The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [67]
“Me, then, and you as an extension of me. We’re at war. I was afraid of this.”
“You’re joking.” She sees my face. “You are joking. The king trusts you to tutor his heir. If Philip doesn’t doubt your loyalty, why should anyone else?”
“You expect reason to govern passion. You’ve been around me too long.”
She grabs my hand and clasps it to her belly; the baby’s kicking. Her face is a joyful question.
“Yes,” I say. “There.”
“Not long now.”
“You think?”
She wrinkles her nose. “How much heavier can I get?”
“All the more reason not to go trekking up to the palace, then. Maybe they’re just mindful of your condition—Baby,” I add sternly, “stop pummelling your mother.”
“No, it’s nice.” She shifts a little in the bed, trying to get comfortable. “It’s different this time, isn’t it? War with Athens will be different from all the other wars. If Philip loses—”
I clap my hands over my ears.
“If Philip wins—”
“When.”
“When Philip wins—”
“That’s it.”
“He’ll rule the world?”
I lean down to kiss her belly.
“Won’t he?”
“This isn’t a battle with the Triballians. Philip stands to lose more than a few thousand geese. It’s an endgame this time. Endgame—”
“I understand.”
“It’s a bad time to be associated with Athens, however distantly. We should plant crocuses.”
Pythias raises her eyebrows.
“Philip won a battle against the Thessalians in a crocus field. It’s considered patriotic.”
“Crocuses,” Pythias says.
“By the front gate, where people will see.”
“And that will take care of it?” Pythias says.
By early autumn, she’s confined and my presence at home is unwelcome. I tell Athea I’ve attended any number of births, assisting my father, but she waves me away. “You faint.”
“I will not.”
“You see wife, all bloody, open between like meat. You never fuck her no more.”
“Even if that were to be the case, I can’t see how it would be your business.”
She laughs. “Trust me little bit, okay? I know how. If problem, I send for you. Better for you, better for her. She no scream, cry, push in front of you. You know.”
I do know. That sounds about right, astute, even. My father believed slaves should treat slaves and free should treat free, but he never had a witch, and especially not one his wife liked and trusted. “You will send for me immediately if there are any problems.”
“Yes, yes, yes.” She pushes me away, actually puts her hands on my arm and pushes me.
She’s happy, I realize. This is her job, what she knows how to do, what she wants to do and hasn’t been allowed to. She won’t make a mistake.
I’m just walking into the street, thinking to drop in on my nephew, when a courier approaches to say the prince requires my presence for a lesson.
“Wait,” I tell the courier, and run to the back of the house for supplies.
At the palace, in our usual courtyard, the prince and Hephaestion are wrestling. They go at each other in silence, ferociously. I clear my throat softly, but only one or two of the younger pages looks at me, then away. I slowly pace the perimeter of the courtyard, under the colonnade, where the pages have encircled the fight. Through the forest of them I glimpse the sexual grappling of their leaders: a foot hooking an ankle, sudden collapse, a turtling stasis as Haephestion presses his chest to Alexander’s back and tries to yank him off his fours and onto the floor, tiled with the sixteen-point starburst of the Macedonian royal house.
“A power struggle,” I murmur to Ptolemy, who stands as is his habit a little apart from the younger boys. Alexander’s cousin does not reply. I’ve tried before to engage with him on a different level from the other pages, a level more suited to his maturity, with quiet asides and small ironies, but Ptolemy is loyal to the prince and cannot be cut away from him. He tolerates my dry little droppings of wit with the barest of grace and moves subtly away from me, as now, without apology. Yet I know him to be intelligent, and wonder why our minds don’t resonate in greater concord, like strings on a common instrument. I know from Leonidas that Ptolemy has a passion