by Tom Holt
Absolutely invincible negotiating technique, and he exploited it to the full; in fact, it was his negotiating technique, happily dropped into his lap by indulgent Fortune. Without it, I don’t suppose he’d have been half the diplomat he was, and diplomacy was easily as important a factor as force in his incredible success. It helped, of course, that he had a soft, quite musical voice that made his northern accent a pleasant thing to listen to rather than a jarring, scraping pain.
So Philip filled the room; there was no time or space to look at anything else, because everything tightened down into that one mutilated eye. There were other Macedonians there, of course, big noble-looking men with hairy black arms and a vague impression of beautiful but fierce women, but every time we met Philip it was like we were alone with him, not even conscious of each other. For a negotiating team, this was a distinct disadvantage.
He trashed us, needless to say. No bluster, no raised voice — when he wanted to shout us down, he simply spoke a little more quietly, so that we had to shut up in order to hear what he was saying. He never mumbled, though. I swear you could have heard Philip of Macedon whispering on the other side of the straits of Euboea . That’s not to say he didn’t make threats. He was all threat, he radiated danger as the sun radiates light, and everyone who stood where he shone knew he was in danger of his life. It was a very immediate, physical danger —you knew for certain that if you happened to say precisely the wrong thing, he’d jump up out of his chair, draw his sword (he was always armed, usually with a broad, blue Thracian steel sabre) and crack your skull open before you could even move; and he’d do it and get away with it because he was Philip, from whom nobody and nothing in the world was safe.
Apart from that he was a pleasant enough man, and I rather liked him.
All the time we were there, there was no respite. When we weren’t negotiating (I use the term for convenience only; we negotiated in the same way as a roast quail negotiates with the man who’s eating it) we were being entertained, either with intimidating quantities of food —meat, meat and more meat, as much of it in one meal as the average Athenian sees in a year — and lethal doses of strong, neat wine, or with very high-class recitals of music and poetry performed by expensive imported artists, which Philip obviously enjoyed almost as much as the heavy banqueting. He was, I should point out at this stage, a ferocious drinker; one of those dangerous drunks who doesn’t show it on the surface one bit. The only difference I could see, in fact, was that when he was drunk he was more inclined to extremes of both cruelty and humanity, though there was no way of knowing which you’d get.
For instance; one evening, when the boozing had reached the stage where our hosts were too fuddled to notice and be offended by the fact that we’d stopped trying to match them flagon for flagon quite some time ago, a man and a woman came storming into the dining hall, with a sleepy-looking guard chasing after them. Before they could be caught and slung out, Philip raised his hand to signify that he was prepared to listen to what they had to say, whereupon the man launched into an incredibly complicated story about a disputed parcel of land about the size of a large hat that adjoined his and the woman’s properties, a hole deliberately drilled in a lead water-pipe to steal water from a private supply, an errant goat that turned up a week later with the woman’s brand mysteriously in place of the original mark, and I don’t know what else. About four minutes into this, the woman joined in, although from what little I could follow she was talking about unlawful lopping of the low branches of a tree growing just her side of the boundary, a vine trampled and broken by a stray donkey, some extremely arcane stuff about the man’s son’s friend’s dog killing somebody else’s neighbour’s daughter’s tame polecat — I’ll be honest with you, I gave up on that one at quite an early stage.
I was surprised at how long Philip just sat there and took all this. I kept expecting him to blow his top with impatience and order the guards to throw both of them down the nearest well — but at that time, you see, I didn’t know how seriously Philip took his duties as supreme arbiter, or how strong was the tradition that the King of Macedon’s subjects had a right to an audience, at any time of day or night, when circumstances justified it. Eventually, though, he’d had enough. He started to speak in that low, calm voice I’ve been telling you about, but by now the two litigants were so engrossed in their tales of the other’s iniquities that they went on yammering and ignored him completely. I braced myself for the sight of blood on the floor; instead, I heard Philip banging on the table with his cup.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘That’ll do. Now then, I won’t pretend I followed what you two were saying. I don’t suppose it’d have made any difference if I had. The plain fact is, you’re both rotten neighbours and I’m damned glad I don’t have to live next door to either one of you. Ready? Good. My judgement is that you will both be fined one drachma, and you will both go away and not come bothering me again. Understood?’
The woman shook her head. ‘That’s not good enough,’ she said. ‘I want justice.’
‘Tough,’ Philip snapped. ‘I haven’t got any. You’ll have to make do with Law, instead.’
But the woman wasn’t having any of that. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’m lodging an appeal.’
Philip frowned. ‘Don’t talk soft,’ he said, ‘I’m the King, the fountain of all justice. Who else is there for you to appeal to?’
‘To Philip, of course; Philip when he’s sober.’
Philip was having a good day; the woman got her appeal, and got judgement in her favour, too. But the silent three or four heartbeats after she’d said that was the longest three or four heartbeats I can ever remember, and when it was over I checked my reflection in a polished silver plate to see if my beard had gone white while I’d been waiting.
As soon as the two litigants had been shooed away again, everybody started talking at once. Philip was pouring himself a stiff drink, probably feeling he’d earned it. I was just starting to relax when I heard raised voices from up on Philip’s table, a man’s voice and a woman’s.
The woman was Philip’s wife, Queen Olympias. The man was Aristotle.
What’s he doing here? I asked myself, feeling a bit like the man in the old story who dies and goes to the Islands of the Blessed only to find when he gets there that his mother-in-law’s there too.
The argument they were having was a wonderful illustration of diametrically opposed slanging-match techniques. Queen Olympias was yelling at the top of her extremely powerful lungs. Aristotle, on the other hand, was waiting till she had to stop and draw breath and then carrying on where he’d left off, ignoring everything she’d said and talking in his most monotonous, plonking tone of voice. Philip rolled his eyes (an alarming sight, I assure you) then belted the table with his fist so hard that cups and jugs fell over on all sides.
‘You two,’ he murmured. ‘Pack it in.’
Did I say just now that everybody in the world was afraid of Philip? Everybody bar one. Whether or not Philip was afraid of Olympias, on the other hand, is a moot point. I don’t think he was; he tolerated her, because killing her would cause more problems than it would solve and besides, he was on-and-off in love with her — fascinated would be a better word — probably for the same reason, that she wasn’t afraid of him.
They’d met when they were both very young, at a weird religious bash in her home territory in the wilds (the very wilds) of Illyria . Olympias’ people were snake-worshippers, and she was as keen as mustard on the whole snake thing. Why Philip was up there getting initiated into a snake cult, the gods only know; he was about as religious as my neighbour Philemon’s old mule and besides, the snake people weren t even his gods. It was lust at first sight for him —ten or so years later, she was still a sight to see, although a lot of wine and honey-cakes had passed through the gates of her teeth in that time, and there was quite a lot more of her in every direction. What she saw in him I don’t know, could have been any one of many things or maybe the snakes told he
r to marry him. In any event, the outcome of all this had been a splurge of diplomatically useful daughters and a son, by the name of Alexander.
Aristotle, I quickly gathered from the text of the slanging-match, was up here as the boy’s tutor, and whatever it was that he was teaching the lad, Olympias didn’t hold with it. Not one bit.
I won’t try to reproduce the way Olympias spoke; Greek wasn’t her native language and she hadn’t bothered to clean up her accent or her grammar. So I’ll translate it a bit and put down what she would have said if she’d been able to;
after all, I’m pretending to be a historian, and that’s what historians do.
‘Evil, that’s what he is.’Those were the first words of hers I actually made out. ‘He’s poisoning my son’s mind with his Athenian lies. If you were any sort of a father, you’d throw him in the river instead of paying him good money to —Philip stood up, crossed the floor to where she was standing in three long strides, and slapped her across the face so hard that she stumbled backwards and sat down heavily, jarring her back against a table. Everybody stopped talking;
but I rather got the impression that this wasn’t the first time that Philip had done something like this, not by a long way.
‘— Teach our son all this blasphemous Athenian trash,’ Olympias carried on as if nothing had happened (though she dabbed blood from her cheek and upper lip with her sleeve as she spoke). ‘I’m telling you for the last time, if you don’t do something about it then I will, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
Philip growled, softly and with considerable menace; it was a characteristic noise of his, one which I think he made without even realising it. ‘You lay one finger on that man and I’ll kill you,’ he replied, his voice only just audible even in the deathly hush. ‘Now get out of my sight. Go and sleep it off somewhere you can’t be seen.’
Olympias stood up, spat with great force on the ground between Philip’s feet, and hobbled out of the audience chamber. For his part, Philip breathed out slowly, then turned to Aristotle and nodded.
‘I apologise for my wife,’ he said. ‘I wish I could say it won’t happen again, but I respect the truth too much for that. I’ll assign you a guard for the next three days or so; after that she’ll lose interest, she’ll be trying to get at me some other way.’
Aristotle smiled, very thinly, and thanked him. Something told me that he wasn’t in the least reassured. I can’t say I blame him.
‘That said,’ Philip went on, ‘I’d be interested to know — what exactly have you been teaching the boy that she’s taken such an exception to? She was saying something about blasphemy, wasn’t she?’
‘Quite so,’ Aristotle replied nervously. ‘But I really can’t imagine why she found it so offensive. Today we were considering animals, and I was pointing out that every living thing has its own nature, to which it cannot help but be faithful — dogs bark and wag their tails, birds sing and lay their eggs in nests, snakes hiss and crawl on their bellies in the dirt—’
‘Snakes,’ Philip repeated. ‘You told him snakes were animals.’
‘I believe so,’ Aristotle replied. ‘I mentioned various examples in today’s lesson; not necessarily the ones I gave you just now, but quite possibly the same. Snakes are quite an obvious—’
‘I see,’ Philip interrupted. ‘What else did you say about snakes?’
Aristotle paused for a moment, frowning. ‘Let me see,’ he said. ‘I mentioned the fact that their jaws are flexible, not fixed; that they shed their skins repeatedly during their lifetimes; that they can extend and retract their tongues; that the eyes of a decapitated snake close of their own accord forty minutes after death, and likewise the severed head of a poisonous snake will still bite and discharge its poison an hour after being struck from the trunk—’
‘I didn’t know that,’ Philip broke in. ‘Is that true?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Aristotle replied confidently. ‘I’ve observed it myself, and it s recorded by good authorities.’ He frowned. ‘Would that have offended her, do you think?’
‘I doubt it,’ Philip replied. ‘Quite the reverse, in fact. Anything that suggests that snakes don’t die the way other animals do ought to please her no end. What else did you say?’
Aristotle tugged at his beard — he actually did do that, the only person I ever met who did. ‘I honestly can’t remember,’ he replied. ‘Oh, yes, I pointed out that the snake, contrary to popular belief, is in fact deaf, and can only detect sounds by feeling vibrations transmitted through the—’
‘What did you just say?’
Aristotle gave him a startled look. ‘Snakes are deaf,’ he repeated.
‘They have no ears. Therefore they cannot hear in the way that—’
‘Ah.’ Philip nodded. ‘That’ll be it, then. You see, she sings to her snakes for an hour every morning and evening. That’s how she prays to them. You implied that they can’t hear her prayers.’
‘Well, properly speaking they can’t—p ‘And if they can’t hear her prayers,’ Philip went on, ‘they can’t hear her telling them the names of the people she’s put curses on. Which means the curses won’t work.’ He smiled. ‘Actually, I’m surprised she confined herself to shouting at you.’
‘Really,’ Aristotle said, rather disdainfully.
Philip nodded. ‘I wouldn’t have, if I was her. Anyway,’ he went on, as Aristotle cringed visibly, ‘no harm done. But if I were you, I’d check my bed carefully before getting into it for a week or so, just to be on the safe side. You might see if the housekeeper’s got some of that fine-mesh Persian gauze, to make a canopy out of, in case someone bores a hole in the ceiling and drops something down on top of you. It’d be highly appropriate if the snakes punished you for your wicked slanders, don’t you think?’
Aristotle had gone ever such a funny colour. ‘It hadn’t occurred to me—’ he began, but Philip didn’t let him finish. ‘Apparently not,’ Philip said. ‘Which surprises me, you being a philosopher and a wise man generally, and knowing how she feels about snakes. Well, it only goes to show; we can all learn something new every day, no matter how clever we are.’
CHAPTER SIX
‘Alexander,’ the Macedonian told me, ‘is the king’s son. What more needs to be said?’
I frowned. I’d been trying to find out more about the boy, simply because Aristotle was his tutor and I didn’t like Aristotle. If it turned out that young Alexander was violent, unruly and big for his age, and that he regularly set booby-traps for his teachers or threw the writing-tablets at them or stabbed them with the pen when they said he’d got something wrong, it would have delighted my soul and brightened my day, since a good man delights as much in the discomfiture of an enemy as in the good fortune of a friend.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘But apart from that; what’s he like? Is he quiet? Noisy?
Does he climb trees? Does he go for long walks on his own and keep pet frogs in jars, or is he more into playing with other kids of his own age? It must be strange,’ I went on, ‘being the King’s son. Where I come from, either they’re in school or they’re out on the hill with the goats or scaring birds off the planted fields. I don’t suppose the King’s son does that sort of thing.’
The Macedonian looked at me as if I was asking detailed questions about his mother’s sex life. ‘The King’s son learns the arts of war and government,’ he said stiffly. ‘As is fitting. He is accompanied by the sons of noblemen, who will grow up at his side and in time become his trusted ministers and captains in war. He also learns such noble accomplishments as hunting, falconry, athletics, dancing and music, although,’ he added, ‘it’s not proper for a nobleman to play or sing too well, just enough to be able to join in the singing at the banquet without disgracing himself. And of course he learns to honour the gods of his country.’
‘Right,’ I said, trying to imagine Aristotle giving falconry lessons. ‘Well, I agree that that’s just the sort of thing a king’s son ought to know.’
The Ma
cedonian raised an eyebrow. ‘You do?’ he said.
I shrugged. ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘My father sent me out to look after the goats so I could learn about keeping livestock and in due course become a farmer. Every man trains his son to take over his trade or occupation. It’s just common sense.’
‘Oh.’ The Macedonian — a middle-aged nobleman called Parmenio, one of Philip’s chief advisers — shrugged. ‘I’m surprised to hear you say that, you being an Athenian. And,’ he added, with the tiniest curl of his lip, ‘a philosopher, so I gather. I thought you had different ideas.’
‘Oh, yes?’ I said. ‘You’re thinking of Aristotle, aren’t you?’
Parmenio nodded. ‘Yes,’ he admitted. I grinned.
‘You don’t want to go judging the rest of us by him,’ I said. ‘And besides, he isn’t even a proper Athenian, he’s from Stagira . Really, he’s one of you more than he’s one of us.’
Parmenio shook his head. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘You should hear the things he’s cramming into that boy’s head. I don’t hold with it, I’m telling you.’ He wrinkled his forehead, aware that he was talking to a foreigner and, by rights, an enemy. ‘However,’ he said, ‘since the King feels it’s appropriate—’
‘I’m sure Philip has his reasons,’ I said. ‘My guess is, he feels it’s important for his son to understand the way the Athenian mind works, the way it’s important for a hunter to understand the mind of the deer.’
Parmenio wasn’t very keen on that analogy. Subtle and perfidious Athenian, I could see him thinking, as if the words were inscribed on his forehead. ‘It’s not my concern,’ he said. ‘And neither,’ he added sternly, ‘with due respect, is it yours.’
‘Oh, quite,’ I replied. ‘Just idle curiosity, that’s all.’
I went away with an image in my mind of a crown prince with all the individuality of a coin-blank, in between being punched out of the silver sheet and hammered between the forming dies to give it its shape. In fact, I used that comparison when I was talking to Lysicles, one of my fellow ambassadors, later on that day.