The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [77]
“You should come,” Alexander says. “March with the army, see the battle. Do you want to die never having seen a battle? Like a woman?”
“You want to teach me. You want me to become the student.”
“I’ve been thinking.” He lies back down and closes his eyes against the sun in a show of casualness. Too casual; something is coming. “I’ve been thinking about the forms that you explained to us that very first day. Do you remember? The chameleon? And how you said that there’s something all chameleons must share, a chameleon form, but that it can’t be in some other world? That it has to be in this world for us to be able to perceive it, and to account for change?”
“I remember.”
“And what we spoke of the day before yesterday, about finding the mean between two extremes. The point of balance. I’ve been thinking the same applies to people. We’re all versions of each other. Repetitions, cycles. You see it best in families, the repetition of physical traits and characteristics. My hair comes from my mother, my height from my father. I’m the point of balance between them. But even more than that. You and my father. Me and my brother.” He opens his eyes, briefly, can’t bear not to see my reaction. “Just versions of the same form, do you see? Opposing extremes, but also versions of the same form.”
I can’t help mentally adding my own pairings: my master and myself, our nephews, Speusippus and Callisthenes, Lysimachus and Leonidas, Olympias and Pythias, Pythias and Herpyllis, Illaeus—now there’s an interesting fulcrum. Illaeus and my master, Illaeus and my father, Illaeus and myself. Carolus and my father. Alexander and—?
“You see the consequences, don’t you?” He’s sitting up again now, eyes wide. He sees what he wants to say quicker than he sees the words to say it. “Macedonians and Greeks, Greeks and Persians. The same form. All just versions of each other.”
“An entertaining lay application of some extremely complex ideas. You might make a philosopher after all, with a few decades’ more study and no distractions.”
“That’ll happen,” he says.
“I wish it would. You can’t develop such ideas beyond the merely entertaining if you’re constantly riding off to war.”
“Merely entertaining? It’s a philosophy of war itself. Every battle is against a version of your own self. Every enemy—” I’m holding a hand up to cut him off. “Every Persian—”
“We’ve had this discussion.”
“Every Athenian, then. Would you deny you have an Athenian self as much as a Macedonian self?”
I open my mouth to speak, think, stop.
“You go into every battle knowing you’re fighting your own self.”
“That would be a thing to see,” I admit.
“So you’ll come?”
Ah. “Your father wouldn’t allow it.”
“My father wouldn’t notice. No one would ask you to fight. You could travel with the medics.”
That old nightmare. But then I think of him holding his hand out to Arrhidaeus at the water’s edge. He’s trying to help me toward something.
“It’s important to him,” I tell Pythias later. “Love, you’re unreasonable. He will take me under his own protection.”
“Little good that will do you if he is defeated,” she says from her bed.
“If we are defeated, it will not matter for long where I am. Pella will be no safer. I thought,” I add, changing tactics, “I thought you had some affection for him.”
“I have some affection for you,” she says, but when I move closer, moved, she closes her eyes and turns to stone.
I go to the baby’s room. At eighteen months she’s already tall and speaks well for her age, with many grown-up words and turns of phrase all cute in her mouth. Her moods—stubbornness, rages—remind me of Arimneste and get on my nerves a little, though Pythias thinks she’ll outgrow them. I’m not so sure. She took Athea’s departure hard but is quiet today, fortunately, playing in-and-out with some wooden blocks and bowls from the kitchen. I get down on the floor beside her, knees popping smartly, and show her how to make a tower by building smaller onto bigger. She watches, learns. I hide her blocks inside bowls, in my fist, under my sandal, and watch her find