Fire From Heaven (15 page)

Alexander struck the last chord and drew a long deep breath. He had not made one mistake.

The guests broke into uneasy applause. Epikrates joined in eagerly. Phoinix shouted rather too loudly, ‘Good! Very good!’

Philip banged down his wine-cup on the table. His forehead had flushed dark crimson; the lid of his blind eye had dropped a little, showing the white spot; his good eye started in its socket.

‘ Good?’ he said.’ Do you call that music for a man?’

The boy turned slowly, as if waking from sleep. He blinked his eyes clear, and fastened them on his father.

‘Never,’ said Philip, ‘let me see you make such a show of yourself again. Leave it to Corinthian whores and Persian eunuchs; you sing well enough for either. You should be as?hamed.’

With the kithara still strapped on to him, the boy stood stock-still for a few moments, his face blank, and, as the blood receded, growing sallow. Looking at no one, he walked out between the couches and left the hall.

Epikrates followed. But he had wasted a few moments thinking what to say, and did not find him.

Ê

A few days later, Gyras, a tribal Macedonian from the inland hills, set out along ancient tracks, returning home on leave. He had told his commander, formally, that his father was dying and had begged for a last sight of him. The officer, who had expected it since the day before, told him not to waste time at home when he had done his business, if he wanted to draw his pay. Tribal wars were winked at, unless they showed signs of spreading; they were immemorial; to put down blood-feud would have taken the army all its time, even had it not been itself steeped in tribal loyalties. Gyras’ uncle had been killed, the wife raped and left for dead; if Gyras was refused leave he would desert. Some such thing happened once a month or so.

It was his second day out. He was a light cavalryman with his own horse, small and scrubby but tough, qualities Gyras shared; a gingery brown man, with a broken nose set slightly skew and a short bristly beard, dressed mainly in leather, and armed to the teeth, this being required for the journey as well as for his errand. He had been favouring his horse over grass wherever he could find it, to keep its unshod hooves sound for the work ahead. At about noon, he was crossing a rolling heathland between the mountain ribs of Macedon. In the wooded dips, birches and larches swayed in a gentle breeze; it was late summer, but up here the air was fresh. Gyras, who did not want to be killed, but preferred it to the life of disgrace which followed a failure to take vengeance, looked about him at the world he might shortly have to leave. Meantime, however, there was an oak-grove ahead; in its hushed and grateful shade a stream burbled over pebbles and black oak-leaves. He watered and tethered his horse; dipping the bronze cup he carried on his belt, he approved the water’s sweetness. From his saddle-bag he took goat cheese and black bread, and sat on a rock to eat.

Hoof-beats cantered on the track behind him. At a walk, some stranger entered the wood. Gyras reached for his javelins, already laid at hand.

‘ Good day to you, Gyras.’

Till the lastest moment he had not believed his eyes. They were a good fifty miles out from Pella.

‘Alexander!’ His bread had stuck in his throat; he dislodged and bolted it, while the boy dismounted and led his horse to the stream. ‘How did you get here? Is no one with you?’

‘You are, now.’ He invoked the god of the stream in proper form, restrained his mount from drinking too much, and tethered it to an oak-sapling. ‘We can eat together.’ He unpacked food and came over. He wore a man’s long hunting-knife on a shoulder sling; his clothes were tumbled and dirty, his hair had pine-needles in it. Clearly he had slept out. His horse carried, among other things, two javelins and a bow. ‘Here, take an apple. I thought I should catch up with you about mealtime.’

Dazedly Gyras complied. The boy drank from cupped hands and splashed his face. Concerned with his own affairs, for him momentous, Gyras had heard nothing of King Philip’s supper-party. The thought of this charge on his hands appalled him. By the time he had returned him and set out again, anything might have happened at home. ‘How did you come so far alone? Are you lost? Were you out hunting?’

‘I am hunting what you are hunting,’ said Alexander, biting into his apple. ‘That is why I am coming with you.’

‘ButÉ butÉ what notionÉ. You don’t know what I’m about.’

‘Of course I do. Everyone in your squadron knows it. I need a war, and yours will do very well. It is quite time, you know, that I got my swordbelt. I have come out to take my man.’

Gyras gazed transfixed. The boy must have tracked him all this way, keeping out of sight. He was equipped with car?e and forethought. Also, something had changed his face. His cheeks had sunk and flattened below the cheekbones; his eyes looked deeper under the shelf of his brows, his high-bridged nose stood out more. There was a line across his forehead. It was scarcely a boy’s face at all. Nonetheless he was twelve years old, and Gyras would have to answer for him.

‘It’s not right,’ he said desperately, ‘what you’ve done. You know it’s not right. I was needed at home, you know that. Now I’ll have to leave them in their trouble, and take you back.’

‘You can’t, you’ve eaten with me, we’re guest-friends.’ He was reproving, not alarmed. ‘It’s wicked to betray a guest-friend.’

‘You should have told me the right of it first, then. I can’t help it now. Come back you must and will. You’re no more than a child. If harm came to you, the King would have me crucified.’

The boy got up without haste, and strolled to his horse. Gyras started up, saw he was not untying it, and sat down again.

‘He won’t kill you if I come back. If I die, you’ll have plenty of time to run away. I don’t suppose he’d kill you anyway. Think about me, instead. If you do anything to get me sent home before I’m ready, if you try to ride back or send a message, then I shall kill you. And that you can be sure of.’

He had turned from the horse with lifted arm. Gyras looked along a javelin, balanced and poised. The narrow leaflike blade shone blue with honing, the point looked like a needle.

‘Keep still, Gyras. Sit just as you are, don’t move. I’m quick, you know, everyone knows it. I can throw before you can do anything. I don’t want you for my first man. It wouldn’t be enough, I should still have to take another in battle. But you will be, if you try to stop me now.’

Gyras looked at his eyes. He had faced such eyes through helmet-slits. He said, ‘Now, come, now, you don’t mean that.’

‘No one will even know I did it. I shall just leave your body in that thicket, for the wolves and kites. You’ll never be buried, or given your rites to set you free.’ His voice grew rhythmic. ‘And the shades of the dead will not let you cross the river to join their company, but you will wander alone for ever before the wide gates of Hades’ house. No, don’t move.’

Gyras sat immobile. It gave him time to think. Though ignorant of the supper-party, he knew about the King’s new wedding, and those before. There was already a boy from one of them. Folk said it had started bright enough, but had turned out an idiot, no doubt poisoned by the Queen. Maybe she had only bribed the nurse to drop it on its head. Maybe it was just a natural. But there might be others. If young Alexander wanted to make himself a man ahead of time, one could see why.

‘Well?’ said the boy. ‘Will you pledge yourself? I can’t stand like this all day.’

‘What I’ve ever done to deserve this of the gods, they only know. What do you want me to swear to?’

‘Not to get word to Pella of me. To tell no one my name without my leave. Not to keep me from going into battle, or get anyone else to do it. You must swear all that, and call down a death-curse on yourself if you break your oath.’

Gyras felt himself flinch. He wanted no such compacts with a witch’s son. The boy lowered his weapon but kept the thong in his fingers, twisted for a throw. ‘You’ll have to do it. I don’t want you creeping up to bind me when I’m asleep. I could sit up to watch, but it would be stupid before a battle. So if you want to come out of this wood alive, you’ll have to swear.’

‘And what’s to become of me after?’

‘If I live I’ll see you right. You must chance my dying, that’s war.’ He reached into his leather saddle-bag, looking over his shoulder at the still unsworn Gyras, and took out a piece of meat. It smelled high, not having been fresh when it left Pella. ‘This is from a haunch of sacrifice,’ he said, slapping it down upon a boulder. ‘I knew we should have to do this. Come here. Lay your hand on it. Have you respect for oaths before the gods?’

‘Yes.’ His hand was so chilly that the dead goat-?flesh felt quite warm.

‘Then say this after me.’

The oath was elaborate and exact, the death-fate invoked was ghastly. The boy was well-versed in such things, and had on his own account a ready awareness of loopholes. Gyras finished binding himself as he was told, and went to swill his bloody hand in the running stream. The boy sniffed at the meat. ‘I don’t think this is fit to eat, even if we were to waste time making fire.’ He tossed it away, bolstered his javelin, and came back to Gyras’ side. ‘Well, that’s done, now we can go on like friends. Let’s finish eating, while you tell me about the war.’

Passing his hand across his brow, Gyras began to recite his kinsmen’s injuries. ‘No, I know about that. How many are you, how many are they? What kind of country is it? Have you horses?’

Their track threaded green hills, steadily rising. Grass gave way to bracken and thyme, the track wound past pine-woods and thickets of arbutus. The ranges heaved up all round them; they met mountain air, with its lifegiving holy pureness. They entered the open secrecy of the heights.

Gyras traced back the feud three generations. The boy, his first questions once answered, proved a good listener. Of his own affairs, he said only, ‘When I’ve taken my man, you must be my witness at Pella. The King didn’t take his man till he was fifteen. Parmenion told me so.’

Gyras planned to spend the last night of the journey with distant kinsmen, half a day’s ride from home. He pointed out their village, clinging to the edge of a gorge, with rocky slopes above it. There was a mule-track along the precipice; Gyras was for taking a good road round the slope, one of King Archelaos’; but the boy, having learned that the pass was just usable, insisted on going that way to see what it was like. Between the steep bends and giddy drops, he said, ‘If these are your clansmen, it’s no use our saying I’m your kin. Say I’m your commander’s son, come to learn about war. They can never claim you lied to them.’

Gyras readily agreed; even this would hint that the boy must be kept an eye on. He could do no more, on account of the death-fate. He was a believing man.

On a flattish shelf a few furlongs round about, between a broken hillside and the gorge, was the hamlet of Skopas, built of the brown stone which lay loose all round it, looking like an outcrop itself. On its open side was a stockade of boulders filled in with thorn-brush. Within, the coarse grass was full of cow-pats from the cattle that spent the night there. One or two small hairy horses were at graze; the rest would be out with the herders and hunters. Goats and some ragged sheep moved on the hill; a goat-boy’s piping sounded from above, like the call of some wild bird.

Above the pass, on a gnarled dead tree, were spiked a yellow skull, and a few bones left of a hand. When the boy asked about it, Gyras said, ‘That was a long time back, when I was a child. That was the man killed his own father.’

Their coming was the news of half a year. A horn was blown to tell the herdsmen; the oldest Skopian was carried in from the lair of still older rags and skins where he lived, waiting to die. In the headman’s house they were offered sweet small figs, and some turbid wine in the best, least-chipped cups; people waited with ritual courtesy till they had done, before the questions began, about themselves, and the distant world. Gyras said the Great King had Egypt under his heel again; King Philip had been called in to set things to rights down in Thessaly, and was Archon there now, as good as King; it had put the southerners in a taking. And was it true, asked the headman’s brother, that he had taken a new wife, and put the Epirote Queen away?

Aware of a stillness more piercing than all the voices, Gyras said that this was a pack of lies. The King as he got new lands in order might honour this lord or that by taking a daughter into his house; to Gyras’ mind, they were by way of a kind of hostage. As for Queen Olympias, she stood in high respect as the mother of the King’s heir,? a credit to both his parents. Having got off this speech, sweated over in silence some hours before, Gyras cut off comment by asking in his turn for news.

News of the feud was bad. Four enemy Kimolians had met in a glen two of Gyras’ clansmen, out after deer. One had lived just long enough to creep home and tell them where to find his brother’s corpse before the jackals had it. The Kimolians were puffed with pride; the old man had no hold upon his sons; soon no one would be safe from them. Many deeds were milled over, many words quoted which had struck someone as telling, while the livestock was driven in, and the women cooked the goat which had been slaughtered to feast the guests. “With the fall of dark, everyone went to bed.

Alexander shared with the headman’s son, who had a proper blanket. It was verminous; so was the child, but being in awe of his guest he let him sleep in what peace the fleas allowed.

He dreamed that Herakles came up to the bed and shook him. He looked as he did in the garden shrine at Pella, beardless and young, hooded in the fanged mask of the lion, its mane hanging down behind. ‘Get up, lazy boy,’ he said, ‘or I shall start without you. I have been calling you this long time.’

All the people in the room were sleeping; he took his cloak and stepped softly out. A late bright moon lit the wide uplands. No one kept watch but the dogs. One huge wolflike beast ran up to him; he stood still to be smelled, and it let him be. It was movement outside the fence that would have had them baying.

All was quiet, why had Herakles called him? His eye fell on a tall crag, with an easy way up well worn by feet, the village lookout. If a guard was there-But no guard was. He scrambled up. He could trace the good road of Archelaos, winding on down the hill; and on it a creeping shadow.