Ben Bova: Orion and the Conqueror

“There’s been enough killing,” said the black-bearded one. Some of his men nodded. To me he raised his voice, “I have need of good soldiers. Would you accept employment in my army?”

I looked around. My companions were either dead or prisoners. I did not have much of a choice, but at least he was offering me something better than being sold into slavery or slaughtered outright.

I thought it over for all of a half-second. “Yes,” I replied. “I would like to be on the winning side, for a change.”

He threw his head back and laughed. “Very well, then! How are you called?”

“My name is Orion.”

“From where?”

I started to reply, then realized that I did not know. I could not remember anything more than a few hours ago.

“From the North,” I temporized.

“Must be a Scythian, from the size of you. I’d recognize those gray eyes anywhere. But where’s your beard? Why are you shaved?”

I hadn’t the faintest idea. “A beard gives your enemy a handhold to grab,” I heard myself answer.

He tugged at his own thick beard. “Does it, now? You sound like my son.” Then he turned and called to one of the soldiers standing closest to him, “Nikkos, take him into your troop. I don’t think he’ll need much training. Looks to me as if he already knows how to use a sarissa.”

He pulled at the reins and trotted off, grinning, the other officer riding beside him.

That was my first sight of Philip, King of the Macedonians. The golden-haired boy who led the cavalry turned out to be his son, Alexandros.

We camped at the battlefield that night, to burn the dead and then rest after the long hard day’s exertions. Nikkos, to my surprise, was a Thracian, not a Macedonian at all.

“In my father’s time we raided into Macedon and stole their horses and cattle,” he told me as we sat by a crackling wood fire and chewed on roasted mutton. “And their women, too,” he added with a leering wink.

He could not have been thirty. His hair was dark brown and wild as an untamed forest. His black beard was smeared and sticky with mutton drippings. About a dozen of us were sitting around the fire while a physician from far-off Corinth went around applying salves and bandages to men’s wounds.

“And now you serve the Macedonians,” I said.

He gulped at his goatskin of wine, splashing much of it over his beard and chest. “You bet we do! Old One-Eye has changed everything. When he became king he beat the shit out of us. And everybody else around him. Struck us in the winter, in the summer. Made no difference to him. He never lost a battle. He knows how many beans makes five, he does.”

“Philip conquered your people,” I murmured.

Nikkos shook his shaggy head vigorously. “No. Not conquered. We still have our own king. He just showed us that we’d be better off allied with him than fighting against him.”

A diplomat , I thought. Then I realized that Philip had done the same thing to me this day.

“Now all the country tribes are allied with Macedon,” Nikkos went on, “and Philip even makes war against Athens.”

If Nikkos was unhappy with this situation he did not show it. Indeed, he seemed to be quite pleased with it all.

Then he leaned closer to me. “D’you know what I think?” he asked in a low voice.

His breath was foul and I could see things crawling in his beard. “What?” I asked, trying to keep the distance of a flea’s jump between us.

“I think it’s her that’s done it.”

“Her?”

“The witch. Philip’s wife.”

“The king’s wife is a witch?”

He lowered his voice even more. “Priestess of the Old Cult. Worships the Snake Goddess and all that. She’s a sorceress, all right. How else can you explain it? I was already big enough to help my father tend his flock when Philip pushed his brother off the throne. Macedonia was being sliced up by all the tribes around it. Not just us, but the Illyrians, the Paionians—all of us. We raided and plundered every year.”

“Philip put a stop to that?”

“In the blink of his one eye, or so it seems. Now all the tribes serve him. It must be that Molossian bitch of his; that’s the only way to explain it.”

I glanced uneasily at the other men sitting around the fire.

Nikkos laughed. “Don’t worry, I can’t say anything about the witch that Old One-Eye hasn’t said himself. He hates her.”

“Hates his wife?”

Several of the men nodded agreement, grinning.

“If it weren’t that she’s the mother of his son and heir he would have sent her packing back to Epeiros long ago.”

“He can’t do that,” said one of the others. “He’s afraid of her.”

“She can cast spells.”

“Spells my ass. She poisons people.”

“Not poison. Magic.”

“Look what she did to the other son, the one by the Thessalian woman.”

“Arrhidaios? The idiot?”

“He was a healthy baby. She fed him poison that made him feeble-minded.”

“Or cast a spell to make certain her own son would be Philip’s heir, even though he’s a couple of years younger.”

The men fell to arguing over whether the king’s wife was a poisoner or a sorceress. I listened with only half an ear. The men around me, the battle we had gone through, this chill, dark night with the black bowl of the heavens strewn with brilliant glittering stars—all of it was strange and new to me. I had no memory of anything farther back than that morning. Each of the men around me had a family and clan and tribe, each of them could recall their kings and histories from generations back.

I had nothing. A blank where my memory should have been. The men spoke of the gods they worshipped; their names meant nothing to me. Until one of them mentioned Athena, the warrior goddess, the patroness of Athens.

“She’s more than a warrior goddess,” said Nikkos grudgingly. “She’s the goddess of wisdom. Or at least, the Athenians think so.”

“They should,” one of the others said. “She gave them the olive tree, didn’t she?”

“And the spinning wheel.”

Athena. A picture of her formed in my mind: tall and slim and incredibly beautiful, with lustrous dark hair and solemn silver-gray eyes.

“We’re all playthings for the gods,” Nikkos was saying. “They pull the strings and we jump.”

“I don’t believe that,” said the man next to him. “I live my own life; nobody pulls my strings.”

But we are here to do the gods’ bidding , I thought. At least I am. I felt certain of that. Yet—what did the gods want me to do? Who was I, really, and why was I here? There was no answer in my mind, no message from the gods to enlighten me.

The fire sputtered low and the men began to wrap themselves in cloaks or blankets and stretch out for sleep. I had nothing but the grimy, skirted chiton of sweat-stained linen that I was wearing. My bronze breastplate and greaves and helmet rested on the ground beside me. Yet as soon as I realized that the night wind was chilling me, I clamped down on my peripheral circulation and consciously speeded my heartbeat to raise my body temperature enough to compensate for the cold.

I did that almost without thinking about it. But then I began to wonder how I could control my body so minutely. And how I knew what I was doing. Somehow I realized that this was far beyond the capabilities of other men. In the battle I had been able to fight and kill without being scratched. I could see everything in slow motion, yet my own reactions were always faster than anyone else’s.

Who am I? I wondered as I laid myself on the hard ground and closed my eyes. Where am I from?