The Golden Mean Part 21

"Athens," Pythias says. "Athens, Athens. Perhaps Philip is right. What would you have done there, really, other than more of the work you do now, for a more attentive audience?"

"Is that nothing?"

"To him it is."

I shake my head. "Look at this city. Look what he's done with it. He's brought in actors, artists, musicians. He knows what it means to be cultured, to feed the mind. He understands the-the diplomacy of it."

"You think it's personal?"

I don't answer.

"Practically, then. What would he do with you? He can hardly force you back into the Academy if they won't have you of their own free choice. He knows that much, at least. So what could you do for him?"

"Run my own school," I say, to be contentious, but I see the pain is returning and she's lost interest in the argument.

"ANH," THE OLD ACTOR SAYS when he sees me, a consonant of pleasure that becomes a guttural, wet coughing. "Long time," he adds when the coughing subsides, gasping for the breath to make the words. when he sees me, a consonant of pleasure that becomes a guttural, wet coughing. "Long time," he adds when the coughing subsides, gasping for the breath to make the words.

A housemaid has led me to the bedside, where Carolus lies in odd relief: what's under the sheet seems shrunken almost to flatness, but his hands and head seem enormous. Hands hairy, knuckly, worked with surpa.s.sing fineness and detail by some master carver. Head leonine, the white hair longer than I remember and styled back in a greasy plume that still shows the plough-marks of the comb, chin stubbled, eyes two gems sunk in soft pouches.

"She's a good girl," he says of the housemaid, when I ask if there's anything I can do for him, anyone I can send; we can easily spare someone to sit with him at night if he wants it. "No. Nights aren't so bad; sometimes I almost sleep. I remember a lot at night. Performances I've been in, actors I've worked with, audiences I've played for, travels, lovers. My childhood, too, and stories my father and grandfather told me about their performances, their days. I have a lot of company at night."

"I'm sorry it's taken me so long. I've been travelling with the army, if you can believe it, as a medic."

"I hadn't thought we were so short of men."

"We're not. Alexander wanted me to come. Get me out seeing the world."

"Through his eyes," Carolus says.

"Through his eyes."

He nods, closes his own, opens them with an effort. "He likes you. That's good."

I wait while he closes his eyes again, and am thinking I should slip away when he opens them. "I'm here," I say.

"You were going to leave."

I can't tell if he's frightened. "Should I?"

"No."

I look around the room while he does the work of breathing, preparing his next sentence. A shelf of books, plays I a.s.sume, that I covet a closer look at. Masks on the walls, and props placed here and there. He's surrounded himself with the things that make him happiest.

"Under the bed," he says.

I bend down from the chair I've drawn up next to him and lift aside the trailing linens and furs. There's a box.

"Yes," he says, and I pull it out.

His fingers twitch a little so I lift it onto his lap where he can reach. He fumbles with the lid. Inside is a mask.

"'How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there's no help in truth!'" I quote. "'I knew this well, but made myself forget. I should not have come.'"

"'Let me go home,'" Carolus replies. Of course he knows his Oedipus Oedipus as well as I do. "'Bear your own fate, and I'll bear mine. It is better so: trust what I say.'" as well as I do. "'Bear your own fate, and I'll bear mine. It is better so: trust what I say.'"

His grandfather's Tiresias mask is fine and light and old; the ribbon that would secure it around the actor's head has yellowed and frayed away to scant fibres. At first it looks almost featureless: the eyes are shallow, unpainted pods, the nose and mouth minimally marked. The cheekbones are high and wide; the brow is delicately wrinkled, in the moulding rather than the paint. It's large, larger than a human face so as to be seen from the back of a theatre, but light; my hands almost seem to rise as I hold it, tricked by the illusion, the contradiction between size and weight.

"Have you ever worn it?"

He lifts his hands and slowly takes it from me to lower it onto his face. After a moment's rest he struggles to raise his hands again to lift it off. I help him, and lay it gently back in the box. "First time," he says. "Last time."

I lid the box and replace it under the bed.

"I miss my father."

After a long moment I realize he's crying.

"May I look at your books?" I ask.

They're well used, torn and marked, some lines underscored and others struck through. He has some I don't. When I turn back to the bed, he's watching me.

"Yours," he says.

"I'm greedy. Even now, and I let you see it. Forgive me."

"I don't forgive you. To be alive is to be greedy. I want you to be greedy. I want everyone to be greedy. You know he came to see me?"

I've lost the thread. "Your father?"

"My father's dead. Alexander. Speaking of greedy. One day that monkey's going to open his mouth and swallow the whole world."

This costs him; he coughs until his whole being is concentrated in a long, gagging exhale that purples his face and closes his eyes to slits, like blind Tiresias himself. The housemaid, hearing, returns to the room with a cup of water and lifts him upright with a practised grip until his breathing eases. He sips, sags, sips again. She settles him back, smooths the covers, puts a palm briefly on his forehead, and gives me a nice look to say hurry up.

"You need to sleep," I say.

I rise and arrange myself to go. I'm not sure what gesture to leave on. Perhaps I'm too aware of my own movements because of his stillness, or because he's an actor after all and would know just what is needed, how to hold your hands when you leave someone for the last time. I bend to kiss his forehead. He opens his eyes again, obviously in pain now, and I hesitate.

"You need to love him better," he says. "Alexander. He knows the difference."

I go the last distance, let my lips touch his wrinkled forehead, which is not cool, not feverish, but warm, humanly warm.

FOUR.

POOR P PROXENUS. My sister's husband tried so hard to be a father to me in those obscene first weeks after my parents' deaths. He spoke gently, patted my back, frowned in concentration on the rare occasions that I spoke. But I was already such a cool boy, and my physiology was such that grief made me cold. So I overheard him telling my sister, Arimneste, on the s.h.i.+p from Pella to Athens, when they thought I was asleep in my bunk. He presented his bafflement to her as a medical diagnosis. I had rare blood and humours, and ran cool in the tubes where others ran hot; was it his fault he found my company distasteful? He was a naturally warm man, as she was a naturally warm woman. They wept, they spoke their love for the dead, they found succour in the rites of mourning, and then they moved on. They were like friendly dogs, but I was a lizard.

"Ssh." Arimneste was feeding the baby again; I could hear the rhythmic sucking. Arimnestus snored quietly in the bunk above mine. "He's not a lizard. His skin is warm when you touch him."

"That could come from the outside, absorption from the sun," Proxenus said. "I really do think he's afflicted. The body needs to weep to release the excess fluid caused by grieving. How is he releasing the fluid if he isn't weeping?"

Arimneste said something I couldn't hear and they both laughed quietly. I rolled over in my bunk and they stopped.

After a minute Arimneste said, barely above a whisper, "Mother used to say he had the ocean inside him, but that it was his great secret and I must never tell anyone. She said if he wanted to talk about it he would, but we must never push him. We have to let him go about things in his own way." She was weeping herself now. "Oh, Mummy," she said, and to Proxenus, "I'm sorry."

"No."

The creak of a bunk. I risked a look: Proxenus getting down to sit with her and the baby on the floor, to kiss her cheek and stroke her hair. I closed my eyes again.

"Is he finished?" Proxenus asked, meaning the baby.

"Almost."

After she settled the baby in his basket, she and Proxenus had s.e.x in their bunk: delicate s.e.x, almost silent, mindful of the baby and of Arimnestus and me. I listened with interest. Their love culminated in Proxenus sighing heavily, once.

"I can't see that school being good for him," Proxenus said after a while. "More brooding and living in his head. Maybe we should take him back to Atarneus with us after all and find him a wife. He can work with me, as my apprentice."

Arimneste said something I couldn't hear.

"We'll find him his own house, then."

Arimneste murmured again.

"You're a bit cold, yourself," Proxenus said. "All right. You know him better. Maybe this Plato will work wonders. Can't say I'll miss your big brother, though, in the meantime."

"WHAT DO YOU MEAN, he's not here?" Proxenus said.

The one named Eudoxus explained that Plato had recently departed for Sicily, to attend to the education of the young king there.

"And when do you expect him back?"

Four, five years? But I was welcome to begin my studies with this Eudoxus and his companion, Callippus, in the meantime. As acting director of the school, he would oversee my education as scrupulously as the great man himself.

"Years?" Proxenus said. Surprised; not distraught.

That night we ate with Eudoxus and Callippus, and sometime during the meal it was decided we would stay the night. The twins and the baby were staying in the city with relatives of our mother.

Proxenus went to his room early to write letters. Restless, I visited our cart in the courtyard and helped myself, quietly I thought, to a fist-burying handful of raisins.

"Still hungry?" a voice said.

"Always." Carefully lidding the amphora.

Eudoxus gestured for me to accompany him, and led me through his gate and into the road. "We'll walk, yes? This way our voices won't disturb your guardian, or Callippus."

"What's he working on?"

Eudoxus laughed. "He's sleeping. He keeps bird's hours. He'll be up at sunrise tomorrow, piping his little song."

I told him I didn't know what that meant.

"Working, writing," Eudoxus said. "We work a lot around here. What do you think of that?"

It was a lovely road we were walking, lined with olive trees, fragrant with flowers from the public gardens we were pa.s.sing. The school was on the city's outskirts. Quiet, almost like country, but no country I knew: sweet and warm and comfortable, even at night. The South, then. Eudoxus (trim (trim was the word I wanted for him: trim of beard and belly, trimly clothed, so trim and tidy and modest in his appet.i.tes, I noticed at supper, waving away meat and wine for a little fruit and water, that he probably could have trimmed a few years off his age without anyone guessing) put a brief hand on my shoulder, squeezed, and let go. was the word I wanted for him: trim of beard and belly, trimly clothed, so trim and tidy and modest in his appet.i.tes, I noticed at supper, waving away meat and wine for a little fruit and water, that he probably could have trimmed a few years off his age without anyone guessing) put a brief hand on my shoulder, squeezed, and let go.

"I was so sorry to hear about your father. Your guardian does him great honour, bringing you to us, and so promptly."

"I don't think he knows what to do with me." My voice was rusty; I'd barely spoken to anyone these past weeks. "He's trying to find me a place to live."

"You might stay with Callippus and me," Eudoxus said. "If you should choose to stay. If your guardian should make that choice. Several foreign students lodge with us."

I thanked him.

"Whose decision is it, anyway? As a matter of interest?"

"I'm not sure," I said.

"I'll show you around, tomorrow."

I liked him for that, for not leaving a beat. "Will there be a lecture?"

"In the morning." Eudoxus himself would speak on a mathematical problem set by Plato before his departure for Sicily. "It should be well attended; you and your guardian will get a good sense of our students and of the atmosphere here."

I asked him if he remembered Illaeus.

He laughed. "Very well. Excellent poet, horrible mathematician. I shall have his mess to undo, I suppose, in you." When I told him that was an empty room rather than a messy one, he laughed again. "Come on." He cut into some trees. "Want to see where you'd live?"

We had circled back without my noticing. Set away from the main building, deep in the garden, was a smaller house with lights in the windows although it was late. We could hear low, young voices and laughter. Eudoxus tapped a knuckle lightly on the door, then pushed it open. Half a dozen young men sat around a low table, drinking and arguing about something on a piece of paper they pa.s.sed from hand to hand.

"New student," Eudoxus said.

I saw I would be the youngest. They greeted me, smiling, friendly. The one who'd answered the door led me deeper into the house to show me the dormitory with its rows of sleeping mats, all clean and comfortable enough, while Eudoxus stayed in the front room, grinning, to look over the piece of paper.

"Do you want to stay here tonight?"

"Yes."

The young man had a flop of hair like my brother and a lazy eye. I was prepared to like him. I was prepared to like all of them, why not, and their math problem too.

The next morning, Proxenus and I hung back under the colonnade while the big courtyard filled with members of the Academy who had come to hear Eudoxus. I struggled to follow the talk, while Proxenus looked around, performing a more pragmatic calculation. Afterwards, at the meal, he told me he liked what he saw. Well dressed, serious men from good families. He had recognized some faces. Later he took Eudoxus aside for a little stroll. I knew they were talking about money. The school didn't charge tuition, but my board would have to be covered. I knew I had plenty of money and land: an estate in Stageira from my father and another at Chalcis from my mother. Money would not be a problem.