“It is the duty of a king to protect his people,” he said in what sounded like a rehearsed speech, “both during his own lifetime and after his death. A king needs an heir. I would take you to wife, My Lady.”
For a moment she was not sure if she remembered how to breathe. If someone had asked her how she felt, she could not have told them. She did not feel anything really, except a shock of surprise that blotted out everything else.
Was he still speaking? Yes, he was.
“I am sorry, Lady. I have no wish to offend you and I am sure you find the subject distressing, but since you have no male relatives with whom to arrange matters—at least, none who are in a position to act for you—I have no choice but to approach you directly. Yet have no fear that I will compel you to this marriage, Lady. If the idea is distasteful to you, or if you feel you cannot in honor accept, then I will give you one of the royal estates and you can live there as you see fit. It would be for the best, however, if you did accept. You are the last of the old line.”
“Is that all you want?” she asked. “Legitimacy?”
“I won my ‘legitimacy,’ as you choose to call it, with the point of my sword.” His fingers closed around the rim of his wine cup and she was not sure he would not crush it to powder, he seemed so angry. “I am to be king by vote of the Elimiote Assembly, and they think I do them a great favor to accept. They are right to think so. But I would put an end to old divisions—for the good of the nation.”
“For the good of which nation?” she asked, not even knowing why she felt so wounded. “The Elimoitai or the Macedonians?”
As she sat there, as he watched her through his beautiful blue-gray eyes—eyes as coldly intelligent as a cat’s—she felt once more her heart dissolving into tears.
Yet she must not weep. The royal women of Elimeia did not weep before strangers. She would rather die than show the Lord Philip what she felt.
“The Elimoitai are Macedonians.” His fingers relaxed around the wine cup and he picked it up but did not raise it to his lips. “We are one people. We must be one people.
“Consider my offer,” he said as if they were discussing the price of a horse. “I would like an answer before the assembly meets.
“One thing—if you decide to accept, you must put aside your loyalty to your brother.”
“I have betrayed him once already. Is that not sufficient assurance?”
“No.” He shook his head. “When a woman marries she leaves one family and joins another. Her husband’s enemies become her own. I simply want you to be clear in your own mind what is possible for you.”
She rose from the table and, before he could stop her, bowed to him.
“Thank you, My Lord. You shall have my answer before the assembly meets.”
When she was alone in her room, when there was no one to see, Phila wept at last. She wept as if her breast would crack. She wept until the tears parched her throat, until there were no more tears left.
And as she lay across her bed, with the door safely bolted, she weighed in her mind what a weak and inconsiderable thing a woman was. Did the Lord Philip want her? For herself did he want her? It was even possible he did, but it would not matter to him if he did not. What he proposed was a dynastic alliance, the sort of marriage she had been raised to expect would be her destiny, yet to hear him propose it was bitter. To be sent away from home, away from one’s family, to be the bride of a stranger—this she knew she could have borne with a lighter heart. But to be the wife of Philip of Macedon, and only because he judged it best, for the good of the nation …
Because she did love him. Perhaps she had loved him since that first moment, in her father’s old garden—she was not sure. She only knew that she would have committed any crime he asked of her.
Was that why she had raised the gate against Derdas? She had not thought so at the time, but now she was no longer sure. She would never be sure.
Yes, take me if you want me, she thought. And I will love you with a woman’s abject, ignoble love. Even if you never look at me, if I never see your smile, I will love you until I die.
28
Five days later, at first light, the Elimoitai met in assembly. A motion was put forward to formally depose King Derdas and it was carried by noisy acclaim. When Philip was hailed as the new king, men gathered around him to beat their swords against their breastplates and shout his name in the traditional display of allegiance. No one had spoken against him because, even if the Macedonian army had not been camped outside the gates of Aiane, there was no other candidate whose election would not have meant civil war. Everyone knew that the life of this lowlander was now all that stood between them and chaos.
When the dog had been cut in half and its blood sprinkled across the road from the amphitheater, Philip led the members of the army, now his subjects, to the temple district, there to purify their weapons and to make sacrifice at the shrine of Zeus. He entered alone, as was the custom, and, as chief priest of the Elimoitai, made sacrifice at the altar fire, offering the thighbone of an ox, wrapped in the animal’s own fat. The fire blazed up, which was considered a lucky omen.
Outside, the ceremony over, he found nearly the entire population of the city gathered to hail him. Their cheers rang in his ears, and he raised his spear in the traditional greeting.
Will you be a king, Philip? Great-Grandfather has said I am to be the bride of a great king someday.
Little Audata, clutching her knees, sitting on the rim of a stone cistern, inquiring if he was to be her destiny. Why, suddenly, had that particular memory floated into his consciousness? How long ago it seemed.
“Yes,” he whispered to himself, listening to the cheers of people who only a few months before had been his enemies, who now had delivered their fates into his hands. “Yes, I am now a king. But it comes too late for us.”
He could not have explained why, at this his moment of triumph, he felt so peculiarly desolate.
Later in the day there was feasting and games. The Elimoitai and Philip’s own soldiers competed on equal terms, dividing the prizes between them. Philip, breaking his own rule, competed in the horse race and won.
The next day, very quietly, the Lady Phila’s possessions were transported to a royal estate within an hour’s journey of the city. As king, Philip now felt obliged to take up residence in the palace, so for propriety’s sake she had to leave. She would stay away until she returned as a bride.
They had agreed that the marriage would take place in the month of Peritios, a propitious time. It would be heavy winter by then, but Philip was not sorry for the delay. He wished to be established as ruler in the people’s minds before he took a wife from the old ruling house. He did not wish to create the impression that he was trying to strengthen his claim.
As king he now held all of the treasury and royal estates as his personal property. In law, the Lady Phila had nothing. Her very life was at Philip’s disposal. Had he wished to, he could have sold her into slavery.
But it would have shamed her to come into marriage thus destitute, so he signed over to her the estate where she was now living, along with thirty thousand Athenian silver drachmas to provide her with a dowry.
They would see each other but infrequently before the betrothal ceremony, only a few days prior to the wedding. It would not be seemly if they were known to be meeting, for all that an hour’s ride was hardly the journey of a lifetime.
Yet he had much to keep the Lady Phila from his thoughts. The enlargements on the royal barracks were proceeding at a rapid pace, and Philip, who knew enough firsthand of carpentry and stonemasonry to take a real interest in the work, was on the site every day, often for several hours. The Elimoitai wondered that a king should sometimes carry building stones on his own back or give audience to his ministers while he plastered a wall, but they were not displeased. Men are rarely disappointed to find that their ruler is concerned with everything that affects them, and Philip, it was soon apparent, worked at being a good king.
Glaukon took over the management of the royal household, serving his foster son as he and his fathers before him had served the kings of Macedon for generations. When he was not entertaining his nobles, and there was no occasion to dine in state, Philip would go to the old man’s apartments and the two of them would eat their dinner out of a common pot.
Most of Philip’s time was given over to the reform of the army. He trained with his men, sparing himself no more than they. The Macedonian soldiers were used to constant drill, but the Elimoitai were not and, at least at first, complained loudly.
“You have tasted defeat once already,” he told them, “and near half your number are now in their burial urns. I mean to see that you never dine from that dish again.”
The complaints stopped.
There were also financial matters that needed attention. Philip had Derdas’s treasurer flogged out of the city, the royal accounts were in such a deplorable state. He introduced a more orderly system of record keeping that he had learned in Thebes and made a practice of checking the accounts himself.
Added to this there were the estates of the Elimoitai to be disposed of. The heirs of men who had fallen in honorable combat beneath the walls of Aiane did not lose their rights—no one would be punished for having done his duty—but the property of those who had fled with Derdas was forfeit, and many among the dead had left no issue. Thus vast holdings in land, cattle, sheep, houses, granaries, and mills had reverted to the crown.
Philip used them to reward those among his own men who had distinguished themselves in the recent battle. Common soldiers received grants of land and livestock so that they could settle in Elimeia and begin a new life. Some he even ennobled. Many took wives from among the local women and settled down comfortably among neighbors who had recently been their enemies in war, becoming themselves Elimoitai. By these means did the new king bind the nation to himself, and to Macedon.
But from time to time, in the midst of these duties, Philip would simply disappear for an afternoon. His ministers and officers would search for him in vain, and even Glaukon professed ignorance.
“Perhaps he has gone hunting,” the old man would say, with a slight smile that the nobles of Elimeia found maddening—yet who would dare even to raise his voice to the king’s chief steward, who enjoyed his master’s perfect confidence?
“That is nonsense. A king does not go hunting alone.”
“Even a king does many things alone, and this king more than most. Yet have no fear, for he will return before the gates are closed.”
And when he did return, riding his great black stallion but without even the carcass of a wild pig to show for his trouble, if anyone asked him where he had been he would fix them with a stare calculated to ensure they would be careful never to repeat the question.
On these occasions, in fact, Philip was with his intended bride. He knew he should stay away—that simple prudence and a decent respect for custom dictated that he should stay away—yet he was drawn to her, almost against his will.
He was not in love. Love, for Philip, was a curse, a kind of madness that descended upon those whom the gods wished to destroy. His mother had been in love, and that fury had ended many lives. No, he was not in love. He would have said, if anyone had had the temerity to ask him, that he was curious. He wanted to know this woman, to see into her heart, for much might depend upon the temper of her nature. After all, one day she might have a future king suckling at her breast.
Yet what he would not have acknowledged, since he hardly even knew it himself, was that in the Lady Phila’s presence he knew at last a little peace. Her gentle voice soothed him, and her smile softened the loneliness that seemed to fill his soul as the air does an empty jar. Philip had grown to manhood knowing himself to be profoundly alone, yet for a few hours, in the presence of this woman, the world seemed a less abandoned place.
Yet he was not in love.
“Next summer I will take you to Pella,” he said to her one autumn afternoon. They were strolling through the estate’s orchard, and fallen leaves were skimming across the ground in a wind that came from the mountains that looked incredibly distant against the northern horizon but were in fact not even a day’s ride away. “I will show you the sea.”
“I have never seen it. What is it like?”
“Cold and wet.” Philip grinned. He had taken her hand as they walked, and she had not resisted. It was the first time he had ever touched her.
“Will you go to Pella to see your brother?” The question sounded so innocent on her lips that Philip could not help glancing at her to be sure she did not mean something else.
“Yes, to see my brother.” He shrugged. He did not want to talk about his brother. He wanted to talk about how the wind caught at strands of her black hair and made them seem to dance. “I suspect he will not be glad to see me, but it will reassure him to find I have left my army at home.”
“He does not trust you, then?”
“He is a king. A king trusts no one, members of his own family perhaps least of all.”
He saw her face darken a little and wished he had not spoken. Of course she would hear his words as a personal allusion, or at least remember what she had done to her own brother.
“My brother has not had an easy life,” he said, trying to draw her mind away. “He had the misfortune of being raised by our mother.”
“And you were not?”
“No, I was not. I was put to nurse with the chief steward’s wife the night I was born. I have always counted it a blessing, but perhaps it accounts for the fact that people say I have more the look of a stable hand than a king.”
She did not smile at the jest.
“I have never heard anyone say such a thing,” she answered.
“Then perhaps they do not. Perhaps I only say it to myself. I have never regretted that I am as I am. But it does not make me feel very kingly.”
“My brother thought that to be a king was to be above the cares of other men, and it brought him to ruin. I think you are wiser than that.”
In a surge of tender gratitude he carried her hand to his lips and kissed her fingers. For a moment they stood like that, her hand folded between both of his, and there were the beginnings of tears in her eyes. He could sense that she was trembling, and he knew that if he reached out to take her, she would surrender herself to him, that in this moment she would deny him nothing. Yet he did not reach out. He wanted her so that his body seemed to ache, but in the end he did nothing. She would go to her bridal bed without self-reproach and, for the moment, it was enough to know he was loved. That knowledge was better than the fulfillment of desire.
The moment passed and they walked on together.
* * *
On the third day of the month of Peritios an Elimiote noble named Lachios vacated his house in Aiane in favor of the Lady Phila. Lachios had led the second cavalry charge against the Macedonians, but he had since conceived a great admiration for Philip, who regarded him as a friend and trusted him enough to take him into his confidence. Lachios moved in with his brother-in-law, who was mystified but willing to remain so when told it was the king’s will, and the Lady Phila slept that night a mere two minutes’ walk from the palace where she had lived most of her life.
The next morning a contingent from the royal household staff, headed by the chief steward himself, arrived to take over the kitchen and to prepare the main reception rooms. That afternoon Philip summoned some hundred of his principle nobles to attend him at the house of Lachios, and when they had arrived and had been offered wine and sesame cakes the king appeared before them, leading a woman by the hand. The woman wore a white tunic and her head was veiled.
“It is my desire to take for wife the Lady Phila, a daughter of the late royal house. Will you accept me, My Lady?”
“I will accept you, My Lord.”
“Then I hereby publish our betrothal and make it known to all men.”
Except for the fact that the Lady Phila h
ad no male relative to speak for her, all had proceeded according to established custom. Nevertheless, the assembled guests were surprised into a silence that was only broken when someone shouted from the back of the room, “May the gods bless this marriage with many sons!” Lachios stood grinning while everyone else took up his cry.
Thus did the people of Elimeia discover that their king was about to take a consort.
Three evenings later there was a full moon. In her apartments the Lady Phila performed the ceremony of dedicating her childish toys to the goddess Artemis and then, veiled as before, descended the great staircase to where a much larger company was assembled to witness her marriage to King Philip. Prayers were offered, with the king himself acting as priest, and a lamb, together with a lock of the bride’s hair, was sacrificed at the household altar. Then there was a feast, lavish and joyful, but, as the women dined in another room, Phila did not see her new husband again until it was announced that the wedding car was at the door.
Philip was waiting for her at the entrance hall. He smiled, looking a trifle nervous, and held out his hand to her. When the door was opened it was discovered that a snowfall had begun and was already nearly a span deep. This was considered a good omen.
As they stepped into the chariot, which was drawn by a pair of perfect white mares, the guests assembled around it, all of them bearing torches, and began to sing the wedding song. They walked beside the car, still singing, their torches seeming to burn like stars in the cold night air, all the way to the palace, where they were greeted with volleys of confetti that mixed strangely with the falling snow.
A chamberlain brought out a silver platter bearing a single quince, symbol of fertility. Phila took it and, lifting her veil, began to eat. When she was finished the guests raised a loud cheer and Philip reached down to embrace his bride around the thighs. He picked her up and carried her across the threshold.
The guests never stopped singing, not until the wedding pair had been conducted to their bridal chamber, which was garlanded with flowers and scented with oil of hyacinth. The door was closed behind them and they stood together in the vast room. Neither moved or spoke until the laughter of the guests, the very sound of their voices, had died away.
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