The Novels of Alexander the Great

by Mary Renault

  A trooper rode to ask, and, when all the boys fled yelling at the sight of him, grabbed up the slowest, who struggled like a netted lynx. Dragged before the general, and finding him no older than his own brother, he was struck dumb. When the portent let him know that all they wanted of him was the name of the spot they stood on, he answered, “Stagira.”

  The column rode on. Alexander said to Hephaistion, “I must speak to Father. It’s time for the old man to have his fee.”

  Hephaistion nodded. He had seen that schooldays were over.

  When the treaties had been signed, the hostages delivered, the strongpoints manned, Alexander went back to Philip, still sitting before Perinthos.

  The King had waited for him, before moving against Byzantion; he had needed to know that all was well. He was marching himself, leaving Parmenion here; for Byzantion would be tougher than Perinthos, three sides protected by Propontis and Golden Horn, the land side by massive walls. He set his hopes upon surprise.

  They mulled over the campaign together, over the pinewood trestle. Often Philip would forget it was not a grown man he was talking to, till some careless bluntness would set up the boy’s back. It was rarer now; rough, wary, touchy, their contact was warmed by a secret, mutual pride in one another’s acceptance.

  “How are the Argives shaping?” asked Alexander not long after, over a midday meal.

  “I shall leave them here. Parmenion must cope with them. They came here I suppose to swagger about before half-trained citizen levies, as they can in the southern cities. Our men think them raw hands, and let them know it. But what are they, soldiers or bridesmaids? Fair pay, good rations, good quarters; yet nothing’s right for them. They sulk at drill; they don’t like the sarissa; all they mean is they’re clumsy still and our own men laugh. Well, they can stay here and use the short spear, for this work it’s well enough. When I’ve marched with my people, and they’re cocks of the walk, they’ll pick up, their officers tell me.”

  Alexander, scooping up fish sauce with his bread, said, “Listen.” His first question had been prompted by half-heard sounds of discord. They were getting louder.

  “Hades take them,” said the King. “What now?”

  Shouted insults, in Greek and Macedonian, could now be heard.

  “Anything looses it off, when they’re at odds like this.” Philip pushed back his chair, wiping off his fingers on his bare thigh. “A cockfight, a squabble over a boy…Parmenion’s on reconnaissance.” The noise was growing; each side was being reinforced. “Nothing for it, I shall have to sort them myself.” He walked with his stolid limp towards the doorway.

  “Father. They sound ugly. Why not get armed?”

  “What? No, that would make too much of it. They’ll give over when they see me. They won’t heed one another’s officers, there’s the mischief.”

  “I’ll come too. If the officers can’t quiet them…”

  “No, no; I don’t need you. Finish your food. Simmias, keep mine hot.”

  He went out as he was, unarmed but for the sword he always wore. Alexander got up and looked after him from the door.

  Between the town, and the straggling village of the siege-lines, was a wide space through which slit trenches ran out to the siege towers, and fortified guard-posts stood. Here between men on duty or changing guard the brawl must have begun, visible all along the lines, so that the factions had gathered quickly. There were already some hundreds; Greeks, who had been nearer, outnumbered Macedonians. Racial taunts were flying. Above the din, voices that sounded like officers’ were exchanging recriminations, and threatening each other with the King. Philip stumped forward a few paces, looked again; then shouted to a trooper who had been riding towards the crowd. The man dismounted and gave him a leg-up. Provided now with a living rostrum, he cantered purposefully forward, and shouted for silence.

  He chose seldom to be formidable. Silence fell; the crowd divided to let him in. As it closed again, Alexander saw that the horse was restive.

  The squires who had waited at table were talking in excited undertones. Alexander gave them a look; they should have been waiting for orders. The next hut was the lodging of all the body-squires; the doorway was full of heads. He called out, “Get armed. Be quick.”

  Philip was wrestling with the horse. His voice, which had carried power, now sounded angry. The horse reared; there was a roar of abuse and cursing; it must have struck a man with its forefeet. Suddenly it gave a great scream, stood almost upright, and sank down, the King still doggedly clinging. Horse and man vanished into a threshing, shouting vortex.

  Alexander ran to the armor-pegs on the wall, snatched his shield and helmet—the corselet would take too long—and called to the squires, “They’ve killed his horse under him. Come.” Soon outdistancing all the others, he ran without looking back. The Macedonians were pouring out of barracks. It was the next moments that counted.

  At first he simply shoved at the mob, and it let him through. These were sightseers, or mere accretions, easily shifted by anyone who knew his own mind. “Let me pass. Let me through to the King.” He could hear the squeals of the dying horse, weakening to groans; no sound from his father. “Back, get back, let me pass. Make way, I want the King.”

  “He wants his dad.” The first defiance; a square-shouldered, square-bearded Argive stood grinning in his way. “Look, here’s the cockalorum.” The last word choked off. His eyes and mouth gaped, a retch came up from his throat. Alexander with an expert jerk freed his sword.

  A gap appeared; he could see the still twitching horse, on its side, his father lying with one leg under it, unmoving; over him stood an Argive with lifted spear, irresolute, waiting for encouragement. Alexander ran him through.

  The crowd heaved and swayed, as the Macedonians flung themselves at its edges. Alexander bestrode his father’s body, one leg braced against the horse which had stiffened in death; he yelled, “The King!” to guide the rescuers. All round him, uncertain men were urging each other to strike. For anyone behind him, he was a gift.

  “This is the King. I will kill the first man who touches him.” Some were scared; he fixed his eyes on the man they had been looking at for guidance; he stuck out his jaw and mumbled, but his eyes were flickering. “Get back all of you. Are you mad? Do you think if you kill him or me, you can get out of Thrace alive?” Someone said they had got out of worse places; but no one moved. “Our men are either side of you, and the enemy has the harbor. Are you tired of life?”

  Some warning, a gift of Herakles, made him whip round. He hardly saw the face of the man whose spear was lifted, only the exposed throat. His stab severed the windpipe; the man reeled back, bloody fingers clawing at the hissing wound. He swung back to confront the others; in this instant the scene had changed, he saw instead the backs of the royal squires, shields locked, heaving off the Argives. Hephaistion came breasting through like a swimmer through surf, and stood to shield his back. It was over, in about as long as it would have taken him to finish his half-eaten fish.

  He looked round. He had not a scratch; he had been a stroke ahead each time. Hephaistion spoke to him and he answered smiling. He was shining and calm at the center of his mystery, the godlike freedom of killing fear. Fear lay dead at his feet.

  Loud voices, expert in command, cleft the confusion; the Argive general, and Parmenion’s deputy, roared at their troops in familiar tones. Hangers-on turned swiftly to spectators; the center fell apart, revealing a scatter of dead and wounded; all the men near the fallen King were arrested and led away. The horse was dragged aside. The riot was over. When shouts began again, they came from those on the outskirts who could not see, spreading rumors or asking news.

  “Alexander! Where’s our boy? Have those whores’ sons killed him?” Then, running the other way in a deep bass counterpoint, “The King, they killed the King! The King is dead!” and higher, as if in answer, “Alexander!”

  He stood, a point of stillness in all the clamor, looking beyond it into the blue dazzli
ng sky.

  There were other voices, down by his knees. “Sir, sir, how are you?” they were saying. “Sir?” He blinked a moment, as if awaking from sleep; then knelt down with the others and touched the body, saying, “Father? Father?”

  He could feel at once that the King was breathing.

  There was blood in his hair. His sword was half out; he must have felt for it as he was struck, perhaps with a pommel by someone whose nerve had failed him to use the edge. His eyes were closed, and he came limply with their lifting hands. Alexander, remembering a lesson of Aristotle’s, pulled back the lid of his good eye. It closed again with a twitch.

  “A shield,” Alexander said. “Roll him gently. I’ll take his head.”

  The Argives had been marched off; the Macedonians crowded round, asking if the King was alive or dead. “He is stunned,” said Alexander. “He will be better presently. He has no other wound. Moschion! The herald is to give that out. Sippas! Order the catapults to fire a volley. Look at the enemy gaping on the wall; I want the fun knocked out of them. Leonnatus, I’ll be with my father till he’s himself again. Bring anything to me.”

  They laid the King on his bed. Alexander drew a bloodstained hand from holding his head, to settle it on the pillow. Philip groaned, and opened his eyes.

  The senior officers, who had felt entitled to crowd in, assured him all was well, all the men in hand. Alexander standing by the bedhead said to one of the squires, “Bring me water, and a sponge.”

  “It was your son, King,” said someone, “your son who saved you.” Philip turned his head and said weakly, “So? Good boy.”

  “Father, did you see which of them struck you?”

  “No,” said Philip, his voice strengthening. “He took me from behind.”

  “Well, I hope I killed him. I killed one there.” His grey eyes dwelt deeply on his father’s face.

  Philip blinked dimly, and sighed. “Good boy. I remember nothing; nothing till I woke up here.”

  The squire came up with the water-bowl and held it out. Alexander took the sponge, and washed his hand clean of blood, going over it carefully, two or three times. He turned away; the squire paused with the bowl, at a loss, then went round to sponge the King’s hair and brow. He had supposed that this was what the Prince had meant it for.

  By evening, though sick and giddy if he moved, Philip could give orders. The Argives were marched off on exchange to Kypsela. Alexander was cheered wherever he was seen; men touched him for luck, or for his virtue to rub off on them, or merely for the sake of touching him. The besieged, encouraged by these disorders, came out on the wall at dusk and attacked a siege tower. Alexander led out a party and beat them off. The doctor announced that the King was mending. One of the squires sat up with him. It was midnight before Alexander got to bed. Though he ate with his father, he had his own lodging. He was a general now.

  There was a scratch on the door, in a familiar rhythm. He folded back the blanket, and moved over. Hephaistion had known, when this tryst was made, that what Alexander wanted was to talk. He could always tell.

  They mulled over the fight, talking softly into the pillow. Presently they fell quiet; in the pause they could hear the sounds of the camp, and, from the distant ramparts of Perinthos, the night watch passing the bell along from man to man, the proof of wakefulness. “What is it?” Hephaistion whispered.

  In the dim glimmer of the window, he saw the shine of Alexander’s eyes coming close to his. “He says he remembers nothing. He’d already come to himself when we picked him up.”

  Hephaistion, who had once been hit by a stone from a Thracian wall, said, “He’ll have forgotten.”

  “No. He was shamming dead.”

  “Was he? Well, who can blame him? One can’t even sit up, everything spins round. He hoped they’d be scared at what they’d done, and go away.”

  “I opened his eye, and I know he saw me. But he gave me no sign, though he knew it was over then.”

  “Very likely he just went off again.”

  “I watched him, he was awake. But he won’t say he remembers.”

  “Well, he’s the King.” Hephaistion had a secret kindness for Philip, who had always treated him with, courtesy, even with tact; with whom, too, he shared an enemy. “People might misunderstand, you know how tales get twisted.”

  “To me he could have said it.” Alexander’s eyes, glittering in the near-darkness, fastened upon his. “He won’t own that he was lying there, knowing he owed his life to me. He didn’t want to admit it, he doesn’t want to remember.”

  Who knows? thought Hephaistion. Or ever will? But he knows, and nothing will ever shift it. His bare shoulder, crossed by Hephaistion’s arm, had a faint sheen like darkened bronze. “Supposing he has his pride? You ought to know what that is.”

  “Yes, I do. But in his place I’d still have spoken.”

  “What need?” He slid his hand up the bronze shoulder into the tousled hair; Alexander pushed against it, like a powerful animal consenting to be stroked. Hephaistion remembered his childishness in the beginning; sometimes it seemed like yesterday, sometimes half a lifetime. “Everyone knows. He does; so do you. Nothing can take it away.”

  He felt Alexander draw a long deep breath. “No; nothing. You’re right, you always understand. He gave me life, or he claims so. Whether or not, now I’ve given it him.”

  “Yes, now you’re quits.”

  Alexander gazed into the black peak of the rafters. “No one can equal the gifts of the gods, one can only try to know them. But it’s good to be clear of debt to men.”

  Tomorrow he would sacrifice to Herakles. Meantime, he felt a deep wish at once to make someone happy. Luckily he had not far to seek.

  “I warned him,” said Alexander, “not to put off dealing with the Triballoi.” He sat with Antipatros at the great desk of Archelaos’ study, over a dispatch full of bad news.

  “Is his wound thought dangerous?” Antipatros asked.

  “He couldn’t sign this; just his seal, and Parmenion’s witness. I doubt he even finished dictating it. The last part reads more like Parmenion.”

  “He has good-healing flesh, your father. It’s in the family.”

  “What were his diviners doing? Nothing’s gone right with him since I left. Perhaps we should consult Delphi or Dodona, in case some god needs appeasing.”

  “It would spread through Greece like wildfire that his luck was out. He’d not thank us for that.”

  “That’s true, no, better not. But look at Byzantion. He did everything right; got there fast, while their best forces were at Perinthos; chose a cloudy night; got up to the very walls. But of a sudden the clouds part, out comes the moon; and all the town dogs start barking. Barking at the crossroads…they light the torches…”

  “Crossroads?” said Antipatros into the pause.

  “Or,” said Alexander briskly, “maybe he misread the weather, it’s changeable on Propontis. But once he’d decided to lift both sieges, why not have rested his men, and let me take on the Scythians?”

  “They were there on his flank, and had just denounced their treaty; but for them he might have hung on at Byzantion. Your father’s always known when to write off his losses. But his troops had their tails down; they needed a solid victory, and loot; both of which he got.”

  Alexander nodded. He could get along well with Antipatros, a Macedonian of ancient stock, bone-loyal to the King beside whom he had fought in youth, but to the King before the man. It was Parmenion who loved the man before the King. “He did indeed. So there he was, lumbered up with a thousand head of cattle, a slave train, wagons of loot, on the north border where they can smell plunder further than buzzards. Tails up or not, his men were tired…If only he’d let me go on north from Alexandropolis; he’d have had no raid from the Triballoi then.” The name was established now; the colonists had settled. “The Agrianoi would have come in with me, they’d already agreed…Well, done’s done. It’s lucky his doctor wasn’t killed.”

&nbs
p; “I should like to wish him well when the courier leaves.”

  “Of course. Let’s not trouble him with business.” (If orders came back, would they be Philip’s or Parmenion’s?) “We shall have to shift for ourselves awhile.” He smiled at Antipatros, whom he liked none the worse for being charmable, and amusingly unaware of it. “War we can deal with well enough. But the business of the south—that’s another thing. It means a great deal to him; he sees it differently; he knows more about it. I should be sorry to act without him there.”

  “Well, they seem to be working for him there better than we could.”

  “At Delphi? I was there when I was twelve, for the Games, and never since. Now, once again, to be sure I understand it: this new offering-house the Athenians put up; they put in their dedications before it had been consecrated?”

  “Yes, a technical impiety. That was the formal charge.”

  “But the real quarrel was the inscription: SHIELDS TAKEN FROM PERSIANS AND THEBANS FIGHTING AGAINST GREECE…Why did the Thebans Medize, instead of allying with the Athenians?”

  “Because they hated them.”

  “Even then? Well, this inscription enraged the Thebans. So when the Sacred League of Delphi met, being I suppose ashamed to come forward themselves, they got some client state to accuse the Athenians of impiety.”

  “The Amphissians. They live below Delphi, up river.”

  “And if this indictment had succeeded, the League would have had to make war on Athens. The Athenians had sent three delegates; two went down with fever, and the third of them was Aischines.”

  “You may remember the man; he was one of the peace envoys, seven years ago.”

  “Oh, I know Aischines, he’s an old friend of mine. Did you know he was an actor once? He must have been good at gagging; because when the Council was about to pass the motion, he suddenly recalled that the Amphissians had been raising crops on some river land which had once been forfeited to Apollo. So he went rushing in, somehow got a hearing, and counteraccused the Amphissians. Is that right? Then, after his great oration, the Delphians forgot Athens, and rushed down pell-mell to wreck the Amphissians’ farms. The Amphissians fought; and some of the Councilors had their sacred persons knocked about. This was last autumn after the harvest.”