The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [59]
I tell Tycho to bring him a plate of food.
“Dotes on him,” Lysimachus continues. “Poor bastard. You should have seen them at Mieza, when he thought they were alone. I know, I know, I wasn’t supposed to be there. But if the prince wishes it—”
“I thought I’d seen you, once or twice,” I say. “You didn’t have to hide from me.”
“Besotted with him,” Lysimachus says. “Oh, gods, that gives him a thrill. Look at him. Just an animal like the rest of us, after all. Don’t worry, I haven’t told anyone who’d care.”
“Don’t threaten me,” I say. “Eat your food.”
He takes the plate from Tycho. “Goat!” He laughs and starts to eat.
I’m aware of my guests watching me.
“I’d fuck him,” Lysimachus says, mouth full. “He smells so nice. Been there yet?”
It’s Antipater I’m most aware of. “That’s enough,” I say.
“All creamy and tight and miserably confused,” Lysimachus says. “I’d fuck him senseless.”
“We’re not talking about anyone I know,” Antipater says.
Then everyone is leaving. I walk them into the street.
“I’m drunk,” Lysimachus says loudly to Antipater, to me. “I didn’t mean anything by it. Anyway, you’re old enough to be his father.”
“I am,” I say.
We look at each other.
“You’re not his father, though,” he says, more quietly.
“I know that.”
“I love him,” he says, so only I will hear.
I nod.
“Maybe you could—” he begins, but Artabazus is at his elbow, smiling and bowing his thanks to me, leading him gently away.
“I know where he lives, not far from me,” Artabazus says. “We will go together, and so. I thank you many thousands of times.”
“And I you,” I say, meaning Lysimachus.
He nods, knows.
Antipater is waiting by the door, shaking his head.
“I guess you heard all that,” I say.
“Not a fucking thing. I only hear what I can put in dispatches.”
“What about Olympias?”
Antipater shakes his head again. He gave me the hour I asked for in Mieza, two weeks ago, but made it clear he was giving it to me, not to her. “Devoted tutors are one thing, meddling queens are another. She’s in seclusion for a while.”
Back inside, after those brief breaths of sharp street air, the atmosphere is close, still thick with food and wine. I pour myself a last cup and take it in to see Pythias in our room. She’s waiting up for me, dozing over her needlework by a table full of candles to give her enough light. She starts awake when she senses me standing near. “Scared me.”
“What are you making?”
She holds it up to show me: a bit of elaborate embroidery, a landscape crawling with tiny figures all in pink and red. It’s pretty.
I sit on the bed while she puts her work aside and blows out most of the candles. I tell her about the evening, about how everyone praised the food and how Lysimachus was more or less the pest I’d thought he might be, and how Antipater gave his best to her specially, and how lovely the house looked and how it had been like having her in the room with me, looking every way and seeing her work there.
“And what did you talk about?” She knows that’s the main thing.
I close my eyes to imagine each of them going home. Antipater, stumbling by the end—bored, I suppose, and so drinking more than usual, or maybe that is usual for him—I don’t know him very well—has the palace to go to, to a wife Pythias is cordial with and has sewn with once or twice (older than us, she has told me, a bit stern and formal, which Pythias can manage very well; she’ll end up that way herself, probably. Rude to the servants, which Pythias doesn’t like, but modest in her clothing and her gossip, as suits a woman of her position, of which Pythias approves). I wonder if she warms the bed for him, or if they use separate rooms. Artabazus the bachelor won’t sleep alone. I don’t quite know how I know this, but I’d bet on it. He lives in a grand house near the courts, the kind Pythias and Callisthenes find so painful, too big for one man and sumptuously decorated. He might as well swag money around