The Macedonian

by Nicholas Guild

  “I am Philip, prince of Macedon,” Philip said, hardly raising his voice. “Say what you have to say.”

  The man rode over to where Philip was standing. It was clear he found the whole business infinitely distasteful.

  “What terms will you offer if we throw open the city to you?” he inquired.

  Philip favored him with a wolfish smile.

  “Better to ask, what terms will I offer if you do not?”

  27

  “We killed about twenty and captured perhaps a hundred,” the cavalry commander reported. He was about Philip’s age and his name was Korous. They had known each other all their lives. “But most escaped.”

  “Did you take Derdas?” It was the only important question.

  “No. We had a prisoner identify the slain on the way back, and he was not among them.”

  He lowered his head just slightly, like a child who expects to be punished for losing a toy. It was obvious he imagined himself to be in disgrace.

  Korous was tall, handsome, and blond, and he had always reminded Philip of his eldest brother, Alexandros, as much in temperament as in appearance. It would be a mistake to humiliate such a man.

  “At least now I won’t have to decide what to do with him,” Philip said, grinning as if he had just escaped something himself. “Tell your men they fought well today. They saved us.”

  And then, out of sheer exhilaration, he started to laugh.

  “We have won a famous victory today, Korous—like when we were boys.”

  They could both laugh now. They were the conquerors, looking down from the absolute pinnacle of their young lives, and Derdas was forgotten.

  Half an hour later, in the middle of the afternoon of a day that already seemed to stretch back half a century, Philip, as he had promised, was mounted on Alastor and about to enter the captured city of Aiane. Before him was his army, drawn up in neat ranks, and, sitting on the ground in postures of exhaustion, the thousand or so of the Elimoitai who had bought their lives at the price of surrender. They were all waiting for Philip to speak, for now his was the only voice that mattered.

  “This city and all who dwell within her are now under the protection of the Lord Perdikkas, king of all the Macedonians, among whom are numbered the Elimoitai. There will be no looting, nor will there be any reprisals. We are all countrymen again, and we are all brothers. Those who have died today lie together on this battlefield, purged of all enmity—so let it be with us.

  “Derdas is gone, having fled when the fighting turned against him. He will not be back. His ancestor was put on his throne by King Alexandros of Macedon, and now a descendant of that king has pulled him down from it. He has forfeited his right to rule and his right to your allegiance, but I say to the men of Elimeia that his fall is not yours. All who take the oath to King Perdikkas, declaring loyalty to him and his heirs, will retain their rank and property. All who do not will number among his enemies. It is for each man to decide alone.

  “And to my own soldiers, lest they feel cheated of their rightful plunder, I declare that one third of the treasury of King Derdas will be distributed among them equally, officers and men—we have shared equally in the danger of this enterprise, so let it be the same with the booty. Until that division is made, perhaps the tavern keepers of Aiane will extend us all credit.”

  There were cheers from the ranks of the Macedonians, for they knew that one-third was the traditional prize of the conquering commander. Even some of the Elimoitai cheered, although perhaps for different reasons. At any rate, it was a long moment before Philip could once more make himself heard.

  “Now let us enter this city, which is today once more a Macedonian city, and may this triumph mark a new beginning for victors and defeated alike.”

  And when the massive doors opened one might have thought that Aiane was welcoming home her own conquering army. People poured out into the streets, out along the great road that led from the city gates. They threw flowers under the hooves of Philip’s horse, crowding so close around that Alastor seemed on the verge of panic and it was all Philip could do to keep him from trampling them under. Women wept, holding up their children that they might see, and men cheered. It was as if they had found themselves a new hero.

  And why should they not cheer? Philip thought, even as he smiled and waved. They know the customary fate of vanquished cities. They are grateful to be alive.

  When he rode into the courtyard of the king’s palace, whence he had come as a supplicant a mere six months before, there were only servants and a few old secretaries, the drudges of royal administration, there to meet him. The only person of rank he saw was the Lady Phila.

  She wore a dark blue tunic, one end of which covered her hair, and her face was drained of expression. She might have been waiting for her executioner.

  “I will conduct you to your apartments,” she said, her voice showing only a trace of strain. “Since there is no one else to do it.”

  “And which apartments would those be, Lady?”

  “Whichever you wish,” came the answer—she appeared surprised that he would see fit to ask—“since this house and all that it contains are now yours.”

  There was nothing of either bitterness or invitation in her words. She was merely stating a fact. Yet, as she led him inside and they were alone together in the vast reception hall, Philip could not help wondering if she enrolled herself in the list of his new possessions.

  “Lady,” he said, speaking almost as if to drive the thought from his mind. “Who ordered the gates to be closed on Derdas?”

  And when she would not answer, he smiled.

  “It was you, was it not?”

  “My brother was so confident of victory,” she said at last, her anguish visible nowhere but in her eyes. “I knew you would have demanded his surrender as the price of peace, and I knew he would not have accepted. I have no illusions about the sort of man he is. He had lost—that was obvious—and he had made no provision for a siege. Nothing could have prevented you from taking Aiane, now or a month from now, and after what suffering? In the end you would have captured him anyway, and I know what revenge is visited upon cities that refuse to submit to their conquerors.”

  “And so you…”

  “And so I betrayed him.” Tears, cold as rainwater, ran down her tortured face. “He leaves me his proxy when he is away, and thus people are accustomed to obeying my orders. In this case they were only too eager…”

  “Of course they were eager—they knew you were saving them.”

  He looked around him, studying the paintings on the walls, that she might be spared observation while she struggled to retain her composure. His back was almost to her when he spoke.

  “Lady, you are both noble and wise—a rare combination. You make me almost glad your brother has escaped with his life.”

  * * *

  Aiane accepted her conquest without fuss, and there were no disturbances in the city that night or in the days that followed. Philip had issued a proclamation that hostages taken in raids over the border had only to present themselves to claim their liberty, and over time perhaps two hundred, mostly young women, found their way into the Macedonian camp. The bulk, of course, were from the great estates, most of them some distance from the city, but they too were not hindered from regaining their liberty. No one was disposed to trifle with Philip’s word.

  But his first priority was not justice but reconciliation. For many days the air was black with the smoke from funeral pyres. The Macedonians had lost not quite a hundred and fifty men, but the Elimoitai had suffered far worse—over a thousand had fallen in those few hours of battle. Philip gave orders that their bones were to be returned to their families without ransom and that those who went unclaimed were to receive honorable burial beside his own soldiers.

  These things made their impression on the Elimoitai, who had never been noted for clemency. As the days passed, Derdas’s nobles, sometimes in groups, sometimes one by one, presented themselves a
t his former palace to stand in the presence of his conqueror and to take the oath of allegiance to King Perdikkas, as did the soldiers of the city garrison.

  But, since men are sometimes more loyal to the corps of which they are a part than to any commander, Philip made it a rule that the old Elimiote army had to be absorbed into the new army he had created to fight them. This was not difficult with the infantry, since many of them had been impressed into service and now only wanted to return to their fathers’ farms, but the cavalry posed special problems. For one thing, there were more of them. Of the Elimoitai who had ridden against Philip’s soldiers that day, perhaps five hundred were still alive. It was not enough to put his own officers in command of Elimiote companies, because he did not have enough officers to go round. And Derdas had not been able to mass his whole force in time to face the Macedonians—there were outlying garrisons that did not even hear of the defeat until half a month after it had happened.

  But Elimeia was fractured with as many regional hatreds as the whole of Macedon generally—the plainsmen thought that anyone from the mountains of the west had to be a barbaric monster, and men from the other side of the Siatista Pass spoke a tongue so larded with Illyrian that it was hardly intelligible to someone not born among them. The ties of kinship and clan were what mattered. All of them had followed their own nobles into battle and were loyal chiefly to them.

  So Philip mixed the survivors together like salt and sand. Let them learn a new way to make war among new faces, he thought. Let them learn to be Macedonians.

  A month after the battle, a group of Elimiote nobles sought a private audience with Philip. He knew what they wanted. He had been expecting them.

  “Derdas is gone,” they said. “He will not come back—after what has happened, we do not wish him back—and he was the last of his line. We need a new king.”

  “You have a king,” Philip replied. “His name is Perdikkas.”

  “Perdikkas is in Pella. We know nothing of Perdikkas, and a king is no good if he is always four days’ march away. Men want a king they can see.”

  “What are you proposing?”

  “We wish to propose you to the Assembly of the Elimoitai. You have won the right by force of arms, and you are of royal blood. Besides, you are already more powerful than any king, and men will be less ashamed of their defeat if they can pledge their loyalty to you and not to some stranger. We wish to know if you will accept.”

  “And do the other nobles agree, or do you speak only for yourselves?”

  “We are not fools, My Lord Philip. We need a king, or we will begin to cut each other to pieces—so it has always been. Victory makes a man respected, so better you than anyone else.”

  “I must write to my brother and ask his permission. King or no king, I will remain his subject.”

  “We understand that.”

  “Then I will write.”

  * * *

  At first, when Perdikkas received his brother’s letter, he did not know what to think. “It is largely a question of forms and the tenderness of local pride,” Philip had written. “Like anyone else, they would rather be ruled by a king of their own choosing than occupied by foreigners. In any case, I will have to stay here for some time. The reorganization and retraining of the Elimiote forces is a slow business. Perhaps by late summer we can exchange a few companies with, for instance, one of the garrisons on the eastern frontier…” Philip seemed to consider the matter purely from a practical standpoint, giving the impression he did not care whether he became king of the Elimoitai. And yet he must care. What was in his mind?

  Philip had gone west with an army of a thousand men, mostly infantry, and now it seemed he had picked up, like a copper coin he had found in the street, some three thousand additional cavalry. Further, his reputation as a commander was suddenly enormous—the conquest of Elimeia was on everyone’s lips—so that Perdikkas was sick unto death of hearing his brother’s praises. And now he wanted to be made a king. Of course he wanted it. How could he not want it?

  Perdikkas, who had only recently emerged from the shadow of one brother, now found he had a rival in the other. Philip was creating an army. What would he finally decide to do with it?

  “If someone, myself or some other, does not maintain strong control over this region we are inviting disaster. The nobles are jealous and afraid of each other. If we leave them to themselves, how long will it be before some of them begin to seek the protection of outside alliances? Either we control Elimeia firmly, and from the center, or it will slowly slip away from us.”

  Well, Philip was right about that. The Elimoitai had to have a king, and that king had to be beholden to Macedon.

  But not Philip—anyone but Philip.

  But if not Philip, who?

  A king, it is said, may trust no one. Who could be sent to Aiane who would not begin to fancy himself as an independent power? No one. Absolutely no one.

  Except Philip. For, when he reached the bedrock of his feelings about his brother, Perdikkas knew that Philip would never betray him. With Philip as king of the Elimoitai, he was safe on his eastern borders.

  And there was something to be said for having Philip in Aiane, far away, embroiled in the squabbles of those mountain savages, rather than in Pella, enjoying his reputation as a conqueror. What honors he would expect! Perdikkas would have to raise him to glory, or the world would judge him ungrateful—and perhaps even suspect him of being jealous. It would be intolerable to have him at home.

  Yes, let him be king in his little rock-strewn kingdom—better there than here. Perdikkas decided he would write back at once, giving his permission.

  * * *

  After her brother’s flight, Phila had continued to live in his palace and, in the absence of any sign that she should not, carried on the running of the household, just as she had done since her father’s time. The Lord Philip used the palace as a headquarters, but he did not live there, preferring to sleep in a tent in the encampment his soldiers had erected outside the city while they built an enlargement to the royal barracks. When it was finished, for all she knew, he might sleep there.

  Thus she saw him but rarely, and then only for a moment or two in passing. He might almost have been avoiding her.

  Her astonishment was therefore all the greater when one morning she received an invitation—an invitation that, of course, carried the force of an order—to join him at his midday meal in her brother’s old council room.

  She had not entered that room since before the Lord Philip’s arrival, and now she hardly recognized it. In her brother’s time it been a bare, melancholy place, for Derdas had had little taste for business and hardly ever used it. Now several of the tables were stacked up against the far wall and of the only two that remained one was covered with papers and maps. The Lord Philip was standing behind it with a small group of officers, both Macedonian and Elimiote, clustered around him. She was ten or twelve paces away and he was speaking in a tone too low to allow her to catch the words, but she could hear the peculiar urgency of his voice and she could see from the faces of the men around him how raptly they listened. For that moment at least, he possessed their souls.

  The scene was a kind of emblem, a distilling of all the impressions she had formed of him since the first time he came to try to persuade Derdas to peace. He was serious. He cared nothing for appearances, preferring to see the world as it was and to describe what he saw in blunt, almost brutally truthful words. He was a man other men would follow by instinct.

  It was a moment or two before he was even aware of her presence. Then he looked up and, without smiling, said, “My Lords, we will continue with this another time.”

  A servant brought in a tray of food and laid it on the other table. There was bread and cheese, a bowl of figs, and a small jar of wine. Still standing, the Lord Philip picked up one of the figs and split it open with a knife.

  “Be pleased to sit, Lady,” he said. He seemed absorbed in the process of scraping the meat out of
his fig. “Be good enough to pour us both some wine.”

  Phila poured the wine into two small cups and set the jar back down on the table. She did not drink, however, nor touch the food. It simply did not occur to her.

  “Why have you summoned me, My Lord?”

  “Summoned?” He looked at her and at last smiled, as if her use of the word amused him. “Do you know what is to happen in five days’ time?”

  “There will be an assembly.”

  “And then?”

  “You will be elected king.”

  He sat down, tore off a corner of bread, and dipped it in his wine. He gave no indication that he had even heard her.

  “Will you resent my being king?” he asked. When she did not reply, he leaned a little to the side so that his shoulder touched the wall. For a long time he remained silent, chewing on his piece of bread and studying her face, as if he still expected an answer.

  “I will be king not for my own sake but because it is necessary,” he said at last. “Derdas, even if he returned and my brother pardoned him, could never rule here again—the nobles will not forgive him for betraying them into a humiliating defeat. You do not like to hear this, but it is still the truth. I will be king because there is no one else.”

  Phila could not raise her eyes to look at him. She knew herself to be very close to tears, but it was not his words which pained her. She simply could not bear the pressure of his gaze. What did he want of her?

  “What do you want?”

  The question at least got him to look away. He suddenly became very busy with the bread and cheese, and it occurred to Phila, with something like astonishment, that he was embarrassed.

  “I want to be a good king, true to my brother and to the people of this place. I want to rule in peace, to end all division and hostility.”

  “And what has this to do with me?”

  Now he really was embarrassed—enough so that he actually blushed. It gave her a small feeling of triumph to know that, at least for the moment, she had the advantage over him.