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The glories of Macedon, eh?
But Attalus didn’t come with us to Aegae. And Parmenio, the steadiest of his generation except for Antipater, was in Asia. And Antipater was nowhere to be found – in fact, he, too, was in self-imposed exile, on his farms.
We rode through a summer landscape of prosperity that thinly covered a state in which we were near to civil war – nearer than we had been in fifty years. Rumours were everywhere.
I remember that on the second day out of Pella, we were alerted by Polystratus that there was a column of foreigners coming the other way, and we took up our battle stations – Attalus employed a lot of Thracians, and we were ready for an attack.
These weren’t Thracians, but Athenian traders on their way to Pella, where they imagined the court to be. Nearchus turned them around, brusquely enough, but when we discovered that they had a cargo of swords and sword blades, we asked them to open their bales, and we probably put them in profit on the spot – fifty of the richest young men in Macedon. The Athenians had Keltoi swords from north of Illyria, beautiful swords with long, leaf-shaped blades and deep central fullers – much stiffer and heavier than our swords or Greek swords, but easy in the hand, and the longer blades promised a longer reach on horseback.
One of the traders showed me how the Keltoi held their swords, with a thumb pressed into the hollow of the blade. I bought the sword, and rode north playing with it. It was a foot longer than my xiphos.
But that’s not what I wanted to tell. What I wanted to tell is that Pausanias came alive at the sight of the blades. He was poor, and I loaned him money, and he purchased a beautiful weapon – the size of a xiphos, but with that heavy leaf blade, sharper than a bronze razor and with an African ivory hilt worked like a chariot and a ru
For as long as he was buying the sword, Pausanias was animated and alive. Even his hair seemed to regain its vibrancy.
And then it was gone. And he sank back into himself, and his face went slack, as if he’d taken a death blow.
We reached Aegae about the same time as the Athenian embassy. I looked for men I knew – I had rather hoped to see Kineas or Diodorus. But the Athenians had not sent any of their great men, except Phokion, and he was a guest friend of the king. He was kind enough to remember me. He clasped my arm – warrior to warrior, a nice compliment.
‘Why are you wearing armour, son of Lagus?’ he asked.
‘Difficult times,’ I said, looking elsewhere. Great as was my respect for the Athenian strategos, I was not going to tell him about our internal squabbles.
Indeed, upon arrival at Aegae, we all breathed a great sigh of relief. Aegae was sacred ground – no one would defile it with treason. Alexander and Olympias and Pausanias and I should all be safe, at least for the next fifteen days. Or so we reckoned.
That night, I played knucklebones with Nearchus and Black Cleitus, drank too much, lost at Polis to Alexander. He was withdrawn, even by his own standards.
I offered to go and check on Pausanias, and Alexander shook his head and held out his wine cup to have it refilled. ‘Pausanias is with my mother, now,’ he said. He said it in much the same voice as a man might have said that another man had died.
The next day, the festivities began. The scale was unprecedented for Macedon, and had I never been to Athens, I think I would have been thrilled. As it was, I could only wince – our most lavish celebration, when placed next to, say, the Panatheneum, was like tinsel placed next to real gold. Philip’s crass lack of taste was like a physical blow, and the Theban envoys didn’t bother to hide their sneers.
But the Herald of Athens – not a man I knew – a
There was a feast that night. Philip let it be known that I was welcome – I put on my best, and my best wasas good as the best the Athenians had – and lay on a kline with a Thessalian nobleman who was fascinated with everything from Athens.
Philip got very drunk and said a great many things that made all of us wince. He referred to the cities of Greece with the term we use for sex slaves, and he made slighting references to Athens and Sparta and the Great King of Persia. In fact, he sounded like a petty and insecure tyrant, and he scared me.
What hurt me most was that many of the older Macedonians ate this sort of crap up, as if Philip’s insults actually made Macedon greater or Athens lesser. And it was in looking around that hall that I realised how many of the older, wiser and better nobles were gone. Parmenio was gone, with Amyntas, in Asia. I hated Attalus, but he was the king’s friend, and he was gone. Antipater was present – but not in any place of favour, and none of his own i
The men he had near him were inferior in every respect, and this crass racism was only the surface of it.
And Alexander watched them the way a hawk watches rabbits. He remained aloof – but it seemed that he might pounce at any moment.
We all drank too much. And Philip ended the evening when he stood up, his chiton open to the crotch, showing his parts, so to speak, and stood by his kline.
‘I am the King of Macedon!’ he said. ‘And this time next year, I’ll be the lord of Asia, and if I want to be a god, I’ll make myself one!’
He tottered away, narrowly missed falling, and two royal companions escorted him to bed.
Alexander may have said something, but his sneer was so palpable that no one needed to hear him. Thebans and Athenians and Thessalians – and Macedonians – noted it.
There were whispers that Philip needed to go. I heard them.
I walked Alexander back to his quarters that night. He was in a large semi-private house, something of a treasury for his family, and it rankled that he was not housed at the palace. It rankled doubly that we had Olympias. She seemed to be awake all the time, and when she wasn’t with Pausanias she seemed inclined to flirt with the pages and Hephaestion.
She was waiting for us, and demanded the story of the evening. Alexander told her, in the pained tones that sons keep for their mothers, and finally forced her to go to bed by refusing to talk any more. He was rude. She was not. She smiled.
‘Tomorrow, you will love me as you have never loved me before,’ she said.
Alexander turned his back on her. Crossed his arms.
She laughed. Then she stopped in front of me, and all the power of those eyes was on me. ‘When you had Diomedes at your feet,’ she said, ‘did his screams please you?’
I looked at the floor.
‘Now, now, my little man,’ she said. This from a woman whose eyes were at my chest. ‘No lies to the queen. Were you disgusted by his weakness? Elated at your own success? Did you force yourself to hurt him in memory of what he did to your poor friend?’ She smiled with real understanding. ‘Or was it delightful to inflict terror and pain on him?’
I stood with my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth.
‘Well, we both know, don’t we?’ she said. ‘Don’t you forget, or grow superior, eh, Ptolemy?’ She laughed at me. ‘Why do you lie to yourself ?’ And walked away, floating on air.
When she was gone, Alexander turned to a slave. ‘Wine,’ he said, snapping his fingers.
The slave, terrified, spilled wine. Alexander looked at the poor boy and he fled.
I picked up the pitcher. A little liquid still sloshed in the base, and I poured a kraterful and handed it to the prince, who poured a libation.