by Tracy Groot
“But you know what?” Her lips trembled, and she shook her head. “I don’t blame the people. They don’t see any hope—it’s been almost four years, and I don’t have much hope myself, not as time goes by. Most know him as he is now.” She clenched fistfuls of her dress.
“But I remember the way he was. He was just Kardus, and I loved him. I’ve told you some bad things of him, but there was good. There was who he was when he was a child. Who he was when he was learning.” She released her dress. “When I look at him now I can’t see anything left of him, except for the familiarity of his face. Even that is not what it used to be.”
She fell silent and looked at her hands in her lap. The breeze lifted her hair, and she answered the breeze by gazing across the waters. Tallis started to touch her shoulder but drew back when she began to speak again.
“‘The problem of Kardus,’ they said. ‘We’re here to talk about the problem of Kardus. He scares our children, scares away trade. Something has to be done.’” She drew up her knees. “One man has affected an entire village. And the hills surrounding the village, and even beyond. This is the country of the Gerasenes—the Girgashites. Long ago, they were driven out of their own land into this region. The name came to mean ‘the expelled ones.’ And I think of that with Kardus. He is an expelled one. Nobody wants him—they drive him away. Well, we told the council it would be murder to put him down like a dog, and that if anything happened to him we would bring it to the magistrates. We told them his violence was mostly upon himself. We said if they didn’t like his screams to stop their ears with wool. That was a few months ago. The problem is, he is getting worse. How he grows in strength, I do not know. Maybe the evil inside him multiplies.”
Tallis shifted in his seat. The evil inside him? Like grain in a sack? Madness and lunacy for certain. He’d seen enough madness in this world. He’d known lunatics. But evil?
“Polonus has tried to keep him in shackles so he will not roam about and frighten people. He tries to keep him quiet until there is a cure. But Kardus screams. And he breaks the chains because he doesn’t understand. He hates the chains, and it—” Kes’s breath caught. She tried hard not to cry. “It breaks my heart to see him chained like an animal. No human being was meant to live the way he is. I cannot go see him anymore; it hurts too much. That is weak of me, I know.”
“It’s not a weak thing to shackle someone you love,” Tallis said.
Kes shrugged miserably. “Doesn’t really matter anymore. The shackles won’t hold him now. He tears them like they’re made of cloth. Then off he goes into the hills. Bad enough to have him live in the tombs, the place of the dead. But he goes naked into the hills. Screaming, crying out.”
Tallis’s eyes widened. He remembered standing in the gravesite on that hill just south of Kursi, toeing a pair of broken shackles. His neck hairs came up—had a raving lunatic spied upon him at that very moment? The legendary Kardus?
“I went away from the inn for a time, after Kardus began to go crazy. I couldn’t take it anymore, I had to be free from it all. Free from the guests and the silence of my father. But I didn’t stay long. I wanted to come home. This is where I belonged. I realized I like taking care of things. Like my father.
“But it’s more than that—I couldn’t bear to be away from Kardus. He is my blood, no matter if he is cursing at me and saying the vilest things you can imagine. No matter if I am afraid to be around him. I remember the way he used to be. Around here they know him as the naked and unchainable. I remember a little boy. I know his face. He is Kardus. My blood.”
After a few gazing moments, she seemed to come to herself. She looked over her shoulder at Tallis. “I certainly didn’t mean to say all that. You bring out the talk in me.”
Tallis folded his hands over his stomach, remembered his ribs, and changed position. “Good. You need to talk. And who knows? Maybe someday we will be able to talk about things not so grim.” Speaking of grim . . . “Tell me about this Demas. Do you want to talk about him now?”
Startled, she said, “That’s—not why I asked for you.” She looked over her other shoulder, in the direction of the barn.
“Well, if you want my opinion, your Demas was a wharf rat. That’s the impression I got from the people at the theater.”
“Of course he was.”
“You knew it? I’d expect better from you.” He smiled a little. Me, for example. I’m older and wiser and have no evil intentions for young maidens—not many. . . .
“Remember when you told me about the tattoo the other day? Ivy leaves and vines? The one you looked for on my arm?”
She knew how to change a subject. “Yes . . .”
“Did you say her name was Portia?”
Tallis studied her. “What about it?”
Kes plucked at her sandal. “Five years ago, Arinna came to the inn with her baby. She brought a sad tale, how she had been turned out of her home by a drunken husband. She pleaded for work, said she’d do anything for room and board. Said her son could help around the place when he was grown. Father and I took pity on her, more for the child. He captured us from the start, perhaps because our hearts were wounded from Mother’s death and Kardus’s absence. Well, from the start, a woman came to visit Zagreus twice a year, on his birthing day and when he was a half year older. She is the boy’s aunt. I always thought it strange that she never took them in. They were her blood. Well, today—”
She fell silent. She always fell silent just when Tallis strained to hear more.
She concentrated on fiddling with her sandal. “Zagreus—has always been afraid of her. He takes to the barn every time she comes, like with the shaman. It’s strange because she reveres him. Today . . . she said she was going to take him home for a visit. To her palace. And that’s when Zagreus wet himself, and that’s when I took him to the barn because I saw the tattoo on her arm. The one you looked for.”
The shock stole his breath for a moment. His gaze strayed to the horizon.
He’d never be free of it. He could go to the farthest corner of the earth and he’d never be free. He wished he had never sought to learn everything he could about the cultus of Dionysus. How he wished he’d stayed dumb as a rock. “Her name is Portia?”
“She calls herself Ariadne.”
“Oh, gods,” Tallis groaned. It had to be Ariadne, and she had to have the mark of the Bacchantes.
“What is it?”
He squeezed his eyes shut, but all he saw was an orange glow, and his eyes flew open. He got up stiffly from the chair. Hand on his ribs, he eased down carefully next to Kes and let his feet dangle over the rock. He gazed blankly upon the waters.
“Why do they call this a sea?” he muttered. “It’s a lake. Have you ever been to the sea?”
“Yes. It’s amazing.”
“This is no sea.”
“If you’ve been south of here, you’ll know why they call it a sea.”
He couldn’t shut away the ache this time. There was nothing he could do but let it hurt until activities of the day covered over it, until life with its living breathed its busy mercy and allowed him again, for a time, to forget.
“Everywhere I look I see Dionysus, no matter how hard I try to stay blind. When Callimachus sent me here, I kept a vigilance to ignore Beth Shean, what the Greeks call Scythopolis. Any scholar of Dionysus knows the name of Scythopolis, and the name Ariadne. . . .” His voice dropped. “And the name Zagreus.”
Kes looked at him, but he couldn’t tell her that part. He went on.
“There is a temple in Scythopolis, and it is either an ancient one or it is built upon the site of an ancient one. It is the temple of Dionysus, and Scythopolis is one of the fabled places of Nysa. Nysa was a Maenad, one of the nurses of the god Dionysus, and Scythopolis is where he is supposed to have buried her. Every three years they have a spring festival. He is supposed to be reincarnated then, during the rites. You know of the Festivals of Dionysus?”
“Of course. The celebrations are eve
rywhere, even Kursi. Not every three years, but once a year, at springtime.”
“But you’ve never heard of the practices of the Dionysiac cultus. Do you know of the Maenads?”
“The women followers of Dionysus. The Bacchantes. Kardus read to us from Euripides.” Kes shrugged. “Everyone knows the Maenads.”
Tallis put a hard look on the lake. Talk like this belonged to no part of the day. It was shameful to speak of such things, especially to an innocent woman like Kes`Elurah. Shameful to let his words put images into her head.
But the woman’s name was Ariadne. And the child’s name was Zagreus.
He remembered the fevered work he had done in his twenties on the activities of the cultus of Dionysus. He’d worried Callimachus with his single-mindedness. When Cal would ask when it would be over, he’d reply, “When there are no more Maenads left on the face of the earth.”
And when his efforts actually changed something, passing legislation in the Senate that placed limitations on the activities of the Bacchanalia (which, in practice, only meant a watchful eye), Cal expected Tallis to set aside his pen. Cal said this had not happened since the senatorial decree nearly two hundred years earlier, that he should be proud of his work—it was time to put his heart to something else. And Tallis had replied, “Their activities are only limited, they’re not banned yet.”
Then the old scholar made sure Tallis had his eye. “All your efforts will never erase what your mother did. Your fight is not with the Maenads. It’s with who drives the Maenads. I do not recommend you take your fight to him.” Then he said, “If you cannot forgive her, imagine what it is like to be mad.”
Not long after, Tallis set aside his pen. He never wrote anything else on the cultus of Dionysus. He would never forgive his mother, but he had put long thoughts to what it must be like to be mad. Only someone mad could do that to her own child.
How could he tell Kes about it? He could allude to the truth and let her draw the right conclusions, but the older he got, the more he hated allusion. If he spoke anything less than truth, he deserved to have his tongue cut out. Truth is what his little brother deserved.
Woodenly, Tallis said, “Ariadne was the queen of the Maenads, Dionysus’s queen. Zagreus is the most ancient name for Dionysus. As Zagreus, he is represented as Dionysus reborn.” He tried to say more, but his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. Truth was bitterly hard. “The Maenads are . . . the divine nurses, responsible to . . . rear the young god . . . participate in his revels when he has reached maturity.”
Thumb fast in his mouth. He didn’t have his blanket scrap with him.
“They select a child. . . .”
Mother, so lovely in her joy. Kicking up her feet in an elegant step.
“They rear him. . . .”
Tallis taught him how to whistle. He used to carry him on his shoulders.
“And at certain festivals the rites become mad. They look for his incarnate presence, and if it comes, the dancing and revelry is swept into chaos. Grown men have been killed in the most horrifying fashion, by the hands of mere women. But it’s not until the—” he clenched his teeth, trembling with effort—“sacred ceremony at midnight . . . on a mountaintop . . . that a child is . . .”
Kes sprang to her feet. She stood with her fists clenched, breathing hard. Stones skittered as she flew off for the barn.
“. . . sacrificed to the god of wine and comfort. They say they do the child a favor, and I’m glad you’re not hearing this, Kes, because the horror doesn’t stop there.” He shook his head, and tears shook down. “No, the Maenads, the Bacchantes—they’ve been called cannibals, you know.” His heart squeezed so hard he couldn’t breathe, and he dropped his head with sorrow. He gasped for breath. “And it is . . . a shameful thing . . . to put on my lips . . . what should belong to legend and myth.”
Except it was true.
He let it hurt because he couldn’t stop it this time. He let it hurt as it had not hurt in years. And he wept, aching for his little brother, as he had not wept, or ached, in years.
He was lying on his side, and his ribs hurt. He pushed up and brushed off his face, embedded with tiny rocks and little shells from the sea. He felt old and shook out and weary.
“I miss you. I’ve missed you for twenty-five years. I’m here, and I haven’t forgotten you, little brother. You’re not forgotten. Don’t think I have. Don’t think I have.”
He looked over his shoulder, north, toward the tombs of Kursi. No longer did he feel hatred for his mother or for her friends. Something was there for them, but it was not hatred. More like despair. He felt a stirring in a place he thought long dead, not for the followers of Dionysus but for Dionysus himself. For the first time in his life, the hatred felt clean.
As he looked at the hills he remembered a bonfire night in Thebes. He remembered being laid out in a chicken yard, pressed down by a force from which he could not rise. And he remembered human touch, from the fiery eyes of a slave who had challenged the Evil.
A foe was in those hills, worse than the Maenads.
Was it time to take the fight to him?
How do you fight a god?
He found Kes in the barn, asleep next to Zagreus.
He hated to scare her like that. Hated how it made him feel when he looked about the barn and found things that belonged to the sane day and not mad nights. Sacks of grain. The smell of the donkey. A heap of sweetgrass. All an illusion. Thin comfort in the certainty of the Evil abroad on this land. This world suddenly seemed less real to Tallis than the other he knew existed.
The money stolen from Cal seemed like a vague wrong. His gaze stopped on shackles hanging from the pegs. More than he wanted to find out who stole from Cal, he wanted to know what had happened to the academy. Why Bion committed suicide, why Theseus was murdered. Why Kardus went mad. Did anyone try to bring the murderers of Theseus to justice? Or, as Tallis suspected, were they too afraid to seek justice for fear of unholy reprisal?
Tallis strolled to the barn door. Despite sore ribs and a sore face, he felt like some exercise. Kes said Polonus lived in the hills, just east of the tombs of Kursi.
He regarded Samir as he paused at the doorway. The dark eyes had been on him since he entered the barn. Tallis looked for what he saw in the chicken yard the other night, that authority, that presence, but saw only a slave’s guarded impassivity.
“Do you know what day of the month it is?” Tallis asked softly.
The slave shook his head.
“Dionysus is called the god of many joys. He is also called Lord of the Souls. The god of madness.”
The slave slowly nodded.
“The nones of the month is only days away, and it is the third year. It’s the Day of Awakening—all of Scythopolis will be celebrating.” Tallis looked over to the sleeping Zagreus, and to Kes with her arm across him. “Don’t take your eyes off him.”
And slowly the slave nodded.
In the tombs of Kursi is a man who is staring at his skin. For a long time he will sit, staring at his skin.
He sees scars upon scars upon thick and ridged scars. Gouges, where ovals of flesh have been bitten. Puffy lines of infection, the creases where maggots lived. Fingers with their blackened nails creep over this skin, inspecting this, their shell. Their possession.
Voices and voices and voices.
Turnaroundturnaroundturnaroundbitter
bitterbitterbitterbitterbitterbitterbitter
AlexanderAlexanderALEXANDER
ALEXANDERALEXANDERRRRRR!!!
The voices crescendo, they waver, they descend, and they whirl. At his ear, across the clearing, in and out around his head. Ancient babble, endless babble. No rhythm, no cadence. A thousand will shout and a thousand will croon and a thousand will twitter and a thousand will hiss. Were there cadence and rhythm, even with the nonsense, he could tolerate it. It was better when they accused or blasphemed; it attracted him from the corner where he dwelled. Coherence of any kind took his attention. A well-forme
d sentence of accusation or blasphemy was better than catalogues of babble.
No rest, no quiet, no stillness. He doesn’t know what it is anymore.
The madman slowly reaches for a broken shackle. He screams above the nonsense and plunges the shackle into the shell. Blood sprays his face, and the pain is victory—it tells him he is trying his best. He will break the shell and let the voices out. He will dig out the Evil. Never meant to be there. Wrong to let Them go there.
He will cut himself, gash himself; he will gouge and rake the shell. He will gorge on raw animal flesh and vomit hard enough to break blood vessels in his face, hard as he can, any way he can. He eats things no human would to make his bowels react with violence and expel Them; he’ll eat bloody pig eyes, fistfuls of dirt, his own filth. He will tear at his eyes and ears, nose and mouth, rectum and navel. He will vomit, defecate, gouge, and gash—anything to expel Them. Hard as he can, any way he can.
He once assaulted a tall rocky cliff and launched himself headfirst. He did it fast to fool the tricksters, but They wouldn’t let him kill the shell. They yanked him short and he dangled in the air, his head inches from the ground. They held him upside down for punishment, for hours and hours, until his face bulged and his mind left him for a time, a rare time of relief.
Runrunrunrunrunabaddonabaddonabaddonapollyon
apollyonapollyonapollyonsomasemasomasemasoma
semasomasemaSOMASEMASOMASEMASOMA
SEMASOMASEMA!
The madman screams with every plunge of the shackle into the shell. Blood spatters his crusted body, mingling with old blood on his chest.
He suddenly hurtles backward and lies insensible against the rocks. His eyelids flutter; his face is ravaged by unnaturalness. Slowly he rises, and cunning comes to his eye. He flings the shackle away. He takes what he has closest and smears it over the newest wounds, protecting the shell, protecting the shell, protecting the possession. . . .
