The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [94]
He looks up.
“What makes you feel fear, pity?”
“That’s easy. You. Stuck here, with me, when you could be great in the world. Put in a little box by my father and the lid nailed down tight. An animal dying in a cage.”
“You’re not dying.”
“I was talking about you.”
“No, you weren’t.”
“And when you’re done and all the juice is sucked out, someone will come along and cut open your head and say, here, look at this enormous brain. Look at the waste.”
“No waste,” I say softly.
“Waste of mind, waste of body, waste of time. What would you write a tragedy about?”
“Master.” Tycho stands in the doorway. “My lady is awake.”
We stand.
“I want to see her alone,” Alexander says.
I wait in the courtyard, picking over my herbs. Late fall again, everything dying again. Even the perennials have gone woody and brown. They aren’t long together.
“She asked if you’d fed me,” Alexander says when he returns after a few minutes. “I told her you hadn’t, and I was starving.”
“Now I’ll have hell to pay.” We walk to the gate together. “How is your mother?”
“Happier. I’m seeing a lot of her, these days. Who’s going to stop me?”
In the street wait Hephaestion and a handful of others I recognize, boys I’ve taught. Men, now, who take no notice of me, except for Hephaestion, who nods and looks away.
“My escort,” Alexander says.
“Will I see you again?”
“My father forbids it. So, of course.”
I return to Pythias. The bedroom is hot and dark and smells of the spices that burn in a little brazier to scent the air.
“He can’t sleep,” she says. “Loud sounds startle him. He can’t concentrate on books. He can’t always remember how he spent his day. He gets angry and then he comes out of it and wants to die.”
“It’s a kind of battle sickness. Soldier’s heart, they call it.”
“Soldier’s heart.” I watch her turn it over in her mind. “Sounds like praise.”
“I’ve thought that, too. I’m told they often recover.”
“He says it’s getting worse.”
I remember him limping for his mother. “He’s worried about you. He wants you to fuss over him so you’ll forget yourself. He’ll be fine.”
The answer, of course, is that I wouldn’t write a tragedy. I don’t have that kind of mind.
PHILIP RETURNS TO PELLA early in the winter a changed man. He chews parsley to sweeten his breath, and dresses fashionably, and drinks noticeably less. It’s said he’s infatuated with the daughter of the general Attalus, a girl named Cleopatra. She’s a living blank, fresh and pretty and unremarkable. Her mouth sits in a natural pout, like the petals of a flower, probably the source of the attraction. She has the guileless serenity of a favourite not old enough to appreciate the danger of her position, and a shrieking laugh.
Herpyllis is from Stageira, and that is the point of the dagger that nicks my heart. Pythias tells me this during one of our long afternoons when our conversation ranges loose and wide and it’s not difficult for me to mention the woman’s particular good care of me during her illness. The next time we happen to be alone together, as Herpyllis is serving my supper, I ask her if it’s true.
“You don’t remember me?”
“I wish I did,” I say, truthfully. “I think you’re younger than me, though.”
“Maybe a little. I remember your father’s house. Beautiful flowers. My father helped yours remove a wasps’ nest from under the eaves. I would have been seven or eight. I remember sitting in the garden, watching with a bunch of other children from the houses around, and you kept herding us farther and farther back so we wouldn’t get stung. Just like a sheepdog.”
“I remember.” And with a thump I do—the high heat of summer, the drone of the wasps, the extraordinary noise from all the visitors in the garden, and my own excitement and exhaustion to be around so many children when I was used to spending my time alone. The day was like a festival. “What else?”
“You were always swimming. We would see this head out in the water, my sisters and I, and know who it was. But our mother told us we must never