“How can you be sure? Let me get the truth out of them.”
“The truth?” Philip’s face twisted into sardonic laughter. “Hold a man’s feet in the fire and he’ll tell you whatever you want to hear. What kind of truth is that? Is that what Aristotle taught you?”
Before Alexandros could reply, Parmenio spoke up. “This man saved your life.” He pointed to me.
Philip fixed his good eye on me.
“When you were down and they were about to spear you, he broke through them and wrestled the spear away from the assassin.”
Philip frowned, trying to remember. At last he said, “Orion, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
He beckoned me to him. “What troop are you with?”
“Nikkos’ phalanx, sir.”
“Nikkos, eh? Well, since you’ve done such a good job of protecting me, you’re now part of my personal guard. Tell the quartermaster to outfit you properly. Antipatros, show him where the guard is camped, eh?”
Antipatros nodded curtly. “Come with me,” he said.
He led me outside the hut. “Scythian, eh? I suppose you can ride a horse,” he said.
“I think so.”
He gave me a sour look. “Well, you’d better.”
Thus I became one of Philip’s bodyguards.
My new companions of the royal guard were almost all Macedonians, most of them sons of very ancient and noble families, although there were a few newcomers and foreigners, such as I. I quickly learned that a true Macedonian nobleman learns to ride a horse before he learns to walk. At least, that is what they told me, and it seemed true enough. They were born riders. My first morning as a guardsman I spent watching the others mount their powerful steeds and ride galloping along the bare earth where they exercised the horses.
Before the sun was at zenith I had learned what I needed to know. With neither saddle nor stirrups, a man had to clamp his knees tight against the horse’s flanks and grip the reins in his left hand to keep the right free to hold a lance or sword. That seemed simple enough. I told the wrangler in charge of the corral that I was ready to ride. He trotted out a dun-colored stallion while several of the other guardsmen stopped what they were doing to watch me.
I swung myself onto the back of the stallion and, gripping with my knees, off I went. The horse had ideas of his own. It broke into a frenzied bucking, kicking and twisting, trying to throw me off its back. The men back by the corral were slapping their thighs with laughter. Obviously they had given me the nastiest beast in the corral, to initiate me into their company.
I leaned forward against the stallion’s neck and, gripping his mane, said aloud, “You can’t shake loose of me, wild one. You and I are a pair from now on.”
I clung with every ounce of strength in me and, after several very rough minutes, the stallion settled down and trotted to a stop, snorting and blowing, flanks heaving. I let it rest a few moments, then urged it forward with a nudge of my heels. We flew like the wind, off toward the distant hills. I turned it around and we cantered back to the corral where the other men stood open mouthed.
“Good horse,” I said. “What do you call him?”
“Thunderbolt,” one of the men said, almost sullen with disappointment, as I slid to the ground.
“I like him,” I said.
The wrangler’s weatherbeaten face showed an expression halfway between disbelief and amusement. He shook his head at me. “Haven’t seen anything like that since the Little King tamed old Ox-Head.”
The Little King was Alexandros, I knew.
“Well, if you like him that much,” said the captain of the guard, Pausanias, “he’s yours.”
I thanked him and led Thunderbolt off to where the slave boys were rubbing down the horses after their exercise.
The siege of Perinthos ended a few weeks later. The city still defied Philip from behind its wall, and still received supplies from the sea. Philip gave the order to break camp and head back to Pella, his capital.
“I don’t understand it,” I said to Pausanias, the highborn Macedonian who headed the king’s guard. “Why are we leaving without either taking the city or being driven away?”
Riding beside me, Pausanias gave a bitter little chuckle. The captain of the guard may have been born to the nobility, but there was something dark and festering in him. The men made jokes about him behind his back that I did not understand, jokes that had to do with stableboys and too much wine.
“There are more ways to win a city than by storming it or starving it out,” he told me as we rode. “The king has a thousand tricks, one more devious than the other.”
“Why did he want Perinthos in the first place?”
“It’s allied to Athens.”
“And why make war on Athens?”
Pausanias had a handsome face, with a well-kept light brown beard. But that grim moodiness showed through the humorless smile he was giving me.
“Why not ask the king? I’m only one of his distant nephews.” And he pulled his horse away from mine, tired of my endless questions.
A short time later Alexandros came dashing up on Ox-Head, his powerful midnight-black charger, almost breathless with excitement.
“We’re turning back!” he shouted to the group of us. “The king wants us to go back!”
“Back to Perinthos?”
“No, but to the coast. Quickly. Follow me!”
We turned and followed. Up ahead I could see Philip with others of his guard and a clutch of officers urging their horses into a swift trot. Something was up.
I rode with Pausanias and the rest of the royal guard, following Philip and his generals. Alexandros led the remainder of the cavalry behind us. The sun was high and hot by the time we slowed to a walk and nosed our mounts through a thin screen of trees and shrubbery atop the low ridge that lined the seashore. Alexandros rode up to his father’s side, leaving the main body of the cavalry down at the bottom of the ridge.
Down on the beach below us a great flotilla of boats had been pulled up on the sand. There must have been two hundred and more of them, fat round-bottomed cargo carriers for the most part, although I saw more than a dozen sleek oar-driven war galleys among them.
Pausanias smiled wickedly as we sat astride our horses, stroking their necks to keep them calm and silent.
“You see?” he said to me, in a low voice, almost a whisper. “There is the Athenian grain fleet, ripe for the taking.”
Men were lolling around the ships, dozing on their decks in the midday sun. A few of the grain carriers were keeled over on their sides while teams of slaves daubed hot pitch on their hulls.
“The gods know who he bribed to get them to stop here,” Pausanias muttered. “The One-Eyed Fox has more tricks than Hermes.”
I knew he meant the king, Philip. From the little I had gleaned of the situation, it appeared that this fleet was carrying the grain harvest from the rich farm lands of the Black Sea, beyond Byzantion and the Bosporus, the annual harvest that fed the land-poor city of Athens.
“The Athenians don’t work the land,” Nikkos had told me one evening. “They don’t work at anything any more. They live on a public dole and bring the grain in through the Bosporus and the Hellespont. That’s why Old One-Eye wants the seaport cities like Perinthos and Byzantion. The Athenians have the finest navy in the world, but it won’t do them any good without ports to tie up in each night, will it?”
Obviously the grain fleet had been afraid to put in at Perinthos, with Philip’s army besieging the city. So they had beached for the night here, nearly a day’s ride below Perinthos, thinking themselves safe. Philip must have had spies along the coast—perhaps even among the sailors of the fleet, if Pausanias’ wry comment had any truth in it.
Philip backed us away from the wooded ridge line, down to where the rest of the cavalry waited, hidden from the beach. We were ordered to feed and water the horses and to take a cold midday meal of preserved strips of goat’s meat and water. The meat chewed like leather.
Presently I saw a long line of soldiers winding along the trail that led toward us. Peltasts, not the heavily armored hoplites, trotting at an easy gait. This was going to be a fast strike, and the lighter-armed peltasts would be more useful than the clanking heavy infantry.
With Pausanias’ permission I crawled up to the ridge line to join the handful of scouts already lying on their bellies, keeping watch on the enemy. The Athenians had not even posted any guards! I saw a few armed men standing near the war galleys, but otherwise their camp was as undefended as air.