The Golden Mean Part 11

I promise to do my best.

"Philip has great things in store for you too, don't forget. He's counting on you. You'll be his man in Athens one of these days, the Macedonian brain in Athens's skull."

I bow my head.

We spend some minutes talking about the campaign in Thrace, a campaign that's looking like it will take longer than Philip ever intended.

"Savages, the Thracians," Antipater says. "Fight like animals."

I understand this is praise.

"He'll overwinter there."

Antipater doesn't seem like he's much given to chit-chat, and I suspect a test. I like tests. "Leaving his own territory unattended for so long?" I say. "Surely war with Athens is inevitable. I'm surprised he doesn't watch his back more closely."

"Unattended?" Antipater says.

"If he were to leave someone behind, someone to give them pause. One of his better generals. Parmenion, say."

Antipater frowns. "I suppose I'm a pet rabbit?"

"A lion of Macedon. Alexander's most worthy adviser." Alexander is now old enough to serve as keeper of the royal seal, but it's clear enough who wields true power. "As such, not to be risked in open warfare if it should come to that."

"p.i.s.s off." He pats my shoulder. "Take care of our boy."

"MIEZA," PYTHIAS SAYS, without expression. I show her on a map. "Goodness."

"I'll come back to visit you."

Her face hardened a little when she saw the distance, but it's a hardening I can't read: displeasure, fear, disappointment, or a mask on some more pleasant emotion? Relief, antic.i.p.ation?

"An elaborate arrangement I'm sure everyone will get tired of eventually," I say.

A few days later I pack minimally and ride out alone, for the pleasure of being alone. It's pretty, pastoral countryside, a morning of brooks and meadows and glens dotted with stone huts and sheep pens fenced with brambles.

Just outside the village of Mieza, the rambling temple complex features a.s.sorted shrines and sanctuaries and modest living quarters. The attendants give me a room, an austere little cell: bed, table, chair. I ask for many lamps. Leonidas has the room next to mine; the boys, I'm told, have a dormitory to themselves, out of earshot. The attendants are old men who accept our presence impa.s.sively; I'm reminded of Pythias. Who knows what goes on in their heads, those secret houses? They shuffle about, avoiding us, the older the shyer, shy as deer.

Once, late at night, as I'm working at my table with all my lamps, I hear a man's laughter. Once I pa.s.s an attendant carrying a tray, the remains of a meal, from a hallway I had thought uninhabited. "Penitents," he says tersely, when I ask about other guests. "They're in seclusion." Once, rounding a corner, I b.u.mp into Lysimachus, who carries on without acknowledging me. I wonder whom to inform-the attendants, Antipater, the newly recalled Parmenion (so!), Philip himself-and decide no one.

It's a charming place, though, especially by springtime, when we can take our lessons outside. Stone seats, shady walks, caves dripping stalact.i.tes I can use for my little stories for the boys, metaphors we can climb in and out of. My old master was much taken with the metaphorical value of caves. I come to enjoy the rhythm of my life here, of the commute back and forth to the city: this or that familiar rock, tree, field, face, the boys at this end, my wife at that, tossed from one to the other, always a hot meal waiting, a more or less luxurious bath. In the end I prefer to be with Pythias. Yet I don't get back to her as often as I'd planned, and sometimes months go by without us seeing each other. A ride in hard frost yields to a ride in tender spring greenery, and I'll realize how long it's been. She never reproaches me. She weaves, she tends the garden; she reads a little, she says when I ask. Nothing, poetry.

I'm not sure how I feel about her helping herself to my library, wonder if she knows the food rule. The next time I return to Mieza, I take the cart so I can bring the most significant volumes with me. I leave her some simple, appropriate material, and make a mental note to buy her some new to make up for my possessiveness. She watches the loading of the cart as she thanks me, but I can't help it. All the way back to Mieza I fuss over the oilcloths covering the crates, and can relax only once my library is safely installed in my room, where I won't have to share it.

Private sessions are impossible here, would be impossible to keep secret, so from the start I decide to slow down and address the boys in terms they'll all easily understand. There follows, accordingly, a kind of pastoral interlude, during which I lead the boys high and low, trailed less and less often by the grimly observant Leonidas, to look at plants and animals, formations of rock, to observe the wind and the sun and the coloration of clouds. I explain the phenomenon of rainbows, a complicated process of reflection that morphs into a geometry lesson as I explain why only half a rainbow is ever visible at one time. I explain the phenomenon of earthquakes as a great wind trapped underground, and when I draw the appropriate a.n.a.logy to the human bowels am rewarded with an afternoon of farting boys crying, "Earthquake!" I speak of the saltiness of the sea, and this too I relate to the body; for even as food goes into the body sweet and leaves a residue in the chamber-pot that is salty and bitter, so do sweet rain and rivers run into the ocean and disperse, leaving a similarly salty residue. I don't tell them I struck on this a.n.a.logy after tasting my own warm p.i.s.s. We spend a happy morning observing the flow of a river, while I tell them of the great underground reservoirs that some believe are the source of all the water in the world. Always Alexander, when I speak of geography, asks about the East, and I oblige with accounts I've read of Egypt and Persia. His eyes go shocked when I speak of the river that flows from the mountains of Parna.s.sus, across which the outer ocean that rings the entire world can be seen.

"I'll go there," he says.

I speak of the Nile, and Alexander says he'll go there too. Once, when I'm speaking of salt and silt and the filtering of sea water, I explain that if you took an empty clay jar, sealed its mouth to prevent water getting in, and left it in the sea overnight, the water that leached into it would be sweet because the clay would have filtered the salt.

"You've tried this?" Alexander asks.

"I've read of it."

This exchange stays in my mind, though. Every time Alexander swears to visit some distant place, and Hephaestion swears he'll go there too, and the others dutifully swear that they, too, will join the company, I think of that jar bobbing in the ocean, the one I've only read of.

One hot afternoon I take the boys into the woods behind the temple and set them hunting for insects, particularly bees. I've brought along a dissecting board and knives, small clay jars for the specimens, and a book to occupy myself while I wait for them to return.

Within half an hour I realize I've made a basic mistake. The shouts and laughter of the boys have long since faded and I know I've lost them to the sweet drugged heat of the afternoon. They're laughing at me, no doubt, wherever they are. Climbing trees, swimming in the river. No matter.

I walk on a little into the woods, calling them without conviction, and am surprised when I come upon Hephaestion and Alexander in a sun-shot grove. Alexander stands still while Hephaestion swats at him.

"They won't leave him alone," Hephaestion says, when I come close. Half a dozen bees have locked onto the smaller boy and are whizzing and darting at him, while Hephaestion tries simultaneously to knock them away and catch one in a wooden cup.

"I attract them," Alexander says. "I have been known for it since childhood. My father's astrologers tell me it is an auspicious sign."

"It's probably your smell," I say.

I spot the nest up in a tree not far from where we're standing, and point.

"I've had enough," Alexander says. I realize he's frightened and afraid to show it.

"Come." I lead him slowly away. "If you don't rush, they won't get agitated."

I take the boys back to the spot where I left my gear and tell them to wait. I go back to the nest tree and look on the ground beneath it until I find a dead bee. I scoop it up with a leaf and take it back to them.

"You should be flattered," I tell Alexander. "Bees have a powerful sense of smell, but they avoid anything rotten. They like only sweet things."

Hephaestion punches Alexander in the arm. Alexander punches him back.

"Look." I drop the dead bee onto the board. "How many parts does the body have?"

"Three," the boys say.

"The head." I touch each part as I name it with the tip of my father's smallest knife. "The middle part, which in animals is the chest. And the stomach, here. A bee will go on living if you cut off its head or stomach, but not if you remove the middle. Bees have eyes and are able to smell, but they have no other sense organs that we can discern. They have stingers."

"I know," Alexander says ruefully.

"Four wings." I delicately display them with the knife tip. "No two-winged insect has a stinger. The bee has no sheath for its wings. Do you know an insect that does?"

"Flying beetle," Hephaestion says.

I feel the sun on my head, p.r.i.c.king out beads of sweat. The boys' heads almost touch over the dead bee. The heat is winey on my tongue. I make an incision as delicately as I can.

"Blood?" I ask.

The boys shake their heads.

"And where does their sound come from?"

"The wings," Alexander says.

"A good guess."

"Wrong," Hephaestion says.

"p.i.s.s off," Alexander says.

I show them the pneuma and the membrane called the hypozoma, and explain how the friction of these two creates the sound of buzzing. The pneuma is like the lung of a breathing creature-though I take care to explain that insects do not really breathe-and the swelling and subsiding of the pneuma, because it's greater when the insect is flying, produces a louder sound at that time. The hypozoma, I further explain, is the membrane through which the insect cools itself, as bees and some others-cicadas, wasps, flying beetles-are naturally hot creatures. I tell them, too, of insects that can live in fire, for there are animals in every other element-earth, air, water-and it follows logically that they must exist.

"I have never seen insects in fire," Alexander says, and I tell him that's because they're very small.

When we get back to the temple, there's a letter waiting to inform me that Hermias of Atarneus has died. I write immediately to Pythias. I don't tell her the manner: that her guardian was ambushed by the Persians, detained, tortured, and crucified. Instead I tell her Hermias fell suddenly to the ground. I tell her I'll arrange for the necessary sacrifices, and also write a commemorative hymn.

Better than gold, the sun is desolate at his pa.s.sing, sacred to the Daughters of Memory, et cetera, et cetera. Well. I killed him, I suppose, or the treaty I carried to Philip did. It was never really a secret. Demosthenes in Athens rails against Philip's eastward scheming like a drip-mouthed dog. The Persians tolerated Hermias while he kept to himself, all nice and tucked in and trim about his territories, but once he started helping himself, just this one more village, and this tasty one too just this one more village, and this tasty one too, and once he reached out to Philip as protector against his protectors, well. I ma.s.sage my palm with my thumb while feeling with my index finger between the bones in the back of my hand, deluding myself about the pain (mightn't you nestle a nail through there smoothly, somehow?). Guilt is not quite the word. If it hadn't been me, someone else would have been the messenger. But he was ever kind to me, wanted to learn from me, gifted me my wife. Different if I had wanted a city, no doubt. I can imagine the dawning, sharpening look on his face. Perhaps he would have liked me even more. And he was such good company: he really did read in his spare time, really did like to sit and talk quietly about what he'd read, really did like to bask in the warm Atarnean evening sipping a cup of his own purple wine made by his own subjects from his own fat grapes, listening to the boom of his own waves and the lowing of his own dear beeves, see his own birds embroider the fragrant air of his own sky over his head, and talk through ideas of form and content and the mystical reality of the Good. His hair had a little curl; his nose had been broken, attractively; his voice was oddly high and strained for his big build (probably the root of the rumour about his gelding); he ignored Pythias utterly after he gave her to me. (Pythias is in all this somewhere, in my muddled, mud-coloured emotions, Pythias and Hermias's b.a.l.l.s, or the lack of them. It's night now, and back in Pella she sleeps, here in Mieza the boys sleep, and here I sit remembering and writing in the doddering lamplight, my little bubble in the dark. Poor Pythias.) But I left him, and that's bothering me tonight. He lived a rich life and offered me the fat and the comfort of it, and I walked away. He understood ambition and would laugh at what I'm trying to understand in myself right now. He would say I'm trying to make a simple thing complicated. An ambitious man wants to go to Athens, he'd say: salt the ocean!

I reread the hymn I've just written. Tomorrow to the copyist, and then to have it circulated. Like blowing a dandelion puff, soon enough one of those pages will land in Athens and my name will fall into place with a little click. Philip will have been seen to be manoeuvring for his easternmost foothold ever, laying the sub-floor for a full-scale Persian campaign. I, in my tiny capacity (love for Hermias = love for Macedon), will have been seen to be a.s.sisting him. a.s.sisting Macedonian imperialism: and what state, even an Athens, is safe from that?

You see, they will say, how his Macedonian blood has frothed up in him. Oh, he is not the one we remember. He never really was one of us, now, was he? Oho!

I remember the first time I met Hermias, at a dinner in Athens while I was still a student. He brought greetings from Proxenus and the twins, and asked me about my work. We walked together afterwards, tugging the thread of our conversation on and on into the night with us, a long strand like a long line drawn on a map, from Athens to Atarneus to Mytilene to Pella to Mieza, as though if I turned around it would still be there and I might trace it back to that long-ago night when a powerful man invited me to visit him one day, and I was excited about that future.

AROUND THE TIME OF the harvest moon, I take the boys out stargazing. They're sleepy and subdued, wrapped in their blankets, while above our heads the stars wheel. I lead them up a small hill not far from the temple and make them lie on their backs in the gra.s.s. A few immediately curl up and go back to sleep; one or two grumble about the cold and the damp ground. Alexander takes his usual place at my side. I let the boys show me the constellations they know, while the moon pales their faces with a milky half-light. the harvest moon, I take the boys out stargazing. They're sleepy and subdued, wrapped in their blankets, while above our heads the stars wheel. I lead them up a small hill not far from the temple and make them lie on their backs in the gra.s.s. A few immediately curl up and go back to sleep; one or two grumble about the cold and the damp ground. Alexander takes his usual place at my side. I let the boys show me the constellations they know, while the moon pales their faces with a milky half-light.

"What do you you see?" Alexander asks eventually. see?" Alexander asks eventually.

I tell him of the concentric spheres that make up the universe: how the earth is in the middle, the moon in the next nearest sphere, then the planets, then, in the outermost sphere, the fixed stars.

"How many spheres are there?" Alexander asks.

"Fifty-five. The math requires it. They move; the sky is not the same in the different months. You know this yourself. This is the rotation of the spheres. Each sphere's rotation causes movement in the one adjacent to it. The outermost sphere is moved by the unmoved mover, or, if you like, by G.o.d. Each of the fifty-five lesser spheres, in addition to the impetus they gain from the spheres nearby, has its own lesser unmoved mover."

Beside me I can hear that the boy's breathing has slowed, but his eyes are open and unblinking. He gazes straight up all the time I speak.

"I can't see the spheres," he says. "Are they ever visible?"

I explain they're made of crystal.

"Lysimachus says when I go to Persia the skies will be different," Alexander says. "He says there are new stars there that no civilized man has seen, but I will see them. He says my greatest battles will be recorded in the constellations. My father's never were, and never will be."

"Perhaps Lysimachus will accompany you," I say. "To Persia."

"Inevitably. Will you?"

"Charging into battle on Tar?"

I can feel him grinning, though he still looks at the sky.

"You will write me great letters," I say. "They will last a thousand years, and forever after all the thinkers will know that you were also one of us." He likes that. But then: "What is it you expect to find there?"

"War."

I'm disappointed and tell him so. "There is more. There is so much more. You want to march all that way for the battle-thrill? To sit tall on a horse and watch your enemy go down? To-I don't even know what it is you do-swipe your sword this way and that and watch the limbs fly?"

"You don't know what it is we do," he repeats.

"I know what your father expects. Tribute, tax revenue. All those wealthy cities and satrapies up and down the coast. They're used to paying up to foreigners; they'd pay your father as soon as the next man. But what do you expect?"

"You've lived there. You tell me."

"I found family and friends. I found what I went for and what I expected to find." And I squinted my eyes to stop from seeing everything at the edges: the dirt, the disease, the people without art or math or civilized music, sitting around their fires in the evenings, muttering in their ugly language, eating their smelly foods, thinking their short-legged-animal thoughts of eating and s.e.xing and s.h.i.tting. Dirty, obsequious, uncivilized. I tell the prince as much, teach him what I know to be true about the land he so romanticizes.

"You know what I'd do?" He's up on his elbows now. "I'd sit at their fires and listen to their music and eat their food and wear their clothes. I'd go with their women."

I hear the blush in his voice though I can't see it on his face. Go with Go with-a sweet pink euphemism from a hale Macedonian boy. He loves Hephaestion.

"I wouldn't go all that way just to keep my eyes closed."

"You don't know what you're talking about." And I tell him about Hermias.

"Well, but that's war," he says. "You're going to hate an entire nation because you lost one friend?"

"You're going to love an entire nation to annoy your teacher?"

"Yes."

"No. Not funny. You think you can go there, sit yourself down at their fires, make yourself at home? You'd have to conquer them first."

"That's the plan."

"You'll have to destroy their world just to get into it. What'll it be worth to you then?"

"I'm not like you. I'm not like my father. I don't want to do things the old ways. I have so many ideas. All my soldiers will be clean-shaven, you know why? So no one can get a hold of their beards in combat. My father would never think of something like that. I'll dress like they do so they'll let their guard down with me. Persia, I'm not afraid of Persia. I don't need to know what I'll find before I get there."

Inevitably, I think of my own advice to Speusippus. Youthful bravado, then? Was Speusippus as annoyed with me as I am now with my own student? Serves me right?

"Artabazus." He points at me like he's scored.

Philip's pet Persian, a renegade satrap and refugee, these past few months, in the Macedonian court, thanks to some quarrel with his own king. Canny, charming. He wrote me a letter of condolence for Hermias.

"I like him," Alexander says. "He's told me a lot about his country. You can't hate Artabazus."

"Lovely marine life."

Alexander looks at me, waiting for the punch line.

"I caught an octopus there, once. Netted it in the water, brought it slowly, slowly back to sh.o.r.e. I kept the net nice and loose so I wouldn't damage it. Slowly, carefully, I lifted it out of the water and laid it on the sand. It died."

"The lesson?" Alexander says.