Madman

by Tracy Groot

  “Why didn’t you . . .”

  “I thought the choice was yours,” she said lightly.

  They held the look as long as they dared, then became aware of the muted sound of children playing outside. And whatever fancy had begun on the back porch in Athens, eight years ago, was quietly laid to rest.

  “You posted a message,” she said, reclining in her chair with her wine.

  “Callimachus sent me to visit the satellite schools—in particular, to find out why we stopped receiving reports from the school in Hippos. From your . . . Decaphiloi.”

  Her eyes narrowed slightly. Kes`Elurah was right, there was no fear in her eyes. If, to Kes, this made her a good person, fine. Tallis still had to find answers.

  “You’re a little late, aren’t you?” she asked. “Three years late?”

  “So I’ve learned—of course, we had no idea the school had disbanded.”

  Surprise in the light-brown eyes. Confusion. Then wariness. The soft tone gained an edge. “What do you mean? What are you talking about? It’s been three years since I’ve taught a class.”

  “I didn’t find out the school has been defunct until I visited Hippos—last week.”

  She stared at him, and in that moment Tallis knew he could trust her. So many elements flashing in those eyes—incredulity, growing indignation—but guile was not there. “You are telling me Callimachus never knew what happened?” she said carefully.

  Tallis leaned forward. “What did happen?”

  “What about my letters?”

  “What letters?”

  Her eyes flashed, and she looked away. She touched her earring, she smoothed her hair. Finally, deliberately quiet, she demanded, “Why has it taken three years for an inquiry?”

  “The reports showed us no reason to come out.”

  “Reports?” she exclaimed, then put her hand to her throat. “Reports of what? That the students taught themselves? Do you know how many gifted students I had to abandon? Do you know I have no idea what happened to them? If they continued with their talents or if they went back to—” She pressed her fingers on her lips.

  “What happened?”

  She would not answer, simply kept her eyes on him. She was not really seeing him. Her gaze soon drifted. She drew a long breath and placed her hands in her lap. “I didn’t tell my husband I was coming,” she said softly. “Philip rescued me from everything—I owe him my life. He thinks it’s all in the past. I should not be here. I should not have come. For his sake. But the message perplexed me. If you were the same Tallis, I could not understand what information you could possibly seek. It never occurred to me you didn’t know.”

  “Know what?” Tallis demanded, and then lowered his voice. “I’ve learned a few things, but not what and not why. I know Theseus is dead. I know Bion committed suicide. And I’ve heard about Kardus. I wasn’t told why or . . .” He trailed off, because the name of Kardus incurred extraordinary response.

  “Kardus,” Julia whispered, and her face crumpled, her fist went to her mouth. Her eyes were stricken, and when she gazed at him, tears welling, he saw her heart laid out, baring anguish. It was an unveiled moment for a strong woman, and he could only look for a moment before decency made him look away.

  Tallis rolled the goblet between his palms. Surely it came to one thing, and with his voice thin, distant in his ears, he felt his way and said, “Julia . . . tell me about Portia.”

  And Julia closed her eyes. A tear fell.

  It was all Tallis needed. He closed his eyes too, as weighted memory tumbled down upon him.

  He wouldn’t believe his father; he had to see for himself. Father always said bad things about Mother—why should Tallis believe him now? Unless he knew . . . somewhere was dark truth in his words. Whatever truth was there, he had to find out for himself. So one evening he followed his mother into the woods.

  Julia was saying something, bringing him back from the Theban hillside, the gully from which he had crouched and peered and lost all innocence remaining to a twelve-year-old boy. She was speaking to him. Whispering him back, just as Callimachus did. He stumbled out of the gully now as he did then, senses reeling. . . .

  “How did you know?” she was saying. Those stricken brown eyes brought him back to a common room in Palestine.

  You’re wrong, Kes`Elurah, there is a great deal of fear in her eyes.

  “Tell me how you knew to name Portia.”

  “My mother was a Bacchante.”

  Memory bore down, and the prettiest face in all of Palestine could not have kept him out of that gully.

  Brambles replaced the face, moonlight upon a hilltop clearing. The moonlight was silver, but he remembered in ghastly orange, the light of the bonfire around which the women danced. Silver had no part in what happened.

  He had hidden in a thicket, peering through parted brambles to watch the dances of the Maenads. He watched his mother, flushed with loveliness, catch up her skirts and kick her feet in an elegant step he had never seen before. He saw joy that had never been, joy his harsh father would never have understood or allowed. His mother was laughing with it, drunk with it, dancing in a happiness that had never touched Tallis’s life. He felt something like envy then, and a certain gladness for his mother.

  He watched as a child, three or four years old, was passed from one celebrant to another. The child was fearful, Tallis could tell from where he crouched. It looked as if he were recently woken. There were blanket creases on his face. His dark eyes were wide, his thumb fast in his mouth. Every dancer received the child with joyous ecstasy, like a mother long away from her son. The child clung to each whirling celebrant with uncertain eyes now upon the bonfire, now searching among the dancers, perhaps for his mother. The celebration went on for a long time.

  Dark eyes wide. Thumb in his mouth. Face bathed in an orange glow. The gods and the goddesses and all sacred under the sun, Tallis would have screamed then. He would have leapt from his hiding place, as he had in his imagining a thousand times since, he would have . . .

  The women in the midnight dance fell upon the child like a pack of wolves, tore him apart before his eyes, and his mother, oh, gods, his mother, his mother had blood on her hands.

  “Excuse me.”

  Tallis pushed up from the table and tugged down the sides of his toga. He left the common room, walking as straight as he could, woodenly aware of the stares from Julia and Kes. He had to get to his place by the water. He had to get to the sea.

  Callimachus forbade him to remember, he forbade . . .

  Callimachus would say it was old grief rolling over, it would soon go to sleep.

  Callimachus had no orange bonfire memories. All of his work to keep a broken boy out of that gully came to nothing.

  He went through the kitchen and paused at the doorway. He slowly raised his eyes to the hills of Kursi. Same feeling as in the Theban gully. He’d felt it the moment he first came from Hippos, an oddness in the air, a vague awareness, and he’d spent every moment since his arrival pretending it wasn’t there. He knew what it was now. He never forgot the bonfire presence.

  He studied the Kursi hills, smoky indigo with twilight. Alexander never did return home. Neither had Tallis. He’d not been home since he was twelve years old.

  Kes`Elurah watched Tallis leave, his face white as milk. The lady remained at the table. Ordinarily Kes would make the lady pay for what she did to make Tallis look that way, but Zagreus said the lady had no fear.

  Kes came around the counter and sat where Tallis had been. She took his goblet and took a long sip of wine, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand and resting the goblet on her cheek as she considered this lady.

  The lady looked at her, surprise mixed with anxiety.

  Kes set down the goblet and put her chin on her fist. “You were lovers,” she mused.

  The woman studied her, then said sadly, “We should have been.”

  The woman was lovely. Kes would never have enough money to buy her kind of per
fume, let alone the lustrous fabric she wore. Nobody like her had ever crossed the threshold. But then, nobody like Tallis had ever stayed here.

  “Is the boy his?”

  Mild surprise crossed the woman’s face, then mild amusement. She folded her arms and cleared her throat delicately. “Your question is forward, at the least. Most would consider it rude. Ordinarily I wouldn’t answer. But you—remind me of an old friend.” Her gaze drifted in memory, and sadness descended. “He was just as plainspoken, never a thought for convention.”

  Tallis was like that. And he padded his plainspeak with humor. A gentleman with a joke, right from that first day. Mother would not have approved of him, and so Kes didn’t, not at first. “Do you speak of Tallis?”

  “No.”

  Such sadness in those eyes. Fine ladies had bad things happen too. No one was safe, didn’t matter if you were fine and lovely and rich. Troubles put a connection between people, made them the same, in a way. Kes felt a twinge of pity for the woman.

  The lady blinked and drew herself straight and looked evenly at Kes. “The boy belongs to my husband.”

  Kes glanced toward the kitchen. “I’ve not seen Tallis like this.” Always so cheerful. It had been a long time since the inn had cheer living in it. “He was fine until you came.” She didn’t bother keeping resentment from her tone. “What did you say to him?”

  “Now you are being rude. Where did he go? To his room?”

  “No. To his place by the sea. I gave him a chair for it.” She never knew a guest to enjoy the view as Tallis did. She had never thought of it as a view, and neither had anyone else. Somehow she knew it became more than a view for him. It became a place he needed. Nobody like him has been here before, and now I fear he is going to leave.

  “How do I get there?”

  “You’re not going there.”

  Startled, the woman said, “I must speak with him.”

  “Not today. You’ve upset him enough.” Kes rose and stood the way her father did over the whole common room—even when he was sitting down—with proprietary authority not to be questioned.

  The woman rose, eyes bristling. “He posted a message in the forum, and I am answering that message.”

  “Answer it tomorrow.”

  Any other woman would have put up a fuss, at least the women Kes knew. This one merely regarded Kes with icy dignity, then turned and left in a soft wake of expensive perfume and graciously flowing fabric. She heard the woman call for the servant, heard the servant call for the child.

  Kes rubbed a water spot on the table, until she noticed her roughened hand.

  In the tombs of Kursi sat a man with his back to the sea. For a long time he sat with his back to the sea. Until it got uncomfortable, and he broke position.

  Polonus rubbed his back and grumbled, “I don’t know how you do it.”

  He had situated himself as Kardus did, bowing his back precisely against the lake of Galilee, forehead on his knees. He tried to make himself sit for hours, as Kardus did, but Polonus was sure he didn’t make it ten minutes. His back muscles were cramped, his neck hurt for pressing his forehead on his knees, his back leg muscles were stretched to pain, his head pulsed with pressure from his blood. He looked over his shoulder and squinted at the glittering waters, wondering what the sea had done to earn Kardus’s contempt. He looked to where Kardus lay, sleeping beside an ancient mound of rocks.

  If sleeping it was. For the three years he had been observing Kardus, the man was never in what Homer called “the sweet grip of sleep.” There was nothing sweet about his twitchings or his eerie half-lidded look, like a drowsy coma. Polonus had hoped at the beginning that sleep would afford Kardus reprieve from the waking nightmare in which he lived, but sleep only trailed the nightmare along.

  “I will be going away for a while, Kardus,” Polonus said softly. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back. I won’t be gone long. A few days.”

  Polonus gazed at the twitching form. He wasn’t able to get clothes on him today. Kardus grew stronger all the time.

  Dirt and defecation covered Kardus like his bruises and scabs, so that actually, from a distance, it looked as if he were indeed clothed, camouflaged in havoc. Havoc, covering havoc. Sometimes he allowed Polonus to pull a tunic over his head. A day later Polonus would find the tunic ripped to shreds or bedecking a gravesite in a horrifying fashion. Kardus once had laid out the tunic over a rock mound like a shroud, and had put a dead bird for a head and broken shackles for the feet and hands.

  He hated to be clothed. It panicked him. Once Kardus had used a cast-off tunic to strangle a stray pig. A pig! He showed Polonus his triumph, then to Polonus’s horror settled down to eat the pig raw. He couldn’t stay for that.

  “I swear to the gods and the elements,” Polonus whispered, “I will see you whole again. If there is a way into madness, logic says there is a way out. I will give you that ladder myself. No human was meant to live like this.”

  It used to be he could chain Kardus up. He would then lead him to people who promised they could help. Some of the people were genuinely concerned; some were charlatans who only took his money. They put the blame on Polonus if the cure did not work.

  Once he took Kardus on a four-day journey east to a revered wise woman of the Chambari tribe. Upon examining Kardus, she announced that she could help and prescribed a spell—which Polonus had to purchase from her at great expense—certain to chase away the “many evil ones” she was sure had come to reside in Kardus. He had to take Kardus to a place where great violence had been done (she recommended any place where gladiatorial spectacles had been put on) and conduct the spell just as dawn broke. In the dirt of the great violence, he had to write out the charm in blood from the womb of a sheatfish, mixed with the juice of the sarapis herb and the spirit Sisioth. Then he was to take the leftover mixture and place it in the mouth of a dead dog. If conducted at dawn, Kardus’s healing would take place within the hour.

  He took Kardus to Scythopolis, because Hippos did not have a Great Stadium. Neither did Scythopolis. Their Great Stadium was under construction, but they had a large area where the spectacles were put on until then, by a steep hillside upon which the people sat to watch. He paid off the steward to conduct the ritual, undisturbed, at dawn. He had selected a dog he felt somehow was noble, and with apologies he killed it. He had no idea what the spirit Sisioth was, knew less how to mix it with the sheatfish blood, but he paid for the services of a local temple priest to come and invoke the spirit at dawn. The womb of a sheatfish does not have much blood, not for the script of the lengthy spell, so he had had to purchase many sheatfish to ensure he had female ones for the womb.

  He wrote the charm in the dust at dawn as the priest, smelling of strange oils and looking like he had just rolled out of bed, invoked the spirit Sisioth. He put the leftover “ink” in the mouth of the noble dead dog, and waited for an hour with the shackled Kardus.

  Nothing happened.

  The priest, who had been mildly interested in the proceedings, shook his head and left. They waited all morning as the sun grew hotter, until the steward came and told him a spectacle was due to start within the hour.

  Polonus squinted up at the man, whose sympathy was clear on his face. “Maybe it was the wrong fish.” He held up a warm and smelly carcass to the steward. “Does this look like sheatfish to you?” The man had shrugged and walked away.

  Polonus left, with a sincere apology to the dead dog, and made straight for the Chambari tribe. Four days after he sat in the dirt of great violence at dawn, he presented the wise woman Cosomatura with a bill of what the whole venture had set him back, and demanded reparation.

  “Why?” she asked, sitting on that pile of animal skins, waving away a fly with a bangled hand. He stared at her, and deliberately swung his gaze to the chained and drooling Kardus.

  “It didn’t work, that’s why. You’re a fraud, and I want my money back. I want you to pay me the coin I spent on the charm itself and on all the things I had to
buy to make it work. Do you know how much sheatfish cost? Do you know I had to send to Caesarea for them?”

  She seized on it. “Caesarea?”

  “Yes, Caesarea. Nobody is hauling in nets stuffed with sheatfish at the Galilee, let me tell you.”

  “Well, there’s your problem. I told you the charm had to be absolutely precise for it to work. You were to use fresh sheatfish. Now if you had to send to Caesarea for them,” she said, and shook her head regretfully, “they were not fresh.”

  And all his stupidity came crashing down upon him in one stunning inglorious moment. Polonus, who had once taught the most brilliant minds at the most promising school Palestine had to offer . . . Polonus, who had earned a name even the great Callimachus had taken note of . . . Polonus, captain of the academy and leader of the once-revered Decaphiloi, stood now before a fat and baleful huckster, brandishing before her a bill of his own foolishness.

  He let the bill slip from his fingers and said, “Come on, Kardus,” and led him home.

  The event had not cured him of hope for his old student. He remembered the look on the young Kardus’s face whenever he arrived at the inn with another scroll. How he loved that eagerness.

  He remembered introducing Kardus to his friends.

  He remembered introducing Kardus to Portia.

  Polonus watched the twitching Kardus. That was the one thing he wished with all his heart he hadn’t done. Antenor had warned him, and he did not listen. For by then, things had changed with Kardus.

  The schoolboy became a young man, and the young man grew . . . tiresome. He was brilliant, and he knew it. He was bloated with his gifts. He had a startling acumen for battle strategies and tactics; he could pick up an entire language in the time it took Polonus to read a book. At the age of twenty, he was fluent in Greek, Latin, at least one form of Persian, and Parthian.

  Was it his own fault Kardus ended up the way he did?

  In the beginning, Polonus had to work against the negative forces at the inn, the boy’s mother in particular. She was a viciously strange woman, furious with Kardus for learning from Polonus, malevolent with the father for allowing it. The child had a nervous habit then, always blinking his wide eyes, except when he forgot himself in the salvation of education. The blinking never failed to go away then, and Polonus knew he had to handle this child carefully. He was careful to praise him lavishly for any accomplishment, careful to employ positive forces to counter all the negative forces that had borne down on the child ever since that shrew gave birth to him.