“This was my father’s room,” she said at last, hardly even knowing why, and, when she saw the expression that for an instant crossed her husband’s face, added, “I loved him. I am glad you chose it.”
“I settled on this one because it seemed the most beautiful.” Philip looked around at the walls as if he had never seen them before. “Perhaps I should have consulted one of the old servants.”
“No, you chose well.”
It was true. Her reaction might have been different if marriage had brought her not only to a strange man but a strange house as well, but she felt safe in this room. It located things. All the emotions associated with it were familiar. This way, at least, she had only one new experience ahead of her.
It gave her the courage to take Philip’s hand, and this, perhaps, encouraged him. After a moment he drew the veil from her face, brushing it aside like a cobweb.
“Everything went well,” he said, with a tense little smile—with a slight shock that had as one of its elements a certain feeling of triumph, Phila realized that her new husband was also a little frightened. “Everyone was pleased, I think. I know that I was pleased.”
Somehow, although she was not conscious that either of them had moved, they were no longer side by side but stood facing each other. Philip touched the side of her face and then slowly, as if solely for the pleasure of feeling her hair gliding by beneath his palm, brought his hand around to the back of her neck. They were so close now. He might almost have been asking permission. She raised her head to bring it closer to him, letting her eyes half close.
No one had ever kissed her on the lips. The softness of his mouth, the tickling coarseness of his beard—each of these she felt as a separate experience, and each in its turn was submerged in an ardent beating of her heart that was like fear and yet was not. She was not afraid. Whatever might happen now, she would not resist it. She would welcome it.
Her wedding tunic had a wide neck that left her shoulders almost bare. Her old nurse had made it for her—she had begun sewing months ago, as soon as Phila had spoken to her of the king’s proposal.
“I will feel almost indecent in this,” she had said, but the old woman had merely smiled.
“The veil will cover you, Lady. And for the rest, you will understand well enough in time.”
She understood now, as Philip’s hands moved down her neck and over her shoulders, pushed the fabric aside so that it slid down her arms until she was naked to the waist.
“You are my lord now,” she murmured, putting her arms around his neck, pressing her breasts against the hard muscles of his rib cage. Let him believe what he liked, she meant to ensnare him. “I belong to you, soul and body both. I would not have it other.”
* * *
She awoke sometime in the early hours of the morning. When she went to the window and opened the shutter, the sky was still black. There was no sound of revelry, so the last wedding guest had gone home, and the servants would not be awake yet for a long time. She went back to bed and crawled in again beside her husband, who slept deeply. He did not even stir. She lay there, listening to his breathing, wishing she dared to touch him.
A few hours ago, on the other side of a chasm bridged by a little sleep, she had been someone else. Who had she been? She could hardly remember. That other self was almost a stranger to her now, and she could only look back to her with a certain amused pity. For now she was the wife of the Lord Philip, prince of Macedon and king of the Elimoitai—Philip, her husband. She must begin to think of him now as simply Philip. In this room, in this bed, that was his only name and title.
And now her womb held his seed.
There had been pain. At first the urgency and power of his lust had been terrifying. But all fear, all pain, all sense of self were quickly overwhelmed.
Was it this way for all women? Had it been this way for her mother? Her mother had died, leaving so much unsaid that it was possible to mourn her loss all over again.
But she could not believe that it could be thus for all women—all women were not married to Philip.
Some men, it was said, shamed the very gods with their mortal splendor, so that they became the darlings of heaven. Surely Philip was one of these. The conqueror of an army that should have crushed him as easily as a hammer crushes a grape, a king before he was twenty—surely he could not be like other men.
And therefore this happiness could not be like the happiness of other women, and therefore it could not long survive.
In the darkness of her wedding night, Phila heard the beating of death’s black wings and knew that her hour would be brief.
Yet what was even death, measured against this?
29
“You look tired, My Lord. You should spend less time in bed.” This, followed by much laughter. Philip found himself the butt of many such jests during the first few weeks after his marriage. He took them in good part, for he was not one to stand on his dignity and it is the lot of every new husband to provide his friends with occasions to exercise their wit. In this, a king was no different from any other man.
Besides, Philip had decided that he liked his new wife. What had begun as a duty of state was developing into a positive pleasure. When he came home after a day with his troops Phila would rub the stiffness out of his muscles and listen to his descriptions of how the training went. He could talk to her about his plans for the nation because she was not interested in power but in him. It was a great relief simply to be able to speak of these things.
“You may wish to take a concubine,” his friend Lachios had told him when Philip had confided his marriage plans to him. “I know nothing of the Lady Phila—I have not spoken five words to her in my life—but these high-born women are not raised to be very comforting. They will bear you sons, but they are too proud and too cold for a man to find much entertainment in their beds. So, when you have done your duty you are free to take a little diversion with some pretty baggage who knows how to spread her legs. I have three or four in my own household who would do nicely. When you are ready, let me know and I will make you a present of whichever pleases you best.”
It was an offer kindly meant and, as they had both been a little drunk at the time, Philip had thanked him profusely and called him a good fellow, clapping him on the back until he almost knocked the wind out of him. Yet now, after just a few days of marriage, he did not see himself visiting Lachios’s slave girls to make a selection.
The Lady Phila was neither proud nor cold. She welcomed him into her bed with what almost amounted to gratitude and, while she seemed to know absolutely nothing about the commerce between men and women, she was eager to learn and even more eager to please. Madzos, who had been fond of saying that a tavern girl in Thebes ends by understanding more of the senses than all the whores in Corinth, would have laughed to know that some of her vast knowledge in these matters was now being hungrily received by the sixteen-year-old consort of a barbarian king.
This passion was different from any other he had known in his life. With Arsinoe, during their one night together, he had been consumed almost as much by fear as by desire—fear of that unknown, dreaded, yet enticing thing, the body of one’s beloved. Perhaps, had they had the chance to know each other a little, it might have been different, but as it was their brief coming together had remained in Philip’s memory as an experience of almost inhuman intensity, a moment incapable of being repeated. A moment he was not even sure he would wish repeated.
With every woman he had known since, the whores of Thebes and Athens, even Madzos, there had been only lust, which was perhaps the most businesslike of all the appetites that afflict mankind. It was like getting drunk, except that one enjoyed it with a certain cold detachment. Madzos, for all that they had slept together so long a time, did not even weep when he had to leave her. And for himself he had never spent a moment in longing for her. It was simply over, and the flesh has no memory.
But with Phila it went beyond mere flesh, and yet, strangely, it
was as relaxed and unalloyed a satisfaction as the eating of a good dinner. It was like having a purse full of money to spend on nothing but one’s own amusement. And there was something too of the gentle, unself-conscious happiness one feels in the company of small children, a sense of the world’s original goodness and innocence. It was the pleasure of giving pleasure. It was an escape from the tyranny of the self.
“Is it different for a man?” she asked him once.
“The poets say that when Tiresias, who for a time inhabited a woman’s body, was asked by Zeus and Hera which of the sexes had the greater pleasure in love, he declared in favor of women. I myself am not in a position to confirm his judgment, but I suspect that it is not far wrong.”
And Phila blushed when she heard this. Even in the dim, flickering light from the single oil lamp that rested beside their bed, he could see that her cheeks were flushed—it was not much different from when she was in the throes of her passion. Philip discovered that the sight aroused him, and he buried his face between her breasts.
“I think it is sharper for a man,” she said at last, stroking his hair while he kissed the tips of her nipples. “It seems almost like pain.”
“Sometimes it is.”
* * *
But it was not his marriage that filled Philip’s life. His marriage, happy as it made him, was merely a resting place, a refuge at the end of the day, a means of escaping. What occupied his mind, and took pride of place in his heart, was the task of kingship. This, he was beginning to understand, was the reason he had been born.
And the task demanded his full attention, for a change of rulers always draws the eye of ambition. And when a king has been deposed or killed, neighboring powers, like the wolves that follow a herd of deer, waiting to pull down the weak and the stragglers, look for the signs of chaos and disunity. They hope to exploit a weakness, to gain some advantage or merely to plunder. So it was when the Fates pulled Ptolemy down—many besides Derdas saw a chance to raid across the border into Macedon. So it was when Philip pulled Derdas down.
By spring Philip was receiving letters from his brother Perdikkas that the Eordoi, whose kingdom was just north of Elimeia, had entered into some sort of treaty with King Menelaos of Lynkos, which put them at liberty to threaten the cities of the western plains. Edessa was already under more or less constant attack.
“Apparently they are not impressed by the example of the Elimoitai,” Perdikkas complained. “I cannot afford to reinforce the western garrisons.”
“You cannot afford not to,” Philip wrote back. “Raise an army and show King Aias and our beloved uncle that you still have your teeth.”
“I raised an army,” Perdikkas replied tartly. “You have it.”
Which posed Philip an interesting problem—he was his brother’s subject and his new army, made up of Macedonians and Elimoitai, needed blooding. But he was also the king of Elimeia, and his subjects would not relish the idea of fighting a war simply to accommodate the king in Pella. He required a pretext.
Fortunately, Aias was happy to oblige.
On the fifth day in the month of Daisios, when the snow had begun to disappear from the ground, Eordian infantry ambushed a squadron of Elimiote soldiers conducting a peaceful border patrol. They caught them in a gorge and rained down arrows from the heights until the patrol commander was forced to surrender. Then they massacred the survivors. They even cut the throats of the horses.
Aias offered a lame apology, claiming that the patrol had strayed into his territory, but it was merely a test to see how much the new king of the Elimoitai was prepared to swallow. By the time he received it, Philip and a force of fifteen hundred infantry and four hundred horse were already on the march north.
Philip was at war; he had no interest in conducting raids. The villages through which he passed were required to provision his men and horses, but they were not otherwise molested. He was across the border for only eight days and fought two engagements.
The first of these was little more than a skirmish. It lasted not even an hour, by the end of which two hundred and seventy men, most of them the enemy, were left dead on the field. Two days later Aias had assembled over three thousand men and the battle lasted all morning and half the afternoon, but long before then it was clear that the king of the Eordoi simply did not know how to deal with this new kind of warfare. He squandered wave after wave of cavalry trying to crack the Elimiote infantry formations, and in the end he had to call a truce and inquire if King Philip would be willing to settle for terms. Philip counted up the casualties—one hundred and twelve dead and seventy-two wounded among his own men against nearly a thousand of the enemy, almost all of them either dead or dying—and demanded a hundred thousand silver drachmas in tribute, thirty-six villages, a repudiation of the treaty with Lynkos, an end to the attacks against Edessa, and Aias’s two eldest sons as hostages. Aias had no choice but to accept.
When Philip returned to Aiane, he wrote to his brother, “By your leave, I will bring my bride to Pella this summer to be received by you. I will also bring King Aias’s eldest son and heir, who is a well-mannered boy but very frightened. I have promised I will not let you chop off his head and eat it. We will have no further trouble with the father.”
Perdikkas, who had already received the Lynkestian ambassador and therefore knew what had happened, was apparently not amused. In his reply he made hardly any reference to the victory, but he demanded the return of the two hundred horse that had made up Philip’s original force of cavalry.
By the time this exchange of letters took place, both of Aias’s sons, who were nine and twelve years old, had adjusted to captivity so well that indeed they hoped it would never end.
The elder of the two boys, Deucalion, was just old enough to look about him and be struck by the differences between Aiane and home, between King Philip and his own father. Some of these became apparent to him during the course of his first night in the Elimiote capital, when he was distinguished from his brother Ctesios by being allowed to attend a banquet of the king’s companions.
“Brothers, let me make known to you our honored guest,” King Philip roared, climbing onto a table to make the announcement and half dragging the still terrified boy up after him. “This fine lad here is Prince Deucalion, son and heir to Aias, king of the Eordoi. Let us welcome and befriend him, for he has the makings of a Macedonian. What say you—is he not old enough to eat with the men?”
This suggestion was greeted with cheers and followed by an extraordinary initiation ceremony in which the king and his nobles took turns carrying the boy around the banqueting hall on their shoulders. When it was over, and he had been welcomed into the company of the companions, Deucalion was so flushed with happiness and pride that he would have laid down his life for King Philip.
Such a thing could never have happened at home. For while King Philip seemed to trust his nobles sufficiently that they dared to speak their minds in his presence and to treat him as a man among other men, a first among equals but still an equal, in his father’s court the king was accorded almost godlike honors by men who were constantly intriguing against him.
Deucalion knew that one day he would succeed his father as king, but as king of what? Aias was little more than a tribal leader, endlessly threatened by his nobles, each with his own retainers, loyal only to him, and his own ambitions. Any one of these might be scheming to supplant their king. It was not even certain that Aias would survive the crisis of his defeat at the hands of the Elimoitai, that he would even be in a position to pass on the crown to his son. Once he realized that he would not be mistreated by his captors, Deucalion was very well pleased to be out of Eordia, where, if his father fell from power, he and his little brother Ctesios were certain to be murdered.
How different was the atmosphere of the Elimiote court, where all authority seemed to flow from a single source, where every man, noble, and common soldier alike was the king’s man, his loyal servant. This was not power that, like a snake grasp
ed too far back from the head, turned to wound the hand that held it. This was power that operated for the safety of all.
And how different a man was King Philip.
Deucalion could not have said how long he had been aware that his father was widely hated. Such an understanding is like a mosaic that is created in one’s mind piece by piece until gradually, in a process too slow and indirect for one to be genuinely aware of it, a general outline of the truth emerges. He simply knew that everyone, from the nobles to the slaves who swept the stones of the palace courtyard, looked upon the Lord Aias with a mixture of hatred and fear. If he had thought about it at all, it had struck him that being hated and feared was a perfectly normal consequence of being a king. How could it be otherwise when men will obey nothing except the power that otherwise threatens to destroy them? Such power cannot help but make a man cruel, since he must be cruel if he is to keep it. “Everyone is envious,” his father had once told Deucalion. “Everyone wishes he were in my place—you will learn this well enough when you are king.”
Yet King Philip said that cruelty was an admission of weakness, that men are cruel only when they are afraid. “If you must frighten a man into obedience, he will betray you when he has the chance. And sooner or later he will have the chance. Loyalty is not made by breaking bones.”
He did not even like to whip his soldiers. When Deucalion asked him why, he seemed not to understand the question. “Why should I whip them? They do their best. Each man knows his survival in battle depends on the courage and skill of the men next to him. That is enough.”
And it was true. Philip’s soldiers—that was what they called themselves, “Philip’s soldiers”—were ashamed to be thought slack. It was actually considered an honor to fight in the front ranks. “That is where our king fights,” they would say.
The Macedonian Page 32
