Orion and the Conqueror o-4

by Ben Bova

  “Vision,” said Olympias.

  “A vision? Like an oracle?”

  “No,” she said, in a slightly disappointed tone. “The kind of vision that excites men’s souls. A goal for the future that is so daring that men will flock to you and follow wherever you lead them.”

  He stopped his pacing and stared at her. “What are you talking about?”

  “You must lead the Greeks against the Persian Empire.”

  Alexandros frowned at his mother. “By the gods, Philip has been talking about fighting the Persians for ten years or more. There’s nothing new or daring in that.”

  Olympias gestured to the chair next to hers. I saw that her fingernails were long and lacquered blood-red.

  Alexandros sat.

  “Philip talks about fighting the Persians. You will speak of conquering the Persian Empire. Philip uses the Persians as an excuse in his drive to bring all the Greek cities under his dominion. You will tell all the Greeks that no Greek city can be free as long the Persian Empire threatens us.”

  “That’s what Aristotle told me—”

  “Of course he did.” Olympias smiled knowingly.

  “But the Persians aren’t threatening us,” Alexandros said. “Their new king is struggling to hold his empire together. They have no intention of invading us.”

  “Little matter. People remember the tales of their grandfathers, and their grandfathers before them. The Persians have invaded us in times past; they all know that. Even today the Persians control the Greek cities of Ionia and interfere in our politics, paying one city to war against another, keeping us weak and divided. Only by crushing the Persian Empire can cities such as Athens be truly free.”

  Alexandros gaped at her. At last he said, “You could be a better orator than Demosthenes himself.”

  Olympias smiled and patted her son on his golden curls. “Philip has an army. Demosthenes has a cause. You can have both.”

  “To conquer the Persian Empire.” Alexandros breathed the words, inhaled the idea like heady perfume. “To conquer the world!”

  Still smiling, Olympias turned to me. “Orion, I have a command for you.”

  I knew that I must obey.

  “This is my son,” she said. “You will protect him at all times against all his enemies. Including the man who believes himself to be his father.”

  “Against Philip?” I asked.

  “Against Philip and anyone else who would stand in his way,” Olympias said to me.

  “I understand.”

  Abruptly she turned back to Alexandros, still sitting there musing about conquering the world. “Be patient. Learn from the One-Eyed Fox himself. Bide your time. But when the moment finally comes, be prepared to strike.”

  “I will, mother,” said Alexandros fervently. “I will.”

  Olympias dismissed me as soon as Alexandros left. I went to my barracks bed that night with my thoughts in a swirl. I owed my allegiance to Philip, yet Olympias had commanded me to protect Alexandros even against Philip himself. What did she fear? What did she plan?

  I forced myself to sleep, willed myself to dream. Once again I found myself on the sunny hillside overlooking the magnificent city by the sea. It sat beneath its glittering dome of energy, looking totally empty, completely abandoned.

  The woman I loved had lived there once. The woman I knew as Athena. Anya was her true name, or as true a name as any of the Creators possessed. They were far beyond the need for names, even the need for words. They were as far beyond mortal human form as the stars are beyond my reach.

  The Creators. I remembered the word, the concept. One of them had created me. Hera had called me a creature, a being created by—by the Golden One, Aten. I remembered that much. My memory was slowly returning. Or were the Creators merely allowing me to remember some things so that I could serve them better?

  Determined to learn more, I started walking toward the glowing city.

  Only to find myself in my rumpled bed in the barracks at Pella, sunlight beaming through the high windows and roosters crowing in the distance.

  Chapter 9

  “Do you think you could make a good spy for me?” Philip asked.

  I had been summoned into his work room. The trestle table was bare, except for a pile of scrolls in one corner. There were no servants, no wine.

  “A spy?” I blurted.

  “Why not?” Philip mused aloud, leaning back in his leather sling-chair. “The best spies are men who seem to be part of the background, men who are not noticed by the people they’re spying on. Or women, of course, but that’s something else altogether.”

  I stood at attention before him, not knowing what to say.

  “Don’t look so miserable, Orion,” the king said with a crooked grin. “I’m not asking you to sneak around and pry into locked rooms.”

  “I don’t understand, sir.”

  He scratched at his beard. Then, “I am sending Aristotle to Athens as an informal diplomat, to make contact with the men there who are against Demosthenes and in favor of making peace with me. He will need an escort. I would like you to head his escort.”

  “Yes, sir,” I replied. “But spying?”

  He laughed. “Just keep your eyes and ears open. See everything. Listen to everyone. Remember it all and tell it to me when you return. That’s what spying is.”

  I felt relieved. I could do that easily enough. And to leave Pella would mean leaving Olympias and her witch’s spell over me. I felt far more than relieved over that. Philip dismissed me after telling me that Aristotle would depart the following morning. But as I started for the door I realized that this mission would take me away from Alexandros. What of the task Olympias gave me to protect her son?

  “By the way,” Philip called before I could reach the door latch. “My son will be going with you. He’s never seen Athens. Neither have I, for that matter.”

  I turned back to the king.

  “He’ll have a few of his Companions with him. They’ll be travelling incognito—if that young hothead can manage to keep his mouth shut, that is.” He sighed like a worried father. “I want you to take special care of him, Orion. He is the future of this kingdom.”

  I must have smiled foolishly, for Philip looked surprised. Then he grinned back at me. As I left him I felt an immense sense of relief. Philip meant no harm to his son. He wanted me to protect Alexandros just as much as Olympias did. And Olympias must have known of this mission to Athens last night. Perhaps it was all her idea, to have her son see Athens, and Philip was just as much of a pawn in her hands as I was. Perhaps I would not be out of her grasp even in distant Athens.

  Still, I felt a new sense of freedom once we had left Pella behind us. The crisp air of the open fields and wooded hills was like wine to me. The sky was bright and clean; the intrigues and intricacies of the capital faded away as we rode our mounts along the trail that wound through the rising, rocky countryside.

  The trip turned into a travelling school. Aristotle had been Alexandros’ tutor until just about a year ago, and now as we rode our horses across the hills and through the mountain passes heading southward, the gnomish old man became engrossed with every fold of the land, every bird and beast and insect, every blade of grass or burr of thistle.

  He sent Alexandros and his Companions scurrying across the countryside collecting samples of everything from grass seeds to rocks. Hephaistion, who seemed especially close to Alexandros, got himself half-killed by wasp stings when he tried to collect a sample of the nest they had constructed in a dead tree. Aristotle tended the lad himself with mudpacks and soothing ointments, all the while telling us that his father had been a physician and had been bitterly disappointed when Aristotle did not follow in his footsteps.

  I had expected the old man to travel in one of the wagons, but he rode horseback as the rest of us did. The servants, of course, rode mules. We had hired professional teamsters to handle the ever-increasing number of wagons in our train.

  The high road south w
ound its way through the rocky Vale of Tempe, between Ossa and craggy Mount Olympos, its lofty peak already gleaming with snow.

  “The abode of the gods,” said Aristotle to me as we rode through the brisk autumn morning. Brittle dead leaves strewed the trail; our horses snorted steam in the early chill.

  “Only in legend,” I replied.

  He looked up at me, his brow furrowed. “You don’t believe in the gods?”

  I must have made a bitter little smile. “I believe in them, but they don’t live up there in the cold. They take better care of themselves than that.”

  Aristotle shook his head. “Remarkable. For a man who has no memory, Orion, you seem very certain of your knowledge about the gods’ residence.”

  “We could climb the mountain,” I said, “and see for ourselves if the gods are living up there.”

  He laughed. “See for ourselves! Very good, Orion. Very good. The essence of truth is knowledge gained by examination. I’ll make a philosopher of you yet!”

  “The essence of truth,” I muttered.

  “Truth is often difficult to determine, Orion. Sokrates gave his life seeking for it. My own teacher, Plato, tried to determine exactly what truth is, and he died brokenhearted.”

  I wondered silently what the essence of truth might be. Were my dreams truer than my waking reality? Were my hazy recollections of other lives true memories or merely desperate fantasies of my mind?

  He misinterpreted my silence. “Yes, I differ from Plato’s teachings. He believed that ideas are the essence of truth: pure ideas, with no physical substance whatsoever. I cannot accept that. To me, the only way to discover truth is by examining the world about us with our five senses.”

  “You say that Plato died of a broken heart?”

  The gnomish old man’s face grew somber. “Dionysios invited Plato to his city of Syracuse, in distant Sicily. There Plato instructed him on how to be a philosopher-king, a great leader among men. It isn’t every day that a philosopher has a king for his student.”

  “What happened?”

  “Dionysios listened very carefully to Plato’s ideas about the ideal republic. And he used those ideas to make himself absolute tyrant of Syracuse. His son was even worse. He threw Plato out of Syracuse, sent him packing home to Athens.”

  “So much for the philosopher-king,” I said.

  Aristotle gave me a troubled look, then fell silent.

  Our little band was growing larger every day with Aristotle’s constantly-growing collections. We had to buy more mules and wagons and more men to tend them. The pack train would be twice the size of our original group by the time we reached Athens. There was already snow on the lower mountaintops, and the trees were turning gauntly bare. I urged our band southward through the narrow pass of Thermopylai, where Leonidas and his Spartans had stood against the invading Persians of Xerxes more than a century and a half earlier.

  Alexandros insisted that we stop and do homage to the brave Spartans, who died to the last man rather than surrender to the Persians.

  So there on the narrow rocky shelf between the grim mountains and the heaving sea, near the hot springs for which the pass was named, we paid honor to ancient heroes while the winds keening down from the north warned of impending winter. Alexandros spoke of the Persians with contempt, ending with, “Never will our people be free until the Persian Empire is shattered completely.”

  Aristotle nodded agreement. The men were impressed with his words. I was more impressed with the smell of snow in the graying sky. We moved on.

  “One thing that Alexandros did not mention,” said Aristotle from the back of the gentle chestnut mare he rode, “was that the Macedonians allowed Xerxes and his army to travel through their territory without raising a finger against them. They even sold the Persians grain and horses and timber for their ships, as a matter of fact.”

  He spoke with a forgiving smile, and in a low voice so that no one could hear but me. Even so, he added, “But that was a long time ago, of course. Things have changed.”

  I had expected Attica to be somewhat like Macedonia, a wide fertile plain ringed with wooded mountains. But instead the mountains marched right to the edge of the sea, and they were mostly starkly bare rock.

  “The Athenians cut down their forests over the generations to make ships for their incessant wars,” Aristotle told me. “Now the country is fit for nothing but bees.”

  Alexandros rode up between us. “You can see why the Athenians took to the sea,” he said excitedly. “There isn’t enough farmland here to feed a village, let alone a great city.”

  “That’s why they depend on the grain from beyond the Bosporus,” I guessed.

  “That’s why they want to hold onto the port towns. We can strangle them by taking all their ports away,” said Alexandros. Suddenly his eyes lit up. “When I make war against the Persians, the first thing I will do is to take all their port cities. That will make their fleet useless!”

  And he galloped off to tell his friends of his sudden strategic insight.

  Philip’s command was that Alexandros and his Companions—he had brought four of them—should remain incognito while in Athens. They were to be nothing more than part of the guard for the revered teacher and philosopher, Aristotle. I knew it would be difficult to keep these high-born Macedonians from shining through any disguise; especially Alexandros, who wanted to see everything and be everywhere. He would never follow my orders. Any Athenian with half an eye would see that this was the golden-haired son of Philip who was already becoming something of a legend throughout the land.

  We entered Athens without fanfare, stopping at the city gates only long enough to tell the guards on duty that this was Aristotle of Stagyra come to visit his old friend Aeschines, the lawyer. As we rode through the narrow, winding, noisy streets I saw the great white cliff of the Acropolis rising before us and, gleaming atop it, splendid marble temples and an immense statue of Athena, the city’s protectress.

  My heart leaped in my chest: Of course! This is her city! This is the place where I will find her.

  As if he could read my thoughts, Alexandros said to Hephaistion, riding beside him. “We must go up there and see the Parthenon.”

  His young friend, tall and lean and dark where Alexandros was short and solid and blond, shook his head. “I don’t think they allow visitors up there. It’s sacred ground.”

  “It’s where they keep their treasury,” Ptolemaios said, laughing. “That’s why they don’t allow visitors.”

  “But I’m not merely a visitor,” Alexandros snapped. “I am the son of a king.”

  “Not on this trip,” said Ptolemaios, like a big brother. “We’re just escorts for the old man.”

  Alexandros tried to stare Ptolemaios down, found he could not, then turned to stare at me. I looked the other way. Yes, I said to myself, it’s going to be very difficult to keep him under control.

  The house of Aeschines, the lawyer, was more magnificent than Philip’s palace. It was smaller, of course, but not by much. Its portico was all marble, its walls decorated with colorful friezes of nymphs and satyrs. Statues crowded the garden like a marble forest: grave men in solemn robes and nubile young women in various stages of undress.

  Aeschines himself was not at home when we arrived, his major domo told Aristotle. He spoke Attic Greek, not the Macedonian dialect, but I could understand him just as well. The lawyer was pleading a case before the Assembly and would probably not return until nightfall. We had several hours to unpack and settle into the spacious guest wing of the house.

  “Is it true?” I asked Aristotle as we watched the slaves unload his specimens and cart them off into the room that had been given him for his studies. “Are all Athenians lawyers?”

  The old man laughed softly. “No, not all Athenians are lawyers. Some are women. Many are slaves.”

  I took an especially heavy crate from a staggering, frail older slave and started off toward the philosopher’s work room with it on my shoulder. Ar
istotle walked beside me as we entered the house.

  “They say this city is a democracy,” I said, “where all the citizens are equal. Yet they have slaves.”

  “Slaves are not citizens, Orion. Nor are women.”

  “Then how can it be a democracy if only a portion of the population has political power?”

  He countered with another question. “How can the city manage without slaves? Will the looms run by themselves? Will crates carry themselves from place to place? You might as well ask that we give up horses and mules and oxen as give up slaves. They are necessary.”

  I fell silent. But once I had gently deposited the crate on the floor of his workroom, Aristotle carried his lesson a step farther.

  “You have hit upon a sensitive point, Orion. Democracy is to be preferred over tyranny—the rule of one man—but democracy itself is far from perfect.”

  Deciding to play the student, I asked, “In what way?”

  There were no chairs in the workroom as yet. Nothing but the crates that the slaves were bringing in. Aristotle peered at one, decided it was not too fragile to sit upon, and planted himself on it. I remained standing.

  “When all political decisions are to be made by a vote of the citizens, then the man who can sway the citizens most easily is the man who makes the real decisions. Do you see the sense of that?”

  “Yes. A demagogue can control the citizenry.”

  “You say ‘demagogue’ with scorn in your voice. The word merely means ‘leader of the people.’ ”

  “The Athenians have turned the word into something else, haven’t they?”

  He blinked at me. “How do you know so much, when you have no memory?”

  “I am learning quickly,” I said.

  He did not look entirely satisfied. Still, he went on. “Yes, it’s quite true that orators like Demosthenes can sway the Assembly on tides of passion and rhetoric. It is Demosthenes who has goaded the Athenians into making war against Philip. It is his demagoguery that I must counter.”

  “Are you an orator, also?”

  He shook his head wearily. “No. Orators can be hired, Orion. They are merely lawyers who work for a fee.”