“My secret master?” Some of the old fire seemed to rekindle in Demosthenes. “I have no m-master except the democracy of Athens!”
“You deny you took money from the Persians?”
“Of course not. I would have t-taken money from the dead souls in Hades if it would have helped to stop Philip.”
“Little good it did you.”
“Athens still stands,” he challenged.
“Your people love Philip now. If you showed yourself on the streets they would no doubt tear you to pieces.”
“Yes. Likely they would. Today. Tomorrow. But in time, perhaps a few weeks, perhaps a few months, they will come back to me.”
Alexandros laughed.
And Demosthenes scowled at him. “You have no idea of how the p-people actually behave, do you? This is a democracy, princeling. Loyalty is not forced. Obedience is not coerced. Where the people are free to make up their own minds, they change their minds often.” As before, the warmer his passion became the less he stuttered.
“Where the people are dazzled by demagogues,” Alexandros countered, “they can be led by their noses by the man who tells the biggest lies.”
“By the man who offers them the clearest vision of their own future,” Demosthenes corrected.
“The same thing,” said Alexandros.
“I will lead Athens again, sooner or later.”
Nodding, Alexandros agreed. “Yes, I understand that a democracy will follow the smoothest talker. I hope they do make you their leader again. I hope it happens when I am king. Then I will smash you once and for all.”
“You will try, I’m sure.”
Alexandros took a step closer to Demosthenes. “I will crush you like a grape, demagogue.” He scuffed a boot against the blue shield. “You’ll need more than that to protect you, next time.”
If Alexandros thought that Pella would ignore his return, he reckoned without his mother. We were only a small band: Alexandros and his Companions, and those of us of the royal guard who had been assigned to them. With the servants and horse handlers and mule drivers and all we came to fewer than a hundred and fifty men.
Yet the streets of Pella were decked with flowers when we returned. Crowds lined the streets as we made our way to the palace, cheering us and throwing even more flowers. Young women ran to us as we rode through the streets to beam smiles up at us and touch us with their outstretched fingertips. Boys pranced along beside our horses, proud to pretend they were part of us.
At the head of the palace steps, at the end of our procession, stood Olympias, resplendent in a red gown that swirled to the ground, her hair decked with garlands, her eyes bright with victory.
The king was nowhere in sight.
We were feted at a royal banquet. Even those of us in the guard were invited to recline on couches in the main dining hall and be served by comely young women and smooth-cheeked young men. Alexandros was up at the head of the hall, his mother beside him. Much wine was poured and most of the men became quite drunk. But neither Alexandros nor his mother did more than sip at their goblets. I drank freely, knowing that I never got drunk. Something in my body burned away the alcohol almost as quickly as I consumed it.
“Where is the king?” I asked Ptolemaios, on the couch next to mine. He was fondling one of the serving girls. Thais had elected to remain in Athens a while; he had complained loudly on the trip back to Pella that the woman was trying to drive him mad. And succeeding.
“Who cares?” he said. Then he returned to nibbling at the serving girl. She could not have been more than fifteen, but that was well past marriageable age among the Macedonians.
The dinner became rowdier. The young men began tossing morsels of food at one another. The more the wine flowed the more uproariously they laughed and bellowed obscene jokes back and forth. Olympias, up on the dais at the head of the hall, seemed to ignore it all as if she saw and heard nothing. She was deep in conversation with Alexandros, whose head was bent toward her.
At last they got up together and left the hall. Then the party became really raucous. Whole platters of food were hurled back and forth, goblets of wine sloshed through the air. Harpalos, the dour giant of the Companions, jumped atop a table and announced that he could make a roasted chicken fly as if it were alive. He pegged the seared bird halfway across the hall, narrowly missing dark-skinned Nearkos, who was intently slicing the skin off a peach in a single spiralling cut.
One by one, the Companions and guards staggered out of the hall, most of them with a girl or boy on their arms. Except for Ptolemaios, who brought two young women with him. “I’ll forget all about her,” he muttered. “At least, for tonight.”
I got up from my couch and pushed past the few couples still carousing, heading for the door. I still wondered where Philip was and why he had not deigned to greet his returning son. And I hoped that Ketu was still somewhere in the palace; there was much I wanted to learn from him.
As I neared the door, however, I noticed a messenger boy scanning the spattered, littered hall. His eyes stopped on me.
“Are you the one called Orion?” he asked me.
“Yes.”
“The queen summons you.”
Glad that I had stayed out of the food fights, I followed him toward the stairs that led to the queen’s rooms.
“She said I would recognize you by your size,” said the lad. While some of the mountain people were big-boned, most of the Macedonians were much smaller in stature than I.
The lad smiled up at me as we started up the stairs. He held his lamp up to my face. “And your beautiful gray eyes,” he added.
I knew that boys his age often sought a mentor who would guide them into adult male society. Homosexual relationships were an accepted norm between noblemen and pubescent boys. Usually the boy grew up to marry and raise a family, and then take on a boy companion at a later stage in life. From what I saw, Macedonian wives had closer bonds with their husbands than those in the cities further south, where wives were left at home and men sported with hetairai, professional courtesans like Thais. Still, men could remain lovers throughout their lives if they wished; Alexandros and Hephaistion seemed to be, although neither of them spoke about it and the other Companions only mentioned it jokingly when neither of them was within earshot.
“I am a stranger here,” I said, “and only a member of the royal guard by the king’s favor. I am not a nobleman.”
“So I had heard,” the boy said, looking a bit disappointed. He was ambitious, I realized. He would find someone other than a hired soldier.
The queen was in her small sitting room, where the window overlooked the palace courtyard. A stiletto-thin sliver of a moon had just cleared the dark bulk of the mountains. I could see stars glittering out in the night.
The room was lit by a single lamp on the table beside the queen. Alexandros had apparently been sitting at his mother’s knee. He scrambled to his feet as the messenger boy opened the door.
“Come in, Orion,” said Olympias. To the boy she said, “You may go.”
He closed the door behind me, although I did not hear his footsteps leaving. He had been barefoot, and he was slight of build. I gave the possibility of his eavesdropping no further thought.
Alexandros eyed me uneasily. He always seemed on edge, upset, when he met with his mother this way. Who knew what poisons she was pouring into his ears?
Olympias seemed content to have me stand at the doorway. She ignored me, reaching for her son’s bare arm.
“Come, sit down again,” she urged. “We still have much to talk over.”
Alexandros looked uncertain, but after a moment’s hesitation he sat on the floor again. For an instant I thought he would rest his head in his mother’s lap.
“It is certain, then?” he asked, looking up into her coldly beautiful face.
Olympias nodded once. “As certain as the man’s insatiable lust. He will marry her.”
“But what will that mean to you, mother?”
“Better to ask what it will mean to you, Alexandros.”
“He can’t disown me. He can’t ignore that I exist.”
“He is a very clever man.”
“But all the army saw me at Chaeroneia. I am a general now, equal in rank to Parmenio and the others.”
“Orion,” she called to me, “do you believe that if the army voted for a new king this night they would elect Alexandros?”
So that’s why she wanted me. As a sounding board for her own opinions.