Alexander (Vol. 3) (Alexander Trilogy) (45 page)

Almost all the night passed in this way – a cold, empty, useless night. The end of the watch was approaching now and dawn would soon be breaking. Hermolaus was tormented by doubts and continued to look at the King who kept lowering his head as though about to fall asleep.

Eurylochus too had stayed up all night because he had realized that all three of the squires on watch were conspirators and he was sure they would decide to act, all the more so because Commander Ptolemy was in the habit of taking Peritas with him when it was his turn to inspect the guard. On seeing that the light in the royal tent kept burning, and that the King had not retired to bed despite the fact that there was no imminent danger of enemy incursions, he was sure that something terrible was about to happen: perhaps Alexander had discovered their plan. Perhaps Hermolaus and the others were about to strike. To think he had believed that words alone were enough to save those wretches. He saw Ptolemy coming to the end of his inspection and decided to speak to him,
‘Heghemon

‘What’s wrong, lad?’

‘I . . . I must speak to you.’

‘I am listening.’

‘Not here.’

‘In my tent then,’ and he led him there and showed him the way in. ‘So? What’s all this secrecy about?’

‘Listen,
Heghemon,’
began Eurylochus. ‘My brother Epimenides, Hermolaus and other lads . . . how to put it . . . they have rather strange ideas . . . you know that Hermolaus together with my brother and some of their friends spend time with Callisthenes, and he’s filled their heads with all sorts of stupid talk about democracy and tyranny and so . . .’

‘So?’ Ptolemy asked, his eyebrows bunching.

‘They are only lads,
Heghemon,’
continued Eurylochus, no longer able to hold back the tears. ‘Perhaps they’ve called it off this time, perhaps the King suspected something . . . I don’t know . . . I decided to speak to you, so that you might give them a good scare and then they’ll get these stupid ideas out of their heads. It’s all Callisthe-nes’ fault, can’t you see? They would never have thought of it. Even if the King did have Hermolaus beaten over that matter of the boar, I don’t know if he would ever actually . . . but then you never know

‘Oh, by Zeus!’ exclaimed Ptolemy, then he shouted, ‘Peritas! Run! Run to Alexander!’ and the dog set off running as fast as his legs could carry him and he burst into the tent just as his master was nodding off, his head on the table, and Hermolaus’s hand was moving stealthily to his belt, under his tunic. Peritas charged him to the ground and bit into the hand that held the dagger.

Ptolemy burst in immediately afterwards and managed to grab the dog just in time before he bit straight through the boy’s hand. Alexander was woken suddenly from his dozing by all that noise and got to his feet, unsheathing his sword.

‘They were out to kill you,’ said Ptolemy, struggling for breath as he disarmed Hermolaus.

The boy writhed and kicked, shouting, ‘Damned tyrant! You bloodthirsty monster! Your hands are stained with blood! You killed Parmenion and Philotas, you are an assassin!’

The other two who were on guard outside tried to slip away, but Ptolemy called the trumpeter and had him sound the call for the shieldsmen, and so the squires were stopped immediately as they sought to make their escape. Eurylochus was still crying as he arrived at a run and pleaded, ‘Do not harm them,
Heghemon!
Don’t hurt them. They will do nothing more, I promise you. Give them to me, I’ll punish them, I’ll have them beaten, but do not harm them, I beg you!’

Alexander left, pale with rage, while Hermolaus continued shouting all types of insult and offence in the midst of the camp that was now seething with soldiers running from all directions.

‘What are the just deserts of these men, Sire?’ Ptolemy asked, using the ritual formula.

‘Let the army decide their fate,’ replied Alexander, and he retired to his tent.

The military judges assembled immediately and the squires underwent a trial which lasted all that day and all through the following night – they were asked to corroborate one another’s stories, led into contradicting themselves and their fellow conspirators, beaten and whipped until they all confessed. None of them, not even under torture, mentioned Callisthenes, but Eurylochus, who had been spared for having saved the King’s life, continued to say that those lads would never have thought up such a plan if Callisthenes had not filled their heads with his ideas. He continued to implore right up to the very end for them to be saved, but it was all in vain.

At dawn, a grey, drizzling daybreak, they were all stoned to death.

Eumenes, who witnessed both the trial and the execution, went to Callisthenes’ tent and found him there, trembling and as pale as a corpse, wringing his hands in anguish.

‘Your name was mentioned,’ he said.

Callisthenes collapsed into a chair with a deep, rattling sigh. ‘So this is the end, is it not?’

Eumenes did not reply.

‘This is the end for me, is it not?’ he shouted.

‘Your ghosts have acquired physical form, Callisthenes, the bodies of those lads, who lie now under a heap of stones. A man like you . . . didn’t you realize that words can kill just as easily as the sword?’

‘Will they torture me? I’ll never hold out, I won’t resist. They can make me say whatever they want!’ Callisthenes shouted as he sobbed.

Eumenes lowered his head in embarrassment. ‘I am sorry. I only wanted to tell you that they will come before long. You don’t have much time,’ and he left under the beating rain.

Callisthenes looked around in desperation, searching for a weapon, a blade, but the only things available were rolls of papyrus, piled everywhere, his works, his
History of Alexander’s Expedition.
Then he suddenly remembered something he should have destroyed a long time ago, but for some reason had kept. He went to a chest, rummaged through it, breathless in fear and anxiety, and finally he held firmly in his hands a metal box. He opened it and inside was a small sheet of papyrus and then, wrapped up in a cloth, a glass phial filled with a white powder. These words were written on the sheet:

Callisthenes burned the papyrus and then swallowed the entire contents of the phial. When the guards arrived, they found him collapsed among the scrolls of his
History
, his eyes wide open and full of terror, staring into nothing.

T
HE COAST OF
P
HOCIS
was clearly visible now, looming out of the evening mist, and the clouds in the sky and the waves in the sea were ablaze with the colours of the sunset. The boat sailed forward on a wind that blew from the Gulf of Aegina. Aristotle moved towards the bow to watch the manoeuvres as they moored and shortly afterwards he disembarked in the small harbour at Cyrra where seamen, port labourers and vendors of sacred objects were all busy at work.

‘Want a sheep to offer in sacrifice?’ one of them asked. ‘Here they cost half of what they want at Delphi. Just take a look at this little lamb – four obols, that’s all. A pair of pigeons then?’

‘I need a donkey,’ replied the philosopher.

A donkey?’ the merchant retorted in amazement. ‘You’ve got to be joking . . . who on earth would ever offer a donkey in—’

‘I do not intend to sacrifice it. I wish to ride it.’

‘Ah! That’s different then. In that case come right this way; I’ve got this old friend, a donkey specialist, and he has the most docile creatures you could ever ask for.’ The merchant had already realized that the man before him was a scholar, a man of letters who was certainly poorly versed in matters equestrian.

They negotiated a price for three days’ hire and a deposit to be refunded on return of the animal, and thus Aristotle set off for the sanctuary of Apollo, unaccompanied. It was late now and usually travellers preferred to climb up through the shining silver of the olive wood in the morning, in the full light of day, rather than in the darkness that transformed the centuries-old trunks into threatening, disturbing shapes. The calm gait of the philosopher’s mount meant that he was able to think a little as the last rays of the setting sun warmed his limbs, somewhat cold as a result of the evening crossing and the wind that had evidently blown down across the first snows up on Mount Cithaeron.

He thought of the many years he had dedicated to his investigation of the death of King Philip, seeking out the elusive truth.

The news from Asia had not been encouraging for some time – Alexander seemed to have forgotten his teachings, at least as far as politics were concerned. He had put the barbarians on the same level as the Greeks, he dressed like a Persian despot, demanded
proskynesis
from those who approached him and gave credit to the rumours his mother Olympias had deliberately spread regarding his divine origin.

Poor King Philip! But it was said that it was the destiny of all great men to be the bastard offspring of a god or a goddess: Hercules, Castor and Pollux, Achilles, Theseus . . . Alexander could not be an exception to this rule. This was understandable, indeed it was only to be expected. And yet, despite all this he missed Alexander and would have given anything to be able to see him once more. He wondered what he might look like, whether he still had that curious way of tilting his head towards his right shoulder when he was listening to or saying something that touched his soul.

And Callisthenes? Extremely able with the pen, no doubt about that, even though a trifle lacking in critical spirit, but definitely low on common sense. He wondered how he might be managing in those extreme situations, out in those inhospitable places, among those rough peoples and the intrigues of that movable court, unstable now and therefore even more dangerous. He had not received news from him for months, but of course lines of communication across such vast territories – deserts and highlands, fast-flowing rivers, mountain chains – would all be in some difficulty.

The philosopher hurried his donkey by digging his heels into its flanks because he wanted to reach the top before darkness. Indeed, Philip’s assassin . . . whoever was behind it must have had a diabolic mind if up to that moment he had eluded him and any other investigators. The first clues suggested Queen Olympias, but she proved to be an unlikely culprit – why had Philip’s wife made the dramatic gesture of crowning the body of the killer? There were still many friends of the King who would have been able to make her pay dearly for the assassination, all the more so because she was a foreigner and therefore doubly exposed and weak in that situation. Then he had followed the hypothesis of a crime of passion, a sordid story of male sex in which Pausanias, the killer, wreaked his revenge on Philip for an outrage he had suffered at the hands of Attalus, father of young Eurydice and the King’s latest father-in-law. But Attalus was dead now and the dead do not speak.

The regular noise of the donkey’s hooves on the gravel of the road accompanied his meditations, almost marking out the quiet rhythm of his thought. There came to mind his interview with Pausanias’s bride-to-be, at a graveside one cold winter’s evening. Here was the third hypothesis: as soon as Philip’s young bride, Eurydice, had given birth to a son, her father, Attalus, the boy’s grandfather and the King’s father-in-law, had thought up a daring scheme – to kill Philip and to proclaim himself regent in his grandson’s name, the grandson who would take the throne on coming of age. The plan stood a good chance of being successful because the little boy’s mother was pureblood Macedonian, unlike Olympias who was a foreigner. This plan would have had a perfect conclusion with the murder of Pausanias, the only witness to the conspiracy. But there was no proof for this theory because Attalus had made no attempt to take power following Philip’s death – he had not marched on Pella with the army he led at that time in Asia. Perhaps he was afraid of Parmenion? Or of Alexander?

In any case, how to explain the words of Pausanias’s betrothed? She was certainly well informed and seemed to believe that her lover had been raped in an orgy by Attalus’s hunting stewards, which made no sense, if he was the assassin. He had searched for the girl again, but he was told that she had disappeared some time previously and that there had been no more news of her.

There was one last possibility – the clues leading to the Shrine at Delphi, the oracle that had issued an apparently ambiguous, but ultimately accurate prophecy regarding the imminent death of Philip. And not far away from here there lived, under a false name, the man who had killed Pausanias, the only witness who might lead him to the person who ordered Philip’s assassination.

The philosopher looked behind him and he saw that the dying light of the sunset had given a purple tinge to the waters of the gulf, a mirror enclosed between two promontories, and way up on high, to his left, was the great Doric temple of Apollo, already illuminated in the glow from the tripods and the lamps. At this point a melodious song rose into the clear silence of the evening: