Kreon of Europos then climbed up on the shoulders of Parmenos, son of Archos of Tyrissa, and defied all comers. Several men took up the challenge and soon they were all pelting each other with pieces of bread dipped in wine. The conflict soon became general and, since each hit left a red stain on the face or breast, soon everyone looked as if he were bleeding from a dozen mortal wounds. Peace was only restored when the combatants ran out of bread, because by the time the grooms brought a fresh supply everyone had grown bored with the fight.
Philip, who had taken no part in these entertainments, had fallen peacefully asleep, his arms cradling his head as they rested on the table. He did not wake up again until the banquet was over and his bench was snatched from beneath him to be added to the bonfire with which the king’s outdoor revels always came to an end. His head was sore and his tongue tasted like something that had crawled into his mouth to die as he watched the fire slowly lapping over the pile of rough wooden furniture.
And as soon as the flames had reached as high as a man’s head, the war dance began.
The war dance was performed not to mark some great triumph of Macedonian arms but as a celebration of war itself. It was an act of worship, a ritual submission to the gods’ love of courage and cruelty. And only those who had fought beside their king, and thus had shed their own mortal terror, could participate. So Philip, once more, found his place among the onlookers.
By tradition it was a wild, ecstatic ceremony, performed to the frantic music of drums and cymbals and to shrieks that seemed to tear the night air like a knife cutting through linen. If men were drunk enough, they sometimes jumped through the flames, coming out of the other side—if, indeed, they did come out, and sometimes they did not—smoke blackened and with their hair burning.
And it always began with the king’s slow circling around the fire, his arms extended and his head thrown back as he searched for the delirious oblivion that kills the fear of death.
Alexandros, his naked body oiled and shining, his long honey-colored hair swinging around and then, for an instant, trembling in the air like a golden flame, Alexandros, lord of Macedon, was glorious in his godlike beauty as he danced alone to the ominous, throbbing music. He was like a being transported, breaking free from his mortal existence …
The bonfire threw ghastly shadows over the faces of men as, slowly, they began to join their king in his delirious, trancelike ecstasy.
Sitting on the ground beside his brother Perdikkas, the two of them clapping their hands in time to the mad rhythm of the dancers, who howled and shouted, throwing themselves about in their frenzied joy, Philip had forgotten all his dark imaginings. He was happy and at peace with himself, lost to everything except the moment. He hardly knew anything was wrong until he heard the drumbeat stop.
But the silence was like cold water, dashing him awake. All at once there was Alexandros lying on the ground, his hand to his side and dark blood running out between his fingers. Standing over him was Praxis, holding a gory sword, glancing triumphantly about at the faces of men too stunned to move.
At last, perhaps to dispel their uncomprehending horror, he raised the sword above his head.
“Death to the tyrant!” he shouted, making as if to strike again. “Glory to—”
Philip, suddenly mad with rage, bounded to his feet. He would kill the traitor, with his bare hands if need be. Yet he had hardly taken a step before Praxis’s voice was cut off—drowned in the sound of a mortal groan as a javelin shattered his chest. He was dead even before his knees struck the bare earth.
Praxis was dead. He no longer mattered. Alexandros was dying, even as Philip knelt to cradle the king’s head in his arms.
“I’m cold,” he whispered through parched lips. “I’m cold, Philip.”
Philip drew his cloak around his brother’s shoulders.
“Is this what death is like? Is this…?”
Suddenly his eyes rolled back in his head and he was gone.
For a moment Philip thought his heart had turned to ice—he seemed to feel nothing. And then, as he lifted his hand away from Alexandros’s corpse and saw that his fingers were coated with blood, in that moment all the grief of this dark world seemed to concentrate within his breast and a cry of fierce, animal pain broke from his lips.
He staggered to his feet and looked around him. Not a step away, Praxis lay on his side, his hands still clenched around the javelin that had torn his life away. Philip reached down and picked up his sword, still wet with the king’s blood.
“Who killed him?” he asked. Tears were streaming from his eyes. And then, when no one answered, Philip shouted out the words like a challenge. “Who killed him?”
“I killed him.”
From the knot of onlookers, the Lord Ptolemy stepped forward. His eyes narrowed when he saw the expression on Philip’s face.
“He seemed ready to strike again. I thought … Is the king dead, then?”
“Yes,” Philip answered, weighing Praxis’s sword in his hand. He discovered he had to fight against the temptation to step forward and run the man through. Was it only because the Lord Ptolemy happened to be standing closest? “They are both dead. They are both far out of reach.”
13
The king’s ashes were still warm in his funeral urn when the Macedonians met in solemn assembly and elected a successor. There was only one candidate, but it was deemed proper, in view of Perdikkas’s youth and inexperience, to appoint a regent. Again, there was only one candidate. For at least the next few years, the substance of power would rest with the Lord Ptolemy.
After the assembly it was discovered that Arrhidaios and his brothers, King Amyntas’s sons by his first wife, had disappeared from the city. They were doubtless wise to do so, because Ptolemy almost certainly would have regarded them as potential rivals and found some pretext for executing them, but their flight occasioned speculation that they might somehow have been involved in the king’s murder.
No one raised the possibility that treason extended any further. Praxis was dead and his corpse had been publicly crucified and then left to the crows. Everyone knew he had nursed a sense of injury ever since Alexandros had thrown him off—and that seemed to end the matter.
Certainly no suspicion fell on the Lord Ptolemy. Had he not, in a vain attempt to save the king’s life, by his own hand killed the traitor? Had not the Macedonian Assembly named him regent to the new king, and was he not now as great as if he wore the crown himself? Even after Ptolemy divorced his wife and married her mother, the Lord Amyntas’s widow, no one thought to accuse him.
No one, except Philip.
Had he known, even in that first moment? It was impossible to determine the steps by which suspicion had hardened into belief and then into certainty. Still, he knew.
“The Lord Ptolemy displayed admirable presence of mind,” he told his brother Perdikkas. “He had his weapon ready at hand and struck down the traitor so quickly one might almost imagine he had been expecting … I wonder who or what Praxis was about to hail when death overtook him.”
Perdikkas, who had never loved Alexandros very much, and for whom the novelty of kingship was still fresh, did not relish this line of inquiry. He could not quite make out its direction, but he suspected enough to be uneasy.
“Praxis was a jealous lover. Thwarted passion can drive even women to murder.” He looked at Philip and smiled sourly, as if he had settled everything.
“But he called Alexandros a tyrant, do you remember? He shouted, ‘Death to the tyrant!’ as if he were avenging some general grievance. Do you think he expected to die? I don’t—I think he expected to be congratulated.”
“Everyone knows that love addles the brains.”
“Perhaps.” Philip pursed his lips, appearing to consider the possibility. “But Praxis was notoriously stupid. The idea of calling our brother a tyrant did not find its way into his head by itself.”
Perdikkas glanced nervously about. They were sitting together in the king’s room
warming their hands over a charcoal grate, for the nights had turned cool since Alexandros’s death. They were alone—that the two royal brothers should be thus alone was perhaps a measure of how completely the Lord Ptolemy had made himself master of the state—yet Perdikkas could not control the shudder of anxiety that passed through him. He was the king, and still he was afraid.
“Your suggestion is almost treasonous, Philip.”
“How is it treasonous? I am speaking to the king my brother about how the king our brother was murdered.”
“But Ptolemy is the regent.”
“Then, since you name him, it appears that you have followed my train of thought to the same conclusion. It was Ptolemy’s will that guided the assassin’s hand. And now, as you so correctly point out, he is the regent and holds power in your name.”
Philip allowed himself a cruel smile.
“It is Ptolemy, and not Praxis, whose corpse should be crucified over the king’s funeral mound. Come, Perdikkas—you are sometimes a wretched coward, but you have never been a fool. You know that I am right.”
Yes, Perdikkas knew. Yet at the same time Philip understood that he would never own that he knew, perhaps not even to himself. He was too frightened for that.
“Ptolemy loved Alexandros. Ptolemy is loyal. Ptolemy would never have—”
“Yes, oh, yes, he would.” Philip put his hand on his brother’s knee. It was a gesture at once of affection and of pity. “He has. The Lord Ptolemy has found it within himself to murder a king. And if you do not pull yourself straight and act the man, he may imagine he is at liberty to murder another.”
* * *
Perdikkas no longer knew what to make of Philip. Philip had changed, almost out of recognition. A few months in the mountains with the Illyrian barbarians and he had come back a different person. One could see it in his eyes.
When they were boys growing up together, Perdikkas had always felt himself the superior. He was the elder by a year, so why should his little brother not defer to him? And Philip, who was so strong-willed in everything else, had accepted his place as the last and least of the king’s sons.
Yet after his return, even while Alexandros was alive, it was almost as if Philip had outgrown them. It was almost possible to envy him, for when he spoke it was with the self-command of a man—a man conscious of his powers, a man seasoned by the lifetime of experience that Philip had somehow compressed into the short span he had been away from them. A man one ignored at one’s peril.
He was not the same.
At first, Perdikkas had been prone to take offense—was not Philip still a boy, his little brother? Now, however, with Alexandros dead, it was strangely comforting to listen to the measured authority of his voice. Even when the words themselves filled him with terror.
The Lord Ptolemy has found it within himself to murder a king. It was impossible to believe such a thing. And yet, when Philip looked straight into one’s face and spoke the words, it was impossible not to believe. Thus, the season of Perdikkas’s fear found its beginnings in that conversation with his brother.
And, as always when his soul was overburdened, he turned for comfort to his mother.
But Eurydike too had changed. The death of her eldest son had cast its shadow over her, and at the same time her marriage to the Lord Ptolemy had infused her with a desperate energy. She seemed less happy in that marriage than determined to be happy, and her nervous vivacity of mind was tainted with something almost like madness.
“This is what it is like,” Perdikkas might have whispered to himself, “when the gods have sent us love as the chosen instrument of our destruction.”
So as she listened to her son, Eurydike’s long, agile fingers played with the beads of the gold necklace Ptolemy had given her as a wedding present. She did not even seem surprised to learn that Philip had accused her new husband of treason and murder. It was not even possible to tell if she did not half believe it. She merely listened, her face as expressionless as a death mask, with only the nervous movements of her fingers hinting at an inner tension.
“Philip had best be more careful,” she said when the recital was over. “He should remember that, although a prince of the royal house and your heir, he is still no more than a subject.”
“He says that he is my subject, Mother—not Ptolemy’s.” Perdikkas glanced down at his lap, as if his brother’s fealty was a burden he was not sure he had the strength to bear. “He says that I have but to speak the word and he will kill Ptolemy. He says I have but to declare myself of age and he will end the regency with Ptolemy’s life. He will challenge Ptolemy in the assembly and kill him there, for all to see. I believe he would do it.”
“Yes, of course he would do it. Or at least he would try. Philip, whatever his other failings, was never lacking in stomach.”
Eurydike actually smiled, as if the idea amused her, and for once her hands grew still.
“But he must be prevented from doing it because the Lord Ptolemy is your loyal servant, as he was your brother’s.”
His mother had a way of quietly gazing into his eyes the power of which Perdikkas had never found a way to combat. She seemed to hold his will prisoner when she looked at him thus, because it was impossible to quell within himself a surge of cringing love for her, or to quite believe that he could ever love her enough. She was his adored mother, and he was a scoundrel if he did not believe everything she told him. Ptolemy was his friend—had always been his friend. His mother loved Ptolemy, and therefore Perdikkas must love him. Ptolemy was a good man, and Philip’s mind was maggoty with baseless suspicion. For that moment, at least, he believed it, even while his reason rebelled against the idea. And afterward, of course, he would be trapped.
“Yes, of course he is loyal, but—”
“And Philip is a fool to imagine anything else,” Eurydike interrupted, still holding him with her gaze. “We can only believe that his mind had grown clouded with grief. We have all been made to suffer through Alexandros’s sudden death. I, his mother…”
At last she turned her head away as she appeared to suppress a pang of sorrow.
“Yes, Mother.”
When she looked at him again her eyes were shiny with unspent tears and her smiling lips trembled. Perdikkas felt his face burning with shame that he had even uttered Philip’s name.
She put her hand over his.
“We will not speak of this again,” she said.
* * *
Still, Eurydike was not so blinded by her passion for the Lord Ptolemy that she did not understand his nature. She had only to look to her own domestic arrangements to see the treachery of which he was capable.
In order to marry her he had first to divorce his wife, her own daughter, and a woman who has been cast off by her husband has nowhere to go except back to her family. Yet, since her brothers were not of an age to have their own establishments, she could only return to her mother, who was now Ptolemy’s wife. Thus she remained part of her former husband’s household.
And he continued to visit her bed, possibly more now than when she had been his wife. He made use of her as casually as he might have one of the servant women—not because he especially wanted her but simply because he knew it would be tolerated by both women in humiliated silence. It seemed to amuse him that, whereas before he had betrayed the daughter with the mother, now it was the other way about.
Eurydike had never been close to her daughter, who bore her name but had always been called “Meda” within the family. And they had not lived together since she was fourteen and King Amyntas had first given her to Ptolemy as a wife. Eurydike had always thought of Meda as a rather lifeless creature, so it surprised her, when they were once more under the same roof, to discover the intensity of the child’s anguish.
It was from Meda’s own lips that she first heard that Ptolemy had begun returning to her bed. And the words were spoken not in triumph, as one might have expected, or even rage, but with a remorse that took all the guilt for the deed
upon herself. Meda was appealing for her mother’s forgiveness, begging her to understand that the touch of this man’s hand deprived her of will and reason. He did not force himself upon her because he did not need force—she was powerless to resist him.
And Eurydike had understood. She knew how it was possible to know the evil in a man, even to hate him for it, and yet to be the willing slave of his desire. She knew Ptolemy’s power over the flesh. She and her daughter had sat together in a corner of her room, their arms around each other’s shoulders, sobbing with grief. And their tears were for each other, for they knew that they were both tangled hopelessly in the web the gods had woven for them.
So why should Eurydike not believe that Ptolemy was behind her son’s murder—except that to believe it would have been to run mad? Ptolemy was capable of anything, this she knew. Would it make any difference if he had killed Alexandros? Would she have been able to tear herself away from him? Perhaps, but only long enough to drive the sword into her own bosom. To believe such a thing was to die, and therefore she could not bring herself to believe it.
Yet the voice within her, whispering that it all might be true, could not be stilled.
Thus there was a sense in which she almost welcomed Philip’s accusation, if only because, in the silence that enclosed so much of her life, it gave her suspicions words that, after all, were not her own.
“My son Philip believes that Praxis did not act alone,” she said, murmuring into the darkness of their bedroom even as Ptolemy’s hand slid over her breast.
“Did he tell you this?”
She could already feel his breath on her neck, and her heart began to beat wildly, like an animal throwing itself against the bars of its cage.
The Macedonian Page 15
