The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [93]
THERE ARE HISTORICAL PRECEDENTS for certain territorial borders—Sparta, Argos, Arcadia, Messene—that Philip, busily redrawing the maps down there, should know about. So I tell myself, planning to send him a letter of advice. Perhaps I’ll compare him to Heracles while I’m at it. Voices at the gate; Tycho will send them away; I’m sick; I don’t leave my study; I see no one. But footsteps.
“Ears full of shit and skull full of shit,” I say to Tycho without turning away from the maps on the table in front of me. “I told you, I’m not home.”
“Can’t hear you.”
I look up.
“Ears full of shit,” Alexander explains.
What is it? Taller, deeper voice, what? Oh, what?
“I came to see Pythias.”
“Did you?”
“She said I could come whenever I wanted.”
The corner of my mouth twitches. A smile, if I could smile.
He kneels in front of me, looks at my face. “She’s not—”
“Not yet.”
He takes my hands.
“No.” I pull back. No warmth, no touch. “She’s sleeping. Will you stay until she wakes?”
He nods.
“How are you? When did you get back?”
“Yesterday.” He tells me briefly of his past few weeks, closely monitored in Athens and then promptly sent home. “They don’t know what to do with me. My father and Antipater. They think I’m going to hurt someone, or myself. Antipater told me as much. I haven’t seen my father since the battle. At least they gave me my knife back.”
So there it is, out on the table between us at last. “Do you remember much of what happened that day?”
“Some. I know what Hephaestion’s told me.” He hesitates. “He told me what my father said about not having an heir. Is it true?”
“Philip was frightened.”
“No, I don’t think so. My father doesn’t get frightened.”
“Pissed off, then. You—we were doing something he didn’t understand.”
“We?”
“You, then.”
“A gift. Carolus liked the head.”
So he does remember. “How did you get that thing, anyway?”
He looks blank, and I shiver. It chutes me back six years, that same look of incomprehension when Carolus asked him where he’d find one.
“You remember. The head was my job. I was going to sculpt one out of clay and paint it. I went to the actor’s house to get a look at him, to make it accurate, and the minute I saw him I knew he wouldn’t be performing. It was obvious to anybody. There was an old woman there who said he’d been sleeping for days and wouldn’t wake up again. He was feverish. She lifted the sheet and showed me his belly. He was swollen from not having had a shit in so long. She said that’s what was killing him: there was a blockage and his body was filling with shit. Can that happen?”
I nod.
“So I sketched his face, for my sculpture, and went home and worked on it, but I couldn’t get it right. It looked silly, like a child had done it.”
“You were a child. Sculpture is difficult enough for a master artist.”
He waves this away. “I should have been able to do it and I couldn’t. But I realized why. It was because I had already had a better idea. It was a waste of time to work on the lesser idea. So I went back to his house.”
I want to know and not to know. “And did you—” I flutter my hands. Soon I will be half a hundred years old. “Help?”
He hesitates; changes what he was going to say. In six years, this is the first time I’ve seen him do this. “The old woman did, with a pillow. She said he had suffered enough.”
“And she let you take the head?”
“I took the whole thing. She knew who I was. What was she going to do? I had him buried properly, afterwards. I’m not an animal.”
The greatest insult one man could level against another, I remember telling him once, and it’s the achievement of my time here that he believes it. “Would you do such a thing again? Today?”
“You have to admit it was effective.”
“I admit it was effective. Would you do it again?”
“You want me to say no. No, I wouldn’t do it again.”
“Why not?”
“Because Carolus is dead.”
“There’s no one left to impress?”
Alexander looks at his lap.
“Forgive me. I inflict pain with words,