by Annabel Lyon
“It interests me.”
I hand it to him.
“Small,” he says.
“An afternoon’s read at most. I hope it will amuse you. It’s by the same author. The setting is a dinner party.”
“Majesty, Master.” An attendant in the doorway looks stricken. “A visitor.”
“Go away,” Alexander says.
“Don’t tell me to go away, you miserable little brat.” Olympias brushes past the attendant, who jumps away from her as though scalded. “Kiss your mother.” Olympias herself, all in white furs, silver stars in her hair, bringing in a fragrant cold breath of the outside.
Alexander looks at her but doesn’t get up. She bends to him and presses her cheek to his.
“Lovely warm boy. I wrote you I was coming. Don’t you read my letters? Don’t lie to me. I know perfectly well no one was expecting me. That attendant looked like he’d seen a ghost. Hello, sir,” she adds, to me. “What’s the lesson?”
“Majesty, Homer. What an unexpected—”
“Not to me,” Alexander says. “I’ve been waiting and waiting.”
“Sweet.” She helps herself to a chair and pulls it up to the hearth to make a threesome. “Well, sit down,” she says to me. “Go on. I won’t interrupt.”
“Yes, you will,” Alexander says.
“May I ask to what we owe this—”
“You owe it to her majesty being bored out of her mind in Pella and missing her baby boy. I see little enough of him, and then that animal of a husband of mine sends him out here. Dionysus himself blew on my little pony’s heels to speed my way. No, actually I left all the servants outside. There’s rather a lot of us, and then quite a bit of luggage.” Her eyes drift up to the ceiling, perhaps the original of her son’s mannerism. “I brought food,” she murmurs.
“I love you,” Alexander says.
“You had better. No one else does. Do you hear from your father?”
“You’re not allowed to ask me that, remember?”
She rolls her eyes. He rolls his, mocking her. The whole performance is shocking: the anger, the meanness, the grotesque intimacy, their willingness to do it for an audience, me.
“Run away, now,” mother says to son, as though reading my mind. “I want a private moment with your tutor. Go get them to fix me a room for the night.”
He goes, taking all three books with him.
“We really did bring food. Rabbits and cakes and things. I’ll be terribly popular with the boys for an hour and a half. What a horrible place.”
“Yes,” I say.
“How’s he doing?”
“I think he’s bored.”
“Yes.” She glances at the ceiling again. “Aren’t we all. You will develop the existing faculties, though, I suppose?”
“Of course.”
“Of course.” She makes an ugly mouth, imitating me. “Does everyone hate me? We’re not talking about Arrhidaeus. We’re talking about my son. My son. The hell I will have to pay, when I get back, for coming out here without permission, just for a glimpse of my baby. Into the dispatches it will go: Olympias rode a horse. Lock her up! You know they’ll do that. They’ll lock me in my rooms. They’ve done it before. Last time it was for a month, because I went down to the parade ground to watch him drill. I just wanted to look at him, up on that great beast of his. I wore a veil but they knew it was me. They always know. Can’t think how.”
“Why did you come, Majesty?”
“I needed to see him. That animal thinks he can keep me in a box. He—”
“Mother.” Alexander’s in the doorway. “Why don’t I give you my room? I can share with Hephaestion.”
Olympias takes a swipe at her eyes with the hem of her cloak. “I would love that. Did I tell you I brought food? Rabbits and cakes and things?” She starts to cry. “Do you think they’ll let me stay this time? Just for one night?”
“This time?”
“She tried last month,” Alexander says. “Antipater caught up to her an hour out of Mieza. Why don’t you go lie down now, Mother? In case you have to ride again tonight.”
“You’ll sit with me, though?” she says.
Noises from outside: a warning bell, men shouting. Olympias begins to rock back and forth, hugging herself and weeping.
“Go,” I say. “I’ll delay Antipater. An hour, anyway. Both of you, go.”
Alexander leads the way, allowing himself to limp heavily now.
“You’re hurt,” Olympias says. “Oh, lean on me.”
He takes her arm and they hobble out. Exit royalty.
THE TABLES HAVE BEEN CLEARED and the door propped open for a bit of air. The first pretty days of fall are long gone now, and raindrops bluster in on sweeps of wind to darken the stoop. The rain is socked in, and each day is colder than the one before. Fall is blurring, smudging into winter. The musicians, a couple of flautists, are finished for the evening, and are being fed their pay in the kitchen. Pythias stood at the door with me in her new dress, welcoming each guest as he arrived, and then disappeared. Only I am still aware of her presence, in the polish on the floor, the trim of the lamps, the twining flowers on the lintels, the plump new cushions on the couches, the delicacy and thought in the succession of dishes. She’s spent a lot of my money tonight, in her quiet way. I’ve put Carolus next to me and the others in careful order after him, with Callisthenes last; I’ve had a word with him, and he understands it’s not a slight. After a bit of a shaky start, it seems to be working, though Carolus has contributed only monosyllables so far and coughs repeatedly into his sleeve. At first I thought he was embarrassed, but I wonder now if he’s unwell. He drinks without eating and follows the conversation doggedly but with dead eyes. Antipater and Artabazus have already clashed swords over the king’s foreign policy and his plans for Persia; Philes and Callisthenes whispered for a while between themselves like schoolboys at their first grown-up table. Leonidas jumped in to spar with Artabazus, though, and soon everyone was laughing. Not a talent I would have attributed to Leonidas; I’m enjoying myself, learning things, already. Lysimachus has simply failed to appear.
Here come the slaves with cups of wine and bowls of water. The formal part of the evening, my favourite part, starts now.
“No jugglers?” Antipater says drily. “No girls?”
Not tonight. The slaves bring each guest a cup and we sip the wine unmixed in the ritual gesture to honour the good demon. A hymn to Dionysus and then I order the wine to be mixed with the water. “Two to five?” I ask, for form’s sake. The standard ratio; I don’t wait for my guests’ assent. Three large bowls are mixed and I hold up a cup of moderate size, again for ritual approval. At the Academy there would be nods all around; here my guests just stare at me. The cups (new, Pythias again) are distributed and the wine is poured, the slaves proceeding around the room in a circle, beginning with Carolus, ending with Callisthenes, who sits on the other side of the doorway from me.
Dessert is brought in on more trays: cheeses, cakes, dried figs and dates, melons and almonds, as well as tiny dishes of spiced salt are placed within everyone’s reach. It’s all been mounded into neat pyramids, even the salt, and I can’t help but look for the shape of my wife’s fingers in the slopes of these dainties. I hate to bring down such painstaking architecture with the yen for a spicy nut. I’m reaching for the more stable brickwork of a pile of dates instead, preparing my opening words, when Callisthenes calls, “Uncle?”
“Nephew?” I say.
“Do you love me, Uncle?”
“Why, what have you done?”
Laughter. “Only you have to excuse me, tonight,” he says. “Everyone has to excuse me. I just can’t do it.”
“Do what?” Antipater asks.
“The talk,” Callisthenes says. “The talk, the speech. I’ve drunk too much and I just don’t think I can put the words together. Forgive me? I’ll just retreat, maybe—” He waves a vague hand toward the door.
He’s performed his little part very
well. This way, anyone else who doesn’t want to speak—Leonidas I was thinking of, primarily—can opt out with Callisthenes, save face, and eat sweets in the next room. I’ve thought of everything.
“Speeches?” Antipater says. “I thought that was a joke.”
“I didn’t understand that part at all,” Artabazus says. “I thought it was because I’m an ignorant foreigner.”
“But it was in the invitations.” Antipater, Artabazus, and Leonidas are already on their feet, going after Callisthenes. “ ‘Tragedy,’ ” I say, raising my voice over the noise of their leaving, repeating the words in the invitation. “ ‘The good life. What it means to live a good life, and the ways in which that goodness can be lost.’ ”
“Shut up,” Carolus says. Only he and Philes are left. “They don’t know how to do that here. You’re embarrassing them.”
I look at Philes, who looks desperately at Carolus.
“The boy’s going to pee himself if you try to make him talk,” Carolus says. “You have to let it go.”
It occurs to me that the only person I can think of who would have enjoyed the evening just as I planned it, who genuinely would have tried to do his part, is Alexander.
“How’s the book coming?” Carolus says. “Your tragedy for beginners.”
“Comedy too. I’ve decided I need to treat both.”
There’s noise from an outer room, a raised voice, laughter, and then Tycho murmuring in my ear: “Lysimachus, Master—”
“Lysimachus,” I say, because never mind announcements, he’s in the doorway, showing himself in.
My other guests trail back in behind him, retake their places, assuming—correctly—that the formal part of the dinner is well and truly buried. Well, I was the one who wanted a student dinner. Who am I to stand on ceremony?
“Here you are,” he says. “Who lives next door? I sort of went there first. Scared the women, I think. They said you were all over here. Got the houses mixed up. Sorry, sorry. Flowers for the women. I’ll send them in the morning. Like flowers, yes? Any special colour? Oh, that’s kind.” Callisthenes has slid over on his couch, making room. Lysimachus sits heavily and looks around. “Very nice, very nice.” He’s laughing at me again; he’s drunk.
“Will you eat? I’ll have them get you a plate from the kitchen.”
“I’ll drink, if you’re offering. Got to keep the levels constant. A sudden dip in the levels and then who knows. Already scared the women. No women here.”
“No,” I say.
“That’s what I thought. Boys? He likes boys.”
Everyone looks at me.
“One boy especially,” Lysimachus says. “Well, nothing wrong with that. We’ve all been there. Excellent taste in all things, always. A bit hopeless in this case, though.”
I tell Tycho to bring him a plate of food.
“Dotes on him,” Lysimachus continues. “Poor bastard. You should have seen them at Mieza, when he thought they were alone. I know, I know, I wasn’t supposed to be there. But if the prince wishes it—”
“I thought I’d seen you, once or twice,” I say. “You didn’t have to hide from me.”
“Besotted with him,” Lysimachus says. “Oh, gods, that gives him a thrill. Look at him. Just an animal like the rest of us, after all. Don’t worry, I haven’t told anyone who’d care.”
“Don’t threaten me,” I say. “Eat your food.”
He takes the plate from Tycho. “Goat!” He laughs and starts to eat.
I’m aware of my guests watching me.
“I’d fuck him,” Lysimachus says, mouth full. “He smells so nice. Been there yet?”
It’s Antipater I’m most aware of. “That’s enough,” I say.
“All creamy and tight and miserably confused,” Lysimachus says. “I’d fuck him senseless.”
“We’re not talking about anyone I know,” Antipater says.
Then everyone is leaving. I walk them into the street.
“I’m drunk,” Lysimachus says loudly to Antipater, to me. “I didn’t mean anything by it. Anyway, you’re old enough to be his father.”
“I am,” I say.
We look at each other.
“You’re not his father, though,” he says, more quietly.
“I know that.”
“I love him,” he says, so only I will hear.
I nod.
“Maybe you could—” he begins, but Artabazus is at his elbow, smiling and bowing his thanks to me, leading him gently away.
“I know where he lives, not far from me,” Artabazus says. “We will go together, and so. I thank you many thousands of times.”
“And I you,” I say, meaning Lysimachus.
He nods, knows.
Antipater is waiting by the door, shaking his head.
“I guess you heard all that,” I say.
“Not a fucking thing. I only hear what I can put in dispatches.”
“What about Olympias?”
Antipater shakes his head again. He gave me the hour I asked for in Mieza, two weeks ago, but made it clear he was giving it to me, not to her. “Devoted tutors are one thing, meddling queens are another. She’s in seclusion for a while.”
Back inside, after those brief breaths of sharp street air, the atmosphere is close, still thick with food and wine. I pour myself a last cup and take it in to see Pythias in our room. She’s waiting up for me, dozing over her needlework by a table full of candles to give her enough light. She starts awake when she senses me standing near. “Scared me.”
“What are you making?”
She holds it up to show me: a bit of elaborate embroidery, a landscape crawling with tiny figures all in pink and red. It’s pretty.
I sit on the bed while she puts her work aside and blows out most of the candles. I tell her about the evening, about how everyone praised the food and how Lysimachus was more or less the pest I’d thought he might be, and how Antipater gave his best to her specially, and how lovely the house looked and how it had been like having her in the room with me, looking every way and seeing her work there.
“And what did you talk about?” She knows that’s the main thing.
I close my eyes to imagine each of them going home. Antipater, stumbling by the end—bored, I suppose, and so drinking more than usual, or maybe that is usual for him—I don’t know him very well—has the palace to go to, to a wife Pythias is cordial with and has sewn with once or twice (older than us, she has told me, a bit stern and formal, which Pythias can manage very well; she’ll end up that way herself, probably. Rude to the servants, which Pythias doesn’t like, but modest in her clothing and her gossip, as suits a woman of her position, of which Pythias approves). I wonder if she warms the bed for him, or if they use separate rooms. Artabazus the bachelor won’t sleep alone. I don’t quite know how I know this, but I’d bet on it. He lives in a grand house near the courts, the kind Pythias and Callisthenes find so painful, too big for one man and sumptuously decorated. He might as well swag money around it, Callisthenes has said. I indulge in a little fantasy of him stopping off for a boy and a girl to warm his bed, and that after a night of debauchery he’ll wake in the morning fresh as a lamb, pink-faced and bright-eyed, eager for his breakfast and the subtle business of the day. Lysimachus, too, will return to his house, though no doubt he’ll bid Artabazus a cheerful but firm good night and choose to walk by himself. Leonidas will walk with Antipater to the palace. Carolus I sent home on the arm of a slave; I’ve never seen where he lives but understand it’s in a poorer district, probably a hut like Illaeus’s. Cozy, I hope. Callisthenes took Philes by the arm and has probably led him off to find someplace to drink and keep talking. They’ll solve everything I’ve spent my life on in the next hour or so, I’m fully confident.
“Love,” I say. “We talked about love.”
Pythias takes the wine cup from me so I won’t spill it. “Lie down.”
She starts rubbing my feet. She works her thumb up from the heel to the tender arch and kneads
a long time under the balls of my toes. After a while she gets up and I wonder if she’s left me; I’m too lazy, my head too full of fumes, to open my eyes and see. But then I feel her weight on the bed again beside my knees and hear the click of clay on clay, a vessel on a plate. She rubs her hands together to warm whatever it is and then she’s rubbing my feet again with something slick, some oil. Something of hers: the scent is pretty, not any oil from the kitchen. I roll onto my front so she can work her way up my legs. I’ll smell pretty too in the morning, and will need a bath to get rid of it. I widen my legs a little when she reaches my thighs. Maybe she’ll let me return the favour, though I doubt it. This is a pure gift. When I feel her little nails on my buttocks I have to turn over, but she continues just as slowly and methodically, hips, chest, shoulders, arms, hands, even palms and fingers, each anointed to its end. Some ritual she needs, maybe. I want to tell her she’s making a meal out of a cracker and we could be finished in a minute if she put her mind to it, but she can surely see that. I let her do it her way this once. She drapes her dress over my face. A flicker of this, a flicker of that through the gauzy cloth: a few bright points of candles, the misty moving shape of her above me, and something coming she doesn’t want me to see. I reach out but she puts my hands back on the bed and holds them there while she rubs her breasts up and down my chest. My face briefly smothered. A poised moment between offerings, and then she sets her weight on me, hips on mine, easing down. It’s not an easy penetration, involving much flexing and adjusting on her part, fingers spreading her dry pink self open, trying to complete the fit, and then she moves too slowly, rocking a little, not knowing what to do. I take her hips and try to move her the way I want but she sucks her breath in, a sharp hiss of disapproval, or perhaps pain. A moment of stillness and then she tries again, the frustrating, tentative rocking that chafes not nearly enough. I take the cloth off my face so I can at least look at her, and she stops again.
“This isn’t working,” she says.
“It’s fine.” The candlelight is flattering and she’s as pretty as she’ll ever be, with her hair hanging down over her shoulders and tendrils licking at her breasts. I reach for them, small, almond-tipped, and she lets me. She looks determined, just short of grim. I decide not to look at her face.
