The Golden Mean (13 page)

“My virtue is intact.”

“Thank the gods.” I get in beside her. “Let me guess. He wanted to talk?”

“He wanted to know what went into the stew. He wanted to tell his mother.”

“Tell her he was here?”

“I don’t think everything he tells her gets back to Philip. Actually, I don’t think anything he tells her gets back to Philip.”

“It’s like that.”

She nods.

“Hard on him.”

“I think so.” She lies back while I make my examination, all gooseflesh in the cold. “I think he just liked having someone to talk to while he was in his bath. Perhaps his mother used to sit with him. He oiled himself and dressed himself.”

I touch my collarbone. “Did he have a scar?”

“I looked. No.”

I blow out the lamp.

“He asked me if I was happy,” Pythias says.

“He asked me that too, about you. What did you say?”

“He asked me if I’d like to be invited up to the palace more often, to get me out of the house. He said he could arrange it with his mother. I said no thank you.”

“You didn’t.”

A pause. “Was that wrong?”

“Nobody likes his mother. You think he doesn’t know that? You didn’t have to rub his nose in it.”

“I told him he could come here whenever he wants,” she says.

I smack my forehead.

“Don’t worry,” she adds. “He said it was too difficult to get away.”

“Thank the gods for that.”

She lies with her back to me. I wrap a curl of her long hair around my finger, the part of her I can touch without her knowing it.

“He asked me about Atarneus. What it was like when I was a girl, the landscape and the weather and the people I knew. He asked about my mother.” When I touch her breast she flinches. “He’ll hear.”

I roll back to my side of the bed. “Night, then.”

“Night.”

When she’s asleep, I get up and go outside. The snow is still coming, thick and fast and silent. Tycho has a weight of it on his head and shoulders. He rears up like a bear in his great blanket when I touch his shoulder.

“Go to bed,” I tell him. “I’m here now.”

He goes inside briefly and comes back out with a second blanket. We sit side by side for the rest of the night, watching nothing go by.

Who am I looking for?
Tycho asked, hours ago, when I first set him to watch.

I’m not sure
, I said.
I guess anyone who might have seen he was alone
.

A
FTER A SEASON OF
sporadic sessions with the boys, interspersed with the obligations of court life and my own studies—I’m settling down, now, finally, into a routine—Antipater summons me to a private meeting. Philip is still in Thrace.

“Tell me about the prince,” Antipater says.

We sit in one of the smaller rooms, with a pebble mosaic of the rape of Helen beneath our feet. I can brush dust from a pink nipple with my toe. I’ve developed, with the first snow, a heavy cold, and am constantly blowing great green skeins of snot from my nose. I wipe my hand now surreptitiously on my cloak, and hope Pythias won’t notice the crust of it when she takes my laundry.

“He is highly intelligent and alarmingly disciplined.”

Antipater laughs. “When he was small his mother would hide sweets in his bed, and Leonidas would search his room until he found them, and throw them away. He believes it’s good for the boy always to be slightly hungry.”

Ah. I wonder if that’s why he’s small.

“Leonidas used to take him on night marches to stop him wetting the bed. It worked, too. Leonidas has been good for him, no doubt about it.”

I wonder if I’ve offended the old tutor and am about to get my reckoning.

“Leonidas tells me the prince is devoted to this Lysimachus,” Antipater says. “That one who calls himself Phoenix and Alexander Achilles. Who does that make Philip, then?”

“Peleus.”

“Peleus.” Antipater frowns. “Well, never mind. Only I suspect his mother’s in there somewhere, encouraging that shit. We don’t need an aesthete, we need a soldier. We need a king.” He seems distracted for a moment by the floor, and cocks his head sideways to squint at an arrangement of limbs. “All right. Philip instructs me to give you the Temple of the Nymphs at Mieza. You’ll tutor Alexander there from now on, Alexander and let’s say a dozen others. He’ll go through his entire life with these boys; you can’t cut him off entirely.”

I nod.

“The mother I can control, and Lysimachus is not to attend him there. I’ll tell him myself. The prince likes you. He thinks you’re almost as smart as he is. Smarter than any of the rest of us, it goes without saying.”

Mieza is a half-day’s ride away, far enough that it will mean staying there. I know vaguely of the place; there are caves, apparently, and it’s supposed to be cooler than Pella in the summertime. What else, I’m not sure. Pythias will have to manage on her own while I’m gone. Perhaps she’ll enjoy it.

“Leonidas disciplined the body,” Antipater says. “You’ll discipline the mind.”

I promise to do my best.

“Philip has great things in store for you too, don’t forget. He’s counting on you. You’ll be his man in Athens one of these days, the Macedonian brain in Athens’s skull.”

I bow my head.

We spend some minutes talking about the campaign in Thrace, a campaign that’s looking like it will take longer than Philip ever intended.

“Savages, the Thracians,” Antipater says. “Fight like animals.”

I understand this is praise.

“He’ll overwinter there.”

Antipater doesn’t seem like he’s much given to chit-chat, and I suspect a test. I like tests. “Leaving his own territory unattended for so long?” I say. “Surely war with Athens is inevitable. I’m surprised he doesn’t watch his back more closely.”

“Unattended?” Antipater says.

“If he were to leave someone behind, someone to give them pause. One of his better generals. Parmenion, say.”

Antipater frowns. “I suppose I’m a pet rabbit?”

“A lion of Macedon. Alexander’s most worthy adviser.” Alexander is now old enough to serve as keeper of the royal seal, but it’s clear enough who wields true power. “As such, not to be risked in open warfare if it should come to that.”

“Piss off.” He pats my shoulder. “Take care of our boy.”

“M
IEZA
,” P
YTHIAS SAYS
, without expression. I show her on a map. “Goodness.”

“I’ll come back to visit you.”

Her face hardened a little when she saw the distance, but it’s a hardening I can’t read: displeasure, fear, disappointment, or a mask on some more pleasant emotion? Relief, anticipation?

“An elaborate arrangement I’m sure everyone will get tired of eventually,” I say.

A few days later I pack minimally and ride out alone, for the pleasure of being alone. It’s pretty, pastoral countryside, a morning of brooks and meadows and glens dotted with stone huts and sheep pens fenced with brambles.

Just outside the village of Mieza, the rambling temple complex features assorted shrines and sanctuaries and modest living quarters. The attendants give me a room, an austere little cell: bed, table, chair. I ask for many lamps. Leonidas has the room next to mine; the boys, I’m told, have a dormitory to themselves, out of earshot. The attendants are old men who accept our presence impassively; I’m reminded of Pythias. Who knows what goes on in their heads, those secret houses? They shuffle about, avoiding us, the older the shyer, shy as deer.

Once, late at night, as I’m working at my table with all my lamps, I hear a man’s laughter. Once I pass an attendant carrying a tray, the remains of a meal, from a hallway I had thought uninhabited. “Penitents,” he says tersely, when I ask about other guests. “They’re in seclusion.” Once, rounding a corner, I bump into Lysimachus, who carries on without acknowledging me. I wonder whom to inform—the attendants, Antipater, the newly recalled Parmenion (so!), Philip himself—and decide no one.

It’s a charming place, though, especially by springtime, when we can take our lessons outside. Stone seats, shady walks, caves dripping stalactites I can use for my little stories for the boys, metaphors we can climb in and out of. My old master was much taken with the metaphorical value of caves. I come to enjoy the rhythm of my life here, of the commute back and forth to the city: this or that familiar rock, tree, field, face, the boys at this end, my wife at that, tossed from one to the other, always a hot meal waiting, a more or less luxurious bath. In the end I prefer to be with Pythias. Yet I don’t get back to her as often as I’d planned, and sometimes months go by without us seeing each other. A ride in hard frost yields to a ride in tender spring greenery, and I’ll realize how long it’s been. She never reproaches me. She weaves, she tends the garden; she reads a little, she says when I ask. Nothing, poetry.

I’m not sure how I feel about her helping herself to my library, wonder if she knows the food rule. The next time I return to Mieza, I take the cart so I can bring the most significant volumes with me. I leave her some simple, appropriate material, and make a mental note to buy her some new to make up for my possessiveness. She watches the loading of the cart as she thanks me, but I can’t help it. All the way back to Mieza I fuss over the oilcloths covering the crates, and can relax only once my library is safely installed in my room, where I won’t have to share it.

Private sessions are impossible here, would be impossible to keep secret, so from the start I decide to slow down and address the boys in terms they’ll all easily understand. There follows, accordingly, a kind of pastoral interlude, during which I lead the boys high and low, trailed less and less often by the grimly observant Leonidas, to look at plants and animals, formations of rock, to observe the wind and the sun and the coloration of clouds. I explain the phenomenon of rainbows, a complicated process of reflection that morphs into a geometry lesson as I explain why only half a rainbow is ever visible at one time. I explain the phenomenon of earthquakes as a great wind trapped underground, and when I draw the appropriate analogy to the human bowels am rewarded with an afternoon of farting boys crying, “Earthquake!” I speak of the saltiness of the sea, and this too I relate to the body; for even as food goes into the body sweet and leaves a residue in the chamber-pot that is salty and bitter, so do sweet rain and rivers run into the ocean and disperse, leaving a similarly salty residue. I don’t tell them I struck on this analogy after tasting my own warm piss. We spend a happy morning observing the flow of a river, while I tell them of the great underground reservoirs that some believe are the source of all the water in the world. Always Alexander, when I speak of geography, asks about the East, and I oblige with accounts I’ve read of Egypt and Persia. His eyes go shocked when I speak of the river that flows from the mountains of Parnassus, across which the outer ocean that rings the entire world can be seen.

“I’ll go there,” he says.

I speak of the Nile, and Alexander says he’ll go there too. Once, when I’m speaking of salt and silt and the filtering of sea water, I explain that if you took an empty clay jar, sealed its mouth to prevent water getting in, and left it in the sea overnight, the water that leached into it would be sweet because the clay would have filtered the salt.

“You’ve tried this?” Alexander asks.

“I’ve read of it.”

This exchange stays in my mind, though. Every time Alexander swears to visit some distant place, and Hephaestion swears he’ll go there too, and the others dutifully swear that they, too, will join the company, I think of that jar bobbing in the ocean, the one I’ve only read of.

One hot afternoon I take the boys into the woods behind the temple and set them hunting for insects, particularly bees. I’ve brought along a dissecting board and knives, small clay jars for the specimens, and a book to occupy myself while I wait for them to return.

Within half an hour I realize I’ve made a basic mistake. The shouts and laughter of the boys have long since faded and I know I’ve lost them to the sweet drugged heat of the afternoon. They’re laughing at me, no doubt, wherever they are. Climbing trees, swimming in the river. No matter.

I walk on a little into the woods, calling them without conviction, and am surprised when I come upon Hephaestion and Alexander in a sun-shot grove. Alexander stands still while Hephaestion swats at him.

“They won’t leave him alone,” Hephaestion says, when I come close. Half a dozen bees have locked onto the smaller boy and are whizzing and darting at him, while Hephaestion tries simultaneously to knock them away and catch one in a wooden cup.

“I attract them,” Alexander says. “I have been known for it since childhood. My father’s astrologers tell me it is an auspicious sign.”

“It’s probably your smell,” I say.

I spot the nest up in a tree not far from where we’re standing, and point.

“I’ve had enough,” Alexander says. I realize he’s frightened and afraid to show it.

“Come.” I lead him slowly away. “If you don’t rush, they won’t get agitated.”

I take the boys back to the spot where I left my gear and tell them to wait. I go back to the nest tree and look on the ground beneath it until I find a dead bee. I scoop it up with a leaf and take it back to them.

“You should be flattered,” I tell Alexander. “Bees have a powerful sense of smell, but they avoid anything rotten. They like only sweet things.”

Hephaestion punches Alexander in the arm. Alexander punches him back.

“Look.” I drop the dead bee onto the board. “How many parts does the body have?”

“Three,” the boys say.

“The head.” I touch each part as I name it with the tip of my father’s smallest knife. “The middle part, which in animals is the chest. And the stomach, here. A bee will go on living if you cut off its head or stomach, but not if you remove the middle. Bees have eyes and are able to smell, but they have no other sense organs that we can discern. They have stingers.”

“I know,” Alexander says ruefully.

“Four wings.” I delicately display them with the knife tip. “No two-winged insect has a stinger. The bee has no sheath for its wings. Do you know an insect that does?”