The Golden Mean Part 16

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 are joking. The king trusts you to tutor his heir. If Philip doesn't doubt your loyalty, why should anyone else?" 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 pa.s.sion. 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 a.s.sociated 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, a.s.sisting my father, but she waves me away. "You faint."

"I will not."

"You see wife, all b.l.o.o.d.y, open between like meat. You never f.u.c.k 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 s.e.xual 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 pa.s.sion for the logistics of battle and will one day make a fine tactician. Perhaps the young man smells my eagerness to encourage any pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sions, 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 spoke only 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 s.h.i.t 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 ma.s.s 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 s.h.i.t-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 partic.i.p.ates in the life of the polis, in the judiciary, in the promotion of the good and the just. Different states have different const.i.tutions, 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 const.i.tutions. I might speak to you of polity, where the middle cla.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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.

She raps a knuckle on a cooking pot. "Iron." Satisfied, she turns back to her doughs.

"Thank you."

"Next time easier." She doesn't bother to look over her shoulder at me. "Maybe I even let you watch."

A week after the birth, I carry the baby around the altar Pythias has lit, purifying her. We've hung wool from the doors to show the world it's a girl, and prepared a feast, overseen by Athea, to celebrate her life so far. Athea is fiercely possessive of the creature, to the point where I've seen her take the baby from Pythias's arms and make Pythias cry, but I don't intervene. After ten days we prepare another feast, inviting some friends this time, for the name-day. Callisthenes brings rattles for my daughter and pretty painted vases for Pythias, as is the tradition, while Athea watches us all blackly, muttering to herself, her face softening only when she looks at the baby.

Little Pythias has a boxer's crease across the bridge of her nose and looks at me with a gaze the slaves say is preternaturally calm and steady, and foretells great wisdom. Other auguries: a white bee in the rosemary, a flight of swallows across the moon at dusk, unseasonable warmth and a sweet-smelling breeze at midnight, a pepper of sparks from a kitchen fire that had supposedly been extinguished. The household collects these happenings and trades them like rare coins. These and other wondrous events continue for weeks, reaching a fever pitch when we all are at our most sleep-deprived. I understand that every household with a new baby goes as foolish fond, and I collect more quietly, and keep to myself, my own talismans: the spider's thread of milk from wife's breast to daughter's lip when they draw apart after a feeding; the abrupt drop of the baby's brows when something amuses her; the way, at times of greatest distress, she buries her entire face in her mother's breast, as though seeking oblivion there. Liberty and self-sufficiency: the house is like a ship, Pythias and I and the servants like mariners, united by the determination to protect our tiny, mewling freight. Tycho lines a handcart with pillows and clean woollens and clatters the baby up and down the courtyard while the servants clap their hands in time and cry, b.u.mp, b.u.mp! for her greater amus.e.m.e.nt. She smiles pacifically, with an infant's mild aristocracy. Everything, everyone, it all belongs to her. When she mouths her first bites of honey pap, the slaves meet my eye, smile, and congratulate me. I realize they don't often look me in the eye.