Ben Bova - Orion and the Conqueror

I pretended to go to sleep, but as soon as I heard the snores of my fellow guardsmen in the darkness, I got up and headed for the queen’s rooms. I knew the layout of the palace well enough to get to her rooms on my own. But I did not want the guards or her serving women to get in my way.

So I went out onto the parade ground in the cold night, barefoot and wearing only my thin chiton. It was dark, moonless. Clouds were scudding low across the stars. The air felt damp, the wind cutting. Staying in the shadows of the barracks wall so that the sentries would not see me, I hurried the length of the parade ground and clambered softly up onto the roof of the stables. I had brought no weapon with me, nothing to clink in the night and alert a drowsy sentry. Nothing but the dagger that I always kept strapped to my thigh.

It was a good leap from the stable roof to the slightly higher roof next to it, but I made it almost silently and then climbed the rough stones of the wall to the still-higher roof of the palace proper. Then I made my way along the sloping timber beams of the roof until I figured I was above the queen’s quarters. I lowered myself from the eave and swung my legs through the curtained window, landing with a soft thud.

“I have been waiting for you, Orion,” said Olympias in the darkness.

I was in her bed chamber, crouched on the balls of my feet, my fingertips touching the polished wood of the floor, ready to fight if I had to.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said, reading my thoughts. “I want you here with me this night.”

“You knew I was coming?” In the shadows I could make out her form reclining on the bed.

“I commanded you to come to me,” she said, her voice taunting. “You don’t think you did this of your own volition, do you?”

I did not want to believe her. “Then why didn’t you send a servant, as before?”

I could sense her smiling in the darkness. “Why encourage palace gossip? The king likes you. He trusts you. Even Alexandros admires your fighting prowess. Why spoil all that by letting the servants know you are my lover?”

“I’m not—”

“But you are, Orion,” she snapped. Her body seemed to glow faintly in the darkness, stretched out languidly on the bed, naked and warm and inviting.

“I don’t want to be your lover,” I said, although it cost me pain to force the words through my gritted teeth.

“What you want is of no consequence,” Olympias replied. “You will do what I command. You will be what I desire you to be. Don’t force me to be cruel to you, Orion. I can make you grovel in slime if I wish it. I can make you do things that would destroy your spirit utterly.”

“Why are you doing this?” I demanded. But even as I asked it, I shuffled closer to her bed. “What are you trying to accomplish?”

“No questions, Orion,” she said. “Tonight is for pleasure. Tomorrow you will learn what your new duties are to be. Perhaps.”

I was helpless. I could not resist her. Even when I saw that the bed she lay upon was writhing with snakes I was unable to turn away, unable even to turn my eyes from her. She laughed as I slowly stripped off my chiton.

“Take off the dagger, too,” she commanded me. “You won’t need it. Your natural equipment will be quite enough.”

I did as she instructed me. The snakes were dry and cold against my bare skin. I felt them biting me, sinking their fangs into my flesh and filling my bloodstream with strange venoms that melted my willpower and heightened my senses to an excruciating pitch. Then it was Olympias’ teeth and nails penetrating me, tearing me apart, giving me pain while she took pleasure from me. She laughed while I wept. She exulted while I abased myself for her.

For weeks, for months, my life was bound to her whims. She would ignore me for long stretches of time and I would begin to think that she had tired of me, but then she would summon me again, and again I knew the tearing passions of physical pleasure and mental anguish. By day I served Philip and watched the love-hate relationship between the king and his son. By night I lay in my barracks bed fighting with every gram of strength in me against her domination. There were times when I almost thought I had thrown off her control.

But then she would call me again, in my mind, silent and invisible and completely irresistible. I would come to her and the snakes that she allowed to coil around her naked body. She would laugh and rend my flesh and rack me until I was utterly exhausted. Yet at dawn I always found myself in my barracks bed, refreshed and unhurt despite what Olympias and her witchcraft had done to me during the hours of darkness and passion.

By day, the news from the south grew steadily worse. Athens and Thebes had indeed concluded their treaty of alliance, backed by Persian gold. The bit of luck that Philip had waited upon turned out to be all bad: now he had to face the two most powerful cities of the south, knowing that if he lost to them he would lose his crown, his life, and all that he had struggled for since coming to the throne of Macedonia.

I wanted to ask Aristotle for his estimation of the situation. He was the wisest man I knew, except perhaps for Philip himself. But Philip’s wisdom was of the kingly sort, centered on what he needed to accomplish to enlarge his kingdom and make it safer and stronger. Aristotle was wise in the ways of human behavior. He cared about understanding the world rather than ruling it.

During one of my off-duty hours I tracked the philosopher down; he was in a shed standing by itself out beyond the stables. In it, on a rough trestle table, he had placed a large box of dirt. He was sitting on a teetering off-balance stool, staring at the dirt intently.

“May I enter?” I called from the doorway of the shed. There was no door, merely a rough blanket hung over the opening, which was so low that I had to duck through. The morning was warm and sunny; spring was in the air.

Aristotle jerked with surprise so hard that his rickety stool nearly toppled over. He peered across the shed at me, blinking painfully.

“Oh! It’s you, Orion. Yes, come in, come in.”

I saw that the box of dirt held a colony of ants.

“We can learn much from the ants,” said Aristotle. “They make kingdoms and even fight wars, much as men do.”

“Why do men fight wars?” I asked.

Aristotle wrinkled his high-domed forehead at me. “You might as well ask why men breathe. It is in their nature.”

I vaguely remembered one of the Creators, the Golden One, telling me arrogantly that he had designed me to be a warrior; me, and the other creatures he had sent into the time of the Neanderthals.

Aristotle mistook my silence for puzzlement. He took my arm in one of his thin-fingered hands and pulled me to the ant colony.

“Do you see them, Orion? I put two queen ants in there, one in this corner and the other on the farther side. They had plenty of room and I saw to it that they had plenty of food.”

The ants all looked exactly alike to me: tiny and black and terribly busy, scampering every which way across the sandy soil that filled the box.

“Yet look there,” Aristotle pointed. Battalions of ants were fighting each other, rending one another apart with fierce mandibles.

“They could live in peace, yet they fight. Each group wants to be master of the other. It is in their nature.”

“But men are not ants,” I said.

“No, they are like ravening dogs.” With real anger in his voice, Aristotle told me, “They see a neighbor who has something they do not, or a neighbor who appears too weak to defend himself, and they want to steal what that neighbor has. War is theft, Orion, thievery on a grand scale. Murder and rape and plunder, that is why men fight wars.”