I had expected the old man to travel in one of the wagons, but he rode horseback as the rest of us did. The servants, of course, rode mules. We had hired professional teamsters to handle the ever-increasing number of wagons in our train.
The high road south wound its way through the rocky Vale of Tempe, between Ossa and craggy Mount Olympos, its lofty peak already gleaming with snow.
“The abode of the gods,” said Aristotle to me as we rode through the brisk autumn morning. Brittle dead leaves strewed the trail; our horses snorted steam in the early chill.
“Only in legend,” I replied.
He looked up at me, his brow furrowed. “You don’t believe in the gods?”
I must have made a bitter little smile. “I believe in them, but they don’t live up there in the cold. They take better care of themselves than that.”
Aristotle shook his head. “Remarkable. For a man who has no memory, Orion, you seem very certain of your knowledge about the gods’ residence.”
“We could climb the mountain,” I said, “and see for ourselves if the gods are living up there.”
He laughed. “See for ourselves! Very good, Orion. Very good. The essence of truth is knowledge gained by examination. I’ll make a philosopher of you yet!”
“The essence of truth,” I muttered.
“Truth is often difficult to determine, Orion. Sokrates gave his life seeking for it. My own teacher, Plato, tried to determine exactly what truth is, and he died brokenhearted.”
I wondered silently what the essence of truth might be. Were my dreams truer than my waking reality? Were my hazy recollections of other lives true memories or merely desperate fantasies of my mind?
He misinterpreted my silence. “Yes, I differ from Plato’s teachings. He believed that ideas are the essence of truth: pure ideas, with no physical substance whatsoever. I cannot accept that. To me, the only way to discover truth is by examining the world about us with our five senses.”
“You say that Plato died of a broken heart?”
The gnomish old man’s face grew somber. “Dionysios invited Plato to his city of Syracuse, in distant Sicily. There Plato instructed him on how to be a philosopher-king, a great leader among men. It isn’t every day that a philosopher has a king for his student.”
“What happened?”
“Dionysios listened very carefully to Plato’s ideas about the ideal republic. And he used those ideas to make himself absolute tyrant of Syracuse. His son was even worse. He threw Plato out of Syracuse, sent him packing home to Athens.”
“So much for the philosopher-king,” I said.
Aristotle gave me a troubled look, then fell silent.
Our little band was growing larger every day with Aristotle’s constantly-growing collections. We had to buy more mules and wagons and more men to tend them. The pack train would be twice the size of our original group by the time we reached Athens. There was already snow on the lower mountaintops, and the trees were turning gauntly bare. I urged our band southward through the narrow pass of Thermopylai, where Leonidas and his Spartans had stood against the invading Persians of Xerxes more than a century and a half earlier.
Alexandros insisted that we stop and do homage to the brave Spartans, who died to the last man rather than surrender to the Persians.
So there on the narrow rocky shelf between the grim mountains and the heaving sea, near the hot springs for which the pass was named, we paid honor to ancient heroes while the winds keening down from the north warned of impending winter. Alexandros spoke of the Persians with contempt, ending with, “Never will our people be free until the Persian Empire is shattered completely.”
Aristotle nodded agreement. The men were impressed with his words. I was more impressed with the smell of snow in the graying sky. We moved on.
“One thing that Alexandros did not mention,” said Aristotle from the back of the gentle chestnut mare he rode, “was that the Macedonians allowed Xerxes and his army to travel through their territory without raising a finger against them. They even sold the Persians grain and horses and timber for their ships, as a matter of fact.”
He spoke with a forgiving smile, and in a low voice so that no one could hear but me. Even so, he added, “But that was a long time ago, of course. Things have changed.”
I had expected Attica to be somewhat like Macedonia, a wide fertile plain ringed with wooded mountains. But instead the mountains marched right to the edge of the sea, and they were mostly starkly bare rock.
“The Athenians cut down their forests over the generations to make ships for their incessant wars,” Aristotle told me. “Now the country is fit for nothing but bees.”
Alexandros rode up between us. “You can see why the Athenians took to the sea,” he said excitedly. “There isn’t enough farmland here to feed a village, let alone a great city.”
“That’s why they depend on the grain from beyond the Bosporus,” I guessed.
“That’s why they want to hold onto the port towns. We can strangle them by taking all their ports away,” said Alexandros. Suddenly his eyes lit up. “When I make war against the Persians, the first thing I will do is to take all their port cities. That will make their fleet useless!”
And he galloped off to tell his friends of his sudden strategic insight.
Philip’s command was that Alexandros and his Companions—he had brought four of them—should remain incognito while in Athens. They were to be nothing more than part of the guard for the revered teacher and philosopher, Aristotle. I knew it would be difficult to keep these high-born Macedonians from shining through any disguise; especially Alexandros, who wanted to see everything and be everywhere. He would never follow my orders. Any Athenian with half an eye would see that this was the golden-haired son of Philip who was already becoming something of a legend throughout the land.
We entered Athens without fanfare, stopping at the city gates only long enough to tell the guards on duty that this was Aristotle of Stagyra come to visit his old friend Aeschines, the lawyer. As we rode through the narrow, winding, noisy streets I saw the great white cliff of the Acropolis rising before us and, gleaming atop it, splendid marble temples and an immense statue of Athena, the city’s protectress.
My heart leaped in my chest: Of course! This is her city! This is the place where I will find her.
As if he could read my thoughts, Alexandros said to Hephaistion, riding beside him. “We must go up there and see the Parthenon.”
His young friend, tall and lean and dark where Alexandros was short and solid and blond, shook his head. “I don’t think they allow visitors up there. It’s sacred ground.”
“It’s where they keep their treasury,” Ptolemaios said, laughing. “That’s why they don’t allow visitors.”
“But I’m not merely a visitor,” Alexandros snapped. “I am the son of a king.”
“Not on this trip,” said Ptolemaios, like a big brother. “We’re just escorts for the old man.”
Alexandros tried to stare Ptolemaios down, found he could not, then turned to stare at me. I looked the other way. Yes, I said to myself, it’s going to be very difficult to keep him under control.
The house of Aeschines, the lawyer, was more magnificent than Philip’s palace. It was smaller, of course, but not by much. Its portico was all marble, its walls decorated with colorful friezes of nymphs and satyrs. Statues crowded the garden like a marble forest: grave men in solemn robes and nubile young women in various stages of undress.