The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [63]
I ATTEND THE TEMPLE of Dionysus at Pythias’s request, to thank the god for her pregnancy. I give the attendant money for a pure white lamb.
“The god is pleased,” the attendant says.
It’s an expensive choice—these things get around—and I decide to enjoy it a little, the luxury of it. A slice across the throat, blood caught darkly in bronze bowls, and then a bit of amateur butchering to release some thigh meat from the animal’s sinews to throw on the fire. An attendant makes off with the rest of the carcass. Lucky attendants today, lucky tummies.
I’m washing up when I see Philes kneeling before a slightly larger than life-size statue of the god. It’s a lovely piece in white marble. The god’s long curls are twined with ivy. The torso is muscular but sleek, the hips narrow, the legs strong, the feet bare. The face shows restrained amusement, not what you might first associate with the god, and always suiting my mood when I have to come here. The nurse is praying fiercely, eyes closed, rocking a little, tears running down his cheeks.
· · ·
“HELLO,” ARRHIDAEUS SAYS.
“What are you doing?” He holds up his tablet for me to see. “No, tell me,” I say. “Use your words.”
“Drawing.”
I have more time for him now that his younger brother is occupied elsewhere. I look at what he wants to show me, something like a face: a circle, anyway, with eyes and a line for a nose, a swirl of hair, and another line for a mouth.
“He needs ears.”
Arrhidaeus dutifully frowns over the task, and soon the circle has smaller circles appended to its sides.
“Does he have a name?”
The prince laughs and won’t tell me.
“Can you write it?”
“No,” he says confidently.
I take him through the alpha-beta-gamma, which he recites fluently now. “What letter does it start with?”
“Horse,” he says. So we talk about the ways to draw a horse, the parts a person would need: body, muzzle, legs, mane, tail.
“I would draw an oval for the body, rather than a circle.” I look over his shoulder. “Like an egg. Where is your nurse today?”
“Take a bath.”
Philes has been friendlier since the invitation to supper. He could hardly be otherwise, but I feel myself changing toward him too, softening. I have a little plan for him, a little idea I want to test. Not today or tomorrow but soon, I anticipate.
I tell Arrhidaeus to fetch his lyre and he frowns harder in concentration over his drawing, pretending not to have heard. His body is cleaner and stronger; his language is improving and so is his dexterity—hence the drawing, which I’ve long encouraged him toward—but he seems, distressingly, to hate music. Who hates music? He’s clumsy, of course, and can’t fit his thick fingers to the simplest positions on the instrument from one week to the next, which is forgivable, but my persistence seems to infect his reaction to all music, and he flinches away if I strum the lyre myself or even if he should hear someone singing in passing. Hates what he cannot master: there’s a lesson there, I suppose, though I wish a sweet melody would make him smile and relax and that could be the end of it.
“Is it necessary?” Philes asked at a previous session, with Arrhidaeus cowering in a corner in snotty tears, the instrument flung down and cracked on the stone floor. “He can’t even clap a steady beat, and he sings like a cow calving.”
“So do I,” I said, but I liked something the nurse had said. “Come for a walk with me, both of you.”
Their preparations were painfully slow, as always, but when we were finally outside I asked the nurse to clap his hands in rhythm with his steps. I did the same. Arrhidaeus ignored us. He’d become a canny animal, knowing when a lesson was coming, and this was how he resisted. I took his hand and beat it against my own in time with our steps. He allowed this.
“Begin there,” I told the nurse. “We’ll come back to the instrument later, as you suggest.” I’d found by then that treating the nurse as a peer, pretending my ideas came from him, warmed him until