The Golden Mean (26 page)

“It’s a kind of battle sickness. Soldier’s heart, they call it.”

“Soldier’s heart.” I watch her turn it over in her mind. “Sounds like praise.”

“I’ve thought that, too. I’m told they often recover.”

“He says it’s getting worse.”

I remember him limping for his mother. “He’s worried about you. He wants you to fuss over him so you’ll forget yourself. He’ll be fine.”

The answer, of course, is that I wouldn’t write a tragedy. I don’t have that kind of mind.

P
HILIP RETURNS TO
P
ELLA
early in the winter a changed man. He chews parsley to sweeten his breath, and dresses fashionably, and drinks noticeably less. It’s said he’s infatuated with the daughter of the general Attalus, a girl named Cleopatra. She’s a living blank, fresh and pretty and unremarkable. Her mouth sits in a natural pout, like the petals of a flower, probably the source of the attraction. She has the guileless serenity of a favourite not old enough to appreciate the danger of her position, and a shrieking laugh.

Herpyllis is from Stageira, and that is the point of the dagger that nicks my heart. Pythias tells me this during one of our long afternoons when our conversation ranges loose and wide and it’s not difficult for me to mention the woman’s particular good care of me during her illness. The next time we happen to be alone together, as Herpyllis is serving my supper, I ask her if it’s true.

“You don’t remember me?”

“I wish I did,” I say, truthfully. “I think you’re younger than me, though.”

“Maybe a little. I remember your father’s house. Beautiful flowers. My father helped yours remove a wasps’ nest from under the eaves. I would have been seven or eight. I remember sitting in the garden, watching with a bunch of other children from the houses around, and you kept herding us farther and farther back so we wouldn’t get stung. Just like a sheepdog.”

“I remember.” And with a thump I do—the high heat of summer, the drone of the wasps, the extraordinary noise from all the visitors in the garden, and my own excitement and exhaustion to be around so many children when I was used to spending my time alone. The day was like a festival. “What else?”

“You were always swimming. We would see this head out in the water, my sisters and I, and know who it was. But our mother told us we must never laugh at you because you were a favourite of the sea-god.”

“You laughed at me?”

She waves this away, laughing now, refilling my cup. “My father was a fisherman. You wouldn’t have known me, but I remember you. I went to work for your mother’s people in Chalcis, and they sent me to you when you married.”

“Yes.” Though this is a watery memory; I could see only Pythias then. Perhaps I remember a woman a few years older than my new wife, taller and heavier, readier to smile. I never had much to do with my wife’s women.

Over the next days and weeks we trade these little reminiscences—the big snowfall, the bumper crop, the terrible storm, the festivals of our shared but separate childhoods. The kitchen offer has not yet been repeated, though I have an idea it will be. She’s not the green sprig Pythias was; her breasts are heavy doughs to Pythias’s apples. For a while I decide I actively dislike her: too easy and pleasant and smiling, too close to my own age, too familiar, and most of all too disconcerting: a black smudge on my memory, a little empty place, a face I should recall and can’t. She becomes annoying, a constant chafing, and I listen for her step, her voice, just for the irritation it produces in me. Her smell, too, a perfume of my wife’s (Pythias told me of the gift; “I have too much; I’ll never get through it all now”), transformed by the alchemy of her different skin from lighter to darker flowers: so I imagine. Her mannerisms—the way she smooths her hair behind her ear with curving fingers, her habit of grunting softly when she sits after long standing or stands after long sitting, the constant light smile, the occasional unconscious cupping of her own breasts—become intolerable to me. Of course I am falling in love, and know it. Sex is not a cure, but a treatment I’m saving for the height of the fever.

One day she tackles the books in my library, takes them out into the sun to blow the dust off and dry them out to inhibit mould, a process I find distracting: the coming and going, the books out of place, fear of my daughter’s grubby hands, fear of rain. I move from my work table to the doorway every minute or two to make sure Little Pythias isn’t sucking on my
Republic
, or a cloud hasn’t blown over to ruin everything.

“Still blue sky,” Herpyllis says, pointing up. The next time I glance out she doesn’t notice: she’s looking at one of the books.

I go up behind her and look over her shoulder. “You read?”

She starts and rolls it up. “No.”

I take the book from her hand. It’s sticky. I unroll it, read a few lines, and laugh. Drawings, too, what she must have been looking at. “Perfect. I needed a gift for the wedding.”

T
HE DAY AFTER THE WEDDING
, Alexander and Olympias and their entourage leave Pella for Dodona, the capital of neighbouring Epirus, where Olympias’s brother is king.

“I don’t see the fuss,” Callisthenes says to me in my study. “Philip’s had other wives since Olympias. Why does she run away now?”

I hear in the turn of phrase the condescension of the court.

“And Alexander. A lion in battle, but at home he’s as hysterical as a woman.”

“Who says so?” I ask.

“If you’d gone to court, you’d have seen it. He’s been as twitchy as hell, picking fights with people over nothing. Like last night. Attacking Attalus? Threatening his own father?”

Callisthenes attended the wedding as Philip’s guest; I wasn’t invited.

“What happened, exactly?” I’ve heard only a garbled report from Tycho. Slaves get their information fast, but it’s rarely accurate.

“Attalus gave a toast saying what handsome children they’d produce, or something like that. Alexander took offence and threw a cup at his head. Nailed him.” Callisthenes mimes Attalus taking a blow to the temple.
“Doof
. Then Philip jumps up and falls flat on his face, and Alexander asks how’s he going to make it to Persia if he can’t make it off his own couch—”

“Cute.”

“—and then something about everyone insulting his mother for the last time. He kind of lost me there, but I’d had a lot to drink.”

“Olympias isn’t Macedonian, she’s Epirote, so that makes Alexander half-and-half. A pure Macedonian son would move ahead of Alexander in line to the throne.”

“Alexander won’t allow himself to be supplanted by a baby,” my nephew says smoothly.

It never ceases to amaze me how the man can glide right over his own ignorance and carry on a conversation as though I’m the one in need of instruction.

“I don’t see how he will prevent it. A regent can rule through a baby until it’s of age. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

Though I’m mostly housebound now, I pick up the gossip; inflamed from my nephew when he visits, calmer from Herpyllis. Alexander installed his mother at her brother’s court, in Dodona, and himself visited the celebrated oracle there, a massive oak tree full of nesting doves and hung with bronze vessels that sound in the wind. Thereafter he rode north, alone, and is rumoured to be reflecting deeply. (Herpyllis smiles; I smile; then we put our smiles away, carefully, without further comment.) Meanwhile a mediator, Demaratus of Corinth, a family friend, is now in Pella, now in Epirus, relaying messages of respect and contrition between father and son. All this the Macedonians watch with their usual voracious affection, as though the two men are a tussling lion and cub. Eventually Alexander returns alone to Pella, head held high, and resumes with dignity and magnanimity his former role of heir apparent. It helps that the child Cleopatra has made herself scarce; it’s said she’s pregnant and ill with it, and rarely leaves her bed.

I begin a little work on respiration, a booklet to keep myself busy at Pythias’s bedside. She slips in and out of consciousness, and I spend hours watching the sunlight move across the walls, listening to the rhythm of her breath. I myself slip too easily, these afternoons, into a kind of drugged stupor, with memories and erotic daydreams twining themselves together as I remember Pythias in the bloom of youth, Pythias on our wedding night in her veils and garlands as I led her to my door, where the women waited with burning torches, and later at the wedding feast, eating sesame cake and quince; Pythias who after that first night I had to coax with infinite patience out of her clothes and into my bed; Pythias who lies bed-bound now, who won’t rise again. I even masturbate once as she lies struggling for breath. I write down everything I know about breathing, in men and animals and fish and birds, and try to dispel the memory I have not been able to resist, the memory that hurts my heart now, of our wedding night, when I laid my head on her breast and felt the rise and fall of her breath, and thought that I would never again have to sleep alone.

P
YTHIAS DIES IN THE NIGHT
. When she starts to rasp I go to the kitchen for a cup of water, and by the time I get back she’s gone. I close her eyes and put the coin on her tongue and lie down beside her, pressing my face into her shoulder, her neck, her breast, into the last warmth there. Mine at the last.

A
FEW DAYS LATER
, a courier appears. Together we ride up to the palace. Summer is coming; the light is flattening out and heat stays longer in the ground. I think briefly of taking Herpyllis to the coast, of teaching her to swim, but know I won’t. She’ll be too ready, too smiling.

My audience turns out to be a private one. After I’ve waited a few minutes alone in a small anteroom, Philip strides in and embraces me roughly.

“I heard. I’m sorry.”

The king sits with me for a long time, speaking with his familiar rough gentleness, with a catch in his voice that sounds genuine, and moves me. He is more patient with me than I am with Little Pythias, who has cried herself into a fever and vomits up everything she eats. She keeps asking for a coin for the ferryman so she can go see Mummy. I can’t bear to be near her.

Eventually I force myself to say to him, “I’m keeping you from your duties.”

“You’re not. I keep thinking of my little one, if she were to have died. I don’t know what I would have done.”

I remember, then, to congratulate him on the birth of his daughter.

“Eurydice, we’re calling her, after my mother.” Philip shakes his head. “I’ll tell you what else. I’ve had the satrap of Caria offering his daughter to Arrhidaeus.”

“In marriage?”

Philip laughs and wipes his eyes.

“Caria.” I try to think clearly.

“Not too big, not too small. Strategic. It might just do. We’re having a dinner for him, you must come.”

“For Arrhidaeus?”

“For Pixodarus. The satrap. That’s a thought, though. I suppose he should be there?”

“Arrhidaeus?” I say again.

“You’re right, of course. I hope he doesn’t fuck it up. Feeds himself, does he?”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

Philip squints fiercely. “Can’t remember,” he says finally. “How long have you been with us?”

“Six years.”

“That sounds about right.”

I get up to go.

“Wait, wait, wait. You’re in a fuck of a rush today. I haven’t told you the main thing yet.”

Apparently not the death of my wife, nor the birth of his daughter, nor the marriage of his son is the main thing. I sit back down.

“You look like I’m going to hit you.”

He feints a punch at my head and I duck automatically. Sometime in the last twenty-five years I’ve acquired the reflex.

Philip laughs. “I never thanked you for my wedding gift, did I, in all the commotion? You always were funny.”

So that is the main thing: a sticky little book, a bit of nostalgia still smelling slightly of raisins. “I was?”

“You had a face like a clown. You were always trying to make everybody laugh. I remember you could mimic people. You used to do your father, and my father. That was a little spooky, actually.”

“Not me.”

“Oh, yes. And you did me once, too, and I beat the shit out of you. Funny as hell, but I had to. I think you were pretending to screw an apple.”

“You did love apples,” I say, slowly, trying to remember.

“Still do.” He swats his own leg conclusively, as though I’ve settled the matter. “And that’s a funny thing. Alexander loves them, too. I used to share mine with him when he was a toddler, feed him off my own knife. He couldn’t get enough of me, once. Where did that little boy go, do you suppose?”

“Got his own knife.”

He bumps my jaw with his fist, gently, a blow I see coming and this time let happen. “We should have been better friends.”

It’s the closest to an apology I’m going to get. I nod.

“Cleopatra says Olympias might be telling the truth about the boy having been fathered by one of the gods. Never mind that face, you’ve heard the rumours. Olympias herself spreads them. Has done for years, but I never paid any attention before now. Little Cleopatra, eh? Already a politician. We both know what she’s really getting at, of course, only she knows better than to come out and say it. Though I don’t think it can be true. Another lover? Not back then, anyway. We were white hot for a while, his mother and I. Do you think he looks like me?”

“What a thing to ask.”

Philip laughs. “See? Funny. After all, what are you going to say? All right. Though he has always favoured her, the hair and skin and so on. Is it ridiculous to start wondering only now?”

I decide my grief will buy me some indulgence. “He’s not very tall.”

“That’s nice of you to remind me.” Philip looks annoyed, which was the danger. But then he says again, “That’s nice of you to remind me,” his eyes no longer focused on me, and I know I’ve given him what he wanted, a little polished stone to hold on to in the night and rub with his thumb, a worry-bead, a talisman: two short men in a kingdom of tall.

I wonder how long this will hold him, and how clever his new little wife really is. A daughter this time, but a son next time, maybe, and then what? Not so blank and guileless, if she’s already looking that far ahead. She’s learned quickly, or someone is teaching her. And how long before Alexander hears that his father is wondering if he’s a bastard?