The Golden Mean Part 6

"I have found you a tutor," my father said.

That sounded possibly pleasant; someone to talk to about the things I was interested in. Though it gave me a sick feeling, too. Someone chosen by my father would probably be someone very like my father, and I didn't want anyone else controlling my time. I didn't want to be guided.

"You're not cut out to be a soldier," he continued. "We have to think what to make of you."

At this I was a little offended. I was tall and rode well and Philip's wrestling lessons had improved my coordination. I could hold my breath under water a long time, and my eyesight and hearing (then, anyway) were pure and sharp. I was not sure how holding my breath was relevant to soldiering, but it was an athletic feat that I thought deserved some respect. And then, if I wasn't meant for soldiering, wasn't I supposed to become a physician, like my father? What failing, I wanted to know, had suddenly disqualified me from that?

"No failing." A trick of the light, maybe, but my father's face softened a little into that sadness that sometimes kept him too long in bed, the way it did me. "You are well on your way to becoming what I am. Only I thought it bored you."

And I was ashamed, because it did.

"His name is Illaeus," my father said. "He had a play in the festival in Athens, once. Your mother tells me you have an interest that way."

And that of course made it official: I would become a tragedian and have plays in the festivals in Athens. The only way to overcome the shame of his knowing this ambition of mine (half-formed at best) was to embrace it wholly.

"He expects you tomorrow afternoon, and says not to be early. Apparently he does his own work in the morning."

I saw approval withheld, but disapproval too. It dawned on me that my father didn't know what to make of this Illaeus, and wasn't at all sure of himself in sending me to him. What other avenues had he exhausted without my even knowing of them, I wondered, that he would take such a risk?

Fall was then hardening into winter, and the next day came up soft and grey, a low sky with a whisper of snow. I liked it; it was a change from rain. If the man did his own work in the morning, then I decided I must too, and sat in a corner of the kitchen with a tablet and stylus. I wrote nothing. After lunch I put on my warmest clothes and went out to find the house my father had directed me to. It was in a poor part of the city, a long walk down the hill from ours. I pa.s.sed a man in rags s.h.i.tting in the street who laughed at me when I looked at him and then when I looked away. Steam rose from the little pile. The houses here were small and mean, and I knew the families inside slept in single rooms with their children and their animals too. My mind went inside their doorways, to the rich noises and smells of that shared sleep. There had been farmers in Stageira who lived that way in the wintertime. I had never shared a room with anyone.

I asked a child for the house of the scholar, Illaeus, and she pointed to a stone hut like the others.

"He'll eat you," she said.

I had seen her appraising my woollen clothes and knew I should toss her a coin, but I had come out with nothing but the pouch my father had given me for the scholar.

"c.u.n.t," she said when I turned away from her. She might have been five.

I rapped my knuckles on the wooden door jamb, pushed aside the heavy curtain, and stepped in. It was dark but for a single oil lamp on a table in the far corner (and that not so far, really, only a few paces away). A man sat there. I could see the outline of him but no details, nor of the room. My eyes had not yet adjusted to the dark.

"Here is star bright," the man said.

I asked where I would find the scholar Illaeus.

"Now, isn't that interesting. You know you've found him but you ask anyway. Is that a good way to start relations?"

I realized my father had never met this man, or I would not be here. I wondered who had been the go-between. Was that person playing a joke on my father, on me? I saw now the table in front of him was empty. He was drinking unwatered wine from a cup he coddled in his groin and never put down. The room was warm enough. The walls were heavily swathed in cloth to keep the heat in, and the bed and chairs were lapped with more cloth and bolsters. Dim warmth and softness on every surface: a drinker's coc.o.o.n. A corner hearth, which I had taken for dead, glowed faintly, a spidery heat outlining the embers in white.

"Will you stay, star bright?" he asked. "Or have I emptied my p.i.s.s-pot for nothing?"

I could see now that he was not as old as my father, though his face was sternly lined, especially around the mouth, like a shirring, and his hair was a bristle-brush of white. It was the skin of his cheeks that gave him away; my father had taught me to look for that; smooth, pink. In a woman of his age it would be a last remaining vanity. His voice was deep, not loud. I sat on a chair.

"Does he talk?" he asked his cup, and drank again.

"My father might have misled you. I'm not writing a play."

"That's a relief."

"What is your work?"

"Chatty," he remarked to his wine cup. "He's chatty now. He likes the idea of work, I think."

I nodded.

"Wants his own work. A problem to solve?"

"Maybe. Not exactly. I'm not sure."

"Why did you think you were writing a play?"

I told him I had trouble sleeping because my mind was so full, and I had thought it might relieve me to write something down, get it out of my head.

"But there are other things to write," he said. "Not just plays."

I told him I thought maybe it would be better for me to write one of those other things.

"Excellent. And did you bring something to write on?"

I pulled my tablet from under my clothes.

"Describe this room, everything in it. Me, if you're ready for that. Don't leave anything out."

"Why?"

"No one will read it but you. You're still nervous. I want you to calm down. We'll start properly next time. We'll get some of the busyness out of your head so that next time you're here you can concentrate. Some of what keeps you awake, yes? Maybe you're thirsty?" He half-offered me the wine cup.

"No."

"Fine young man." He nestled the cup back in his groin. "We begin."

I wrote for a long time, until, even in the windowless hut, I could tell it was getting dark. My stomach growled.

"Tomorrow you might even take off your cloak." He had lit one or two more lamps and woken the fire, and there was a simmering pot now, beans from the smell, hanging from a peg above the flames. I had been oblivious to everything.

On my way out, he handed me a coin from the pouch I had given him. "If there's a boy in the street out there, give him this and tell him Illaeus is hungry. A young one, mind you. Not if the voice has broken, like yours."

In the darkening street I found a boy my brother's age playing a game on the ground with pebbles, tossing them into piles and allotting himself more pebbles as prizes when he scored. "Do you know Illaeus, who lives in that house?" I asked, pointing.

He held out his hand. I gave him the coin and walked away, back up the long hill, without looking back.

I went to him for three years. I learned more about him-that he had lived in Athens, studied with a great man there named Plato, had been a star bright himself, briefly-and I learned nothing more than I had learned that first day: that he was a drunk with a tooth for young boys, who didn't like me or my father but badly needed our money for wine and s.e.x. He needed these so much. Some days he was too drunk to teach, and I stayed in the shadows and let him ramble on about his glorious youth and every petty remembered grudge and grievance, t.i.ts he had nursed at for years, that had led him to this time and place, where he would die. Other times he spoke of Plato, still in Athens, still nurturing young men such as he had once been, young prodigies. "Maybe one day you'll go to him, star bright," he said, and the idea seemed to take root in him as he spoke it, for he mentioned it again once or twice when he was more sober, said he would write to recommend me, said the man would remember him and would take him seriously. "I can't do this forever," he would say, which I believed-he had some sickness in the chest and by the end kept two cups on the table, one for his wine and one for the wine-coloured clots he spat up. He was never so drunk, though, that I could slip away without him giving me a coin and having me procure a child for him. Once he even asked for a girl. "Variety," he said, laughing at the surprise on my face. "You must taste all the fruits of the world. Curiosity is the first sign of an intelligent mind."

I found a prost.i.tute my own age, fifteen or so by then, whose face opened up when I approached her and closed again when I explained the situation. She said the coin wasn't enough. I turned to walk away.

"Not enough for that old bag of blood, I mean," she said. "It's enough for you."

My sister had married Proxenus a few months before and gone to live with him in Atarneus, where she was now, at thirteen, expecting her first child. Arimnestus's training with the pages had given him biceps and soldier's slang and a flop of hair over the eyes and a lazy grin. People liked him. People, girls.

"Where?" I asked.

She led me into another hut a few doors down. An old woman poking at the hearth with a stick got up and left when we came in. The girl sat me on the bed and sucked on me until I went weak and the room tipped over into sweetness. My father had told me that touching myself would turn my fingers black and my mother would know what I had been doing, and I had believed him. For long moments I thought this girl was murdering me in a way I had never heard of. I thought I was dying, had died. When I finally sat up, the girl smiled, grudgingly, with one side of her mouth.

The next day, Illaeus said nothing about the missing girl or the missing coin.

I haven't said what he taught. At first history, geometry, a bit of astronomy. He had books that he kept hidden, in a hole in the floor or behind the cloths on the walls or in some other place altogether, I couldn't tell. I would arrive and he would have one or two sitting on the table in front of him. He would a.s.sign me to read and then summarize what I had read. Exercises of memory, I said once, dismissively (I was good at them), and he corrected me: exercises of attention. Once he asked me if I agreed with a particular pa.s.sage from Herodotus, about the battle of Marathon. I told him I didn't think it made sense to agree or disagree; it was history, facts.

"Of course." It was a year before he asked me the same question again, about the same pa.s.sage.

"An exercise of attention," I said.

"Don't be such a braggart smarta.s.s. I get so sick of you I want to puke."

"No, you don't." I knew he had come, if not to like me, at least to tolerate me. He got angry when I was late and smiled when I was quick with an answer.

"No, I don't," he agreed. "I get tired is what it is. I didn't think my life would end this way. I don't mean you, you're a good boy."

I could see the lesson was ending, and hesitated, my hand grazing the Herodotus.

"Yes, yes, you can borrow it. I loved books, too, when I was your age. You know not to eat when you're reading?"

I did; my mother had taught me that during one of my father's long absences, when she reluctantly allowed me into his library for the first time. No eating, no creasing, no taking books outside; clean hands, not too close to the lamp, and everything back exactly where I found it.

It was my father who noticed the inscription.

"Look at that," he said. "Plato. You have to be one of ten or twenty in the world to be allowed to study with him. This Illaeus, does he speak much of his time there?"

"A little," I said. "Not really. He seems-bitter."

My father frowned. This wasn't what he wanted to hear. "Perhaps you should ask him. Draw him out in conversation. Ask him about his own work. Flatter him a little. You can be quite unfriendly at times, and perhaps he senses that."

"I am not!"

"Bitter." It was as though the word had only just caught up to him. "I wonder why he left the school. Those who study there often stay on to teach, I'm told. Would something like that appeal to you?"

"Teaching?" I was appalled.

"I didn't think so." He handed me back the book. "Take care of this. I don't want him coming after me for a replacement because you dropped it in a puddle."

"I can take care of books!"

"Don't raise your voice to me," my father said. "Bitterness is caused by an excess of gall. Perhaps he needs to drink more milk to counteract the effect of that humour. I think I will prescribe the same for you, so you don't end up with a similar personality. I see the beginnings of it in you, already."

I drank goat's milk every day from then on, brought to me by a slave on a small tray every afternoon, usually while I was studying. It became one of the household rituals. I was to take it out into the courtyard, drain the cup, eat the accompanying walnuts (little brains for my big-little brain), and give the tray back to the slave, who would take the empty cup straight to my father, to prove I was following orders. Our household was sewn up in such solemnities, the absurdity of many of which was gradually coming clear to me.

Fortunately I could visit the palace when the smallness of my parents' world threatened to overwhelm me. No one made Philip drink goat's milk to forestall bitterness, and a black cloud of disappointment did not hang over his rooms if he put a book back on the wrong shelf.

"You're just in time," he said, the next time I went to see him.

I was allowed to use the palace gymnasium because of my father's standing at court, and often went there as a pretext when I was hoping for company. He had found me doing squats with a weighted ball, without much enthusiasm, but he had a soldier's respect for athleticism of any sort and waited for me to finish my set before he spoke.

"My new armour's ready. Come see when you're done."

"I'm done."

He took me to the armoury, where his new gear was laid out on a table: helmet, breastplate, sword, shield, spear, greaves, sandals. There were starbursts worked into the breastplate and shield. A gift from his father, he said. He had outgrown his practice gear anyway. I watched him lace and strap himself up, everything fitting just so. I wanted to make a joke about it, how he must have had to stand still for hours while they measured him, like a woman being fitted for a dress, but I knew he wouldn't laugh.

"It's magnificent," I said, and meant it. He looked the warrior, with the helmet pulled down and the nose piece riding perfectly, everything glinting, the new leather creaking. His eyes were dead level, and I wondered what enemy might next stand this close to him in his finery, and the last thing he would see would be those eyes: calm, measuring, not without a kind of patient humour. He was looking at me like that right now.

"You don't like to fight, do you?" he said. "You wouldn't want all this. You really wouldn't."

"I wouldn't know where to begin with it. It would be like play-acting for me." I was on the verge of offending him, I knew. "Can you see me wielding a sword? The only person I'd be a danger to would be myself."

"That's true enough." He gently removed the helmet-gentle with the helmet, I mean, rather than his own head-and laid it back on the table. "The future's coming fast, do you know that?"

Such an extraordinary thing to say that I immediately suspected he had recently had it said to him, and was merely repeating the wisdom to me. His father? I knew there were ongoing skirmishes with the petty mountain kings in Illyria, who were trying to encroach south into Macedon. Philip was probably headed off to one of these in his bright new gear, to b.l.o.o.d.y it up a little and prove he was worth it. A life in meat, and never a doubt about it.

"And you?" he was saying. "What's coming for you?"

I didn't answer. I was a child next to him, or an old man, so crippled by thinking that I couldn't even make a sentence.

"You could still have a place in the army."

That was the curious kindness in him, the way he saw my distress and held the punch anyone else our age would have landed without thinking.

"You could be a medic," he continued. "Your father's trained you, hasn't he? Don't you still do rounds with him?"

"Sometimes. I think he wants me to be a teacher, though."

"Of what?" He dug a finger in his ear and rooted, looking either skeptical or pained by his own nail. He may not have been thinking of me at all, or listening to my answer. s.e.x and books, that was what I wanted from the future. An Illaeus in my heart after all, maybe.

"Everything," I said. "Swimming."

He laughed. "When are we going again?"

"Now."

He disarmed and we went down to the beach, a long walk, without speaking. I knew he was more comfortable surrounded by larger groups in higher spirits. We didn't often find a lot to talk about when we were alone, though he never avoided such situations, trying, I think, to be kind to me. I in turn tried not to talk too much, or to a.s.sume any intimacy, and test his patience that way. It was snowing again, very lightly, a high mindless drifting that would turn heavy that night and freeze everything but the ocean by morning. Everything was soft and grey and sounds were m.u.f.fled and distended. Our breaths were smoky in the cold. The sun was a white disc, faraway, cool. At the usual rock I began to undress.

"f.u.c.k, no," Philip said, but when I didn't stop, he undressed too.

The water was warm for a moment and then searingly cold, burning rings around my ankles, my calves, my knees, my thighs, every time I stopped to think about what I was doing. I hadn't been swimming in weeks. Just before the plunge I looked back to see Philip, naked, in to his knees, hands on his hips, surveying the horizon. We didn't stay in long. Afterwards we dried ourselves on our cloaks and walked back up to the city carrying them sopping over our arms, shivering.

The next time I saw him was in the spring, at games. Philip had recently returned from a brutal winter campaign in Illyria; I had recently finished writing my first book, a treatise on local varieties of crustacea. I had described and categorized as many types as I could find, attempting to group them into families, and written of their habits from long solitary hours spent on the winter beaches staring into rock pools, and included ill.u.s.trations I had drawn myself. Those had been the hardest, but Illaeus had shown me the trick of using gridded paper to get the proportions right. He had also recommended a scribe to make a fair copy, someone whose handwriting and materials would be better than mine-a tiny, grinning, snaggle-toothed man in another dank hut-and they were. I presented the finished article to my father as a gift.

"That is lovely," he had said. "Lovely paper. Egyptian, is it?"

I was not discouraged. Illaeus had made me revise again and again until every sentence was concise and clear and necessary. He had asked me if I loved sh.e.l.lfish, found them elegant, and I had said I supposed I did. Then I must write elegantly about them, he had said, and that was our entire discussion about the validity of my project. He did not ask me for a copy of the book, but took a small spiral sh.e.l.l I had brought with me from Stageira, which I had put on the table in front of me while I was working one day.