As the lumbering baggage train began to follow the soldiers, she looked about her at the horizons of the land she still meant to rule. Over the near hills was her father’s house where Kynna had taught her war. She would keep it for her hunting-lodge, her private place, when she was Queen.
She looked down idly at the grandiose front of the palace with its painted pediment and columns of colored marble. On the broad steps the tutor Kebes came down, the child Alexander beside him, trailing a wooden hobby-horse by its scarlet bridle. The child of the barbarian, who must not reign. How would Kassandros deal with that? She frowned.
Roxane behind her curtains grew weary of watching wagons, a sight too long familiar. Her eyes wandered. There on a balcony, brazenly showing herself to the world like a harlot looking for trade, stood Philip’s mannish wife. What was she staring at so fiercely? Roxane’s ear caught the sound of her own child’s piping chatter. Yes, it was at him that she was looking! Swiftly, Roxane made the sign against the evil eye, and ran to her casket. Where was the silver charm her mother had given her against the malice of harem rivals? He must put it on. A letter was beside it, with the royal seal of Epiros. She reread it, and knew what she must do.
Kebes proved easy to persuade. The times were doubtful; so was his own future. He could well believe that the son of Alexander was in danger, and not only from his mother’s spoiling. He had softened to Roxane; she might need protection too. It was eleven years since her beauty had hit Alexander like a fiery arrow across a torchlit hall; but her looks had been tended, her legend lived in them still. It seemed to the young man that he too could enter the legend, rescuing the woman Alexander had loved, and his only child.
It was he who chose the litter-bearers and the armed escort of four; who swore them to secrecy, who bought the mules, who found a messenger to ride ahead with news of their coming. Two days later, just before dawn, they were on the mountain road making for Dodona.
The royal house had a steep-pitched roof to throw off the winter snows. Roofs in Molossia gave no platform for watchers. Olympias stood in the window of the King’s bedchamber, which she had taken when her daughter left it. Her eyes were fixed on a curl of smoke from the nearest hilltop. On three heights in an eastward line she had had beacons laid, to signal the approach of her daughter-in-law and grandson. Now she sent for the captain of the palace guard, and ordered him to meet them with an escort.
Olympias had assented to her age. In the month of mourning for Alexander she had washed the paint from her face, and covered her hair with a dark veil. When the month was over, and she put the veil away, her hair was silky white. She was sixty, and lean where she had been slim. Her fine redhead’s skin was brittle like pressed petals; but lacking color the proud bone showed more. Under their white brows, the smoky grey eyes could still pale dangerously.
She had waited long for this day. As the emptiness of loss came home to her, she had craved to touch this last living vestige of him; but the child was unborn, there was no remedy for waiting. With the wars’ delays, her longing dulled and earlier doubts returned. The mother was a barbarian, a campaign wife, whose son he had meant to pass over—in a secret letter he had told her so—if the Great King’s daughter had borne a boy. Would anything remain of him in this stranger?
When the child reached Macedon, her feud with Antipatros had left her only two ways to go back there, submission or war. The first was unthinkable; against the second Eumenes, on whom she must depend, had warned her. Then Roxane had written begging for a refuge, and she had answered, “Come.”
Next day the cavalcade arrived; the tough Molossian troopers on their shaggy ponies, two disheveled waiting-women on stumbling donkeys, a covered litter with its mules. Her eyes on the litter, she did not see at first the young man who carried across his horse’s withers a six-year-old boy. He lifted him down and spoke to him quietly, pointing. Resolutely, on legs more a boy’s than a child’s, he walked up the steps, gave her a soldier’s salute, and said, “May you live, Grandmother. I am Alexander.”
She took him between her hands while the company made respectful gestures, and kissed his brow, dirty with travel, and looked again. Kebes had fulfilled his trust. Alexander’s son was no longer the podgy nursling of the harem tent. Olympias saw a beautiful young Persian, fine-boned and dark-eyed. The hair was cut sloping to the nape, as Alexander used to wear it, but it was straight, heavy, and raven-black. He looked up at her from under his fine dark brows and his blue-brown, thick-lashed eyelids; and though there was nothing of him anywhere that was Macedonian, she saw Alexander in his upward, deep-set gaze. It was too much, it took her a few moments to gather herself together. Then she took his pale slender hand. “Welcome, my child. Come, bring me to your mother.”
The roads from Pella down into Greece had been smoothed since old Philip’s reign for the swift march of armies. The roads to the west were rough. Despite the difference in distance, therefore, it was at about the same time that Polyperchon in the Peloponnese, and Olympias in Dodona, got news from Macedon that Eurydike had assumed the regency.
Polyperchon got, in addition, an order signed by her, directing him to hand over to Kassandros the Macedonian forces in the south.
Speechless for a while, the old soldier kept his head, offered the courier wine without disclosing the message, and asked for news. It seemed that the Queen had called Assembly, and addressed it with great spirit. The barbarian woman, she told them, had fled the land with her child, fearing the anger of the Macedonians; she would do well not to return. All who had known Alexander would testify that the child looked nothing like him. He had died before the birth, had never acknowledged the infant; there was no proof that he was the father. Whereas she herself had on both sides the Macedonian royal blood.
For a time, Assembly had been in doubt. But Nikanor, Kassandros’ brother, had given her his voice and the whole clan had come in with him. That had carried the vote. She was now giving audiences, receiving envoys and petitioners, and in all ways acting as reigning Queen.
Polyperchon thanked the man, rewarded and dismissed him, cursed to relieve his feelings, and sat down to think. He quickly decided what he himself would do; and, soon afterwards, what to do with Philip.
He had had hopes of him, if he could be removed from his wife’s control; but had soon learned better. At first, he had been so docile that it had seemed safe to produce him, set up impressively on a gold-canopied throne, for a delegation from Athens. In the midst of a speech he had guffawed at a rhetorical trope which, like a child, he had taken literally. Later, when Polyperchon had rebuked a speaker, the King had grabbed at his ceremonial spear; if Polyperchon had not grappled with him in front of everyone, the man would have been run through. “You said,” he had protested, “that he told lies.” The delegation had been dismissed too hastily, causing a political disaster and some lives.
It was now clear to Polyperchon that all Philip was good for was to hold the throne for Alexander’s son, who had better come of age quickly. As for Eurydike, her claim was plain usurpation.
Konon came when sent for, saluting woodenly. His silent “I told you so” had irked Polyperchon after the incident of the spear and several others. Good riddance to both of them. “I have decided,” he said, “to send back the King to Macedon.”
“Sir.” The general felt, reverberating from this blank surface, knowledge that the campaign had gone badly, that he had had to raise the important siege of Megalopolis, that Kassandros still held the Piraeus and might well get Athens, in which event the Greek cities would join him. But that was irrelevant now.
“I will give you an escort. Tell the Queen that I am sending back the King in obedience to her wishes. That is all.”