It was a sharp bright March day with a northeast wind. The fretted shutters had been closed to keep the papers from blowing about; a cold dazzling sun came splintering through, mixed with icy drafts. The Chief Secretary had a heated brick hidden in his cloak to warm his hands on; his clerk blew enviously on his fingers, but silently lest the King should hear. King Philip sat at ease. He had just come back from campaign in Thrace; after winter there, he thought his Palace a Sybaris of comfort.
As his power reached steadily towards the immemorial corn route of the Hellespont, the gullet of all Greece; as he encircled colonies, wrested from Athens the allegiance of tribal lands, laid siege to her allies’ cities, the southerners counted it among their bitterest wrongs that he had broken the old decent rule of abandoning war in wintertime, when even bears holed up.
He sat at the great table, his brown scarred hand, chapped with cold and calloused from reins and spear-shaft, grasping a silver stylos he kept to pick his teeth with. On a cross-legged stool, a clerk with a tablet on his knees waited to take a letter to a client lord in Thessaly.
There he could see his way; it was business of the south had brought him home. At last his foot was in the door. In Delphi, the impious Phokians were turning like mad dogs on one another, worn out with war and guilt. They had had a good run for the money they had melted down, coining the temple treasures for soldiers’ pay; now far-shooting Apollo was after them. He knew how to wait; on the day they had dug below the Tripod itself for gold, he had sent the earthquake. Then panic, frantic mutual accusations, exilings, torturings. The losing leader now held with his outcast force the strongpoints of Thermopylai, a desperate man who could soon be treated with. Already he had turned back a garrison relief from Athens, though they were the Phokians’ allies; he feared being handed over to the ruling faction. Soon he would be ripe and ready. Leonidas under his heavy grave-mound, thought Philip, must be tossing in his sleep.
Go tell the Spartans, traveler passing by…Go tell them all Greece will obey me within ten years, because city cannot keep faith with city, nor man with man. They have forgotten even what you could show them, how to stand and die. Envy and greed have conquered them for me. They will follow me, and be reborn from it; under me they shall win back their pride. They will look to me to lead them; and their sons will look to my son.
The peroration reminded him he had sent for the boy some time ago. No doubt he would come when found; at ten years, one did not expect them to be sitting still. Philip returned his thoughts to his letter.
Before he was through it, he heard his son’s voice outside, greeting the bodyguard. How many score—or hundred—men did the boy know by name? This one had only been in the Guard five days.
The tall doors opened. He looked small between them, shining and compact, his feet bare on the cold floor of figured marble, his arms folded inside his cloak, not to warm them, but in the well-drilled posture of modest Spartan boyhood, taught him by Leonidas. In this room served by pale bookish men, father and son had the gloss of wild animals among tame: the swarthy soldier, tanned almost black, his arms striped with pink cockled war-scars, the forehead crossed with the light band left by the helmet-rim, his blind eye with its milky fleck staring out under the half-drooped lid; the boy at the door, his brown silky skin flawed only with the grazes and scratches of a boy’s adventures, his heavy tousled hair making Archelaos’ gildings look dusty. His homespun clothes, softened and bleached by many washings and beatings on the river stones, long since subdued to their wearer, now carried his style as if he had chosen them himself in a willful arrogance. His grey eyes, which the cold slanting sun had lightened, kept to themselves some thought he had brought with him.
“Come in, Alexander.” He was already doing so; Philip had spoken only to be heard, resenting this withdrawal.
Alexander came forward, noting that like a servant he had been given leave to enter. The glow of the wind outside ebbed from his face, the skin seemed to change its texture, becoming more opaque. He had been thinking at the door that Pausanias, the new bodyguard, had the sort of looks his father liked. If anything came of it, for a time there might be no new girl. There was a certain look one came to know, when they met one’s eyes, or did not; it had not happened yet.
He came up to the desk and waited, his hands disposed in his cloak. One part of the Spartan deportment, however, Leonidas had never managed to impose; he should have been looking down till his elders spoke to him.
Philip, meeting the steady eyes, felt a stab of familiar pain. Even hate might have been better. He had seen such a look in the eyes of men prepared to die before they would yield the gate or the pass; not a challenge, an inward thing. How have I deserved it? It is that witch, who comes with her poison whenever my back is turned, to steal my son.
Alexander had been meaning to ask his father about the Thracian battle-order; accounts had differed, but he would know…Not now, however.
Philip sent out the clerk, and motioned the boy to the empty stool. As he sat straight-backed on the scarlet sheepskin, Philip felt him already poised to go.
It pleased Philip’s enemies, hate being blinder than love, to think his men in the Greek cities had all alike been bought. But though none lost by serving him, there were many who would have taken nothing from him, had they not first been won by charm. “Here,” he said, picking up from the desk a glittering tangle of soft leather. “What do you make of this?”
The boy turned it over; at once his long square-ended fingers began to work, slipping thongs under or over, pulling, straightening. As order came out of chaos his face grew intent, full of grave pleasure. “It’s a sling and a shot-bag. It should go on a belt, through here. Where do they do this work?”
The bag was stitched with gold plaques cut out in the bold, stylized, flowing forms of stags. Philip said, “It was found on a Thracian chief, but it comes from far north, from the plains of grass. It’s Scythian.”
Alexander pored over this trophy from the edge of the Kimmerian wilderness, thinking of the endless steppes beyond the Ister, the fabled burial grounds of the kings with their rings of dead riders staked around them, horses and men withering in the dry cold air. His longing to know more was too much for him; in the end he asked all his stored-up questions. They talked for some time.
“Well, try the sling; I brought it for you. See what you can bring down. But don’t go off too far. The Athenian envoys are on the way.”
The sling lay in the boy’s lap, remembered only by his hands. “About the peace?”
“Yes. They landed at Halos and asked for safe-conduct through the lines, without waiting for the herald. They are in a hurry, it seems.”
“The roads are bad.”
“Yes, they’ll need to thaw out before I hear them. When I do, you may come and listen. This will be serious business; it is time you saw how things are done.”
“I’ll stay near Pella. I’d like to come.”
“At last, we may see action out of talk. They have been buzzing like a kicked bee-skep ever since I took Olynthos. Half last year they were touting the southern cities, trying to work up a league against us. Nothing came of it but dusty feet.”
“Were they all afraid?”
“Not all; but all mistrusted each other. Some trusted men who trusted me. I shall redeem their trust.”