  Thus casually was the invitation issued, halfway through dinner as Pammenes was wiping up the gravy at the bottom of his bowl with a fragment of bread. His face, dominated by his long upper lips and his slightly bulbous nose, was furrowed in concentration, for he was a man who took eating seriously.

  “Yes, of course. Thank you. I would like that very much.”

  Pammenes looked up and smiled, not without a certain amount of mischief. “Good. Perhaps, when you have seen her, you will decide that Athens is the greater prize and will leave poor Thebes in peace. A day’s travel by land and two days by ship, since it is a rough journey over the mountains. Besides, everyone’s first impression of Athens should be as she appears from the sea.”

  He picked up the wine pitcher and was about to refill Philip’s cup, but then seemed to think better of it.

  “We will be leaving the city well before dawn that we may avoid as much of the midday heat as we can, and it is disagreeable to awaken in the dark with one’s head buzzing like a hornet’s nest—perhaps we have both drunk enough for one night.”

  An hour later Philip was in his bed, his head buzzing not with wine but with thoughts of the journey and of Athens. She arose in his imagination all white, a perfect city, pure, crowned with light. Her columns gleamed under sunshine that was like the benediction of heaven. Her streets were populated with philosophers, poets, and statesmen, her temples and courts echoing to the sound of their wisdom. Athens seemed as distant from the life that he knew as Olympos itself, for it too was inhabited by gods.

  It was a distance the beginnings of which stretched out over hours and hours of dusty, rock-strewn roads, until at last they looked up and saw a tern gliding overhead, its wings spread wide and set.

  “We will be in Rhamnous soon,” someone announced. “We will dine on octopus and mussels tonight—I can almost smell the water.”

  Only a few moments later they made the summit of a hill and saw the Euboean Gulf glittering in the late-afternoon sunlight.

  The journey by boat took them first to Carystos, where they tied up for the night, and then, in a long sweep around the Attic peninsula, to Athens itself.

  They arrived in the hour just before sunset, with the red light of dusk streaming over the great fortress of the Akropolis so that her marble buildings, which were in fact a pale, yellowish gray, looked as if they had been stained with blood.

  “What is that?” Philip asked, shading his eyes as he pointed out a squat box of columns at the very summit.

  For some reason Pammenes seemed to find the question amusing.

  “That, Prince, is the temple of Athena Parthenos, patroness of the city. It is worth the climb to see, for it is perhaps the most beautifully decorated building in all Greece and the statue of the goddess is one of the wonders of the world.”

  “Then I will go there tomorrow, and I will offer sacrifice to the Lady of the Gray Eyes.”

  “Have you chosen her for your patroness as well, Philip? Would you have her love you as she did Herakles? Are you ambitious even in your devotions?”

  But if Pammenes had intended to be teasing, he did not achieve his object. Philip merely turned to him with an expression the Boeotarch, for all his long experience of men, found impossible to read.

  “I chose nothing,” he said at last, measuring the words out so that each seemed to carry the same weight. “Instead, I was chosen.”

  * * *

  It was apparent that the Athenians did not believe in making elaborate provision for the comfort of visiting diplomats, since the Theban party were obliged to find accommodation for themselves at an inn near the waterfront, where no one seemed to have the least idea that Pammenes and his young companion were anyone except a pair of ordinary travelers. They had dinner that night in company with the master of a trading vessel out of Syracuse and a Lydian slave merchant who was on a buying trip for a string of brothels in Egypt; their conversation was not only enter
taining but a genuine education.

  “Life itself is a brothel,” the Lydian observed in his liquid, strangely accented Greek. “One pays at the door, makes a choice based entirely upon appearances, and then goes out again feeling that the experience fell short of the expectation. This is the constantly repeated pattern of every man’s existence—we are always disappointed and always surprised at being so. We are all fools, but the Athenians are the biggest fools of all for they believe in the possibility of wisdom. Have you listened to their philosophers? I am glad to be an honest man who trades merely in whores.”

  “Athens is not so bad,” replied the master, who was sixty and apparently from some remote part of the Italian peninsula. He picked up his wine cup with the tips of his fingers, holding it around the rim as if to test its weight, and then set it down again. “But I would rather be a clod-scraping farmer with dung between my toes than live in any city. When I am in a city for longer than it takes to dispose of my cargo, I always end in the law courts. I think half the men in any city between Carthage and Antioch live solely by bringing suit against foreigners. Cities fester with corruption. By the way, if you have filled your holding pens within a day or two, I can give you a cheap rate for transport to Naukratis, as I have a shipment of papyrus waiting for me there.”

  The Lydian’s eyes narrowed as he reassumed his identity as a canny man of affairs.

  “What would you charge?”

  This seemed to be a question calling for the nicest philosophical discernment. The master stared into space for a moment, as if consulting some inner voice, and at last said, “Half a drachma a head.”

  “I am sure you are getting nothing close to that for your present consignment.” The Lydian smiled. He was not a man to be imposed upon. “What did you say it was? Wine?”

  “Yes, that is true. But wine, when it is off-loaded, leaves the hold clean and sweet. Women, on the other hand, are a dirty cargo—a ship carries slaves for a year and you will never get the smell out. After three years there is no choice but to haul it up on the beach and burn it.”