The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [50]
“War.”
I’m disappointed and tell him so. “There is more. There is so much more. You want to march all that way for the battle-thrill? To sit tall on a horse and watch your enemy go down? To—I don’t even know what it is you do—swipe your sword this way and that and watch the limbs fly?”
“You don’t know what it is we do,” he repeats.
“I know what your father expects. Tribute, tax revenue. All those wealthy cities and satrapies up and down the coast. They’re used to paying up to foreigners; they’d pay your father as soon as the next man. But what do you expect?”
“You’ve lived there. You tell me.”
“I found family and friends. I found what I went for and what I expected to find.” And I squinted my eyes to stop from seeing everything at the edges: the dirt, the disease, the people without art or math or civilized music, sitting around their fires in the evenings, muttering in their ugly language, eating their smelly foods, thinking their short-legged-animal thoughts of eating and sexing and shitting. Dirty, obsequious, uncivilized. I tell the prince as much, teach him what I know to be true about the land he so romanticizes.
“You know what I’d do?” He’s up on his elbows now. “I’d sit at their fires and listen to their music and eat their food and wear their clothes. I’d go with their women.”
I hear the blush in his voice though I can’t see it on his face. Go with—a sweet pink euphemism from a hale Macedonian boy. He loves Hephaestion.
“I wouldn’t go all that way just to keep my eyes closed.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” And I tell him about Hermias.
“Well, but that’s war,” he says. “You’re going to hate an entire nation because you lost one friend?”
“You’re going to love an entire nation to annoy your teacher?”
“Yes.”
“No. Not funny. You think you can go there, sit yourself down at their fires, make yourself at home? You’d have to conquer them first.”
“That’s the plan.”
“You’ll have to destroy their world just to get into it. What’ll it be worth to you then?”
“I’m not like you. I’m not like my father. I don’t want to do things the old ways. I have so many ideas. All my soldiers will be clean-shaven, you know why? So no one can get a hold of their beards in combat. My father would never think of something like that. I’ll dress like they do so they’ll let their guard down with me. Persia, I’m not afraid of Persia. I don’t need to know what I’ll find before I get there.”
Inevitably, I think of my own advice to Speusippus. Youthful bravado, then? Was Speusippus as annoyed with me as I am now with my own student? Serves me right?
“Artabazus.” He points at me like he’s scored.
Philip’s pet Persian, a renegade satrap and refugee, these past few months, in the Macedonian court, thanks to some quarrel with his own king. Canny, charming. He wrote me a letter of condolence for Hermias.
“I like him,” Alexander says. “He’s told me a lot about his country. You can’t hate Artabazus.”
“Lovely marine life.”
Alexander looks at me, waiting for the punch line.
“I caught an octopus there, once. Netted it in the water, brought it slowly, slowly back to shore. I kept the net nice and loose so I wouldn’t damage it. Slowly, carefully, I lifted it out of the water and laid it on the sand. It died.”
“The lesson?” Alexander says.
“You make the world larger for yourself by conquering it, but you always lose something in the process. You can learn without conquering.”
“You can,” he says.
AT HOME, I PRESENT the hymn to Pythias and tell her I want to plan a dinner: some friends and colleagues and a few new faces for a meal and wine and conversation. I tell her I want it to be like the communal dinners from my student days, when everyone brought a dish and shared, but Pythias refuses. She says guests in her house will not bring food, and she’ll order Tycho to turn away anyone who tries.
“Your house?” I’m delighted. “Your house!”
She will