“You ought to have waited, before you dashed in alone, to see if we’d come up with you. You know you run faster than anyone else. I could have killed you for it, when we were milling in the doorway.”
“They were going to drop that rock there, look at the size of it. I knew you weren’t far off.”
Hephaistion was feeling the reaction, not only to his fears for Alexander, but to all he had seen and done. “Rock or no rock, you’d have gone in. It was written all over you. It’s only luck you’re alive.”
“It was the help of Herakles,” said Alexander calmly. “And hitting them quickly, before they could hit me.”
He had found this easier than he had foreseen. The best he had hoped from his constant weapon-practice had been some lessening of disadvantage, against seasoned men. Hephaistion, reading his thought, said, “These Thracians are peasants. They fight two or three times a year, in a cattle-raid or a brawl. Most of them are stupid, none of them are trained. Real soldiers, like your father’s men, would have cut you down before you were well inside.”
“Wait till they do it,” said Alexander sharply, “and tell me about it then.”
“You went in without me. You didn’t even look.”
Suddenly transformed, Alexander gave him a loving smile. “What’s the matter with you? Patroklos reproached Achilles for not fighting.”
“He was listened to,” said Hephaistion in a different voice.
From below in the fort, the wail of a woman keening rhythmically over some dead man broke off in a shriek of terror.
“He should call the men in,” Alexander said. “It’s enough. I know there was nothing else worth taking, but—”
They looked along the wall; but Philip had gone off on some other business.
“Alexander. Listen. It’s no use to be angry. When you’re a general, you’ll not be able to expose yourself like that. The King’s a brave man, but he doesn’t do it. If you’d been killed, it would have been like a battle won for Kersobleptes. And later, when you’re King…”
Alexander turned round, and riveted on him that gaze of peculiar intensity with which he told a secret. Dropping his voice, a needless caution in so much noise, he said, “I can never not do it. I know it, I’ve felt it, it’s the truth of the god. It’s then that I—”
A sound of panting breath, catching in shrill sobs, broke in on them. A young Thracian woman rushed in from the ramparts and, without looking right or left, dashed towards the wide parapet above the gate. It was some thirty feet from the ground. As she got her knee on the sill, Alexander jumped after and grasped her arm. She screamed, and clawed at him with her free hand, till Hephaistion caught it back. She stared into Alexander’s face with the fixity of a cornered animal, writhed suddenly free, crouched down and clutched his knees.
“Get up, we won’t harm you.” Alexander’s Thracian had been improved by his talks with Lambaros. “Don’t fear, get up. Let go.”
The woman gripped harder, pouring out a stream of half-smothered words as she pressed her face with its running eyes and nose against his bare leg.
“Get up,” he said again. “We won’t…” He had never learned the essential word. Hephaistion supplied a gesture of universal meaning, followed by a strongly negative sign.
The woman let go and sat back on her heels, rocking and wailing. She had red matted hair, and a dress of some coarse raw wool, torn at the shoulder. The front was splashed with blood; there were damp patches of leaked milk over the heavy breasts. She wrenched at her hair, and began to wail again. Suddenly she started, leaped to her feet, and flattened herself against the wall behind them. Footsteps approached; a thick breathless voice called, “I saw you, you bitch. Come here. I saw you.” Kassandros entered. His face was crimson, his freckled brow beaded with sweat. He charged blindly in, and stopped dead.
The girl, shouting out curses, entreaties, and the incomprehensible tale of her wrongs, ran up behind Alexander and grabbed his waist, holding him like a shield. Her hot breath was in his ear; her wet softness seemed to seep even through his corselet; he was half stifled with the rank female smell of dirty flesh and hair, blood, milk and sex. Pushing her arms away, he gazed at Kassandros with mystified repugnance.
“She’s mine,” panted Kassandros, with an urgency hardly capable of words. “You don’t want her. She’s mine.”
Alexander said, “No. She’s a suppliant, I’ve pledged her.”
“She’s mine.” He spoke as if the word must produce effect, staring across at the woman. Alexander looked him over, pausing at the linen kilt below his corselet. In a withdrawn distaste he said, “No.”
“I caught her once,” Kassandros insisted. “But she got away.” His face was plowed down one side with scratches.
“So you lost her. I found her. Go away yourself.”
Kassandros had not quite forgotten his father’s warnings. He kept his voice down. “You can’t interfere here. You’re a boy. You know nothing about it.”
“Don’t dare call him a boy!” said Hephaistion furiously. “He fought better than you did. Ask the men.”
Kassandros, who had blundered and hacked his way through the complex obstacles of battle, confused, harassed, and intermittently scared, recalled with hatred the enraptured presence cleaving the chaos, as lucid as a point of flame. The woman, supposing all this to be concerned with her, began to pour out another flood of Thracian. Above it Kassandros shouted, “He was looked after! Whatever fool thing he did, they were bound to follow him! He’s the King’s son. Or so they say.”
Stupid with anger, and looking at Hephaistion, he was an instant too late for Alexander, whose standing leap at his throat took him off balance and hurled him to the rugged floor. He threshed and flailed; Alexander, intent on choking him, took kicks and blows with indifference. Hephaistion hovered, not daring to help without leave. Something rushed past him from behind. It was the woman, whom they had all forgotten. She had snatched up a three-legged stool; missing Alexander by an inch, she brought it down in a side-sweep on Kassandros’ head. Alexander rolled out of the way; with a frenzied rage she began to beat Kassandros over the body, slamming him back whenever he tried to rise; taking both hands to it, as if she were threshing corn.
Hephaistion, who was becoming overwrought, burst out laughing. Alexander, regaining his feet, stood looking down, stone-cold. It was Hephaistion who said, “We must stop her. She’ll finish him off.”
Without moving, Alexander answered, “Someone killed her child. That’s its blood on her.”
Kassandros had begun to roar with pain. “If he dies,” said Hephaistion, “she’ll be stoned. The King couldn’t refuse. You pledged her.”
“Stop!” said Alexander in Thracian. Between them they got the stool away. She burst into wild weeping, while Kassandros rolled about on the cobbled floor.
“He’s alive,” said Alexander, turning away. “Let’s find someone reliable, and get her out of the fort.”
A little later, rumors reached King Philip that his son had thrashed Antipatros’ son in a fight over a woman. He said offhandedly, “Boys will be men, it seems.” The note of pride was too clear for anyone to risk taking it further.
Hephaistion, walking back with Alexander, said grinning, “He can hardly complain to Antipatros that you stood by and let a woman beat him.”
“He can complain where he likes,” said Alexander. “If he likes.” They had turned into the gate. A sound of groaning came from a house within the wall. Here on makeshift bedding the wounded lay; the doctor and his two servants were going to and fro. Hephaistion said, “Let him see properly to your arm.” It had started to bleed again, after the brawl in the gatehouse.
“There’s Peithon,” Alexander said, peering into the gloom with its buzzing flies. “I must thank him first.”