Fire From Heaven (10 page)

Agave was coming, cried the Messenger, with the trophy of her kill.

They ran in through the parodos in bloody robes. Queen Agave carried the head, spiked on a spear as hunters did it. It was made of the Pentheus mask and wig with stuffing in them, and bits of red rag hanging down. She wore a terrible mad mask, with an agonized brow, deep staring eyes and frenziedly grimacing mouth. From this mouth came a voice. At its first words, he sat as if he too had seen two suns in the sky. He was not far above the stage; his ears and eyes were sharp. The wig of her mask was fair; but in its streaming tresses live hair was spilling through, the dark red showed clearly. The Queen’s arms were bare. He knew them; even their bracelets.

The players, enacting shock and horror, drew back to give her the stage. The audience began to buzz; they had heard at once, after the sexless boys, that this was a real woman. WhoÉ whatÉ? The boy seemed to himself to have been hours alone with his knowledge, before questions began to get answers and the word ran round. It spread like a brush-fire; good eyes insisting to dim ones, the women’s high chatter and outraged sibilance; the deep ebb-shoal murmur from the men above; from the seats of honour, a stunned dead silence.

The boy sat as if his own head had been transfixed. His mother tossed her hair and gestured at the bleeding trophy. She had grown into the dreadful mask, it had become her face. He broke his nails, gripping the edge of his stone seat. The flautist blew on his double pipes; she sang.

‘I am exalted

Great upon earth!

Let men praise me -

This hunt was mine!’

Two rows down, the boy saw his father’s back, as he turned towards a guest beside him. His face was out of sight.

The curse in the tomb, the black dog’s blood, the thorn-pierced mammet, had all been secret rites. This was the Hekate spell by daylight, a sacrifice for a death. The head on the Queen’s spear was her son’s.

It was the voices all around that roused him from the nightmare. They waked him into another. They rose like the hum of flies disturbed from carrion, almost drowning the actors’ lines.

It was of her they were talking, not of Queen Agave in the play. They were talking of her! The southerners who said Macedon was barbarous; the lords and farmers and peasants. The soldiers were talking.

A sorceress they might call her. The goddesses worked magic. This was another thing; he knew these voices. So the men of the phalanx talked in the guardroom, about a woman half of them had had; or some village wife with a bastard.

Phoinix too was suffering. A steady man rather than a quick one, he had been stunned at first; he had not thought even Olympias capable of such wildness. Without doubt, she had vowed this to Dionysos while giddy with wine and dancing at her rites. He began to put out a hand for comfort; looked again and refrained.

Queen Agave came out of frenzy to knowledge and despair; the relentless god appeared above, to close the play. The chorus sang the tag-lines.

‘The gods have many faces.

And many fates fulfil,

To work their will.

The end expected comes not;

God brings the unthought to be,

As here we see.

It was finished; but no one stirred to go. What would she do? She made a revere?nce to the cult-statue of Dionysos in the orchestra, before sweeping out with the others; some extra picked up the head; it was clear she would not return. From high up in the faceless crush of men came a long shrill whistle.

The protagonist came back to take absent-minded applause. He had not been at his best, with this freak on his mind; however, it had been made well worth his while.

The boy rose, without looking at Phoinix. Chin up, looking straight ahead, he thrust his way through the lingering chattering crowd. All along their way, talk stopped for them; but not soon enough. Just outside the propylon, he turned round, looked Phoinix in the face, and said, ‘She was better than the actors.’

‘Yes indeed. The god inspired her. It was her dedication to do him honour. Such offerings are very pleasing to Dionysos.’

They came out into the square of tramped earth outside the theatre. The women, in twittering groups, were drifting homeward, the men standing about. Close by, exempt from convention, stood a cluster of well-dressed hetairas, expensive girls from Ephesos and Corinth, who served the officers at Pella. One said in a sweet carrying voice, ‘Poor dear little lad, you can see he feels it.’ Without turning, the boy walked on.

They were nearly out of the press; Phoinix was starting to breathe more easily, then found him gone. How not, indeed? But no; there he was not twenty feet off, near a huddle of talking men. Phoinix heard their laughter; he ran, but was still too late.

The man who had spoken the last and unambiguous word, had been aware of nothing amiss. But another, whose back was to the boy, felt a quick low tug at his sword-belt. Looking about at man-height, he was only just in time to knock up the boy’s arm. The man who had spoken got the dagger along his side, instead of straight in his belly.

It had been so swift and silent, no bystander had turned. The group stood stock-still; the stabbed man with a snake of blood running down his leg; the dagger’s owner, who had grabbed the boy before he saw who it was, gazing blankly at the stained weapon in his hand; Phoinix behind the boy, both hands on his shoulders; the boy staring into the face of the wounded man, and finding it one he knew. The man, clutching the warm ooze from his side, stared back in astonishment and pain; then with a shock of recognition.

Breath was drawn in all round. Before anyone spoke, Phoinix lifted his hand as if he had been at war; his square face grew bull-like, they would hardly have known him. ‘It will be better for you all to keep your mouths shut.’ He pulled at the boy, breaking off the exchange of looks still unresolved, and led him away.

Knowing nowhere else to hide him, he took him to his own lodging in the one good street of the little town. The small room was frowsty with old wool, old scrolls, old bedding, and the ointment Phoinix rubbed on his stiff knees. On the bed, with its blanket of blue and red squares, the boy fell face down and lay soundless. Phoinix patted his shoulders and his head, and, when he broke into convulsive weeping, gathered him up.

Beyond this instant and its needs, the man saw no call to look. His love, being sexless, seemed to him proved selfless. Certainly he would have given all he had, shed his own blood. Much less was wanted now, only comfort and a healing word.

‘A filthy fellow. Small loss if you had killed him. No man of honour could let it pass-A godless fellow who mocks a dedication-There, my Achilles, don’t weep that the warrior came out in you. He’ll mend, it’s more than he deserves; and keep quiet if he knows what’s good for him. No one shall hear a word from me.’

The boy choked into Phoinix’ shoulder. ‘He made me my bow.’

‘Throw it out, I’ll get you a better.’

There was a pause. ‘It wasn’t said to me. He didn’t know I was there.’

‘And who wants such a friend?’

‘He wasn’t ready.’

‘Nor were you, to hear him.’

Gently, with a careful courtesy, the boy disengaged himself, and lay down again with his face hidden. Presently he sa?t up, wiping his hand across his eyes and nose. Phoinix wrung out a towel from the ewer and cleaned his face. He sat staring, saying ‘Thank you’ now and then.

Phoinix got out his best silver cup from his pillow-box, and the last of his breakfast wine. The boy drank, with a little coaxing; it seemed to run straight through to his skin, flushing his drawn face, his throat and breast. Presently he said, ‘He insulted my kin. But he wasn’t ready.’ He shook out his hair, pulled down his creased chiton, re-tied a loosened sandal string. ‘Thank you for having me in your house. Now I am going to ride.’

‘Now that’s foolish. You’ve had no breakfast yet.’

‘I have had enough, thank you. Good-bye.’

‘Wait, then, I’ll change and go with you.’

‘No, thank you. I want to go alone.’

‘No, no; let’s be quiet awhile, read, or go walking -’

‘Let me go.’

Phoinix’s hand withdrew like a scared child’s.

Later, going to see, he found the boy’s riding boots gone, his pony, his practice javelins. Phoinix hurried about for word of him. He had been seen above the town, riding towards Mount Olympos.

It still wanted some hours to noon. Phoinix, waiting his return, heard people agree that the Queen had done this outlandish thing as an offering. Epirotes were mystai with their mothers’ milk, but it would do her no good with Macedonians. The King had put the best face he could on it for the guests, and been civil to Neoptolemos the tragedian. And where was young Alexander?

Oh, gone riding, answered Phoinix, hiding his mounting fear. What had possessed him, to let the boy walk off like a grown man? He should not have let him for a moment out of his sight. No use to follow; in the huge Olympian massif, two armies could be hidden from one another. There were fathomless crags, whose feet were inaccessible; there were boar, wolves, leopards; even lions lived there still.

The sun westered; the steep eastern faces, under which Dion stood, grew darker; cloud swirled round the hidden summits. Phoinix rode about, quartering the cleared land above the town. At the foot of a sacred oak he stretched up his arms to the ever-sunlit peak, King Zeus’ throne bathed in its clear aether.

Weeping he prayed and vowed his offerings. When night came, he would be able to hide the truth no longer.

The great shadow of Olympos crept beyond the shoreline, and quenched the sea’s evening glow. Dusk filled the oak-grove; further in, the woods were already black. Between the dusk and the night, something moved. He flung himself on his horse, his stiff joints stabbing him, and rode towards it.

The boy came down through the trees, walking at the pony’s head. The beast, bone-weary, head down, plodded beside him, pecking a little with one foot. They moved steadily down the glade; when the boy saw Phoinix, he raised his hand in greeting, but did not speak.

His javelins were tied across his saddle-cloth; he did not yet own a holster. The pony like a conspirator leaned its cheek to his. His clothes were torn, his knees grazed and caked with dirt, his arms and legs scribbled with scratches; he seemed, since morning, visibly to have lost weight. His chiton was darkened all down the front with blood. He came calmly forward between the trees, his eyes hollow and dilated; walking lightly, floatingly; inhumanly tranquil and serene.

Phoinix dismounted by him, grasping, scolding, questioning. The boy ran his hand over the pony’s nose and said, ‘He was going lame.’

‘I have been running about here, half out of my mind. What have you done to yourself? Where are you bleeding? Where have you been?’

‘I’m not bleeding.’ He held out his hands, which he had rinsed in some mountain stream; there was blood around the nails. His eyes dwelt on Phoinix’s, revealing only the impenetrable. ‘I made an altar and a shrine, and sacrificed to Zeus.’ He lifted his head; his white brow under the springing peak of hair looked transparent, almost luminous. His eyes widened and glowed in their deep sockets. ‘I sacrificed to the god. And he spoke to me. He? spoke to me.’

King Archelaos’ study was more splendid than the Perseus Room, having been nearer his heart. Here he had received the poets and philosophers whom his open-handed hospitality and rich guest-gifts had tempted up to Pella. On the sphinx-headed arms of the chair from Egypt had rested the hands of Agathon and of Euripides.

The Muses, to whom the room was dedicated, sang round Apollo in a vast mural which filled the inner wall. Apollo, as he played his lyre, gazed out inscrutably at the polished shelving with its precious books and scrolls. Tooled bindings, cases gilded and jewelled; finials of ivory, agate and sardonyx; tassels of silk and bullion; from reign to reign, even during the succession wars, these treasures had been dusted and tended by well-trained slaves. It was a generation since anyone else had read in them. They were too valuable; the real books were in the library.

There was an exquisite Athenian bronze of Hermes inventing the Lyre, bought from some bankrupt in the last years of the city’s greatness; two standing lamps, in the form of columns twined with laurel-boughs, stood by the huge writing-table inlaid with lapis and chalcedony, and supported on lions’ feet. All this was little changed since Archelaos’ day. But through the door at the far end, the painted walls of the reading-cell had vanished behind racks and shelves, stuffed with the documents of administration; its couch and table given place to a laden desk, where the Chief Secretary was working through the day’s letter-bag.

It was a sharp bright March day with a north-east wind. The fretted shutters had been closed to keep the papers from blowing about; a cold dazzling sun came splintering through, mixed with icy draughts. The Chief Secretary had a heated brick hidden in his cloak to warm his hands on; his clerk blew enviously on his fingers, but silently lest the King should hear. King Philip sat at ease. He had just come back from campaign in Thrace; after winter there, he thought his Palace a Sybaris of comfort.

As his power reached steadily towards the immemorial corn-route of the Hellespont, the gullet of all Greece; as he encircled colonies, wrested from Athens the allegiance of tribal lands, laid siege to her allies’ cities, the southerners counted it among their bitterest wrongs that he had broken the old decent rule of abandoning war in winter-time, when even bears holed up.

He sat at the great table, his brown scarred hand, chapped with cold and calloused from reins and spear-shaft, grasping a silver stylos he kept to pick his teeth with. On a cross-legged stool, a clerk with a tablet on his knees waited to take a letter to a client lord in Thessaly.

There he could see his way; it was business of the south had brought him home. At last his foot was in the door. In Delphi, the impious Phokians were turning like mad dogs on one another, worn out with war and guilt. They had had a good run for the money they had melted down, coining the temple treasures for soldiers’ pay; now far-shooting Apollo was after them. He knew how to wait; on the day they had dug below the Tripod itself for gold, he had sent the earthquake. Then panic, frantic mutual accusations, exilings, torturings. The losing leader now held with his outcast force the strongpoints of Thermopylai, a desperate man who could soon be treated with. Already he had turned back a garrison relief from Athens, though they were the Phokians’ allies; he feared being handed over to the ruling faction. Soon he would be ripe and ready. King Leonidas under his grave-mound, thought Philip, must be tossing in his sleep.

Go tell the Spartans, traveller passing byÉ. Go tell them all Greece will obey me within ten years, because city cannot keep faith with city, nor man with man. They have forgotten even what you could show them, how to stand and die. Envy and greed have conquered them for me. They will follow me, and be reborn from it; under me they shall win back their pride. They will look to me to lead them; and their sons will look to my son.

The peroration reminded him he had sent for the boy some time ago. No doubt he would come when found; at ten years, one did not expect them to be sitting still. Philip returned his thoughts to his letter. Before he was through it, he heard his son’s voice outside, greeting the bodyguard. How many score - or hundred - men did the boy know by name? This one had only been in the Guard five days.

The tall doors opened. He looked small between them, shining and compact, his feet bare on the cold floor of figured marble, his arms folded inside his cloak, not to warm them, but in the well-drilled posture of modest Spartan boyhood, taught him by Leonidas. In this room served by pale bookish men, father and son had the gloss of wild animals among tame: the swarthy soldier, tanned almost black, his arms striped with pink cockled war-scars, the forehead crossed with the light band left by the helmet-rim, his blind eye with its milky fleck staring out under the half-drooped lid; the boy at the door, his brown silky skin flawed only with the grazes and scratches of a boy’s adventures, his heavy tousled hair making Archelaos’ gildings look dusty. His homespun clothes, softened and bleached by many washings and beatings on the river-stones, long since subdued to their wearer, now carried his style as if he had chosen them himself in a wilful arrogance. His grey eyes, which the cold slanting sun had lightened, kept to themselves some thought he had brought with him.

‘Come in, Alexander.’ He was already doing so; Philip had spoken only to be heard, resenting this withdrawal.

Alexander came forward, noting that like a servant he had been given leave to enter. The glow of the wind outside ebbed from his face, the skin seemed to change its texture, becoming more opaque. He had been thinking at the door that Pausanias, the new bodyguard, had the sort of looks his father liked. If anything came of it, for a time there might be no new girl. There was a certain look one came to know, when they met one’s eyes, or did not; it had not happened yet.

He came up to the desk and waited, his hands disposed in his cloak. One part of the Spartan deportment, however, Leonidas had never managed to impose; he should have been looking down till his elders spoke to him.

Philip, meeting the steady eyes, felt a stab of familiar pain. Even hate might have been better. He had seen such a look in the eyes of men prepared to die before they would yield the gate or the pass; not a challenge, an inward thing. How have I deserved it? It is that witch, who comes with her poison whenever my back is turned, to steal my son.

Alexander had been meaning to ask his father about the Thracian battle-order; accounts had differed, but he would knowÉ. Not now, however.

Philip sent out the clerk, and motioned the boy to the empty stool. As he sat straight-backed on the scarlet sheepskin, Philip felt him already poised to go.

It pleased Philip’s enemies, hate being blinder than love, to think his men in the Greek cities had all alike been bought. But though none lost by serving him, there were many who would have taken nothing from him, had they not first been won by charm. ‘Here,’ he said, picking up from the desk a glittering tangle of soft leather. ‘What do you make of this?’

The boy turned it over; at once his long square-ended fingers began to work, slipping thongs under or over, pulling, straightening. As order came out of chaos his face grew intent, full of grave pleasure. ‘It’s a sling and a shot-bag. It should go on a belt, through here. Where do they do this work?’

The bag was stitched with gold plaques cut out in the bold, stylized, flowing forms of stags. Philip said, ‘It was found on a Thracian chief, but it comes from far north, from the plains of grass. It’s Scythian.’

Alexander pored over this trophy from the edge of the Kimmerian wilderness, thinking of the endless steppes beyond the Ister, the fabled burial-grounds of the kings with their rings of dead riders staked around them, horses and men withering in the dry cold? air. His longing to know more was too much for him; in the end he asked all his stored-up questions. They talked for some time.

‘Well, try the sling; I brought it for you. See what you can bring down. But don’t go off too far. The Athenian envoys are on the way.’

The sling lay in the boy’s lap, remembered only by his hands. ‘About the peace?’

‘Yes. They landed at Halos and asked for safe conduct through the lines, without waiting for the herald. They are in a hurry, it seems.’

‘The roads are bad.’

‘Yes, they’ll need to thaw out before I hear them. When I do, you may come and listen. This will be serious business; it is time you saw how things are done.’

‘I’ll stay near Pella. I’d like to come.’

‘At last, we may see action out of talk. They have been buzzing like a kicked bee-skep ever since I took Olynthos. Half last year they were touting the southern cities, trying to work up a league against us. Nothing came of it but dusty feet.’

“Were they all afraid?’

‘Not all; but all mistrusted each other. Some trusted men who trusted me. I shall redeem their trust.”

The fine inner ends of the boy’s gilt-brown eyebrows drew together, almost meeting, outlining the heavy bone-shelf over his deep-set eyes. ‘Wouldn’t even the Spartans fight?’

‘To serve under Athenians? They won’t lead, they’ve had their bellyful; and they’ll never follow.’ He smiled to himself. ‘And they’re not the audience for a speechmaker beating his breast in tears, or scolding like a market-woman short-changed of an obol.’

‘When Aristodemos came back here about that man Iatrokles’ ransom, he told me he thought the Athenians would vote for peace.’

It was long since such remarks had had power to startle Philip. ‘Well, to encourage them, I had Iatrokles home before him, ransom free. Let them send me envoys by all means. If they think they can bring Phokis into their treaty, or Thrace either, they are fools; but so much the better, they can be voting on it while I act. Never discourage your enemies from wasting timeÉ. Iatrokles will be an envoy; so will Aristodemos. That should do us no harm.’

‘He recited some Homer at supper, when he was here. Achilles and Hektor, before they fight. But he’s too old.’

‘That comes to us all. Oh, and Philokrates will be there, of course.’ He did not waste time in saying that this was his chief Athenian agent; the boy would be sure to know. ‘He will be treated like all the others; it would do him no good at home to be singled out. There are ten, in all.’

‘Ten?’ said the boy staring. ‘What for? Will they all make speeches?’

‘Oh, they need them all to watch each other. Yes, they will all speak, not one will consent to be passed over. Let us hope they agree beforehand to divide their themes. At least there will be one show-piece. Demosthenes is coming.’

The boy seemed to prick his ears, like a dog called for a walk. Philip looked at his kindling face. Was every enemy of his a hero to his son?

Alexander was thinking about the eloquence of Homer’s warriors. He pictured Demosthenes tall and dark, like Hektor, with a voice of bronze and flaming eyes.

‘Is he brave? Like the men at Marathon?’

Philip, to whom this question came as from another world, paused to bring round his mind to it, and smiled sourly in his black beard.

‘See him and guess. But do not ask him to his face.’

A slow flush spread up from the boy’s fair-skinned neck into his hair. His lips met hard. He said nothing.

In anger he looked just like his mother. It always got under Philip’s skin. ‘Can’t you tell,’ he said impatiently, ‘when a man is joking? You’re as touchy as a girl.’

How dare he, thought the boy, speak of girls to me? His hands clenched on the sling, so that the gold bit into them.

Now, Philip thought, all the good work was undone. He cursed in his heart his wife, his son, himself. Forcing ease into his voice, he said, ‘Well, we shall both see for ourselves, I know him no more than you.’ This was less than honest; through his agents’ reports, he felt he had live?d with the man for years. Feeling wronged, he indulged a little malice. Let the boy keep himself to himself, then, and his expectations too.

A few days later, he sent for him again. For both, the time had been full; for the man with business, for the boy with the perennial search for new tests on which to stretch himself, rock-clefts to leap, half-broken horses to ride, records to beat at throwing and running. He had been taught a new piece, too, on his new kithara.

‘They should be here by nightfall,’ Philip said. They will rest in the morning; after luncheon I shall hear them. There is a public dinner at night; so time should limit their eloquence. Of course, you will wear court dress.’

His mother kept his best clothes. He found her in her room, writing a letter to her brother in Epiros, complaining of her husband. She wrote well, having much business she could not trust to a scribe. When he came she closed the diptych, and took him in her arms.

‘I have to dress,’ he told her, ‘for the Athenian envoys. I’ll wear the blue.’

‘I know just what suits you, darling.’

‘No, but it must be right for Athenians. I’ll wear the blue.’

‘T-tt! My lord must be obeyed. The blue, then, the lapis broochÉ’

‘No, only women wear jewels in Athens, except for rings.’

‘But my darling, it is proper you out-dress them. They are nothing, these envoys.’

‘No, Mother. They think jewels barbarous. I shan’t wear them.’

She had begun lately to hear this new voice sometimes. It pleased her. She had never yet conceived of its being used against her.

‘You shall be all man, then, my lord.’ Seated as she was, she could lean on him and look up. She stroked his windblown hair. ‘Come in good time; you are as wild as a mountain lion, I must see to this myself.’

When evening came, he said to Phoinix, ‘I want to stay up, please, to see the Athenians come.’

Phoinix looked out with distaste at the lowering dusk. ‘What do you expect to see?’ he grumbled. ‘A parcel of men with their hats pulled down to their cloaks. With this ground-mist tonight, you’ll not know master from servant.’

‘Never mind. I want to see.’

The night came on raw and dank. The rushes dripped by the lake, the frogs trilled ceaselessly like a noise in the head. A windless mist hung round the sedge, winding with the lagoon till it met the breeze off the sea. In the streets of Pella, muddy runnels carried ten days’ filth and garbage down to the rain-pocked water. Alexander stood at the window of Phoinix’s room, where he had gone to rouse him out. He himself was dressed already in his riding-boots and hooded cloak. Phoinix sat at his book with lamp and brazier, as if they had the night before them. ‘Look! There are the outriders’ torches coming round the bend.’