“Take me to the king!” I shouted again as they locked me into a cell. My throat was getting hoarse from my unheeded demands. “I must see the king and warn him!”
To no avail. They dumped me into the dirt-floored cell, still chained. The last one to leave me was Harkan. He waited until all the others had filed out, then knelt beside me.
Ah-hah! I thought. Now he’s going to tell me that he’ll return and get me out of this.
But instead he whispered swiftly, “I’m sorry, Orion. It was you or my children. She’s promised to give them back to me if I brought you in.”
She. The queen. Olympias. Hera.
“She means to kill me,” I said.
He nodded wordlessly and then left me lying there on the floor of the cell. The door clanged shut and I was alone in the darkness.
But not for long. My eyes were just adjusting to the gloom when I heard footsteps coming down the corridor outside. The door was unlocked and pushed open. Two jailers came in and, grunting, lifted me by my armpits to a sitting position and dragged me across the cell until my back was propped up against the rough stone wall.
They left and Olympias stepped into the cell. Pausanias came in behind her, holding a torch in his right hand.
“We should kill him now and get it over with,” Pausanias muttered.
“Not just yet,” said Olympias. “He may still be of value to us, once Philip is dead.”
I saw the ageless eyes of Hera in her beautiful, cruel face.
“What value?” Pausanias snapped.
“You question me?”
He immediately yielded to the iron in her voice. “I just wanted to know—that is, he’s dangerous. We should be rid of him.”
“After Philip is killed,” Olympias whispered. “Then you can have him.”
“Do you think I won’t go through with it?” Pausanias snapped. “Do you think I need a prize, a reward, to make me kill the king?”
“No, of course not,” she soothed. “But wait until afterward. It will be better afterward, I promise you.”
Pausanias stepped closer to me. “Very well. After.” Then he kicked me with all his might squarely on the side of my head. As I slid toward unconsciousness I heard him growl, “I owed you that.”
Chapter 33
I remained unconscious willingly, deliberately. My body lay in the musty cell, chained hand and foot, but my mind was aware and active. I sought out the city of the Creators once again, seeking the only refuge I could think of.
My eyes opened on that grassy hill above the empty and abandoned city. The sun glittered on the sea, the flowers nodded to the passing breeze, the trees sighed as they had sighed for a hundred million years. Yet I could not approach the city any closer than I had before. Once again that invisible barrier held me in its grip.
There was nowhere for me to go except back to Macedonia, back to that dark dungeon in Aigai, chained and helpless while Hera goaded Pausanias into murdering his king. There was no way I could get to Philip in time to warn him.
Or was there? If I could not get out of my cell to go to Philip, could I bring him here to this ageless bubble of spacetime to be with me? I paced along the soft grassy slope, thinking hard, noting absently that as long as I walked away from the city I was not hindered by the barrier.
How often had the Creators summoned me here? How many times had I made the transition from some place and time to this eternal city? I knew what it felt like so well that I could translate myself here without their aid, without their even knowing it. Could I stretch that power to pluck Philip from Aigai and bring him here, even briefly, to warn him?
As I pondered the problem I thought I heard the faintest, subtlest echo of laughter. Mocking, cynical laughter that seemed to say to me that I had never moved myself through the continuum unaided, that I did not have the power to translate a molecule from one placetime to another, that everything I thought I had done on my own was really done for me by one of the Creators.
No, I raged silently. I have achieved these things by myself. Anya told me so in a previous life. The Creators were even becoming wary of my increasing powers, fearful that I would one day equal them despite all they tried to do to stop me. That is why they wiped my memory and sent back to ancient Macedonia. But it didn’t work. I am learning again, growing, gaining strength despite their betrayals.
That mocking laughter was one of their tricks, I told myself—trying to weaken my resolve, my self-confidence.
I can bring Philip to me, I told them. I know how to do it. I have the power.
And Philip, king of Macedonia, appeared before me.
He seemed more annoyed than startled. He was wearing nothing but a thin cloth wrapped around his middle. His one good eye blinked in the sunlight, and I realized that I had taken him from his sleep.
“Orion,” he said, without surprise.
“My lord.”
He looked around. “What place is this? What’s that city down there?”
“We are far from Macedonia. You might say that the city is the abode of the gods.”
He snorted. “Doesn’t look much like Mount Olympus, does it?” His body was covered with scars, old puckered white lines across his chest and shoulders, a raw ugly knotted gash along the length of his left thigh. He bore the history of all the battles he had fought.
“Pausanias told me that you’re a deserter. Are you a witch, as well?”
I started to answer, then suddenly realized that Olympias had shown him other domains of spacetime just as she had shown me. Philip was not startled to be plucked from his bed and drawn to a different part of the continuum because she had done this to him previously.
“No, I’m not a witch,” I replied. “Neither is your wife.”
“Ex-wife, Orion. And I guarantee you, she is a witch.”
“She’s shown you other places?”
He nodded. “More than once, when we were first married. She showed me how powerful Macedonia could become if I followed her advice.” Then he aimed his one good eye at me. “You’re in league with her, then?”
“No. Quite the contrary.”
“You have the same powers she has.”
“Some of the same powers,” I said. “I’m afraid she’s much more powerful than I.”
“More powerful than anyone,” he muttered.
“She means to kill you.”
“I know. I’ve known it for years.”
“But this time—”
He held up a hand to silence me. “Speak no more about it, Orion. I know what she plans. I’ve outlived my usefulness to her. Now it’s time for Alexandros to fulfill her ambitions.”
“You want to die?”
“No, not particularly. But every man dies, Orion, sooner or later. My work is finished. I’ve done what she wanted me to do. She’s like a female spider that must devour her mate.”
“But it doesn’t have to be that way,” I objected.
“What would you have me do?” he asked, his fierce beard bristling. “If I want to stay alive, stay on the throne, I’ll have to kill her and I can’t do that, else she’ll goad Alexandros into civil war. Do you think I want to see my people torn apart like that? Do you think I want to kill my own son?”
Before I could answer he went on, “If Macedonians make war on each other, what do you think the nations around us will do? What do you think Demosthenes and the rest of the Athenians will do? Or the Thebans? Or the Great King over in Persia?”
“I see.”
“Do you? We’ll be right back where we were before I made myself king.” He pulled in a deep breath, then added, “And even if he’s not my true son, that makes no difference. I won’t murder him.”