Fire From Heaven (39 page)

Alexander knelt, and as one might straighten a garment, replaced the flap of flesh. It adhered, sticky with blood. He looked round at Hephaistion and said, ‘I did this. I remember it. He was trying to spear Oxhead through the neck. I did it.’

‘He shouldn’t have lost his helmet. I suppose the chin-strap was weak.’

‘I don’t remember the other.’

He had been speared through the body, and the spear wrenched? back in the urgency of battle, leaving a great torn hole. His face was set in a grimace of agony; he had died wide awake.

‘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 chirrupped 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 honour 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.

Ê

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’s 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 peace-making. 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 Chaironeia 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 p?ut 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 lifeÉWell, 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 honoured 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.

Ê

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 tasselled 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 north-west 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 armour 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. T?he 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.

He ate at the house of Demades, with a few guests of honour; the occasion was not one for feasting. But it was very Attic: well-worn spare elegance, couches and tables whose ornament was perfect shaping and silky wood; wine-cups of old silver thin with polishing; quiet expert service, talk in which no one interrupted or raised his voice. In Macedon, Alexander’s mere lack of greed put his table manners above the common run; but here he took care to observe the others first.

Next day on the Acropolis he made dedications to the City’s gods, in earnest of the peace. Here were the fabled glories, towering Athene of the Vanguard whose spear-tip guided ships - where were you, Lady, did your father forbid you the battle, as he did at Troy? This time were you obedient? Here in her temple stood Pheidias’ ivory Maiden in her robe of folded gold; here were the trophies and dedications of a hundred years. (Three generations; only three!)

He had been reared in the Palace of Archelaos; fine building was nothing new to him; he talked of history, and was shown Athene’s olive, which sprouted green overnight when the Persians had burned it. They had carried off, too, the old statues of the Liberators, Harmodios and Aristogeiton, to adorn Persepolis. ‘If we can get them back,’ he said, ‘we will let you have them. Those were brave men and faithful friends.’ No one answered; Macedonian boastfulness was a byword. From the parapet he looked for the place where the Persians had climbed up, and found it without help; it had seemed impolite to ask.

The Peace party had got a motion passed that, to recognize Philip’s clemency, his statue and his son’s should be set up in the Parthenon. As he sat for the sculptor’s sketch, he thought of his father’s image standing there, and wondered how soon the man would follow it.

Was there anything else, they asked, any sight he would like to visit before he left? ‘Yes; the Academy. Aristotle my tutor studied there. He lives now in Stagira; my father rebuilt the town and brought the people back. But I should like to see where Plato taught.’

Along the road there, all the great soldiers of Athens’ past were buried. He saw the battle-trophies, and his questions delayed the ride. Here, too, men who had died together in famous actions lay in fraternal tombs. A new site was being cleared; he did not ask for whom.

The road petered out into a grove of ancient olives, whose long grass and field-flowers were dried with autumn. Near the altar of Eros was another, inscribed EROS AVENGED. He asked the story. An immigrant, they said, had loved a beautiful Athenian youth, and vowed there was nothing he would not do for him. He had said, Then go jump off the Rock.’ When he found he had been obeyed, he made the same leap himself. ‘He did right,’ said Alexander. ‘What does it matter where a man comes from? It’s what he is in himself.’ They changed the subject, exchanging looks; it was natural the son of the Macedonian upstart should have such thoughts.

Speusippos, who had inherited the school from Plato, had died the year before. In the cool, plain white house that had been Plato’s, the new head, Xenokrates, received him, a tall big-boned man whose gravity, it was said, cleared a path before him even through the Agora at market-time. Alexander, entertained with the courtesy of eminent teacher to promising student, felt the man to be solid and took to him on sight. They talked a little about Aristotle’s methods. ‘A man must follow his truth,’ Xenokrates said, ‘wherever it leads him. It will lead Aristotle, I think, away from Plato, who was a man for making How serve Why. Me it keeps at Plato’s feet.’

‘Have you a likeness of him?’

Xenokrates led him out past a dolphin fountain to Plato’s myrtle-shaded tomb; the statue stood near it. He sat scroll in hand, his classic oval head stooped forward fro?m heavy shoulders. To the end of his days he had kept the athlete’s short-cut hair of his youth. His beard was cleanly trimmed; his brow was furrowed across and down; from under its weight looked the haunted unwavering eyes of a survivor who has fled from nothing. ‘Yet still he believed in good. I have some books of his.’

‘As to the good,’ said Xenokrates, ‘he himself was his own evidence. Without that, a man will find no other. I knew him well. I am glad you read him. But his books, he always said, contained the teaching of his master, Sokrates; there would never be a book of Plato, for what he had to teach could only be learned as fire is kindled, by the touch of the flame itself.’

Alexander gazed eagerly at the brooding face, as if at a fort on some impregnable rock. But the crag was gone, overthrown by the floods of time, never to be assailed again. ‘He had a secret doctrine?’

‘An open secret. You, who are a soldier, can only teach your wisdom to men whose bodies have been prepared for hardship, and their minds to resist fear; isn’t that so? Then the spark can kindle the spark. So with him.’

With regret and surmise, Xenokrates gazed at the youth who looked, with surmise and regret, at the marble face. He rode back past the dead heroes to the City.

He was about to change for supper when a man was announced and left alone with him; a well-dressed, well-spoken person, who claimed to have met him at the Council Hall. Everyone, he learned, had praised the modesty and restraint he had shown, so proper to his mission. Many regretted he should have denied himself, from respect for public mourning, the pleasures of a city so well able to provide them. It would be disgraceful were he not offered the chance to taste them in harmless privacy. ‘Now I have a boyÉ’He described the graces of a Ganymede.

Alexander heard him out without interruption. ‘What do you mean,’ he then said,’ that you have a boy? Is he your son?’