The Golden Mean: A Novel

by Annabel Lyon

  “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 playing dress-up 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 bloody 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. Sex 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 assume 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 muffled 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.

  “Fuck, 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 illustrations 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; 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 shellfish, 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 shell I had brought with me from Stageira, which I had put on the table in front of me while I was working one day.

  “I’ll keep this,” he had said, and that was that.

  It was tiny, whorled like an ear, pink like a nipple, with a creamy pouting lip; a perfect prize, and I didn’t fight for it. Suddenly I had my book, and that was more.

  The games were to honour Amyntas’s recent death—from old age, an extraordinary feat in the house of Macedon—and to celebrate the accession of Philip’s elder brother, Perdicaas. Philip and I were both sixteen by then, both looking it, in different ways. I had shot up past my father, who was not a small man, and grown a neat, tight fuzz of a beard my mother loved to pat. The swimming season had begun again in earnest a few weeks back and I had begun to put on muscle, though I was still gangly next to Philip. I watched him in the wrestling and the javelin, both of which he won.

  Afterwards my father took me to the temple of Heracles to sacrifice for future military success, and then he suggested the baths. He wanted a look at the whole of me, I knew, with his physician’s eye, something I’d increasingly been denying him. He wanted to see the tone of my skin, the hang of my joints, the set of my muscles, the size of my penis. He wanted to find something he could fix.

  “You might have competed,” he said, once we were stripped.

  I sat with my back to him, scraping the dirt from my legs with a honed stone while he looked me over.

  “Perhaps this summer.”

  “In what?” I meant the question rhetorically, scornfully. After the first moment I couldn’t look at him; he was an old man now, pasty, sparse-haired, with an old man’s tits and a frost-haired, drooping business between his legs that I didn’t want to get a clear image of.

  “Running.”

  “That’s ridiculous. You’ve never even seen me run.”

  “You have the body for it. Not for a sprinter, no, but for distance. Perhaps that would be something for us to think about.”

  I foresaw another of my father’s regimens, a training routine to go with my goat’s milk and my nuts and my studies with Illaeus. “No.”

  “Think about it,” my father said.

  I thought about it; I thought about the fact that my father never used to value games, and that our time in Pella was making him increasingly ashamed of me. Arimnestus was all right; Arimnestus was brave and athletic and gave a shit about horses; Arimnestus would make a solid Companion. But I was not the kind of son men had here, and something in my father had given way, like a rotten floor, so that he could no longer see how very like him I was, and how inappropriate his plans for me were. He could only see that I was not like other Macedonian boys, and that was a problem. I realized for the first time that it might be necessary to leave Pella, to leave my father, if I did not want to end up a uniformed medic—trudging along at the ass-end of Philip’s glorious army, diapering his shit—who had once placed fourth in a distance event before he became a bitter letch, a misanthrope, and a drunk.

  Still, my world was small, and I could think only of returning to Stageira. I planned vaguely to farm and write and swim and find some girl to marry who would suck on me the way the prostitute had, for some regular relief.

  I didn’t think about Illaeus’s boasting about the great teacher in Athens until my last day with him, which I didn’t know would be my last day. He told me he had received a reply to his letter.

  “What letter?” I asked.

  Instead of answering, he gave it to me and told me to give it to my father. He had resealed the wax over a candle. “All right?” he said.

  I saw his hand come up, for my hair or my shoulder, and I left quickly, b
efore he could find a coin. I had asked him recently what his work was, as my father had advised, finally summoned up that courage, and he had said quite simply that he was writing a play, and had been writing the same play for as long as he had been in Pella: over a decade.

  “It must be very long,” I had said.

  “Not really.”

  I wanted to ask him the name of it, or what it was about, but we glided onto other subjects and I never raised it again. It was a simple enough exchange, but things between us changed after that, as though we had been intimate in some way that left him vulnerable to me. It wasn’t a feeling I liked. He did not always tidy his table, now, before my lessons, and sometimes I arrived to see the crabbed sheaves with their angry strikethroughs and scribblings. He would look up at me, shyly, acknowledging that he had allowed me to see, and then tidy them away with tender hands that made me a little sick.

  At home, my father read the letter in silence while I watched him. Summer, again, and the dust turned in the dusky, golden air around his head. The plague was bad that year, the worst since we’d arrived, and my father was tired from long days with the dead and dying. He gripped the letter a little too hard. I understood the gist, by then: a place in Plato’s academy, room and board, a place in the shape of myself held for me in the fabled city.

  “He shouldn’t have written without consulting me,” my father said. “It’s out of the question.”

  The next day, he didn’t get out of bed. I assumed it was melancholy.

  “I want to go,” I told my mother. I had found her in the courtyard, clipping herbs. “No one has any use for me here.” She didn’t answer. I looked closely and saw the fine skin around her eyes all ruined with crying. “What?”

  “Daddy told me to collect these.” She meant the herbs. “For him. He has—” Her fingers fluttered under her arm. “Two of them. Only two. Here, and here.”

  “What colour?”

  “Red, like blisters.”

  “Seeping?”

  She shook her head. “That’s good, isn’t it? No blood?”

  I didn’t know how to answer. She read my face and ran into the house, into my father’s room, with her fistful of greenstuff, and forbade anyone to open the door. That same day I was sent to the palace to sleep with the pages. Arimnestus, quarantined with me, was bewildered. I pretended to be too.

  Two days later, we were summoned to appear before the king. Philip, I knew, didn’t have much time for his elder brother. Perdicaas had been tutored in his own youth by one of Illaeus’s classmates, a man named Euphraeus, who was still influential at court and arranged what Philip called poncy dinners, with preset topics of conversation and minimal drinking. Perdicaas was taller than Philip, thinner, paler, only adequate in battle, always drumming his fingers on whatever book he was reading and wanted to get back to. Eight years later he would die in Illyria in a rout, four thousand killed, bequeathing Philip a royal mess.

  “I’m sorry,” the king said.

  Arimnestus wept and asked for our mother.

  “I’m sorry,” Perdicaas the reader-king said again, tap-tap-tapping on his Homer. I had to squint to make out what it was.

  Arimneste arrived from Atarneus with Proxenus, her husband, and their baby son. She took charge of the household and of Arimnestus, managing servants and meals and her twin brother’s pain. There was ash in all the corners from where my sister had burnt herbs to purify the air of plague. It got on our clothes and in the food, but that was good. You left the ash to disperse naturally or the cleansing wouldn’t take. Arimneste was matronly now, plumper, busy and efficient, and wouldn’t look me in the eye. Someone—one of the slaves—must have told her I hadn’t wept. I lived in my father’s study, now, surrounded by the smell of him—faintly spicy from his apothecary, faintly sour from his old body—and his books. Mine, now. I piled them around me, scrolls unspooling, single leaves falling in drifts to the floor, and read late into every night. There were books I had never seen before, medical books shading into smut, wild histories, and plays, raunchy satires I had never suspected my father had a taste for. Periodically I came up for air, visiting the kitchen for an apple or bread. The servants avoided me. Every time I started to feel something, I dove back into the books and stayed down for as long as I could.

  “You don’t grieve?” Proxenus asked me.

  He was a decent man, a hard worker who treated my sister well and had revered our father. My dry eyes outraged him. I had returned from a walk—I still took walks, numbly, trying to tire myself enough to sleep—to find him in my father’s study, in my father’s chair. He wanted to tidy the mess I’d made, wanted me to help him. When I didn’t respond, he waved a piece of paper I recognized.

  “There’s a letter here. As your guardian, I can’t let you remain in Pella.”

  Escalating military losses meant Philip and forty-nine companions would soon leave for Thebes as hostages, an elaborate diplomatic arrangement to ensure Macedonian docility. Philip would spend the next three years in the household of the great Theban general Pammenes, learning the arts of war in a city famous for its infantry, cavalry, and military leadership. He would watch their phalanxes drill on the training ground every day. I was high enough born and a frequent enough companion of the prince that I knew Proxenus feared to see me promoted to hostage number fifty-one. I was not hardened to military life and probably would not have survived my first winter there. If I wanted to live, I would be wise to leave Pella before the Theban escort arrived.

  Arimnestus would stay with Proxenus and Arimneste, at least until he was of age. They would leave as soon as possible. I knew the twins didn’t need me, and Proxenus didn’t want me festering in his house, staring too long at people and taking over his library. It was time I became a problem to no one but myself.

  I told him I wanted to go to Athens. “You would always be welcome to come to us in Atarneus,” he lied. “Perhaps once your studies are concluded.”

  “I would like that,” I said.

  When I told Philip, he called me a piece of shit, and congratulated me, and told me not to leave without coming to the palace one last time. Suddenly everything was happening fast, and I was leaving much sooner than I was ready for. Not even weeks; days. Arimneste and her maids made clothes for me, summer clothes painstakingly embroidered. Then it was the day before the journey. Proxenus and the twins would ride down with me to see me settled and then continue on to their own home. Their preparations took far longer than mine, and on the afternoon of that frantic eve I went up to the palace.

  “Got you something.” Philip gave me a book of pornographic verse, illustrated. He had found it in the palace library, he said, and doubted his brother would miss it.

  I thanked him, wondering where to hide it on the journey. My trunk was already packed and stowed on the cart. I asked him, in our old manner for the last time, if he was sure he could spare it.

  “It’s a book, you dumb shit. You think I need it from a book?” He grabbed at his crotch. He repeated the gesture the next morning when we rode out—he and some pages had come down to wave me off—and smiled his disarmingly happy smile. I had finally stuffed the book deep down the throat of a giant amphora of sweet raisins with which my sister had lovingly provisioned me for the winter ahead.

  THREE

  PYTHIAS SAYS SHE doesn’t mind living in the palace, but now that we’re staying in Pella I want a house of my own. The flunky knows of a place, a modest single-storey house tucked behind the first row of mansions immediately south of the marketplace. We tour it behind the owner’s widow, a sniffling young woman in an indigo mourning veil. She scurries ahead of us from room to room, trying simultaneously to straighten things up and keep out of sight. The flunky assures me she’s got family to go to; I don’t press him for details. The house has a gaudy entrance hall (the mosaic floor shows Zeus eyeing a nymph); a small courtyard and measly garden, surrounded by a colonnade; and, at the back, living quarters, including a room for my books, a room for the
women, bedrooms, and a small shrine whose care I’ll leave to Pythias. Callisthenes is old enough to find his own place. When I tell him this, he hesitates, swallows, nods. He’ll be fine.

  I stack the animal cages against a south-facing wall, though half my specimens—tender as playwrights—have already died from the wet cold. I attend court, and bring Pythias gifts from the marketplace: some fine black and white pottery, a bolt of pale violet cloth. I have bulbs planted in the garden, and furniture delivered to the house.

  “We’re settling down, then?” Pythias asks. Laughing at me with her gravest face.

  At least she’s happy about it, or less unhappy. She likes the house, which is bigger than the one we had in Mytilene, and she likes her status here too. Is shocked by it, I think: in Mytilene she was simply herself, but here she is in vogue. The royal wives fight over her for their sewing parties. Her advice on hair and clothes and food and servants is sought out and followed. I’ve taught her to explain, if anyone asks, that our slaves are like family: we’ve had them for years, care for them, would never sell them; you don’t sell your own family. Very cosmopolitan, very chic, very fresh. The wives are impressed.

  “You see,” I tell her, “we will be a force for the good, you and I. A civilizing influence. When we leave, we’ll have helped shape the future of a great empire.”

  “The prince, you mean,” Pythias says. “I like that boy. There’s something pure in him.”

  I hug my fashionable wife, hold on a moment too long, smelling her clean hair. That boy is my project now, my first human project. A problem, a test, a trust; a metaphor I’ve staked my life on. A thirteen-year-old boy. And Athens is a promise Philip has made me, payment in gold for when my time here is done.

  “Sweet and pure,” I agree.

  The palace is quieter now with the army gone. In the Macedonian tradition, the king must be present at battle to win the favour of the gods. Tiring for Philip, no doubt, and eerie for those of us left behind. It’s hard not to feel like a child left alone when his parents have gone to an important dinner and will be away all night. The familiar rooms echo differently, somehow, and time turns to honey.