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.