The Golden Mean (12 page)

“Alexander goes to your director friend for lessons in rhetoric,” Callisthenes says. He’s started attending my lessons with the boys, and being younger is more in their confidence. “He has to memorize everything, though. Carolus won’t let him speak with notes.”

A suspicion erupts like a little bubble on the surface of my mind. “That boy of yours,” I say. “Is he one of the pages?”

“Of course.” Callisthenes lies on his back, gazing at the sky. “They’re like a little harem, those pages. Lots of the Companions use them. His family comes from up north somewhere. He’s terribly lonely. He likes the attention.”

“You’re over your qualms, then. Macedonian rapacity and vulgarity and so forth.”

“Qualms.” A blunt word for stabbing, but he tries to stab me with it. He doesn’t want to be reminded.

“So Alexander goes to Carolus.”

“Unofficially, of course.”

Of course.

T
HE FIRST SNOW OF
the season comes whispering late one grey afternoon, just as the light is going, and I’m walking home from my weekly obligation to attend court. I find the slaves murmuring to each other, and then the reason why: Pythias is sitting in a corner of our spare bedroom, one of the few rooms without a window, with her veil drawn over her head.

“What is it?” She lifts her arms above her head and sprinkles her fingers down to her lap.

She’s been waiting all afternoon for me; won’t go outside, won’t let it touch her, until I’ve given her an explanation she can accept.

“Snow,” I say.

Most of the slaves, more gifts from Hermias, haven’t seen snow before either. I stand them under the colonnade so they can watch me go out in the courtyard bare-headed. I let it land on my arms and body, and tip my head back with my tongue out. It seems to fall from nowhere, bits of pure colourlessness peeled off from the sky and drifting down, thicker now. They’re watching me. Pythias is first: she steps out from under the colonnade and holds out a palm to catch some of the stuff. She comes to me. The slaves slowly follow, and soon we’re all standing about in the courtyard letting snow fall on our faces and wet our clothes.

“Why do they send it?” Pythias asks.

Their faces turn toward me.
Yes, why?

“Who, love?” Though I know.

“The gods.”

A conversation we’ve danced around a few times before; and here we are again. She prods me toward it, sometimes, I think; can’t quite bring herself to confront me directly, but worries at it like a little dog with a big bone. “It” being my unusual religious beliefs (I choose this term as neither hers nor my own, but one we might skittishly agree on for the purposes of argument, if we ever were to argue, which we never do). Pythias is pious, keeps the household shrine, attends various temples, observes rites when there are rites to be observed—births and deaths and weddings. She sacrifices to thank and appease and show penitence; she is (though she tries to hide it from me) superstitious (she would say devout), and sees signs where I see only the natural beauty and familiar strangeness of the world. In fact I am not irreligious, and swoon before a smoke-plume of autumn birds just as she would, but for my own reasons.

“The gods don’t send it,” I say. “It’s part of the machinery of the world. When the air is cold enough, rain turns to snow. It freezes. The droplets attach to each other and harden.”

“But why?”

She wants to hear that once upon a time Apollo did this or that to a nymph and snow was the result. I can’t offer it. Divinity for me is that very plume of birds, the patterns of stars, the recurrence of seasons. I love these things and weep for the joy of them. The reality of numbers, again, for instance: I could weep if I thought about numbers for too long, their glorious architecture. I want to weep, now, for the beauty of the sky dispensing itself across my courtyard, the cold warmth in all our cheeks, the fear-turned-to-pleasure in my slaves’ eyes. Pythias sees my face and holds her hand out to me.

“For pleasure,” I manage to say. “So that we may go in and warm ourselves by the fire and look out at it from time to time, and feel—”

“It’s all right,” she says. “Come in, now.”

“—and feel—”

“It’s all right,” she says again, because I am weeping now, and not quite exactly for joy, though that too is part of the spice.

“Why do you think they send it?” I ask her.

She turns her face up to the sky. Flakes land in her hair and lashes. I look helplessly at the line of her cheek.

“To remind us of them,” she says, and there is no arguing with that.

“Master.”

I turn to the slave, take a deep breath, exhale. “Tycho.”

Tycho smiles, seeing me trying to rally. We’ve known each other a long time. “There’s a boy at the gate.”

Pythias gathers her skirts up from the whitening ground and sweeps into the house. “Your lady’s gone to the kitchen for some bread. Tell him he’ll get something in a minute.”

“He doesn’t look like a beggar.”

“Messenger?”

Tycho shrugs. “He asked for my lady.”

In the street, people are hurrying, heads down, through the snow. No one seems to have noticed Alexander standing alone by my gate. He wears sandals and a tunic; no cloak, no hat.

“Child, where’s your guard?” I ask.

“I slipped them.”

Tycho opens the gate and I hustle the prince into the courtyard just as Pythias re-emerges with a crust.

“Is that for me?”

Pythias instinctively draws up her veil. “Majesty.” Shock, pleasure.

“I followed you from court,” the boy says to me. “I wanted to see where you live.” He takes the bread from Pythias, bites, and stands there chewing, looking around.

“Tycho and I will escort you back to the palace.”

“No.” He swallows. “It’s too dark now. Not safe. You’ll have to send for my guard in the morning.”

“You’re staying the night?”

“Carolus said you wouldn’t mind.”

Pythias bows and withdraws into the house.

“I’m starving.” He puts his head back, as I did, and stares up into the sky. “I love snow.”

“They’ll be looking for you. I’ll send Tycho to the palace for your escort.”

“But I want to stay here. You can’t refuse me hospitality.”

“Your parents will worry.”

“They never worry when I spend time with Hephaestion,” the boy says. “His family’s very loyal.”

“That’s where they think you are? With Hephaestion?”

Our cock screams once; Pythias is working fast.

“Stop worrying. I’m perfectly safe here, and so are you. I haven’t brought anything bad into your house.” He looks around the courtyard some more, at my pots of winter leek and onion, and the lights in the windows. “Nice,” he says. “Cozy.”

“You’re cold.” He’s shivering. It’s dark now, blue dark beyond the pools of torchlight. “Would you like to see my study?”

“I want to see Pythias.”

I take him into the kitchen, where Pythias has every woman in the house putting together a meal. The cock lies on the chopping board, blood draining from its throat into a bowl. The fire roars high; it’s hot in here. When Pythias sees we mean to stay, she has two chairs pulled up in front of the fire. In front of Alexander’s chair she puts a basin of hot water.

“Take off your sandals,” she says.

While he soaks his feet and the women clatter, I take Tycho aside.

“Should I be armed?” he asks when I’ve finished.

“Just vigilant.”

He goes off to the gate to spend the night awake there, wrapped in a horse blanket.

In the kitchen, Alexander is eating a plate of cheese. It takes me a moment to realize he’s wearing my best snow-white wool.

“His clothes were soaked through,” Pythias murmurs behind me, touching my elbow. “I didn’t know what else to give him. Supper’s an hour off still, but he ate that bread so quickly.”

“You did right.” We stand together for a moment in the doorway, this thought between us: we would dote so on a son, worry the details of his feeding and clothing with such brow-furrowing tenderness. I brave a look at her face, but she can’t, won’t, look at me, and hurries back in to her women, flushing a little. It’s hot in here.

“These clothes of yours,” Alexander says when I take my seat across from him. “You don’t seem vain, but Pythias showed me your trunk when she was finding this. You could sell some of that cloth and buy a bigger house. Are you very sensitive to the feel of things?”

“Am I what?”

“I was. When I was a baby I couldn’t wear anything rough, my mother says. My skin went red and I cried all the time. Leonidas took all my nice things away. He said my baby skin needed to thicken before I could be a soldier. I like your clothes.”

“Thank you. I like them too.” Pythias’s work, all of it fine, fine, fine; I’ve learned my tastes from her. She’s made me a dandy, but I’ve lately had to hurt her feelings by buying coarser wear from the market. It’s one thing to be teased for effeminacy at court but another in the street, and I don’t go armed. “Would you like some more cheese? Bread? We’re an hour away from the meal still, Pythias tells me.”

“Wine?”

I fetch a cup for each of us: watered for him, neat for me. “You didn’t have to follow me. You could have just said you wanted to visit. We could have prepared properly.”

“Then I wouldn’t have seen anything interesting.” He looks around approvingly. “Would you have let me into your kitchen? Would I be wearing your clothes? Would I have seen your bedroom? Where will I sleep tonight?”

“Outside, in the snow.”

He grins.

“So this is Carolus’s doing?”

Pythias kneels beside us. “Will you have a bath tonight, Majesty?”

“Yes, please.”

She rises and withdraws to arrange that.

“You’re too old for her,” Alexander says.

“Yes.”

“She’s overdressed, too.”

“Yes.”

“You’re not going to get mad at me, are you?”

I shrug. “Do you want me to?” My darkling mood, suspended by the shock of his appearance, is threatening to reassert itself.

“Do you suppose she’s happy?”

I close my eyes.

“I often wonder that about people,” Alexander says. “It’s a way of understanding why they do the things they do. My mother taught me that. She said not to trust happy people.”

“What else did she teach you, your unhappy mother?”

He looks at Pythias, across the room.

“I assume she’s unhappy, your mother,” I add. “If she prizes it so.”

“She says nice things about you,” Alexander says.

We eat in the big room, Pythias bejewelled, our three breaths smoking in the cold. Conversation shrivels in it. The slaves come and go with plates of food. The cock, stewed too briefly, is tough and stringy; the wine is cold.

“How is Carolus?” Pythias asks into the silence.

“He coughs.”

Pythias looks at me.

“I’ll send him something,” I say dutifully.

“Your father was a doctor,” Alexander says.

“He saved your father’s life when we were boys. Patched a spear wound.”

Alexander touches his collarbone,
here?
I nod.

“That wouldn’t kill you,” Alexander says. “Everyone I know has one of those, from drills. Would you teach me some medicine, though? As part of my studies?”

“You want to deliver babies?”

He blushes. Pythias frowns.

“For the field,” he says. “Wounds.”

I shrug. “The little that I know, I’ll teach you. Bind a bleeder, squeeze a squirter. That was something my father used to say.”

Pythias pushes her plate away. Well, she shouldn’t be here at all, but Alexander wanted it. Carolus’s encouragement again, no doubt.

“Will you have dessert, or your bath?” she asks the prince.

“Dessert
in
the bath?”

She smiles briefly, grudgingly, at his hope-against-hoping face. I have a vision of my long-ago prostitute, amused despite herself by men’s awe at the variety of pleasure in the world.

“It’s not that he has
no
boundaries,” I tell Pythias, later, once the boy is installed in the great bronze pot by the kitchen hearth with his plate of honey and apples, and we’re in the room the slaves have prepared for him, the room where Pythias hid from the snow, checking it over. “He knows precisely what the boundaries are. It’s more like he has to overstep. He has to push everyone a little bit too far, just to see what will happen. Following me here, for instance.”

“I humiliated you. Supper was terrible.”

“I doubt he noticed. Did you see how he ate? Like he hasn’t had a square meal in days.”

“I saw that.” She dusts a little table with the hem of her dress. “I thought I’d leave him out a plate of fruit, in case he wakes in the night.”

“Do that.”

“I still think the other room is nicer, the one with the window.”

“This is safer. Warmer. He’s closer to us here too.”

She hesitates. “How are you feeling?”

I shake my head, a shorthand she knows. Knuckles tap at the door frame, two taps: Pythias’s maid.

“Lady,” the girl says. “He asks for you.”

“Me?” Pythias says. “Where is he?”

“Still in his bath.”

“Monkey.” I think evil to Carolus. Now what? “He’s trying to insult me. I’ll go.”

That wry smile, again. “Me, surely, if anyone,” Pythias says. “And he’s only a boy. If it’s just testing boundaries, as you say—let’s at least see what he wants.”

“What he thinks he wants.”

She’s gone a long time. I stew longer than the cock: in the guest room, first, napping the fur we’ve put on his bed, plumping pillows, fussing over lamps; and then in my own bigger bedroom, where I can pace.

When she returns she waves my words away unspoken and says, “He’s in bed now. He wants you.”

I shake my head, grimacing. “Monkey.”

His room is warm and golden from the lamplight; more lamps now than the pair I trimmed. He lies under the fur, rosy and smiling, eyes round and dark as a small child’s with the effort of keeping awake for me.

“All right?”

He smiles, nods.

I rest a hand briefly on his forehead. “Shall I blow out some of these lamps?”

“I will, in a minute.”

I return to my room, where Pythias is sitting up in bed. “So?” I ask.