Flood Tide

by Alexander Geiger

  “Tell him, Aniketos!” somebody yelled out.

  “Hand-to-hand combat against the enemy commanders,” Alexandros continued. “For a minute, I thought I saw the walls of Troy looming above us.”

  “Champion against champion!” someone else interjected.

  “Achilleus against Hektor!” This, predictably, from Hephaistion.

  “Man on man!”

  “Horse on horse!”

  “Bullshit on clover!” Kleitos concluded, after which the entire group dissolved into helpless laughter.

  “Actually, sire, it was pretty tense for a moment,” Kleitos resumed after the merriment had subsided a bit. “I don’t know if you remember but when Mithridates threw his javelin at you, from close quarters, and you tried to parry it with your shield, it was like waving an animal pelt to repel a lightning bolt. The spear tip punched right through your shield, through your cuirass, through your tunic, and probably through your skin.”

  “It hardly left a mark.”

  “We thought you were dead right then and there.”

  “I guess I came back from the dead then.” Alexandros was reveling in the narrative. “Go on!”

  “It was amazing, sire. You jerked the javelin out and threw it at Mithridates, after which you smashed your own spear into his breastplate. Unfortunately, it shattered against his armor.”

  “Must’ve hit him too hard.”

  “He just kept coming. He drew his sword and tried to slash you. You rammed the stub of your spear into his face, dumping him from his horse.”

  “Wow!” Hephaistion called out.

  “You were about to finish him off when another one of their noblemen, Rhosakes, rode up on you from behind and hit you over the head with his sword, slicing your helmet in two and leaving that scratch on your skull.”

  “That’s the point where my recollection gets a little hazy,” Alexandros admitted.

  “Well, sire, anybody else would surely have been out cold but you still managed to keep your seat on Boukephalas, to spin, and to slash your sword across Rhosakes’s face, killing him instantly.”

  “It wasn’t me anymore, Kleitos. Some supernatural force had taken hold of my body.”

  “No, Aniketos, it was all you, doing what you do best.” Hephaistion was getting to be pretty annoying.

  “Just then,” Kleitos continued, ignoring Hephaistion, “another satrap, Spithridates, came charging at you from behind.”

  “Rhosakes’s brother,” Parmenion observed, drawing an irritated look from Alexandros.

  Kleitos forged ahead undaunted. “You were a mess by then, sire, just sitting there, slumped forward, holding on to Boukephalas’s mane, helmet smashed, your face covered in blood. I couldn’t tell whether you were conscious or not. But I could see Spithridates sneaking up on you from behind, raising his sword, ready to finish you off.”

  The tent was silent. Those of us who had witnessed the scene relived our own emotions during that infinitely long instant when we had all thought we were watching Alexandros’s last moments on Earth.

  “And that’s when I cut his arm off,” Kleitos concluded cheerfully.

  It was uncanny. We all let out a collective sigh of relief, as if we had not known, simply from seeing Alexandros sitting there, laughing and drinking, that Spithridates’s sword had not completed its predestined arc and Alexandros’s head had not gotten sliced in two like a ripe pomegranate.

  In my case, I was also sighing for the certainty I’d lost during that brief quantum of time. Up to that instant, I’d known, to an epistemological certainty, that Alexandros would die during the battle. When he didn’t, my entire world view wobbled on its axis. Now, hours after I’d witnessed his survival, I was still nauseous, suffering from a form of kinetosis that might more accurately be called chronotosis.

  Of course, the story didn’t end there. Despite Kleitos’s timely intervention, Alexandros was nevertheless rendered unconscious, was dislodged from his horse, and was almost killed by the Persian cavalry that engulfed us. But nobody was interested in that part of the story.

  Alexandros grew serious for an instant. “Thank you, Kleitos, for saving my life.”

  The king’s seer – Aristandros was his name – couldn’t stand the moment of genuine gratitude. “It was foreordained, your majesty,” he hurried to declare. “This man was but the instrument chosen by the Fates to advance your destiny, great king. Your survival was never in doubt. I had read it in the auguries before the battle, remember?”

  “It’s true, Aristandros. You did tell me, before the battle, that the signs were propitious and we would emerge victorious. Though you neglected to mention that I would emerge with a new part in my hair.”

  “Sorry, sire. The entrails can be a little messy.”

  A tiny, barely audible snort escaped me. No one, except Aristandros, noticed it.

  “Well, try to be a little more accurate next time,” Alexandros said in mock rebuke. “And you, Kleitos, don’t bother waiting until somebody bops me on the head before intervening, got that?”

  “Yes, sire.”

  “And make sure you’re close at hand at the banquet the day after tomorrow. I might be surrounded by a bunch of drunkards and in need of your protection once again,” Alexandros joked.

  “You need no protection from us,” Hephaistion assured him.

  Alexandros ignored the interruption. “Besides, Kleitos, there is a chance you might be singled out during the distribution of honors and rewards. What do you think, Aristandros? Will I survive the banquet the day after tomorrow?”

  “I have to slaughter a sheep before I can tell you for sure, sire. For now, I’d just keep an eye on Ptolemaios here,” Aristandros said, pointing at me. “He looks pretty menacing with that torch and that bloody rag in his hand.”

  “It’s not blood; it’s only wine.” My defensive response was drowned out by everybody’s laugher. It was an easily amused crowd but Aristandros’s poisoned barb was no accident. He’d maintained an unfailing antipathy toward me since the day I met him.

  Surprisingly, Alexandros came to my defense. “Leave Metoikos alone. From what I could see, he fought pretty well today.”

  I forced a smile. “Thank you, sire.”

  Ptolemaios Metoikos is what they called me. It was meant to be an affectionate nickname. The word Metoikos meant traveler, alien, stranger, outsider. Having a nickname showed I’d arrived, which was true, both literally and figuratively. I’d arrived in this young, vital, exuberant era as an enthusiastic and naive twenty-one-year-old explorer, intending to observe an initiation ceremony, unobtrusively and tracelessly, and then return home after a few days. Now, nine years later, I was still here but, in the interim, I’d managed to earn a place in Alexandros’s elite Companion Cavalry and become one of his personal bodyguards.

  Alexandros switched directions abruptly. “Well, don’t just stand there. Let’s start drinking! And bring something to eat! I’m famished. And where are my reports?”

  Parmenion spoke up. “The men are here, sire. Have a bite to eat and when you’re done, they’ll make their reports.”

  Several orderlies materialized in the tent, bearing large bronze chargers, heaping with bread – dark, stale, and hard, but tantalizing for all that. They also carried in several small tables to hold the platters, along with a few terracotta kylikes filled with turbid olive oil, barely suitable for dipping. Finally, and to much applause, they dragged in an enormous silver krater and proceeded to fill it with pitcher after pitcher of red wine and local water. We stopped them before they could ruin the wine with too much water and used the water to wash our hands instead. Then, after a perfunctory libation, we all fell to it, acting as if we had not eaten since before the battle, which in fact we hadn’t.

  “Stop!” Alexandros roared. “Let’s thank the gods first, sing a paean, make a proper libation, and then we can eat and drink.”

  “Easy for you to say. You’ve been drinking all this time,” somebody objected, to catcalls and
laughter, but we all stopped eating and did as we were told. Then we devoured the bread and drowned it with diluted wine.

  We all did, that is, except for Alexandros, who didn’t start eating immediately. “I can eat and listen at the same time,” he told Parmenion. “Let’s have those reports.”

  For someone who hadn’t slept in two days, who’d suffered a severe blow to the head only hours earlier, who’d just undergone surgery without the benefit of anesthesia, who’d drunk enough fortified wine to render a mere mortal unconscious, Alexandros had a surprisingly healthy appetite and a remarkably clear mind.

  While we all ate, and mostly while we all drank, Alexandros listened to a detailed listing of Macedonian casualties. He’d already spoken, in the immediate aftermath of the battle, to as many of his wounded soldiers as he could find, before retiring to his tent and submitting to the ministrations of his physician. Still, he wanted updated reports and repeatedly asked for assurances that the injured men were receiving the best possible care. He teared up at the mention of each comrade lost in combat but in fact our casualties were minimal given the scale of the battle. Only a few dozen of our men were dead, and perhaps as many as two hundred lay wounded. (The twenty-five members of the Companion Cavalry who’d died during the initial, unsuccessful – some might say foolish – assault across the Granikos River weighed especially heavily on Alexandros. In due course, he had statues erected to each one of them at Dion, a city located at the foot of Mount Olympos.)

  Our casualties would escalate, and Alexandros’s sentimentality would diminish, as our campaigns unfolded, but I didn’t know any of that as we boisterously celebrated our unexpected victory over the Persians. Well, at least it was unexpected to me; I had fully anticipated – no, I had known – that the Macedonians would lose. It struck me, for the second time that day, that I was utterly lost. I’ve got no idea what comes next.

  Watching my fellow soldiers, whooping and hollering, teasing and laughing, eating and drinking, pissing, retching, and then drinking some more, I stood there, alone, sipping my wine and trying to cope with the deepening realization that I had no better grasp on what fate had in store for us than they did. It was a little disconcerting suddenly to lose my road map to the future but, in a perverse way, my abrupt loss of prescience left me with an odd sense of liberation. No more Prime Directive[6] to worry about, I told myself. Of course, I knew better, even as the thought flashed through my mind, but I couldn’t bring myself to analyze my situation clearly. It was just too early.

  Alexandros’s insistent voice cut through my jumbled ruminations. “I need exact figures! How many men did the enemy lose?”

  “Sire, it’s dark outside,” Parmenion protested. “We’ll count the bodies tomorrow.”

  “If we can count that high,” someone chuckled.

  Alexandros was especially curious to know the fate of the Greek mercenaries who had fought on the Persian side. “I don’t want a single traitor to escape the battlefield,” he said more than once.

  “Most of them are dead, sire, and the few that survived are prisoners,” Parmenion assured him.

  “I didn’t want any Greek prisoners,” Alexandros muttered, but he let the subject pass, at least for the moment. “What about the plans for the victory games and the big feast?”

  “Tomorrow, sire, tomorrow,” Parmenion told him.

  “It’s always tomorrow with you, Parmenion. I think we’ll change your name to Not-Today Parmenion.”

  The wittiness of that last remark required another round of drinks for everybody in the tent. We had all started out high in the wake of the battle but now, slowly but surely, we were all also getting drunk. Plus, the elation of victory started to give way to bone-weariness and the gradual recognition of niggling cuts and bruises and, in some cases, more serious injuries.

  Men started to drift away. Parmenion brought in sentries to stand guard outside the tent overnight while those of us left inside, including Alexandros, collapsed into dreamless sleep, on packed dirt or, if we were lucky, on trampled patches of sod.

  *******

  I was awakened by a sharp poke in the ribs. “Get up, smart ass!” somebody whispered in my ear. In the near total darkness of the tent, all I could see was a man with a long beard leaning over me, holding a knife to my throat.

  My training kicked in before I was fully awake. Using my left palm to parry the arm holding the knife, I used my other hand to grab my assailant by the neck, unbalance him, rotate him to his back, and pin him on the ground, all in one nice, smooth movement.

  “Help, help! He’s trying to kill me!” My attacker unleashed an anguished outcry.

  I recognized his voice. “Aristandros? What the hell are you doing?”

  “Let go of me, you lunatic!” he yelled. The commotion roused my sleeping companions and brought the sentries running.

  Aristandros continued to scream. “He tried to kill me!”

  I stood up, releasing my would-be assassin. “He’s the one holding the knife,” I pointed out to the small circle of people that had formed around us. But when we looked, there was no knife to be found.

  “He had a nightmare,” Aristandros sneered, brushing himself off. Nobody else was amused. Grumbling, they all went back to sleep or back to their posts.

  I lay down as well but couldn’t fall asleep. This guy is a problem.

  At that time, Aristandros of Telmessos was probably in his fifties but looked older. He was bald, with a fringe of long, thin, flowing white hair. His beard was much more robust than his hair but also completely white. His face had the expected furrows, folds, wrinkles, moles and skin tags of a veritable sage and prophet but his small, furtive eyes exuded all the warmth of a venomous snake.

  He was a seer, which meant he read entrails, deciphered auguries, interpreted dreams, delivered oracular pronouncements, explained the inexplicable, communicated with the gods, and generally predicted the future. In other words, he was a charlatan.

  I couldn’t remember the first time I had become aware of his existence. It must have been shortly after my arrival at the Macedonian court in Pella because Aristandros was already well-established in King Philippos’s retinue by that time. He had first made his fame, a dozen or more years earlier, by interpreting a vivid dream that had jolted the king out of his postcoital sleep, one night shortly after his marriage to his fourth wife, Olympias.

  Philippos had watched himself, in this dream, sealing Olympias’s vagina with wax and stamping the plug with his royal device, which featured a rampant lion. Needless to say, the dream occasioned a certain amount of consternation. Philippos’s first impulse was to question his new wife’s chastity but his advisors, when he recounted the dream to them, gave widely disparate explanations, ranging from incipient frigidity to latent bestiality. One well-established soothsayer even permitted himself an allusion to impotence, which resulted in his instantaneous and permanent banishment from court. None of the explanations sounded the expected peal of revelation in Philippos’s mind.

  Aristandros, recently arrived at the court, heard about the dream and managed to secure an audience with the king. He told Philippos there was a simple explanation for the dream: Olympias was pregnant. After all, he reasoned, people did not seal empty amphorae. Philippos was overjoyed but Aristandros was only getting started. He also predicted, based on the design of the king’s seal, that the child would be boisterous, leonine, and male. When it turned out that Olympias was in fact pregnant and did deliver in due course a healthy, energetic, and evidently bright baby boy, whom his parents named Alexandros, Aristandros became a permanent fixture at court, presumably taking over the job vacated by the unfortunate impotency alluder.

  When the prophesied son assumed the throne upon the death of his father, Aristandros’s influence at court increased immeasurably. Before Alexandros undertook any new venture, appointed a commander, entered into a treaty, wrote a letter, changed his tunic, went to the latrine, made any important decision at all, he would consult with,
and rely upon the prognostications of, his number one soothsayer, Aristandros the Seer.

  And I had to admit, Aristandros was uncanny in the accuracy of his predictions. Until that moment, it had not struck me how remarkable his foresight had been. I’d never thought about it, I suppose, because I’d always been able to foresee the same events with equal accuracy. Of course, in my case, I’d read about all those events in the history books in preparation for what was meant to be my quick expedition into the past. Somehow, I’d never stopped to wonder how Aristandros could see the future so clearly in the entrails of slaughtered animals, in the patterns of cast lots, in the rustling of leaves of sacred trees, in the flights of eagles, or in any number of other, essentially random events. But he was never wrong.

  On the other hand, he was an old, scrawny noncombatant. It seemed incredible, even to me, that he would attempt to attack me physically. Admittedly, he’d been unremitting in his efforts to derail any advancement coming my way at the court but his efforts had always been cerebral, not physical. Perhaps I’d dreamt it after all. I rejected the thought before I’d finished thinking it. I didn’t confuse dreams with reality. On the contrary, I prided myself on my ability to recognize, even amidst a nightmare, that what I was seeing in my mind was simply a dream. And, perhaps more importantly, while awake, I never suffered from hallucinations. No, it had really happened, but why? Why is this guy so much on my case?

  Despite the nine years I’d spent serving the king, not all my fellow soldiers necessarily accepted me as one of their own. There was a reason why they called me Metoikos. My Macedonian dialect had improved over the years, as had my horsemanship. I’d proven myself on the field of battle and at the drinking parties. I’d become one of Alexandros’s leading commanders but I couldn’t become a Macedonian. Some of my fellow commanders resented not only my rapid advancement but also my very existence in their midst. Perhaps Aristandros had acted at the behest, and with the connivance, of my enemies in the ranks. That smacks of paranoia, I thought. Besides, Aristandros always struck me as someone actuated by an animosity all his own. Of course, that didn’t exclude the possibility that the insidious fortune-teller and the conspiratorial commanders were proceeding on parallel tracks.