The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [96]
“Alexander won’t allow himself to be supplanted by a baby,” my nephew says smoothly.
It never ceases to amaze me how the man can glide right over his own ignorance and carry on a conversation as though I’m the one in need of instruction.
“I don’t see how he will prevent it. A regent can rule through a baby until it’s of age. It wouldn’t be the first time.”
Though I’m mostly housebound now, I pick up the gossip; inflamed from my nephew when he visits, calmer from Herpyllis. Alexander installed his mother at her brother’s court, in Dodona, and himself visited the celebrated oracle there, a massive oak tree full of nesting doves and hung with bronze vessels that sound in the wind. Thereafter he rode north, alone, and is rumoured to be reflecting deeply. (Herpyllis smiles; I smile; then we put our smiles away, carefully, without further comment.) Meanwhile a mediator, Demaratus of Corinth, a family friend, is now in Pella, now in Epirus, relaying messages of respect and contrition between father and son. All this the Macedonians watch with their usual voracious affection, as though the two men are a tussling lion and cub. Eventually Alexander returns alone to Pella, head held high, and resumes with dignity and magnanimity his former role of heir apparent. It helps that the child Cleopatra has made herself scarce; it’s said she’s pregnant and ill with it, and rarely leaves her bed.
I begin a little work on respiration, a booklet to keep myself busy at Pythias’s bedside. She slips in and out of consciousness, and I spend hours watching the sunlight move across the walls, listening to the rhythm of her breath. I myself slip too easily, these afternoons, into a kind of drugged stupor, with memories and erotic daydreams twining themselves together as I remember Pythias in the bloom of youth, Pythias on our wedding night in her veils and garlands as I led her to my door, where the women waited with burning torches, and later at the wedding feast, eating sesame cake and quince; Pythias who after that first night I had to coax with infinite patience out of her clothes and into my bed; Pythias who lies bed-bound now, who won’t rise again. I even masturbate once as she lies struggling for breath. I write down everything I know about breathing, in men and animals and fish and birds, and try to dispel the memory I have not been able to resist, the memory that hurts my heart now, of our wedding night, when I laid my head on her breast and felt the rise and fall of her breath, and thought that I would never again have to sleep alone.
PYTHIAS DIES IN THE NIGHT. When she starts to rasp I go to the kitchen for a cup of water, and by the time I get back she’s gone. I close her eyes and put the coin on her tongue and lie down beside her, pressing my face into her shoulder, her neck, her breast, into the last warmth there. Mine at the last.
A FEW DAYS LATER, a courier appears. Together we ride up to the palace. Summer is coming; the light is flattening out and heat stays longer in the ground. I think briefly of taking Herpyllis to the coast, of teaching her to swim, but know I won’t. She’ll be too ready, too smiling.
My audience turns out to be a private one. After I’ve waited a few minutes alone in a small anteroom, Philip strides in and embraces me roughly.
“I heard. I’m sorry.”
The king sits with me for a long time, speaking with his familiar rough gentleness, with a catch in his voice that sounds genuine, and moves me. He is more patient with me than I am with Little Pythias, who has cried herself into a fever and vomits up everything she eats. She keeps asking for a coin for the ferryman so she can go see Mummy. I can’t bear to be near her.
Eventually I force myself to say to him, “I’m keeping you from your duties.”
“You’re not. I keep thinking of my little one, if she were to have died. I don’t know what I would have done.”
I remember, then, to congratulate him on the birth of his daughter.
“Eurydice, we’re calling her, after my mother.