• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 577 0

his voice was oddly high and strained for his big build (probably the root of the rumour about his gelding); he ignored Pythias utterly after he gave her to me. (Pythias is in all this somewhere, in my muddled, mud-coloured emotions, Pythias and Hermias’s balls, or the lack of them. It’s night now, and back in Pella she sleeps, here in Mieza the boys sleep, and here I sit remembering and writing in the doddering lamplight, my little bubble in the dark. Poor Pythias.) But I left him, and that’s bothering me tonight. He lived a rich life and offered me the fat and the comfort of it, and I walked away. He understood ambition and would laugh at what I’m trying to understand in myself right now. He would say I’m trying to make a simple thing complicated. An ambitious man wants to go to Athens, he’d say: salt the ocean!

I reread the hymn I’ve just written. Tomorrow to the copyist, and then to have it circulated. Like blowing a dandelion puff, soon enough one of those pages will land in Athens and my name will fall into place with a little click. Philip will have been seen to be manoeuvring for his easternmost foothold ever, laying the sub-floor for a full-scale Persian campaign. I, in my tiny capacity (love for Hermias = love for Macedon), will have been seen to be assisting him. Assisting Macedonian imperialism: and what state, even an Athens, is safe from that?

You see, they will say, how his Macedonian blood has frothed up in him. Oh, he is not the one we remember. He never really was one of us, now, was he? Oho!

I remember the first time I met Hermias, at a dinner in Athens while I was still a student. He brought greetings from Proxenus and the twins, and asked me about my work. We walked together afterwards, tugging the thread of our conversation on and on into the night with us, a long strand like a long line drawn on a map, from Athens to Atarneus to Mytilene to Pella to Mieza, as though if I turned around it would still be there and I might trace it back to that long-ago night when a powerful man invited me to visit him one day, and I was excited about that future.

AROUND THE TIME OF the harvest moon, I take the boys out stargazing. They’re sleepy and subdued, wrapped in their blankets, while above our heads the stars wheel. I lead them up a small hill not far from the temple and make them lie on their backs in the grass. A few immediately curl up and go back to sleep; one or two grumble about the cold and the damp ground. Alexander takes his usual place at my side. I let the boys show me the constellations they know, while the moon pales their faces with a milky half-light.

“What do you see?” Alexander asks eventually.

I tell him of the concentric spheres that make up the universe: how the earth is in the middle, the moon in the next nearest sphere, then the planets, then, in the outermost sphere, the fixed stars.

“How many spheres are there?” Alexander asks.

“Fifty-five. The math requires it. They move; the sky is not the same in the different months. You know this yourself. This is the rotation of the spheres. Each sphere’s rotation causes movement in the one adjacent to it. The outermost sphere is moved by the unmoved mover, or, if you like, by god. Each of the fifty-five lesser spheres, in addition to the impetus they gain from the spheres nearby, has its own lesser unmoved mover.”

Beside me I can hear that the boy’s breathing has slowed, but his eyes are open and unblinking. He gazes straight up all the time I speak.

“I can’t see the spheres,” he says. “Are they ever visible?”

I explain they’re made of crystal.

“Lysimachus says when I go to Persia the skies will be different,” Alexander says. “He says there are new stars there that no civilized man has seen, but I will see them. He says my greatest battles will be recorded in the constellations. My father’s never were, and never will be.”

“Perhaps Lysimachus will accompany you,” I say. “To Persia.”

“Inevitably. Will you?”

“Charging into battle on Tar?”

I can feel him grinning, though he still looks at the sky.

“You will write me great letters,”