The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [30]
“No, I don’t,” he agreed. “I get tired is what it is. I didn’t think my life would end this way. I don’t mean you, you’re a good boy.”
I could see the lesson was ending, and hesitated, my hand grazing the Herodotus.
“Yes, yes, you can borrow it. I loved books, too, when I was your age. You know not to eat when you’re reading?”
I did; my mother had taught me that during one of my father’s long absences, when she reluctantly allowed me into his library for the first time. No eating, no creasing, no taking books outside; clean hands, not too close to the lamp, and everything back exactly where I found it.
It was my father who noticed the inscription.
“Look at that,” he said. “Plato. You have to be one of ten or twenty in the world to be allowed to study with him. This Illaeus, does he speak much of his time there?”
“A little,” I said. “Not really. He seems—bitter.”
My father frowned. This wasn’t what he wanted to hear. “Perhaps you should ask him. Draw him out in conversation. Ask him about his own work. Flatter him a little. You can be quite unfriendly at times, and perhaps he senses that.”
“I am not!”
“Bitter.” It was as though the word had only just caught up to him. “I wonder why he left the school. Those who study there often stay on to teach, I’m told. Would something like that appeal to you?”
“Teaching?” I was appalled.
“I didn’t think so.” He handed me back the book. “Take care of this. I don’t want him coming after me for a replacement because you dropped it in a puddle.”
“I can take care of books!”
“Don’t raise your voice to me,” my father said. “Bitterness is caused by an excess of gall. Perhaps he needs to drink more milk to counteract the effect of that humour. I think I will prescribe the same for you, so you don’t end up with a similar personality. I see the beginnings of it in you, already.”
I drank goat’s milk every day from then on, brought to me by a slave on a small tray every afternoon, usually while I was studying. It became one of the household rituals. I was to take it out into the courtyard, drain the cup, eat the accompanying walnuts (little brains for my big-little brain), and give the tray back to the slave, who would take the empty cup straight to my father, to prove I was following orders. Our household was sewn up in such solemnities, the absurdity of many of which was gradually coming clear to me.
Fortunately I could visit the palace when the smallness of my parents’ world threatened to overwhelm me. No one made Philip drink goat’s milk to forestall bitterness, and a black cloud of disappointment did not hang over his rooms if he put a book back on the wrong shelf.
“You’re just in time,” he said, the next time I went to see him.
I was allowed to use the palace gymnasium because of my father’s standing at court, and often went there as a pretext when I was hoping for company. He had found me doing squats with a weighted ball, without much enthusiasm, but he had a soldier’s respect for athleticism of any sort and waited for me to finish my set before he spoke.
“My new armour’s ready. Come see when you’re done.”
“I’m done.”
He took me to the armoury, where his new gear was laid out on a table: helmet, breastplate, sword, shield, spear, greaves, sandals. There were starbursts worked into the breastplate and shield. A gift from his father, he said. He had outgrown his practice gear anyway. I watched him lace and strap himself up, everything fitting just so. I wanted to make a joke about it, how he must have had to stand still for hours while they measured him, like a woman being fitted for a dress, but I knew he wouldn’t laugh.
“It’s magnificent,” I said, and meant it. He looked the warrior, with the helmet pulled down and the nose piece riding perfectly, everything glinting, the new leather creaking. His eyes were dead level, and I wondered what enemy might next stand this close to him in his finery, and the last thing he would see would be those eyes: calm, measuring, not without a kind