The Macedonian

by Nicholas Guild

  It had been a masterstroke, this business with Philip: the boy dies while a hostage of the Illyrians, and Alexandros, his brain clouded with rage and remorse, declares war against Bardylis, only to be defeated and to fall himself in battle. Alexandros was headstrong, and brave to the point of folly, so why should he not be killed? What could be more easily arranged?

  And then, of course, it would be necessary to buy peace with the Illyrians—Ptolemy had already settled on the terms with Pleuratos, Bardylis’s ambitious grandson and a man with whom one could do business. Macedon would forfeit the northern provinces and would be obliged to pay a heavy yearly tribute, but better a diminished realm provided only that it was one’s own.

  For Perdikkas, the last of Amyntas’s sons, would still be too young to rule in his own right and would require a regent—and who more fit than his brother-in-law, the Lord Ptolemy?

  And in time, when Perdikkas had been taken from this world by some misfortune—for they were an unlucky family, the sons of Amyntas—then who would the Macedonians elect to succeed him but his brother-in-law, the Lord Ptolemy?

  It would all be so simple, provided only that Pleuratos fulfilled his end of the bargain and made sure of that brat Philip …

  * * *

  The first time Bardylis heard Philip refer to his captors as “Illyrians,” he corrected him at once. “We are Dardanians. To a Macedonian the distinction may not seem important, but it does to us. The Illyrians consist of many nations, but we are their leaders—a Theban would not think it a compliment if you called him a Boeotian. It is the same with us.”

  And the Dardanians, Philip quickly discovered, were obsessed with war. They had no thought of war as an instrument of statecraft, nor were they a race of soldiers like the Spartans, for they cared nothing about the moral discipline of war that the Spartans carried into their daily lives and had thus made into something almost noble. Indeed, it seemed unlikely the Dardanians could even have conceived of such a thing. Ideas like glory, service, and discipline meant nothing to them, for theirs was the philosophy of bandits. They had no scruples about anything. The only virtue they recognized was courage, which they had in abundance, but, beyond that, they saw war as a child might see it, as a kind of game—a game brought to the final extremity, where wounds and death were the hazards and the rewards were rape and plunder.

  And this, merely this, was to the Dardanians the very pinnacle of life.

  Yet the wisest and best of men do not always make the most amiable companions, particularly when one is just coming into manhood, and Philip found life among this brigand nation decidedly to his taste.

  Most of the Dardanian nobles spoke at least a little Greek, and Philip quickly learned a hundred or so words of their original language, enough to allow him to mix freely even with common people, who made no scruple about adopting almost as one of their own this foreign prince who was descended from their king, could ride as well as any of them, and seemed afraid of nothing. Philip enjoyed himself immensely—he enjoyed their society and, most particularly, he enjoyed the barbaric excitement of their cavalry exercises.

  Soldiers drilled, and every soldier hates drill. But the Dardanians were not real soldiers and therefore their practice for war was both less disciplined and more amusing—a game, really, which they pursued with the obsessive enthusiasm of children.

  In the early days of winter, while the plain that stretched before their city was still only two or three spans deep with the season’s first real snowfall, they held mock battles, using lances with their tips wrapped in cloth and charging each other in long, ecstatically shouting lines of cavalry. As they galloped through the powdery snow, their sure-footed horses threw up soft clouds that almost hid them from sight, and men who were careless or unlucky enough to be knocked from their mounts would usually pick themselves up laughing, perhaps spitting out blood and broken teeth as they brushed the ice from their beards.

  It was war without the numbing threat of death—and what, after all, did Philip know of death? The game filled him with a strange exultation that canceled all fear and weariness, that made him feel like an immortal. He would ride all day, never stopping, until Alastor’s sides were lathered with sweat.

  The first time or two they admitted Philip to their sport, while they still regarded him as a stranger, the Dardanians treated him with that condescending deference that is usually reserved for children. Yet they saw quickly enough that “the Macedonian boy” could be thrown to the snowy ground many times and would always come back. He was neither cowardly nor weak, and he took their laughter with good grace. He was also relentless. After the third day they stopped calling him a boy, and soon, very soon, when he had acquired the knack of this sort of warfare, the sight of “Philip the Macedonian” mounted on his great black stallion, bearing down on them at a heedless gallop, his lance tip swinging around to take aim at their hearts, was enough to stir a thrill of terror in men who had been raiding his father’s border villages before he was born.

  All afternoon would be consumed with this wonderful game, and then everyone would ride home to the baths, to sweat the stiffness out of their aching bodies and drink strong wine and display their injuries, boasting to one another about how they had received them. In this too Philip took vast pleasure and pride, for in the midst of the Dardanians he now truly felt himself accepted as a man among other men. He had put aside his boyhood forever.

  Yet, though the Dardanians treated him as one of them, he was still a prisoner, for old Bardylis’s watchdog, the man he had called Zolfi, was never far away. Even as Philip rode back toward the gates, he had only to glance down at the ground to see the shadow of his warder’s horse. So he had no trouble remembering Alexandros’s charge: “Remember, when you are among them, to keep your eyes open.” And his eyes, as he studied the catwalks and towers of the city wall, were those of an enemy.

  They build fortifications, but without conviction, he thought. They cannot credit they will ever need them—they cannot conceive that anyone would ever dare to bring war to their own gates. I could conquer this city in half a day.

  And in imagination, almost between one breath and another, he did conquer it. The walls lay in rubble and a haze of smoke hung over the sacked and ruined buildings. Old Bardylis, come as a penitent to beg for his people’s lives, how his eyes would widen when he saw his great-grandson grinning at him from beneath the commander’s bronze war helmet!

  And then, of course, Philip remembered the narrow, rock-walled pass leading into this valley, and how easily a handful of men could defend it against an army. What would numbers matter there, except as more dead bodies to choke off the entrance?

  Philip promised himself he would find some pretext to scout the position. Perhaps there was a weakness he hadn’t noticed.

  He goaded Alastor forward, resisting the temptation to turn his head. Zolfi could not read his thoughts, but it was possible for a man to betray himself with a glance.

  Inside the gates Philip was surprised to find little Audata, calmly sitting on the broad stone rim of an empty cistern, her arms wrapped around her knees as if to fend off the evening wind that was already beginning to stir. It was the first time he had seen her since the night of his arrival.

  Without actually looking at him, she raised her face in a way that suggested she meant to be noticed. And Philip did notice her, for hers was less a child’s face than a woman’s. Indeed, it occurred to him, she was quite beautiful, with bronze-colored hair and high cheekbones that gave her a delicately feline appearance—perhaps it was this that created the impression of unawakened sensuality, but Philip couldn’t help remembering the way she had kissed him. He smiled at the recollection, feeling suddenly rather awkward.

  “Aren’t you cold?” he asked, leaning down so that he almost seemed to be lying across his horse’s neck. It was a second before she turned her blue-gray eyes to him, and then she seemed not to have heard.

  “Will you ever be a king?”

  He must
have looked startled, because she repeated the question.

  “Will you be a king, Philip? Great-Grandfather has said I am to be the bride of a great king someday.”

  “It will be a black hour for the Macedonians when they are obliged to choose me, for I have two elder brothers.” He laughed, although suddenly his distance from the kingship, which had never troubled him before, seemed almost a grief.

  “Yet stranger things have happened,” she answered. “Perhaps you will be a king after all.”

  From almost directly behind him, Philip heard a string of curses—although he understood not one word of them, they could not have been anything else—and, with a kind of start, as if awakened into a cold and unforgiving present, Audata slid down from the edge of the cistern and scurried out of sight. A horse drew up beside Philip’s. Its rider was Pleuratos. For a moment Pleuratos glared at him, seeming to hate him in a silence that was itself a curse, and then he turned his face away and rode on.

  7

  Bardylis in his eighties could still ride almost as well and as tirelessly as in the days of his youth, but in the summer of his seventy-second year, during a punitive raid against the Taulantii, his horse had been killed from beneath him and he had mangled his left leg in the fall. The bones had never healed properly, and as a result he was obliged to walk using a stick.

  He was not a man to suffer his infirmities patiently—or even to admit he had any—so the stick was a permanent grievance. When he walked about with Philip he preferred to leave it behind and to lean instead on the young man’s shoulder, which was just at the right height. Perhaps this was what created the intimacy between them, or perhaps something about Philip stirred into tenderness some long-forgotten memory. Or perhaps Bardylis simply liked being able to leave his stick behind. In any case, it soon became apparent that the king of the Dardanians had developed a particular fondness for the company of his great-grandson.

  “I wish you would stay with us,” Bardylis said one morning as the two of them were strolling down to the city gate and back, which was the farthest limit the old man would venture on foot. “I wish you would forget all about being a Macedonian. Then I would set Pleuratos aside and make you my heir. My grandson is a lout, you know. He is good for nothing except plundering villages—he has no subtlety of mind. You would make a much better king.”

  “It is the general opinion that plundering villages is all any Dardanian is good for,” Philip answered. They laughed at this together, for Bardylis was not a man to cherish any illusions. “Besides, if I defected, what would Alexandros do to the hostage he is holding?”

  “Cut his throat.” Bardylis’s voice was perfectly level, as if noting a fact of no importance. “He is also a great-grandson. You have seen him—having his throat cut would leave him vastly improved. Why? Did you imagine I would be fool enough to send someone whose life I valued?”

  He turned to Philip and smiled. It was a pleasant enough smile, but it sent a chill through one’s heart.

  “Remember, Philip, should you ever chance to become a king, that the tree of royalty remains sturdy only so long as one remembers to prune away the weaker branches.

  “Now I have shocked you,” he went on, sounding rather as though he had achieved the effect he desired. “And now you will not wish to become my heir. But there was never any chance of that, was there, for you will never forget that you are a Macedonian, and you plan to take possession of all this not by inheritance but by conquest.”

  He made a sweeping gesture that seemed to take in the whole world, and then let his arm drop back to his side, as if the strength had suddenly left it.

  “You see, Philip, I have noticed the way you look about you, coveting the very walls of my city. I do not resent this, since it is natural enough, particularly in a young man who feels the lust for glory surging within him. I remember my own youth, and the dreams of future triumphs that haunted my every thought. And thus I know it is only a kind of game you play inside your head. Take care, however, for others doubtless have also noticed. And they might put a less tolerant construction on it.”

  “Against which are you warning me, Great-Grandfather—against attacking your city or against Pleuratos?”

  The old man’s laughter was high-pitched and brittle, a sound somehow reminiscent of splintering ice.

  “Not much escapes you, does it, boy?” His voice was wheezy, as if the effort of his own hilarity had exhausted him. “Philip, you will surely be a great man someday, provided you live, yet I think the Dardanians are safe enough, even from you, for no Macedonian would ever dare to lead an army into this place.”

  “Then it is Pleuratos.”

  “I have said nothing,” Bardylis answered, tightening his grip on Philip’s shoulder. “It is not a matter in which I choose to interfere.”

  “Nevertheless, I will learn to be careful of my back.”

  “That is always wise.”

  * * *

  In the end, Bardylis offered no objection when Philip proposed to take a riding tour of the surrounding mountains. “Go,” he said. “Satisfy yourself, for I would have you free yourself of any illusions. All that you will discover is what experience has taught many others, and at terrible cost—that this valley is impregnable. The cliffs are high, and covered with ice this time of year—be careful of your footing.”

  The old king favored him with another of his wintry smiles, as if to suggest a warning within the warning.

  And so it was that one bitterly cold morning, about two months after he had first come among the Dardanians, Philip set out to survey the valley’s rocky perimeter. He carried provisions enough to last four days, and, as always, riding behind him like a reminder of mortality, was the man Zolfi. Philip had grown so accustomed to his silent presence that he seemed hardly to notice it anymore.

  He found that the cold no longer troubled him. He had adopted Dardanian dress and wore a fur jacket that left his arms exposed, but he felt perfectly comfortable—perhaps, he thought, the southern races treated themselves too kindly. Perhaps one suffered from the cold only as much as one expected to. At any rate, he felt himself to have grown harder among these northern savages, less fastidious and altogether more of a match for the world’s cruelty. He remembered the boy he had been those first few days away from Alcmene’s hearthside, shivering inside his fleece-lined cloak, and a smile of something like contempt pulled at the corners of his mouth.

  He would need to be hard, he thought, even as the shadow of the city gates passed over him, for before he returned this way he would be required to defend his life.

  For days Philip had sensed that Zolfi was only waiting upon his chance. The man meant to kill him. It was a deed that could not be owned, since otherwise he would already be dead, but Zolfi was like a fox sniffing at the rabbit’s burrow.

  It would be made to seem an innocent death. There would be no sword cuts, not even any marks of a struggle on Philip’s body when it would be turned over to the Macedonians for burial, nothing that would oblige Alexandros to seek vengeance. A riding accident, perhaps, a fall under his own horse’s hooves that would break open his skull like a melon and leave his brains to leak into the snow. “He was dead even before we reached him,” the Dardanians would explain. “He was an impetuous boy, and that black beast of his … We put it to death.” And the Macedonians would nod, grim-faced and perhaps a little suspicious, but willing at last to accept that such a thing could happen easily enough. It would be something like that.

  Philip did not know why, or by whom, but he was sure the order had been given for his murder. He could sense the change: Zolfi no longer boiled with barely suppressed hatred but seemed almost happy. The hunting dog had at last been let out of its cage and could scent a kill. He only wondered if old Bardylis knew—knew, rather than guessed, for surely he had guessed—and had perhaps even consented. Somehow he could not quite bring himself to believe it.

  Thus the surveying expedition served a double purpose, for Zolfi must be given hi
s opportunity before he decided to make one for himself. Philip knew that his only possible defense lay in choosing the time and the place.

  The snow on the valley floor was deep enough that a man on foot might have worn himself out struggling through a distance of five or six hundred paces, yet the horses had little enough trouble, their thin, knobby legs thrusting into the unblemished whiteness with a playful, seemingly effortless delicacy. So muted was their contact with the frozen earth that it was almost as if the snow buoyed them up, as if it were some vast, foaming sea through which they swam like dolphins. Philip had never felt so alive, and his whole soul filled with fear-annihilating joy. For long stretches he lost all sense of time and place, of his own mortal existence. And then he would remember, but only as one remembers the fading terrors of a dream.

  They spent that night in a stone hut perhaps an hour below the summit of the western mountains, sharing a charcoal brazier with six of the men who guarded the valley’s narrow approach. In their midst Philip knew himself to be safe, just as he knew that the sunrise would mean an end to safety, perhaps even to life. Tomorrow would have to be left to itself, and even when it came he knew he could only hold himself in readiness and wait upon Zolfi’s pleasure.

  It was impossible to plan anything because it was impossible to anticipate how death might come, yet his mind kept endlessly turning on this one theme. Still, that was better than yielding to the black, shapeless terror that seemed to wait for him, just beyond reach.

  The next morning, while the dawn was still only a pale pink sliver against the darkness of the eastern sky, they all shared out a soldiers’ breakfast to which Philip contributed two loaves of bread that were only a day old, along with a jar of rough red wine that still had fragments of grape husk floating in it. The guards had all been there for half a month. They were due for relief soon, and they talked about home as if it were on a different continent instead of just across the valley—perhaps that only made it worse for them.