by Annabel Lyon
“A road,” she’ll say, or, “I am walking,” and then the terror will grip her again and she’ll refuse to say more. I know she believes these dreams to be prophetic.
“If you tell me the dreams, I might find a way to stop them.” But this, too, troubles her: if the gods want her to watch her death, it would be impious to refuse the vision.
“So you die in the dream, then?” I ask, relentlessly. I’ve never had a recurring dream, never had dreams of any coherence, in fact, and am fascinated.
Pythias closes her eyes, and with a great effort opens them again. She looks directly into my eyes while she speaks, and my attention to her words is overlaid with the revelation that throughout our marriage we’ve rarely made eye contact. She’s always gazing just over my shoulder, or at my chest, or my feet.
“I am walking,” she says. “I am alone. There is a wind and the sky is black. Then the sky begins to melt. It falls away in strips, and behind the sky is a white fire, and a huge noise. Soon the heavens are on fire, and the sky is a few black tatters, peeling away in the wind. The wind and the noise and the heat are unbearable, but worst of all is that I am alone.”
She clings to my hands, her knuckles gone white.
“I barely have to close my eyes and it comes,” she whispers. “Have I done wrong to tell you?”
I comfort her as best I know how, in the language of reason, explaining that the body’s sense-organ, the heart, needs natural intermissions, called sleep; that the goal is to give rest to the senses. I explain the relationship between digestion and sleep (privately taking note to question the maid about her eating habits), and tell her that dreams are the persistence of sensory impressions, playing upon the imagination. Many factors can affect the nature of one’s dreams, such as slight sensory input during sleep—a room too hot or too cold, say—which will then become exaggerated in the dream, producing an impression of freezing or burning. Perhaps her dream of great heat was suggested by her fever, or too many blankets. (Her eyes follow mine throughout this lesson, like Little Pythias’s when I tell her she will one day be a great beautiful lady like her mother; doubtful, yet wanting to believe.) I explain further that certain people are particularly susceptible to violent dreams, these including people who are excitable, or under the grip of some strong emotion, or those with vacant minds, vacuums that need to be filled. (I don’t suggest to which category she might belong. My own dreams are negligible; my mind is too busy in waking to suck for fuel during sleep.) As for impiety, I explain gently, dogs have been known to dream—they run their legs in sleep—and why would the gods send visions to a dog? No, dreams might be coincidental, or prescient, but then some people respond to almost any stimulus, the way water trembles throughout when the smallest pebble is tossed into it, and see visions in straw and cooking pots and fingernail clippings as much as in dreams. It means nothing.
“I had thought, perhaps, it was a memory.” Pythias is calmer now. “When you told me of the heavens, of all the—the spheres, and the outermost sphere that was black but all full of pin-holes, so that the great fire behind shone through as stars. It frightened me at the time, when you explained it to me, and I thought perhaps I was remembering this in my dreams.”
“Now, you see.” I feel a simultaneous rush of gratitude and affection and amazement and pain at the inevitable, impending loss of her. “You have already thought it through, without me. I am proud of you.”
She lies back, then, and closes her eyes in a show of bravery.
“She is comfortable,” the maid says later, when I ask. “She slept this afternoon, a little, while you were out.” This maid, Herpyllis, is a warm creature, not especially young, with a tidy bent and a sympathetic face. The dark one with the green eyes, the one Pythias likes. Now that Pythias is utterly bedridden, Herpyllis has taken over the running of the household. I’ve seen her coddle Little Pythias with hugs and cooing, affection the little girl accepts with total, unsmiling attention. I suspect her of trying to comfort me. I don’t resent the effort, but am curious about the audacity it implies. She’s a servant, not a slave; still.
“You take it very calmly,” I say to her as she closes the door to the sickroom. Her arms are full of the bed linens she has just changed, her face flushed with the effort of stripping them without disturbing Pythias. I’d been meaning to spell her by the sickbed, as I do every evening now, but Pythias waved me away, saying I would only try to make her think.
“You can talk to Herpyllis instead,” my wife said. “She will listen.”
“I’ve seen it before,” the maid says now, in the hall. “When I was a girl. Sometimes in the stomach, sometimes the breasts. My mother used to sit with the sick. She would take me with her.”
I stand aside to let her precede me, and follow her to the kitchen, where she drops the laundry in a corner. “And can you guess,” I say, but courage crumples inside me and I stand unhappily without finishing the sentence.
“How long?”
I nod. She, in turn, shakes her head, which I take at first to mean she doesn’t want to venture a guess, but then she says, “She won’t suffer much more.”
I watch her move around the kitchen, tidying, and beginning to prepare my meal. She plucks a hair from her head, a coarse white strand from the dark, and with it sets to slicing a hard-boiled egg for Little Pythias’s supper. Not so young, but not so old. Her hands, the nails especially, are clean for a servant’s. The pans are burnished, the floor scrubbed. My own bed linen, I’m only now realizing, is always changed before I have a chance to smell myself on it. My meals are prompt and hot; my favourites appear without me asking for them. Even the courtyard garden appears more kempt, weeded and watered and clipped and staked. I’m noticing everything, now.
When I clear my throat, she turns away from her chopping board, wipes her hands, and pulls up her skirts—from some wetness on the floor, I think at first. When she smiles, laughter in her eyes, I start back, as though from a cinder. The rest of the evening I spend in my study with the door closed, which the servants know means I am absolutely not to be disturbed.
THERE ARE HISTORICAL PRECEDENTS for certain territorial borders—Sparta, Argos, Arcadia, Messene—that Philip, busily redrawing the maps down there, should know about. So I tell myself, planning to send him a letter of advice. Perhaps I’ll compare him to Hercules while I’m at it. Voices at the gate; Tycho will send them away; I’m sick; I don’t leave my study; I see no one. But footsteps.
“Ears full of shit and skull full of shit,” I say to Tycho without turning away from the maps on the table in front of me. “I told you, I’m not home.”
“Can’t hear you.”
I look up.
“Ears full of shit,” Alexander explains.
What is it? Taller, deeper voice, what? Oh, what?
“I came to see Pythias.”
“Did you?”
“She said I could come whenever I wanted.”
The corner of my mouth twitches. A smile, if I could smile.
He kneels in front of me, looks at my face. “She’s not—”
“Not yet.”
He takes my hands.
“No.” I pull back. No warmth, no touch. “She’s sleeping. Will you stay until she wakes?”
He nods.
“How are you? When did you get back?”
“Yesterday.” He tells me briefly of his past few weeks, closely monitored in Athens and then promptly sent home. “They don’t know what to do with me. My father and Antipater. They think I’m going to hurt someone, or myself. Antipater told me as much. I haven’t seen my father since the battle. At least they gave me my knife back.”
So there it is, out on the table between us at last. “Do you remember much of what happened that day?”
“Some. I know what Hephaestion’s told me.” He hesitates. “He told me what my father said about not having an heir. Is it true?”
“Philip was frightened.”
“No, I don’t think so. My father does
n’t get frightened.”
“Pissed off, then. You—we were doing something he didn’t understand.”
“We?”
“You, then.”
“A gift. Carolus liked the head.”
So he does remember. “How did you get that thing, anyway?”
He looks blank, and I shiver. It chutes me back six years, that same look of incomprehension when Carolus asked him where he’d find one.
“You remember. The head was my job. I was going to sculpt one out of clay and paint it. I went to the actor’s house to get a look at him, to make it accurate, and the minute I saw him I knew he wouldn’t be performing. It was obvious to anybody. There was an old woman there who said he’d been sleeping for days and wouldn’t wake up again. He was feverish. She lifted the sheet and showed me his belly. He was swollen from not having had a shit in so long. She said that’s what was killing him: there was a blockage and his body was filling with shit. Can that happen?”
I nod.
“So I sketched his face, for my sculpture, and went home and worked on it, but I couldn’t get it right. It looked silly, like a child had done it.”
“You were a child. Sculpture is difficult enough for a master artist.”
He waves this away. “I should have been able to do it and I couldn’t. But I realized why. It was because I had already had a better idea. It was a waste of time to work on the lesser idea. So I went back to his house.”
I want to know and not to know. “And did you—” I flutter my hands. Soon I will be half a hundred years old. “Help?”
He hesitates; changes what he was going to say. In six years, this is the first time I’ve seen him do this. “The old woman did, with a pillow. She said he had suffered enough.”
“And she let you take the head?”
“I took the whole thing. She knew who I was. What was she going to do? I had him buried properly, afterwards. I’m not an animal.”
The greatest insult one man could level against another, I remember telling him once, and it’s the achievement of my time here that he believes it. “Would you do such a thing again? Today?”
“You have to admit it was effective.”
“I admit it was effective. Would you do it again?”
“You want me to say no. No, I wouldn’t do it again.”
“Why not?”
“Because Carolus is dead.”
“There’s no one left to impress?”
Alexander looks at his lap.
“Forgive me. I inflict pain with words, the tragedian’s art. Tell me, if you were to write a tragedy, what would it be about?”
“Me?”
“What makes you feel fear, pity?”
“That’s easy. You. Stuck here, with me, when you could be great in the world. Put in a little box by my father and the lid nailed down tight. An animal dying in a cage.”
“You’re not dying.”
“I was talking about you.”
“No, you weren’t.”
“And when you’re done and all the juice is sucked out, someone will come along and cut open your head and say, here, look at this enormous brain. Look at the waste.”
“No waste,” I say softly.
“Waste of mind, waste of body, waste of time. What would you write a tragedy about?”
“Master.” Tycho stands in the doorway. “My lady is awake.”
We stand.
“I want to see her alone,” Alexander says.
I wait in the courtyard, picking over my herbs. Late fall again, everything dying again. Even the perennials have gone woody and brown. They aren’t long together.
“She asked if you’d fed me,” Alexander says when he returns after a few minutes. “I told her you hadn’t, and I was starving.”
“Now I’ll have hell to pay.” We walk to the gate together. “How is your mother?”
“Happier. I’m seeing a lot of her, these days. Who’s going to stop me?”
In the street wait Hephaestion and a handful of others I recognize, boys I’ve taught. Men, now, who take no notice of me, except for Hephaestion, who nods and looks away.
“My escort,” Alexander says.
“Will I see you again?”
“My father forbids it. So, of course.”
I return to Pythias. The bedroom is hot and dark and smells of the spices that burn in a little brazier to scent the air.
“He can’t sleep,” she says. “Loud sounds startle him. He can’t concentrate on books. He can’t always remember how he spent his day. He gets angry and then he comes out of it and wants to die.”
“It’s a kind of battle sickness. Soldier’s heart, they call it.”
“Soldier’s heart.” I watch her turn it over in her mind. “Sounds like praise.”
“I’ve thought that, too. I’m told they often recover.”
“He says it’s getting worse.”
I remember him limping for his mother. “He’s worried about you. He wants you to fuss over him so you’ll forget yourself. He’ll be fine.”
The answer, of course, is that I wouldn’t write a tragedy. I don’t have that kind of mind.
PHILIP RETURNS TO PELLA early in the winter a changed man. He chews parsley to sweeten his breath, and dresses fashionably, and drinks noticeably less. It’s said he’s infatuated with the daughter of the general Attalus, a girl named Cleopatra. She’s a living blank, fresh and pretty and unremarkable. Her mouth sits in a natural pout, like the petals of a flower, probably the source of the attraction. She has the guileless serenity of a favourite not old enough to appreciate the danger of her position, and a shrieking laugh.
Herpyllis is from Stageira, and that is the point of the dagger that nicks my heart. Pythias tells me this during one of our long afternoons when our conversation ranges loose and wide and it’s not difficult for me to mention the woman’s particular good care of me during her illness. The next time we happen to be alone together, as Herpyllis is serving my supper, I ask her if it’s true.
“You don’t remember me?”
“I wish I did,” I say, truthfully. “I think you’re younger than me, though.”
“Maybe a little. I remember your father’s house. Beautiful flowers. My father helped yours remove a wasps’ nest from under the eaves. I would have been seven or eight. I remember sitting in the garden, watching with a bunch of other children from the houses around, and you kept herding us farther and farther back so we wouldn’t get stung. Just like a sheepdog.”
“I remember.” And with a thump I do—the high heat of summer, the drone of the wasps, the extraordinary noise from all the visitors in the garden, and my own excitement and exhaustion to be around so many children when I was used to spending my time alone. The day was like a festival. “What else?”
“You were always swimming. We would see this head out in the water, my sisters and I, and know who it was. But our mother told us we must never laugh at you because you were a favourite of the sea-god.”
“You laughed at me?”
She waves this away, laughing now, refilling my cup. “My father was a fisherman. You wouldn’t have known me, but I remember you. I went to work for your mother after you left home, and she sent me to you when you married.”
“Yes.” Though this is a watery memory; I could see only Pythias then. Perhaps I remember a woman a few years older than my new wife, taller and heavier, readier to smile. I never had much to do with my wife’s women.
Over the next days and weeks we trade these little reminiscences—the big snowfall, the bumper crop, the terrible storm, the festivals of our shared but separate childhoods. The kitchen offer has not yet been repeated, though I have an idea it will be. She’s not the green sprig Pythias was; her breasts are heavy doughs to Pythias’s apples. For a while I decide I actively dislike her: too easy and pleasant and smiling, too close to my own age, too familiar, and most of all too disconcerting: a black smudge on my memory, a little empty place, a face I should recall and can’t. Sh
e becomes annoying, a constant chafing, and I listen for her step, her voice, just for the irritation it produces in me. Her smell, too, a perfume of my wife’s (Pythias told me of the gift; “I have too much; I’ll never get through it all now”), transformed by the alchemy of her different skin from lighter to darker flowers: so I imagine. Her mannerisms—the way she smooths her hair behind her ear with curving fingers, her habit of grunting softly when she sits after long standing or stands after long sitting, the constant light smile, the occasional unconscious cupping of her own breasts—become intolerable to me. Of course I am falling in love, and know it. Sex is not a cure, but a treatment I’m saving for the height of the fever.
One day she tackles the books in my library, takes them out into the sun to blow the dust off and dry them out to inhibit mould, a process I find distracting: the coming and going, the books out of place, fear of my daughter’s grubby hands, fear of rain. I move from my work table to the doorway every minute or two to make sure Little Pythias isn’t sucking on my Republic, or a cloud hasn’t blown over to ruin everything.
“Still blue sky,” Herpyllis says, pointing up. The next time I glance out she doesn’t notice: she’s looking at one of the books.
I go up behind her and look over her shoulder. “You read?”
She starts and slaps the book closed. “No.”
I take the book from her hand. The cover is sticky. I open it, read a few lines, and laugh. Drawings, too, what she must have been looking at. “Perfect. I needed a gift for the wedding.”
THE DAY AFTER THE WEDDING, Alexander and Olympias and their entourage leave Pella for Dodona, the capital of neighbouring Epirus, where Olympias’s brother is king.
“I don’t see the fuss,” Callisthenes says to me in my study. “Philip’s had other wives since Olympias. Why does she run away now?”
I hear in the turn of phrase the condescension of the court.
“And Alexander. A lion in battle, but at home he’s as hysterical as a woman.”
“Who says so?” I ask.
“If you’d gone to court, you’d have seen it. He’s been as twitchy as hell, picking fights with people over nothing. Like last night. Attacking Attalus? Threatening his own father?”
