The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [32]
“I’ll keep this,” he had said, and that was that.
It was tiny, whorled like an ear, pink like a nipple, with a creamy pouting lip; a perfect prize, and I didn’t fight for it. Suddenly I had my book, and that was more.
The games were to honour Amyntas’s recent death—from old age, an extraordinary feat in the house of Macedon—and to celebrate the accession of Philip’s elder brother, Perdicaas. Philip and I were both sixteen by then, both looking it, in different ways. I had shot up past my father, who was not a small man, and grown a neat, tight fuzz of a beard my mother loved to pat. The swimming season had begun again in earnest a few weeks back and I had begun to put on muscle, though I was still gangly next to Philip. I watched him in the wrestling and the javelin, both of which he won.
Afterwards my father took me to the temple of Heracles to sacrifice for future military success, and then he suggested the baths. He wanted a look at the whole of me, I knew, with his physician’s eye, something I’d increasingly been denying him. He wanted to see the tone of my skin, the hang of my joints, the set of my muscles, the size of my penis. He wanted to find something he could fix.
“You might have competed,” he said, once we were stripped.
I sat with my back to him, scraping the dirt from my legs with a honed stone while he looked me over.
“Perhaps this summer.”
“In what?” I meant the question rhetorically, scornfully. After the first moment I couldn’t look at him; he was an old man now, pasty, sparse-haired, with an old man’s tits and a frost-haired, drooping business between his legs that I didn’t want to get a clear image of.
“Running.”
“That’s ridiculous. You’ve never even seen me run.”
“You have the body for it. Not for a sprinter, no, but for distance. Perhaps that would be something for us to think about.”
I foresaw another of my father’s regimens, a training routine to go with my goat’s milk and my nuts and my studies with Illaeus. “No.”
“Think about it,” my father said.
I thought about it; I thought about the fact that my father never used to value games, and that our time in Pella was making him increasingly ashamed of me. Arimnestus was all right; Arimnestus was brave and athletic and gave a shit about horses; Arimnestus would make a solid Companion. But I was not the kind of son men had here, and something in my father had given way, like a rotten floor, so that he could no longer see how very like him I was, and how inappropriate his plans for me were. He could only see that I was not like other Macedonian boys, and that was a problem. I realized for the first time that it might be necessary to leave Pella, to leave my father, if I did not want to end up a uniformed medic—trudging along at the ass-end of Philip’s glorious army, diapering his shit—who had once placed fourth in a distance event before he became a bitter letch, a misanthrope, and a drunk.
Still, my world was small, and I could think only of returning to Stageira. I planned vaguely to farm and write and swim and find some girl to marry who would suck on me the way the prostitute had, for some regular relief.
I didn’t think about Illaeus’s boasting about the great teacher in Athens until my last day with him, which I didn’t know would be my last day. He told me he had received a reply to his letter.
“What letter?” I asked.
Instead of answering, he gave it to me and told me to give it to my father. He had resealed the wax over a candle. “All right?” he said.
I saw his hand come up, for my hair or my shoulder, and I left quickly, before he could find a coin. I had asked him recently