The Macedonian

by Nicholas Guild

  That is what he plans to do, Philip thought. And soon. Perdikkas would be eighteen in another two months, and the regency would then have to come to an end. The only choices remaining to Ptolemy were death or murder, for once Perdikkas broke free he would be certain to order him killed—not to strengthen his rule or even in revenge for Alexandros but out of the vindictiveness born of fear. Perdikkas would crush him merely to prove to himself that he was afraid no longer. And this Ptolemy knew as well as anyone.

  * * *

  The next morning, while the western horizon was still black with night, Philip was dressed and sitting before the cold ashes of the fire, scraping his breakfast out of a pot left over from last night’s dinner. The landlord, when he found him there, assumed at once that he was trying to take himself off while everyone was asleep to avoid the reckoning.

  “Your money is in that pouch hanging from the roasting spit,” Philip said. “Two Athenian drachmas of silver, lest you imagine I intended to rob you.”

  The landlord, once he had retrieved the pouch and emptied the coins out into his hand, declared that no such suspicion had crossed his mind, but by way of atonement—and because two silver drachmas was enough to pay for a banquet—he offered Philip a cup of wine to clear his throat and made him up a dinner sack with meat and bread and even a small jar of his best Lemnian. For two silver drachmas he would have been content to let Philip lie with his daughter as well.

  When the city gates opened at sunrise, Philip’s horse was the first one through.

  It was a measure of Philip’s urgency that on the third night after leaving Pharsalos he slept in the last of the northern Greek colonies, the city of Methone. The next morning, following the coastal road, he met a farmer walking along with his mattock over his shoulder, and when he asked the man the name of the village up ahead, he was answered in the heavy, rather clipped accent of the Macedonian peasantry. He knew then that he was home.

  By the early afternoon he was in the city of Aloros. It would have been a simple matter to hire a boat and sail across the gulf to Pella, but he was too well known along the docks of the capital. Someone was sure to recognize him and within an hour, probably, Ptolemy would know that he was back. He had come too far to lose everything for want of a little patience. Thus, although he burned to be home, he decided to keep to his horse and follow the road that curved around the water’s edge like a fishhook. He slept on the ground that night, and the next afternoon, when he began to recognize the countryside and knew he was within a few hours of Pella, he left the road and rode inland. He would shelter that night on the plains, where he had hunted and played as a boy, where his mind would be free and he could decide what to do.

  It was dark by the time he found a place to stop, and he cooked his dinner in a grove of oak trees close enough to the city where he had been born that he could see the fire against which the guards warmed themselves outside the main gate. It felt strange to be so close and yet not dare to enter—for Pella was the regent’s city, and there every loyal subject’s hand would be turned against him. By returning home without leave, Philip had made himself an outlaw.

  He sat beside his campfire, letting it die out of its own, trying to think of some clever approach that would allow him to get close enough to Ptolemy to kill him before anyone had a chance to intervene. He considered simply riding into the palace courtyard and walking in on the man while he was having his breakfast, but Ptolemy was no fool and no one was allowed to carry arms within the royal precincts. Even if he wasn’t arrested, his sword would be taken away from him, and the regent would see to it that he never had another chance. He would probably finish up in a dungeon somewhere—or in a ditch.

  No, it had to be in the open. It had to take him unawares so that he would have no recourse but to answer Philip as one man to another, without subterfuge or cunning. And it had to be a public challenge, something he could not dismiss except at the expense of his reputation as a man of courage and honor.

  But where? And, more importantly, how? Philip had no solutions. He would have to leave it in the laps of the gods.

  It was not until he awoke the next morning—late, it seemed, for the sun was already two hours over the horizon before he opened his eyes—that he recognized the grove. Four years ago, just here, the owl had swept down out of these trees to mark his face with its claws. In a sense, he had come to manhood on this very spot.

  “Why have you led me back here, Goddess?” he whispered. “To what end? Show me what you would have of me.”

  His prayer was answered almost as soon as it had passed his lips, for in the distance, in the direction of Pella, he saw, first as no more than a dark smear on the horizon and then more clearly, a body of horsemen. He saw them first, and then he heard them—the murmur of many voices blended with the barking of dogs, the thin whine of the kennel master’s trumpet. It was a hunting party. And, from the scale of it, a royal hunting party.

  Philip scrambled to his feet, his heart beating against his ribs like a fox in a trap. Standing in the shade of an oak tree, where he would be concealed, he strained his eyes to make out the forms of the riders as they began to take shape in the distance. The first person he recognized was old Geron, the head groom, and then, on the huge black horse of which the Thracian had spoken, the regent himself, the Lord Ptolemy.

  “You are wise, Lady of the Gray Eyes,” Philip said as if the goddess were there standing beside him. “Thank you, that you have delivered my enemy into my hands.”

  And then, almost in the same breath. “Alastor! That son of a whore—he has stolen my horse!”

  By the gods, that stallion was a big one! the Thracian had said. And so fierce he seemed to breathe fire. Philip couldn’t understand why he hadn’t recognized the description at once.

  “My horse. By the gods, how dare he take my horse.”

  Good, Philip thought. His anger had grown dull over the years—somehow this put the edge back on it. And he would need anger.

  A second later he recognized his brother’s face among the riders. So he was not too late.

  His horse was tethered just a few paces away, so Philip undid the hobbles and slipped the bridle over its head. Then he took his sword and jumped on the horse’s back. The hunters were now no more than a quarter of an hour away.

  He rode out of the grove and into the light. He could tell the precise moment in which he was recognized, for the entire hunting party, as if with a single will, reined in their horses and came to a sudden halt. They waited, and a peculiar stillness settled over them, as if they had stepped outside of time—all except the Lord Ptolemy, who was hard pressed to keep the great black stallion from breaking ranks.

  They waited while Philip approached and, when he was perhaps no more than seventy-five or eighty paces away, he shouted out his challenge.

  “Ptolemy Alorites, I accuse you of treason. I accuse you of complicity in the murder of King Alexandros. I accuse you of plotting to set aside the Lord Perdikkas and to make yourself king in his place.”

  At first there was no reply, and then abruptly the Lord Ptolemy threw back his head and laughed.

  “We have heard such things from the Lord Philip before,” he said. “My stepson, everyone will recall, once charged me with plotting his own murder.” He turned his head toward Perdikkas, who was just to his right, and laughed again, but if he expected the king to join in his laughter, he was disappointed. Perdikkas turned his eyes away, with a look registering something between fear and embarrassment. Everyone else was silent, waiting.

  “What proof do you offer, Philip?” Ptolemy went on, when he saw the faces of the men around him. “You accuse me of terrible crimes, for which I would be expected to answer with my life. What is your proof?”

  “The proof lies in your own guilty breast, My Lord. I accuse you before the bright gods, from whom nothing is hidden, and I offer the proof of my own sword. I mean to avenge my family, My Lord, and think you will not dare to refuse me, for I will shout your treaso
n to the heavens as long as there is breath under my ribs. Ptolemy Alorites, I challenge you to single combat.”

  Philip dismounted and, when his feet were on the ground, drew his sword. He slapped his horse on the rump, sending it cantering out of harm’s way.

  “Philip!” Perdikkas shouted all at once as if he had just shaken himself free of a trance. “Philip, I forbid this—this has—”

  “This has gone too far already to be forbidden,” Ptolemy interrupted him, snatching his javelin away from a groom. “Philip, son of Amyntas, you young fool, you have brought this death upon yourself!”

  He dug his heels into his horse’s flanks so hard that his spurs drew blood, and the black stallion, his eyes wild, screaming like a damned soul, bolted into a run.

  For an instant, standing there on the bare ground, Philip’s mind seemed to seize up with fear. This man did not intend to fight. He was simply going to run him down, to trample him to death like a frog in the road.

  And then fear gave way to anger—the Lord Ptolemy was a coward who had abandoned his honor.

  Well, he was not prepared to die under the hooves of his own horse.

  “Alastor!” he shouted. “Alastor—halt!”

  In later years, when those who witnessed it spoke of what happened, they sometimes said that the great black stallion must in that moment have been possessed by some god, for a horse is not a man to treasure his memories over time. Even a dog will know its own master, even should it see him again after the whole span of its life—did not the poet Homer write that Odysseos’s dog, old and feeble, licked the hand of the beggar whom all despised, knowing him to be the lord of the house, returned after twenty years? Yet a horse will not. A horse’s memory is like a cup made of sand. It will hold nothing. Therefore, men said, it must have been a god who filled the stallion’s heart with his own will.

  For at the sound of Philip’s voice, Alastor fulfilled the prophecy of his name, stopping in the midst of his charge and rearing up and kicking at the empty air. The Lord Ptolemy was thrown to the ground and, as he tried to crawl away, the stallion wheeled about and brought his great hooves down in the center of his back—once, twice, and then a third time, as if he meant to grind the man into paste.

  “Stop, Alastor!” Philip came running up, dropping his sword as a thing forgotten and useless. He was full of horror. “Stop.”

  And, from one instant to the next, the stallion grew calm. He accepted the touch of Philip’s hand upon his neck and stood idly by as Philip walked up on his shattered enemy, who had somehow managed to roll over.

  Ptolemy made a limp, futile grab at his javelin, which was lying on the ground beside him, but it was too far away.

  “I cannot even feel my legs,” he said as Philip knelt beside him. “That beast has killed me. He has broken my spine like a rotten twig—your mother always said that he would kill me one day, if you did not.”

  He tried to smile, but his lips twisted back in a grimace of pain.

  “By the gods, is it to end like this?” he went on, his words hardly more than a gasp between clenched teeth. “Finish me off, then—show a little mercy. Where is your sword? Find it and avenge your brother, for that idiot Praxis killed him at my bidding. This you knew. Finish me off, you damned boy. You guessed right, all along. Complete your triumph over me.”

  A shadow fell across the regent’s face. If Philip had but raised his eyes, he would have seen his brother Perdikkas, standing over them with Ptolemy’s javelin in his hand.

  “That is my honor, My Lord,” he snarled.

  At the sound Philip glanced up. When he saw what was about to happen he raised his arm as if to fend off a blow and began to say something, but it was too late. With both hands clenched around the shaft of the javelin, Perdikkas drove the point into the Lord Ptolemy’s chest, splitting his heart.

  22

  “I will not forget this, Philip. You have done me a service.”

  “You shouldn’t have killed him.”

  Philip and his brother, standing over the corpse of the dead regent, would have only a moment alone. Already the other members of the hunting party were dismounting their horses and running toward them.

  “Why should I not kill him? He was a traitor—you heard it from his own lips. Or is it simply that you wanted to kill him yourself?”

  “Not only that. If he dies at my hands, it is a private quarrel. If he dies at the king’s hands, he is a traitor under the law. Now his whole family lies under the sentence of his treason. You can save our mother, but he has a son.”

  “Philoxenos? Is he a particular friend of yours? For myself, I can bear to be parted from him.”

  “That is good, for you have condemned him.”

  No one heard—perhaps not even Perdikkas. As men began to cluster around them, all eyes were on the dead face of the Lord Ptolemy. They had attention for nothing else, as if they found it impossible to believe that such a man could after all have been mortal.

  Philip walked away unnoticed. There was one more duty that he owed his brother and he longed to perform it. Perhaps it would erase this ugly scene from his heart.

  He found his sword and, among the baggage of the hunting party, a small bronze shield. As he approached the little knot of men who were still staring wordlessly down at the corpse of their slain master, he began to beat the flat of his sword against the shield.

  “The king has acted a man’s part and rid himself of the traitor Ptolemy!” he cried. “I pledge life and honor to the Lord Perdikkas, king of the Macedonians. Hail, Perdikkas!”

  At first they all stared at him as if they thought him mad. And then, one after the other, when they understood what was happening, they drew their swords and beat them against their shields.

  “Perdikkas!” they shouted. “Perdikkas—king of the Macedonians!”

  In their joy, the dead regent was almost forgotten.

  * * *

  There would be no hunt that day. Instead, it was the body of the Lord Ptolemy that was tied over the back of a packhorse like a prize boar. It was time to go home.

  Philip walked up to where Alastor was peacefully eating grass. The great black stallion suffered the touch of his hand with perfect tranquility, and at last, when he lifted his head, Philip slipped the bit from his mouth.

  “I promise you will never wear this again,” he murmured in the horse’s ear as he examined the bit—it was a cruel piece of work, sharp enough to cut the flesh. “Was he so afraid of you, then? And you as gentle as a newborn kitten.”

  He grabbed Alastor’s mane in both hands and jumped lightly up onto his back. At the first touch of Philip’s knees, the stallion started forward at a walk—then a trot, then a brief gallop, then a sudden stop. Once more, as in the past, horse and rider seemed merged into a single will.

  “I will never surrender you again,” Philip said, reaching down to caress the stallion’s gleaming neck. Never before that moment had he felt such love, compounded of gratitude and relief, for any living thing. “While we both live, you will be mine and no other’s. I swear it.”

  On the ride home, Perdikkas and Philip, king and prince, rode a little apart from the others.

  “In two months I will have reached my majority,” Perdikkas said—the thought seemed to expand him with joy. “I will be king in fact then, and not just in name. In two months, ask anything of me and you will have your reward.”

  Philip turned his head to look at his brother. From the expression of distaste on his face, anyone would have thought he had been offered an insult.

  “You are king in fact now, if you will but realize it. You have declared your manhood today. There will not be another regent.”

  “You think not?”

  “No. After what has happened, who would dare?”

  This answer seemed to please Perdikkas immensely. With a tight smile, as if trying to suppress his elation, he nodded. “Then name your reward.”

  Philip did not answer, and for several minutes they rode on in si
lence.

  “I will begin purging Ptolemy’s friends at once,” Perdikkas went on at last, as if he had forgotten that he owed anyone anything. “I will assemble the council…”

  “Be careful, brother. There are many good men on the council, men you cannot afford to antagonize. And they are guilty of no crime.”

  “Is it not a crime to serve a traitor?” Perdikkas asked, just on the verge of becoming seriously angry. But Philip only shook his head.

  “If it were, all the Macedonians would be traitors. A few will have to be sent away, to be sure—Lukios for one, since he is fool enough to cause trouble if he stays in Pella—but let there be no executions. The country is weak enough without that.”

  “You seem to forget that I am king, and not you, Philip.”

  But Philip, who had never learned to be afraid of his brother, simply turned to him with such a look of disdain that Perdikkas grew ashamed.

  “We will send Lukios away,” he said, his voice sounding strained and uncomfortable. “His young bride will not like it—can you imagine what it will be like for her, locked up in some mountain fastness with that oaf—but you are right. The man is a dangerous fool.”

  “Is he married again?” Philip grinned, having decided to accept his brother’s unspoken apology. “Who would have him?”

  “Our cousin Arsinoe. Is that not a waste to make the gods weep? She is even delivered of a child, although there is some suspicion that it is not Lukios’s. Ptolemy arranged the whole affair. He seemed to think it a most exquisite joke.”

  Perdikkas threw back his head and laughed. He seemed to have forgotten Philip’s part in the story, so he did not even notice his brother’s struggle to preserve something like composure, nor the uncertain character of his victory.

  By now they were close enough to the city walls that one could make out the soldiers of the watch as they patrolled the catwalk along its top. It was necessary to speak once again.