Nikanor’s Horse was again Alexander’s squadron.
The haggling had lasted some time; many couriers between Demaratos and the King had crossed the rough tracks into Epiros. It was the center of the bargain, achieved with much maneuvering, that neither party should claim an outright victory. When father met son at length, both felt that enough had been said already; they excused themselves from going over it again in words. Each eyed the other with curiosity, resentment, suspicion, regret, and a half-hope which each hid too well.
Under Demaratos’ complacent eyes, they exchanged a symbolic kiss of reconcilement. Alexander led up his mother; Philip kissed her too, noting to himself the lines of pride and rancor etched deeper in, and recalling with wonder, for a moment, his youthful passion. Then they all went off to take up their lives as they found them now.
Most men about the court had been able, so far, to avoid taking sides. Only small groups of partisans, Attalids, agents of Olympias, friends and comrades of Alexander, had bickered and intrigued. But the exiles’ living presence was like verjuice stirred into milk. Separation began.
The young knew that he was young and had excelled his elders; that when old envious men had tried to put him down, he had stood up to it and won. He was all their own smoldering rebellions, expressed in flame; their hero-victim. Because it was his, they made even Olympias’ cause their own. To see one’s mother shamed, and one’s father, an old man past forty, make a public show of himself with a girl of fifteen; why should one swallow that? When they saw him, therefore, they greeted him with defiant fervor. He never failed to acknowledge it.
His face was thinner. It had been weathered for years, but the closed drawn look was new. Their salutations changed it; his warm confiding smile made them feel rewarded.
Hephaistion, Ptolemy, Harpalos and the rest, the companions of his exile, were treated with awed respect, their stories becoming legend. They did not fail their friend. All the tales were of success; the leopard, the lightning marches to the border, a glorious victory in the tribal war. Their pride was invested in him, besides their love; they would have changed, if they could, his very memories. His thanks, though unspoken, were enough; they felt themselves beloved. Soon they seemed acknowledged leaders, to the young men and to themselves as well; they began to show it, sometimes with discretion, sometimes not.
His party gathered; made up of men who liked him, or had fought beside him; who, perhaps, wounded and half-frozen in Thrace had been given his own place by the fire and a drink from his own wine cup; or whose courage had been damping out when he came along and kindled it; or who had told him tales in the guardroom when he was a child: supported by men who looked back to the lawless years, and wanted a strong heir; by men, also, who hated his enemies. The Attalids were daily growing in power and pride. Parmenion, some time widowed, had lately married Attalos’ daughter, and the King had stood as groomsman.
The first time Alexander met Pausanias out of others’ hearing, he thanked him for his house’s hospitality. The bearded lips moved stiffly, as if they would have returned his smile had they not lost the knack. “It was nothing, Alexander. We were honored…I would do more than that.” For a moment their eyes met, Pausanias’ exploring, Alexander’s questioning; but he had never been an easy man to understand.
Eurydike had a fine new house on the slope, a short walk from the Palace. A pine wood had been felled to clear the site, and a statue of Dionysos, which had stood in the grove, returned to Queen Olympias, who had set it up. It had not been a shrine of ancient sanctity, only a fancy of hers, to which rumor attached some scandal.
Hephaistion, who had arrived too late to know much about such things, knew like anyone else that a son’s legitimacy hangs on his mother’s honor. Of course he must defend her, he had no choice; but why with such passion, such bitterness to his father, such blindness to his own good? True friends share everything, except the past before they met.
That she had her faction, everyone knew too well; her rooms were like the meeting-house of some exiled opposition in the southern states. Hephaistion felt his teeth on edge, whenever Alexander went there. Did even he know all she was up to? Whatever it was, if trouble broke the King would believe he knew.
Hephaistion too was young; he had shared the shock when time-servers, once assiduous, now kept their distance. Alexander’s very victories were their warning. In Macedon with its history, he was marked dangerous as brightly as the panther. He had always despised servility; but rooted in him was the need to be beloved. Now he was learning which men had known and used it. Watching the lesson, with grim quiet irony, was the King.
“You should try to mend matters,” Hephaistion would say. “He must want to, or why recall you? It’s always for the younger to come forward first, no disgrace in that.”
“I don’t like the way he looks at me.”
“He may think the same, you’re both on edge. But how can you doubt you’re his heir? Who else is there? Arridaios?”
The idiot had been in Pella lately, for one of the great festivals. His mother’s kin always brought him, spruced and combed, to pay his respects to his father, who had acknowledged him with pride when, a fine healthy-looking infant, he had been brought out of the birth-room. Now at seventeen he was taller than Alexander, and favored Philip’s looks except when his mouth fell open. He was no longer taken to the theater, where he would laugh loudly at the tragic climaxes, nor to solemn rites, in case one of his fits should take him, when he would flap on the ground like a landed fish, wetting and dirtying himself. It was the fits had done some violence to his mind, the doctors said; he had been a likely child before them. He enjoyed the sideshows of the feast, led about by an old family slave like a little boy with his pedagogue. This year his black beard had grown; but he would not be parted from his doll.
“What a rival!” Hephaistion said. “Why can’t you be easy?”
After giving this good advice, he would go out, run into some man of the Attalid faction, or even one of Olympias’ many enemies; would resent what they said, and hit them in the teeth. All Alexander’s friends were doing their share of this; Hephaistion, being quick-tempered, did rather more. True friends share everything, especially their quarrels. Later he might reproach himself; but all of them knew they would get no reproach from Alexander for these proofs of love. It was not that he set them on to make trouble; only that there grew up around him that kind of defiant loyalty from which sparks are struck, as if from flint.
He hunted untiringly, best pleased when the quarry was dangerous, or gave him a long hard chase. He read little, but to the purpose; his restlessness needed action, he was only content when readying his men for the coming war. He seemed everywhere, demanding from the engineers catapults which could be taken apart and carted, not left behind to rot after every siege; in the horse-lines, looking at feet, inspecting the stable floors and discussing fodder. He talked much with traveling men, traders and envoys, actors, paid-up mercenaries, who knew Greek Asia and even the lands beyond. All they told him, he checked stage by stage against Xenophon’s Inland March.
Hephaistion, whom he shared his studies with, saw all his hopes staked on the war. He was scarred by the months of impotence as if by a fetter; he needed the medicine of command, victory to confound his enemies and heal his pride. He still took for granted he would be sent ahead, alone or with Parmenion, to make good an Asian bridgehead for the main force. Hephaistion, concealing his own uneasiness, asked if he had talked of it with the King. “No. Let him come to me.”
The King, though busy himself, was watchful. He saw tactical changes which should have had his sanction and waited to be asked, in vain. He saw the young man’s altered face, and his friends as thick as thieves. It had never been easy to read his mind, but once he would have come with all this as soldier to soldier; he could not have kept it in. As a man, Philip was hurt and angry; as a ruler, he was distrustful.