The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [104]
“You’re jealous?”
“No. Yes, of course. But that’s not—I’m trying to say I’ve been watching you for a long, long time. You have a sickness. Everyone who loves you sees it in you. When you were in Mieza, Pythias and I used to talk about how to help you. She said you needed Alexander. She said if ever they took him away, you’d die.”
“Black bile,” I say.
“She wasn’t resentful. She was more astute than I think you ever—”
“Not in her, in me. My father taught me long ago that black bile can be hot or cold. Cold: it makes you sluggish and stupid. Hot: it makes you brilliant, insatiable, frenzied. Like the different stages of drunkenness, you see? Only my father didn’t realize that none of this had to be bad. The people who find the balance between the extremes—”
Callisthenes puts his hand on my arm.
“—the very best teachers, artists, warriors—”
“Plato, Carolus, Alexander—”
“I swung back and forth for a long time. I’d find a girl and fuck myself empty, and then afterwards I wanted to die. Lately, though, as you say, it’s better. Not so high, not so low. Maybe it’s Herpyllis; maybe. Does it matter, if it holds?”
“You think it won’t hold here?”
“You saw the orchard by the big house?”
“Plums.”
“Plums. One of my oldest memories, the taste of those plums. I looked at them as we walked by just now and thought, too small, after all these years. Those damn trees are still too small to hold a noose. That’s the furniture in my mind, here, still.”
“Athens, then.”
“For me. For you?”
He looks shy, surprised.
I nod. “Your work is solid. You don’t need me any more. I’ll give you this place, if you want it.”
We start the walk down to the camp. “Remember how I hated Macedon when we first got here?” my nephew says.
“I do.”
“Stageira,” he says. “Comfort and leisure and time to write. I could do worse.”
“Or you could come with me, stay with me. Colleague, rather than apprentice.”
“Or I could do something else altogether. Fall in love, maybe. Travel.”
“Both.”
He laughs. “Both, then.”
“Fucking cold one tonight,” the sentry says. “Extra blankets in the storage tent. Help yourself to what you need.”
“MAJESTY.”
“Master,” Alexander says.
We embrace, briefly. I feel the dry, slightly feverish heat in his skin that corresponds precisely to the ruddiness of his complexion, feel the strength of him, and smell the faint, pleasant spiciness that so endeared him as a boy to my dead wife. We’re in the palace library, back in Pella, for the last time. He’s been king for eight months.
“I can’t believe you’re going,” he says.
I give my student two gifts: a volume of Homer, and one of Euripides.
“But these are your own.” He looks through them. “Your notes are here.”
I nod.
“I will always sleep with them beneath my pillow,” he says gravely, and I bite back a smile. I rise. “No, no. For all I’m giving you, I want one more gift.”
“Anything.” What else can I say?
Alexander laughs and says, to an invisible audience, “Look at him. You’d think I was asking for his first-born.”
I feel a last pang of jealousy. Here is a mannerism I’ve not seen before; already Alexander has fallen under new influences. That I’ll no longer be close enough to watch him adopt and adapt, to watch his mind fill in as his body has—this is love, then, finally, I think, what I feel as I watch him. Maybe Callisthenes was right. As good as love.
“A lesson. I want a last lesson.”
We take our seats.
“I suppose it would be a waste of time to speak to you of moderation.” I hook a smile. “Therefore I will speak to you of excellence. What is human excellence? When is a man a good man? What does it mean to live a good life?”
“To triumph. To act to the furthest extent of one’s capacities. To flourish.”
“To flourish.” I nod. I talk about the exercise of a man’s faculties,