The Macedonian

by Nicholas Guild

  “I think you are afraid.” Perdikkas stood up, assuming a posture that would have been challenging if the two men had not been three or four paces apart.

  “Of this? Yes! If you start a war with Athens, you will be committing a piece of folly that will be remembered for a thousand years. Shall that be your memorial, brother? Are you so eager to be the last king of Macedon?”

  “I think you are afraid,” Perdikkas repeated, precisely as if Philip had not spoken. “You have made a great name for yourself by crushing a few hill tribes, and you cannot bear the thought of seeing your glory eclipsed—not even by your elder brother and king!”

  Philip glanced at the door, wondering whether anyone had heard the shouting and would come bursting in to see if the king was being murdered. Perhaps it was well that neither of them was armed, for Perdikkas was quite red in the face and the veins in his neck stood out like cords.

  “So it is about glory, is it?” Philip asked, provokingly calm. “You would be a great conqueror? Then don’t go to war with Athens. If you like, I will undertake to stay home in bed next time there is a border incident with Eordia. Just don’t go to war with Athens. If I truly saw myself as your rival, I would encourage you to do this thing, for in your place I would never do it.”

  “Leave my presence, Philip.”

  For a long time after Philip had gone away, Perdikkas sat at the table in his room, drinking what was left of the wine that had been brought him with breakfast. The wine was mixed with water at two parts to five, but Perdikkas was normally abstemious in his habits so even thus weakened it blurred the edges of things nicely. If it had not been for the wine, he thought, he might have choked on his own anger.

  Why did his younger brother have this effect on him? He did not really believe that Philip begrudged him a share of triumph. Jealousy was simply not part of his nature, and he had never been anything except the most loyal of friends. In their childhood Philip had always defended him, even against Alexandros. Perhaps that was the reason. It was galling to be under the protection of one’s little brother.

  Yet he could not in justice blame Philip for that. Somehow he would have to make this disagreeable squabble up with him. Besides, he would need Philip’s support if anything went wrong with this Athenian venture.

  Not that anything would go wrong. What with the Athenians still smarting from their defeat at Amphipolis, Euphraeos thought this an excellent opportunity to drive them out of the gulf—and Euphraeos was a far shrewder judge of these matters than Philip. Philip was a good soldier, but he was no statesman.

  * * *

  It is always more difficult to patch up a quarrel than to make one. Perdikkas thought it might be enough to signal the end of his wrath with some public compliment, but when he found out that Philip was actually making preparations to depart for Elimeia he at last had to humble himself to the extent of going to his brother and admitting that he had simply lost his temper. It was well that Philip was not one to nurse a grievance, admitting that he too had probably spoken intemperately and dismissing the whole business as a stupid misunderstanding, because Perdikkas had gone as far as he felt his dignity as king would permit him.

  In any case, when the day came Philip was still in Pella to attend his brother’s betrothal ceremony.

  The bride was indeed a beauty. Her name was Arete and she had honey-colored hair, delicate features, and skin of such clarity that one could almost see through it. She was about fifteen and seemed a quiet girl, completely overwhelmed by her sudden elevation. Philip noticed that she hardly dared raise her eyes to her intended husband’s face.

  “I think, to use my brother’s phrase, she will do well enough,” Philip told his wife that night as he lay on their bed, watching her braid up her hair. She sat in front of a bronze mirror, her naked back to him, and he thought, as he did almost every night, that Phila had very fine arms. “I hope, when she ceases to be afraid of him, she will be clever enough not to let him know it. Perdikkas will be better pleased by a show of the most dreadful awe.”

  “Are you very disappointed in him, then?”

  Philip did not move, but his wife, had she turned around, might have noticed that her fine arms no longer held his gaze. His attention was turned inward as he considered if he had said too much.

  He did not like to criticize Perdikkas, but that, it seemed, was what he had done. Yes, he decided, he was disappointed, although it would not do to say so.

  “I spoke a few words to her tonight,” she went on, when she realized that the only answer she would receive was silence. “She seems pleasant and sweet—perhaps she will make your brother happy.”

  “Not as happy as you have made me.”

  She glanced over her shoulder and saw that he was smiling, which at least meant that he was not offended.

  “But the chief happiness Perdikkas expects from a wife is a son. He will breathe easier, I think, when he has another heir than me.”

  After a few minutes, Phila blew out the oil lamp and crawled into bed beside her husband. She ran the palm of her hand over his chest and down where she could feel the ropelike muscles along his rib cage. His whole body, she thought, was like living stone.

  “Will you breathe easier when you have an heir?” she asked.

  “Perhaps my subjects will.”

  It took a moment before the implications of the question made their impression, but when they did it was as if he had been struck a blow. He simply stared at her, his mind unable even to form a sentence.

  “I am with child,” she said at last, out of simple mercy. “I had suspected even before we left Aiane, but now I am sure. Are you pleased?”

  She pressed herself closer to him as, apparently, he tried to decide.

  “I … I … I don’t know—yes, of course I am pleased. Are you really sure?”

  With great care, Philip placed his hand on her naked belly.

  “You won’t find any change yet, and, yes, I am sure.” She brought his hand up to her breast. “The baby is months away yet, and in the meantime I won’t break.”

  * * *

  Within a month of its beginning, Perdikkas’s campaign to liberate the cities of Pydna and Methone came to grief. The snow from the last winter storm was still fresh on the ground when he marched his army down the road that ran along the western coast of the Thermaic Gulf, and by the beginning of spring he was sitting in a tent, across a table from the Athenian general Kallisthenes, discussing the conditions on which the king of Macedon would be allowed to sue for peace.

  He had not even the consolation of a glorious and dramatic failure, for there had been only two engagements, during both of which the only strategic choices open to the Macedonians were a hasty withdrawal or total annihilation. The Athenians had reinforced their garrisons at breathtaking speed, with the result that Perdikkas’s rather pitiful offensive was simply overwhelmed.

  Kallisthenes, when they met to parley, seemed rather amused by the whole business. Like someone slapping a small child’s hand for stealing apples, he offered remarkably easy terms. He demanded an indemnity of one hundred thousand silver drachmas, ransom for all Macedonian soldiers held as prisoners, and a restoration of the alliance. Considering that there was really no force worth mentioning between his soldiers and Pella, it was a surprising display of generosity. In person he was very considerate of the young king’s feelings, almost consoling—his triumph had been that complete.

  “War is a hard teacher, but eventually a commander learns to know the limits of the possible,” he said, offering his former antagonist a cup of wine. “As a young man I made some horrific mistakes, just as bad as this, but fortunately I was still a subordinate officer. It is a cruel thing to have the full responsibility thrust on one so early.”

  It was a punishment more bitter than death to have to listen to such things and know they were not the worst that could be said. The worst would come when the prisoners were returned.

  When Philip learned that several of his Elimiote hor
semen had been captured, he wrote inquiring about the amount of ransom demanded for them and sent it as soon as he received his brother’s reply. The silver was brought under military escort and Perdikkas had it within half a month of his surrender to Kallisthenes.

  His own treasury was nearly empty and he would be hard pressed to meet the rest of the Athenian demands. He toyed with the idea of using Philip’s silver to ransom his own soldiers and leaving the Elimoitai to wear out their lives as quarry slaves, but in the end he simply didn’t dare. He knew Philip would never forgive him such a piece of treachery and he needed his brother’s loyalty more than ever now. It rankled almost as much as defeat itself, but he simply could not dispense with Philip.

  And so Perdikkas was condemned to suffer the return from captivity of the Elimiote cavalry, and among them was their commander, Lachios.

  It was a miracle the man was even alive—a miracle yet, from Perdikkas’s point of view, very far from a blessing. A javelin had gone straight through his thigh and killed the horse he was riding. The only thing that saved him from bleeding to death was the fact that the Macedonian defeat had been so swift that he was captured and put under the care of Athenian physicians almost as soon as he hit the ground. Twenty-five days later, he had to be carried back across the truce line on a litter.

  When Lachios arrived in Pella he was offered the use of apartments in the royal palace, but instead he moved into a vacant house near the harbor, where he was attended by his own servants. A slave woman who had been his concubine for years cooked his meals, going to the public market every morning to purchase fresh vegetables and meat. He would have nothing from the king’s kitchen. No physician was allowed to dress his wounds except old Nikomachos, and he only because Lachios had once heard Philip speak of him as a man to be trusted. Whether this behavior was motivated by fear of assassination or by a simple disinclination to accept anything from Perdikkas’s hand was not easy to say.

  The king visited him once, and only once, a few days after his arrival in the city. Lachios was still in a weakened condition, but during that visit his shouting could be heard all over the house.

  “And when you write to King Philip,” he bellowed after Perdikkas as the latter tried to take his leave, “you may assure him that I will be back in Elimeia as soon as I can sit a horse! And you may further tell him that it is my intention to remain there as long as his blundering fool of a brother is king of Macedon!”

  Perdikkas’s reply, if any, is not recorded.

  31

  In Elimeia the winter was slow to release its grip. The ground remained frozen even late into the month of Xandikos, and as Phila neared her travail the clouds above Aiane were dark and laden with snow.

  It had been a difficult pregnancy. She had begun to bleed almost as soon as they returned from Pella, and the bleeding had never really stopped. On the advice of her physician, a clever little Cypriot with a pointed beard who enjoyed a great reputation in treating women’s complaints, Philip took her to a royal hunting lodge closer to the mountains, but the solitude seemed only to depress her. When she began to fancy that the child was dead in her womb, he brought her home again. It made no difference to her health, but at least she was quieter in her mind.

  At the beginning of the seventh month, the Cypriot said he did not like the color of the blood she was passing and ordered her to keep to her bed.

  “Protect your child and yourself,” he said. “Do not allow yourself to become excited, for there is nothing to fear.” Privately he told Philip that if she began to show little rosy patches in her face, he despaired of her living to reach full term.

  One morning at the beginning of her last month, Philip noticed what looked like a little spider’s web of broken veins on her left cheek. He said nothing to her, but later that day he went to the shrine of Hera, goddess of childbearing, and made offerings of a wheat cake and some cuttings from his beard.

  Perhaps the goddess was pleased, since Phila lived out that final month.

  Yet she must have sensed the loss of some inner harmony, for she knew she was in danger. “I can accept death if our son lives,” she said suddenly one evening, while Philip was trying to distract her with a letter he had received from Aristotle in Athens.

  “You will not die, and the child will not die.” He smiled and took her hand. “And the child may be a daughter.”

  “The child will be a son. I can feel him kicking at night—I know he will be a boy.”

  She said no more after that and he continued to read to her from the letter, but he could tell from the expression on her face that she was not really listening.

  She hardly slept at night and when she did she was tormented by frightful dreams. The physician said there was nothing sinister about a woman’s having nightmares when her womb was heavy, but it frightened Philip a little that his wife never wanted to tell him what she dreamed. Sometimes she woke him with her screaming, and he would hold her in his arms until she was calm again, but if he asked what had frightened her, she was always silent.

  At first he thought it was just another dream when one night he was awakened by a sound like wailing and the pressure of her hand on his face.

  “It is only the wind you hear,” he said, still half-asleep, and he turned to offer her the comfort of his embrace.

  “Get the physician. My pains are beginning.”

  He was wide awake now. With a single quick movement he was on his knees beside her, his hand resting on her swollen belly. He was suddenly more afraid than he had ever been in his life, even in battle.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. Get him.”

  In the next instant Philip was running down a palace corridor, struggling to cover his nakedness with a tunic while he tried to remember where he was going. For the last several nights, he had given orders that a servant was to be stationed outside his door, but when the moment came the fellow was asleep on his stool and, in any case, Philip did not even notice him or remember his existence.

  The physician had been given a room close to the king’s own apartments. Philip kicked at the bottom of the door and shouted as if to raise the whole palace.

  “Machaon! Wake up in there! We need you now. Wake up!”

  The door opened and there stood the little Cypriot fully dressed and looking as if he had been awake for hours.

  “I thought it would be tonight,” he said calmly. “The wind, you see. Don’t ask me why, but—”

  “I won’t—just come!”

  For the next half hour Philip waited in the antechamber to his bedroom, pacing up and down the tiny room, listening for the smallest sound and cursing the wind. When the physician came outside to speak to him, he took the man by the shoulders as if to shake him.

  “It is only the beginning, My Lord,” Machaon said, not even glancing at the hands clutching him—proof that one can become hardened to anything. “We have still a long wait ahead of us. I have told her to sleep, but I doubt she will. I am telling you the same. Find a bed somewhere and use it. Your child may not be born for many hours and, with respect, Lord, here you will only be in the way.”

  This was excellent advice. Philip knew that it was excellent advice, so he went into his study, where he kept a sleeping roll, and spread it over a couch. He lay there for perhaps half an hour, as rigid as a building block, unable to close his eyes. He wondered if Machaon had ever fathered any children.

  It was actually a relief when there was a tapping at the door and old Glaukon put his head through.

  “I heard her travail has begun,” he said, his eyes glittering like pieces of glass. In that moment Philip remembered that Glaukon and Alcmene had lost their only child at birth. He wondered if that memory was what he saw shining in the old man’s eyes. “I thought…”

  “Come. Stay with me.” Philip held out his hand. “I am full of fear tonight.”

  The two of them sat together on the couch, not exchanging a word, for over two hours. It was a comfort to them both
.

  “Perhaps you ought to go see how it is coming,” Glaukon said at last.

  “Perhaps I ought.”

  Philip rose and went to the door of his bedroom. He stood there listening for several minutes, not daring to knock, before it opened and a woman servant carrying a basin of bloodstained water almost ran into him. She shut the door behind her and went scurrying away, but not before Philip had a glimpse of his wife’s face, shiny with sweat and the color of candle wax.

  A moment later the physician came out to speak to him. The sleeves of his tunic were rolled up to the armpits and he looked grim.

  “The labor is sluggish,” he said, lifting his chin as if he meant to stab Philip in the chest with the point of his beard. “Her travail is hard, harder than I would have expected so early on, but the baby does not move. And she is losing a great deal of blood. I am not hopeful about the outcome.”

  “Is there nothing that can be done?”

  “Nothing, Lord. A physician can only ease the course of the inevitable, but in the end it rests with the gods.”

  “I am only in the next room. Call me if anything…”

  “Yes, Lord—if there is any change.”

  Philip returned to his study and conveyed the cheerless news to Glaukon.

  “What happened to Alcmene’s child?” he asked, putting his hand on the old man’s knee. “Does it pain you to speak of it?”

  “No more than to think of it,” Glaukon answered, shaking his head, “and how can I not think of it tonight? Everything went well, but the child was born with his birth cord wrapped around his neck. It choked out his life.”

  “Did Alcmene suffer greatly?”

  “Only in her mind—only until you came to us. I think had it not been for you she might have followed our son to the funeral pyre.”

  “You fill my heart with cheer,” Philip said.

  “It is better to be prepared against the worst. I never thought of death, so the shock was all the greater. If all goes well, someday you will remember this conversation and smile.”