“I don’t know what you are all talking about,” said Derkylos, the gymnastic trainer, suddenly. The others had thought he was asleep. He was reclining on Naukles’ bed; he thought effort should alternate with relaxation. He was in his mid-thirties, with the oval head and short curls admired by sculptors, and a fine body kept painstakingly in shape; as an example to pupils, he used to say, but, thought the envious schoolmasters, no doubt from vanity. He had a list of crowned victors to his credit, and no pretensions to intellect.
“We were wishing,” said Timanthes with patronage, “that the boy would make more effort.”
“I heard you.” The athlete raised himself on one elbow, looking aggressively statuesque. “You have spoken words of ill omen. Spit for luck.”
The grammarian shrugged. Naukles said tartly, “Will you tell us, Derkylos, you don’t know why you stay?”
“It seems I’m the one with the best reason. To keep him, if I can, from killing himself too young. He has no safety-stop. Surely you’ve seen that?”
“I fear,” said Timanthes, “that the terms of the palaestra are to me arcane.”
“I’ve seen it,” said Epikrates, “if you mean what I suppose.”
“I don’t know all your life histories,” said Derkylos. “But if any of you has seen red in battle, or been frightened out of his skin, you may remember putting out strength you had never known was in you. At exercise, even in a contest, you could not find it. There is a lock on it, put there by nature or the gods’ wisdom. It is the reserve against extremity.”
“I remember,” said Naukles presently, “in the earthquake, when the house fell on our mother, I lifted the beams. Yet later I could not move them.”
“Nature wrung it out of you. Few men are born whose own will can do it. This boy will be one.”
Epikrates said, “Yes, you may well be right.”
“And I reckon it something off a man’s life each time. I have to watch him already. He told me once that Achilles chose between glory and length of days.”
“What?” said Timanthes, startled. “But we’ve scarcely begun Book One.”
Derkylos gazed at him in silence, then said mildly, “You forget his maternal ancestry.”
Timanthes clicked his tongue, and bade them good night. Naukles fidgeted; he wanted to get to bed. The musician and the athlete strolled off through the park.
“It’s useless talking to him,” said Derkylos. “But I doubt the boy gets enough to eat.”
“You must be joking. Here?”
“It’s the regime of that stiff-necked old fool Leonidas. I check his height each month; he’s not growing fast enough. Of course you can’t call him starved; but he burns it all up, he could take as much again. He’s very quick-thinking, and his body has to keep pace, he won’t take a no from it. Do you know he can hit the mark with a javelin while he’s running?”
“You let him handle edged weapons? At his age?”
“I wish grown men were all as neat with them. It keeps him quiet…What is it drives him like this?”
Epikrates looked round. They were in the open, no one near. “His mother has made a good many enemies. She’s a foreigner from Epiros; she has the name of a witch. Have you never heard whispers about his birth?”
“I remember once—But who’d dare let him hear word of it?”
“He seems to me to have a burden of proof upon him. Well, he enjoys his music for itself, he finds release in it. I have studied that side of the art a little.”
“I must speak to Leonidas again about his diet. Last time, I was told that in Sparta it would be one spare meal a day, and find the rest off the land. Don’t tell it abroad, but I feed him myself sometimes. I used to do it now and then at Argos, for some good boy from a poor home…These tales—do you believe them?”
“Not with my reason. He has Philip’s capacity, if not his face or his soul. No, no, I don’t believe them…Do you know that old song about Orpheus, how he played his lyre on the mountainside, and found a lion had crouched at his feet to listen? I’m no Orpheus, I know; but sometimes I see the lion’s eyes. Where did it go, after the music, what became of it? The story doesn’t say.”
“Today,” said Timanthes, “you have made better progress. For the next lesson, you may memorize eight lines. Here they are. Copy them on the wax, on the right side of the diptych. On the left, list the archaic word-forms. See you have them correctly; I shall expect you to repeat those first.” He handed over the tablet, and put away the roll, his stiff blue-veined hands shaking as he worked it into its leather case. “Yes, that is all. You may go.”
“Please, may I borrow the book?”
Timanthes looked up, amazed and outraged.
“The book? Most certainly you may not, it is a valuable recension. What do you want with the book?”
“I want to see what happened. I’ll keep it in my casket, and wash my hands each time.”
“We should all like, no doubt, to run before we can walk. Learn your passage, and pay attention to the Ionic forms. Your accent is still too Doric. This, Alexander, is not some suppertime diversion. This is Homer. Master his language, then you may talk of reading him.” He tied the strings of the case.
The lines were those in which vengeful Apollo comes striding down the peaks of Olympos with his arrows rattling at his back. Worked over in the schoolroom, hammered out piecemeal like some store-list being inventoried by kitchen slaves, once the boy was alone they came together: a great landscape of clanging gloom lit by funereal fires. He knew Olympos. He pictured the dead light of an eclipse; the tall striding darkness, and round it a faint rim of fire, such as they said the hidden sun had, able to strike men blind. He came down like the fall of night.
He walked in the grove above Pella, hearing the deep shuddering note of the bowstring, the hiss of the shafts, and thinking it into Macedonian. It found its way, next day, into his repetition. Timanthes rebuked at length his idleness, inattention, and lack of interest in his work, and set him at once to copy the passage twenty times, with the mistakes again by themselves.
He dug away at the wax, the vision dispersed and faded. Timanthes, whom something had caused to look up, found the grey eyes considering him with a cold distant stare.
“Do not daydream, Alexander. What are you thinking of?”
“Nothing.” He bent again over his writing-stick. He had been wondering if there was any way of getting Timanthes killed. He supposed not; it would be unfair to ask his friends, who might be punished, and would feel it a disgrace to kill such an ancient man. It would make trouble, too, for his mother.
He went missing next day.
After huntsmen had been out after him with dogs, he was brought back at evening by a woodcutter on his lean old donkey; bruised black, covered with bloody grazes from a tumble down some rocks, and with a swollen foot which would not bear him. He had been trying, said the man, to get along on hands and knees; at night the forest was full of wolves, no place for the young lord alone.
He opened his mouth long enough to thank this man; to demand that he be fed, because he was hungry, and given a younger ass, which he had promised him on the way. These things attended to he became mute. The doctor could scarcely get from him more than yes or no, and a wince when the foot was moved. The compress and splint were put on; his mother came to his bedside. He turned his face away.
She put aside her anger, which belonged elsewhere; brought him a supper of all the treats Leonidas had banned; propped him against her breast while she fed him with sweet mulled wine. When he had told her all the trouble, as far as himself he understood it, she kissed him, tucked him in, and went off in a towering rage to quarrel with Leonidas.
The tempest shook the Palace, like a clash of gods above the Trojan plain. But many weapons which had served her against Philip were here denied her. Leonidas was very correct, very Athenian. He offered to leave, and tell the boy’s father why. When she emerged from his study (she had been too angry to wait and have him sent for) everyone hid who saw her coming; but the truth was, she was in tears.