Stories Nothing, Nicholas had noticed, was ever really silent. No matter how still he was, he could still hear things: birds twittering outside the windows, fabric whispering against fabric, his own breathing. He had sometimes made Maeve worry there was something wrong with him, sitting very still and trying to breathe as quietly as possible, so quietly that he could not hear it at all; so far, he had not yet succeeded, because nothing was ever really silent.
The door to his room was quiet enough that he more felt it open than really heard it, but he was not surprised when it was then followed by a light footstep. He was, however, a little surprised when the source of his current mood appeared and sank down to sit on the floor in front of him.
“Maeve says you wouldn’t eat your lunch,” his mother said in her light, thin voice. Her dark eyes were calm as they studied his face. “Do you feel sick?”
“No,” said Nicholas.
“So why didn’t you eat your lunch?”
Nicholas considered his options. Mommy did not like it when he or Alexander did what she called ‘sulking’ – as far as he could tell, this meant being upset and not wanting to talk to her, or giving her the wrong answer when she asked them questions about why they didn’t want to talk to her. He considered this massively unfair, as she was allowed to be upset with them or even to go away and not talk to anyone at all, but this was a problem he could not solve until he was big, and right now he was still very small. He was sitting on the edge of his bed and his mother was sitting on the floor, but she was still taller than him.
“Because I’m mad,” he said, concluding there wasn’t an answer she would like and so just telling the truth.
She nodded, not changing expression or removing her hands from where they were balanced on top of her knees. This, he knew, was what she called the Easy Pose, though he didn’t know why – he had tried to copy her once while she had been doing the set of exercises that didn’t involve throwing herself through the air on bars high above even her head, and it had been anything but easy. He’d fallen over. “Why are you mad?” she asked.
Nicholas scowled. “You told a story,” he said accusingly. “And it wasn’t true. That’s not the rules,” he added, glaring at her.
To his disappointment, she still did not really react, though she did look slightly surprised. “Why do you say that?” she asked. “What did I say that you don’t think is true?”
Nicholas looked at his feet. “You said the picture was good,” he said.
Sometime – he did not know when, only that it had been another time – there had been an evening when Mommy had not dressed the way she usually did. Normally, at home, she dressed the way she was dressed now: usually without shoes and with thin, light fabric trousers and shirts which allowed her to move around freely. He knew she had other clothes – she had a lot of them, and he had seen her wear dresses when he and Alexander were allowed to eat supper with her and their father, and sometimes when she was coming in from having been out, and of course in the winter, going outside involved everyone being bundled up into hats and scarves and gloves until all that was visible were pairs of eyes – but that was what he regarded as normal, proper Mommy attire. Sometime, though, it had been nighttime, and she and Daddy had been going somewhere, and she had worn a new dress, which he had thought looked like it was made of shining purple feathers. Instead of her usual star-like earrings, she had been wearing long sparkling things that nearly brushed her shoulders, and there had been golden flowers in her dark hair. He had never seen anything like it before.
Another time – more recently – Maeve had given him and Alexander paper and colors and told them to make pictures for their parents, so Nicholas had tried to make his look like his mother had in the purple dress. As soon as he had started, though, it had all started to go wrong – the end result had not looked anything like he wanted it to at all. It had just been blobs and scribbles of color, not anything like the paintings he had seen of people before. He had wanted to throw it away, but Maeve had said he ought to give it to Mommy anyway, and she had acted like she liked it very much, and he had been mad at her ever since.
“It wasn’t,” he said. “It didn’t look like I wanted. It was no good, and you said you liked it. You told a story,” he repeated.
Mommy seemed to consider this for a moment, and then suddenly – and very surprisingly – she smiled, one of the smiles it was hard not to smile back at, even when he was mad at her. When she smiled, it was like when the weather changed quickly, and everything became bathed in sunshine, and they could go out, even if it had been thundering so much before that he couldn’t take his nap.
“I didn’t,” she said. “Though I am glad you are smart enough to know when something could be better than it is, Nicholas. I’m proud of you for that,” she added, reaching out to stroke his hair. “But I didn’t like it because of what it looked like – I liked it because you made it for me, and you’re someone I love very much.”
“But it wasn’t good,” he protested – sensing, somehow, that she was trying to shift the tables on him, but not sure how.
“But you tried your best, didn’t you?” He nodded reluctantly. “Here – well – here, that’s enough.” She patted his shoulder and smiled again. “So why don’t we go eat now?”
Later, he was playing with his blocks and trying to pretend he wasn’t getting sleepy when his mother came back in the nursery, now wearing a skirt and shoes – he guessed the adults had eaten, then. Maeve stood up from where she was watching him and Alexander. “Mrs. Pierce,” she said, sounding surprised. “You’re early.”
“There’s something I want to show the boys. You can go for now, Maeve, thank you.” She walked over to Maeve’s chair and sat upon it and smiled at both Nicholas and his brother, neither more than the other. “Come here, please,” she instructed them. She had, Nicholas noticed as he approached, a big book, which she spread open over her knees. “I’m going to tell you a story,” she said.
“A long time ago, there was a city called Ileum,” she told them, pointing to a picture of some buildings with walls around them in the book. “In that city, there was a prince named Alexandros – which means the same thing as your name does, Alexander,” she added, smiling now specifically at Alexander. “It means ‘the protector of the people.’ He was born to be a great ruler, and he decided that his people would be all the people of the known world. It’s said that when he reached the ocean, he cried, because there were no more enemies to fight.”
She turned more pages, where the city stood again, this time with boats in front of it and a lot of people looking angry around it. “That was a mistake, of course,” she said. “One you will never make, Alexander,” she added, slipping back out of her storytelling voice to give an order. “Alexandros forgot that protecting all the people meant he had to do more than just going to take over new places. He came home and found that Ileum was being attacked!
“There was a very long war. One of the people who fought was named Diomedes.”
“That’s me!” exclaimed Nicholas. Most of the time, his name was Nicholas, but when he did something wrong, sometimes Mommy said “Nicholas Diomedes,” in the same disappointed, firm tone she said “Alex-an-der” when his brother was the one who did something wrong.
She smiled at him. “Yes, that’s your middle name,” she agreed, and pointed to another picture, where three grown-ups appeared to be running away from one little person in funny clothes with a long stick in his hand. “Diomedes was a great warrior – so strong and clever that when the gods of the Greeks tried to help people he did not like, he defeated them, and made them all run away to Mount Olympus!” Nicholas laughed, amused at this idea of making giants who did not like him run away, though he had no idea what gods, Greeks, or Mount Olympus were – or, indeed, what it was like to not like someone, or to be disliked.
“Other people in the battle were two brothers, Great Ajax and his brother Teucer. Ajax held a shield and Teucer stood behind him and shot arrows at their enemies,” she continued, pointing to a different picture. “You two must be like they were. Alexander will be very important on our mountain one day – and then you will have to remember to always be good and take care of all your people. And Nicholas – your name means the Victory of the People. You must always help your brother win, do you understand?”
She was closing the book even as she looked between them, indicating that the story was over and that they now knew the point of it, but Nicholas’ mind had wandered by this time. “Where were you?” he asked.
“What?”
“In the story. Where are you?”
“Me…my name isn’t in the story, darling.” She tilted her head, then added, “but I suppose there is another story, that is a little bit like mine.
“In that same long time ago, there was another prince named Jason. He traveled on a boat to see the world, sort of like Mommy and Daddy did, before we had an Alexander or a Nicholas. Jason, though, was all alone, until he met the Princess Medea.” She ran her hands over the edge of the book, looking away for a moment. “She was not like Jason – she was not Greek,” she said. “She was the granddaughter of the sun, and that meant she was a far more powerful witch than any of the witches in Greece, one who could lift a drought from over all of Corinth, or heal the sick – or make anyone she wanted go away,” she summarized. “Jason admired her power and thought she was very beautiful, so they got married and she joined him in traveling the world – even though this meant going away from her family. And they traveled and traveled and traveled, and wherever they went, Medea made sure nobody at all hurt Jason. And then – well, then, they went home to Corinth, and had two little boys, just like Daddy and I did,” she said. “And – “ her voice went up again, so the story was about to end – “they were very happy, and she always helped her older son be a good king, just like Mommy will always help both of you,” she concluded, pulling them into a hug.
OOC: Alicia does things to classical mythology that would make a scholar cry here. While the names ‘Alexandros’ and ‘Nikolaos’ do mean what she says they mean (though ‘Alexandros’ can also be translated as meaning ‘one who repels men,’ meaning something along the lines of being able to single-handedly break an opposing battle line) , and depiction of the Trojan War is…close enough, she replaces the rather unimpressive life story of the Trojan prince Alexandros (aka Paris, aka the “awarding Nemesis’ golden apple” and “running off with Helen of Troy” guy) with that of Alexander the Great (historical figure) entirely, with nothing there resembling the original story of the Trojan prince, and then altering the ending of the story of Alexander the Great, too. She also both very much softens the terms under which Medea “went away from her family” and then completely rewrites the end of the story of Jason and Medea – see also, Euripides, Medea, for the actual ending, or at least the version of it which involves politics, racism, skin-melting poison, and a dragon chariot.