The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [48]
Hephaestion punches Alexander in the arm. Alexander punches him back.
“Look.” I drop the dead bee onto the board. “How many parts does the body have?”
“Three,” the boys say.
“The head.” I touch each part as I name it with the tip of my father’s smallest knife. “The middle part, which in animals is the chest. And the stomach, here. A bee will go on living if you cut off its head or stomach, but not if you remove the middle. Bees have eyes and are able to smell, but they have no other sense organs that we can discern. They have stingers.”
“I know,” Alexander says ruefully.
“Four wings.” I delicately display them with the knife tip. “No two-winged insect has a stinger. The bee has no sheath for its wings. Do you know an insect that does?”
“Flying beetle,” Hephaestion says.
I feel the sun on my head, pricking out beads of sweat. The boys’ heads almost touch over the dead bee. The heat is winey on my tongue. I make an incision as delicately as I can.
“Blood?” I ask.
The boys shake their heads.
“And where does their sound come from?”
“The wings,” Alexander says.
“A good guess.”
“Wrong,” Hephaestion says.
“Piss off,” Alexander says.
I show them the pneuma and the membrane called the hypozoma, and explain how the friction of these two creates the sound of buzzing. The pneuma is like the lung of a breathing creature—though I take care to explain that insects do not really breathe—and the swelling and subsiding of the pneuma, because it’s greater when the insect is flying, produces a louder sound at that time. The hypozoma, I further explain, is the membrane through which the insect cools itself, as bees and some others—cicadas, wasps, flying beetles—are naturally hot creatures. I tell them, too, of insects that can live in fire, for there are animals in every other element—earth, air, water—and it follows logically that they must exist.
“I have never seen insects in fire,” Alexander says, and I tell him that’s because they’re very small.
When we get back to the temple, there’s a letter waiting to inform me that Hermias of Atarneus has died. I write immediately to Pythias. I don’t tell her the manner: that her guardian was ambushed by the Persians, detained, tortured, and crucified. Instead I tell her Hermias fell suddenly to the ground. I tell her I’ll arrange for the necessary sacrifices, and also write a commemorative hymn.
Better than gold, the sun is desolate at his passing, sacred to the Daughters of Memory, et cetera, et cetera. Well. I killed him, I suppose, or the treaty I carried to Philip did. It was never really a secret. Demosthenes in Athens rails against Philip’s eastward scheming like a drip-mouthed dog. The Persians tolerated Hermias while he kept to himself, all nice and tucked in and trim about his territories, but once he started helping himself, just this one more village, and this tasty one too, and once he reached out to Philip as protector against his protectors, well. I massage my palm with my thumb while feeling with my index finger between the bones in the back of my hand, deluding myself about the pain (mightn’t you nestle a nail through there smoothly, somehow?). Guilt is not quite the word. If it hadn’t been me, someone else would have been the messenger. But he was ever kind to me, wanted to learn from me, gifted me my wife. Different if I had wanted a city, no doubt. I can imagine the dawning, sharpening look on his face. Perhaps he would have liked me even more. And he was such good company: he really did read in his spare time, really did like to sit and talk quietly about what he’d read, really did like to bask in the warm Atarnean evening sipping a cup of his own purple wine made by his own subjects from his own fat grapes, listening to the boom of his own waves and the lowing of his own dear beeves, see his own birds embroider the fragrant air of his own sky over his head, and talk through ideas of form and content and the mystical reality of the Good. His hair had a little curl; his nose had been broken, attractively;