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

2

HE WAS SEVEN YEARS old, the age at which boys left the care of women. It was time to make a Greek of him.

King Philip was at war again on the northeast Chalkidian coast, securing his boundaries, which meant stretching them. His marriage grew no easier; rather than a wife, it seemed to him, he had wedded a great and dangerous noble who could not be reduced by war, and whose spies knew everything. From a girl she had grown into a woman of striking beauty; but, girl or youth, it was the young who roused desire in him. For a while young men had contented him; then, after his fathers’ custom, he had taken a wellborn young concubine with the status of a minor wife. Olympias’ outraged pride had shaken the Palace like an earthquake. She had been seen at night, near Aigai, going with a torch to the royal tombs; it was ancient witchcraft, to write a curse on lead and leave it for the ghosts to work on. It was said a child had been with her. He had looked at his son when next they met; the smoke-grey eyes had met his, unflinching, haunted, mute. As he went away he felt the eyes in his back.

The war in Chalkidike could not wait; nor should the boy. Though not big for his years, he was forward in everything else. Hellanike had taught him his letters and his scale (his high voice was true and its pitch was perfect); the soldiers of the Guard, and even of the barracks, to whom he escaped every second day, had taught him their peasant dialect, and what else one could only guess. As for what he had learned from his mother, that was best not thought of.

When Kings of Macedon went to war, it was second nature to guard their backs. To the west, the Illyrians had been subdued in the first years of his reign. The east he was about to deal with. There remained the old dangers of tribal kingdoms: conspiracies at home, and feuds. If before he marched he had taken the boy from Olympias, and appointed some man of his own as governor, both these evils were certain.

Philip took some pride in seeing where a pass could be turned without a battle. He slept on the problem, and woke remembering Leonidas.

He was Olympias’ uncle; but more Hellenized than Philip himself. As a young man, in love with the idea rather than the ideas of Greece, he had traveled south, making first for Athens. Here he had acquired a pure Attic speech, studied oratory and composition; and sampled the philosophic schools just long enough to decide they could only undermine sound tradition and the findings of common sense. As was natural to a man of his birth, he made friends among the aristocracy, hereditary oligarchs who looked to the good old days, deplored the times, and, like their forebears back to the Great War, admired the customs of Sparta. In due course Leonidas went to see it.

Used by now to the high diversions of Athens, drama festivals, music contests, sacred processions put on like great performances, supper clubs with their verse-capping and well-read wit, he had found Lakedaimon stiflingly provincial. To a feudal lord of Epiros, with deep roots in his demesne, the racial rule of Spartiate over Helot was foreign and uneasy; the blunt-spoken familiarity of Spartiate with Spartiate, and with himself, struck him as boorish. And here too, as in Athens, the great days were over. Like an old dog thrashed by a younger one, which will show its teeth but keep its distance, Sparta had not been the same since the Thebans had marched up to the walls. Barter had gone out, money had come in and was prized here as elsewhere; the rich had amassed great lands, the poor could no longer pay their shot at the citizens’ public mess-tables, and had sunk to mere “by-dwellers” whose gallantry had bled out of them with their pride. But in one respect he had found them equal to their past. They could still rear disciplined boys, hardy, uncoddled and respectful, who did what they were told at once without asking why, stood up when their elders entered, and never spoke till spoken to. Attic culture and Spartan manners, he had thought as he sailed homeward; combine them in the pliant mind of youth and they would give you the perfect man.

He returned to Epiros, the consequence of his rank increased by his travels. Long after his knowledge was out of date it had been universally deferred to. King Philip, who had agents in all the Greek cities, knew better than this; nonetheless, when he talked with Leonidas he became aware that his own Greek was rather Boeotian. Along with the Attic speech went the Hellene maxims: “Nothing in excess”; “Well begun, half done”; and “It is a woman’s glory not to be spoken of, either for praise or blame.”

Here was the perfect compromise. Olympias’ kin was honored. Leonidas, who had a passion for correctness, would allot her the dues of a highborn lady, himself the dues of a man. She would find him harder than even Philip to meddle with. Through his southern guest-friends he could engage all the proper tutors the King had not time to find, and ensure they were sound in politics and morals. Letters were exchanged. Philip rode off, his mind at rest, leaving orders that Leonidas be given a state welcome.

On the day he was expected, Hellanike laid out Alexander’s best clothes, and had her slave fill him a bath. Kleopatra came in while they were scouring him. She was a podgy child, with Olympias’ red hair and the square build of Philip. She ate too much because she was often unhappy, knowing their mother loved Alexander more, and differently.

“You’re a schoolboy now,” she said. “You can’t come in the women’s rooms.”

When he found her in trouble he would often console her, amuse her or give her things. When she threatened him with her womanhood, he hated her. “I shall come in when I like. Who do you think will stop me?”

“Your teacher will.” She began chanting it, jumping up and down. He leaped out, soaking the floor, and threw her in with all her clothes on. Hellanike laid him wet across her knee and beat him with her sandal. Kleopatra mocked him, was beaten in turn, and thrust out screaming, to be dried by the maid.

Alexander did not weep. He had understood the whole business of the appointment. No one had needed to tell him that if he did not obey this man, it would lose his mother a battle in her war; nor that the next one would then be fought over himself. He was scarred within by such battles. When another threatened, the scars throbbed like old wounds before the rain.

Hellanike combed his tangled hair, making him clench his teeth. He cried easily at old war-songs where sworn comrades died together, at a falling cadence of the flute. He had cried half a day, when his dog fell sick and died. Already he knew what it was to mourn the fallen; for Agis he had wept his heart out. But to cry for his own wounds would make Herakles forsake him. This had long been a part of their secret compact.

Bathed, combed and dressed, he was summoned to the Perseus Room, where Olympias and the guest sat in chairs of honor. The boy had expected an aged scholar; he saw a spruce upright man in the forties, his dark beard scarcely grizzled, looking about like a general who, though off duty, will remember it all tomorrow. The boy knew a good deal about officers, mostly from below. His friends kept his secrets, and he kept theirs.

Leonidas was genial, kissed him on both cheeks, set firm hands on his shoulders, was sure he would be a credit to his ancestors. Alexander submitted civilly; his sense of the realities made him stand through it all like a soldier on parade. Leonidas had not hoped to see the Spartan training so well begun. The boy, though too beautiful for safety, looked healthy and alert; no doubt he would prove teachable. “You have reared a fine child, Olympias. These pretty baby-clothes show your care. Now we must find him something for a boy.”

His eyes moved to his mother, who had embroidered herself his tunic of soft combed wool. Sitting straight in her chair, she gave him a little nod, and looked away.

Leonidas moved into his Palace quarters. To negotiate for suitable teachers would take time. Those eminent enough would have schools to leave; some must be looked into, for dangerous thoughts. His own work must begin at once; he saw it could not be too soon.

The drilled look had been illusion. The boy had done as he liked; got up at cocklight or had his sleep out; run about with boys or men. Though grossly spoiled, one must own him not a milksop; but his speech was dreadful. Not only was he nearly Greekless; but where had he learned his Macedonian? One might suppose he had been begotten against a barrack wall.

Clearly, school hours were insufficient. His life must be taken in hand from dawn till dusk.

Every morning before sunup he was at exercise; twice round the running-track, swinging the hand-weights, leaping and hurling. When breakfast came at last, it was never quite enough. If he said he was still hungry, he was told to say it in proper Greek; to be answered, in proper Greek, that spare breakfasts were good for the health.

His clothes had been changed for homespun, harsh to the skin and unadorned. It was good enough for the kings’ sons of Sparta. Autumn came on; in colder and colder weather, he was hardened off by going cloakless. Running about to keep warm made him much hungrier, but he did not get much more food.

Leonidas found himself obeyed; doggedly, without complaint, with steady unconcealed resentment. It was all too clear that he and his regime were simply a detested ordeal, which the boy endured for his mother’s sake, sustained by pride.

He was uneasy, but could not breach the wall. He was one of those men in whom the role of father, once achieved, blots out all memories of childhood. His own sons could have told him so, had they ever told him anything. He would do his duty by the boy, and knew of no one who could do it better.

Greek lessons began. It soon appeared that Alexander was in fact quite fluent. He simply disliked it; a disgrace, as his tutor told him, when his father spoke it so well. He repeated it briskly; soon learned to write it; and expected, as soon as he left the schoolroom, to lapse into broad Macedonian and the argot of the phalanx.

When he understood he had to speak Greek all day, he could scarcely credit it. Even slaves could use their home tongue to one another.

He had respites. To Olympias, the tongue of the north was the heroes’ unspoiled heritage, Greek a degenerate patois. She spoke it to Greeks as a courtesy to inferiors, and to them alone. Leonidas had social duties, during which his captive could escape. If he could get to the barracks at mess-time, there was always porridge to spare.

Riding he still enjoyed; but he soon lost his favorite escort, a young officer of the Companions, to whom he offered an accustomed kiss as the man lifted him down. Leonidas saw from the stable yard. Ordered out of hearing, and seeing his friend flush scarlet, the boy thought a limit had been passed. He walked back, and stood between.

“I kissed him first. And he has never tried to have me.” He used the barrack term, knowing no other.

After a speechless pause, he was marched away in silence. In the schoolroom, still without a word, Leonidas beat him.

He had given far worse to his own sons. Rank and Olympias had their claims. But it was a boy’s beating, not a child’s. Leonidas did not own to himself that he had been waiting for the chance, to see how his charge would take it.

He heard no sound but the blows. He had meant at the end to bid the boy turn and face him; but was forestalled. He had looked only for a Spartan fortitude, or self-pity. He confronted dry wide eyes, their irises stretched to a pale rim round the black; hard-shut white lips and dilated nostrils; a blazing rage, condensed by silence like the core of a furnace. For a moment, he had a sense of actual menace.

Alone among those at Pella, he had seen Olympias’ childhood. But she would have flown in straight away with her nails; her nurse’s face had been scored with them. This containment was another thing. One even dreaded lest it break.

His first instinct was to take the boy by his scruff, and thrash the defiance out of him. But though a narrow man he was by his lights a just one, with an exacting self-esteem. Moreover, he had been brought here to rear a fighting King of Macedon, not to break in a slave. The boy had at least controlled himself.

“The silence of a soldier. I approve a man who can bear his wounds. No further work today.”

He received in exchange the look which accords grudging respect to a mortal enemy. As the boy went out, Leonidas saw a bloodstain on the back of his homespun chiton. It would have been nothing in Sparta; yet he found himself wishing he had not hit quite so hard.

The boy said nothing to his mother; but she found the weals. In the room where they had shared many secrets, she clasped him weeping, and presently they wept together. He stopped first; went to the loose stone under the hearth, pulled out a wax mammet he had seen there, and urged her to bewitch Leonidas. She took it quickly away, saying he must not touch, and besides it was not for that. It had a long thorn stuck through its phallos, but had failed to work on Philip, though often tried. She had not known the child was watching.

For him, the comfort of tears had been brief and false. He felt betrayed, when he met Herakles in the garden. He had not cried for the pain, but for his lost happiness; he could have held back if she had not softened him. Next time she must not know.

They shared a plot, however. She had never been reconciled to the Spartan clothes; she had loved to dress him. Reared in a house where ladies sat in Hall like the queens of Homer, to hear the ancestral heroes sung by bards, she was contemptuous of Spartans, a race of faceless obedient infantry, and unwashed women half soldier, half brood mare. That her son should be forced into the likeness of this grey and plebeian race would have enraged her, had she thought it could be done. Resenting even the attempt, she brought him a new chiton worked in blue and scarlet, saying, as she tucked it into his clothes chest, that there was no harm in his looking like a gentleman when his uncle was away. Later she added Corinthian sandals, a chlamys of Milesian wool, and a gold brooch for its shoulder.

Good clothes made him feel himself again. Discreet at first, he grew careless with success. Leonidas, knowing where to lay the blame, said nothing. He merely went to the chest and took the new clothes away, along with an extra blanket he found hidden there.

He had challenged the gods at last, thought Alexander; this must be the end of him. But she only smiled ruefully, and asked how he could have let himself be found out. Leonidas must not be defied; he might be offended and go home. “And then, my darling, we might find our troubles only starting.”

Toys were toys, power was power. Nothing to be had for nothing. Later she smuggled him other gifts. He was more wary, but Leonidas was more vigilant, and took to searching the chest every so often, as a matter of course.

More manly gifts, he was allowed to keep. A friend had made him a quiver, a perfect miniature with a shoulder sling. Finding it hang too low on him, he sat in the Palace forecourt to undo the buckle. The tongue was awkward, the leather stiff. He was about to go in and find an awl to prize it, when a bigger child walked up and stood in the light. He was handsome and sturdy, with bronze-gold hair and dark grey eyes. Holding out his hand he said, “I’ll try, let me.” He spoke with confidence, in a Greek which had got beyond the schoolroom.

“It’s new, that’s why it’s stiff.” He had had his day’s work of Greek, and answered in Macedonian.

The stranger squatted beside him. “It’s like a real one, like a man’s. Did your father make it?”

“Of course not. Doreios the Cretan did. He can’t make me a Cretan bow, those are horn, only men can pull them. Koragos will make a bow for me.”

“Why do you want to undo it?”

“It’s too long.”

“It looks right to me. No, but you’re smaller. Here, I’ll do it.”

“I’ve measured it. It wants taking in two holes.”

“You can let it out when you’re bigger. It’s stiff, but I’ll do it. My father’s seeing the King.”

“What does he want?”

“I don’t know, he said to wait for him.”

“Does he make you speak Greek all day?”

“It’s what we all speak at home. My father’s a guest-friend of the King. When I’m older, I’ll have to go to court.”

“Don’t you want to come?”

“Not much; I like it at home. Look, up on that hill; no, not the first one, the second; all that land’s ours. Can’t you speak Greek at all?”

“Yes, I can if I want. I stop when I get sick of it.”

“Why, you speak it nearly as well as I do. Why did you talk like that, then? People will think you’re a farm boy.”

“My tutor makes me wear these clothes to be like the Spartans. I do have good ones; I wear them at the feasts.”

“They beat all the boys in Sparta.”

“Oh, he drew blood on me once. But I didn’t cry.”

“He’s no right to beat you, he should only tell your father. How much did he cost?”

“He’s my mother’s uncle.”

“Mm, I see. My father bought my pedagogue, just for me.”

“Well, it teaches you to bear your wounds when you go to war.”

“War? But you’re only six.”

“Of course not, I’m eight next Lion Month. You can see that.”

“So am I. But you don’t look it, you look six.”

“Oh, let me do that, you’re too slow.”

He snatched away the sling-strap. The leather slipped back into the buckle. The stranger grabbed it angrily. “Silly fool, I’d nearly done it.”

Alexander swore at him in barrack Macedonian. The other boy opened his mouth and eyes, and listened riveted. Alexander, who could keep it up for some time, became aware of respect and did so. With the quiver between them, they crouched in the pose of their forgotten strife.

“Hephaistion!” came a roar from the columned stoa. The boys sat like scuffling dogs over whom a bucket has been emptied.

The lord Amyntor, his audience over, had seen with concern that his son had left the porch where he had been told to wait, invaded the Prince’s playground and snatched his toy. At that age they were not safe a moment out of one’s sight. Amyntor blamed his own vanity; he liked to show the boy off, but to have brought him here was stupid. Angry with himself, he strode over, grabbed him by the back of his clothes, and gave him a clout on the ear.

Alexander jumped to his feet. He had already forgotten why he had been angry. “Don’t hit him. I don’t mind him. He came to help me.”

“You are good to say so, Alexander. But he disobeyed.”

For a moment the boys exchanged looks, confusedly sharing their sense of human mutability, as the culprit was dragged away.

It was six years before they met again.

“He lacks application and discipline,” said Timanthes the grammarian.

Most of the teachers Leonidas had engaged found the drinking in Hall too much for them, and would escape, with excuses which amused the Macedonians, to bed, or to talk in each other’s rooms.

“Maybe,” said the music-master, Epikrates. “But one values the horse above the bridle.”

“He applies when it suits him,” said Naukles the mathematician. “At first he could not have enough. He can work out the height of the Palace from its noon shadow, and if you ask him how many men in fifteen phalanxes, he hardly has to pause. But I have never brought him to perceive the beauty of numbers. Have you, Epikrates?”

The musician, a thin dark Ephesian Greek, shook his head smiling. “With you he makes them serve the use; with me, the feeling. Still, as we know, music is ethical; and I’ve a king to train, not a concert artist.”

“He will get no further with me,” said the mathematician. “I would say I don’t know why I stay, if I thought I should be believed.”

A roar of bawdy laughter sounded from the hall, where someone with talent was improving a traditional skolion. For the seventh time they bawled the chorus.

“Yes, we are well paid,” said Epikrates. “But I could earn as much in Ephesos, between teaching and concert work; and earn it as a musician. Here I am a conjurer, I call up dreams. It’s not what I came to do. Yet it holds me. Does it never hold you, Timanthes?”

Timanthes sniffed. He thought Epikrates’ compositions too modern and emotional. He himself was an Athenian, pre-eminent for the purity of his style; he had in fact been the teacher of Leonidas. He had closed his school to come, finding at his age the work grow burdensome, and glad to provide for his last years. He had read everything worth reading, and when young had once known what the poets meant.

“It appears to me,” he said, “that here in Macedon they have enough of the passions. One heard a great deal about the culture of Archelaos, in my student days. With the late wars of succession, it seems chaos returned. I will not say the court is without refinements; but on the whole, we are in the wilds. Do you know youths come of age here when they have killed a boar and a man? One might suppose oneself in the age of Troy.”

“That should lighten your task,” said Epikrates, “when you proceed to Homer.”

“System and application are what we need for that. The boy has a good memory, when he cares to use it. At first he learned his lists quite well. But he cannot keep his mind on system. One explains the construction; one quotes the proper example. But apply it? No. It is ‘Why did they chain Prometheus to the rock?’ or, ‘Who was Hekabe mourning for?’”

“Did you tell him? Kings should learn to pity Hekabe.”

“Kings should learn self-discipline. This morning he brought the lesson to a stop, because, purely for syntax, I gave him some lines from Seven against Thebes. Why, if you please, were there seven generals; which led the cavalry, the phalanx, the light-armed skirmishers? ‘It is not to the purpose,’ I said, ‘not to the purpose; attend to syntax.’ He had the insolence to answer in Macedonian. I had to put my thong across his palm.”

The singing in Hall was broken by quarrelsome drunken shouts. Crockery crashed. The King’s voice roared out; the noise subsided; a different song began.

“Discipline,” said Timanthes meaningly. “Moderation, restraint, respect for law. If we do not ground him in them, who will? His mother?”

There was a pause while Naukles, whose room it was, nervously opened the door and looked outside. Epikrates said, “If you want to compete with her, Timanthes, you had best sweeten your medicine, as I do mine.”

“He must make the effort to apply. It is the root of all education.”

“I don’t know what you are all talking about,” said Derkylos, the gymnastic trainer, suddenly. The others had thought he was asleep. He was reclining on Naukles’ bed; he thought effort should alternate with relaxation. He was in his mid-thirties, with the oval head and short curls admired by sculptors, and a fine body kept painstakingly in shape; as an example to pupils, he used to say, but, thought the envious schoolmasters, no doubt from vanity. He had a list of crowned victors to his credit, and no pretensions to intellect.

“We were wishing,” said Timanthes with patronage, “that the boy would make more effort.”

“I heard you.” The athlete raised himself on one elbow, looking aggressively statuesque. “You have spoken words of ill omen. Spit for luck.”

The grammarian shrugged. Naukles said tartly, “Will you tell us, Derkylos, you don’t know why you stay?”

“It seems I’m the one with the best reason. To keep him, if I can, from killing himself too young. He has no safety-stop. Surely you’ve seen that?”

“I fear,” said Timanthes, “that the terms of the palaestra are to me arcane.”

“I’ve seen it,” said Epikrates, “if you mean what I suppose.”

“I don’t know all your life histories,” said Derkylos. “But if any of you has seen red in battle, or been frightened out of his skin, you may remember putting out strength you had never known was in you. At exercise, even in a contest, you could not find it. There is a lock on it, put there by nature or the gods’ wisdom. It is the reserve against extremity.”

“I remember,” said Naukles presently, “in the earthquake, when the house fell on our mother, I lifted the beams. Yet later I could not move them.”

“Nature wrung it out of you. Few men are born whose own will can do it. This boy will be one.”

Epikrates said, “Yes, you may well be right.”

“And I reckon it something off a man’s life each time. I have to watch him already. He told me once that Achilles chose between glory and length of days.”

“What?” said Timanthes, startled. “But we’ve scarcely begun Book One.”

Derkylos gazed at him in silence, then said mildly, “You forget his maternal ancestry.”

Timanthes clicked his tongue, and bade them good night. Naukles fidgeted; he wanted to get to bed. The musician and the athlete strolled off through the park.

“It’s useless talking to him,” said Derkylos. “But I doubt the boy gets enough to eat.”

“You must be joking. Here?”

“It’s the regime of that stiff-necked old fool Leonidas. I check his height each month; he’s not growing fast enough. Of course you can’t call him starved; but he burns it all up, he could take as much again. He’s very quick-thinking, and his body has to keep pace, he won’t take a no from it. Do you know he can hit the mark with a javelin while he’s running?”

“You let him handle edged weapons? At his age?”

“I wish grown men were all as neat with them. It keeps him quiet…What is it drives him like this?”

Epikrates looked round. They were in the open, no one near. “His mother has made a good many enemies. She’s a foreigner from Epiros; she has the name of a witch. Have you never heard whispers about his birth?”

“I remember once—But who’d dare let him hear word of it?”

“He seems to me to have a burden of proof upon him. Well, he enjoys his music for itself, he finds release in it. I have studied that side of the art a little.”

“I must speak to Leonidas again about his diet. Last time, I was told that in Sparta it would be one spare meal a day, and find the rest off the land. Don’t tell it abroad, but I feed him myself sometimes. I used to do it now and then at Argos, for some good boy from a poor home…These tales—do you believe them?”

“Not with my reason. He has Philip’s capacity, if not his face or his soul. No, no, I don’t believe them…Do you know that old song about Orpheus, how he played his lyre on the mountainside, and found a lion had crouched at his feet to listen? I’m no Orpheus, I know; but sometimes I see the lion’s eyes. Where did it go, after the music, what became of it? The story doesn’t say.”

“Today,” said Timanthes, “you have made better progress. For the next lesson, you may memorize eight lines. Here they are. Copy them on the wax, on the right side of the diptych. On the left, list the archaic word-forms. See you have them correctly; I shall expect you to repeat those first.” He handed over the tablet, and put away the roll, his stiff blue-veined hands shaking as he worked it into its leather case. “Yes, that is all. You may go.”

“Please, may I borrow the book?”

Timanthes looked up, amazed and outraged.

“The book? Most certainly you may not, it is a valuable recension. What do you want with the book?”

“I want to see what happened. I’ll keep it in my casket, and wash my hands each time.”

“We should all like, no doubt, to run before we can walk. Learn your passage, and pay attention to the Ionic forms. Your accent is still too Doric. This, Alexander, is not some suppertime diversion. This is Homer. Master his language, then you may talk of reading him.” He tied the strings of the case.

The lines were those in which vengeful Apollo comes striding down the peaks of Olympos with his arrows rattling at his back. Worked over in the schoolroom, hammered out piecemeal like some store-list being inventoried by kitchen slaves, once the boy was alone they came together: a great landscape of clanging gloom lit by funereal fires. He knew Olympos. He pictured the dead light of an eclipse; the tall striding darkness, and round it a faint rim of fire, such as they said the hidden sun had, able to strike men blind. He came down like the fall of night.

He walked in the grove above Pella, hearing the deep shuddering note of the bowstring, the hiss of the shafts, and thinking it into Macedonian. It found its way, next day, into his repetition. Timanthes rebuked at length his idleness, inattention, and lack of interest in his work, and set him at once to copy the passage twenty times, with the mistakes again by themselves.

He dug away at the wax, the vision dispersed and faded. Timanthes, whom something had caused to look up, found the grey eyes considering him with a cold distant stare.

“Do not daydream, Alexander. What are you thinking of?”

“Nothing.” He bent again over his writing-stick. He had been wondering if there was any way of getting Timanthes killed. He supposed not; it would be unfair to ask his friends, who might be punished, and would feel it a disgrace to kill such an ancient man. It would make trouble, too, for his mother.

He went missing next day.

After huntsmen had been out after him with dogs, he was brought back at evening by a woodcutter on his lean old donkey; bruised black, covered with bloody grazes from a tumble down some rocks, and with a swollen foot which would not bear him. He had been trying, said the man, to get along on hands and knees; at night the forest was full of wolves, no place for the young lord alone.

He opened his mouth long enough to thank this man; to demand that he be fed, because he was hungry, and given a younger ass, which he had promised him on the way. These things attended to he became mute. The doctor could scarcely get from him more than yes or no, and a wince when the foot was moved. The compress and splint were put on; his mother came to his bedside. He turned his face away.

She put aside her anger, which belonged elsewhere; brought him a supper of all the treats Leonidas had banned; propped him against her breast while she fed him with sweet mulled wine. When he had told her all the trouble, as far as himself he understood it, she kissed him, tucked him in, and went off in a towering rage to quarrel with Leonidas.

The tempest shook the Palace, like a clash of gods above the Trojan plain. But many weapons which had served her against Philip were here denied her. Leonidas was very correct, very Athenian. He offered to leave, and tell the boy’s father why. When she emerged from his study (she had been too angry to wait and have him sent for) everyone hid who saw her coming; but the truth was, she was in tears.

Old Lysimachos, who had lain in wait for her since, starting out, she had swept by him unseeing, greeted her as she returned, and said with no more fuss than if she had been a farmer’s wife in his native Akarnania, “How is the boy?”

No one paid attention to Lysimachos. He was always about, a Palace guest-friend since early in Philip’s reign. He had backed his accession when support was urgent; had proved good company at supper, and been rewarded with the hand of an heiress in royal wardship. On the estate it brought him, he farmed and hunted. But the gods had denied him children; not only by her, but by all women he had ever lain with. This reproach being ready to any man’s hand who chose to throw it, he thought hubris would ill become him, and was an unpretentious man. His one distinction was to have the run of the royal library; Philip had added to Archelaos’ fine collection, and was careful whom he let loose inside. From the depths of his reading-cell, Lysimachos’ voice could be heard murmuring by the hour over the scrolls, tasting words and cadences; but nothing had come of it, no treatise, history or tragedy. His mind, it seemed, was as infertile as his loins.

Olympias, at the sight of his square blunt face, his grey-blond hair and beard and faded blue eyes, felt a homely comfort, and asked him into her private guest-room. Once bidden to sit, he sat while she paced about, and offered harmless murmurs whenever she paused for breath, till she had run herself to a stop. Then he said, “My dear madam, now the boy has outgrown his nurse’s care, don’t you think he may need a pedagogue?”

She wheeled round so sharply that her jewels clattered. “Never! I will not have it, the King knows that. What do they want to make of him, a clerk, a merchant, a steward? He feels what he is. All day these lowbred pedants are working to break his spirit. He has scarcely an hour, from his rising to his lying down, when his soul has space to breathe. Now is he to live like some captive thief, marched about in charge of a slave? Let no one speak of it in my hearing. And if the King sent you word to do it, tell him, Lysimachos, that before my son shall suffer that I will have blood for it, yes, by the Three-fold Hekate, I will have blood!”

He waited till he thought that she would hear him, then said, “I should be sorry too to see it. Rather than that, I myself would be his pedagogue. In fact, madam, that is what I came to ask for.”

She sat down in her tall chair. He waited patiently, knowing she had paused, not to ask herself why a gentleman should offer for a servant’s work, but whether he would do.

Presently he said, “It has often seemed to me that Achilles has come again in him. If so, he needs a Phoinix. ‘…You, godlike Achilles, were the son I chose for my own, That someday you would keep the hard times from me.’”

“Did he do so? When Phoinix spoke those words, he had been rooted up in his age from Phthia, and brought to Troy. And what he was asking, Achilles did not grant.”

“If he had, it would have saved him sorrow. Maybe his soul has remembered. As we know, the ashes of Achilles and Patroklos were mingled in one urn. Not even a god could sift the one from the other. Achilles has come back with his fierceness and his pride, and with Patroklos feeling. Each of them suffered for what he was; this boy will suffer for both.”

“There is more,” she said, “as men will find.”

“I do not question it. Just now, this is enough. Let me try with him; if he cannot do with me, I will let him be.”

She got up again, and took a turn about the room.

“Yes, try,” she said. “If you can stand between him and those fools, I shall be your debtor.”

Alexander was feverish at night, and slept most of next day. Lysimachos, looking in next morning, found him sitting up in the window, his good foot dangling outside, and shouting down in his high clear voice; two Companion Cavalry officers had come in from Thrace on the King’s business, and he wanted news of the war. This they gave; but refused to take him riding, when they learned they were to catch him as he jumped down from the upper floor. Laughing and waving they clattered off. As the boy turned away with a sigh, Lysimachos reached up and carried him back to bed.

He submitted easily, having known the man all his life. As early as he had been able to run about, he had sat on his knee to hear his stories. Timanthes indeed had said of him to Leonidas that he was, rather than a scholar, a learned schoolboy. The boy at least was glad to see him, and confided to him the whole tale of his day in the woods, not without bragging.

“Did you walk on that foot just now?”

“I can’t, I hopped.” He frowned at it with displeasure; it was hurting him. Lysimachos eased the pillow under.

“Look after it. The ankle was Achilles’ weakness. His mother held him by it, when she dipped him in the Styx, and forgot to wet it after.”

“Is that in the book, how Achilles died?”

“No. But he knows he will, because he has fulfilled his death-fate.”

“Didn’t the diviners warn him?”

“Yes, he was warned that his death would follow Hektor’s, but still he killed him. He was avenging Patroklos, his friend, whom Hektor had killed.”

The boy considered this intently. “He was his best friend of all?”

“Yes, from when they were boys together.”

“Why didn’t Achilles save him first, then?”

“He had taken his men out of the battle, because the High King had insulted him. The Greeks were getting the worst of it without him; that was as he’d been promised by the god. But Patroklos, who had a feeling heart, when he saw old comrades falling came to Achilles weeping for pity. ‘Lend me only your armor,’ he said, ‘and let me show myself in the field. They will think you are back; it will be enough to scare them off.’ So Achilles gave him leave, and he did great deeds, but…” He was stopped by the boy’s shocked stare.

“He couldn’t do that! He was a general! And he sent a junior officer; when he wouldn’t go! It was his fault Patroklos died.”

“Oh, yes, he knew. He had sacrificed him to his pride. That was why he fulfilled his death-fate.”

“How did the King insult him? How did it start?”

Lysimachos settled himself on the stool of dyed sheepskin by the bed.

As the tale unfolded, Alexander found to his surprise that it could all have happened, any day, in Macedon.

The harebrained younger son, stealing the wife of his powerful host; bringing her and the feud to his father’s hold—the old houses of Macedon and Epiros could tell such tales by the score. The High King had called up his levies and his under-chiefs. King Peleus, being over-age, had sent his one son, Achilles, born of a goddess queen. When at sixteen he came to the plain of Troy, he was already the best of the warriors.

The war itself was just like some tribal skirmish in the hills: warriors whooping each other on into single combats without asking leave; the infantry, it seemed, scrambling about in rabbles behind the lords. He had heard of a dozen such wars in the lifetime of men who told the story, breaking out from old feuds, or flaring up over blood shed in a drinking-brawl, the moving of a boundary stone, an unpaid bride-price, a cuckold mocked at a feast.

Lysimachos told it as he had pictured it in his youth. He had read the speculations of Anaxagoras, the maxims of Herakleitos, the history of Thukydides, the philosophy of Plato, Euripides’ melodramas and Agathon’s romantic plays; but Homer returned him to his childhood, when he had sat on his father’s knee to hear the bard, and watched his tall brothers walk clanking sword at hip, as men still did in the streets of Pella.

The boy, who had always thought less of Achilles for making all this trouble only about a girl, now learned that she was a prize for valor, which the King had taken away to humble him. Now he well understood Achilles’ anger. He pictured Agamemnon as a stocky man, with a strong black beard.

So, then, Achilles was sitting in his war-hut, self-exiled from his glory, playing his lyre to Patroklos, the only one who understood his mind, when the King’s envoys came to him. The Greeks were in extremity; the King had had to eat dirt. Achilles should have his girl returned. Also, he could marry Agamemnon’s own daughter with a huge dowry of lands and cities. If he liked, he could even have the dowry without her.

As people do at the crux of a tragedy though they know the end, the boy willed that all should be well now: that Achilles should relent, that he and Patroklos should go into battle side by side, happy and glorious. But Achilles turned away his face. They still asked too much, he said. “For my goddess mother has told me I bear two death-fates within me, If I stay before Troy and fight, I lose my homecoming, but win everlasting fame. Or, if I go home to my dear fatherland, I lose the height of my glory, but have a long life left me, death will not come for me soon.” Now his honor had been blown on, he would choose the second fate, and sail home.

The third envoy had not yet spoken. Now he came forward; old Phoinix, who had known Achilles since he was a child upon his knee. King Peleus had adopted him, after his own father had cursed him out of doors. He had been happy at Peleus’ court; but the father’s curse had worked, making him forever childless. Achilles was the child he had chosen for his own, so that one day he would keep the hard times from him. Now, if he sailed, he would go along with him; he would never forsake him, even in exchange for being made young again. But he begged Achilles rather to heed his prayers, and lead out the Greeks to battle.

A moral digression followed; the boy, his attention wandering, withdrew into himself. Impatient of delays, he wished to bestow at once on Lysimachos some gift he had always wanted. It seemed to him that he could.

“I’d have said yes, if you had asked me.” Scarcely feeling his sprained foot as he moved, he clasped Lysimachos’ neck.

Lysimachos embraced him, openly weeping. The boy was undisturbed at it; Herakles allowed such tears. It was great luck to have had the right gift at hand. It was real too, he had not lied at all to him; he truly loved him, would be like his son and keep the hard times from him. If he had come like Phoinix to Achilles, he would have given him what he asked: have led out the Greeks to fight, taking the first of the death-fates, never to come home to the dear fatherland, never to grow old. It was all quite true, and had given happiness. Why add, then, that though he would give consent, it would not be for Phoinix’ sake?

He would do it for the everlasting fame.

The great city of Olynthos, on the northeast coast, had fallen to King Philip. His gold got in first, his soldiers later.

The Olynthians had looked askance at his rising power. For years they had harbored two bastard half-brothers of his who claimed his throne; had played him and Athens off against each other whenever it served their turn, and then allied with Athens.

First he took care that his bought men in the town should grow rich, and show it. Their party grew. Down south in Euboia, he fomented a rising to keep the Athenians minding their own business. Meantime he kept exchanging envoys with Olynthos, haggling at length over peace terms, while he reduced strategic country all around.

This done, he sent them an ultimatum. Either they or he would have to go; he had decided they should. If they surrendered, they could leave with a safe-conduct. No doubt their Athenian allies would look after them.

In spite of Philip’s party, the vote went for holding out. They gave him some costly fighting, before his clients contrived to lose a couple of battles, and let him through the gates.

Now, he thought, was the time to warn others against giving so much trouble. Let Olynthos be an example. The rebel half-brothers died by the Companions’ spears. Soon the chain-gangs of slaves were going down through Greece, driven by the dealers, or men whose usefulness had deserved a gift. Cities which had seen, time out of mind, their heavy work done by Thracians or Ethiops or broad-cheeked Scythians, gazed in outrage at Greek men bearing burdens under the lash, Greek girls sold to the brothels in the open market. Demosthenes’ voice rallied all decent men to stand against the barbarian.

The boys of Macedon saw the hopeless convoys pass, the children wailing in the dust as they trudged at their mothers’ skirts. It brought the millennial message. This is defeat: avoid it.

At the sea-foot of Mount Olympos stood the town of Dion, the holy footstool of Olympian Zeus. Here Philip held his victory feast, in the god’s sacred month, with splendors which Archelaos had never equaled. Distinguished guests came north from all over Greece; kitharists and flautists, rhapsodes and actors, competed for gold wreaths, purple gowns and bags of silver.

Euripides’ Bakchai was to be staged; Euripides had first put it on in this very theater. The best scene-painter of Corinth was painting the flats with Theban hills and a royal palace; the tragedians were heard each morning in their lodgings, practicing the gamut of all their voices from the boom of gods to maiden trebles. Even the schoolmasters were on holiday. Achilles and his Phoinix (the nickname had stuck at once) had the threshold of Olympos, and the sights of the festival, to themselves. Phoinix had given Achilles his own Iliad, a secret from Timanthes. They gave trouble to no one, absorbed in their private game.

On the god’s annual feast-day, the King gave a grand banquet. Alexander was to appear, but to leave before the drinking. He wore a new blue chiton stitched with gold; his heavy loose-waving hair was curled. He sat on the end of his father’s supper couch, his own silver bowl and cup beside him. The hall was brilliant with lamps; the lords’ sons of the Royal Bodyguard came and went between the King and his guests of honor, bringing them his gifts.

There were some Athenians, of the party which favored peace with Macedon. The boy noticed his father taking care with his accent. The Athenians might have helped his enemies; they might have sunk to intrigue with the Persians their forebears had fought at Marathon; but they still had in their gift the prize of Greekness.

The King, shouting down the hall, was asking some guest why he looked so glum. It was Satyros, the great comedian of Athens. Having got the feed he had worked for, he mimed fear amusingly, and said he hardly dared ask for what he wanted. Only name it, cried the King with extended hand. It turned out to be the freedom of two young girls he had seen among the slaves, daughters of an old Olynthian guest-friend; he wanted to save them from their fate and give them marriage portions. A happiness, cried the King, to grant a request itself so generous. There was a buzz of applause; good feeling warmed the room. The guests who had passed the slave pens found their food taste a little better.

The garlands were coming in, and big wine-coolers packed with Olympian snow. Philip turned to his son, stroked back the moist fair hair, already losing its curl, from his warm brow, gave it a bristly kiss while the guests murmured delight, and bade him run off to bed. He slipped down, said good night to the guard at the door, who was a friend of his; and made his way to his mother’s room to tell her all about it.

Before his hand was on the door, some warning reached him from within.

The place was in confusion. The women stood huddled like frightened hens. His mother, still dressed in the robe she had worn for the choral odes, was pacing to and fro. The mirror-table was overturned; a maid was on hands and knees, scrambling for jars and pins. As the door opened she dropped a jar and the kohl spilled out. Olympias strode across, and sent her sprawling with a blow on the head.

“Out, all of you!” she shouted. “Sluts, useless gaping halfwits! Get out, and leave me with my son.”

He came in. The flush of the hot hall and his watered wine drained from his face; his stomach clenched itself on its meal. Silently he walked forward. As the women scurried out, she flung herself on the bed, beating and biting the pillows. He came and knelt beside her, feeling the coldness of his own hands as he stroked her hair. He did not ask the trouble.

Olympias writhed round on the bed, and grasped him by the shoulders, calling all gods to witness her injuries and avenge her. She gripped him to her so that they both shook to and fro; the heavens forbid, she cried, that he should ever learn what she suffered from this vilest of all men; it was unfit for the innocence of his years. She always said this at first. He moved his head so that he could breathe. Not a young man this time, he thought; it must be a girl.

It was a proverb in Macedon, that the King took a wife for every war. It was true these matches, always sealed with rites to please the kindred, were a good way of making reliable allies. The boy only knew the fact. He now remembered a sleekness about his father which he had known before. “A Thracian!” his mother cried. “A filthy, blue-painted Thracian!” Somewhere in Dion, then, all this while, the girl had been hidden away. Hetairas went about, everyone saw them.

“I’m sorry, Mother,” he said leadenly. “Did Father marry her?”

“Don’t call that man your father!” She held him at arms’ length, staring into his face; her lashes were matted, the lids streaked with black and blue; her dilated eyes showed white all round the iris. One shoulder of her gown had fallen; her thick dark-red hair stood out all round her face and fell tangled on her bared breast. He remembered the Gorgon’s head in the Perseus room, and shook off the thought with horror. “Your father!” she cried to him. “Zagreus be my witness, you are clean of that!” Her fingers dug into his shoulders, so that he clenched his teeth with pain. “The day will come, yes it will come, when he will learn what part he had in you! Oh yes, he will learn a greater was here before him!” Letting go, she flung herself back on her elbows and began to laugh.

She rolled in her red hair, laughing in sobs, catching her breath with shrill crowing gasps, the pitch of her laughter mounting louder and higher. The boy, to whom this was new, knelt by her in stifling terror, pulling at her hands, kissing her sweat-smeared face, calling in her ear to her to stop, to speak to him; he was here with her, he, Alexander; she must not go mad or he would die.

At last she moaned deeply, sat up, gathered him in her arms and stroked her cheek against his head. Weak with relief, he lay against her with closed eyes. “Poor boy, poor child. It was only the laughing-sickness; that is what he has brought me to. I should be ashamed, before anyone but you; but you know what I have to bear. See, darling, I know you, I am not mad. Though he would gladly see it, the man who calls himself your father.”

He opened his eyes and sat up. “When I’m a man, I’ll see right done you.”

“Ah, he does not guess what you are. But I know. I and the god.”

He asked no question. Enough had happened. Later, in the night, when, empty with vomiting, he lay dry-lipped in bed listening to the distant roar of the feast, her words came back to him.

Next day the games began. The two-horse chariots ran their laps, the dismounter leaping off and running with the car and vaulting on again. Phoinix, who had noticed the boy’s hollow eyes and guessed the cause, was glad to see him held by it.

He woke just before midnight, thinking of his mother. He got out of bed and dressed. He had dreamed she called to him from the sea, like the goddess mother of Achilles. He would go to her, and ask her what she had meant last night.

Her room was empty. Only an old crone, belonging to the house, crept muttering about, picking things up; they had all forgotten her. She looked at him with a little wet red eye, and said the Queen had gone to the Hekate shrine.

He slipped out into the night, among the drunks and whores and soldiers and pickpurses. He needed to see her, whether she saw him or not. He knew the way to the crossroads.

The city gates stood open for the festival. Far ahead were the black cloaks and the torch. It was a Hekate night, moonless; they did not see him stalking them. She had to fend for herself, because she had not a son of age to help her. It was his business, what she did.

She had made her women wait, and gone on alone. He skirted the oleanders and the tamarisks, to the shrine with its three-faced image. She was there, with something whining and whimpering in her hands. She set her torch in the sooty socket by the altar-slab. She was all in black, and what she held was a young black dog. She held it up by the nape, and hacked a knife at its throat. It writhed and squealed, the whites of its eyes shone in the torchlight. Now she grasped it by its hind feet, jerking and choking while the blood ran down; when it only twitched, she laid it down on the altar. Kneeling before the image, she beat her fists on the ground. He heard the furious whisper, soft as a snake’s, rise to a howl the dog itself might have made; the unknown words of the incantation, the known words of the curse. Her long hair trailed in the puddled blood; when she got up the ends were sticky, and her hands were clotted with black.

When it was over he tracked her home, keeping himself hidden. She looked familiar again, in her black cloak, walking among her women. He did not want to let her out of his sight.

Next day Epikrates said to Phoinix, “You must spare him to me today. I want to take him to the music contest.” He had meant to go with friends, with whom he could discuss technique; but the boy’s looks disturbed him. Like everyone else, he had heard the talk.

It was the contest for the kitharists. There was hardly a leading artist from the mainland or Greek Asia or the cities of Sicily and Italy, who had not come. The unguessed-at beauty caught the boy up, breaking his mood and throwing him straight into ecstasy. So Hektor, stunned by Ajax’ great stone, had looked up at a voice that raised the hair on his head, and found Apollo standing by him.

After this, he took up his life much as before. His mother reminded him often with a sigh or a meaning look; but the shock had passed the worst, his body was strong and his age resilient; he sought healing as nature taught him. On the footslopes of Mount Olympos, he rode with Phoinix through chestnut groves, chanting line for line of Homer, first in Macedonian and then in Greek.

Phoinix would gladly have kept him from the women’s rooms. But if once the Queen mistrusted his loyalty, the boy would be lost to him forever. She must not look for her son in vain. At least he seemed now to come away in better spirits.

He had found her busy with some plan which made her almost cheerful. He had waited in dread, at first, for her to come with her midnight torch, and fetch him to the Hekate shrine. She had never yet bade him call down a curse himself upon his father; the night they went to the tomb, he had only had to hold things and stand by.

Time passed; it was clearly no such thing; at last he even questioned her. She smiled, the subtle shadows curving under her cheekbones. He should know in good time, and it would surprise him. It was a service she had vowed to Dionysos; she promised he should be there. His spirits lightened. It must be the dancing for the god. These last two years she had been saying he was too old for women’s mysteries. He was eight now. It had been bitter to think that Kleopatra would soon go with her instead.

Like the King, she gave audience to many foreign guests. Aristodemos the tragedian had come not to perform, but as a diplomat, a role often entrusted to well-known actors; he was arranging ransoms for Athenians taken at Olynthos. A slender elegant man, he managed his voice like a polished flute; one could almost see him caress it. Alexander admired the good sense of his mother’s questions about the theater. Later she received Neoptolemos of Skyros, a protagonist even more distinguished, who was rehearsing for The Bakchai, playing the god. This time, the boy was absent.

He would not have known his mother was working magic, if he had not heard her through the door one day. Though the wood was thick, he caught some of the incantation. It was one he did not know, about killing a lion on the mountain; but the meaning was always the same. So he went away without knocking.

It was Phoinix who roused him at dawn to see the play. He was too young for the chairs of honor; he would sit with his father when he came of age. He had asked his mother if he could sit with her, as he had done till only last year; but she said she would not be watching, she had other business then. He must tell her afterwards how he had liked it.

He loved the theater; waking to a treat which would begin at once; the sweet morning smells, dew-laid dust, grass and herbs bruised by many feet, the smoke of the early workers’ torches just quenched at daybreak; people clambering down the tiers, the deep buzz of the soldiers and peasants up at the top, the fuss with cushions and rugs down among the seats of honor, the chatter from the women’s block; then suddenly the first notes of the flute, all other sound dying but the morning birdsong.

The play began eerily in the dawn-dusk; the god, masked as a beautiful fair-haired youth, saluting the fire on his mother’s tomb, and planning revenge on the Theban King who scorned his rites. His young voice, the boy perceived, was being skillfully done by a man; his maenads had flat breasts, and cool boys’ voices; but, this knowledge once stored away, he gave himself to the illusion.

Dark-haired young Pentheus spoke wickedly of the maenads and their rites. The god was bound to kill him. Several friends had described the plot beforehand. Pentheus’ death was the most dreadful one could conceive; but Phoinix had promised one did not see it.

While the blind prophet rebuked the King, Phoinix whispered that this old voice from the mask was the same actor’s who played the youthful god; such was the tragedian’s art. When Pentheus had died offstage, this actor too would change masks, and enact the mad queen Agave.

Imprisoned by the King, the god broke out with fire and earthquake; the effects, set up by Athenian craftsmen, entranced the boy. Pentheus, defying miracles, infatuate for doom, still rejected the divinity. His last chance gone, Dionysos wound him in deadly magic and stole his wits away. He saw two suns in the sky; thought he could move mountains; yet let the mocking god disguise him absurdly as a woman, to spy on the maenad rites. The boy joined in the laughter whose edge was sharpened by the sense of terrors to come.

The King went off to his agony; the chorus sang; then the Messenger brought the news. Pentheus had climbed a tree to spy from; the maenads had seen him, and in their god-crazed strength uprooted it. His mad mother, seeing only a wild beast, had led them to tear him in pieces. It was over, and as Phoinix had said, need not be seen. The mere telling had been enough.

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. Who…what…? 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 honor, 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 women 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 fulfill,

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 reverence 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 honor. Such offerings are very pleasing to Dionysos.”

They came out into the square of tramped earth outside the theater. 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 bulllike, 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 honor 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 sat 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, retied 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. Goodbye.”

“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’ 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 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 saddlecloth; 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’, 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.”