The Macedonian

by Nicholas Guild

  Philip stood up. He was surrounded by a wall of drawn swords and he reached out to touch the points of those closest to him, thus affirming his acceptance. He did not speak—his new subjects wanted no words and, in any case, no one would have heard—but waited for a path to be cleared for him to the entrance. He would now perform his first duty as king and lead his army to the temple of Herakles for the purification of their weapons.

  It is odd the tricks that memory can sometimes play on a man. As he stood before the entrance to the amphitheater, as the gathered citizens of Pella cheered him, he seemed not to hear them. He seemed, to himself, to be part of another vast, adoring crowd, looking up from his place by the side of the road, watching with his brothers Perdikkas and Arrhidaios as Alexandros was hailed as king. They were all alive again in his mind, untainted by treachery and death. What a hero Alexandros had looked at that moment!

  “My Lord Philip!”

  The sound of a woman’s voice, like the wild cry of an animal, full of mortal terror, brought him back to himself. He hardly knew who she was as she rushed forward, a bundle in her arms. She prostrated herself before him, reaching out a hand to touch his foot in supplication.

  Then she lifted her head to look at him—it was Arete. She was cradling her child in her arms. The crowd fell into a numb silence.

  “My Lord Philip, I beseech you to spare the life of your brother’s son,” she sobbed. “I make my submission to you. I beg you for his life.”

  All about him Philip could hear the shuffling of feet and the whisper of swords drawn from their scabbards. The officers surrounding him, many of whom could not see what was happening, did not know what to expect—was this perhaps the prelude to an assassination attempt?—and they were little inclined to mercy, for too much depended on the life of this one man.

  “Put away your weapons,” he said, his voice at once firm and calm, as if he were directing a servant to clear a table. “There is nothing to be alarmed about.”

  “I beg you for his life,” Arete repeated, the word trailing off into a sob. Her outstretched hand still touched the top of his foot.

  “Best to kill them both,” someone murmured behind him. Philip could not recognize the voice—he did not wish to. “We are at war with half the earth, and a displaced heir breeds treason. Best to kill them now.”

  “And must I make war on heaven as well?” he answered, without turning around. “I will not stain the beginning of my rule with the shedding of innocent blood.”

  He knelt and took his brother’s widow by the shoulders, lifting her up.

  “You are safe and he is safe.”

  He took the child from her and held him in his arms.

  “This boy is the son of my brother Perdikkas,” he announced. “I will stand in a father’s place for him and, while I have no son of my own, he is my sole heir. He lives under my protection. Let any man who would rob him of his life remember that, for his enemies will be my enemies.”

  He returned the child to his mother, who knelt and would have kissed his foot if Philip had not forced her to rise.

  “Enough, Lady—you were a king’s wife. Do not humble yourself more.”

  They stood there a moment together and it was apparent that the citizens of Pella approved, for they cheered all the louder now. But it was not to them he listened.

  You see? They have made their choice, he heard himself say, in the voice of the child he had been. And he saw the face of his half brother, Arrhidaios, smiling a little wanly.

  Yes—they have made their choice.

  35

  The month of Artemisios covered the grasslands near the Thracian border with blue flowers. Philip and his party had ridden down from Heraklea Sintika and were camped on the southern shore of Lake Kerkinitis. They were only a hundred men and the enemy was no more than an hour’s ride away, but those were the terms King Berisades had insisted upon.

  “I think he means to cut your throat, march in, and install your cousin Pausanias on the throne,” Korous muttered as he stirred the fire with the point of his sword.

  “You will ruin its temper doing that,” Philip said.

  Korous took his sword out of the embers and laid it on the long grass, still wet with that morning’s dew. It hissed like an adder.

  “Nevertheless, he means to kill you.”

  “And would Pausanias really make such a bad king?”

  Philip smiled and scratched his beard. He had slept very well, as he always did in the open, and he was feeling mischievous. But the jest was lost on Korous.

  “They say he has grown immensely fat in exile,” Korous answered glumly. “And he always was a cowardly, vindictive little worm. Do you remember, when we were children, how he caught us feeding apples to his horse and turned us over to stable master to be whipped?”

  “We probably fed that horse twenty apples—we deserved whipping.”

  “He will make an excellent king from the Thracians’ point of view.”

  “Then I will try to remember not to allow Berisades to cut my throat.”

  “What are you going to say to him?”

  “To Pausanias? Why? Do you have a message for him?”

  “Try to be serious, Philip. This business frightens me and you are playing on my nerves. What are you going to say to Berisades?”

  Philip tilted his head a little to one side, giving the impression he was thinking the matter over for the very first time. The truth was that he had thought of little else during this first month of his kingship.

  “I will not tell him anything he does not already know,” he said finally. “The great point will be to remind him that I know it too.”

  * * *

  The arrangements had been carefully worked out. In almost his first act as king, Philip had dispatched emissaries to Thrace and Paionia, but it had taken the better part of a month to erect a framework for this meeting with King Berisades. King Agis of Paionia, his ministers made it known, was too advanced in age and too feeble to leave his capital, but anyone could have seen that this was diplomatic bluff—Agis was a crafty old bandit who would wait to see what Berisades could wring from the young king of Macedon and then ask for more. This gave the first meeting all the greater importance.

  Philip had made the first concession by agreeing to come into Thracian territory, but he had asked in return that the encounter should take place outside the city of Eion, in the narrow wedge of land the Thracians occupied on the west bank of the Strymon River. This meant that at least he would not have to retreat back over water should Berisades set him a trap, but it represented a very narrow advantage because Eion itself was heavily fortified.

  The site of the meeting was a great expanse of flatland bounded on the east by the river and on the south by the sea, which was visible only as a faint gray haze upon the skyline. West and north the waving, flower-dusted grass seemed to stretch on forever, making it one of the poorest places on earth for an ambush.

  In three columns of five the main party of the Macedonians rode toward the river, which was far over the eastern horizon. Two patrols of ten each were on the northern and southern perimeter—no one was disposed to take anything on trust. When they saw a line of horsemen in the distance they came to a halt and formed themselves into a long row to give the Thracians an opportunity to number their exact strength. Then the center of the row, twenty-five men in all with Philip in the midst, rode forward toward a precisely equal party of Thracians, which was advancing on them.

  When the two groups were separated by perhaps two hundred paces they both came to a halt. Philip took his sword from its scabbard, waved it over his head, and then let it drop to the ground. Then a figure in the center of the Thracian line, presumably Berisades himself, drew his sword, flourished it, and let it fall. This was the signal for both men to advance toward the center of the empty plain, leaving their escorts behind.

  As soon as they were about ten paces apart they both stopped, as if this too had been agreed in advance. For a moment
the only sound was the whisper of the wind through the tall grass.

  “You are younger than I anticipated,” Berisades announced as if he expected his auditor to be as surprised as himself. He leaned forward across his horse’s neck for a better view, and as he did so he grinned, showing a couple of broken stumps of teeth. “You are hardly more than a boy. The Macedonians might as well have chosen Perdikkas’s little brat.”

  It was not an accusation anyone would have leveled at the king of the Thracians, whose throat was puckered in little folds and who already had the cynical, bored eyes one sometimes saw in the faces of men who had lived long enough to grow weary even of their sins. He was in fact about thirty-two years old, having reigned for eight years, since the death of his father, whose murder many believed him to have compassed.

  “It was a close thing, but in the end they decided they needed someone who at least had all his teeth.”

  The new king of Macedon smiled, honing the point of the insult, and waited until Berisades’ eyes darkened with recognition. The Thracian had a reputation for reckless violence that made him widely feared, even by his allies, but Philip judged that if he allowed himself to be bullied once by this man, who had the appearance of one who had never not yielded to an impulse, there would be no end to it.

  At last Berisades threw back his head and laughed.

  “I was told you have a sharp tongue. Be careful lest you cut your throat with it.” He was still laughing, but his eyes narrowed in warning. “You are not in a position to make many enemies.”

  “I am not here to make enemies,” Philip answered him, but in a tone that suggested that another, more or less, might not prove unbearable. “I have no shortage of enemies. I am here to persuade you to let me deal with them—one at a time, and in my own way.”

  “And why am I here?” He posed it as a real question. “I have only to raise my arm and Philip of Macedon can begin numbering out his life in minutes rather than years. What is there to prevent me?”

  “The fact that you have already worked out for yourself that I am more dangerous to you dead than alive.”

  Berisades smiled, acknowledging, as far as he was able, that he had been surprised. He urged his horse forward a few paces, as if, in that vast emptiness of which the two of them were the center, he wished a more confidential word.

  “Go on,” he said. “I will listen a little longer to this impertinence.”

  “Is it impertinence for two kings to recognize between themselves their various points of weakness? We each have ambassadors to tell our lies for us, which leaves you and I the luxury of frankness.”

  Philip did not smile as he said this, and his blue-gray eyes held Berisades in their gaze with an intensity that was almost cruel. He waited until the other man was forced to glance away.

  “My kingdom is threatened with dissolution,” he went on. “The Illyrians are poised to take over the west, and the Athenians will try to seize control of the Thermaic Gulf as soon as it occurs to them they have the chance. In the north the Paionians will pick up what crumbs they can.”

  “And I too am not without my ambitions,” Berisades broke in, looking at the king of the Macedonians exactly as if he wished to eat him, horse and all.

  But he did not believe it. He was only exacting his revenge on Philip for not being able to frighten him, so Philip did not take it personally. Instead, he went on as if he had not heard the interruption.

  “I think the Athenians will strike first. The Illyrians have not followed up their victory over my brother, so I believe they will wait—the gods know why, since it is not what I would have done in their place. But the stronger the Athenians grow in the Gulf, the more they will press upon the Chalcidians, until the league is forced to go over to them, and when that happens they will seal up all Thrace’s approaches to the sea.”

  “I can stop them,” Berisades murmured, half to himself. Philip noticed that he was glancing nervously about, as if afraid the waving grass about his horse’s hooves might be hostile infantry. “With my help the league can continue to resist.”

  Now it was Philip’s turn to laugh.

  “The league will not look to you,” he said with something akin to scorn. “What is Thrace but a thinly peopled waste on the edge of the world? You cannot field the army that Athens could buy with a month’s harbor dues. Do you understand now? If I fall, how long before it is your turn? My survival is your survival—we need each other.”

  For a moment Berisades looked at him with real fear. It was not Athens he feared, or the collapse of his alliance with the Chalcidian League—it was Philip himself, who, for all his youth, gazed out at the world with such cold, knowing eyes. Philip made him feel his vulnerability, feel it as he might a cold wind, and his own fear was made all the more terrible by his growing suspicion that this boy might not be afraid of anything.

  “What is it you want from me?” he asked finally, a little surprised by the sound of his own words. It almost seemed as if he were the supplicant.

  “Time.” Philip reached down and ran the palm of his hand over Alastor’s black neck. He did not even look at the Thracian king. “Time to rebuild my army. Time to look about me and get ready for war against the Illyrians. I am prepared to pay for peace with Thrace, but I would warn you against driving too hard a bargain. If I perish, in a year’s time there will be an Illyrian king on the throne in Pella and I don’t imagine you will care for Bardylis as a neighbor—after all, what will there be to stop him from riding east until he has conquered all the lands between here and the Bosporus? And then the old bandit will be the Persian king’s problem, because you and I will both be dead.”

  Once, when he was a very small boy, Berisades had been caught in some minor offense—at this distance of time, he could not even remember what it was—and his father had ordered him flogged like a slave and locked naked in an iron oven in the kitchens. His father had told him that he would decide later whether to start a fire under the oven, but that for the time being he was to stay there, in the dark, huddled in a space so tiny he had to keep his head between his knees. He had been left alone like that for three hours, and all the time the only thing he could think of was the fact that his father was precisely the sort of man who would be capable of ordering his only son roasted like a joint of mutton. He had never forgotten the experience. Even into manhood it still haunted his dreams, putting him back in that black hole, waiting for the walls to heat up. It had taught him to hate his father, in whose death he had rejoiced, and it had taught him the terror of utter helplessness.

  And that was why he hated the king of Macedon, who was once more slamming the iron doors in his face. One day, he promised himself, he would have his revenge, just as he had had his revenge against his father, but that day was not yet. For the present he knew, and he had known then, that his only chance lay in acquiescence.

  “And what am I to do about the Lord Pausanias?” he asked. “Do you propose it as part of our arrangement that he be killed?”

  For a moment Philip seemed lost in some private abstraction so that he hardly seemed conscious of where he was. And then he turned his eyes on the king of the Thracians and smiled the coldest smile Berisades had ever seen.

  “Yes,” he said. “It is part of the arrangement.”

  * * *

  Philip’s conversation with the king of the Thracians lasted hardly more than an hour. When he returned to his own escort it was impossible to tell from his face whether there was to be peace or war. When Korous asked him he only shook his head.

  “What did you offer him?”

  “A chance to survive,” Philip answered, “along with one hundred and fifty gold talents.”

  “One hundred and fifty?” Korous shook his head incredulously. “How can you possibly pay such a sum?”

  “It is a trifle—the king of the Paionians, when he hears, will doubtless ask for two hundred.”

  “What will you do?”

  “What will I do?” For a moment he seeme
d absorbed in the task of adjusting his horse’s bridle, then he managed a sidewise glance at Korous and grinned. “I will cultivate all the arts of a king. I will lie, cheat, and grasp at every pretext for delay. I have pledged myself to fifteen talents within the month and the rest over ten years, but I haven’t the slightest intention of keeping that pledge—I think even Berisades understands as much.”

  “A year from now he will expect to be paid again.”

  “I may be dead by then, but if I am not, we will see if he has the temerity to press his claim, or if I have the strength to refuse.”

  Philip said no more, and Korous did not press him, for he had learned to respect the closely guarded silences with which his royal master surrounded himself. What Philip wished him to know he would hear from his own lips—for the rest, the king’s mind was open to no man’s inspection.

  They camped on the same spot as the night before, on a bluff close to Lake Kerkinitis. The evening was very still and they could hear the water lapping against the shore. Philip talked about horse racing, which was a sure sign his mind was elsewhere.

  “I should have liked to ride Alastor in the Pithian Games, but he is too old now—he still has his stamina, but I am afraid he might tear a muscle running against two-year-olds. After all, he might lose and then I would have offended against his dignity. The first year I owned him, though, he was a match for any horse from here to the Peloponnese.”

  After a time he gave up even the pretext of conversation and lapsed into a moody stillness.

  The next morning Korous woke up about half an hour before dawn and found his king already building a fire.

  “Didn’t you sleep?” he asked.

  “I have an itch to get away from here,” Philip answered, smiling as if he found something ridiculous in the fact. “I have the feeling that something unpleasant is lying in wait for us here.”

  “Are you expecting Berisades to ambush us?”