The Novels of Alexander the Great

by Mary Renault

  The mountainside grew steep, the path doubled to and fro; he threaded its windings quietly, lit by the sinking moon and the first glimmer of dawn. Down in Aigai, the cocks were crowing; the sound, thinned by distance, was magical and menacing, a ghostly challenge. On the zigzag path above him, the line of torches twined like a fiery snake.

  Dawn rose up out of Asia and touched the snow-peaks. Far ahead in the forest he heard the death-squeal of some young animal, then the bacchic cry.

  A steep bluff was split by a timbered gorge; its waters spread from their narrow cleft in a chuckling bed. The path turned left; but he remembered the terrain, and paused to think. This gorge went right up till it flanked the dancing-place. It would be a hard climb through virgin woods to the other edge, but it would make a perfect hide, out of reach yet near; the cleft was narrow there. He could hardly reach it before the sacrifice; but he would see her dance.

  He forded the fast ice-cold water, clinging to the rocks. The pine woods above were thick, untouched by man, dead timber lying where time had felled it; his feet sank in the black sheddings of a thousand years. At last he glimpsed the torches flitting, small as glow-worms; then, as he drew nearer, the bright clear flame from the altar fire. The singing too was like flames, shrilling and sinking and rising in some new place as one voice kindled another.

  The first shafts of sunlight shone ahead, at the open edge of the gorge. Here grew a fringe of small sun-fed greenery, myrtle and arbutus and broom. On hands and knees, stealthily as if stalking leopard, he crept behind their screen.

  On the far side it was clear and open. There was the dancing-place, the secret meadow screened from below, exposed only to the peaks and the gods. Between its rowan trees it was scattered with small yellow flowers. Its altar smoked from the flesh of the victim and blazed with resin; they had thrown the butts of their torches on it. Below him the gorge plunged a hundred feet, but across it was only a javelin-cast. He could see their dew-dabbled, bloodstained robes and their pine-topped wands. Even from so far, their faces looked emptied for the god.

  His mother stood by the altar, the ivy-twined thyrsos in her hand. Her voice led the hymn; her unbound hair flowed over her robe and fawnskin and her white shoulders, from under her ivy crown. He had seen her, then. He had done what men must not do, only the gods.

  She held one of the round wine flasks proper to the festival. Her face was not wild or blank, like some of the others’, but bright, clear and smiling. Hyrmina from Epiros, who knew most of her secrets, ran up to her in the dance; she held the flask to her mouth and spoke in her ear.

  They were dancing round the altar, running out and back from it, then in on it with loud cries. After a while, his mother threw away her thyrsos, and sang out a magic word in Old Thracian, as they called the unknown tongue which was the language of the rites. They all threw their wands away, left the altar, and joined hands in a ring. His mother beckoned to a girl along the line, to come out in the middle. The girl came slowly, urged on by the others’ hands. He stared. Surely, he knew her.

  Suddenly, she ducked under their joined arms, and started running towards the gorge, taken no doubt by the maenad frenzy. As she came nearer, he saw it was certainly the girl Gorgo. The divine frenzy, like terror, had made her eyes start and stretched her mouth. The dance stopped, while some of the women ran after her. Such things, no doubt, were common at the rites.

  She ran furiously, keeping well ahead, till her foot tripped on something. She was up again in a moment, but they caught her. In her bacchic madness, she began to scream. The women ran her back towards the others; on her feet at first, till her knees gave way and they pulled her along the ground. His mother waited, smiling. The girl lay at her feet, neither weeping nor praying; only shrieking on and on, a thin shrill note like a hare in a fox’s jaws.

  It was past noon. Hephaistion walked about the footslopes, calling as it seemed to him he had been doing for many hours, though it was not so long; earlier he had been ashamed to search, not knowing what he might find. Only since the sun was high had misery changed to fear.

  “Alexander!” he called. A cliff-slab at the head of the glade flung “…ander!” back and forth. A stream ran out from a gorge, spreading through scattered rocks. On one of them Alexander sat, looking straight before him.

  Hephaistion ran to him. He did not rise, scarcely looked round. It’s true, thought Hephaistion, it’s done. A woman, he is changed already. Now it will never be.

  Alexander looked at him strainingly, with sunken eyes, as if feeling it urgent to remember who he was.

  “Alexander. What is it? What happened, tell me. Did you fall, have you hurt your head? Alexander!”

  “What are you doing,” said Alexander in a flat clear voice, “running about on the mountain? Are you looking for a girl?”

  “No. I was looking for you.”

  “Try the gorge up there, you’ll find one. But she’s dead.”

  Hephaistion, sitting down on the rock beside him, almost said, “Did you kill her?” for nothing seemed impossible to this face. But he dared not speak.

  Alexander rubbed the back of a dirt-crusted hand across his brow, and blinked. “I didn’t do it. No.” He gave the dry rictus of a smile. “She was a pretty girl, my father thought so, my mother too. It was the frenzy of the god. They had a wildcat’s kittens, and a fawn, and something else one couldn’t tell. Wait if you like, she’ll come down with the stream.”

  Speaking quietly, watching him, Hephaistion said, “I’m sorry you saw that.”

  “I shall go back and read my book. Xenophon says, if you lay the tusk of a boar on them, you can see it shrivel. It’s the heat of their flesh. Xenophon says it scorches violets.”

  “Alexander. Drink some of this. You’ve been up since yesterday. I brought you some wine along…Alexander, look, I brought some wine. Are you sure you’re not hurt?”

  “Oh no, I didn’t let them catch me, I saw the play.”

  “Look. Look here. Look at me. Now drink this, do as I tell you. Drink it.” After the first swallow, he took the flask from Hephaistion’s hand, and emptied it thirstily.

  “That’s better.” Instinct told Hephaistion to be common and plain. “I’ve some food too. You shouldn’t follow the maenads, everyone knows it’s unlucky. No wonder you feel bad. You’ve a great thorn in your leg here, hold still while I get it out.” He grumbled on, like a nurse sponging a child’s bruises. Alexander sat docile under his hands.

  “I’ve seen worse,” said Alexander suddenly, “on a battlefield.”

  “Yes. We have to get used to blood.”

  “That man on the wall at Doriskos, his entrails fell out and he tried to put them back.”

  “Did he? I must have looked away.”

  “One must be able to look at anything. I was twelve when I took my man. I cut off the head myself. They’d have done it for me, but I made them give me the ax.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “She came down from Olympos to the plain of Troy, walking softly, that’s what the book says, walking softly with little steps like a quivering dove. Then she put on the helm of death.”

  “Of course you can look at anything, everyone knows you can. You’ve been up all night…Alexander, are you listening? Can you hear what I say?”

  “Be quiet. They’re singing.”

  He sat with hands on knees, his eyes upturned towards the mountain. Hephaistion could see white below the iris. He must be found, wherever he was. He ought not to be alone.

  Quietly, insistently, without touching him, Hephaistion said, “You’re with me now. I promised you I’d be here. Listen, Alexander. Think of Achilles, how his mother dipped him in the Styx. Think how black and terrible, like dying, like being turned to stone. But then he was invulnerable. Look, it’s finished, it’s over now. Now you’re with me.”

  He put out his hand. Alexander’s came out and touched it, deathly cold; then closed on it crushingly, so that he caught his breath with mingled relief and pain. “You’
re with me,” Hephaistion said. “I love you. You mean more to me than anything. I’d die for you any time. I love you.”

  For some time they sat like this, with their clasped hands resting on Alexander’s knee. After a while the vise of his grip relaxed a little; his face lost its masklike stiffness, and looked only rather ill. He gazed vaguely at their joined hands.

  “That wine was good. I’m not so very tired. One should learn to do without sleep, it’s useful in war.”

  “Next time, we’ll stay up together.”

  “One should learn to do without anything one can. But I should find it very hard to do without you.”

  “I’ll be there.” The warm spring sun, slanting now towards afternoon, slid into the glade. A thrush was singing. Hephaistion’s omens spoke to him, telling him there had been a change: a death, a birth, the intervention of a god. What had been born was bloodstained from a hard passage, still frail, not to be handled. But it lived, it would grow.

  They must be getting back to Aigai, but there was no hurry yet, they were well enough as they were; let him have some quiet. Alexander rested from his thoughts in a waking sleep. Hephaistion watched him, with the steadfast eyes and tender patience of the leopard crouched by the pool, its hunger comforted by the sound of light distant footfalls, straying down the forest track.

  6

  THE PLUM-BLOSSOM HAD fallen, and lay beaten with spring rain; the time of violets was done, and the vines were budding.

  The philosopher had found some of his students a little scatterbrained after the Dionysia, a thing not unknown even in Athens; but the Prince was studious and quiet, doing well at ethics and logic. He remained sometimes unaccountable; when found sacrificing a black goat to Dionysos, he evaded questions; it was to be feared philosophy had not yet rid him of superstition; yet this reticence showed, perhaps, a proper self-questioning.

  Alexander and Hephaistion stood leaning on one of the small rustic bridges which spanned the stream of the Nymphs.

  “Now,” Alexander said, “I think I have made my peace with the god. That’s why I’ve been able to tell you everything.”

  “Isn’t it better?”

  “Yes, but I had to master it first in my own mind. It was the anger of Dionysos pursuing me, till I made my peace with him. When I think about it logically, I see it would be unjust to be shocked at what my mother did, only because she’s a woman, when my father has killed men by thousands. You and I have killed men who never injured us except for the chance of war. Women can’t issue challenges to their enemies, as we can; they can only be avenged like women. Rather than blame them, we ought to be thankful to the gods for making us men.”

  “Yes,” said Hephaistion. “Yes, we should.”

  “So then I saw it was the anger of Dionysos, because I profaned his mystery. I’ve been under his protection, you know, ever since I was a child; but lately I’ve sacrificed more to Herakles than to him. When I presumed, he showed his anger. He didn’t kill me, like Pentheus in the play, because I was under his protection; but he punished me. It would have been worse, but for you. You were like Pylades, who stayed with Orestes even when the Furies came for him.”

  “Of course I stayed with you.”

  “I’ll tell you something else. This girl, I’d thought, perhaps, at the Dionysia…But some god protected me.”

  “He could protect you because you’d a hold over yourself.”

  “Yes. All this happened because my father couldn’t be continent, even for decency in his own house. He’s always been the same. It’s known everywhere. People who should be respecting him, because he can beat them in battle, mock him behind his back. I couldn’t bear my life, to know they talked like that of me. To know one’s not master of oneself.”

  “People will never talk like that about you.”

  “I’ll never love anyone I’m ashamed of, that I know.” He pointed to the clear brown water. “Look at all those fish.” They leaned together over the wooden rail, their heads touching; the shoal shot like a flight of arrows into the shadow of the bank. Presently straightening up Alexander said, “Kyros the Great was never enslaved by women.”

  “No,” said Hephaistion. “Not by the most beautiful woman of mortal birth in Asia. It’s in the book.”

  Alexander had letters from both his parents. Neither had been much disturbed by his unwonted quiet after the Dionysia, though each, at parting, had been aware of a certain scrutiny, as if from a window in a doorless wall. But the Dionysia left many young lads changed; there would be more cause for concern if it passed them by.

  His father wrote that the Athenians were pouring colonists into the Greek coastal lands of Thrace, such as the Chersonesos; but, faced with a cut in the public dole, had refused to maintain the supporting fleet, which kept going perforce on piracy and inshore raids, like the reivers of Homer’s day. Macedonian ships and steadings had been looted; they had even seized a Macedonian envoy sent to ransom prisoners, tortured him, and extracted nine talents’ ransom for his life.

  Olympias, for once almost at one with Philip, had a similar tale to tell. A Euboian dealer, Anaxinos, who imported southern goods for her, had been seized in Athens on the orders of Demosthenes, because the house of his host had been visited by Aischines. He was tortured till he confessed to being a spy of Philip, on which he was put to death.

  “I wonder how long,” Philotas said, “before it comes to war.”

  “We are at war,” said Alexander. “It’s only a matter of where we shall fight the battle. It would be impious to lay Athens waste; like sacking a temple. But sooner or later, we shall have to deal with the Athenians.”

  “Will you?” asked crippled Harpalos, who saw in the fighters round him a friendly but alien race. “The louder they bark, the more you can see their rotten teeth.”

  “Not so rotten that we can do with them in our backsides when we cross to Asia.”

  The war for the Greek cities of Asia was no longer a vision; its essential strategy had begun. Each year saw the causeway of conquered lands pushed nearer to the Hellespont. The strongpoints of the narrow seas, Perinthos and Byzantion, were the last great obstacles. If they could be taken, Philip would need only to secure his rear.

  This fact being plain, the Athenian orators were touring Greece again in search of allies whom Philip had not yet persuaded, scared or bought. The fleet off Thrace was sent a little money; an island base was garrisoned in Thasos, close at hand. In the garden of Mieza, the young men debated together how soon they would get another taste of fighting, or, under the eye of the philosopher, discussed the nature and attributes of the soul.

  Hephaistion, who had never imported anything in his life before, had gone through the complex business of ordering from Athens a copy of The Myrmidons, which he gave to Alexander. Under a flower-bowed lilac beside the pool of the Nymphs, they discussed the nature and attributes of love.

  It was the time when the wild beasts mated in the woods. Aristotle was preparing a thesis on their coupling and the generation of their young. His pupils, instead of hunting, hid in the coverts and made notes. Harpalos and a friend of his amused themselves by inventing far-fetched procedures, carefully doctored with enough science to secure belief. The philosopher, who thought himself too useful to mankind to risk a chill crouching for hours on wet ground, thanked them warmly and wrote all of it down.

  One beautiful day, Hephaistion told Alexander he had found a vixen’s earth, and thought she was mating. An old tree near by had been uprooted in the storms, leaving a deep hollow; one could watch from there. In the late sunlight, they went into the forest, not crossing the paths of their friends. Neither remarked on this, or offered the other any reason.

  The dead roots of the fallen tree sheltered the hollow; its bottom was soft with last year’s deep-drifted leaves. After some time the vixen, heavy with young, came slipping through the shadows with a partridge chick in her mouth. Hephaistion half-raised his head; Alexander, who had closed his eyes, heard the rustle of her pass
age but did not open them. She took fright at their breathing, and ran like a red streak into her lair.

  Soon after, Aristotle expressed the wish to dissect a pregnant fox bitch; but they spared the guardian of their mystery. She grew used to them, after a while, would bring out her cubs without fear, feed them and let them play.

  Hephaistion liked the cubs, because they made Alexander smile. After love he would grow silent, drifting into some private darkness; if recalled he was not impatient, but too gentle, as if with something to hide.

  Both agreed that all this had been ordained by their destinies before their birth. Hephaistion still felt an incredulous sense of miracle; his days and nights were lived in a glittering cloud. It was only at these times that a shadow pierced it; he would point to the fox cubs playing, the deep brooding eyes would move and lighten, and all was well again. The pools and streams were fringed with forget-me-not and iris; in sunny copses the famous dog-roses of Mieza, blessed by the Nymphs, opened their great bland faces and spread their scent.

  The young men read the signs with which their youth made them familiar, and paid up their bets. The philosopher, less expert and not so good a loser, while they all walked or sat in the rose-starred gardens looked doubtfully at the two handsome boys unfailingly side by side. He risked no questions; there was no place in his thesis for the answers.

  The olives were powdered with fine pale-green flowers, whose faint sweet waxy scent blew everywhere. The apple trees let fall their false fruit; small and green the true apples began to set. The vixen led her cubs into the forest; it was time they learned the craft by which they would live.

  Hephaistion, too, became a patient and skillful hunter. Till his prey first came to his lure, he had not doubted that the passionate affection bestowed on him so freely held the germ of passion itself. He found matters less simple.

  Once more he told himself that when the gods are bountiful, man must not cry for more. He thought how, like the heir of great wealth who is happy at first only to know his fortune, he had gazed at the face before him; the wind-tossed hair springing loosely from its peak, the forehead already traced with faint creases by the eyes’ intensity; the eyes in their beautiful hollows, the firm yet feeling mouth, the aspiring arch of the golden eyebrows. It had seemed he could sit forever, content simply with this. So it had seemed at first.