Orion and the Conqueror (5 page)

The dinner guests sitting below them were all male, of course. At first. There were plenty of women servants, most of them young and slim and smiling as the men ogled and pawed at them. The boys among the servants were treated much the same. Even Philip pinched buttocks without regard to gender. Wine was poured liberally, and the laughter and rowdiness rose with each gulp.

I saw that Alexandros was not present, nor any of his young Companions. This was a dinner for the king's friends and companions-in-arms. And for relatives, close and distant, such as Attalos, a fat and beady-eyed clan leader who owned, it was said, the biggest house in Pella and the richest horse ranch in Macedonia.

Attalos also had a fourteen-year-old niece who was being dangled as bait before Philip's eyes, according to the barracks gossip.

"Philip likes 'em young," one of my barracks mates had told me while we were suiting up for duty. "Girls, boys, makes no difference."

"How old was Olympias when he married her?" I had asked.

"Ahh, that was different. That was a state marriage. Brought the Molossians and all of Epeiros over to Philip's side with that marriage."

"He was mad about her, though," said one of the other men.

"Bewitched by her, you mean."

"Well, whatever it was, it wore off as soon as she bore him Alexandros."

"Doesn't matter; the old fox casts his one good eye on anything with smooth skin."

They all laughed approvingly, wishing they had the kingly prerogatives of Philip.

As the dinner stretched into a long drinking bout I wondered if I would be able to keep my midnight appointment with the queen. Philip looked half-unconscious from the wine he had drunk, yet he had a boy of ten or so pouring still more into his gold goblet. Some of the dinner guests were drowsing on their couches; those who weren't were fondling the prettier servants.

Then the hetairai were admitted into the dining hall and the servants scampered away, many of them looking grateful. These professional women were older and looked quite sure of themselves. It seemed to me that they picked out the men they wished to be with. No one argued with their choices. And the men's behavior actually improved. The lewd
jokes
and roaring laughter quieted down as one of
the
courtesans pointed to the musicians who had been sitting idly in a corner. They struck up their lyres and flutes and lovely soft music filled the dining hall. The stench of spilled wine and vomit still hung in the air. But now the perfumes of distant lands began to make the room more pleasant.

In less than an hour the dining hall emptied out. No one could leave before the king did, of course, but soon after the hetairai appeared he lumbered off with one of the serving boys, leaning heavily on the lad's shoulders, dragging his bad leg. One by one the other men went off with their female companions until at last the hall was emptied of all except the servants, who wearily began cleaning off the tables and throwing scraps to the dogs who had been waiting by the fire all evening long.

At last Pausanias strode past my post at the entrance. "Dismissed," was all that he managed to say.

I hurried back to the barracks, took off my armor, and rushed back to the palace to find Olympias' audience chamber.

Chapter 7

The queen was not in her audience chamber. But a sloe-eyed maid with flowing dark hair and a knowing smile was waiting for me. Holding a clay oil lamp in one upraised hand, she guided me through the upper levels of the palace, a dizzying labyrinth of stairs and corridors and rooms. I thought she was deliberately trying to confuse me.

"Is the queen's room in a hidden place?" I asked, half joking.

She looked up at me in the yellow light of the lamp, her smile full of secrets. "You will see," she said.

And I did. Soon we came to a low wooden door at the end of an otherwise blank corridor. I could hear the night wind moaning even though we had passed no window. We must be up high, I reasoned.

The servant scratched at the door and it swung inward on silent hinges. She went through and beckoned me enter. I had to duck to get through the arched doorway. The servant slipped behind me and went out again, closing the door behind her.

It was dark inside. Blacker than the darkest moonless night, a darkness so deep and all-engulfing that I felt as if I had stepped into oblivion, an emptiness where nothing at all existed. Dark and cold, frigid, as if I had been plunged into the void where warmth and light could not exist. My breath froze in my throat. I stretched out my arms like a blind man, reaching for some reference point in this Stygian abyss, searching sightlessly while my senses told me I was
falling,
tumbling through a nothingness where neither time nor space existed. Panic rose within me as I struggled to breathe.

Then I saw the faintest, faintest glow of a distant light. Like the flicker of the first star of evening, so tenuous that I could not be certain it was there at all. Gradually, though, the light brightened. I heard a slithering of bare feet, the faintest suggestion of distant laughter. I could breathe again. My fear subsided. I stood immobile, silent, waiting for the light to brighten further, my right hand resting gently on the dagger strapped beneath my skirt.

Slowly, lamps came aglow, low and guttering at first, then gradually brightening. I saw that the room I stood in was immense, impossibly long and wide, its vast ceiling lost in shadows, its floor polished white marble, massive columns of green marble marching in rows along either side of me.

At the far end sat Olympias—Hera?—on a throne of ivory inlaid with gold. She glowed with splendor. Snakes slithered on the dais of her throne, on the steps of the marble platform, on the high back of her throne itself. Some were small and deadly poisonous. Others were huge constrictors, their eyes glittering in the lamplight.

This colossal opulent room could not possibly have been part of Philip's palace. Somehow I had passed through a gateway into another world, another universe. This was witchcraft, I realized, beyond anything that Philip's rough soldiers could imagine.

"Come to me, Orion," Olympias called. Her voice was low and melodious, yet it carried the distance from her throne to me as if she had been standing at my side.

I walked as if in a trance. It seemed to take hours. I heard nothing but the clacking of my boots against the marble floor. I watched the snakes watching me with their glittering eyes.

At last I stood at the foot of her throne. Olympias wore a copper-red robe that matched the color of her hair and left her shoulders and arms bare. Its slitted skirt revealed her long smooth legs. Bright jewelry bedecked her throat, her arms and wrists. She looked down on me and smiled a cruelly beautiful smile.

"Do you fear me, Orion?"

"No," I replied truthfully. One of the pythons was entwining its mottled body of brown and green around my leg, climbing me as if I were a tree. And I stood immobile as a tree, unable to turn away, unable to run, unable even to move my arms or fingers. Yet I felt no fear. I was truly under her spell.

Olympias leaned back in her throne as a sleek cobra slithered over her bare shoulder and across her bosom.

"Do you love me, Orion?"

"No," I said. "I love—Athena."

Her smile turned cold. "A mortal man cannot love a goddess, Orion. You need a woman of flesh and blood. You love me."

"I mean no offense, but—"

"You
will
love me!" she snapped. "And no other."

I found that I was unable to speak. The python had coiled itself around my chest. Its head rose to my eye level and its flickering tongue touched my face. I stared into its slitted yellow eyes and saw nothing, no purpose, no reason. It was being controlled just as I was.

"You will love me," Olympias repeated. "And you will do my bidding. Not merely here, but wherever and whenever I command you."

It was if my body did not belong to me, as if it were a machine under someone else's control. I could think, I could feel the massive strength of the python's muscular coils gripping me tightly, feel the tingling jabs of its tongue on my face. I could hear Olympias' words and see her leaning forward on her throne, her eyes as glittery as the snakes'. But I could not move. I knew that if she willed it, my heart would stop.

The cobra glided across her lap and down the leg of the throne. I saw that what I had at first thought to be a bright metal armband was actually a small snake that she now removed from her forearm and considered silently for a moment.

Then she got up from her throne, holding the little coral snake in both hands, and came down the three steps of the dais to me.

"You will love me," she repeated, "and do whatever I command you to do."

She held the snake to my throat. I felt its tiny fangs penetrate my flesh and a hot surge of flaming agony raced along my veins with the speed of an electrical shock. I realized why Olympias had made the python coil around me. Without it I would have collapsed to the cold marble floor.

I never lost consciousness. The pain passed and my body felt frozen, totally numb. Yet when Olympias commanded me to follow her, I found that the python had slid off me and I could walk almost normally. She led me to a bedchamber that seemed suspended in emptiness. I felt a solid floor beneath my feet, but when I looked down I saw nothing but tiny pinpoints of light winking in swirling clouds of cold mist that billowed pink and blue and golden yellow.

We reclined on a bed as soft and yielding as the gentle swells of a becalmed sea, stars gleaming out of the darkness all around us. Olympias unfastened her robe; her body was magnificent, perfect skin glowing in the darkness, a form as divine as a goddess.

"Do you like what you see, Orion?" she asked as she knelt beside me.

I could not help but answer, "Yes."

She took my clothes off me, clucking her tongue slightly at the dagger strapped to my thigh.

"The gift of Odysseus," I explained. "At Troy."

Wordlessly she unstrapped the dagger and tossed it off into the darkness surrounding our bed.

"Now you are mine, Orion," she murmured.

We made love, slowly at first but then with increasing ardor. Every time she climaxed she screamed, "You're
mine! Mine!
"

In the lulls between times she asked, "Who do you love, Orion?"

I could not answer. I could not say her name, and her control of my body would not permit me to speak the name of Athena. Then we would begin anew and the passion would surge in us both as we thrashed and tumbled and sweated wildly. "Did she ever do
this
for you?" Olympias would ask. "Did she ever make you do
this?
"

How long we spent coupling was impossible for me to reckon. But at last we lay side by side, staring into the infinite sea of stars, panting like a pair of rutting animals.

"Speak the name of the woman you love, Orion," she commanded me.

"You will not like what you hear," I replied.

I had expected anger. Instead, she laughed. "Her hold on you is deeper than I had expected."

"We love each other."

"That was a dream, Orion. Nothing more than a dream of yours. Forget it. Accept this reality."

"She loves me. Athena. Anya."

For long moments she was silent in the darkness.

Then, "A goddess may take on human form and make love to a mortal. That is not love, Orion."

"Who am I?" I asked while her control over me was relaxed. "Why am I here?"

"Who are you? Why, Orion, you are nothing more than any other human creature—a plaything of the gods." And her laughter turned cruel once more.

I closed my eyes and wondered how I could escape this evil woman's grasp. She had to be the goddess Hera that I had seen in my dream. Or was she merely the witch Olympias, controlling me, bewitching me, with the power of her dark magic? Were my memories of Athena and the other gods and goddesses merely vivid dreams hatched by my own longing for a knowledge of my origins, my own yearning for someone to love, for someone who could love me? Was Olympias' powerful magic truly witchcraft, or the superhuman abilities of an actual goddess? I fell asleep trying to fathom the mystery.

When I opened my eyes again early morning sunlight was filtering through the beaded curtain of a window. I was lying beside a naked woman in a rumpled bed. The makeup smeared across her face told me that she was one of the hetairai who had attended Philip's dinner the night before.

I sat up slowly, not wanting to wake her. In the milky early light she looked older, tired.

Softly I rose from the bed and gathered my clothes, which had been neatly piled on a curved chair in the corner of the bedroom. Even my dagger was there, at the bottom of the pile. I dressed, ducked through the curtained doorway of the bedroom, and bumped right into Pausanias.

"You've had a busy night of it," he growled.

I had no idea of how I had gotten here, so I said nothing.

"Damned Thais just picks out whoever she likes, like a man," said Pausanias as he led me down the corridor toward a flight of stairs. We went down to the ground floor and out into the street. It was still early, quiet outside.

"How did you get there?" Pausanias asked grumpily, jerking a thumb back toward Thais' house. It was a modest two-story building, but well kept, with flower boxes blooming brightly beneath every window.

With a shrug that I hoped was convincing, I replied, "I don't really know."

"If you can't hold your wine you shouldn't drink."

"Yes, you're right."

We marched along the empty street, heading uphill toward the palace.

"Trouble is," Pausanias said, "that young Ptolemaios has his eye on her. And she taps
you
on the shoulder instead."

Ptolemaios was one of Alexandros' Companions, I knew. Rumored to be a bastard son of Philip, as well.

"Perhaps she's merely trying to make him jealous," I half-joked, still wondering how I did get into Thais' house. And bed.

"That kind of jealousy leads to murder, Orion. And blood feuds."

I shrugged light-heartedly. "I have no family to carry on a blood feud after I'm gone."

"Thank the gods for small favors," he muttered.

As we neared the palace wall a question popped into my mind. "How did you know where I was?"

Pausanias fixed me with a surly glance. "One of the queen's servants woke me before cock's crow and warned me of it. Said I'd better get you out of there before Ptolemaios finds out about it."

"And how did this servant know?"

"I told you she was one of the queen's servants. The witch knows everything that happens in the palace—sometimes before it even happens."