by Annabel Lyon
I stack the animal cages against a south-facing wall, though half my specimens—tender as playwrights—have already died from the wet cold. I attend court, and bring Pythias gifts from the marketplace: some fine black and white pottery, a bolt of pale violet cloth. I have bulbs planted in the garden, and furniture delivered to the house.
“We’re settling down, then?” Pythias asks. Laughing at me with her gravest face.
At least she’s happy about it, or less unhappy. She likes the house, which is bigger than the one we had in Mytilene, and she likes her status here too. Is shocked by it, I think: in Mytilene she was simply herself, but here she is in vogue. The royal wives fight over her for their sewing parties. Her advice on hair and clothes and food and servants is sought out and followed. I’ve taught her to explain, if anyone asks, that our slaves are like family: we’ve had them for years, care for them, would never sell them; you don’t sell your own family. Very cosmopolitan, very chic, very fresh. The wives are impressed.
“You see,” I tell her, “we will be a force for the good, you and I. A civilizing influence. When we leave, we’ll have helped shape the future of a great empire.”
“The prince, you mean,” Pythias says. “I like that boy. There’s something pure in him.”
I hug my fashionable wife, hold on a moment too long, smelling her clean hair. That boy is my project now, my first human project. A problem, a test, a trust; a metaphor I’ve staked my life on. A thirteen-year-old boy. And Athens is a promise Philip has made me, payment in gold for when my time here is done.
“Sweet and pure,” I agree.
The palace is quieter now with the army gone. In the Macedonian tradition, the king must be present at battle to win the favour of the gods. Tiring for Philip, no doubt, and eerie for those of us left behind. It’s hard not to feel like a child left alone when his parents have gone to an important dinner and will be away all night. The familiar rooms echo differently, somehow, and time turns to honey.
Boys, each in the black and white livery of a court page, file into the hall I’ve been assigned. There must be thirty of them, all armed. I look at Leonidas.
“His companions,” the older man says grimly.
Alexander is not among them. “What am I, a nurse?” I say.
Leonidas shrugs.
I ask which are the prince’s closest friends. Leonidas singles out a pretty pink-skinned black-eyed boy named Hephaestion, a young man my nephew’s age named Ptolemy, and a couple of others.
“Right,” I say. “You boys to the left, please, and everyone else to the right.” Athenian boys would tussle and tarry; these Macedonian boys are quick and silent, efficient as a drill team. “Right side is dismissed.”
The boys on the right, including all the littlest ones, look from me to Leonidas and back again.
“Where do you want them to go?” Leonidas asks.
I shrug.
Leonidas points to the door and barks them back to the barracks. They run.
I’m left with the four oldest standing at attention. A philosopher with no military rank, I’m not sure I have the authority to tell them to relax. I put the cloth-draped cage I brought with me on a table. Leonidas withdraws to the back of the room.
“You can’t start,” Hephaestion says. “Alexander’s not here.”
“Who?” I say.
I remove the cloth. Inside the cage is the chameleon, but emaciated, barely alive after its three weeks in Pella. The dissection of a blooded animal requires careful preparation, otherwise the blood will flood the viscera at the moment of death. You have to starve the animal first, I explain, and kill it by strangling to preserve the integrity of the blood vessels. Fortunately this one hung on just long enough. I open the top of the cage, reach in with both hands, and grasp the leathery throat. It struggles feebly, opening and closing its mouth. When it’s dead, I take it out and lay it on the table. The cage I put on the floor.
“Now,” I say. I turn it on its back. Normally I would spread-eagle the legs with pins, but I want to keep the boys’ interest. I nod for one each to hold a leg. “Let’s find the heart,” I say. With a sharp knife I cut through the belly skin, peeling back the flaps to reveal the viscera. The boys press closer, crowding me, but I don’t ask them to step back.
“You see, here,” I say. “The oesophagus, the windpipe. Feel your own.”
The boys touch their throats.
“See the movement, the contraction around the ribs? In the membrane, here.”
Movement in the back of the hall. I don’t look up.
“This will continue for some time, even after death.”
The boys part for Alexander, who walks up to the table.
“You see there isn’t much meat. A little by the jaws, here, and here, by the root of the tail. Not much blood, either, but some around the heart. Show me the heart.”
Alexander points into the chameleon’s body.
I make a sudden fist and hold it up in front of his face. His eyes flare in surprise. Around me the boys go still. “Your heart is this big,” I tell Alexander. With what I will always think of as the second blade from the left, ears—the ghost of my father’s grip worn into the wooden handle—I detach the bloody nut of the lizard’s heart and hold it out to him. He takes it slowly, looks at me, and puts it in his mouth.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” he says. “I was with my mother.”
Shorry, it emerges through the mouthful. There’s blood on one corner of his mouth like a trace of fruit. He chews and chews and swallows with difficulty.
“That’s all right,” I say. “Are you going to vomit?”
He nods, then shakes his head.
“Shall we have a look at the brain?”
The animal’s brain is reduced, through the boys’ industrious prickings and slicings, to a substance like meal. Alexander has recovered from his fit of petulance or penitence or peckishness or whatever it was and is busy impaling bits of brain on his knife and smearing them on the arm of the boy next to him. Another boy flicks some brain into Alexander’s hair. They’re all giggling now, jostling, feinting at each other with their brainy knives, normal boyish behaviour I infinitely prefer to their creepy militarism. We move on to the lungs, the kidneys, the ligaments, the bowel, the lovely doll-knuckle-bones of the spine. Alexander sneaks glances at me and when our eyes meet we both look quickly away. Ours is after all a kind of marriage, arranged by his father. I wonder which of us is the bride.
“Who can tell me what a chameleon is?” I ask.
“An animal.”
“A lizard.”
I collect my father’s scalpels from the boys and wipe them slowly, meticulously, as I was taught. “I had a master, when I was not much older than you. He was very interested in what things were. In what was real, if you like, and what”—I gesture at the remains of the chameleon—“was perishable, what would pass away and be lost. He believed that there were two worlds. In the world we see and hear and touch, in the world we live in, things are temporary and imperfect. There are many, many chameleons in the world, for instance, but this one has a lame foot, and that one’s colour is uneven, and so on. Yet we know they are all chameleons; there is something they share that makes them alike. We might say they have the same form; though they differ in the details, they all share in the same form, the form of a chameleon. It is this form, rather than the chameleon itself, that is ideal, perfect, and unchanging. We might say the same of a dog or a cat, or a horse, or a man. Or a chair, or a number. Each of these exists in the world of forms, perfectly, unchangingly.
“My master’s theory was ingenious, but it had many problems. For instance, how are we able to perceive the forms, if we are of this world and they are not? And if two similar objects share a form, then must there not be yet another form of which all three partake? And then a fourth form, and a fifth, and so on? And what of change? How can a perfect, unchanging world be the ideal form of this world, where change surrounds us?”
From outsi
de comes the clang of a bell and the sound of many boys shouting, running, rallying to their next place of instruction.
“Master.” The boys salute me, one after another.
When it’s Alexander’s turn I touch the corner of my mouth. He hesitates, then wipes off the dried blood with the heel of his hand. I nod and he leaves.
Leonidas steps forward from his corner. He’s a tall old man with a craggy face, a warrior who has lived too long. He looks tired. “They liked the lizard.”
Together we pack up my materials and scoop the guts into a bowl.
“You left them behind,” Leonidas says. “I suppose you know that. All this metaphysics goes over their heads. I’m not sure it would be useful to them even if they did understand it.”
“Nor am I.”
“They’ve had trouble keeping tutors for him. He—”
“Yes,” I say.
“He frightens people.”
Yes.
Leonidas invites me to eat with him. It’s a simple meal, austere even—bread and a small cheese, some wizened fruit, and water.
“I like soldier’s rations,” he says. “That’s what I’m used to. Quite the feast, eh?”
I hear in the sarcasm a gruff note of apology.
“Plato would have approved. He ate fruits and vegetables only, no meat, and believed in Spartan habits: cold water, a hard bed, simple clothing. I was his disciple for a long time.”
“No longer?”
“His nickname for me was the Brain. When I began to confront him, he said it was in the nature of the colt to kick at its father.”
“Ha,” Leonidas says.
After a moment, I realize this is an expression of genuine amusement.
As I’m leaving the palace for the day I look into the theatre, hoping for a drink and a debriefing with Carolus. Fortunately I’ve made no noise. Alexander is alone on the stage, mouthing words I can’t hear. Abruptly he raises a fist to eye level, then lowers it. He performs this gesture again and again, each time with a different face: smiling, threatening, sarcastic, quizzical. He can’t seem to decide which he likes best, which makes the most sense. My palms are sparkling like the night I stood backstage: for pleasure, excitement, shame at my own amateur theatrics?
Silently, I back out of the theatre.
I AM NOT HIS only master. There are the men like Leonidas who teach him the arts of war: weaponry and riding, combat, the choreography of battle. These are soldiers, athletes, and don’t interest me much. But there are others, too: a musician, for gods help us but the boy is talented on the flute; a grey-faced geometer; and an all-around wit and wag named Lysimachus, younger than me and more charming.
At the end of our next lesson, as the boys leave, Lysimachus steps forward and introduces himself. I hadn’t noticed him, and feel my face harden. He flatters me prettily: my books, my reputation, my oratory, my way with the boys, right down to the leather of my sandals, obvious quality, obvious taste. He perches his bum on the edge of the table where I’m sitting so he can look down on me. He has one toe on the ground and one foot in the air waggling languorously, letting his own loose sandal slip a little back and forth. It looks new. I wonder if I’m meant to return the compliment.
“The arts,” he says, to the question I ask instead.
It’s an answer he seems immensely satisfied to give. And a surprise: he’s big and young and hearty, muscle-bound, and I’ve seen him from a distance, mounted, at war games with the prince and pages. He’s no flower.
“Some theatre, poetry, history. I’m glad you bring it up. I’m glad you have the same concern I do. You’ve no idea how much that eases my mind. I had been afraid this conversation would be difficult.”
“What concern is that?” I ask.
It emerges that he’s worried about overlap: about us treading on each other’s toes, pedagogically speaking, and the prince getting caught in the middle. A brilliant but challenging student, didn’t I agree? Needing a little extra guidance, deserving a little something extra behind the scenes?
“I’m not aware of holding anything back,” I say. “Ethics, politics, and metaphysics are my primary subjects. And whatever else I see fit. The king did not restrict me.”
“Excellent!” he says. “You know, I was even thinking—stop me if this is presumptuous—I was thinking we might meet regularly, to discuss the prince’s progress. To chart a course, yes? Plan our areas of influence? Divide and conquer, if you see what I mean.”
“No. I don’t.”
“Absolutely,” he says. “Absolutely. You think about it. He’s at an impressionable age, the sap only just rising. Wouldn’t want to confuse him, would we? One thing from me, another from you? We connect, he and I. He’s always eager to hear what I have to say. Enjoyed your talk this morning, by the way. You’re confident, aren’t you.”
So, an enemy.
I’M NEVER SURE HOW much Arrhidaeus understands, but decide to ignore his affliction when possible and speak to him as I would to any boy his age. When I tell him I’ll be visiting him for a long time to come, he smiles his sudden sweet smile and I wonder if he’s almost understood. We’re readying Tar and Gem for a ride in the fields when a group of boys, including Alexander, enter the stables. The boys busy themselves with their tack, preparing for lessons of their own. Alexander looks at Arrhidaeus and away.
“What are you doing?” he says to me.
“Tutoring the prince.”
He flushes, a trait he must get from his mother, along with the fair skin and rusty hair.
“Do you spend much time with your brother?”
“Don’t call him that.”
“Do you?”
Alexander won’t look at Arrhidaeus, who’s mounted now and clutching the reins, watching the younger boy with unconcealed pleasure, his mouth slackly open. “My brother died when I was three. He was five.”
“I’m surprised no one told me,” I say, trying to hook a laugh, but Alexander won’t be caught. “Why don’t you come riding with us? You’d be surprised, I think, at all he can do. He’s not how you probably remember him as a child.”
“How I probably remember him?” Alexander says. “I used to have my lessons with him. I know him better than you do. He drools, he shits. He walks on two legs instead of four—I’ve seen trained dogs do that too. Now you’re teaching him more tricks. You know what? I don’t think you’re doing it to help him. I think you’re doing it to prove you can. I think you’ve probably tried to teach your horse to talk. I think you probably have a trained bird at home. It hops over to you and you make it do a trick, nod or flap its wings, and then you give it a seed, and tell yourself you’re a great teacher. I think that animal”—he points to his brother—“is another laurel leaf for you. A challenge.”
He’s flushed, he’s breathing hard. This is the longest conversation we’ve had. Hatred, or maybe just disgust—let’s say disgust, something I can work with—has lit a fire in him.
“Every student is both a challenge and a laurel leaf.” I mean his own self, and mean him to know it. “I like a challenge. Don’t you? And if he drools and shits like an animal in a human skin, wouldn’t it be worthwhile to make him a little more like us if we can? To clean him up, teach him to speak more clearly, and see what he has to say?”
“What would a dog say? Feed me, scratch me.” Alexander shakes his head. “He used to follow me around everywhere. I took care of him and taught him the names of animals, and songs, and things like that. I taught him to beg and fetch because it made people laugh, but it never made me laugh. He’s never going to fight a battle or ride a horse properly or travel anywhere. He’s going to stay right here until he’s an old man, doing the same things day after day. Feed me, scratch me. It makes me sick.”
Arrhidaeus grunts out some sounds. He’s eager to be off and is telling me so.
“He doesn’t seem to remember you,” I say.
Alexander looks at him and again away, as though from something painful, the sun. “I told my
father I didn’t want him near me any more. Not for lessons, not for meals. I didn’t want to look at him ever again.”
“How old would you have been?”
“Seven,” he says. “I know, because it was right around the time of my first hunt. Arrhidaeus, fetch!”
The older boy’s head snaps up sharply, looking for the thrown object.
“He remembers me,” Alexander says.
“You’re a cruel little shit, aren’t you?”
His eyes go wide.
“Leonidas says you frighten people. You don’t frighten me, you make me sad. You’re supposed to be brilliant. Everyone tells me so: your father, Lysimachus, everyone I meet at court who congratulates me on the honour of becoming your master. You know what I see? An utterly ordinary boy. I train birds, you pull the wings off flies. I haven’t seen anything in you that tells me you’re extraordinary in any way. Athletics, I wouldn’t know or care about that. I’m talking about your mind, your personality. Just an ordinary boy with too many privileges. A violent, snotty little boy. How could you possibly know what your noble brother might or might not be capable of?”
Now we’re both breathing hard.
“Stop insulting me,” he says quietly.
“Stop insulting me. You’re late to lessons when you come at all. You don’t do your homework. I don’t think you try to understand anything I teach you. Are you really as stupid as you seem, or are you just putting on a show?”
“You need to stop right now.” He’s almost whispering.
“Or what?”
“There are three cavalry officers about ten paces behind you. If they hear you talking to me like that, they’ll kill you. Don’t look back. Act like we’re joking around.”
Slowly I reach a hand up to tousle his hair.
“I don’t understand your lessons,” he says. “I don’t understand what they’re for. Maybe I am stupid. Smile. They’re coming over.”
