“I remember him,” said Hephaistion. “He came at you after you struck the first one down. You had your hands full already. So I took him on.”
There was a silence. Small frogs chirruped in the river shallows. A night bird sang liquidly. Behind them sounded the blurred chant of the komos.
“It’s war,” said Hephaistion. “They know they’d have done the same to us.”
“Oh yes. Yes, it is with the gods.”
He knelt down by the two bodies, and tried to compose the limbs; but they were set hard as wood; the eyes, when he had closed the lids, opened again to stare. Finally he dragged the man’s corpse over, till it lay by the youth’s with one stiff arm across it. Taking off his shoulder-cloak he spread it so that both faces were covered.
“Alexander. I think you should go back to the komos. The King will be missing you.”
“Kleitos can sing much louder.” He looked round at the still shapes, the dried blood blackened by moonlight, the palely shining bronze. “It is better here among friends.”
“It’s only right you should be seen. It’s a victory komos. You were first through the line. He waited for that.”
“Everyone knows what I did. There’s only one honor I want tonight, to have it said I wasn’t there.” He pointed at the wobbling torchlight.
“Come, then,” said Hephaistion. They went down to the water and washed the blood from their hands. Hephaistion loosened his shoulder-cloak and wrapped it around both of them. They walked on by the river into the hanging shadow of the willows fed by the stream.
Philip finished the evening sober. As he danced before the captives, a certain Demades, an Athenian eupatrid, had said to him with quiet dignity, “When fortune has cast you for Agamemnon, King, aren’t you ashamed to play Thersites?”
Philip was not too drunk to feel, through this harshness, a rebuke from Greek to Greek. He stopped the komos, had Demades bathed and freshly clothed, gave him supper in his tent, and, the next day, sent him back to Athens as an envoy. Even in drink, Philip’s eye had been good; the man was one of Phokion’s party, who had worked for peace but obeyed the call to war. By him, the King’s terms were conveyed to Athens. They were proclaimed to an Assembly stunned silent with incredulous relief.
Athens was to acknowledge the hegemony of Macedon; so far the condition was Sparta’s of sixty years before. But the Spartans had cut the throats of all their captives at Goat River, three thousand men; they had pulled down the Long Walls to the sound of flutes, and set up a tyranny. Philip would release his prisoners without ransom; he would not march into Attica; he left their form of government to their own choice.
They accepted; and were granted in due form the bones of their dead. They had been burned on a common pyre, since they could not last out the days of peacemaking. The pyre was broad; one party of troops stoked it all day with timber, another fed it with corpses; it smoked up from sunrise to sunset, and both details finished worn out. There were more than a thousand men to burn. The ashes and calcined bones were boxed in oaken chests, awaiting a state cortege.
Thebes, stripped and helpless, had surrendered without condition. Athens had been an open enemy; but Thebes, a faithless ally. Philip garrisoned her citadel, killed or dispossessed her leading anti-Macedonians, and freed the Boeotians from her rule. There being no parleys, her dead were quickly gathered. The Band were given the heroes’ right of a common tomb, and remained together; above them the Lion of Cheironeia sat down to its long watch.
When his envoys returned from Athens, Philip let the Athenian prisoners know they were free to go, and went off to his midday meal. He was eating in his tent when a senior officer asked leave to enter. He was in charge of dispatching the convoy. “Yes?” said Philip. “What’s wrong?”
“Sir, they’re asking for their baggage.”
Philip put down his soup-soaked bannock. “Asking for what?”
“Their stuff from their camp, bedding-rolls and so on.”
Macedonian mouths and eyes fell open. Philip gave a bark of laughter. He grasped his chair-arms, and jutted his black beard. “Do they think,” he roared, “that we beat them at a game of knucklebones? Tell them to get out.”
As the grumbling exodus was heard, Alexander said, “Why not have marched on? We need not have damaged the city; they’d have left it when you came in sight.”
Philip shook his head. “One can’t be sure. And the Acropolis has never fallen, so long as it was manned.”
“Never?” said Alexander. A dreaming aspiration shone in his eyes.
“And when it did fall, it was to Xerxes. No, no.”
“No. That’s true.” Neither had spoken of the komos, or of Alexander’s leaving it; each had welcomed the other’s forbearance. “But I wonder you didn’t at least make them hand over Demosthenes.”
Philip swept his bread around his soup bowl. “Instead of the man, there would be his hero-statue. The man will be truer to life…Well, you can see Athens for yourself very shortly. I am sending you as my envoy, to return their dead.”
Alexander looked round slowly; he had supposed for a moment he was the object of some obscure joke. He had never thought it possible that, having spared Athens both invasion and occupation, his father would not himself ride in as a magnanimous victor, to receive her thanks. Was it shame for the komos? Policy? Could it be even hope?
“To send you,” said Philip, “is a civility. For me to go would be thought hubristic. They have the status of allies now. A more fitting time may come.”
Yes, it was still the dream. He wanted the gates opened from within. When he had won the war in Asia and freed the cities, it was in Athens, not as conqueror but honored guest, that he would hold the feast of victory. And he had never even seen it.
“Very well, Father, I’ll go.” A moment later, he remembered to express thanks.
He rode between the towers of the Dipylon Gate, and into the Kerameikos. On either side were the tombs of the great and noble; old painted grave-steles faded with weather, new ones whose withered grave-wreaths were tasseled with the mourners’ hair. Marble knights rode heroically nude, ladies at tiring-tables remembered beauty; a soldier gazed out at the sea that kept his bones. They were quiet people. Among them, the noisy crowds of the living milled to stare.
A pavilion had been built, to house the ossuaries till the tomb was ready; they were lifted in from the train of biers. As he rode on between obsequious faces, a shrill keening swelled up behind him; the women had surged upon the catafalque, to wail the fallen. Oxhead started under him; from behind a grave, someone had hurled a clod. Horse and rider had known worse, and neither deigned to look round. If you were at the fight, my friend, this does not become you; still less if you were not. But if you are a woman, I understand it.
Ahead towered the steep northwest cliffs of the Acropolis. He ran his eye over them, wondering about the other sides. Someone was inviting him to a civic function; he bowed acceptance. By the road, a marble hoplite in antique armor leaned on his spear; Hermes, guide of the dead, bent to offer a child his hand; a wife and husband bade farewell; two friends clasped hands on an altar, a cup beside them. Everywhere Love faced Necessity in silence. No rhetoric here. Whoever had come after, these people had built this city.
He was led through the Agora to hear speeches in the Council Hall. Sometimes far back in the crowd he heard a shouted curse; but the war party, its prophecies made void, mostly kept away. Demosthenes might have vanished into air. Old Macedonian guest-friends and supporters were thrust forward; he did his best with these awkward meetings. Here came Aischines, carrying it off well, but defensive under it. Philip had showed more mercy than even the peace party had dared predict; they were smeared with the odium of men who have been too right. The bereaved, the ruined, watched them Argus-eyed for a gleam of triumph and were sure to find it. Philip’s hirelings came too, some cautious, some fawning; these found Philip’s son civil, but opaque.