Philip nodded.
“I don’t trust spies,” grumbled Antigonos. “They can lie to you as often as not. I prefer to see the enemy’s dispositions with my own eye.” And he put a forefinger below his one good eye.
“Perhaps you and I should scout out the enemy together,” suggested Philip, pointing to his own single eye. “Between us we equal one whole scout.”
Everyone broke into laughter, the king loudest of all.
“We need to scout them out,” agreed Parmenio. “Even the best of spies doesn’t have a military head. We need to find out exactly what we’re facing.”
“You won’t like what you see,” Philip warned. “They’ll outnumber us by quite a bit.”
“And the Theban Sacred Band is worth two or three times its numbers,” said Antigonos.
“We need some scouts,” Parmenio insisted.
“I’ll take a look at them,” Alexandros said.
“No. It’s too risky. You stay in camp.”
“But I can do it!”
“So could I,” said the king. “But I’m too valuable to risk on a mission that others can do as well.”
“All our necks will be beneath the blade once the battle begins,” Antipatros said, trying to make peace. “There’s no sense taking risks now that we can avoid.”
Alexandros raised no further objections, and the meeting broke up with the agreement that Parmenio would pick the men who would cautiously scout the enemy encampments.
But as I followed Alexandros and his Companions back toward their tents, Alexandros pulled me aside. Waving the others to go on, he walked me toward a small clump of trees near one of the horse corrals. I had become accustomed to the smell of the horses and their nervous snuffling when they were penned into the makeshift corrals. It was almost sundown and the horses were anticipating the arrival of the slaves with their bundles of hay.
“Orion,” said Alexandros, in a low, confidential tone, “it is clear to me that my father and his generals need information from inside the enemy’s camp.”
“I’m sure—”
He cut me off, impatient to have his say. “Parmenio’s scouts won’t be able to glean the kind of information we need.”
“Your father has spies in the enemy camp, though. Surely they’ll bring out—”
“No, no! We need someone from the army to go into the enemy camp and see for himself how they are arrayed, who their leaders are, what their plans are.”
I thought I understood what he was driving at.
“You want me to do this?”
He had to crane his neck to look up into my face. “Not exactly, Orion. I am going to do it myself.”
“You!” I was thunderstruck.
“But since my mother told me I must not go anywhere without you,” he went on, unperturbed, “you will have to accompany me.”
“But you can’t—”
“I can’t let Hephaistion and the others know; they’ll want to come with me.”
Appalled, I blurted, “You can’t go into the enemy’s camp!”
“And why not?”
“You’d be recognized! You’d be killed or captured and held for ransom. You could wreck your father’s entire plan!”
Alexandros smiled at me, pityingly. “How little you understand, Orion. I cannot be killed. Not before my time. My mother is a priestess of the Old Gods and she has prophesied that I will not die until I have conquered all the world.”
“Not all prophecies come true.”
“You doubt my mother?” he asked coldly.
I knew where that would lead, so I evaded with, “Even if you are not killed, if the enemy captures you they will hold you a hostage until your father surrenders to them.”
“In the first place, Orion, my father is more likely to be Zeus than mortal Philip. In the second place, if I am discovered I will fight to the death rather than allow myself to be captured.”
“But—”
“And since I am not destined to die until I have conquered the world,” he overrode me, “I obviously will not be killed now.”
There was no way to penetrate such logic.
“You must accompany me; that is my mother’s command.”
“And the king’s,” I reminded him. “Your father commanded me to protect you at all times.”
He laughed and headed for his tent.
CHAPTER 14
We waited until the crescent moon was setting behind the jagged mountains to the west. All our camp was asleep, except for the sentries standing muffled in their cloaks against the night’s chill.
I slipped out of my tent without waking the other men of the royal guard sleeping there, and wrapped the scabbard of my sword with a long strip of cloth as I made my way to Alexandros’ tent. Silence would be our ally, and I wanted no clink of metal to reveal our presence—either to the enemy or to our own sentries. I wore a dark woolen vest over my chiton, leaving my arms and legs free. The cool night air was no discomfort to me; I simply adjusted my body’s circulation to keep myself warm.
There were two guards on duty before Alexandros’ tent, leaning sleepily on their spears at its entrance. They allowed me inside without challenge. Alexandros was awake and bristling with energy, pacing the length of his tent, which was larger than the one in which six of us guardsmen slept and furnished almost as handsomely as his quarters in the palace. As soon as he saw me he wordlessly took up a dark half-length cloak and fastened it across his shoulders.
“Do you have a hat or a hood?” I asked. “That golden hair of yours is a dead giveaway.”
He nodded and went to a chest at the foot of his cot. From it he pulled out a dark woolen cap and tugged it over his hair.
As far as the guards were concerned, the prince was going for a late-night stroll through the camp with his personal bodyguard. The sentries were a different matter. We had to slip past them without being seen.
“Follow me,” whispered Alexandros. “I scouted our own camp this afternoon.”
He led me to the little stream that meandered through the camp. Tangled bushes grew at its banks, except for the places where the soldiers had cut them down to get at the water. We waded knee-deep into the icy water and made our way out of the camp. When we came to sentries posted on either bank, we ducked low and let the shrubbery screen us. When the stream turned at an angle that hid us from the sentries’ sight, we clambered out, struggling through the thorny bushes onto bare dry ground.
Alexandros shivered, but I thought it was more excitement than the cold. He was happy as a little boy at play. We pressed on toward the enemy camp.
“We should tell Parmenio or one of the other generals that someone can sneak into our camp through that stream,” I whispered.
He made a grunt that might have been an affirmative.
Up ahead I could see camp fires, thousands of them. It looked as if the dark countryside had been visited by a plague of fireflies. But these lights did not dart and flicker through the shadows; they remained fixed in place. I knew that each of them represented anywhere from six to a dozen or more soldiers. There must be fifty thousand troops facing us, I figured.
Far in the distance a few other lights gleamed wanly. I touched Alexandros’ shoulder and pointed.
“That’s the town,” he whispered to me. “Chaeroneia.”
We went down on our bellies and crawled like beetles to get past the enemy sentries. It took a long time; we would inch along, then stop, wait, glance around to see where the sentries were and if they were looking our way. Then we dragged ourselves across a few more feet of the dusty hard ground.
At last we were deep enough inside the camp to get to our hands and knees and scamper behind the shelter of a decent-sized rock.
Alexandros was grinning. “We used to play at this when we were boys, Ptolemaios and Harpalos and I.”
He was little more than a boy now, I thought. But I said nothing.
Once inside the camp’s guarded perimeter it was almost easy to walk around. There were men from many different cities and tribes, and even though they tended to camp amongst their own, we saw that many others were walking through the camp, talking with friends or strangers or drifting alone with their thoughts, unable to sleep on the night before battle.
Alexandros could distinguish among them by their accents. He spoke to several men, low and brief in his words. I noticed that he used the Attic accent rather well, disguising his native Macedonian tongue.
Finally we were among the Athenians. I saw a very large tent, bright with candles within and guarded by half a dozen men in armor.
“Their generals must be there,” I said to Alexandros as we stood in the shadows between lesser tents. “Making their last-minute plans.”