The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [31]
“You don’t like to fight, do you?” he said. “You wouldn’t want all this. You really wouldn’t.”
“I wouldn’t know where to begin with it. It would be like play-acting for me.” I was on the verge of offending him, I knew. “Can you see me wielding a sword? The only person I’d be a danger to would be myself.”
“That’s true enough.” He gently removed the helmet—gentle with the helmet, I mean, rather than his own head—and laid it back on the table. “The future’s coming fast, do you know that?”
Such an extraordinary thing to say that I immediately suspected he had recently had it said to him, and was merely repeating the wisdom to me. His father? I knew there were ongoing skirmishes with the petty mountain kings in Illyria, who were trying to encroach south into Macedon. Philip was probably headed off to one of these in his bright new gear, to bloody it up a little and prove he was worth it. A life in meat, and never a doubt about it.
“And you?” he was saying. “What’s coming for you?”
I didn’t answer. I was a child next to him, or an old man, so crippled by thinking that I couldn’t even make a sentence.
“You could still have a place in the army.”
That was the curious kindness in him, the way he saw my distress and held the punch anyone else our age would have landed without thinking.
“You could be a medic,” he continued. “Your father’s trained you, hasn’t he? Don’t you still do rounds with him?”
“Sometimes. I think he wants me to be a teacher, though.”
“Of what?” He dug a finger in his ear and rooted, looking either skeptical or pained by his own nail. He may not have been thinking of me at all, or listening to my answer. Sex and books, that was what I wanted from the future. An Illaeus in my heart after all, maybe.
“Everything,” I said. “Swimming.”
He laughed. “When are we going again?”
“Now.”
He disarmed and we went down to the beach, a long walk, without speaking. I knew he was more comfortable surrounded by larger groups in higher spirits. We didn’t often find a lot to talk about when we were alone, though he never avoided such situations, trying, I think, to be kind to me. I in turn tried not to talk too much, or to assume any intimacy, and test his patience that way. It was snowing again, very lightly, a high mindless drifting that would turn heavy that night and freeze everything but the ocean by morning. Everything was soft and grey and sounds were muffled and distended. Our breaths were smoky in the cold. The sun was a white disc, faraway, cool. At the usual rock I began to undress.
“Fuck, no,” Philip said, but when I didn’t stop, he undressed too.
The water was warm for a moment and then searingly cold, burning rings around my ankles, my calves, my knees, my thighs, every time I stopped to think about what I was doing. I hadn’t been swimming in weeks. Just before the plunge I looked back to see Philip, naked, in to his knees, hands on his hips, surveying the horizon. We didn’t stay in long. Afterwards we dried ourselves on our cloaks and walked back up to the city carrying them sopping over our arms, shivering.
The next time I saw him was in the spring, at games. Philip had recently returned from a brutal winter campaign in Illyria; I had recently finished writing my first book, a treatise on local varieties of crustacea. I had described and categorized as many types as I could find, attempting to group them into families, and written of their habits from long solitary hours spent on the winter beaches staring into rock pools, and included illustrations I had drawn myself. Those had been the hardest, but Illaeus had shown me the trick of using gridded paper to get the proportions right. He had also recommended a scribe to make a fair copy, someone whose handwriting and materials would be better than mine—a tiny, grinning, snaggle-toothed man in another dank hut—and they were. I presented the finished article to my father as a gift.
“That is lovely,” he had said. “Lovely paper. Egyptian, is it?”
I was not discouraged. Illaeus had made me revise