“The king my brother, along with his entire army, has been slain by the Illyrians.”
Lachios and Korous, who had fought on opposite sides when Philip seized the throne of Elimeia, now exchanged a glance as they sat across the council table from the master they both loved. They both had a very clear conception of what this news meant.
“I must go to Pella. Korous, since you are entitled to a place in the assembly, I wish you to organize an escort and accompany me. Lachios will be in command here, with full powers, until I return—I may not return for a long time.”
“Take an army with you and make yourself king,” Lachios said and then looked to Korous, who nodded his approval.
“Lachios is right, Philip. The assembly will elect you if you show them you do not mean to be refused. In this emergency they will have no choice.”
At first the lord of Elimeia was silent. His face was set and grim and he simply stared into space, as if contemplating a future only he could see.
“I will not use force to displace my brother’s child,” he said at last. “Only the assembly may choose a king of Macedon, and the son of Perdikkas is closest in line of succession. How could I possibly command the loyalty of men whom I had threatened into electing me king? What you are proposing is an invitation to civil war. Make up a guard of fifty men, and I will take that to Pella.”
“Then there must be a regency.” Korous shook his head, very slowly, as if he could not believe such folly. “You are the only possible candidate, but all regencies suffer from the same weakness—as the boy king grows up, men begin to think of the future. Your power will founder on court jealousies.”
Philip uttered a short, mirthless laugh.
“Korous, if five years from now there is still a Macedon to be jealous over, then I will gladly yield. Until then, I think I will have little enough to fear from a babe who is still cutting his first teeth.”
He stood up—slowly, as if he were accustoming himself to some great weight.
“When we leave for Pella, we will take the boy Deucalion with us. It will remind his father that he has something to lose if he thinks of switching his allegiance from us to the Illyrians. Lachios, double the guard at the Zygos Pass. Let us at least keep this door closed on the enemy.
“And send an envoy to Bardylis to inquire on what terms he will give us back the king’s body for burial—after all, Perdikkas was his great-grandson.”
He smiled wanly, as if conscious that he had made a poor jest.
“More than that, there is nothing more to say. Be good enough to leave me now.”
When he was alone again, he closed his eyes and tried to clear his mind. It was simply too much to deal with in a mass. He felt like a harp the strings of which have all been plucked together, as if the discord of his own thoughts and feelings had blended into a meaningless hum.
He knew he could not afford to think of his brother, whose corpse, unless Bardylis had had the decency to burn it, was even now feasting the crows. He could not allow himself the luxury of mourning. There could be no great oaths of revenge, for the gods alone knew what sort of arrangement he might have to come to with the Illyrians. He must think of Perdikkas’s death solely as it affected the safety of the nation—there could be no room for private feelings.
He must confine himself to the situation. Perdikkas was gone, together with an army of four thousand men, about half the total strength of the army. Thus there was almost nothing standing between the Illyrians and the northwestern provinces. Relations with Athens were bad, and the Paionians and Thracians were, as always, hostile and threatening. It was perfectly possible that these four would simply divide the nation among themselves, leaving Macedon a truncated dependency of whichever among her conquerors could put their pretender on the throne.
And all of this it was his task to prevent. He alone stood between Macedon and chaos. There was simply no one else. Philip did not even consider the possibility of failure, for even to approach the thought made him giddy with fear.
In the morning, before departing for Pella, he would go to the temple of Athena and make sacrifice to the Lady of the Gray Eyes. Soon he would need her.
But for now he went to Glaukon’s rooms near the servants’ quarters, where he knew the old man would be studying the household accounts, his usual relaxation before going to bed. Philip brought a jar of wine with him.
He did not trouble to knock at the door, for a man needs no invitation to enter his father’s house. Glaukon did not seem surprised to see him—why should he have been surprised? He merely raised his eyes from his writing table and, when he noticed the wine, he smiled.
“We are on our travels again,” Philip said, breaking the jar’s seal with his thumb. “Can you be prepared to leave for Pella in the morning?”
Glaukon took down a pair of cups and put them on the table. “What has happened?” he asked as he watched Philip pour the wine.
“Perdikkas is dead. His Illyrian adventure has ended in a great slaughter.”
For a long time the king’s steward made no answer. He merely stared at his wine cup as though it were filled with blood. At last he took it and raised it to his lips.
“Then your great moment has come at last.”
“Do you mock me?” Philip asked, approaching as near to anger as he had ever come with the man who had raised him. “I do not think I have been guilty of ambition.”
“I was not speaking of your purposes, but of the gods’.” Glaukon, who was not in the habit of reproving kings, spoke almost as sternly as Philip had. “Every man has his own peculiar destiny, his own place in the great design that we are not privileged to understand and yet cannot doubt rules our lives. Mine has been to be steward to four kings and to raise you into manhood—an obscure destiny it might be said, yet I think, on the whole, a greater one than many kings can boast.”
He paused for a moment, lifting the cup to his lips for a taste, as if to be sure the wine merchant had not cheated him. Philip said nothing, content to wait, for he knew the old man was not to be hurried but would make all things clear in his own time—it had been no different when Glaukon had explained to him, as a child of eight or nine, the various grades and qualities of olive oil and how one arrived at a price for them.
“Without disrespect, My Lord, most kings are paltry beings, their greatness an illusion, for they are no different from other men. It makes no difference if their reigns are long or short; they strut about for a time and then they are dust. They are but pebbles dropped into the pool of mortality—the water closes over them and very quickly the ripples die away. As soon as they are shut up in their burial urns it is as if they never lived, and no one but the chroniclers even remembers their names. So it was with your father, the Lord Amyntas. So it was with your brother Alexandros. And so now too with Perdikkas. I do not believe that this is the fate the heavens have marked out for you.”
“Then you are saying I will never be king of Macedon?”
“I am saying it makes little difference whether you are or not.” Glaukon shook his head, as if Philip were still the small boy he once taught to tally the accounts and he had made a mistake with his sums. “That is why you were wrong to imagine I accused you of ambition. Ambition is for little men. I speak of a glory that far transcends any title to a kingdom. I speak of the greatness that only the gods may bestow upon a man as their free gift—or perhaps as their curse, since it follows not his purposes but their own. This I know you have carried in you all your life. I have known it since that first night I carried you home in my arms, when Herakles burned so brightly in the black sky. And now, I think, it is about to take possession of you.”
* * *
By the time Philip had taken horse and was on his way home the news of Perdikkas’s death had spread across the broad plains of Macedon like a grass fire driven by the wind. Every shepherd boy knew what it meant—the nation was hedged in by enemies, half the army was dead in some wilderness beyond the mountains, and the heir
of the throne was not even old enough to walk. A time of trial was coming, during which the king’s disaster would make itself felt in the remotest village and the humblest peasant cottage.
This knowledge was written on the faces of the men and women who stood by the roadside to pay their silent homage to the last of Amyntas’s sons as he rode toward Pella. They did not speak. They simply followed him with their eyes as he passed. He had only to glance at these people to know that they looked to him to protect the homeland and to keep foreign invaders from their doors. Such was the ancient duty of the Argeadai, who had given Macedon her kings since the days of the heroes, a duty which now fell to Philip.
And at Aigai, an hour’s ride from the gates of the old capital, the road was choked by foot soldiers and cavalry from the city garrison.
“What do they mean by this?” Korous exclaimed, reining in his horse as he lifted his hand to bring the escort to a halt. “Have they raised a mutiny?”
Philip merely laughed. “At least I have the consolation of knowing they cannot be in mutiny against me, for I have no authority over them.” He touched his heels to Alastor’s flanks, urging the great stallion forward. “Come. Let us see what they want.”
As Philip approached, the garrison commander rode forward to meet him. He was a man of about forty with a red face and a slightly bulbous nose that somehow made him look angry. Once he had been a rising young officer in the royal garrison at Pella. Philip could remember from his childhood being very frightened of him.
“Epikles, why the reception?” he asked now, not frightened in the least—he noticed, as a matter of no great importance, that the man appeared to start a little at being recognized. “Do you mean to stop us, or is this intended as a display of hospitality?”
“Neither, Lord Philip. We wish to accompany you to Pella.” Epikles waited for a moment, as if expecting some reaction, and then continued. “You are the last of the royal line, Prince, and no one must be allowed to deny you your brother’s crown. The soldiers have voted among themselves, and we are yours to a man.”
“You are in error, for I am not the last of the line. Perdikkas left a son.”
“A sucking babe cannot be a king,” Epikles replied with some heat. “The soldiers will choose you. We mean to see to it.”
For a long moment Philip regarded the garrison commander with what looked like disinterested curiosity—he might have been studying a problem in geometry. Then he put his right hand behind his neck and shrugged, as though despairing of the solution.
“If you and your men wish to travel with me, you are welcome,” he said at last. “I cannot stop you and I would not if I could, for every Macedonian under arms has a right to his place in the assembly that will choose our next king. But do not imagine I will subvert the ancient laws. You will not make me the leader of a coup.”
After a second’s deliberation, Epikles nodded vigorously. “Fair enough, Lord. We will leave it to the assembly.”
That night Philip slept in the garrison, having refused the apartment that had been prepared for him in the old royal palace, unoccupied for over fifty years. The next morning, while he was still at breakfast, he was informed that a delegation had arrived from Beroia and desired an audience. They too pledged themselves to his cause and asked to accompany him to Pella, and they too were accepted on the same terms. In the same hour he received messages from the garrison commanders at Meiza and Aloros.
“I assume you know what all this means,” Korous said to him as they at last mounted their horses in the garrison courtyard. “They mean to make you king, whether you will or no. They have no choice and neither have you, not if the nation is to survive. You had best give some thought to what you mean to do with the child.”
Philip felt something like a sliver of ice going through his vitals, for he knew precisely what Korous had in his mind.
“Yes,” he said, looking about him as if he were counting the soldiers in his escort, “I know what it all means.”
Three days later, when at last he arrived in Pella, the crowds that came out to meet him were large and, on the whole, silent. He might have been an invader entering a conquered city, for they watched his arrival with what seemed a mingling of curiosity and fear.
Yes, of course they are frightened, he thought. It was not unreasonable. Over the last several years he had lived very little in Pella, and Perdikkas’s ambivalence toward him had doubtless communicated itself to the citizens of his capital. They did not know what to expect from this stranger.
This was not unfair, since he hardly knew what to expect from himself.
He left his escort at the garrison and rode into the courtyard of the royal palace alone. Most of those who were gathered there to meet him were old servants who remembered Philip from his boyhood, but among them were Euphraeos and the Lady Arete.
The sight of his brother’s widow, whom he had not seen since her wedding day, made Philip’s throat contract painfully. He embraced her and wept, but apparently even the comfort of a shared grief was to be denied to him, for Arete held her arms to her breast, as unyielding as stone.
“The gods know it is hard,” he said, his voice still full of tears. “Our family seems to gather sorrow to it like a mother clutching at her children, but we might at least have been spared this.”
She did not answer at first but merely stared at him, as if gauging an actor’s performance in a tragedy.
“You will not cheat my son of his birthright,” she said finally. “My son is king now.”
She shook off his embrace and, as Philip tried to find some word of explanation, she began walking, almost running, back toward the palace.
“You will not set my son aside!”
The words were like a curse and vibrated in the air for several seconds after she had disappeared inside.
“She is afraid of you,” Euphraeos stated with his usual bland authority. He had stepped forward and made an elaborately courtly bow to Philip. “She believes you are the most dangerous of the many enemies that surround her and her child—she would prefer Bardylis to you.”
“And who put such ideas into her head?”
The philosopher managed one of his grim, dyspeptic smiles.
“Her husband, I should imagine.”
“And who put them into his?”
Euphraeos was silent for a moment, as if he had not heard the question—or did not like to think what it might mean. Presently his gaze drifted away from Philip and he appeared to survey the stonework in the courtyard walls.
“She is a danger,” he said and smiled again. “She and the child will always be a focus of opposition to your rule. In the present crisis, I do not suppose you can afford that.”
“What would you suggest?”
“That you have them both killed.”
The remark was quite casual, as if the point were so obvious he was a trifle embarrassed at having to mention it.
“I could be of use to you.”
“In killing them? I do not need you for that, Athenian—the means are always at hand.
“In other ways. I could be of service.”
“As you were of use to my brother? You have done enough mischief.”
Euphraeos’s eyes returned to Philip’s countenance with a kind of snap. He appeared shocked. This, it would seem, was the last response he had expected.
“The assembly will meet in two or three days,” Philip continued, his voice hard and calm. “You would do well to be on a ship by then. I would not be too particular about its destination, because after the Macedonians have made their will known, if I find you in the city, I will have your head mounted on the point of a spear.”
* * *
When the assembly met, Philip took his place on the tier of seats reserved for the Argeadai—nothing could have represented more starkly the choice facing the Macedonians, for he sat quite alone. He did not speak to anyone and he took no part in the debate.
The amphitheater was almost completely full, for nea
rly every garrison in the realm had sent as large a delegation as they could. The winter sun shone on the breastplates so that one could hardly bear to look at them.
First came prayers and sacrifice—the bone and fat from a bull’s hindquarters burned on an altar in the center of the well—and finally the commander of the Pella garrison stood up. Dardanos was a man past sixty and so stout that his lieutenant had to help him to his feet, yet he had been a famous soldier in old King Amyntas’s day. By ancient custom it was his right to speak first.
He raised his hand to command silence.
“We have but two alternatives,” he began. “We can declare the child Amyntas, son of the Lord Perdikkas, to be king and appoint his uncle the Lord Philip regent during his minority, or we can set Amyntas aside and declare the Lord Philip king in his place. These two are the last of the royal line whom death or treason has not disqualified.
“In normal times the line of succession flows from father to son, but if the natural heir is judged incompetent by reason of defect, or if the present danger demands it, the assembly has the right to let its choice fall to another.
“So the question becomes not who will rule, for the substance of power must now surely fall to the Lord Philip, but who will be king. We must look to the times for our answer, and there is no one here who does not know as well as I the crisis to which King Perdikkas’s death has brought us. As well we know that if the Lord Philip is to lead us out of it—if such a thing is even possible—he will need all the authority that it is in the power of this assembly to place in his hands. Thus let us decide, can we afford the luxury of a child king, or do we need a man and a proven soldier upon the throne of Macedon?”
After that there was little doubt how the vote would go. Dardanos resumed his seat amid a murmur of approval. The next man on his feet, the garrison commander from Aigai, formally moved that Philip, son of Amyntas, be named king of Macedon.
No one spoke after that—no one could have made himself heard. The entire assembly rose as one man and filed down into the well of the amphitheater that they might stand before the new king and display their loyalty by shouting his name and beating the flats of their swords against their breastplates. The sound made the very air shake.
The Macedonian Page 37
