Eurydike only smiled, having heard something of the sort every few weeks for almost the whole time she had lived under the Lord Ptolemy’s roof. It would be a blessing if Mena could become pregnant—it would distract her—but it was not to be.
“You will see. He will love me again if I bear him a son.”
“He loves no one,” Eurydike answered, reaching down to stroke her daughter’s hair. “He does not even love the son he has. He married you out of ambition and then, when I could serve him better, he put me in your place. He loves no one.”
“How can you say that? You are his wife.”
“Then who should know better? He has treated you wretchedly—surely you cannot be blind to his true nature. He is a wicked man.”
“Yet you love him.”
“Yes. This is the curse the gods have visited upon me.”
When her fingertips brushed Mena’s cheek Eurydike felt her daughter’s tears.
“You must not weep,” she said. “You must put aside your illusions. It would be far better if you learned to hate him. Surely he has earned your hatred. You must never weep for him.”
“Yet you weep for him.”
In that moment Eurydike felt as if her heart might tear open. She almost wished it would, that she might die at once.
“No, I never weep,” she said.
21
Philip woke with a start. He waited for a moment, listening, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. There was nothing. Every shadow in the tiny room was familiar to him, and the only sound was the quiet stir of Madzos’s breathing as she slept beside him.
Perhaps there had been a noise outside. Perhaps he should look and see. Philip climbed out of bed and opened the shutter on the room’s only window. The moon had been full just two nights before, so he could see quite clearly. He could make out the individual stones of the city wall. The street, some ten or twelve cubits below him, was empty. There was no sound anywhere. It was the middle of the night, and the decent people of Thebes were all asleep.
Then he heard it again.
The roof of the building across the street was almost level with the window and, perched on the crest, so close that Philip could not understand how he had missed seeing it before, was an owl, staring back at him with gigantic yellow eyes. Its call was what had awakened him.
For a moment the owl stayed quite still, and then it opened its wings and flapped them, as if to call attention to itself before suddenly throwing itself forward and into flight. It wheeled around once and then flew away, heading north.
He did not have to inquire into the meaning of this strange encounter—the goddess’s intention was quite clear.
“Are you up?”
Philip turned around and smiled, although he was not sure Madzos could even see him in the darkness. After what had happened, even the smile felt like an act of treachery.
“Yes, I am up.”
“What is it?”
Had there been something in his voice? After all this time Madzos could probably read him like a scroll, except that she couldn’t read. And a girl raised in a tavern would have an intimate understanding of human weakness and perfidy. There seemed little enough point in lying to her.
“I have to go back,” he said, wondering why his words sounded so hollow.
“Back where?”
By now she was sitting up in the bed. In a moment she would light a lamp and he would be able to see the way her long black hair cascaded over her shoulders, half covering her breasts. He had been sleeping with her for nearly two years, yet his longing for her, for the taste of her flesh and the feel of her thighs pressing against his own, had never been stronger.
“Back to Macedon. I have to go home.”
She didn’t say anything at first. When the lamplight began to throw shadows over her body and he could see her face, she didn’t even seem surprised. Yet what could surprise a woman who had been brought to this house at the age of eight and had worked here as a slave until the tavern master married her? A wife at fifteen, a widow at seventeen, and her own mistress for ten years. She was nearly that much older than Philip, yet the difference in experience had nothing to do with time.
“But not tonight,” she said, blowing out the lamp, as if realizing that lighting it had been a mistake. “Come back to bed—you can keep me warm until the morning.”
* * *
And when the morning came Philip went to the house of Pammenes, where he found the great man in his garden, at breakfast.
“You say you must return?” Pammenes asked after listening to Philip’s story. He poured the younger man a cup of wine, blended with five parts of water as befitted the hour. “Yet to see an owl in the middle of the night is not so unusual an occurrence that we are compelled to read into it the promptings of the gods.”
“One may see the most commonplace thing and know in one’s bowels that it is from the gods.” Philip grinned, as if to concede the folly of his own words. “I have been summoned, and I have no choice but to obey.”
“You Macedonians are a superstitious lot. Yet in your fervor to submit to heaven’s call have you calculated how long you are likely to live after you have put yourself once more within the Lord Ptolemy’s reach?”
Philip merely shrugged. When Pammenes understood that this was all the answer he was to receive, he nodded.
“I see. Then have you given any thought to how you will proceed?”
“I planned simply to ride out this morning as if I intended to go hunting. You could then report to the regent that I had escaped. You have always been my friend, My Lord, and I had no wish to burden you with a diplomatic problem.”
Pammenes made a contemptuous face as he dipped a piece of flatbread into his wine.
“Macedon is not so great a power in the world that Thebes need stand in much awe of the Lord Ptolemy’s wrath—I do not wish to insult your patriotism, Philip, but there it is.”
His eyes narrowed as he studied Philip’s face. Then suddenly he smiled.
“Yet there is nothing to be gained by alerting your stepfather’s spies, is there? I assume you plan to travel overland?”
“That would give me the best chance of slipping back into Macedon undetected, yes.”
“Yet the journey by horse, particularly at this season, will take you at least twelve days, and a letter carried by ship could be read in Pella after three. There are not so many roads through the mountains that the regent cannot have them all patrolled. I think perhaps an escape is not the best plan.”
They were sitting in the shade of a grape arbor, and Pammenes frowned as a linnet perched among the vines. He reached down to pick up a handful of pebbles and threw them with savage force at the bird, who managed to flutter away unharmed.
“My wife used to feed them,” he said in a voice that was almost a growl. “And still they come around. When they are disappointed of bread crumbs they peck at the grapes.”
It occurred to Philip that he had known the Lord Pammenes for more than two years, and this was the first he had ever heard of any wife. Yet he did not seem destined to learn anything more, for the Boeotarch quickly returned to his original subject.
“There is an envoy leaving for Delphi tomorrow,” he said. “His ostensible purpose is to consult the oracle, but his real business is of a more practical nature and need not concern you. You can travel with him for half a day, just until you are well out of sight of the city, and then strike off to the north on your own. I will see to it that the commander of the escort has his orders and will not hinder you. I can provide you with a letter of safe conduct, which will be respected as far as Thessaly, but perhaps it would be better if you did not have it on your person when you cross the border into Macedon.”
“I would certainly not show it to the regent,” Philip replied, but if he had intended his answer for a joke, it was a failure. Pammenes’ frown deepened, as if Philip too had been picking at his grape arbor.
“I am far more concerned that he might find
it on your corpse, Prince. Your return will present the Lord Ptolemy with far too direct a challenge to allow him to ignore it, and we both know he is not burdened with many scruples about the spilling of blood. Thus I do not rate your chances of survival very highly.”
“It is in the hands of the goddess,” Philip said, with a simplicity that made it impossible to imagine he was anything except perfectly serious. “I can only hope that the Lady Athena spares me for some purpose of her own.”
“Yes, indeed—piety is all very well.” Still frowning, Pammenes surveyed the upper reaches of his grape arbor, giving the impression he expected a cloud of birds to descend upon it. “And if, after tomorrow, ever I hear from you again, Philip, I truly will believe you lead a charmed life.”
* * *
The ride north was like an escape from prison. Among other things, Philip discovered that he really had been a hostage in Thebes—if not to the Thebans then to his own sense of futility. In Thebes he had felt like the witness to a catastrophe he was helpless to prevent. One brother had been murdered and the other lived at the whim of his murderer. It was intolerable and yet had somehow to be tolerated. Without knowing what he should do, Philip had always carried with him the sense that his enforced idleness was a shameful indulgence of his own weakness and cowardice.
And now the goddess had released him. He knew precisely what was expected of him—that he return to Pella and either kill the Lord Ptolemy or die in the attempt, which was the more probable outcome. But Pella was eight or ten days to the north and in the meantime, riding across the vast, empty grasslands of northern Greece, he enjoyed a delicious sense of freedom, as if he had had but one decision to make in his life and he had made it.
Although he kept to the main road, he would sometimes go all day without meeting another traveler. Winter was giving way to spring, and the rains were beginning in earnest. In the middle of the afternoon, sometimes with no warning, the heavens would open and, for an hour or so, drown the world. There was nothing to be done except to find a bit of shelter, which in that treeless expanse was not always just at hand, and wait. Anyone who had a choice stayed comfortably at home.
Two hours before Philip saw the watchtowers of Pharsalos he was caught in the open by an icy rain that drenched him as thoroughly as if he had thrown himself in a river. Even his sleeping blanket was soaked through. Out of deference to Pammenes, who, without saying so, had implied that he would prefer that his letter of safe conduct be used as sparingly as possible, Philip had avoided the cities, buying food and horse fodder at farmhouses he encountered along the way, but tonight the prospect of a tavern, where he could dine on roasted meat and dry his clothes before the hearth where it was being cooked, where he could sleep in a warm room and a dry bed, was simply more than he could resist.
As it happened, the guards were playing dice as he passed in through the city gates, and did not even glance up. He could have had an invading army at his back and they would never have noticed.
At the first tavern he found he gave his horse to the stableboy and carried his bag and bedroll inside. When he opened the door the sound of laughter and the welcoming, warm, food-scented air seemed to jolt him out of a trance. There was a side of mutton on the fire and, as it turned on the spit, sizzling juice ran down it like sweat. He couldn’t remember when he had ever been so hungry.
A short time later, his clothes dry, his belly full, and his head buzzing with wine, Philip sat on a stool in front of the hearth waiting for the ninth hour, when the lamps would be dimmed and the local people would be sent home to their beds. Then the landlord would spread a blanket on the floor for him and he would be allowed to go to sleep. His beard felt warm from the fire and he was enjoying an almost voluptuous sense of exhaustion when he felt a breath of cold air on the back of his neck and, the next instant, heard the door slam shut behind him. He turned to look, not really very interested, and saw that another traveler had arrived.
“Something to eat, landlord—and a jar of that thick Thessalian wine. I have been riding into a raw wind all evening and I need to coat my throat. By the gods, I would not leave a dog outside on such a night.”
Philip knew at once that the man was a Thracian, for even by Macedonian standards his accent was barbaric and he wore a heavy woolen cape of a dark green that marked him as a member of one of the coastal tribes. He was tall, as were most of that race, about thirty years old, and possessed of an elaborately curled black beard. The Thracians, when they weren’t raiding other people’s cattle, were great traders all over the north of Greece.
Where had this one come from? They were only about four days’ ride from the border with Macedon. Perhaps the man had journeyed through Pella on his way south. It was with a mixture of dread and anticipation that Philip realized he might be about to hear his first recent news of home in over two years.
“While you wait for the landlord to find his way to the cellar, have a taste of mine, friend,” Philip said, dropping into the country dialect that he had first heard at Alcmene’s knee. Without rising from his stool, he held up his own cup for the man’s inspection. “Thick as syrup and red as blood—you could catch flies with it.”
The Thracian took the offered cup and, after saluting Philip with a mischievous smile, drained off the last drop.
“That went down nicely, friend,” he said as he lowered himself onto the stool beside Philip’s. “I thank you, for these Greeks have no more notion of hospitality than does a cow whose backside is swarming with flies. How long have you been away from home?”
“Two years and more. I’ve been in Thebes, studying to be a physician, but I’m afraid I haven’t made much of a success of it.”
Philip grinned like a man making light of his own weakness. He had learned a long time ago that people will believe any evil a man speaks of himself and he wanted to forestall detailed inquiries. He was pleased to observe how forgivingly the Thracian nodded.
“I know how it is—spent more time studying anatomy with the whores than with your teachers, hey? Hah, hah! Well, a fellow is only young once. You wouldn’t happen to have a taste more of that axle grease, now would you?”
Half an hour later, when they had shared out the rest of Philip’s jar between them, then the Thracian’s, and were halfway through another, and Philip had heard all about the intricacies of the hide business—as it turned out, the fellow traded all around the northern lands, from Chalcidice to Acarnania—the conversation at last turned in a promising direction.
“Well, I don’t suppose you will be too happy to be home, eh?” The hide merchant shook his head, as if to answer his own question. “I suppose you’re from Pella, since everywhere else in Macedon is just a mud hovel. A boring place is Pella.”
“Have you been there recently?”
“Recently? Oh, yes. I was in Pella at the beginning of last month. Did a few good strokes of business too. Bought a few hundred horse hides. The Macedonians, I’ll say this for ’em, know a thing or two about the management of horses—there wasn’t a mark or a blemish on any one of them hides. Still, I was glad to leave.”
“And how fares the king?” Philip was conscious of time seeming to stop while he waited for an answer.
“Well enough, for all I know. Why? Is he a great favorite of yours?” The Thracian slapped Philip on the back, laughing with great energy. “Yes, well enough. I saw him once. Rode right past me through the city gates—hunting, I suppose. They say he is very keen on hunting. Fine figure of a man. Admired his horse.”
The Thracian took a meditative sip from his wine cup, seeming to relive in memory that one sight of Macedon’s king. Or perhaps he was imagining how well the horse’s skin would look stretched tight on one of his drying racks.
Yet something was not right. Perdikkas, unless he had improved mightily in two years, was an ungainly rider, always giving the impression that he was in imminent danger of falling off.
“Perhaps then it was not the king you saw,” Philip ventured. “Perhaps…�
�
“Oh, yes. It was the king.” This followed by several vigorous nods. “I recall someone saying, ‘There goes the king.’ A man in his fifties riding a black stallion. It was Ptolemy.”
Philip felt a shiver of dread through his bowels that was almost painful. Yet a foreigner could always make a mistake …
“The king is a young man,” Philip said evenly as if it were the most neutral of topics they were discussing. “He is hardly older than myself. When I left home they had just appointed a regent—I think his name was Ptolemy. If there has been a change, I am surprised to have heard nothing of it.”
“Well, I heard a man call him ‘king.’” The Thracian’s tone was belligerent, as if Philip had called him a liar. And then, almost from one breath to the next, he seemed to dismiss his anger. “But perhaps the rogue was mistaken—a regent is as good as a king in most men’s eyes. I own I was more interested in this fellow Ptolemy’s horse than in him. By the gods, that stallion was a big one! And so fierce he seemed to breathe fire. If Ptolemy wasn’t the king, perhaps he should have been, with a horse like that.”
That night, as Philip lay in the darkened tavern, with only the embers from the fire to throw a lurid gleam across part of the floor, he tried to calm his wilder fears and to see the thing as it really was. After all, it had been a mere four days since he had left Thebes, and surely if Ptolemy had declared himself king, Pammenes would have received word of it almost as soon as the first ship arrived from Pella. This drunken hide seller, who was at present snoring loudly with his back to the hearth, could offer no intelligence that was not at least a month and a half old. Therefore Perdikkas was still alive and there had been no revolution.
What the Thracian was reporting was simply the climate of opinion. A regent is as good as a king in most men’s eyes. People had simply grown accustomed to the Lord Ptolemy’s assumption of his king’s place.
And he had let them, for he had no intention of ever relinquishing it. Doubtless by now no one would be too shocked if Perdikkas were set aside and Ptolemy became king in name as well as in fact.
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