The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [17]
“My own invention,” he said. “The sarissa. Look, you see, here’s a Thracian lance, and an Illyrian, and a few others. The sarissa is longer again by a third. You see the implications?”
I did see, but was more interested in the physics. I hefted one. “It’s heavier.”
“Not by much. You adjust for the weight with a smaller shield.”
I took a few thrusts while he watched.
“You’re rusty,” he said finally. “At least you’ve changed your clothes.”
He introduced me to the soldier, who turned out to be one of his older generals, Antipater. Short hair, short beard, tired eyes. When Philip was off at war, Antipater was regent. The three of us sat under the colonnade, while the first rain of the day speckled the courtyard, and drank wine mixed with water. While we spoke, I thought about Philip as a boy. We had played together, in this very courtyard perhaps. I seemed to remember a wrestling match, smells of sweat and grass; fierce, private, sweet. I couldn’t recall who had won.
“He offers you his loyalty, and asks for your help,” I said now, of Hermias.
Philip reread the treaty I had brought him, slowly, while a page gathered up the assorted lances and took them in out of the drumming rain. I imagined Philip on various battlefields, squinting about for a new piece to add to his collection and promptly killing the bearer when he found one. Wasn’t that, too, a kind of science?
“Drink,” Philip ordered without lifting his eyes, when I shifted in my chair.
I drank. A scholar surrounded by scholars, I had forgotten how slowly some people read. After a long while, Philip began to talk about his ambitions.
“I like your friend here,” he said, waving the treaty. “He’s shrewd, a survivor.”
“I will be pleased to relay that message to him.”
“Someone will. Not you. I’ll be needing you now.”
I watched the page, a dark-skinned boy with tight curls and yellow palms. He had come from far away, Egypt, perhaps, or Ethiopia. He might have changed hands many, many times before landing here with these spears and dummies. Philip was talking about Athens. Athens was old, Athens was decayed, Athens was dying, but Athens was also key. Antipater sat with his feet flat on the ground, his palms flat on his thighs, staring fixedly at the air between his knees. I wondered, though he had parried nimbly enough, if he was in pain. Athens, though—that was all right. For a moment Philip had frightened me, saying he needed me.
“We had hoped,” he said, “after Plato’s death, the Academy would go to you. Then you would have had some influence. I don’t like this Speusippus who’s there now.”
I was confused; Plato, my master, had died five years before. Philip had been watching me five years ago? “Speusippus is his nephew,” I said. “I don’t like him either.” With his little hands and his mild manners and his mild little mind. He wrote dialogues, like his uncle, in which the challenger was always crumbling into confusion before the questioner’s blithe probing. I told him once not to be afraid to enter an argument he couldn’t immediately see his way out of. I had thought to be helpful, but he counted me an enemy, in his mild way, after that.
“He writes me letters,” Philip said. “Counselling me. He compares me to Heracles. Astounding parallels he finds between us.”
Antipater and I smiled identical smiles, small and dry; we caught each other’s eye and looked away. Friends, that quickly.
Philip, a deft enough wit to move swiftly past his own jokes, shook his head. “They’ll consider you again, though, when Speusippus dies. He’s elderly, yes? Because that’s the sort of power I need. You can’t do it all with spears. They look at me and see an animal, but they look at you and see one of their own. Military power they’ll fight and fight like a butting goat, but you could get under their skin. Head of the Academy, that’s the kind of thing they respect. Plato used the office like a diplomat, power-brokering, influencing policy. Kings listened to