The Creators. I remembered the word, the concept. One of them had created me. Hera had called me a creature, a being created by—by the Golden One, Aten. I remembered that much. My memory was slowly returning. Or were the Creators merely allowing me to remember some things so that I could serve them better?
Determined to learn more, I started walking toward the glowing city.
Only to find myself in my rumpled bed in the barracks at Pella, sunlight beaming through the high windows and roosters crowing in the distance.
CHAPTER 9
“Do you think you could make a good spy for me?” Philip asked.
I had been summoned into his work room. The trestle table was bare, except for a pile of scrolls in one corner. There were no servants, no wine.
“A spy?” I blurted.
“Why not?” Philip mused aloud, leaning back in his leather sling-chair. “The best spies are men who seem to be part of the background, men who are not noticed by the people they’re spying on. Or women, of course, but that’s something else altogether.”
I stood at attention before him, not knowing what to say.
“Don’t look so miserable, Orion,” the king said with a crooked grin. “I’m not asking you to sneak around and pry into locked rooms.”
“I don’t understand, sir.”
He scratched at his beard. Then, “I am sending Aristotle to Athens as an informal diplomat, to make contact with the men there who are against Demosthenes and in favor of making peace with me. He will need an escort. I would like you to head his escort.”
“Yes, sir,” I replied. “But spying?”
He laughed. “Just keep your eyes and ears open. See everything. Listen to everyone. Remember it all and tell it to me when you return. That’s what spying is.”
I felt relieved. I could do that easily enough. And to leave Pella would mean leaving Olympias and her witch’s spell over me. I felt far more than relieved over that. Philip dismissed me after telling me that Aristotle would depart the following morning. But as I started for the door I realized that this mission would take me away from Alexandros. What of the task Olympias gave me to protect her son?
“By the way,” Philip called before I could reach the door latch. “My son will be going with you. He’s never seen Athens. Neither have I, for that matter.”
I turned back to the king.
“He’ll have a few of his Companions with him. They’ll be travelling incognito—if that young hothead can manage to keep his mouth shut, that is.” He sighed like a worried father. “I want you to take special care of him, Orion. He is the future of this kingdom.”
I must have smiled foolishly, for Philip looked surprised. Then he grinned back at me. As I left him I felt an immense sense of relief. Philip meant no harm to his son. He wanted me to protect Alexandros just as much as Olympias did. And Olympias must have known of this mission to Athens last night. Perhaps it was all her idea, to have her son see Athens, and Philip was just as much of a pawn in her hands as I was. Perhaps I would not be out of her grasp even in distant Athens.
Still, I felt a new sense of freedom once we had left Pella behind us. The crisp air of the open fields and wooded hills was like wine to me. The sky was bright and clean; the intrigues and intricacies of the capital faded away as we rode our mounts along the trail that wound through the rising, rocky countryside.
The trip turned into a travelling school. Aristotle had been Alexandros’ tutor until just about a year ago, and now as we rode our horses across the hills and through the mountain passes heading southward, the gnomish old man became engrossed with every fold of the land, every bird and beast and insect, every blade of grass or burr of thistle.
He sent Alexandros and his Companions scurrying across the countryside collecting samples of everything from grass seeds to rocks. Hephaistion, who seemed especially close to Alexandros, got himself half-killed by wasp stings when he tried to collect a sample of the nest they had constructed in a dead tree. Aristotle tended the lad himself with mudpacks and soothing ointments, all the while telling us that his father had been a physician and had been bitterly disappointed when Aristotle did not follow in his footsteps.
I had expected the old man to travel in one of the wagons, but he rode horseback as the rest of us did. The servants, of course, rode mules. We had hired professional teamsters to handle the ever-increasing number of wagons in our train.
The high road south wound its way through the rocky Vale of Tempe, between Ossa and craggy Mount Olympos, its lofty peak already gleaming with snow.
“The abode of the gods,” said Aristotle to me as we rode through the brisk autumn morning. Brittle dead leaves strewed the trail; our horses snorted steam in the early chill.
“Only in legend,” I replied.
He looked up at me, his brow furrowed. “You don’t believe in the gods?”
I must have made a bitter little smile. “I believe in them, but they don’t live up there in the cold. They take better care of themselves than that.”
Aristotle shook his head. “Remarkable. For a man who has no memory, Orion, you seem very certain of your knowledge about the gods’ residence.”
“We could climb the mountain,” I said, “and see for ourselves if the gods are living up there.”
He laughed. “See for ourselves! Very good, Orion. Very good. The essence of truth is knowledge gained by examination. I’ll make a philosopher of you yet!”
“The essence of truth,” I muttered.
“Truth is often difficult to determine, Orion. Sokrates gave his life seeking for it. My own teacher, Plato, tried to determine exactly what truth is, and he died brokenhearted.”
I wondered silently what the essence of truth might be. Were my dreams truer than my waking reality? Were my hazy recollections of other lives true memories or merely desperate fantasies of my mind?
He misinterpreted my silence. “Yes, I differ from Plato’s teachings. He believed that ideas are the essence of truth: pure ideas, with no physical substance whatsoever. I cannot accept that. To me, the only way to discover truth is by examining the world about us with our five senses.”
“You say that Plato died of a broken heart?”
The gnomish old man’s face grew somber. “Dionysios invited Plato to his city of Syracuse, in distant Sicily. There Plato instructed him on how to be a philosopher-king, a great leader among men. It isn’t every day that a philosopher has a king for his student.”
“What happened?”
“Dionysios listened very carefully to Plato’s ideas about the ideal republic. And he used those ideas to make himself absolute tyrant of Syracuse. His son was even worse. He threw Plato out of Syracuse, sent him packing home to Athens.”
“So much for the philosopher-king,” I said.
Aristotle gave me a troubled look, then fell silent.
Our little band was growing larger every day with Aristotle’s constantly-growing collections. We had to buy more mules and wagons and more men to tend them. The pack train would be twice the size of our original group by the time we reached Athens. There was already snow on the lower mountaintops, and the trees were turning gauntly bare. I urged our band southward through the narrow pass of Thermopylai, where Leonidas and his Spartans had stood against the invading Persians of Xerxes more than a century and a half earlier.
Alexandros insisted that we stop and do homage to the brave Spartans, who died to the last man rather than surrender to the Persians.
So there on the narrow rocky shelf between the grim mountains and the heaving sea, near the hot springs for which the pass was named, we paid honor to ancient heroes while the winds keening down from the north warned of impending winter. Alexandros spoke of the Persians with contempt, ending with, “Never will our people be free until the Persian Empire is shattered completely.”
Aristotle nodded agreement. The men were impressed with his words. I was more impressed with the smell of snow in the graying sky. We moved on.
“One thing that Alexandros did not mention,” said Aristotle from the back of the gentle chestnut mare he rode, “was that the Macedonians allowed Xerxes and his army to travel through their territory without raising a finger against them. They even sold the Persians grain and horses and timber for their ships, as a matter of fact.”
He spoke with a forgiving smile, and in a low voice so that no one could hear but me. Even so, he added, “But that was a long time ago, of course. Things have changed.”