The Golden Mean: A Novel

by Annabel Lyon

  “Women’s work.” He looks over his shoulder. “Oh, fuck me.” He heaves the Theban onto his back so we can’t see the hole I’ve made there. “Kneel,” he hisses.

  “Majesty,” I say.

  “Dismiss.” Alexander’s looking at the Theban. Head runs; runs. I stay. “Is he dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because,” Alexander says, “sometimes you think they’re dead but they’re not. You have to finish them.”

  “Yes.”

  Hephaestion has stopped a dozen paces away. His face is white.

  “I fought here,” Alexander says. “East field. Is he dead?”

  What’s been smoking up my thoughts is clearing now. Behind Hephaestion I see Antipater and Philip himself. They, too, stop a cautious distance away.

  “Child,” I say. “Has something happened?”

  “What are you doing?”

  I hold out my tablet for him to see.

  “Can I help?”

  “I’m just done. Another time. I think we need to go wash.”

  “I fought here.”

  “Alexander.” Hephaestion steps forward. Alexander draws his knife. Hephaestion steps back.

  “Child,” I say again. “Will you show me where to wash?”

  He’s looking at the Theban. He kneels down beside him, as I did hours ago.

  I walk a wide circle around him, over to Philip and Antipater. They’re arguing in whispers.

  “It happens,” Antipater is hissing. “You know it as well as I do.”

  “What happens?”

  Philip shakes his head. “He stabbed Ox-Head’s groom,” Antipater says. “Thought he was the enemy. The battle was over.”

  “Like after Maedi.”

  Antipater looks haggard.

  “What?” Philip says.

  We look over. Alexander is working at the Theban with his knife, up by the hairline.

  “This is your fault,” Philip says to me. “You teach him this shit. What kind of animal are you, anyway? Who does this to a body? What happened after Maedi?”

  Antipater shakes his head.

  “That’s my son.”

  “He still is,” I say.

  “He’s supposed to be king someday.”

  “Look,” Alexander calls. He’s leaning over the body. “It comes off. Come look.”

  Hephaestion is backing away.

  “Deal with this,” Philip says. “The two of you, since you know so much about it. Get him into a tent, for fuck’s sake, before anyone sees.” He draws his own knife far enough to slam it back into its leather. “Do I have an heir or not?”

  Hephaestion is green on the side of his face, the phenomenon Arimneste tried to describe to me so long ago.

  “This isn’t happening,” Philip says. “I’m going back to camp.”

  I go see what Alexander’s doing. He’s got the face peeled down from the forehead. He’s working it down with his knife, ripping and jiggling. He’s got it peeled to the eyes.

  “I tried, at Maedi,” Alexander says. “I tried to bring one back. But I couldn’t get it off.”

  “For me?”

  “For Carolus. I was thinking it could be dried. He said they couldn’t afford masks.”

  “May I help?” I reach for his knife. He lets me have it. I take the flap of forehead and hold it delicately taut, as he did. “May I finish this for you? I think you are required back at camp.”

  “I want to stay here, with you.”

  “Your father is very proud of you,” I say slowly. “Of the work you did today. He wants to celebrate with you. He wants the world to see you together.” I feel Antipater behind me, closer. “Your father needs you now.”

  “Majesty, come,” Antipater says.

  Alexander looks at Hephaestion. “Hey.” His face lights with pleasure. “When did you get here?”

  Hephaestion looks at me. “Just now.”

  I nod at him over Alexander’s head, That’s right. Go on.

  “Hey,” Hephaestion says. “So, hey. I’m starving. You want to find something to eat?”

  Alexander slings an arm around his shoulders and they walk back toward the tents that way. I try to smooth the Theban’s forehead back down but the fit is ragged now, and the lips of skin won’t meet at the scalp.

  “He won’t remember any of this,” Antipater says. “Alexander. He didn’t last time, either.”

  The young medic comes running up, panting, three tablets under his arm. “Is this enough? It’s all I could find. Theban, yeah? They’re asking at the pyres. I’ll help you carry him over when you’re done.”

  “He’s done,” Antipater says.

  We carry him the hundred paces to the Theban pile, already spitting and crackling in the golden late-afternoon light. Gutted, he’s not very heavy. We heave him onto the other bodies while the presiding officer makes a note on his tablet, keeping count. The medic runs off. Antipater and I stare at the fire and the heated air wobbling around it.

  “I get nightmares,” Antipater says.

  A long silence.

  “I work,” I say. “It’s like the ocean. I go in, way down deep, and then I come out.”

  He nods, shakes his head. The setting sun gilds our hair. The Theban—smoke—rises to the spheres.

  ANTIPATER AND THE PRINCE leave for Athens, escorting the bones of the Athenian dead. A courtesy: defeat has made the Athenians respected allies again. I secured a bag of poppy seed from Head before we broke camp and showed Antipater how to administer the proper dosage. Philip will spend the fall in the Peloponnese tying up loose ends and arranging a great conference in Corinth, where he can get down to the business of readying all his new subjects for a Persian war. Philip has never been to Athens, and to forgo this opportunity is extra-ordinary. My guess is he can’t stand, right now, to be near his son.

  I travel home to Pella with a convoy of walking wounded. No goats, this time; no luck; no hurry. I change bandages, clean wounds, lance infections, sedate the delusional.

  At home I give Little Pythias her present, a tiny Athenian soldier carved for me by the medic in exchange for my knives. I visit her mother in bed, where she spends most of her time now. I can’t persuade her to take exercise, and when she does get up she creeps along the walls, or supports herself on a slave’s arm. I can’t bring myself to accuse her of malingering, but nor can I dispel that suspicion.

  “Athens,” Pythias says. “Athens, Athens. Perhaps Philip is right. What would you have done there, really, other than more of the work you do now, for a more attentive audience?”

  “Is that nothing?”

  “To him it is.”

  I shake my head. “Look at this city. Look what he’s done with it. He’s brought in actors, artists, musicians. He knows what it means to be cultured, to feed the mind. He understands the—the diplomacy of it.”

  “You think it’s personal?”

  I don’t answer.

  “Practically, then. What would he do with you? He can hardly force you back into the Academy if they won’t have you of their own free choice. He knows that much, at least. So what could you do for him?”

  “Run my own school,” I say, to be contentious, but I see the pain is returning and she’s lost interest in the argument.

  “ANH,” THE OLD ACTOR SAYS when he sees me, a consonant of pleasure that becomes a guttural, wet coughing. “Long time,” he adds when the coughing subsides, gasping for the breath to make the words.

  A housemaid has led me to the bedside, where Carolus lies in odd relief: what’s under the sheet seems shrunken almost to flatness, but his hands and head seem enormous. Hands hairy, knuckly, worked with surpassing fineness and detail by some master carver. Head leonine, the white hair longer than I re-member and styled back in a greasy plume that still shows the plough-marks of the comb, chin stubbled, eyes two gems sunk in soft pouches.

  “She’s a good girl,” he says of the housemaid, when I ask if there’s anything I can do for him, anyone I can send; we can easily
spare someone to sit with him at night if he wants it. “No. Nights aren’t so bad; sometimes I almost sleep. I remember a lot at night. Performances I’ve been in, actors I’ve worked with, audiences I’ve played for, travels, lovers. My childhood, too, and stories my father and grandfather told me about their performances, their days. I have a lot of company at night.”

  “I’m sorry it’s taken me so long. I’ve been travelling with the army, if you can believe it, as a medic.”

  “I hadn’t thought we were so short of men.”

  “We’re not. Alexander wanted me to come. Get me out seeing the world.”

  “Through his eyes,” Carolus says.

  “Through his eyes.”

  He nods, closes his own, opens them with an effort. “He likes you. That’s good.”

  I wait while he closes his eyes again, and am thinking I should slip away when he opens them. “I’m here,” I say.

  “You were going to leave.”

  I can’t tell if he’s frightened. “Should I?”

  “No.”

  I look around the room while he does the work of breathing, preparing his next sentence. A shelf of books, plays I assume, that I covet a closer look at. Masks on the walls, and props placed here and there. He’s surrounded himself with the things that make him happiest.

  “Under the bed,” he says.

  I bend down from the chair I’ve drawn up next to him and lift aside the trailing linens and furs. There’s a box.

  “Yes,” he says, and I pull it out.

  His fingers twitch a little so I lift it onto his lap where he can reach. He fumbles with the lid. Inside is a mask.

  “‘How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there’s no help in truth!’” I quote. “‘I knew this well, but made myself forget. I should not have come.’”

  “‘Let me go home,’” Carolus replies. Of course he knows his Oedipus as well as I do. “‘Bear your own fate, and I’ll bear mine. It is better so: trust what I say.’”

  His grandfather’s Tiresias mask is fine and light and old; the ribbon that would secure it around the actor’s head has yellowed and frayed away to scant fibres. At first it looks almost featureless: the eyes are shallow, unpainted pods, the nose and mouth minimally marked. The cheekbones are high and wide; the brow is delicately wrinkled, in the moulding rather than the paint. It’s large, larger than a human face so as to be seen from the back of a theatre, but light; my hands almost seem to rise as I hold it, tricked by the illusion, the contradiction between size and weight.

  “Have you ever worn it?”

  He lifts his hands and slowly takes it from me to lower it onto his face. After a moment’s rest he struggles to raise his hands again to lift it off. I help him, and lay it gently back in the box. “First time,” he says. “Last time.”

  I lid the box and replace it under the bed.

  “I miss my father.”

  After a long moment I realize he’s crying.

  “May I look at your books?” I ask.

  They’re well used, torn and marked, some lines underscored and others struck through. He has some I don’t. When I turn back to the bed, he’s watching me.

  “Yours,” he says.

  “I’m greedy. Even now, and I let you see it. Forgive me.”

  “I don’t forgive you. To be alive is to be greedy. I want you to be greedy. I want everyone to be greedy. You know he came to see me?”

  I’ve lost the thread. “Your father?”

  “My father’s dead. Alexander. Speaking of greedy. One day that monkey’s going to open his mouth and swallow the whole world.”

  This costs him; he coughs until his whole being is concentrated in a long, gagging exhale that purples his face and closes his eyes to slits, like blind Tiresias himself. The housemaid, hearing, returns to the room with a cup of water and lifts him upright with a practised grip until his breathing eases. He sips, sags, sips again. She settles him back, smooths the covers, puts a palm briefly on his forehead, and gives me a nice look to say hurry up.

  “You need to sleep,” I say.

  I rise and arrange myself to go. I’m not sure what gesture to leave on. Perhaps I’m too aware of my own movements because of his stillness, or because he’s an actor after all and would know just what is needed, how to hold your hands when you leave someone for the last time. I bend to kiss his forehead. He opens his eyes again, obviously in pain now, and I hesitate.

  “You need to love him better,” he says. “Alexander. He knows the difference.”

  I go the last distance, let my lips touch his wrinkled forehead, which is not cool, not feverish, but warm, humanly warm.

  FOUR

  POOR PROXENUS. My sister’s husband tried so hard to be a father to me in those obscene first weeks after my parents’ deaths. He spoke gently, patted my back, frowned in concentration on the rare occasions that I spoke. But I was already such a cool boy, and my physiology was such that grief made me cold. So I overheard him telling my sister, Arimneste, on the ship from Pella to Athens, when they thought I was asleep in my bunk. He presented his bafflement to her as a medical diagnosis. I had rare blood and humours, and ran cool in the tubes where others ran hot; was it his fault he found my company distasteful? He was a naturally warm man, as she was a naturally warm woman. They wept, they spoke their love for the dead, they found succour in the rites of mourning, and then they moved on. They were like friendly dogs, but I was a lizard.

  “Ssh.” Arimneste was feeding the baby again; I could hear the rhythmic sucking. Arimnestus snored quietly in the bunk above mine. “He’s not a lizard. His skin is warm when you touch him.”

  “That could come from the outside, absorption from the sun,” Proxenus said. “I really do think he’s afflicted. The body needs to weep to release the excess fluid caused by grieving. How is he releasing the fluid if he isn’t weeping?”

  Arimneste said something I couldn’t hear and they both laughed quietly. I rolled over in my bunk and they stopped.

  After a minute Arimneste said, barely above a whisper, “Mother used to say he had the ocean inside him, but that it was his great secret and I must never tell anyone. She said if he wanted to talk about it he would, but we must never push him. We have to let him go about things in his own way.” She was weeping herself, now. “Oh, Mummy,” she said, and to Proxenus, “I’m sorry.”

  “No.”

  The creak of a bunk. I risked a look: Proxenus getting down to sit with her and the baby on the floor, to kiss her cheek and stroke her hair. I closed my eyes again.

  “Is he finished?” Proxenus asked, meaning the baby.

  “Almost.”

  After she settled the baby in his basket, she and Proxenus had sex in their bunk: delicate sex, almost silent, mindful of the baby and of Arimnestus and me. I listened with interest. Their love culminated in Proxenus sighing heavily, once.

  “I can’t see that school being good for him,” Proxenus said after a while. “More brooding and living in his head. Maybe we should take him back to Atarneus with us after all and find him a wife. He can work with me, as my apprentice.”

  Arimneste said something I couldn’t hear.

  “We’ll find him his own house, then.”

  Arimneste murmured again.

  “You’re a bit cold, yourself,” Proxenus said. “All right. You know him better. Maybe this Plato will work wonders. Can’t say I’ll miss your big brother, though, in the meantime.”

  “WHAT DO YOU MEAN, he’s not here?” Proxenus said.

  The one named Eudoxus explained that Plato had recently departed for Sicily, to attend to the education of the young king there.

  “And when do you expect him back?”

  Four, five years? But I was welcome to begin my studies with this Eudoxus and his companion, Callippus, in the meantime. As acting director of the school, he would oversee my education as scrupulously as the great man himself.

  “Years?” Proxenus said. Surprised; not distraught.

&
nbsp; That night we ate with Eudoxus and Callippus, and sometime during the meal it was decided we would stay the night. The twins and the baby were staying in the city with relatives of our mother.

  Proxenus went to his room early to write letters. Restless, I visited our cart in the courtyard and helped myself, quietly I thought, to a fist-burying handful of raisins.

  “Still hungry?” a voice said.

  “Always.” Carefully lidding the amphora.

  Eudoxus gestured for me to accompany him, and led me through his gate and into the road. “We’ll walk, yes? This way our voices won’t disturb your guardian, or Callippus.”

  “What’s he working on?”

  Eudoxus laughed. “He’s sleeping. He keeps bird’s hours. He’ll be up at sunrise tomorrow, piping his little song.”

  I told him I didn’t know what that meant.

  “Working, writing,” Eudoxus said. “We work a lot around here. What do you think of that?”

  It was a lovely road we were walking, lined with olive trees, fragrant with flowers from the public gardens we were passing. The school was on the city’s outskirts. Quiet, almost like country, but no country I knew: sweet and warm and comfortable, even at night. The South, then. Eudoxus (trim was the word I wanted for him: trim of beard and belly, trimly clothed, so trim and tidy and modest in his appetites, I noticed at supper, waving away meat and wine for a little fruit and water, that he probably could have trimmed a few years off his age without anyone guessing) put a brief hand on my shoulder, squeezed, and let go.

  “I was so sorry to hear about your father. Your guardian does him great honour, bringing you to us, and so promptly.”

  “I don’t think he knows what to do with me.” My voice was rusty; I’d barely spoken to anyone these past weeks. “He’s trying to find me a place to live.”

  “You might stay with Callippus and me,” Eudoxus said. “If you should choose to stay. If your guardian should make that choice. Several foreign students lodge with us.”

  I thanked him.

  “Whose decision is it, anyway? As a matter of interest?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “I’ll show you around, tomorrow.”

  I liked him for that, for not leaving a beat. “Will there be a lecture?”