The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [71]
Pythias has been distracted lately, frowning, and asks me to write a brief life of Hermias for a keepsake, which I do one morning in the courtyard while my fat daughter sits on the sun-warmed stones, babbling and staring at her fingers. I haven’t permitted her to be swaddled, believing it inhibits the development of the muscles. And here she is, a healthy baby, pink and blooming; Hermias’s own blood, perhaps, babbling prettily in the sun. I think the old fox would have been moved despite himself.
“It’s lovely,” Pythias says.
“I was thinking of our Little Pythias as I wrote it.”
She thanks me again, then frowns and puts a hand to her side. A moment later I’m calling for the slaves, supporting her in my arms. She has to be carried to her bed, where she lies in great pain for several days.
“What is?” Athea asks me. She’s stopped me in the hall outside our bedroom. Asks; demands, truly. She doesn’t look happy.
“I don’t know.”
“I look. Is no baby again.”
“She is not pregnant, no.”
“I’m tell you,” she says, annoyed. “Is sickness.”
“She is a little warm. Apart from the pain in the belly, there is some paleness, a bit of sweating. Cool cloths, I think, and a light diet. Clear liquids. We will wait a few days and watch how it progresses.” I have begun a case study, as my father would have; my first since boyhood. I’m not happy, either.
“I tell women,” Athea says.
I’m not sure I understand; I wonder if it is the chasm between our languages, if something is getting lost there. “You are her woman,” I say, slowly, loudly. “I am instructing you in her care. You are skilled in these things, more than the others; you will follow my instructions and report to me if there is any change.”
“No,” Athea says. “I tell women. I no do with sick.”
For a moment I have no words. Then: “What are you talking about?”
“I no do with sick.” She crosses her arms across her breast for emphasis, a bit of business that makes me think briefly of Carolus.
I could hit her, whip her, maim her, slit her thick throat for impudence. Could.
“I tell women for you,” she says. “Cool cloth, light food. I tell.”
“Will you not do what you’re told?”
She shrugs.
It comes out of me before I can stop it: “Please.”
She flinches. I might as well have hit her, because I can’t keep her now.
“You stupid woman,” I say.
The talk at court is of war and war and war, now, but Philip is playing a deeper game, and once again his army seems to stall. He takes the port city of Naupactus but then sends embassies to Thebes and Athens. Word comes, too, that Speusippus has died at Athens. With Philip in a diplomatic mood, I write immediately to put my name up for election as leader of the Academy, and write to let Philip know. At night, by lamplight, I sit with Pythias and tell her about Athens, try to conjure it for her in the shadows. She’s a flower, I tell her, in Macedonian mud; her refinement is better suited to a Southern life. The weather is milder there, I tell her, none of these endless winter rains. The houses, it’s true, are smaller, but more tasteful and elegant. The temples are more diverse, the food more tempting, the theatre more sophisticated. The greatest actors, the greatest music in the world! And the Academy (is she asleep? no, the room is too silent; she’s listening), the Academy, where the greatest minds apply themselves to the greatest problems, where one glimpses order behind the chaos. On and on I speak, sketching the beauty of the life I’ll arrange there, the tranquillity, and eventually, toward morning, she sleeps.
The next day, as she lies drenched and feverish, I palpate her swollen belly and she screams.
“How is lady?” Athea stops me again in the hall,