The Macedonian

by Nicholas Guild

  “No.” Philip shook his head. “No, if he intended anything like that we would already be dead. Not that, but something…”

  During the ride back to Heraklea Sintika he seemed to forget about it. He jested with the soldiers in his escort and listened with evident amusement to an obscene song about a donkey and a boatman’s daughter. He was his own self again, the Philip Korous had known all his life.

  And then, about an hour short of noon, Alastor seemed to grow nervous, whinnying and shaking his head. Philip reined him in and held up his arm, not so much to force a halt as to command silence.

  “What is it?” Korous asked.

  “I don’t know—is…”

  Philip turned his great stallion to face the direction from which they had come. He put a hand on the black neck and leaned forward.

  “You sense something, don’t you?” he murmured, almost in the horse’s ear. “Do you know yet what it might be?”

  But there was nothing. Philip stared back at an empty skyline.

  And then, at last, there was something, no more than a tiny speck in the distance, like a grain of sand rolling soundlessly toward them.

  “It is a man on horseback.” Korous watched with the keen attention of a hunting dog, his eyes screwed almost shut. “One man, no more. He is riding fast.”

  “Then we will stop and let him catch up with us—if only out of compassion for his mount.”

  The wait was harder on Philip’s men than on him, for they naturally feared the worst. A few of them slid down from their horses and knelt on the ground to retension the strings on their bows.

  “One man does not make war against a hundred,” Philip said. “Whatever he wants, he means us no harm. Let no one do anything foolish.”

  Long before they could hear the beat of the horse’s hooves, they saw that the man was wearing Thracian dress. The wind was blowing toward them, and by the time he was close enough to hail they could taste his dust on the wind.

  When he was about seventy-five or eighty paces distant he pulled his horse to an abrupt stop. For a moment he surveyed the line of men ranged against him, as if to be sure of not making a mistake, then he pulled something from a leather bag tied to his waist—something about the size and shape of a melon—and threw it contemptuously to the ground. In the next second he wheeled about and galloped back the way he had come.

  Philip waited several minutes, long enough for him to get well away.

  “Let us see what Berisades has gone to so much trouble about,” he said at last.

  It was a man’s head, badly battered yet still recognizable. The lips were torn and hideously swollen, and one eye was missing. The condition of the bruises suggested that most but not all had been inflicted before death.

  The last time Philip had seen it, it had rested on the shoulders of his cousin Pausanias.

  He dismounted, took off his cloak, and wrapped the head in it.

  “I want this purified and buried. A gold coin in the mouth—the whole ritual.” His face, when he looked up, was like a stone mask.

  “Why?” Korous asked, accepting the bundle. “Why did they do this to him?”

  “They killed him because that was part of what I bought with my hundred and fifty gold talents. The gods know why they chose to do it so savagely. A warning perhaps—or to avenge themselves for having been obliged to betray him. Does a man like Berisades need a reason?”

  Philip shook his head, as if abandoning some treasured illusion.

  “Yet I am no better than he, for this blood is more on my hands than on his. We are just the same. We are what a man becomes when others will make of him a king.”

  36

  As he approached his ninetieth year Bardylis, king of the Dardanians, was forced to concede that he was in the deep twilight of his life. It had been a long time coming, but now, as he felt his strength ebbing almost from day to day, he could sense the approach of his last hour the way one can feel a hint of winter in the wind. His own guess was that he would be dead within two years.

  And, as a consequence, he had no choice but to turn over more and more of the burden of power to his grandson Pleuratos. This was a greater grief to him even than the approach of death, for he disliked and feared Pleuratos. Not for his own sake, since he had lived too long to treasure any fear for himself. His fears were centered on the future he would not survive to see.

  No man relishes the prospect of his life’s work going down to destruction, and Bardylis knew, with almost the clarity of memory, as if he had watched it happen and could recall at his leisure the stages of the catastrophe, that his grandson would never be able to hold together the empire he had so painstakingly accumulated. Even now, while he was still alive, he had to witness Pleuratos blundering into this useless war with Macedon.

  “I don’t know why you’re so anxious about it,” Pleuratos had said in his usual tone of injury. “We have extended and solidified our control over the whole border region—Lynkos is virtually a province. We have destroyed the Macedonian army and their king is dead. I had expected to hear myself congratulated for the completeness of my victory.”

  “They have another king now, or hadn’t you heard?”

  “Philip?” Pleuratos indulged himself in a contemptuous shrug. “He is no more than an impetuous boy. I have taken his measure.”

  “Or so you thought once before, when you tried to have him murdered.”

  It was an old grievance between them. Bardylis knew all about the pact his grandson had made with Ptolemy and, the breach of hospitality aside, he had never been able to forgive the flagrant stupidity of the whole enterprise. It was the sort of crass ploy that gambled everything in hopes of winning a trifle. He could date from that incident, from the morning he had put Philip on a horse and told him to run for his life, the hardening of his doubts into a conviction. Pleuratos was not fit to be anything more than a tribal headman. He lacked any sense of his own weaknesses as measured against the strengths of others. He had no understanding of diplomacy, which was no more than the art of turning weakness into the appearance of strength—he seemed to have no understanding of anything except perhaps war. His reign would have the character of an extended raiding party. If there had been anyone else—if even one other of his sons or grandsons were still alive—Bardylis would long since have arranged to have the idiot’s throat cut. He would have done it himself, cheerfully.

  And to think how easily Philip, instead of this oaf, might have been his successor.

  “It remains a fact that their army has been destroyed,” Pleuratos answered after a long, sullen silence. “A king is not much of a king if he has no army.”

  “Philip will have an army soon enough. But that isn’t the point.”

  “Then what is the point?”

  “The point is that we don’t want Macedon, because we haven’t the strength to hold it—I learned that lesson while you were still playing with wooden swords, when I drove Amyntas out of Pella. He came back—I couldn’t keep him out. I found I could not hold so much territory, which remained aggressively hostile, without being overextended. It is better to have Macedon as it is now, weak and pliant, than to end by becoming so weakened ourselves that soon we will not be able to hold on to anything.”

  “You seem to forget that I won!” Pleuratos almost shouted. “Perdikkas, along with most of his army, is dead!”

  “I think you will discover one day that Philip is a very different bowl of porridge.”

  “Is that why you insisted that his brother’s body be returned to him? Is it possible you are afraid of him?”

  “No, I am not afraid of him.” Bardylis shook his head at the impossibility of making himself understood. “But you should be.”

  * * *

  But it was not for reasons of policy alone that the king of the Dardanians forbade his grandson to pursue war against Macedon. His real motives were not those of a practical ruler, nor were they of a character that he would have dared reveal to Pleuratos.

 
The truth was that the approach of death had freed Bardylis from one kind of ambition only to enslave him to another. He had spent a lifetime acquiring a vast empire, and the fact of the empire itself was what mattered to him—only that. He had begun by wishing to see his own nation a great people, rulers over their neighbors, masters of vast wealth and power. After all, was he not their king? Was not his final loyalty to them? Once, perhaps, but no longer. Now he looked upon this tribe of brutal savages with something approaching contempt. He no longer even thought of himself as a Dardanian. The Dardanians were merely one more among his instruments, another possession like his horse.

  What mattered was that his own blood should continue to hold sway over the territories he had forced into submission to his will. With time—and it might be the work of generations—these territories would be enlarged until one day his descendants ruled all the lands between the Adriatic and the Black Sea. But he had outlived all his sons, and Pleuratos was an idiot. In the one thing upon which he had set his heart he was baffled, rendering empty the long series of triumphs that had filled his life.

  Yet there was Philip, who was also of his race. In Philip Bardylis saw himself as a young man. Philip, had he not been a Macedonian, had he not suffered the crushing disadvantage of being born into the royal house of that fractious and excessively civilized kingdom, might have become … Well, he might have become almost anything.

  It was a great pity. In a year or two, probably, Philip would be murdered or would perish in battle, after which there must inevitably follow a long, murky struggle for the succession while what was left of the House of the Argeadai poured its royal blood into the ground. If he chanced still to be alive by then, Bardylis thought he might with luck be able to procure the election of a candidate favorable to himself, but it would hardly make any difference. The king of Macedon was always destined to be a nonentity, simply by virtue of the fact that he was king of Macedon. The title carried with it the twin curses of obscurity and defeat.

  Philip had been such a promising boy—it was all very much to be regretted.

  The king of the Dardanians had an almost daily reminder of precisely how much in his great-granddaughter Audata who, at eighteen, should long since have been married off to one king or another. She remained in her father’s house because Bardylis, in his old age, had discovered that he loved this bewitching girl far more than any of the multitude of children who could claim to be his descendants. He loved her enough, in fact, that he had once foolishly made her a promise that he would never force upon her a husband not to her taste—a promise that had turned out to have been a serious mistake, for little Audata, the glance of whose catlike eyes had captivated more than a few of the world’s great men, had steadfastly turned away every suitor who had found his way to Bardylis’s court. So many, in fact, that it had become something of a diplomatic embarrassment. When he had taxed her with it, asking her why she persisted in being so unreasonably fastidious, she had revealed her secret heart to him—had confided to him the thing that, perhaps, he had least wished to hear.

  “Do you remember, when I was a child?” she had asked him as if obliging him to reach far back into the distant past. “Do you remember that you told me once I would be the wife of a great king?”

  “Yes. I recall it perfectly,” Bardylis answered, smiling at the memory—for her so remote, yet for him so recent. “There are many such in the world, and you have refused full half of them. What, for instance, is amiss with Lyppeios of Paionia? He is a presentable boy and the eldest son of an old and sickly father. Only wait a year or two for Agis to die. Or is Paionia not good enough to satisfy your ambition?”

  “A handsome nonentity who happens to rule over a vast and wealthy dominion is not a great king.”

  She pronounced this sentence with such quiet assurance that the king of the Dardanians, who considered himself great by any standard, was much taken aback. When had she formed such settled opinions? It would be worth something to know, yet one could hardly ask. Bardylis could only marvel and wish that fool Pleuratos had half his daughter’s insight.

  “It is clear you set a high standard for greatness,” he said at last. “I wonder if any man living can meet it.”

  “Only two have met it.”

  She turned a little away from him, as if embarrassed, and favored him with a sidelong glimpse of one of her shy, subtle, feline smiles. She was playing on his vanity and his affection for her—this he knew perfectly well, and knew that she knew he knew. It made no difference, for the smile had its desired effect.

  “You are the first, Great-Grandfather, and in all the world you have but one peer.”

  “And I gather that Lyppeios of Paionia is not he.”

  “No. This man is of your seed. He came here once as a prisoner. I have never forgotten him.”

  Bardylis, king of the Dardanians, felt a sinking in his heart such as a man might experience on the brink of combat when he sees that his enemy’s strength is overwhelming, for how far had Philip of Macedon ever been from his own thoughts?

  “He was hardly more than a boy then,” he said, noticing only after he had spoken that he not thought it necessary to pronounce the name. This somehow profoundly humiliating discovery prompted him to take his revenge. “It would appear he has forgotten you, since he has already taken and buried one wife.”

  When he saw the change in her face, Bardylis instantly regretted his own cruelty—Audata always had that advantage over him, that she could make him feel whatever she felt.

  “Besides, I love you too much to give you to him,” he went on quickly. “He will probably be dead before the winter. You are too young to be a widow and, besides, no king of Macedon will ever be great.”

  “He is great already,” she answered, with unsettling seriousness. “It is a quality in himself. He would have it if he were the master of your stables.”

  “Well, it is unlikely he will ever have much chance to show it.”

  Poor child, she seemed destined to misery, for what could be more hopeless than the love that attached itself to a doomed man? Surely she was destined to shed many tears.

  Yet perhaps not right away. Bardylis could still derive some pleasure from thwarting the lunatic ambitions of his grandson, so the day when the new king of Macedon was to be crushed had not yet come.

  Come it must, though. And then, when her dream was shattered and she was forced to submit herself to the commonplace glory of someone like Lyppeios of Paionia, little Audata would taste the full bitterness of her grief. It was enough to make an old man glad at last to part with life.

  37

  Arrhidaios had never really adjusted to life in exile. Athens was an entertaining and comfortable city, and certain friends with trading interests in the north had provided him with a pension suitable to his rank and his potential usefulness, but he had never felt at ease there. It was not that he was homesick. It was not Macedon or his circle of friends and family there he missed. It was something else he had abandoned that night after the death of Alexandros, when he had fled the purge he knew the Lord Ptolemy was about to unleash against anyone among the House of the Argeadai who might have constituted a threat to his power. It was rather the sense of being taken seriously. In Athens he simply was not important enough that it would cross anyone’s mind to have him murdered.

  Thus his reaction, when he received Philip’s letter, was complex.

  It was delivered with disagreeable informality by Aristotle, who had just come back from visiting his father in Pella. The two young men had known each other from childhood, but in Athens they hardly ever met. Aristotle, doubtless, was only displaying a very natural caution, understandable enough when one remembered that Arrhidaios had been attainted before the assembly as a traitor, yet it was not an omission that was likely to go unresented—Arrhidaios, like all exiles, had developed a long memory for slights. Thus, when Aristotle called one morning at the house Arrhidaios rented not far from the Stoa of Zeus, and a servant showed him into th
e small walled garden where the master was having breakfast, his reception was not particularly cordial.

  “How many years has it been?” Arrhidaios inquired without preamble. When Aristotle failed to reply, he smiled thinly.

  “Six, or perhaps even seven,” he went on, answering his own question. “I think, therefore, I am entitled to be surprised.”

  “You are no more surprised than I.” Without waiting to be asked, Aristotle sat down on a marble bench next to the tiny fountain that occupied the center of the garden. “You of course are offended that I have avoided you all these years, but under the circumstances that is rather childish of you—Pella is not Athens, but I prefer to be at liberty to return to it now and again. I am not in a position to ignore the prejudices of the mighty.”

  “Then why are you here now?”

  “Because the mighty have sent me.”

  Arrhidaios was sufficiently startled that, without thinking, he filled a cup of wine and handed it to Aristotle.

  “And how does Philip enjoy being a king?” Arrhidaios inquired when he had regained his composure.

  Aristotle, after tasting the wine, made a face and set the cup down.

  “I don’t have the impression he thinks of it in such personal terms,” he said, somehow managing to make the reply sound like a rebuke. “He is very active, but he was always that. I would say he is much the same.”

  “Yet a man would have to be made of wood if he did not find some pleasure in such eminence.”

  “I think he would trade all his ‘eminence’ for half a month’s rationing of his army. You know him. He was never proud. One hardly notices that he is a king.”

  When Arrhidaios began to smile with something like contempt, Aristotle merely added, “Yet I think he has more real authority than did even his father. Does that surprise you? Men may still call him ‘Philip,’ but they obey him in the same way they breathe—without considering why.”

  “And what does he want of me?”

  “I have no idea.” Aristotle seemed to look at nothing as he spoke. “He is a king, remember? On this matter I am not in his confidence.”