Orion and the Conqueror o-4

by Ben Bova

  “I am of the house of Odysseus,” I said, half-dreaming. “I remember that.”

  His jaw dropped open, then he laughed and planted his fists on his hips. “You’ve taken one too many blows on your head, Scythian. You’re crazy.”

  I wondered how he knew that I was believed to be a Scythian.

  Another Argive stepped up beside the first one. He too was armed. Nikkos and several others of my band scrambled to their feet.

  “Odysseus has been dead for a thousand years,” said the second Argive. He had a nasty sneer on his bearded face. “If he ever lived at all.”

  “He lived,” I said. “I was with him.”

  “At Troy, I suppose.”

  They both laughed at me. Then the second one stepped close and looked up into my face. He barely came to my shoulders.

  “You’re crazy, all right,” he said.

  “Or a champion liar,” said the first Argive.

  I could feel Nikkos and the other men behind me stiffen with tension.

  “No, look,” I said, reaching for my dagger. “Odysseus gave me—”

  The Argive jumped back and pulled the sword at his belt. “Trying to knife me!”

  “No, I—”

  He lunged at me. I parried with the dagger and punched him in the jaw with my left hand. He went down like a slaughtered ox.

  And the camp around me erupted into violence. Men were punching, kicking, biting, wrestling each other onto the ground. I stood in the midst of it, the dagger still in my hand, while the fight swirled around me.

  Feeling dumbfounded, I backed away, out of the firelight. At least they weren’t using weapons, I thought. The one man who had drawn his sword lay unconscious by the fire.

  Officers were bellowing in the night. I sheathed the dagger and stepped back into the fray, trying to separate the fighting men.

  Philip himself rode up on a chestnut horse, bareheaded, without armor, his one good eye blazing with anger.

  “Stop this at once!” he roared. And we stopped. The authority in his powerful voice was unmistakable.

  For a moment everything was quite still. Men stood or knelt or lay stretched on the ground, all of us covered with dust, some of us bloody. Nikkos, his shirt torn and the welts on his back still livid, had one knee on the chest of an Argive and his teeth clamped on the man’s bloody ear.

  Before Philip could say another word a stone came hurtling out of the darkness and struck him squarely on the back of his head. It sounded almost as loud as one of the catapult bolts landing. Philip’s head snapped forward, he slumped and fell off the horse. An Argive ran up with a spear in his hand and I saw that about a dozen of the Argives had formed a ring around Philip’s prostrate body. All of them had swords in their hands.

  I charged forward, head down, and bulled through the ring of armored men, grabbed the spear and wrested it from the Argive’s hands before he could plunge it into the unconscious king.

  Battle fury seized me again and the world slowed down around me. Holding the spear like a quarter-staff I smashed its weighted end into the face of the man I had taken it from. He fell like a stone. Then I stood over Philip’s body, my back to his nervously stamping horse, ready to protect the king. The circle of armed Argives looked stunned with surprise. Beyond them Nikkos and the others of my troop seemed just as shocked and frozen into immobility.

  Then a fresh commotion erupted out in the darkness beyond the firelight. A man’s rough voice choked off in a bloody gargle, others shouted, and suddenly young Alexandros burst upon us, golden hair glowing, eyes wild, the sword in his hand bloodied.

  “The king!” he shouted, pushing men out of his way and advancing upon me.

  “I think he’s merely stunned, sir,” I said.

  He stared hard at me, then turned to the ring of Argives who still held their swords. “Take them,” he snapped. “All of them.”

  Nikkos and the others disarmed the Argives and led them off into the darkness.

  “You saved my father’s life,” said Alexandros to me.

  Parmenio and other officers came rushing up now and knelt beside Philip.

  “I want those assassins hanged,” Alexandros said into the night air. “But not until they tell us who paid them.”

  No one seemed to be listening to him. He fixed his blazing eyes on me. “Go with the king. I will join you presently.”

  And he stalked off into the darkness. If ever a man had murder on his face, it was Alexandros at that moment. It was difficult to realize that he was scarcely eighteen years old.

  Chapter 4

  An hour later Philip was still woozy. I had followed the officers who carried him to his cabin, a rough log hut with horse blankets covering the dirt floor. I stood at the open doorway, the Argive spear still in my hands. The officers had carried Philip to his cot with a tenderness I had seldom seen. Several physicians and generals crowded around the king. A frightened-looking slave girl brought a flagon of wine to the cot.

  Philip regained consciousness slowly. Although the physicians urged him to remain on the cot, he insisted on sitting up. His officers helped him to a folding camp chair. He gripped its arms weakly.

  A scream of agony ripped through the night. Philip looked up sharply. Another scream, longer and more tortured than the first.

  Philip gestured to one of the generals, who bent his ear to his king’s lips. Philip spoke, the general nodded and strode out of the hut, past me.

  The physicians bustled about. One of them bathed the back of the king’s head. I saw that the cloth came away bloody. Another seemed to be preparing some kind of ointment in a shallow bowl over a candle flame. It smelled of camphor.

  “Wine.” It was the first word I had heard from him since he’d been felled. “More wine.”

  The girl’s eyes lit up. She smiled with relief. She could not have been more than thirteen or fourteen.

  A few moments later I saw a small parade approaching the hut. I recognized the general that Philip had sent out, a big, burly, hard-faced man with a beard blacker than Philip’s own and outrageously bowed legs. Antipatros was his name, I learned later. Beside him strode Alexandros, his face white with anger or something else, his eyes still ablaze. And behind Alexandros marched a half-dozen other young men from his chosen Companions, all of them clean-shaven as Alexandros himself was. It made them look even younger than they were.

  The Companions stopped at the doorway. Alexandros went through, followed by Antipatros.

  Alexandros went straight to his father. “Thank the gods you’re all right!”

  Philip grinned crookedly. “I have a thicker skull than they thought, eh?”

  If they were father and son they did not look it. Philip was dark of hair and swarthy of skin, his beard bristling, his arms thick and hairy where they were not laced with scars. Alexandros shone like gold; his hair was golden, his skin fair, his eyes gleaming. I thought of someone I had once known, a Golden One, and for some reason the hazy memory made me shudder.

  “I’ll find out who’s responsible for this,” Alexandros said grimly.

  But Philip waved a hand at him. “We know who’s responsible. Athens. Demosthenes or some of his friends.”

  “They bought out the Argives. I’ll hang every one of them.”

  “No,” said Philip. “Only the ones who had weapons in their hands. The rest of them had nothing to do with it.”

  “How can you be sure? Let me get the truth out of them.”

  “The truth?” Philip’s face twisted into sardonic laughter. “Hold a man’s feet in the fire and he’ll tell you whatever you want to hear. What kind of truth is that? Is that what Aristotle taught you?”

  Before Alexandros could reply, Parmenio spoke up. “This man saved your life.” He pointed to me.

  Philip fixed his good eye on me.

  “When you were down and they were about to spear you, he broke through them and wrestled the spear away from the assassin.”

  Philip frowned, trying to remember. At l
ast he said, “Orion, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  He beckoned me to him. “What troop are you with?”

  “Nikkos’ phalanx, sir.”

  “Nikkos, eh? Well, since you’ve done such a good job of protecting me, you’re now part of my personal guard. Tell the quartermaster to outfit you properly. Antipatros, show him where the guard is camped, eh?”

  Antipatros nodded curtly. “Come with me,” he said.

  He led me outside the hut. “Scythian, eh? I suppose you can ride a horse,” he said.

  “I think so.”

  He gave me a sour look. “Well, you’d better.”

  Thus I became one of Philip’s bodyguards.

  My new companions of the royal guard were almost all Macedonians, most of them sons of very ancient and noble families, although there were a few newcomers and foreigners, such as I. I quickly learned that a true Macedonian nobleman learns to ride a horse before he learns to walk. At least, that is what they told me, and it seemed true enough. They were born riders. My first morning as a guardsman I spent watching the others mount their powerful steeds and ride galloping along the bare earth where they exercised the horses.

  Before the sun was at zenith I had learned what I needed to know. With neither saddle nor stirrups, a man had to clamp his knees tight against the horse’s flanks and grip the reins in his left hand to keep the right free to hold a lance or sword. That seemed simple enough. I told the wrangler in charge of the corral that I was ready to ride. He trotted out a dun-colored stallion while several of the other guardsmen stopped what they were doing to watch me.

  I swung myself onto the back of the stallion and, gripping with my knees, off I went. The horse had ideas of his own. It broke into a frenzied bucking, kicking and twisting, trying to throw me off its back. The men back by the corral were slapping their thighs with laughter. Obviously they had given me the nastiest beast in the corral, to initiate me into their company.

  I leaned forward against the stallion’s neck and, gripping his mane, said aloud, “You can’t shake loose of me, wild one. You and I are a pair from now on.”

  I clung with every ounce of strength in me and, after several very rough minutes, the stallion settled down and trotted to a stop, snorting and blowing, flanks heaving. I let it rest a few moments, then urged it forward with a nudge of my heels. We flew like the wind, off toward the distant hills. I turned it around and we cantered back to the corral where the other men stood open mouthed.

  “Good horse,” I said. “What do you call him?”

  “Thunderbolt,” one of the men said, almost sullen with disappointment, as I slid to the ground.

  “I like him,” I said.

  The wrangler’s weatherbeaten face showed an expression halfway between disbelief and amusement. He shook his head at me. “Haven’t seen anything like that since the Little King tamed old Ox-Head.”

  The Little King was Alexandros, I knew.

  “Well, if you like him that much,” said the captain of the guard, Pausanias, “he’s yours.”

  I thanked him and led Thunderbolt off to where the slave boys were rubbing down the horses after their exercise.

  The siege of Perinthos ended a few weeks later. The city still defied Philip from behind its wall, and still received supplies from the sea. Philip gave the order to break camp and head back to Pella, his capital.

  “I don’t understand it,” I said to Pausanias, the highborn Macedonian who headed the king’s guard. “Why are we leaving without either taking the city or being driven away?”

  Riding beside me, Pausanias gave a bitter little chuckle. The captain of the guard may have been born to the nobility, but there was something dark and festering in him. The men made jokes about him behind his back that I did not understand, jokes that had to do with stableboys and too much wine.

  “There are more ways to win a city than by storming it or starving it out,” he told me as we rode. “The king has a thousand tricks, one more devious than the other.”

  “Why did he want Perinthos in the first place?”

  “It’s allied to Athens.”

  “And why make war on Athens?”

  Pausanias had a handsome face, with a well-kept light brown beard. But that grim moodiness showed through the humorless smile he was giving me.

  “Why not ask the king? I’m only one of his distant nephews.” And he pulled his horse away from mine, tired of my endless questions.

  A short time later Alexandros came dashing up on Ox-Head, his powerful midnight-black charger, almost breathless with excitement.

  “We’re turning back!” he shouted to the group of us. “The king wants us to go back!”

  “Back to Perinthos?”

  “No, but to the coast. Quickly. Follow me!”

  We turned and followed. Up ahead I could see Philip with others of his guard and a clutch of officers urging their horses into a swift trot. Something was up.

  I rode with Pausanias and the rest of the royal guard, following Philip and his generals. Alexandros led the remainder of the cavalry behind us. The sun was high and hot by the time we slowed to a walk and nosed our mounts through a thin screen of trees and shrubbery atop the low ridge that lined the seashore. Alexandros rode up to his father’s side, leaving the main body of the cavalry down at the bottom of the ridge.

  Down on the beach below us a great flotilla of boats had been pulled up on the sand. There must have been two hundred and more of them, fat round-bottomed cargo carriers for the most part, although I saw more than a dozen sleek oar-driven war galleys among them.

  Pausanias smiled wickedly as we sat astride our horses, stroking their necks to keep them calm and silent.

  “You see?” he said to me, in a low voice, almost a whisper. “There is the Athenian grain fleet, ripe for the taking.”

  Men were lolling around the ships, dozing on their decks in the midday sun. A few of the grain carriers were keeled over on their sides while teams of slaves daubed hot pitch on their hulls.

  “The gods know who he bribed to get them to stop here,” Pausanias muttered. “The One-Eyed Fox has more tricks than Hermes.”

  I knew he meant the king, Philip. From the little I had gleaned of the situation, it appeared that this fleet was carrying the grain harvest from the rich farm lands of the Black Sea, beyond Byzantion and the Bosporus, the annual harvest that fed the land-poor city of Athens.

  “The Athenians don’t work the land,” Nikkos had told me one evening. “They don’t work at anything any more. They live on a public dole and bring the grain in through the Bosporus and the Hellespont. That’s why Old One-Eye wants the seaport cities like Perinthos and Byzantion. The Athenians have the finest navy in the world, but it won’t do them any good without ports to tie up in each night, will it?”

  Obviously the grain fleet had been afraid to put in at Perinthos, with Philip’s army besieging the city. So they had beached for the night here, nearly a day’s ride below Perinthos, thinking themselves safe. Philip must have had spies along the coast—perhaps even among the sailors of the fleet, if Pausanias’ wry comment had any truth in it.

  Philip backed us away from the wooded ridge line, down to where the rest of the cavalry waited, hidden from the beach. We were ordered to feed and water the horses and to take a cold midday meal of preserved strips of goat’s meat and water. The meat chewed like leather.

  Presently I saw a long line of soldiers winding along the trail that led toward us. Peltasts, not the heavily armored hoplites, trotting at an easy gait. This was going to be a fast strike, and the lighter-armed peltasts would be more useful than the clanking heavy infantry.

  With Pausanias’ permission I crawled up to the ridge line to join the handful of scouts already lying on their bellies, keeping watch on the enemy. The Athenians had not even posted any guards! I saw a few armed men standing near the war galleys, but otherwise their camp was as undefended as air.

  The sun had swung behind us and was he
ading for the rugged bare hills at our backs when Philip gave the order to mount up. I was dressed and armored exactly like all the others of the king’s personal guard: a bronze cuirass molded to resemble a man’s well-muscled torso, leather windings to protect my lower legs, and a bronze Corinthian-type helmet with cheek flaps. I bore a lance in my right hand and a sword in its scabbard against my hip. I also had my ancient dagger strapped to my thigh beneath the skirt of my chiton.

  We did not charge. The word came from the king that we were to ride slowly down from the ridge toward the beach, ready to break into a gallop if the trumpets so ordered. It was not necessary. The sailors froze where they stood at the sight of more than a thousand of Philip’s cavalry ambling out of the woods toward their beached boats. As I rode toward them, my lance upright in my hand, I saw the shock and terror on their faces. The peltasts came in at either end of the curving beach, javelins and bows ready. The sailors were trapped against the sea.

  There was no fight in them. They surrendered meekly and the entire year’s grain harvest became Philip’s prize. There would be hunger in Athens this winter. Or so I thought.

  Chapter 5

  Philip was in high spirits as we rode toward Pella, his capital. He had failed to capture Perinthos, and had done little more to Byzantion than throw a scare into its citizens. But he had the grain harvest. An army of slaves had loaded it all onto creaking ox carts and then we had burned the Athenian ships, every last one of them. The black smoke rose like an offering to the gods and stained the crystal blue sky for days. The Athenian sailors he sent home on foot, despite the urgings of Alexandros and several others to enslave them.

  None of us was disappointed that we had won the grain without a fight. Except for Alexandros.

  “The young hothead thinks he’s a new Achilles,” grumbled Pausanias as we rode toward the capital. “He wants glory and the only way he can get it is by bloodshed.”

  “How young is he?” I asked.

  “Eighteen.”