The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [43]
“You’re cold.” He’s shivering. It’s dark now, blue dark beyond the pools of torchlight. “Would you like to see my study?”
“I want to see Pythias.”
I take him into the kitchen, where Pythias has every woman in the house putting together a meal. The cock lies on the chopping board, blood draining from its throat into a bowl. The fire roars high; it’s hot in here. When Pythias sees we mean to stay, she has two chairs pulled up in front of the fire. In front of Alexander’s chair she puts a basin of hot water.
“Take off your sandals,” she says.
While he soaks his feet and the women clatter, I take Tycho aside.
“Should I be armed?” he asks when I’ve finished.
“Just vigilant.”
He goes off to the gate to spend the night awake there, wrapped in a horse blanket.
In the kitchen, Alexander is eating a plate of cheese. It takes me a moment to realize he’s wearing my best snow-white wool.
“His clothes were soaked through,” Pythias murmurs behind me, touching my elbow. “I didn’t know what else to give him. Supper’s an hour off still, but he ate that bread so quickly.”
“You did right.” We stand together for a moment in the doorway, this thought between us: we would dote so on a son, worry the details of his feeding and clothing with such brow-furrowing tenderness. I brave a look at her face, but she can’t, won’t, look at me, and hurries back in to her women, flushing a little. It’s hot in here.
“These clothes of yours,” Alexander says when I take my seat across from him. “You don’t seem vain, but Pythias showed me your trunk when she was finding this. You could sell some of that cloth and buy a bigger house. Are you very sensitive to the feel of things?”
“Am I what?”
“I was. When I was a baby I couldn’t wear anything rough, my mother says. My skin went red and I cried all the time. Leonidas took all my nice things away. He said my baby skin needed to thicken before I could be a soldier. I like your clothes.”
“Thank you. I like them too.” Pythias’s work, all of it fine, fine, fine; I’ve learned my tastes from her. She’s made me a dandy, but I’ve lately had to hurt her feelings by buying coarser wear from the market. It’s one thing to be teased for effeminacy at court but another in the street, and I don’t go armed. “Would you like some more cheese? Bread? We’re an hour away from the meal still, Pythias tells me.”
“Wine?”
I fetch a cup for each of us: watered for him, neat for me. “You didn’t have to follow me. You could have just said you wanted to visit. We could have prepared properly.”
“Then I wouldn’t have seen anything interesting.” He looks around approvingly. “Would you have let me into your kitchen? Would I be wearing your clothes? Would I have seen your bedroom? Where will I sleep tonight?”
“Outside, in the snow.”
He grins.
“So this is Carolus’s doing?”
Pythias kneels beside us. “Will you have a bath tonight, Majesty?”
“Yes, please.”
She rises and withdraws to arrange that.
“You’re too old for her,” Alexander says.
“Yes.”
“She’s overdressed, too.”
“Yes.”
“You’re not going to get mad at me, are you?”
I shrug. “Do you want me to?” My darkling mood, suspended by the shock of his appearance, is threatening to reassert itself.
“Do you suppose she’s happy?”
I close my eyes.
“I often wonder that about people,” Alexander says. “It’s a way of understanding why they do the things they do. My mother taught me that. She said not to trust happy people.”
“What else did she teach you, your unhappy mother?”
He looks at Pythias, across the room.
“I assume she’s unhappy, your mother,” I add. “If she prizes it so.”
“She says nice things about you,” Alexander says.
We eat in the big room, Pythias bejewelled, our three breaths smoking in the cold. Conversation shrivels in it. The slaves come and go with plates of food. The cock, stewed too briefly, is tough and stringy; the wine is cold.
“How is Carolus?” Pythias asks into the silence.
“He