The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [91]
We spoke for a while about that. I too wanted him to love me the most, already, and suspected the way to achieve that was to fight him. He had enough fawns in the other room. He said he believed in perfection; I said I believed in compromise. Perfection was an extreme, and I had a need to avoid extremes, perhaps because I was so subject to them.
“I will help you,” he said.
A tap on the door frame, and Eudoxus looked in. “Food.” He set a plate on the table.
“Sleep, rather.” Plato rose, handing me the plate. “Eat for me. Boys are always hungry. Our conversation will last years; we needn’t finish it tonight.”
Eudoxus led me back to the party. “You may not want that.” He nodded at the plate. “It was prepared specially for him. No honey, no salt. He likes you. What did you talk about?”
Bread, figs, yogourt, a duck egg.
“Lucky!” My friends gathered around, staring at the plate, at me.
The girl had licked and bitten, licked and bitten, until I didn’t know myself. I knew I had seen her for the last time. Giddy, I gave the plate away.
FIVE
PYTHIAS IS DYING. Her pain is a bright ribbon drawing her on through dun days and sleepless nights; it’s all that’s real to her. She lies in her room, in her bed, in sheets sweet-scented by fruits left to ripen in the cupboards, fanned by the hour by her maid. I can’t help thinking of her pain, also, as a rational being, one with whom she must argue to rescue herself, but as a poor reasoner she cannot. I see the perplexity in her face, the lines in the brow, as pain’s logic bests her again and again. Sometimes, in a low voice, she speaks of her girlhood in Hermias’s court, of her mother and of a younger sister, whom she’s never mentioned before; sometimes she cries out, and I can’t tell pain from grief. In her sleep she thrashes, gripped by nightmares, and wakes white-faced, eyes and mouth black with fear. It takes a long time to persuade her to tell me what she sees.
“A road,” she’ll say, or, “I am walking,” and then the terror will grip her again and she’ll refuse to say more. I know she believes these dreams to be prophetic.
“If you tell me the dreams, I might find a way to stop them.” But this, too, troubles her: if the gods want her to watch her death, it would be impious to refuse the vision.
“So you die in the dream, then?” I ask, relentlessly. I’ve never had a recurring dream, never had dreams of any coherence, in fact, and am fascinated.
Pythias closes her eyes, and with a great effort opens them again. She looks directly into my eyes while she speaks, and my attention to her words is overlaid with the revelation that throughout our marriage we’ve rarely made eye contact. She’s always gazing just over my shoulder, or at my chest, or my feet.
“I am walking,” she says. “I am alone. There is a wind and the sky is black. Then the sky begins to melt. It falls away in strips, and behind the sky is a white fire, and a huge noise. Soon the heavens are on fire, and the sky is a few black tatters, peeling away in the wind. The wind and the noise and the heat are unbearable, but worst of all is that I am alone.”
She clings to my hands, her knuckles gone white.
“I barely have to close my eyes and it comes,” she whispers. “Have I done wrong to tell you?”
I comfort her as best I know how, in the language of reason, explaining that the body’s sense-organ, the heart, needs natural intermissions, called sleep; that the goal is to give rest to the senses. I explain the relationship between digestion and sleep (privately taking note to question the maid about her eating habits), and tell her that dreams are the persistence of sensory impressions, playing upon the imagination. Many factors can affect the nature of one’s dreams, such as slight sensory input during sleep—a room too hot or too cold, say—which will then become exaggerated in the dream, producing an impression of freezing or burning. Perhaps her dream of great heat was suggested by her fever, or too many blankets. (Her eyes follow mine throughout this lesson, like Little Pythias’s when I tell