Daimon

Chapter 1

Part 1: The Sorceress and the Bull

Chapter 1

I have always known my destiny.

When I was a child, I would often dream of myself rising in the night and running—not the way you do in dreams, barely lighting on the stones, but the way an Olympian runs. Swift and sure, I would race past the servants, who moved silently through the corridors on the second floor and the guards who stood as still as the blue- and cream-colored columns that ringed the two courtyards. Heedless of the rough-hewn statues and bramble gardens, I would make my way down the steps to the sea. There I would hurl myself into the water and, floating on my back, yielded to its embrace unafraid, for above me was the fixèd star that had been there when I was born and has guided me ever since. It will never desert me.

My star was real enough, but I knew the rest to be a dream even as I dreamt it. And I was glad of it, for while I loved the sea and longed to see Ocean, I had never excelled at swimming. Some things are best savored from a distance, particularly when that distance is no greater than one’s soft, warm couch in the palace at Pella.

Pella—my childhood home on the coast of Macedon and the capital of our proud nation. They—the Greeks mostly—would have you believe it was a tough, unsophisticated place. Nothing could have been further from the truth. If Pella were not quite a city where ideas were born, like Athens, then it was surely one where they were tested, in the massive agora flanked by a double arcade that teemed with artisans. How I loved to sneak behind the stalls to watch the sculptors carve figures from the Trojan War—noble Hector, brave Achilles, and brilliant Athena—all ravishing in their physical perfection.

Pella was also where Euripides ended his days and wrote the greatest of his plays, The Bacchae. Many was the night my teenage self imagined the women of the title writhing against a statue of their god, Dionysus—their careless garments revealing the creamy dunes of their breasts, their frenzied movements and the kohl-eyed beauty of their god only serving to stoke rather than satisfy their lust, and mine.

Many was the day I escaped to the marketplace or imagined myself caught up in the Bacchae’s trance, for I was born in Pella in the Month of Lions to a king and queen, who, like the storm-tossed sea, were also best savored from a distance.

My father and mother—Philip and Olympias. Consider them as I see them now—with love, with regret, but without illusion. Did they ever love each other? They had hated each other for so long—as long as I could remember—that it seemed impossible. Still, they were young once, filled with possibilities. Perhaps there had been a moment…

They had met during the celebration of the Sacred Mysteries on the island of Samothrace when my mother, flushed with religious fervor, was an orphaned, virgin princess of eighteen, and my father, though a king and a husband many times over, was still a dashing general at twenty-five. They began by lying to themselves. So, it was inevitable that they would end by lying to each other.

He—a man who could never surmise the depths of anyone’s desires, save his own—had convinced himself that the poppy he plucked on Samothrace was just another to twine about his fingers. She—with a heart as dark as the raven-tresses of Dionysus, the deity she served—had convinced herself that she could belong to Philip’s army of wives, mistresses, male lovers, and those poor creatures who were forced to share his bed at too tender an age. Their tactical miscalculations—about power, about each other—would prove deadly. But I am getting ahead of myself here.

See them as I do in memory, a king and a queen with no heart for each other but a duty to fulfill, a country to rule—less refined perhaps than those quarrelsome Greek city-states to the south but ascendant nonetheless and ready to eclipse the Greeks themselves.

My father would become their hegemon. And though he often said the Greeks were a pain in his lame leg and lost eye, protecting them was easier than controlling our family. Perhaps that was because our family was made up mostly of women, the men having died in battle or in bed, where it was said that a Macedonian royal’s best accessory was a dagger kept under his pillow.

Like many a self-styled ladies’ man, Father mistook s****l conquest for actual knowledge—meaning that he never understood women at all. Whereas I—who would be celebrated as a lover of men and would perhaps find my greatest happiness with my beloved—was intimately acquainted with women. My grandmother Eurydice, strong and beautiful in old age, to whom I’d run when Mother grew too oppressive; my older half-sister, Cynane, as skilled with a bow and arrow as Artemis; my baby sister, Cleopatra, a chubby five-year-old but already a little queen; and, of course, Mother herself, as patient as one of those snakes she kept for her rituals and just as poisonous, always ready to strike at the heel.

And at the heart. Sometimes I wondered if being her favorite was a blessing or a curse.

“You are Alexander,” she would say, hugging me too tightly, “a name meaning ‘protector of men.’ And that is what you shall do, protect us—me, your sisters, our family—and one day, our country, the Greeks and yes, even the world.”

It was a tall order for a slight six-year-old. Yet it never occurred to me to think of it as a burden. I had only to look around at my grandmother’s fine-boned, wrinkled face; my sisters, as delicate as pliant flowers; and my half-brother, Philip Arrhidaeus, whom they called a fool, because he was slow and stammered and twitched. Some said Mother had bewitched him. But I think that was just a story given out by Philip A.’s mother, Philinna of Larissa, one of father’s earlier wives.

If my mother had wanted to do him harm—something she was perfectly capable of doing—why did she raise him, educate him, and tenderly care for him when he was sick and insist that he recline at table, even though he drooled and at times convulsed and spit up?

Yes, she raised him as well as all of Father’s many bastards. And when Father took another wife or mistress, she turned a blind eye. And when the male servants panted in pleasure in his bedchamber, she turned a deaf ear.

And when Father fondled a child a little too familiarly, well, she did and said nothing. For she was a queen and the mother of the son who would be king.

Being queen had its advantages. She reveled in the superior expressions of the Athenian ambassadors as Father told them that we Macedonians were much more civilized than the Persians, for we used stoning—and on occasion, crucifixion—to punish transgressors, while the Persian king still used impalement, considered a more prolonged form of execution.

We children watched quietly from the upper gallery—for it was way past our bedtime—for some sense that Father, a crafty diplomat, had said this to strike terror obliquely into the heart of Athens—which, truth be told, was not quite the Periclean prize it thought it was when it came to dispensing justice. But no, Father’s remark was made matter-of-factly to convey Macedonian strength tempered with mercy. We shrugged and rolled our eyes then, while Father clapped his hands and announced a play by “our Euripides,” as he called him.

“Poor, dear, stupid Philip,” my mother would say, luxuriating in her bed afterward. “He thinks that just because he orders a play to be performed that it makes him cultured, that it makes him loved.”

She would hold out herself to me then, and I would propel myself into her arms, snuggling close and drinking the heady perfume of her flesh, which was separated from me only by her thin, fluted garment. And so, at a young age—too young an age—I became my mother’s confidant, learning all her tricks and fears and more about what went on between a man and a woman than any child should know. Sometimes I hated her for making me in effect her substitute husband. But what was I to do? What was she to do?

“Why, why do you always take her part?” my father would bellow later whenever I came between them and took the blows that were meant for her. “Why can’t you love me the way you love her, the way I love you?”

“I do love you, Father,” I would say. “But you have everything and she, nothing, not even a man to defend her. Her father’s dead; her brother, too young and far away in Epirus. As for her husband,” I added, looking him coldly in the eye, “well, he stopped loving her a long time ago. So, I must do what a man would do.”

What a man would do. Yes, I learned what a man must do from the women of my youth, and that real power belongs only to those who are strong enough to champion the weak.

It was a lesson I would remind myself of daily when I turned seven, for my whole life was about to change.