by Annabel Lyon
The woman walks a few paces behind us. The slaver offered to rope her wrists for me to lead her like a horse, but I declined. If she runs, Callisthenes will catch her and then we’ll all know where we stand.
“Maybe just a little bit,” Callisthenes says.
“Hey fuck you,” the woman says. “He got deal. I’m cook like how you say.”
“She’s cook like how you say.” Callisthenes turns to the woman. “What was in the tent?”
She shrugs, makes a loose fist with one hand, and plugs a finger in and out of the hole with the other. “Customer.”
“And where are you from?”
She says a name, a guttural I can’t get my mouth around. She laughs when I try.
“Forest country?”
“Sea. Real sea. Cold, not like here.”
“Somewhere up north,” Callisthenes says helpfully.
“Far.” She ignores him, looks at me, seeing I want to know. “You no go farther. You fall off edge.”
“Of the land, or the sea?”
“Sea pour off edge to hell,” she clarifies.
It’s fun to watch Athea—that’s her name—and Pythias take each other’s measure.
“Thank you.” Pythias’s face lights with surprise.
“Hey fuck you,” Athea says.
Sometimes I mistake Pythias for being frailer than she is.
“Don’t speak to me so rudely,” Pythias says. “We are kind to each other in this house. If you speak to me unkindly, your new master here will have to take you back to the market and I promise wherever you end up next won’t be as congenial. Shall I show you the house and the kitchen, and where you will sleep? Are those your belongings?” She means a clinking lump of things Athea brought with her from the slaver’s tent, tied up in a cloth that she dangles by the ears.
“Ah, ah, ah,” Athea says. “Everyone so nice. All right. Maybe we are best friends by tonight, yes? Maybe everyone wake up tomorrow after all?” She winks at me.
“It will be better here,” I say awkwardly, meaning better than wherever she was before, but she just waves a hand at me, dismissing me and my reassurances, and follows Pythias from the room.
Callisthenes makes his fingers into horns and pretends to clash them together.
“She’s awful,” Pythias says that evening, after supper.
We’re sitting in the courtyard while the slaves tidy up around us and dusk falls. One of our last out-of-doors meals; it’s fall now, cooling fast, the sunlight a thinner gold. Paler colours everywhere, paler pink at sunrise, green slowly leaching from the trees, in this last serving of hospitable days. The rains are on their way. The smell of smoke and burning everywhere now. We’re alone now, but can hear them in the kitchen, the clatter of their work and their voices, talking and occasionally laughing. Pythias seems content. Her cheeks are rosy, perhaps from the wine.
“She made one of the girls cry just by staring at her. She told me my house was filthy and Macedonians are animals. I told her we weren’t Macedonian.”
“And she said?”
Pythias has drunk more than usual, actually, or she would never say what she says next: “She said she could cure our problem.”
She’s blushing, and I assume none of this is very serious. “What problem is that?”
“She showed me what she had in that bag. Some stones, some bones, some dried herbs. She’s a kind of witch, or thinks she is. She says she’s helped people like us before.”
“That’s what we got her for.” I’m assuming she’ll come out with it eventually, our problem as diagnosed by Athea the snarly witch.
“Tomorrow I’m going to have her start on the big room. You’ll have the dinner there, I’m assuming. We still have barrels and crates and things in there from when we moved. We’ll have to find somewhere else for all that. The floor will need scouring, and the walls, and the ceiling. Have you ever really looked at the ceilings in here? Black, all black from the lamps. I don’t think they’ve been cleaned ever.”
“Stones and bones and herbs?”
“You bought a witch,” she says, and giggles.
“The slaver told me she was a Scythian healer. He said her village exiled her when a child she had been caring for died. She was walking to the next village, hoping to go to some family there, when she was picked up by an army. She didn’t know which, didn’t speak their language. When they were defeated, she was sold off with the other prisoners of war. He said she was next employed in the house of a wealthy man in Byzantium as a cook, but she tried to run away and so he sold her to the slaver. He said he’d refused a couple of times already to sell her because the buyers wanted her to work in the fields, and he knew she had more skills than that.”
A failed healer: Callisthenes saw it right away. Pythias may or may not, I can’t tell. Sometimes I think she knows all of my weak spots, sometimes none.
“That starts out right,” Pythias says. “The child was brought to her too late, she says. There was nothing she could do, but they blamed her anyway. They made her leave her family behind, her own children. She doesn’t know who got them. She scavenged for the army until they were wiped out, and spent a month in the slave market before she was bought. The wealthy man was a miser who bought old meat for the household because it was cheap, and when they all got sick after she cooked a meal for them she got a reputation as a poisoner. They took her back to the market and sold her to the man you bought her from. She said he made his living travelling, selling cheap goods cheap. He never refused anyone. He’d be gone before the buyer could realize they’d bought dregs. I doubt he kept her for soft work. She said he told her if he didn’t sell her in Pella, he’d kill her rather than have to feed her another day. She said she was getting ready to die when you showed up.”
“The family got sick, or died?” I say.
“She says her training was as a midwife. They never should have brought the child to her in the first place, it needed a doctor, but there was no doctor. She had no idea what to do for it. She says she told the rich man’s wife the meat was no good and the woman beat her. She says I should eat more fruit, and you shouldn’t take any hot baths, and we should pay attention to the cycles of the moon.”
“She told you a lot for the first day. Do you want to eat more fruit?”
Night now, and I waved the lamps away some time ago. We’re sitting in darkness while the slaves wait for us to finish so they can clean up after us and get to bed themselves.
“I like fruit,” she says.
I can’t see her face.
I send her to bed and sit a while longer on my own. It’s Athea herself who comes over to clear our last dishes and wine cups. I wonder if she’s been listening, though we’ve kept our voices low. A witch, so.
“All right?” I ask.
“Go to bed.”
I tell her to take a lamp to my library. I want to sit up and work for a while.
“Go to bed, you.”
I tell her to take a lamp to my library.
“What you work on?”
“Tragedy,” I say.
“Hey fuck you. You don’t want tell me, I’m nothing, don’t tell me. Your wife tell me other day, maybe. She like to talk.”
My wife likes to talk? “Goodness. The good life. What it means to live a good life, and the ways in which that goodness can be lost.”
I wait for her to laugh, or say something sarcastic, or tell me to fuck myself again, but she is only silent. Then she says, “I give garlic your wife, okay?”
“I don’t know. Is it okay? What does she need garlic for?”
“You are not doctor?” She looks proud of herself, like she’s trumped me with this piece of information she thinks she’s ferreted out from somewhere. “You know what for. I am surprise you not try this yourself. Shy, maybe. Is okay. I explain to her.”
“Explain it to me.”
She studies me, assessing whether I’m being disingenuous or genuinely don’t know what she’s talking about. Apparently I pas
s. “Some doctor,” she says, not displeased. “Your wife she stick the garlic up. In the morning, smell her breath.”
This is what I thought. “Up where?”
“Up.” She shoves a hand at her crotch. “Where you fuck. Put the garlic there. One clove only, is enough. If her breath smell, passages are open. If not, no baby for you.”
“I’ve heard of this. With onion, though.”
She waves this away. “No, no, no. Garlic. Stronger. Fit better also.”
“And if the passages are closed?” I feel like my father. “I suppose you have a charm to open them?”
“I don’t know charm. We try this first, then we see.”
“Athea,” I say. “Listen to me. My wife is right: we are kind to one another in this house. But you have only been here one day. There is no ‘we.’ We have not retained your services. We do not have any kind of problem that concerns you. You will not mention this or anything like this to my wife. No garlic. No charms. If you speak of this again, I will take you back to the market. My wife was right about that also.”
“Is stupid.” She shrugs.
“Probably. Now go and do what you’re told.”
She does indeed cook like how you say. Supper this night was a bean soup, bread, cheese, olives, fish, a spread of colourful little saucers we emptied and stacked in a teetering pile, licking our fingers as we went.
“These are ours?” I asked Pythias, of the saucers.
“Athea found them in one of the crates. She asked if she could use them.”
The soup was thick with greenery, herbs and some kind of tender, deep green leaf that withered in the liquid but kept its jewelled colour. She’d found a marrow bone for it too. The bread was gritless and still warm, the round white cheese pressed with walnuts in a flower pattern, the sardines intact but magically boneless. The witch has knife skills worthy of my surgeon father.
“I’VE READ THIS ALREADY,” Alexander says.
We’re in Mieza, in the kitchen, seated beside each other in front of the hearth. Not where I’d prefer to be sharing books, but he’s lately pulled something in his leg in games and has been told to sweat the muscle until he can run on it again. He sits with his heel propped on the bar where the pots hang, my Homer in his lap. I’m anxious for the book—embers, smuts—but so far he’s shielding it nicely, taking care. It’s sweet to see.
“I know you have,” I say. “You are Achilles, your father is Peleus. Hephaestion would be your Patroclus, yes? Who’s your Odysseus?”
“Ptolemy. He’s clever.”
He glances automatically toward the door at the sound of bark-shouts from outside. I have him alone today; his companions are out doing drills as the leaves crisp and drift from the trees in the high fall air. He’s annoyed not to be with them. Hell, he’s annoyed not to be in Thrace with his father, deposing kings, founding cities.
“Do I have to go through it again?” he says.
“You’ve read it with Lysimachus. You haven’t read it with me.”
He starts to say something, then stops. I wonder if Lysimachus has got his ear pressed to the door even now. “Let’s talk about book one, the argument,” I say. “Can you summarize it for me?” We’ll see if the prince considers this an exercise of memory or attention.
“Nine years into the Trojan War.” He’s still staring at the window. “Agamemnon has been allotted a girl, Chryseis, as a battle-prize. Her father, a priest of Apollo, offers a generous ransom for her return, which Agamemnon refuses. Apollo comes down like the nightfall—” Here he hesitates, leaving a little space for me to admire him; exercise of memory, then; I say nothing. “—and besieges the troops until Agamemnon is forced to relent. But since he must give up his own prize, he requires Achilles to hand over his girl Briseis. Achilles, feeling the injustice of this, refuses to fight until she is returned to him.”
“Very good. And the squabbling ensues for the next twenty-three books.”
Now he looks at me.
“‘Briseis of the lovely cheeks.’ Do you suppose Achilles is in love with her? Or is his honour slighted? Or is he petty and pompous and rather full of himself?” I ask.
“Why not all of the above?” He shifts his leg on the bar, winces. “I’ve noticed something about you, Priam. You don’t mind if I call you Priam? You remind me of him, the sad old king who doesn’t fight and has to beg for his own son’s shreds so he can give him a proper burial after he’s been defeated. I’ve noticed you like to say, On the one hand”—he holds out an open hand—“on the other hand”—he holds out the other hand—“and then what we’re looking for is some conflation of the two.” He brings his hands together. “Don’t you ever worry about being too tidy?”
“I don’t worry about it. Isn’t tidiness a virtue?”
“A woman’s virtue.”
“A soldier’s, too. Tidiness is another name for discipline. Let me put it this way. Do you think the story is a comedy or a tragedy?”
He holds out both hands again, juggling them up and down.
“Well, it has to be one or the other, doesn’t it?” I say.
He shrugs.
“You didn’t enjoy it at all?”
“Finally,” he says. “Finally, a question where you haven’t already planned the answer. I liked some of it. I liked the battles. I like Achilles. I wish I were taller.”
“Men regress. It’s a rule of nature. In Achilles’ time, men were taller and stronger. Every generation shrinks back a little from greatness. We’re just shadows of our ancestors.”
He nods.
“You could read it as a comedy: the squabbling gods, the squabbling kings. The warriors running around whapping each other upside the head for nine years. Nine years! The farcical showdown between Paris and Menelaus. The trope of mistaken identity when Patroclus masquerades as Achilles. These are the elements of comedy, aren’t they?”
“I laughed all the way through,” he says.
“I know you have a sense of humour.” I’m going to allude to Carolus’s production of Euripides, to the head, but he’s looking at me so brightly and expectantly, now, waiting for praise, that I falter. Such a needy little monster cub. Shall I continue to pose him riddles to make him a brighter monster, or shall I make him human?
“I’ve been working on a little treatise on literature, the literary arts. Tragedy, comedy, epic. Because I’ve been wondering, what’s the point? What is the point of it all? Why not simply relate such history as has come down to us in a sober manner, not pretending to fill in the gaps?”
He hikes his leg down from the bar and massages the muscle for a moment. “I’ve been reading something. I brought it from the palace library. Wait.”
He limps off, to his room I guess. Except he doesn’t limp, though he must want to. He takes care to disguise the injury and walk evenly. A leader must never reveal weakness in battle, in case he demoralize his troops and encourage the enemy. Something he figured out for himself, or had to be taught? Something a king would teach a king; I hope it comes from Philip.
He’s back, breathless. He ran on it once he was out of the room. The book he wants to show me is one I know well, one of my old master’s, where he rails against the depraved influence of the arts on decent society.
“Only, you know, he can’t mean what he says.” Alexander sits again. “Because he uses theatre to convey his arguments, doesn’t he? A pretend dialogue between pretend people, with a setting and so on. He needs the artifice for something, doesn’t he?”
“Exactly. That’s exactly right.”
“To get the reader’s attention. It’s more fun to read than a dry treatise.”
“It is that.” I think of my own early attempts at the dialogue form. I had no gift for it, and gave it up. “Then, too, I think, you feel more when it’s set up that way. You care more about the characters, about the outcomes of things. That’s the point of the literary arts, surely. You can convey ideas in an accessible way, and in a way that makes the reader or the viewer feel
what is being told rather than just hear it.”
“Agreed.” He’s mocking me, but nicely.
“I too have been reading a book, wondering if it might interest you.”
“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.
