Daimon

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

My father, ever eager to outmaneuver my mother on the battlefield that was me, had decided to remove me from the company of the women and begin my education in earnest as a future leader of men. And my mother, always anxious to countermand his actions, had put forth her own candidate as my tutor, a relative named Leonidas. Only like a lot of clever people, my mother outsmarted herself, hiring a teacher who took his role as a molder of men too seriously—as I soon discovered.

One day a trunk arrived that promised to make up for my new Spartan surroundings. It was filled with figs, olives, and a new chiton of soft purple and white cloth bordered in gold—all beautifully crafted by Mother and Cynane. I smiled as I buried my face in the cloth, relishing their commingled scents. Years later—separated from them by time and place—I would be carried back to that moment whenever a parcel arrived with some trinket or treat or a lovingly woven garment. No matter how many silks I sent to my mother and sisters from the East, they always came back to me in the form of finished clothing. Every token of affection was repaid as a gift fit for a king.

This particular trunk also contained a small, spare statue of Achilles, my mother’s great ancestor, and the hero I admired most in the world, for he best embodied what I held to be the highest goal—arête—excellence.

I had no sooner set Achilles on the little table by my bed and selected a fig to munch on while I observed him when I heard Leonidas in the hall yelling, “Where is it? And more to the point, where is he?”

He flew into the room and flung the contents of the trunk—clothing, sweets and sours, demigod, and all—into the hearth that provided what little warmth was to be had under Leonidas’ tutelage.

“How dare you?” I cried. “This is a private gift from my mother the queen and my princess sisters. You have no right.”

But before I could continue, Leonidas seized me and, ripping the drab chiton I was wearing in two, threw me on the bed, and began whipping my back and buttocks savagely. Huge welts and tears began to form. But I did not cry out. I was much too proud and hurt to do that. And too shocked. What had I done to deserve this? I had only tried to please and, when I spoke up, it was only to defend what was fair and right. Now I realized that injustice sometimes must be met with silence.

So, I offered no rebuke, and when at last Leonidas released me, his rage spent, I crawled gasping and shivering to the hearth—clutching the torn chiton in front of me—and curled up in a ball like a dog who’s been kicked so often that it cannot make itself small enough to hide from view.

For a long while, I drifted in and out of sleep. In my dreams—or was I awake?—the chiton my mother had fashioned for me melted into a plume of purple flame that spiraled into scented smoke, while the figs and olives she had packed along with it blackened and shriveled like the innards of dead animals. Only Achilles survived his fiery Hades, tarnished but unbroken.

I have the heart of Achilles, I told myself. And I will bear this on my back, for someday I will bear much worse. First, though, I decided to sulk as beautifully as the great Achilles—strumming his lyre in his tent as he absented himself from the Trojan War. For there is nothing that lends nobility to suffering quite so well as an injury that is not so great as you imagined it to be.

The next three days, I huddled naked and bruised by the dying fire, refusing to look at Leonidas or speak to anyone. And so, I did not take part in the early morning march that passed for breakfast or eat the light breakfast that passed for dinner.

When I finally emerged at the end of my self-imposed exile, it was with a new sense of purpose. I even willingly gave my bare back to Leonidas after the next transgression, a cool smile at play on my lips.

Yes, pompous fool, you may beat me. But you will never break me, for I was born to rule the world. That is where my daimon, my guiding spirit, is leading me. That is my destiny.

I would have my revenge on Leonidas. Once I was soundly thrashed for throwing too much incense into a pot before a statue of Zeus. So when all the stores of the East became my province, I sent Leonidas five-hundred talents of frankincense and a hundred talents of myrrh—a king’s ransom—with a note that said simply: Don’t be so stingy with the gods.

Yes, revenge is never so delicious as when it’s seasoned with the passage of time, and the transgressor has forgotten the offense. That I learned from my cobra mother.

Ah, Mother: While I became adept at shielding my bruises and true feelings, every once and awhile I slipped. When I next visited her, I made the mistake of letting her hold me too close—as if anything could stop that force of nature anyway.

“What’s this?” she said with an anxious smile as she pulled up my sleeve, then spun me around to peer down my back.

The next thing I knew she was dragging me by my right arm—which made me ache even more—shrieking “Ai, Ai, Ai,” as she made her way to the great reception hall in the inner courtyard. There, amid the lofty columns and torches, the pebbled mosaic floors with their great scenes of a lion hunt and Dionysus riding a dolphin, my father stood, chatting with the emissaries from Corinth.

“Look, look,” she yelled, pushing me toward him, heedless of the Corinthian ambassadors, who diplomatically retreated from the scene, but not before bestowing a self-satisfied smile on one another.

“Look what you’ve done to my child,” she said, hitting her chest. “My child.”

“Your child? Your child, Madam?” my father bellowed back triumphantly. “Your relatives. Your choice for a tutor. Isn’t this what you wanted?”

Like Zeus hanging Hera out by her hair to twist slowly in the wind on Mount Olympus, my father had often done great violence to my mother, particularly when I was absent or too young to defend her. But he could not have hurt her more at that moment than if he had flayed her alive. The stunned hurt on her face was a look I will never forget.

Sensing that my father would do no more to injure her that day, I extricated myself from between their close bodies to let them thrash it out with a phalanx of words. No point in suffocating between them. Besides, I had done my time as a hostage to their hatred.

My father may have won the battle, but my mother won the war. She always did. Soon Leonidas was sent packing, and a new tutor was engaged, Lysimachus, who fancied himself Phoenix, after Achilles’ mentor, to my flame-haired warrior and my father as Achilles’ father, King Peleus. But flattery, I have observed, will take you only so far in this world, even with someone as ready to be flattered as Father, who recognized I would need a mentor of sterner stuff. And so he hired one whose weapons were not fists or compliments, but ideas. Aristotle had come from Stagira, which my father had destroyed and rebuilt. He was a man much admired for the profundity of his thought and his ability to express it elegantly.

“A king’s son requires a philosopher-tutor worthy of a king,” my father had announced airily to the half-listening Theban ambassadors, if for no other reason than to remind those emissaries that he could afford the best.

If he were the best my father’s money could buy, Aristotle was certainly too wise to acknowledge it. A fine-boned man of forty with a receding line of wavy hair, he had come armed with a pedigree from Plato, a reputation for discourse on any subject and a healthy, amused skepticism of me. But I easily won him over, in a way that I never could the dogmatic Leonidas, by, wonder of wonders, merely being myself—half-rebellious, half-contrite, but always striving and openhearted. Aristotle appreciated a questing nature and even my enemies—yes, they were there from the beginning—had to concede I possessed that.

Father was already besotted with him, for Aristotle was the one thing he could never be—a gentleman. And even Mother, so leery of anyone she perceived to be a rival for my affections, was forced to admit that the new tutor meant her son no harm and might do him a great deal of good. Thus Aristotle was allowed to retreat with my thirteen-year-old self from Pella to the garden at nearby Mieza.

It wasn’t a garden per se, but a clearing nestled in the Macedonian highlands with a grey stone temple dedicated to the nymphs beside a gurgling brook. Yet all the Persian paradises I would encounter later—with their pavilions and parasols, pomegranates and peacocks, quartered by rills and fountains—would be nothing to my childhood memory of Mieza, for there was perfect love. There was perfect happiness. Listening to Aristotle talk about the plants and animals of the world. (One day I would proudly send him many of their exotic specimens from the East.) Questioning his characterization of the Persians. (How could he call this tall, bearded race with their fine silks and finer manners barbarians?) Reciting Homer’s Iliad alongside him, my light voice thrilling to mingle with his richer tone. (How I secretly wept when Achilles said to young Lycaon as he was about to kill him: “See how great I am, see how beautiful. Yet I too shall die, though my mother is immortal. You also then resign yourself to fate.”)

Yes, we, too, must resign ourselves to our fates and one day leave this garden to its lengthening shadows. No wonder the stone nymphs wept.

For once, though, I had friends to share the emotions that threatened to overwhelm my heart. They were, of course, handpicked by Father and Mother from the best families in Macedon. There was Ptolemy of Eordaia, older and more experienced than the rest of us—one of Father’s many bastards, if the stories were to be believed. He would become one of my most steadfast generals. Harpalus, son of Machatas, never met a sum he couldn’t cipher or a coin he wouldn’t horde. He would become my treasurer.

Callisthenes of Olynthus, Aristotle’s own kinsman, along for the ride, was a shaper of words and later, of my story. Philotas was the son of Parmenion, a general of impeccable credentials and Father’s right hand. Nearchus of Crete was as eager to see Ocean on the far side of the world as I was to see it after hearing Aristotle tell of it. He would become the admiral of my fleet.

They were good lads all, boys I could grow up and grow old with. Or so I thought then.

Years later, I would mourn for what some of them had become and for the boy who had given his heart too easily. There was, however, one who would never break my heart but would cherish it and lock it away in his own. His name was Hephaestion, son of Amyntor, and though we had met briefly at the palace at Pella when we were eight or nine—for we were almost exactly the same age—it was not until his father agreed to let him be tutored with me that I took any note of him.

At first, I thought him shy and prickly. Then one day, when we were drawing, our knees lightly touched as I dropped my stylus, and we both reached for it. He grabbed it first, and, handing it back to me, squeezed my hand, gazing at me with those huge blue eyes that could shift from welling to playing in an instant. He grinned his grin then—all the more charming for its infrequency—and, looking away, went back to his drawing.

You never know who the love of your life will be. But if you’re lucky enough to recognize such love, then you must protect it and fight for it, for it transcends time and place and yes, even death. I knew that we were destined to be together, though never alone or at peace.

I knew, too, that we would become lovers, though my virginal teenage self could scarcely acknowledge it. Somehow, I found it easier to pretend that Hephaestion wasn’t holding my hand after a long run, that he hadn’t caressed my neck when he fashioned a laurel wreath for my head, that our wrestling didn’t produce a predictable reaction.

We had stumbled into an uncharted country. Each of us could’ve accepted the attentions of one of the many older men who sought us out, to complete our manly education. That was the Greek way, and nary an eyebrow would have been raised.

Instead, we chose to raise each other, which was cause for some concern, no doubt because it went against the grain.

“That’s enough playing Patroclus and Achilles,” Aristotle would say, placing himself between us.

For some reason, we loved to reenact the scene from a red-figure drinking cup in which a solicitous Achilles bandages Patroclus’ injured arm as he looks away, nobly enduring the pain.

Perhaps we somehow knew that we would one day play the scene for real after the Battle of Gaugamela when we were twenty-five years old and all of Persia lay at our feet.

“It has to come out,” I said, looking at a shard embedded in his left arm.

“It’s nothing,” he said testily, “a scratch. Go tend the other wounded.”

“They have better physicians to care for them. First I’ll see to this.”

“It’s nothing, I tell you.”

“Hephaestion—”

“All right, then, but do it quickly.”

I grabbed hold of the piece, making sure I had all of it, and yanked it out.

“Uh, by Zeus, you’re no Hippocrates.”

“The patient’s nothing to brag about either. Hold still now,” I said, ignoring his complaints as I applied the sap from some aloe leaves, just as Aristotle had taught me.

“Zeus,” he cried, pulling away. “That stings.”

“Well, of course, it does. It wouldn’t be working if it didn’t sting,” I countered.

After applying the leaves and pressure, I wrapped the wound in a clean cloth like Achilles of old. Then I did something that I imagined Achilles did immediately after bandaging Patroclus’ arm. I drew him close and kissed him tenderly on the forehead.

“My love,” I whispered.

For he was my love, my heart, the only one who had never asked anything of me except that I be myself.

Just then a soldier came up to us, and we drew apart. He had the look of a man who had wandered into the amphitheater during the third act of a Sophoclean drama and was eager to know what had transpired.

“King Alexander,” he shouted, hitting his chest with his right fist and raising his hand in the air with the palm open in salute.

“General,” he added, nodding sharply to Hephaestion. “How’s the arm?”

“More to the point,” Hephaestion snapped, “how are our supply lines?”

The soldier let out a small sigh, as if he were sorry he had been chosen for this assignment.

“If you’re well enough to ride, permit me to show you myself, sir.”

And with that Hephaestion was off.