The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [41]
“My squash and my beans,” he says. “Dear Auntie. Has she had that beer yet?”
“Respect,” I say.
He laughs again.
After we finish our meal, he wants to talk politics; gossip, I want to say, though politics is a kind of theatre too, and it occurs to me we might tease out something useful for the new work I’m contemplating. The personalities of the city-states, the logic of their confrontations, the simultaneous sense of both the contingent and the inexorable. Philip is still in Thrace. Athens clashes with Cardia, in the Chersonese, where the Athenian corn ships must pass. Philip will back Cardia when the time comes, ever so reasonably and regretfully. Demosthenes rants as much, fumes and foams about it in the Athenian assembly. I tell Callisthenes it’s well known that Demosthenes writes all his speeches out in advance, and is incapable of putting two words together if they’re not already written on a piece of paper in front of him. I tell him how he studied the gestures of actors, and how as a young man he built himself an underground room in which to practise gesturing and declaiming, and how to make himself focus he would shave half his head so he’d be too ashamed to go out in public, thus forcing himself to stay home and work. Callisthenes puts his head to the side and opens his mouth to question the ridiculousness of this, but I tell him that’s not the point. The point is that the man allows these stories to be told of himself, is proud of them. I invent a word for the sake of clever conversation, the verb to Cassandra. He Cassandras away about Philip, I tell my nephew, like an actor hoping for a prize.
“Alexander goes to your director friend for lessons in rhetoric,” Callisthenes says. He’s started attending my lessons with the boys, and being younger is more in their confidence. “He has to memorize everything, though. Carolus won’t let him speak with notes.”
A suspicion erupts like a little bubble on the surface of my mind. “That boy of yours,” I say. “Is he one of the pages?”
“Of course.” Callisthenes lies on his back, gazing at the sky. “They’re like a little harem, those pages. Lots of the Companions use them. His family comes from up north somewhere. He’s terribly lonely. He likes the attention.”
“You’re over your qualms, then. Macedonian rapacity and vulgarity and so forth.”
“Qualms.” A blunt word for stabbing, but he tries to stab me with it. He doesn’t want to be reminded.
“So Alexander goes to Carolus.”
“Unofficially, of course.”
Of course.
THE FIRST SNOW OF the season comes whispering late one grey afternoon, just as the light is going, and I’m walking home from my weekly obligation to attend court. I find the slaves murmuring to each other, and then the reason why: Pythias is sitting in a corner of our spare bedroom, one of the few rooms without a window, with her veil drawn over her head.
“What is it?” She lifts her arms above her head and sprinkles her fingers down to her lap.
She’s been waiting all afternoon for me; won’t go outside, won’t let it touch her, until I’ve given her an explanation she can accept.
“Snow,” I say.
Most of the slaves, more gifts from Hermias, haven’t seen snow before either. I stand them under the colonnade so they can watch me go out in the courtyard bare-headed. I let it land on my arms and body, and tip my head back with my tongue out. It seems to fall from nowhere, bits of pure colourlessness peeled off from the sky and drifting down, thicker now. They’re watching me. Pythias is first: she steps out from under the colonnade and holds out a palm to catch some of the stuff. She comes to me. The slaves slowly follow, and soon we’re all standing about in the courtyard letting snow fall on our faces and wet our clothes.
“Why do they send it?” Pythias asks.
Their faces turn toward me. Yes, why?
“Who, love?” Though I know.
“The gods.”
A conversation