The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [6]
“Your eye.”
Philip barks once, a single unit of laughter, and allows me to study the pale rivulet of a scar through the left eyebrow, the permanently closed lid. We are our fathers now.
“An arrow,” Philip says. “A bee sting for my troubles.”
Around us courtiers laugh. Barbarians, supposedly, but I see only men of my own height and build. Small Philip is an anomaly. He wears a short beard now, but is as full-lipped as I remember him, broad-browed, with a drinker’s flush across the nose and cheeks. An amiable asshole, sprung straight from boyhood to middle age.
I left off my accounting to Pythias with Philip’s invasion of Thrace. From there he went on to Chalcidice, my own homeland, a three-fingered fist of land thrust into the Aegean. An early casualty was the village of my birth. Our caravan passed by that way, three days ago now; a significant detour, but I needed to see it. Little Stageira, strung across the saddle of two hills facing the sea. The western wall was rubble, the guard towers too. My father’s house, mine now, badly burned; the garden uprooted, though the trees seemed all right. The fishing boats along the shore, burned. Paving stones had been prised up from the streets, and the population, men and women I’d known since childhood, dispersed. The destruction was five years old. News of it had first reached me just before I left Athens and the Academy for Hermias’s court, but I couldn’t face it until now. Weeds crept their green lace over doorsteps, birds nested in empty rooms, and there was no corpse smell. Sounds: sea and gulls, sea and gulls.
“An easy journey?” Philip asks.
Macedonians pride themselves on speaking freely to their king. I remind myself we were children together, and take a breath. Not an easy journey, no, I tell him. Not easy to see my father’s estate raped. Not easy to imagine the cast of my childhood banished. Not easy to have my earliest childhood memories splotched with his army’s piss. “Poor policy,” I tell him. “To destroy your own land and terrorize your own people?”
He’s not smiling, but not angry either. “I had to,” he says. “The Chalcidician League had Athens behind it, or would have if I’d waited much longer. Wealthy, strong fortifications, a good jumping-off spot if you felt like attacking Pella. I had to close that door. You’re going to tell me we’re at peace with Athens now. We’re on the Amphictyonic Council together, best friends. I’d like nothing better, believe me. I’d like to think they’re not building a coalition against me as we speak. I’d like to think they could just learn their fucking place. Reasonably, one reasonable man to another, are they going to rule the world again? Did they ever, truly? Are they hiding another Pericles someplace? Could they take Persia again? Reasonably?”
Ah, one of my favourite words. “Reasonably, no.”
“Speaking of Persia, I think you have something for me.”
Hermias’s proposal. I hand it to Philip, who hands it to an aide, who puts it away.
“Persia,” Philip says. “I could take Persia, with a little peace and quiet at my back.”
This surprises me; not the ambition, but the confidence. “You’ve got a navy?” The Macedon of my childhood had twenty warships to Athens’s three hundred and fifty.
“Athens has my navy.”
“Ah.”
“You can’t be sweeter than I’ve been,” Philip says. “Sweeter or more accommodating or more understanding. I let them off easy every time, freeing prisoners, returning territory. Demosthenes should make a speech or two about that.”
Demosthenes, the Athenian orator who gives poisonous, roaring speeches against Philip in the Athenian assembly. I saw him once in the marketplace when I was a student. He was buying wine, chatting.
“What do you think of him?” Philip asks.
“Bilious, choleric,” I diagnose. “I prescribe less wine, more milk and cheese. Avoid stressful situations. Avoid hot weather. Chew each bite of food thoroughly. Retire from public life. Cool cloths to the forehead.