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 assign 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 passage 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 passage.
“An exercise of attention,” I said.
“Don’t be such a braggart smartass. 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 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—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 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, before 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 strike-throughs 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.