He chose seldom to be formidable. Silence fell; the crowd divided to let him in. As it closed again, Alexander saw that the horse was restive.
The squires who had waited at table were talking in excited undertones. Alexander gave them a look; they should have been waiting for orders. The next hut was the lodging of all the body-squires; the doorway was full of heads. He called out, “Get armed. Be quick.”
Philip was wrestling with the horse. His voice, which had carried power, now sounded angry. The horse reared; there was a roar of abuse and cursing; it must have struck a man with its forefeet. Suddenly it gave a great scream, stood almost upright, and sank down, the King still doggedly clinging. Horse and man vanished into a threshing, shouting vortex.
Alexander ran to the armor-pegs on the wall, snatched his shield and helmet—the corselet would take too long—and called to the squires, “They’ve killed his horse under him. Come.” Soon outdistancing all the others, he ran without looking back. The Macedonians were pouring out of barracks. It was the next moments that counted.
At first he simply shoved at the mob, and it let him through. These were sightseers, or mere accretions, easily shifted by anyone who knew his own mind. “Let me pass. Let me through to the King.” He could hear the squeals of the dying horse, weakening to groans; no sound from his father. “Back, get back, let me pass. Make way, I want the King.”
“He wants his dad.” The first defiance; a square-shouldered, square-bearded Argive stood grinning in his way. “Look, here’s the cockalorum.” The last word choked off. His eyes and mouth gaped, a retch came up from his throat. Alexander with an expert jerk freed his sword.
A gap appeared; he could see the still twitching horse, on its side, his father lying with one leg under it, unmoving; over him stood an Argive with lifted spear, irresolute, waiting for encouragement. Alexander ran him through.
The crowd heaved and swayed, as the Macedonians flung themselves at its edges. Alexander bestrode his father’s body, one leg braced against the horse which had stiffened in death; he yelled, “The King!” to guide the rescuers. All round him, uncertain men were urging each other to strike. For anyone behind him, he was a gift.
“This is the King. I will kill the first man who touches him.” Some were scared; he fixed his eyes on the man they had been looking at for guidance; he stuck out his jaw and mumbled, but his eyes were flickering. “Get back all of you. Are you mad? Do you think if you kill him or me, you can get out of Thrace alive?” Someone said they had got out of worse places; but no one moved. “Our men are either side of you, and the enemy has the harbor. Are you tired of life?”
Some warning, a gift of Herakles, made him whip round. He hardly saw the face of the man whose spear was lifted, only the exposed throat. His stab severed the windpipe; the man reeled back, bloody fingers clawing at the hissing wound. He swung back to confront the others; in this instant the scene had changed, he saw instead the backs of the royal squires, shields locked, heaving off the Argives. Hephaistion came breasting through like a swimmer through surf, and stood to shield his back. It was over, in about as long as it would have taken him to finish his half-eaten fish.
He looked round. He had not a scratch; he had been a stroke ahead each time. Hephaistion spoke to him and he answered smiling. He was shining and calm at the center of his mystery, the godlike freedom of killing fear. Fear lay dead at his feet.
Loud voices, expert in command, cleft the confusion; the Argive general, and Parmenion’s deputy, roared at their troops in familiar tones. Hangers-on turned swiftly to spectators; the center fell apart, revealing a scatter of dead and wounded; all the men near the fallen King were arrested and led away. The horse was dragged aside. The riot was over. When shouts began again, they came from those on the outskirts who could not see, spreading rumors or asking news.
“Alexander! Where’s our boy? Have those whores’ sons killed him?” Then, running the other way in a deep bass counterpoint, “The King, they killed the King! The King is dead!” and higher, as if in answer, “Alexander!”
He stood, a point of stillness in all the clamor, looking beyond it into the blue dazzling sky.
There were other voices, down by his knees. “Sir, sir, how are you?” they were saying. “Sir?” He blinked a moment, as if awaking from sleep; then knelt down with the others and touched the body, saying, “Father? Father?”
He could feel at once that the King was breathing.
There was blood in his hair. His sword was half out; he must have felt for it as he was struck, perhaps with a pommel by someone whose nerve had failed him to use the edge. His eyes were closed, and he came limply with their lifting hands. Alexander, remembering a lesson of Aristotle’s, pulled back the lid of his good eye. It closed again with a twitch.
“A shield,” Alexander said. “Roll him gently. I’ll take his head.”
The Argives had been marched off; the Macedonians crowded round, asking if the King was alive or dead. “He is stunned,” said Alexander. “He will be better presently. He has no other wound. Moschion! The herald is to give that out. Sippas! Order the catapults to fire a volley. Look at the enemy gaping on the wall; I want the fun knocked out of them. Leonnatus, I’ll be with my father till he’s himself again. Bring anything to me.”
They laid the King on his bed. Alexander drew a bloodstained hand from holding his head, to settle it on the pillow. Philip groaned, and opened his eyes.
The senior officers, who had felt entitled to crowd in, assured him all was well, all the men in hand. Alexander standing by the bedhead said to one of the squires, “Bring me water, and a sponge.”
“It was your son, King,” said someone, “your son who saved you.” Philip turned his head and said weakly, “So? Good boy.”
“Father, did you see which of them struck you?”
“No,” said Philip, his voice strengthening. “He took me from behind.”
“Well, I hope I killed him. I killed one there.” His grey eyes dwelt deeply on his father’s face.
Philip blinked dimly, and sighed. “Good boy. I remember nothing; nothing till I woke up here.”
The squire came up with the water-bowl and held it out. Alexander took the sponge, and washed his hand clean of blood, going over it carefully, two or three times. He turned away; the squire paused with the bowl, at a loss, then went round to sponge the King’s hair and brow. He had supposed that this was what the Prince had meant it for.
By evening, though sick and giddy if he moved, Philip could give orders. The Argives were marched off on exchange to Kypsela. Alexander was cheered wherever he was seen; men touched him for luck, or for his virtue to rub off on them, or merely for the sake of touching him. The besieged, encouraged by these disorders, came out on the wall at dusk and attacked a siege tower. Alexander led out a party and beat them off. The doctor announced that the King was mending. One of the squires sat up with him. It was midnight before Alexander got to bed. Though he ate with his father, he had his own lodging. He was a general now.
There was a scratch on the door, in a familiar rhythm. He folded back the blanket, and moved over. Hephaistion had known, when this tryst was made, that what Alexander wanted was to talk. He could always tell.
They mulled over the fight, talking softly into the pillow. Presently they fell quiet; in the pause they could hear the sounds of the camp, and, from the distant ramparts of Perinthos, the night watch passing the bell along from man to man, the proof of wakefulness. “What is it?” Hephaistion whispered.
In the dim glimmer of the window, he saw the shine of Alexander’s eyes coming close to his. “He says he remembers nothing. He’d already come to himself when we picked him up.”
Hephaistion, who had once been hit by a stone from a Thracian wall, said, “He’ll have forgotten.”