The Macedonian

by Nicholas Guild

  In the evening, as they sat around a dying cooking fire, the king’s officers watched the thin line of yellowish light that showed through his tent flat. Philip had not come out for supper.

  “They are half brothers, then?” Lachios inquired after a long silence, as if the precise relationship would somehow explain everything.

  “Yes. Arrhidaios was the child of the old king’s first wife.”

  “And were they close as boys?”

  “Close enough that he feels it as he does.” Korous held a wine cup between thumb and first finger, as if hoping to catch something in it. Finally he set it down next to his foot. “It has been a bad day for him—first Deucalion leaving, and now this. Although I suppose no one is surprised by it except Philip.”

  “Is this brother any kind of a soldier?”

  “Who can say?”

  “We should have marched on Aigai at once,” Lachios pronounced glumly. “It was a mistake to wait.”

  “Perhaps he needs to prove something to himself, even if it is only the loyalty of a single garrison.”

  “Will they hold, then? Even with the Athenians in Methone?”

  “Epikles is not a man to care for all the Athenians who ever lived.”

  “Yes, but his officers might take a more pragmatic view. You lowlanders have not always been so steadfast to your kings.”

  Lachios grinned, just to show that he was jesting, but Korous appeared to consider the question very seriously.

  “I cannot believe it,” he said finally. “I think the garrison would mutiny and cut their officers’ throats if they abandoned this king. It is just a thing one senses about him, that he is somehow different—that he is like no other man, that there is some element of him that is uniquely his own. His soldiers feel it. They trust their lives to it. I feel it, and I have known him since we were children.”

  “Then perhaps he is wise to wait.”

  “Yes, perhaps he is.”

  With a single impulse they turned their eyes back to the sliver of light that came from the king’s tent.

  “I wonder how he bears it,” Lachios said, almost to himself.

  * * *

  When Arrhidaios’s foreign army was within sight, Philip rode to the crest of a low bluff for a better view of its dispositions. His own infantry numbered less than a thousand men, but he had an advantage of cavalry, even if they only numbered forty or fifty. It might be enough.

  “Draw up our cavalry in two wings, with most of the weight on the right side,” he ordered. “Give them about a hundred and fifty paces before you advance to meet their infantry. If I am any judge, their lines will have begun to disintegrate by then—hit them from two sides at once. They must never have a chance to regroup.”

  His commanders, now including Epikles and his ranking officers, formed a circle around him while he used the bronze tip of an arrow to draw his plans in the dust. No one else spoke. No one thought to raise an objection, for one does not question a fact and Philip had the gift of bringing an extraordinary vividness to his analyses. It was as if he had already waged this battle in his imagination so that the actual fighting would be an anticlimax, the enemy doomed in advance like the protagonist in some tragic drama.

  “Break through their infantry lines here, between the left wing and the center. Our infantry will pour into the hole, and I think that will finish them. These men are mercenaries and their campaign has come to nothing, so now they will have no object except to stay alive. It is my will that the Aigai garrison shall have the honor of leading the offensive—they have earned it.”

  Two hours later, just at sunset, it was over, and Arrhidaios’s defeat had been overwhelming. What had been the field of battle now belonged to the dead and the dying, and almost the only sound came from pack animals too badly wounded to rise from the ground. They screamed like women in childbirth.

  The mercenaries were vanquished and fully half of them, including their commander, were dead. Most of the remainder had been taken prisoner—they stood around in disconsolate little clumps, the heart so gone from them that they hardly even needed guarding. The Macedonians who had come with Arrhidaios, knowing what surrender would mean, were also dead.

  Yet perhaps it was not quite over. A tiny force, still in possession of their weapons, had sought refuge and the illusion of freedom on the crest of a hill, away from the main battle. Their position was hopeless. They could only wait and marvel that somehow they had not been overrun. It was as if, in the course of the fighting that had flowed around them, they had been forgotten.

  But they had not been forgotten. Philip merely stayed his hand, ordering that six companies be deployed to make any attempt at escape impossible. The light was fading, so they built huge bonfires around the base of the hill.

  As he listened to his commanders reporting their losses and the identities of all notable prisoners Philip sat on the tongue of an overturned wagon while a physician from Aigai cleaned out a wound on his arm with the bronze tip of an arrow that had been heated to a dull red. The physician was nervous to find himself attending a king and perhaps for that reason the procedure was taking a long time, which did nothing to improve his patient’s disposition.

  “Epikles is dead,” he was told. “It was almost an accident—a wounded horse rolled over and kicked him in the head while he was dispatching its rider. Fewer than thirty men from the Aigai garrison were killed, and he had to be one of them.”

  Philip might not have been paying attention. In his mind he heard the voice of a red-faced old soldier telling him, We are yours to a man.

  “Have you found my brother?” he asked at last. It was impossible to tell whether he anticipated the answer or dreaded it.

  “He has not been captured. If he is among the slain, we will probably not know before tomorrow. It is quite certain he has not escaped—no one has escaped.”

  “Send men out with torches to inspect the battlefield. I want to know if Arrhidaios is still alive.”

  Philip did not say what he would do if he was. Perhaps he did not know himself.

  It was two hours before midnight when a badly frightened Athenian with a careful little margin of beard around his jaw, who looked as if he had never been a soldier, was shown into the king’s presence.

  “He is from the hill,” his guard said. “He came down bearing emblems of truce, asking to be brought to you.”

  “Is my brother alive?” Philip asked him, even as the man was making his bow. “Tell me that first, and then I will let you bargain for your life.”

  “The pretender is in our keeping, My Lord King, as well as some ten or fifteen of the Macedonian rebels who followed him. The rest are mercenaries, along with a few Athenians like myself—peaceful men who came only to observe and who took no role in the fighting.”

  He actually managed a cringing smile, as if he expected Philip to be grateful that he had taken no role in the fighting.

  “Then here are my terms,” Philip answered, his voice cold and without expression. “My brother Arrhidaios will be delivered to me unharmed. The rest of you will surrender yourselves by dawn, without preconditions, or face another trial by arms in which you must expect no quarter.”

  “But surely, Lord, there will be mercy for the noncombatants. Surely, My Lord…”

  The words died away as the Athenian’s eyes searched the conqueror’s face for some clue to his fate.

  “You have until dawn.” Philip made a gesture to the guard that he might escort his prisoner away. “I would suggest you make haste back to your friends, as you will have hardly any time left to decide.”

  * * *

  Philip had little sleep that night, and that little was restless and tormenting. He awakened with a start, unable to remember his dream, which had left no trace in his consciousness except an unfocused panic that drained away only very slowly. When he lit a lamp he discovered there was blood on his fingers—he had torn open the wound on his arm.

  The physician was called for, and he stitch
ed the wound closed with a sailmaker’s curved needle and a hair from the tail of the king’s horse. This time Philip was almost grateful for the pain. He found it cleared his mind.

  When dawn came he discovered the remains of Arrhidaios’s force had surrendered and were waiting for him at the bottom of the hill that had been their last refuge. Some ten or twelve of the Macedonians had drawn lots to cut each other’s throats rather than face the punishment for treason, but Arrhidaios himself was alive. His hands had been lashed behind his back, doubtless to keep him from also taking his own life.

  The mercenaries, who perhaps expected it less, were too proud to beg for mercy, but the Athenians fell on their faces the moment they beheld the face of their conqueror.

  “Get up,” Philip said with a distaste he could not, did not wish to hide. “This is unseemly. Get up. Get your noses out of the dirt.”

  Reluctantly, as if loath to abandon the tactical advantage of their abasement, the prisoners first pushed themselves up with their arms and, when they saw that even a kneeling posture was forbidden them, finally regained their feet. After an exchange of glances, one of them stepped forward. He was the same man to whom Philip had spoken the night before.

  “Please be so clement as to accept the ransom our families and the assembly will offer for our release,” he said, risking an occasional glance up from the ground, as if the gaze of Macedon’s king would burn him to ashes if he dared to meet it. “We are all men of substance, and our—”

  “You will be provided with horses and escorted back to Methone,” Philip interrupted him. “I will accept no ransom for your lives, and you may tell your assembly that Philip of Macedon desires only peace with Athens and will look with favor upon her ambassadors if they come to him with an offer of friendship. This conflict was of your making, not of mine, and I will do nothing to carry it forward.”

  He lapsed into silence, his eyes hard and unforgiving as he surveyed the last remnants of the army that had been hurled against him.

  “As for the rest,” he said at last, “they will hear my sentence soon enough.”

  He turned on his heel and walked away, his principal officers trailing after him.

  “Do you have any concept of what you have thrown away?” Lachios demanded as soon as he caught up with him, his voice a suppressed cry of rage. “Your treasury is empty, and you let them ride out of here as if they had been your guests for dinner? Those men would easily have been worth a hundred talents of gold!”

  “And right now peace with Athens is worth a good deal more than that,” Philip answered without looking around. “Those smooth-handed politicians will be home before the moon has had time to wane, and they will remember but two things: the generosity of their captors and their own fear. The latter they will never speak of, for nothing shames a man like the recollection of how he groveled for his life, so what do you think they will report to their fellow citizens? The assembly is a mob, Lachios, and mobs are greatly impressed by generous gestures.”

  “Yes, perhaps—but the leaders who arranged this little expedition, who are not a mob but as coldhearted as any king who ever lived, they will read your generous gesture as a sign of weakness.”

  “And they will be right. We are weak. We are so weak that we gain nothing by attempting to hide the fact. Let us settle for what we can get. Believe me, it will be some time before our enemies in Athens will be voted the money to try again.”

  Philip put his hand on his friend’s shoulder, and the two of them slowed to a stop.

  “It is done, Lachios,” he said, almost as if he were consoling a child. “Now do me the kindness to have my brother brought to me. I would see him now.”

  * * *

  When he was brought to Philip’s tent, Arrhidaios already had the look of a condemned man. His tunic was smeared with mud and his eyes appeared sunken, as if he had not slept for two or three days. He seemed past fear. The first thing Philip did when they were alone was draw his sword and cut his brother’s bonds.

  “How long has it been since you have eaten?” he asked, but Arrhidaios only stood there, rubbing his wrists where the lashes had rubbed them raw.

  “Would you like some food?”

  “Some wine perhaps,” Arrhidaios answered at last with a vague shrug. “Am I permitted to sit down?”

  Philip made a gesture toward the bed that occupied one corner and Arrhidaios did not so much sit down as collapse on top of it. He took the cup of wine that was offered him, drank it off in what seemed one swallow, and then held it out to be refilled.

  “Have you brought me here to offer me pardon, brother?”

  Philip shook his head. “If I could spare you, I would, but I cannot. You knew that already.”

  “Yes, I knew it. Thank you at least for having the decency not to trifle with me. Then what is it you do want—to gloat?”

  “Can you believe that of me?”

  Arrhidaios allowed himself a short, joyless laugh.

  “Under the circumstances, I could believe it of any man. When will the assembly meet to condemn me?”

  “I take no pleasure in this, brother. I only want to know why.”

  “I asked first,” Arrhidaios snapped. And then, as if with a deliberate effort to control himself, “When am I to die?”

  “Your trial will be in Pella. Two or three days, I should think. Why did you make war against me?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Not to me.”

  For just a moment, until he remembered himself, Arrhidaios wore the expression of a man who has known the sudden grief of witnessing the death of some sustaining illusion. It was the thing of an instant, just something that flickered briefly across his face, but it was enough to make Philip understand.

  “You thought I would betray you,” he said, an edge of cold disgust in his voice. “You thought I had invited you home in order to have you murdered.”

  When Arrhidaios did not respond, Philip shook his head.

  “There is no one here except us two,” he continued. “At this extremity I have no reason to lie—I swear to you, I had no such intention.”

  “If you have no reason to lie, you also have no reason to tell the truth.”

  Arrhidaios showed his brother a tight half smile, as if affirming the unbridgeable gap between them. No, they would have nothing together this side of death, not even a common understanding.

  “Yet there is one thing you might tell me,” Philip said, accepting the fact of this final estrangement. “And that is the names of the men in Athens who led you to this folly.”

  “Why would you want to know?” Arrhidaios answered, obviously surprised.

  “That someday I might avenge you.”

  41

  The triumph over Arrhidaios and his mercenaries was a new beginning for the Macedonian army. Trifling as it might have been in purely military terms, it canceled out Perdikkas’s defeat at the hands of the Illyrians. The day before Aigai, almost no one imagined that the nation could stave off collapse. The day after, there was hardly a man under arms who was not positive of their ultimate triumph. They felt themselves ready for any test.

  The difference, they believed, was Philip. He was invincible. He could see into the minds of his enemies. The men who had fought with him in Elimeia and in the campaign against Aias told fabulous stories about him. The position he defended was impregnable. The position he attacked was doomed. Even the Elimoitai horsemen who had fought against him beneath the walls of Aiane bragged shamelessly of his genius and courage—it seemed that to have been defeated by Philip of Macedon conferred almost as much distinction as victory.

  But for the object of all this praise the days following the rout of the Athenian expedition were full of a bitter darkness, for it was Philip who had to stand before the Macedonian Assembly and accuse his own brother of treason. It was Philip who had to watch that same brother perish under a rain of spears as soon as the verdict had been pronounced. It was Philip who had to preside over the crucifix
ion of the guilty man’s corpse, that the crows might make a feast of him and his soul wander this earth forever, unable to cross over into the realm of the dead. These were duties that law and custom imposed upon the king, duties that he could not shirk. These things, he felt sure, would poison his life forever.

  The House of the Argeadai has been cursed, he thought. Only witness how the gods pick us off, one after the other.

  It was actually a relief to hear that Agis, the old king of Paionia, was dying, since war left no place for black reflections.

  “We will march north as soon as we can marshal sufficient strength,” Philip ordered. “It is only Agis’s weakening health that has thus far inclined the Paionians to accept our tribute money. As soon as his son Lyppeios is on the throne they will attack us. Our only real chance is to strike first.”

  It was on the day before he had appointed to leave Pella to join his army, which was assembling at Tyrissa, that he received the ambassadors from Athens. They quickly agreed to a treaty accepting the occupation of Methone, provided it was the northern extremity of Athenian expansion.

  “Let them have their garrisons,” Philip said after they had gone. “I cannot drive them out now, and their greed makes it certain they will sooner or later give us an excuse to repudiate this treaty. At least for the moment Athens and Macedon are great friends, and that, let us hope, will be long enough.”

  * * *

  There were four thousand soldiers waiting for their king at Tyrissa. They were the first fruits of a reign that had witnessed the sacrifice of both treasure and national pride, of whatever the lord of Macedon could barter away that would purchase a few more months in which to prepare this force. They were men who had spent nearly a year being drilled in the formations and tactics that had carried the day at Aigai. They had seen the miracle for which they had prayed. They had been made to believe in themselves.

  “You are late,” Korous announced, even before Philip had dismounted from his horse. “The dispatch rider arrived this morning—Agis died six days ago. Where have you been?”