The Macedonian

by Nicholas Guild

  “You see how they observe us?” Philip asked, pointing up at the guard towers. “They wonder why the regent’s hunting party is returning so early. Already they know it is I and not Ptolemy who rides beside you. Soon they will notice the burden carried by one of the packhorses, and they will guess it is a corpse under the blanket. In a quarter of an hour it will be all over the city that the Lord Ptolemy is dead. You had best think what you will say to our mother.”

  “When she knows the truth, she will understand.” Perdikkas swallowed hard, as if that truth were bitter for him as well. “He was a bad man—she could not have been so blind to his nature as not to recognize that. When she hears that he murdered Alexandros…”

  His voice trailed off as he began to anticipate what it would be like to tell her. It was almost possible to pity him.

  Philip did not answer at once. He was not bound to his mother by any ties of affection, so he could see the thing more clearly. The nature of Eurydike’s passion for the Lord Ptolemy was a mystery to him, no less than to Perdikkas, but at least he knew that he did not understand it.

  “Perhaps you should ride ahead and tell her,” he said finally.

  But Perdikkas only shook his head.

  Already a crowd was beginning to gather outside the city gates. The distance was too great to make out their faces, but Philip could see from the huddled way they stood about in little groups that already they knew the regent was dead. There was something tragic in it. The Lord Ptolemy had never inspired much affection, but that made no difference. They mourned not for him but for themselves. What did they know of Perdikkas? Nothing. For the common people, who are wiser sometimes than their rulers, change was always evil.

  “I will fall back and ride with the others,” Philip said. “You are the king. Pella is your city now, and you must take possession of it.”

  Perdikkas did not answer, but his face registered a change. It was a mixture of anxiety and triumph, and at last triumph prevailed. No, he did not wish to share this moment with anyone.

  Yet the triumph was brief. The king and his companions entered under the main gate, through crowds at once sullen and fearful. No one threw handfuls of mud at the corpse of the late regent and there was no cheering. To avoid antagonizing the Lord Ptolemy, for most of his reign Perdikkas had kept out of the public view. Most people did not even recognize him, and those few who did had no idea what he might be like as a ruler. They saw the future ride by while the past was carried slung over the back of a packhorse. The future was a blank to them. On the whole, they preferred the past.

  Similar feelings of apprehension seemed to grip many members of the hunting party, for the greater part of it appeared to melt away between the city gate and the entrance to the courtyard of the royal palace. Perhaps they were afraid they might be targets of vengeance—perhaps they preferred to wait at home for a time and see how Perdikkas reacted to his new power. Or perhaps they smelled deeds of blood when the reckoning for Ptolemy’s death would have to be paid and they did not care to be remembered as having witnessed what must come when the king stepped across his threshold. At any rate, by the time the grooms were taking the reins of their horses they were down to a handful.

  The Lady Eurydike stood in the center of the courtyard. Her face was white and, for all the tears that streamed down it, immovable as stone.

  “Show me his body,” she said in a voice that betrayed nothing, that was just loud enough for everyone to hear and carried all the authority of one who had been the wife and mother of kings.

  They took Ptolemy’s corpse down from the horse and laid it on the ground before her. He was still wrapped in a blanket—she reached down to pick up one corner and pulled it away.

  The dead always looked so surprised. Eurydike knelt down beside him and, with a hand that a keen enough observer might have noticed trembling slightly, she closed his eyes. She touched his face and his beard, as she might have a thousand times while he lived. It was a touch that mingled passion with tenderness and was at the same time expressive of the most terrible grief. Her fingers brushed against his chest. They came away coated with blood and as she knelt there, staring at it, a crazed look came into her eyes.

  Perdikkas stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. It was the bravest action of his life.

  All at once she raised her eyes to her son’s face. For a moment they seemed frozen, outside of time, in some reality of their own.

  “How did he die?”

  “He was a traitor, Mother. He murdered Alexandros—he would have…”

  “How did he die?” she repeated, measuring out each word so that each carried the same weight. “Who killed him?”

  Perdikkas released his hold on her shoulders and stepped away. His courage was at an end. He did not even have enough left to lie.

  “I did.” His face puckered, as if he would weep. “I had to, Mother. I had…”

  She sprang up, as one might recoil from a serpent. Her hands came up, her fingers curling into talons. She seemed ready to attack him, to tear his face with her nails, but she did not. The expression on her face was hardly human. She was shaking all over with demented rage.

  “I curse you!” she shouted. “I curse the hour I bore you, that I did not strangle you with your birth cord. I curse all the days of your life. May you die as he died, under the eyes of strangers. May your reign end in destruction and may no son follow after you. I curse you, Perdikkas! A mother’s curse upon you!”

  Eurydike wheeled around and ran back into the palace. She did not even see Philip approaching.

  “She is mad!” Perdikkas cried. He put his hand upon Philip’s shoulder, possibly because he was afraid his legs would give way beneath him.

  “She has been mad for a long time—did you really not realize? The gods know what she will do now. Perhaps it is best if she is not left alone.”

  “She cursed me. She cursed me to death and ruin.” Suddenly wild with terror, the king of the Macedonians clutched at his younger brother the way a child clutches at its nurse. “She must be made to take it back.”

  But Philip shook his head, appalled to the bottom of his soul.

  “She will not take it back. She will never take it back, not if you have her torn into pieces. She knows how to hate, that one.”

  Gently, with an almost feminine delicacy, Philip disengaged his brother’s hands from his arm.

  “Someone must see to her,” he murmured. “I will go.”

  It had been over two years since he had been inside the palace. He knew his way, but as one does in a dream, where the familiar is at the same time strange. He passed servants in the corridors who were so surprised to see him that they forgot even to bow.

  When he reached the regent’s apartments he discovered that the door had been bolted from the inside.

  “Mother, let me in. It is Philip, Mother.”

  There was no answer. A moment later he heard a scream. It did not sound like Eurydike’s voice.

  “Mother, open the door—now!”

  He beat on the rough wooden planks with his fists and then threw his full weight against the door, but it was as solid as a wall.

  I will need help, he thought, before it is too late. Yet in his bowels he knew that it was already too late.

  In the great hall he found Glaukon, who had come looking for him. There was no time even for an embrace.

  “Bring two men and that bench,” he ordered, the words stumbling over each other in his haste. “And send word to old Nikomachos—we may have need of a physician.”

  The corridor was narrow and the door was strong. It took them several tries before they succeeded in battering it loose from its hinges. As soon as Philip had climbed over the shattered door and was inside the regent’s apartments, he could smell blood.

  A servant girl was crouched under a table. She was trembling and sobbing, too frightened even to answer their questions. Her tunic was spattered across the bosom with a thin spray of blood, but she was not hurt. The
gods only knew what she had seen.

  Philip went into his mother’s room alone. He found her there, facedown, lying across the bed. Her head was in a pool of blood. She had cut her own throat.

  The knife she had used was lying beside her.

  “Your sister is dead too.”

  Philip turned and saw the physician Nikomachos standing in the doorway. His hands were smeared with blood.

  “Mena?”

  “Yes, Mena.” Nikomachos shook his head as if he could not bring himself to believe it. “I brought her into this world. I…”

  Philip seemed to feel nothing. He knew that later, when it became real to him, he would know the pain of this moment, but just then he was too shocked even to weep. He picked up the bloody knife that lay beside his mother’s body.

  “She must have killed Mena and then come in here to kill herself. What could have possessed her?”

  The physician said nothing. He had no answers.

  “My family seems to live under some curse,” Philip went on, astonished at his own words. “And it has not yet worked out its poison.”

  23

  Ptolemy’s corpse was taken to the old capital of Aigai, where all the kings of Macedon were buried, and there it was crucified over Alexandros’s tomb. His son, Philoxenos, who stood condemned of his father’s treason, was brought before the assembly and there put to death, impaled upon the spears of the very men who, less than three years before, had voted to make his father regent.

  Perdikkas, as head of the family, lit his sister’s funeral pyre with his own hand, and her bones were wrapped in purple and gold cloth and placed in a golden box in the antechamber of her father’s tomb. Eurydike, as a suicide, was cremated at night, lest the sight of it offend the eyes of the gods, and her burial urn filled an unmarked grave beyond the city walls.

  Everything that was done in those first few days after the Lord Ptolemy’s death was sanctioned by law and custom, yet nothing could erase the stain that marked the beginning of Perdikkas’s reign. People said he would be an unlucky king, cursed by the last words his mother ever spoke.

  And, at first, Perdikkas seemed bent on confirming this impression, for his actions were those of one filled with fear. He surrounded himself with men who had been out of favor under Ptolemy, and who avenged three years of accumulated slights by urging the king to purge all the late regent’s close supporters. There were many treason trials before the assembly—so many that the Macedonians under arms grew weary of them and began to balk at convicting men whose only crime seemed to be loyalty to an authority that all had accepted. At last even Perdikkas saw that the trials were unpopular and dangerous, and he put a stop to them.

  But the fear did not leave him.

  He would even have feared his brother Philip, had that been possible. But Philip’s loyalty was of a caste that even Perdikkas could not bring himself to doubt and, besides, Philip seemed to take no interest in power. The deaths of his mother and sister seemed to have unnerved him.

  He had been fond of his sister, Mena, although he had rarely seen her after her marriage to Ptolemy. His mother had disliked and shunned him and therefore, perversely, Philip took her death all the harder, for it is an agony of the soul to mourn someone for whom you have never been permitted to have any affection. It was he, her last and unloved son, who dug Eurydike’s grave with his own hands, pouring out offerings of wine that her ghost might find what repose it could.

  Philip began to believe that Eurydike’s curse might have been less her own grief and madness than, in some weird sense, the voice of heaven. It seemed to him that the House of the Argeadai had somehow forfeited the favor of the gods and had been consigned to ruin and extinction. First Alexandros, then Mena, then his mother—all the victims of treachery and madness. Of his real family there was only Perdikkas left, and Perdikkas was now a jealous and apprehensive king, cut off from him, wordlessly estranged. Philip’s influence with his brother was sporadic only. Most of the time it was better if he did not speak at all.

  But Philip could congratulate himself on one thing—with a word at the right moment he had prevented Lukios from suffering anything worse than banishment to his own estates. At least six of the regent’s closest supporters had been condemned—a few anticipated the judgment of the assembly and either fell upon their swords or fled—and Lukios, who had followed at Ptolemy’s heels since they were boys, who had even named his youngest son after him, surely Lukios would have been one of their number had not Philip, quite by chance, used his name as an example of those with whom the king should temper his wrath.

  For Lukios would not have perished alone. The penalty for treason was the annihilation of one’s line—wife, brother, children, down to the babe at its mother’s breast. The law made no separation between the guilty and the innocent. And no one, not the king himself, could change the law.

  Without intending it, without even knowing that it was about to take place, Philip happened to be part of the crowd that witnessed Lukios’s departure from the city. The fallen lord rode through the streets of Pella and into exile, looking at no one, lost in his own private reflections, and behind him came his servants, leaning against their walking staffs as if the journey were at its end rather than its beginning, and, in a wagon covered with a linen canopy, his family. Thus did Philip have his last look at Arsinoe.

  She was as beautiful as ever—more beautiful perhaps, for with some women anger has the effect of defining the character of the face. As she trundled past, her eyes searched over the crowd, lighting on one and then another, in the manner of one marking out her enemies for future vengeance.

  When she saw Philip—and who can say if she had not been looking for him all along?—her face hardened even more. Then she reached down to pick up her little boy, who was beside her, and held him to her breast. She caressed his hair and kissed him, but her eyes never left Philip’s face.

  Yes, this is my son, Philip thought. And she means me to know it. It is the only revenge that is left to her, and it is sufficient.

  Somehow, this seemed the crowning defeat.

  So after that, little by little, Philip withdrew into himself. Unless he had business there—and that was rare enough—he hardly went near his brother’s court. Although there were apartments in the royal palace set aside for him, he continued to live with old Glaukon, as he had when a boy. He spent his time with common people, soldiers, and artisans. Indeed, he spent so much time at the building sites around Pella that a rumor began circulating that he had apprenticed himself to a stonemason.

  The rumor was in error only as to the facts, for it was of precisely such a destiny that Philip, prince of Macedon and heir apparent to the throne, dreamed as ardently as other men dream of wealth or love. He would have given much to be allowed to forget that the blood of kings flowed through his veins, for his birth tied him to the evil destiny that seemed his family’s only legitimate inheritance.

  To be a stonemason and spend his life thickening the callouses on his hands. Or, even better, to take ship with the merchant sailors who stopped off on their way south from the Black Sea—that would be something, to drift away on the morning breeze and never set eyes on Pella again!

  Yet it was not to be, for he was a child not only of the Argeadai but of Macedon. Nothing else remained to him. This he knew, although he tried to deny it to himself. And of this he was reminded when at last he was summoned into the presence of his brother the king.

  He found Perdikkas in the room that had been their father’s study, a room he had not entered before more than twice in his life, so that it had the strangeness of an unknown continent. Perdikkas was seated at a massive table, and behind him, explaining some detail of a map, stood a chamberlain whom Philip had never seen before. Perdikkas wore a sullen face, but lately this expression had become almost habitual with him so it did not suggest that he labored under any immediate grievance. It was several moments before he seemed to notice Philip’s presence, and when he did, his frown deepen
ed.

  “Where had you been hiding yourself?” he snapped. “Playing in the mud again with your laborer friends?”

  But Philip did not answer nor even look at his brother. Instead, his eyes were fixed on the chamberlain, as if he were trying to decide what the man could be doing there. At last Perdikkas took the hint and waved his hand in dismissal.

  “Very well, then, Skopos, you may leave us now. I wish to speak to the Lord Philip alone.”

  They both waited in silence until the chamberlain had left the room and the door had closed behind him.

  “I’ve hardly seen you the last month,” Perdikkas said at last. “You never come to court—people are beginning to comment on it.”

  “Aren’t you going to invite me to sit down? Or am I in disgrace?”

  Perdikkas interrupted his brooding long enough to make an impatient gesture toward the room’s only other chair, seeming to resent even that.

  “I want you to begin attending meetings of the council.”

  “Why should I? You have other advisors.”

  “Because you are the heir!”

  “Then have you had a premonition of death?”

  Philip grinned when he saw how well he had succeeding in nettling his brother. Then he felt a little ashamed.

  “You have no need of me, Perdikkas, so I stay away. I will grow old as your heir.”

  “Nevertheless, your absence from court creates the impression that there is some quarrel between us. We both know how these things go—I do not wish your behavior giving rise to factions.”

  All Philip could do was laugh, which annoyed Perdikkas even more.

  “There is nothing to laugh at,” he said with some heat. “Macedon is weak enough that we cannot afford to be divided at the center.”

  “I was just thinking what a miserable time any partisan of mine would have of it. What would he do? Join me in carrying stones up the wall of the new city granary? A day or two of that and I’ve no doubt he would remember the duty he owed his king.”

  Philip shrugged, seeming to dismiss the idea as an absurdity.