The Golden Mean (14 page)

“Flying beetle,” Hephaestion says.

I feel the sun on my head, pricking out beads of sweat. The boys’ heads almost touch over the dead bee. The heat is winey on my tongue. I make an incision as delicately as I can.

“Blood?” I ask.

The boys shake their heads.

“And where does their sound come from?”

“The wings,” Alexander says.

“A good guess.”

“Wrong,” Hephaestion says.

“Piss off,” Alexander says.

I show them the pneuma and the membrane called the hypozoma, and explain how the friction of these two creates the sound of buzzing. The pneuma is like the lung of a breathing creature—though I take care to explain that insects do not really breathe—and the swelling and subsiding of the pneuma, because it’s greater when the insect is flying, produces a louder sound at that time. The hypozoma, I further explain, is the membrane through which the insect cools itself, as bees and some others—cicadas, wasps, flying beetles—are naturally hot creatures. I tell them, too, of insects that can live in fire, for there are animals in every other element—earth, air, water—and it follows logically that they must exist.

“I have never seen insects in fire,” Alexander says, and I tell him that’s because they’re very small.

When we get back to the temple, there’s a letter waiting to inform me that Hermias of Atarneus has died. I write immediately to Pythias. I don’t tell her the manner: that her guardian was ambushed by the Persians, detained, tortured, and crucified. Instead I tell her Hermias fell suddenly to the ground. I tell her I’ll arrange for the necessary sacrifices, and also write a commemorative hymn.

Better than gold, the sun is desolate at his passing, sacred to the Daughters of Memory
, et cetera, et cetera. Well. I killed him, I suppose, or the treaty I carried to Philip did. It was never really a secret. Demosthenes in Athens rails against Philip’s eastward scheming like a drip-mouthed dog. The Persians tolerated Hermias while he kept to himself, all nice and tucked in and trim about his territories, but once he started helping himself,
just this one more village, and this tasty one too
, and once he reached out to Philip as protector against his protectors, well. I massage my palm with my thumb while feeling with my index finger between the bones in the back of my hand, deluding myself about the pain (mightn’t you nestle a nail through there smoothly, somehow?). Guilt is not quite the word. If it hadn’t been me, someone else would have been the messenger. But he was ever kind to me, wanted to learn from me, gifted me my wife. Different if I had wanted a city, no doubt. I can imagine the dawning, sharpening look on his face. Perhaps he would have liked me even more. And he was such good company: he really did read in his spare time, really did like to sit and talk quietly about what he’d read, really did like to bask in the warm Atarnean evening sipping a cup of his own purple wine made by his own subjects from his own fat grapes, listening to the boom of his own waves and the lowing of his own dear beeves, see his own birds embroider the fragrant air of his own sky over his head, and talk through ideas of form and content and the mystical reality of the Good. His hair had a little curl; his nose had been broken, attractively; his voice was oddly high and strained for his big build (probably the root of the rumour about his gelding); he ignored Pythias utterly after he gave her to me. (Pythias is in all this somewhere, in my muddled, mud-coloured emotions, Pythias and Hermias’s balls, or the lack of them. It’s night now, and back in Pella she sleeps, here in Mieza the boys sleep, and here I sit remembering and writing in the doddering lamplight, my little bubble in the dark. Poor Pythias.) But I left him, and that’s bothering me tonight. He lived a rich life and offered me the fat and the comfort of it, and I walked away. He understood ambition and would laugh at what I’m trying to understand in myself right now. He would say I’m trying to make a simple thing complicated. An ambitious man wants to go to Athens, he’d say: salt the ocean!

I reread the hymn I’ve just written. Tomorrow to the copyist, and then to have it circulated. Like blowing a dandelion puff, soon enough one of those pages will land in Athens and my name will fall into place with a little click. Philip will have been seen to be manoeuvring for his easternmost foothold ever, laying the sub-floor for a full-scale Persian campaign. I, in my tiny capacity (love for Hermias = love for Macedon), will have been seen to be assisting him. Assisting Macedonian imperialism: and what state, even an Athens, is safe from that?

You see, they will say, how his Macedonian blood has frothed up in him. Oh, he is not the one we remember. He never really was one of us, now, was he? Oho!

I remember the first time I met Hermias, at a dinner in Athens while I was still a student. He brought greetings from Proxenus and the twins, and asked me about my work. We walked together afterwards, tugging the thread of our conversation on and on into the night with us, a long strand like a long line drawn on a map, from Athens to Atarneus to Mytilene to Pella to Mieza, as though if I turned around it would still be there and I might trace it back to that long-ago night when a powerful man invited me to visit him one day, and I was excited about that future.

A
ROUND THE TIME OF
the harvest moon, I take the boys out stargazing. They’re sleepy and subdued, wrapped in their blankets, while above our heads the stars wheel. I lead them up a small hill not far from the temple and make them lie on their backs in the grass. A few immediately curl up and go back to sleep; one or two grumble about the cold and the damp ground. Alexander takes his usual place at my side. I let the boys show me the constellations they know, while the moon pales their faces with a milky half-light.

“What do
you
see?” Alexander asks eventually.

I tell him of the concentric spheres that make up the universe: how the earth is in the middle, the moon in the next nearest sphere, then the planets, then, in the outermost sphere, the fixed stars.

“How many spheres are there?” Alexander asks.

“Fifty-five. The math requires it. They move; the sky is not the same in the different months. You know this yourself. This is the rotation of the spheres. Each sphere’s rotation causes movement in the one adjacent to it. The outermost sphere is moved by the unmoved mover, or, if you like, by god. Each of the fifty-five lesser spheres, in addition to the impetus they gain from the spheres nearby, has its own lesser unmoved mover.”

Beside me I can hear that the boy’s breathing has slowed, but his eyes are open and unblinking. He gazes straight up all the time I speak.

“I can’t see the spheres,” he says. “Are they ever visible?”

I explain they’re made of crystal.

“Lysimachus says when I go to Persia the skies will be different,” Alexander says. “He says there are new stars there that no civilized man has seen, but I will see them. He says my greatest battles will be recorded in the constellations. My father’s never were, and never will be.”

“Perhaps Lysimachus will accompany you,” I say. “To Persia.”

“Inevitably. Will you?”

“Charging into battle on Tar?”

I can feel him grinning, though he still looks at the sky.

“You will write me great letters,” I say. “They will last a thousand years, and forever after all the thinkers will know that you were also one of us.” He likes that. But then: “What is it you expect to find there?”

“War.”

I’m disappointed and tell him so. “There is more. There is so much more. You want to march all that way for the battle-thrill? To sit tall on a horse and watch your enemy go down? To—I don’t even know what it is you do—swipe your sword this way and that and watch the limbs fly?”

“You don’t know what it is we do,” he repeats.

“I know what your father expects. Tribute, tax revenue. All those wealthy cities and satrapies up and down the coast. They’re used to paying up to foreigners; they’d pay your father as soon as the next man. But what do you expect?”

“You’ve lived there. You tell me.”

“I found family and friends. I found what I went for and what I expected to find.” And I squinted my eyes to stop from seeing everything at the edges: the dirt, the disease, the people without art or math or civilized music, sitting around their fires in the evenings, muttering in their ugly language, eating their smelly foods, thinking their short-legged-animal thoughts of eating and sexing and shitting. Dirty, obsequious, uncivilized. I tell the prince as much, teach him what I know to be true about the land he so romanticizes.

“You know what I’d do?” He’s up on his elbows now. “I’d sit at their fires and listen to their music and eat their food and wear their clothes. I’d go with their women.”

I hear the blush in his voice though I can’t see it on his face.
Go with
—a sweet pink euphemism from a hale Macedonian boy. He loves Hephaestion.

“I wouldn’t go all that way just to keep my eyes closed.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” And I tell him about Hermias.

“Well, but that’s war,” he says. “You’re going to hate an entire nation because you lost one friend?”

“You’re going to love an entire nation to annoy your teacher?”

“Yes.”

“No. Not funny. You think you can go there, sit yourself down at their fires, make yourself at home? You’d have to conquer them first.”

“That’s the plan.”

“You’ll have to destroy their world just to get into it. What’ll it be worth to you then?”

“I’m not like you. I’m not like my father. I don’t want to do things the old ways. I have so many ideas. All my soldiers will be clean-shaven, you know why? So no one can get a hold of their beards in combat. My father would never think of something like that. I’ll dress like they do so they’ll let their guard down with me. Persia, I’m not afraid of Persia. I don’t need to know what I’ll find before I get there.”

Inevitably, I think of my own advice to Speusippus. Youthful bravado, then? Was Speusippus as annoyed with me as I am now with my own student? Serves me right?

“Artabazus.” He points at me like he’s scored.

Philip’s pet Persian, a renegade satrap and refugee, these past few months, in the Macedonian court, thanks to some quarrel with his own king. Canny, charming. He wrote me a letter of condolence for Hermias.

“I like him,” Alexander says. “He’s told me a lot about his country. You can’t hate Artabazus.”

“Lovely marine life.”

Alexander looks at me, waiting for the punch line.

“I caught an octopus there, once. Netted it in the water, brought it slowly, slowly back to shore. I kept the net nice and loose so I wouldn’t damage it. Slowly, carefully, I lifted it out of the water and laid it on the sand. It died.”

“The lesson?” Alexander says.

“You make the world larger for yourself by conquering it, but you always lose something in the process. You can learn without conquering.”

“
You
can,” he says.

A
T HOME
, I
PRESENT
the hymn to Pythias and tell her I want to plan a dinner: some friends and colleagues and a few new faces for a meal and wine and conversation. I tell her I want it to be like the communal dinners from my student days, when everyone brought a dish and shared, but Pythias refuses. She says guests in her house will not bring food, and she’ll order Tycho to turn away anyone who tries.

“Your house?” I’m delighted. “Your house!”

She will plan the menu herself, and oversee the preparation. She wants a chicken and a goat, and money for everything else: dinner party as military campaign. “My house. You just tell me which day and how many. I’ll need a month, at least.”

“I was thinking the day after tomorrow.” I’m due back in Mieza.

She shakes her head. “A month. We have to clean. We haven’t cleaned properly since we got here. Three weeks, maybe, if I had an extra girl.”

“So that’s what you’re after.”

“I’m not after anything. You suit yourself. A month, then, and not a day sooner.”

I make a list: Callisthenes, of course; Carolus, the old actor; Antipater; Artabazus, because I owe him a courtesy for his condolence letter, and because my last conversation with Alexander is bothering me; Leonidas; Lysimachus; and—after some thought, as an experiment—Arrhidaeus’s morose nurse, Philes.

The next day I take Callisthenes down to the market with me. We wander through the stalls, inspecting fruit and fish hooks and leather goods and knives. I’ve already begun mapping out the conversation, a little—a symposium on theatre appeals to me, so Carolus won’t feel in over his head, and Lysimachus can show off, harmlessly, and Artabazus will see we’re cultured, and Antipater can have a night off from the wars, and young Philes can just sit gobsmacked and listen. And Leonidas; who knows what old Leonidas will do. Eat, maybe. At a gem stall, watched by a bulge-bodied mercenary hired to guard the place, I buy Pythias an agate the size and coral colour of her baby fingernail, engraved with a Heracles the size of an ant. She likes tiny things, rings and perfume bottles and trinkets she can keep in a carved sandalwood box I can hold in the palm of my hand, a gift from Hermias. A reaction against Macedonian ostentation, I suspect: lately, the tinier, the better. The slave trade is new to Pella, a small business still, catering to foreigners like me, and usually there isn’t much on offer. Today, though, we’re in luck: a new shipment is just in from Euboea. The slaver is genial, chatty, smelling profit and taking his ease in anticipation of it. He tells us about the journey, by ship, a rough one with much sickness but no lives lost. He’s got some soldiers, Thracians, prisoners of war, good for farm work but with a look in their eye that says they’d take watching. He’s got three young children, brothers and sister, he says, and what hard heart would separate them? They’re each eating a piece of bread (a pretty show on the slaver’s part), dirty but bright-eyed, the girl maybe three, the older boy eight or nine. What hard heart, indeed, though what a soft heart would do with them is a question I’m not interested in answering today. He asks us what we’re looking for. A girl for my wife, I tell him. Housework, kitchen help, nothing too rough.