Orion and the Conqueror by Ben Bova Page B

Philip.
    As the dinner stretched into a long drinking bout I wondered if I would be able to keep my midnight appointment with the queen. Philip looked half-unconscious from the wine he had drunk, yet he had a boy of ten or so pouring still more into his gold goblet. Some of the dinner guests were drowsing on their couches; those who weren't were fondling the prettier servants.
    Then the hetairai were admitted into the dining hall and the servants scampered away, many of them looking grateful. These professional women were older and looked quite sure of themselves. It seemed to me that they picked out the men they wished to be with. No one argued with their choices. And the men's behavior actually improved. The lewdjokesand roaring laughter quieted down as one ofthecourtesans pointed to the musicians who had been sitting idly in a corner. They struck up their lyres and flutes and lovely soft music filled the dining hall. The stench of spilled wine and vomit still hung in the air. But now the perfumes of distant lands began to make the room more pleasant.
    In less than an hour the dining hall emptied out. No one could leave before the king did, of course, but soon after the hetairai appeared he lumbered off with one of the serving boys, leaning heavily on the lad's shoulders, dragging his bad leg. One by one the other men went off with their female companions until at last the hall was emptied of all except the servants, who wearily began cleaning off the tables and throwing scraps to the dogs who had been waiting by the fire all evening long.
    At last Pausanias strode past my post at the entrance. "Dismissed," was all that he managed to say.
    I hurried back to the barracks, took off my armor, and rushed back to the palace to find Olympias' audience chamber.

Chapter 7

    The queen was not in her audience chamber. But a sloe-eyed maid with flowing dark hair and a knowing smile was waiting for me. Holding a clay oil lamp in one upraised hand, she guided me through the upper levels of the palace, a dizzying labyrinth of stairs and corridors and rooms. I thought she was deliberately trying to confuse me.
    "Is the queen's room in a hidden place?" I asked, half joking.
    She looked up at me in the yellow light of the lamp, her smile full of secrets. "You will see," she said.
    And I did. Soon we came to a low wooden door at the end of an otherwise blank corridor. I could hear the night wind moaning even though we had passed no window. We must be up high, I reasoned.
    The servant scratched at the door and it swung inward on silent hinges. She went through and beckoned me enter. I had to duck to get through the arched doorway. The servant slipped behind me and went out again, closing the door behind her.
    It was dark inside. Blacker than the darkest moonless night, a darkness so deep and all-engulfing that I felt as if I had stepped into oblivion, an emptiness where nothing at all existed. Dark and cold, frigid, as if I had been plunged into the void where warmth and light could not exist. My breath froze in my throat. I stretched out my arms like a blind man, reaching for some reference point in this Stygian abyss, searching sightlessly while my senses told me I was falling, tumbling through a nothingness where neither time nor space existed. Panic rose within me as I struggled to breathe.
    Then I saw the faintest, faintest glow of a distant light. Like the flicker of the first star of evening, so tenuous that I could not be certain it was there at all. Gradually, though, the light brightened. I heard a slithering of bare feet, the faintest suggestion of distant laughter. I could breathe again. My fear subsided. I stood immobile, silent, waiting for the light to brighten further, my right hand resting gently on the dagger strapped beneath my skirt.
    Slowly, lamps came aglow, low and guttering at first, then gradually brightening. I saw that the room I stood in was immense, impossibly long and wide, its vast ceiling lost in shadows, its