The child nodded, like one to whom all has been made clear. “He had to do them, to show he was the best.”
Agis missed these words. He had heard at last, along the passage, the captain of the night guard, going his rounds.
“No one’s been by, sir,” he explained. “I can’t think what the nurse can have been about. The child was blue with cold, running about the Palace mother-naked. He says he’s looking for his snake.”
“Lazy bitch of a woman. I’ll shake up some slave-girl to go in and rouse her. It’s too late to disturb the Queen.”
He strode rattling off. Agis hoisted the child across his shoulder, patting his buttocks. “Bed for you, Herakles, and not before time.”
The child wriggled down, to clasp both arms round his neck. Agis had sheltered his wounds and not betrayed them. Nothing was too good for such a friend. He shared his secret, since it was all he had to give.
“If my Tyche comes back, tell him where I’ve gone. He knows my name.”
Ptolemy, known as the son of Lagos, cantered his new chestnut towards the lake of Pella; there was good riding-land along the shore. The horse was a gift from Lagos, who had grown fonder of him with the years, though his childhood had been less happy. He was eighteen, a dark big-boned youth whose strong profile would grow craggy in later life. He had speared his boar, and could sit at table with the men; had killed his man in a border skirmish, and changed his boy’s waist-cord for a red leather sword belt with a horn-handled dagger in its slot. It was agreed he brought Lagos credit. In the end they had done pretty well by one another; and the King had done well by both.
Between the pine woods and the lake, he saw Alexander waving to him, and rode that way. He was fond of the boy, who seemed to belong nowhere: too bright for the seven-year-olds, though not yet seven; too small for the older boys. He came running through the marshland, hard-caked with summer around its scrubby reeds; his huge dog rooted after voles, coming back to push its dirty nose in his ear, which it could do with both forepaws on the ground.
“Hup!” said the youth, and hoisted him in front on the cloth saddle-square. They trotted along in search of a stretch to gallop. “Is that dog of yours still growing?”
“Yes. He’s not big enough for his paws.”
“You were right; he’s Molossian both sides sure enough. He’s growing his mane.”
“It was just about here, where we are now, the man was going to drown him.”
“When you don’t know the sire, they don’t always pay for rearing.”
“He said he was rubbish; he had a stone tied round him.”
“Someone got bitten in the end, or so I heard. I shouldn’t like a bite from that dog.”
“He was too little to bite. I did it. Look, we can go.”
The dog, glad to stretch its great legs, raced by them along the broad lagoon which linked Pella with the sea. As they galloped full-out along its verge, mallards and gulls, dangle-foot herons and cranes, came beating and honking from the sedges, startled by their thunder. The boy in his high clear voice sang loudly the paean of the Companion Cavalry, a fierce crescendo tuned to the rhythm of the charge. His face was flushed, his fair hair fluttered from the peak upon his brow, his grey eyes looked blue, he shone.
Ptolemy slowed to breathe the horse, and extolled its virtues. Alexander replied in terms as expert as a groom’s. Ptolemy, who sometimes felt responsible, said, “Does your father know you spend so much time with the soldiers?”
“Oh, yes. He said Silanos could teach me throwing at the mark, and Menestas could take me hunting. I only go with my friends.”
Least said, then, soonest mended. Ptolemy had heard before that the King preferred even rough company for the boy, to leaving him all day with his mother. He flicked the horse to a canter, till a stone lodged in its frog and he had to dismount and see to it. The voice of the boy above him said, “Ptolemy. Is it true you’re really my brother?”
“What?” His start freed the horse; it began to trot away. The boy, who had at once got hold of the reins, pulled it firmly up again. But the young man, disconcerted, walked at its head without mounting. Perceiving something amiss, the boy said soberly, “They were saying it in the guardroom.”
They paced on in silence. The boy, sensing consternation more than anger, waited gravely.
Ptolemy said at length, “They may; but they don’t say it to me. Nor must you. I’d have to kill a man if he said it.”
“Why?”
“Well, one must, that’s all.”
There was no answer. Ptolemy saw with dismay that the boy was bitterly wounded. It was something he had not thought of.
“Come,” he said awkwardly, “a big growing boy like you, if you don’t know why…Of course I’d gladly be your brother, that’s nothing to do with it, that’s not it. But my mother’s married to Father. It would mean I was a bastard. You know what that is.”
“Yes,” said Alexander, who knew it was a deadly insult.
Sensing confusion if not ignorance, Ptolemy did a brother’s duty. His blunt questions got blunt answers; the boy had used his ears among his guardroom friends. It seemed, though, that he thought the birth of offspring called for some further magic. The young man, having dealt sensibly with the matter, was surprised by the long intent silence at the end.
“What is it? It’s the way we are all born, nothing wrong with it, the gods made us so. But women must only do it with their husbands, or the child’s a bastard. That’s why the man wanted to drown your dog: for fear he’d not run true to strain.”
“Yes,” said the boy, and returned to his thoughts.
Ptolemy felt distressed. In his childhood, when Philip had been only a younger son and a hostage too, he had been made to suffer; later he had ceased to be ashamed. If his mother had been unmarried he could have been acknowledged, and would not have been sorry. It was a matter of the decencies; he felt he had treated the boy meanly, not to have made this clear.
Alexander was looking straight ahead. His dirty childish hands kept a managing grip on the reins, minding their own business, making no demand on his thought. Their capacity, so far beyond their growth, approached the freakish; it gave an uneasy feeling. Through his face’s puppy roundness, a gem-clear profile already began to show. Ptolemy thought, The image of his mother, nothing of Philip at all.
A thought struck him like a thunderflash. Ever since he had been eating with the men, he had been hearing tales about Queen Olympias. Strange, turbulent, uncanny, wild as a Thracian maenad, able if she was crossed to put the Eye on you: fittingly the King had met her in a cave by torchlight, at the Mysteries of Samothrace; had been mad for her at first sight, even before he knew what house she came of; and had brought her, with a useful treaty of alliance, in triumph home. In Epiros, it was said, until quite lately women had ruled without men. Sometimes the drums and cymbals sounded all night in her pine grove, and strange piping came from her room. It was said she coupled with serpents; old women’s tales, but what happened in the grove? Did the boy, so long her shadow, know more than he should? Had it only now come home to him?
As if he had turned a stone from a cave-mouth of the Underworld, letting loose a swarm of bat-squeaking shades, there passed through Ptolemy’s mind a score of bloody tales going back for centuries, of struggles for the throne of Macedon: tribes fighting for High Kingship, kindred killing kindred to be High King; wars, massacres, poisonings; treacherous spears in the hunting-field, knives in the back, in the dark, in the bed of love. He was not without ambition; but the thought of plunging in that stream made his marrow cold. Dangerous guesswork, and what proof could there ever be? Here was the boy in trouble. Forget the rest.