A Mixture of Madness, Book II of The Bow of Heaven (5 page)

“You have my solemn word
that I will follow your instructions to the best of my abilities.”

“Good. Very good. One last thing. You have been with us almost two months. I would like
two lists from you in my office by the end of the week: one—any physical items or training which you feel you lack in order to perform you current list of responsibilities to your highest capabilities; and any personal grievances or issues that you and I need to address in order to have the best possible working relationship for the benefit of the house we now both serve. You may go.”

I never received either
list, and to my discredit, I never asked for them again.

•••

After the incident with the pomegranate, a change came over our lady. She refused to keep to her room, dressing with desperate elegance after fretting over each detail of her makeup and attire. She threw frequent and elaborate dinner parties, arranged poetry readings and plays in the atrium; one night she amazed her guests by unveiling a caged tiger from Asia Minor for their inspection. Alone, though, those who knew her well would note she spent more time before our household gods, lighting incense, sprinkling salt over fresh barley cakes, murmuring prayers with an urgency she had never demonstrated before.

Crassus was courteous, soft-spoken and as solicitous as always. He never failed to take his wife’s hand as they walked through the house; he brought her little trinkets and made sure to compliment her on her hair or a menu she had prepared. But his voice was just a little too loud, her gaiety a little too forced. The genuine affection of decades, a vase of subtle and delicate craftsmanship, had cracked and chipped. We watched as our lord and lady toiled to glue each
tiny fragment to the whole with kindhearted routine and time-worn habit. Every one of us prayed that they would succeed at their task, and that when their work was done, no one would be able to see the imperfections. We prayed, because we knew better than to hope.

In Junius, having been at home less than two months, we fled the city, a month earlier than most, taking refuge in our Baiaen villa to escape not only the heat, but the extravagant parties that
preceded the aristocracy’s departure just after the elections were announced in Quintilis. So it was that my lord made himself unavailable to stand for
consul
as he had agreed with Caesar. Pompeius, too, was absent, having sailed for Sardinia, Sicily and Africa to negotiate the purchase of desperately needed grain to feed the 300,000 mouths of Romans citizens who depended on the state to sustain them.

We tarried in Baiae and did not return to the city until October. Livia stayed behind, asking and receiving permission from Crassus to remain in Rome over the summer. The city suffered its worst bouts of illness in the heat and humidity of the season; my brave healer would do what she could in our master’s clinic, opening its doors to all, with his blessing. Crassus left both guards and provisions to feed and heal the sick, and though his name was imprinted on every sack of grain and every
ampulla
of medicine, I cannot believe his sole motive was selfish.

Fate had just returned Livia to me and now, laughing, was dragging me away from her again. Oh, it must have been great fun for the immortals to play this foolish game of hide and seek, concealing Livia from me, then allowing me to find her, then pulling her away again. Thus it had been ever since we had met, she as a child, me newborn to the house of Crassus. I pined for her when we were apart, and wept when we were reunited. Since that first kiss under the statue of Apollo in the garden of Crassus, a memory twenty years old yet fresh as a new-picked flower, I was no longer master of the heart that beat inside my own breast, but slave to a desire postponed and never satisfied.

Oh,
for the love of reason! Surely you who read these scrolls must agree this kind of hand-wringing whining is utter drivel. Can love and wisdom coexist? Do not think it for an instant. It is widely known that Aristotle defined love as “the composition of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.” First of all, he was talking about friendship, and second, I have it on good authority that at the time he uttered those words, he was falling down drunk.

One has to be at least as ancient as I am now to see that if you try to make sense of life, if you look for patterns and meaning, not only are you bound to be disappointed, you are likely to waste
a good deal of precious time.

•••

As we neared the city late in the day, the tombs of the wealthy sprang up like mushrooms on either side of the Via Appia, each vying for prominence, crowding up against each other until the left side of the road succumbed to the shadows of these tall and lavish castles of the dead. A bulwark of beggars, arms waving like undersea flora in the tide of our passing, hugged the curb on the opposite side, still awash in the warming sun. Only those few creatures too sluggish of thought or foot were left almost unseen in the gloom.

Riding at my place just behind
dominus
, I was applying needless energy with helpless gusto worrying over something over which I had no control. As you may imagine, this was a pastime I visited with zealous frequency. Presently, I was ticking off the preparations Curio would have had to oversee and complete within the hour to adequately, which is to say, perfectly prepare for our homecoming. Had the furniture been cleaned? Had the masks of the ancestors been dusted? Was the house warm enough? What about supper? Had the gardens been pruned? Were there fresh flowers in every room? Had the house gods received their offerings? The list went on and on until even I began to tire of my finikin disquiet. Why should I fret? Lucius was a younger version of myself; left to maintain our Roman residence while we sought the cooler breezes of Baiae, I knew I would find everything in pristine order. Which is precisely when a more insidious thought crept in to harass my better self. Wouldn’t I love to find just one small thing with which to find fault: a lamp wick untrimmed, a corner not swept, a pillow not plumped,
something
to chide the ever-flawless Lucius Calpurnius Curio? Of course I wouldn’t.

I diverted my mind’s energies to screwing tight the taps on my mind’s
caustic, leaky faucet and concentrated instead on nothing at all. I had only a moment’s rest from myself when, from her
raeda
, lady Tertulla leaned out a window and called the procession to a halt. Being closest to her carriage, I leapt off Apollo, my dark brown bay, and inquired how I might assist her. “Follow me,” she said, opening the door and
stepping down onto the road. Immediately surrounded by a troop of guards, she brushed them aside and headed for the shadowed curb. Only Crassus seemed unperturbed. He did not know what she was up to, but was not about to come between her will and her objective. His six senate-appointed
lictors
crowded about him, their eyes busy.

Tertulla approached a boy who looked no more than twelve (I later learned his small frame had suffered in this world for fifteen years). He was wrapped in rags, sitting on the curb with an empty begging bowl between his legs. His hair looked as if it had never been cut, or washed. Something about his eyes was off and unsettling—they were too far apart and their focus lagged behind whatever drew their attention. In addition, his head struck me as too large for his frail shoulders. These defects, however, faded to insignificance in the light of the boy’s startling, beatific expression. He was looking up at us with the most innocent, guileless smile I had ever seen upon man or woman. He positively beamed, as if he had been sitting there waiting for this precise moment his entire life. The effect was multiplied by his outstretched arms:  they did not seem so much a supplication for alms as an urgent wish to be picked up and held.

Then I saw his hands.

What I beheld was the result of no accident. Someone had deliberately cut off the majority of the poor child’s fingers, leaving him with only the thumb and third finger of each hand. An involuntary shiver ran through me as I imagined the transformation in his trusting aspect when that mutilation was perpetrated. It had to have been deliberate—what kind of accident could leave such a perfect array of carnage?

Domina
snapped me out of my morbid speculation. “That smile—I saw it from the carriage. I had to stop to behold this wonder.”

From deeper within the shadows
behind the boy, one of the guards dragged an older man. He was dressed no better than the lad, but unlike the boy, his grey, whiskered face was made of a clay that had long ago set into a resentful scowl.

“Put your arms down, fool,” he growled at the child. The boy winced at the man’s voice, slowly lowering his arms in unison without unlocking his elbows, as if he were setting down an invisible basket.

“Can you speak?”
domina
asked. “What is your name, child?”

“Hanno!” the boy shouted proudly, his head shaking for emphasis, his arms springing up again into the air.

“
Domina
,” I whispered in her ear, “the boy is what we in Greece call an ‘idiot.’ He is malformed in both mind and body. Let me put a coin in his bowl so that we may depart.” I dropped a
n
as
, then another
into the wooden bowl and was taken aback by the boy’s reaction. His attention, which had been riveted to the kind smile on my lady’s face, whipped from her visage to mine; his jaw dropped, his eyes widened, and he yelped with what I was to learn was his unflappable state of ear-splitting enthusiasm. His squeal of gratitude, and now his outstretched arms were directly squarely at me. That others were witnessing a communication between myself and this unfortunate…well, I was discomfited. I thought to reply with a curt word of comfort or a nod of my head, but I could only stand with my hands at my sides, pinned by his idiot grin.

“Are you the father of this child?” Tertulla asked, her blue eyes narrowed ever so slightly. She had not yet condemned him, but she was close.

“I am not,” he answered. His tone was enough to cause a second guard to take hold of his other arm. “But we took him in, and fed him, and kept him alive, which is more than most would have done.”

“What do you mean, ‘we took him in?’”

“My wife found him, in the woods near Norba. He’d been left for the wolves.”

“Where is your wife?”

“Dead. Died birthing. Took the baby with her, too. Been two years now. ‘Couldn’t keep the farm up without her, so me and the boy moved to town.”

“I see,” Tertulla said. What she saw was much more than what this scrofulous miscreant was saying. Remembering my first days of enslavement, thrall to eight legionaries in the hidebound misery they called a tent, I wondered what else the child had suffered at his hands. “Despicable,” she spat. “You couldn’t find work, or maybe didn’t even look. Why bother, when you had the child? Was not the poor boy sympathetic enough with all his fingers?”

“I done no such thing!” His eyes darted about, looking for an escape he would not find. “I never hurt him.” His wild eyes told a different tale. The child could not help the subhuman condition of his birth; as distasteful as it was to look upon him, I might at least pity him. For his ‘caretaker,’ I felt nothing but revulsion.

At that moment, Crassus, mounted and glorious, came into the thick of us.
Eurysaces (sired by Ajax, now put to pasture) bent his ink black head and to the delight of the boy nuzzled his cheek. One dumb creature recognizing another.

“What mischief are you up to,
columba
?” my lord asked.

Domina
told him. Crassus thought a moment, then, from a height loftier than even that afforded by his horse, handed down his judgment. “You will accompany my men,” he said, pointing at the boy’s soon-to-be former caretaker. “Tomorrow, we will go to the courts and for the sum of 500 sesterces you will relinquish any and all claims upon this child…to me. Is that clear?”

“Really,
dominus
, is that necessary?” I said. “I’m sure we can find the boy a suitable home.”

“I just did,” Crassus said. “Clean him up. Tend to him. Make your mistress happy,
atriensis
.” There was no brooking that tone.

Domina
reached up and squeezed her husband’s hand. A look passed between them, of gratitude and something more.

As the guards dispersed the crowd that had gathered, I sighed and held out my hand to the boy. He made to pick up his begging bowl. “Leave that,” I snapped.

Using his thumb, he pointed to the coins and said, “Yours.” To my surprise, his pronunciation of this difficult word was acceptable.

“No, yours. I’ll keep them for you.” I bent down to collect the money, then offered my free hand to him. He took it in both of his. The feel of those four bony hooks clinging to the soft meat of my palm made my bile rise. I helped him stand, and as soon as he got to his feet he threw his arms around me with such ferocity I was compelled to take a step backward to keep my balance. Oh, the stench! If I could not wriggle free of him, I would have to burn my tunic. I would most certainly incinerate his.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he kept repeating, his forehead pressed hard upon my chest. He might just as easily have been thanking me for holding his money as freeing him from that monster. I was clueless, and frankly too distraught to care.