“It’s not right,” he said desperately, “what you’ve done. You know it’s not right. I was needed at home, you know that. Now I’ll have to leave them in their trouble, and take you back.”
“You can’t, you’ve eaten with me, we’re guest-friends.” He was reproving, not alarmed. “It’s wicked to betray a guest-friend.”
“You should have told me the right of it first, then. I can’t help it now. Come back you must and will. You’re no more than a child. If harm came to you, the King would have me crucified.”
The boy got up without haste, and strolled to his horse. Gyras started up, saw he was not untying it, and sat down again.
“He won’t kill you if I come back. If I die, you’ll have plenty of time to run away. I don’t suppose he’d kill you anyway. Think about me, instead. If you do anything to get me sent home before I’m ready, if you try to ride back or send a message, then I shall kill you. And that you can be sure of.”
He had turned from the horse with lifted arm. Gyras looked along a javelin, balanced and poised. The narrow leaflike blade shone blue with honing, the point looked like a needle.
“Keep still, Gyras. Sit just as you are, don’t move. I’m quick, you know, everyone knows it. I can throw before you can do anything. I don’t want you for my first man. It wouldn’t be enough, I should still have to take another in battle. But you will be, if you try to stop me now.”
Gyras looked at his eyes. He had faced such eyes through helmet-slits. He said, “Now, come, now, you don’t mean that.”
“No one will even know I did it. I shall just leave your body in that thicket, for the wolves and kites. You’ll never be buried, or given your rites to set you free.” His voice grew rhythmic. “And the shades of the dead will not let you cross the river to join their company, but you will wander alone forever before the wide gates of Hades’ house. No, don’t move.”
Gyras sat immobile. It gave him time to think. Though ignorant of the supper party, he knew about the King’s new wedding, and those before. There was already a boy from one of them. Folk said it had started bright enough, but had turned out an idiot, no doubt poisoned by the Queen. Maybe she had only bribed the nurse to drop it on its head. Maybe it was just a natural. But there might be others. If young Alexander wanted to make himself a man ahead of time, one could see why.
“Well?” said the boy. “Will you pledge yourself? I can’t stand like this all day.”
“What I’ve ever done to deserve this of the gods, they only know. What do you want me to swear to?”
“Not to get word to Pella of me. To tell no one my name without my leave. Not to keep me from going into battle, or get anyone else to do it. You must swear all that, and call down a death-curse on yourself if you break your oath.”
Gyras felt himself flinch. He wanted no such compacts with a witch’s son. The boy lowered his weapon but kept the thong in his fingers, twisted for a throw. “You’ll have to do it. I don’t want you creeping up to bind me when I’m asleep. I could sit up to watch, but it would be stupid before a battle. So if you want to come out of this wood alive, you’ll have to swear.”
“And what’s to become of me after?”
“If I live I’ll see you right. You must chance my dying, that’s war.” He reached into his leather saddlebag, looking over his shoulder at the still unsworn Gyras, and took out a piece of meat. It smelled high, not having been fresh when it left Pella. “This is from a haunch of sacrifice,” he said, slapping it down upon a boulder. “I knew we should have to do this. Come here. Lay your hand on it. Have you respect for oaths before the gods?”
“Yes.” His hand was so chilly that the dead goat-flesh felt quite warm.
“Then say this after me.”
The oath was elaborate and exact, the death-fate invoked was ghastly. The boy was well versed in such things, and had on his own account a ready awareness of loopholes. Gyras finished binding himself as he was told, and went to swill his bloody hand in the running stream. The boy sniffed at the meat. “I don’t think this is fit to eat, even if we were to waste time making fire.” He tossed it away, holstered his javelin, and came back to Gyras’ side. “Well, that’s done, now we can go on like friends. Let’s finish eating, while you tell me about the war.”
Passing his hand across his brow, Gyras began to recite his kinsmen’s injuries. “No, I know about that. How many are you, how many are they? What kind of country is it? Have you horses?”
Their track threaded green hills, steadily rising. Grass gave way to bracken and thyme, the track wound past pine woods and thickets of arbutus. The ranges heaved up all round them; they met mountain air, with its life-giving holy pureness. They entered the open secrecy of the heights.
Gyras traced back the feud three generations. The boy, his first questions once answered, proved a good listener. Of his own affairs, he said only, “When I’ve taken my man, you must be my witness at Pella. The King didn’t take his man till he was fifteen. Parmenion told me so.”
Gyras planned to spend the last night of the journey with distant kinsmen, half a day’s ride from home. He pointed out their village, clinging to the edge of a gorge, with rocky slopes above it. There was a mule-track along the precipice; Gyras was for taking a good road round the slope, one of King Archelaos’; but the boy, having learned that the pass was just usable, insisted on going that way to see what it was like. Between the steep bends and giddy drops, he said, “If these are your clansmen, it’s no use our saying I’m your kin. Say I’m your commander’s son, come to learn about war. They can never claim you lied to them.”
Gyras readily agreed; even this would hint that the boy must be kept an eye on. He could do no more, on account of the death-fate. He was a believing man.
On a flattish shelf a few furlongs round about, between a broken hillside and the gorge, was the hamlet of Skopas, built of the brown stone which lay loose all round it, looking like an outcrop itself. On its open side was a stockade of boulders filled in with thorn-brush. Within, the coarse grass was full of cow-pats from the cattle that spent the night there. One or two small hairy horses were at graze; the rest would be out with the herders and hunters. Goats and some ragged sheep moved on the hill; a goat-boy’s piping sounded from above, like the call of some wild bird.
Above the pass, on a gnarled dead tree, was spiked a yellow skull, and a few bones left of a hand. When the boy asked about it, Gyras said, “That was a long time back, when I was a child. That was the man killed his own father.”
Their coming was the news of half a year. A horn was blown to tell the herdsmen; the oldest Skopian was carried in from the lair of still older rags and skins where he was waiting to die. In the headman’s house they were offered sweet small figs, and some turbid wine in the best, least chipped cups; people waited with ritual courtesy till they had done, before the questions began, about themselves, and the distant world. Gyras said the Great King had Egypt under his heel again; King Philip had been called in to set things to rights down in Thessaly, and was Archon there now, as good as King; it had put the southerners in a taking. And was it true, asked the headman’s brother, that he had taken a new wife, and put the Epirote Queen away?
Aware of a stillness more piercing than all the voices, Gyras said that this was a pack of lies. The King as he got new lands in order might honor this lord or that by taking a daughter into his house; to Gyras’ mind, they were by way of a kind of hostage. As for Queen Olympias, she stood in high respect as the mother of the King’s heir, a credit to both his parents. Having got off this speech, sweated over in silence some hours before, Gyras cut off comment by asking in his turn for news.