Orion and the Conqueror (3 page)

"You saved my father's life," said Alexandros to me.

Parmenio and other officers came rushing up now and knelt beside Philip.

"I want those assassins hanged," Alexandros said into the night air. "But not until they tell us who paid them."

No one seemed to be listening to him. He fixed his blazing eyes on me. "Go with the king. I will join you presently."

And he stalked off into the darkness. If ever a man had murder on his face, it was Alexandros at that moment. It was difficult to realize that he was scarcely eighteen years old.

Chapter 4

An hour later Philip was still woozy. I had followed the officers who carried him to his cabin, a rough log hut with horse blankets covering the dirt floor. I stood at the open doorway, the Argive spear still in my hands. The officers had carried Philip to his cot with a tenderness I had seldom seen. Several physicians and generals crowded around the king. A frightened-looking slave girl brought a flagon of wine to the cot.

Philip regained consciousness slowly. Although the physicians urged him to remain on the cot, he insisted on sitting up. His officers helped him to a folding camp chair. He gripped its arms weakly.

A scream of agony ripped through the night. Philip looked up sharply. Another scream, longer and more tortured than the first.

Philip gestured to one of the generals, who bent his ear to his king's lips. Philip spoke, the general nodded and strode out of the hut, past me.

The physicians bustled about. One of them bathed the back of the king's head. I saw that the cloth came away bloody. Another seemed to be preparing some kind of ointment in a shallow bowl over a candle flame. It smelled of camphor.

"Wine." It was the first word I had heard from him since he'd been felled. "More wine."

The girl's eyes lit up. She smiled with relief. She could not have been more than thirteen or fourteen.

A few moments later I saw a small parade approaching the hut. I recognized the general that Philip had sent out, a big, burly, hard-faced man with a beard blacker than Philip's own and outrageously bowed legs. Antipatros was his name, I learned later. Beside him strode Alexandros, his face white with anger or something else, his eyes still ablaze. And behind Alexandros marched a half-dozen other young men from his chosen Companions, all of them clean-shaven as Alexandros himself was. It made them look even younger than they were.

The Companions stopped at the doorway. Alexandros went through, followed by Antipatros.

Alexandros went straight to his father. "Thank the gods you're all right!"

Philip grinned crookedly. "I have a thicker skull than they thought, eh?"

If they were father and son they did not look it. Philip was dark of hair and swarthy of skin, his beard bristling, his arms thick and hairy where they were not laced with scars. Alexandros shone like gold; his hair was golden, his skin fair, his eyes gleaming. I thought of someone I had once known, a Golden One, and for some reason the hazy memory made me shudder.

"I'll find out who's responsible for this," Alexandros said grimly.

But Philip waved a hand at him. "We know who's responsible. Athens. Demosthenes or some of his friends."

"They bought out the Argives. I'll hang every one of them."

"No," said Philip. "Only the ones who had weapons in their hands. The rest of them had nothing to do with it."

"How can you be sure? Let me get the truth out of them."

"The truth?" Philip's face twisted into sardonic laughter. "Hold a man's feet in the fire and he'll tell you whatever you want to hear. What kind of truth is that? Is that what Aristotle taught you?"

Before Alexandros could reply, Parmenio spoke up. "This man saved your life." He pointed to me.

Philip fixed his good eye on me.

"When you were down and they were about to spear you, he broke through them and wrestled the spear away from the assassin."

Philip frowned, trying to remember. At last he said, "Orion, isn't it?"

"Yes, sir," I said.

He beckoned me to him. "What troop are you with?"

"Nikkos' phalanx, sir."

"Nikkos, eh? Well, since you've done such a good job of protecting me, you're now part of my personal guard. Tell the quartermaster to outfit you properly. Antipatros, show him where the guard is camped, eh?"

Antipatros nodded curtly. "Come with me," he said.

He led me outside the hut. "Scythian, eh? I suppose you can ride a horse," he said.

"I think so."

He gave me a sour look. "Well, you'd better."

Thus I became one of Philip's bodyguards.

My new companions of the royal guard were almost all Macedonians, most of them sons of very ancient and noble families, although there were a few newcomers and foreigners, such as I. I quickly learned that a true Macedonian nobleman learns to ride a horse before he learns to walk. At least, that is what they told me, and it seemed true enough. They were born riders. My first morning as a guardsman I spent watching the others mount their powerful steeds and ride galloping along the bare earth where they exercised the horses.

Before the sun was at zenith I had learned what I needed to know. With neither saddle nor stirrups, a man had to clamp his knees tight against the horse's flanks and grip the reins in his left hand to keep the right free to hold a lance or sword. That seemed simple enough. I told the wrangler in charge of the corral that I was ready to ride. He trotted out a dun-colored stallion while several of the other guardsmen stopped what they were doing to watch me.

I swung myself onto the back of the stallion and, gripping with my knees, off I went. The horse had ideas of his own. It broke into a frenzied bucking, kicking and twisting, trying to throw me off its back. The men back by the corral were slapping their thighs with laughter. Obviously they had given me the nastiest beast in the corral, to initiate me into their company.

I leaned forward against the stallion's neck and, gripping his mane, said aloud, "You can't shake loose of me, wild one. You and I are a pair from now on."

I clung with every ounce of strength in me and, after several very rough minutes, the stallion settled down and trotted to a stop, snorting and blowing, flanks heaving. I let it rest a few moments, then urged it forward with a nudge of my heels. We flew like the wind, off toward the distant hills. I turned it around and we cantered back to the corral where the other men stood open mouthed.

"Good horse," I said. "What do you call him?"

"Thunderbolt," one of the men said, almost sullen with disappointment, as I slid to the ground.

"I like him," I said.

The wrangler's weatherbeaten face showed an expression halfway between disbelief and amusement. He shook his head at me. "Haven't seen anything like that since the Little King tamed old Ox-Head."

The Little King was Alexandros, I knew.

"Well, if you like him that much," said the captain of the guard, Pausanias, "he's yours."

I thanked him and led Thunderbolt off to where the slave boys were rubbing down the horses after their exercise.

The siege of Perinthos ended a few weeks later. The city still defied Philip from behind its wall, and still received supplies from the sea. Philip gave the order to break camp and head back to Pella, his capital.

"I don't understand it," I said to Pausanias, the highborn Macedonian who headed the king's guard. "Why are I we leaving without either taking the city or being driven away?"

Riding beside me, Pausanias gave a bitter little chuckle. The captain of the guard may have been born to the nobility, but there was something dark and festering in him. The men made jokes about him behind his back that I did not understand, jokes that had to do with stableboys and too much wine.

"There are more ways to win a city than by storming it or starving it out," he told me as we rode. "The king has a thousand tricks, one more devious than the other."

"Why did he want Perinthos in the first place?"

"It's allied to Athens."

"And why make war on Athens?"

Pausanias had a handsome face, with a well-kept light brown beard. But that grim moodiness showed through the humorless smile he was giving me.

"Why not ask the king? I'm only one of his distant nephews." And he pulled his horse away from mine, tired of my endless questions.

A short time later Alexandros came dashing up on Ox-Head, his powerful midnight-black charger, almost breathless with excitement.

"We're turning back!" he shouted to the group of us. "The king wants us to go back!"

"Back to Perinthos?"

"No, but to the coast. Quickly. Follow me!"

We turned and followed. Up ahead I could see Philip with others of his guard and a clutch of officers urging their horses into a swift trot. Something was up.

I rode with Pausanias and the rest of the royal guard, following Philip and his generals. Alexandros led the remainder of the cavalry behind us. The sun was high and hot by the time we slowed to a walk and nosed our mounts through a thin screen of trees and shrubbery atop the low ridge that lined the seashore. Alexandros rode up to his father's side, leaving the main body of the cavalry down at the bottom of the ridge.

Down on the beach below us a great flotilla of boats had been pulled up on the sand. There must have been two hundred and more of them, fat round-bottomed cargo carriers for the most part, although I saw more than a dozen sleek oar-driven war galleys among them.

Pausanias smiled wickedly as we sat astride our horses, stroking their necks to keep them calm and silent.

"You see?" he said to me, in a low voice, almost a whisper. "There is the Athenian grain fleet, ripe for the taking."

Men were lolling around the ships, dozing on their decks in the midday sun. A few of the grain carriers were keeled over on their sides while teams of slaves daubed hot pitch on their hulls.

"The gods know who he bribed to get them to stop here," Pausanias muttered. "The One-Eyed Fox has more tricks than Hermes."

I knew he meant the king, Philip. From the little I had gleaned of the situation, it appeared that this fleet was carrying the grain harvest from the rich farm lands of the Black Sea, beyond Byzantion and the Bosporus, the annual harvest that fed the land-poor city of Athens.

"The Athenians don't work the land," Nikkos had told me one evening. "They don't work at anything any more. They live on a public dole and bring the grain in through the Bosporus and the Hellespont. That's why Old One-Eye wants the seaport cities like Perinthos and Byzantion. The Athenians have the finest navy in the world, but it won't do them any good without ports to tie up in each night, will it?"

Obviously the grain fleet had been afraid to put in at Perinthos, with Philip's army besieging the city. So they had beached for the night here, nearly a day's ride below Perinthos, thinking themselves safe. Philip must have had spies along the coast—perhaps even among the sailors of the fleet, if Pausanias' wry comment had any truth in it.

Philip backed us away from the wooded ridge line, down to where the rest of the cavalry waited, hidden from the beach. We were ordered to feed and water the horses and to take a cold midday meal of preserved strips of goat's meat and water. The meat chewed like leather.

Presently I saw a long line of soldiers winding along the trail that led toward us. Peltasts, not the heavily armored hoplites, trotting at an easy gait. This was going to be a fast strike, and the lighter-armed peltasts would be more useful than the clanking heavy infantry.

With Pausanias' permission I crawled up to the ridge line to join the handful of scouts already lying on their bellies, keeping watch on the enemy. The Athenians had not even posted any guards! I saw a few armed men standing near the war galleys, but otherwise their camp was as undefended as air.

The sun had swung behind us and was heading for the rugged bare hills at our backs when Philip gave the order to mount up. I was dressed and armored exactly like all the others of the king's personal guard: a bronze cuirass molded to resemble a man's well-muscled torso, leather windings to protect my lower legs, and a bronze Corinthian-type helmet with cheek flaps. I bore a lance in my right hand and a sword in its scabbard against my hip. I also had my ancient dagger strapped to my thigh beneath the skirt of my chiton.

We did not charge. The word came from the king that we were to ride slowly down from the ridge toward the beach, ready to break into a gallop if the trumpets so ordered. It was not necessary. The sailors froze where they stood at the sight of more than a thousand of Philip's cavalry ambling out of the woods toward their beached boats. As I rode toward them, my lance upright in my hand, I saw the shock and terror on their faces. The peltasts came in at either end of the curving beach, javelins and bows ready. The sailors were trapped against the sea.

There was no fight in them. They surrendered meekly and the entire year's grain harvest became Philip's prize. There would be hunger in Athens this winter. Or so I thought.

Chapter 5

Philip was in high spirits as we rode toward Pella, his capital. He had failed to capture Perinthos, and had done little more to Byzantion than throw a scare into its citizens. But he had the grain harvest. An army of slaves had loaded it all onto creaking ox carts and then we had burned the Athenian ships, every last one of them. The black smoke rose like an offering to the gods and stained the crystal blue sky for days. The Athenian sailors he sent home on foot, despite the urgings of Alexandros and several others to enslave them.

None of us was disappointed that we had won the grain without a fight. Except for Alexandros.

"The young hothead thinks he's a new Achilles," grumbled Pausanias as we rode toward the capital. "He wants glory and the only way he can get it is by bloodshed."

"How young is he?" I asked.

"Eighteen."

I made myself chuckle. "It's understandable, isn't it? Didn't you want to be a hero when you were eighteen?"

Pausanias did not reply to my question. Instead, he told me, "A few years ago, while we were campaigning in northern Thrace, Philip left Alexandros in Pella, to govern while he was in the field. Gave him the ring and the seal and everything. That's when people started calling him the Little King. He couldn't have been more than sixteen."

"He was left in charge at sixteen?" I marveled.

"Antipatros was left with him, of course, to steer him by the elbow, but Alexandros took himself very seriously, even then. One of the hill tribes, the Maeti, stirred up some trouble. They're always raiding one another, those cattle herders, or trying to get away from paying the king's taxes."

"Alexandros went after them?"

Pausanias nodded. "Left the capital in Antipatros' hands, and he and his boyfriends went galloping out to deal with this miserable handful of cattle thieves."

He broke into a sour grin, the closest I had seen Pausanias come to laughter. "The Maeti ran off to the hills, of course, and left their pitiful little village empty. So Alexandros sent back to Pella for a dozen or so Macedonian families, resettled them in the village, and changed its name to Alexandropolis."

I waited for the rest of the story. Pausanias gave me an exasperated look.

"No one is allowed to put his name to a city," he explained impatiently. "Only the king."

I said, "Oh."

"Do you know what Philip said when he heard about it?"

"What?"

" 'At least he might have waited until I'm dead.' "

I laughed. "He must be fond of the boy."

"He was proud of him. Proud! The little snot slaps him in the face and he's proud of it."

I looked around us. We were riding at the head of the group but there were others of the guard close enough to overhear us. It was not wise to call Alexandros names.

"Don't worry," Pausanias said, seeing the concern on my face. "None of
my
men will inform on us. They all feel the same way."

I wondered if that were true.

Pausanias went silent for a while and we rode with no sound but the soft padding of the horses' hooves on the dusty ground and the occasional jingle of metal from their harnesses.

"It's his mother, if you want to know where the fault lies," Pausanias muttered, almost as if talking to himself. "Olympias has filled the boy's head with crazy tales ever since he suckled at her breast. She's the one who's made him think he's a godling. Made him believe that he's too good for us, too good even for his own father."

I said nothing. There was nothing that I could say.

"All those tales that Philip isn't his true father, that he was sired by Herakles—that's Olympias' twaddle, for sure. Sired by Herakles! She would've loved to have Herakles plow her, all right. But she settled for Philip."

I recalled that Nikkos had called Olympias a witch, and the other men had argued about her supernatural powers. And her reputation as a poisoner.

For my part, Alexandros seemed like a typical teen-age lad—albeit a teen-age boy whose father was king of Macedonia; a teenager who had already led cavalry in battle a half-dozen times. To me he seemed eager to show the men around him that he too was a man and no longer a boy. And even more desperate to prove himself in his father's eyes, I thought. He was heir to the kingdom, but his accession to the throne was apparently not all that certain: the Macedonians elected their kings, and if anything happened to Philip, young Alexandros might have a difficult time convincing the elders that he was ready for the throne.

He had his Companions, though: the lads he had grown up with, mostly the sons of Macedonian noble families. He was their natural leader, and they seemed almost to worship him. Four of them seemed especially close to him: smiling Ptolemaios, gangling Harpalos, the Cretan Nearkos, and especially the handsome Hephaistion vied with one another to shine in Alexandros' eyes. In battle they rode together, each trying to outdo the other. They even shaved their chins clean, as Alexandros did, although the word among the guards was that Alexandros hardly needed to shave at all.

"He's effeminate that way," Pausanias told me, more than once. He seemed to take pleasure in saying it. I wondered if he realized that my own beard grew so slowly that I shaved only rarely.

There was something in Alexandros' eyes, though, that disturbed me. More than ambition, more than an avid quest for glory. His eyes seemed to me far older than eighteen. Something glittered in those golden eyes that seemed ageless, timeless. Something that seemed faintly mocking whenever the Little King looked my way.

As the days passed, my memory did not improve. It was as if I had been born, fully grown and dressed in a mercenary hoplite's armor, just a few days earlier. The men around me took me for a Scythian, since I was tall and broad of shoulder, and had gray eyes. Yet I understood their language—the various dialects and even the outright foreign tongues that some of the men spoke.

I tried to remember who I was and why I was here. I could not avoid the feeling that I had been sent here purposely, dispatched to this time and place for a reason that I could not fathom.

The dagger strapped to my thigh was a clue. It had been there for so long that even when I removed it the straps and sheath left their imprint against my flesh. I had not shown it to anyone since the night the Argives had tried to assassinate Philip.

But on the trail back to Pella one night I removed it from beneath my skirt and one of the other guardsmen noticed its polished onyx hilt glint in the firelight.

"Where did you get that?" he asked, eyeing the beautifully crafted dagger appreciatively.

From Odysseus
,
I started to say. But I held my tongue. No one would believe that. I was not certain that I believed it myself.

"I don't know," I said, letting him take it from my hand and examine it closely. "I have no memory beyond a week or so ago."

Soon the other members of the guard were admiring it. They began to argue over its origin.

"That's a Cretan dagger," said one of the men. "See the way the hilt is curved. Cretan."

"Pah! You don't know what you're talking about. Take a good look at the
design
on the hilt. You ever see a Cretan design that used flying cranes? Never!"

"All right, hawkeye, where's it from, then?"

"Egypt."

"Egypt? You've had too much wine!"

"It's an Egyptian piece, I tell you."

"So's your mother."

The men nearly came to blows. Pausanias and I had to push them apart and change the subject.

But the following night the armorer of the guardsmen asked to see my dagger. It was becoming famous, which worried me. I had always kept it hidden so that I could use it in an emergency when all else failed. If everyone knew about it, how could I use it as a surprise weapon?

"That blade," said the armorer admiringly. "I've never seen work like that. Nobody makes an iron blade like that. It's a damned work of art."

The flying cranes were the symbol of the House of Odysseus, I knew. Somehow I had received that dagger from Odysseus, king of Ithaca, in the Achaian camp outside the walls of Troy.

A thousand years ago.

It could not be, yet I seemed to remember it. I could see in my mind's eye those high thick walls and the single combats between heroes on the plain before the city. I could see valiant Hector and fiery Achilles and stout Agamemnon and wary Odysseus as clearly as if I were with them now.

When I stretched myself out on the ground beneath my guardsman's cloak that night I clutched the dagger in my hand, determined to dream a dream about it, and about who I was and why I could remember a war from a thousand years in the past yet could not remember anything from a month ago.

I dreamed.

It was a confused, troubling dream, whirling and moving and filled with half-hidden faces and voices I could not quite hear.

I saw Alexandros, golden hair streaming in the wind as he galloped on his midnight steed over a stark desert made of human skulls. His face changed ever so subtly, still the golden-haired intense face of that royal youth, yet now he was someone else, someone mocking and scornful who laughed as he rode roughshod over living men, crushing their bodies beneath his horse's hooves.

Everything shifted, changed, melted like hot wax into a different scene where Philip slumped drunkenly against a dining couch, wine cup in one hand, his good eye glaring balefully at me.

"I trusted you," he mumbled at me. "I trusted you."

He was not drunk, he was dying, blood spurting from a sword gash in his belly. In my right hand I held a bloodied sword as I backed away from Philip's throne.

Someone laughed behind me and I turned, nearly slipping on the blood-slicked stones of the floor, and saw that it was Alexandros. Yet it was not him, but a different person, the Golden One, age-old yet ageless, youthful flesh with eyes that had seen the millennia pass by. He laughed with a bitterness and scorn that chilled my soul.

And beyond him stood a tall, regal, utterly beautiful woman with flowing red hair and skin as white as alabaster. She smiled at me grimly.

"Well done, Orion," she said. And she stepped past the Golden One to put her hands on my shoulders and then slide her arms around my neck and kiss me full on the lips.

"You are not Athena," I said.

"No, Orion. I am not. You may address me as Hera."

"But I love—" I was about to say Athena, then I realized that that was not her true name.

"You will love me, Orion," said flame-haired Hera. "I will make you forget about the one you call Athena."

"But . . ." I wanted to tell her something, but I could no longer think of what it was.

"Go back to the timeflow, Orion," said the Golden One, still smirking. "Go back and play out the role we have written for you."

His eyes were on the dead form of Philip as he commanded me. The bloodied sword was still tight in my grip.

I awoke in the camp with Philip's other guardsmen, still clutching the ancient dagger, sick at heart at my dream.

We resumed our march along the rocky trail through the coastal hills back to Pella. Following along behind us was the long, long train of wagons bearing the grain harvest that we had taken. Already there was talk in the camp each night that Philip would sell the grain harvest to raise more troops and then attack Athens. Or sell the grain
to
Athens in exchange for Perinthos and Byzantion. Or store the grain at Pella in preparation for an Athenian attack on the capital.

If Philip expected an attack on Pella, however, the city certainly did not look it. My first glimpse of Philip's capital, on the morning when we finally rode into sight of it, impressed me. There was no wall around the city. It sat on the rolling plain by the high road, a sizeable city of stone buildings, as open and defenseless as the Athenian grain fleet had been.

"We are its defense," Pausanias said. "The army. Philip fights his wars in the enemy's territory. They never get the chance to threaten his cities."

Pella was a new city, Pausanias explained to me. "The old capital, Aigai, up in the mountains, it's got walls around it, all right. Built to be a fortress, Aigai is. But Olympias hated it there, so Philip moved his capital here, by the high road, just to please her."

The city was still being built, I saw as we rode closer. Houses and temples were being constructed from stone and masonry; before us as we approached was a large theater carved into the hillside. Up on the highest ground stood a cluster of columned buildings of polished granite: Philip's palace, Pausanias informed me.

"It's big," I said, meaning the palace.

"The biggest city I've ever seen," said Pausanias.

"You haven't seen Athens," came a voice from behind us.

Turning on my mount I saw it was Alexandros, golden hair shining in the morning sun, eyes aflame with inner passion.

"Athens is built in marble, not this gray, dull granite," he said. His voice was sharp, high-pitched. "Thebes, Corinth—even Sparta is more beautiful than this pile of rocks."

"When were you in Athens?" Pausanias asked icily. "Or Thebes. Or Corinth. Or—"

Alexandros shot him a glance of pure fury and darted past us, his black Ox-Head kicking dust in our faces as he galloped away.

Pausanias spat. "To hear him talk, you'd think he's been around the whole world in a chariot."

Half a moment later Alexandros' Companions dashed past and we got more dust in our mouths.

When we stopped for the noon meal Pausanias made us clean up our gear. Grooms brushed our horses, slaves polished our armor. We trooped into the city bright and shining, and the citizens of Pella came out into the streets to welcome us with flowers and warm shouts of victory. I did not feel particularly victorious, and my dream still troubled me. I wondered if there were anyone in the city whom I could trust to interpret the dream without denouncing me as a traitor for even dreaming of slaying the king.

Philip rode in our midst, and the people showered him with flowers and cheers. From what I had heard among the soldiers, when Philip had become king, less than twenty years ago, Macedonia was being carved up by its neighbors. Now Macedonia had either conquered those neighbors or forced them into alliances. Philip was so successful that his capital needed no wall around it. Now he was struggling to make himself master of all the region, from the Illyrians along the Adriatic Sea to the Byzantines on the Bosporus, from wild northern tribes along the Ister River to the mighty cities of Thebes and Corinth and even Athens herself.