The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [106]
“No.”
“Look at me.” He stands up. “I’m short. I fumble when I talk. I blush. I’m afraid of the dark. I black out in the middle of battle and can’t remember anything afterwards. They look at me, they say, Great warrior, well-spoken, charming, worthy student of the greatest mind in the world. I’m holding on by my fingertips and so are you.”
I nod.
“Maybe you’ve made me into yourself after all. A fine, fierce surface on the mess underneath. Like you polished up my brother, teaching him to speak, teaching him to ride. That’s you, isn’t it? That’s you, and me, and him?”
I say nothing.
“I’ll tell you what I accept, in your theory of happiness,” he says. “I accept that the greatest happiness comes to those capable of the highest things. That’s where we leave my brother behind. That’s where you and I walk away from the rest of the world. You and I can appreciate the glory of things. We walk to the very edge as everyone else knows and understands and experiences it, and then we walk the next step. We go places no one has ever been. That’s who we are. That’s who you’ve taught me to be.”
“Did I teach you that?”
“I’ve made you sad.”
“Yes.” I touch my forehead. “Yes, you have.”
“We’re so alike. I’m your child.”
The boy who knew where to find the head, the heart, the breath, the brain. The boy who smelled so nice. The boy running in from the rain. “Majesty.”
He says, “Stay with me. Don’t make me go the next step alone.”
WE LEAVE ON A SUNNY DAY, when the sunlight sparkles on the marsh and makes the ocean blinding.
Alexander has loaded me down with goods and gear and servants and money until I begged him to stop. Herpyllis rides with the children on a cart lined with furs; she is cheerful and placid, nursing the baby, chatting with Little Pythias, almost four, who’s excited and fretful and already looking strained around the eyes, a sign of the headaches that afflict her. I gesture to Herpyllis to remind her about her hat. I know I am seeing in Little Pythias the anxiety her mother would be feeling about such a trip. Herpyllis, in contrast, could be going to the seaside, or back to Mytilene; it’s all the same to her. The slaves, Tycho and Simon and the rest, have a cart to themselves. Philes is mounted beside me, my plan for him realized at last. He can’t speak. He’s terrified.
“Uncle.” Callisthenes holds out his hand.
He’ll serve Alexander on his expeditions as official historian. Travel, then; with luck, love is still to come. We embrace and bid each other farewell.
I’m about to mount when he says, “There’s someone else here who wants to say goodbye.”
A tall young man with a familiar loping gait steps out from behind a cart, where he’s been hiding with the little groom who is now his companion. Both their grins are enormous.
“Now who is this?” I say, knowing.
“I don’t want you to go,” Arrhidaeus says.
The young man clings to me, even weeps briefly, while I pat his shoulders and his hair. “I’m very proud of you, Arrhidaeus.”
This, then, is what I see as I ride out: my nephew, his heart a Macedonian heart now; and the fool beside him no longer quite a fool, one hand raised in farewell, until they’ve dwindled, in my sight, almost to specks.
As soon as there’s no one to see, I dismount and get onto a cart so I can write. No more doctoring, politicking, teaching children; no more dabbling. Soon I’ll be alone in a quiet room where, for the rest of my life, I can float farther and farther out into the world; while my student, charging off the end of every map, falls deeper and deeper into the well of himself. Never be afraid to enter an argument you can’t immediately see your way out of. Can anyone tell me what a tragedy is?
AFTERWORD
CLEOPATRA AND HER BABY DAUGHTER were murdered shortly after Philip’s death, supposedly by Olympias. Leonidas once rebuked the boy Alexander for wasting incense on the altar, saying he should not be extravagant until he had conquered the countries that produced such spices. Years later, from Gaza, according to Plutarch, Alexander