“Pah! You don’t know what you’re talking about. Take a good look at the design on the hilt. You ever see a Cretan design that used flying cranes? Never!”
“All right, hawkeye, where’s it from, then?”
“Egypt.”
“Egypt? You’ve had too much wine!”
“It’s an Egyptian piece, I tell you.”
“So’s your mother.”
The men nearly came to blows. Pausanias and I had to push them apart and change the subject.
But the following night the armorer of the guardsmen asked to see my dagger. It was becoming famous, which worried me. I had always kept it hidden so that I could use it in an emergency when all else failed. If everyone knew about it, how could I use it as a surprise weapon?
“That blade,” said the armorer admiringly. “I’ve never seen work like that. Nobody makes an iron blade like that. It’s a damned work of art.”
The flying cranes were the symbol of the House of Odysseus, I knew. Somehow I had received that dagger from Odysseus, king of Ithaca, in the Achaian camp outside the walls of Troy.
A thousand years ago.
It could not be, yet I seemed to remember it. I could see in my mind’s eye those high thick walls and the single combats between heroes on the plain before the city. I could see valiant Hector and fiery Achilles and stout Agamemnon and wary Odysseus as clearly as if I were with them now.
When I stretched myself out on the ground beneath my guardsman’s cloak that night I clutched the dagger in my hand, determined to dream a dream about it, and about who I was and why I could remember a war from a thousand years in the past yet could not remember anything from a month ago.
I dreamed.
It was a confused, troubling dream, whirling and moving and filled with half-hidden faces and voices I could not quite hear.
I saw Alexandros, golden hair streaming in the wind as he galloped on his midnight steed over a stark desert made of human skulls. His face changed ever so subtly, still the golden-haired intense face of that royal youth, yet now he was someone else, someone mocking and scornful who laughed as he rode roughshod over living men, crushing their bodies beneath his horse’s hooves.
Everything shifted, changed, melted like hot wax into a different scene where Philip slumped drunkenly against a dining couch, wine cup in one hand, his good eye glaring balefully at me.
“I trusted you,” he mumbled at me. “I trusted you.”
He was not drunk, he was dying, blood spurting from a sword gash in his belly. In my right hand I held a bloodied sword as I backed away from Philip’s throne.
Someone laughed behind me and I turned, nearly slipping on the blood-slicked stones of the floor, and saw that it was Alexandros. Yet it was not him, but a different person, the Golden One, age-old yet ageless, youthful flesh with eyes that had seen the millennia pass by. He laughed with a bitterness and scorn that chilled my soul.
And beyond him stood a tall, regal, utterly beautiful woman with flowing red hair and skin as white as alabaster. She smiled at me grimly.
“Well done, Orion,” she said. And she stepped past the Golden One to put her hands on my shoulders and then slide her arms around my neck and kiss me full on the lips.
“You are not Athena,” I said.
“No, Orion. I am not. You may address me as Hera.”
“But I love—” I was about to say Athena, then I realized that that was not her true name.
“You will love me, Orion,” said flame-haired Hera. “I will make you forget about the one you call Athena.”
“But…” I wanted to tell her something, but I could no longer think of what it was.
“Go back to the timeflow, Orion,” said the Golden One, still smirking. “Go back and play out the role we have written for you.”
His eyes were on the dead form of Philip as he commanded me. The bloodied sword was still tight in my grip.
I awoke in the camp with Philip’s other guardsmen, still clutching the ancient dagger, sick at heart at my dream.
We resumed our march along the rocky trail through the coastal hills back to Pella. Following along behind us was the long, long train of wagons bearing the grain harvest that we had taken. Already there was talk in the camp each night that Philip would sell the grain harvest to raise more troops and then attack Athens. Or sell the grain to Athens in exchange for Perinthos and Byzantion. Or store the grain at Pella in preparation for an Athenian attack on the capital.
If Philip expected an attack on Pella, however, the city certainly did not look it. My first glimpse of Philip’s capital, on the morning when we finally rode into sight of it, impressed me. There was no wall around the city. It sat on the rolling plain by the high road, a sizeable city of stone buildings, as open and defenseless as the Athenian grain fleet had been.
“We are its defense,” Pausanias said. “The army. Philip fights his wars in the enemy’s territory. They never get the chance to threaten his cities.”
Pella was a new city, Pausanias explained to me. “The old capital, Aigai, up in the mountains, it’s got walls around it, all right. Built to be a fortress, Aigai is. But Olympias hated it there, so Philip moved his capital here, by the high road, just to please her.”
The city was still being built, I saw as we rode closer. Houses and temples were being constructed from stone and masonry; before us as we approached was a large theater carved into the hillside. Up on the highest ground stood a cluster of columned buildings of polished granite: Philip’s palace, Pausanias informed me.
“It’s big,” I said, meaning the palace.
“The biggest city I’ve ever seen,” said Pausanias.
“You haven’t seen Athens,” came a voice from behind us.
Turning on my mount I saw it was Alexandros, golden hair shining in the morning sun, eyes aflame with inner passion.
“Athens is built in marble, not this gray, dull granite,” he said. His voice was sharp, high-pitched. “Thebes, Corinth—even Sparta is more beautiful than this pile of rocks.”
“When were you in Athens?” Pausanias asked icily. “Or Thebes. Or Corinth. Or—”
Alexandros shot him a glance of pure fury and darted past us, his black Ox-Head kicking dust in our faces as he galloped away.
Pausanias spat. “To hear him talk, you’d think he’s been around the whole world in a chariot.”
Half a moment later Alexandros’ Companions dashed past and we got more dust in our mouths.
When we stopped for the noon meal Pausanias made us clean up our gear. Grooms brushed our horses, slaves polished our armor. We trooped into the city bright and shining, and the citizens of Pella came out into the streets to welcome us with flowers and warm shouts of victory. I did not feel particularly victorious, and my dream still troubled me. I wondered if there were anyone in the city whom I could trust to interpret the dream without denouncing me as a traitor for even dreaming of slaying the king.
Philip rode in our midst, and the people showered him with flowers and cheers. From what I had heard among the soldiers, when Philip had become king, less than twenty years ago, Macedonia was being carved up by its neighbors. Now Macedonia had either conquered those neighbors or forced them into alliances. Philip was so successful that his capital needed no wall around it. Now he was struggling to make himself master of all the region, from the Illyrians along the Adriatic Sea to the Byzantines on the Bosporus, from wild northern tribes along the Ister River to the mighty cities of Thebes and Corinth and even Athens herself.
There was even talk of invading Asia, once the issue with Athens was settled, to free the Greek cities of Ionia and pluck the beard of the Persian High King.
Up the wide main thoroughfare of Pella we rode, enjoying the crowd’s welcome, until we passed through the gates of the palace wall. At home now, Philip prodded his horse to the front and thus was the first to arrive at the steps of the palace.
Standing at the top of the gray stone stairs, proud and regal, her flame-red hair tied up in spirals that made her seem even taller than she was naturally, her royal gown purest white with shimmering crimson borders, her incredibly beautiful face haughty and imperious, stood the woman from my dream who had called herself Hera.
I gaped at her.
“Close your mouth, Orion,” whispered Pausanias harshly. “That’s the queen you’re staring at: Olympias.”
It was Hera.
And she recognized me. She looked past Philip, who was stumping painfully up the stairs. I realized for the first time that in addition to all the other wounds he had suffered, Philip was nearly crippled. But that is not what stunned me. It was Olympias. Hera. She looked straight at me and gave me an icy shadow of a smile. Her blood-red lips moved ever so slightly, mouthing a single word: