Orion and the Conqueror o-4

by Ben Bova

  “No one is allowed inside,” said their leader. I recognized him as a barracks mate.

  “I must see the king.”

  “I have my orders, Orion. No one means no one.”

  “Yes,” I said softly. “I understand.”

  Swifter than his eye could follow I snatched his sword from its scabbard with my right hand while I drove the heel of my left beneath his chin. His head snapped back and I heard the spinal cord crack. Before the others could react I smashed the next guard on his helmet, splitting the bronze and the bone beneath it.

  They both fell in slow motion as I turned to face the two men who still stood with their spears crossed in front of the door. I could see their eyes widening, their mouths gulping air in surprised shock. I drove my sword through the nearer one’s chest so hard that it impaled him on the door. His companion was levelling his spear at me; a clumsy weapon when I was so close. I grabbed it with one hand while I kicked his kneecap out from under him. He went down with a yowl of pain and I pushed through the door, the dead guard still hanging from the sword through his chest.

  I pulled it out and he dropped to the floor of packed earth. Bloody sword in hand, I went looking for Philip. And Pausanias.

  Chapter 34

  The castle of Aigai was old and grim, its ground floor nothing more than hard-packed dirt, the walls of the chamber I strode through made of rough-hewn stones, dark as the bloody sword I gripped.

  I could hear the sounds of revelry coming from the main hall. The wedding had taken place the day before, from what Ketu told me, but the celebration roared on. Philip would be there, steeped in wine. Pausanias, as captain of the guard, would be in charge of protecting him. Olympias would be elsewhere in the castle, waiting to hear the wailing and cries of murder.

  And Alexandros? Where would he be? Was he part of the murder plot? Did he know what his mother had set in motion?

  There was another quartet of guards at the door to the main hall, each of them aimed with spear and sword. Harkan and Batu were among them, I saw.

  Harkan’s bearded face went red once he recognized who was approaching. Batu smiled as if he’d won a wager. The lieutenant in charge stared at my bloody sword.

  “Orion,” he snapped, “what’s going on?”

  “They’re going to kill the king unless we stop them.”

  “Kill the king? Who?”

  “Pausanias.”

  “Are you crazy? Pausanias is captain of the—”

  He never finished the sentence. Screams and roars of rage broke out from the other side of the door. Harkan threw the door open and we saw that the hall was in turmoil. Men were leaping across couches, servants and slaves were scattering in every direction, screaming in terror.

  “The king! The king!”

  I bolted past Harkan and the others, through the wildly scrambling crowd, toward the king. A dozen men clustered around him. I pulled them away, forced my way to Philip’s side. He lay back against his couch, wine goblet locked in one frozen hand, his other clutched against his middle, his gut ripped open, hot red blood soaking his robe and dripping onto the dirt floor. It was a painful way to die.

  “I trusted you,” he muttered. “I trusted you.”

  And I heard Hera’s bitter laughter in my mind. The vision from my old dream had come true. I stood before the dying Philip with a bloody sword in my hand and watched the light fade from his eye.

  Harkan grabbed me by the shoulders. “This way,” he said in a low voice. “Pausanias fled toward the stables.”

  As I ran back toward the door with him and Batu, I saw Alexandros standing on one of the tables, white-faced with shock, guarded by Antipatros and Antigonos and a dozen of his Companions. None of them had weapons on them, but if an assassin meant to reach Alexandros he would have to go through them first. Armed guards were pouring into the hall, though, through the doors at its far end.

  “I swear by Almighty Zeus,” Alexandros was shouting, his voice nearly cracking with emotion, “that I will find the assassins and deal with them as they’ve dealt with my father.”

  So now he’s your father again, I thought as we left the hall. And you are his son and heir to the throne. Hera and the Golden One will have their way; pity the Great King and his shaky empire.

  The three of us raced across the courtyard to the stables. A half-dozen armed men barred the gate, but we cut them down without an instant’s hesitation.

  Pausanias was already on horseback when we broke in. Two other men were with him. Batu nailed one with his spear and Harkan knocked the other one off his horse, then drove his spear through the screaming traitor’s chest.

  Wild-eyed, Pausanias drove his mount straight at us. Dropping my sword, I stepped to one side as the horse thundered by and grabbed him around the middle. The two of us thudded to the dirt floor of the stable. I planted a knee on Pausanias’ chest and pulled his own sword from its scabbard.

  He stared up at me, gasping for breath. But his eyes became calm.

  “It’s done,” he said. “Now you can do what you must. I don’t care anymore.”

  I hesitated. Should I turn him over to Alexandros or give him a quick and painless death here and now? I thought of how he had slashed Philip and scalding anger boiled through me.

  Harkan and Batu were standing over us. Quite calmly Harkan drove the point of his spear through Pausanias’ throat. Blood fountained hot and red, splashing over me, as he jerked convulsively and gave a single gargling groan.

  I looked up at Harkan.

  He yanked the spear from Pausanias’ dead body and said grimly, “She instructed us that there were to be no witnesses left alive, Orion.”

  I got to my feet. “That includes me, doesn’t it?”

  “I’m afraid so.” He levelled his spear at my heart.

  “Can you trust her?” I asked.

  “My children are already safely at a farm up in the hills. That’s where I’m going when this is finished.”

  “If she lets you live.”

  He shrugged. “Even if she doesn’t, I’ll know that my children are free.”

  I glanced at Batu. His dark face looked troubled, as if he could not decide which side he wanted to be on.

  “Orion,” he said, “I am not part of this. I did not know until this moment—”

  “Then don’t get involved now,” I told him. “This is between Harkan and me. And the queen.”

  “She is a witch of great power,” said Batu.

  “Yes.” I nodded.

  “She can steal a man’s wits from him.”

  “And his strength.” I turned back to Harkan. His spear had not wavered a millimeter from my heart. “Go ahead, my friend. Do it and get it over with.”

  He hesitated.

  “For your children,” I told him.

  Harkan took a deep breath, then plunged the spear into my chest with all his might. I felt no pain at all. Just darkness engulfing me, welcome, blessed nothingness.

  I died.

  Epilogue

  This time death was like being in the center of a whirlpool, inside the heart of a roaring tornado. The universe spun madly, time and space whirling into a dizzying blur, planets and stars and atoms and electrons racing in wild orbits with me in the middle of it all, falling, falling endlessly into a cryogenically cold oblivion.

  Gradually all sensation left me. It might have taken moments or millennia; I had no way to gauge time, but all feeling of motion and cold seeped away from me, as if I were being numbed, frozen, turned into an immobile, insensate block of ice.

  Still my mind continued to function. I knew I was being translated across spacetime, from one cusp of the continuum to another. Yet for all I could see or touch or hear, I was in total oblivion. For a measureless time I almost felt glad to be free of the wheel of life at last, beyond pain, beyond desire, beyond the agonizing duty that the Creators forced upon me.

  Beyond love.

  That stirred me. Somewhere in the vast reaches of spacetime Anya was st
ruggling against forces that I could not even comprehend, in danger despite her godlike powers, facing enemies that frightened even the Golden One and the other Creators.

  I reached out with my mind, seeking to penetrate the blank darkness that engulfed me. Nothing. It was if there were no universe, no continuum, neither time nor space. But I knew that somewhere, sometime, she existed. She had loved me as I had loved her. Nothing in all the universes of existence would keep us apart.

  A glimmer of light. So faint and distant that at first I thought it might be merely my imagination obeying my desire. But yes, it truly was there. A faintest, faintest glow. Light. Warmth.

  Whether I moved to it or it moved to me mattered not at all to me. The glow grew and brightened until I seemed to be hurtling toward it like a chip thrown into a furnace, like a meteor drawn to a star. The light blazed like the sun now and I threw my arms across my eyes to ease the pain, delighted that I had eyes and arms and could feel again.

  “Orion,” came a voice from that blinding, overpowering radiance. “You have returned.”

  It was Aten, of course, the Golden One. He resolved his presence into human form, a powerful godlike figure with thick golden mane, robed in shimmering gold, almost too bright for me to look upon.

  He stood before me in an utterly barren landscape that stretched toward infinity in every direction: a featureless plain of billowing mist that played about our ankles, an empty bowl of sky above us the color of hammered copper.

  “Where is Anya?” I asked.

  “Far from here.”

  “I must go to her. She is in great danger.”

  “So are we all, Orion.”

  “I don’t care about you or the others. It is Anya I care for.”

  A faint hint of a smirk curled the corners of his lips. “What you care or don’t care about is inconsequential, Orion. I created you to do my bidding.”

  “I want to be with Anya.”

  “Impossible. There are other tasks for you to perform, creature.”

  I stared into his golden eyes and knew that he had the power to send me where he chose. But I had powers, too, powers that were growing and strengthening.

  “I will find her,” I said.

  He laughed scornfully. But I knew that whatever he did, wherever he sent me, I would seek the woman I loved, the goddess who loved me. And I would not cease until I found her.

  Author’s Note

  While this continuation of the tale of Orion’s struggles with his Creators is of course fiction, the details of fourth-century B.C. history are as accurate as I could make them. Throughout the novel I have used the Greek-style spellings for proper names, a practice that sometimes drives my copyeditors to despair.

  Since I first read about Alexander the Great, when I was a child, I have been more interested in his father than in Alexander himself. And I think there are important lessons to be pondered in the story of Philip’s life.

  Without Philip there could have been no Alexander the Great. Philip II welded a dispirited and divided Macedonia into the first true nation-state of Europe. By force of arms, at first, but increasingly by diplomacy and clever use of military leverage, Philip made Macedonia supreme among the Greek city-states of the Fourth Century B.C. He was not merely a great general; he became a great statesman. He learned and grew during the course of his relatively short, arduous, painful life.

  The struggle between ancient Athens and Philip’s Macedonia has been painted by most historians as a contest between democracy and tyranny. So it was, although Athenian democracy was limited to free males born in the city, and Philip was not a tyrant in the modern, pejorative sense of the word. His authority had its limits.

  For us, who have lived through a bitter Cold War and seen the collapse of the superpower that opposed us, it may seem uncomfortable to consider the parallels between fourth-century (B.C.) Athens and twentieth-century (A.D.) America. The city-state of Athens was overflowing with lawyers. Most of the great speeches that have come down to us over the intervening centuries were actually speeches made by lawyers who were trying to sway the Athenian council. In a sense, lawyers such as Demosthenes were the “media stars” of the day. They deliberately used every oratorical trick they knew to sway the crowds who came to listen to them.

  Thus Athenian policy was often guided by bursts of emotion rather than carefully-reckoned reality, a danger that lurks in the shadows of every democracy—including our own. Athens was not conquered by Macedonia so much as made trivial by the growth of a new kind of nation-state. Eventually both Macedonia and Athens fell prey to the growing power of the Roman Empire. Could American democracy be cast aside, made trivial by new forms of corporate or governmental power? While our lawyers sue one another, are there Philips and Alexanders and Romans out there in other lands changing the very ground on which we stand?

  For his part, Philip was a master of military might and diplomatic skill. Had a man of his caliber been running the Kremlin for the past twenty-some years, the Cold War might very well have been decided against us.

  The problem with tyrants, though, even benevolent tyrants, is the problem of succession. Democracies, whatever other faults they may have, almost invariably produce peaceful changes of leadership. With kings and dictators, change usually means bloodshed. It was by no means certain that Alexander would automatically succeed his father to the Macedonian throne. He was young, and known to be impetuous. Philip had started a new family, formally divorcing Olympias and thereby placing Alexander’s legitimacy in some doubt. Philip’s assassination placed Alexander on the throne, and to this day most historians believe that if Alexander took no active part in the murder, he very probably knew of it and took no steps to prevent it.

  Olympias stood at the center of these events, working with all her powers to assure that her son would succeed to the throne. That is what primate mothers do, whether they are chimpanzees or goddesses.

  As soon as Alexander was accepted as king of the Macedonians, the tribes to the north and west rebelled, as they always did when a new king took the throne. Alexander spent a year quelling their desire for independence. Twenty-three centuries later, those Balkan tribes are still fighting among themselves.

  Athens became restive and Thebes openly rebelled. Where his father was lenient, Alexander was genocidal. He stormed Thebes and burned that ancient city to the ground, selling its surviving inhabitants into slavery. The other cities, including Athens, bowed in terror to their new master. Demosthenes fled Athens as Alexander at last launched his full-scale invasion of the rickety Persian Empire. He cracked it open like an overripe melon, besting Darius’ armies every time they met.

  The Great King was murdered by his own guards as he tried to flee Alexander’s triumphant march through his empire. Demosthenes committed suicide, literally hounded to death by Alexander’s implacable hatred. Alexander himself was accepted as the new god-king of the Persian Empire, but not even that satisfied him and he pushed across the Indus River into India, seeking to conquer the ends of the earth.

  Inevitably he descended into the madness that plagues tyrants, growing suspicious of those closest to him. By his orders Attalus and his entire family were wiped out. Alexander’s fevered paranoia began to fall upon his own Companions, friends since childhood. Torture and murder became his tools until even the army began to grow restive.

  They rebelled in a sullen, grumbling refusal to march further into steaming Hindustan. He punished them by marching the army back toward Persia across barren desert wastes where more men died from thirst and heat than had been killed in his battles.

  One of the casualties was Alexander himself. He came down with a fever and died in his thirty-third year.

  His remaining Companions, including his half-brother Ptolemaios, gathered around his death bed and pressed him to tell them to whom he would leave his empire.

  In his final moment Alexander gave his answer:

  “To the strongest.”

  The surge and flow of ideas an
d armies between Europe and Asia has been one of the principal features of human history. In this novel, as in the earlier Vengeance of Orion, I made it a major aim of the Creators to fashion an empire that spans East and West. Alexander finally accomplished this, for a century or so. His empire broke apart into the separate kingdoms of his successors. By the time the Romans swallowed Greece, the Persians had reasserted themselves. The Roman Empire never penetrated eastward much beyond Palestine.

  What of Orion and Anya and the other Creators? With all of spacetime as their arena, you can be sure that their story is not yet finished.

  Acknowledgments

  The epigraphs that begin each section of this novel are from William Shakespeare, King Lear; Karl von Clausewitz, On War; Sophocles, Electra; and Shakespeare again, Macbeth.

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