The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [87]
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“I’ll show you around, tomorrow.”
I liked him for that, for not leaving a beat. “Will there be a lecture?”
“In the morning.” Eudoxus himself would speak on a mathematical problem set by Plato before his departure for Sicily. “It should be well attended; you and your guardian will get a good sense of our students and of the atmosphere here.”
I asked him if he remembered Illaeus.
He laughed. “Very well. Excellent poet, horrible mathematician. I shall have his mess to undo, I suppose, in you.” When I told him that was an empty room rather than a messy one, he laughed again. “Come on.” He cut into some trees. “Want to see where you’d live?”
We had circled back without my noticing. Set away from the main building, deep in the garden, was a smaller house with lights in the windows although it was late. We could hear low, young voices and laughter. Eudoxus tapped a knuckle lightly on the door, then pushed it open. Half a dozen young men sat around a low table, drinking and arguing about something on a piece of paper they passed from hand to hand.
“New student,” Eudoxus said.
I saw I would be the youngest. They greeted me, smiling, friendly. The one who’d answered the door led me deeper into the house to show me the dormitory with its rows of sleeping mats, all clean and comfortable enough, while Eudoxus stayed in the front room, grinning, to look over the piece of paper.
“Do you want to stay here tonight?”
“Yes.”
The young man had a flop of hair like my brother and a lazy eye. I was prepared to like him. I was prepared to like all of them, why not, and their math problem too.
The next morning, Proxenus and I hung back under the colonnade while the big courtyard filled with members of the Academy who had come to hear Eudoxus. I struggled to follow the talk, while Proxenus looked around, performing a more pragmatic calculation. Afterwards, at the meal, he told me he liked what he saw. Well dressed, serious men from good families. He had recognized some faces. Later he took Eudoxus aside for a little stroll. I knew they were talking about money. The school didn’t charge tuition, but my board would have to be covered. I knew I had plenty of money and land: an estate in Stageira from my father and another at Chalcis from my mother. Money would not be a problem.
My housemate with the lazy eye drew me over to some other young men. “We’re going into town. Want to come?”
I nodded. “I have to say goodbye to my family.”
Proxenus had sent a messenger ahead to the house of our city relatives, so that the twins were already waiting in the street with the carts when we arrived. I kissed the baby, Nicanor, that Arimneste held out for me, and embraced Arimnestus.
“Those yours?” my brother said of my housemates, who hung back a little, respecting our farewells.
Eudoxus had told them of our parents’ sudden deaths, and told them too, I guessed, of my own numbness. At least, they hadn’t yet asked me why I didn’t talk. They probably looked freakish to my brother: indoor skin, no weapons, skinny arms hanging down. Freakish brains, like mine.
“Friends,” I said.
Arimnestus knew I didn’t know how to make friends. I could see he wanted to say something, some advice he was afraid to offer. Finally he brought our foreheads together in an affectionate butt and whispered, so Proxenus wouldn’t hear, “Relax. Drink a little more.”
I nodded.
Arimneste hugged me long but said only, “Take care.”
Proxenus had never dismounted. I was sorry, in that moment, that he so disliked me, read me so wrong.
“You come to us in Atarneus when you’re done here,” he said.
“Write,” Arimneste called, holding the baby up to see me.
The carts were already moving, sending up dust. I held my hand up, kept it in the air while they moved away. I wanted to die.
“All right?” my housemate said.
They knew a place where we could eat, a two-storey house on a busy street in a commercial district. Over bread and meat skewers at a long table someone produced the piece of paper from the night before, and they