The Golden Mean Part 10

"You're too old for her," Alexander says.

"Yes."

"She's overdressed, too."

"Yes."

"You're not going to get mad at me, are you?"

I shrug. "Do you want me to?" My darkling mood, suspended by the shock of his appearance, is threatening to rea.s.sert itself.

"Do you suppose she's happy?"

I close my eyes.

"I often wonder that about people," Alexander says. "It's a way of understanding why they do the things they do. My mother taught me that. She said not to trust happy people."

"What else did she teach you, your unhappy mother?"

He looks at Pythias, across the room.

"I a.s.sume she's unhappy, your mother," I add. "If she prizes it so."

"She says nice things about you," Alexander says.

We eat in the big room, Pythias bejewelled, our three breaths smoking in the cold. Conversation shrivels in it. The slaves come and go with plates of food. The c.o.c.k, stewed too briefly, is tough and stringy; the wine is cold.

"How is Carolus?" Pythias asks into the silence.

"He coughs."

Pythias looks at me.

"I'll send him something," I say dutifully.

"Your father was a doctor," Alexander says.

"He saved your father's life when we were boys. Patched a spear wound."

Alexander touches his collarbone, here? here? I nod. I nod.

"That wouldn't kill you," Alexander says. "Everyone I know has one of those, from drills. Would you teach me some medicine, though? As part of my studies?"

"You want to deliver babies?"

He blushes. Pythias frowns.

"For the field," he says. "Wounds."

I shrug. "The little that I know, I'll teach you. Bind a bleeder, squeeze a squirter. That was something my father used to say."

Pythias pushes her plate away. Well, she shouldn't be here at all, but Alexander wanted it. Carolus's encouragement again, no doubt.

"Will you have dessert, or your bath?" she asks the prince.

"Dessert in in the bath?" the bath?"

She smiles briefly, grudgingly, at his hope-against-hoping face. I have a vision of my long-ago prost.i.tute, amused despite herself by men's awe at the variety of pleasure in the world.

"It's not that he has no no boundaries," I tell Pythias, later, once the boy is installed in the great bronze pot by the kitchen hearth with his plate of honey and apples, and we're in the room the slaves have prepared for him, the room where Pythias hid from the snow, checking it over. "He knows precisely what the boundaries are. It's more like he has to overstep. He has to push everyone a little bit too far, just to see what will happen. Following me here, for instance." boundaries," I tell Pythias, later, once the boy is installed in the great bronze pot by the kitchen hearth with his plate of honey and apples, and we're in the room the slaves have prepared for him, the room where Pythias hid from the snow, checking it over. "He knows precisely what the boundaries are. It's more like he has to overstep. He has to push everyone a little bit too far, just to see what will happen. Following me here, for instance."

"I humiliated you. Supper was terrible."

"I doubt he noticed. Did you see how he ate? Like he hasn't had a square meal in days."

"I saw that." She dusts a little table with the hem of her dress. "I thought I'd leave him out a plate of fruit, in case he wakes in the night."

"Do that."

"I still think the other room is nicer, the one with the window."

"This is safer. Warmer. He's closer to us here too."

She hesitates. "How are you feeling?"

I shake my head, a shorthand she knows. Knuckles tap at the door frame, two taps: Pythias's maid.

"Lady," the girl says. "He asks for you."

"Me?" Pythias says. "Where is he?"

"Still in his bath."

"Monkey." I think evil to Carolus. Now what? "He's trying to insult me. I'll go."

That wry smile, again. "Me, surely, if anyone," Pythias says. "And he's only a boy. If it's just testing boundaries, as you say-let's at least see what he wants."

"What he thinks he wants."

She's gone a long time. I stew longer than the c.o.c.k: in the guest room, first, napping the fur we've put on his bed, plumping pillows, fussing over lamps; and then in my own bigger bedroom, where I can pace.

When she returns she waves my words away unspoken and says, "He's in bed now. He wants you."

I shake my head, grimacing. "Monkey."

His room is warm and golden from the lamplight; more lamps now than the pair I trimmed. He lies under the fur, rosy and smiling, eyes round and dark as a small child's with the effort of keeping awake for me.

"All right?"

He smiles, nods.

I rest a hand briefly on his forehead. "Shall I blow out some of these lamps?"

"I will, in a minute."

I return to my room, where Pythias is sitting up in bed. "So?" I ask.

"My virtue is intact."

"Thank the G.o.ds." I get in beside her. "Let me guess. He wanted to talk?"

"He wanted to know what went into the stew. He wanted to tell his mother."

"Tell her he was here?"

"I don't think everything he tells her gets back to Philip. Actually, I don't think anything he tells her gets back to Philip."

"It's like that."

She nods.

"Hard on him."

"I think so." She lies back while I make my examination, all gooseflesh in the cold. "I think he just liked having someone to talk to while he was in his bath. Perhaps his mother used to sit with him. He oiled himself and dressed himself."

I touch my collarbone. "Did he have a scar?"

"I looked. No."

I blow out the lamp.

"He asked me if I was happy," Pythias says.

"He asked me that too, about you. What did you say?"

"He asked me if I'd like to be invited up to the palace more often, to get me out of the house. He said he could arrange it with his mother. I said no thank you."

"You didn't."

A pause. "Was that wrong?"

"n.o.body likes his mother. You think he doesn't know that? You didn't have to rub his nose in it."

"I told him he could come here whenever he wants," she says.

I smack my forehead.

"Don't worry," she adds. "He said it was too difficult to get away."

"Thank the G.o.ds for that."

She lies with her back to me. I wrap a curl of her long hair around my finger, the part of her I can touch without her knowing it.

"He asked me about Atarneus. What it was like when I was a girl, the landscape and the weather and the people I knew. He asked about my mother." When I touch her breast she flinches. "He'll hear."

I roll back to my side of the bed. "Night, then."

"Night."

When she's asleep, I get up and go outside. The snow is still coming, thick and fast and silent. Tycho has a weight of it on his head and shoulders. He rears up like a bear in his great blanket when I touch his shoulder.

"Go to bed," I tell him. "I'm here now."

He goes inside briefly and comes back out with a second blanket. We sit side by side for the rest of the night, watching nothing go by.

Who am I looking for? Tycho asked, hours ago, when I first set him to watch. Tycho asked, hours ago, when I first set him to watch.

I'm not sure, I said. I guess anyone who might have seen he was alone I guess anyone who might have seen he was alone.

AFTER A SEASON OF sporadic sessions with the boys, interspersed with the obligations of court life and my own studies-I'm settling down, now, finally, into a routine-Antipater summons me to a private meeting. Philip is still in Thrace. sporadic sessions with the boys, interspersed with the obligations of court life and my own studies-I'm settling down, now, finally, into a routine-Antipater summons me to a private meeting. Philip is still in Thrace.

"Tell me about the prince," Antipater says.

We sit in one of the smaller rooms, with a pebble mosaic of the rape of Helen beneath our feet. I can brush dust from a pink nipple with my toe. I've developed, with the first snow, a heavy cold, and am constantly blowing great green skeins of snot from my nose. I wipe my hand now surrept.i.tiously on my cloak, and hope Pythias won't notice the crust of it when she takes my laundry.

"He is highly intelligent and alarmingly disciplined."

Antipater laughs. "When he was small his mother would hide sweets in his bed, and Leonidas would search his room until he found them, and throw them away. He believes it's good for the boy always to be slightly hungry."

Ah. I wonder if that's why he's small.

"Leonidas used to take him on night marches to stop him wetting the bed. It worked, too. Leonidas has been good for him, no doubt about it."

I wonder if I've offended the old tutor and am about to get my reckoning.

"Leonidas tells me the prince is devoted to this Lysimachus," Antipater says. "That one who calls himself Phoenix and Alexander Achilles. Who does that make Philip, then?"

"Peleus."

"Peleus." Antipater frowns. "Well, never mind. Only I suspect his mother's in there somewhere, encouraging that s.h.i.+t. We don't need an aesthete, we need a soldier. We need a king." He seems distracted for a moment by the floor, and c.o.c.ks his head sideways to squint at an arrangement of limbs. "All right. Philip instructs me to give you the Temple of the Nymphs at Mieza. You'll tutor Alexander there from now on, Alexander and let's say a dozen others. He'll go through his entire life with these boys; you can't cut him off entirely."

I nod.

"The mother I can control, and Lysimachus is not to attend him there. I'll tell him myself. The prince likes you. He thinks you're almost as smart as he is. Smarter than any of the rest of us, it goes without saying."

Mieza is a half-day's ride away, far enough that it will mean staying there. I know vaguely of the place; there are caves, apparently, and it's supposed to be cooler than Pella in the summertime. What else, I'm not sure. Pythias will have to manage on her own while I'm gone. Perhaps she'll enjoy it.

"Leonidas disciplined the body," Antipater says. "You'll discipline the mind."