Orion and the Conqueror o-4

by Ben Bova

  Again that ghostly smile animated her lips briefly. I realized that if Philip had been assassinated, her son might now be king.

  “Olympias, Queen of the Macedonians, offers her thanks to you, Orion.”

  I bowed again.

  “What reward would you have?” she asked. “Speak freely.”

  I heard the words on my tongue before I had a chance to think about them. “I have no memory, Your Majesty, beyond a few days ago. If it is in your power, I would like to know who I am and why I am here.”

  She arched an eyebrow at me, as if half-amused, half-affronted by my request.

  But she smiled once more and murmured, “Come to this room at midnight, Orion. Come alone and tell no one. Do you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “Until midnight, then.”

  I hurried out of her audience chamber. Come alone and tell no one. That sounded dangerous. What would the king think if he learned of it?

  As it turned out, the king was also thinking about my lack of memory. The messenger who had conveyed me to the queen’s chamber was still waiting outside in the anteroom when I left Olympias. He told me that Parmenio wanted to see me now.

  It was difficult not to like red-nosed Parmenio. He was an older man, probably almost fifty, his hair and beard grizzled with gray. He was built like a boar, low to the ground, thick in the chest and arms. Blunt as a boar, too; there was not a trace of dissemblance in him.

  “The king wants you to talk with Alexandros’ teacher,” he said once I was ushered into his quarters. It was a sparse, spare room in the palace. If he had a family and a real home, they must have been elsewhere.

  “Alexandros’ teacher?” I asked.

  “He’s heard about your lack of memory and he wants to see you. His name’s Aristotle. Fancies himself a philosopher, although he’s from these parts—Stagyra. Spent some time in Athens, though; that must be where he got all the weird ideas he’s always mumbling about.”

  I was getting a good tour of the palace and its surrounding buildings. I followed the same perfumed young man out of the palace, through the gate we had ridden past earlier in the day, and down one of the noisy streets of Pella to the house of Aristotle the Stagyrite.

  The air in the streets seemed thick with dust—whether from all the construction that seemed to be going on everywhere, or blown in by the cutting wind from the plain beyond the city, I could not tell. The city was raucous with the sounds of hammering and yammering, builders and vendors and street hawkers and housewives and men of business all conducting their affairs at the top of their lungs. I saw a slim young girl, hardly into her teens, leaning against the freshly plastered wall of a new house, fiddling with one of her sandals. She was a pretty little thing, her long brown hair done up nicely, her short-skirted blue dress slipping over one bare shoulder. Then I realized that she was applying ink to her sandal. Wherever she stepped she left an advertising imprint for the brothel of Dionysia of Amphipolis. I laughed: Dionysia must have a high-class clientele if she expected new customers to be able to read.

  The house that Philip had furnished Aristotle was large and spacious, although not imposing. Some of the new houses I had passed, and others still under construction, seemed much grander, with fluted columns and impressive staircases fronting them. Most of them were set well back from the street, separated from the traffic by low walls and flower gardens.

  Everyone who was anyone, it seemed to me, was pouring into the capital. Men whose fathers had been horse-thieving hill-clan leaders were now vying with one another to build the most impressive house and lavish garden. These new noblemen had left their ancestors’ homes in the hills to be in Philip’s capital and to serve the king.

  Aristotle’s house was low and wide, with a newly-timbered roof the only sign that anyone cared about it. The garden in front of it had gone to weeds. The gravel path was also weed-choked and obviously had not been raked in months. The shutters on the windows were unpainted, cracked with age; a few of them were dangling lopsidedly.

  Yet once I was ushered inside everything changed. I had thought the house much too large for one man, since I had been told that the philosopher lived alone. I saw that I was wrong: the house was barely large enough for him, because he was far from alone in it.

  The house was a museum, a library, a repository for every kind of book and specimen and drawing and sample of all the myriad kinds of things that interested the Stagyrite’s far-ranging mind. The pretty young messenger left me at the front door, after it was opened to me by a bright-eyed servant with a ragged sandy brown beard and thinning hair. His chiton was clean but seemed very old and frayed.

  I stepped from the untended garden into a room that had originally been an entryway. Now its walls were lined with shelves and the shelves were crammed with book scrolls, all of them well-worn. Down a hallway narrowed by more bookshelves I was conducted by the balding servant until we came to the back of the house where Aristotle stood bent over a long table covered with seashells. No two of them were alike.

  He looked up, blinked at me, and then dismissed the servant with an abrupt flick of his hand.

  Aristotle looked almost like a gnome. Short and lean almost to the point of emaciation, his head was large and high-domed, dominating his tiny, shrivelled body. His hair was thinning but still dark; his beard neatly trimmed. His eyes were small and he blinked constantly as if they pained him.

  “You are the one called Orion?” he asked, in a voice that was surprisingly deep and strong.

  “I am Orion,” I said.

  “Son of?”

  I could only shrug.

  He smiled, showing ragged yellow teeth. “Pardon me, young man. That was a trick. Four times before I have seen men who have lost their memory. Sometimes an innocent question brings an answer before they can think about it and the memory returns. Or at least part of it.”

  He sat me on a stool next to his worktable and examined my head in the afternoon light streaming through the long windows.

  “No scars,” he muttered. “No sign of a head wound.”

  “I heal very quickly,” I said.

  He fixed me with those burning eyes. “You remember that?”

  “No,” I replied truthfully. “I know it. Just as I know that my name is Orion.”

  “You remember nothing that happened to you beyond a few days ago?”

  “It is as if I were born as an adult. The first thing I remember is marching with the mercenaries of Diopeithes on the plain of Perinthos, little more than a week ago.”

  “Born fully-formed, with shield and spear in hand,” he said, half smiling. “Like Athena.”

  “Athena? You know her?”

  “I know of all the gods, Orion.”

  “I dream of them.”

  “Do you?”

  I hesitated, wondering how much I could tell him. Would he consider me insane? Would he consider it treason against Philip to dream that Olympias, the queen, was also Hera the goddess? And that she intended that I should slay the king?

  “What does Athena look like?” I asked.

  He blinked several times. “Usually she is portrayed in armor and helmet. Phydias’ great statue of her shows her bearing shield and spear. Often she has an owl with her, the symbol of her wisdom.”

  “But her face,” I insisted. “Her form. What does she look like?”

  Aristotle’s eyes widened at my question. “She is a goddess, Orion. No one has seen her features.”

  “I have.”

  “In your dreams?”

  I had blurted enough, I decided. So I merely replied, “Yes, in my dreams.”

  Aristotle considered this a moment, his large dome of a head tilted slightly to one side on his frail shoulders. “Is she beautiful?” he asked at length.

  “Extremely beautiful. Her eyes are silver-gray, her hair as black as the midnight sky. Her face…” I could not find the words to describe her.

  “Do you love her?” he asked.

 
I nodded.

  “And she loves you? In your dreams?”

  She loved me in the barren snowy wastes of the Ice Age, I knew. She loved me in the green forests of Paradise. We had loved each other through a hundred million years: in the dusty camps of the Great Khan, in the electric cities of the industrial world, on the shores of the methane sea of ringed Saturn’s largest moon.

  All this I kept to myself. He would think me a raving madman if I told him a hundredth of it. So I answered merely:

  “Yes. In my dreams we love each other.”

  He must have sensed that there was much I was holding back from him. We talked until the sunlight faded from the windows and slaves entered the room softly to light the oil lamps. The balding major-domo who had admitted me to the house came and whispered in his master’s ear.

  “You are wanted back at your barracks, Orion,” said Aristotle to me.

  I got up from the stool, surprised that we had been talking for so long that my joints popped when I stood up.

  “Thank you for your time,” I said.

  “I hope I have been helpful.”

  “Yes. A little.”

  “Come see me again. I am almost always here and I will be happy to see you.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  He walked with me around the long table toward the door to the room. “I think that perhaps the key to your memory lies in those dreams you described. Often men dream of things that they do not think of when they are awake.”

  “The gods use dreams to give us messages,” I suggested.

  He smiled and reached up to pat my shoulder. “The gods have other fish to fry, Orion, if they actually take any interest in human affairs at all. They are far too busy to meddle in our dreams, I fear.”

  His words sent a shock through me. Somehow I knew he was right, and I wondered how he knew so much about the gods. Yet, at the same instant, I knew he was also wrong. The gods’ principal interest is to meddle in human affairs.

  I had been recalled to barracks because I was assigned to duty that evening. Most of the royal guard had gone off to their homes scattered through the city, so the handful of us who lived in the barracks got the chore of standing like statues through the king’s long, loud, wine-soaked dinners.

  Pausanias was one of the few Macedonian nobles who actually did his guard duty that night. Sour-faced and grumbling, he complained that he should be reclining on a dinner couch with the others rather than standing around in armor and helmet while his fellow nobles drank themselves into a stupor.

  “I’m as good as they are,” I heard him growl as he inspected my uniform. We were all decked out as if we were marching into battle. We even carried our shields with us.

  My post was by the main entrance to the dining hall. It was a big room with a huge fireplace at one end of it, roaring hot although no cooking was done on it. Even in summer the Macedonian nights could be chill. The food was brought in on long trays by sweating servants and set down on the dinner tables, while the dogs, lolling by the fireplace, watched silently with hungry eyes that caught the flickering of the flames.

  Philip reclined on a couch at the front of the hall, raised up on a two-step dais, beneath a strikingly vivid mosaic of a roaring lion done in colored pebbles. Flanking him along the table were his generals Parmenio and Antipatros, and Antigonos, gray and lean as an old wolf. Like Philip, Antigonos had lost an eye in battle long ago.

  The dinner guests sitting below them were all male, of course. At first. There were plenty of women servants, most of them young and slim and smiling as the men ogled and pawed at them. The boys among the servants were treated much the same. Even Philip pinched buttocks without regard to gender. Wine was poured liberally, and the laughter and rowdiness rose with each gulp.

  I saw that Alexandros was not present, nor any of his young Companions. This was a dinner for the king’s friends and companions-in-arms. And for relatives, close and distant, such as Attalos, a fat and beady-eyed clan leader who owned, it was said, the biggest house in Pella and the richest horse ranch in Macedonia.

  Attalos also had a fourteen-year-old niece who was being dangled as bait before Philip’s eyes, according to the barracks gossip.

  “Philip likes ’em young,” one of my barracks mates had told me while we were suiting up for duty. “Girls, boys, makes no difference.”

  “How old was Olympias when he married her?” I had asked.

  “Ahh, that was different. That was a state marriage. Brought the Molossians and all of Epeiros over to Philip’s side with that marriage.”

  “He was mad about her, though,” said one of the other men.

  “Bewitched by her, you mean.”

  “Well, whatever it was, it wore off as soon as she bore him Alexandros.”

  “Doesn’t matter; the old fox casts his one good eye on anything with smooth skin.”

  They all laughed approvingly, wishing they had the kingly prerogatives of Philip.

  As the dinner stretched into a long drinking bout I wondered if I would be able to keep my midnight appointment with the queen. Philip looked half-unconscious from the wine he had drunk, yet he had a boy of ten or so pouring still more into his gold goblet. Some of the dinner guests were drowsing on their couches; those who weren’t were fondling the prettier servants.

  Then the hetairai were admitted into the dining hall and the servants scampered away, many of them looking grateful. These professional women were older and looked quite sure of themselves. It seemed to me that they picked out the men they wished to be with. No one argued with their choices. And the men’s behavior actually improved. The lewd jokes and roaring laughter quieted down as one of the courtesans pointed to the musicians who had been sitting idly in a corner. They struck up their lyres and flutes and lovely soft music filled the dining hall. The stench of spilled wine and vomit still hung in the air. But now the perfumes of distant lands began to make the room more pleasant.

  In less than an hour the dining hall emptied out. No one could leave before the king did, of course, but soon after the hetairai appeared he lumbered off with one of the serving boys, leaning heavily on the lad’s shoulders, dragging his bad leg. One by one the other men went off with their female companions until at last the hall was emptied of all except the servants, who wearily began cleaning off the tables and throwing scraps to the dogs who had been waiting by the fire all evening long.

  At last Pausanias strode past my post at the entrance. “Dismissed,” was all that he managed to say.

  I hurried back to the barracks, took off my armor, and rushed back to the palace to find Olympias’ audience chamber.

  Chapter 7

  The queen was not in her audience chamber. But a sloe-eyed maid with flowing dark hair and a knowing smile was waiting for me. Holding a clay oil lamp in one upraised hand, she guided me through the upper levels of the palace, a dizzying labyrinth of stairs and corridors and rooms. I thought she was deliberately trying to confuse me.

  “Is the queen’s room in a hidden place?” I asked, half joking.

  She looked up at me in the yellow light of the lamp, her smile full of secrets. “You will see,” she said.

  And I did. Soon we came to a low wooden door at the end of an otherwise blank corridor. I could hear the night wind moaning even though we had passed no window. We must be up high, I reasoned.

  The servant scratched at the door and it swung inward on silent hinges. She went through and beckoned me enter. I had to duck to get through the arched doorway. The servant slipped behind me and went out again, closing the door behind her.

  It was dark inside. Blacker than the darkest moonless night, a darkness so deep and all-engulfing that I felt as if I had stepped into oblivion, an emptiness where nothing at all existed. Dark and cold, frigid, as if I had been plunged into the void where warmth and light could not exist. My breath froze in my throat. I stretched out my arms like a blind man, reaching for some reference point in this stygian abyss, searching sightlessly while m
y senses told me I was falling, tumbling through a nothingness where neither time nor space existed. Panic rose within me as I struggled to breathe.

  Then I saw the faintest, faintest glow of a distant light. Like the flicker of the first star of evening, so tenuous that I could not be certain it was there at all. Gradually, though, the light brightened. I heard a slithering of bare feet, the faintest suggestion of distant laughter. I could breathe again. My fear subsided. I stood immobile, silent, waiting for the light to brighten further, my right hand resting gently on the dagger strapped beneath my skirt.

  Slowly, lamps came aglow, low and guttering at first, then gradually brightening. I saw that the room I stood in was immense, impossibly long and wide, its vast ceiling lost in shadows, its floor polished white marble, massive columns of green marble marching in rows along either side of me.

  At the far end sat Olympias—Hera?—on a throne of ivory inlaid with gold. She glowed with splendor. Snakes slithered on the dais of her throne, on the steps of the marble platform, on the high back of her throne itself. Some were small and deadly poisonous. Others were huge constrictors, their eyes glittering in the lamplight.

  This colossal opulent room could not possibly have been part of Philip’s palace. Somehow I had passed through a gateway into another world, another universe. This was witchcraft, I realized, beyond anything that Philip’s rough soldiers could imagine.

  “Come to me, Orion,” Olympias called. Her voice was low and melodious, yet it carried the distance from her throne to me as if she had been standing at my side.

  I walked as if in a trance. It seemed to take hours. I heard nothing but the clacking of my boots against the marble floor. I watched the snakes watching me with their glittering eyes.

  At last I stood at the foot of her throne. Olympias wore a copper-red robe that matched the color of her hair and left her shoulders and arms bare. Its slitted skirt revealed her long smooth legs. Bright jewelry bedecked her throat, her arms and wrists. She looked down on me and smiled a cruelly beautiful smile.

  “Do you fear me, Orion?”