The Golden Mean: A Novel Page 2

  “It’ll happen,” I say. “It’s our time.”

  The fat man laughs again, claps his hands. “Very good, doctor’s son,” he says. “You’re a quick study. Say, ‘I spit on Athens.’”

  I spit, just to make him laugh again, to set off all that wobbling.

  When he’s gone, I look back to the courtyard.

  “Go to him,” Pythias says, passing behind me with her maids, lighting lamps against the coming darkness.

  In other windows I can see lights, little prickings, and hear the voices of men and women returning to their rooms for the evening, public duties done. Palace life is the same everywhere. I was happy enough to get away from it for a time, though I know Hermias was disappointed when we left him. Powerful men never like you to leave.

  “I’m fine here,” Pythias says. “We’ll see to the unpacking. Go.”

  “He hasn’t been able to get away from us for ten days. He probably wants a break.”

  A soldier arrives to tell me the king will see me in the morning. Then a page comes with plates of food: fresh and dried fruit, small fish, and wine.

  “Eat,” Pythias is saying. Some time has passed; I’m not sure how much. I’m in a chair, wrapped in a blanket, and she is setting a black plate and cup by my foot. “You know it helps you to eat.”

  I’m weeping: something about Callisthenes, and nightfall, and the distressing disarray of our lives just now. She pats my face with the sleeve of her dress, a green one I like. She’s found time to change into something dry. Wet things are draped and swagged everywhere; I’m in the only chair that hasn’t been tented.

  “He’s so young,” she says. “He wants a look at the city, that’s all. He’ll come back.”

  “I know.”

  “Eat, then.”

  I let her put a bite of fish in my mouth. Oil, salt tang. I realize I’m hungry.

  “You see?” she says.

  There’s no name for this sickness, no diagnosis, no treatment mentioned in my father’s medical books. You could stand next to me and never guess my symptoms. Metaphor: I am afflicted by colours: grey, hot red, maw-black, gold. I can’t always see how to go on, how best to live with an affliction I can’t explain and can’t cure.

  I let her put me to bed. I lie in the sheets she has warmed with stones from the hearth, listening to the surf-sounds of her undressing. “You took care of me today,” I say. My eyes are closed, but I can hear her shrug. “Making me ride. You didn’t want them laughing at me.”

  Redness flares behind my closed eyelids; she’s brought a candle to the bedside.

  “Not tonight,” I say.

  Before we were married, I gave her many fine gifts: sheep, jewellery, perfume, pottery, excellent clothes. I taught her to read and write because I was besotted and wanted to give her something no lover had ever thought of before.

  The next morning I see the note she’s left for me, the mouse-scratching I thought I heard as I slipped into sleep: warm, dry.

  MY NEPHEW IS STILL sprawled on his couch when I pass through his room on my way to my audience. He’s drunk and has been fucked: face rosy and sweet, sleep deep, smell of flowers unpleasantly sweet. We’ll all want baths, later. Another grey day, with a bite in the air and rain pending. You wouldn’t know it was spring. My mood feels delicate but bearable; I’m walking along the cliff edge, but for the moment staying upright. I may go down to the city myself, later, to scrounge a memory, something drawn up from deep in the mind’s hole.

  The palace seems to have rearranged itself during my long absence, like a snake might rearrange its coils. I recognize each door and hall but not the order of them, and looking for the throne room I walk into the indoor theatre instead. “Bitch,” someone is yelling. “Bitch!”

  It takes me a moment to realize he’s yelling at me.

  “Get out!”

  My eyes adjust to the smoky dimness. I make out a few figures on the stage, and one very angry man climbing toward me over the rows of stone seats. A plume of white hair over a good face, a great face. Killing eyes. “Get out!”

  I ask him what play they’re preparing.

  “I’m working.” A vein throbs by his eye. He’s right up to me now, his breath in my face. He’s wrecked, he’s a killer.

  I apologize. “I got lost. The throne room—?”

  “I’ll take him.”

  I look down at the boy who’s suddenly appeared at my side. The boy from the gates, the one I pretended not to recognize.

  The director turns away and stalks back down to his position. “Places,” he barks.

  “They’re doing the Bacchae,” the boy says. “We all love the Bacchae.”

  Back in the hall he raises a hand and a soldier appears. The boy goes back into the theatre before I can thank him. The soldier leads me across another courtyard and through an anteroom with an elaborate mosaic floor, a lion hunt rendered in subtly shaded pebbles. It’s been a long time since I was here. The lion’s red yawn is pink now; the azure of a hunter’s terrified gaze has faded to bird’s-egg blue. I wonder where all the colour went, if it brushed off on the soles of a thousand shoes and got wiped across the kingdom. A guard holds a curtain aside for me.

  “You refined piece of shit,” the king says. “You’ve spent too long in the East. Look at yourself, man.”

  We embrace. As boys we played together, when Philip’s father was king and my father was the king’s physician. I was taller but Philip was tougher: so it remains. I’m conscious of the fine, light clothing I’ve changed into for this meeting, of the fashionable short clip of my hair, of my fingers gently splayed with rings. Philip’s beard is rough; his fingernails are dirty; he wears homespun. He looks like what he is: a soldier, bored by this great marble throne room.

  “Your eye.”

  Philip barks once, a single unit of laughter, and allows me to study the pale rivulet of a scar through the left eyebrow, the permanently closed lid. We are our fathers now.

  “An arrow,” Philip says. “A bee sting for my troubles.”

  Around us courtiers laugh. Barbarians, supposedly, but I see only men of my own height and build. Small Philip is an anomaly. He wears a short beard now, but is as full-lipped as I remember him, broad-browed, with a drinker’s flush across the nose and cheeks. An amiable asshole, sprung straight from boyhood to middle age.

  I left off my accounting to Pythias with Philip’s invasion of Thrace. From there he went on to Chalcidice, my own homeland, a three-fingered fist of land thrust into the Aegean. An early casualty was the village of my birth. Our caravan passed by that way, three days ago now; a significant detour, but I needed to see it. Little Stageira, strung across the saddle of two hills facing the sea. The western wall was rubble, the guard towers too. My father’s house, mine now, badly burned; the garden uprooted, though the trees seemed all right. The fishing boats along the shore, burned. Paving stones had been prised up from the streets, and the population, men and women I’d known since childhood, dispersed. The destruction was five years old. News of it had first reached me just before I left Athens and the Academy for Hermias’s court, but I couldn’t face it until now. Weeds crept their green lace over doorsteps, birds nested in empty rooms, and there was no corpse smell. Sounds: sea and gulls, sea and gulls.

  “An easy journey?” Philip asks.

  Macedonians pride themselves on speaking freely to their king. I remind myself we were children together, and take a breath. Not an easy journey, no, I tell him. Not easy to see my father’s estate raped. Not easy to imagine the cast of my childhood banished. Not easy to have my earliest childhood memories splotched with his army’s piss. “Poor policy,” I tell him. “To destroy your own land and terrorize your own people?”

  He’s not smiling, but not angry either. “I had to,” he says. “The Chalcidician League had Athens behind it, or would have if I’d waited much longer. Wealthy, strong fortifications, a good jumping-off spot if you felt like attacking Pella. I had to close that door. You’re going to tell me
we’re at peace with Athens now. We’re on the Amphictyonic Council together, best friends. I’d like nothing better, believe me. I’d like to think they’re not building a coalition against me as we speak. I’d like to think they could just learn their fucking place. Reasonably, one reasonable man to another, are they going to rule the world again? Did they ever, truly? Are they hiding another Pericles someplace? Could they take Persia again? Reasonably?”

  Ah, one of my favourite words. “Reasonably, no.”

  “Speaking of Persia, I think you have something for me.”

  Hermias’s proposal. I hand it to Philip, who hands it to an aide, who puts it away.

  “Persia,” Philip says. “I could take Persia, with a little peace and quiet at my back.”

  This surprises me; not the ambition, but the confidence. “You’ve got a navy?” The Macedon of my childhood had twenty warships to Athens’s three hundred and fifty.

  “Athens has my navy.”

  “Ah.”

  “You can’t be sweeter than I’ve been,” Philip says. “Sweeter or more accommodating or more understanding. I let them off easy every time, freeing prisoners, returning territory. Demosthenes should make a speech or two about that.”

  Demosthenes, the Athenian orator who gives poisonous, roaring speeches against Philip in the Athenian assembly. I saw him once in the marketplace when I was a student. He was buying wine, chatting.

  “What do you think of him?” Philip asks.

  “Bilious, choleric,” I diagnose. “Less wine, more milk and cheese. Avoid stressful situations. Avoid hot weather. Chew each bite of food thoroughly. Retire from public life. Cool cloths to the forehead.”

  Philip doesn’t laugh. He cocks his head to the side, looking at me, deciding something. It’s unnerving.

  “The army’s moving?” I say. “I saw the preparations as we arrived. Thessaly again, is it?”

  “Thessaly again, then Thrace again.” Abruptly: “You brought your family?”

  “My wife and nephew.”

  “Healthy?”

  I thank him for his interest and return the question, ritually. Philip begins to speak of his sons. The one a champion, godling, genius, star. The other—

  “Yes, yes,” Philip says. “You’ll have a look at the older one for me.”

  I nod.

  “Look at yourself,” Philip repeats, genuinely perplexed this time. “You’re dressed like a woman.”

  “I’ve been away.”

  “I make it twenty years.”

  “Twenty-five. I left when I was seventeen.”

  “Piece of shit,” he says again. “Where do you go from here?”

  “Athens, to teach. I know, I know. But the Academy still rules a few small worlds: ethics, metaphysics, astronomy. In my job, you have to go where the best minds are if you want to leave your mark.”

  He rises, and his courtiers around him. “We’ll hunt together before I leave.”

  “It would be an honour.”

  “And you’ll have a look at my son,” he says again. “Let’s see if you have some art.”

  A NURSE ADMITS ME to the elder son’s room. He’s tall but his affliction makes his age difficult to guess. He walks loosely, palsied like an old man, and his eyes move vaguely from object to object in the room. While the nurse and I talk, his fingers drift up to his mouth and pluck repeatedly at his lower lip. Sitting or standing, awkwardly turning this way and that as he is instructed, he seems affable enough but is clearly an idiot. His room is decorated for a child much younger, with balls and toys and carved animals strewn on the floor. The smell is thick, an animal musk.

  “Arrhidaeus,” he slurs proudly, when I ask him his name. I have to ask twice, repeating myself after the nurse tells me the boy is hard of hearing.

  Despite the mask of foolishness, I can see the king his father in him, in the breadth of his shoulders and the frank laughter when something pleases him, when I take deep breaths or open my mouth as wide as I can to show the boy what I want him to do. The nurse says he’s sixteen, and had been an utterly healthy child, handsome and beloved, until the age of five. He fell ill, the nurse says, and the whole house mourned, thinking he could not possibly survive the fever, the headaches, the strange stiffness in the neck, the vomiting, and finally the seizures and the ominous lethargy. But perhaps what had happened was worse.

  “Not worse.” I study the boy’s nose and ears, the extension of his limbs, and test the soft muscles against my own. “Not worse.”

  Though privately I thrill to the various beauty and order of the world, and this boy gives me a pang of horror.

  “Take this.” I hand Arrhidaeus a wax tablet. “Can you draw me a triangle?”

  But he doesn’t know how to hold the stylus. When I show him, he crows with delight and begins to scratch wavering lines. When I draw a triangle, he laughs. Inevitably I think of my own masters at school, with their modish theories about the workings of the mind. There have been always true thoughts in him … which only need to be awakened into knowledge by putting questions to him …

  “He is unused,” I say. “The mind, the body. I will give you exercises. You are his companion?”

  The nurse nods.

  “Take him to the gymnasium with you. Teach him to run and catch a ball. Have the masseur work on his muscles, especially the legs. You read?”

  The nurse nods again.

  “Teach him his letters. Aloud, first, and later have him draw them with his finger in the sand. That will be easier for him than the stylus, at least to start with. Kindly, mind you.”

  “Alpha, beta, gamma,” the boy says, beaming.

  “Good!” I ruffle his hair. “That’s very good, Arrhidaeus.”

  “For a while my father taught both children,” the nurse says. “I was their companion. The younger one is very bright. Arrhidaeus parrots him. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Delta,” I say, ignoring the nurse.

  “Delta,” Arrhidaeus says.

  “I want to see him every morning until I leave. I will give you instructions as we go along.”

  The nurse holds out his hand to Arrhidaeus, who takes it. They rise to leave. Suddenly Arrhidaeus’s face lights up and he begins to clap his hands, while the nurse bows. I turn. In the doorway stands a woman my own age in a simple grey dress. Her red hair is dressed elaborately in long loops and curls, hours’ worth, fixed with gems and amber. Her skin is dry and freckled. Her eyes are clear brown.

  “Did he tell you?” she asks me. “Did my husband tell you how I poisoned this poor child?”

  The nurse has gone stone-still. The woman and Arrhidaeus have their arms around each other’s waists, and she fondly kisses the crown of his head.

  “Olympias poisoned Arrhidaeus,” she singsongs. “That’s what they all say. Jealous of her husband’s eldest son. Determined to secure the throne for her own child. Isn’t that what they say?” Arrhidaeus laughs, clearly understanding nothing. “Isn’t it?” she asks the nurse.

  The young man’s mouth opens and closes, like a fish’s.

  “You may leave us,” she says. “Yes, puppet,” she adds, when Arrhidaeus insists on giving her a hug. He runs after his nurse.

  “Forgive me,” I say when they’re gone. “I didn’t recognize you.”

  “But I knew you. Philip told me all about you. Can you help the child?”

  I repeat what I told the nurse, about developing the boy’s existing faculties as opposed to seeking a cure.

  “Your father was a doctor, yes? But you, I think, are not.”

  “I have many interests,” I say. “Too many, I’m told. My knowledge is not as deep as his was, but I have a knack for seeing things whole. That child could be more than he is.”

  “That child belongs to Dionysus.” She touches her heart. “There is more to him than reason. I have a fierce affection for him, despite what you may hear. Anything you do for him, I will take as a personal favour.”

  Her voice rings false, the low vibranc
y of it, the formality of her sentences, the practised whiff of sex. More than reason? She sets off a simmer of irritation in me, hot and dark and not entirely unpleasant.

  “Anything I can do for you, I will,” I hear myself say.

  After she leaves, I return to my rooms. Pythias is instructing her maids in the laundry.

  “Only gently, this time,” she’s saying. Her voice is weak and tight and high; petulant. They bow and go out with the baskets between them. “Callisthenes found a servant to show them down to the river. They’ll beat my linens with rocks again, wait and see, and say they mistook them for the bedding. They’d never have dared back home.”

  “You’ll have new linens once we’re settled. Just another day or two here. Look at you, trying not to smile. You can’t wait.”

  “I can wait a little longer,” she says, trying to bat my hands away.

  Pretty, I called her; once, maybe. Now her hair hangs thin and lank, and her brows, ten days without tweezing, have begun to sprout rogue hairs like insect legs. The lips—thinner on top, fuller beneath, with two bites of chap from the cold and damp—I want to kiss, but that’s for pity. I pull her to me to feel the green hardness of her, the bony hips and breasts like small apples. I ask her if she’d like a bath, and her eyes close for a long moment. I am both a gross idiot and the answer to her most fervent prayer.

  When we come back from the baths (which, to my deep satisfaction, made her gasp: the pipes for hot and cold, hot hung with warming towels; the spout in the shape of a lion’s mouth; the marble tub; the stones and sponges; the combs and oils and files and mirrors and scents; I will bring her here every day we remain), Callisthenes is up and eating the remains of last night’s meal. Pythias withdraws to the innermost room, to her maids and her sewing. The boy looks abashed but pleased with himself also. Laughing Callisthenes, with his curls and freckles. He has a sweet nature and a nimble mind and makes connections others can’t, darting from ethics to metaphysics to geometry to politics to poetics like a bee darts from flower to flower, spreading pollen. I taught him that. He can be lazy, too, though, like a sun-struck bee. I worry about him from both sides of the pendulum: that he’ll leave me, that he’ll never leave me.