I hadn’t the faintest idea. “A beard gives your enemy a handhold to grab,” I heard myself answer.
He tugged at his own thick beard. “Does it, now? You sound like my son.” Then he turned and called to one of the soldiers standing closest to him, “Nikkos, take him into your troop. I don’t think he’ll need much training. Looks to me as if he already knows how to use a sarissa.”
He pulled at the reins and trotted off, grinning, the other officer riding beside him.
That was my first sight of Philip, King of the Macedonians. The golden-haired boy who led the cavalry turned out to be his son, Alexandros.
CHAPTER 2
We camped at the battlefield that night, to burn the dead and then rest after the long hard day’s exertions. Nikkos, to my surprise, was a Thracian, not a Macedonian at all.
“In my father’s time we raided into Macedon and stole their horses and cattle,” he told me as we sat by a crackling wood fire and chewed on roasted mutton. “And their women, too,” he added with a leering wink.
He could not have been thirty. His hair was dark brown and wild as an untamed forest. His black beard was smeared and sticky with mutton drippings. About a dozen of us were sitting around the fire while a physician from far-off Corinth went around applying salves and bandages to men’s wounds.
“And now you serve the Macedonians,” I said.
He gulped at his goatskin of wine, splashing much of it over his beard and chest. “You bet we do! Old One-Eye has changed everything. When he became king he beat the shit out of us. And everybody else around him. Struck us in the winter, in the summer. Made no difference to him. He never lost a battle. He knows how many beans makes five, he does.”
“Philip conquered your people,” I murmured.
Nikkos shook his shaggy head vigorously. “No. Not conquered. We still have our own king. He just showed us that we’d be better off allied with him than fighting against him.”
A diplomat, I thought. Then I realized that Philip had done the same thing to me this day.
“Now all the country tribes are allied with Macedon,” Nikkos went on, “and Philip even makes war against Athens.”
If Nikkos was unhappy with this situation he did not show it. Indeed, he seemed to be quite pleased with it all.
Then he leaned closer to me. “D’you know what I think?” he asked in a low voice.
His breath was foul and I could see things crawling in his beard. “What?” I asked, trying to keep the distance of a flea’s jump between us.
“I think it’s her that’s done it.”
“Her?”
“The witch. Philip’s wife.”
“The king’s wife is a witch?”
He lowered his voice even more. “Priestess of the Old Cult. Worships the Snake Goddess and all that. She’s a sorceress, all right. How else can you explain it? I was already big enough to help my father tend his flock when Philip pushed his brother off the throne. Macedonia was being sliced up by all the tribes around it. Not just us, but the Illyrians, the Paionians—all of us. We raided and plundered every year.”
“Philip put a stop to that?”
“In the blink of his one eye, or so it seems. Now all the tribes serve him. It must be that Molossian bitch of his; that’s the only way to explain it.”
I glanced uneasily at the other men sitting around the fire.
Nikkos laughed. “Don’t worry, I can’t say anything about the witch that Old One-Eye hasn’t said himself. He hates her.”
“Hates his wife?”
Several of the men nodded agreement, grinning.
“If it weren’t that she’s the mother of his son and heir he would have sent her packing back to Epeiros long ago.”
“He can’t do that,” said one of the others. “He’s afraid of her.”
“She can cast spells.”
“Spells my ass. She poisons people.”
“Not poison. Magic.”
“Look what she did to the other son, the one by the Thessalian woman.”
“Arrhidaios? The idiot?”
“He was a healthy baby. She fed him poison that made him feeble-minded.”