The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [101]
“They held him down and took turns,” Callisthenes says. “He shit blood for days.”
“He attacks the king because of some rough trade? That doesn’t sound right.” Though, as Carolus once reminded me, they celebrate with it, they make people suffer with it, they do their business with it, they run the kingdom with it. “You don’t suppose Philip’s dead?”
The room has one tall slit of a window overlooking vineyards. Callisthenes cranes his neck, trying to see something, anything. “Do you think anyone remembers we’re in here?”
The answer comes at midnight. We’ve lit lamps and drunk this morning’s stale water but we haven’t dared go look for food. Now we’re lying in our bedrolls, wide awake, when a soldier opens the door. A soldier: Antipater.
“Not you,” he says to Callisthenes.
I follow him through the unfamiliar halls. Aegeae is older and rougher than modern, expensive Pella; the halls are narrower, darker, with lower ceilings and uneven floors. We pass sentries and patrols, antsy soldiers with white faces who startle and bristle until they recognize Antipater. I’m glad we didn’t try to leave the library ourselves.
“Face me,” Antipater says outside a door. “Spread your arms.” He pats me down for weapons. “Go in.”
“What is this?”
“Go in.”
A bedroom. Alexander sits on the bed, head in his hands. He looks up when I come in. I sit down beside him and put an arm around his shoulders.
“Maybe I wanted it,” he says.
“All young men want their fathers dead. I did. And then when it happens—”
“I sacrificed for it.”
“What did you sacrifice?”
“A black cock. I wanted a bull but you can’t hide a bull. But the gods knew what I meant.”
“When was this?”
“After Maedi, after he said he’d cripple me if I went out again on my own.”
“Three years ago?”
“The gods knew.”
“Three years,” I say. “Child, the gods don’t wait that long. You didn’t do this.”
“I knew about Pausanias.”
“His argument with Attalus?”
“And if it wasn’t Pausanias, it would have been someone else. The gods heard me.”
Accept the guilt. Accuse yourselves.
“He looked at me,” Alexander says. “I was behind him, under the archway, waiting for my turn to enter the theatre. After Pausanias—my father couldn’t speak, but he turned to look at me. He knew it was really me. The gods opened the door.”
Opposing extremes, but also versions of the same form.
“I’ve been waiting and waiting for you,” Alexander says. “No one knew where to find you. Where were you?”
“In the library.”
He starts to cry.
“My father died of plague.” I take my arm from his shoulders. “Your father was killed by an assassin. The body needs a balance of fluids. Grief creates an excess, which we release through tears. Too many tears and the body becomes parched; the brain shrivels. You need to grieve, and drink water, and sleep. In the morning you’ll ask the gods to turn the guilt you feel into a tiny fish. You’ll hide that fish somewhere inside yourself.” I touch my temple, my heart. “Here, or here. You can live like that. No one will know.”
“Antipater thinks Pausanias was paid.”
“Who by?”
He looks at me.
“He doesn’t think that.”
“My mother, then.”
“That’s ridiculous. Wipe your nose.” He wipes his nose on his sleeve. “Any number of ambitious men would perceive a benefit in your father’s death. Antipater will see that.”
“You think so?”
“It makes sense. Some disgruntled chieftain who fancies himself in line for the throne, maybe, who found a sharpened tool in Pausanias. I’ll have a word with him.” I stand. “You need to sleep. Shall I bring the lamp?” He nods. I light a table lamp from a torch on the wall and bring it to his bed, where he’s lain down. “All right?”
He nods.
“You didn’t do this.”
He closes his eyes.
Children hold hands. Men walk by themselves, you see?
AFTER PURIFICATION RITUALS AND a period of lying-instate, Philip is buried with his weapons under a great tumulus of earth. Pausanias’s mutilated body is burned on top of the pile. The sons of Aëropus, a disgruntled chieftain, are tried, convicted, and put to death. Ritual sacrifices, funerary games, full pomp and