The Golden Mean (21 page)

“No!” Pythias says as I turn to the door. “She’s mine!”

“You have others. That dark one you like, Herpyllis—”

“You said they were family. You said we don’t sell family.”

“They were never family. Look. Listen. It’s the natural order of things, the natural ends things are fitted to. Means and ends. Some people are born to be slaves, some masters. But sometimes life interferes with the natural order, and things get—confused. We’ve made a mistake with Athea.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’ve made a mistake. She wasn’t meant to be a slave. She isn’t fitted for it. She wasn’t born to it, and she’s too independent and stubborn to accept that her circumstances have changed. If she were a man, she’d make a physician. I can’t in good conscience keep her.”

Pythias looks at me the way my father looked at me long ago, like something is happening to me, to my face, to the words coming out of my mouth.

“It would be unethical.”

“Free her, then.” Pythias shakes her head once, sharply, like she’s trying to rid herself of something. “Free her and pay her for her services. She’d stay with us as a freed-woman, I know she would. Where else would she go?”

“We’re arguing in circles. I don’t want to keep her. She’s disobedient. You think that will improve if we try to keep her as a servant instead of a slave? It’ll only get worse, and set a bad example to the others. They’ll think we’re afraid of her, don’t dare tell her what to do, don’t dare get rid of her. We have only one option.” An idea occurs to me, a cruel idea. Little Pythias is newly walking now. She clings to Athea’s skirts, following her everywhere, singsonging the slave’s name in her deep little voice. “The baby will miss her, it’s true.”

Pythias goes still.

“And she will miss the baby. They’re very close, those two, aren’t they?”

“She’s a witch.” Pythias raises her eyes to me, slowly. “I’m sick.”

“She hasn’t made you so, and she can’t cure you. Sticks and stones and bones?”

“You will cure me.”

I bow, as though to agree. I’m out of this conversation, anyway, out of this room.

A
T THE MARKET THE
slaving stalls are crowded, a bad sign for me. War brings uncertainty, tightens purse strings. There’s a glut in the market at the moment and the goods don’t move. The first man I approach sees me coming, gives her a single glance, and shakes his head. The second asks what she does without looking at me or her. He can’t take his eyes off a cockfight a few stalls away.

“Wonderful cook. Good general house slave. Loyal. Good with children.” All true enough, mostly.

“Why do you want to sell her, then?”

“My wife doesn’t like her.” The slaver gives her a tired onceover. “You know how women are. Likes and dislikes coming out of nowhere. You can’t reason with them.”

“Not much to be jealous of there.” The slaver’s eyes drift back to the cocks.

“Hey fuck you,” Athea says.

We try another stall out of sight and hearing of the one we’ve just left. “No talking,” I tell her. I should have brought Callisthenes, I suppose, who’s better at anything requiring charm, but I’m embarrassed that he was right in the first place.

“Or what you do?”

“How much?” the next slaver says.

I quote something low.

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Hey fuck you,” I say, pre-empting Athea and hopefully shutting her up. “She’s healthy. I just don’t need her any more. Household economy and so on. Trimming the fat.”

“You gamble?” He looks interested. He thinks he’s got my number. It’ll do.

“Mind your own business,” I say, in a way I mean him to take for yes. And I probably look like a loser, too, a mild, daintily dressed man with soft hands dragging a grinning slave from stall to stall and finding no takers.

He offers a price, less than half what I paid for her.

“She cooks,” I say.

“Take it,” Athea says. “He look okay.”

The man’s eyebrows go up and a grin starts. He looks back and forth between us, waiting for something to happen. I’m supposed to hit her, I suppose.

“I’ll take it,” I say.

The grin blooms. Even in this market, even for back-talk, he’s got a deal. He pays me and opens the cage door. Athea ducks inside. I hope she had a good breakfast.

“She’s a witch, by the way,” I tell the slaver, to wipe the grin off and, I hope, make him think twice about how he treats her. I don’t let myself look back.

A
RRHIDAEUS IS TALLER THAN
A
LEXANDER
. For the rest of my life I will be able to close my eyes and see them walking down the dusty beach road between the long dry grasses, the ocean roaring just out of sight, just over the next rise. Somewhere they are alone in the universe on this sunny road, still walking, Alexander asking questions slowly and waiting for the answers, Arrhidaeus inclining his head to his brother’s level. We of their retinue follow behind in an ever-thickening tail: royals first, myself, Philes, then maids and guards and porters and horses and carts to carry the stuff of a royal day at the beach. They’ll set up pavilions on the sand, with furniture and carpets, tables of bread and fruit, couches so no one need know the feel of a sleep in hot sand, rising after to leave the form of himself behind. Only Alexander’s companions are missing, though whether he left them behind out of embarrassment or consideration I can’t guess. While the beach is transformed into a village behind him, Alexander walks his brother up to the top of a nearby dune to continue their conversation. He is putting himself on show. I flatter myself, believe he’s doing it for me, to show he can keep his word and keep it nobly, even in circumstances I know he finds revolting, horrifying even: proximity to his shit-headed brother. I wonder what they’re talking about. The failure of Philip’s embassies, perhaps, and Alexander’s imminent departure, finally, to join his father’s army?

“Princes, come.” I drop my bag in the sand. Philes hangs back, as I’ve asked him to. Relax for an hour, read a book, I told him; I’ve got this one. I strip and walk toward the waves. Little nothings today, little lickings at the blond shore. All along the beach heads turn to watch the three of us. The princes strip as I’ve done, Alexander easily, Arrhidaeus excitedly, tangling his head in his tunic and needing rescue from his brother. They drop their clothes in the sand as I’ve done. Later we’ll find everything we’ve discarded neatly arranged in one of the pavilions, as though by reproving mothers.

Now they’re in front of me, looking fine in the sunlight, waiting for what I have to offer next.

“It’s like a big bath,” I say, mainly for Arrhidaeus.

“I was telling him how we used to have our lessons together,” Alexander says.

“No,” Arrhidaeus says.

I take his hand and walk him into the water to his ankles, where he stops and squats.

“No.” The water licks at him, wets his bum.

Alexander walks out ahead of us until he’s in to his waist. He holds his arms out of the water like a girl afraid to wet her hands. I stride past him to piss him off, dive in, and swim a few strokes. When I look back they’re in the same positions, watching me.

“Come on,” I say.

Alexander holds his hand out to his brother to lead him in.

After our swim, Arrhidaeus heads doggedly for the tents and his nurse. His skin has gone grey in the way that I know, his eyes dull. He wants his nap. Alexander is happy to let him go, and throws himself down on the hot sand. I sit beside him. “Nice to get an outing.”

He laughs, eyes closed to the sun.

“I used to come down here all the time, when I was your age,” I say. “I should do it more often. Some days I hardly leave my library. I can’t remember the last time I came swimming. I’ll feel it tomorrow,” I add, rubbing my legs. Truthfully, I feel it a little already.

“You sound like you’re a thousand years old,” Alexander says. “You want an outing? A real outing?”

I don’t answer. I’m thinking about a masseur, hoping my aching muscles won’t distract me, tomorrow, from my work. Annoying prospect.

“Aeschylus fought at Marathon,” Alexander says. “Even Socrates was a foot soldier. What’s your excuse?”

“Respect.” I rummage in my bag for a towel. My legs could cramp if I leave them wet. I think perhaps they’re cramping already.

“You should come,” Alexander says. “March with the army, see the battle. Do you want to die never having seen a battle? Like a woman?”

“You want to teach me. You want me to become the student.”

“I’ve been thinking.” He lies back down and closes his eyes against the sun in a show of casualness. Too casual; something is coming. “I’ve been thinking about the forms that you explained to us that very first day. Do you remember? The chameleon? And how you said that there’s something all chameleons must share, a chameleon form, but that it can’t be in some other world? That it has to be in this world for us to be able to perceive it, and to account for change?”

“I remember.”

“And what we spoke of the day before yesterday, about finding the mean between two extremes. The point of balance. I’ve been thinking the same applies to people. We’re all versions of each other. Repetitions, cycles. You see it best in families, the repetition of physical traits and characteristics. My hair comes from my mother, my height from my father. I’m the point of balance between them. But even more than that. You and my father. Me and my brother.” He opens his eyes, briefly, can’t bear not to see my reaction. “Just versions of the same form, do you see? Opposing extremes, but also versions of the same form.”

I can’t help mentally adding my own pairings: my master and myself, our nephews, Speusippus and Callisthenes, Lysimachus and Leonidas, Olympias and Pythias, Pythias and Herpyllis, Illaeus—now there’s an interesting fulcrum. Illaeus and my master, Illaeus and my father, Illaeus and myself. Carolus and my father. Alexander and—?

“You see the consequences, don’t you?” He’s sitting up again now, eyes wide. He sees what he wants to say quicker than he sees the words to say it. “Macedonians and Greeks, Greeks and Persians. The same form. All just versions of each other.”

“An entertaining lay application of some extremely complex ideas. You might make a philosopher after all, with a few decades’ more study and no distractions.”

“That’ll happen,” he says.

“I wish it would. You can’t develop such ideas beyond the merely entertaining if you’re constantly riding off to war.”

“Merely entertaining? It’s a philosophy of war itself. Every battle is against a version of your own self. Every enemy—” I’m holding a hand up to cut him off. “Every Persian—”

“We’ve had this discussion.”

“Every Athenian, then. Would you deny you have an Athenian self as much as a Macedonian self?”

I open my mouth to speak, think, stop.

“You go into every battle knowing you’re fighting your own self.”

“That would be a thing to see,” I admit.

“So you’ll come?”

Ah. “Your father wouldn’t allow it.”

“My father wouldn’t notice. No one would ask you to fight. You could travel with the medics.”

That old nightmare. But then I think of him holding his hand out to Arrhidaeus at the water’s edge. He’s trying to help me toward something.

“It’s important to him,” I tell Pythias later. “Love, you’re unreasonable. He will take me under his own protection.”

“Little good that will do you if he is defeated,” she says from her bed.

“If we are defeated, it will not matter for long where I am. Pella will be no safer. I thought,” I add, changing tactics, “I thought you had some affection for him.”

“I have some affection for you,” she says, but when I move closer, moved, she closes her eyes and turns to stone.

I go to the baby’s room. At eighteen months she’s already tall and speaks well for her age, with many grown-up words and turns of phrase all cute in her mouth. Her moods—stubbornness, rages—remind me of Arimneste and get on my nerves a little, though Pythias thinks she’ll outgrow them. I’m not so sure. She took Athea’s departure hard but is quiet today, fortunately, playing in-and-out with some wooden blocks and bowls from the kitchen. I get down on the floor beside her, knees popping smartly, and show her how to make a tower by building smaller onto bigger. She watches, learns. I hide her blocks inside bowls, in my fist, under my sandal, and watch her find them. I tell her I’m going away for a few days (because what are weeks, months, to her?) but she doesn’t react. She pretends not to hear when I ask for a hug and a kiss. I get up to leave and she flings herself at me,
no, no
. Her little cream dress is a copy of her mother’s, right down to the embroidered pink roses at the hem. I have to unpeel her fingers, push her away to get her off me, call for Tycho to hold her in the house so I can open the gate and go.

P
HILIP IS ALREADY IN
P
HOCIS
, marching toward Boetia and Athens itself. I ride with Alexander and Antipater and some reinforcements to catch up to the main force.

We are led in our march south, symbolically and for luck, by that perennial Macedonian mascot, a goat; one of a dozen transported in their very own cart so they can spell one another. If only my own circumstances were so comfortable. I walk, ride, walk, allowing the blisters and the chafing to spell each other, wondering how long it takes the average cavalier to develop a groin of hide. We are mostly foot soldiers, with only a few cavalry, friends of Alexander who ride with him. They carry knives and long lances akin to the foot soldiers’ sarissae and wear only light armour. The foot soldiers are arranged into squadrons of about two hundred men, grouped geographically; I walk for a while with the Chalcidician squadron, hoping to meet someone from home. They are scouts, archers, slingers, sword- and pike-men. They too are only lightly armed. If the cavalry are aristocracy, the foot soldiers are a great hot stew of Macedonians, conquered colonials, and mercenaries, and speak more languages than I can recognize around the fires at night. They travel fast, as fast as a pampered goat, thanks to that light armour and the fact that the heavy equipment of the siege train is already with Philip. The units—the smallest being groups of ten who camp and eat and piss and screw and fight together—are fiercely loyal to one another and to Philip, and even the mercenaries are better behaved than most, because Philip takes care to pay them well and promptly.