“He left for Aigai this morning.”
“Then I must go to Aigai.”
Now, in the moonlight, I could see Harkan’s face. He looked perplexed. “You’re a fugitive.”
“That was the queen’s doing. The king will pardon me when he hears what I have to tell him.”
“You think so?” another voice asked. A deep voice: Batu’s. He stepped out of the inky shadow cast by the overhanging roof. Like Harkan he was naked, and armed with a sword.
I clasped his outstretched hand as I asked, “What are you doing out here?”
With a broad smile Batu replied, “I heard you scrabbling across the roof tiles. Harkan went to one end of the barracks, I went to this end.”
“You two sleep very lightly.”
“It comes from the life we’ve led,” said Batu lightly. “Those others in there, they’ve been paid soldiers all their lives. Bandits don’t sleep as well as they do.”
I grinned back at him.
“But what makes you think the king will pardon you?” Batu asked again.
“Even if he doesn’t, I have to warn him. Pausanias plans to kill him at the wedding.”
Harkan scowled at me. “That’s a serious charge, Orion.”
“He told me himself.”
“And the queen is behind it?”
“Yes.”
“That means Alexandros is in it, too.”
“Perhaps,” I said. “He will certainly benefit from it—if we allow it to happen.”
“We?” Batu asked.
“I need your help,” I said. “I can’t get into Aigai by myself.”
They both fell silent for many moments. I could understand what was going through their minds. They had found employment, a roof over their heads, a place in the world here in Philip’s kingdom. They were no longer outlaws, hunted, living in the wild little better than the beasts. And I was asking them to throw all that away, to desert their positions and fling themselves into the midst of the machinations being hatched by the witch-queen Olympias.
They would be fools to agree. Yet they owed their comfortable positions to me and they knew it. I had brought them to Pella and Philip’s employ. If anyone had a right to ask them to give it up, it was I.
Before either of them could speak, my own mind hatched a plot of its own.
“Has Pausanias left for Aigai yet?”
“He departs tomorrow at first light,” said Harkan.
“Then listen to me,” I said, “Pausanias will send you scouring the countryside when he finds that I have broken out of confinement. He knows I will head for Aigai and he’ll send you and most of the guard searching for me. All I ask is that when you find me you bring me to the king, not to Pausanias or the queen.”
“How do you know Pausanias will send us?” Harkan asked.
“And even if he does, he will not send only the two of us,” added Batu. “How can you be certain that we will be the ones who will find you?”
I gave them a grim smile. “Pausanias will send almost the entire royal guard, never fear. And I will find you, my friends. In the hills outside Aigai.”
Harkan looked doubtful, Batu amused at my certainty.
“When does the wedding take place?” I asked.
“The night of the full moon.”
I looked up at the fat waxing moon. “Three nights from now, I judge.”
They agreed.
“Search the hills to the right side of the road before Aigai,” I said. “I’ll be waiting for you there.”
Before they could argue I reached up to the edge of the eave and, after lifting myself onto the roof, ran toward the section of the barracks where Pausanias and the other officers slept in individual rooms.
I had no way of knowing which window was his. I simply swung myself through the first one I came to. It was not Pausanias, but the man stirred in his sleep as I leaned over him close enough to see his face in the darkness. Four sleeping rooms I went through before I found Pausanias. There were no guards in the corridor that linked the rooms, although I knew there was a perfunctory pair of men drowsing on guard duty down in the yard, before the door to the barracks.