The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [95]
“You laughed at me?”
She waves this away, laughing now, refilling my cup. “My father was a fisherman. You wouldn’t have known me, but I remember you. I went to work for your mother’s people in Chalcis, and they sent me to you when you married.”
“Yes.” Though this is a watery memory; I could see only Pythias then. Perhaps I remember a woman a few years older than my new wife, taller and heavier, readier to smile. I never had much to do with my wife’s women.
Over the next days and weeks we trade these little reminiscences—the big snowfall, the bumper crop, the terrible storm, the festivals of our shared but separate childhoods. The kitchen offer has not yet been repeated, though I have an idea it will be. She’s not the green sprig Pythias was; her breasts are heavy doughs to Pythias’s apples. For a while I decide I actively dislike her: too easy and pleasant and smiling, too close to my own age, too familiar, and most of all too disconcerting: a black smudge on my memory, a little empty place, a face I should recall and can’t. She becomes annoying, a constant chafing, and I listen for her step, her voice, just for the irritation it produces in me. Her smell, too, a perfume of my wife’s (Pythias told me of the gift; “I have too much; I’ll never get through it all now”), transformed by the alchemy of her different skin from lighter to darker flowers: so I imagine. Her mannerisms—the way she smooths her hair behind her ear with curving fingers, her habit of grunting softly when she sits after long standing or stands after long sitting, the constant light smile, the occasional unconscious cupping of her own breasts—become intolerable to me. Of course I am falling in love, and know it. Sex is not a cure, but a treatment I’m saving for the height of the fever.
One day she tackles the books in my library, takes them out into the sun to blow the dust off and dry them out to inhibit mould, a process I find distracting: the coming and going, the books out of place, fear of my daughter’s grubby hands, fear of rain. I move from my work table to the doorway every minute or two to make sure Little Pythias isn’t sucking on my Republic, or a cloud hasn’t blown over to ruin everything.
“Still blue sky,” Herpyllis says, pointing up. The next time I glance out she doesn’t notice: she’s looking at one of the books.
I go up behind her and look over her shoulder. “You read?”
She starts and rolls it up. “No.”
I take the book from her hand. It’s sticky. I unroll it, read a few lines, and laugh. Drawings, too, what she must have been looking at. “Perfect. I needed a gift for the wedding.”
THE DAY AFTER THE WEDDING, Alexander and Olympias and their entourage leave Pella for Dodona, the capital of neighbouring Epirus, where Olympias’s brother is king.
“I don’t see the fuss,” Callisthenes says to me in my study. “Philip’s had other wives since Olympias. Why does she run away now?”
I hear in the turn of phrase the condescension of the court.
“And Alexander. A lion in battle, but at home he’s as hysterical as a woman.”
“Who says so?” I ask.
“If you’d gone to court, you’d have seen it. He’s been as twitchy as hell, picking fights with people over nothing. Like last night. Attacking Attalus? Threatening his own father?”
Callisthenes attended the wedding as Philip’s guest; I wasn’t invited.
“What happened, exactly?” I’ve heard only a garbled report from Tycho. Slaves get their information fast, but it’s rarely accurate.
“Attalus gave a toast saying what handsome children they’d produce, or something like that. Alexander took offence and threw a cup at his head. Nailed him.” Callisthenes mimes Attalus taking a blow to the temple. “Doof. Then Philip jumps up and falls flat on his face, and Alexander asks how’s he going to make it to Persia if he can’t make it off his own couch—”
“Cute.”
“—and then something about everyone insulting his mother for the last time. He kind of lost me there, but I’d had a lot to drink.”
“Olympias isn’t Macedonian, she’s Epirote, so that makes Alexander