The Novels of Alexander the Great: Fire From Heaven, the Persian Boy, and Funeral Games

318 B.C.

EUMENES SAT IN HIS TENT on the kindly coastland of Kilikia, looking across the sea towards Cyprus’ distant hills. The warm fruitful plain was a paradise after the cramped fort, perched on the high Tauros, where Antigonos had kept him invested all through last winter in the bitter mountain wind. A spring of good water, plenty of grain, and precious little else. The men’s gums had started to rot from the lack of greenstuff; he had had hard work to stop them from eating the horses, on which their lives might yet depend; he had kept the beasts exercised by having their forequarters hoisted up once a day in slings, and making the grooms shout and hit at them, so that they thrashed about and got into a sweat. He had almost made up his mind to slaughter them when, of a sudden, Antigonos sent an envoy to offer terms. The Regent was dead, it was every man for himself, and Antigonos wanted an ally.

He had demanded an oath of loyalty before he lifted the siege. To Antigonos and the Kings, the envoy said. Eumenes had changed it, in the act of swearing, to Olympias and the Kings. The envoy had let it pass. Antigonos had not liked it; but by the time he knew of it, they had all got out. This was as well; Eumenes had heard from Polyperchon, appointing him in the Kings’ name to Antigonos’ command; which, since Antigonos would certainly not resign it, he would have to get by force. Meantime, he was to take over the provincial treasury of Kilikia, and the command of its garrison regiment, the Silver Shields.

He was now in camp with them, while they made themselves snug with stolen comforts, won by every devious ruse known to campaigners who had been, many of them, fifty years under arms. None of them had been serving for less than forty; tough, wicked old sweats whom Alexander had thought himself well shot of, and whom even he had not rid himself of without a mutiny. They had been his legacy from his father Philip, men of the phalanx, wielders of the long sarissa, all of them hand-picked fighters. They had been young men along with Philip; many were older than he would have been if he were still alive. Now, when they should be living with their loot and Alexander’s bounty on their homeland farms, here they still were, hard as their boot-nails, their discharge held up by the death of Krateros and their own obdurate resistance; never yet beaten, and ready to march again.

Not a man was under sixty; most of them were past seventy; their arrogance was a proverb; and Eumenes, a generation younger, and an alien Greek, had to take them over.

He had almost refused; but while, after the siege, he was salvaging his scattered forces, he had a letter brought by land and sea from Epiros. It was from Olympias.

I beg you to help us. Only you, Eumenes, are left, most loyal of all my friends, and best able to rescue our forsaken house. I entreat you, do not fail me. Let me hear from you; shall I entrust myself and my grandson to men who claim, one after another, to be his guardians, and then are found planning to steal his heritage? Roxane his mother sends me word that she fears for his life, once Polyperchon leaves Macedon to fight the traitor Kassandros. Is it best she flies to me here, bringing the boy; or shall I raise troops and go to Macedon?

The letter had deeply moved him. He had been still young when first he had met Olympias, and so had she. Often in Philip’s absences the Regent, who loathed her, had sent Eumenes with messages to her, partly to slight her with his lower rank, partly to keep out of her way. During many domestic quarrels Philip had done the same. To the young Greek, she had a quality of archaic myth; a Bacchic Ariadne, waiting the embrace of a Dionysos who never came. He had seen her in tears, in savage mirth, in blazing anger and sometimes in regal grace. He had no more desired her than one desires a splendid play of lightning over the sea; but he had adored her. Even when he had known well that she was in the wrong, and that he had to tell her so, he had never gone to face her without a thrill at the heart. In fact, she had often unbent to him. He had been a handsome young man; though she had never been able to make him her partisan or subvert his faith to Philip, she had enjoyed his admiration.

He knew she had harassed Alexander all through Asia, pursuing her feud with the Regent; he remembered how, handing him one such letter, her son had said, “By God, she charges high rent for the nine-months’ lodging she gave me!” But he had said it half laughing; he, too, had loved her through everything. He had left her still beautiful; and, like Eumenes, was never to see her old.

One thing he now knew at once: on no account must she go to Macedon, with or without an army. She knew moderation no more than a hunting leopardess; she would not be there a month before she destroyed her cause. He had written to her exhorting her to stay in Epiros till the present war was settled; meantime, she could count on his fidelity, to her and to Alexander’s son.

He did not refer to Roxane and her fears. Who would say what fancies might scare the Bactrian? During his long campaign, followed by the winter siege, he had had little news from Europe. Since the wedding at Sardis, he had barely heard of Eurydike.

Soon Antigonos would be after him—clearly the man meant to make a kingdom for himself in Asia—and he must be moving, with his native levies and their stiffening, the battle-hardened Silver Shields. From his tent-opening, he could see them now, sitting in their groupings established over half a century, while their women made their breakfasts; Lydian women, Tyrian women, Bactrians and Parthians and Medes and Indians, the spoils of their long wanderings, with a few old hardy Macedonians who had come with them from home and somehow survived. The surviving children—a third, perhaps, of those begotten along the way—chattered softly round the cook-fires, wary of a clout from their fathers; brown and honey-colored and fair, speaking their lingua franca. When camp broke, the women would pack the wagon train with all its world-wide pickings, and march once more.

On the next knoll, Eumenes could see the tents of the two commanders, Antigenes and Teutamos; crafty and stubborn old war-dogs, each old enough to be his father. Today he must call them to a war council; and would they defer to him without resentment? From wounded pride, he knew too well, comes treachery. He sighed wearily, his mind going back to the days when he and they had not been flotsam on the stream of history, but had proudly shaped its course. Those old sinners over there, he thought, even they must remember.

His mind had been suppled by years of precarious survival; now it took one of those leaps which had saved him in places tighter than this. The day was still young, the sunlight upon Cyprus fresh and tender. He shaved, dressed himself neatly without ostentation, and called the herald.

“Sound,” he said, “for the officers to assemble.”

He had his slaves set out the stools and camp-chairs casually, without precedence, on the grass. As the leathery ancients, taking their time, approached, he waved them affably to be seated. From the chair they left for him, he rose and addressed them standing.

“Gentlemen, I have called you together to give you serious news. I have received an omen.”

As he had foreseen, dead silence fell. Old soldiers were as superstitious as sailors. They all knew what chance can do to a man in war.

“If ever the gods gave a man a powerful dream, they gave one to me at cockcrow. A dream more real than waking. My name was called. I knew the voice, it was Alexander’s. He was in my tent, in that very chair that you, Teutamos, are sitting on. ‘Eumenes!’ he said.”

They sat forward in their chairs. Teutamos’ gnarled hands stroked the pinewood arms as if he touched a talisman.

“I begged his pardon for sleeping in his presence, as if he had been alive. He had on his white robe edged with purple, and a gold diadem. ‘I am holding a council of state,’ he said. ‘Are you all here?’ And he looked about him. Then it seemed the tent was not mine but his, the tent he took from Darius. He was there on his throne, with the Bodyguard around him; and you too were there, with the other generals, waiting for his words. He leaned forward to address us; but as he began, I woke.”

Skilled in the arts of rhetoric, he had tried none here. He had looked and spoken like a man remembering something momentous. It had worked. They were looking at one another, but not in distrust, only wondering what it meant.

“I believe,” he said, “that I divined Alexander’s wish. He is concerned for us. He wants to be present at our councils. If we appeal to him, he will guide us in our decisions.” He paused for questions; but they hardly murmured.

“So let us not receive him meanly. Here we have the gold of Koyinda which you, gentlemen, have guarded for him faithfully. Let us send for craftsmen to make him a golden throne, a scepter and a diadem, let us dedicate a tent to him, and lay the insignia on the throne, and offer incense to his spirit. Then we will confer before him, making him our supreme commander.”

Their shrewd, scarred faces considered him. He was not, it seemed, setting himself above them; he was not planning to steal the treasure; if Alexander had appeared only to him, after all he had known him well. And Alexander liked his orders obeyed.

The tent, the throne and the insignia were ready within a week. Even some purple was found, to dye a canopy. When it was time to march towards Phoenicia, they met in the tent to discuss the coming campaign. Before they sat down, each offered his pinch of incense at the little portable altar, saying, “Divine Alexander, favor us.” All of them deferred to Eumenes, whose divination was manifest around them.

It did not matter that scarcely any of them had seen Alexander enthroned. They remembered him in old leather cuirass and burnished greaves, his helmet off for them to see him, riding along the line before an action, reminding them of their past victories and telling them how to win another. They did not care that the local goldsmith was not of the highest skill. The shining of the gold, the smoke of frankincense, wakened a memory long silted over by the weather and war and weariness of thirteen years; of a golden chariot driving in triumph through the flower-strewn streets of Babylon; the trumpets, the paean, the censers and the cheers. For a little while, standing before the empty throne, it seemed to them that they might become what they once had been.