A Mixture of Madness
Book II of
The Bow of Heaven
A Novel of Ancient Rome
by
Andrew Levkoff
Copyright 2012 Andrew Levkoff
Peacock Angel Publishing LLC
ISBN 978-0-9839101-4-5
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cover illustration / design by Lynnette Shelley
www.lynnetteshelley.com
for Allison and Stephany
•••
"No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness." - Aristotle
•••
CONTENTS
Map
Preface: 55 – 54 BCE - Winter, On the March
Prolog: 19 BCE, Summer, Siphnos, Greece
Part I: Home
Part II: A Hardness of Stone
Epilog
Afterword
Acknowledgments
GLOSSARY (clicking on an underlined word or phrase in the text will take you to the Glossary and back again)
Timeline
The Bow of Heaven, Book III: The Arc of the Arrow (excerpt)
Bibliography
Illustration credits
Map: University of Austin, Texas, Historical Atlas, William Shepherd 1911
Part I: Coming Home, Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion, Nicholas Poussin, 1648
Click on the image below and you will be taken to andrewlevkoff.com where you may enlarge this and other maps. If the link is not working, got to andrewlevkoff.com/maps2.
Preface
55 – 54 BCE - Winter, On the March
Year of the consulship of
Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus and Marcus Licinius Crassus Dives
“Bona Dea! What was that?!” Legionary Flavius Betto sat up, shoving Drusus Malchus awake. Betto, whose tent-mates called him Muris, the mouse, set to work upon a hangnail as if he were breaking his fast.
“It was a scream,” Malchus said, yawning and stretching. “You’re a soldier. We’re at war. You’ll hear lots of screaming. Go back to sleep.” The four other soldiers in the tent agreed with short, vehement curses. The Celt threw a bronze mess cup at Betto but hit Malchus. Betto was lucky the two remaining members of their contubernium, the brothers Broccus, were on guard duty.
Malchus casually tossed the cup back toward its owner. He was philosophical about these things. People were often throwing things at Betto, and his friend Malchus, being so much the greater target, took his share of unintentional abuse. He was the only man in his century who could not wear standard issue. It would be unfair to call him fat, and more unkind than unwise. Hostus Broccus had once said that if they were ever shipwrecked together, they could make a raft of his body and a sail from his tunic. Hearing this, Tarautus Broccus had pressed a finger to one broad nostril, leaned over and emptied the other with a sharp exhale. Broccus had wiped his face on his tunic, then said he’d rather swim for it than lie on Malchus’ naked chest. Drusus had laughed along with everyone else.
“It wasn’t a scream,” Betto argued. “It sounded more like…like the moaning of my Aunt Iunia.”
“You told me she died from eating bad mullet year before last.”
“My point exactly.” Betto began to reach for the tent flap, then thought better of it.
“It was a scream,” Malchus muttered, knowing this was an argument he would not win. He pulled his brown wool sagum all the way up over his head, wondering if he could fall back asleep before the next sentence was uttered.
“How could it be a scream?” Betto asked the woolen lump that was his best friend. “Have you looked outside? We’re in Roman Syria, not Ctesiphon. The fighting hasn’t started yet.”
“It will if you don’t shut up!” said the Etruscan.
“That’s it. I’m wide awake now,” Malchus grumbled. He threw off his cloak, leaned forward and peered through the tent flap. “The blessed cornu will blow within the hour anyway.”
“It’s another omen, I know it,” warned Betto, peering over Malchus’ shoulder.
“Oh, here we go again,” said someone else.
“You think I’m joking?” Betto said. “Tell me, how did Malchus and I come to join you fine fellows? I’ll tell you how.” Someone muttered “again,” but Betto plowed ahead. “Because the six other legionaries we shipped out with drowned, that’s how! Remember the men who stood on the rostra with us in Brundisium? Well now they’re DEAD!”
“And here you are in the first century of the first cohort of Legion I Columba,” said the Celt, throwing his tunic over his head.
The Etruscan muttered, “Columba. Why name an army after a bird of peace? The Dove Army—about as threatening as a kiss on the cheek.”
“Ever have 30,000 doves shit on you?” Malchus asked.
The Celt continued unperturbed, “Under whose standard march the best legionaries Marcus Crassus’ sesterces can buy. So I suggest you start acting like it.”
“It’s been almost five months, Flavius,” Malchus said. “You need to let it go. You’re driving everyone crazy.”
“You don’t understand,” Betto persisted. “Thousands of men drowned. I don’t suppose you call that a good omen, do you?”
“Think on it, my superstitious friend,” Malchus said, “there is a reason the gods gave you a mouth that closes and ears that don’t.” This got a laugh from the others, who had now resigned themselves to being well awake by the time Diana’s Hymn sounded.
“Scoff if you want,” Betto said. “But between the tribune’s curse and the ill wind that took our brothers, I’d say someone in the command tent isn’t praying hard enough.”
A voice in the dark said, “The proper sacrifices were made to Neptune and Tempestates. The legion’s augur confirmed our crossing at that inopportune time has been absolved. There’s an end to it.”
“There’s an end to it, all right,” Betto groused. “If by ‘it’ you mean us.” He joined the others and started dressing. At least his pre-dawn nerves, Malchus told him cheerfully, would enable them to beat the morning rush to the latrine.
•••
“This is not the way. We’re in the wrong wing! Give me that!” I seize the torch from the slave. “See my atriensis in the morning and instruct him to flog you. Ask for Alexander. Now be gone!” Athena, protect me—not here again. Not again, I beg you.
I point the sputtering torch down a dark hallway and see that it is too short to be my own. In the dark, they all look alike. The spirits of a house come alive at night. Torchlight sets them free. Too many columns. Too many shadows. No one about. Even the slaves are abed. I’m drunk. How can I be drunk and dreaming?
Luca.
They say the entrance to Hades is at Avernus, but for me it lies here, somewhere in this house. No matter where I walk, in the end, the torture of the pit awaits me. I’m so tired. If I could but sleep a dreamless sleep. Come nightmare, do thy worst and let me rest. I hurry now past columns
that throw grasping shadow arms. There is the garden atrium, rain splashing into the impluvium and blowing spray in gusts over the slick tile floor. I slip on a wet spot and fall to my knees. The torch skids, hits a clay planter head-on and goes out with a hiss and a small explosion of sparks.
That is the sign. I am close now. I get to my feet and grope along the walls until finally, I hear a woman’s voice, low and urgent. It doesn’t sound like my wife. More words, then a grunt as if someone has been struck. I draw my pugio from its scabbard for the hundredth time, swearing that this time I will plunge it into the traitor’s neck. I make my way down the hall, past two empty cubiculae. I squint at a wall painting, recognize the image of Orpheus and Eurydice, the viper curled around her ankle. Now it comes.
Knowledge spurs me not to greater speed, but turns my feet to stone. They scrape on the stone floor as I drag myself forward, my mind silently screaming, ‘Awaken! Awaken!’
The cubiculum has no door, and the heavy drapes that separate it from the hallway are partially drawn. I peer past the curtains. The room is dark, and I can hear more than I can see. The rhythmic grunts of the man in the room are occasionally echoed by a woman’s groan, whether in pain or pleasure I cannot tell. There is also the intermittently rhythmic thump of a chest of drawers as it is knocked up against a wall.
Forms begin to be discernible out of the murk. Two bodies face the wall, leaning over the waist high wooden chest. A man whose head is turned away from the doorway has his tunic pulled up above his waist and stuffed into his belt. His pale, exposed buttocks moves in a short arc, up and down, like comic moons unsure whether to rise or set. I can see the prominent bald spot on the back of Caesar’s head as he hunches over my wife’s right shoulder.
“Haste, Julius,” she says, “or my husband will discover how boring you are.” Her last word turns into a grunt as Caesar responds with a vicious thrust that practically lifts Tertulla off her feet. I gag as I always do. Does she mock him, or encourage him? I can never tell. The left shoulder of her tunic is torn. Did she struggle? Or is this more evidence of their ardor? I know as I follow the slender line of her bare arms, up to her shaking shoulders, past her neck and the ringlets of hair that half obscure her cheeks, that whenever I force myself to gaze just a little higher, I will find that she is looking straight into my eyes.
Now Crassus, now! Here in the instant of recognition, in the one moment when all the gods call out for decisiveness, for retribution, this is the moment for action! I feel the knife in my hand, but I cannot move a muscle. She has pinned me like an insect; though the light is still very dim, I know she sees me standing here. Is that a look of terror that passes over her face at the sight of me. Too soon, whatever was there is replaced by an expression of unbearable sorrow.
The meeting of our eyes is far more terrible than the sight of her rutting. Move, Crassus, move! The longer I stand here, the more my shame grows. The longer I delay, the more shards of me fall away and shatter. Quiet! or they will hear. Look away, Tertulla, set me free to act, but she holds me fast with the saddest gaze in all the world.
Cold sweat pools around the hilt of my dagger till I feel it will slip from my fingers. Something new in this recurring nightmare! With immense effort, I can raise the blade till the iron comes between my lady’s eyes and mine. The spell is broken. Now to act! Quickly, choose one of three fates and end these night terrors. Slip it beneath my own breastbone or, if Tertulla be untrue, then this long knife should pass full through her slender throat. No, no blood shall stain her fair neck with crimson, not by my hand. It must be Caesar then, whose pulsing artery cries out for severing. The man I’d thought my friend is turned the other way; he cannot see me, his mind fixed as it always is, on conquest.
Tertulla makes a small, frantic gesture. She shakes her head in a clear imprecation for me to do nothing. Her eyes widen and only because of thirty years’ intimacy with that face, could I see she wants me to slip away, to depart—to continue to do what I have done since the moment I had come upon them—nothing.
So, there is to be no peace. Nothing changes. Does she save me, or spurn me? Knowing that my mind will now crack like an egg only makes the coming agony worse. In my chest, there lies a thick knot of rope where my heart had but a moment ago beat; now it tightens, tightens. I know I will obey her. Even in betrayal, it is a reflex of love I cannot abandon. And the core of me, already broken in two, finds it can shatter into even smaller pieces. I take one step back and let the curtain come between my eyes and hers, between a joyous past and an empty future.
When I am all alone again in the dark, I scream.
Prolog
19 BCE - Spring, Siphnos, Greece
Year of the consulship of
Quintus Lucretius Vespillo and Gaius Sentius Saturninus
I forgave him.
Perhaps that is my failing.
•••
My head jerks off the table and once more I take up my pen. Why must the old succumb to so many naps? We begin as babies and end the same; but the dreams of the very young are free from torment. I have lived too long and seen too much to be at peace. Sleep is not the refuge it once was.
I see a man on a skittish horse, but memories of dreams do not hold up well in the light—the fragment is frail and fleeting. I think of Crassus, and how I used to calm him from his recurring night terrors.
Melyaket pads quietly onto the patio, sits on the balustrade, one foot on the floor, the other dangling. His strange attire no longer startles: today he wears a pale green, belted shirt with a wide band of embroidery along the edges and the wrists of its odd, long sleeves; a plain leather vest and the sherwal of his land, baggy trousers tied at the ankles. I ignore him until a cloying, acrid smell wrinkles my nostrils. “Must you do that here? ” I ask him. He is waxing his bow with what smells like rancid goat fat. I glance up and notice for the first time that grey has begun to cajole a place in amongst the thick tangle of his short, black curls. He tells me he must leave, an announcement I have anticipated yet quietly disregarded. I think how sad his absence will make me. He laughs and I realize I have spoken my thought aloud. “I thought you'd be happy to be rid of me,” he says.
“Let us say your departure will give slightly more pain than your arrival. When will you go?”
“At sunrise.”
“Then waste no more time with an old man. Go, prepare yourself,” I say. Melyaket reminds me that there is real work yet to do; he cannot sit like me, day in and day out, doing nothing but admiring the sea.
A man of astonishingly fleet reflexes, which in my case are hilariously nonessential, Melyaket has taken a step backward before the thought to strike him has reached the muscles in my arm. Intention finally pairs with action, and my walking stick swings ineffectually past him. "You think this is nothing?!” I cry hoarsely, pointing a shaky finger toward the stacked tins stuffed with completed parchments. Melyaket smiles, lays his bow against the railing and wipes his hands on a rag. He pads behind me, grips me with strong fingers and kneads the stiffness from my shoulders.
“You're a good boy,” I say, mollified. I reach up to pat his hand.
“And you are an alarmingly old man,” he says. After awhile he circles round and drops to his knees before my chair, his necklace of polished blue stones clinking. Sitting on his heels, he says, “Try not to die while I'm gone.” His eyes speak in silence what words would cheapen.
“Try not to get killed before you return,” I reply.
Melyaket smiles the smile of faith. “By the grace of Melek Ta'us, we will see each other again.”
“Hmmph. You and your Peacock Angel.”
“Do you think we have come all this way by accident?”
“What I think about it is as irrelevant as your faith. Then, we were there; now, we are here. Go, live your life, what's left of it.”
“Wait and see. With Her blessing, I shall bring company when I return.”
I glance up at him, my eyes two stones. “He is dead.”
“You do not know that for certain.”
“Then I am dead, to him. Don’t waste your time.”
As he so often does, Melyaket ignores my words. “How about one more foot massage before the midday meal?” He reaches into one of the bottomless pockets of his trousers and wags a small vial of oil before my eyes.
“If your hands are dry, just say so,” I answer, bending to remove my sandals.
“You are a gnarled old walnut tree, aren’t you.” He warms a few drops of oil in his hands. Then he looks at me with that way he has. I hate that look. “Camel,” he says.
I stare him down, but it’s no use. Before his hands touch my grateful heels, I start to smile. And then we laugh.
•••
The scrolls of the first part of my tale are on their way to Alexandria, and Melyaket has left to find whatever destiny awaits him. Both are dear to me and I pray that each may find their way. Neither is a certainty. Was it chance, prowess, or the goddess Melek Ta'us who had protected him through all his years? If this Peacock Angel be everything Melyaket claims, may she watch over him and return him safely. And while I am asking for miracles, may she and any other gods who are eavesdropping on an old man’s thoughts watch over me as well, so that if and when Melyaket returns at last, he does not find me feeding the vegetables in the garden, and I do not mean from a bag of manure.
My writings are as safe as I could make them: a friend at the Serapeum will see to their copying and distribution. To publish the work in Rome would be to invite the ire and censorship of mighty Augustus, who not only styles himself Caesar, but divi filius, son of the divine one, Julius Caesar himself.
Octavian's great-uncle was no god, no matter what accolades the senate may have heaped upon him. Julius Caesar invaded our home to filch advantage from a counterfeit friendship, looked down upon his benefactor as if my master's generosity were an amusing imperfection in character, and most heinous of all, Caesar sought to cement his own political advantage through my mistress by assaulting her and using the rape as political blackmail. I would wipe the horror of that night from my mind, but it will not go. It remains as fresh and vile as the stink of Melyaket's goat fat.
A Mixture of Madness, Book II of The Bow of Heaven Page 1
