The Pillars of Hercules (19 page)

“Over here,” yelled a voice.

It was Matthias. He was in the prow of the ship that had originally taken Barsine—and which was now heading straight toward the swimming Lugorix. At the last moment, the ship turned aside—Matthias reached down and grabbed Lugorix’s arm. Together, they helped a spluttering Barsine into the boat, which then began to slide at speed across the water, back toward Athens. Lugorix realized that while he had been in the bowels of the Leviathan, the Athenians had fired more ropes out across the water, attaching crampons to the ship with Matthias’ help. Now the ship was being pulled back the way it had come with as much speed as the men hauling at those ropes could muster. Out in the moat, a battle royale began to develop between several Athenian ships and scores of barbarian boats—though it was a one-sided battle, as the two Leviathans kicked and smashed their way through the Athenian vessels, moving in toward the walls—

“Heads up,” said Matthias.

Lugorix turned as the ship they were in ground onto the shore of the moat. Athenians reached out to help Barsine, but he and Matthias shook them off, helped her off the boat and onto the shore, the wall towering above them. Even as they ran toward it they could see stone sliding aside and nozzles protruding from the wall. Liquid began spraying from those nozzles, coating part of the surface of the moat.

“Oh fuck,” said Matthias. Lugorix said nothing. There was nothing to say—faced with the assault about to hit them, the Athenians had decided to cut their losses. Everyone out in that moat, friend and foe alike, was now forfeit. Just as the three got back inside the doorway through which the Macedonians had carried Barsine scant minutes earlier, there was a sudden whooshing noise. They felt a burst of intense heat on their backs as the moat suddenly burst into flame. For a moment none of them could breathe—the air was too hot, the pressure too much. With his fast-diminishing strength, Lugorix and another Athenian manhandled the door shut. Everyone stumbled on into darkness.

Face expressionless, Alexander turned away from the window. The sky was black with smoke and flame; the cries of those caught out in that inferno was deafening. The Leviathans were pillars of flame now. And yet even now a third wave of barbarians was pouring from the Macedonian siege-works out into the plain. Eumenes had learned enough from Alexander about generalship to know that throwing more bodies into a slaughterhouse only added to the scale of the slaughter. Common sense dictated that the additional troops be held back for another attack, at another time. But if the assault had failed, the cannon-fodder still had to be spent. Had this been the critical moment in the battle, Alexander’s actions would have been precisely calibrated to achieve the decisive breakthrough.

But as Eumenes gazed out at the smoke and fire, he knew in his heart that no such moment was at hand. He wondered what those dying for Macedonia under the walls of Athens would say if they knew that Alexander was even now leaving his command post—if they knew that they were just pieces that had to be cleared from the board of a larger game. They had been hired not to conquer but to die; they were being snuffed out so that they’d never return to their homelands—perishing so that the commander who’d bought them could lead an army up the Danube with as little resistance as possible. Eumenes suspected that Alexander had never intended to capture Athens—that he wanted his western expedition to be the straw that broke the camel’s back, rather than a glorified mop-up expedition. Perhaps the defenses of Athens were so strong that nothing could have shattered them. But if Philip had been there, he’d have made sure those defenses were truly put to the test, with diversionary attacks to cover the main assault, rather than simply throwing everything against a single section of the walls.

Though clearly Alexander had possessed some other reason for aiming at that section of the walls. Whatever had been in that boat before it had been sunk or incincerated (for it was impossible to see any sign of it amidst the flames and wreckage that covered the moat) had presumably been lost for good. Could it have been some kind of information? A stolen document? Or perhaps it was an artifact of Aristotle’s. Or maybe something of symbolic value to the people of Athens… Alexander certainly understood the value of symbols, as he’d demonstrated with the Gordian knot. But usually his symbols were displayed for all the world to see—flaunted to advertise his triumphs. Which today certainly wasn’t. Alexander had concentrated on a single section of the walls of Athens, as part of some plot that remained obscure. Except that it involved treason within the walls of Athens.

And perhaps within Pella too.

For that was at least part of the key, thought Eumenes. Philip
couldn’t
have commanded the siege in person. He couldn’t leave his palace. To do otherwise would render him vulnerable to the plotting of his own son. Whether or not Alexander wanted to be a god, he certainly wanted to be king. To achieve that all he had to do was eliminate his father.

Whereas Philip had no such options. Perhaps he hoped to build up Ptolemy as a potential successor, but the truth of the matter was that until the war with Athens was won, Alexander was irreplaceable. So the old king was going to sit in his palace in Pella, surrounded by his bodyguards and army. Only a civil war would get him off the throne. And with the capital of an enemy superpower scarcely two hundred miles to the south a civil war would be fatal to Macedonia. Meaning the final reckoning between father and son would have to wait until victory over Athens. Unless the king died of natural causes. But not many Macedonian rulers had died of those.

More rumbling shook the room. Eumenes looked up with a start—found the eyes of Hephaestion staring into his own with an intensity that suggested the man knew exactly what he’d been thinking. He gazed back at Hephaestion, willed himself not to look away.

“Something on your mind?” he asked.

“Trying to figure out what’s on yours,” replied Hephaestion. 

There were three of them who rode away from the smoking wreck of the Macedonian siege-lines that night. They were king’s messengers, and the fact that today they bore the prince’s messages was all the same to them: they served the royal house of Macedonia. One made for Pella—he had the shortest journey but the hardest task, for he had to break the news of the failure of the siege and face the wrath of Philip. The second bypassed the capital, rode north, into the mountains of Thrace, heading eastward, toward the mouth of the Danube where officers of the Macedonian navy were busy assembling a vast supply of grain and weapons. They would have to accelerate such preparations if they wanted to keep their posts, let alone their heads. This was the kind of message that the king’s couriers relished delivering—all the trouble went to the recipient, and none to the messenger himself. There was no feeling quite like the one of standing there stone-faced, awaiting orders while the recipient read the message with sinking comprehension.

But it was the third man who had the longest journey. He would have to cross the Bosphorus, heading through Asia Minor before turning south into Lebanon. He would use the royal roads of Persia that ran across mountains and desert, linking all the territories that the Great Kings had once ruled. Their empire had lasted for centuries, in no small part because of their first-class system of roadways. So now the messenger made haste along them, making all the speed he could, acutely aware that he could never go as fast as the more conventional system of using relays of messengers—but speed had been sacrificed for security, as the message he was carrying was deemed too sensitive to entrust to more than a single man.

Not that the courier knew what it said. All he knew was that he had to hand the sealed orders personally to Craterus, chief marshal of the Macedonian forces in Egypt. After which it would be Craterus’ problem. The messenger knew that whatever he carried involved the titanic struggle now underway between the ruler of the land and the mistress of the sea. But he didn’t really concern himself with that. He was just the bearer of tidings. That was all. He was a worshipper of Hermes, the messenger god, whose spirit he prayed would guide him on these roads above, keep him off those roads below.

It was a good day for the birds.

Dust drifted over the Attican plain, mingled with the groans of the dying. Smoke rose from the wreckage of mantlets and siege engines. The melted wreckage of the Leviathans was strewn through the now-dry moat. Bodies were everywhere. Some had died by heat. Some had been trampled by their own comrades piling up behind them. But the bulk of them had succumbed to the time-honored way to die in a siege-assault, struck by one of the myriad projectiles flung from the walls which they were charging. Nor had there been any retreat. The toxic gas being pumped in behind them had ensured that the barbarians had been forced to keep charging forward until they were all dead. Those who had reached the moat had been greeted by inferno. Most had never got that far.

The birds were eating their fill. Vultures, kites, hawks, ospreys—they must have come from all over Greece, for the sky was black with them. To the archon Leosthenes, inspecting the walls with guards in tow, it seemed less like the aftermath of victory than a portent of the gods, the sun over the Parthenon blotted out by creatures that fed on anything lifeless.

“Quite a sight,” said Memnon.

Leosthenes nodded. He wasn’t in the mood for conversation right now, particularly not Memnon’s. The last few days had pushed them all to the brink. Had the Macedonians launched an assault against all sides of Athens—well, the war would have been decided there one way or another. Perhaps that was why Macedonia hadn’t. Philip would ultimately have had to commit the bulk of his shock troops, and those troops would have had to either conquer or die. It may have been in Alexander’s nature to gamble everything on one throw of the die. But not in Philip’s.

And now the reports indicated that Macedonian forces were deploying west, to probe for weakness on the periphery of the Athenian imperium. On the one hand that was good news—at the very least, a reprieve. But there had been disquieting reports from the spies… that Alexander’s real objective in the west involved something that would not only bring down the Athenian Empire, but would establish a new order that would last (according to one spy) ‘until the Sun burnt out and the Earth withered.’ Heavy stuff… probably bullshit… and yet Leosthenes had gone so far as to show (via an agent reporting to Memnon, who was a master of deniability) the disgraced Demosthenes the latest intelligence estimates. He didn’t leave a copy with him, of course—but Demosthenes had been his mentor and supporter in his early days on the council, and unlike everyone else on that council, he still trusted the man.
Had
trusted the man—for now Demosthenes was dead, the victim of Macedonian agents or Athenian treason or both. Apparently he’d been engaged in his own private games even after leaving the council—well, Leosthenes would have expected nothing less. In fact, that was precisely why he’d shown Demosthenes the compilation of what Athenian spies based in Pella were saying—what Aristotle was rumored to have discovered prior to his fleeing the Macedonian capitol. If the Persian witch who had passed through Athens didn’t trust anyone still holding office in Athens enough to contact them—well, Leosthenes couldn’t say he blamed her. Hopefully Demosthenes had helped her with whatever schemes she was concocting against Alexander.

It wasn’t like Leosthenes was in a position to do shit. Memnon’s fears that he’d be scapegoated for Egypt had almost been borne out. Only the rivalry on the council between Phocion and Hypereides had allowed Leosthenes to keep his post: his belonging to neither faction meant that both still hoped to win his support—and he gave each faction just enough hope to keep them interested. Yet while survival under those circumstances could be considered quite an accomplishment, right now his political triumph seemed as hollow as that of Athens’ military one. Because this war was just beginning.

It was going to be a long one.

Chapter Nine

T
he messenger travelled by night now whenever possible, turning off the road to skirt past towns and cities. It seemed only prudent to do so. It was true that all those settlements were technically under Macedonian overlordship now. But what did that mean? Who really ran them? Who reported to who? Like any good courier, he had an acute sense of politics—not in the manner of a player of those games, but in the way a sailor knows the direction of the tide and where the more treacherous shoals might lay. That there was tension between father and son was obvious. Same with the the tension that simmered among the the son’s generals. There was word that at least one of them had been declared to be a son of Philip in his own right—a rival for Alexander, or just a cat’s paw, the gods above only knew. The messenger certainly didn’t.

So he rode on, ever further south, through the forests of the Levant, the smell of pine all around him, the blue of Mediterranean occasionally visible through those trees. As a Macedonian, that sea made him uneasy. It was forbidden territory. And yet somehow they would have to conquer it. Which was a disquieting thought. If Athens really
was
impregnable, then how much more so was her empire? The messenger wondered how Alexander intended to come to grips with it. He had no doubt his prince was up to something.

Lugorix would never have believed it would have taken several more weeks before they could get out of Athens. But the city was on too high a military alert to do it sooner. They’d been lucky to get away from the walls in the first place—had been stopped by Athenian soldiers while trying to leave the barbican, and placed under guard. But the officer whose men Lugorix and Matthias had assisted recognized them and ordered their release.

Of course, his decision might have been influenced by the gold that Barsine was carrying. She’d given him a month’s wages. Two more bribes were necessary to get back to the wreckage of Demosthenes’ house, and even those probably wouldn’t have sufficed had it still been day. But they used the cover of night to slip past the sentries posted around the still-smoldering debris—and then shoved some of that debris aside to gain access to one of the trapdoors and make their way down to the hidden dock. Damitra was right where they left her, still aboard the
Xerxes,
meditating calmly, her countenance totally at odds with her hysteria of a few hours ago. She professed not to remember any of it, and simply said they needed to leave the city as soon as possible.