The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [61]
This is the best sex we will ever have.
My father explained to me once that human male sperm was a potent distillation of all the fluids in the body, and that when those fluids became warm and agitated they produced foam, just as in cooking or sea water. The fluid or foam passes from the brain into the spine, and from there through the veins along the kidneys, then via the testicles into the penis. In the womb, the secretion of the man and the secretion of the woman are mixed together, though the man experiences pleasure in the process and the woman does not. Even so, it is healthy for a woman to have regular intercourse, to keep the womb moist, and to warm the blood.
I FALL SICK, my old usual. It encroaches slowly, as it always does, slowly enough that I can persuade myself it’s nothing this time, only fatigue, only tension from the palace preventing my sleep, hurting my head, nibbling at my memory, sucking colour from the sky and warmth from the world. I grow short-tempered, snapping at the slaves, who remain impassive. I suppose they’ve seen it before, and anyway it’s nothing this time, just fatigue, just tension.
“It’s this miserable climate,” Pythias says. “Always raining, always dark. I feel it myself, sometimes.”
“What is it you feel?” The impatience that makes me bark at the slaves makes me over-formal, over-polite, and wilfully obtuse with her. I don’t need to be told I have a woman’s problem, and I above all don’t need Athea sniffing round me after a few dropped words from her lady, lecturing, prescribing, curing for all I know, and gaining strength from my weakness thereby.
“Tired,” Pythias says. “Sad. Soft, sort of, in my thinking. I forget things, can’t summon the energy to do all the things I would normally do in a day.”
“I feel better already. To have a partner in suffering. My books go unwritten, your sewing goes undone. What a consolation to me, to know I am not alone.”
“Don’t be nasty,” she says.
“Love.” I repent immediately, but she’s already out of the room. Still, I can’t accept that what afflicts me is not somehow unique, a disorder with no previous name. Long ago my father diagnosed in me an excess of black bile, which is true enough some of the time, but does not account for the other times, when I simply don’t need sleep, and the books seem to write themselves, and the world seems painted into every last corner with colour and sweetness, a kind of glowing, divine infusion. Nor, again, does it account for the whiplashing from the one condition to the next, from black melancholy to golden joy. Though melancholy has always been the more predominant of the two states, and has become increasingly so as I’ve grown older. Perhaps one day I’ll cease to have moods, as my mother long ago called them, altogether, and will simply settle into a constant state of bitterness and misery, a pain not physical but no less a burden for that.
Philip is home from Thrace after an absence of some eighteen months; not the happiest homecoming, and he’ll be heading back again in a week or two with his replacement troops, leaving behind some of his longest-serving units for a well-earned winter at home. At court we hear the details. The cities of Perinthus and Byzantium, probably goaded on by Athens, refused to assist Philip’s efforts in Eastern Thrace. While the Athenians sharked their navy up and down the coast, Philip went after Perinthus. Built on a long, narrow headland, the city was difficult to attack by land, and Philip’s navy was weak. Siege, then, and a chance to try out the shiny new Macedonian torsion and arrow-shooting catapults. The catapult attacks were conducted in relay, day and night. They used battering-rams; they had sappers to tunnel under the city walls and scaling ladders to get over them; they built towers the height of fifteen men to let them shoot down on the enemy, over the walls. When the wall was finally breached, Philip’s troops poured in, only to discover a second