The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [84]
I travel home to Pella with a convoy of walking wounded. No goats, this time; no luck; no hurry. I change bandages, clean wounds, lance infections, sedate the delusional.
At home I give Little Pythias her present, a tiny Athenian soldier carved for me by the medic in exchange for my knives. I visit her mother in bed, where she spends most of her time now. I can’t persuade her to take exercise, and when she does get up she creeps along the walls, or supports herself on a slave’s arm. I can’t bring myself to accuse her of malingering, but nor can I dispel that suspicion.
“Athens,” Pythias says. “Athens, Athens. Perhaps Philip is right. What would you have done there, really, other than more of the work you do now, for a more attentive audience?”
“Is that nothing?”
“To him it is.”
I shake my head. “Look at this city. Look what he’s done with it. He’s brought in actors, artists, musicians. He knows what it means to be cultured, to feed the mind. He understands the—the diplomacy of it.”
“You think it’s personal?”
I don’t answer.
“Practically, then. What would he do with you? He can hardly force you back into the Academy if they won’t have you of their own free choice. He knows that much, at least. So what could you do for him?”
“Run my own school,” I say, to be contentious, but I see the pain is returning and she’s lost interest in the argument.
· · ·
“ANH,” THE OLD ACTOR SAYS when he sees me, a consonant of pleasure that becomes a guttural, wet coughing. “Long time,” he adds when the coughing subsides, gasping for the breath to make the words.
A housemaid has led me to the bedside, where Carolus lies in odd relief: what’s under the sheet seems shrunken almost to flatness, but his hands and head seem enormous. Hands hairy, knuckly, worked with surpassing fineness and detail by some master carver. Head leonine, the white hair longer than I remember and styled back in a greasy plume that still shows the plough-marks of the comb, chin stubbled, eyes two gems sunk in soft pouches.
“She’s a good girl,” he says of the housemaid, when I ask if there’s anything I can do for him, anyone I can send; we can easily spare someone to sit with him at night if he wants it. “No. Nights aren’t so bad; sometimes I almost sleep. I remember a lot at night. Performances I’ve been in, actors I’ve worked with, audiences I’ve played for, travels, lovers. My childhood, too, and stories my father and grandfather told me about their performances, their days. I have a lot of company at night.”
“I’m sorry it’s taken me so long. I’ve been travelling with the army, if you can believe it, as a medic.”
“I hadn’t thought we were so short of men.”
“We’re not. Alexander wanted me to come. Get me out seeing the world.”
“Through his eyes,” Carolus says.
“Through his eyes.”
He nods, closes his own, opens them with an effort. “He likes you. That’s good.”
I wait while he closes his eyes again, and am thinking I should slip away when he opens them. “I’m here,” I say.
“You were going to leave.”
I can’t tell if he’s frightened. “Should I?”
“No.”
I look around the room while he does the work of breathing, preparing his next sentence. A shelf of books, plays I assume, that I covet a closer look at. Masks on the walls, and props placed here and there. He’s surrounded himself with the things that make him happiest.
“Under the bed,” he says.
I bend down from the chair I’ve drawn up next to him and lift aside the trailing linens and furs. There’s a box.
“Yes,” he says, and I pull it out.
His fingers twitch a little so I lift it onto his lap where he can reach. He fumbles with the lid. Inside is a mask.