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By Root 498 0

in their hair, their many languages glorifying the air. The rest of the guests—a thousand all told, I’ve heard—will be feasting already, waiting for this afternoon’s games. The heat is oppressive and I’m missing Herpyllis, who’s remained behind in Pella to care for Little Pythias and our newborn son: Nicomachus, after my father. I miss my son’s small self in the bed, where Herpyllis matter-of-factly put him between us that first night, where he sleeps with his arms stretched wide, a hand on his mother and a hand on me. He gives me a deep animal pleasure—his fat little heat and snoring, a cub in the den, tangling limbs—that I never had with my daughter. Pythias insisted she sleep in her own room with her nurse, who for nighttime feeds roused us formally with a ritual knock at the door, as though fearing to interrupt us in some act of uxoriousness. Little Pythias was a fretful baby and took forever to get back to sleep once woken. Little Nicomachus, so far, eats like a wolf—Herpyllis feeds him on her lap, cross-legged next to me in the bed, like a peasant girl—and sleeps like a sot, a white trickle of his bliss still in the corner of his mouth. He will be an uncomplicated sort, I think. I miss him. I take pleasure, too, in Herpyllis, who is naturally kind and competent, who shares my childhood memories and has a reassuring earthiness to my dead wife’s absentee etherealism. But my work frankly bores her, and when I speak of it she always has another task in hand, mending, or trimming vegetables, or feeding the baby, or braiding Little Pythias’s fine hair.

It’s time to start choosing a future: somewhere with people I can talk to, or at least ghosts I can live with. “I see a journey,” Callisthenes said to me yesterday, waggling his fingers in front of his eyes like a priest having a vision. So do I; but journeys need hope and courage and planning and a desire to get up in the morning. It’s going to take me a while to muster those troops.

The procession starts, the drums and trumpets, the statues of the gods, and then Philip himself a few steps ahead of his bodyguard. The crowd roars. One of the bodyguard ducks suddenly and draws a knife. Philip seems to say something, seems to raise a hand to the soldier’s shoulder, and then the knife is sticking in Philip’s chest. What? Philip looks over his shoulder, kneels carefully, touches the knife’s handle, and lies down.

I don’t see what happens onstage after that. All around me men are shouting profanities, naming the gods, denying what they’ve seen. What? No! Then the crowd is pushing and stumbling and running and we are borne along in it, Callisthenes and I, particles in a current. We link elbows to stay together. Outside the theatre, soldiers are yelling at people to go back to wherever they’re lodging and stay there. For us, that’s the palace library. We’re searched for weapons several times as we make our way there. Callisthenes is bleeding from a kicked ankle.

“Is the prince all right?” I ask a soldier at the palace gate. He recognizes us.

“The king, you mean.”

“Is he all right?”

“He’s the king,” the soldier says.

The library is silent. Our bedrolls are where we left them this morning. So many foreigners are here, every spare room is taken. I don’t like eating and drinking and washing and pissing in here, bringing moisture in with the books, but we weren’t given a choice.

“You saw who it was?” Callisthenes tears a strip from his bed linen to bind his ankle. “Pausanias.”

“Why?”

Callisthenes knows. There’s a story told about the officer—a bookend to the story Carolus told me about his promotion, long ago—that he quarrelled with Attalus, the new queen’s father, and that Attalus, pretending reconciliation, invited him to dinner, got him drunk, and threw him into the yard with the stableboys. When Pausanias went to Philip for justice, the king refused to punish his own father-in-law. Instead, he sent Attalus off in command of an advance force to Persia to prepare for the coming invasion, and promoted Pausanias once again, this time to his personal bodyguard, in an attempt