The Macedonian

by Nicholas Guild

  “I wept when I heard what had happened to your mother,” Menelaos said after a long, brooding silence. “I wept, but I was not surprised. Even as a child she was willful and passionate. When she was seven years old our father gave her a ferret as a pet, and she seemed fond of it. Then one day she threw it into the kennel and stood there watching as the dogs tore it to pieces. She was whipped for that, but she would not cry. She would not explain why she had done such a thing and she would not cry. I think she was always a little mad. And now her shade wanders the earth, banished forever from the realms of the dead.”

  “That at least it does not. Before her corpse was burned I slipped a gold coin into her mouth that she might pay the ferryman for her voyage across the River Styx. I buried her myself and left offerings in her grave.”

  Menelaos raised his eyebrows in astonishment. “You committed an impurity. Yet perhaps it was one which the gods could forgive—a son’s act of pity can never offend too deeply. I am glad you told me.”

  Philip did not relish the subject of his mother and he made a slight, peremptory gesture with his hand to indicate that he wished to speak of these things no more.

  “My mother has been dead for nearly seven years, and you are under siege by the Illyrians,” he said with perhaps more edge in his voice than he intended. “I do not think you rode all this way in a snowstorm merely for the pleasure of unburdening your grief. What do you want, Uncle?”

  For a moment the king of Lynkos seemed to be debating with himself if he should take offense, but if that was the case, he decided he would be better served by a display of faint amusement. Accordingly, he smiled.

  “Everyone, it appears, is impatient with me.” He picked up his wine cup and appeared to study the pattern under the glaze. Then he set it down again as if he had forgotten its existence. “The Illyrians think I have reigned too long and wish to chase me from my throne—either that or kill me sitting on it, whichever is more convenient—and my nephew thinks I waste his valuable time with insincere family chat.”

  He smiled again, the whole time studying Philip’s face for some hint of a reaction, whether of embarrassment or something else it was impossible to say. At last he gave up the search as fruitless and his smile slowly vanished.

  “You show great promise as a king, Philip. You have learned very quickly to be hard.”

  “I will ask again, Uncle—what do you want? And what are you prepared to surrender to get it?”

  But Menelaos, who had balanced his enemies against each other for long enough to have developed a certain faith in his own agility, was not to be rushed into anything against his will.

  “You have developed into something of a military wizard, Philip,” he said, shaking his head in what seemed like astonished admiration. “You inherited a broken, demoralized army and a country hedged about by enemies, and now, not even a year later, you have won two major battles and are reckoned dangerous enough that the Athenians have signed a treaty of peace with you. I must concede you my respect—frankly, I had expected that by now you would already be dead.”

  “Are you disappointed?”

  “No. I have not grown so lost to all human feeling that I would rejoice in the death of my sister’s son.”

  “And, besides, now you need me.”

  “And, besides, now I need you.”

  Menelaos took a deep breath and let it out in a long, weary sigh. It was as if the accumulated strain of many anxious months had at last caught up with him.

  “Do you know Pleuratos?” he asked.

  “Yes. I met him while I was Bardylis’s hostage.”

  “Yes, of course—you would have. I had forgotten.” Menelaos absentmindedly touched the faint purplish birthmark that was visible on the right side of his face to about a finger’s breadth above the beard, and for the first time Philip noticed how much gray had become mixed in with his kinsman’s curly brown hair. “Well, for all that the old king lives, Pleuratos seems to be the one in authority. I could always deal with Bardylis, but his grandson is a different matter.”

  “I gathered as much from the fact that his soldiers now occupy about a quarter of your territory.”

  Philip smiled mirthlessly, and Menelaos looked as if he felt the thrust.

  “They are bogged down in the snow,” he said. “We are safe enough through the winter, but the spring will be another matter. Unless Pleuratos can be persuaded to withdraw, by the beginning of summer he will be in possession of Pisoderi and I will be dead or in exile. On the whole I would prefer death.”

  “Do you think there is any chance he will withdraw?”

  Menelaos shook his head. “Why should he? If he can take Lynkos from me, I have nothing left with which to bribe him.”

  Plainly the king of the Lynkestians was not enjoying this conversation. He paused for a moment and swallowed deeply from his wine cup, as if nerving himself to go on.

  “When the snows melt Pleuratos intends to finish me off quickly and then he will march south. Lynkos will be merely a preliminary skirmish, in itself a prize hardly worth the taking, but Lynkos is the gateway to Lower Macedon. It is you he yearns to destroy, not me. Thus by summer you will find yourself at war with the Illyrians—it is something that you cannot avoid. I am not even sure you wish to avoid it.”

  He looked into his nephew’s blue-gray eyes—eyes so much like his dead sister’s, the child of his father’s second wife—perhaps searching them for some confirming sign, but he found none. Perhaps all he found there was the awareness that Philip’s heart, like his mother’s, hid its secrets well.

  “And when you and Pleuratos meet,” he continued, “there will be a great battle, perhaps the greatest battle since Troy. And in this inevitability I find my one hope of survival—that it takes place before and not after I am myself vanquished. It is a slender hope, for I think it probable that you will be defeated, but it is my last hope. Pleuratos offers only death, or that which, for a king, is worse than death. What do you offer, Philip?”

  Philip glanced away for a moment, and then returned his gaze to Menelaos with an intensity that was almost painful.

  “Support, Uncle. Such support as I would feel myself obliged to offer a kinsman—and a subject.”

  Menelaos gave a little cough of astonishment, as if he could not believe that defeat could come so quickly, so little heralded, so like a trap that lies unconcealed and yet strangely invisible. Philip, it was clear, would not bargain. He would only announce the terms on which he would accept surrender—terms that did not admit of a refusal.

  For four generations the House of the Bakchiadai had reigned as masters of Lynkos and of their own destiny, ignoring the Argeadai’s ancient claims of lordship. They had made war and peace as absolute sovereigns, treating with the kings of Lower Macedon as equals. But now, it seemed, all of that was to end, and at a word from the boy Menelaos had once caught poaching his boar.

  “Very well,” he said, with a slight shrug. “It would seem, Philip, that I have tethered my fate to yours.”

  * * *

  The next morning, before Menelaos began his return journey to Lynkos, he took formal leave of Philip and acknowledged him as his sovereign master and king of all the Macedonians, obliging the members of his escort to do the same. Then he turned and rode away, back to the ice-choked mountains that, at least while the cold weather held, were his only security.

  “Do you think he will honor his pledge?” Korous asked as he and Philip watched the Lynkestians disappear into the swirling snow.

  “I think that even at this moment he is wondering how he can betray us to the Illyrians,” Philip answered without turning round. “But I think he knows that Pleuratos will break any promise he makes.”

  “Then we are sure of him.”

  “No. He knows we will fight the Illyrians during the next campaigning season, but he may hope to remain neutral and then deal with a victor who is too exhausted to pose a threat to him. That is why, when the spring comes, we will move north befor
e Pleuratos can begin to move south. When my uncle sees us at his doorstep, and understands we give him no third choice between being our ally or our enemy, even he will realize that he has seen the last of his opportunities for treachery. We will be sure of him then.”

  “Will we be ready to face the Illyrians by spring?”

  Philip glanced over his shoulder and smiled thinly. “Have we a choice?”

  * * *

  From the walls of her great-grandfather’s citadel, Audata watched the cavalry exercises in the long, sloping valley below. Men and horses appeared as nothing more than black smudges against the snow, which in places was deep enough that the horses sometimes had to jump to push their way through.

  Winter had only just settled in, and Audata had not yet grown hardened to the cold. She wore a sheepskin cloak with the fleece on the inside, but the spot where she was standing was high and exposed and there was a damp, steady wind.

  The cavalry exercises made no sense to her. She could detect neither pattern nor intention, only a series of frantic, random movements. All she understood of them was that their ultimate purpose was to destroy the only man she had ever loved.

  “Is it only the wind that brings these tears to your eyes?”

  The nearness of his voice startled her—that was all. She turned around to find Bardylis, king of the Illyrians, standing within arm’s reach.

  “You should not climb so many stairs, Great-Grandfather,” she said to him. “There must be—”

  “There are forty-seven. Yet sometimes one must do what one oughtn’t, if only to prove that one is still alive.” He smiled so that his ancient, seamed face appeared to crack open in a hundred places, and looked out over the plain, where men who had sworn loyalty to him unto death were throwing up great plumes of snow as they rode back and forth. “Have you developed an interest in military matters?”

  “No.”

  “Really not? Well, then, perhaps there is someone among my nobles to whom you have taken a fancy.”

  She glanced at him with a baffled expression and then, suddenly, appeared to understand and dropped her catlike eyes.

  “Only once before have I known you to come up here to watch the soldiers disporting themselves,” he went on with that amusement the old sometimes feel in tormenting the young, “and that was when young Philip was among us. Are you thinking of him now?”

  “I think of him constantly,” she answered, with a matter-of-fact sincerity that made Bardylis regret his intrusion, because it reminded him that her heart was one of the few things in his world he did not command.

  “Your father is levying soldiers in every corner of the realm. By spring he will have raised a force sufficient to allow him to field ten thousand men against Philip. And the strange thing is that he does not even suspect how you feel toward this king of Macedon whom he yearns so to destroy.”

  “Would it make any difference?”

  “No.” The old king shook his head. “No, for the wound to his vanity is deeper than that. If he knew, he would hate Philip all the more, but everything nourishes such hatred as your father’s. And the summer grass will already be tall over one of their graves—I am glad for your peace of mind that it will not be within your power to choose which.”

  “Do you believe Philip will be crushed, Great-Grandfather?”

  “Does it matter what I believe, child?” He smiled joylessly, knowing that she understood his thoughts. “But perhaps what Philip believes is of somewhat greater importance.”

  43

  All through that winter Philip’s nights were plagued by a dream. He was a boy again, summoned to his father’s deathbed. He would enter the room and find the House of the Argeadai all there, even Arrhidaios, his body torn by spear wounds, who this time had somehow contrived to arrive ahead of him.

  “Here is Philip, late as usual,” his mother would say, the front of her tunic drenched in the blood that trickled from the slash across her throat, and the others, all except Pausanias, who held his battered head between his hands, would nod in disapproving agreement.

  “Save your tears for the funeral,” Alexandros would announce sternly. He was naked and shining with oil, with the wounds from Praxis’s sword showing below his rib cage, and standing beside him was Perdikkas, dressed in mud-spattered armor, the gash from an Illyrian sword stroke running across his face. Perdikkas always turned his eyes away when he saw Philip and, in a voice too low to be intelligible, said something to Ptolemy, who would smile with bloodstained lips.

  Nothing is ever surprising in a dream, so Philip never felt any astonishment at the discovery that all the assembled members of his family were dead. After all, most of them had been dead for years, and the dream, which was not a memory but a dream, existed not in the true past but in that past that is also the present. Therefore Philip the boy in the dream accepted all this as natural, and Philip the dreamer, the helpless spectator, witnessed it with horror.

  Only the old king was alive. His eyes would come to rest on Philip and he would make a small, feeble gesture, beckoning him closer. Amyntas’s lips would move soundlessly, forming the words, “The king’s burden…”

  And then Philip would wake up. In that first moment, when he realized it was merely the dream again, he would experience an odd mixture of surprise and disappointment. The ghastly faces of the dead were gone, but Amyntas’s last words remained unspoken. I will never know what he meant to tell me, Philip would think. I will never know.

  And sometimes, while the winter sun shone brightly as the king of Macedon drilled with his soldiers for the battle with the Illyrians that would decide all their fates, he would be seized with a terrible feeling of regret, as if his life were blighted and all his labor destined to come to nothing because asleep or awake he had never heard the sentence Amyntas, his father, had left unfinished.

  I will never know.

  At such times he felt utterly abandoned, cut off from gods and men. These were his thoughts, this the yawning pit of despair that opened before him as events carried him toward the great crisis of his life.

  “We must have ten thousand soldiers before the spring thaw,” he told his officers, who exchanged worried glances, as if they imagined his mind to be cracking under the strain.

  “Ten thousand, no less,” he went on, almost daring them to refuse. “Pleuratos will have at least that many, and we cannot afford a victory that leaves us so weak we might as well have been defeated. If we fight this battle on equal terms, we have some chance of keeping our losses tolerably low.”

  “How can you hope to raise such a force?” Lachios asked him, giving form to the question that was in everyone’s mind. “It has hardly been a year since King Perdikkas lost an army of four thousand prime troops. The recruiting officers are stripping the villages naked—we will be lucky if by spring we have eight or nine thousand men under arms in the whole country. We cannot leave the garrisons empty, Philip.”

  “I will have ten thousand men if I have to march north with every soldier in Macedon at my back.”

  “If you lose, the nation will be defenseless.”

  “If I lose, there will be no nation to defend.”

  It was not a proposition with which anyone could argue, so the training camps soon grew bloated with conscripts, farm boys, most of whom had never held either sword or shield in their lives. These Philip and his officers drilled until their knees were ready to fold beneath them, until they knew their weapons better than the faces of their wives and mothers, until they forgot they had ever been anything except soldiers.

  During the first week they would nurse the bruises on their shins where they bumped against the rims of their shields, and they would complain endlessly about the drill.

  “Carry your shields higher,” the veterans would tell them. “You will find that less vexatious than an Illyrian spear through your guts.”

  “How can anyone do battle all jammed up like this, with the next man’s elbow almost in his face? My mother’s uncle won enough b
ooty fighting for old King Amyntas to buy forty head of sheep—in his day all a soldier needed was courage.”

  “Do you want to be a dead hero? This king keeps his men alive, and he wins. You take my advice and practice your drill. I have served under the Lord Philip since Aiane and, believe me, he knows what he is doing. That is him there.”

  “That is the king?”

  It was something they acquired along with a knowledge of the proper way to manage a pike staff and how to pad their greaves to keep them from chafing, this conviction that their king, who walked among them in an old brown cloak and was not too proud to drink soldiers’ beer, was the darling of Ares, the war god’s favorite son. He was never weary, never afraid, and never wrong. It was deemed a stroke of luck to stand near him in battle, for the line in which the Lord Philip fought could not be broken. He was at once perfectly familiar and the object of the most dreadful awe, and the confidence he inspired in his men was absolute. The green recruits learned it from the veterans of past campaigns, who told stories of the battles they had fought and the victories they had won, hardly conscious of the myth they were creating. Their king had become the wall sheltering them against a time of disasters.

  And if Philip believed in the myth, no one could say, for his doubts and his dreams he kept locked away in the privacy of his soul. It was his nature to have many friends but no confidants. His father had spoken of the king’s burden with his dying breath, and what, after all, was the king’s burden if not this?

  It was also in his nature that when he received a letter from the new king of the Eordoi he carried it around with him for half the day before at last looking at it.

  “It is from Deucalion,” he told Korous as they sat on the ground, resting their backs against the wheel of a supply wagon while they waited for dinner.

  “What does it say?”

  Philip scanned halfway down the scroll and then put it back in his pocket. “It says he is alive and safe and will be with us in the spring.”

  “How does he like being a king?”

  “He doesn’t mention it.”