Ben Bova - Orion and the Conqueror

I found the barracks where Philip’s soldiers were housed and announced myself as one of the king’s guard, returning from Asia with ten new recruits for the army. The officer in charge, a crusty old graybeard with a bad limp, put us up overnight and provided us the next morning with horses. I was anxious to reach Pella. Harkan was just as anxious to track down his children.

We rode from one army station to the next, across Thrace and into Macedonia. Each night I could feel myself coming closer to Hera’s power. I tried not to sleep. I went for almost a week without closing my eyes for more than a few moments at a time. But at last the night came when I could stay awake no longer, and as I sat on a cot in an army barracks, my back against the rough logs of its wall, I finally drifted into a deep slumber.

She came to me in dream, as she had before, beautiful, haughty, demanding.

“You are returning at an auspicious time, Orion,” Olympias/Hera told me.

I was standing before her in that magnificent chamber that did not exist in Pella yet was connected to the palace by a gateway that spanned the dimensions of spacetime. Olympias reclined on a throne that was almost a couch, carved from green bloodstone veined with dark streaks like rivulets of dried blood. Snakes slithered at her feet, twined across the back of the throne, coiled around her bare legs.

I could not move, could not even speak. All I was able to do was to see her, decked in a gown of deepest black glittering with jeweled lights, like stars, her magnificent red hair tumbling past her shoulders, her yellow eyes fixed on mine. I could hear her words. I could breathe. My heart beat. But I know she could destroy me with a glance if she wished to.

“Philip has taken a new wife,” she said, with a smile that was pure malice. “He has put me aside. I no longer reside in Pella, but have returned to my kinfolk in Epeiros. What say you to that?”

I found that I could open my mouth. My voice was scratchy, coughing, as if I had not spoken in weeks.

“You are allowing him to do so?” I asked.

“I am allowing him to write his own death warrant,” Olympias answered. “And you, my obedient creature, will be the instrument of my vengeance.”

“I will not willingly harm Philip.”

She laughed. “Harm him unwillingly, then.”

And then the pain struck me, wave upon wave of agony pouring over me like breakers rolling up on a beach. Through teeth clenched with anguish I managed to utter, “No. I will not.”

The pain intensified as she watched, an amused smile flickering across her lips, her eyes smoldering with sadistic pleasure. I could not move, could not even cry out, but she seemed to sense every iota of the agony she was putting me through, and to relish each moment.

Normally I can control pain, shut off my brain’s pain receptors. But I was not in control of my own body, my own mind. After an interminable time, though, the pain began to ease. I could not tell if I was regaining control of my own senses or if my tortured nervous system was simply beginning to fail under the continued stress.

Hera’s face told me the answer. Her smile was fading, her pleasure waning. At length the pain ended altogether, although I still could neither speak nor move.

“This grows tiresome,” she said peevishly. “You are strong, Orion. Perhaps we built you too well.”

I wanted to answer her but could not.

“No matter. What must be done will be done. And you will play your role in it.”

Suddenly I was awake in the barracks, still sitting against the rough log wall. Every part of my body ached. Even my insides felt raw, inflamed, as if I had been roasted alive.

At dawn we resumed our trek toward Pella.

“You are quiet this morning,” said Batu as we rode along the inland road.

“You look as if you spent the night drinking,” Harkan said, peering at me with those flinty eyes.

“Or wenching.” Batu laughed.

I said nothing. But all that morning I was thinking that Olympias was biding her time, waiting for the proper moment to strike Philip down so that Alexandros could take the throne. That time was drawing near.

The stables were the best place to learn the latest gossip. Each village we came to was abuzz with the news from the capital. Philip had indeed married Kleopatra, niece of Attalos. Olympias, who had been his chief wife for twenty-five years, had truly been sent packing back to her brother in Epeiros.

“And Alexandros?” I asked.

The news was awful. At the wedding feast, oily Attalos had smugly proposed a toast that Philip and his niece produce “a legitimate heir to the throne.”

Alexandros leaped to his feet. “You call me bastard?” He threw his wine cup at Attalos, opening a gash on the older man’s forehead.

Philip, seemingly stupefied with wine, staggered up from his couch. Some said he pulled a sword from one of the guards in murderous rage and wanted to kill Alexandros. Others claimed he was merely trying to get between Alexandros and Attalos to prevent a bloody fight from breaking out. The entire hall was on its feet; mayhem was in the air. Whatever Philip’s intention, his bad leg gave way and he sprawled clumsily to the wine-slicked floor.

Shaking with fury, Alexandros stared down at his father for a moment, then shouted, “This is the man who would take us across into Asia. He can’t even get himself from one bench to the other.”

Then he swept out of the hall, his Companions close behind him. Before dawn he and his mother had left Pella for Epeiros.

“He is still there?” I asked.

“So I hear. With his mother. In Epeiros.”

“It’s too bad about the Little King,” said one of the stable men. “Bad business, his falling out with his father that way.”

“But good riddance to the witch,” said another as we exchanged our horses.

They were not going to get rid her that easily, I knew.

At last we came to Pella, on a fine summer morning under an azure sky, with a cool breeze from the mountains moderating the heat of the sun. Harkan, riding beside me, murmured, “That’s a sizeable city.”

I nodded, and noted that Pella had grown noticeably, even in the two years I had been away. New houses reached up into the hills, new arcades and markets spread along the high road. A cloud of gritty gray-brown dust hung over the city, kicked up by the many corrals where horses and mules stirred and whinnied, by the building work going on everywhere, by the traffic streaming along the high road and into the city’s streets.

As we rode into the city itself Batu laughingly complained, “Such noise! How can a man think in all this bustle?”

I had paid scant attention to the city’s constant din before, but once Batu had said it I realized that the cities in Asia were much quieter and more orderly than Pella. Certainly the marketplaces were noisy with the cries of sellers and arguments of buyers, but the other sections of those ancient cities were sleepy in the hot sun, orderly and quiet. Pella was more like a madhouse, with the constant din of construction hammering everywhere, chariots and wagons and horsemen clattering through the cobblestoned streets, people laughing and talking at the top of their lungs on almost every corner.

No one stopped us or even paid us much attention as we rode up the main street toward Philip’s palace. The people were accustomed to seeing soldiers; the army was the backbone of Macedonian society and these people did not fear their army, as the peoples of the Persian Empire’s cities did.