The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [86]
Arimneste said something I couldn’t hear and they both laughed quietly. I rolled over in my bunk and they stopped.
After a minute Arimneste said, barely above a whisper, “Mother used to say he had the ocean inside him, but that it was his great secret and I must never tell anyone. She said if he wanted to talk about it he would, but we must never push him. We have to let him go about things in his own way.” She was weeping herself now. “Oh, Mummy,” she said, and to Proxenus, “I’m sorry.”
“No.”
The creak of a bunk. I risked a look: Proxenus getting down to sit with her and the baby on the floor, to kiss her cheek and stroke her hair. I closed my eyes again.
“Is he finished?” Proxenus asked, meaning the baby.
“Almost.”
After she settled the baby in his basket, she and Proxenus had sex in their bunk: delicate sex, almost silent, mindful of the baby and of Arimnestus and me. I listened with interest. Their love culminated in Proxenus sighing heavily, once.
“I can’t see that school being good for him,” Proxenus said after a while. “More brooding and living in his head. Maybe we should take him back to Atarneus with us after all and find him a wife. He can work with me, as my apprentice.”
Arimneste said something I couldn’t hear.
“We’ll find him his own house, then.”
Arimneste murmured again.
“You’re a bit cold, yourself,” Proxenus said. “All right. You know him better. Maybe this Plato will work wonders. Can’t say I’ll miss your big brother, though, in the meantime.”
· · ·
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, he’s not here?” Proxenus said.
The one named Eudoxus explained that Plato had recently departed for Sicily, to attend to the education of the young king there.
“And when do you expect him back?”
Four, five years? But I was welcome to begin my studies with this Eudoxus and his companion, Callippus, in the meantime. As acting director of the school, he would oversee my education as scrupulously as the great man himself.
“Years?” Proxenus said. Surprised; not distraught.
That night we ate with Eudoxus and Callippus, and sometime during the meal it was decided we would stay the night. The twins and the baby were staying in the city with relatives of our mother.
Proxenus went to his room early to write letters. Restless, I visited our cart in the courtyard and helped myself, quietly I thought, to a fist-burying handful of raisins.
“Still hungry?” a voice said.
“Always.” Carefully lidding the amphora.
Eudoxus gestured for me to accompany him, and led me through his gate and into the road. “We’ll walk, yes? This way our voices won’t disturb your guardian, or Callippus.”
“What’s he working on?”
Eudoxus laughed. “He’s sleeping. He keeps bird’s hours. He’ll be up at sunrise tomorrow, piping his little song.”
I told him I didn’t know what that meant.
“Working, writing,” Eudoxus said. “We work a lot around here. What do you think of that?”
It was a lovely road we were walking, lined with olive trees, fragrant with flowers from the public gardens we were passing. The school was on the city’s outskirts. Quiet, almost like country, but no country I knew: sweet and warm and comfortable, even at night. The South, then. Eudoxus (trim was the word I wanted for him: trim of beard and belly, trimly clothed, so trim and tidy and modest in his appetites, I noticed at supper, waving away meat and wine for a little fruit and water, that he probably could have trimmed a few years off his age without anyone guessing) put a brief hand on my shoulder, squeezed, and let go.
“I was so sorry to hear about your father. Your guardian does him great honour, bringing you to us, and so promptly.”
“I don’t think he knows what to do with me.” My voice was rusty; I’d barely spoken to anyone these past weeks. “He’s trying to find me a place to live.”
“You might stay with Callippus and me,” Eudoxus said. “If you should choose to stay. If your guardian should make that choice. Several foreign students lodge with us.”
I thanked him.
“Whose decision is