“She scorns me, Orion, and plots with her son to get him the throne.”
“Alexandros wants to be a good son to you,” I told him. “He wants to be worthy of your throne.”
Philip smiled crookedly. “He wants to sit on my throne, and the only way he can do that is to kill me.”
“No,” I said. “I see nothing of that in him. He wants to show you that he’s worthy. He wants your approval.”
“Does he?”
“Despite all that his mother has poured into his ears, he admires you.”
“Does he acknowledge that I’m his father?”
So he knows about Alexandros’ personal mythology, I realized.
Aloud, I replied, “Boyish ego. He doesn’t believe it himself.”
Philip cast his good eye on me. “I wonder.” He pulled the cloak tighter around him. “I wonder if maybe it’s all true. Maybe Herakles or some god did beget him. Maybe he’s not my true son, after all.”
“No god begat him, sir,” I said. “There are no gods. Only men and women.”
“Sokrates was given hemlock on the accusation of not believing in the gods.” He smiled again as he said it.
I smiled back. “If you poisoned everyone who did not believe in the gods, you would run out of hemlock long before the job was half finished.”
He chuckled. “You jest, Orion. Yet it seems to me that you are serious, at the same time.”
How could I tell him that the so-called gods and goddesses were as human as he was? The faint memory of them seethed in my mind: the deities were men and women from that city of my dreams, the city that existed in another time from this.
He mistook my silence. “You needn’t fear, Orion. Your beliefs are safe with me.”
“May I make a suggestion, sir?”
“What is it?”
“Keep the boy close to you. Don’t allow him to see his mother—”
“That’s easier said than done, unless I chain him up like a dog.”
“The more he is with you the less his mother can influence him. Take him with you on campaign. Let him show his mettle before your eyes.”
Philip cocked his head, as if giving my suggestion some thought. Then he tapped a forefinger against the cheekbone below his empty eye socket.
“I only have one eye, Orion. But perhaps you’re right. I’ll bring the lad come on campaign with me.”
“Another campaign?”
His expression went grim. “The damned Athenians are negotiating with Thebes and several other cities to form a league against me. I’ve never wanted to fight Athens directly, and I certainly don’t want to tangle with Thebes. But now it looks as if I’ll have to face them both together.”
“Your army has never lost a major battle,” I encouraged him.
He shook his head. “Do you know why, Orion?” Before I could reply he answered his own question. “Because if I had lost a major battle, just one, my whole kingdom would collapse like a house of cards.”
“No, that could not be.”
“It would, Orion, and I know it. It gnaws at me every minute of the day. It keeps me awake when I try to sleep. Macedonia is strong and free only so long as we keep winning. If my army is ever defeated, all the tribes that owe me allegiance will go back to their rebel ways. Thrace and Illyria and even the goddamned Molossians will rise against me—or Alexandros, assuming he survives. I’ll be dead on the battlefield, you can rest assured.”
That was the vision that haunted Philip. He feared his kingdom would be torn apart if he lost a major battle. He had to keep on winning, always fighting, always victorious, or lose everything. That is why he avoided battle with Athens. One throw of the dice could destroy everything that he had worked his entire life to create.
That night I decided to see the queen on my own terms. But my duty as a guardsman came first. I was serving once again as one of the formal guards at Philip’s royal dinner, posted this time behind the king’s couch, to stand there like a statue in armor and spear while Philip and his guests ate and drank and caroused. His guests were mostly Macedonian, including the oily Attalos, who fawned on the king and praised even his belches. There were a few foreigners reclining on dinner couches near the king: I thought one a Persian and recognized another as the Athenian merchant whom I had seen in Pella before. They were spies, I knew. But for which side? Did they spy on Athens and the Great King in Persia for Philip? Or did they spy on Philip for the Great King and Athens?
Probably both, I concluded. They would take gold from either side and praise the winner.
Parmenio and Philip’s other generals were present, of course, but there was no talk over dinner of matters military. Only politics. Would Demosthenes’ representatives be able to talk Thebes into an alliance with Athens?
“After all the patience you’ve shown with both cities,” said Antipatros, “this is the thanks they give you.”
“I never expected their thanks,” Philip said, holding his wine goblet out for the serving boy to fill it.
From my post at the king’s couch I saw with satisfaction that Alexandros had been placed next to his father.
“We should march on them now,” he said, almost shouting to make his light tenor voice heard over the buzz of background talk. “First Thebes and then Athens.”
“If we march now,” Philip replied, “it will give them the excuse they need to cement their alliance.”
Alexandros looked at his father. “You will let them prepare for war against us while we sit here drinking?”
His own wine cup had not been refilled since the eating had ended. He drank little; he ate little, as well. His old teacher Leonidas, I had been told, raised the boy with Spartan values and discipline.
Philip grinned at his son. “I will give them plenty of time to argue over the terms of their alliance. With a bit of luck they’ll fall out between themselves and there will be no alliance for us to worry about.”
“But if the luck goes against us?” Alexandros asked. “What then?”
Philip took a long draft of his wine. “We’ll just have to wait and see. Patience, my son. Patience. It’s a virtue, I’m told.”
“So is courage,” Alexandros snapped.
The dining hall fell absolutely silent.
But Philip laughed. “I don’t need to prove my courage, son. You can count my scars.”
And Alexandros smiled back at his father. “Yes, that’s true enough.”
The tension eased. Men went back to talking with one another. Goblets were refilled. Philip fondled the thigh of the boy who was serving him. Alexandros bristled at that, but then looked across the room at the place where his Companions were reclining. Ptolemaios and the others were nuzzling the serving girls there. Except for Hephaistion. He stared back at Alexandros across the wide, noisy hall as if there were no one else in the room.
Then I noticed Pausanias, captain of the guard, standing at the doorway of the dining hall. His fists were planted on his hips, as if he were about to deliver one of his withering verbal blasts at the two guards posted there, his mouth set in its usual sour grimace. But his eyes were on Philip, and even from across the breadth of the dining hall I could see that Pausanias was burning with anger.
The hours toiled on, the wine goblets were refilled over and again, and the dinner guests became rowdier and bawdier. No one left until finally Philip pushed himself up from his couch, draped one arm heavily around the shoulders of the boy who had been serving him, and lurched off toward his bedchamber. Slowly the other guests struggled to their feet and staggered off, many of them with either girls or boys in their grip. Alexandros rose from his couch coldly sober. Hephaistion, equally restrained, crossed the hall to be with him.
As the kitchen slaves came in to clean the hall, Pausanias finally gave us leave to return to barracks. Clearly something had enraged him, but he gave no hint of what it was.
I pretended to go to sleep, but as soon as I heard the snores of my fellow guardsmen in the darkness, I got up and headed for the queen’s rooms. I knew the layout of the palace well enough to get to her rooms on my own. But I did not want the guards or her serving women to get in my way.
So I went out onto the parade ground in the cold night, barefoot and wearing only my thin chiton. It was dark, moonless. Clouds were scudding low across the stars. The air felt damp, the wind cutting. Staying in the shadows of the barracks wall so that the sentries would not see me, I hurried the length of the parade ground and clambered softly up onto the roof of the stables. I had brought no weapon with me, nothing to clink in the night and alert a drowsy sentry. Nothing but the dagger that I always kept strapped to my thigh.