The Golden Mean (3 page)

“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 vibrancy 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.

“Had a good time?” I say. “Out again tonight?” Jealousy pinches my sentences, but I can’t stop myself. The pendulum swings hard left today.

“Come with me,” he says. I tell him I have to work—the reality of numbers, I remind him—and he groans. “Come with me,” he says. “You can be my guide.”

“I can be your guide here,” I say.

“I thought I caught a glimpse of the number three last night, by the flower stall in the market,” he says. “It was hiding behind a sprig of orange blossom.”

“Known for shyness, the number three,” I say.

“Is Pella much bigger than you remember?”

“I wouldn’t remember a thing,” I say truthfully. “The city has probably tripled in size. I got lost this morning trying to find the baths just here in the palace.”

“Wouldn’t you like to find your father’s old house?”

“I think it’s part of the garrison now. Shall I show you the baths now that I know the way? We can work after that. You still have a headache, anyway.”

“Headache,” Callisthenes confirms. “Bad wine. Bad everything, really. Or not bad, but—vulgar. Have you seen the houses? They’re huge. And gaudy. Like these mosaics everywhere. The way they talk, the way they eat, the music, the dancing, the women. It’s like there’s all this money everywhere and they don’t know what to do with it.”

“I don’t remember it that way,” I say. “I remember the cold, and the snow. I’ll bet you’ve never seen snow. I remember the toughness of the people. The best lamb, mountain lamb.”

“I saw something last night,” Callisthenes says. “I saw a man kill another man over a drink. He held him by the shoulder and punched him in the gut over and over until the man bled out of his ears and his mouth and his eyes, weeping blood, and then he died. Everyone laughed. They just laughed and laughed. Men, boys. What kind of a people is that?”

“You tell me,” I say.

“Animals,” Callisthenes says. He’s looking me in the eye, not smiling. A rare passion from such a mild creature.

“And what separates man from the animals?”

“Reason. Work. The life of the mind.”

“Out again tonight?” I ask.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
I return to Arrhidaeus in his room. His face is tear-stained and snot-crusted; his nurse gazes out a window and pretends not to hear me enter. The boy himself smiles, sweet and frail, when he sees me. I wish him good morning and he says,
“Uh.”

“Any progress?” I ask the nurse.

“In one day?”

I help myself to a cloak hanging on the back of a chair, which I drape over the boy’s shoulders. “Where are your shoes?”

The nurse is watching now. He’s a prissy little shit, and sees his moment.

“He can’t walk far,” he says. “He doesn’t have winter shoes, just sandals. He never goes outdoors, really.”

“Then we’ll have to borrow yours,” I tell him.

Eyebrows up: “And what will I wear?”

“You can wear Arrhidaeus’s sandals since you won’t be coming.”

“I’m obliged to accompany him everywhere.”

I can’t tell if he’s angry with me or frightened of being caught away from his charge. He glances at Arrhidaeus and reaches automatically to wipe the hair from the boy’s face. Arrhidaeus flinches from his touch. So, they’ve had that kind of morning.

“Give me your fucking shoes,” I say.

Arrhidaeus wants to take my hand as we walk. “No, Arrhidaeus,” I tell him. “Children hold hands. Men walk by themselves, you see?”

He cries a little, but stops when he sees where I’m leading him. He gibbers something I can’t make out.

“That’s right,” I say. “We’ll take a walk into town, shall we?”

He laughs and points at everything: the soldiers, the gate, the grey swirl of the sky. The soldiers look interested, but no one stops us. I wonder how often he leaves his room, and if they even know who he is.

“Where is your favourite place to go?”

He doesn’t understand. But when he sees a horse, a big stallion led through the gate, he claps his hands and gibbers some more.

“Horses? You like horses?”

Through the gate I’ve caught a glimpse of the town—people, horses, the monstrous houses that so offended my nephew—and I realize my heart’s not ready for it, so I’m happy enough to lead him back to the stables. In the middle of a long row of stalls I find our animals, Tweak and Tar and Lady and Gem and the others. Arrhidaeus is painfully excited and when he stumbles into me I wonder from the smell if he’s pissed himself. The other horses look sidelong, and only big black Tar takes much of an interest in us, lifting his head when he recognizes me and ambling over for some affection. I show Arrhidaeus how to offer him a carrot from his open hand, but when the horse touches him, he shrieks and flinches away. I take his hand and guide it back, getting him to stroke the blaze on Tar’s forehead. He wants to use his knuckles, and when I look closely I see his palm is scored with open sores, some kind of rash. I’ll have to find him an ointment.

“Do you ride?” I ask him.

“No, sir,” someone calls. It’s a groom who’s been mucking out the straw. “That other one brings him here sometimes and lets him sit in a corner. He’ll sit quiet for hours that way. He hasn’t got the balance for riding, though. Doesn’t need another fall on the head, does he?”

I lead Tar out into the yard and saddle him. It’s raining again. I get Arrhidaeus’s foot in my cupped hands and then he’s stuck. He’s stopped laughing, at least, and looks at me for help. I try to give him a boost up, but he’s too weak to heft himself over the horse’s back. He hops a little on one foot with the other cocked up in the air, giving me a view of his wet crotch.

“Here,” the groom says, and rolls over a barrel for the boy to stand on.

Between the two of us we get him up alongside the horse and persuade him to throw a leg over the animal’s back.

“Now you hug him,” the groom says, and leans forward with his arms curved around an imaginary mount. Arrhidaeus collapses eagerly onto Tar’s back and hugs him hard. I try to get him to sit back up, but the groom says, “No, no. Let the animal walk a bit and get him used to the movement.”

I lead Tar slowly around the yard while Arrhidaeus clings to him full-body, his face buried in the mane. The groom watches.

“Is he a good horse?” he calls to Arrhidaeus.

The boy smiles, eyes closed. He’s in bliss.

“Look at that, now,” the groom says. “Poor brained bastard. Did he piss himself?”

I nod.

“There, now.” He leads Tar back to the barrel and helps Arrhidaeus back down. I had expected the boy to resist but he seems too stunned to do anything but what he’s told.

“Would you like to come back here?” I ask him. “Learn to ride properly, like a man?” He claps his hands. “When are we least in the way?” I ask the groom.

He waves the question away. His black eyes are bright and curious, assessing, now Tar, now Arrhidaeus. “I don’t know you,” he says, without looking at me properly. He slaps Tar fondly on the neck.

“I’m the prince’s physician.” I rest a hand on Arrhidaeus’s shoulder. “And his tutor. Just for a few days.”

The groom laughs, but not so that I dislike him for it.

E
URIPIDES WROTE THE
Bacchae
at the end of his life. He left Athens disgusted by his plays’ losses at the competitions, so the story goes, and accepted an invitation from King Archelaus to come to Pella and work for a more appreciative (less discriminating) audience. He died that winter from the cold.

Plot: Angry that his godhead is denied by the Theban royal house, Dionysus decides to take his revenge on the priggish young King Pentheus. Pentheus has Dionysus imprisoned. The god, in turn, offers to help him spy on the revels of his female followers, the Bacchantes. Pentheus, both fascinated and repulsed by the wild behaviour of these women, agrees to allow himself to be disguised as one of them to infiltrate their revels on Mount Kithairon. The disguise fails, and Pentheus is ripped to pieces by the Bacchantes, including his own mother, Agave. She returns to Thebes with his head, believing she has killed a mountain lion, and only slowly recovers from her possessed state to realize what she’s done. The royal family is destroyed, killed or exiled by the god. The play took first prize at the competition in Athens the following year, after Euripides’s death.

We all love the
Bacchae.

The actors huddle together downstage, except for the man playing the god, who stands on an apple crate so he can look down on the mortals. He’s not very tall. For the performance they could dress him in a robe long enough to hide the crate. That’s a good idea.

“Pentheus, my son … my baby …,” the actor playing Agave says. “You lay in my arms so often, so helpless, and now again you need my loving care. My dear, sweet child … I killed you—No! I will not say that, I was not there!” an actor says. “I was … in some other place. It was Dionysus. Dionysus took me, Dionysus used me, and Dionysus murdered you.”

“No,” the actor playing the god replies. “Accept the guilt, accuse yourselves.”

“Dionysus, listen to us,” the actor playing Agave’s father, Kadmos, says. “We have been wrong.”

After a moment’s hesitation, the director calls, “Now you understand.”

“Now you understand, but now is too late. When you should have seen, you were blind,” the actor playing the god says.

“We know that. But you are like a tide that turns and drowns us.”

“Because I was born with dominion over you and you dispossessed me. And I don’t—”

The director interrupts, calling, “Kadmos!”

“Then you should not be like us, your subjects. You should have no passions,” the old man upstage says reprovingly.

“And I don’t,” the actor repeats, and when no one interrupts him, continues, “But these are the laws, the—the laws of life. I cannot change them.”

“The laws of life,” the director calls.

“The laws of life,” the actor repeats.

“It is decided, Father,” the actor playing the woman, Agave, says. “We must go, and take our grief with us.”

There’s some business with a sheet of cloth, allowing the actor playing Dionysus to slip offstage, unseen by the audience, leaving the crate behind. I amend my idea to stilts.

When the actor playing Agave takes a deep breath and says nothing, the director calls, “Help me. Take me to my sisters. They will share my exile and the years of sorrow. Take me where I cannot see Mount Kithairon, where branches wound with ivy cannot remind me of what has happened. Let someone else be possessed. I have withered. Fuck me, but I have withered.”