He was nearly two, and seen to be small for his age; but, as she said, his father must have been so. Otherwise, it was clearly her looks he favored; the soft dark hair, the bright dark eyes. He was lively, and seldom ill; curious and exploring; a terror to his nurses who must watch his safety at peril of their lives. Though he must be protected, she did not like him thwarted; he must learn from the beginning that he was a king.
Perdikkas called on her every few days; he was the King’s guardian, as he reminded her whenever they fell out, which happened often. He was offended that the child shrank from him; it came, he said, of never seeing any other man. “His father, you should remember, was not reared among eunuchs.”
“Among my people they leave the harem at five, and still make warriors.”
“However, he beat them. That is why you are here.”
“How dare you,” she cried, “call me a captive of the spear! You who were our wedding guest! Oh, if he were here!”
“You may well wish that,” Perdikkas said, and left to visit his other ward.
When the army made camp, Philip had his tent just as before. Eurydike, as became a lady of rank, had her wagon; and in this she slept. It lacked Roxane’s splendors; but, as she had not seen them, she found it comfortable, and even handsome when her dowry things were set out. It had a roomy locker; and in this, disguised in a roll of blankets, at the hour of departure she had concealed her arms.
Philip was quite happy with these arrangements. He would have been gravely disconcerted by her presence in his tent at night; she might even have wanted Konon to go. In the daytime he was delighted to have her company; would often ride beside her wagon, and point out the sights they passed. He had traversed this whole route in the train of Alexander, and from time to time something would jog an inconsequent flash of memory. He had been encamped for months before the huge walls of Tyre.
In the evening, she dined with him in his tent. She hated at first to watch him eat, but with instruction he improved a little. Sometimes at sunset, if the camp was near the shore, she would walk with him, guarded by Konon, helping him to look for stones and shells; and then she talked to him, telling the legends of the royal house of Macedon she had heard from Kynna, right back to the boy who took the sunbeam for his wages. “You and I,” she said, “will be King and Queen there soon.”
A dim anxiety stirred in his eyes. “But Alexander told me …”
“That was because he was King himself. All that is over. You are the King. You must listen to me, now that we are married. I will tell you what we can do.”
They had passed the Sinai, and in the lands of Egypt made camp by the flat green coast. A few miles ahead was the ancient port of Pelusion; beyond that, the spread-fingered Delta of the Nile, webbed with its intricate veins of canal and stream. Beyond the Nile was Alexandria.
Among the date-palms and little black irrigation canals and clumps of tall papyrus, the army spread itself restlessly. The warm dry wind from the southern sand was just beginning; the Nile was low, the crops stood deep in the rich silt, the patient oxen toiled at the wooden water-wheels. By the elephant-lines, the mahouts stripped off their dhotis to wash their children in the canal, gaily splashing them as they showered themselves with their trunks after the hot trudge across Sinai. The camels, drinking prodigiously, refilled their secret storage tanks; the soldiers’ women washed their clothes and their children. The sutlers went out to find supplies. The soldiers prepared for war.
Perdikkas and his staff scanned the terrain. He had been here with Alexander; but that was eleven years back, and for the last two, Ptolemy had been making himself at home. The land’s long vistas showed where, at vital points of access, where a mound or a rocky outcrop offered foundation, stout forts of brick or timber had appeared. He could get no further coastwise; Pelusion was well defended by the salt-marsh between. He must strike south, below the meshes of the Delta.
The main camp must stay here. He would take a mobile force, light and unencumbered. Alexander had taught him that. He rode back to his tent in the quick-falling dusk which the breath of the desert reddened, to make his plans.
Through the wide straggling camp, the cook-fires budded and bloomed; little fires of the women, big ones—for the nights were cold still—where twenty or thirty men would share their bean-soup and porridge, their bread and olives, with a relish of dates and cheese, washed down with rough wine.
It was in the hour between food and sleep, when men talked idly, told tales or sang, that the voices began to sound around the camp, just beyond the reach of the firelight. They called softly, speaking good Macedonian; uttering familiar names, recalling old battles under Alexander, old fallen friends, old jokes. First unrebuffed, then hesitantly welcomed, the speaker would come up to the fire. Just a jar together for old times’ sake, seeing he’d brought one. Tomorrow, who could say, they might have to kill each other, but meantime, good health and no hard feelings. As for himself, he could only speak as he’d found; now Alexander was gone, Ptolemy was next best. He was a soldier and no one’s fool; but he looked after you, he had time for your troubles, and where else would you find that today? What wage, by the way, was Perdikkas paying veterans? What? (A shake of the head, a long contemptuous whistle.)
“He promised you loot, I suppose? Oh, yes, it’s there; but not so you’ll ever get to it. This country’s murder to those who don’t know the waterways. Look out for the crocodiles; they’re bigger than in India, and cunning.”
To a growing audience, he would go on to the comforts and pleasures of Alexandria, the shipping from everywhere, the good fresh food, the wineshops and the girls, the good air all the year round; and Alexander to bring the city luck.
The wine-jar emptied, his mission done, the visitor would slip away, his footfalls merging into the uncanny noises of the Egyptian night. As he threaded his way back to his fort, he would reflect comfortably that he’d not given them a word of a lie, and doing old friends a kindness was a very good way of earning a hundred drachmas.
Perdikkas made his last camp a little above the wrist of the Nile, from which the fingers of the Delta spread northwards. The noncombatants he had brought thus far would await him; among them the Kings, whom he wanted under his eye. From here he would make his march towards the river.
They watched him and his soldiers go into the shimmer of morning mist, horse and foot, the pack-mules with the rations, the camel-train with the parts for the catapults, the elephants plodding after. For a long time they grew smaller in the flat distance, vanishing at last into a low horizon of tamarisk and palm.
Pacing the royal tent, Eurydike waited restlessly for news. Konon had found an escort, and taken Philip riding. She too had liked to ride, free on the hills of Macedon, sitting astride; but she had to remember, now, what would be acceptable in a queen. Perdikkas had told her so.
Now that for the first time she was with an army in the field, all her training and her nature rebelled at being laid aside with slaves and women. Her marriage she had felt as a grotesque necessity, something to be managed, altering nothing of herself; even more, now, she felt women an alien species, imposing no laws upon her.
Over by her wagon, her two maids sat in its shade, chattering softly in Lydian. Both were slaves. She had been offered ladies-in-waiting, but had refused, telling Perdikkas she would not ask softly nurtured women to endure the hardships of the march. The truth was that she would not endure the tedium of female talk. To sex she was indifferent; in this respect she needed women even less than men. Her wedding night had killed the last of that. In adolescent dreams she had fought, like Hippolyta, at a hero’s side. Since then she had become ambitious, and her dreams were otherwise.