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, shrivelled 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.
The dinner guests sitting below them were all male, of course. At first. There were plenty of women servants, most of them young and slim and smiling as the men ogled and pawed at them. The boys among the servants were treated much the same. Even Philip pinched buttocks without regard to gender. Wine was poured liberally, and the laughter and rowdiness rose with each gulp.
I saw that Alexandros was not present, nor any of his young Companions. This was a dinner for the king’s friends and companions-in-arms. And for relatives, close and distant, such as Attalos, a fat and beady-eyed clan leader who owned, it was said, the biggest house in Pella and the richest horse ranch in Macedonia.
Attalos also had a fourteen-year-old niece who was being dangled as bait before Philip’s eyes, according to the barracks gossip.
“Philip likes ’em young,” one of my barracks mates had told me while we were suiting up for duty. “Girls, boys, makes no difference.”
“How old was Olympias when he married her?” I had asked.
“Ahh, that was different. That was a state marriage. Brought the Molossians and all of Epeiros over to Philip’s side with that marriage.”
“He was mad about her, though,” said one of the other men.
“Bewitched by her, you mean.”
“Well, whatever it was, it wore off as soon as she bore him Alexandros.”
“Doesn’t matter; the old fox casts his one good eye on anything with smooth skin.”
They all laughed approvingly, wishing they had the kingly prerogatives of Philip.
As the dinner stretched into a long drinking bout I wondered if I would be able to keep my midnight appointment with the queen. Philip looked half-unconscious from the wine he had drunk, yet he had a boy of ten or so pouring still more into his gold goblet. Some of the dinner guests were drowsing on their couches; those who weren’t were fondling the prettier servants.
Then the hetairai were admitted into the dining hall and the servants scampered away, many of them looking grateful. These professional women were older and looked quite sure of themselves. It seemed to me that they picked out the men they wished to be with. No one argued with their choices. And the men’s behavior actually improved. The lewd jokes and roaring laughter quieted down as one of the courtesans pointed to the musicians who had been sitting idly in a corner. They struck up their lyres and flutes and lovely soft music filled the dining hall. The stench of spilled wine and vomit still hung in the air. But now the perfumes of distant lands began to make the room more pleasant.