The Macedonian

by Nicholas Guild

  Ptolemy made no answer. The Lady Eurydike had once more turned away from him so that her hair, which was like tarnished honey, cascaded heavily across her white back.

  He did not love her. She was merely useful, he told himself. She was the key with which he would one day open the door to power. He told himself it was enough that Eurydike loved him—loved him with the blind, devoted passion that the gods visit upon those whom they mean to destroy. Yet their intrigue had exposed a vein of sensuality in him that he had not even suspected of existing, for it was deeply stirring to have excited such desire in a woman, and all the more so because it knew no rival. Beside him, neither her husband nor the children of her own body meant anything to her.

  Moreover, for all that she had borne many children and was almost forty, she was still beautiful.

  Yet the very wildness of her passion, exciting enough in an embrace, was at other times unnerving. It was dangerous, precisely because it knew no limits.

  The king was old—dying, so everyone said. They were safe from his wrath, but what did Eurydike care for safety? She had beckoned Ptolemy into her arms long ago, when the slightest whisper would have meant their deaths, yet such had been her lust that the risks had meant nothing to her.

  In an instant, in one of those sudden swings of mood that seemed to transform her utterly, she turned back to him, a smile on her lips.

  “When you rise from here, will you go to my daughter’s bed?” she asked as if she already knew the answer—as if she only wanted the self-torturing pleasure of hearing him speak it. “Does your bride know how you wear away your strength laboring over her mother’s body?”

  Like a restless and unwelcome spirit, the thought of his wife stole into Ptolemy’s mind. Likewise called Eurydike, and as unlike her mother as it was possible to imagine, she was a pretty, quiet, pious girl who made daily offerings at the shrine of Hera, patroness of domestic life, that she might grow quick with a son and thus find a way into her husband’s love. A son, as if that would make any difference …

  “Yes, of course she knows. By now, everyone knows.”

  “Except the king, who is beyond caring, even if he did know.”

  With a fit of savage laughter, she lunged at him, baring her teeth to bite him on the chest. Ptolemy grabbed her shoulders and thus just prevented her. She would have done it, had done it before. He had scars to witness for him.

  “You are mad.” His hands slipped up to her throat. He thought how easy it would be to kill her. Perhaps it would be the best thing, he thought. It would be the sort of death she might relish. “You are as savage as an animal.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  But he did not kill her. Instead, he found himself once more full of desire. Her flesh seemed to burn under his touch. He took her breasts in his hands, digging his fingers into them as if he would tear them from her body. And still she laughed—pain meant nothing to her.

  She moved closer to him, dragging herself beneath his weight.

  When it was over, and she had burned his lust to ashes so that he almost hated her, she reached beneath the bed and took out a pair of cups and a small jar of wine. Yes, he was thirsty. His throat felt as if the inside had been coated with pitch, but he resented that she should find him so predictable.

  “He may yet break his neck,” he said with a certain malicious satisfaction, although he knew the remark had no power to wound her. It was a few seconds before she even remembered who he could have meant.

  “Philip? No.” The Lady Eurydike shook her head, almost grimly, as if acknowledging a defeat. “Yet it would be safer for you if he did.”

  “He is only a boy—I am not afraid of him.”

  “You should be.”

  She smiled at him, and even in the dim light from a single oil lamp he could read the contempt in her smile—he was her lover and she hated this her youngest child, yet Philip was still her son and thus enough like her to be a match for all the Ptolemies who had ever lived. This she believed in the very core of her soul, and it made her hatred more like love than love itself.

  “He will kill you,” she said matter-of-factly, the smile dying on her lips. “Alexandros has courage, but he is vain. You can outwit Alexandros. And I can control Perdikkas. But Philip … As you plan your treason, Philip should never be far from your thoughts.”

  “The king is old and infirm and cannot last through the next winter. When he is gone, there will be only Alexandros, who trusts me as his friend. Perdikkas and Philip are boys.”

  “You say that as if boys never grew into men.”

  “Some of them do not.”

  “Do you mean to kill my sons?” she asked as if she expected to find the answer amusing. “Will you be king in their place? The Assembly of the Macedonians elects the king. What will they think if they find you with your hands reddened by the blood of three royal princes?”

  She shrugged her naked shoulders and brought the wine cup to her lips, seemingly indifferent.

  “Since it is power you wish, you shall have it. I will see to it that you are great in the next reign. But if you wish to live to enjoy such power, keep your ambition within bounds—for your own sake if not for mine, since I know how little I mean to you. And do not speak again as if you would harm my sons.”

  His wine cup was empty, so she refilled it. Then she kissed his lips with the most abject tenderness.

  “Yet be careful of Philip. Do not make the mistake of thinking that because he is only a boy he is not the most dangerous of enemies.”

  Ptolemy knew she was right. He could feel the truth of it in the cold fear that held his bowels clenched like a fist.

  “He may yet break his neck,” he said at last. “It still might happen. Some horses are never truly broken—they wait upon the time, and then they kill.”

  * * *

  Philip himself entertained no such doubts. He had a fine new horse and he was on the threshold of manhood. Neither of these held any terrors for him, and life had not yet taught him there could be anything more to hope for. The king and his mother were distant figures, and his cousin the Lord Ptolemy he hardly knew. His family, as defined by his affections, consisted of Glaukon and Alcmene, who occupied the place of parents, Alexandros and Perdikkas, and his half brother, Arrhidaios, his closest friend.

  Thus, a few days later, it was to Arrhidaios that he revealed the most recent of his triumphs. He had trained his new possession, now bearing the name “Alastor,” to answer to the pressure of his knees instead of to the bit alone.

  “You see?” Philip almost shouted with exultation as the great black stallion began pacing slowly to the left. “Soon he will learn to do the same at a gallop, and then I will be able to keep my hands free at all times, even in a cavalry charge.”

  Arrhidaios laughed. “It is a good thing you will never be king,” he said. “You are so in love with war that your reign would be a scene of continuous bloodshed.”

  But Philip did not seem to hear him. He slid down from the horse, his bare feet striking the ground as if he intended to anchor himself to that spot.

  “Want to try him?”

  Arrhidaios merely shook his head, letting his long arms cross over the neck of his dappled gelding. He was two years older than Philip and by nature more cautious, as befitted the second son of a king’s second wife.

  “He understands that he has found his match in you, but everyone says he is a demon. Who knows if, with another rider, he might not decide to take his revenge?” He shrugged, bringing his wide, bony shoulders up into little points. “‘Alastor’—trust you to name your horse after the cruelest and most wicked of the gods. Would you frighten us all out of our lives?”

  Philip placed his hand on the stallion’s neck, as if to demonstrate its placidity.

  “Don’t be such a coward,” he said. “Try him. See? He’s as peaceful as a plow ox.”

  “I’m quite content where I am, thank you. I’ve no inclination to find my death beneath that black
brute’s hooves.”

  Then they could both laugh, and Philip grabbed handfuls of the stallion’s mane and scrambled up again onto its back.

  “Let’s race to the river and back!” Philip shouted, his mount already skittering nervously.

  “It would hardly be a contest. This nag breathes like a bellows if forced above a trot.”

  “Then let’s go hunting.”

  But there was little game this near to Pella, and what there was had long since grown wary of men on horseback. Thus the two royal princes quickly abandoned even the pretense that they expected to use their iron-tipped javelins for anything more than target practice. They rode at will over the broad plains north of the city, sometimes chasing furiously after a wild pig that would appear suddenly just out of range and then just as suddenly disappear into a ravine, sometimes engaging in mock battles against an invisible foe, enjoying themselves after the aimless fashion of boys who have nothing to do but to grow triumphantly into men.

  At last, when their shadows began to lengthen over the yellow grass, they turned their faces back to where the buildings of the king’s capital made a broken line against the horizon. It was almost dark by the time they had left their horses with the grooms of the royal stable.

  “I’m hungry,” Philip announced as if the discovery came to him as a surprise. “We’ll have to hope Alcmene saved us some dinner.”

  But of course Alcmene, who was not a woman to leave such things to chance, had saved them some dinner. They sat at a wooden table in her kitchen while she filled their bowls with a meat stew rich enough almost to sate their hunger if they but held their faces over it and breathed in the steam that rose from its surface.

  And all the time they ate, Alcmene scolded Philip—for being late, for risking his life on “that dreadful animal,” for having forgotten to take a lunch bag with him, for his general heedlessness—all the while calling him “Prince” and “My Lord.” She was perhaps thirty years old, a plump and motherly creature with the pale blue, despairing eyes of one who has long since resigned herself to barrenness, and Philip was the idol of her life, upon whom she lavished the love she could not give her own unborn children.

  Philip, for his part, did not answer, did not even really listen. Alcmene’s complaints against him had been in his ears ever since he could remember. They were like another woman’s caresses. He merely ate and made jokes with Arrhidaios.

  “Where is Glaukon?” he asked suddenly.

  “Like a good servant, about his master’s business,” she replied as if meeting an accusation. She loved Philip above any living thing, but her husband was her standard of all the manly virtues—if a prince could not model himself upon the king’s chief steward, then so much the worse for the prince. “A page came for him not an hour ago. Doubtless he will tell you about it when he returns.”

  “Doubtless.”

  Philip smiled at Arrhidaios, tore a piece of bread in half, and shrugged. Almost everything he knew of life in his father’s court he had learned from listening to Glaukon. It was not a topic about which he was very curious, for to a boy of his age war was the only item of statecraft of any real interest—or, at least, of interest to the boy who was Prince Philip of Macedon—and during the last several years of this reign the nation had been at peace.

  Nevertheless, almost against his will, he had absorbed it all, all the kitchen gossip, all the intrigues and the rivalries, everything that Glaukon thought fit to tell him—and there were few secrets that did not reach the ears of the king’s chief steward. The result was that Philip saw the men and women who surrounded the king not as they saw themselves but as they appeared to the eyes of an intelligent servant. He was not cynical, for cynicism implies an expectation of something better, and Philip expected nothing. It was just that these rulers of the earth did not seem to him so very grand.

  A moment later the door opened. It was Glaukon. As soon as his gaze came to rest on Philip he frowned, just the way he had frowned once when he had caught the youngest prince of Macedon stealing apples from Alcmene’s larder, with a kind of pitying regret.

  “You are sent for,” he said in a flat voice. “You as well, My Lord Arrhidaios. The king your father is dying.”

  Philip experienced the words almost as a physical shock: The king your father is dying. But the shock was merely surprise, for he did not feel himself at all involved in the fact. All good Macedonians loved their king, and Philip was a good Macedonian. But that this king was his father meant nothing. What, after all, was a father? Someone hopelessly remote—like a king.

  “Then we must go.”

  Philip was a little taken aback by the sound of his own voice. It seemed to belong to someone else.

  On the walk to the palace compound, Glaukon told them what had happened. “The Lord Amyntas was visited with a stroke. It came without warning—he simply collapsed. He is paralyzed along the whole left side of his body. His speech is hardly more than a whisper, but his mind is clear. Nikomachos does not believe he will live more than a few hours more. He called for his son.”

  “Then he meant Alexandros,” Philip announced with the tone of someone stating the obvious. “He wishes to see his heir.”

  “He did not mean Alexandros.”

  For some reason, Glaukon looked embarrassed. Although it was a warm night, he drew his cloak around him as they walked, and his pace quickened. It was obvious he did not intend to elaborate.

  When they reached the long antechamber to the king’s private apartments, the chief steward paused before a great oak door.

  “Go inside,” he said. “Both of you, go inside. I will wait here. A king is a man like other men, and his death is properly the concern of his family. This room no longer holds any place for servants.”

  Philip and Arrhidaios exchanged glances. It seemed a strange business, and neither of them had ever been inside the king’s bedchamber.

  The door opened soundlessly, and the two boys entered. The room was surprisingly small and seemed all the smaller for the number of people it held. No one spoke, or even looked up to see who had come in—their whole attention belonged to the figure on the bed.

  At first Philip thought that the king must already have died, he was so still. He looked incalculably old, which is the way one always imagines the dead to look. A blanket covered him to the waist, and his hands, lying at his sides, were as pale as wax. His eyes were shut and he did not appear to be breathing.

  Then he opened his eyes.

  He glanced about him, searching the faces gathered around his bed, seemingly bewildered, as if their presence was only one more frightening proof that he was dying, as if he could not quite remember who they were: his sons, chief among them Alexandros, his beautiful countenance creased with anger, as though he imagined himself somehow cheated; the king’s two wives, with expressions like birds of prey; cousin Ptolemy, his face suitably grave; even cousin Pausanias, a king’s son himself and the last of his line, giving the impression he was more frightened of death even than was the dying man. The House of the Argeadai was there complete. The only stranger was Nikomachos, the royal physician.

  When the king’s eyes fell on his youngest son, they rested there. Now Philip was frightened. He did not dare look away, for his father’s gaze held him, as if they were alone.

  At last Amyntas, king of Macedon, opened his mouth to speak, although the sound of his voice was lost even in that stillness. The strain seemed to tire him beyond bearing. Nikomachos brought a cup of wine to his lips, but he shook his head. Then he made a tiny movement with the fingers of his right hand—a gesture of summons. He had never taken his eyes from Philip’s face.

  Philip approached the bed and knelt beside his father, covering the king’s withered hand with his own. The dying man seemed to gather the last of his strength.

  “Sometimes,” he said, speaking so softly the boy could hardly hear, “sometimes, before they stop a man’s breath, the gods reveal their will to him, perhaps only that he may know w
hat folly his life has been.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment, giving the impression the effort of these few words was unendurable. Then he opened them again, and his hand stirred beneath Philip’s, as if he would grasp the boy’s fingers.

  “Philip, my son, the king’s burden…”

  But it was too late. The sentence was lost in his last breath. All at once his face changed in some indefinable way.

  Nikomachos reached down and touched the side of the king’s neck.

  “He is gone,” the physician murmured, although it seemed the loudest sound in the world. “What did he say, Prince?”

  Philip looked up, his eyes glistening with unspent tears.

  “Nothing.”

  3

  Philip walked back through the silent darkness of a city that had lost its king. He had knelt by the bed, still holding his father’s hand, as the physician Nikomachos closed the third Amyntas’s eyes. Then there was a murmur of voices as, one after the other, the Argeadai began to adjust themselves to the awesome reality of death.

  All at once Philip felt the weight of a hand on his shoulder.

  “Let go,” Alexandros said, giving him a rough shake. “Let go of his hand before the fingers lock shut around yours. Time for you to go home.”

  He looked at his youngest brother as if their father’s corpse were his personal property.

  “Save your tears for the funeral.”

  By now the household slaves were washing the dead king’s limbs, preparing him for the purifying fire. Amyntas, lord of the Macedonians, already belonged to the past.

  There was an unnatural quiet. Philip saw not a living face as he made his way back to Glaukon’s house. The precincts around the palace were dark and still, as if everyone were in hiding—as if the numb feeling in his own breast had spread out through the whole royal quarter.

  He no longer understood himself. The king had lived a stranger to him yet, almost with his last breath, had called him “my son,” making his heart tremble like a bell struck once after years of silence. Was a son’s love so accessible that this man could reach inside him and take it in handfuls, now, when it was too late for both of them? Was this grief, this sense of having been plundered? If this was grief, then Philip felt contempt for it. What else he felt he did not know.