The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [33]
“It must be very long,” I had said.
“Not really.”
I wanted to ask him the name of it, or what it was about, but we glided onto other subjects and I never raised it again. It was a simple enough exchange, but things between us changed after that, as though we had been intimate in some way that left him vulnerable to me. It wasn’t a feeling I liked. He did not always tidy his table, now, before my lessons, and sometimes I arrived to see the crabbed sheaves with their angry strike-throughs and scribblings. He would look up at me, shyly, acknowledging that he had allowed me to see, and then tidy them away with tender hands that made me a little sick.
At home, my father read the letter in silence while I watched him. Summer, again, and the dust turned in the dusky, golden air around his head. The plague was bad that year, the worst since we’d arrived, and my father was tired from long days with the dead and dying. He gripped the letter a little too hard. I understood the gist, by then: a place in Plato’s Academy, room and board, a place in the shape of myself held for me in the fabled city.
“He shouldn’t have written without consulting me,” my father said. “It’s out of the question.”
The next day, he didn’t get out of bed. I assumed it was melancholy.
“I want to go,” I told my mother. I had found her in the courtyard, clipping herbs. “No one has any use for me here.” She didn’t answer. I looked closely and saw the fine skin around her eyes all ruined with crying. “What?”
“Daddy told me to collect these.” She meant the herbs. “For him. He has—” Her fingers fluttered under her arm. “Two of them. Only two. Here, and here.”
“What colour?”
“Red, like blisters.”
“Seeping?”
She shook her head. “That’s good, isn’t it? No blood?”
I didn’t know how to answer. She read my face and ran into the house, into my father’s room, with her fistful of greenstuff, and forbade anyone to open the door. That same day I was sent to the palace to sleep with the pages. Arimnestus, quarantined with me, was bewildered. I pretended to be too.
Two days later, we were summoned to appear before the king. Philip, I knew, didn’t have much time for his elder brother. Perdicaas had been tutored in his own youth by one of Illaeus’s classmates, a man named Euphraeus, who was still influential at court and arranged what Philip called snot dinners, with pre-set topics of conversation and minimal drinking. Perdicaas was taller than Philip, thinner, paler, only adequate in battle, always drumming his fingers on whatever book he was reading and wanted to get back to. Eight years later he would die in Illyria in a rout, four thousand killed, bequeathing Philip a royal mess.
“I’m sorry,” the king said.
Arimnestus wept and asked for our mother.
“I’m sorry,” Perdicaas the reader-king said again, tap-tap-tapping on his Homer. I had to squint to make out what it was.
Arimneste arrived from Atarneus with Proxenus and their baby son. She took charge of the household and of Arimnestus, managing servants and meals and her twin brother’s pain. There was ash in all the corners from where my sister had burnt herbs to purify the air of plague. It got on our clothes and in the food, but that was good. You left the ash to disperse naturally or the cleansing wouldn’t take. Arimneste was matronly now, plumper, busy and efficient, and wouldn’t look me in the eye. Someone—one of the slaves—must have told her I hadn’t wept. I lived in my father’s study, now, surrounded by the smell of him—faintly spicy from his apothecary, faintly sour from his old body—and his books. Mine, now. I piled them around me, scrolls unspooling, single leaves falling in drifts to the floor, and read late into every night. There were books I had never seen before, medical books shading into smut, wild histories, and plays, raunchy satires I had never suspected my father had a taste