The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [40]
“It’s all sex with you, isn’t it.”
He laughs. “Not just me. I was a bit of an oddity in Athens, I’ll grant you, but here I fit right in. It’s in the air, the dirt, the water. It touches everything. Why am I telling you this, anyway? You’re from here. You know.”
I shake my head. “It was different then. Power changes things, maybe. Macedon wasn’t the power it is today when I was young. I don’t remember it being so—charged.”
“Well, whatever the reason. They celebrate with it, they make people suffer with it, they do their business with it. They run the kingdom with it. You’ve heard about Pausanias’s promotion?”
I nod. Pausanias was a soldier who serviced the king so thoroughly, gossip had it, that he made officer the next morning. Not the Philip I remember, but I’ve been away a long time. Who knows?
“Maybe because of how they lock their women away here,” he says. “Where is that wife of yours, anyway? She didn’t even eat with us.”
“She thought you might prefer that.”
“She thought wrong.” Carolus sits up. “I miss talking to women. Haul her on out here and let’s see what she thinks.”
I send a slave to find her. “Thinks about what?”
“About our boy.”
Pythias appears minutes later with a plate of sweets that she sets on the floor beside Carolus’s couch. “Husband,” she murmurs.
I pat the couch beside me. “We were just talking about the prince.”
Carolus says, “We were talking about love.”
She sits and lets me take both of her hands in mine. “I liked him very much, the once we met.”
“Liked him why?” Carolus demands.
Pythias says, “He seemed frail.”
Carolus and I snort, laughing.
“Frail and sad.” She’s frowning, distressed but determined too.
Carolus takes her hand and kisses it. “Forgive us, pretty one. We’re just all barnacled over with meanness, the two of us.”
“I’m not,” I say.
“I’m sure he’s very good at sports,” Pythias says. “That’s not what I meant. Will you laugh at me if I say lonely? He seemed like a lonely little boy, younger than his years, with that awful shrieking mother. I wanted to hug him and whisper in his ear, ‘Come stay with me for a while. I’ll take care of you.’ ”
“You did?” I say.
Carolus leans forward. “Did you, indeed.”
I LIKE THE FEELING of combing out the tangles in things, of looking at the world around me and feeling I’m clearing all the brush, bit by bit. This bit reclaimed from chaos, and this bit here, and that bit there. Back in Mytilene, my focus was on biology, particularly marine life. Here in Pella, I want something new.
I feel the thoughts clustering, forming a constellation whose inner logic I’ve yet to perceive, the harmony of whose spheres I’ve yet to hear. It’s that little book on theatre I sketched for Carolus: something about his father and my father, Illaeus’s sickness and my own, and my two young princes, especially Alexander. He’s a different boy in our private sessions: tense, intense. He rarely smiles. He asks incessant questions and writes down the answers. These sessions are generally late in the evening to keep them secret; he’s giving up sleep for the pretense of effortlessness. He’s angry, curious, pompous, charming, driven. He’s a comedy or a tragedy, one or the other. Which?
My nephew, I’ve decided, is a comedy. He’s found himself a house in the city, and his comings and goings are less my concern these days. I visit him there for an informal supper, and am surprised by the gap that has grown up between us, between his student-slovenliness and his elaborate care of me, his older guest. The place has a reek to it. He has, moreover, found himself a lover—so he tells me, while we eat, lying on couches in the courtyard in a drift of fall leaves—and is throwing gifts at the boy like he’s a moving target.
“Three pairs of winter shoes!” Callisthenes brags.
“That’s practical,” I say. “At least you’re not off writing poetry all day.”
“Picking flowers,” Callisthenes says.
“You did that?”
Callisthenes covers his eyes with his hand, laughing at himself.
“Pythias instructs me to ask you,” I say, “before I forget, are