The Golden Mean (23 page)

“This way.”

Head leads us toward the river, toward the horses. There’s a detail for that, too: a cavalry officer works grimly through the downed animals, cutting throats. Some scream; some scrabble their legs, running nowhere. Other medic teams are spread across the field, heads down, like berry pickers. I find Head close to me, keeping an eye.

“No,” he says, as I stoop for a closer look at something; someone. Theban. “Walk on.”

I stop.

“Walk on.”

The Theban is looking at me.

“Walk on, cunt.”

I kneel down and unshoulder my kit. Overhead, vultures orbit the field, singing, waiting for us to leave.

“You cunt.” Head kneels down beside me. The Theban’s eyes move back and forth between us. Head feels for a pulse at the side of the throat, thumbs up the brows for a better look at the eyes, tweaks the man’s feet. He moves up the legs, pinching. He’s at the chest before the Theban grunts. “Help me.” Together we roll him on his side. Blood all down the back. “Paralyzed,” Head says. “Slashed spine. Were you running away, fucker?”

“No,” the Theban says.

We roll him back so he can look at the sky. “Walk on,” Head says to me. “Come on. You don’t want to see this.”

I don’t move.

“Close your eyes,” Head tells the Theban. He doesn’t. “I’m doing you like one of our own,” he says, and sinks his knife where he recently felt for the pulse. We both jump back from the blood that leaps out. The Theban’s hand slaps the ground a few times and then stops. His eyes never close.

“That’s not my job,” Head says. “Don’t make me do that again.”

“Head!”

The young medic has something; he’s waving us over. I kneel down again.

“I don’t have time for this.” Head turns away. “You’re on your own.”

In my kit I have a tablet and stylus. I roll the Theban back onto his side and unlace the leather corset. It falls away in pieces where the weapon severed it. The lips of skin are plum-coloured. I pull them apart to discover a flap of yellow fat. It’s bone I want; I need my knives, then something to clean my hands on so I can write and draw.

I don’t know how much time passes.

“Here you are.”

“Minute.” I’m teasing out a long thread of something from deep in the cavity.

“What
is
that?” Head kneels beside me, squinting.

“I don’t know. I’m seeing where it goes.”

“Look at that.” Another voice, another shadow kneeling beside me. The young medic. “All those bits came out of just this one here?”

I’ve laid a lot of viscera out on the ground.

“Are you all right?” the medic says.

“I need more tablets.”

Head nods at the medic, who jogs off. “He’ll find you what you need. What—fuck
off.”
A stench rises; I’ve hit bowel. “You
do
this?” he says.

“You
do this.”

“Not after they’re dead.” Head looks around the field. I try to stand up. “Steady.” He catches my arm. My feet are pins and needles from squatting so long. “They’re building the pyres. You almost done?”

“No.”

“He’s got to go with his people.”

“I haven’t started the head.”

Shouting at the edge of the field, behind us; some argument. “Ah, no.” Head starts kicking dirt over the viscera. “No, no, no. Roll him back, quick. Help me. Put your shit away.”

“I’m not done.”

“Look,” Head says. “I know who you are and why you’re here. I understand what you do, sort of. But soldiers are not going to get this. You left the sex alone, at least. But you have to stop now.”

“I was getting there.”

“Women’s work.” He looks over his shoulder. “Oh, fuck me.” He heaves the Theban onto his back so we can’t see the hole I’ve made there. “Kneel,” he hisses.

“Majesty,” I say.

“Dismiss.” Alexander’s looking at the Theban. Head runs; runs. I stay. “Is he dead?”

“Yes.”

“Because,” Alexander says, “sometimes you think they’re dead but they’re not. You have to finish them.”

“Yes.”

Hephaestion has stopped a dozen paces away. His face is white.

“I fought here,” Alexander says. “East field. Is he dead?”

What’s been smoking up my thoughts is clearing now. Behind Hephaestion I see Antipater and Philip himself. They, too, stop a cautious distance away.

“Child,” I say. “Has something happened?”

“What are you doing?”

I hold out my tablet for him to see.

“Can I help?”

“I’m just done. Another time. I think we need to go wash.”

“I fought here.”

“Alexander.” Hephaestion steps forward. Alexander draws his knife. Hephaestion steps back.

“Child,” I say again. “Will you show me where to wash?”

He’s looking at the Theban. He kneels down beside him, as I did hours ago.

I walk a wide circle around him, over to Philip and Antipater. They’re arguing in whispers.

“It happens,” Antipater is hissing. “You know it as well as I do.”

“What happens?”

Philip shakes his head. “He stabbed Ox-Head’s groom,” Antipater says. “Thought he was the enemy. The battle was over.”

“Like after Maedi.”

Antipater looks haggard.

“What?” Philip says.

We look over. Alexander is working at the Theban with his knife, up by the hairline.

“This is your fault,” Philip says to me. “You teach him this shit. What kind of animal are you, anyway? Who does this to a body? What happened after Maedi?”

Antipater shakes his head.

“That’s my son.”

“He still is,” I say.

“He’s supposed to be king someday.”

“Look,” Alexander calls. He’s leaning over the body. “It comes off. Come look.”

Hephaestion is backing away.

“Deal with this,” Philip says. “The two of you, since you know so much about it. Get him into a tent, for fuck’s sake, before anyone sees.” He draws his own knife far enough to slam it back into its leather. “Do I have an heir or not?”

Hephaestion is green on the side of his face, the phenomenon Arimneste tried to describe to me so long ago.

“This isn’t happening,” Philip says. “I’m going back to camp.”

I go see what Alexander’s doing. He’s got the face peeled down from the forehead. He’s working it down with his knife, ripping and jiggling. He’s got it peeled to the eyes.

“I tried, at Maedi,” Alexander says. “I tried to bring one back. But I couldn’t get it off.”

“For me?”

“For Carolus. I was thinking it could be dried. He said they couldn’t afford masks.”

“May I help?” I reach for his knife. He lets me have it. I take the flap of forehead and hold it delicately taut, as he did. “May I finish this for you? I think you are required back at camp.”

“I want to stay here, with you.”

“Your father is very proud of you,” I say slowly. “Of the work you did today. He wants to celebrate with you. He wants the world to see you together.” I feel Antipater behind me, closer. “Your father needs you now.”

“Majesty, come,” Antipater says.

Alexander looks at Hephaestion. “Hey.” His face lights with pleasure. “When did you get here?”

Hephaestion looks at me. “Just now.”

I nod at him over Alexander’s head,
That’s right. Go on
.

“Hey,” Hephaestion says. “So, hey. I’m starving. You want to find something to eat?”

Alexander slings an arm around his shoulders and they walk back toward the tents that way. I try to smooth the Theban’s forehead back down but the fit is ragged now, and the lips of skin won’t meet at the scalp.

“He won’t remember any of this,” Antipater says. “Alexander. He didn’t last time, either.”

The young medic comes running up, panting, three tablets under his arm. “Is this enough? It’s all I could find. Theban, yeah? They’re asking at the pyres. I’ll help you carry him over when you’re done.”

“He’s done,” Antipater says.

We carry him the hundred paces to the Theban pile, already spitting and crackling in the golden late-afternoon light. Gutted, he’s not very heavy. We heave him onto the other bodies while the presiding officer makes a note on his tablet, keeping count. The medic runs off. Antipater and I stare at the fire and the heated air wobbling around it.

“I get nightmares,” Antipater says.

A long silence.

“I work,” I say. “It’s like the ocean. I go in, way down deep, and then I come out.”

He nods, shakes his head. The setting sun gilds our hair. The Theban—smoke—rises to the spheres.

A
NTIPATER AND THE PRINCE
leave for Athens, escorting the bones of the Athenian dead. A courtesy: defeat has made the Athenians respected allies again. I secured a bag of poppy seed from Head before we broke camp and showed Antipater how to administer the proper dosage. Philip will spend the fall in the Peloponnese tying up loose ends and arranging a great conference in Corinth, where he can get down to the business of readying all his new subjects for a Persian war. Philip has never been to Athens, and to forgo this opportunity is extraordinary. My guess is he can’t stand, right now, to be near his son.

I travel home to Pella with a convoy of walking wounded. No goats, this time; no luck; no hurry. I change bandages, clean wounds, lance infections, sedate the delusional.

At home I give Little Pythias her present, a tiny Athenian soldier carved for me by the medic in exchange for my knives. I visit her mother in bed, where she spends most of her time now. I can’t persuade her to take exercise, and when she does get up she creeps along the walls, or supports herself on a slave’s arm. I can’t bring myself to accuse her of malingering, but nor can I dispel that suspicion.

“Athens,” Pythias says. “Athens, Athens. Perhaps Philip is right. What would you have done there, really, other than more of the work you do now, for a more attentive audience?”

“Is that nothing?”

“To him it is.”

I shake my head. “Look at this city. Look what he’s done with it. He’s brought in actors, artists, musicians. He knows what it means to be cultured, to feed the mind. He understands the—the diplomacy of it.”

“You think it’s personal?”

I don’t answer.

“Practically, then. What would he do with you? He can hardly force you back into the Academy if they won’t have you of their own free choice. He knows that much, at least. So what could you do for him?”

“Run my own school,” I say, to be contentious, but I see the pain is returning and she’s lost interest in the argument.

·   ·   ·

“A
NH,” THE OLD ACTOR SAYS
when he sees me, a consonant of pleasure that becomes a guttural, wet coughing. “Long time,” he adds when the coughing subsides, gasping for the breath to make the words.

A housemaid has led me to the bedside, where Carolus lies in odd relief: what’s under the sheet seems shrunken almost to flatness, but his hands and head seem enormous. Hands hairy, knuckly, worked with surpassing fineness and detail by some master carver. Head leonine, the white hair longer than I remember and styled back in a greasy plume that still shows the plough-marks of the comb, chin stubbled, eyes two gems sunk in soft pouches.

“She’s a good girl,” he says of the housemaid, when I ask if there’s anything I can do for him, anyone I can send; we can easily spare someone to sit with him at night if he wants it. “No. Nights aren’t so bad; sometimes I almost sleep. I remember a lot at night. Performances I’ve been in, actors I’ve worked with, audiences I’ve played for, travels, lovers. My childhood, too, and stories my father and grandfather told me about their performances, their days. I have a lot of company at night.”

“I’m sorry it’s taken me so long. I’ve been travelling with the army, if you can believe it, as a medic.”

“I hadn’t thought we were so short of men.”

“We’re not. Alexander wanted me to come. Get me out seeing the world.”

“Through his eyes,” Carolus says.

“Through his eyes.”

He nods, closes his own, opens them with an effort. “He likes you. That’s good.”

I wait while he closes his eyes again, and am thinking I should slip away when he opens them. “I’m here,” I say.

“You were going to leave.”

I can’t tell if he’s frightened. “Should I?”

“No.”

I look around the room while he does the work of breathing, preparing his next sentence. A shelf of books, plays I assume, that I covet a closer look at. Masks on the walls, and props placed here and there. He’s surrounded himself with the things that make him happiest.

“Under the bed,” he says.

I bend down from the chair I’ve drawn up next to him and lift aside the trailing linens and furs. There’s a box.

“Yes,” he says, and I pull it out.

His fingers twitch a little so I lift it onto his lap where he can reach. He fumbles with the lid. Inside is a mask.

“ ‘How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there’s no help in truth!’ ” I quote. “ ‘I knew this well, but made myself forget. I should not have come.’ ”

“ ‘Let me go home,’ ” Carolus replies. Of course he knows his
Oedipus
as well as I do. “ ‘Bear your own fate, and I’ll bear mine. It is better so: trust what I say.’ ”

His grandfather’s Tiresias mask is fine and light and old; the ribbon that would secure it around the actor’s head has yellowed and frayed away to scant fibres. At first it looks almost featureless: the eyes are shallow, unpainted pods, the nose and mouth minimally marked. The cheekbones are high and wide; the brow is delicately wrinkled, in the moulding rather than the paint. It’s large, larger than a human face so as to be seen from the back of a theatre, but light; my hands almost seem to rise as I hold it, tricked by the illusion, the contradiction between size and weight.

“Have you ever worn it?”

He lifts his hands and slowly takes it from me to lower it onto his face. After a moment’s rest he struggles to raise his hands again to lift it off. I help him, and lay it gently back in the box. “First time,” he says. “Last time.”

I lid the box and replace it under the bed.

“I miss my father.”

After a long moment I realize he’s crying.

“May I look at your books?” I ask.