A shocked pause fell between them. Kleopatra, unheeded, ran outside. Olympias flung herself back into her chair, and burst into a storm of tears.
He went up presently, as so often before, and stroked her hair. She wept on his breast, murmuring of the cruelties she suffered, crying that she would no longer wish to see the light of day if he turned against her. He said that he loved her, that she knew it well enough. Much time passed in such words. In the end, he hardly knew how, it was decided he should receive the sophist himself, with Leonidas and Phoinix; and a little after, he went away. He felt neither defeated nor victorious, merely drained.
At the stair-foot Hephaistion was waiting. He happened to be there, as he happened to have a ball handy if Alexander wanted a game, or water if he was thirsty; not by calculation, but in a constant awareness by which no smallest trifle was missed. Now, when he came down the stairs with a shut mouth and blue lines under his eyes, Hephaistion received some mute signal he understood, and fell into step beside him. They went up along the path which wandered into the wood; in an open glade was an old fallen oak-bole with orange fungus and a lace of ivy. Hephaistion sat down with his back to it. Alexander, in a silence unbroken since setting out, came and settled into his arm. After a while he sighed; no other word was spoken for some time.
“They claim to love you,” he said at length. “And they eat you raw.”
Words made Hephaistion anxious; it had been simpler and safer to do without. “It’s that children belong to them, but men have to go away. That’s what my mother says. She says she wants me to be a man, and yet she doesn’t.”
“Mine does. Whatever she likes to say.” He edged himself closer; like an animal, Hephaistion thought, which is reassured by handling. It was nothing more for him. No matter, whatever he needed he must have. The place was solitary, but he spoke softly as it the birds were spies. “She needs a man to stand up for her. You know why.”
“Yes.”
“She’s always known I shall do that. But I saw today, she thinks when my time comes I shall let her reign for me. We didn’t speak of it. But she knows that I told her no.”
Hephaistion’s back prickled with danger, but his heart was full of pride. He had never hoped to be called in alliance against this mighty rival. He expressed his allegiance, but without risking words.
“She cried. I made her cry.”
He was still looking quite pale. Words must be found. “She cried too when you were born. But it had to be. So has this.”
There was a long pause; then, “You know that other thing I told you?”
Hephaistion assented. They had not spoken of it since.
“She promised to tell me everything one day. Sometimes she says one thing, sometimes another…I dreamed I caught a sacred snake and I was trying to make it speak to me, but it kept escaping and turning away.”
Hephaistion said, “Perhaps it wanted you to follow it.”
“No, it had a secret, but it wouldn’t speak…She hates my father. I think I’m the only one she ever truly loved. She wants me all hers, none of me his. Sometimes I’ve wondered…is that all?”
In the sun-steeped wood, Hephaistion felt a fine tremor running through him. Anything he needed, he must have. “The gods will reveal it. They revealed it to all the heroes. But your mother…in any case…she would be mortal.”
“Yes, that’s true.” He paused, turning it over. “Once when I was by myself on Mount Olympos, I had a sign. I vowed to keep it forever between me and the god.” He made a little movement, asking to be released, and stretched his whole frame in a long shuddering sigh. “Sometimes I forget all this for months on end. Sometimes I think of it day and night. Sometimes I think, unless I find out the truth of it, I shall go mad.”
“That’s stupid. You’ve got me now. Do you think I’d let you go mad?”
“I can talk to you. As long as you’re there…”
“I promise you before God, I’ll be there as long as I’m alive.”
They looked up together into the tall clouds, whose scarcely visible drift was like stillness in the sky of the long summer day.
Aristotle, son of Nikomachos the physician of the line of the Asklepiads, gazed round him as the ship rowed into harbor, trying to recall the scenes of boyhood. It was a long time; everything looked strange. He had had a quick smooth voyage from Mytilene, sole passenger in a fast war-galley sent to fetch him. It was no surprise, therefore, to see a mounted escort waiting on the wharf.
He hoped to find its leader helpful. He was well informed already, but no knowledge was ever trivial; truth was the sum of all its parts.
A gull swooped over the ship. With the reflex of many years’ self-training, he noted its species, the angle of its flight, its wing-spread, its droppings, the food it dived for. The lines of the vessel’s bow-wave had changed with its lessening speed; a mathematical ratio formed in his mind, he stored it where he would find it again when he had time. He never needed to carry tablets and stylos with him.
Through the cluster of small craft, he could not see the escort clearly. The King would have sent someone responsible. He prepared his questions; those of a man formed by his era, when philosophy and politics were totally engaged, when no man of intellect could conceive for his thought a higher value than that of being physician to Hellas’ sickness. Barbarians, by definition, were hopeless cases; as well try to make a hunchback straight. Hellas must be healed to guide the world.
Two generations had seen each decent form of government decay into its own perversion: aristocracy into oligarchy, democracy to demagogy, kingship to tyranny. With mathematical progression, according to the number who shared the evil the deadweight against reform increased. To change a tyranny had lately been proved impossible. To change an oligarchy called for power and ruthlessness, destructive to the soul. To change a demagogy, one must become a demagogue and destroy one’s mind as well. But to reform a monarchy, one need only mold one man. The chance to be a king-shaper, the prize every philosopher prayed for, had fallen to him.
Plato had risked death for it in Syracuse, once with the tyrant father, again with the trivial son. He had thrown away half his last harvest-time, sooner than refuse the challenge he himself had first defined. It was the aristocrat and soldier in him; or maybe the dreamer. Far better have collected reliable data first, and saved the journey…Yet even this crisp thought evoked that formidable brooding presence; the old unease, the sense of something eluding the tools of measurement, defeating category and system, came hauntingly back with the summer scents of the Academy garden.
Well, in Syracuse he had failed. Maybe for want of good stuff to work on; but his failure had resounded through all Greece. And before the end, his mind must have been failing too, to bequeath the School to Speusippos, that barren metaphysician. At all events, Speusippos had been eager to give up even that, and come to Pella. The King cooperative, the boy intelligent and strong-willed, without known vices, the heir to yearly increasing power; no wonder that Speusippos had been tempted, after the squalors and miseries of Syracuse. But Speusippos had been turned down. Demosthenes and his faction had achieved this if nothing else, that no one from Athens had stood a moment’s chance.
Good friends in Mytilene had praised his courage in braving the backward and violent northland; he had brushed it aside with his astringent smile. His roots were here; in the air of these mountains he had known childhood happiness, tasting their beauty while his elders’ minds were clenched in the cares of war. As for violence, he was no novice, having lived under the shadow of Persian power. If there he had succeeded in making of a man with so dark a past a friend and a philosopher, he need hardly fear failure with an unformed boy.