The Golden Mean (11 page)

“No. I don’t.”

“Absolutely,” he says. “Absolutely. You think about it. He’s at an impressionable age, the sap only just rising. Wouldn’t want to confuse him, would we? One thing from me, another from you? We connect, he and I. He’s always eager to hear what I have to say. Enjoyed your talk this morning, by the way. You’re confident, aren’t you.”

So, an enemy.

I
’M NEVER SURE HOW
much Arrhidaeus understands, but decide to ignore his affliction when possible and speak to him as I would to any boy his age. When I tell him I’ll be visiting him for a long time to come, he smiles his sudden sweet smile and I wonder if he’s almost understood. We’re readying Tar and Gem for a ride in the fields when a group of boys, including Alexander, enter the stables. The boys busy themselves with their tack, preparing for lessons of their own. Alexander looks at Arrhidaeus and away.

“What are you doing?” he says to me.

“Tutoring the prince.”

He flushes, a trait he must get from his mother, along with the fair skin and rusty hair.

“Do you spend much time with your brother?”

“Don’t call him that.”

“Do you?”

Alexander won’t look at Arrhidaeus, who’s mounted now and clutching the reins, watching the younger boy with unconcealed pleasure, his mouth slackly open. “My brother died when I was three. He was five.”

“I’m surprised no one told me,” I say, trying to hook a laugh, but Alexander won’t be caught. “Why don’t you come riding with us? You’d be surprised, I think, at all he can do. He’s not how you probably remember him as a child.”

“How I probably remember him?” Alexander says. “I used to have my lessons with him. I know him better than you do. He drools, he shits. He walks on two legs instead of four—I’ve seen trained dogs do that too. Now you’re teaching him more tricks. You know what? I don’t think you’re doing it to help him. I think you’re doing it to prove you can. I think you’ve probably tried to teach your horse to talk. I think you probably have a trained bird at home. It hops over to you and you make it do a trick, nod or flap its wings, and then you give it a seed, and tell yourself you’re a great teacher. I think that animal”—he points to his brother—“is another laurel leaf for you. A challenge.”

He’s flushed, he’s breathing hard. This is the longest conversation we’ve had. Hatred, or maybe just disgust—let’s say disgust, something I can work with—has lit a fire in him.

“Every student is both a challenge and a laurel leaf.” I mean his own self, and mean him to know it. “I like a challenge. Don’t you? And if he drools and shits like an animal in a human skin, wouldn’t it be worthwhile to make him a little more like us if we can? To clean him up, teach him to speak more clearly, and see what he has to say?”

“What would a dog say? Feed me, scratch me.” Alexander shakes his head. “He used to follow me around everywhere. I took care of him and taught him the names of animals, and songs, and things like that. I taught him to beg and fetch because it made people laugh, but it never made me laugh. He’s never going to fight a battle or ride a horse properly or travel anywhere. He’s going to stay right here until he’s an old man, doing the same things day after day. Feed me, scratch me. It makes me sick.”

Arrhidaeus grunts out some sounds. He’s eager to be off and is telling me so.

“He doesn’t seem to remember you,” I say.

Alexander looks at him and again away, as though from something painful, the sun. “I told my father I didn’t want him near me any more. Not for lessons, not for meals. I didn’t want to look at him ever again.”

“How old would you have been?”

“Seven,” he says. “I know, because it was right around the time of my first hunt. Arrhidaeus, fetch!”

The older boy’s head snaps up sharply, looking for the thrown object.

“He remembers me,” Alexander says.

“You’re a cruel little shit, aren’t you?”

His eyes go wide.

“Leonidas says you frighten people. You don’t frighten me, you make me sad. You’re supposed to be brilliant. Everyone tells me so: your father, Lysimachus, everyone I meet at court who congratulates me on the honour of becoming your master. You know what I see? An utterly ordinary boy. I train birds, you pull the wings off flies. I haven’t seen anything in you that tells me you’re extraordinary in any way. Athletics, I wouldn’t know or care about that. I’m talking about your mind, your personality. Just an ordinary boy with too many privileges. A violent, snotty little boy. How could you possibly know what your noble brother might or might not be capable of?”

Now we’re both breathing hard.

“Stop insulting me,” he says quietly.

“Stop insulting
me
. You’re late to lessons when you come at all. You don’t do your homework. I don’t think you try to understand anything I teach you. Are you really as stupid as you seem, or are you just putting on a show?”

“You need to stop right now.” He’s almost whispering.

“Or what?”

“There are three cavalry officers about ten paces behind you. If they hear you talking to me like that, they’ll kill you. Don’t look back. Act like we’re joking around.”

Slowly I reach a hand up to tousle his hair.

“I don’t understand your lessons,” he says. “I don’t understand what they’re for. Maybe I am stupid. Smile. They’re coming over.”

“You’re an actor, aren’t you?” I murmur, smiling stiffly.

“I have to be.”

The officers pass, saluting Alexander, squinting at me, ignoring Arrhidaeus, who sits oblivious through all of this, high up on Tar, plucking at his thick lips.

“Thank you,” I say when they’re out of earshot.

Alexander looks up at his brother on my horse. “I can’t ask questions in front of the others. I can’t let them know I don’t understand. When I’m king they’ll remember and they won’t respect me.”

“Private lessons, then. I’ll arrange it with Leonidas.”

He nods.

“Can I clear up one thing quickly, before you go? My lessons are to make you think in ways others don’t. To make your world bigger. Not this world”—I wave a hand to take in the stables, the palace, Pella, Macedon—“but the world in here.” I tap my temple.

“I thought you didn’t believe in two worlds.”

I point at him. He smiles for real now, pleased with himself, and runs off to rejoin the boys, who are now under the eye of one of the officers, their riding master. Alexander swings up onto Ox-Head and joins the file out of the yard and into the arena.

“Look, Arrhidaeus.” I point after him. “Look how tall he sits, and how he keeps his heels down.”

“Down.” Arrhidaeus bumps up and down a couple of times, impatient for us to go our own way.

C
AROLUS SAYS
I
’M WRONG
. “It’s not the father at all, it’s the mother. Olympias takes up so much room in his head, I’m surprised her hands aren’t sticking out of his ears. He gets a lot from her, no doubt at all.”

We’re in my house, summer ending, supper just finished, talking about the prince’s weirdness. “It’s like he already is king in his mind,” I say. “Never showing weakness. The insolence, the dramatic gestures. The brains, for that matter. Philip’s not stupid.”

“Nor is Olympias.” Carolus lies back on his couch, wine cup trailing from his long fingers. “Can you believe she used to be a beauty? Not all tight and dried like she is now.”

“A dried apricot.”

“It’s difficult skin, red-haired skin.” Carolus closes his eyes. “I’ve seen it in actors. The reds age quicker than others. Darker skin looks younger longer, for some reason. Do you know why that is?”

“More oils?” I guess.

“Alexander got her looks, anyway. I don’t see Philip in him at all.”

“You find him attractive?”

Carolus doesn’t miss a beat. “I find them all attractive, friend. Though, yes, he’s got a little something extra. Just who he is, maybe, the power he has, or will have. You can’t help wanting to see that on its knees. You don’t?”

I shake my head.

“You do,” Carolus says. “You just don’t know it yet.”

“Lysimachus does. You know Lysimachus, his history master?”

Carolus nods. “Always go carefully around large animals in heat.”

“It’s all sex with you, isn’t it.”

He laughs. “Not just me. I was a bit of an oddity in Athens, I’ll grant you, but here I fit right in. It’s in the air, the dirt, the water. It touches everything. Why am I telling you this, anyway? You’re from here. You know.”

I shake my head. “It was different then. Power changes things, maybe. Macedon wasn’t the power it is today when I was young. I don’t remember it being so—charged.”

“Well, whatever the reason. They celebrate with it, they make people suffer with it, they do their business with it. They run the kingdom with it. You’ve heard about Pausanias’s promotion?”

I nod. Pausanias was a soldier who serviced the king so thoroughly, gossip had it, that he made officer the next morning. Not the Philip I remember, but I’ve been away a long time. Who knows?

“Maybe because of how they lock their women away here,” he says. “Where is that wife of yours, anyway? She didn’t even eat with us.”

“She thought you might prefer that.”

“She thought wrong.” Carolus sits up. “I miss talking to women. Haul her on out here and let’s see what she thinks.”

I send a slave to find her. “Thinks about what?”

“About our boy.”

Pythias appears minutes later with a plate of sweets that she sets on the floor beside Carolus’s couch. “Husband,” she murmurs.

I pat the couch beside me. “We were just talking about the prince.”

Carolus says, “We were talking about love.”

She sits and lets me take both of her hands in mine. “I liked him very much, the once we met.”

“Liked him why?” Carolus demands.

Pythias says, “He seemed frail.”

Carolus and I snort, laughing.

“Frail and sad.” She’s frowning, distressed but determined too.

Carolus takes her hand and kisses it. “Forgive us, pretty one. We’re just all barnacled over with meanness, the two of us.”

“I’m not,” I say.

“I’m sure he’s very good at sports,” Pythias says. “That’s not what I meant. Will you laugh at me if I say lonely? He seemed like a lonely little boy, younger than his years, with that awful shrieking mother. I wanted to hug him and whisper in his ear, ‘Come stay with me for a while. I’ll take care of you.’ ”

“You did?” I say.

Carolus leans forward. “Did you, indeed.”

I
LIKE THE FEELING
of combing out the tangles in things, of looking at the world around me and feeling I’m clearing all the brush, bit by bit. This bit reclaimed from chaos, and this bit here, and that bit there. Back in Mytilene, my focus was on biology, particularly marine life. Here in Pella, I want something new.

I feel the thoughts clustering, forming a constellation whose inner logic I’ve yet to perceive, the harmony of whose spheres I’ve yet to hear. It’s that little book on theatre I sketched for Carolus: something about his father and my father, Illaeus’s sickness and my own, and my two young princes, especially Alexander. He’s a different boy in our private sessions: tense, intense. He rarely smiles. He asks incessant questions and writes down the answers. These sessions are generally late in the evening to keep them secret; he’s giving up sleep for the pretense of effortlessness. He’s angry, curious, pompous, charming, driven. He’s a comedy or a tragedy, one or the other. Which?

My nephew, I’ve decided, is a comedy. He’s found himself a house in the city, and his comings and goings are less my concern these days. I visit him there for an informal supper, and am surprised by the gap that has grown up between us, between his student-slovenliness and his elaborate care of me, his older guest. The place has a reek to it. He has, moreover, found himself a lover—so he tells me, while we eat, lying on couches in the courtyard in a drift of fall leaves—and is throwing gifts at the boy like he’s a moving target.

“Three pairs of winter shoes!” Callisthenes brags.

“That’s practical,” I say. “At least you’re not off writing poetry all day.”

“Picking flowers,” Callisthenes says.

“You did that?”

Callisthenes covers his eyes with his hand, laughing at himself.

“Pythias instructs me to ask you,” I say, “before I forget, are you provisioned for the winter? She says to tell you to start thinking about your squash and your beans, about putting them up now, while they’re still available in the market. I think she’ll make a list for you, if you like.”

“My squash and my beans,” he says. “Dear Auntie. Has she had that beer yet?”

“Respect,” I say.

He laughs again.

After we finish our meal, he wants to talk politics; gossip, I want to say, though politics is a kind of theatre too, and it occurs to me we might tease out something useful for the new work I’m contemplating. The personalities of the city-states, the logic of their confrontations, the simultaneous sense of both the contingent and the inexorable. Philip is still in Thrace. Athens clashes with Cardia, in the Chersonese, where the Athenian corn ships must pass. Philip will back Cardia when the time comes, ever so reasonably and regretfully. Demosthenes rants as much, fumes and foams about it in the Athenian assembly. I tell Callisthenes it’s well known that Demosthenes writes all his speeches out in advance, and is incapable of putting two words together if they’re not already written on a piece of paper in front of him. I tell him how he studied the gestures of actors, and how as a young man he built himself an underground room in which to practise gesturing and declaiming, and how to make himself focus he would shave half his head so he’d be too ashamed to go out in public, thus forcing himself to stay home and work. Callisthenes puts his head to the side and opens his mouth to question the ridiculousness of this, but I tell him that’s not the point. The point is that the man allows these stories to be told of himself, is proud of them. I invent a word for the sake of clever conversation, the verb
to Cassandra
. He Cassandras away about Philip, I tell my nephew, like an actor hoping for a prize.