The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [19]
“He’s a strange boy,” I overheard my father tell my mother, on one of his increasingly rare visits home. “He worries me. Not his health, but his mind. I don’t know if he has too much discipline or none at all. He goes places I can’t follow, inside himself.”
“He misses you,” my mother said.
I WATCH ALEXANDER MORE closely now. On the eve of Philip’s departure for Thessaly, one early summer dawn, we ride out to hunt. I arrive in second-best clothes, unarmed, on slow, reliable Tar. Philip and his entourage of pages and purple-cloaked Companions are in full battledress. The ground beneath their mounts roils with dogs. After some insults—it’s suggested I be made to wear a halter around my waist, like a boy who hasn’t had his first kill—I’m handed a spare pike and shield and left to keep up as best I can. We ride to the royal park, where the day’s festivities begin with the sacrifice of a screaming, spurting piglet. It’s a day of pomp and etiquette that I see as a succession of frozen images, like a series of coins struck and over-struck, glinting in the sun. Philip in profile, helmeted. A dog rearing up on hind legs as its owner unclips its lead. A spear balanced on a shoulder. A boar crashing through a clearing. Alexander, unstraddling his horse, knife unsheathed. The boar shaking off a spear sunk too shallow in its side, kicking in the skull of a dog, crashing off again. The dog, one leg spastic. The dog, dead. A wineskin passed from hand to hand. Alexander looking for his mount.
Philip begins to tease him, offering him a skittish horse, daring him to ride it. Ox-Head, the animal is called, for the white mark on its forehead. The boy turns it toward the sun, blinding it, and mounts it easily. Philip, drunk, makes a sarcastic remark. From the warhorse’s back, the boy looks down at his father as though he’s coated in filth. That’s the coin I’ll carry longest in my pocket, the image I’ll worry over and over with my thumb.
I could help him, just like his brother. I could fill my plate. I could stay.
TWO
WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN, my father came home to announce we were moving to the capital because he had been named personal physician to the king. Abruptly his travels stopped, and for a final few weeks he stayed in Stageira, treating only local cases, preparing for the move. As my mother and sister and the servants busied themselves packing up the carts, I indulged in precocious fits of nostalgia, wandering from cliff to shore, swimming, and wondering when we would return. I was afraid of Pella, of the lack of solitude, of a landscape I wasn’t intimate with, of being under my parents’ eyes much more than I ever had been in our village. I was afraid of my father. Though as a small boy I had missed him terribly, now I found him strict, remote, and often disappointed in me. His encouragement came in mean doses, and often at random; why was it fine to want to watch the birth of a litter of puppies but idle and wasteful to work out the mathematical relationship between the length of a lyre string and the tone it produced?
He liked me best when I accompanied him in his work and helped him at bedsides, when I spoke little and remembered from one visit to the next which powder was used to treat which illness, and when I correctly recited the aphorisms he made me memorize: use a fluid diet to treat a fever; avoid starchy foods in summer; it is better that a fever follow a convulsion than a convulsion follow a fever; purge at the start of an illness but never at its height; teething can cause fevers and diarrhea; drugs may be administered to pregnant women most safely in the fourth to seventh months of gestation, after which the dosages should be reduced; sandy urine indicates a stone forming in the bladder; eunuchs do not suffer gout; women are never ambidextrous; and on, and on, and on.
My father was a man of causes and effects, impatient with amateurs who tried to pray or magic sicknesses away. He would accept a stone bound to a wrist to ease a fever, say, only if the stone had proven