by Annabel Lyon
“Do you think something happened there, something unusual? Something he hasn’t told you?”
“I can hear everything you’re saying, you know,” Alexander says through the door.
We go in. The room is neat, bed made, books tidy. The remains of a meal are on the table, with two chairs pulled up: a late supper for two. Poor, sweet, loyal Hephaestion. The cutlery is gone.
“Is he all right?” Alexander is pale but seems composed.
“Are you?”
He makes a noise, tick of the tongue, annoyance. “I’m tired. I suppose I’m allowed to be tired. I got confused for a minute. It was just a scratch, wasn’t it? He knows I wouldn’t hurt him for real. What’s the book?”
I’ve put my father’s book down on the table with my bag, next to his supper. I show him.
“That’s what you thought this was about?” Antipater says.
“Drag me out in the middle of the night, what do I know?”
“That’s disgusting.” Alexander turns a page. “That too.”
“Any bumps on the head while you were away?”
“No.” He lets me examine him briefly. A few bruises and scratches, and pressure on one knee makes him wince. “This doesn’t have to go in dispatches, does it?” he asks Antipater.
“That Hephaestion took a wound in battle?”
They look at each other a moment. Alexander nods slightly, Thank you.
Back in the hall, I say, “Does it?”
Antipater beckons me away from the door. “Every account I got, from every soldier I asked, said he was brilliant. Everything textbook. Said he threw his spear like he was at games, just beautiful. Effortless. He could have hung back and let his men do it, but he led. He went first on every charge. That’s what his father needs to know, and that’s what I told him. This other, we’ll put it down to first-time nerves. Find your own way out?”
“Soldier’s heart,” I say. “Did you ever have it?”
Antipater stalks off down the hall. “Never,” he calls back, without turning around.
Hephaestion is still awake, as I’d hoped. “He didn’t tell you? Maybe he didn’t want to say anything in front of Antipater. He killed a boy who was trying to surrender. He’d thrown his weapons away and got down on his knees, crying for his mother. He can’t stop thinking about it. Do you have any of that poppy seed after all?”
I look through my bag. “Not too much, though. It’ll make you sleepy.”
“Not for me, for Alexander. He gets headaches.”
I show him how to grind it down, what dosage, and screw a sample portion in a twist of paper. “He feels guilty for killing the boy, then.”
“No, he enjoyed it. He said it was his favourite kill of the battle.”
“He ranks them?”
“Oh, we all do that.” Hephaestion moves his arm gingerly. “I think he went back after, though, and did something to the body.”
“Do you know what?”
“No. He made me stay behind.”
I believe him.
“But that’s when it started. Whatever he did to the boy, after he was already dead.”
THREE YEARS AFTER IT BEGAN, Philip’s Thracian campaign is over. Callisthenes and I go into the city with thousands of others to greet the returning army and watch Alexander walk to his father, holding out a bowlful of wine, which Philip accepts as the traditional libation of a king returning to his city. They embrace and the people cheer. They turn and continue the walk to the palace together, Philip’s arm around Alexander’s shoulders. I’ve heard no gossip about Alexander since my late-night visit to the palace—nothing, that is, beyond the usual do-they-or-don’t-they speculations about him and Hephaestion—nor have I been summoned for a lesson. The former I attribute to Antipater’s white-knuckle discretion, the latter to my student’s. I’ve seen him naked now, the soft white places; soft, or rotten. We both need time to forget.
We stay a long time to watch the procession that follows them. The news of Philip’s long withdrawal from Thrace, after the disappointments of Perinthus and Byzantium, precedes him.
A campaign in Scythia netted some twenty thousand captives, women and children, as well as another twenty thousand breeding mares, flocks, and herds. Philip’s army battled the Triballians on the way home, encumbered by all this living baggage, and were forced to leave a good deal of it behind. It was a vicious battle. Philip took a spear to the thigh and lay for a time pinned beneath his own dead horse. He was briefly taken for dead, and he limps distinctly now. A representative sampling of Thracian women and children and geese and ducks and pregnant horses and Triballian prisoners are paraded past. Along the way, too, Philip has picked up a sixth wife, a Getic princess named Meda, and here she is in a blue dress and sandals, walking in the middle of this great mess of prisoners and soldiers and horses, a blonde for his collection. I remember my long-ago description to Pythias of Thracian women, but she has no tattoos that I can see. Pythias will have to sew with her soon enough, no doubt, and will be able to inform me definitively.
But the invitation never comes. Pythias points this out to me one evening as we’re getting ready for bed. “I haven’t been asked up to the palace in ages,” she says. “By Olympias or anyone. Also I sent a note to Antipater’s wife asking her to visit and she never replied. Have I done something wrong?”
I press the heel of my hand to my forehead, trying to hold back a headache. “They perceive us as Athenian.”
She laughs. “What? I’ve never even been there.”
“Me, then, and you as an extension of me. We’re at war. I was afraid of this.”
“You’re joking.” She sees my face. “You are joking. The king trusts you to tutor his heir. If Philip doesn’t doubt your loyalty, why should anyone else?”
“You expect reason to govern passion. You’ve been around me too long.”
She grabs my hand and clasps it to her belly; the baby’s kicking. Her face is a joyful question.
“Yes,” I say. “There.”
“Not long now.”
“You think?”
She wrinkles her nose. “How much heavier can I get?”
“All the more reason not to go trekking up to the palace, then. Maybe they’re just mindful of your condition—Baby,” I add sternly, “stop pummelling your mother.”
“No, it’s nice.” She shifts a little in the bed, trying to get comfortable. “It’s different this time, isn’t it? War with Athens will be different from all the other wars. If Philip loses—”
I clap my hands over my ears.
“If Philip wins—”
“When.”
“When Philip wins—”
“That’s it.”
“He’ll rule the world?”
I lean down to kiss her belly.
“Won’t he?”
“This isn’t a battle with the Triballians. Philip stands to lose more than a few thousand geese. It’s an endgame this time. Endgame—”
“I understand.”
“It’s a bad time to be associated with Athens, however distantly. We should plant crocuses.”
Pythias raises her eyebrows.
“Philip won a battle against the Thessalians in a crocus field. It’s considered patriotic.”
“Crocuses,” Pythias says.
“By the front gate, where people will see.”
“And that will take care of it?” Pythias says.
By early autumn, she’s confined and my presence at home is unwelcome. I tell Athea I’ve attended any number of births, assisting my father, but she waves me away. “You faint.”
“I will not.”
“You see wife, all bloody, open between like meat. You never fuck her no more.”
“Even if that were to be the case, I can’t see how it would be your business.”
She laughs. “Trust me little bit, okay? I know how. If problem, I send for you. Better for you, better for her. She no scream, cry, push in front of you. You know.”
I do
know. That sounds about right, astute, even. My father believed slaves should treat slaves and free should treat free, but he never had a witch, and especially not one his wife liked and trusted. “You will send for me immediately if there are any problems.”
“Yes, yes, yes.” She pushes me away, actually puts her hands on my arm and pushes me.
She’s happy, I realize. This is her job, what she knows how to do, what she wants to do and hasn’t been allowed to. She won’t make a mistake.
I’m just walking into the street, thinking to drop in on my nephew, when a courier approaches to say the prince requires my presence for a lesson.
“Wait,” I tell the courier, and run to the back of the house for supplies.
At the palace, in our usual courtyard, the prince and Hephaestion are wrestling. They go at each other in silence, ferociously. I clear my throat softly, but only one or two of the younger pages looks at me, then away. I slowly pace the perimeter of the courtyard, under the colonnade, where the pages have encircled the fight. Through the forest of them I glimpse the sexual grappling of their leaders: a foot hooking an ankle, sudden collapse, a turtling stasis as Haephestion presses his chest to Alexander’s back and tries to yank him off his fours and onto the floor, tiled with the sixteen-point starburst of the Macedonian royal house.
“A power struggle,” I murmur to Ptolemy, who stands as is his habit a little apart from the younger boys. Alexander’s cousin does not reply. I’ve tried before to engage with him on a different level from the other pages, a level more suited to his maturity, with quiet asides and small ironies, but Ptolemy is loyal to the prince and cannot be cut away from him. He tolerates my dry little droppings of wit with the barest of grace and moves subtly away from me, as now, without apology. Yet I know him to be intelligent, and wonder why our minds don’t resonate in greater concord, like strings on a common instrument. I know from Leonidas that Ptolemy has a passion for the logistics of battle and will one day make a fine tactician. Perhaps the young man smells my eagerness to encourage any passion of the mind and my desire to contribute to it, though my own knowledge might be weak in that particular area. He finds me arrogant, I think with sudden insight, or possessive. I confess I want to touch all their passions, smooth and straighten and freshen them, like a slave at laundry, and thus leave my mark.
“Ahem,” I say, more loudly this time. “Shall we begin?”
“Greek,” a voice says, all insolence, and the insult is taken up in a chorus of hoots and jeers: “Greek! Greek!”
“My mother told me otherwise,” I say. The boys snicker.
“It’s true.” Hephaestion seems not even to have to raise his voice, though his chest heaves. He and Alexander have broken apart and are circling each other again; I guess he only spoke to taunt his opponent with his casualness. “He’s a Macedonian. A Stageirite.”
“He’s an Athenian,” another voice cries, and the hooting starts again. Oh, for the repressive presence of Leonidas.
“What’s in the jar, Stageirite?” Ptolemy asks from his corner.
“My father wiped Stageira off the map.” Alexander abruptly stands from the wary crouch in which he’s readying to meet Hephaestion’s tense embrace. “Like shit from his shoes.”
The pages part to let him through.
“What’s in the jar?” he asks.
I upend the jar into a large, shallow dish I’ve brought from home for this purpose. Pythias and I and the servants have lately eaten a stew from it. The tiny creatures scramble blackly over each other, half-scaling and then tumbling back down the shallow sides. I give the jar’s bottom a spank to disgorge the last of them and the chunks of earth I’ve provided as a temporary home.
“Ants,” Alexander says. His interest is no longer a boy’s interest in their dirtiness and squirming, but a man’s interest in the metaphor to come.
“Tell me about ants,” I say.
As Alexander speaks, I’m aware of Hephaestion, who is lingering in the colonnade, towelling the golden sweat off himself and laughing with two older pages who likewise have hung back from the lesson. Extraordinary behaviour, since lovely Hephaestion does not noticeably have a mind of his own. When he sees me looking at him, something in his face falters. He’s a sweet boy, essentially, and it goes against his nature to be malicious or manipulative, as he’s attempting to be now. I wonder what the quarrel was.
“Indeed,” I say to Alexander, who has concluded his little peroration on the inferiority, the absolute inconsequence, of ants, and is looking calmer. If it rouses him to use his body, it settles him to use his mind. “Yet they are like men, also, if we care to see it.”
Man and young men and boys stare into the bowl, into the writhing mass there.
“You have a way, Athenian,” Alexander says in his dreamiest voice, “of beginning all your teachings by putting me wrong.”
“Ants were the easiest to collect for my purpose. I could equally have brought you wasps. Or cranes. Willingly would I have brought you a flock of cranes, had I the traps.”
Alexander says nothing, waiting.
I explain that these animals share with men a need to live communally, with a single purpose or goal common to them all: they build dwellings, share food, and work to perpetuate their kind.
“We live in an anthill?” Alexander says. “Or some shit-splashed crane’s nest? Athens must have been grand.”
“But the difference, the difference is that man distinguishes good from bad, just from unjust. No other animal does that. That is the basis of a state just as it is the basis of a household.”
“Laws.” Ptolemy looks interested.
“Athens has the grandest of laws, too, doesn’t it?” Alexander persists. “The most just? I think it must have the very best of everything. How you must long for it.”
“Indeed, at times, when my students are tiresome. It is the ideal state.”
The sound of twenty pages who have momentarily forgotten how to exhale.
“Macedon is the ideal state,” Alexander says.
“Macedon is an empire, not a state. In the ideal state, every citizen participates in the life of the polis, in the judiciary, in the promotion of the good and the just. Different states have different constitutions, of course, governing the amount and kind of power each citizen may possess. I might speak to you of Sparta, of Thebes, of their different constitutions. I might speak to you of polity, where the middle class holds the balance of power. Although each individual may not be utterly good, or utterly fit to lead, the ability of the collective of individuals always exceeds the sum of its parts. Think of a communal dinner, so much more enjoyable than a dinner provided at one individual’s expense. I might in this regard speak of Athens.”
“We are at war with Athens.” Ptolemy comes closer. “You might rather speak of Macedon.”
“I might, equally, speak to you of monarchy.” I skate over the interruption and the warning it implies, of thin ice below. “Where one family exceeds all others in excellence, is it not right that that family should govern?”
“Is that a question?” Alexander says.
“What are the goals of the state? I propose two: self-sufficiency and liberty.”
Ptolemy, at my elbow now, leans over and upends the bowl of ants. The boys cry out in shivery pleasure as the ants spill over their hands and feet and clothes and onto the floor.
“Liberty.” Ptolemy shrugs, brushing dirt from his hands. “Chaos.”
“You said best of seven,” Hephaestion calls suddenly, with the precisely ridiculous timing of a very bad but determined actor. “We’re only at three and two. Caught your breath or do you need more time?”
Their collision, the sound of it, reminds me that men, too, are meat. The cheers of the boys drown out the sounds of the fight, and I quickly recover my bowl before it gets broken. They have no respect for me today; there will be no further lesson. As I prepare to withdraw, I meet Ptolemy’s look.
“Pretty place, was it, Stageira?” Ptolemy asks
, not unkindly.
I thank him for his interest.
“In fact, I know it was pretty.” The boys scream and roil about us and Alexander and Hephaestion abandon wrestling for fists, messier and more true. “I was there when they—”
“Yes. I wondered.”
“Only you should be more careful.” Ptolemy glances at the pages, then meets my eyes again with his straight, cool, frank look, sympathetic, though with no purchase for friendship in it. “No one wants to hear about the glories of Athens right now. We are at war.”
“Am I to fear boys, then?”
“Boys,” Ptolemy says. “Boys, their fathers.”
“What do you hear from the army?” Philip is on campaign again. Thermopylae was supposed to hold him back, as it had so many invaders in the past, but the Athenians and the Thebans between them forgot to reinforce the back roads, and Philip simply took the long way round. He has recently taken the city of Elateia, two or three days’ march from Attica and Athens.
“Diplomatic overtures to Thebes,” Ptolemy says. “Join us against Athens, or at least stay neutral and let us pass through your territory without trouble. Though I hear Demosthenes himself is in Thebes, waiting to deliver the Athenian pitch.”
“You hear a lot.”
“I do.”
“I’m surprised you’re not with them.”
“Antipater asked me to stay here.”
We watch the fight.
“He’s feeling much better,” Ptolemy says.
I thank him for the information.
At home I’m met by Tycho, who tells me Pythias has given birth to a daughter. I find her asleep in clean sheets with her hair dressed, and the baby already bathed and swaddled, sleeping in a basket beside her. Athea is in the kitchen kneading bread, thank you, as though this were the day’s real work that she’s had to interrupt to deliver a baby.
“Easy,” she says before I can speak. “Long time but no problems. Always first is long time. Next is easier. My lady—”
She struggles for the words. I wonder when Pythias became her lady instead of my wife, when that affection set in.
“Resting?” I suggest.
