The Golden Mean (28 page)

“Maybe I wanted it,” he says.

“All young men want their fathers dead. I did. And then when it happens—”

“I sacrificed for it.”

“What did you sacrifice?”

“A black cock. I wanted a bull but you can’t hide a bull. But the gods knew what I meant.”

“When was this?”

“After Maedi, after he said he’d cripple me if I went out again on my own.”

“Three years ago?”

“The gods knew.”

“Three years,” I say. “Child, the gods don’t wait that long. You didn’t do this.”

“I knew about Pausanias.”

“His argument with Attalus?”

“And if it wasn’t Pausanias, it would have been someone else. The gods heard me.”

Accept the guilt. Accuse yourselves
.

“He looked at me,” Alexander says. “I was behind him, under the archway, waiting for my turn to enter the theatre. After Pausanias—my father couldn’t speak, but he turned to look at me. He knew it was really me. The gods opened the door.”

Opposing extremes, but also versions of the same form
.

“I’ve been waiting and waiting for you,” Alexander says. “No one knew where to find you. Where were you?”

“In the library.”

He starts to cry.

“My father died of plague.” I take my arm from his shoulders. “Your father was killed by an assassin. The body needs a balance of fluids. Grief creates an excess, which we release through tears. Too many tears and the body becomes parched; the brain shrivels. You need to grieve, and drink water, and sleep. In the morning you’ll ask the gods to turn the guilt you feel into a tiny fish. You’ll hide that fish somewhere inside yourself.” I touch my temple, my heart. “Here, or here. You can live like that. No one will know.”

“Antipater thinks Pausanias was paid.”

“Who by?”

He looks at me.

“He doesn’t think that.”

“My mother, then.”

“That’s ridiculous. Wipe your nose.” He wipes his nose on his sleeve. “Any number of ambitious men would perceive a benefit in your father’s death. Antipater will see that.”

“You think so?”

“It makes sense. Some disgruntled chieftain who fancies himself in line for the throne, maybe, who found a sharpened tool in Pausanias. I’ll have a word with him.” I stand. “You need to sleep. Shall I bring the lamp?” He nods. I light a table lamp from a torch on the wall and bring it to his bed, where he’s lain down. “All right?”

He nods.

“You didn’t do this.”

He closes his eyes.

Children hold hands. Men walk by themselves, you see?

A
FTER PURIFICATION RITUALS AND
a period of lying-instate, Philip is buried with his weapons under a great tumulus of earth. Pausanias’s mutilated body is burned on top of the pile. The sons of Aëropus, a disgruntled chieftain, are tried, convicted, and put to death. Ritual sacrifices, funerary games, full pomp and honours in the high, golden, late-afternoon summer sunlight, pollen twinkling in the air all around.

I grieve. There’s a tiny place deep in my chest where a little man sits, a manikin, weeping. I tell him to settle down. In the evenings, when I drink, he clambers up onto my shoulder for a shy look round. He thinks the same thoughts I do, in his small way, highly spiced thoughts, meat skewers, tiny and intense memories. He’s a bit of an Arrhidaeus, my manikin, with his crust-nosed gibbering, probably diapered, probably can’t feed himself, but he remembers exorbitantly, lavishly, complexly, in flashes of super-saturated colour. Here’s one: Philip opening his eyes under water for the first time and laughing, bubbles streaming silently from his mouth, reaching to touch the bubbles that streamed from mine, looking over his shoulder, at his feet, over his head to the surface, and back to my face. Philip with both eyes open, laughing under the sea.

“B
E SAFE
,” H
ERPYLLIS SAYS
.

It’s bronze-dayed, crisp-nighted harvest time. Callisthenes and I are taking a trip while we can, before the weather turns. We’ll ride Tar and Lady; Tweak is for the bags. He huffs and snuffs, annoyed at the unaccustomed weight. Callisthenes scratches his nose and tells him he’s gone soft.

I pick Little Pythias up in a hug and tell her I’m going to find us a new house to live in.

“Me too?” she says.

“You too.”

She bumps her forehead to mine. I put her down and she goes to stand beside Herpyllis, who holds the baby.

We mount and ride away. “It hasn’t been all bad,” Callisthenes says as we turn back to wave, meaning Pella, meaning the three of them.

“You think we should stay?”

“In Pella? No.”

“In Macedon?”

“That’s what this trip is about, isn’t it?”

We ride east, in sight of the ocean for a while and then inland. We toast bread on green sticks over our nightly smudge of fire and sleep rough. We’re quiet together, each looking inward. I have a feeling about my nephew, an idea there’s something he wants to tell me. No matter. I won’t mind what he decides either way, though I’ll miss him.

Philip’s army—Alexander’s now—has been busy in Chalcidice. Even just a few weeks’ reconstruction have brought some of the prettiness back, some of the prosperity, the fruit and the birds and the colour. Go still at sundown and you can hear the earth itself humming. The ground stays warm long into the night; strange-familiar faces smile up at us from the fields; the stars are a splash of silver liquid across the sky, a spill pattern as familiar as the stains on my mother’s kitchen table. I’m almost home; all this time, it’s been only two days’ ride away. Callisthenes smiles at me once or twice without saying anything, at something he sees in my face. It’ll take a good month to pack up the house in Pella and conclude my affairs there, and by then it’ll be too late in the season for the women and children to travel, too wet and cold for the baby especially. We’ll make this journey again, for real, in the spring. This is just reconnaissance.

As Antipater warned me, the east coast is still bleak; Stageira is the exception. The fields lie fallow and the vineyards are overgrown but the village has been patched back together, old stones and new wood. I show Antipater’s letter to the officer in charge, who gives us stew in his own tent and says he’s grown fond of the place these past couple of months. Nice manners. I tell him his men have worked fast.

He pours more wine. “We know where our orders come from. Who you are.”

We throw dice together for a while, and then I walk down to the shore in the moonlight. Callisthenes follows after a couple of minutes.

“You’re happy,” he says.

“Am I?”

“Comfortable. You belong here.”

“I guess I do. I don’t know. It’s a good place for a childhood. I like to think of Nicomachus running around here the way I did when I was a child.”

“Playing with your ghost.”

I point at the sea. “That little boy is about fifty feet out and twenty feet down, diving for shells. Anyone who wants to go look for him can try.”

Callisthenes hugs himself and rubs his biceps up and down. “I’d rather see the house.”

My father’s estate is set back from the sea. The big house is dark but from a distance we can see light in one of the outbuildings. Closer, the window of the garden cottage. When our footsteps sound on the pebbles, an old woman appears in the doorway.

“Hello, Beauty.” Callisthenes ducks down to greet her.

She’s a hunchback and twists herself so she can look at our faces with sharp eyes. I don’t recognize her.

“Do you live here?” he asks.

“I know you.”

Callisthenes smiles. “I don’t—”

“Not you.” She looks at me. “You.”

I tell her my name and my father’s name. “If you know me, you know where you’re living.”

“No one’s been here for years. They rebuilt it first and it stood empty. I keep it nice.”

“May we see?”

We follow her inside the cottage.

“Ah!” I say. It’s small; they rebuilt it small, or my memory did. Six years ago it was half-burnt, roof gone. It’s clear the old woman lives in this one room with the neat hearth and the dried lavender hanging from the ceiling. How is it possible the place smells the same after all that’s happened, all this time? “Do you keep the big house, too?”

“As I can. I sweep it out most days. I’m trying to bring back the garden, too. Can’t manage the orchard, though, except for the windfall.”

“You’re alone?”

“I’m too old to leave. My boys aren’t far. I lived with them for a while after the war, after the exile order, but I belong here. I came back last month when I saw the big house was finished. Army knows I’m here; army don’t care. Nobody cares. My boys check on me every few days, bring me what I need.”

I’m scouring my brain, trying to place her. “Sons. No daughter?”

“You should know my little girl.”

“Should I?”

“My baby, Herpyllis. She serves your lady.” She sees my face. “No. Not my baby before me.”

“No, no. It was my wife who died.”

“Ah.” She relaxes, shakes her head, pats my arm. “I’m sorry. How long?”

“A year and a half ago. Herpyllis—” I look at and then away from Callisthenes, who’s considering the ceiling. “Herpyllis was a great comfort to her lady through her sickness. To me, too.”

“You didn’t get rid of her, then, after.”

“Ah.”

Callisthenes is humming faintly, eyes closed now.

“No. As a matter of fact—” I’ve never had a mother-in-law. “Shut up,” I tell Callisthenes.

“Sorry.”

The old woman laughs. “That kind of comfort, is it?”

“A son is a great comfort.”

“A son!” She claps her hands; pulls her dress wide with her fingertips and describes a slow circle in the middle of the room: dancing. “A grandson!”

“Herpyllis is very happy,” Callisthenes says.

The old woman has gone pink in the cheeks. “Will I show you the big house? It’s ready for you. You’ll bring them here, bring them back. Won’t you? Get the lantern for me, love. Up on that shelf.”

“Tomorrow.”

Callisthenes begins to talk about my household, Herpyllis and the baby, the good food they eat, the nice clothes they wear, all easy and expansive, distracting her from the answer he knows I haven’t given. She asks us to stay, but the officer expects us back for a tour of the reconstruction first thing in the morning.

“In the afternoon, then.”

“The afternoon.”

Callisthenes and I walk back to the soldiers’ camp.

“You’ll break her old heart,” he says eventually.

“I can’t help that.”

“I know.” It’s late; cold. Our breath smokes. “This is why we came. For you to decide.”

I can’t speak.

“You’ve seemed better, lately.” Callisthenes doesn’t look at me. “Your illness. It was so bad for a while, but just lately—”

“Illness?”

We’re on a small rise overlooking the soldiers’ encampment. I raise my hand to acknowledge the sentry, who’s spotted us. He sits back down at his fire.

“Please,” Callisthenes says. “Won’t you talk about it, even to me? Haven’t I known you long enough?”

I shake my head.

“You’re better when you have someone new to love. Alexander, at first. Herpyllis, now. Me, once. You pull out of yourself. It helps you. I remember when I first came to you, in Atarneus. Everyone warned me what a miserable man you were, but I was never happier in my life. You always had time for me, always wanted to talk to me. You gave me gifts, encouraged me, made me welcome, made me feel brilliant. I wondered for a while if it was sex you wanted. But it wasn’t; you just loved me. Then you got married and it was Pythias. Then we came to Pella and it was Alexander.”

“You’re jealous?”

“No. Yes, of course. But that’s not—I’m trying to say I’ve been watching you for a long, long time. You have a sickness. Everyone who loves you sees it in you. When you were in Mieza, Pythias and I used to talk about how to help you. She said you needed Alexander. She said if ever they took him away, you’d die.”

“Black bile,” I say.

“She wasn’t resentful. She was more astute than I think you ever—”

“Not in her, in me. My father taught me long ago that black bile can be hot or cold. Cold: it makes you sluggish and stupid. Hot: it makes you brilliant, insatiable, frenzied. Like the different stages of drunkenness, you see? Only my father didn’t realize that none of this had to be bad. The people who find the balance between the extremes—”

Callisthenes puts his hand on my arm.

“—the very best teachers, artists, warriors—”

“Plato, Carolus, Alexander—”

“I swung back and forth for a long time. I’d find a girl and fuck myself empty, and then afterwards I wanted to die. Lately, though, as you say, it’s better. Not so high, not so low. Maybe it’s Herpyllis; maybe. Does it matter, if it holds?”

“You think it won’t hold here?”

“You saw the orchard by the big house?”

“Plums.”

“Plums. One of my oldest memories, the taste of those plums. I looked at them as we walked by just now and thought, too small, after all these years. Those damn trees are still too small to hold a noose. That’s the furniture in my mind, here, still.”

“Athens, then.”

“For me. For you?”

He looks shy, surprised.

I nod. “Your work is solid. You don’t need me any more. I’ll give you this place, if you want it.”

We start the walk down to the camp. “Remember how I hated Macedon when we first got here?” my nephew says.

“I do.”

“Stageira,” he says. “Comfort and leisure and time to write. I could do worse.”

“Or you could come with me, stay with me. Colleague, rather than apprentice.”

“Or I could do something else altogether. Fall in love, maybe. Travel.”

“Both.”

He laughs. “Both, then.”

“Fucking cold one tonight,” the sentry says. “Extra blankets in the storage tent. Help yourself to what you need.”

“M
AJESTY.”

“Master,” Alexander says.

We embrace, briefly. I feel the dry, slightly feverish heat in his skin that corresponds precisely to the ruddiness of his complexion, feel the strength of him, and smell the faint, pleasant spiciness that so endeared him as a boy to my dead wife. We’re in the palace library, back in Pella, for the last time. He’s been king for eight months.