Fire From Heaven (13 page)

Hateful he had expected Philip to be; but not unnerving. His speech of welcome, though perfectly courteous, had not wasted a word, its brevity subtly hinting that smoke-screens of verbiage would not serve. Whenever a speaker turned to the ?other envoys for support, Philip would scan the line of faces. His blind eye, which was as mobile as the good one, seemed to Demosthenes the more baleful of the two.

The day wore on; the steep sun-patches under the windows stretched along the floor. Speaker after speaker urged Athens’ claims to Olynthos, to Amphipolis, to her old spheres of influence in Thrace and Chersonesos; referred to the Euboian war, to this naval brush or that; dragged up old dealings with Macedon in the long complex wars of her succession; talked of the Hellespont corn route, of the aims of Persia and the intrigues of her coastal satraps. Every so often, Demosthenes would see the bright black eye and its spatchcock yokefellow move his way and linger.

He was being awaited, he the famous tyrannophobe, as the protagonist is awaited through the opening chorus. How often, in the law courts and at Assembly, this knowledge had quickened his blood and wits! Now, it came to him that never before had he so addressed himself to a single man.

He knew every string of his instrument, could measure the lightest turn of each key; he could transpose righteousness into hatred; play on self-interest till it seemed even to itself a self-denying duty; he knew where thrown mud would stick on a clean man, and whitewash on a dirty one; even for a lawyer-politician of his day, when standards of skill were high, he was a first-class professional. And he had known himself to be more; on great days he had tasted the pure ecstasy of the artist when he had kindled them all with his own dream of Athenian greatness. He was reaching the peak of his powers; he would be better yet; but now it was borne in on him that the medium of his art was the crowd alone. When it left for home, it would still be praising his oration; but it would break up into so many thousand men, not one of whom really liked him. There was no one at whose side he had locked shields in battle. And when he wanted love, it cost two drachmas.

They were down to the eighth speaker, Ktesiphon. Soon he himself would be speaking; not to the manifold ear he knew, but to this one black probing eye.

His nose was blocked again; he had to blow it on his cloak, the floor looked too pretentiously ornate. What if it ran while he was speaking? To keep his mind off the King, he looked at red big-boned Antipatros, and Parmenion with his broad shoulders, brown bush of beard, and bowed horseman’s knees. This was unwise. They had not Philip’s obligations to the speaker, and were frankly appraising the envoys together. The fierce blue eye of Antipatros brought back, the moment it met his, the eye of the phylarch under whom he had done his compulsory army training, as a spindly youth of eighteen.

All this while, the gaudy princeling sat unmoving in his low chair, his eyes bent towards his knees. Any Athenian lad would have been looking about him, impertinent perhaps (alas, manners were declining everywhere) but at least alert. A Spartan training. Sparta, symbol of past tyranny and present oligarchy. It was just what one would expect in Philip’s son.

Ktesiphon had done. He bowed; Philip spoke a few words of thanks. He had managed to make each speaker feel noticed and remembered. The herald announced Aischines.

He rose to his full height (he had been too tall to do well in women’s roles, one cause of his leaving the stage). Would he betray himself? Not a word or tone must be missed. The King must be watched too.

Aischines went into his preamble. Once more, Demosthenes was forced to see how training told. He himself relied much on gesture; he indeed had brought it into public speaking, calling the old sculpted stance a relic of aristocracy; but when warmed up, he tended to do it from the elbow. Aischines’ right hand rested easily just outside his cloak; he wore a manly dignity, not trying to old-soldier the three great generals before him, but hinting the respect of one who knows the face of war. It was a good speech, following the scheme arranged. He would give nothing away, whatever he had been up ?to. Giving up in disgust, Demosthenes blew his nose again, and turned to a mental run-through of his own oration.

‘And your elder kinsmen will bear out what I say. For after your father Amyntas and your uncle Alexandros had both fallen, while your brother Perdikkas and you were childrenÉ’

His mind hung suspended in the pause between shock and thought. The words were right. But Aischines, not he, had spoken them.

‘É betrayed by false friends; and Pausanias was coming back from exile to contest the throneÉ”

The voice ran on, unforced, persuasive, expertly timed. Wild thoughts of coincidence rose and died, as word followed word, confirming infamy. ‘You yourself were only a small child. She put you on his knee, sayingÉ’

The early years of anguished struggle to cure his stammer, project his thin voice and temper its shrillness, made him need his own reassurance. Again and again, in audible undertones, script in hand, he must have rehearsed this passage on the journey, on board ship or at inns. This mountebank pedlar of others’ words; of course he could have mastered it.

The anecdote reached its well-turned close. Everyone looked impressed; the King, the generals, the other envoys; all but the boy, who, growing restless at last after the hours of stillness, had begun to scratch his head.

Demosthenes confronted not only the loss of his most telling passage; that was the least of it. It should have led his theme to the central matter. Now, at this last moment, he would have to recast his speech.

He had never been good extempore, even with the audience on his side. The King’s eye had swivelled his way again, expectantly.

Frantically he gathered in mind the fragments of his speech, trying edge against edge for joins, bridging, transposing. But having taken no interest in Aischines’ speech, he had no idea how much of it was left, how soon his own turn would come. The suspense scattered his thoughts. He could only remember the times when he had put down Aischines’ upstart pretensions, reminding him, and people of influence along with him, that he came of broken-down gentlefolk, that as a boy he had ground ink for his father’s school and copied civil service lists; that on the stage he had never played leading roles. Who could have reckoned on his bringing to the noble theatre of politics the sleights of his sordid trade?

And he could never be accused of it. To own the truth would make any orator the laughing-stock of Athens. One would never live it down.

Aischines’ voice had the swell of peroration. Demosthenes felt cold sweat on his brow. He clung to his opening paragraph; its momentum might lead him on. Perseus hovered scornfully. The King sat stroking his beard. Antipatros was muttering something to Parmenion. The boy was raking his fingers through his hair.

Deftly, into his final paragraph, Aischines slipped the key passage of Demosthenes’ prepared finale. He bowed, was thanked. ‘Demosthenes,’ said the herald, ’son of Demosthenes, of Paionia.’

He rose and began, advancing as to a precipice; all sense of style had deserted him, he was glad to remember the mere words. Almost at the last, his normal quick sense revived; he saw how to bridge the gap. At this moment, a movement drew his eye. For the first time, the boy had lifted his head.

The crimped curls, already loosening before he had begun work on them, had changed to a tousled mane springing strongly from a peak. His grey eyes were wide open. He was very slightly smiling.

‘To take a broad view of the questionÉ a broad viewÉ to take aÉ’

His voice strangled in his throat. His mouth closed and opened; nothing came out but breath.

Everyone sat up and stared. Aischines, rising, patted him solicitously on the back. The boy’s eyes were levelled in perfect comprehension, missing nothing, awaiting more. His face was filled with a clear, cold brightness.

‘To take a broad viewÉ IÉ IÉ’

King Philip, astounded and bewildered, had grasped the one fact that he could-afford to be magnanimous. ‘My dear sir, take your t?ime. Don’t be disturbed; it will come back to you in a moment.’

The boy had tilted his head a little to the left; Demosthenes recalled the pose. Again the grey eyes opened, measuring his fear.

‘Try to think of it little by little,’ said Philip good-humouredly, ‘back from the beginning. No need to be put off by a moment’s dry-up, like the actors in the theatre. I assure you, we can wait.’

What cat-and-mouse game was this? It was impossible the boy should not have told his father. He remembered the school-room Greek: ‘You are going to die. I am telling you.’

There was a buzz from the envoys’ chairs; his speech contained matter of importance, not yet covered. The main headings, if he could find only thoseÉIn dull panic, he followed the King’s advice, stumbling again through the preamble. The boy’s lips moved gently, smilingly, silently. Demosthenes’ head felt empty, like a dried gourd. He said, ‘I am sorry,’ and sat down.

‘In that case, gentlemenÉ’ said Philip. He signed to the herald. ‘When you have rested and refreshed yourselves, I will let you have my answer.’

Outside, Antipatros and Parmenion were telling each other how they thought the envoys would shape in cavalry. Philip, as he turned towards his study where he had his written speech (he had kept a few spaces for matters arising) became aware of his son looking up at him. He signed with his head; the boy followed him into the garden, where, in reflective silence, they relieved themselves among the trees.

‘You could have gone out,’ said Philip. ‘I didn’t think to tell you.’

‘I didn’t drink anything first. You told me once.’

‘Did I? Well; what did you make of Demosthenes?’

‘You were right, Father. He isn’t brave.’

Philip let fall his robe and looked round; something in the voice had arrested him. ‘What ailed the man? Do youknow?’

‘That man’s an actor, who spoke before him. He stole his lines.’

‘However do you know that?’

‘I heard him practising them in the garden. He spoke to me.’

‘Demosthenes? What about?’

‘He thought I was a slave and asked if I was spying. Then when I spoke in Greek, he said he supposed I was someone’s bed-boy.’ He used the barrack word which came to him most readily. ‘I didn’t tell him; I thought I’d wait.’

‘What?’

‘I sat up when he started speaking, and he knew me then.’

The boy saw, with unmixed pleasure, his father’s slow laughter inform his gap-toothed grin, his good eye, even his blind one. ‘But why didn’t you tell me first?’

‘He’d have expected that. He doesn’t know what to think.’

Philip looked at him glintingly. ‘Did the man proposition you?’

‘He wouldn’t ask a slave. He just wondered how much I’d cost.’

‘Well; we may suppose that now he knows.’

Father and son exchanged looks, in a moment of perfect harmony; unalienated heirs of bronze-sworded chariot lords from beyond the Ister, who had led their tribes down in past millennia, some driving further to seize the southlands and learn their ways, some taking these mountain kingdoms where they kept old customs on; burying their dead in chamber tombs alongside their forbears whose skulls were cased in boar-tusk helms and whose handbones grasped double axes; handing down, father to son, elaborate niceties of blood-feud and revenge.

Affront had been requited, on a man immune from the sword and in any case beneath its dignity; with finesse, in terms cut to his measure. It had been as neat, in its way, as the vengeance in the hall at Aigai.

Ê

The peace-terms were debated at length in Athens. Antipatros and Parmenion, who went to represent Philip, watched fascinated the strange ways of the south. In Macedon, the only thing ever voted on was the putting of a man to death; all other public matters were for the King.

By the time the terms had been accepted (Aischines urging it strongly), and the envoys had journeyed back to ratify, King Philip had had time to reduce the Thracian stronghold of Kersobleptes, and take his surrender on terms, bringing back his son to Pella, as a hostage for his ?loyalty.

Meantime, in the hill-forts above Thermopylai, the exiled temple-robber, Phalaikos the Phokian, was running out of gold, food and hope. Philip was now treating with him in secret. News that Macedon held the Hot Gates would strike Athenians like an earthquake; they could bear the Phokians’ sins (and had indeed an alliance with them) far more lightly than this. It must be hidden till the peace had been ratified by sacred and binding oaths.

Philip was charming to the second embassy. Aischines was most valuable, a man not bought but changed in heart. He accepted gladly the king’s assurance that he meant no harm to Athens, which was sincere; and, which he saw as not false, that he would deal mildly with the Phokians. Athens needed Phokis; not only to hold Thermopylai, but to contain the ancient enemy, Thebes.

The envoys were entertained and given conspicuous guest-gifts, which they all took except Demosthenes. He had spoken first this time, but his colleagues had all agreed that he lacked his usual fire. They had in fact been quarrelling and intriguing all the way from Athens. Demosthenes’ suspicions of Philokrates had reached certainty; he was eager to convince the others, but also to convict Aischines; this charge, being doubted, discredited the other. Brooding on these injuries, he had gone in to dinner, where the guests had been entertained by young Alexander and another boy singing part-songs to the lyre. Across the instrument, two cool grey eyes had lingered on Demosthenes; turning quickly, he had seen Aischines smile.

The oaths were ratified; the envoys went home. Philip escorted them south as far as Thessaly, without revealing that it was on his way. As soon as they had gone, he marched over to Thermopylai, and received the hill-forts from Phalaikos in return for a safe-conduct. The exiles went gratefully, wandering off to hire out their swords in the endless local wars of Greece, dying here and there as Apollo picked them off.

Athens was in panic. They waited for Philip to sweep down on them like Xerxes. The walls were manned, refugees from Attica crowded in. But Philip only sent word that he wished to set in order the affairs of Delphi, so long a scandal, and invited the Athenians to send an allied force.