The Macedonian

by Nicholas Guild

  Alcmene was still awake. She sat on a stool beside the hearth, her hands in her lap. There was still fire enough to keep the cooking pot warm.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked, looking up at him with her imploring blue eyes—she had given him dinner out of the same pot not four hours ago, but Alcmene believed in food as the sovereign remedy for all afflictions, of the body and the soul both.

  Philip shook his head. He did not know why, but at that moment he could not have trusted himself to speak.

  “Then take some wine, My Lord.”

  Instead, he knelt beside her, placing his head on her lap. Without knowing why, he was suddenly overwhelmed by sorrow. His eyes filled with tears, and a great sob convulsed him. Alcmene put an arm over his shoulders and stroked his hair.

  “I know, I know,” she murmured, the sound of her voice like a caress. “I know, my little prince—it is bitter to learn this truth so young.”

  * * *

  By sunrise everyone in Pella knew of Amyntas’s death, and at noon every man under arms was gathered in the amphitheater, which stood at the summit of a small hill near the city’s outskirts, with the purpose of choosing a successor. Even Glaukon, although he had never known battle, wore a breastplate into assembly and carried a sword, for these things were the emblems of citizenship. Whether he served or not, every Macedonian was a soldier, and the army elected the king.

  Philip, Perdikkas, and Arrhidaios were still too young to take part, so they remained at the base of the hill, waiting with the crowds of women, children, and foreigners. They waited without suspense since, like everyone else, they knew what the decision must be. Tradition held that the nation would survive and prosper only so long as it was ruled by a descendant of Herakles, and thus only the House of the Argeadai could provide a king. Alexandros was the eldest son and labored under no disability that rendered him either incapable or offensive to the gods. Had he been a minor like his brothers, a regent might have been appointed or he might even have been set aside, but he was of age, a proven warrior, and popular with the army. He had also been his father’s choice. His election was assured.

  Perdikkas’s attention seemed focused on the plane trees that lined the outside wall of the amphitheater. Their upper branches stirred slightly in a breeze that was not detectible from the ground, and Perdikkas watched with sulky concentration, as if he took even this as a personal affront.

  “They have been about it a long time,” he said finally. “Perhaps they do not mean to make Alexandros king after all.”

  It was impossible to tell from his expression whether the idea pleased him or not. The way that he plucked at his few tufts of beard suggested that he could not decide himself.

  Philip glanced down at the dust on his sandals, as if embarrassed.

  “They must first make sacrifice and offer prayers that the gods will favor their decision. Be patient.”

  As if in answer, a great shout rose from the amphitheater, followed by a mounting wave of sound, harsh and insistent, like stones breaking against one another—it was a clang of swords upon breastplates as the Macedonians under arms affirmed their loyalty to a new king.

  “You see?” Philip grinned broadly as if at some personal triumph. “They have made their choice.”

  “Yes, they have made their choice.” It was the first time Arrhidaios had broken his silence.

  “You mustn’t be dismayed.” Perdikkas regarded him with a sly smile. “It only means that you and your brothers now belong to a collateral branch. Or did you cherish an ambition to be king?”

  “It is to be hoped that none of us cherish such an ambition,” Philip answered—before Arrhidaios had a chance. “We must pray that Alexandros has a long reign and fathers many sons. The Macedonians will then be free to make war on their enemies, instead of on each other.”

  Perdikkas and Arrhidaios both looked at him as if he had spoken like a fool, and Philip himself experienced an instant of doubt whether perhaps he had.

  Yet that doubt vanished as quickly as it had come when a man in full battle dress appeared at the entrance to the amphitheater and walked a few paces down toward the waiting crowd before coming to a halt. He carried an ax in his right hand, and he led a dog by the coil of rope he held in the other. The crowd fell silent.

  Perhaps it was the sudden hush, but in that moment the dog seemed to become aware of danger. It began to bark, the sound gradually rising into a panicky squeal, and for the first time fought against the rope that held it. It was an old dog, stiff in its movements, and there were gray hairs mixed in with the patchy brown on its muzzle. There was something pathetic about its terror.

  The soldier was very efficient. He simply hauled the dog in until he held it by its rope collar, then knelt down and, in a single, deft movement, struck it across the top of its skull with the flat side of the ax head. The dog was only stunned, but it offered no further resistance. It did not even cry out when the soldier laid it across a flat stone by the side of the path leading down from the amphitheater, placed his sandaled foot across the dog’s neck, and once more raised the ax.

  The next blow was certainly fatal, for it caught the animal just at the edge of its rib cage and severed its spine.

  It took the soldier only a few more seconds to cut the carcass in half. When that was done, he wiped his ax clean on a patch of grass and stood up, holding the dog’s hind quarters in his left hand. These he threw to the other side of the path—they left a thin trail of blood in the air—before he disappeared back inside the amphitheater. By this grisly ritual, as old as the foundations of the state, was the election of a new king of Macedon announced.

  A moment later Alexandros came into view. He wore a breastplate and there was a sword in his belt, but his handsome head was bare. The sight of him brought a cheer from the waiting crowds, but he did not acknowledge it. He merely glanced about him, with his cold blue eyes, as if waiting for the tumult to end.

  At first he stood alone in the columned entranceway, but gradually the space behind him filled with men. Unlike their king, they all wore helmets and many of them carried spears.

  The crowd grew silent and began to fall back along either side of the path, clearing a way for the king and his soldiers, who would now march to the center of the city, to the temple of Herakles, in a ceremony of purification.

  It was then, at the last moment before the army of Macedon began its solemn procession, that Philip happened to turn his head and noticed Pausanias, standing a little way down on the other side of the path, among a group of Athenian merchants.

  Himself the son and grandson of kings, his rightful place was with the other great nobles, the companions who now ranged themselves behind Alexandros and would henceforth be at his side in war and in council. It was strange to see him there, among foreigners, as if he were one of them and not a member of the royal house itself.

  But Pausanias did not now look like an Argead. He shifted his weight nervously from one foot to the other, and his eyes were never still. He seemed almost ready to flee.

  “What is he doing out here?” Perdikkas asked in a tone that suggested he felt himself insulted.

  “Perhaps he was afraid of what might have happened to him inside,” Arrhidaios replied. “Perhaps he was afraid that Alexandros’s first action as king might be to condemn him to death.”

  Philip said nothing, for Pausanias was discovering that he had been noticed and he appeared to be trying to recall where he had seen these boys before. When his gaze settled on Philip he actually seemed to take fright—his face darkened and he scowled, as if caught in the midst of some shameful act. After a moment he began to edge his way back through the crowd, which soon engulfed him.

  Perdikkas, however, had already lost interest.

  “Here they come!” he cried, just as the new king, with his army behind him, came out of the shadow of the entranceway. “Glory to the king of Macedon! Glory to the House of the Argeadai!” He waved his arms as he shouted, in a perfect ecstasy of ex
citement.

  Alexandros, as he walked past, only glanced at his younger brother, but that glance was full of withering contempt.

  * * *

  King Amyntas’s body had been consigned to the fire, and his bones had been washed and wrapped in a gold-and-purple cloth for burial among his ancestors in Aigai. The next day was set aside for his funeral games.

  The Lady Eurydike watched them from her seat beneath an awning on a patch of slightly rising ground just at the eastern edge of the playing field. It was a place of honor to which no one disputed her right, for she was the new king’s mother and the line of direct descent now ran through her sons.

  She was almost the only woman present, for the games were not a public event, and the dead king’s family and court made up both the participants and the audience. All the great nobles were there, eager to display their prowess at wrestling or horse racing or with the discus—Alexandros himself would compete in the footraces. And the Lady Eurydike, as Amyntas’s widow and the mother of his successor, was expected to acknowledge the winners with gifts and tokens of victory.

  At the moment about a dozen of the companions were testing one another in the javelin throw. Ptolemy was one of these. What pleasure it would give her to set the laurel wreath upon his brow! What a moment that would be: Here is my lover, the strongest among the strong!

  But she knew this would be denied her, for the honors of the day, which should have been his, would inevitably go to younger men—boys, really, striplings for whom time cast no shadow and whom, for that alone, she almost found it possible to hate.

  Her eyes might have filled with tears of resentment had she not turned them away and pretended to discover the contestants less interesting than her fellow members of the audience.

  Alexandros was on the sidelines, surrounded a small circle of youths who had been his friends since childhood, and each of whom expected to stand high in the reign that was just beginning. Alexandros was handsome, gifted, and brave, but experience had yet to find anything to teach him and such was his fierce pride in himself that he believed it never would. The sight of him bruised Eurydike’s heart, for she could not bring herself to believe that the gods would suffer him to live a long life.

  And a little distance away, with Glaukon the steward, the physician Nikomachos, and Nikomachos’s son young Aristotle, whom everyone spoke of as a lad of great intellect, was Philip—it was so like Philip to put himself among low-born men, little better than servants. He seemed to disdain the company of his equals, valuing only such as were clever or talented or blessed with some particular virtue. It was hard to remember that the blood of kings flowed through his veins.

  Yet of all her sons it seemed to her that, in a strange way, Philip was the most like Amyntas.

  Eurydike hated her youngest child, hated him precisely because, even as he quickened in her womb, she had learned to hate his father.

  The House of the Bakchiadai had ruled Lynkos as kings in their own right for as long as anyone could remember. The Argeadai claimed sovereignty over the whole of Macedon, but it had not been so since the days of the first Alexandros, for the Lynkestai made war and entered into treaties, sometimes with the enemies of the Argeadai, just as they saw fit. So it was that King Arrhabaios sought among the women of the royal house of Illyria a bride for his son and heir Sirrhas, who had recently lost his wife, the mother of his son. This Illyrian woman gave birth to two stillborn sons and then died herself after the birth of a daughter—named Eurydike.

  And Arrhabaios, beholding the weakness of the Argeadai, had forced Amyntas to take his granddaughter as a wife, that the rulers of Macedon might one day have his blood in their veins. Eurydike, at fifteen, found herself a bride in a strange court, surrounded by people she had been raised to see as enemies and oppressors.

  But she had been dutiful. She had borne Amyntas a son, then a daughter, then another son, and the king her lord had treated her with the kindness of indifference. Theirs had been much like any other royal marriage, an obligation of rank, understood as such on both sides and therefore tolerable.

  And then her father, Sirrhas, who had long since come to the throne and dreamed of throwing off the tyranny of the Argeadai, had sided with his father-in-law, Bardylis, king of the Illyrians. There was war, and Amyntas was forced to yield territory and to countenance, if not accept, the independence of the Lynkestai.

  So he took his revenge upon his wife.

  Such was his rage that he might have killed her had he dared, but he did not dare. Instead, he became inflamed with senile lust, using her like a tavern whore, though she was still weak from the birth of her second son—perhaps he had meant to kill her in that way, that thus no blame could attach to his name.

  How she had learned to loathe the weight of him on her belly. And how he had delighted in degrading her, in indulging the most unspeakable appetites! The things he had done to her, and made her do … Even after all these years, she still remembered that time with a thrill of horror.

  At last it became obvious that she was once more with child. Amyntas never touched her again.

  And for of all this, Philip carried the burden. She had nearly died when he was born, and they had taken him away to be cared for by another—to become another woman’s son and almost a stranger to the mother who had given him life. Perhaps, if it had not been so, if she had been allowed to nurse him at her own breasts … But her milk had dried up, and with it, the last chance to find the love for her son that was untainted by the curse of a wife’s loathing for the husband who had wounded her soul.

  Perhaps, in the end, Philip would serve her even worse.

  “I should be among the competitors,” Perdikkas announced sullenly, without looking at her. “I would be, had you not discouraged me.”

  The Lady Eurydike turned her eyes to her middle son, who was seated at her right hand. She smiled, for she loved Perdikkas, with a mother’s love for the weakest of her children. Perdikkas was an intelligent boy and yet still a fool, after the manner of one who can believe something which he knows to be false.

  “In what would you have competed?” she asked. “As an athlete you are not gifted.”

  “I am as good as anyone else.”

  He frowned, still keeping his gaze on the javelin hurlers. He frowned because he knew himself to be physically awkward and did not care to admit it, perhaps even in the privacy of his own heart.

  “You are young, and prowess on the field is also a matter of experience.”

  In fact, as they both knew, she had discouraged him lest he make an exhibition of himself. This was not the time to excite the laughter of Alexandros and his friends.

  “These are your father’s funeral games,” she added. “Sometimes it is best to maintain a dignified composure.”

  He started to say something, and then thought better of it. To save his feelings, she allowed her attention to return to the field.

  Each competitor had already taken three of his five throws, and it was already clear that the contest was between only two men. Ptolemy was not one of these, although his three javelins had buried their points in the earth respectably close to the others.

  He was sitting on the ground, waiting his turn for the fourth throw, with his javelin balanced across his knees. One of the other men turned to him and said something that made him throw back his head and laugh, and his beard seemed to gleam in the sunlight like polished iron. There were already a few patches of gray in its shimmering blackness—the thought of it touching her skin made Eurydike’s breath catch—but otherwise he still had the look and bearing of a youth.

  Though she labored to keep all expression out of her face, Eurydike could feel her bowels melting like hot wax. She was always surprised and perhaps a little frightened that the mere sight of this man should exercise such power over her. It must be so that the gods only visited love such as this on those whom they meant to destroy. Surely at last she would die, or pray for death, over some folly into which her passion had bet
rayed her, for love had not rendered her blind. She knew the sort of man she loved, dangerous and without scruple, greedy beyond reason for the power that must finally elude him—a man fated to a bad end. And she knew he did not return her love but was only using it as the tool of his ambition. She knew all this, but she was helpless. That was the full measure of the gods’ enmity that they allowed her to see so clearly the destruction to which she hurried.

  Yet what was that against the sight of him, against the press of his arms and the smell of his warm flesh? Even at the end, and no matter what terrors and suffering that end held in waiting for her, she knew she would not be able to regret anything.

  Ptolemy’s last two attempts did nothing to change the outcome of the contest, which was won by Craterus, eldest son of Antipatros, Lord of the Edonoi. Knowing how these things were to be managed, Ptolemy embraced Craterus and congratulated the father on the prowess of his heir—Ptolemy was a man who made friends wherever he could. He then walked over to sit on the ground at the Lady Eurydike’s feet, thus demonstrating to anyone who cared to look what favor he found and how high he stood among the House of the Argeadai.

  “It is a sport for boys,” he said as if to no one in particular. “In my youth I was unsurpassed, but one’s strength fades. At my age I should be content to sit on the sidelines and applaud the triumphs of a son.”

  “And you will when your son is of an age to compete—and there is yet hope you may have others.”

  The Lady Eurydike smiled. No, she was not taunting him. She knew he was not greatly grieved that his second wife seemed to be barren.

  “Yes, I am not yet so decrepit that I cannot father children,” he answered.

  Perdikkas coughed uncomfortably. Perhaps he merely disliked being ignored, but he seemed embarrassed. That his mother and his sister’s husband were lovers constituted a fact that was at once obvious and impossible to acknowledge, even to himself. Therefore he was even more than usually eager to attract Ptolemy’s attention.