The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [15]
“I’ve brought my library with me,” I say. “I wondered if you might want to borrow something while I’m out with the prince.”
“I’ve been wondering if I shouldn’t be accompanying you,” he says. “So I’ll know how to continue once you’ve gone.”
At last. We have exchanged courtesies, now, finally, and can begin to get a hold of each other.
“I’m here for a few days yet,” I say. “Let me bring you something tomorrow. What do you like best? Poetry, history, the habits of animals?”
He laughs at this, contemptuously; thinks I’ve made a joke at Arrhidaeus’s expense and is looking to play along.
“Something on education, perhaps,” I say.
He wipes the look off his face. So much for a truce.
“I don’t understand,” he says, seeing the moment slip away. “He’s worthless, useless. You of all people should understand. I thought you of all people would. I know who you are. How can you stand to spend time with him? How can it not hurt you? You who understand all a human mind can be, how can you bear it? I don’t have the hundredth part of your mind and there are days when I think I’ll go mad. I can feel it. Or hear it. It’s more like hearing something creeping along the walls, just behind my head, getting closer and closer. A big insect, maybe a scorpion. A dry skittering, that’s what madness sounds like to me.”
Verse, then. A young man still, after all, in love with his own melancholy, forced to brood on his own wasted intelligence. But then I see he’s weeping, his eyes glittering with it. He turns away so I won’t see him in his depths. I ask how long he’s been the prince’s companion. He takes a shaky breath and says it doesn’t matter.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty.”
As old as my nephew. “Where do you sleep?”
He shrugs. “Here.” Then: “There. On the floor.” He points to a wall. He must unroll a pallet at night and put it away during the day to give the prince more play-space. Already the tears have soaked back into him, the eyes and nose, and he’s back to being sullen. I am familiar with such easy fits of tears, and the odd disjunction between what the face does and what the mind might be doing. I myself can weep while working, eating, bathing, and have woken in the night with the snail-trails of it on my face.
Arrhidaeus has finished his feed and is tugging at the nurse’s arm. The nurse obediently gets down on his knees and fishes the pot from beneath the bed. He places it behind a screen for Arrhidaeus, who’s already bared himself and goes at it as noisily as he does his food, grunting and grumbling to himself, audibly straining. The stink is rich. I’m ready to go.
“Pythagoras,” the nurse says.
I nod; my own blackness is lapping at me now and I need to leave. I’ll bring him my Pythagoras.
“I wanted to study—” he says.
But I can’t listen to any more. I’m out of the room and off down the hall, walking fast and faster, concentrating on the pattern of the tiles, thinking about the geometry of star-shapes.
I AM GARBAGE. This knowledge is my weather, my private clouds. Sometimes low-slung, black, and heavy; sometimes high and scudding, the white unbothersome flock of a fine summer’s day. I tell Pythias sometimes, an urgent bulletin from the dark-lands: I’m garbage. She says nothing.
I WAS TO HAVE been Philip’s guest at the performance, but Carolus asks me if I’ll stand backstage with him, hold his copy of the text, help with the props, and generally be a calming influence. “On them, not me,” he says. “They’re used to you now. Tell me, why are even bad actors so high-strung?” I open my mouth to reply but he says, “Oh, shut up. That was a rhetorical question. You do like to talk, don’t you. Here, hold this.”
It’s Pentheus’s head, a second rag ball since the boy went off with the first and didn’t come back. This one’s been tied tighter, at least, and shouldn’t come undone, though the face is still crude: staring black eyes, two-thirds of a triangle for a nose, red mouth, single red gash at the throat.
“These, too.” Carolus gives me a handful of