The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [102]
I grieve. There’s a tiny place deep in my chest where a little man sits, a manikin, weeping. I tell him to settle down. In the evenings, when I drink, he clambers up onto my shoulder for a shy look round. He thinks the same thoughts I do, in his small way, highly spiced thoughts, meat skewers, tiny and intense memories. He’s a bit of an Arrhidaeus, my manikin, with his crust-nosed gibbering, probably diapered, probably can’t feed himself, but he remembers exorbitantly, lavishly, complexly, in flashes of super-saturated colour. Here’s one: Philip opening his eyes under water for the first time and laughing, bubbles streaming silently from his mouth, reaching to touch the bubbles that streamed from mine, looking over his shoulder, at his feet, over his head to the surface, and back to my face. Philip with both eyes open, laughing under the sea.
“BE SAFE,” HERPYLLIS SAYS.
It’s bronze-dayed, crisp-nighted harvest time. Callisthenes and I are taking a trip while we can, before the weather turns. We’ll ride Tar and Lady; Tweak is for the bags. He huffs and snuffs, annoyed at the unaccustomed weight. Callisthenes scratches his nose and tells him he’s gone soft.
I pick Little Pythias up in a hug and tell her I’m going to find us a new house to live in.
“Me too?” she says.
“You too.”
She bumps her forehead to mine. I put her down and she goes to stand beside Herpyllis, who holds the baby.
We mount and ride away. “It hasn’t been all bad,” Callisthenes says as we turn back to wave, meaning Pella, meaning the three of them.
“You think we should stay?”
“In Pella? No.”
“In Macedon?”
“That’s what this trip is about, isn’t it?”
We ride east, in sight of the ocean for a while and then inland. We toast bread on green sticks over our nightly smudge of fire and sleep rough. We’re quiet together, each looking inward. I have a feeling about my nephew, an idea there’s something he wants to tell me. No matter. I won’t mind what he decides either way, though I’ll miss him.
Philip’s army—Alexander’s now—has been busy in Chalcidice. Even just a few weeks’ reconstruction have brought some of the prettiness back, some of the prosperity, the fruit and the birds and the colour. Go still at sundown and you can hear the earth itself humming. The ground stays warm long into the night; strange-familiar faces smile up at us from the fields; the stars are a splash of silver liquid across the sky, a spill pattern as familiar as the stains on my mother’s kitchen table. I’m almost home; all this time, it’s been only two days’ ride away. Callisthenes smiles at me once or twice without saying anything, at something he sees in my face. It’ll take a good month to pack up the house in Pella and conclude my affairs there, and by then it’ll be too late in the season for the women and children to travel, too wet and cold for the baby especially. We’ll make this journey again, for real, in the spring. This is just reconnaissance.
As Antipater warned me, the east coast is still bleak; Stageira is the exception. The fields lie fallow and the vineyards are overgrown but the village has been patched back together, old stones and new wood. I show Antipater’s letter to the officer in charge, who gives us stew in his own tent and says he’s grown fond of the place these past couple of months. Nice manners. I tell him his men have worked fast.
He pours more wine. “We know where our orders come from. Who you are.”
We throw dice together for a while, and then I walk down to the shore in the moonlight. Callisthenes follows after a couple of minutes.
“You’re happy,” he says.
“Am I?”
“Comfortable. You belong here.”
“I guess I do. I don’t know. It’s a good place for a childhood. I like to think of Nicomachus running around here the way I did when I was a child.”
“Playing with your ghost.”
I point at the sea. “That little boy is about fifty feet out and twenty feet down, diving for shells. Anyone who wants to go look for him can try.”
Callisthenes hugs himself