Eurydike, standing on an outcrop to survey the field, pointed this out to Derdas. The enemy flanks were on broken, brushy ground which would favor infantry. “Yes,” he said, “if they let our infantry get there. Polyperchon may be no”—he just stopped himself from saying Alexander—“but he knows better than that.”
The old man could be clearly seen on the opposite slope, in a clump of horsemen, conferring. Eurydike’s men pointed him out to one another, not feeling him a great menace in himself, but bringing the comfortless thought that they were about to fight old comrades.
“Nikanor.” (He had left his contingent to join the council of war.) “There is still no signal from the beacon?”
He shook his head. The beacon had been laid on a peak behind them, commanding a view of the southern pass. “Without a doubt Kassandros would be here, if something had not prevented him. Perhaps he has been attacked upon the march. You know the confusion in the Greek states, thanks to Polyperchon.”
Derdas made no comment. He did not like Nikanor’s disposition of his men, but this was no time to say so.
Eurydike stood on the tall flat rock, shading her eyes to look across at the enemy. In her bright helmet and gold-studded cuirass, her knee-high kilt of scarlet wool above her shining greaves, she looked a gallant figure. Derdas thought to himself that she looked like a boy actor in a play, masked to enact the young Achilles at Aulis. It was she, however, who first saw the herald.
He emerged from the knot around Polyperchon, and rode down towards them; unarmed, bareheaded, with a white wool fillet round his grey hair, carrying a white rod bound with olive; a man with presence.
At the stream-bed he dismounted, to let his horse pick its way over the stones. Having crossed, he walked a few paces forward and waited. Eurydike and Derdas came down to meet him. She turned to Nikanor to join them, but he had disappeared into the mass.
The herald had voice as well as presence, and the curve of the slope threw up his words like the hollow bowl of a theater.
“To Philip son of Philip, to Eurydike his wife, and to all the Macedonians!” He sat at ease on his strong stocky horse, a ward of the gods, protected by immemorial custom. “In the name of Polyperchon, guardian of both the Kings.” He paused, just long enough for suspense. “Also,” he added slowly, “in the name of Queen Olympias, daughter of King Neoptolemos of Molossia; wife of Philip, King of the Macedonians; and mother of Alexander.”
In the silence, a dog could be heard to bark in a village half a mile away.
“I am charged to say this to the Macedonians. Philip found you pressed by enemies and torn with civil wars. He gave you peace, reconciled your factions, and made you masters of all Greece. And by Queen Olympias herself he was the father of Alexander, who made the Macedonians masters of the world. She asks you, have you forgotten all these benefits, that you will drive out Alexander’s only son? Will you take up arms against Alexander’s mother?”
He had thrown his voice past Eurydike and her staff, to the silent ranks of men. When he ceased, he wheeled round his mount, and pointed.
Another rider was coming from the group above. On a black horse, in a black robe and veil, Olympias paced slowly down towards the stream.
She rode astride, in a wide skirt that fell to the tops of her crimson riding-boots. The headstall of her horse glittered with gold rosettes and silver plaques, the spoils of Susa and Persepolis. She herself wore no ornaments. A little way above the stream, where she could be seen by everyone, and where Eurydike had to look up to her, she drew rein and threw back the dark veil from her white hair. She said nothing. Her deep-set grey eyes swept the hushed murmuring ranks.
Eurydike was aware of the distant gaze pausing upon her. A light breeze floated back the black veil, stirred the horse’s long mane and ruffled the snowy hair. The face was still. Eurydike felt a shiver go through her. It was like being glanced at by Atropos, the third Fate, who cuts the thread.
The herald, who had been forgotten, now suddenly raised his loud voice again. “Macedonians! There before you is the mother of Alexander. Will you fight against her?”
There was a pause, like the pause of a rearing wave before it topples to break. Then a new sound began. It was a slight rapping, at first, of wood on metal. Then it was a spreading rattle, a mounting beat; then, echoing back from along the hillside, a thunderous drumming, the banging of thousands of spear-shafts upon shields. With a united roar the royal army cried, “No!”
Eurydike had heard it before, though never so loudly. It had greeted her when she was voted Regent. For many long seconds, she thought they were defying the enemy, that the shouting was for her.
Across the stream, Olympias raised her arm in a regal gesture of acknowledgment. Then, with a beckoning movement, she turned her horse. She moved up the hill like a leader of warriors, who need not look back to be sure that they will follow.
As she went up in triumph, the whole prospect on the opposite slope fragmented. The royal army drawn up in its formations, the phalanx, the cavalry, the light-armed skirmishers, ceased to be an army, as a village struck by an earthquake ceases to be a street. There was just a mass of men, with horses heaving about among them; shouting to each other, gravitating to groups of friends or clansmen; the whole united only in a single disordered movement, going like landslide pebbles down towards the stream.
Eurydike was overwhelmed in it. When she began to shout orders, to exhort them, she was scarcely heard. Men jostled her unnoticing; those who saw her did not meet her eyes. Her horse grew restive in the crush and reared, she was afraid of being thrown and trampled.
An officer thrust through to her, held the horse and quieted it. She knew him, he was one of her partisans from the very first days in Egypt, a man about thirty, light-haired, with a skin still yellowed from some Indian fever. He looked at her with concern. Here at last, she thought, was a man in his right mind. “How can we rally them?” she cried. “Can you find me a trumpeter? We must call them back!”
He ran his hand over the horse’s sweating neck. Slowly, like a man explaining something simple to a child, which even a child must see, he said, “But, madam. That is Alexander’s mother.”
“Traitor!” She knew it was unjust, her anger belonged elsewhere. She had seen, at last, her real enemy. Not the terrible old woman on the black horse; she could be terrible only because of him, the glowing ghost, the lion-maned head on the silver drachmas, directing her fate from his golden bier.
“There’s no help for it,” said the man, forbearingly, but with little time to spare for her. “You don’t understand. You see, you never knew him.”
For a moment she grasped her sword; but one cannot kill a ghost. The jostling press below was beginning to cross the stream. Names were shouted, as the soldiers of Polyperchon welcomed back old friends.
He sighted a brother in the crush, and gave an urgent wave, before turning back to her. “Madam, you were too young, that’s all. You made a good try of it, but … There’s not a man wishes you harm. You’ve a fresh horse there. Make for the hills before her people cross over.”
“No!” she said. “Nikanor and the Antipatrids are over there on the left. Come, we’ll join them and fall back and hold Black Pass. They’ll never make peace with Olympias.”
He followed her eyes. “They won’t do that. But they’re off, you see.”
She saw, then, that the force on the heathery rise was moving. Its shining shields were facing the other way. Its head was dipping already over the skyline.
She looked round. The man had sought his brother, and vanished down the hill.
Dismounting, she held her horse, the only living thing that would still obey her. As the man had said, she was young. The despair she felt was not the grim resignation of Perdikkas, paying the price of failure. Both had played for power and lost; but Perdikkas had never put his stake upon love. She stood by the fretting horse, her throat choking, her eyes blinded with tears.