The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [7]
Philip doesn’t laugh. He cocks his head to the side, looking at me, deciding something. It’s unnerving.
“The army’s moving?” I say. “I saw the preparations as we arrived. Thessaly again, is it?”
“Thessaly again, then Thrace again.” Abruptly: “You brought your family?”
“My wife and nephew.”
“Healthy?”
I thank him for his interest and return the question, ritually. Philip begins to speak of his sons. The one a champion, godling, genius, star. The other—
“Yes, yes,” Philip says. “You’ll have a look at the older one for me.”
I nod.
“Look at yourself,” Philip repeats, genuinely perplexed this time. “You’re dressed like a woman.”
“I’ve been away.”
“I make it twenty years.”
“Twenty-five. I left when I was seventeen.”
“Piece of shit,” he says again. “Where do you go from here?”
“Athens, to teach. I know, I know. But the Academy still rules a few small worlds: ethics, metaphysics, astronomy. In my job, you have to go where the best minds are if you want to leave your mark.”
He rises, and his courtiers around him. “We’ll hunt together before I leave.”
“It would be an honour.”
“And you’ll have a look at my son,” he says again. “Let’s see if you have some art.”
A NURSE ADMITS ME to the elder son’s room. He’s tall but his affliction makes his age difficult to guess. He walks loosely, palsied like an old man, and his eyes move vaguely from object to object in the room. While the nurse and I talk, his fingers drift up to his mouth and pluck repeatedly at his lower lip. Sitting or standing, awkwardly turning this way and that as he is instructed, he seems affable enough but is clearly an idiot. His room is decorated for a child much younger, with balls and toys and carved animals strewn on the floor. The smell is thick, an animal musk.
“Arrhidaeus,” he slurs proudly, when I ask him his name. I have to ask twice, repeating myself after the nurse tells me the boy is hard of hearing.
Despite the mask of foolishness, I can see the king his father in him, in the breadth of his shoulders and the frank laughter when something pleases him, when I take deep breaths or open my mouth as wide as I can to show the boy what I want him to do. The nurse says he’s sixteen, and had been an utterly healthy child, handsome and beloved, until the age of five. He fell ill, the nurse says, and the whole house mourned, thinking he could not possibly survive the fever, the headaches, the strange stiffness in the neck, the vomiting, and finally the seizures and the ominous lethargy. But perhaps what had happened was worse.
“Not worse.” I study the boy’s nose and ears, the extension of his limbs, and test the soft muscles against my own. “Not worse.”
Though privately I thrill to the various beauty and order of the world, and this boy gives me a pang of horror.
“Take this.” I hand Arrhidaeus a wax tablet. “Can you draw me a triangle?”
But he doesn’t know how to hold the stylus. When I show him, he crows with delight and begins to scratch wavering lines. When I draw a triangle, he laughs. Inevitably I think of my own masters at school, with their modish theories about the workings of the mind. There have been always true thoughts in him … which only need to be awakened into knowledge by putting questions to him …
“He is unused,” I say. “The mind, the body. I will give you exercises. You are his companion?”
The nurse nods.
“Take him to the gymnasium with you. Teach him to run and catch a ball. Have the masseur work on his muscles, especially the legs. You read?”
The nurse nods again.
“Teach him his letters. Aloud, first, and later have him draw them with his finger in the sand. That will be easier for him than the stylus, at least to start with. Kindly, mind you.”
“Alpha, beta, gamma,” the boy says, beaming.
“Good!” I ruffle his hair. “That’s very good, Arrhidaeus.”
“For a while my father taught both children,” the nurse says. “I was their companion. The younger one is very bright. Arrhidaeus parrots him. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Delta,” I say, ignoring the nurse.
“Delta,” Arrhidaeus says.
“I want to see him every morning until