(no subject)

[toujours_nigel]

“Lysander!”

 

“Coming.”

 

“What,” says Menesthes, shouldering aside the tent flaps, “are you doing?”

 

“My mother,” he says, writing madly, “will be expecting a letter. The post will leave this day, and…”

 

“Fuck you. Fuck your dutiful nature. And fuck your mother’s expectations. Come on, Lysander.”

 

“In a moment.”

 

“Now.”

 

“A moment.”

 

“What Iliad are you composing, Lysander? We have to go.”

 

“I’ll catch up.”

 

“We,” says Menesthes, hands grabbing at him, tossing the diptych away, “are leaving, now.”

 

“My horse is saddled already.”

 

“So is mine. So is everyone else’s. Come. On. You. Thrice-cursed. Dog.”

 

“Inventive,” says a new voice, and a shadow falls across them.

 

They still, Menesthes’ eyes near pushing out of his skull—he knows that voice. “General,” he croaks.

 

“Quite. Come, Menesthes.”

 

“Sir.” Menesthes jerks away, hauls him up, hand clenched in his chiton.

 

He scrambles up, sacrificing his diptych. “My fault, sir.” Fuck his dutiful nature, indeed.

 

“So I had assumed. Lysander, son of… Alexander.”

 

Menesthes grins impudently, teeth very white against his dark skin. “He looks the part, doesn’t he?”

 

“Chryse would kill you completely for that, boy.”

 

“Ah, but you’ll not tell her.”

 

“Out.”

 

Menesthes grins again and ducks out, and then it is him in the tent, alone with the general.

 

“Are you ready, son of Alexander?”

 

“Sir.”

 

“Come, then, the horses are chafing to go.”

 

He shoulders his pack in silence, looks still at his feet, near stumbles over his abandoned diptych, despite all that.

 

There is no steadying hand at his shoulder, only a flood of sunshine on his face, and the tall figure of the man standing in it, arm outstretched to hold the flap away, to let him shoulder past.

 

“Sir,” he says again, looking anywhere save at his face—Menesthes, with some strange instinct, has drawn away from the others, and he looks, instead, at him—both from the hills beyond Pella—no, not quite true, Menesthes’ mother lived near Pella, it is her childhood home that Menesthes lives in, his father is dead.

 

“I’ll not eat you, boy.”

 

“No sir.”

 

“I see Menesthes has been hard at work.”

 

“No sir.”

 

“I’ve done nothing.” Menesthes, of course. And he has never felt as grateful.

 

“Oh, I can see that, boy.”

 

“Sir, General, sir.”

 

 

***

 

“You.” He turns, wishes he had not. Menesthes eyes’—his mother’s eyes, light in his face, and luminous—are wide and angry. “What did you say to him?”

 

“Nothing.”

 

“What was he blaming me for?”

 

“I know not.”

 

“Hephaistion never… said nothing, did you?”

 

“Not I.”

 

“Kept your eyes on the ground, didn’t look at his face, muttered yes and no.”

 

“Aye.”

 

“Oh, Lysander.”

 

“What?”

 

“Lysander, you poor fool. Oh, but Xanthos is going to laugh.” And he spurs his horse onwards, till he’s riding just behind the general, and then beside him, and Lysander, edges his own slowly back, till he’s bringing up the rear, just ahead of the luggage.

to this.