“Blame Crassus if you must. But if not Crassus, then Pompeius, and if not Pompeius, then Caesar, or a dozen other generals, as many as it would take. Rome would have kept coming until the task was done. Rome was wrong, Crassus was wrong, but until you have spent thirty-two years with the man, lived his life with him, become closer than any brother, do not be so quick to condemn him.”
“And be sure to wash between his toes when he demands it.”
“I was his slave, and that is my misfortune. But Crassus was a great man, once. Now he has become misguided. I mourn for him.”
“She is beautiful,” Spartacus says. “You made the wrong choice.”
I had been looking off into the hills, but as the dead gladiator makes that pronouncement, I turn toward him again to say, “Why do you—” He is gone. Squawking and complaining, the crows are flapping away in fear of his replacement. In the middle of the Via Appia stands Marcus Crassus astride Eurysaces, his giant black mount snorting and pawing at the paving stones with impatience, anxious to be moving away from this place. The general wears the armor and weapons lady Tertulla had given him before his departure from Rome.
“Who were you talking to?” he asks.
“The slave, Spartacus.”
“Hmph. A shame. I would have enjoyed a word with him.”
“I am almost certain it would not have been mutually relished.” We appraise each other in silence. Eurysaces stamps his hoof. “Well,” I say, “you finally got me where you wanted me.”
“You put yourself up there, not I.” Crassus looks behind me as if searching for something. I cannot afford such luxury of movement.
“You are a cruel, heartless, hate-filled shell of a man.”
“Alexander!”
“What perversity to kill me thus. Whatever there was between us is gone.”
“It saddens me to hear you say so.”
“Where has noble Crassus gone? Do you remember that man? Gods, but you were a paragon! In the beginning, after I stopped hating you, it wasn’t long before I actually began to revere you. How could that be? You were decent, a man of character—I was baffled.”
“It is always disorienting when one begins service in a new house.” Crassus rises in his saddle and peers off into the distance.
“Am I keeping you from something?”
“Of course not. Do continue.”
“‘Service.’ At this point in our lives can we not call it what it is?”
“All right. Slavery. You were my slave. What of it? You had money, power, respect, comfort, even love. How many free men can claim as much?”
“That is true. You make a fine argument for the condition. If only every slave had the opportunity to rise as high as I; if only every master could be as kind as you.
“A slave, even a slave like me, has but one choice: obey, or die. Either way, whoever that man was before—vanishes. He becomes something new. But what? For me, in order to survive as another man’s property, the only way I could make sense of it and remain sane was to take my identity from you. Don’t you see, Marcus, I have always been defined by you—it was your essential goodness that allowed me to live in this abhorrent state.”
“Deliriousness,” Crassus admonishes, “is no excuse for familiarity.”
I ignored him—what more could he do to me? “I became a reflection of you—instantaneous justification for living one day to the next. I had become a slave, but the man I served was honorable. I could be just and noble because Crassus was just and noble. I could become wealthy, fall in love, start a family, all because my world existed inside the universe of Crassus, and Crassus was good.”
“So you have reconciled yourself to this,” he said, pointing at the endless geometry of crosses curving into the distance.
“You did what you had to do. But even that foul necessity is not as heinous as what you are about to do now.”
“Why is that?”
“You believed your war against Spartacus was for the good of Rome. You don’t give a fig for Rome now—you will instigate this war with Parthia, risk tens of thousands of lives, disrupt hundreds of thousands of families who will pay the price for generations—for spite, for the lost virility you think you should have found on that night, for the chance to take your vengeance upon one man. You have lost your way, Crassus. If you are lost, then I am lost.”
“You are taking this very personally.”
“I thought there might yet be some hope of redemption, because domina still stood by your side. Do this, and you will no longer be deserving of a woman like the lady Tertulla. You were a man of honor, a statesman. Now look at you. Do you know what you have become? A Roman. How disappointing.”
“I, too,” Crassus said, nodding ever so slightly, “have very much enjoyed your company over the years, but that is not why I have come. Prepare yourself. As for the rest, I do what I must, but I did what I could.”
“I do not understand.”
“Breathe. Take one more step toward living.”
“What?”
“Wake up. It is almost time.”
•••
A spasm in my stomach jerks me forward, cracking my shoulders and setting the muscles of my chest on fire. My feet fly off the foot rest; all my weight is being carried by my arms. I am flailing about like a torn sail. I inhale in short gasps but I cannot seem to let it out. My left ankle slams into the foot rest but I am grateful for that little agony, a beacon to guide me up and onto the flat surface. There—I push off on the ball of my left foot, my arms almost useless.
My chest cavity releases my lungs from its grip and I am free to exhale. I have no idea how long I have hung in this place, or what guards amuse themselves below. My left thigh burns and I know my calf will cramp at any moment. I need not worry, for the foot rest fails before I do, splitting in half and setting my body free to be wrenched back by my arms. This is more than I can bear, but my body goes on struggling without me. Down the hill a voice says, “That’s it for him, then.” My knees bend, my feet and back press upon the post, pushing, pushing up against the rough wood. Two things, however, are now as clear as the tear that hangs on my eyelash, refusing to fall: the first is that I can no longer feel the glass vials in my mouth; the second is that I will never last to see the sunrise.
•••
There are some predicaments from which the mind, once it has been exercised in misuse, even though it bring all its powers of reason and logic to bear on the thorny snare that entangled it in the first place, simply cannot escape. Cause will have its effect.
Epilog
19 BCE - Winter, Siphnos, Greece
Year of the consulship of
Quintus Lucretius Vespillo and Gaius Sentius Saturninus
You will not be surprised to learn that I did not perish upon that cruel wood, and may have some interest in the circumstances leading up to my rescue and consequent escape. I have but a hazy memory of the former, and none at all of the latter—I must combine my own memory’s etchings with the version accorded me by my savior.
I suffered greatly that night, but to my unending shame, I made Livia suffer more. Looking back to that wretched time with the perspective of another thirty-seven years, I see a fool blinded by his own pompous, self-justifying rhetoric, a sagacious and perceptive shade by the name of Spartacus, and a lord of Rome who paused in the making of the means of his own destruction to help a man he would, but could not call “friend.”
I shall tell you what I can, but first I require a brief nap, for in this heat, my thoughts, rather than marching in orderly fashion like the line of ants that now stream in single file along the terrace wall with blind determination, are like a rabble of copper butterflies startled from a field of campanula, flying this way and that, with no…
•••
The thwack of the ladder against the back of the crossbeam brings me out of my semi-conscious stupor with a thrill of agony. Instinct and pools of strength kept secret even from myself push and pull me up to work at
the air with my crumpled bellows, my cheeks inflating each time I send a befouled breath out into the darkness. It is the last deep of the night, that hour when dawn’s nearness may be smelled and heard, but not seen. Behind me, a legionary takes each complaining step with caution, either to minimize the jarring of his movements, or to guard against spilling his precious charge. I peel my tongue from the roof of my mouth in preparation to receive the balm of water which he carries. This time there will be no brave declination. I shall take what is offered. I have no wish to extend my misery, though that will surely be the result. I am beyond caring. It is the sensation I crave—the slippery invasion of liquid, its coolness, the oppositeness of the hardening concrete which has become the interior of my mouth. I anticipate the wetness on my lips, the drops that will fall to run down my broken chest, the clean taste of life that my body must have, that it demands, overriding any argument my shriveled mind might make to refuse it. In my delirium, I believe that I can smell it.
“Thannuh,” I rasp as the soldier reaches the top of the beam, but the sounds I emit are unintelligible.
He laughs. “You sound like me now. Worse.”
I want to say that I do not understand, but what comes out instead is, “Wahr.”
“Water? Is that what you want?” The dim face that leers down at me over the top of the beam is a nightmare of exposed teeth and gums; I remember that the rest is a scarred ruin left by the pox. It is a face made for the night. Palaemon reaches down and holds a camp cup in front of my own exhausted features. He moves the rim just below my lips. Then he stops.
“Ah’ff phulled guard duty for you. Phretty funny, don’t you think? ”
While he’s talking, my stomach muscles cramp involuntarily and I buckle. My forehead knocks the cup and water spills to the ground. As if he’s talking to a child Palaemon says, “Aleckthander! See what youff done!” He looks at what little is left in the brass cup, then drinks it. He makes an exaggerated sound of satisfaction, then sets the cup on top of the beam behind my head.
“You din’t really think you were getting any, did you?” My disappointment is so severe that a tear rolls down into my mouth. It is hot and salty and might as well have been burning oil. Thankfully, the moon has set and it is too dark for my tormentor to notice. I slump back down, too exhausted to even attempt to keep my knees bent and my feet flat against the post. My breath is shallow and labored; strange, animal sounds that must be mine sing to its rhythm. I pray for death.
Palaemon rambles on. “Ah came uffere for something else. Ffeelus says there’s some chance we might get killed in this war. You will be dead for certain, but if Ah don’t surfife, Ah don’t want to meet up with you in Hades. Effryone knows about your skill with a knife, so Ffeelus says if Ah’m so worried aboudit Ah should make sure you can’t take reffenge on me once Ah get to the underworld.
“Ah’m just going to take your thumb is all. ‘Probly won’t hurt any worse than anything else. You might not even feel it.”
I am vaguely aware the man above me is saying something about my hand. I say, “Hanno?”
“You’re far gone, you are,” he says. “Still, you might scream. Thass why Ah brought this.” He reaches down out of sight and comes back with a rag which he balls up and forces into my mouth. He whispers conspiratorially, nodding toward the other guards. “Ah din’t menshun this to them.”
With one hand, Palaemon flattens my own right hand against the face of the beam. I grunt with the additional insult, but it is almost as if someone else’s thumb is being pulled away from the rest of his hand, high and taut. There is a flash of polished iron as Palaemon draws his dagger, holding it above the beam while he decides on the best place to draw the blade. “Wha d’you think, should be chust like cutting a chicken wing.”
He knocks loudly on the beam, then is silent.
•••
A little after sunrise, Palaemon’s watch was relieved. I had neither witnessed the break of day, nor, as the evening had progressed, did I expect to be extant for its arrival. At some point during the night I had come to the conclusion that I would never gaze upon the chariots of Helios again. This one example that life was subject to certain limitations ranked as minor compared to a thousand other shocks of loss. I was more than reconciled to my fate.
The tale of the attack spread like quicksilver throughout Antioch, eventually, some weeks later, even reaching my own ears. Every school child could repeat the grisly details to his comrades; every adult whispered to each other of reprisals to come. But they didn’t.
The legionaries who walked, then ran to the charming hill just outside the northern gates of the city came upon a scene of carnage. About their small campsite, one soldier lay beneath his cloak, his throat slashed. A second had been shot in the side. He had fallen and rolled over the campfire and apparently had been put out of his misery by a second arrow. His legs and midsection were still smoking. A third man was some distance away from the others, but he too, had died of knife and arrow wounds.
The furious Romans looked up the hill, blinded as the sun rose behind it. Shielding their eyes against the light, they saw an empty cross, but one that was not completely unoccupied. A brass camp cup, the split foot rest and an iron pugio lay on the dewy ground, but Palaemon still claimed his place atop the ladder, his chin resting on the beam, his arms hanging over the cross. The back of his neck was securely fastened to the wood by the smooth shaft of a Parthian arrow.
My thumb was not among the detritus. Still attached to my unconscious body, it and I were already many miles east of Antioch.
When Crassus was informed of the murders by Antoninus, he thanked the legate but gave no orders for a counterstrike. It was no coincidence that the general had requested the worst soldiers from among each of the legions to be picked for this particular guard duty. (Velus Herclides had been called but, preferring the warmth of his tent, had bribed his way off the list.)
Before retiring to his quarters where his wife awaited him, Crassus sent word for the medicus, Livia, to attend him. His bunions had immediate need of the palliative relief only her pungent, brown balm could bestow.
•••
“I told you I would not forsake my charge.” The rag was moist against my lips, the voice familiar. Eyes closed, I listened politely (something deep within told me this was the correct behavior), but I was far more intent on wresting what drops I could from the damp cloth. I could not feel my body, only a great thirst. He spoke again. “We will remain here till you are fit for travel. Sleep, my friend. You have suffered greatly.” I considered opening my eyes to see where “here” was, but drifted away before I could lift a single eyelash.
•••
It was a thin soup, most of which made rivulets down either side of my chin, but it was warm, and it was good. I was swaddled from the neck down in long strips of muslin. My wrists had been medicated and bandaged as was my right heel—apparently one of the nails which had split rather than secured the foot rest had caught my foot while I dangled. I was propped up against a palm whose fronds chattered overhead. Before me, two horses drank from the pool of an oasis; a makeshift sling hung from a boxthorn bush. Somewhere in my mind I knew I must still be wracked with pain, but that Alexandros was far from the one thinking and feeling—his pain barely mattered. Drugged, thank the gods.
“Do you remember,” Melyaket said, taking a sip from the bowl himself, “when we were by the river hunting the mescejn? I told you then. Marcus Crassus bid me watch over you, and so I have. Though not very well, I’m afraid.”
Crassus. Very bad memories began blooming like the sewers backing up when the Tiber overflowed its banks. I grunted—the distant Alexandros had begun walking closer at a frighteningly brisk pace.
“See what you’ve done,” said another voice, deeper than Melyaket’s. “Let him be.”
“Here,” Melyaket said, forcing a bitter liquid into my mouth. “Your healer is not the only one who knows how to extract juice from the poppy.”
&n
bsp; I had many questions, but I also wanted very much for that other Alexandros to go away.
•••
“Eight days!” I cried. “Where is Livia?” My swaddling had been removed and I was dressed as they were, in plain tunic and belted baggy pants. I could sit up on my own, even walk to the water and back to my place by the palm.
“Surrounded by seven Roman legions,” Melyaket said, “the safest place she can be. They’ll march from Antioch before the last almond flowers have fallen.”
“He’s very poetic, isn’t he,” Hami said, eating a dried plum. Hami was as tall as I, but broad and powerfully built. His head was completely shaved. Like Melyaket, he looked to be in his early twenties.
“Rhapsodical,” I replied, “but what does he mean, and where are they going?”
“Hierapolis, end of Aprilis,” Hami said.
“I must go to her.”
“That way,” Hami said. He spit a seed westward.
“Alexandros,” Melyaket said, “you are in no condition to travel, least of all back there. Think about it.”
I did think about it, and realized I had something else to say. “Thank you.”
“I should have been there sooner.” Gently, he rested a hand on my bruised shoulder. “I only expected one or two guards.”
Hami smiled and said, “Sorry you had to wait, but coming to me for help was the first smart thing this one’s done since we left Sinjar.”
Melyaket bowed gracefully toward his friend, then said to me, “As if he would recognize ‘smart.’ I have something for you.” He ran to his horse and returned with a scroll and a red purse tied with gold threads. He held them out to me, but I took the letter from him first.
Pelargós,
You are alive. Don’t scold me for restating the obvious—that has been the only thought in my head since dominus summoned me. He told me you were taken from the cross by a Parthian raiding party. I don’t know why you were saved or by whom, but whoever they are, I will kiss their feet in gratitude when we meet.
A Mixture of Madness, Book II of The Bow of Heaven Page 44
