The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [72]
I will have to find a nursemaid. Pythias is too weak to care for the child, and Athea—Athea, Athea. I won’t sand my baby girl down with such rough Northern paper.
“Go see for yourself.”
Little Pythias holds out her arms, and shouts at me when I don’t take her.
Ten days later I receive a response to my letter: the Academy thanks me for my interest, and informs me it has selected an Athenian, Xenocrates, to lead the school. He is a senior Academician, and known to all as a scholar, an able administrator, and a patriot.
At court, Alexander sits in a lesser chair beside the empty throne, Antipater beside him. They look over the Academy’s letter together. Alexander reads faster but pretends not to. I see his eyes fall from the paper to his lap when he’s done, even though his head never moves.
“I’ll put it in dispatches,” Antipater says. “Other business?”
I clear my throat. “I thought we might discuss other tactics. If there’s some leverage that might be used, some political pressure, some way of making them reverse the decision—”
“This is not a pressing issue,” Antipater says.
I look for something yielding in him. Grim mouth, unblinking eyes. His wife won’t sew with my wife. “I’m not Athenian,” I say.
He gestures at the letter as though to say, You want to be.
“We could have Xenocrates assassinated,” Alexander says.
“Other business,” Antipater says.
Smirks, sniggers. The other men in attendance are too old or too young to fight. I, of course, am neither.
“See to it yourself, my buck,” one of the old ones says, for me to overhear. “If you want it so badly.”
“He wants it,” another says. “Look at him. He’s crying.” Hisses from around the room.
“Shut up, all of you,” Alexander says. “My head hurts.”
Antipater looks up at me.
“I’ll do it myself,” Alexander says. “Why not? It’s a valuable position. We could use him there.”
“We will discuss this privately,” Antipater says. “Other business?”
“Fuck you,” Alexander says. “You’re not my father.”
“Let’s discuss it now, then,” Antipater says. “No. You are not going alone to Athens to snuff some hundred-year-old egghead with a protractor for a dick. You’re a prince of Macedon. That particular piece of nonsense is not for you.”
Antipater catches my eye.
“Xenocrates was a friend of mine, long ago,” I say. “We studied together.” I bow deeply to Alexander. “Forgive my emotion. My disappointment makes me irrational. Shall we discuss the embassies, instead? I had an idea—”
“Dismiss,” Antipater says.
A bark of laughter all around at the half-second it takes me to realize he’s talking to me. Alexander flinches at the sound.
“They abuse you,” the prince says that afternoon.
We’re alone. Hephaestion doesn’t show and Alexander has dismissed his remaining companions with a rare pissiness. “You, too,” he told Ptolemy, who hesitated at the door. “I’m sick of you. You like being a nursemaid?”
“Understandably,” I say now. “They’ve chosen me to represent what they hate. Whether that’s a fair choice is beside the point. How’s your head?”
“I should have thought it was the entire point. You were a friend to my father and to Antipater, and they treat you this way.”
I look at the range of possible responses to this and decide to lay down two or three at once.
“One, I would not so glorify myself as to call myself a friend to your father. I am his subject, his sometime adviser, and his son’s tutor. One does not easily befriend a king. Two, if your father loses to Athens, he loses everything. That is an enormous strain to be under; understandably, he and Antipater will be hostile to anyone even remotely connected with the enemy. Three, you yourself know friendship is a most complicated relationship, more complicated at times than the affection between man and wife. It is also the more valuable.”
He shrugs.
“No,” I say. “A king is at all times articulate.”
“Talk, talk, talk. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of lessons and diplomacy and staying home to charm visitors to my father’s court. Do you know what Carolus taught me? He said there is never truth in words,