by Annabel Lyon
Callisthenes attended the wedding as Philip’s guest; I wasn’t invited.
“What happened, exactly?” I’ve heard only a garbled report from Tycho. Slaves get their information fast, but it’s rarely accurate.
“Attalus gave a toast saying what handsome children they’d produce, or something like that. Alexander took offence and threw a cup at his head. Nailed him.” Callisthenes mimes Attalus taking a blow to the temple. “Doof. Then Philip jumps up and falls flat on his face, and Alexander asks how’s he going to make it to Persia if he can’t make it off his own couch—”
“Cute.”
“—and then something about everyone insulting his mother for the last time. He kind of lost me there, but I’d had a lot to drink.”
“Olympias isn’t Macedonian, she’s Epirote, so that makes Alexander half-and-half. A pure Macedonian son would move ahead of Alexander in line to the throne.”
“Alexander won’t allow himself to be supplanted by a baby,” my nephew says smoothly.
It never ceases to amaze me how the man can glide right over his own ignorance and carry on a conversation as though I’m the one in need of instruction.
“I don’t see how he will prevent it. A regent can rule through a baby until it’s of age. It wouldn’t be the first time.”
Though I’m mostly housebound now, I pick up the gossip; inflamed from my nephew when he visits, calmer from Herpyllis. Alexander installed his mother at her brother’s court, in Dodona, and himself visited the celebrated oracle there, a massive oak tree full of nesting doves and hung with bronze vessels that sound in the wind. Thereafter he rode north, alone, and is rumoured to be reflecting deeply. (Herpyllis smiles; I smile; then we put our smiles away, carefully, without further comment.) Meanwhile a mediator, Demaratus of Corinth, a family friend, is now in Pella, now in Epirus, relaying messages of respect and contrition between father and son. All this the Macedonians watch with their usual voracious affection, as though the two men are a tussling lion and cub. Eventually Alexander returns alone to Pella, head held high, and resumes with dignity and magnanimity his former role of heir apparent. It helps that the child Cleopatra has made herself scarce; it’s said she’s pregnant and ill with it, and rarely leaves her bed.
I begin a little work on respiration, a booklet to keep myself busy at Pythias’s bedside. She slips in and out of consciousness, and I spend hours watching the sunlight move across the walls, listening to the rhythm of her breath. I myself slip too easily, these afternoons, into a kind of drugged stupor, with memories and erotic daydreams twining themselves together as I remember Pythias in the bloom of youth, Pythias on our wedding night in her veils and garlands as I led her to my door, where the women waited with burning torches, and later at the wedding feast, eating sesame cake and quince; Pythias who after that first night I had to coax with infinite patience out of her clothes and into my bed; Pythias who lies bed-bound now, who won’t rise again. I even masturbate once as she lies struggling for breath. I write down everything I know about breathing, in men and animals and fish and birds, and try to dispel the memory I have not been able to resist, the memory that hurts my heart now, of our wedding night, when I laid my head on her breast and felt the rise and fall of her breath, and thought that I would never again have to sleep alone.
PYTHIAS DIES IN THE NIGHT. When she starts to rasp I go to the kitchen for a cup of water, and by the time I get back she’s gone. I close her eyes and put the coin on her tongue and lie down beside her, pressing my face into her shoulder, her neck, her breast, into the last warmth there. Mine at the last.
A FEW DAYS LATER, a courier appears. Together we ride up to the palace. Summer is coming; the light is flattening out and heat stays longer in the ground. I think briefly of taking Herpyllis to the coast, of teaching her to swim, but know I won’t. She’ll be too ready, too smiling.
My audience turns out to be a private one. After I’ve waited a few minutes alone in a small anteroom, Philip strides in and embraces me roughly.
“I heard. I’m sorry.”
The king sits with me for a long time, speaking with his familiar rough gentleness, with a catch in his voice that sounds genuine, and moves me. He is more patient with me than I am with Little Pythias, who has cried herself into a fever and vomits up everything she eats. She keeps asking for a coin for the ferryman so she can go see Mummy. I can’t bear to be near her.
Eventually I force myself to say to him, “I’m keeping you from your duties.”
“You’re not. I keep thinking of my little one, if she were to have died. I don’t know what I would have done.”
I remember, then, to congratulate him on the birth of his daughter.
“Eurydice, we’re calling her, after my mother.” Philip shakes his head. “I’ll tell you what else. I’ve had the satrap of Caria offering his daughter to Arrhidaeus.”
“In marriage?”
Philip laughs and wipes his eyes.
“Caria.” I try to think clearly.
“Not too big, not too small. Strategic. It might just do. We’re having a dinner for him, you must come.”
“For Arrhidaeus?”
“For Pixodarus. The satrap. That’s a thought, though. I suppose he should be there?”
“Arrhidaeus?” I say again.
“You’re right, of course. I hope he doesn’t fuck it up. Feeds himself, does he?”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
Philip squints fiercely. “Can’t remember,” he says finally. “How long have you been with us?”
“Six years.”
“That sounds about right.”
I get up to go.
“Wait, wait, wait. You’re in a fuck of a rush today. I haven’t told you the main thing yet.”
Apparently not the death of my wife, nor the birth of his daughter, nor the marriage of his son is the main thing. I sit back down.
“You look like I’m going to hit you.”
He feints a punch at my head and I duck automatically. Sometime in the last twenty-five years I’ve acquired the reflex.
Philip laughs. “I never thanked you for my wedding gift, did I, in all the commotion? You always were funny.”
So that is the main thing: a sticky little book, a bit of nostalgia still smelling slightly of raisins. “I was?”
“You had a face like a clown. You were always trying to make everybody laugh. I remember you could mimic people. You used to do your father, and my father. That was a little spooky, actually.”
“Not me.”
“Oh, yes. And you did me once, too, and I beat the shit out of you. Funny as hell, but I had to. I think you were pretending to screw an apple.”
“You did love apples,” I say, slowly, trying to remember.
“Still do.” He swats his own leg conclusively, as though I’ve settled the matter. “And that’s a funny thing. Alexander loves them, too. I used to share mine with him when he was a toddler, feed him off my own knife. He couldn’t get enough of me, once. Where did that little boy go, do you suppose?”
“Got his own knife.”
He bumps my jaw with his fist, gently, a blow I see coming and this time let happen. “We should have been better friends.”
It’s the closest to an apology I’m going to get. I nod.
“Cleopatra says Olympias might be telling the truth about the boy having been fathered by one of the gods. Never mind that face, you’ve heard the rumours. Olympias herself spreads them. Has done for years, but I never paid any attention before now. Little Cleopatra, eh? Already a politician. We both know what she’s really getting at, of course, only she knows better than to come out and say it. Though I don’t think it can be true. Another lover? Not back then, anyway. We were white hot for a while, his mother and I. Do you think he looks like me?”
“What a thing to ask.”
Philip laughs. “See? Funny. After all, what are you going to say. All right. Though he has always favoured her, the hair and skin and so o
n. Is it ridiculous to start wondering only now?”
I decide my grief will buy me some indulgence. “He’s not very tall.”
“That’s nice of you to remind me.” Philip looks annoyed, which was the danger. But then he says again, “That’s nice of you to remind me,” his eyes no longer focused on me, and I know I’ve given him what he wanted, a little polished stone to hold onto in the night and rub with his thumb, a worry-bead, a talisman: two short men in a kingdom of tall.
I wonder how long this will hold him, and how clever his new little wife really is. A daughter this time, but a son next time, maybe, and then what? Not so blank and guileless, if she’s already looking that far ahead. She’s learned quickly, or someone is teaching her. And how long before Alexander hears that his father is wondering if he’s a bastard?
“All right,” Philip says. I wonder how much of this he’s already figured out for himself. Most of it, would be my guess. “You see, it’s always good for me to talk to you. Now I’m going to give you something. This probably isn’t the right time, and you may not care right now in your time of mourning, but I want you to take it away with you, if you know what I mean, and let it sink in. I’m rebuilding Stageira.”
“Stageira?”
“A repayment, for all you’ve done with the boy. A gift. Call it whatever you want. I know things haven’t turned out the way either of us expected, but you can’t look at him and think you’ve wasted your time.”
“No. I don’t.”
“You can’t. Anyway. I’ve ordered the work started, and I want you to go there later this summer and oversee it. You can tell me what needs doing and I’ll have it taken care of. Fields, crops, buildings, boats, whatever it needs. We could bring the people back, too, try to. You’d know where to find some of them, maybe?”
“Maybe.”
“I remember you had a brother.”
“Yes.” I don’t tell him that Arimnestus died in his eighteenth year after a fall from a horse, nor that the following year Arimneste died giving birth to her second child, a daughter who died with her, and that Proxenus and Nicanor left Atarneus before I ever got there and are settled now in Eresus, on Lesvos. Pythias and I visited them there once or twice during our years in Mytilene. Stageira doesn’t mean anything to them. And it surely isn’t Athens, but I understand that promise is in the spheres now, with the Theban.
We rise together and embrace one last time.
“He’s like a god, isn’t he,” Philip says. “Who understands the gods? You can’t blame me for making backup plans. Some days I just look at him and wonder what he’ll do next.”
“WATCH THIS,” ALEXANDER SAYS.
At his sign, the actor begins to declaim.
“You can’t do that,” I say, within a couple of words, when I’ve caught the gist of the speech.
The actor stops. Alexander turns to me with his old look of amused incredulity.
“Majesty,” I add quickly.
We’re in the palace library, where Alexander summoned me ostensibly for a lesson.
“But I can, and I will,” Alexander says. “Who do you think he’ll prefer for his daughter, Arrhidaeus or me? Would he dare refuse me?”
The actor is tall and slender and handsome, and stands with an unnatural stillness while others speak. I recognize him as Thessalus from Corinth, the famous tragedian, a new favourite of the Macedonian court.
“Again,” Alexander says, and the actor starts over. He speaks lengthily of Alexander’s qualities while the prince beats time on the arm of his chair.
“You’ve met this girl?” I ask when he’s done.
Alexander tosses a few coins that the actor catches neatly and pockets. He bows low and slow, with tragic dignity, and leaves the room.
Alexander brushes away the remark, and by implication all casual conversation, with a toss of his hand, as though at a fly. “He arranges a marriage for my brother. My feeble, idiot, older brother. Why not me, then? Am I not marriageable? Does he think Arrhidaeus has something I lack? Caria is our most important ally against the Persians.”
I wonder if I dare point out this isn’t true.
“He’s trying to replace me. He doesn’t trust me. He had a daughter, you see, so now he must find another way. He’ll take Arrhidaeus’s whelp before me, even.”
I notice a pile of papers on the table at his elbow. “Do you hear from your mother?” Olympias has remained in Epirus with the king her brother, sulking, the Macedonians say.
“She writes me.” Alexander indicates the papers.
I counsel him to reconsider.
“I suppose you think I am not fit for marriage either.” “Not for this marriage, no. It’s beneath you.” I watch the boy consider my words, holding himself nobly still, as the actor did.
WHEN PHILIP FOUND OUT about Alexander’s scheme, he banished four of Alexander’s companions, including Ptolemy, but not Hephaestion. Never a fool, Philip, even in anger; he wanted to punish his son, not break him. When Philip learned Thessalus was already on his way back to Corinth, he sent soldiers out after him and had him brought back to Pella in chains. This indignity the actor bore with great nobility and quiet suffering.
“I can imagine,” I say.
Herpyllis, who’s telling the story, pokes my arm reprovingly. We’re in bed. We’re screwing now, a nice salty business I don’t have to explain to anyone. She went to see the actor dragged through the streets, as did most of Pella, while I stayed home to work on my book.
“That poor girl, though,” Herpyllis says. “Not knowing which brother she’s getting.”
I turn onto my back to help her. “She’s getting Arrhidaeus. I think Philip took care of that pretty quickly.”
“Poor girl.”
I close my eyes. “Poor boy.”
My mind goes to work on the categories of pleasure and how to teach them. The first time or two, Herpyllis let me go at it in my own way. When she began to guide me a little, I assumed she was offering me liberties she thought I was hesitant to take: tongue at the tit, fingers in the hole. Then, one night after I had spent myself, she continued to grunt and shift until I asked her what was wrong. I ran my fingers down her arm to her own fingers to see what she was doing.
“Do you need a cloth?” I asked. Not wiping, though, but rubbing. She tried to use my fingers but I pulled away and told her to be more modest.
“What?” she said.
“I am finished.” I was aware of sounding like my father. “That is not necessary.”
“You’re finished. I’m not.”
Not knowing what to say, I let her continue. She arched her back a little and then collapsed in a series of spasms, moaning weakly with each exhale. An annoying sound.
“And what was that?”
I assumed her answer was a lie. My father had taught me what she claimed to experience was not physically possible.
“Next time, you can help,” she said.
I asked her to describe her pleasure.
“Like honey,” she said, and, “Like a drum.” And other similes: cresting a hill, waves breaking, the colour of gold.
She said when I came I sounded like a man lifting something heavy and then, with a great effort, setting it down.
THE FIRST GREEK KING in Macedon was told by an oracle to build a city at the place where he first saw the aigas, the goats. Twenty-four years ago, Philip’s first military outing as king was the defence of Aegeae—former capital, site of the royal tombs—against Athens. Late this summer, the court relocates to Aegeae.
The palace, protected from behind by a mountain, faces north, with a view across the shrine and the city to the plain below. It’s smaller than the palace at Pella but older and holier; all important ceremonies are held here. At the heart of the complex is a square courtyard forested with columns; then reception rooms, shrines, living rooms. The circular throne-room has an inscription to Heracles in mosaic; elsewhere the floor is worked with stone vines and flowers so that it’s like walking across mea
dows in bloom. Near the west wall is the outdoor theatre. A tall stone wall shelters courtiers on their way from the palace to the theatre, cutting them off from the public space of the city. The theatre is stone and beaten earth, with platforms for the audience and an altar to Dionysus at the centre of the pit.
In addition to the court from Pella comes the king of Epirus, Olympias’s brother Alexandros. Philip, politicking to the last, has arranged for his and Olympias’s daughter to wed her own uncle. The marriage is widely understood as a tool to confirm Alexandros’s loyalty to Philip, rather than to Olympias. It’s an important wedding, too, not so much because of who the bride and groom are—Philip, presumably, still has a thumb free for each of them—but as an opportunity for Philip to display his grand greatness before all the world. Macedon itself will be on display. There will be a festival of the arts, games, and massive banquets over many days. Foreign guests come from everywhere; this is not the season when foreigners are refusing Philip.
On the morning of the first day of celebrations is to be a performance of Euripides, the Bacchae, again. Is Philip indulging in a little irony, reminding his brother-in-law of the last performance they attended together, all those years ago? We all love the Bacchae.
I sit in the audience with my nephew, toward the back, waiting for the play to begin. Below us sit a few hundred of Philip’s choicest guests, men all bright and lovely in their festival clothes, flowers in their hair, their many languages glorifying the air. The rest of the guests—a thousand all told, I’ve heard—will be feasting already, waiting for this afternoon’s games. The heat is oppressive and I’m missing Herpyllis, who’s remained behind in Pella to care for Little Pythias and our newborn son: Nicomachus, after my father. I miss my son’s small self in the bed, where Herpyllis matter-of-factly put him between us that first night, where he sleeps with his arms stretched wide, a hand on his mother and a hand on me. He gives me a deep animal pleasure—his fat little heat and snoring, a cub in the den, tangling limbs—that I never had with my daughter. Pythias insisted she sleep in her own room with her nurse, who for nighttime feeds roused us formally with a ritual knock at the door, as though fearing to interrupt us in some act of uxoriousness. Little Pythias was a fretful baby and took forever to get back to sleep once woken. Little Nicomachus, so far, eats like a wolf—Herpyllis feeds him on her lap, cross-legged next to me in the bed, like a peasant girl—and sleeps like a sot, a white trickle of his bliss still in the corner of his mouth. He will be an uncomplicated sort, I think. I miss him. I take pleasure, too, in Herpyllis, who is naturally kind and competent, who shares my childhood memories and has a reassuring earthiness to my dead wife’s absentee etherealism. But my work frankly bores her, and when I speak of it she always has another task in hand, mending, or trimming vegetables, or feeding the baby, or braiding Little Pythias’s fine hair.
