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.”