The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [44]
Pythias looks at me.
“I’ll send him something,” I say dutifully.
“Your father was a doctor,” Alexander says.
“He saved your father’s life when we were boys. Patched a spear wound.”
Alexander touches his collarbone, here? I nod.
“That wouldn’t kill you,” Alexander says. “Everyone I know has one of those, from drills. Would you teach me some medicine, though? As part of my studies?”
“You want to deliver babies?”
He blushes. Pythias frowns.
“For the field,” he says. “Wounds.”
I shrug. “The little that I know, I’ll teach you. Bind a bleeder, squeeze a squirter. That was something my father used to say.”
Pythias pushes her plate away. Well, she shouldn’t be here at all, but Alexander wanted it. Carolus’s encouragement again, no doubt.
“Will you have dessert, or your bath?” she asks the prince.
“Dessert in the bath?”
She smiles briefly, grudgingly, at his hope-against-hoping face. I have a vision of my long-ago prostitute, amused despite herself by men’s awe at the variety of pleasure in the world.
“It’s not that he has no boundaries,” I tell Pythias, later, once the boy is installed in the great bronze pot by the kitchen hearth with his plate of honey and apples, and we’re in the room the slaves have prepared for him, the room where Pythias hid from the snow, checking it over. “He knows precisely what the boundaries are. It’s more like he has to overstep. He has to push everyone a little bit too far, just to see what will happen. Following me here, for instance.”
“I humiliated you. Supper was terrible.”
“I doubt he noticed. Did you see how he ate? Like he hasn’t had a square meal in days.”
“I saw that.” She dusts a little table with the hem of her dress. “I thought I’d leave him out a plate of fruit, in case he wakes in the night.”
“Do that.”
“I still think the other room is nicer, the one with the window.”
“This is safer. Warmer. He’s closer to us here too.”
She hesitates. “How are you feeling?”
I shake my head, a shorthand she knows. Knuckles tap at the door frame, two taps: Pythias’s maid.
“Lady,” the girl says. “He asks for you.”
“Me?” Pythias says. “Where is he?”
“Still in his bath.”
“Monkey.” I think evil to Carolus. Now what? “He’s trying to insult me. I’ll go.”
That wry smile, again. “Me, surely, if anyone,” Pythias says. “And he’s only a boy. If it’s just testing boundaries, as you say—let’s at least see what he wants.”
“What he thinks he wants.”
She’s gone a long time. I stew longer than the cock: in the guest room, first, napping the fur we’ve put on his bed, plumping pillows, fussing over lamps; and then in my own bigger bedroom, where I can pace.
When she returns she waves my words away unspoken and says, “He’s in bed now. He wants you.”
I shake my head, grimacing. “Monkey.”
His room is warm and golden from the lamplight; more lamps now than the pair I trimmed. He lies under the fur, rosy and smiling, eyes round and dark as a small child’s with the effort of keeping awake for me.
“All right?”
He smiles, nods.
I rest a hand briefly on his forehead. “Shall I blow out some of these lamps?”
“I will, in a minute.”
I return to my room, where Pythias is sitting up in bed. “So?” I ask.
“My virtue is intact.”
“Thank the gods.” I get in beside her. “Let me guess. He wanted to talk?”
“He wanted to know what went into the stew. He wanted to tell his mother.”
“Tell her he was here?”
“I don’t think everything he tells her gets back to Philip. Actually, I don’t think anything he tells her gets back to Philip.”
“It’s like that.”
She nods.
“Hard on him.”
“I think so.” She lies back while I make my examination, all gooseflesh in the cold. “I think he just liked having someone to talk to while he was in his bath. Perhaps his mother used to sit with him. He oiled himself and dressed himself.”
I touch my collarbone. “Did he have a scar?”
“I looked. No.”
I blow out the lamp.
“He asked me if I was happy,” Pythias says.
“He asked me that too, about you. What did you say?”
“He asked me if I’d like to be invited up to the palace more often, to get me out of the house. He said he