Ben Bova – Orion and the Conqueror

Again her disdainful laughter. “Don’t torture yourself trying to understand us, Orion.”

“Us?”

“We Creators. Your mind can’t comprehend our powers, don’t even bother to try.” Then she leaned against me and ran her hand down my abdomen to my crotch. “Your task is to satisfy my desires, creature.”

“That’s easy enough to do in bed,” I countered, still avoiding her eyes, trying to maintain control of myself long enough to learn more. “But what am I to do about Alexandros and Philip?”

“Serve Philip well,” she said. “Protect Alexandros, as you did in Athens. And wait.”

“Wait? For what?”

“No more questions,” she murmured.

“One more. Why did you send those assassins against Alexandros?”

I felt her body twitch with shocked surprise. “How did you—” Then she caught herself. For a startled moment she stared down at me, speechless. At last she broke into a bitter laughter. “My creature exhibits some powers of intelligence, after all.”

“No one could profit by having Alexandros assassinated,” I reasoned. “But someone might profit by having me save Alexandros from assassination.”

“I wanted Alexandros to accept you. To trust you. When you started out for Athens he regarded you as one of his father’s men. Now he owes his life to you.”

“He hardly thinks so.”

“I know what he thinks better than you do, Orion,” she said. “Alexandros trusts you now.”

Again I asked, “But why did you—”

“I said no more questions.” And she slid her body over mine, supple as one of her snakes, eyes burning with human passion and something beyond.

CHAPTER 13

The army was on the move again, this time heading south, toward Attica. Long columns of troops winding along the roads, stirring up clouds of dust that could be seen for miles. Cavalry flanking the roads, moving up along the hillsides where there was grass enough for the horses. Threading through the narrow mountain passes, the cavalry went first and the foot soldiers ate dust. In the rear was the long train of mules and ox-carts, laden with armor and weapons and supplies.

It felt good to be out of the palace, away from Olympias’ grasp. Once again I breathed the crisp clear air of the mountains. Even with the dust and smell of the horses and mules it tasted like nectar to me.

I was assigned to Alexandros’ guard and rode along with his Companions. They bantered good-naturedly about Thunderbolt and even compared my mount favorably to Alexandros’ own Ox-head—but never when he was within hearing.

Alexandros was a young man of moods. I could see that he was being torn up within himself. He admired his father and hated him at the same time. Olympias had filled his mind with the central idea that Philip did not love him and did not truly accept him as his son and heir. Still, Alexandros wanted his father to admire him; yet he feared that such a desire was treason to his mother.

Young, ambitious, uncertain of his abilities or his acceptance by his own father, Alexandros did what so many frightened, self-conscious teenagers do: he went to extremes. He boasted that his true father was Zeus himself, or at least Herakles. He claimed that he wanted to be like Achilles, who chose glory over a long life. He had to be braver and more daring than anyone else. He took risks that others would blanch at.

My job was to keep him alive.

“He’s a young hothead,” Philip told me the day we began our march southward. “And his Companions are completely in awe of him. They even shave their faces clean, just as he does. It’s up to you to see that he doesn’t break his foolish neck.”

No easy task.

When the cavalry had to forage in the hills of Pieria, Alexandros took it upon himself to raise fresh recruits for the army by galloping his Companions into each miserable little village along the way and giving a speech from Ox-Head’s back.

“We march to glory!” he shouted in his thin tenor voice. “Who will come with me?”

Inevitably some of the village youths would step forward, faces burning with visions of fame and honor—and loot. Just as inevitably the village elders would tug them back into the crowd. Or worse, their mothers would while the rest of the villagers laughed. Still, Alexandros got a handful of newcomers along the way.

As we approached Thessaly, though, the responses became decidedly more hostile. At one of the mountain passes the local sheep herders even tried to ambush us.

All they saw, I’m sure, was a gaggle of beardless lads on horseback, all of them richly adorned. The horses alone would be worth a fortune to a man who spent his life scrabbling out a living on those rocky hillsides.

Our job was to scout the pass, make certain it was safe for the main body of the army to come through. We knew full well that a handful of determined men could hold up an army for days or even weeks, as Leonidas had at Thermopylae long ago. Philip wanted to get to Thebes before the Athenians could bring their army up to unite with the Thebans. To be held up in these mountain passes could be disastrous.

The local hill folk held scant allegiance to Thebes or anyone else except their own villages. To them, the world was bounded by their mountains and valleys. They knew nothing of the impending war. So when they saw a half-dozen young dandies riding through one of their passes, they thought they had received a windfall from the gods.

They chose their spot well, where the rocky mountain walls nearly touched one another and a rider had to nose his horse carefully around the boulders strewn along the trail.

Alexandros was in the lead, as he usually insisted on, with Hephaistion close behind him. Strung out further behind were Ptolemaios, Nearkos and Harpalos. Ptolemaios was singing a bawdy song, enjoying the echo of his own voice against the mountain walls. I brought up the rear, constantly searching the rugged crests of the mountains and looking behind us for any signs of peril.

I heard the danger, rather than saw it. A rumbling, crunching sound. Looking up, I saw a boulder bouncing down the steep mountainside, kicking up more rocks as it fell.

“Look out!” I bellowed, pulling up on Thunderbolt’s reins.

Alexandros heard it too. With a single glance upward he kicked Ox-Head forward, Hephaistion right beside him. The rest of us turned our horses around, away from the rock slide.

The boulders thundered down and crashed to the floor of the pass in a shower of gritty dust and flying pebbles. Our mounts shied and whinnied. Thunderbolt would have taken off altogether; it took all my strength to hold him where he was.

Eerie war cries echoed through the canyon and I saw men racing along the top of the cliffs. A spear came flying toward me. I saw it in slow-motion, flexing as it glided through the air. Men were scrambling down the rocky face of the cliffs on both sides of us.

And Alexandros was on the other side of the boulders that they had rolled down.

I ducked under the spear and let it fall clattering to the bare ground. Ptolemaios, Harpalos, and Nearkos were being swarmed under by more than a dozen half-naked men armed with spears and staves, but they had their swords out and were slashing at their attackers from horseback. I urged Thunderbolt through the melee, bashing a few heads with my own sword as I approached the rock slide.

The boulders formed a barrier that I could not ride past. I could hear shouting and swearing from the other side, and the scream of a man in death-agony. Swiftly I climbed onto Thunderbolt’s back and leaped atop the nearest boulder, then jumped to the next one.

Alexandros and Hephaistion were on their feet, back to back, surrounded by hill tribesmen with murder in their eyes. Two half-grown boys were leading Hephaistion’s horse down the canyon. Ox-Head was nowhere in sight.

With the greatest roar my lungs could give I leaped from the boulder onto the mass of men attacking Alexandros. Spears snapped and bones crunched. I rolled to my feet and slashed the nearest man almost in two. They were all moving with languid dreamy slowness. I ducked a spear and thrust my sword into the man’s belly, dodged sideways as I yanked the sword out and grabbed the next man’s spear with my left hand. I cracked the spearman’s skull apart with an overhand swing of my sword just as another spear pierced my leather corselet and sliced into my ribs.

I hit the spear with a backhand sword thrust and it pulled free of my flesh. I felt no pain, only the exultation of battle fever. Alexandros killed the man who had speared me and suddenly the attackers broke and ran.

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