The Golden Mean (6 page)

“We’ll do what we’ll do,” she says again.

“You can’t have no opinion. It can’t be nothing to you. If we stay, it might be for years.”

“You’ve got a choice?”

I say nothing.

“They’re rude,” she says. “All of them. Their bodies stink. The women do slaves’ work. Their wine is bad. The queen”—she glances back over her shoulder at me—“is insane.”

“They will rule the world.”

“I don’t doubt it.” She gets in beside me and lies on her back.

I rest on an elbow to look at her. “I wanted to take you to Athens,” I say. “You’d have been at home there.”

“I was at home in Mytilene.”

Because her tone is petulant I don’t answer, but touch her hip. She spreads her legs. Dry, again. She flinches when I touch her. She says something more about my decision, asks some question. I put my tongue just there, on the pomegranate seed, and the tendons in her groin go taut as bowstrings. Pity and fear, purgation, relief. My tongue, working. A substance like the white of an egg.

T
HAT NIGHT
, I
DREAM
of Stageira. When I wake, I sit for a long time by the window, wrapped in a blanket, remembering. I was a miserable child, lonely, and frightened when my father was called away at night or travelling, which was often. He was the only doctor for many of the little coastal villages, and as his reputation grew he was called ever farther away, to ever bigger towns. The twins were still allowed to sleep with our mother, but I had no one. I suffered night terrors until my mother taught me the trick of concentrating on whatever was closest to me—the length and texture of the hairs on the fur I slept on, or counting the threads of the pulse in my wrist, or feeling the tide of the breath in my body—and so distracting myself. She said this trick had helped her with the same problem. Soon I was practising it everywhere I went, observing and analyzing and categorizing compulsively, until no one wanted to talk to me because of the questions I asked and the information I spilled. Have you ever noticed? I would ask boys my own age. Can you tell me? I would ask adults. Soon I was spending all my time alone, swimming with my eyes open, trapping insects, reading my father’s books, cutting myself to observe the blood, drawing maps, tracing leaves, charting stars, and all of it helped a little, and none of it helped a lot. On the worst days I stayed in bed, unable to speak or eat, until the blackness lifted.

“He’s a strange boy,” I overheard my father tell my mother, on one of his increasingly rare visits home. “He worries me. Not his health, but his mind. I don’t know if he has too much discipline or none at all. He goes places I can’t follow, inside himself.”

“He misses you,” my mother said.

I
WATCH
A
LEXANDER MORE
closely now. On the eve of Philip’s departure for Thessaly, one early summer dawn, we ride out to hunt. I arrive in second-best clothes, unarmed, on slow, reliable Tar. Philip and his entourage of pages and purple-cloaked Companions are in full battledress. The ground beneath their mounts roils with dogs. After some insults—it’s suggested I be made to wear a halter around my waist, like a boy who hasn’t had his first kill—I’m handed a spare pike and shield and left to keep up as best I can. We ride to the royal park, where the day’s festivities begin with the sacrifice of a screaming, spurting piglet. It’s a day of pomp and etiquette that I see as a succession of frozen images, like a series of coins struck and over-struck, glinting in the sun. Philip in profile, helmeted. A dog rearing up on hind legs as its owner unclips its lead. A spear balanced on a shoulder. A boar crashing through a clearing. Alexander, unstraddling his horse, knife unsheathed. The boar shaking off a spear sunk too shallow in its side, kicking in the skull of a dog, crashing off again. The dog, one leg spastic. The dog, dead. A wineskin passed from hand to hand. Alexander looking for his mount.

Philip begins to tease him, offering him a skittish horse, daring him to ride it. Ox-Head, the animal is called, for the white mark on its forehead. The boy turns it toward the sun, blinding it, and mounts it easily. Philip, drunk, makes a sarcastic remark. From the warhorse’s back, the boy looks down at his father as though he’s coated in filth. That’s the coin I’ll carry longest in my pocket, the image I’ll worry over and over with my thumb.

I could help him, just like his brother. I could fill my plate. I could stay.

TWO

W
HEN
I
WAS FOURTEEN
, my father came home to announce we were moving to the capital because he had been named personal physician to the king. Abruptly his travels stopped, and for a final few weeks he stayed in Stageira, treating only local cases, preparing for the move. As my mother and sister and the servants busied themselves packing up the carts, I indulged in precocious fits of nostalgia, wandering from cliff to shore, swimming, and wondering when we would return. I was afraid of Pella, of the lack of solitude, of a landscape I wasn’t intimate with, of being under my parents’ eyes much more than I ever had been in our village. I was afraid of my father. Though as a small boy I had missed him terribly, now I found him strict, remote, and often disappointed in me. His encouragement came in mean doses, and often at random; why was it fine to want to watch the birth of a litter of puppies but idle and wasteful to work out the mathematical relationship between the length of a lyre string and the tone it produced?

He liked me best when I accompanied him in his work and helped him at bedsides, when I spoke little and remembered from one visit to the next which powder was used to treat which illness, and when I correctly recited the aphorisms he made me memorize: use a fluid diet to treat a fever; avoid starchy foods in summer; it is better that a fever follow a convulsion than a convulsion follow a fever; purge at the start of an illness but never at its height; teething can cause fevers and diarrhea; drugs may be administered to pregnant women most safely in the fourth to seventh months of gestation, after which the dosages should be reduced; sandy urine indicates a stone forming in the bladder; eunuchs do not suffer gout; women are never ambidextrous; and on, and on, and on.

My father was a man of causes and effects, impatient with amateurs who tried to pray or magic sicknesses away. He would accept a stone bound to a wrist to ease a fever, say, only if the stone had proven itself on two or three other patients in the past. He believed in the medicinal properties of opposites: cold to cure heat, sweetness to cure bile, and so on. He used herbs, and sacrifices were of course conventional, though he opposed ostentation of any sort and once refused to treat a feverish man whose family had ruined itself to buy and slaughter an ox on his behalf. The hysterical waste of it revolted my father, and (probably more to the point) made him doubt they would follow any less glamorous, more pragmatic instructions of his. The man died. My father disliked, too, the procedure known as incubation, where a patient would be made to spend a night alone in a temple in the expectation that the god would send him a dream of how he was to be cured. My father said this was blasphemous. He taught me to keep case studies, charting the progress of an illness day by day in the modern manner, though he seemed to prefer problems that needed only a single visit. “In and out,” he would say with satisfaction after some spectacular single treatment; I once saw him pop a separated shoulder back into place in the time it took to greet the man. He had a gift for childbirth, though he particularly despised women healers, and tolerated midwives only grudgingly. They practised witchery for the most part, he told me, and were irrational, untrustworthy, and liable to do more damage to a woman than if she were left alone and allowed to follow her own crude animal instincts. He spoke of women in these terms generally—witches, animals. Still, he was at his softest with a labouring woman, speaking gently, cajoling but not babying, and greeting each dripping purple arrival with quiet joy, lifting it to the light in a private ritual only I recognized as such, having seen it again and again.

The first surgery I ever witnessed he performed on a local village girl who had been labouring for two days. She was only half-conscious by the time we got to her, though we lived only a few minutes’ walk away, and the family had already begun to prepare the house for her death: neighbour women had gathered by the front door, hoping to be hired for the mourning, and we stepped past a tray of anointing oils and white cloths outside the sickroom door, as well as a coin for the ferryman to be put in her mouth once she was dead. My father examined her quickly, palpated her belly, and said the baby had started to come feet first and was stuck. Quickly he stripped the bed and the girl and called for clean sheets. I stared at the great mound of her belly, trying to picture the arrangement inside. I was ten, and had never seen a woman naked before. “Can you see it?” my father said, unexpectedly.

I thought he had forgotten me. I knew he meant could I imagine the position of the baby through the flesh, and I said I wasn’t sure. The wet sheets were replaced with new.

“This is so I can see the progress of the fluids, the colour and quantity and so on,” my father said, just to me, calmly, as though all this—the dying girl, the weeping family, the husband already wordless, motionless in a corner chair, grief-stricken—was for my private instruction. “Did you bring my knives?”

A rhetorical question. It was my job to prepare his kit every morning before we set out and to clean it every evening when we got home, and though we generally had some idea of the patients we would be visiting in the course of a given day—say, a childbirth, a fracture, a couple of fevers in the same house, a baby with spots, an old one bringing up blood—my father told me never to bring only what I thought we would need, because inevitably we would be surprised by something and find ourselves lacking. The resulting kit of everything strapped to my back was too heavy for me to walk upright, but I knew better than to complain. Wraps and bandages, woollen pads, splints, sponges, plaster, bowls and ampoules for collecting fluids and other excretions, metal wands for cautery, a tablet and stylus for note-taking, a selection of herbs and medications for the most common remedies (he kept a larger apothecary at home), tongue depressors, tourniquets, scissors, razors, bronze pipes for blood-letting, and a small amphora of marsh-water and leeches. Also a purse of assorted coins to make change when we were paid.

I unrolled the pack now and produced the leather sleeve of knives I whetted regularly and had yet to see him use. “Third from the left,” he told me over his shoulder. He had called for four men and was showing them how to hold the girl down, one at each limb. I unsheathed a knife not much smaller than a table knife, though not the very smallest blade, and gave it to him. (“Eyes and ears,” he had told me of the first two when I asked him once.)

The girl woke with the cut, a stroke the length of my hand from navel to pubic hair. It looked like a scratch at first, and then it started to bleed. My father probed it with his finger, and then ran the knife a second time along the same line, deepening the cut. The girl was screaming now, get it out, get it out.

“Quickly,” my father said, glancing up at me. “If you want to see.”

I did want to see. Through the blood and the yellow fat I saw the head, and then my father reached in and lifted out the baby. It wasn’t moving. The umbilical cord was thick and ropy, an unfleshy grey. My father was holding the baby with one hand and pointing back inside the girl with the other, naming parts I couldn’t properly make out for the gore. A midwife appeared at his elbow with a clean cloth; he gave her the baby so he could cut the cord. Fortunately he had encountered her before—a competent, unemotional woman near his own age. It was she who had persuaded the family to send for him when her own skills had proved insufficient. She didn’t wait for his instruction now, but swiped the baby’s mouth out with her little finger and then put her face over its nose to suck out the blood and mucus. Her own lips now red with blood, like a predator at feed, she slapped its purple bum smartly and it began to choke, then scream.

“Good.” My father, surprised, glanced up from the cord, which he had tied off to stop the bleeding. “There’s a little sewing kit, like your mother uses,” he told me, but I already had it out. He closed the lips of the girl’s belly with small, tight stitches, a painstaking process made worse by her screaming and writhing. In the corner, the husband was vomiting a thin yellow gruel onto the floor. My father had me hold a wadded cloth to the incision to sop up the blood that continued to seep through, and held his hands out for the baby. This had all taken a matter of minutes.

“Boy,” the midwife said, and handed it over.

“A lovely boy.” My father held the swaddled bundle up to the light, and then down to the mother’s head, so she could see. Her glance slid to it and stayed there. My father nodded at one of the slaves, who released her arm so she could reach for it and touch its hair. When we left, she was still bleeding.

“The baby will live,” my father said as we walked home. We were both bloody, my father especially, and I carried the bloodied tools in a separate bag to keep the rest of the kit clean. “The mother will die, tonight or tomorrow. Usually like that you lose them both. That was a good day’s work.”

“What if you sealed the incision with wax to stop the bleeding?” I asked.

My father shook his head. “You have a good head for this. I was proud of you today. Wax would get into the wound and clot the veins, kill her from the inside. Did you see the afterbirth?”

I had: a slab the size and texture of a beef’s liver, with a membrane dangling from one side. My father had pulled it out before he closed the incision and had given it to another woman, who took it away, wrapped in a cloth.

“You must never forget to remove the afterbirth,” he said. “Through the belly, as we did today, or through the vagina if it is a normal birth. It will rot if you leave it inside and kill her that way. Sometimes you can cut a slit to make the vagina bigger, but that works best when the baby’s head is already coming. That wouldn’t have helped us today.” We were home. “This way.” My father led me around back. “We’ll clean up before your mother sees us. That’s good manners.”

That evening, my father saw me attempting to draw the inside of the girl’s belly. “The blood made it hard to see,” I said.

My father looked at the drawing but offered no correction. “You learn to do it by feel. The position of the baby, the depth of the incision, the bits of the afterbirth if it’s torn apart. Your fingers become like your eyes.”

“Have you ever cut in the wrong place?”

“Certainly,” my father said.

“But we are all the same inside.” I tried to approach what I wanted to say without sounding unfeeling, or blasphemous. “I mean, men are the same as men and women are the same as women. The organs are in the same places, aren’t they?”

“Yes, more or less. I think so. The size can vary. You know a field slave has bigger muscles than a lady like your mother. Similarly, the organs can vary in size depending on use. The stomach of a fat man and the stomach of a starving man will not look the same.”

“Still, the location will be roughly the same.”

My father looked uncertain.

“You don’t know?”

Now he looked displeased, but I was too close to my thought to keep it in my mouth.

“If you could cut open a person’s body,” I said, “a dead person, to see inside, you could make a drawing of all the parts, and then know. You could refer to it when you had to perform a surgery on a live patient, and reduce the risk of mistake.”

“No.” My father was looking at me the way he did sometimes, as though black birds had flown out of my mouth. “We don’t treat the dead that way.”

I knew we didn’t treat the dead that way. I thought of the girl whose baby my father had delivered that day, who would die, or was dead, and the map of her all sealed up in her skin. We had killed her by breaking that seal.

“She would have died either way,” my father said, responding to something I was not aware of showing, and then he called for my mother, whose face puckered into concern when she saw me.

The next day I was excused from accompanying my father on his rounds, and spent the day swimming while my mother and her woman watched me oh-so-casually from the picnic site they had set up on my favourite beach.

“It’s not fair,” my sister Arimneste said. She was eight to my ten, and had recently been forbidden to swim; she had reached the age when she must keep her clothes on. She walked barefoot at the edge of the surf, skirts held up sloppily and often trailing in the water, purposely, to show her disappointment. I paddled a few feet farther out. “I want to come watch, too.”

“You’d puke.”

“I didn’t when Ajax and Achilles were born.” Her kittens. “I think it’s interesting.”

Tall for her age, like me, and my eyes. Her twin, Arimnestus, had taken to rampaging around with a gang of village boys, setting fires, torturing livestock, and pretending he and Arimneste hadn’t once been inseparable. A tomboy, she disdained the village girls and would have gone with him if she could. My father had come to an understanding with a colleague of his, a promising young physician named Proxenus, but the wedding was still a few years away. I knew she was lonely.

“You’re the one who puked, anyway,” she said. “You should have seen yourself last night. You were green.”

“People don’t turn green,” I said.