The Golden Mean (18 page)

Alexander’s troops retake Maedi and, for good measure, establish a colony named Alexandropolis. A bit of arrogance with Philip still alive, but there were already a Philippi and a Philippopolis in Thrace, and the man was probably more than happy to indulge his son’s first successful command. I attend the formal greeting of the victors at court a few weeks after my conversation with Callisthenes, where Alexander is subdued and leaves almost immediately after the ritual offerings. I can’t get close enough to see if he’s picked something up on his travels, some bit of sickness, or if he’s just tired from all the excitement.

When I return home, I find Pythias has ordered a lamb sacrificed in the boy’s honour.

“You do love him,” I say.

Pythias, by now, is fat with child, and her lassitude has given way to dogged industry as she prepares for its arrival. She strokes her belly placidly while we speak. Athea no longer speaks to me, won’t look me in the eye. If she had anything to do with it, I don’t want to know.

“They say he is not Philip’s child at all,” she tells me.

“Women’s gossip.”

“Men’s, too.”

“All right, then. Who does slander make the father?”

Pythias wrinkles her brow earnestly. “Zeus, or else Dionysus. Olympias herself says so.”

I laugh. “Spoken like a true Macedonian.”

Late that night comes a tapping at my gate. Tycho gets me from my study, where I’m just finishing up. The rest of the household is already in bed. A messenger in palace livery informs me I am required by Antipater.

“Now?”

“A medical matter.”

The palace has doctors, the army has medics. The messenger has a horse for me, for speed and discretion, so I won’t raise the household saddling Tar. Antipater himself, then, or the prince, and it’s something shameful. I scour my memory for what my father taught me about diseases of the cock, and annoy the messenger by making him wait while I run back to my study for one of my father’s old books.

“Finally,” Antipater says. “Though I think the danger has passed. He looked worse an hour ago, when I sent for you.”

I ask if there’s blood in the urine or a burning sensation.

“What?” Antipater says. “I’m not worried about his piss, I’m worried about his arm. Alexander slashed him with a meat knife. Thought he was back in Maedi.”

He leads me to a room where Hephaestion is sitting with a cloth held tight to his arm.

“Bind a bleeder,” he says, seeing me, grinning weakly. He starts to cry.

“All right, child. Let me look.”

Antipater, that good soldier, has already washed him; there’s not much more I can do. The bleeding’s down to a trickle. It’s a long, vicious slash, deep enough. I advise him to keep it bound and prescribe poppy seed for the pain.

“Stop crying,” Antipater tells him.

“I don’t need poppy seed,” Hephaestion says. “Will he be all right?”

“Where is he?” I put bandages and scissors back in my father’s old bag. “I’d better see him, too.”

We walk Hephaestion back to his room, next door to the prince’s. Antipater rests his hand briefly on the pretty boy’s head.

“Go, sleep. And for fuck’s sake, stop crying. The prince will be fine.”

“Thank you, sir,” Hephaestion says.

“What happened?” I ask once Antipater has dismissed the sentry.

“Soldier’s heart, we call it.” He shakes his head. “They think they’re back in battle. I wondered if it was coming. He’s been odd, since they got back. Flinching at sounds, anything metallic. Dead-eyed, drinking too much.”

“I’m surprised you let him go alone.”

Antipater gives me a look. “Alexander didn’t ask me. I wanted to give him hell, but Philip’s letters couldn’t have been prouder. What can I do? I’m not his father.”

“So you’ve seen this before.”

“Usually on long campaigns, when we’re losing. It shouldn’t have happened this time. Maedi was an easy victory. His first real battle, sure, but he’s Philip’s son. He’s trained for this.”

“Do you think something happened there, something unusual? Something he hasn’t told you?”

“I can hear everything you’re saying, you know,” Alexander says through the door.

We go in. The room is neat, bed made, books tidy. The remains of a meal are on the table, with two chairs pulled up: a late supper for two. Poor, sweet, loyal Hephaestion. The cutlery is gone.

“Is he all right?” Alexander is pale but seems composed.

“Are you?”

He makes a noise, tick of the tongue, annoyance. “I’m tired. I suppose I’m allowed to be tired. I got confused for a minute. It was just a scratch, wasn’t it? He knows I wouldn’t hurt him for real. What’s the book?”

I’ve put my father’s book down on the table with my bag, next to his supper. I show him.

“That’s what you thought this was about?” Antipater says.

“Drag me out in the middle of the night, what do I know?”

“That’s disgusting.” Alexander scrolls on. “That too.”

“Any bumps on the head while you were away?”

“No.” He lets me examine him briefly. A few bruises and scratches, and pressure on one knee makes him wince. “This doesn’t have to go in dispatches, does it?” he asks Antipater.

“That Hephaestion took a wound in battle?”

They look at each other a moment. Alexander nods slightly,
Thank you
.

Back in the hall, I say, “Does it?”

Antipater beckons me away from the door. “Every account I got, from every soldier I asked, said he was brilliant. Everything textbook. Said he threw his spear like he was at games, just beautiful. Effortless. He could have hung back and let his men do it, but he led. He went first on every charge. That’s what his father needs to know, and that’s what I told him. This other, we’ll put it down to first-time nerves. Find your own way out?”

“Soldier’s heart,” I say. “Did you ever have it?”

Antipater stalks off down the hall. “Never,” he calls back, without turning around.

Hephaestion is still awake, as I’d hoped. “He didn’t tell you? Maybe he didn’t want to say anything in front of Antipater. He killed a boy who was trying to surrender. He’d thrown his weapons away and got down on his knees, crying for his mother. He can’t stop thinking about it. Do you have any of that poppy seed after all?”

I look through my bag. “Not too much, though. It’ll make you sleepy.”

“Not for me, for Alexander. He gets headaches.”

I show him how to grind it down, what dosage, and screw a sample portion in a twist of cloth. “He feels guilty for killing the boy, then.”

“No, he enjoyed it. He said it was his favourite kill of the battle.”

“He ranks them?”

“Oh, we all do that.” Hephaestion moves his arm gingerly. “I think he went back after, though, and did something to the body.”

“Do you know what?”

“No. He made me stay behind.”

I believe him.

“But that’s when it started. Whatever he did to the boy, after he was already dead.”

T
HREE YEARS AFTER IT BEGAN
, Philip’s Thracian campaign is over. Callisthenes and I go into the city with thousands of others to greet the returning army and watch Alexander walk to his father, holding out a bowlful of wine, which Philip accepts as the traditional libation of a king returning to his city. They embrace and the people cheer. They turn and continue the walk to the palace together, Philip’s arm around Alexander’s shoulders. I’ve heard no gossip about Alexander since my late-night visit to the palace—nothing, that is, beyond the usual do-they-or-don’t-they speculations about him and Hephaestion—nor have I been summoned for a lesson. The former I attribute to Antipater’s white-knuckle discretion, the latter to my student’s. I’ve seen him naked now, the soft white places; soft, or rotten. We both need time to forget.

We stay a long time to watch the procession that follows them. The news of Philip’s long withdrawal from Thrace, after the disappointments of Perinthus and Byzantium, precedes him.

A campaign in Scythia netted some twenty thousand captives, women and children, as well as another twenty thousand breeding mares, flocks, and herds. Philip’s army battled the Triballians on the way home, encumbered by all this living baggage, and were forced to leave a good deal of it behind. It was a vicious battle. Philip took a spear to the thigh and lay for a time pinned beneath his own dead horse. He was briefly taken for dead, and he limps distinctly now. A representative sampling of Thracian women and children and geese and ducks and pregnant horses and Triballian prisoners are paraded past. Along the way, too, Philip has picked up a sixth wife, a Getic princess named Meda, and here she is in a blue dress and sandals, walking in the middle of this great mess of prisoners and soldiers and horses, a blonde for his collection. I remember my long-ago description to Pythias of Thracian women, but she has no tattoos that I can see. Pythias will have to sew with her soon enough, no doubt, and will be able to inform me definitively.

But the invitation never comes. Pythias points this out to me one evening as we’re getting ready for bed. “I haven’t been asked up to the palace in ages,” she says. “By Olympias or anyone. Also I sent a note to Antipater’s wife asking her to visit and she never replied. Have I done something wrong?”

I press the heel of my hand to my forehead, trying to hold back a headache. “They perceive us as Athenian.”

She laughs. “What? I’ve never even been there.”

“Me, then, and you as an extension of me. We’re at war. I was afraid of this.”

“You’re joking.” She sees my face. “You
are
joking. The king trusts you to tutor his heir. If Philip doesn’t doubt your loyalty, why should anyone else?”

“You expect reason to govern passion. You’ve been around me too long.”

She grabs my hand and clasps it to her belly; the baby’s kicking. Her face is a joyful question.

“Yes,” I say. “There.”

“Not long now.”

“You think?”

She wrinkles her nose. “How much heavier can I get?”

“All the more reason not to go trekking up to the palace, then. Maybe they’re just mindful of your condition—Baby,” I add sternly, “stop pummelling your mother.”

“No, it’s nice.” She shifts a little in the bed, trying to get comfortable. “It’s different this time, isn’t it? War with Athens will be different from all the other wars. If Philip loses—”

I clap my hands over my ears.

“If Philip wins—”

“When.”

“When Philip wins—”

“That’s it.”

“He’ll rule the world?”

I lean down to kiss her belly.

“Won’t he?”

“This isn’t a battle with the Triballians. Philip stands to lose more than a few thousand geese. It’s an endgame this time. Endgame—”

“I understand.”

“It’s a bad time to be associated with Athens, however distantly. We should plant crocuses.”

Pythias raises her eyebrows.

“Philip won a battle against the Thessalians in a crocus field. It’s considered patriotic.”

“Crocuses,” Pythias says.

“By the front gate, where people will see.”

“And that will take care of it?” Pythias says.

By early autumn, she’s confined and my presence at home is unwelcome. I tell Athea I’ve attended any number of births, assisting my father, but she waves me away. “You faint.”

“I will not.”

“You see wife, all bloody, open between like meat. You never fuck her no more.”

“Even if that were to be the case, I can’t see how it would be your business.”

She laughs. “Trust me little bit, okay? I know how. If problem, I send for you. Better for you, better for her. She no scream, cry, push in front of you. You know.”

I do know. That sounds about right, astute, even. My father believed slaves should treat slaves and free should treat free, but he never had a witch, and especially not one his wife liked and trusted. “You will send for me immediately if there are any problems.”

“Yes, yes, yes.” She pushes me away, actually puts her hands on my arm and pushes me.

She’s happy, I realize. This is her job, what she knows how to do, what she wants to do and hasn’t been allowed to. She won’t make a mistake.

I’m just walking into the street, thinking to drop in on my nephew, when a courier approaches to say the prince requires my presence for a lesson.

“Wait,” I tell the courier, and run to the back of the house for supplies.

At the palace, in our usual courtyard, the prince and Hephaestion are wrestling. They go at each other in silence, ferociously. I clear my throat softly, but only one or two of the younger pages looks at me, then away. I slowly pace the perimeter of the courtyard, under the colonnade, where the pages have encircled the fight. Through the forest of them I glimpse the sexual grappling of their leaders: a foot hooking an ankle, sudden collapse, a turtling stasis as Haephestion presses his chest to Alexander’s back and tries to yank him off his fours and onto the floor, tiled with the sixteen-point starburst of the Macedonian royal house.

“A power struggle,” I murmur to Ptolemy, who stands as is his habit a little apart from the younger boys. Alexander’s cousin does not reply. I’ve tried before to engage with him on a different level from the other pages, a level more suited to his maturity, with quiet asides and small ironies, but Ptolemy is loyal to the prince and cannot be cut away from him. He tolerates my dry little droppings of wit with the barest of grace and moves subtly away from me, as now, without apology. Yet I know him to be intelligent, and wonder why our minds don’t resonate in greater concord, like strings on a common instrument. I know from Leonidas that Ptolemy has a passion for the logistics of battle and will one day make a fine tactician. Perhaps the young man smells my eagerness to encourage any passion of the mind and my desire to contribute to it, though my own knowledge might be weak in that particular area. He finds me arrogant, I think with sudden insight, or possessive. I confess I want to touch all their passions, smooth and straighten and freshen them, like a slave at laundry, and thus leave my mark.

“Ahem,” I say, more loudly this time. “Shall we begin?”

“Greek,” a voice says, all insolence, and the insult is taken up in a chorus of hoots and jeers: “Greek! Greek!”