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.
“He is greatly admired,” I said.
“But not yet nineteen years old,” the queen countered.
“The men trust him. At Chaeroneia—”
“Answer me truthfully. If the army voted this night, would they elect a nineteen-year-old over Parmenio? Or even Antipatros? Remember that their families are as old and noble as Philip’s. They were all horse thieves together only a generation ago.”
“I believe they would vote Alexandros king,” I said truthfully. “Probably with Parmenio as regent for a year or so.”
“You see?” she said to Alexandros. “You would get the title but not the authority. They will keep you from true power.”