The Golden Mean (10 page)

“He shouldn’t have written without consulting me,” my father said. “It’s out of the question.”

The next day, he didn’t get out of bed. I assumed it was melancholy.

“I want to go,” I told my mother. I had found her in the courtyard, clipping herbs. “No one has any use for me here.” She didn’t answer. I looked closely and saw the fine skin around her eyes all ruined with crying. “What?”

“Daddy told me to collect these.” She meant the herbs. “For him. He has—” Her fingers fluttered under her arm. “Two of them. Only two. Here, and here.”

“What colour?”

“Red, like blisters.”

“Seeping?”

She shook her head. “That’s good, isn’t it? No blood?”

I didn’t know how to answer. She read my face and ran into the house, into my father’s room, with her fistful of greenstuff, and forbade anyone to open the door. That same day I was sent to the palace to sleep with the pages. Arimnestus, quarantined with me, was bewildered. I pretended to be too.

Two days later, we were summoned to appear before the king. Philip, I knew, didn’t have much time for his elder brother. Perdicaas had been tutored in his own youth by one of Illaeus’s classmates, a man named Euphraeus, who was still influential at court and arranged what Philip called snot dinners, with pre-set topics of conversation and minimal drinking. Perdicaas was taller than Philip, thinner, paler, only adequate in battle, always drumming his fingers on whatever book he was reading and wanted to get back to. Eight years later he would die in Illyria in a rout, four thousand killed, bequeathing Philip a royal mess.

“I’m sorry,” the king said.

Arimnestus wept and asked for our mother.

“I’m sorry,” Perdicaas the reader-king said again, tap-tap-tapping on his Homer. I had to squint to make out what it was.

Arimneste arrived from Atarneus with Proxenus and their baby son. She took charge of the household and of Arimnestus, managing servants and meals and her twin brother’s pain. There was ash in all the corners from where my sister had burnt herbs to purify the air of plague. It got on our clothes and in the food, but that was good. You left the ash to disperse naturally or the cleansing wouldn’t take. Arimneste was matronly now, plumper, busy and efficient, and wouldn’t look me in the eye. Someone—one of the slaves—must have told her I hadn’t wept. I lived in my father’s study, now, surrounded by the smell of him—faintly spicy from his apothecary, faintly sour from his old body—and his books. Mine, now. I piled them around me, scrolls unspooling, single leaves falling in drifts to the floor, and read late into every night. There were books I had never seen before, medical books shading into smut, wild histories, and plays, raunchy satires I had never suspected my father had a taste for. Periodically I came up for air, visiting the kitchen for an apple or bread. The servants avoided me. Every time I started to feel something, I dove back into the books and stayed down for as long as I could.

“You don’t grieve?” Proxenus asked me.

He was a decent man, a hard worker who treated my sister well and had revered our father. My dry eyes outraged him. I had returned from a walk—I still took walks, numbly, trying to tire myself enough to sleep—to find him in my father’s study, in my father’s chair. He wanted to tidy the mess I’d made, wanted me to help him. When I didn’t respond, he waved a piece of paper I recognized.

“There’s a letter here. As your guardian, I can’t let you remain in Pella.”

Escalating military losses meant Philip and forty-nine Companions would soon leave for Thebes as hostages, an elaborate diplomatic arrangement to ensure Macedonian docility. Philip would spend the next three years in the household of the great Theban general Pammenes, learning the arts of war in a city famous for its infantry, cavalry, and military leadership. He would watch their phalanxes drill on the training ground every day. I was high enough born and a frequent enough companion of the prince that I knew Proxenus feared to see me promoted to hostage number fifty-one. I was not hardened to military life and probably would not have survived my first winter there. If I wanted to live, I would be wise to leave Pella before the Theban escort arrived.

Arimnestus would stay with Proxenus and Arimneste, at least until he was of age. They would leave as soon as possible. I knew the twins didn’t need me, and Proxenus didn’t want me festering in his house, staring too long at people and taking over his library. It was time I became a problem to no one but myself.

I told him I wanted to go to Athens. “You would always be welcome to come to us in Atarneus,” he lied. “Perhaps once your studies are concluded.”

“I would like that,” I said.

When I told Philip, he called me a piece of shit, and congratulated me, and told me not to leave without coming to the palace one last time. Suddenly everything was happening fast, and I was leaving much sooner than I was ready for. Not even weeks; days. Arimneste and her maids made clothes for me, summer clothes painstakingly embroidered. Then it was the day before the journey. Proxenus and the twins would ride down with me to see me settled and then continue on to their own home. Their preparations took far longer than mine, and on the afternoon of that frantic eve I went up to the palace.

“Got you something.” Philip gave me a book of pornographic verse, illustrated. He had found it in the palace library, he said, and doubted his brother would miss it.

I thanked him, wondering where to hide it on the journey. My trunk was already packed and stowed on the cart. I asked him, in our old manner for the last time, if he was sure he could spare it.

“It’s a book, you dumb shit. You think I need it from a book?” He grabbed at his crotch. He repeated the gesture the next morning when we rode out—he and some pages had come down to wave me off—and smiled his disarmingly happy smile. I had finally stuffed the book deep down the throat of a giant amphora of sweet raisins with which my sister had lovingly provisioned me for the winter ahead.

THREE

P
YTHIAS SAYS SHE
doesn’t mind living in the palace, but now that we’re staying in Pella I want a house of my own. The flunky knows of a place, a modest single-storey house tucked behind the first row of mansions immediately south of the marketplace. We tour it behind the owner’s widow, a sniffling young woman in an indigo mourning veil. She scurries ahead of us from room to room, trying simultaneously to straighten things up and keep out of sight. The flunky assures me she’s got family to go to; I don’t press him for details. The house has a gaudy entrance hall (the mosaic floor shows Zeus eyeing a nymph); a small courtyard and measly garden, surrounded by a colonnade; and, at the back, living quarters, including a room for my books, a room for the women, bedrooms, and a small shrine whose care I’ll leave to Pythias. Callisthenes is old enough to find his own place. When I tell him this, he hesitates, swallows, nods. He’ll be fine.

I stack the animal cages against a south-facing wall, though half my specimens—tender as playwrights—have already died from the wet cold. I attend court, and bring Pythias gifts from the marketplace: some fine black and white pottery, a bolt of pale violet cloth. I have bulbs planted in the garden, and furniture delivered to the house.

“We’re settling down, then?” Pythias asks. Laughing at me with her gravest face.

At least she’s happy about it, or less unhappy. She likes the house, which is bigger than the one we had in Mytilene, and she likes her status here too. Is shocked by it, I think: in Mytilene she was simply herself, but here she is in vogue. The royal wives fight over her for their sewing parties. Her advice on hair and clothes and food and servants is sought out and followed. I’ve taught her to explain, if anyone asks, that our slaves are like family: we’ve had them for years, care for them, would never sell them; you don’t sell your own family. Very cosmopolitan, very chic, very fresh. The wives are impressed.

“You see,” I tell her, “we will be a force for the good, you and I. A civilizing influence. When we leave, we’ll have helped shape the future of a great empire.”

“The prince, you mean,” Pythias says. “I like that boy. There’s something pure in him.”

I hug my fashionable wife, hold on a moment too long, smelling her clean hair. That boy is my project now, my first human project. A problem, a test, a trust; a metaphor I’ve staked my life on. A thirteen-year-old boy. And Athens is a promise Philip has made me, payment in gold for when my time here is done.

“Sweet and pure,” I agree.

The palace is quieter now with the army gone. In the Macedonian tradition, the king must be present at battle to win the favour of the gods. Tiring for Philip, no doubt, and eerie for those of us left behind. It’s hard not to feel like a child left alone when his parents have gone to an important dinner and will be away all night. The familiar rooms echo differently, somehow, and time turns to honey.

Boys, each in the black and white livery of a court page, file into the hall I’ve been assigned. There must be thirty of them, all armed. I look at Leonidas.

“His companions,” the older man says grimly.

Alexander is not among them. “What am I, a nurse?” I say.

Leonidas shrugs.

I ask which are the prince’s closest friends. Leonidas singles out a pretty pink-skinned black-eyed boy named Hephaestion, a young man my nephew’s age named Ptolemy, and a couple of others.

“Right,” I say. “You boys to the left, please, and everyone else to the right.” Athenian boys would tussle and tarry; these Macedonian boys are quick and silent, efficient as a drill team. “Right side is dismissed.”

The boys on the right, including all the littlest ones, look from me to Leonidas and back again.

“Where do you want them to go?” Leonidas asks.

I shrug.

Leonidas points to the door and barks them back to the barracks. They run.

I’m left with the four oldest standing at attention. A philosopher with no military rank, I’m not sure I have the authority to tell them to relax. I put the cloth-draped cage I brought with me on a table. Leonidas withdraws to the back of the room.

“You can’t start,” Hephaestion says. “Alexander’s not here.”

“Who?” I say.

I remove the cloth. Inside the cage is the chameleon, but emaciated, barely alive after its three weeks in Pella. The dissection of a blooded animal requires careful preparation, otherwise the blood will flood the viscera at the moment of death. You have to starve the animal first, I explain, and kill it by strangling to preserve the integrity of the blood vessels. Fortunately this one hung on just long enough. I open the top of the cage, reach in with both hands, and grasp the leathery throat. It struggles feebly, opening and closing its mouth. When it’s dead, I take it out and lay it on the table. The cage I put on the floor.

“Now,” I say. I turn it on its back. Normally I would spread-eagle the legs with pins, but I want to keep the boys’ interest. I nod for one each to hold a leg. “Let’s find the heart,” I say. With a sharp knife I cut through the belly skin, peeling back the flaps to reveal the viscera. The boys press closer, crowding me, but I don’t ask them to step back.

“You see, here,” I say. “The oesophagus, the windpipe. Feel your own.”

The boys touch their throats.

“See the movement, the contraction around the ribs? In the membrane, here.”

Movement in the back of the hall. I don’t look up.

“This will continue for some time, even after death.”

The boys part for Alexander, who walks up to the table.

“You see there isn’t much meat. A little by the jaws, here, and here, by the root of the tail. Not much blood, either, but some around the heart. Show me the heart.”

Alexander points into the chameleon’s body.

I make a sudden fist and hold it up in front of his face. His eyes flare in surprise. Around me the boys go still. “Your heart is this big,” I tell Alexander. With what I will always think of as the second blade from the left, ears—the ghost of my father’s grip worn into the wooden handle—I detach the bloody nut of the lizard’s heart and hold it out to him. He takes it slowly, looks at me, and puts it in his mouth.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” he says. “I was with my mother.”

Shorry
, it emerges through the mouthful. There’s blood on one corner of his mouth like a trace of fruit. He chews and chews and swallows with difficulty.

“That’s all right,” I say. “Are you going to vomit?”

He nods, then shakes his head.

“Shall we have a look at the brain?”

The animal’s brain is reduced, through the boys’ industrious prickings and slicings, to a substance like meal. Alexander has recovered from his fit of petulance or penitence or peckishness or whatever it was and is busy impaling bits of brain on his knife and smearing them on the arm of the boy next to him. Another boy flicks some brain into Alexander’s hair. They’re all giggling now, jostling, feinting at each other with their brainy knives, normal boyish behaviour I infinitely prefer to their creepy militarism. We move on to the lungs, the kidneys, the ligaments, the bowel, the lovely doll-knuckle-bones of the spine. Alexander sneaks glances at me and when our eyes meet we both look quickly away. Ours is after all a kind of marriage, arranged by his father. I wonder which of us is the bride.

“Who can tell me what a chameleon is?” I ask.

“An animal.”

“A lizard.”

I collect my father’s scalpels from the boys and wipe them slowly, meticulously, as I was taught. “I had a master, when I was not much older than you. He was very interested in what things were. In what was real, if you like, and what”—I gesture at the remains of the chameleon—“was perishable, what would pass away and be lost. He believed that there were two worlds. In the world we see and hear and touch, in the world we live in, things are temporary and imperfect. There are many, many chameleons in the world, for instance, but this one has a lame foot, and that one’s colour is uneven, and so on. Yet we know they are all chameleons; there is something they share that makes them alike. We might say they have the same form; though they differ in the details, they all share in the same form, the form of a chameleon. It is this form, rather than the chameleon itself, that is ideal, perfect, and unchanging. We might say the same of a dog or a cat, or a horse, or a man. Or a chair, or a number. Each of these exists in the world of forms, perfectly, unchangingly.

“My master’s theory was ingenious, but it had many problems. For instance, how are we able to perceive the forms, if we are of this world and they are not? And if two similar objects share a form, then must there not be yet another form of which all three partake? And then a fourth form, and a fifth, and so on? And what of change? How can a perfect, unchanging world be the ideal form of
this
world, where change surrounds us?”

From outside comes the clang of a bell and the sound of many boys shouting, running, rallying to their next place of instruction.

“Master.” The boys salute me, one after another.

When it’s Alexander’s turn I touch the corner of my mouth. He hesitates, then wipes off the dried blood with the heel of his hand. I nod and he leaves.

Leonidas steps forward from his corner. He’s a tall old man with a craggy face, a warrior who has lived too long. He looks tired. “They liked the lizard.”

Together we pack up my materials and scoop the guts into a bowl.

“You left them behind,” Leonidas says. “I suppose you know that. All this metaphysics goes over their heads. I’m not sure it would be useful to them even if they did understand it.”

“Nor am I.”

“They’ve had trouble keeping tutors for him. He—”

“Yes,” I say.

“He frightens people.”

Yes.

Leonidas invites me to eat with him. It’s a simple meal, austere even—bread and a small cheese, some wizened fruit, and water.

“I like soldier’s rations,” he says. “That’s what I’m used to. Quite the feast, eh?”

I hear in the sarcasm a gruff note of apology.

“Plato would have approved. He ate fruits and vegetables only, no meat, and believed in Spartan habits: cold water, a hard bed, simple clothing. I was his disciple for a long time.”

“No longer?”

“His nickname for me was the Brain. When I began to confront him, he said it was in the nature of the colt to kick at its father.”

“Ha,” Leonidas says.

After a moment, I realize this is an expression of genuine amusement.

As I’m leaving the palace for the day I look into the theatre, hoping for a drink and a debriefing with Carolus. Fortunately I’ve made no noise. Alexander is alone on the stage, mouthing words I can’t hear. Abruptly he raises a fist to eye level, then lowers it. He performs this gesture again and again, each time with a different face: smiling, threatening, sarcastic, quizzical. He can’t seem to decide which he likes best, which makes the most sense. My palms are sparkling like the night I stood backstage: for pleasure, excitement, shame at my own amateur theatrics?

Silently, I back out of the theatre.

I
AM NOT HIS
only master. There are the men like Leonidas who teach him the arts of war: weaponry and riding, combat, the choreography of battle. These are soldiers, athletes, and don’t interest me much. But there are others, too: a musician, for gods help us but the boy is talented on the flute; a grey-faced geometer; and an all-around wit and wag named Lysimachus, younger than me and more charming.

At the end of our next lesson, as the boys leave, Lysimachus steps forward and introduces himself. I hadn’t noticed him, and feel my face harden. He flatters me prettily: my books, my reputation, my oratory, my way with the boys, right down to the leather of my sandals, obvious quality, obvious taste. He perches his bum on the edge of the table where I’m sitting so he can look down on me. He has one toe on the ground and one foot in the air waggling languorously, letting his own loose sandal slip a little back and forth. It looks new. I wonder if I’m meant to return the compliment.

“The arts,” he says, to the question I ask instead.

It’s an answer he seems immensely satisfied to give. And a surprise: he’s big and young and hearty, muscle-bound, and I’ve seen him from a distance, mounted, at war games with the prince and pages. He’s no flower.

“Some theatre, poetry, history. I’m glad you bring it up. I’m glad you have the same concern I do. You’ve no idea how much that eases my mind. I had been afraid this conversation would be difficult.”

“What concern is that?” I ask.

It emerges that he’s worried about overlap: about us treading on each other’s toes, pedagogically speaking, and the prince getting caught in the middle. A brilliant but challenging student, didn’t I agree? Needing a little extra guidance, deserving a little something extra behind the scenes?

“I’m not aware of holding anything back,” I say. “Ethics, politics, and metaphysics are my primary subjects. And whatever else I see fit. The king did not restrict me.”

“Excellent!” he says. “You know, I was even thinking—stop me if this is presumptuous—I was thinking we might meet regularly, to discuss the prince’s progress. To chart a course, yes? Plan our areas of influence? Divide and conquer, if you see what I mean.”