The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [45]
“You didn’t.”
A pause. “Was that wrong?”
“Nobody likes his mother. You think he doesn’t know that? You didn’t have to rub his nose in it.”
“I told him he could come here whenever he wants,” she says.
I smack my forehead.
“Don’t worry,” she adds. “He said it was too difficult to get away.”
“Thank the gods for that.”
She lies with her back to me. I wrap a curl of her long hair around my finger, the part of her I can touch without her knowing it.
“He asked me about Atarneus. What it was like when I was a girl, the landscape and the weather and the people I knew. He asked about my mother.” When I touch her breast she flinches. “He’ll hear.”
I roll back to my side of the bed. “Night, then.”
“Night.”
When she’s asleep, I get up and go outside. The snow is still coming, thick and fast and silent. Tycho has a weight of it on his head and shoulders. He rears up like a bear in his great blanket when I touch his shoulder.
“Go to bed,” I tell him. “I’m here now.”
He goes inside briefly and comes back out with a second blanket. We sit side by side for the rest of the night, watching nothing go by.
Who am I looking for? Tycho asked, hours ago, when I first set him to watch.
I’m not sure, I said. I guess anyone who might have seen he was alone.
AFTER A SEASON OF sporadic sessions with the boys, interspersed with the obligations of court life and my own studies—I’m settling down, now, finally, into a routine—Antipater summons me to a private meeting. Philip is still in Thrace.
“Tell me about the prince,” Antipater says.
We sit in one of the smaller rooms, with a pebble mosaic of the rape of Helen beneath our feet. I can brush dust from a pink nipple with my toe. I’ve developed, with the first snow, a heavy cold, and am constantly blowing great green skeins of snot from my nose. I wipe my hand now surreptitiously on my cloak, and hope Pythias won’t notice the crust of it when she takes my laundry.
“He is highly intelligent and alarmingly disciplined.”
Antipater laughs. “When he was small his mother would hide sweets in his bed, and Leonidas would search his room until he found them, and throw them away. He believes it’s good for the boy always to be slightly hungry.”
Ah. I wonder if that’s why he’s small.
“Leonidas used to take him on night marches to stop him wetting the bed. It worked, too. Leonidas has been good for him, no doubt about it.”
I wonder if I’ve offended the old tutor and am about to get my reckoning.
“Leonidas tells me the prince is devoted to this Lysimachus,” Antipater says. “That one who calls himself Phoenix and Alexander Achilles. Who does that make Philip, then?”
“Peleus.”
“Peleus.” Antipater frowns. “Well, never mind. Only I suspect his mother’s in there somewhere, encouraging that shit. We don’t need an aesthete, we need a soldier. We need a king.” He seems distracted for a moment by the floor, and cocks his head sideways to squint at an arrangement of limbs. “All right. Philip instructs me to give you the Temple of the Nymphs at Mieza. You’ll tutor Alexander there from now on, Alexander and let’s say a dozen others. He’ll go through his entire life with these boys; you can’t cut him off entirely.”
I nod.
“The mother I can control, and Lysimachus is not to attend him there. I’ll tell him myself. The prince likes you. He thinks you’re almost as smart as he is. Smarter than any of the rest of us, it goes without saying.”
Mieza is a half-day’s ride away, far enough that it will mean staying there. I know vaguely of the place; there are caves, apparently, and it’s supposed to be cooler than Pella in the summertime. What else, I’m not sure. Pythias will have to manage on her own while I’m gone. Perhaps she’ll enjoy it.
“Leonidas disciplined the body,” Antipater says. “You’ll discipline the mind.”
I promise to do my best.
“Philip has great things in store for you too, don’t forget. He’s counting on you. You’ll be his man in Athens one of these days, the Macedonian brain in Athens’s skull.”
I bow my head.
We spend some minutes talking