The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [8]
The nurse holds out his hand to Arrhidaeus, who takes it. They rise to leave. Suddenly Arrhidaeus’s face lights up and he begins to clap his hands, while the nurse bows. I turn. In the doorway stands a woman my own age in a simple grey dress. Her red hair is dressed elaborately in long loops and curls, hours’ worth, fixed with gems and amber. Her skin is dry and freckled. Her eyes are clear brown.
“Did he tell you?” she asks me. “Did my husband tell you how I poisoned this poor child?”
The nurse has gone stone-still. The woman and Arrhidaeus have their arms around each other’s waists, and she fondly kisses the crown of his head.
“Olympias poisoned Arrhidaeus,” she singsongs. “That’s what they all say. Jealous of her husband’s eldest son. Determined to secure the throne for her own child. Isn’t that what they say?” Arrhidaeus laughs, clearly understanding nothing. “Isn’t it?” she asks the nurse.
The young man’s mouth opens and closes, like a fish’s.
“You may leave us,” she says. “Yes, puppet,” she adds, when Arrhidaeus insists on giving her a hug. He runs after his nurse.
“Forgive me,” I say when they’re gone. “I didn’t recognize you.”
“But I knew you. Philip told me all about you. Can you help the child?”
I repeat what I told the nurse, about developing the boy’s existing faculties as opposed to seeking a cure.
“Your father was a doctor, yes? But you, I think, are not.”
“I have many interests,” I say. “Too many, I’m told. My knowledge is not as deep as his was, but I have a knack for seeing things whole. That child could be more than he is.”
“That child belongs to Dionysus.” She touches her heart. “There is more to him than reason. I have a fierce affection for him, despite what you may hear. Anything you do for him, I will take as a personal favour.”
Her voice rings false, the low vibrancy of it, the formality of her sentences, the practised whiff of sex. More than reason? She sets off a simmer of irritation in me, hot and dark and not entirely unpleasant.
“Anything I can do for you, I will,” I hear myself say.
After she leaves, I return to my rooms. Pythias is instructing her maids in the laundry.
“Only gently, this time,” she’s saying. Her voice is weak and tight and high; petulant. They bow and go out with the baskets between them. “Callisthenes found a servant to show them down to the river. They’ll beat my linens with rocks again, wait and see, and say they mistook them for the bedding. They’d never have dared back home.”
“You’ll have new linens once we’re settled. Just another day or two here. Look at you, trying not to smile. You can’t wait.”
“I can wait a little longer,” she says, trying to bat my hands away.
Pretty, I called her; once, maybe. Now her hair hangs thin and lank, and her brows, ten days without tweezing, have begun to sprout rogue hairs like insect legs. The lips—thinner on top, fuller beneath, with two bites of chap from the cold and damp—I want to kiss, but that’s for pity. I pull her to me to feel the green hardness of her, the bony hips and breasts like small apples. I ask her if she’d like a bath, and her eyes close for a long moment. I am both a gross idiot and the answer to her most fervent prayer.
When we come back from the baths (which, to my deep satisfaction, made her gasp: the pipes for hot and cold, hot hung with warming towels; the spout in the shape of a lion’s mouth; the marble tub; the stones and sponges; the combs and oils and files and mirrors and scents; I will bring her here every day we remain), Callisthenes is up and eating the remains of last night’s meal. Pythias withdraws to the innermost room, to her maids and her sewing. The boy looks abashed but pleased with himself also. Laughing Callisthenes, with his curls and freckles. He has a sweet nature and a nimble mind and makes connections others can’t, darting from ethics to metaphysics to geometry to politics to poetics like a bee darts from flower to flower, spreading pollen. I taught him that. He can be lazy, too, though, like a sun-struck bee. I worry