The Macedonian

by Nicholas Guild

  It was strange to see misery and shame in a setting of such grandeur, for the northern mountains were so majestic a landscape that Philip could hardly believe the gods would ever have allowed mere mortals to dwell in them. Yet it was also a cruel place. Winter had already begun here, for all that the clear sunlight was still strong enough to hurt one’s eyes, and everywhere the living water that oozed down the sheer rock faces of the mountains was frozen to marble, as if suspended in the act of falling. Overhead, in the pale sky that seemed as wide as creation, hawks swung about in great effortless circles, like silent prophecies of death.

  On the early afternoon of the fourth day after their rendezvous at the Vatokhori Pass, Philip and the Illyrian, whose voice he had yet to hear, rounded an outcropping of rock that turned out to be one face of a narrow passageway between two mountains. As they rode down this corridor of stone, a natural fortification that twenty men could easily have held against five hundred, Philip had only to glance about him to see the evidences of human contrivance—a narrow rampart carved out of the granite wall some fifteen cubits above his head, a pile of boulders arranged so that the touch of a man’s hand would have been enough to send them sliding down on an intruder, a pair of sentry posts hidden in shadow. Philip could see no one, yet he could sense that he and his guide were being watched. It was clear they had reached the entrance to some stronghold.

  The passageway opened onto a meadow about a two-hour journey across at its widest point and surrounded on all sides by steeply slanting rock walls. Built into the eastern wall, and at this distance almost invisible against it, was a city of stone buildings, humble enough if one compared it to Pella but a city for all that. To the inhabitants of these mountains, it must have seemed the center of the world.

  Philip and the Illyrian exchanged a glance—it was almost as if the man felt he had been tricked into even this, for he looked away at once—and then rode into the snow-covered valley. Not a quarter of an hour passed before Philip heard the low rumbling of horses’ hooves and, a few minutes later, saw perhaps as many as a hundred riders bearing down on him at a full gallop.

  When they were about fifty paces away, the horsemen slowed to a trot, and then to a walk, forming up into a line some twenty riders across, and then, when the distance separating them was no more than eight or ten paces, they stopped.

  His guide caught at Philip’s bridle and reined in his own horse. They had come, it seemed, to the end of their journey.

  Someone shouted something in a language Philip had never heard before, and the Illyrian shouted back—so, his tongue was not dead in his mouth after all. Philip understood not a word of the exchange, but he could recognize that the one in the center of the line of horsemen, who had been the first to speak, was Bardylis. After all, he was too elderly to be anyone except a king.

  “Well, then, Zolfi,” the frail-looking old man called out, this time—and presumably for Philip’s benefit—in thickly accented Greek, “so you have at last brought me my great-grandson.”

  * * *

  “Your grandmother was my second daughter, the child of my third wife,” Bardylis explained when he could spare the time from eating. He was so thin he looked like a desiccated corpse, yet in the course of the banquet given to honor his hostage he had clawed through plates of goat flesh and millet, washed down by numberless cups of wine, with all the rapacity of a true conqueror. “At least that is my recollection, yet at this reach of time it is possible I could be mistaken. I was in my twenties when she was born and had more to do than to pester myself about girl babies. I cannot even remember her name.

  “I gave her to old Arrhabaios of Lynkos as a bride for that son of his. She died in childbirth, full forty years ago. Nevertheless, through her my blood runs in your veins. I am your ancestor, boy—ah, hah, hah!”

  Everyone in the tiny room laughed, even Philip. He had discovered he rather liked his old skeleton of a great-grandsire, although there was a certain offhand quality in the king’s manner toward him that he distrusted by instinct.

  Even Bardylis’s retainers laughed, for all that most of them probably understood very little Greek. Even Pleuratos laughed.

  Bardylis had outlived all of his sons, and thus Pleuratos, whose father had been the king’s firstborn, was generally looked upon as his heir. He was just on the threshold of middle age, a strong, heavily built man, very serious in his manner but with eyes which were a trifle too small for his face, giving it an expression of baffled perplexity. Up to that point in the dinner, no sound had issued from his lips.

  Among the lessons Philip had learned from listening to old Glaukon’s descriptions of court life at Pella was that much can be inferred from watching men’s faces at a banquet, where everyone is obliged to seem as if he is enjoying himself and, in fact, no one finds it possible to relax, even for a moment. “A man must be a fool to find banquets entertaining,” Glaukon used to say, “for they are simply the business of intrigue carried out under another form. One has but to look about one to understand this. Follow men’s eyes and you will see clearly enough where the lines of power are drawn. The only people who are at their ease on such occasions are the servants.”

  Philip had never attended a royal banquet at Pella, but he saw clearly enough that Glaukon’s observation had the force of truth. Men ate and made jokes and smiled, but their eyes never lost their anxious expression as they threw darting glances about the room, always measuring the strength of one against the weakness of another—and trying to judge their own position between the two.

  And it was clear to him that Pleuratos was not only Bardylis’s heir but his rival as well. Bardylis was king now, but the future belonged to his grandson, and, since men must live in both, his nobles were forced to divide their allegiance. Philip wondered how much support Pleuratos could already command. Probably it didn’t matter, since time must inevitably favor him.

  A girl, perhaps eight or nine years old, appeared in the doorway from what was presumably the kitchen. She carried a jug of wine, placing it on the table before Bardylis, who put his thin arm around her neck in an embrace to which she seemed perfectly accustomed.

  “My great-granddaughter, Audata,” he said, displaying her to Philip as if she were a prize of war. “It is only at the last that one learns to appreciate female children. I love this one extravagantly.”

  Then, motioning toward Philip, he said something to the girl, who followed his gesture with large, speculative eyes. Then she walked around the table to where Philip was sitting and pulled on the sleeve of his tunic. When he turned his head to hear what she was saying, she kissed him—not on the cheek, as he might have expected, but full on the mouth. Then she turned and walked out of the room, without glancing back.

  Philip discovered that he was blushing. Pleuratos looked annoyed, but said nothing. Bardylis laughed.

  “My grandson is eaten up with jealousy!” he shouted. “For it would seem that his little Audata has learned to find the woman within herself—see? Already the chick begins sharpening her beak! Ah, hah, hah!”

  And then, suddenly, the king ceased to laugh. His face clouded, as if with some long-forgotten grief.

  “I remember her name now. Dakrua—her name was Dakrua. You could be her son, young Philip of Macedon, for she had your eyes.”

  And then he seemed to dismiss the matter from his thoughts.

  “I knew nothing of the relationship,” Philip said quietly, keeping his voice deliberately neutral.

  The remark overtook Bardylis in the midst of another huge mouthful of food and seemed to come as an unwelcome surprise. He swallowed hard.

  “I suppose, by now, everyone’s forgotten. That is the great diplomatic advantage of surviving into one’s old age. I remember what everyone else has forgotten.”

  His eyes, which were the same blue gray as Eurydike’s, even as Philip’s own, narrowed slightly, as if the king meant something more than he was disposed to say.

  6

  As she leaned forward to re
fill her son Alexandros’s wine cup, the Lady Eurydike discovered she had to fight back a rising sensation of panic. It had come to her more and more of late, this feeling of utter helplessness before some terrible but unspecific danger that haunted a future she could imagine only as more fearful than death, from which death might at last be a merciful escape. A cry of warning rose to her lips—against what? She could not have found the words to answer, even to herself. So she strangled it behind a thin, unconvincing smile.

  What had they been talking about? Did it matter? She couldn’t seem to remember.

  Alexandros looked bored. He had hardly touched his food, and he was drinking too much wine, which inclined him to sullenness. He longed to be away, that was obvious, back with his soldiers, back to the familiar and easy companionship of other men. The company of women, even of his own mother, made him restless.

  Which was precisely the difficulty.

  “You have been wearing yourself out,” Eurydike said, picking up the thread. Her voice reflected just the right balance between sympathy and reproach. “You need looking after.”

  “The army is what needs looking after, Mother. These ten years and more it has been allowed to sink into decay. One can scarcely believe…”

  “The army is nothing without its king, and you take better care of your horses than you do of yourself. Besides, a king’s duty does not lie with the army alone. You need a wife.”

  She smiled again, ignoring the irritation that flickered across Alexandros’s handsome face.

  “And doubtless you have thought of someone—just to save me the inconvenience of looking?”

  Eurydike shrugged her shoulders and smiled as if to say, Of course.

  “My brother Menelaos has a daughter of marriageable age,” she answered instead, although she had only to look at the notch that was forming between her son’s eyebrows to know that she was speaking in vain, that Alexandros would not marry her niece Philinna, that he would probably never marry at all. “There would be political advantages, since the ties with Lynkos…”

  “Lynkos is in rebellion.” For an instant Alexandros seemed on the verge of rising from his seat, but he did not. “Menelaos conspires with the Illyrians against me. If the fact that he is my uncle cannot purchase his loyalty, I fail to see how I will benefit from making him my father-in-law.”

  “She could give you a son—”

  “The succession is secure,” he answered, cutting her off—his voice was rising as if he thought he might need to shout her down. “I nominated Perdikkas as my heir a month ago. There is no necessity to speak of wives.”

  That he knew how the haste of anger had betrayed him into a mistake was apparent from the way he dropped his eyes.

  But Eurydike, with a mother’s wisdom, decided, for the moment, to ignore it.

  “Is the thought of a woman then so distasteful to you, my son?” She reached across the table and placed her hand gently on his. He did not shrink from her touch. “It is a little thing, over in a moment, and then a king’s duty is done. You must remember your own safety as well, for how many of the kings of Macedon have fallen not in battle but at the hands of wicked subjects? An assassin will think before he strikes if there is a son to avenge the father’s death.”

  “My brothers would avenge me.”

  He knew it was not true, so that the words seemed to die even on his lips. Eurydike had to choke back the temptation to laugh—laughter that would quickly have shaded into hysterical weeping.

  “Perdikkas would avenge you?” she asked, not even trying to keep the disdain out of her voice. “Perdikkas? Oh, I think that any man possessed of the audacity to slay you could trust himself with Perdikkas. And Perdikkas, after all, would be king.”

  She waited, to see if he could bring himself to pronounce Philip’s name, but he remained silent. It suited them both to forget for the moment that he even existed.

  “I will consider it,” he said in a way that implied he had already rejected the idea.

  “Do consider it, my son. Consider all that you might purchase with those few hours spent in a woman’s arms…”

  Alexandros smiled, showing his teeth so that the smile seemed to become a kind of threat.

  “And what, Mother, has cousin Ptolemy purchased for himself in your arms?”

  * * *

  Praxis was an effeminate, vicious, mean-spirited youth, with nothing to recommend him except a distinguished ancestry and a well-formed backside. None but the coarsest tastes could be long satisfied with such a one, and therefore it was not surprising that, after a brief infatuation, Alexandros had cast him off, nor that, characteristically, he had failed to appreciate the danger posed by discarded lovers. Praxis was not even discouraged from remaining at court, where he sulked like a woman and treasured up his sense of injury—and where the Lord Ptolemy, recognizing a useful instrument when he saw one, wasted little time in seducing the boy.

  The trial of a single night was enough to convince the Lord Ptolemy that he had chosen well, since Praxis would submit to anything, would endure any indignity—seemed, in fact, to relish brutal and contemptuous treatment—provided only that he was allowed to believe that he excited the most passionate desire. The gods had jested in giving him a man’s body, for he was born to play the whore’s part and would spread his buttocks with cringing gratitude for any use one thought to make of him.

  “Praxis, my beloved, with your slave’s heart, full of resentment and cringing jealousy, what a revolting little creature you are,” mused Ptolemy as, in the middle of the night, thinking to cleanse his throat with a swallow or two of wine, he sat up in bed and chanced to glance down at the form asleep beside him. “And how admirably you will suit my purposes.”

  And, as he drank his wine in the still darkness, he felt a thrill of something compounded of about equal parts fear and exhilaration, for he knew he had the bowels for anything that served the limitless ambition that glowed like an ember in the core of his soul, consuming all else that it might burn the brighter, and his own daring both appalled and fascinated him.

  It was perhaps only at moments like this, when he was utterly alone with himself, that he understood the enormity of the risks he was prepared to take, had in fact already taken, to gain that which he desired the way no man had ever desired a lover. What was mere flesh—or even life itself—compared to the attraction of power? The longing for power could transform everything, making even his own dread, as he contemplated the death he courted, into an almost sensual pleasure.

  Certainly it had transformed him, for Ptolemy had lived at court from the first hour of his life. Archelaos, his grandfather, had ruled then, a vain, swaggering man—the second son of his second son, Ptolemy remembered him quite distinctly, how his laughter seemed to make the walls shake, even the smell of his beard. He had been the sort of man who seemed to beckon disaster to him. Finally it came. One of his nobles, a man named Crataeas, had murdered him for breaking his betrothal to the younger of the king’s daughters.

  There had followed eight years of chaos, the years during which Ptolemy grew to manhood. Archelaos’s son Orestes followed him to the throne and shared his fate, struck down by an uncle, Aeropos, the old king’s brother, who took his place, ruled a few years, and died. Then two more kings were proclaimed and murdered between one winter and the next, first Archelaos’s second son, Amyntas the Little, Ptolemy’s own father, then Aeropos’s son Pausanias.

  And then, when the Macedonians had assembled under arms to elect a new king, Ptolemy, with that ruthless clarity of vision that is the sign of those born to rule, saw at once that he stood no chance of succeeding his father—after all, he was hardly more than a boy, and the Macedonians wanted a strong king to put an end to the bloodshed and the weakness—that to put himself forward would only mark him out as an ambitious and dangerous youth, the sort of young men new kings fear the most, and most quickly find some pretext for condemning. Therefore, he made sure to be among the very first to declare himself for Amynt
as, son of Arrhidaios.

  Pausanias had left a son of his name, a child not yet fit to leave his mother, and some had thought to elect him, putting the power of the state in a regent’s hands. But a boy as king invites murder and chaos, so when Ptolemy rose to his feet, striking his sword against his breastplate to command attention, many among the Macedonians were prepared to listen.

  “How much more must we endure before the nation falls to pieces and is consumed by our enemies?” he shouted. “Let us not invite destruction, and let us—for once—have a king to rule us whose lineage is not smeared with the blood of treason. There is yet among us one descended of the Argeadai, ripe in his manhood, whose abilities have been tested and are known…”

  In the end, of course, there had been no other choice. Ptolemy’s wisdom had consisted of seeing this a little sooner than the others.

  And he had gone on to prove that his loyalty extended beyond a timely word in council. When the Illyrians drove the new king into exile, Ptolemy went with him, negotiated with the Thessalians for military support, and served as a captain of horse in the yearlong campaign to regain Pella and Amyntas’s throne.

  There had been rewards, for the lord of Macedon was generous in his gratitude—lands, honors, important commands, and at last the king’s only daughter for a wife. But never enough.

  For Ptolemy, the son and grandson of kings, could not but ask himself why any other man should be raised to glory over him. His claim by blood was as good or better, since Amyntas’s grandfather, after all, had been the last born of old King Alexandros’s sons. Yet Ptolemy was the servant, and Amyntas was the master.

  So Ptolemy set about taking his revenge. First he had seduced the king’s principal wife, the mother of his heir, laboring hard between her legs that she might grow so besotted with love that she would be blind to all else. And then, with Amyntas dead, he had prepared the destruction of the royal sons.