Fire From Heaven (35 page)

They pressed on, to command the heights above the passes before the enemy; and came to Herakleia, whose fertile valley had been fought for in many wars. The Lynkestids were as familiar here as the storks on the house-roofs; they heartened their people with gnarled country jokes, and saluted shrines of immemorial gods elsewhere unknown. At Alexander the folk gazed as at a fable, and placed his acquisition to the credit of their lords.

The army rode up between vine-terraces, stone-edged in good red earth, to the next range; down past Lake Prespa cupped in its rocky hills, and on till Lychnidis smiled blue below them, sky-clear, fringed with its poplars and white acacias and groves of ash, shapely with bays and rocky headlands. From the near side, war-smoke was rising, Illyria had crossed over into Macedon.

At a small hill-fort on the pass, Lynkestid clansmen greeted their chief with loyal cries. To their own kinsmen in the force, they said out of his hearing, ‘A man only lives once; we’d not have waited so long with that horde so near, only that we heard the witch’s son was coming. Is it true that a snake-daimon got him on the Queen? That he’s weapon-proof? Is it true he was born in a caul?’ Peasants to whom a visit to the nearest market ten miles off was a thing for the greater festivals, they had never seen a shaved man and asked the easterners if he was a eunuch. Those who had managed to press near reported it false that he was weapon-proof; young as he was, he was already battle-scarred; but they could attest that he was magical, having seen his eyes. Also he had forbidden the soldiers, on the way, to kill a great viper which had slid along the pass in front of them, calling it a messenger of good fortune. They eyed him warily, but with hope.

The battle was fought by the lake, among the ash-groves and orchards and glittering poplar-trees, on slopes starred with yellow mallows or blue with irises, which the soldiers crushed under trampling feet or stained with blood. The lapis-blue waters were churned and fouled; the storks and the herons fled the reeds; the eaters of carrion watched each his neighbour drop from the sky, and swooped to the glut of corpses heaped on the grassy shores, or floating under the small-flowered rocks.

The Lynkestids obeyed orders, and fought to the honour of their house. They recognized, though they could not have planned, the neat tactics which had trapped the Illyrian raiders between the steeps and the shore. They joined in the pursuit, on into the snow-topped western mountains and down the gorges, where Illyrians who made a stand were dislodged from their fastnesses to die or yield.

The Lynkestids were surprised to see him taking prisoners, after his fierceness in the battle. They had been thinking that those who nicknamed him Basiliskos must have had in mind the crowned dragon whose stare is death. But now, when they themselves would not have spared one of the ancient foes, he was taking oaths of peace as though they were not barbarians.

The Illyrians were tall lean mountaineers, leathery, brown-haired, not unlike the Lynkestids whose forbears had often married with them. Kossos, the chief who had led the raid, had been trapped in a river-gorge and taken alive. They brought him bound before Alexander by the rushing stream which foamed brown between the borders. He was a younger son of the great Bardelys, King Philip’s old enemy, the terror of the border till he fell spear in hand at ninety years old. Now, the greybeard of fifty, hard and straight as a spear, stared impassively, hiding his wonder, at the boy with a man’s eyes, sitting a horse which by itself would have been worth a border raid.

‘You have wasted our lands,’ said Alexander, ‘driven off the cattle, looted our towns and forced our women. What do you think you deserve?’

Kossos knew little Macedonian, but enough for this. He wanted no in?terpreter coming between them. He looked long into the young man’s face and answered, ‘What is due to me, we might not agree on. Do with me, son of Philip, what you think is due to yourself.’

Alexander nodded. ‘Unbind him, and give him back his sword.’

He had lost in the battle two of his twelve sons; five more had been taken captive. Alexander freed three of them without ransom, and took two as hostages.

He had come to settle the border, not to breed new feuds. Though he had gone deep into Illyria, he did not try to push the frontier beyond Lake Lychnidis, where Philip had won it long ago and where the earth-shaping gods had drawn it. One thing at a time.

This was his first real war in sole command. He had gone into unknown country, and dealt with what he found; everyone thought it a great victory. With him rested the secret that it was the mask for a greater war. Alone with Hephaistion, he said, ‘It would have been base to take revenge on Kossos.’

By the clear lake of Lychnidis, the mud of combat settled, pike and eels picked clean the drifting dead. The crushed lilies slept to sprout green another year; the white acacia-flowers fell like snow in the next fresh wind, and hid the blood. Widows mourned, maimed men fumbled at former skills, orphans knew hunger who had never lacked before. The people bowed to fate, as to a murrain on the cattle, or untimely hail stripping the olive-trees. They went, even the widows and orphans, to make thank-offerings at the shrines; the Illyrians, notorious pirates and slavers, might have won. Their gods, regarding their offerings kindly, kept from them the knowledge that they had been a means and not an end. In grief more than in joy, man longs to know that the universe turns around him.

Ê

A few weeks later, King Philip came back from Thrace. With the ships of Athens ranging the coasts, the comfort of a sea-trip had been denied him; he had come most of the way by litter, but, for the last lap to Pella, mounted a horse to show that he could do it. He had to be helped down; Alexander, seeing he still walked with pain, came up to offer his shoulder. They went in together to a muted hum of comment; a sick bent man who had put on ten years and lost a stone; and a glowing youth who wore victory like the spring velvet on young stags’ horns.

Olympias at her window exulted in the sight. She was less pleased when as soon as the King was rested, Alexander went to his room and stayed two hours.

Some days later the King managed to hobble down for supper in Hall. Alexander, helping him up on his couch, noticed that the smell of pus still clung to him. Himself fastidiously clean, he reminded himself it was the smell of an honourable wound, and, seeing everyone’s eyes on the ungainly scramble, said, ‘Never mind, Father, every step you take is the witness of your valour.’ The company was much pleased. It was five years now since the evening of the kithara, and few of them remembered it.

With home comfort and good doctoring, Philip mended quickly. But his limp was much worse; the same leg had been pierced again, this time in the hamstring. In Thrace the wound had putrefied; he had lain days near to death in fever; when the rotten flesh sloughed off, Parmenion said, there had been a hole you could get your fist into. It would be long before he could mount a horse without a leg-up, if he ever did; but once up, he sat handsomely with the straight-leg grip of the riding schools. In a few weeks he took over the army’s training; praised the good discipline he found, and kept to himself the thought that there had been a spate of innovations. Some of them were even worth following up.

In Athens, the marble tablet which witnessed the peace with Macedon had been torn down, in formal declaration of war. Demosthenes had convinced nearly all the citizens that Philip was a power-drunk barbarian, who looked to them as a source of plunder and slaves. That they had lain an easy prey five years before, and he had not harmed them, was credited to anything but himself. He had offe?red, later, to treat Athenian troops as allies in the Phokian war; but Demosthenes had kept them at home by declaring they would be held as hostages; so many men going to see for themselves could only come back and confuse the issue. Phokion, the general who had done best in action against Macedon, declared Philip’s offer to be sincere, and narrowly escaped a treason charge; he was only saved by a known probity which rivalled that of Aristeides the Just.

Demosthenes found it a constant nuisance. He had no doubt that he was laying out in the City’s interests the gold that the Persians sent him; but a great deal passed through his hands, he was accountable to no one, and the agent’s cut was naturally allowed for. It freed him from daily cares, and his time for public service; what object could be worthier? But he had to take care with Phokion.

In the Great War with Sparta, the Athenians had fought for glory and for empire; they had ended beaten to the dust and stripped of everything. They had fought for freedom and democracy, and had finished under the most brutal tyranny of their recorded years. Old men still lived who had starved through the winter siege; the middle-aged had heard of it at first hand, mostly from people it had ruined. They had lost faith in war. If they turned to it again, it could only be in one cause, for mere survival. Step by step they had been brought to think that Philip meant to destroy them. Had he not destroyed Olynthos? So at last they gave up the public dole, to spend it on the fleet; the tax on the rich was raised above the old flat rate, in proportion to what they owned.

It was the Athenian navy which made her safer than Thebes.Ê Few understood that its high command was not just then very talented; Demosthenes took for granted that mere numbers must be decisive. Sea-power had saved Perinthos and Byzantion and the corn-route of the Hellespont. If Philip forced his way south it must be by land. Demosthenes was now the most powerful man in Athens, her symbol of salvation. Alliance with Thebes was in his grasp; he had replaced the ancient enmity by a greater.

Thebes paused in doubt. Philip had confirmed her rule over the Boeotian countryside around her, an age-long issue; where Athens, declaring it anti-democratic, had sought to weaken her by giving the Boeotians self-rule. But Thebes controlled the land-route into Attica; this was her value to Philip; all her bargaining power with him would vanish, if he and Athens made a separate peace.

So they debated, willing things to be as they had always been, unwilling to know that events are made by men, and that men had changed.

In Macedon, Philip grew brown and weathered, he could endure first half a day on horseback, and then a day; on the great horse-field by Pella lake, the cavalry wheeled and charged in complex manoeuvres. There were now two royal squadrons, Philip’s and Alexander’s. Father and son were seen riding together deep in counsel, the gold head bent towards the grizzled one. Queen Olympias’ maids looked pale and fretted; one had been beaten, and was two days laid up.

In midsummer, when the grain was tall and green, the Council of Delphi met again. Kottyphos reported the Amphissians still defaulting, the proscribed leaders unexpelled; it was beyond his makeshift army to force them to their knees. He proposed in Council that King Philip of Macedon, who had championed the god against the impious Phokians, be asked to undertake the holy war.

Antipatros, who was there as envoy, rose to say he was empowered to give the King’s consent. What was more, Philip, as a pious offering, would campaign at his own expense. Votes of thanks and an elaborate commission were drafted, and inscribed by the local writing-master; he finished his task about the time when Antipatros’ courier, for whom fresh horses had stood by all the way, arrived at Pella.

Alexander was in the ball-court, playing odd-man out with his friends. It was his turn to stand in the centre of the ring, and try to stop the ball on its way. He had just g?ot it with a four-foot jump, when Harpalos, condemned as usual to watch others limbering up, caught a flying rumour from outside, and called that the courier was here from Delphi. Alexander, in his eagerness to see the letter opened, brought it in to the King while he was in his bath.

He stood in a broad basin of ornate bronze, steaming his wounded leg while one of the squires rubbed in a strong-smelling liniment. His flesh was still sunken, his scars were ploughed and knotted all over him; one collar-bone, broken long ago when his horse was killed in battle, had knit with a thick callus. He was like some old tree on which the cattle year after year have rubbed their horns. With unthinking instinct, Alexander saw what kind of weapon had made each wound. What scars shall I carry, when I am as old as he?

‘Open it for me,’ said Philip. ‘My hands are wet.’ He drooped his eyelid as a sign to hide bad news. But there was no need.

When Alexander ran back to the ball-court, the clean-shaved young men were splashing in the fountain, throwing jars of water at each other to sluice off the dust and cool down. Seeing his face, they paused, arrested in action like a sculpture-group by Skopas.

‘It has come!’ he said. ‘We are going south.’

At the foot of the painted stairway, the bodyguard leaned on his spear. It was Keteus, a stocky iron-bearded veteran rising sixty. It had not been thought seemly for youths to guard the Queen, since the King had ceased to visit her.

The young man in the black cloak paused in the shadowed passage with its checkered floor-mosaic. He had never been so late to his mother’s room.

At his footfall, the guard threw up his shield and pointed his spear, bidding him declare himself. He showed his face, and went up the stairs. When he scratched on the door there was no answer. He drew his dagger, and rapped sharply with the hilt.

A sleepy bustle sounded within, followed by a breathing silence.

‘It is Alexander,’ he said. ‘Open the door.’

A blinking rumpled woman, a robe dragged round her, put out her head; behind her the voices rustled like mice. They must have thought, before, that it was the King.

‘Madam is sleeping. It is late, Alexander, long past midnight.’

His mother’s voice from beyond said, ‘Let him in.’

She stood by the bed, tying the girdle of her night-robe, made of wool the colour of curded cream edged with dark fur. He could just see her by the flickering night-light; a maid, clumsy from sleep, was trying to kindle from it the wicks of the standing lamp-cluster. The hearth was swept clean, it was summer now.

The first wick of the three burned up. She said, ‘That is enough.’

Her red hair mixed on her shoulders with the dark sleekness of the fur. The slanting lamplight etched the frown-creases between her brows, the lines that framed the corners of her mouth. When she faced the light full, one saw only the fine structure, the clear skin and the firm closed lips. She was thirty-four years old.

The one lamp left the room’s edges dark. He said, ‘Is Kleopatra here?’

‘At this hour? She is in her room. Do you want her?’

‘No.’

She said to the women, ‘Go back to bed.’

When the door closed, she threw the embroidered coverlet over the tumbled bed, and motioned him to sit by her; but he did not move.

‘What is it?’ she said softly. ‘We have said good-bye. You should be sleeping, if you march at dawn. What is it? You look strange. Have you had a dream?’

‘I have been waiting. This is not a little war, it is the beginning of everything. I thought you would send for me. You must know what brings me here.’

She stroked back the hair across her brow, her hand masking her eyes. ‘Do you want me to make a divination for you?’

‘I need no divination, Mother. Only the truth.’ She had let fall her hand too quickly, his eyes had seized on hers. ‘What am I?’ he said. ‘Tell me who I am.’

She stared. He saw she had expected some other question.

‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘whatever you have been doing. I know nothing about it. Te?ll me what I ask.’

She saw that in the few hours since they had last met, he had grown haggard. She had nearly said to him, ‘Is that all?’

It was long past, overlaid with living; the dark shudder, the fiery consuming dream, the shock of waking, the words of the old wise-woman brought by night to this room in secret from her cave. How had it been? She no longer knew. She had brought forth the child of the dragon, and he asked, ‘Who am I?’ It is I who need to ask that of him.

He was pacing, quick and light as a caged wolf, about the room. Coming to a sudden stop before her, he said, ‘I am Philip’s son. Isn’t it so?’

Only yesterday she had seen them together going to the drill-field; Philip had spoken grinning, Alexander thrown back his head and laughed. She grew quiet, and with a long look under her eyelids said, ‘Do not pretend you can believe that.’

‘Well, then? I have come to hear.’

‘These things cannot be scrambled at, on a whim at midnight. It is a solemn matter. There are powers one must propitiateÉ’

His searching, shadowed eyes seemed to pass clean through her, going too deep. ‘What sign,’ he said softly, ‘did my daimon give you?’

She took both his hands, pulled him near and whispered. When she had done, she drew back to look. He was wholly within, scarcely aware of her, wrestling it out. His eyes did not tell the outcome. ‘And that is everything?’

‘What more? Even now are you not satisfied?’

He looked into the dark beyond the lamp. ‘All things are known to the gods. The thing is how to question them.’ He lifted her to her feet, and for a few moments held her at arms’ length, the corners of his brows pulled together. At last her eyes fell before his.

His fingers tightened; then he embraced her, quickly and closely, and let her go. When he had left, the dark crept up all around her. She kindled the other two lamps, and slept at last with all three burning.

Alexander paused at the door of Hephaistion’s room, opened it quietly and went in. He was fast asleep, one arm thrown out, in a square of moonlight. Alexander stretched out a hand, and then withdrew it. He had meant, if his mind had been satisfied, to wake him and tell him everything. But all was still dark and doubtful, she too was mortal, one must await the certain word. Why break his good sleep with that? It would be a long ride tomorrow. The moon shone straight down on his closed eyes. Softly Alexander drew the curtain half across, lest the powers of night should harm him.

Ê

In Thessaly they picked up the allied cavalry; they came streaming down over the hills, without formation, yelling and tossing their lances, showing off their horsemanship. It was a land where men rode as soon as they could walk. Alexander raised his brows; but Philip said they would do what they were told in battle, and do it well. This show was a tradition.

The army bore south-west, towards Delphi and Amphissa. Some levies from the Sacred League joined them along the way; their generals were made welcome, and swiftly briefed. Used to the confederate forces of small rival states, the edging for precedence, the long wrangles with whichever general had been given chief command, they were drawn amazed into a moving army of thirty thousand foot and two thousand horse, each man of which knew where he had to be, and went there.

There were no forces from Athens. The Athenians had a seat on the League Council; but when it commissioned Philip, no Athenian had been present to dissent. Demosthenes had persuaded them to boycott it. A vote against Amphissa would have antagonized Thebes. He had seen no further.

The army reached Thermopylai, the hot gates between the mountains and the sea. Alexander, who had not passed this way since he was twelve, went with Hephaistion to bathe in the warm springs for which the pass was named. On the grave-mound of Leonidas, with its marble lion, he laid a garland. ‘I don’t think,’ he remarked after, ‘that he was really much of a general. If he’d made sure the Phokian troops understood their orders, th?e Persians could never have turned the pass. These southern states never work together. But one must honour a man as brave as that.’

The Thebans still had the fort above. Philip, playing their own game, sent up an envoy, politely asking them to leave so that he could relieve them. They looked down at the long snake of men filling the shore-road and thickening into distance; stolidly they picked up their gear, and left for Thebes.

Now the army was on the great south-east road; they saw on their right the stark mountains of Hellas’ spine, barer and bleaker, more despoiled by man’s axes and man’s herds, than the wooded heights of Macedon. In the valleys between these tall deserts, flesh between bones, lay the earth and water that fed mankind.

‘Now I see it again,’ said Alexander to Hephaistion as they rode, ‘I can understand just why the southerners are as they are. They’re land-starved; each man covets his neighbour’s, and knows the neighbour covets his. And each state has its fringe of mountains. Have you seen two dogs by the fence where one of them lives, running up and down barking?’

‘But,’ said Hephaistion, ‘when dogs come to a gap, they don’t rush through and fight, they just look surprised and walk off. Sometimes dogs have more sense than men.’

The road towards Amphissa turned due south; an advance party under Parmenion had gone ahead, to take the strong-point of Kytinion and secure this road, as earnest of Philip’s purpose to pursue the holy war. But the main force marched on by the highway, still going south-east, towards Thebes and Athens.

‘Look,’ said Alexander, pointing ahead, ‘there’s Elatia. Look, the masons and engineers are there already. It shouldn’t take long to raise the walls, they say all the stone’s still there.’

Elatia had been a fort of the god-robbing Phokians, pulled down at the end of the previous holy war. It commanded the road. It was two days’ fast march from Thebes, and three from Athens.

A thousand slaves, under skilled masons, soon put back the well-squared ashlar. The army occupied the fort and the heights around it. Philip set his headquarters up, and sent an envoy to Thebes.

For years, his message said, the Athenians had made war on him, first covertly, then openly; he could no longer hold his hand. To Thebes they had been hostile even longer; yet now they were trying to draw Thebes, too, into war against him. He must ask the Thebans therefore to declare themselves. Would they stand by their alliance, and give his army passage south?

The royal tent had been put up within the walls; the shepherds who had made hovels in the ruins had fled when the army came. Philip had had a supper-couch carted along, to rest his game leg after the day’s work. Alexander sat on a chair beside him. The squires had set out wine, and withdrawn.

‘This should settle it,’ said Philip, ‘once for all. Time comes when one must put down the stake and throw. I think it’s long odds against war. If the Thebans are sane, they’ll declare for us; the Athenians will wake up and see where their demagogues have brought them; Phokion’s party will come in; and we can cross to Asia without a drop of blood shed in Greece.’

Alexander turned his winecup in his hands, and bent to smell the local vintage. They made better wine in Thrace, but Thrace had been given it by Dionysos. ‘Well, yesÉ but look what happened while you were laid up and I was raising the army. We gave out we were arming against the Illyrians; and everyone believed it, the Illyrians most of all. Now, what about the Athenians? They’ve been told for years by Demosthenes to expect us; here we are. And what becomes of him, if Phokion’s party gets the vote?’

‘He can do nothing, if Thebes has declared for us.’

‘They’ve ten thousand trained mercenaries in Athens.’

‘Ah, yes. But it’s the Thebans who will decide. You know their constitution. A moderate oligarchy they call it, but the franchise test is low; it takes in any man who can afford a hoplite panoply. There you have it. In Thebes, it’s the electorate that w?ill fight in any war it votes for.’

He began to talk about his hostage years there, almost with nostalgia. Time had misted the hardships; it had the taste of vanished youth. He had been smuggled once by friends into action under Epaminondas. He had known Pelopidas. Alexander as he listened thought of the Sacred Band, which Pelopidas had gathered into one corps, rather than founded; for their heroic vows were ancient, going back to Herakles and Iolaos, at whose altar they were sworn. Men of the Band, having each in his charge a twofold honour, did not retreat; they advanced, or stood, or died. There was much Alexander would have liked to know of them, and tell Hephaistion, had there been anyone else to ask.

‘I wonder,’ he remarked instead, ‘what is going on now in Athens.’

Athens had had the news at sunset, on the day Elatia was occupied. The City Councillors were at their civic meal in the Council Hall, with some old Olympic victors, retired generals and other worthies honoured with this privilege. The Agora was clamorous; the courier from Thebes came only on the heels of rumour. All night the streets were like market-time, with kindred running to kindred, merchants to the Piraieus; strangers talking passionately to strangers, women running with half-veiled faces to the women’s rooms of houses where they had friends. At daybreak the City Trumpeter called Assembly; in the Agora the hurdles of the stock-pens and the market stalls were set alight to beacon the outer suburbs. The men poured across to Pnyx Hill with its stone rostrum. They were told the news; that Philip was expected to march south at once, and that Thebes would make no resistance. Old men recalled a black day of their childhood, the beginning of shame, starvation, tyranny, when the first stragglers had come in from Goat River on the Hellespont, where the fleet had been annihilated; the Great War lost and the death-throes still to come. The crisp cool air of an autumn morning struck to the bone like a winter frost. The presiding Councillor called aloud. ‘Does anyone wish to speak?’

A long silence followed. All eyes turned one way. Nobody had the folly to come between the people and their choice. When they saw him mount the bema, no one cheered; the chill was too deep for that; there was only a deep murmur, like the sound of prayer.

All night the lamp had burned in Demosthenes’ study; men walking the streets, too troubled to go to bed, had been comforted by its light. In the dark before the dawn, the draft of his speech was ready. The city of Theseus, Solon, Perikles, at her crux of fate had turned to him. She had found him ready.

Firstly, he said, they could dismiss their fear that Philip was sure of Thebes. If he were, he would not be sitting in Elatia; he would be here now before their walls, he who had always aimed at their destruction. He was making a show of force, to hearten his bought friends in Thebes and daunt the patriots. Now at last they must resolve to forget the ancient feud, and send envoys to offer generous terms of alliance, before Philip’s men had done their evil work there. He himself, if summoned, would not refuse the call. Meantime, let the men of fighting age put on their arms, and march up the Theban road as far as Eleusis, in token of readiness to take the field.

As he ended, the sun rose, and they saw across the dip the Acropolis bathed in splendour; the mellow old marble, the white new shrines, the colour and the gold. A great cheer ran over the hill. Those who had been too far to hear all joined in it, sure that salvation had been proclaimed.