Fire From Heaven (2 page)

The lips of Olympias parted, and the blacks of her eyes grew wide, invading the grey irises; he saw them like soft silk, pleating together. Her arms slackened about him; he was held in the grasp of her eyes.

‘He knows you,’ she whispered. ‘Tonight, when he came, be sure it was not for the first time. He must have come often, while you slept. See how he clings to you. He knows you well. He comes from the god. He is your daimon, Alexander.’

The lamp flickered. The end of a pine-brand slipped into the embers, and threw up blue flame. The snake squeezed him swiftly, as if to share a secret; its scales trickled like water.

‘I shall call him Tyche,’ he said presently. ‘He shall have his milk in my gold cup. Will he talk to me?’

‘Who knows? He is your daimon. Listen, I will tell you - ‘

The muted noises from the Hall broke out loud as its doors were opened. Men shouted to each other good nights, jokes or drunken taunts. The noise flowed in on them through their closed defences. Olympias broke off, gathered him close into her side, and said softly, ‘Never mind, he won’t come here.’ But he felt her taut with listening. There was a sound of heavy feet, a stumble and a curse; then the rap of Agis’ spear-butt on the floor, and the slap of his soles as he presented ?arms.

The feet came scuffing and tramping up the stairs. The door flew open. King Philip crashed it behind him, and without a glance at the bed started taking off his clothes.

Olympias had pulled up the blanket. The child, eyes round with alarm, had for a moment been glad to lie hidden. Then, cowered in the womb of soft wool and scented flesh, he began to feel horror of the danger he could not confront or see. He worked down a fold to make a peephole; it was better to know than to guess.

The King stood naked, one foot up on the cushioned stool of the toilet-table, loosing his sandal strap. His black-bearded face was cocked sideways to see what he was doing; his blind eye was towards the bed.

For a year or more, the child had run in and out of the wrestling-ground, when anyone dependable would take him off the women’s hands. Bare bodies or clothed, it was all one, except for being able to see men’s war-scars. Yet his father’s nakedness, seldom seen, always disgusted him. Now, since one eye had been blinded at the siege of Methone, he had become frightful. At first he had kept it covered with a bandage, from which blood-tinged tears had stained a track down into his beard. Then these had dried, and the bandage had come off. The lid, which the arrow had pierced on its way in, was puckered and streaked with red; the lashes were gummed with yellow matter. They were black, like his good eye and his beard, and the mats of hair on his shins and forearms and chest; a track of black hair led down his belly to the bush, like a second beard, between his loins. His arms and neck and legs were seamed with thick scars, white, red or purple. He belched, filling the air with the smell of stale wine, and showing the gap in his teeth. The child, glued to his peephole, knew suddenly what his father looked like. It was the ogre, one-eyed Polyphemos, who had picked up Odysseus’ sailors and crunched them raw.

His mother had risen on one elbow, with the clothes pulled up to her chin. ‘No, Philip. Not tonight. It is not the time.’

The King took a stride towards the bed. ‘Not the time?’ he said loudly. He was still panting from the stairs on a full stomach. ‘You said that half a month ago. Do you think I can’t count, you Molossian bitch?’

The child felt his mother’s hand, which had been curved around his body, clench into a fist. When she spoke again it was in her fighting voice. ‘Count, you wineskin? You’re not fit to know summer from winter. Go to your minion. Any day of the month is the same to him.’

The child’s knowledge of such things was still imperfect; yet he had a feeling of what was meant. He disliked his father’s new young man, who put on airs; he loathed the secrets he sensed between them. His mother’s body had tightened and hardened all over. He held his breath.

‘You cat-a-mountain!’ said the King. The child saw him rush upon them, like Polyphemos on his prey. He seemed to bristle all over; even the rod that hung in his black bushy crotch had risen by itself and was thrusting forward, a sight of mysterious horror. He pulled back the bedclothes.

The child lay in his mother’s arm, his fingers dug into her side. His father started back, cursing and pointing. But it was not at them; the blind eye was still turned that way. The child perceived why his mother had not been surprised to feel his new snake beside her. Glaukos had been there already. He must have been asleep.

‘How dare you?’ panted Philip hoarsely. He had had a sickening shock. ‘How dare you, when I forbade it, bring your filthy vermin in my bed? Sorceress, barbarian witchÉ”

His voice stopped. Drawn by the hatred in his wife’s two eyes, his one eye had moved that way, and he had seen the child. The two faces confronted one another: the man’s empurpled, with the wine, and with anger heightened now by shame; the child’s as brilliant as a jewel set in gold, the blue-grey eyes fixed and wide, the skin transparent, the delicate flesh, taut with uncomprehended agony, moulded close to the fine bones.

Muttering something, Philip rea?ched by instinct for his robe to cover his nakedness; but there was no more need. He had been wronged, insulted, exposed, betrayed. If his sword had been at hand, he might well have killed her.

Disturbed by all this, the child’s living girdle writhed, and lifted its head. Till now, Philip had not seen it.

‘What’s that?’ His pointing finger shook. ‘What’s that upon the boy? That thing of yours? Are you teaching him now? Are you making him into a back-country, snake-dancing, howling mystagogue? I tell you, I’ll not endure it, take heed of what I say, before you suffer; for by Zeus I mean it, as you will feel. My son is a Greek, not one of your barbarous cattle-lifting hillmenÉ’

‘Barbarous!’ Her voice rose ringing, then sank to a deadly undertone, like Glaukos’ when angered. ‘My father, you peasant, sprang from Achilles, and my mother from the royal house of Troy. My forbears were ruling men, when yours were hired farm-hands in Argos. Have you looked in a mirror? One can see the Thracian in you. If my son is Greek, it is from me. In Epiros, our blood runs true.’

Philip gritted his teeth. It squared his chin and broadened his cheekbones, which were wide already. Even under these mortal insults, he remembered the child was there. ‘I scorn to answer you. If you are Greek, then show a Greek woman’s manners. Let us see some modesty.’ He felt the lack of clothes. Two pairs of grey eyes, smokily rimmed, stared from the bed. ‘Greek schooling, reason, civility, I mean the boy to have them as I have had. Make up your mind to that.’

‘Oh, Thebes!’ She threw out the word like a ritual curse. ‘Is it Thebes again, now? I know enough of Thebes. In Thebes they made you a Greek, in Thebes you learned civility! In Thebes! Have you heard an Athenian speak of Thebes? The byword of Greece for boorishness. Don’t make such a fool of yourself.’

‘Athens, that talking-shop. Their great days are done there. They should keep quiet about Thebes for shame.’

‘It is you should do that. What were you in Thebes?’

‘A hostage, a pledge of policy. Did I make my brother’s treaty? Do you throw that in my face? I was sixteen. I found more courtesy there than you ever showed me. And they taught me war. What was Macedon, when Perdikkas died? He had fallen to the Illyrians with four thousand men. The valleys lay fallow; our people were afraid to come down out of the hill-forts. All they had were the sheep whose skins they wore, and those they could hardly keep. Soon the Illyrians would have taken everything; Bardelys was making ready. Now you know what we are and where our frontiers stand. Through Thebes, and the men who made me a soldier there, I came to you a king. Your kindred were glad enough of it.”

The child, pressed to her side, felt her breath drawn in and in. Blindly he waited for the unknown storm to break from the lowering sky. His fingers clenched on the blanket. He knew himself forgotten now, and alone.

The storm broke. ‘A soldier, was it, they made you there? And what else? What else?’ He could feel her ribs convulsed with rage. ‘You went south at sixteen, and by then already the country all around was full of your by-blows, don’t you think I know who they are? That whore Arsinoe, Lagos’ wife, old enough to be your mother-Then the great Pelopidas taught you all the learning Thebes is famous for. Battle and boys!’

‘Be silent!’ roared Philip, loud enough for a battlefield. ‘Have you no decency before the child? What does he see in this room? What does he hear? I tell you, my son shall be brought up civilized, if I have toÉ’

His voice was drowned by her laughter. She drew back her hand from the child, to thrust her body forward. With her arms and open palms propping her weight, her red hair falling forward over her naked breasts and the child’s open mouth and eyes, she laughed till the high room echoed, ‘Your son?’ she cried. ‘Your son!’

King Philip breathed as if he had just run the long-race. He strode forward and raised his hand.

Starting out of a perfect stillness, in one flash of movement the ch?ild threw off the curtain of his mother’s hair, and stood upright on the bed. His grey eyes, dilated, looked almost black; his mouth had whitened. He struck at the lifted arm of his father, who from mere astonishment withdrew it. ‘Go away!’ screamed the child, glittering and fierce as a forest wildcat. ‘Go away!Ê She hates you!Ê Go away! She will marry me!’

For three long breaths, Philip stood rooted, mouth and eyes gaping, like a man clubbed on the head. Then diving forward, he seized the child by both shoulders, swung him through the air, let go with one hand while he wrenched the great door open, and tossed him outside. Taken unawares, rigid with shock and fury, he did nothing to help himself. His sliding body reached the head of the stairs and began to tumble down them.

With a great clattering din, young Agis let fall his spear, dragged his arm out of his shield-straps, and taking the stairs in threes and fours leaped forward to catch the child. At the third stair down he reached him, and picked him up. His head seemed not to have been struck, and his eyes were open. Up above, King Philip had paused with the door in his hand. He did not slam it till he had seen that all was well; but of this the child knew nothing.

Caught up along with him, startled and bruised, the snake whipped free of him as he began to fall, poured itself down the stairs, and was gone into the dark.

Agis, after his first start, had seen what it was. The child was enough to think about. He carried him downstairs, and sitting at their foot took him on his knees, looking him over by the light of the torch in its wall-sconce. He felt stiff as a board, and his eyes were turned up to show the whites.

In the name of all gods below, thought the young man, what shall I do? If I leave my post, the Captain will have my blood. If his son dies on my hands, the King will. One night last year, before the new favourite’s reign began, Philip had looked his way, and he had pretended to be dense. Now he had seen too much; his fortunes, he thought, would sell dear at a sack of beans. The child was looking blue about the lips. In the far corner was Agis’ thick wool night cloak, ready for the cold small hours. He picked it up, wadded a fold between the child and his own hard corselet, and wrapped him round. ‘Come,’ he said anxiously. ‘Come, look, all’s well.’

He seemed not to be breathing. What to do? Slap him, like a woman in a laughing-fit? It might kill him instead. His eyes were moving, and focusing. He drew in a crowing breath, and gave a violent scream.

Deeply relieved, Agis loosed the cloak round the struggling limbs. He clucked and muttered as if to a frightened horse, not holding him in too hard but letting him feel firm hands. In the room above, his parents were calling down curses on one another.Ê ÊAfter a time Agis did not reckon - he had most of the night before him - these sounds died down, and the child began to weep, but not for long. Having come thus far to himself, soon he fell quiet. He lay biting his lower lip, swallowing, and gazing up at Agis, who tried suddenly to remember how old he was.

‘That’s my young captain,’ he said gently, moved by the almost manlike struggle on the childish face. He dried it with the cloak, and kissed it, trying as he did so to picture what this golden boy would look like when he was old enough for love. ‘Come, sweetheart, you and I will stand guard together. We’ll look after one another, eh?’

He enfolded the child and stroked him. After a time, the quiet, the warmth, the unconscious sensuality of the young man’s caresses, a vague awareness of being more admired than pitied, began to heal the enormous wound which had seemed his whole and only self. It began to close, sealing-in all within it.

Presently he put out his head from the cloak and looked about. ‘Where is my Tyche?’

What did the strange child mean, calling upon his fortune? ‘ Seeing Agis’ face look blank, he added, ‘My snake, my daimon. Where did he go?’

‘Ah, your lucky snake.’ Agis thought the Queen’s pets entir?ely loathsome. ‘He’s hiding awhile, he’ll soon be back.’ He wrapped more cloak round the child; he had begun to shiver. ‘Don’t take it to heart, your father didn’t mean it. It was only the wine in him. Many a clip on the head I’ve had from mine.’

‘When I’m big-’ He paused to count on his fingers, up to ten. ‘When I’m big, I’ll kill him.’

Agis sucked in his breath through his lower teeth. ‘Ss-ss! Don’t say such a thing. It’s god-cursed to kill a father, it sets the Furies after a man,’ He began to describe them, but broke off as the child’s eyes widened; he had had more than enough. ‘All these knocks we get when we’re young, that’s how we learn to bear our wounds, when we go to war. Look. Move over. Look what I got, the first time I fought the Illyrians.’

He pulled back the kilt of scarlet wool from his thigh, and showed the long ridged scar, with a pit where the spear-head had ploughed through almost to the bone. The boy gazed with respect, and felt it with his finger.

”Well,’ said Agis, covering it again, ‘that hurt, you can guess. And what kept me from yelling out, and being shamed before the Companions? My father’s clips on the ear. The fellow who gave me that never lived to boast of it. My first man, he was. When I showed my father his head, he gave me my sword-belt, offered up my boy’s girdle-cord, and feasted all our kindred.’ He looked along the passage. Would no one ever come by, and take the child to his bed?