“Does it matter who told me?” She ran her hand over his chest until her fingers rested against the jagged scar just below his rib cage where, as a youth, he had taken an arrow in battle against the Illyrians. “He believes it—that is enough.”
“Has he named an accomplice?” His beard just grazed her chin. As always, the stiff hairs seemed to cut at her like pieces of broken flint, and she grew almost faint with longing.
“Yes. He says it was you.”
She crushed her mouth hungrily against the yielding softness of his lips, as if she would devour him. She felt starved for him, as if the appetite fed upon itself. With a leg thrown across his hips, she pressed herself against him, feeling every contour of his naked body on her own.
“You will not touch my son,” she whispered, making it sound like a curse. “You will put this limit at least upon your ambition, that you will not raise your hand against my son.”
“Why? Do you love him so much?”
“You will not touch my son.”
“Why?”
“He is my son. That is enough.”
When it was over, and they lay in each other’s arms, bathed in sweat, Ptolemy turned his head to look up at the ceiling, shrouded in darkness.
“No one will credit such an accusation,” he said at last. It seemed as close to a denial as he could bring himself.
“At least, no one will say they credit it.”
He did not so much as glance at her, but his face seemed to harden, as if stung by a rebuke. Then he sat up at the edge of the bed and poured himself a cup of wine. He did not speak again until he had drunk nearly half of it.
“I am the regent,” he said. His back was to her, so she could only judge by his voice. He seemed almost to be boasting. “I cannot have it whispered about that I have been involved in treason.”
“Then you have nothing to fear, since Philip, when he makes an accusation, is not the type to whisper it.”
“Do you mock me, woman?”
“No.” Eurydike drew the blanket up over her breasts, for suddenly she was cold. “No, I do not mock you. I am only surprised.”
“Surprised at what?”
“That the whole world should be so afraid of you, and you so afraid of Philip.”
“You have always warned me against him.”
“Yes.” She nodded, although she knew he would not see the gesture. “You are right to be afraid.”
Ptolemy did not reply, but finished his wine and then set the cup down by his foot. He seemed to be debating with himself whether he should rise from the bed.
At last he lay down again, but he held his arms close against his body and made no move to touch his wife.
“Philip must be sent away,” he said, making it sound as if the idea had just come into his head.
“You would send him into exile?”
“No, not exile. He will join the hostages in Thebes, where he will be safe and out of the way. The change will help to rid him of these grotesque fancies. Philip will like Thebes. My own son is there.”
“I do not think he will like it any better for that.”
But Ptolemy had already closed his eyes. It was as if he had not even heard.
* * *
What thoughts visited Ptolemy in the long night? Was he haunted by the ghost of the king he had murdered, or was he beyond remorse? Philip tried to imagine what that could be like, but found he could not.
He could only mourn. Alexandros’s bones had already made their journey to the royal tombs at Aigai. The earth was piled high over his burial chamber—he was as remote as the deathless gods. So Philip was left to console himself by pouring libations over the grave of his foster mother in hopes of quieting her restless spirit, and his own.
There was nothing he could do. He would gladly have killed Ptolemy, even at the cost of his own life—then the royal house of the Argeadai would at least be free of this mad fire of ambition which was burning in its vitals. Then Perdikkas might perhaps have some chance to grow into his kingship. Now Perdikkas was imprisoned by fear, and fear would die with Ptolemy, but fear was what kept him from sanctioning his own release. Philip could not bring himself to strike against the king’s will, for he would not make himself a traitor. Perdikkas might be weak, but he was still the king, and his commands must mean something.
There seemed no way out.
He wished now that he could lay his head on Alcmene’s lap, just as he had done when he was a child and had hurt himself in some rough boy’s game. His soul felt bruised, as if the slightest touch would make it bleed. And now there was no tenderness left in the world.
“Do you come here often?”
He glanced up and was astonished to discover Arsinoe standing just a few paces from him. Before he could think of what to say she closed the distance and knelt beside him so that her trailing hair just brushed his shoulder.
“My father is buried not far from here,” she said. “I saw you, and…”
“Has he been dead long?”
“My father? Yes, for over a year now.”
“Do you still feel the pain of it?”
Instead of answering, Arsinoe placed her hand on his arm, just above the elbow.
“And who lies here?” she asked.
“My mo— The woman who raised me. Her name was Alcmene. She died while I was with the Illyrians.”
Even while he spoke, it was with the greatest difficulty that Philip was able to maintain his composure. He loved Arsinoe—at least, he assumed that this strange feeling that tormented him whenever he saw her must be love. Yet now he only wished she would go away, because her presence only made everything else harder to bear. Yet at the same time he felt he would die if she left him, simply break in half like a stone split by the ice that had found its way into some tiny flaw. He felt the strongest temptation to throw himself into her arms and weep like a child, like Alcmene’s child, and she would despise him for that. He would despise himself.
So he did nothing. He merely waited, unable even to look at her, until she decided his fate.
“Do you want to be with me?” she asked finally.
At first he did not understand what she meant. Was she asking him if he wished her to stay? How could he answer her when he did not know himself? Then he felt her hand as it slipped inside the neck of his tunic.
“Do you want to be with me?”
She kissed him on the lips, and he felt such a turmoil of pleasure that he could hardly breathe.
“You need not be alone, Philip, for I love you.”
It was past twilight now, and the burial grounds were empty. They were quite alone in the covering darkness, safe from all eyes, but this hardly mattered to them. In that moment, only they two lived and had being. The world beyond their two bodies was not even a shadow.
She took his hands in hers and guided them to her breasts. Then, sliding her arms around his neck, she drew him to her.
As they made love in the cool grass her soul seemed to pour into him, like wine into water, so that he became someone else, a stranger to himself, lightened of all his burdens, his heart alive again within his breast, godlike, blessed with a happiness that would never die.
“I love you,” he whispered, the words almost speaking themselves. “I want only to be like this forever. I will never leave you.”
14
It was shortly after midday when Philip first beheld Thebes. It was still more than an hour’s ride distant, so he could see little beyond the city walls, which caught the sun so that they gleamed like polished marble.
He and his escort had left the seaport town of Rhamnous at first light, after two days aboard a heaving ship. There had been no leave-taking at Pella—in what seemed like the middle of the night he was roused from his bed by a palace messenger and taken straight into Ptolemy’s presence.
“Your travels begin again,” the regent told him. “A ship bound for Boeotia will leave at dawn, and you will be on it. You will enjoy Thebes, Philip. The weather is p
leasant, and a young man who wants to be a soldier can learn much there. It will do you good.”
Philip thought of Arsinoe, the taste of whose kisses were still on his lips, and he felt as if a sliver of ice were being pushed through his heart.
“I do not wish to leave Pella. I am tired of being sent around like a diplomatic satchel. Send someone else.”
“There is no one else. The Thebans are not interested in entertaining kitchen slaves.”
“You have no right to do this, My Lord. In this matter I will appeal to the king.”
“I speak in the king’s name, Philip. The king will not see you—the king will still be asleep in his bed when you are out of sight of land.”
He had only to look at the way the regent smiled at him to know that it was so, that he was not being given a choice.
“Then give me an hour or two to make my farewells.”
“There is no time, Philip.”
The two men regarded each other for a moment. There were no secrets between them. Without a word spoken, they understood each other perfectly.
Philip turned on his heel and left the room.
Guards met him outside the door and took him straight back to Glaukon’s house, where he had less than a quarter of an hour to prepare for the journey. The king’s steward, who knew better than to ask questions that could not be answered, watched in silence as Philip filled a wicker basket with a few clothes.
“If anyone should come asking for me, say I would have stayed if I could.”
“Who might come, My Prince?”
Philip looked only at his hands as they folded the winter tunic Alcmene had made for him before he went among the Illyrians. And now, once more, he was bound for the polite captivity of a diplomatic hostage. At the end of this journey would he find yet another assassin?
“No one, Glaukon,” he answered, shaking his head. He might love the slender, sweet-armed girl who had given herself to him in that field of sorrow. It was even possible she might love him in return, yet he had no right to involve anyone in his fate. “No one at all.”
No one at all. The words echoed in his mind as he looked down from the mouth of the pass onto the wide plains of Boeotia. Even in the mountains the heat had been ferocious, and the grasslands that stretched before him were burned brown by the sun. This was a hostile place, and he felt himself alone in it.
The men around him were the lightly armed cavalry soldiers of the Theban army. They had been waiting on the wharf at Rhamnous and conducted themselves toward him as if they were a guard of honor rather than a prisoner’s escort. Yet they were distant in their bearing, whether as a mark of respect or for some other reason he had no way of knowing. He had found himself eating his noon meal with only the officer for company, while the men, sitting a little way off, huddled round their lunch bags ignoring them. It had struck him as odd behavior in the soldiers of a democracy—in Macedonia the king himself was not so grand that he disdained the common cooking pot and the companionship of even his humblest subjects.
He kept thinking of Arsinoe. What must she think of him? She probably imagined that he had known he was about to be sent away and had taken her quite casually, to sneak off without a word or gesture. She probably hated him now.
And there, across the plain, glistening in the sun, was Thebes—his place of exile. The sight of it hurt his eyes.
“She is beautiful, is she not, Prince?” said the officer in charge of Philip’s escort, a man named Ganelon, who, although barely twenty, had already served in four campaigns and had been to Macedon with Pelopidas. “She is the queen of cities, as cultured as Athens and as warlike as Sparta. You will find much to admire within those walls.”
“I would have preferred to continue admiring her from a distance,” Philip answered. This reply Ganelon affected to find vastly amusing, and his laughter covered what might otherwise have become an embarrassing silence.
In the mountains there had been a breath of wind to vitiate the heat, but as soon as the road they had been following dropped into the central plains the air itself seemed baked and exhausted. Harvest time was over, and the fields they passed were cut to stubble so that the bare earth showed through. Philip noticed, however, that the bottoms of the irrigation ditches were still black with mud, so water must have been plentiful. The farmhouses they passed appeared well kept, surrounded by vines and olive trees, and the animals that grazed here and there for whatever the scythe had left behind were fat and sleek. Obviously, the Boeotians prospered.
And it was clear they had taken measures to protect their prosperity. The road, which lay narrow and straight beneath the horses’ hooves, was perfect for a peasant family fleeing to the protection of the city walls but could not but leave an invading army strung out and exposed to ambush. And the walls themselves, rising from the very edge of a high bluff, would be no easy matter to breach. All the advantages of terrain and construction would lay with the defenders, so that after a long siege the Thebans might be starved into submission but, so long as their army remained intact, their city was unlikely ever to be taken by storm.
The road grew so steep as they approached the city walls that Philip was tempted to climb down and walk to spare his animal. Yet his escort kept their mounts and their agile little horses, smaller than the horses of Macedon so that they almost might be colts, seemed accustomed to laboring up and down this harsh grade.
As they reached the main gate a man stepped out from beneath its shadow and approached them. He was in the middle of life and, except for the restless intelligence of his eyes, undistinguished in his appearance. He wore a simple brown soldier’s cloak, which, after the fashion of the southern Greeks, exposed the right arm but covered the left all the way down to the wrist. It was his right hand that he extended to help Philip down from his horse.
“Welcome, young man,” he said in the manner of a family friend. “You are to be my guest during your stay among us. I am Pammenes.”
* * *
Of course Philip knew the name. His host was one of the triumvirate of leaders who in little more than a decade had created an army without equal in the world and had made of Thebes a power with no real rival except Athens.
Pelopidas, Epaminondas, and Pammenes—when still young men, after being driven into exile by the Spartan-backed oligarchy who ruled Thebes, had returned home in secret, and, disguised as women, had broken in on a dinner party at which the three polemarchs were celebrating the end of their year in office and assassinated them. That same night the other pro-Spartan oligarchs in the city were hunted down and killed.
There followed four years of war as the Spartans attempted to reassert their control of Boeotia, at the end of which the world was astonished to see them beaten and humiliated. The best professional fighting force in Greece went down to defeat before a small, hastily assembled citizen army. Commanders of vast experience and brilliant reputation found themselves overmastered by unknown men they would hardly even have considered soldiers. Thebes had emerged as a great power—and all this was the work of three men.
Pammenes was descended from the old Theban aristocracy, but his family had lost everything during the years of Spartan domination. He did not seem to regret his poverty, or even to notice it, as that first night he entertained his young houseguest over a plain dinner of goat flesh and boiled millet.
“Pelopidas mentioned you often in his letters,” he said to Philip, refilling his cup with a vile, unmixed wine as thick as horse blood. “You made an impression on him. So did the Lord Ptolemy, although of a different sort. It is a great pity about your brother the king—to die so young, and at the hands of a friend, is indeed bitter.”
His face, as he spoke, was as bland as milk, and his words seemed at once to imply everything and nothing. Pammenes, one suspected, was a man who hid behind his appearance of mediocrity, wearing it like a disguise.
“Bitter, yes. But not unexpected.”
At first Pammenes affected to be surprised by this answer, but i
n the end he merely shrugged his shoulders and sighed as if at the last in a long series of anticipated disappointments.
“No, not unexpected,” he said, carefully looking at nothing. “Pelopidas was perhaps wise to insist that the Lord Ptolemy’s own son be among the hostages delivered over to us, since it is in everyone’s interest that the new regent’s ambitions be curbed.”
He tasted his wine and made a face. The subject of the Lord Ptolemy’s ambition appeared to have disappeared from his mind until he spoke again.
“If I may speak frankly, Prince, I am a little surprised to see you here in Thebes. The regent must be nodding—or perhaps he wishes to display the harmlessness of his intentions.”
Philip must have looked puzzled, for his host smiled.
“You must know,” Pammenes continued as if explaining the solution to a riddle, “that your presence here is the best possible guarantor of the new king’s life. The Lord Ptolemy’s tenderness toward his son may not be very great, but as long as we have you he will respect the peace and make no attempt to remove your brother Perdikkas.”
Now it was Philip’s turn to smile. He tore a corner from a flat piece of bread and used it to wipe up a bit of drippings from his plate.
“I think you miscalculate. Cut this throat, My Lord, and for the rest of his life the regent will count you dearer to him than a brother.”
As if to underscore the point, he dropped the fragment of bread into his mouth and swallowed it without taking the trouble to chew.
Pammenes shook his head.
“Suppose, my young friend, that the regent decides he is not content with the substance of power. ‘I would be king,’ he says. What would he do then?”
“Have Perdikkas murdered,” Philip answered. He frowned, apparently at a loss to discover the point of the question.
“The way Alexandros was murdered, so that no one lives to stand accused to it?”
“Yes, of course. The assembly will not condone treason.”
“Yet even suppose that your brother the king dies in his sleep. Would Ptolemy feel himself secure of his crown?”
Philip’s eyes narrowed. He was beginning to see the point.
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