The Golden Mean (17 page)

“Shut up,” Carolus says. Only he and Philes are left. “They don’t know how to do that here. You’re embarrassing them.”

I look at Philes, who looks desperately at Carolus.

“The boy’s going to pee himself if you try to make him talk,” Carolus says. “You have to let it go.”

It occurs to me that the only person I can think of who would have enjoyed the evening just as I planned it, who genuinely would have tried to do his part, is Alexander.

“How’s the book coming?” Carolus says. “Your tragedy for beginners.”

“Comedy too. I’ve decided I need to treat both.”

There’s noise from an outer room, a raised voice, laughter, and then Tycho murmuring in my ear: “Lysimachus, Master—”

“Lysimachus,” I say, because never mind announcements, he’s in the doorway, showing himself in.

My other guests trail back in behind him, retake their places, assuming—correctly—that the formal part of the dinner is well and truly buried. Well, I was the one who wanted a student dinner. Who am I to stand on ceremony?

“Here you are,” he says. “Who lives next door? I sort of went there first. Scared the women, I think. They said you were all over here. Got the houses mixed up. Sorry, sorry. Flowers for the women. I’ll send them in the morning. Like flowers, yes? Any special colour? Oh, that’s kind.” Callisthenes has slid over on his couch, making room. Lysimachus sits heavily and looks around. “Very nice, very nice.” He’s laughing at me again; he’s drunk.

“Will you eat? I’ll have them get you a plate from the kitchen.”

“I’ll drink, if you’re offering. Got to keep the levels constant. A sudden dip in the levels and then who knows. Already scared the women. No women here.”

“No,” I say.

“That’s what I thought. Boys? He likes boys.”

Everyone looks at me.

“One boy especially,” Lysimachus says. “Well, nothing wrong with that. We’ve all been there. Excellent taste in all things, always. A bit hopeless in this case, though.”

I tell Tycho to bring him a plate of food.

“Dotes on him,” Lysimachus continues. “Poor bastard. You should have seen them at Mieza, when he thought they were alone. I know, I know, I wasn’t supposed to be there. But if the prince wishes it—”

“I thought I’d seen you, once or twice,” I say. “You didn’t have to hide from me.”

“Besotted with him,” Lysimachus says. “Oh, gods, that gives him a thrill. Look at him. Just an animal like the rest of us, after all. Don’t worry, I haven’t told anyone who’d care.”

“Don’t threaten me,” I say. “Eat your food.”

He takes the plate from Tycho. “Goat!” He laughs and starts to eat.

I’m aware of my guests watching me.

“I’d fuck him,” Lysimachus says, mouth full. “He smells so nice. Been there yet?”

It’s Antipater I’m most aware of. “That’s enough,” I say.

“All creamy and tight and miserably confused,” Lysimachus says. “I’d fuck him senseless.”

“We’re not talking about anyone I know,” Antipater says.

Then everyone is leaving. I walk them into the street.

“I’m drunk,” Lysimachus says loudly to Antipater, to me. “I didn’t mean anything by it. Anyway, you’re old enough to be his father.”

“I am,” I say.

We look at each other.

“You’re not his father, though,” he says, more quietly.

“I know that.”

“I love him,” he says, so only I will hear.

I nod.

“Maybe you could—” he begins, but Artabazus is at his elbow, smiling and bowing his thanks to me, leading him gently away.

“I know where he lives, not far from me,” Artabazus says. “We will go together, and so. I thank you many thousands of times.”

“And I you,” I say, meaning Lysimachus.

He nods, knows.

Antipater is waiting by the door, shaking his head.

“I guess you heard all that,” I say.

“Not a fucking thing. I only hear what I can put in dispatches.”

“What about Olympias?”

Antipater shakes his head again. He gave me the hour I asked for in Mieza, two weeks ago, but made it clear he was giving it to me, not to her. “Devoted tutors are one thing, meddling queens are another. She’s in seclusion for a while.”

Back inside, after those brief breaths of sharp street air, the atmosphere is close, still thick with food and wine. I pour myself a last cup and take it in to see Pythias in our room. She’s waiting up for me, dozing over her needlework by a table full of candles to give her enough light. She starts awake when she senses me standing near. “Scared me.”

“What are you making?”

She holds it up to show me: a bit of elaborate embroidery, a landscape crawling with tiny figures all in pink and red. It’s pretty.

I sit on the bed while she puts her work aside and blows out most of the candles. I tell her about the evening, about how everyone praised the food and how Lysimachus was more or less the pest I’d thought he might be, and how Antipater gave his best to her specially, and how lovely the house looked and how it had been like having her in the room with me, looking every way and seeing her work there.

“And what did you talk about?” She knows that’s the main thing.

I close my eyes to imagine each of them going home. Antipater, stumbling by the end—bored, I suppose, and so drinking more than usual, or maybe that is usual for him—I don’t know him very well—has the palace to go to, to a wife Pythias is cordial with and has sewn with once or twice (older than us, she has told me, a bit stern and formal, which Pythias can manage very well; she’ll end up that way herself, probably. Rude to the servants, which Pythias doesn’t like, but modest in her clothing and her gossip, as suits a woman of her position, of which Pythias approves). I wonder if she warms the bed for him, or if they use separate rooms. Artabazus the bachelor won’t sleep alone. I don’t quite know how I know this, but I’d bet on it. He lives in a grand house near the courts, the kind Pythias and Callisthenes find so painful, too big for one man and sumptuously decorated. He might as well swag money around it, Callisthenes has said. I indulge in a little fantasy of him stopping off for a boy and a girl to warm his bed, and that after a night of debauchery he’ll wake in the morning fresh as a lamb, pink-faced and bright-eyed, eager for his breakfast and the subtle business of the day. Lysimachus, too, will return to his house, though no doubt he’ll bid Artabazus a cheerful but firm good night and choose to walk by himself. Leonidas will walk with Antipater to the palace. Carolus I sent home on the arm of a slave; I’ve never seen where he lives but understand it’s in a poorer district, probably a hut like Illaeus’s. Cozy, I hope. Callisthenes took Philes by the arm and has probably led him off to find someplace to drink and keep talking. They’ll solve everything I’ve spent my life on in the next hour or so, I’m fully confident.

“Love,” I say. “We talked about love.”

Pythias takes the wine cup from me so I won’t spill it. “Lie down.”

She starts rubbing my feet. She works her thumb up from the heel to the tender arch and kneads a long time under the balls of my toes. After a while she gets up and I wonder if she’s left me; I’m too lazy, my head too full of fumes, to open my eyes and see. But then I feel her weight on the bed again beside my knees and hear the click of clay on clay, a vessel on a plate. She rubs her hands together to warm whatever it is and then she’s rubbing my feet again with something slick, some oil. Something of hers: the scent is pretty, not any oil from the kitchen. I roll onto my front so she can work her way up my legs. I’ll smell pretty too in the morning, and will need a bath to get rid of it. I widen my legs a little when she reaches my thighs. Maybe she’ll let me return the favour, though I doubt it. This is a pure gift. When I feel her little nails on my buttocks I have to turn over, but she continues just as slowly and methodically, hips, chest, shoulders, arms, hands, even palms and fingers, each anointed to its end. Some ritual she needs, maybe. I want to tell her she’s making a meal out of a cracker and we could be finished in a minute if she put her mind to it, but she can surely see that. I let her do it her way this once. She drapes her dress over my face. A flicker of this, a flicker of that through the gauzy cloth: a few bright points of candles, the misty moving shape of her above me, and something coming she doesn’t want me to see. I reach out but she puts my hands back on the bed and holds them there while she rubs her breasts up and down my chest. My face briefly smothered. A poised moment between offerings, and then she sets her weight on me, hips on mine, easing down. It’s not an easy penetration, involving much flexing and adjusting on her part, fingers spreading her dry pink self open, trying to complete the fit, and then she moves too slowly, rocking a little, not knowing what to do. I take her hips and try to move her the way I want but she sucks her breath in, a sharp hiss of disapproval, or perhaps pain. A moment of stillness and then she tries again, the frustrating, tentative rocking that chafes not nearly enough. I take the cloth off my face so I can at least look at her, and she stops again.

“This isn’t working,” she says.

“It’s fine.” The candlelight is flattering and she’s as pretty as she’ll ever be, with her hair hanging down over her shoulders and tendrils licking at her breasts. I reach for them, small, almond-tipped, and she lets me. She looks determined, just short of grim. I decide not to look at her face.

“Harder,” I tell her. “Like grinding meal.”

It comes out more sternly than I mean, but I decide it’s a game I could like. “Fuck me, for once.” Saying the words aloud instead of thinking them becomes entwined with the pleasure coming, but incredibly she stops a third time and gets off me. “What?”

“We have to finish normally, for it to take.”

Normally. She wants to lie on her back, but I don’t let her. We finish with her face down, taking it hard, her two hands pinned by my one. I come like a monster. When I get off her, she rolls onto her back and pulls her knees up neatly and stays like that for a long time. She might be crying. My wife’s taken lessons from a witch.

This is the best sex we will ever have.

My father explained to me once that human male sperm was a potent distillation of all the fluids in the body, and that when those fluids became warm and agitated they produced foam, just as in cooking or sea water. The fluid or foam passes from the brain into the spine, and from there through the veins along the kidneys, then via the testicles into the penis. In the womb, the secretion of the man and the secretion of the woman are mixed together, though the man experiences pleasure in the process and the woman does not. Even so, it is healthy for a woman to have regular intercourse, to keep the womb moist, and to warm the blood.

I
FALL SICK
, my old usual. It encroaches slowly, as it always does, slowly enough that I can persuade myself it’s nothing this time, only fatigue, only tension from the palace preventing my sleep, hurting my head, nibbling at my memory, sucking colour from the sky and warmth from the world. I grow short-tempered, snapping at the slaves, who remain impassive. I suppose they’ve seen it before, and anyway it’s nothing this time, just fatigue, just tension.

“It’s this miserable climate,” Pythias says. “Always raining, always dark. I feel it myself, sometimes.”

“What is it you feel?” The impatience that makes me bark at the slaves makes me over-formal, over-polite, and wilfully obtuse with her. I don’t need to be told I have a woman’s problem, and I above all don’t need Athea sniffing round me after a few dropped words from her lady, lecturing, prescribing, curing for all I know, and gaining strength from my weakness thereby.

“Tired,” Pythias says. “Sad. Soft, sort of, in my thinking. I forget things, can’t summon the energy to do all the things I would normally do in a day.”

“I feel better already. To have a partner in suffering. My books go unwritten, your sewing goes undone. What a consolation to me, to know I am not alone.”

“Don’t be nasty,” she says.

“Love.” I repent immediately, but she’s already out of the room. Still, I can’t accept that what afflicts me is not somehow unique, a disorder with no previous name. Long ago my father diagnosed in me an excess of black bile, which is true enough some of the time, but does not account for the other times, when I simply don’t need sleep, and the books seem to write themselves, and the world seems painted into every last corner with colour and sweetness, a kind of glowing, divine infusion. Nor, again, does it account for the whiplashing from the one condition to the next, from black melancholy to golden joy. Though melancholy has always been the more predominant of the two states, and has become increasingly so as I’ve grown older. Perhaps one day I’ll cease to have moods, as my mother long ago called them, altogether, and will simply settle into a constant state of bitterness and misery, a pain not physical but no less a burden for that.

Philip is home from Thrace after an absence of some eighteen months; not the happiest homecoming, and he’ll be heading back again in a week or two with his replacement troops, leaving behind some of his longest-serving units for a well-earned winter at home. At court we hear the details. The cities of Perinthus and Byzantium, probably goaded on by Athens, refused to assist Philip’s efforts in Eastern Thrace. While the Athenians sharked their navy up and down the coast, Philip went after Perinthus. Built on a long, narrow headland, the city was difficult to attack by land, and Philip’s navy was weak. Siege, then, and a chance to try out the shiny new Macedonian torsion and arrow-shooting catapults. The catapult attacks were conducted in relay, day and night. They used battering-rams; they had sappers to tunnel under the city walls and scaling ladders to get over them; they built towers the height of fifteen men to let them shoot down on the enemy, over the walls. When the wall was finally breached, Philip’s troops poured in, only to discover a second wall the Perintheans had been building while the Macedonians pecked and poked and wormed and beetled away at the first.

The siege began again on the second wall. Behind it were tiers of houses accessible only by narrow, steep streets, easy to plug. The Perintheans throughout the siege received money, arms, and corn from Byzantium and several Persian satrapies. The Athenian navy hung back and watched. Philip, foreseeing a nasty fight, suddenly withdrew half his forces and rushed to Byzantium, short-handed now because of its support of Perinthus. But somehow that city, too, escaped a quick defeat. Philip, in a second surprise attack, took the Athenian corn fleet, then on its way back from the Black Sea, heading through the Bosporus. A success to enrich the Macedonian treasury and boost the army’s morale; open war now, incidentally, with Athens, though hostilities did not erupt immediately. Now the siege of Byzantium began in earnest, and lasted most of the fall and winter and into the following spring. Again the siege-train came out; again the city, backed by its allies in the region and Athens openly now, resisted. Then the Macedonian navy took its first hard hit from the Athenian navy, and finally Philip had to cut his losses and withdraw.

“Am I boring you?” Philip says.

I snap to. When I woke this morning I wept to realize I was awake and had a whole day to get through. Pythias woke too but pretended not to while I wiped my eyes. My tears must bore her, at least sometimes.

“No. I was considering the problem.”

Thrace something, Alexander something, I could weep again for the stupidity of all of it. Should he take Alexander to Thrace? Was that the problem? Truly, I have no idea what he was asking.

“May I offer a suggestion?” Lysimachus jumps in.

I’m grateful, and give him a look that says so. He’s a scholar, after all; maybe he suffers something similar. Maybe he recognizes it and is helping me. A kindness returned, for the invitation to dinner.

“May you fucking the fuck get on with it?” Philip says. “Can’t any of you just get a sentence out?”

“Leave him here,” Lysimachus says. “He’s in the best of hands, and at a delicate age too, when the metal is just hardening, if you see what I mean. Don’t want to muck with the tempering.”

“Eh?” Philip says.

“My esteemed colleague here has been a wonderful influence.” Lysimachus bows to me. “A wonderful influence. I’ve never seen such an influence on a boy. I’ve never seen a teacher have such an impact on a student. I look at them together sometimes, their heads bent together over something, and it’s hard to believe they’re not father and son. Modelled so finely after the great one’s mind, if you see what I mean. I’m not sure anyone apart from me has quite realized how close they’ve become. Rip him away now and he’ll bear the wound for the rest of his life. The mind is just ripening. What’s more important than the mind?”

Philip looks at me. I look at Antipater. Antipater shakes his head, minimally.

“He very much wants to see the world,” I say.

Philip looks at me.

“He’s the brightest student I’ve ever had.”

Philip looks at me.

“I’m unwell. Will you excuse me?”

I leave the court with Lysimachus’s dagger sticking from the small of my back.

T
EN DAYS LATER
, I’m told by an attendant to gather my things: Mieza is done. Alexander is required back at court; his military training has been neglected; we are at war with Athens; he is enough of a philosopher for now. Lysimachus’s dagger, in to the hilt, though Philip has returned to Thrace without his son after all. The prince will be disappointed. Abruptly the boys are gone and we old men, their retinue, linger in the slow business of packing, myself especially, two years’ worth of books and specimens and manuscripts, while the temple attendants watch impassively as ever. We are a storm that has finally passed from their lives. I am told I will continue to attend the prince in Pella, but less intensively, less often, as other duties encroach on their studies.

Pythias welcomes me with an expensive meal and later a shy fuck in my own bed, an echo of our last coupling, an unexpected pleasure I feel even in the soles of my feet. I am home.

I
ATTEND THE TEMPLE
of Dionysus at Pythias’s request, to thank the god for her pregnancy. I give the attendant money for a pure white lamb.

“The god is pleased,” the attendant says.

It’s an expensive choice—these things get around—and I decide to enjoy it a little, the luxury of it. A slice across the throat, blood caught darkly in bronze bowls, and then a bit of amateur butchering to release some thigh meat from the animal’s sinews to throw on the fire. An attendant makes off with the rest of the carcass. Lucky attendants today, lucky tummies.

I’m washing up when I see Philes kneeling before a slightly larger than life-size statue of the god. It’s a lovely piece in white marble. The god’s long curls are twined with ivy. The torso is muscular but sleek, the hips narrow, the legs strong, the feet bare. The face shows restrained amusement, not what you might first associate with the god, and always suiting my mood when I have to come here. The nurse is praying fiercely, eyes closed, rocking a little, tears running down his cheeks.

·   ·   ·

“H
ELLO,”
A
RRHIDAEUS SAYS
.

“What are you doing?” He holds up his tablet for me to see. “No, tell me,” I say. “Use your words.”

“Drawing.”

I have more time for him now that his younger brother is occupied elsewhere. I look at what he wants to show me, something like a face: a circle, anyway, with eyes and a line for a nose, a swirl of hair, and another line for a mouth.

“He needs ears.”

Arrhidaeus dutifully frowns over the task, and soon the circle has smaller circles appended to its sides.

“Does he have a name?”

The prince laughs and won’t tell me.

“Can you write it?”

“No,” he says confidently.

I take him through the alpha-beta-gamma, which he recites fluently now. “What letter does it start with?”

“Horse,” he says. So we talk about the ways to draw a horse, the parts a person would need: body, muzzle, legs, mane, tail.

“I would draw an oval for the body, rather than a circle.” I look over his shoulder. “Like an egg. Where is your nurse today?”

“Take a bath.”

Philes has been friendlier since the invitation to supper. He could hardly be otherwise, but I feel myself changing toward him too, softening. I have a little plan for him, a little idea I want to test. Not today or tomorrow but soon, I anticipate.

I tell Arrhidaeus to fetch his lyre and he frowns harder in concentration over his drawing, pretending not to have heard. His body is cleaner and stronger; his language is improving and so is his dexterity—hence the drawing, which I’ve long encouraged him toward—but he seems, distressingly, to hate music. Who hates music? He’s clumsy, of course, and can’t fit his thick fingers to the simplest positions on the instrument from one week to the next, which is forgivable, but my persistence seems to infect his reaction to all music, and he flinches away if I strum the lyre myself or even if he should hear someone singing in passing. Hates what he cannot master: there’s a lesson there, I suppose, though I wish a sweet melody would make him smile and relax and that could be the end of it.

“Is it necessary?” Philes asked at a previous session, with Arrhidaeus cowering in a corner in snotty tears, the instrument flung down and cracked on the stone floor. “He can’t even clap a steady beat, and he sings like a cow calving.”

“So do I,” I said, but I liked something the nurse had said. “Come for a walk with me, both of you.”

Their preparations were painfully slow, as always, but when we were finally outside I asked the nurse to clap his hands in rhythm with his steps. I did the same. Arrhidaeus ignored us. He’d become a canny animal, knowing when a lesson was coming, and this was how he resisted. I took his hand and beat it against my own in time with our steps. He allowed this.

“Begin there,” I told the nurse. “We’ll come back to the instrument later, as you suggest.” I’d found by then that treating the nurse as a peer, pretending my ideas came from him, warmed him until he became buttery and would do whatever I asked. Soon he had Arrhidaeus clapping well, something we practised on horseback also, but our music lessons had stalled there. Nevertheless.

“That is enough drawing, Arrhidaeus,” I tell him today. “We play music now.”

“No.”

I try to take the tablet from his hands but he fights me. He stands up and shoves me, and I lose my balance and fall on my ass, at which point of course Philes returns. He stands in the doorway, his hair still oily-damp from the baths, surveying our wretched little scene.

“Help me up, please, Arrhidaeus,” I say. “I think that was an accident, wasn’t it?”

He gives me his hand, pleased, and yanks on my arm about as forcefully as he pushed me down. Warrior stock, I remind myself, and it was I myself who suggested he be trained at the gymnasium.

“What happened?” Philes is all womanish concern, advancing into the room. “You’re not hurt?” He hovers close, plays at straightening my clothes and brushing me off, while I shrug away, fluttering my hands like a man beset by bugs.

Arrhidaeus picks up the lyre as studiously as he bent over his tablet a few moments ago, ignoring our clown show, and strums a passable chord, stopping us both.

“Again,” I say.

He refits his fingers and manages the same chord again. He’s remembered something.

“Shall we sing?” I say.

And we make a ridiculous joyous noise, the three of us, clapping our hands, snapping our fingers, the prince strumming his one wavering chord, Philes and I singing like cows (he’s no better than me),
the boat, the boat, the boat and the silver sea
, until a palace guard sticks his head in the door to see who’s in so much pain and smiles despite himself when he sees the morose nurse, the idiot prince, and the great philosopher conducting themselves like people who are simply happy.

O
NE MORNING AT THE BATHS
I find Callisthenes scrubbing himself vigorously with pumice.

“You haven’t heard?” he says. “Alexander rode out this morning. A revolt at Maedi. A courier came in the night.”

The young man seems invigorated, by either his scrubbing or the potent news.

“He is a child,” I say.

“Well, he’s not, though.” My nephew turns the stone over in his hand thoughtfully. He’s right, of course: Alexander is sixteen. “I hear Olympias isn’t too pleased,” he says.

“Respect.”

“The queen would have preferred him to leave the Maedians to the generals. You should have seen him ride out, in full armour, on Ox-Head. He looked like a king already.”

“I should have been told.”

Again, my nephew seems perplexed and thoughtful and amused and sweetly reasonable all at once. “Why? He can’t get permission from his own mother and he’s going to ask it of a philosopher?”

I feel a hot sweet splash of guilt in my chest and wonder if guilt, too, is a humour, and, if so, where is its gland.

“We got up before the cocks to see them ride out.”

“Did you wish you had been one of them?”

“You should have seen them,” my nephew repeats, frowning, avoiding the question, answering it, and chiding the questioner all in the same breath. He, too, is young.