Orion and the Conqueror (4 page)

There was even talk of invading Asia, once the issue with Athens was settled, to free the Greek cities of Ionia and pluck the beard of the Persian High King.

Up the wide main thoroughfare of Pella we rode, enjoying the crowd's welcome, until we passed through the gates of the palace wall. At home now, Philip prodded his horse to the front and thus was the first to arrive at the steps of the palace.

Standing at the top of the gray stone stairs, proud and regal, her flame-red hair tied up in spirals that made her seem even taller than she was naturally, her royal gown purest white with shimmering crimson borders, her incredibly beautiful face haughty and imperious, stood the woman from my dream who had called herself Hera.

I gaped at her.

"Close your mouth, Orion," whispered Pausanias harshly. "That's the queen you're staring at: Olympias."

It was Hera.

And she recognized me. She looked past Philip, who was stumping painfully up the stairs. I realized for the first time that in addition to all the other wounds he had suffered, Philip was nearly crippled. But that is not what stunned me. It was Olympias. Hera. She looked straight at me and gave me an icy shadow of a smile. Her blood-red lips moved ever so slightly, mouthing a single word:

"Orion."

She knew me. My dream had not been a dream, after all.

Chapter 6

Somehow I was not surprised when I was told that the queen commanded me to appear in her presence.

Most of the royal guard were young Macedonian nobles; once we were relieved of duty they quickly dispersed to their homes and families. Only those few of us foreigners or men who had no house in Pella remained in the barracks.

We were quartered in one of the buildings adjacent to the palace, where slaves of all ages and both sexes bustled about to make us comfortable. Our quarters were almost luxurious, for a barracks. There were good beds in a wide room with strong rafters holding up a wooden ceiling. Plenty of room for us to stretch out. The room was well-aired, too, with windows that looked out on the parade ground.

I saw that the men knew these household slaves well. Several of the women, and some of the younger boys as well, seemed to be lovers of certain of the guardsmen.

A messenger informed me of the queen's command as I was bathing in the spring-fed pool outside the exercise yard. The water was icy but I did not mind it, nor did I care that some of the men laughed at me for washing myself.

"It will rain soon enough, Orion," called one of them from the stone benches lining the yard.

"What are you, one of those Athenian dainties who has to take a bath every month?" jeered another.

But when the queen's messenger arrived they quickly fell silent. To them it must have seemed as if I had known the queen would summon me. Or as if the queen had magically made me wash so that I would be sweet-smelling in her presence.

So I followed the messenger, a smooth-cheeked youth who smelled of perfume, through the many rooms of the palace to the queen's audience chamber.

She was Hera, the flame-haired, imperious beauty who had told me in my dream that I would love her. It
had
to be a dream, I told myself as I walked from the entrance of her audience room to her throne and bowed low before her. How could it be otherwise? Men sometimes glimpse their futures in dreams. And she recognized me and knew my name because she had been informed by messengers from Philip's camp. Messengers—or spies.

That could explain how she recognized me, I thought. Yet how could I explain that the Hera in my dream looked exactly like the Olympias, queen of Macedon, who sat before me on a throne of polished ebony? I had never seen her before, except for my dream.

Two guards in handsomely burnished armor stood behind her throne, staring stonily into infinity. Several women sat off in a corner of the large room. The floor was polished wood. Her throne was flanked by tall red-figured vases filled with vibrant flowers.

"Your name is Orion, I am told," she said to me.

"Yes, Your Majesty," I replied formally, thinking that she knew perfectly well what my name was. Then a new thought surfaced in my mind:
Perhaps she knows more than my name; perhaps she knows who I truly am, why I am here, everything!

"I am told that you saved the king's life."

"I did what any loyal man would have done," I said.

Again that ghostly smile animated her lips briefly. I realized that if Philip had been assassinated, her son might now be king.

"Olympias, Queen of the Macedonians, offers her thanks to you, Orion."

I bowed again.

"What reward would you have?" she asked. "Speak freely."

I heard the words on my tongue before I had a chance to think about them. "I have no memory, Your Majesty, beyond a few days ago. If it is in your power, I would like to know who I am and why I am here."

She arched an eyebrow at me, as if half-amused, half-affronted by my request.

But she smiled once more and murmured, "Come to this room at midnight, Orion. Come alone and tell no one. Do you understand?"

"I understand."

"Until midnight, then."

I hurried out of her audience chamber. Come alone and tell no one. That sounded dangerous. What would the king think if he learned of it?

As it turned out, the king was also thinking about my lack of memory. The messenger who had conveyed me to the queen's chamber was still waiting outside in the anteroom when I left Olympias. He told me that Parmenio wanted to see me now.

It was difficult not to like red-nosed Parmenio. He was an older man, probably almost fifty, his hair and beard grizzled with gray. He was built like a boar, low to the ground, thick in the chest and arms. Blunt as a boar, too; there was not a trace of dissemblance in him.

"The king wants you to talk with Alexandros' teacher," he said once I was ushered into his quarters. It was a sparse, spare room in the palace. If he had a family and a real home, they must have been elsewhere.

"Alexandros' teacher?" I asked.

"He's heard about your lack of memory and he wants to see you. His name's Aristotle. Fancies himself a philosopher, although he's from these parts—Stagyra. Spent some time in Athens, though; that must be where he got all the weird ideas he's always mumbling about."

I was getting a good tour of the palace and its surrounding buildings. I followed the same perfumed young man out of the palace, through the gate we had ridden past earlier in the day, and down one of the noisy streets of Pella to the house of Aristotle the Stagyrite.

The air in the streets seemed thick with dust—whether from all the construction that seemed to be going on everywhere, or blown in by the cutting wind from the plain beyond the city, I could not tell. The city was raucous with the sounds of hammering and yammering, builders and vendors and street hawkers and housewives and men of business all conducting their affairs at the top of their lungs. I saw a slim young girl, hardly into her teens, leaning against the freshly plastered wall of a new house, fiddling with one of her sandals. She was a pretty little thing, her long brown hair done up nicely, her short-skirted blue dress slipping over one bare shoulder. Then I realized that she was applying ink to her sandal. Wherever she stepped she left an advertising imprint for the brothel of Dionysia of Amphipolis. I laughed: Dionysia must have a high-class clientele if she expected new customers to be able to read.

The house that Philip had furnished Aristotle was large and spacious, although not imposing. Some of the new houses I had passed, and others still under construction, seemed much grander, with fluted columns and impressive staircases fronting them. Most of them were set well back from the street, separated from the traffic by low walls and flower gardens.

Everyone who was anyone, it seemed to me, was pouring into the capital. Men whose fathers had been horse-thieving hill-clan leaders were now vying with one another
to build the most
impressive house and lavish garden. These new noblemen had left their ancestors' homes in the hills to be in Philip's capital and to serve the king.

Aristotle's house was low and wide, with a newly-timbered roof the only sign that anyone cared about it. The garden in front of it had gone to weeds. The gravel path was also weed-choked and obviously had not been raked in months. The shutters on the windows were unpainted, cracked with age; a few of them were dangling lopsidedly.

Yet once I was ushered inside everything changed. I had thought the house much too large for one man, since I had been told that the philosopher lived alone. I saw that I was wrong: the house was barely large enough for him, because he was far from alone in it.

The house was a museum, a library, a repository for every kind of book and specimen and drawing and sample of all the myriad kinds of things that interested the Stagyrite's far-ranging mind. The pretty young messenger left me at the front door, after it was opened to me by a bright-eyed servant with a ragged sandy brown beard and thinning hair. His chiton was clean but seemed very old and frayed.

I stepped from the untended garden into a room that had originally been an entryway. Now its walls were lined with shelves and the shelves were crammed with book scrolls, all of them well-worn. Down a hallway narrowed by more bookshelves I was conducted by the balding servant until we came to the back of the house where Aristotle stood bent over a long table covered with seashells. No two of them were alike.

He looked up, blinked at me, and then dismissed the servant with an abrupt flick of his hand.

Aristotle looked almost like a gnome. Short and lean almost to the point of emaciation, his head was large and high-domed, dominating his tiny, shriveled body. His hair was thinning but still dark; his beard neatly trimmed. His eyes were small and he blinked constantly as if they pained him.

"You are the one called Orion?" he asked, in a voice that was surprisingly deep and strong.

"I am Orion," I said.

"Son of?"

I could only shrug.

He smiled, showing ragged yellow teeth. "Pardon me, young man. That was a trick. Four times before I have seen men who have lost their memory. Sometimes an innocent question brings an answer before they can think about it and the memory returns. Or at least part of it."

He sat me on a stool next to his worktable and examined my head in the afternoon light streaming through the long windows.

"No scars," he muttered. "No sign of a head wound."

"I heal very quickly," I said.

He fixed me with those burning eyes. "You remember that?"

"No," I replied truthfully. "I
know
it. Just as I know that my name is Orion."

"You remember nothing that happened to you beyond a few days ago?"

"It is as if I were born as an adult. The first thing I remember is marching with the mercenaries of Diopeithes on the plain of Perinthos, little more than a week ago."

"Born fully-formed, with shield and spear in hand," he said, half smiling. "Like Athena."

"Athena? You know her?"

"I know of all the gods, Orion."

"I dream of them."

"Do you?"

I hesitated, wondering how much I could tell him.

Would he consider me insane? Would he consider it treason against Philip to dream that Olympias, the queen, was also Hera
the goddess?
And that she intended that I should slay the king?

"What
does Athena look like?" I asked.

He blinked several times. "Usually she is portrayed in armor and helmet. Phydias' great statue of her shows her bearing shield and spear. Often she has an owl with her, the symbol of her wisdom."

"But her face," I insisted. "Her form. What does she look like?"

Aristotle's eyes widened at my question. "She is a goddess, Orion. No one has seen her features."

"I have."

"In your dreams?"

I had blurted enough, I decided. So I merely replied, "Yes, in my dreams."

Aristotle considered this a moment, his large dome of a head tilted slightly to one side on his frail shoulders. "Is she beautiful?" he asked at length.

"Extremely beautiful. Her eyes are silver-gray, her hair as black as the midnight sky. Her face . . ." I could not find the words to describe her.

"Do you love her?" he asked.

I nodded.

"And she loves you? In your dreams?"

She loved me in the barren snowy wastes of the Ice Age, I knew. She loved me in the green forests of Paradise. We had loved each other through a hundred million years: in the dusty camps of the Great Khan, in the electric cities of the industrial world, on the shores of the methane sea of ringed Saturn's largest moon.

All this I kept to myself. He would think me a raving madman if I told him a hundredth of it. So I answered merely:

"Yes. In my dreams we love each other."

He must have sensed that there was much I was holding back from him. We talked until the sunlight faded from the windows and slaves entered the room softly to light the oil lamps. The balding major-domo who had admitted me to the house came and whispered in his master's ear.

"You are wanted back at your barracks, Orion," said Aristotle to me.

I got up from the stool, surprised that we had been talking for so long that my joints popped when I stood up.

"Thank you for your time," I said.

"I hope I have been helpful."

"Yes. A little."

"Come see me again. I am almost always here and I will be happy to see you."

"Thank you," I said.

He walked with me around the long table toward the door to the room. "I think that perhaps the key to your memory lies in those dreams you described. Often men dream of things that they do not think of when they are awake."

"The gods use dreams to give us messages," I suggested.

He smiled and reached up to pat my shoulder. "The gods have other fish to fry, Orion, if they actually take any interest in human affairs at all. They are far too busy to meddle in our dreams, I fear."

His words sent a shock through me. Somehow I knew he was right, and I wondered how he knew so much about the gods. Yet, at the same instant, I knew he was also wrong. The gods' principal interest is to meddle in human affairs.

I had been recalled to barracks because I was assigned to duty that evening. Most of the royal guard had gone off to their homes scattered through the city, so the handful of us who lived in the barracks got the chore of standing like statues through the king's long, loud, wine-soaked dinners.

Pausanias was one of the few Macedonian nobles who actually did his guard duty that night. Sour-faced and grumbling, he complained that he should be reclining on a dinner couch with the others rather than standing around in armor and helmet while his fellow nobles drank themselves into a stupor.

"I'm as good as they are," I heard him growl as he inspected my uniform. We were all decked out as if we were marching into battle. We even carried our shields with us.

My post was by the main entrance to the dining hall. It was a big room with a huge fireplace at one end of it, roaring hot although no cooking was done on it. Even in summer the Macedonian nights could be chill. The food was brought in on long trays by sweating servants and set down on the dinner tables, while the dogs, lolling by the fireplace, watched silently with hungry eyes that caught the flickering of the flames.

Philip reclined on a couch at the front of the hall, raised up on a two-step dais, beneath a strikingly vivid mosaic of a roaring lion done in colored pebbles. Flanking him along the table were his generals Parmenio and Antipatros, and Antigonos, gray and lean as an old wolf. Like Philip, Antigonos had lost an eye in battle long ago.