The Golden Mean (27 page)

“All right,” Philip says. I wonder how much of this he’s already figured out for himself. Most of it, would be my guess. “You see, it’s always good for me to talk to you. Now I’m going to give you something. This probably isn’t the right time, and you may not care right now in your time of mourning, but I want you to take it away with you, if you know what I mean, and let it sink in. I’m rebuilding Stageira.”

“Stageira?”

“A repayment, for all you’ve done with the boy. A gift. Call it whatever you want. I know things haven’t turned out the way either of us expected, but you can’t look at him and think you’ve wasted your time.”

“No. I don’t.”

“You can’t. Anyway. I’ve ordered the work started, and I want you to go there later this summer and oversee it. You can tell me what needs doing and I’ll have it taken care of. Fields, crops, buildings, boats, whatever it needs. We could bring the people back, too, try to. You’d know where to find some of them, maybe?”

“Maybe.”

“I remember you had a brother.”

“Yes.” I don’t tell him that Arimnestus died in his eighteenth year after a fall from a horse, nor that the following year Arimneste died giving birth to her second child, a daughter who died with her, and that Proxenus and Nicanor left Atarneus before I ever got there and are settled now in Eresus, on Lesvos. Pythias and I visited them there once or twice during our years in Mytilene. Stageira doesn’t mean anything to them. And it surely isn’t Athens, but I understand that promise is in the spheres now, with the Theban.

We rise together and embrace one last time.

“He’s like a god, isn’t he,” Philip says. “Who understands the gods? You can’t blame me for making backup plans. Some days I just look at him and wonder what he’ll do next.”

·   ·   ·

“W
ATCH THIS
,” A
LEXANDER SAYS
.

At his sign, the actor begins to declaim.

“You can’t do that,” I say, within a couple of words, when I’ve caught the gist of the speech.

The actor stops. Alexander turns to me with his old look of amused incredulity.

“Majesty,” I add quickly.

We’re in the palace library, where Alexander summoned me ostensibly for a lesson.

“But I can, and I will,” Alexander says. “Who do you think he’ll prefer for his daughter, Arrhidaeus or me? Would he dare refuse me?”

The actor is tall and slender and handsome, and stands with an unnatural stillness while others speak. I recognize him as Thessalus from Corinth, the famous tragedian, a new favourite of the Macedonian court.

“Again,” Alexander says, and the actor starts over. He speaks lengthily of Alexander’s qualities while the prince beats time on the arm of his chair.

“You’ve met this girl?” I ask when he’s done.

Alexander tosses a few coins that the actor catches neatly and pockets. He bows low and slow, with tragic dignity, and leaves the room.

Alexander brushes away the remark, and by implication all casual conversation, with a toss of his hand, as though at a fly. “He arranges a marriage for my brother. My feeble, idiot, older brother. Why not me, then? Am I not marriageable? Does he think Arrhidaeus has something I lack? Caria is our most important ally against the Persians.”

I wonder if I dare point out this isn’t true.

“He’s trying to replace me. He doesn’t trust me. He had a daughter, you see, so now he must find another way. He’ll take Arrhidaeus’s whelp before me, even.”

I notice a pile of papers on the table at his elbow. “Do you hear from your mother?” Olympias has remained in Epirus with the king her brother, sulking, the Macedonians say.

“She writes me.” Alexander indicates the papers.

I counsel him to reconsider.

“I suppose you think I am not fit for marriage either.”

“Not for this marriage, no. It’s beneath you.”

I watch the boy consider my words, holding himself nobly still, as the actor did.

W
HEN
P
HILIP FOUND OUT
about Alexander’s scheme, he banished four of Alexander’s companions, including Ptolemy, but not Hephaestion. Never a fool, Philip, even in anger; he wanted to punish his son, not break him. When Philip learned Thessalus was already on his way back to Corinth, he sent soldiers out after him and had him brought back to Pella in chains. This indignity the actor bore with great nobility and quiet suffering.

“I can imagine,” I say.

Herpyllis, who’s telling the story, pokes my arm reprovingly. We’re in bed. We’re screwing now, a nice salty business I don’t have to explain to anyone. She went to see the actor dragged through the streets, as did most of Pella, while I stayed home to work on my book.

“That poor girl, though,” Herpyllis says. “Not knowing which brother she’s getting.”

I turn onto my back to help her. “She’s getting Arrhidaeus. I think Philip took care of that pretty quickly.”

“Poor girl.”

I close my eyes. “Poor boy.”

My mind goes to work on the categories of pleasure and how to teach them. The first time or two, Herpyllis let me go at it in my own way. When she began to guide me a little, I assumed she was offering me liberties she thought I was hesitant to take: tongue at the tit, fingers in the hole. Then, one night after I had spent myself, she continued to grunt and shift until I asked her what was wrong. I ran my fingers down her arm to her own fingers to see what she was doing.

“Do you need a cloth?” I asked. Not wiping, though, but rubbing. She tried to use my fingers but I pulled away and told her to be more modest.

“What?” she said.

“I am finished.” I was aware of sounding like my father. “That is not necessary.”

“You’re finished. I’m not.”

Not knowing what to say, I let her continue. She arched her back a little and then collapsed in a series of spasms, moaning weakly with each exhale. An annoying sound.

“And what was that?”

I assumed her answer was a lie. My father had taught me what she claimed to experience was not physically possible.

“Next time, you can help,” she said.

I asked her to describe her pleasure.

“Like honey,” she said, and, “Like a drum.” And other similes: cresting a hill, waves breaking, the colour of gold.

She said when I came I sounded like a man lifting something heavy and then, with a great effort, setting it down.

·   ·   ·

T
HE FIRST
G
REEK KING
in Macedon was told by an oracle to build a city at the place where he first saw the
aigas
, the goats. Twenty-four years ago, Philip’s first military outing as king was the defence of Aegeae—former capital, site of the royal tombs—against Athens. Late this summer, the court relocates to Aegeae.

The palace, protected from behind by a mountain, faces north, with a view across the shrine and the city to the plain below. It’s smaller than the palace at Pella but older and holier; all important ceremonies are held here. At the heart of the complex is a square courtyard forested with columns; then reception rooms, shrines, living rooms. The circular throne-room has an inscription to Heracles in mosaic; elsewhere the floor is worked with stone vines and flowers so that it’s like walking across meadows in bloom. Near the west wall is the outdoor theatre. A tall stone wall shelters courtiers on their way from the palace to the theatre, cutting them off from the public space of the city. The theatre is stone and beaten earth, with platforms for the audience and an altar to Dionysus at the centre of the pit.

In addition to the court from Pella comes the king of Epirus, Olympias’s brother Alexandros. Philip, politicking to the last, has arranged for his and Olympias’s daughter to wed her own uncle. The marriage is widely understood as a tool to confirm Alexandros’s loyalty to Philip, rather than to Olympias. It’s an important wedding, too, not so much because of who the bride and groom are—Philip, presumably, still has a thumb free for each of them—but as an opportunity for Philip to display his grand greatness before all the world. Macedon itself will be on display. There will be a festival of the arts, games, and massive banquets over many days. Foreign guests come from everywhere; this is not the season when foreigners are refusing Philip.

On the morning of the first day of celebrations is to be a performance of Euripides, the
Bacchae
, again. Is Philip indulging in a little irony, reminding his brother-in-law of the last performance they attended together, all those years ago? We all love the
Bacchae
.

I sit in the audience with my nephew, toward the back, waiting for the play to begin. Below us sit a few hundred of Philip’s choicest guests, men all bright and lovely in their festival clothes, flowers in their hair, their many languages glorifying the air. The rest of the guests—a thousand all told, I’ve heard—will be feasting already, waiting for this afternoon’s games. The heat is oppressive and I’m missing Herpyllis, who’s remained behind in Pella to care for Little Pythias and our newborn son: Nicomachus, after my father. I miss my son’s small self in the bed, where Herpyllis matter-of-factly put him between us that first night, where he sleeps with his arms stretched wide, a hand on his mother and a hand on me. He gives me a deep animal pleasure—his fat little heat and snoring, a cub in the den, tangling limbs—that I never had with my daughter. Pythias insisted she sleep in her own room with her nurse, who for nighttime feeds roused us formally with a ritual knock at the door, as though fearing to interrupt us in some act of uxoriousness. Little Pythias was a fretful baby and took forever to get back to sleep once woken. Little Nicomachus, so far, eats like a wolf—Herpyllis feeds him on her lap, cross-legged next to me in the bed, like a peasant girl—and sleeps like a sot, a white trickle of his bliss still in the corner of his mouth. He will be an uncomplicated sort, I think. I miss him. I take pleasure, too, in Herpyllis, who is naturally kind and competent, who shares my childhood memories and has a reassuring earthiness to my dead wife’s absentee etherealism. But my work frankly bores her, and when I speak of it she always has another task in hand, mending, or trimming vegetables, or feeding the baby, or braiding Little Pythias’s fine hair.

It’s time to start choosing a future: somewhere with people I can talk to, or at least ghosts I can live with. “I see a journey,” Callisthenes said to me yesterday, waggling his fingers in front of his eyes like a priest having a vision. So do I; but journeys need hope and courage and planning and a desire to get up in the morning. It’s going to take me a while to muster those troops.

The procession starts, the drums and trumpets, the statues of the gods, and then Philip himself a few steps ahead of his bodyguard. The crowd roars. One of the bodyguard ducks suddenly and draws a knife. Philip seems to say something, seems to raise a hand to the soldier’s shoulder, and then the knife is sticking in Philip’s chest. What? Philip looks over his shoulder, kneels carefully, touches the knife’s handle, and lies down.

I don’t see what happens onstage after that. All around me men are shouting profanities, naming the gods, denying what they’ve seen. What? No! Then the crowd is pushing and stumbling and running and we are borne along in it, Callisthenes and I, particles in a current. We link elbows to stay together. Outside the theatre, soldiers are yelling at people to go back to wherever they’re lodging and stay there. For us, that’s the palace library. We’re searched for weapons several times as we make our way there. Callisthenes is bleeding from a kicked ankle.

“Is the prince all right?” I ask a soldier at the palace gate. He recognizes us.

“The king, you mean.”

“Is he all right?”

“He’s the king,” the soldier says.

The library is silent. Our bedrolls are where we left them this morning. So many foreigners are here, every spare room is taken. I don’t like eating and drinking and washing and pissing in here, bringing moisture in with the books, but we weren’t given a choice.

“You saw who it was?” Callisthenes tears a strip from his bed linen to bind his ankle. “Pausanias.”

“Why?”

Callisthenes knows. There’s a story told about the officer—a bookend to the story Carolus told me about his promotion, long ago—that he quarrelled with Attalus, the new queen’s father, and that Attalus, pretending reconciliation, invited him to dinner, got him drunk, and threw him into the yard with the stableboys. When Pausanias went to Philip for justice, the king refused to punish his own father-in-law. Instead, he sent Attalus off in command of an advance force to Persia to prepare for the coming invasion, and promoted Pausanias once again, this time to his personal bodyguard, in an attempt to pacify him.

“They held him down and took turns,” Callisthenes says. “He shit blood for days.”

“He attacks the king because of some rough trade? That doesn’t sound right.” Though, as Carolus once reminded me,
they celebrate with it, they make people suffer with it, they do their business with it, they run the kingdom with it
. “You don’t suppose Philip’s dead?”

The room has one tall slit of a window overlooking vineyards. Callisthenes cranes his neck, trying to see something, anything. “Do you think anyone remembers we’re in here?”

The answer comes at midnight. We’ve lit lamps and drunk this morning’s stale water but we haven’t dared go look for food. Now we’re lying in our bedrolls, wide awake, when a soldier opens the door. A soldier: Antipater.

“Not you,” he says to Callisthenes.

I follow him through the unfamiliar halls. Aegeae is older and rougher than modern, expensive Pella; the halls are narrower, darker, with lower ceilings and uneven floors. We pass sentries and patrols, antsy soldiers with white faces who startle and bristle until they recognize Antipater. I’m glad we didn’t try to leave the library ourselves.

“Face me,” Antipater says outside a door. “Spread your arms.” He pats me down for weapons. “Go in.”

“What is this?”

“Go in.”

A bedroom. Alexander sits on the bed, head in his hands. He looks up when I come in. I sit down beside him and put an arm around his shoulders.