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.”