The Macedonian

by Nicholas Guild

  For five hours they waited, listening now and then through the open door of his study to the slap, slap, slap of sandaled feet passing back and forth through the antechamber to the royal bedroom. Philip tried to judge the progress of events by the sound of the servant women’s footfalls, whether or not their speed conveyed a sense of urgency, but he knew this was folly.

  It was his sense of helplessness that most oppressed him, the feeling of having surrendered his life to the play of chance. He was by nature active and had always seen himself as the chief agent of his own destiny, yet now he had to accept the fact of his own insignificance. Phila and her child would live or die, and it would have nothing to do with him. He could not help them.

  At last he heard the measured tread of a man. The study door opened a little wider and Philip saw the physician gesturing to him. He had only to look at the man’s expression to know all.

  “The child is dead,” he murmured. “I think he died some hours ago, but there is no way to be sure.”

  “It was a son, then?”

  “Yes.” And then, for the first time, a look of real anguish crossed the little Cypriot’s face. “I am sorry, My Lord. All that the healing arts can do was done, but it was not enough.”

  “Does my wife know?”

  With a deliberate slowness, Machaon shook his head. “It is for you to tell her, if you think it right. Her bleeding has been fearful, Lord, and it has not abated. She cannot last more than another hour or two.”

  “She is dying?”

  “Yes. She is dying. And there is no hope of recovery. If you wish to speak to her, you had best go now.”

  It was only with the most extraordinary exercise of will that Philip was able to walk the few steps into the next room, where his wife lay on their blood-spattered bed, her beautiful face ravaged and white as paste. Her eyes were closed, making her look as though she might be dead already—it would almost have been a relief if she were.

  He knelt beside her, forcing himself into an icy, passionless calm, thinking all the time that if he failed her now, it would be a sin for which he could never atone. At last he took her hand and, a moment later, she opened her eyes.

  “We have a son,” he said quietly, as if afraid of startling her. At the words he felt the slightest pressure from her hand folded inside his own.

  “Let me see him.”

  But Philip shook his head. “He is with the wet nurse. After you have rested awhile they shall bring him back to you.”

  “But he lives? You have seen him?”

  “Of course he lives,” Philip answered, giving the impression he thought the question a little absurd. “From the way he howls he will make a fine king.”

  “Then it is worth dying for.”

  She closed her eyes again with a resigned weariness, really giving the impression that now she could peacefully consign herself to death.

  “You will not die.” Philip could feel his own burning, unspent tears, but his voice remained calm. “You have been through an ordeal, but it is over and now you will…”

  All at once he realized she could not hear him. He stayed there beside her while she slept, until it became the sleep from which there is no awakening.

  * * *

  Philip never saw the corpse of his son. He did not wish to see it, and at last the tiny body, which had never known life, was wrapped in linen and placed beside his mother’s, and both were consumed together by the purifying fire.

  While it was considered unseemly for a king to grieve over the loss of a wife, a son was another matter and Philip might safely have allowed himself the luxury of mourning. Yet he seemed to feel nothing—nothing except a sullen disappointment, in himself and in the workings of the Fates. He had failed to provide his subjects with an heir. He had failed to protect Phila. He felt almost as if he had murdered her. His only consolation was that she had died without ever learning that her life had been sacrificed to no purpose.

  To his friends he seemed no more than perhaps a trifle more serious, his smile a trifle less ready. They never guessed at the long periods of abstraction that afflicted him when he was alone, when time would seem to stop for him and he would lose all sense of present reality as his mind darkened until it could reflect nothing except the memory of those last few minutes with his wife.

  Did she know that their child was dead? Was she a flickering shadow down in Hades, forever bewailing her loss? The idea tormented him. Perhaps, he sometimes thought. Perhaps he should have told her. Yet she had suffered so much, and how much more could mere flesh endure? He had been right to let her die in peace—if only she could remain in peace.

  He missed her. Sometimes at night he missed her horribly so that he found himself straining to catch the sound of her voice in the darkness. Yet he blamed himself that he did not miss her more, that his heart did not crack from it, that it was not more than he could bear, that he did not wish his breath to stop. In this too he felt he wronged her, because she had loved him so much. She had died to please him. Was she not worth the tribute of a little pain? He could live, overcoming grief, while she faded more and more into the inaccessible past. This too seemed an injustice, almost an affront.

  “You need to marry again,” Glaukon told him about three months after Phila’s death. The two of them sat over dinner in the old man’s suite of rooms near the servants’ quarters. Neither of them had spoken for several minutes. “I know you miss her more than you show, but you cannot turn your back on your grief as if it didn’t exist. You need a new wife.”

  Philip smiled, thinking that Glaukon was perhaps the only man alive who would dare to speak to him thus—and certainly the only one to whom he would listen.

  “You did not marry again,” he said.

  “I am a subject, while you are a king. You must have an heir. Besides, I was older.”

  “Will a new wife make me forget the old one?”

  “No.”

  “I am glad, for otherwise I would never take another wife.” He shook his head, as if he had just decided something. “I will marry again when I can love again. That will not be soon.”

  “Did you love her, then?”

  “Yes.”

  Yes—he had loved her. That was the discovery he had made after losing her. That was the weight burdening his soul.

  32

  Perdikkas, king of all the Macedonians, had abandoned any hope of driving the Athenians out of Pydna and Methone. In defiance of the peace treaty he had signed with Kallisthenes, he continued to send troops to fight for the Chalcidian League, but even Athens’s final defeat at Amphipolis, where she was obliged to burn her fleet, did nothing to change Macedon’s essential weakness. No one was going to help her drive Athens from the gulf, and Macedon could not do it alone.

  Even Euphraeos seemed to have lost interest in the struggle, for more and more he was directing the king’s attention to other dangers—the Illyrians had formed an alliance with Menelaos of Lynkos and were once more threatening the northern borders.

  “Perhaps I should send Philip to frighten them,” Perdikkas told him, acknowledging in jest the fact that for well over two years now the west had been perfectly quiet. Euphraeos smiled his peculiarly unpleasant smile.

  “No one, it appears, cares to challenge the king of Elimeia,” he replied, knowing how little his master relished hearing Philip praised. “Men are careful not to tread on a coiled adder.”

  “Leave me, Euphraeos.”

  Not a flicker of surprise showed itself in the philosopher’s expression as he received his dismissal. He bowed himself out of the king’s presence, knowing he had made his point.

  Because Perdikkas had understood perfectly. He was not even angry as he sat behind the big table in what had been his elder brother’s study, his fingers toying with the hilt of a broken sword his father had kept as a souvenir of some long-forgotten battle. The emotion he experienced was closer to gloom than to rage.

  For Perdikkas had come very gradually to understand that as kin
g of the Macedonians he was marked out for failure. He did not understand why this should be. It was not for want of ability, since his gifts were in no way inferior to those of either of his predecessors. He was not a fool and he was not a coward, yet his reign had been a succession of disasters.

  Had he lived, would Alexandros have had to face all this? Or would the blind favor of the gods, which had only deserted him in the last moment of his life, have somehow smoothed his way? It would be comforting to think not, but it was also difficult to imagine Alexandros sitting in a tent being lectured by an Athenian general on the virtues of learning from his mistakes.

  And their father, who had reigned for so long, had he not suffered reverses in his youth? Had the Illyrians not once even driven him from his throne? Yet the times had been different, and Amyntas had been elected king after a long period of chaos and internal strife. It had been his achievement to die leaving the succession undisputed and the nation weakened but at peace. No, their father did not provide a reassuring parallel.

  Philip did not even enter into his calculations, because his younger brother, after all, was nothing more than a lout whom Fortune had raised and would surely cast down again. Philip, in the end, counted for nothing.

  So what was left, except the feeling that events had slipped out of his control, that he and Macedon were moving toward a ruin that he was helpless to prevent or even to predict? The Athenians had established garrisons almost at his doorstep, the Thracians and the Chalcidian League had formed an alliance that threatened his eastern borders, and now there was this business with the Illyrians. It was like living in a room where the walls were collapsing inward.

  Over the years Bardylis of Illyria had subjugated his neighbors until his vast mountain empire was clutching at all the Greek-speaking kingdoms to the east like a hand trying to rob a basket of apples. Now, secured in the north by his alliance with Lynkos, the old bandit had invaded Molossis, and Arybbas, king of that country, was able to do little more than to harass the enemy while his subjects were systematically plundered. Arybbas was not a friend, but his displacement was a threat to her southern border that Macedon could not possibly ignore. The question was what to do about it.

  The easiest and perhaps the wisest course would be to follow his own joking suggestion and send Philip. Philip had experience of mountain warfare and knew the Illyrians at first hand. Besides, whatever other limitations he might be burdened with, Philip was a good soldier.

  Yet there was much to argue against it.

  For one thing, Bardylis was no petty rebel chieftain and Philip would require an army of possibly three thousand men. And if he triumphed, he might become more dangerous than the Illyrians. King of Elimeia, with an army that size and with his already considerable prestige enhanced by yet another victory, Philip would not long be a subject but an equal. There would be nothing, utterly nothing, restraining him except such personal loyalty as he might feel he owed his brother and sovereign. Yes, Philip was loyal—now. But a king, if he is to be a king, must be in a position to demand loyalty, not beg it as a favor.

  In any case, Philip was not a magician. If Bardylis could be brought down, other men besides Philip could do it. Perdikkas was reasonably sure he could do it himself.

  And if he could not—if the gods really meant to destroy him—a military campaign against the Illyrians was as good a way as any other to meet his fate.

  At twenty-three the king of the Macedonians sometimes felt like an old man, used up and finished. He was weary of being king; in certain moods he was weary of life. He was weary of the sense of uncertainty that enveloped him. He felt an almost overpowering desire to push things to some grand crisis, after which all doubts would be settled. Perhaps that was the great attraction of war, the source of its fatal glamour, the fact that it transformed everything.

  Perdikkas decided he would do no more work that day. Tomorrow he would begin the preparations for a thrust north—if Bardylis was in the south, looting villages, then it made good sense to attack him where he was weakest—but today he would do nothing more. He went to visit his wife and son.

  His marriage was at least one thing in life that had not disappointed him, if only because he had entered it with limited expectations. Perdikkas had always thought the pleasures of physical conjunction overrated—the poets praised it, but they also praised drunkenness and horse racing—and it was not to his wife that a sensible man turned for companionship. Arete was virtuous, quiet, submissive, and fecund, which was all that Perdikkas required of her. A year and a half after their marriage she had presented her husband with a son, and six months later both she and little Amyntas were thriving. Philip had lost both wife and child and showed no inclination to tempt his luck again, so in this at least Perdikkas had enjoyed an advantage.

  The boy pleased him. Amyntas was a fat, sturdy child with the stumps of two teeth sticking through his gums, and he crawled along over the fur rugs of his nursery at a reckless speed. It was a pleasure to spend an hour with him, supporting his compact little body while he tried to stand, listening to his mother describe his latest triumphs. Perdikkas knew that it was not quite dignified to take such an interest in one’s infant children, but existence held few enough pleasures that he felt entitled to look in every three or four days. It gratified him that the boy always seemed to know his father, greeting him with a huge smile.

  But even this pleasure was tempered with uneasiness, for Perdikkas had not forgotten how his own mother had cursed him, almost with her dying breath. May you die as he died, under the eyes of strangers. May your reign end in destruction and may no son follow after you. And so the king of Macedon was at some pains that no harm should befall his heir. Prince Amyntas had his own physician, and his food came not from the main kitchen but was prepared for him specially under his mother’s eyes. Even the nursery maids had been warned that they would be flogged if the boy so much as skinned his knee. Amyntas would follow his father to the throne—Perdikkas had every intention of making certain that he did. Eurydike had not spoken with the voice of heaven, and she could not bring down her son and all his house with a word. Eurydike had been dead for over three years, and in all that time her curse had achieved nothing.

  Besides, there would be other princes. Arete was young and strong, and there would be many more fat baby boys. Why shouldn’t the rightful succession stretch down through time and into eternity?

  “You will be Amyntas the Fourth,” Perdikkas would sometimes whisper to the child who sat in his lap, playing with the rings on his father’s fingers. “You will rule after me, and Philip will grow old and die as my servant and yours.”

  * * *

  Philip also had received intelligence of Molossis’s plight. He had established friendly relations with his neighbor Pitheas, king of the Tymphaioi, and he was in receipt of letters describing how refugees were daily pouring over the western mountains to escape the savagery of the Illyrians. At this time of year the high places were already filling up with snow, and the Molossians could expect little enough in Tymphaia, but it seemed they preferred to risk freezing and then starving to whatever fate they anticipated under the Illyrians. The stories they brought with them into exile made one’s blood run cold.

  The great prize, of course, was the Zygos Pass—whoever controlled it commanded access to all the kingdoms of southern Macedon. Arybbas was still harassing the enemy on their descent into Molossis, but his was essentially a holding action against inevitable defeat and Philip was not prepared to trust to them for his own protection. He quickly came to an arrangement with Pitheas, who after all was in the more immediate danger, and installed a garrison of five hundred men at the summit of the pass. Bardylis could kick against the stopper as much as he liked, but the jar was sealed.

  Next Philip wrote to his brother suggesting an alliance with the Molossians, which Arybbas was in no position to refuse, and an immediate attack from around the far side of Mount Pindos while the main Macedonian army marched north to frighten th
e Lynkestians into neutrality and to cut the Illyrians off from their home bases.

  The letter was sent by dispatch rider, who was told to wait for a reply. When he returned he informed Philip, “I was not admitted into the king’s presence. On the third day after I arrived a minister told me that King Perdikkas would send no reply. He said you were to await the king’s commands.” The rider was a boy of about sixteen, and from the embarrassed way he delivered his report one might have gathered that he found it strange that anyone should presume to tell the king of Elimeia—his king—to await commands.

  “What was the minister’s name?”

  “Euphraeos.”

  Philip understood well enough. There would be no campaign. Nevertheless, he sent a second rider with another letter and the same instructions. This time the rider did not return for twenty days, but at least he brought a reply in Perdikkas’s own hand.

  “Do not presume, little brother, to lecture me on the arts of war,” Perdikkas wrote. “I will deal with Bardylis in my own way and in my own time, and until then I am content that you keep him at bay in the south. In any case, it is too late in the season for campaigning.”

  Lachios happened to be with him when he received the letter. They had been out hunting and were still in the stables, watching the grooms rub down their horses. It was almost sundown and the smell of hay and horse sweat was very pleasant. When Philip was done reading he handed it to Lachios without comment.

  “Whenever I think about your brother commanding an army, all my scars begin to ache,” Lachios said, carefully rolling the letter back up before returning it to Philip. “I do not relish the idea of crossing the mountains at this time of year, but does Perdikkas imagine the Illyrians will be any easier to defeat after fattening for the winter in Molossis?”

  “I have the most dreadful feeling about this.” Philip took the letter and crumpled it into a wad. Then he opened his fingers and looked at it as if at something he suspected might make him sick if he ate it. “I see the pit trap straight in his path, but as loud as I shout I cannot make him look down at how the ground gives way beneath his feet.”