Orion and the Conqueror o-4 Read online

  He could not have been thirty. His hair was dark brown and wild as an untamed forest. His black beard was smeared and sticky with mutton drippings. About a dozen of us were sitting around the fire while a physician from far-off Corinth went around applying salves and bandages to men’s wounds.

  “And now you serve the Macedonians,” I said.

  He gulped at his goatskin of wine, splashing much of it over his beard and chest. “You bet we do! Old One-Eye has changed everything. When he became king he beat the shit out of us. And everybody else around him. Struck us in the winter, in the summer. Made no difference to him. He never lost a battle. He knows how many beans makes five, he does.”

  “Philip conquered your people,” I murmured.

  Nikkos shook his shaggy head vigorously. “No. Not conquered. We still have our own king. He just showed us that we’d be better off allied with him than fighting against him.”

  A diplomat, I thought. Then I realized that Philip had done the same thing to me this day.

  “Now all the country tribes are allied with Macedon,” Nikkos went on, “and Philip even makes war against Athens.”

  If Nikkos was unhappy with this situation he did not show it. Indeed, he seemed to be quite pleased with it all.

  Then he leaned closer to me. “D’you know what I think?” he asked in a low voice.

  His breath was foul and I could see things crawling in his beard. “What?” I asked, trying to keep the distance of a flea’s jump between us.

  “I think it’s her that’s done it.”

  “Her?”

  “The witch. Philip’s wife.”

  “The king’s wife is a witch?”

  He lowered his voice even more. “Priestess of the Old Cult. Worships the Snake Goddess and all that. She’s a sorceress, all right. How else can you explain it? I was already big enough to help my father tend his flock when Philip pushed his brother off the throne. Macedonia was being sliced up by all the tribes around it. Not just us, but the Illyrians, the Paionians—all of us. We raided and plundered every year.”

  “Philip put a stop to that?”

  “In the blink of his one eye, or so it seems. Now all the tribes serve him. It must be that Molossian bitch of his; that’s the only way to explain it.”

  I glanced uneasily at the other men sitting around the fire.

  Nikkos laughed. “Don’t worry, I can’t say anything about the witch that Old One-Eye hasn’t said himself. He hates her.”

  “Hates his wife?”

  Several of the men nodded agreement, grinning.

  “If it weren’t that she’s the mother of his son and heir he would have sent her packing back to Epeiros long ago.”

  “He can’t do that,” said one of the others. “He’s afraid of her.”

  “She can cast spells.”

  “Spells my ass. She poisons people.”

  “Not poison. Magic.”

  “Look what she did to the other son, the one by the Thessalian woman.”

  “Arrhidaios? The idiot?”

  “He was a healthy baby. She fed him poison that made him feeble-minded.”

  “Or cast a spell to make certain her own son would be Philip’s heir, even though he’s a couple of years younger.”

  The men fell to arguing over whether the king’s wife was a poisoner or a sorceress. I listened with only half an ear. The men around me, the battle we had gone through, this chill, dark night with the black bowl of the heavens strewn with brilliant glittering stars—all of it was strange and new to me. I had no memory of anything farther back than that morning. Each of the men around me had a family and clan and tribe, each of them could recall their kings and histories from generations back.

  I had nothing. A blank where my memory should have been. The men spoke of the gods they worshipped; their names meant nothing to me. Until one of them mentioned Athena, the warrior goddess, the patroness of Athens.

  “She’s more than a warrior goddess,” said Nikkos grudgingly. “She’s the goddess of wisdom. Or at least, the Athenians think so.”

  “They should,” one of the others said. “She gave them the olive tree, didn’t she?”

  “And the spinning wheel.”

  Athena. A picture of her formed in my mind: tall and slim and incredibly beautiful, with lustrous dark hair and solemn silver-gray eyes.

  “We’re all playthings for the gods,” Nikkos was saying. “They pull the strings and we jump.”

  “I don’t believe that,” said the man next to him. “I live my own life; nobody pulls my strings.”

  But we are here to do the gods’ bidding, I thought. At least I am. I felt certain of that. Yet—what did the gods want me to do? Who was I, really, and why was I here? There was no answer in my mind, no message from the gods to enlighten me.

  The fire sputtered low and the men began to wrap themselves in cloaks or blankets and stretch out for sleep. I had nothing but the grimy, skirted chiton of sweat-stained linen that I was wearing. My bronze breastplate and greaves and helmet rested on the ground beside me. Yet as soon as I realized that the night wind was chilling me, I clamped down on my peripheral circulation and consciously speeded my heartbeat to raise my body temperature enough to compensate for the cold.

  I did that almost without thinking about it. But then I began to wonder how I could control my body so minutely. And how I knew what I was doing. Somehow I realized that this was far beyond the capabilities of other men. In the battle I had been able to fight and kill without being scratched. I could see everything in slow motion, yet my own reactions were always faster than anyone else’s.

  Who am I? I wondered as I laid myself on the hard ground and closed my eyes. Where am I from?

  For hours I lay on my back staring sleeplessly at the gleaming stars wheeling majestically above me. I recognized the two Dippers, and Cassiopeia on her throne. Nearby her daughter, Andromeda, chained to the rock with Perseus the hero beside her. My own constellation, Orion, was still below the horizon, although I could see the Dog Star blazing like a sapphire just above the rim of the hills.

  At last I closed my eyes in sleep. Or was it sleep? I seemed to be transported to another place, in some other world far removed in time and distance from the battlefield near the walled city of Perinthos.

  This is a dream, I told myself, even though I did not truly believe it. I stood on a grassy hillside dotted with wildflowers beneath a warm summer sun. Below me on the plain was a magnificent city shimmering in the day’s heat, lofty towers and mighty monuments lining stately broad avenues. And beyond the city was the sea, dazzlingly blue-green in the bright sunshine, waves marching up onto a white sand beach in tireless procession.

  The city seemed empty, dead, yet perfectly preserved. I began to realize that the shimmering I saw was some sort of protective dome over it, thin as a soap bubble, pure energy.

  My life was tied to that city. I knew that with an absolute certainty. Yet I could remember none of it. Nothing except the concrete conviction that my life began with that city. And my love, as well. The woman I loved, the goddess who loved me, was part of that dead, empty, abandoned city.

  When I tried to walk down the hill toward the city I found that my feet would not obey me. I stood rooted to the spot. In the distance, so far and so faint that I could not be entirely sure of it, I heard someone laughing sardonically. Almost crying, so bitter was the laughter. A man’s twisted laughter, I thought, although I could not be altogether sure.

  With all the force I could muster I tried to break free of whatever held me immobile and start on the way down the hill toward the city.

  Only to wake up on the threadbare grass of the stony battlefield outside Perinthos with the first rays of the sun glinting over the rugged hilltops.

  Who am I? The question echoed in my mind. Then another question arose to haunt me: Why am I here?

  Chapter 3

  That morning we marched to Perinthos, where the main body of Philip’s army was camped outside the city
’s wall. It was embarrassing to realize that Philip had used only a small part of his army to defeat my mercenary troops. Most of the Macedonian forces were besieging Perinthos, while still another contingent of his troops was marching swiftly toward Byzantion, on the narrow strait of Bosporus that separated Europe from Asia.

  The city was no great affair. I could not see much of it, huddled behind its wall and locked gates, but it seemed small and cramped to me. The main wall was rough and uneven; crenelated towers stood by each of its two gates and only a few buildings inside were tall enough to rise above the wall’s top. It sat at the edge of the water, where the rocky plain that descended from the distant hills met the Propontis, the sea that lay between the narrows of the Hellespont and the Bosporus.

  Yet there was something familiar about the city, something that tugged at my memory. When I tried to recall what it was, though, I struck a blank wall much more obdurate than the city wall of Perinthos.

  Philip’s camp lay sprawled on the threadbare plain, almost within an arrow’s shot of the city wall. I sensed an edginess in the air. The camp reeked with a restless, disgruntled mood, the kind of irritation that arises when soldiers have been sitting too long in one place with neither the comforts of their home base nor the prospect of getting home any time in the near future.

  The siege was going badly. Perinthos was a seaport, so it could stay behind its locked gates and defy the Macedonians while ships brought in fresh supplies and, occasionally, reinforcements from Athenian allies such as Byzantion. Philip, supreme on land, had no navy. It must have been sheer madness for the Perinthians to try to relieve the siege with the handful of mercenaries that Athens had sent. Philip had made short work of them, but now that the battle was over, the siege went on and the city remained defiant.

  The horses kicking up clouds of dust in their corrals seemed to be more active than the soldiers. Men loafed about as we marched into the camp. I saw that they had been here long enough to have built log huts for themselves with well-trampled paths between them. Mules brayed as slaves led them past us, their backs piled high with fodder and stacks of firewood.

  The only soldiers who seemed busy were the engineers swearing and sweating over a massive catapult, yelling at a quartet of bare-chested slaves straining to load a heavy iron bolt onto it while another squad of half-naked slaves sat waiting to start the mules pulling the thick ropes that would cock the catapult’s arm. I saw that someone had scratched onto the dark iron bolt the words, From Philip.

  I heard the thump of another catapult being fired and, turning, saw its missile tumbling high into the morning sun. It cleared the wall and disappeared behind it. Then came a thunderous crunching boom as it hit. Voices wailed, a woman’s high-pitched shriek cut through the air as a cloud of dust rose above the wall like a dark blot against the sky. From Philip.

  Troy. Vaguely I remembered another siege of another city, long ago: Troy. Had I been there, or had I merely heard tales about it? My right hand pressed against my thigh and I felt the dagger that I kept strapped beneath the skirt of my chiton. What had it to do with my faint recollection of Troy?

  Nikkos directed our phalanx to a relatively clear area of the camp, as far from the smell and dust of the corrals as possible. I saw that Philip’s army was much larger than the Macedonians could field by themselves. He had added troops from all the tribes allied to his kingdom, such as Nikkos’ Thracians, and still hired mercenaries, as well.

  “See those gilded lilies there?” Nikkos prodded my ribs with his elbow as we were unloading our equipment from the mule train that had followed us into camp.

  I looked in the direction he was staring. A troop of men in identical polished armor and helmets of gleaming bronze was forming up in well-ordered ranks under the flinty eyes of a trio of officers. Their breastplates were molded to look like a well-muscled torso; their helmets were plumed with horsehair dyed red. They seemed to sparkle in the sun.

  “Argives,” said Nikkos. “Fresh meat from the Peloponnesos.”

  “More mercenaries?” I asked.

  He nodded and spat into the dusty ground. “Look at ’em. All prettied up in their fine bright armor. I bet they’ve never done anything more than parade around and tell tall tales. They must think they can get the Perinthians to swoon at the sight of ’em.”

  I had to laugh, especially when I looked down at my own battered armor, dented and scratched and caked with dust. But then I had to wonder: armor like that cost a great deal of money. Where did I get it? What other battles had I fought, to dent and scratch it so? Where was I from?

  Philip and his generals seemed to understand full well that soldiers with little do to begin to rot from the inside. We were drilled every day, trained in the close-order formations of the phalanx until handling our sixteen-foot-long sarissas seemed as natural as using a soup spoon. The mercenaries loafed and laughed at us while we of the Macedonian phalanxes marched and wheeled and turned and charged at the bawling commands of our unit leaders.

  It was dull, sweaty work; endless repetition. But I had seen how Philip’s machine had ground up my mercenary phalanx like a meat chopper with ten thousand arms and one brain. I went through the drills without complaint and ignored the jeers of the mercenaries.

  Most of the tribesmen served not as hoplites in a phalanx but as peltasts, archers or slingers or javelin throwers, light infantry that could skirmish against the heavier-armed phalanxes and dash away before the hoplites could close with them. The mercenaries were all hoplites, of course, heavy infantry.

  “The country’s full of mercenary troops,” Nikkos told me. “Any poor boy who wants to make something of himself joins a mercenary troop and goes off soldiering. Every city in the land grows soldiers nowadays. Except Athens, of course.”

  “What do they grow in Athens?” I asked.

  “Lawyers.” And he spat again.

  Some of the other men near us laughed. I let it pass.

  The men fell to arguing over which city produced the best soldiers. Some felt that the Spartans were the bravest, but most agreed that Thebes had an even better reputation.

  “Especially their Sacred Band,” said one of the men.

  “The Sacred Band aren’t mercenaries,” Nikkos pointed out. “They fight only for Thebes.”

  “And damned well, too.”

  “They’re all lovers. Each man in the Sacred Band is part of a pair.”

  “The philosophers say that makes the best kind of soldier, a man who’s fighting alongside his lover. They’ll never let each other down.”

  “Fuck the philosophers. The Sacred Band’s the best damned bunch of soldiers in the world.”

  “Better than us?”

  “Better.”

  “We have a better general!”

  “But they’re not mercenaries. As long as we don’t make war against Thebes we don’t have to worry about them.”

  “There are plenty of Theban mercenaries, though. Even the Great King, over in Asia, hires mercenaries from Thebes.”

  “The Great King?” I asked.

  Nikkos gave me a peculiar look. “Of Persia,” he said. “Don’t you know anything?”

  I could only shake my head.

  Nikkos did not trust the newly-arrived Argives. He kept calling them “pretty boys” who would be next to worthless in a real battle. For their part, the Argives swaggered through the camp as if they were each personally descended from Achilles, and laughed at our constant drilling.

  “Why doesn’t the king send them against the wall?” Nikkos grumbled. “Then we’d see what they’re really made of.”

  But Philip apparently had no intention of attacking the city wall. The army sat outside and did little more than drill—and fire a few missiles into the city each day. The Perinthians sat tight and cheered each time a ship sailed into their wall-protected harbor.

  Our phalanx was camped next to the strutting Argives, and there was plenty of bad blood between us. It was natural, I suppose; if we were not allowed t
o fight the real enemy we fought each other. There were rows and fistfights almost every night. The officers on both sides sternly punished the men involved; Nikkos himself took ten lashes one morning while we were all made to stand at attention and watch. One of Philip’s generals, Parmenio, threatened to stop our wine supply if we did not behave.

  “We’ll see how belligerent you are on water,” he growled at us. I had heard that Parmenio was a wine lover, and he looked it: heavy and red-faced, with broken blood vessels splotching his cheeks and bulbous nose.

  The Argives were punished by their own officers, of course, but it seemed to us that their punishments were much lighter than our own.

  I tried to stay out of the squabbling. Without quite remembering the details I recalled how another army had been almost destroyed because of a quarrel between its leaders. Was that at Troy?

  Then came the night that changed everything.

  “Where is Troy?” I asked Nikkos that evening, as we reclined on our blankets in front of the dinner fire.

  He furrowed his brow at me. “Who knows? Maybe it’s only a story.”

  “No,” said one of the other men. “It’s on the other side of the Hellespont.”

  “It’s still there? I thought it was burned to the ground.”

  “That’s where it was.”

  “How do you know? If it ever existed it was so long ago—”

  “In the time of heroes.”

  “Heroes?” I asked.

  “Like Achilles and Odysseus and Agamemnon.”

  Odysseus. That name rang a bell in my mind. Was it he who gave me the dagger I kept strapped to my thigh?

  “What do you horse thieves know about Agamemnon?” shouted one of the Argives, barely a stone’s throw from our fire.

  “He was one of the leaders of the Achaians at Troy,” I answered.

  “He was an Argive,” said the mercenary, stepping into the light from our fire. “King of Mycenae. Not some shit-footed farmer from the hills like you bunch.”

  I got to my feet. The Argive was big, and wearing his muscled cuirass plus a short stabbing sword at his hip, but I was taller by half a head and wider across the shoulders.