The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [66]
Back in the hall, I say, “Does it?”
Antipater beckons me away from the door. “Every account I got, from every soldier I asked, said he was brilliant. Everything textbook. Said he threw his spear like he was at games, just beautiful. Effortless. He could have hung back and let his men do it, but he led. He went first on every charge. That’s what his father needs to know, and that’s what I told him. This other, we’ll put it down to first-time nerves. Find your own way out?”
“Soldier’s heart,” I say. “Did you ever have it?”
Antipater stalks off down the hall. “Never,” he calls back, without turning around.
Hephaestion is still awake, as I’d hoped. “He didn’t tell you? Maybe he didn’t want to say anything in front of Antipater. He killed a boy who was trying to surrender. He’d thrown his weapons away and got down on his knees, crying for his mother. He can’t stop thinking about it. Do you have any of that poppy seed after all?”
I look through my bag. “Not too much, though. It’ll make you sleepy.”
“Not for me, for Alexander. He gets headaches.”
I show him how to grind it down, what dosage, and screw a sample portion in a twist of cloth. “He feels guilty for killing the boy, then.”
“No, he enjoyed it. He said it was his favourite kill of the battle.”
“He ranks them?”
“Oh, we all do that.” Hephaestion moves his arm gingerly. “I think he went back after, though, and did something to the body.”
“Do you know what?”
“No. He made me stay behind.”
I believe him.
“But that’s when it started. Whatever he did to the boy, after he was already dead.”
THREE YEARS AFTER IT BEGAN, Philip’s Thracian campaign is over. Callisthenes and I go into the city with thousands of others to greet the returning army and watch Alexander walk to his father, holding out a bowlful of wine, which Philip accepts as the traditional libation of a king returning to his city. They embrace and the people cheer. They turn and continue the walk to the palace together, Philip’s arm around Alexander’s shoulders. I’ve heard no gossip about Alexander since my late-night visit to the palace—nothing, that is, beyond the usual do-they-or-don’t-they speculations about him and Hephaestion—nor have I been summoned for a lesson. The former I attribute to Antipater’s white-knuckle discretion, the latter to my student’s. I’ve seen him naked now, the soft white places; soft, or rotten. We both need time to forget.
We stay a long time to watch the procession that follows them. The news of Philip’s long withdrawal from Thrace, after the disappointments of Perinthus and Byzantium, precedes him.
A campaign in Scythia netted some twenty thousand captives, women and children, as well as another twenty thousand breeding mares, flocks, and herds. Philip’s army battled the Triballians on the way home, encumbered by all this living baggage, and were forced to leave a good deal of it behind. It was a vicious battle. Philip took a spear to the thigh and lay for a time pinned beneath his own dead horse. He was briefly taken for dead, and he limps distinctly now. A representative sampling of Thracian women and children and geese and ducks and pregnant horses and Triballian prisoners are paraded past. Along the way, too, Philip has picked up a sixth wife, a Getic princess named Meda, and here she is in a blue dress and sandals, walking in the middle of this great mess of prisoners and soldiers and horses, a blonde for his collection. I remember my long-ago description to Pythias of Thracian women, but she has no tattoos that I can see. Pythias will have to sew with her soon enough, no doubt, and will be able to inform me definitively.
But the invitation never comes. Pythias points this out to me one evening as we’re getting ready for bed. “I haven’t been asked up to the palace in ages,” she says. “By Olympias or anyone. Also I sent a note to Antipater’s wife asking her to visit and she never replied. Have I done something wrong?”
I press the heel of my hand to my forehead, trying to hold back a headache. “They perceive us as Athenian.”
She laughs. “What?