Then came the night that changed everything.
“Where is Troy?” I asked Nikkos that evening, as we reclined on our blankets in front of the dinner fire.
He furrowed his brow at me. “Who knows? Maybe it’s only a story.”
“No,” said one of the other men. “It’s on the other side of the Hellespont.”
“It’s still there? I thought it was burned to the ground.”
“That’s where it was.”
“How do you know? If it ever existed it was so long ago—”
“In the time of heroes.”
“Heroes?” I asked.
“Like Achilles and Odysseus and Agamemnon.”
Odysseus. That name rang a bell in my mind. Was it he who gave me the dagger I kept strapped to my thigh?
“What do you horse thieves know about Agamemnon?” shouted one of the Argives, barely a stone’s throw from our fire.
“He was one of the leaders of the Achaians at Troy,” I answered.
“He was an Argive,” said the mercenary, stepping into the light from our fire. “King of Mycenae. Not some shit-footed farmer from the hills like you bunch.”
I got to my feet. The Argive was big, and wearing his muscled cuirass plus a short stabbing sword at his hip, but I was taller by half a head and wider across the shoulders.
“I am of the house of Odysseus,” I said, half-dreaming. “I remember that.”
His jaw dropped open, then he laughed and planted his fists on his hips. “You’ve taken one too many blows on your head, Scythian. You’re crazy.”
I wondered how he knew that I was believed to be a Scythian.
Another Argive stepped up beside the first one. He too was armed. Nikkos and several others of my band scrambled to their feet.
“Odysseus has been dead for a thousand years,” said the second Argive. He had a nasty sneer on his bearded face. “If he ever lived at all.”
“He lived,” I said. “I was with him.”
“At Troy, I suppose.”
They both laughed at me. Then the second one stepped close and looked up into my face. He barely came to my shoulders.
“You’re crazy, all right,” he said.
“Or a champion liar,” said the first Argive.
I could feel Nikkos and the other men behind me stiffen with tension.
“No, look,” I said, reaching for my dagger. “Odysseus gave me—”
The Argive jumped back and pulled the sword at his belt. “Trying to knife me!”
“No, I—”
He lunged at me. I parried with the dagger and punched him in the jaw with my left hand. He went down like a slaughtered ox.
And the camp around me erupted into violence. Men were punching, kicking, biting, wrestling each other onto the ground. I stood in the midst of it, the dagger still in my hand, while the fight swirled around me.
Feeling dumbfounded, I backed away, out of the firelight. At least they weren’t using weapons, I thought. The one man who had drawn his sword lay unconscious by the fire.
Officers were bellowing in the night. I sheathed the dagger and stepped back into the fray, trying to separate the fighting men.
Philip himself rode up on a chestnut horse, bareheaded, without armor, his one good eye blazing with anger.
“Stop this at once!” he roared. And we stopped. The authority in his powerful voice was unmistakable.
For a moment everything was quite still. Men stood or knelt or lay stretched on the ground, all of us covered with dust, some of us bloody. Nikkos, his shirt torn and the welts on his back still livid, had one knee on the chest of an Argive and his teeth clamped on the man’s bloody ear.
Before Philip could say another word a stone came hurtling out of the darkness and struck him squarely on the back of his head. It sounded almost as loud as one of the catapult bolts landing. Philip’s head snapped forward, he slumped and fell off the horse. An Argive ran up with a spear in his hand and I saw that about a dozen of the Argives had formed a ring around Philip’s prostrate body. All of them had swords in their hands.
I charged forward, head down, and bulled through the ring of armored men, grabbed the spear and wrested it from the Argive’s hands before he could plunge it into the unconscious king.
Battle fury seized me again and the world slowed down around me. Holding the spear like a quarter-staff I smashed its weighted end into the face of the man I had taken it from. He fell like a stone. Then I stood over Philip’s body, my back to his nervously stamping horse, ready to protect the king. The circle of armed Argives looked stunned with surprise. Beyond them Nikkos and the others of my troop seemed just as shocked and frozen into immobility.
Then a fresh commotion erupted out in the darkness beyond the firelight. A man’s rough voice choked off in a bloody gargle, others shouted, and suddenly young Alexandros burst upon us, golden hair glowing, eyes wild, the sword in his hand bloodied.
“The king!” he shouted, pushing men out of his way and advancing upon me.
“I think he’s merely stunned, sir,” I said.
He stared hard at me, then turned to the ring of Argives who still held their swords. “Take them,” he snapped. “All of them.”
Nikkos and the others disarmed the Argives and led them off into the darkness.
“You saved my father’s life,” said Alexandros to me.
Parmenio and other officers came rushing up now and knelt beside Philip.
“I want those assassins hanged,” Alexandros said into the night air. “But not until they tell us who paid them.”
No one seemed to be listening to him. He fixed his blazing eyes on me. “Go with the king. I will join you presently.”
And he stalked off into the darkness. If ever a man had murder on his face, it was Alexandros at that moment. It was difficult to realize that he was scarcely eighteen years old.
CHAPTER 4
An hour later Philip was still woozy. I had followed the officers who carried him to his cabin, a rough log hut with horse blankets covering the dirt floor. I stood at the open doorway, the Argive spear still in my hands. The officers had carried Philip to his cot with a tenderness I had seldom seen. Several physicians and generals crowded around the king. A frightened-looking slave girl brought a flagon of wine to the cot.
Philip regained consciousness slowly. Although the physicians urged him to remain on the cot, he insisted on sitting up. His officers helped him to a folding camp chair. He gripped its arms weakly.
A scream of agony ripped through the night. Philip looked up sharply. Another scream, longer and more tortured than the first.
Philip gestured to one of the generals, who bent his ear to his king’s lips. Philip spoke, the general nodded and strode out of the hut, past me.
The physicians bustled about. One of them bathed the back of the king’s head. I saw that the cloth came away bloody. Another seemed to be preparing some kind of ointment in a shallow bowl over a candle flame. It smelled of camphor.
“Wine.” It was the first word I had heard from him since he’d been felled. “More wine.”
The girl’s eyes lit up. She smiled with relief. She could not have been more than thirteen or fourteen.
A few moments later I saw a small parade approaching the hut. I recognized the general that Philip had sent out, a big, burly, hard-faced man with a beard blacker than Philip’s own and outrageously bowed legs. Antipatros was his name, I learned later. Beside him strode Alexandros, his face white with anger or something else, his eyes still ablaze. And behind Alexandros marched a half-dozen other young men from his chosen Companions, all of them clean-shaven as Alexandros himself was. It made them look even younger than they were.
The Companions stopped at the doorway. Alexandros went through, followed by Antipatros.
Alexandros went straight to his father. “Thank the gods you’re all right!”
Philip grinned crookedly. “I have a thicker skull than they thought, eh?”
If they were father and son they did not look it. Philip was dark of hair and swarthy of skin, his beard bristling, his arms thick and hairy where they were not laced with scars. Alexandros shone like gold; his hair was golden, his skin fair, his eyes gleaming. I thought of someone I had once known, a Golden One, and for some reason the hazy memory made me shudder.
“I’ll find out who’s responsible for this,” Alexandros said grimly.
But Philip waved a hand at him. “We know who’s responsible. Athens. Demosthenes or some of his friends.”
“They bought out the Argives. I’ll hang every one of them.”
“No,” said Philip. “Only the ones who had weapons in their hands. The rest of them had nothing to do with it.”