Orion and the Conqueror o-4

by Ben Bova

  The hours toiled on, the wine goblets were refilled over and again, and the dinner guests became rowdier and bawdier. No one left until finally Philip pushed himself up from his couch, draped one arm heavily around the shoulders of the boy who had been serving him, and lurched off toward his bedchamber. Slowly the other guests struggled to their feet and staggered off, many of them with either girls or boys in their grip. Alexandros rose from his couch coldly sober. Hephaistion, equally restrained, crossed the hall to be with him.

  As the kitchen slaves came in to clean the hall, Pausanias finally gave us leave to return to barracks. Clearly something had enraged him, but he gave no hint of what it was.

  I pretended to go to sleep, but as soon as I heard the snores of my fellow guardsmen in the darkness, I got up and headed for the queen’s rooms. I knew the layout of the palace well enough to get to her rooms on my own. But I did not want the guards or her serving women to get in my way.

  So I went out onto the parade ground in the cold night, barefoot and wearing only my thin chiton. It was dark, moonless. Clouds were scudding low across the stars. The air felt damp, the wind cutting. Staying in the shadows of the barracks wall so that the sentries would not see me, I hurried the length of the parade ground and clambered softly up onto the roof of the stables. I had brought no weapon with me, nothing to clink in the night and alert a drowsy sentry. Nothing but the dagger that I always kept strapped to my thigh.

  It was a good leap from the stable roof to the slightly higher roof next to it, but I made it almost silently and then climbed the rough stones of the wall to the still-higher roof of the palace proper. Then I made my way along the sloping timber beams of the roof until I figured I was above the queen’s quarters. I lowered myself from the eave and swung my legs through the curtained window, landing with a soft thud.

  “I have been waiting for you, Orion,” said Olympias in the darkness.

  I was in her bed chamber, crouched on the balls of my feet, my fingertips touching the polished wood of the floor, ready to fight if I had to.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she said, reading my thoughts. “I want you here with me this night.”

  “You knew I was coming?” In the shadows I could make out her form reclining on the bed.

  “I commanded you to come to me,” she said, her voice taunting. “You don’t think you did this of your own volition, do you?”

  I did not want to believe her. “Then why didn’t you send a servant, as before?”

  I could sense her smiling in the darkness. “Why encourage palace gossip? The king likes you. He trusts you. Even Alexandros admires your fighting prowess. Why spoil all that by letting the servants know you are my lover?”

  “I’m not—”

  “But you are, Orion,” she snapped. Her body seemed to glow faintly in the darkness, stretched out languidly on the bed, naked and warm and inviting.

  “I don’t want to be your lover,” I said, although it cost me pain to force the words through my gritted teeth.

  “What you want is of no consequence,” Olympias replied. “You will do what I command. You will be what I desire you to be. Don’t force me to be cruel to you, Orion. I can make you grovel in slime if I wish it. I can make you do things that would destroy your spirit utterly.”

  “Why are you doing this?” I demanded. But even as I asked it, I shuffled closer to her bed. “What are you trying to accomplish?”

  “No questions, Orion,” she said. “Tonight is for pleasure. Tomorrow you will learn what your new duties are to be. Perhaps.”

  I was helpless. I could not resist her. Even when I saw that the bed she lay upon was writhing with snakes I was unable to turn away, unable even to turn my eyes from her. She laughed as I slowly stripped off my chiton.

  “Take off the dagger, too,” she commanded me. “You won’t need it. Your natural equipment will be quite enough.”

  I did as she instructed me. The snakes were dry and cold against my bare skin. I felt them biting me, sinking their fangs into my flesh and filling my bloodstream with strange venoms that melted my willpower and heightened my senses to an excruciating pitch. Then it was Olympias’ teeth and nails penetrating me, tearing me apart, giving me pain while she took pleasure from me. She laughed while I wept. She exulted while I abased myself for her.

  Chapter 12

  For weeks, for months, my life was bound to her whims. She would ignore me for long stretches of time and I would begin to think that she had tired of me, but then she would summon me again, and again I knew the tearing passions of physical pleasure and mental anguish. By day I served Philip and watched the love-hate relationship between the king and his son. By night I lay in my barracks bed fighting with every gram of strength in me against her domination. There were times when I almost thought I had thrown off her control.

  But then she would call me again, in my mind, silent and invisible and completely irresistible. I would come to her and the snakes that she allowed to coil around her naked body. She would laugh and rend my flesh and rack me until I was utterly exhausted. Yet at dawn I always found myself in my barracks bed, refreshed and unhurt despite what Olympias and her witchcraft had done to me during the hours of darkness and passion.

  By day, the news from the south grew steadily worse. Athens and Thebes had indeed concluded their treaty of alliance, backed by Persian gold. The bit of luck that Philip had waited upon turned out to be all bad: now he had to face the two most powerful cities of the south, knowing that if he lost to them he would lose his crown, his life, and all that he had struggled for since coming to the throne of Macedonia.

  I wanted to ask Aristotle for his estimation of the situation. He was the wisest man I knew, except perhaps for Philip himself. But Philip’s wisdom was of the kingly sort, centered on what he needed to accomplish to enlarge his kingdom and make it safer and stronger. Aristotle was wise in the ways of human behavior. He cared about understanding the world rather than ruling it.

  During one of my off-duty hours I tracked the philosopher down; he was in a shed standing by itself out beyond the stables. In it, on a rough trestle table, he had placed a large box of dirt. He was sitting on a teetering off-balance stool, staring at the dirt intently.

  “May I enter?” I called from the doorway of the shed. There was no door, merely a rough blanket hung over the opening, which was so low that I had to duck through. The morning was warm and sunny; spring was in the air.

  Aristotle jerked with surprise so hard that his rickety stool nearly toppled over. He peered across the shed at me, blinking painfully.

  “Oh! It’s you, Orion. Yes, come in, come in.”

  I saw that the box of dirt held a colony of ants.

  “We can learn much from the ants,” said Aristotle. “They make kingdoms and even fight wars, much as men do.”

  “Why do men fight wars?” I asked.

  Aristotle wrinkled his high-domed forehead at me. “You might as well ask why men breathe. It is in their nature.”

  I vaguely remembered one of the Creators, the Golden One, telling me arrogantly that he had designed me to be a warrior; me, and the other creatures he had sent into the time of the Neanderthals.

  Aristotle mistook my silence for puzzlement. He took my arm in one of his thin-fingered hands and pulled me to the ant colony.

  “Do you see them, Orion? I put two queen ants in there, one in this corner and the other on the farther side. They had plenty of room and I saw to it that they had plenty of food.”

  The ants all looked exactly alike to me: tiny and black and terribly busy, scampering every which way across the sandy soil that filled the box.

  “Yet look there,” Aristotle pointed. Battalions of ants were fighting each other, rending one another apart with fierce mandibles.

  “They could live in peace, yet they fight. Each group wants to be master of the other. It is in their nature.”

  “But men are not ants,” I said.

  “No, they are like ravening dogs.” W
ith real anger in his voice, Aristotle told me, “They see a neighbor who has something they do not, or a neighbor who appears too weak to defend himself, and they want to steal what that neighbor has. War is theft, Orion, thievery on a grand scale. Murder and rape and plunder, that is why men fight wars.”

  “Does Philip intend to rape and plunder Athens and Thebes?”

  “No, but they would do it to us.”

  “Really?”

  “That is what we fear.”

  “But those cities lie far to the south. Why are we preparing to make war on them? Why do they want to make war against us?”

  “Ah, your questions grow more specific. Good.”

  “Well?”

  Aristotle got down off his stool and clasped his hands behind his back. He had to look up to see into my face.

  “Are you prepared to listen to a lecture on history, Orion?”

  I knew from his tone that this would be a long lecture. I nodded. He began to pace. And speak.

  The Greeks have never been able to unite themselves, Aristotle said. That is their glory and their weakness. Not since Agamemnon led the Achaians against Troy, countless ages ago, have the Greek cities been able to stand together for more than a few years at a time.

  They united briefly, a century and a half ago, when the Persians under the old Dareios invaded Greece as punishment for Athenian support of a rebellion against Persia by the Greek cities on the Ionian coast, across the Aegean from Athens. The Persians were driven off after the Athenians stopped them at Marathon. Ten years later, Dareios’ son Xerxes invaded Greece again with an army that blackened the land with their numbers. Again the Persians were beaten off, even though they sacked Athens itself, because the cities of the south—principally Athens and Sparta—fought side by side against the invaders.

  “Both times the Macedonians allowed the Persians to pass through their territory without a fight. They even sold the Persians horses for their cavalry and timber for their ships. Athens has never forgotten that.”

  “But that was more than a century ago,” I said.

  “Yes, and the Macedonians were little more than a bundle of cattlemen,” said Aristotle. “No match for the power of the Persian Empire. They did not even consider themselves to be Greeks, in the sense that the Athenians did.”

  “The Athenians still call the Macedonians barbarians,” I recalled.

  Aristotle nodded. “To this day.”

  After their second defeat in Greece the Persians decided that these rugged fighters living at the edge of their empire were not worth the trouble to conquer them. But the Great King wanted to keep the rich Ionian cities on the Aegean coast, despite the fact that those cities were as Greek as Athens or Sparta or Thebes.

  “Ever since then,” Aristotle continued, “the Persians have meddled in Greek politics. At one time they supported Sparta against Athens. At another, Athens against Corinth. Persian gold has been spent to keep the cities from uniting. Thus the Great King keeps us weak and no danger to his empire.”

  “And Philip wants to change that?”

  Aristotle smiled, a bit ruefully, I thought. “No man is completely master of his own actions, Orion, not even a king.”

  Certainly not me, I knew.

  “Philip came to the throne with Macedonia in chaos. The ravening dogs around us were tearing the country to pieces. Our neighbors to the north and the west and the east all invaded Macedonia, seizing whatever they could. No one was safe. Fire and savagery were everywhere. Every man’s hand was raised against us.

  “Philip was not the chosen king then. He had to push his own brother off the throne in order to save the country. He united the Macedonians and threw back the invaders. He enlarged the kingdom by conquering those who had invaded us. He has made the Thracians and Illyrians and Molossians and many other warring tribes into allies or outright colonies of Macedonia. He has stretched his power to the edge of the Adriatic Sea, where those primitive tribesmen kill one another for sport. He has expanded his influence into central Greece, where Thebes and Corinth oppose him. For the past several years he has fought a war—sometimes undeclared, but a war nonetheless—against Athens.”

  “But why?”

  Aristotle’s smile turned knowing. “The Athenians still believe that they are the greatest power among the Greeks. They are loath to allow any other power to become strong enough to challenge them. Encouraged by Persian gold, Athens strives to limit Philip’s power.”

  “So that Athens can remain supreme among the Greek cities?”

  He nodded. “For his part, Philip believes that he must bend Athens to his will or Athens will destroy Macedonia.”

  “Is that the truth?”

  “Close enough for Philip. And for Demosthenes.”

  “But for you?”

  “I see the hand of the Great King behind it all. Like his forebears, this new Dareios fears the power of a united Greece. Philip is the only man who can unite all the Greeks, so young Dareios encourages Athens and the other cities to work against Macedonia.”

  “He sees Philip as a threat to the Persian Empire?” I knew that there had been talk from time to time about wresting the Ionian cities from the Persians, but I had taken it to be little more than talk.

  Now Aristotle became very serious, even grave. “Orion, it is our destiny to unite the Greeks and conquer the Persians. Unless we do, the Greeks will always be as disunited and quarrelsome as those barbarous Balkan tribes.”

  I must have gaped at him. This gnomish philosopher with the weak eyes, this studier of ants and espouser of moral codes, he wanted Philip to make war against the greatest empire in the world.

  “And that, in the end, is why men make war upon one another,” said Aristotle. “It is just as natural as a lion chasing down a deer. Kill or be killed. The world must be either one thing or the other. If we do not destroy the Persians they will destroy us.”

  I was almost dumbfounded. “But you say that the Persians have tried to destroy Greece for more than a century and a half. They have not been able to do so.”

  “Not as yet,” he said calmly. “But what is a century and a half in the affairs of mankind? What is a thousand years? I speak of the long term, Orion, of the ebb and flow of human affairs that takes a thousand generations or more. The Persians can afford to be patient. They have an immense empire and wealth beyond compare. Slowly, slowly they are grinding us down. They paid Sparta to conquer Athens, and when the Spartans became too powerful they paid Thebes to beat down Sparta.”

  “And now they play Athens and Thebes against us,” I said.

  “Exactly. And every year, every generation, we grow weaker and more tired. Eventually all the Greeks will fall prey to the Persians and we will be swallowed up entirely.”

  “Unless we swallow them.”

  “Precisely,” he said. “The Greeks and the Persians cannot exist peacefully together. Either we conquer them or they conquer us. There is no other alternative.”

  “You are certain of this?”

  Aristotle nodded solemnly. “That is what I have trained young Alexandros for. To conquer the world.”

  To conquer the world.

  Aristotle may have trained young Alexandros to conquer the Persian Empire—which was all the world worth conquering, in his eyes—but to accomplish that, Alexandros needed a united Greece behind him, and only his father Philip could bring all the Greek cities together under Macedonian hegemony. And Olympias, I knew, was scheming to set Alexandros against his father.

  “Why?” I asked her, the next time she summoned me to her bed. “Why do you try to make Alexandros hate Philip?”

  “You ask too many questions, Orion,” she said, lazily twining her bare arms around my neck.

  I put one thumb on her lovely throat. “I want to know.”

  Her eyes widened. “You dare to threaten me?”

  “I want to know,” I repeated in a whisper, applying a bit of pressure to her windpipe.

  One of the pythons slithered up o
nto my back. I pressed my body close to Hera’s. “Your snake will have to crush us both.”

  A viper slid past her face, hissing at me. “The poison will not work fast enough to stop me from snapping your lovely neck,” I said.

  Olympias’ eyes glittered like the snake’s. But then I saw something different in them, as if another person were looking out at me through her jade-green eyes. “I have never died before. What is it like, Orion?”

  I must have looked surprised. She said, “Oh, you have died countless times. Don’t you remember? No, of course not.”

  A word drifted into my mind. A name. “Osiris.”

  Her smile widened. “Yes, Osiris. The god who dies each winter and is reborn in the spring. That was you, Orion, in another life. And Prometheus. Do you remember the band of warriors?”

  “In the Ice Age.” Vaguely I recalled a battle in the snowy wastes of a distant time. “Anya was there.”

  “Is it exciting to die?” she asked me. I could feel the pulse in her throat quickening. “Is it arousing?”

  Try as I might, I could remember nothing definite of those earlier incarnations. And then I realized what was happening.

  “You’re playing with me,” I said. “Toying with my mind.”

  But Hera’s thoughts were on death. “Tell me, Orion. What is it like to die? What does the ultimate adventure feel like?”

  I remembered falling down the endless pit into the molten core of the Earth. I remembered the cave bear that ripped my body apart.

  “Pain,” I said. “The deaths I have suffered have been painful ones.”

  “And afterward?”

  I rolled off her naked body. I could feel the snakes slithering out from under me.

  “Afterward it begins all over again. Another life, another death. What does it matter?”

  She was Hera. No more pretense of being Olympias, no need for witchcraft. Undisguised now, she revealed herself as the goddess, one of the Creators. Propping herself up on one elbow she traced a red fingernail across my chest. “What’s the matter, creature? Don’t tell me you’re bored with life.”