The Golden Mean (5 page)

“I mean for yourself.”

“Books?”

I nod.

“Why?”

And there is my prize. He’s suspicious, painfully, because he wants painfully what he’s not quite sure I’m offering.

“I’ve brought my library with me,” I say. “I wondered if you might want to borrow something while I’m out with the prince.”

“I’ve been wondering if I shouldn’t be accompanying you,” he says. “So I’ll know how to continue once you’ve gone.”

At last. We have exchanged courtesies, now, finally, and can begin to get a hold of each other.

“I’m here for a few days yet,” I say. “Let me bring you something tomorrow. What do you like best? Poetry, history, the habits of animals?”

He laughs at this, contemptuously; thinks I’ve made a joke at Arrhidaeus’s expense and is looking to play along.

“Something on education, perhaps,” I say.

He wipes the look off his face. So much for a truce.

“I don’t understand,” he says, seeing the moment slip away. “He’s worthless, useless. You of all people should understand. I thought you of all people would. I know who you are. How can you stand to spend time with him? How can it not hurt you? You who understand all a human mind can be, how can you bear it? I don’t have the hundredth part of your mind and there are days when I think I’ll go mad. I can feel it. Or hear it. It’s more like hearing something creeping along the walls, just behind my head, getting closer and closer. A big insect, maybe a scorpion. A dry skittering, that’s what madness sounds like to me.”

Verse, then. A young man still, after all, in love with his own melancholy, forced to brood on his own wasted intelligence. But then I see he’s weeping, his eyes glittering with it. He turns away so I won’t see him in his depths. I ask how long he’s been the prince’s companion. He takes a shaky breath and says it doesn’t matter.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty.”

As old as my nephew. “Where do you sleep?”

He shrugs. “Here.” Then: “There. On the floor.” He points to a wall. He must unroll a pallet at night and put it away during the day to give the prince more play-space. Already the tears have soaked back into him, the eyes and nose, and he’s back to being sullen. I am familiar with such easy fits of tears, and the odd disjunction between what the face does and what the mind might be doing. I myself can weep while working, eating, bathing, and have woken in the night with the snail-trails of it on my face.

Arrhidaeus has finished his feed and is tugging at the nurse’s arm. The nurse obediently gets down on his knees and fishes the pot from beneath the bed. He places it behind a screen for Arrhidaeus, who’s already bared himself and goes at it as noisily as he does his food, grunting and grumbling to himself, audibly straining. The stink is rich. I’m ready to go.

“Pythagoras,” the nurse says.

I nod; my own blackness is lapping at me now and I need to leave. I’ll bring him my Pythagoras.

“I wanted to study—” he says.

But I can’t listen to any more. I’m out of the room and off down the hall, walking fast and faster, concentrating on the pattern of the tiles, thinking about the geometry of star-shapes.

I
AM GARBAGE
. This knowledge is my weather, my private clouds. Sometimes low-slung, black, and heavy; sometimes high and scudding, the white unbothersome flock of a fine summer’s day. I tell Pythias sometimes, an urgent bulletin from the dark-lands:
I’m garbage
. She says nothing.

I
WAS TO HAVE
been Philip’s guest at the performance, but Carolus asks me if I’ll stand backstage with him, hold his copy of the text, help with the props, and generally be a calming influence. “On them, not me,” he says. “They’re used to you now. Tell me, why are even bad actors so high-strung?” I open my mouth to reply but he says, “Oh, shut up. That was a rhetorical question. You do like to talk, don’t you. Here, hold this.”

It’s Pentheus’s head, a second rag ball since the boy went off with the first and didn’t come back. This one’s been tied tighter, at least, and shouldn’t come undone, though the face is still crude: staring black eyes, two-thirds of a triangle for a nose, red mouth, single red gash at the throat.

“These, too.” Carolus gives me a handful of sticks wound with ivy. He himself is dressed in Pentheus’s robes; like the boy, the actor has disappeared, and no one seems to know what happened to him. What Carolus really wants me for, I think, is to prompt the actors when he’s onstage. Philip at any rate is occupied with his latest guest, Olympias’s brother, Alexandros. He spent years as the king’s ward in Pella, while Philip waited for him to come of age. Now Philip has just had him kinged in Molossos, and this is his first state visit to the court he called home for so long. He’s coloured like his sister—rosy, rusty, dark eyes—and Philip likes him. From behind the flies I can see them drinking steadily, heads together in conversation, often laughing. I doubt they’ll give the play much attention.

I tuck the head under my arm and stand ready to hand the sticks to the chorus as they file past. My palms sparkle with excitement; I’ve been giddy all day. I love this vantage point, the play from behind, and seeing all that’s gone into it. I love to be on the inside, the backside, the underside of anything, and see the usually unseen.

“And.” Carolus raises a hand, then brings it down. The music starts.

I’m not sure when exactly the boy slips in beside me. I look over and he’s simply there, watching the stage, rapt as I am. He notices the movement of my head, looks at me, and we both smile. This is the real thing. He takes the head from beneath my arm, helping, and I nod, as much as to say I’ll give him the signal when it’s time to hand it to the actor.

“Look, she’s coming,” the actors playing the chorus say in unison. “Agave, his mother, running back home. Her eyes! Look at her eyes! They’re staring. She is possessed. Take her into our midst, she is full of the god and his ecstasy.”

I nod. The boy gives the head to the actor playing Agave, who rushes it onstage. Then, for a moment, silence. A faltering. Carolus, beside me, looks up sharply from the text and hisses, “Women of the east.”

I look at the boy. He tosses the rag head he took from me in the air, catches it, and looks deliberately at the stage.

“Women of the east,” Carolus hisses, louder.

“Women of the east—Bacchae,” Agave says.

I remember the actor playing Pentheus had straight hair but a curly beard, and a mole beneath the left eye. I remember because I’m looking at his head now, cradled in the arms of the actor who plays Agave.

“Do you know us?” one of the chorus says. The others, staring at the head, have forgotten to speak. “Do you know who you are? Our true nature?”

“Look. It is a lion cub. I caught it. I caught it without nets. Look,” Agave says. His voice has gone shrill and his eyes are glazed. He’s drugged with shock.

In the audience, Philip has stopped talking to his guest. His eyebrows are up, he’s watching the stage. He’s interested now.

Afterwards, Carolus can’t stop shaking his head. “That was the best fucking performance I have ever seen in my entire miserable fucking life.”

The head is gone; he’s had a stagehand wrap it back up in the cloth the boy brought it in and dispose of it somewhere.

“I cauterized it, like you said,” the boy tells me. “It worked.”

“Fucking monkey monster,” Carolus says.

“I thought they might not do it if they knew ahead of time,” the boy says. “I was thinking of what you said about things looking real enough, and how you were always complaining about them all being such bad actors. And I thought, what if they didn’t have to act? What if they just had to be themselves?”

The actors have long since fled. Backstage smells of piss and vomit: pity and fear. Carolus will have laundry ahead of him after all.

“He died last night,” the boy continues. “I told you he was sick. I think things happen for a reason, don’t you?” For the first time, he looks—not doubtful, maybe, but impatient. “What?” He looks from Carolus to me, back and forth. “You know it was perfect. What?”

T
HIS MORNING
, before the performance, Philip had sent for me. I found him in a courtyard surrounded by assorted lengths of wood, tilting at a soldier who parried with a shield. I’d noticed the guards’ enormous lances, which I had assumed were ornamental, but here was the king wielding roughly trimmed boughs of a similar length.

“My own invention,” he said. “The sarissa. Look, you see, here’s a Thracian lance, and an Illyrian, and a few others. The sarissa is longer again by a third. You see the implications?”

I did see, but was more interested in the physics. I hefted one. “It’s heavier.”

“Not by much. You adjust for the weight with a smaller shield.”

I took a few thrusts while he watched.

“You’re rusty,” he said finally. “At least you’ve changed your clothes.”

He introduced me to the soldier, who turned out to be one of his older generals, Antipater. Short hair, short beard, tired eyes. When Philip was off at war, Antipater was regent. The three of us sat under the colonnade, while the first rain of the day speckled the courtyard, and drank wine mixed with water. While we spoke, I thought about Philip as a boy. We had played together, in this very courtyard perhaps. I seemed to remember a wrestling match, smells of sweat and grass; fierce, private, sweet. I couldn’t recall who had won.

“He offers you his loyalty, and asks for your help,” I said now, of Hermias.

Philip reread the treaty I had brought him, slowly, while a page gathered up the assorted lances and took them in out of the drumming rain. I imagined Philip on various battlefields, squinting about for a new piece to add to his collection and promptly killing the bearer when he found one. Wasn’t that, too, a kind of science?

“Drink,” Philip ordered without lifting his eyes, when I shifted in my chair.

I drank. A scholar surrounded by scholars, I had forgotten how slowly some people read. After a long while, Philip began to talk about his ambitions.

“I like your friend here,” he said, waving the treaty. “He’s shrewd, a survivor.”

“I will be pleased to relay that message to him.”

“Someone will. Not you. I’ll be needing you now.”

I watched the page, a dark-skinned boy with tight curls and yellow palms. He had come from far away, Egypt, perhaps, or Ethiopia. He might have changed hands many, many times before landing here with these spears and dummies. Philip was talking about Athens. Athens was old, Athens was decayed, Athens was dying, but Athens was also key. Antipater sat with his feet flat on the ground, his palms flat on his thighs, staring fixedly at the air between his knees. I wondered, though he had parried nimbly enough, if he was in pain. Athens, though—that was all right. For a moment Philip had frightened me, saying he needed me.

“We had hoped,” he said, “after Plato’s death, the Academy would go to you. Then you would have had some influence. I don’t like this Speusippus who’s there now.”

I was confused; Plato, my master, had died five years before. Philip had been watching me five years ago? “Speusippus is his nephew,” I said. “I don’t like him either.” With his little hands and his mild manners and his mild little mind. He wrote dialogues, like his uncle, in which the challenger was always crumbling into confusion before the questioner’s blithe probing. I told him once not to be afraid to enter an argument he couldn’t immediately see his way out of. I had thought to be helpful, but he counted me an enemy, in his mild way, after that.

“He writes me letters,” Philip said. “Counselling me. He compares me to Heracles. Astounding parallels he finds between us.”

Antipater and I smiled identical smiles, small and dry; we caught each other’s eye and looked away. Friends, that quickly.

Philip, a deft enough wit to move swiftly past his own jokes, shook his head. “They’ll consider you again, though, when Speusippus dies. He’s elderly, yes? Because that’s the sort of power I need. You can’t do it all with spears. They look at me and see an animal, but they look at you and see one of their own. Military power they’ll fight and fight like a butting goat, but you could get under their skin. Head of the Academy, that’s the kind of thing they respect. Plato used the office like a diplomat, power-brokering, influencing policy. Kings listened to him.”

“As you listen to Speusippus?”

“You’re not an effeminate clown. Well, you’re not a clown. They’ll listen to you, too, when the time comes. Meanwhile I’ve got a job for you here.”

No. “Here.”

“You can tutor my son.”

The rain paused in the air, then continued to fall.

“That’s beneath you?”

“Of course it’s beneath me,” I said. “I’ve got work to do.”

“But he likes you already. He told me so himself.”

“Arrhidaeus?”

Antipater raised his head.

Philip looked wondering for a moment. Then his face cleared. “No, you dumb shit,” he said. “Alexander.”

A
FTER THE PERFORMANCE
, I lie in bed watching my wife remove the long gold pins from her hair and the sharp clasps from her tunic. What a lot of spikes it takes to hold her together. While the men were at the theatre, she spent the evening with Olympias and her women, weaving. She says the queen kept a basket by her foot, and when she saw Pythias looking at it, waved her over to see. Inside was a black snake no bigger than a bracelet. When the meal came Olympias fed it from her own plate, meat sliced fine, like you would give to a baby. The women spoke enthusiastically of the meal, and of different ways of preparing beans and meat. They demonstrated their favourite cuts by slapping themselves on the rump and legs, laughing, until my poor Pythias had to push her own plate away. The only pleasant moment of the evening, as she tells it, came early, when the boy Alexander stopped by to kiss his mother. That must have been before the performance. Introduced to Pythias, he greeted her warmly, with great courtesy and charm, and smelled, she said, most cleanly and pleasantly of spice. I haven’t been able to tell her about the head. Maybe she’ll never have to know.