A Traveler at the Gates of Wisdom

by John Boyne

  Naevius hesitated a little now, for he had spent his life in fear of authority but could not stand for the insult either, particularly when the traders on the street were watching.

  “My daughter is a married woman,” he said forcefully, and Marinus shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “Her wedding day has yet to come.”

  Naevius turned to glare at Floriana, who blushed furiously and looked down at the ground.

  “A matter of seven days, that’s all,” protested Naevius. “And then—”

  “Seven days is a long time,” replied my father. “We might all be dead in seven days. Or seven minutes. Surely I might be allowed to offer my own proposal before it is too late?” He softened his tone and reached out to touch the older man on the arm in a gesture of humility. “I mean you no disrespect, sir,” he said. “But when a man encounters such a great beauty as your daughter, a girl with the lineage of a proud house behind her, it is only natural that he should seek to make her his wife. Don’t you agree?”

  “I do,” said Naevius, puffing up his chest at the platitudes. “But it’s impossible, of course.”

  “Why?” asked Marinus.

  “Because of the Great Elephant of Bayt Sahur,” replied my grandfather, leaning forward and opening his eyes so wide my father could see the veins that ran across the sclera like aimless tributaries.

  “And what has he to do with anything?”

  “He is to be my husband,” said my mother and, at her interruption, Naevius raised his hand to strike her for her insolence, but my father reached out and caught that same hand in midair, urging peace.

  “You would give your daughter to the Great Elephant of Bayt Sahur?” he asked, infusing his tone with as much deferential outrage as he could summon. “A man who is so fat he can scarcely fit through his own doorway? A man known to break the backs of the unfortunate donkeys tasked with carrying him? Why, he would crush every bone in her body on their wedding night, if he could even find his cock within that vile mass of quivering blubber. The Great Elephant of Bayt Sahur? No, sir, the Great Whale! The Great Whale!”

  “He’s a man with a healthy appetite, it is true,” conceded my grandfather. “But he’s also wealthy, you can’t deny that. One of the wealthiest merchants in this region. And he’s been widowed for almost a month, so it’s natural that he would seek a new woman.”

  “Did he not kill his last two wives?” asked Marinus.

  “Yes, but they were unfaithful to him,” replied Naevius with a shrug. “So, he was within his rights.”

  “He fed the first to a lion then stripped the skin from the second over the course of a week.”

  “I have heard it said,” admitted Naevius. “He is ingenious in his cruelty.”

  “Then your daughter wanders into dangerous territory,” said Marinus, shaking his head. “I wonder that a man of your dignity and reputation could permit such a match when a better opportunity stands before her?”

  TURKEY

  A.D. 41

  THAT BETTER OPPORTUNITY which my mother would come to enjoy included a small house, built from a combination of mud bricks dried by the sun and rough-hewn stones that acted as quoins, giving us a slightly more elevated status than most of our neighbors. Wooden beams packed with clay kept us dry from above, while the earthen floor beneath our feet was covered intermittently with paving stones. We slept in different corners, without privacy, but a fire burned from morning till night in a central stove that served the dual purpose of keeping us warm and cooking our food.

  My father, Marek, was not a man much given to humor, which makes it all the more surprising that one of my earliest memories is of him marching through the door with tears of laughter pouring down his face. I had started walking a few months earlier but was still uncertain on my feet and I stumbled across the room to greet him, eager to be enveloped in his mirth.

  “You’re in good humor,” said my mother, Folami, looking around as he sat down and swept me onto his knee while she continued with her bread-making. My father’s wages as a Roman legionnaire in Cappadocia could scarcely support a family of six, as we were then, but my mother was well regarded in the province for her baking skills and women appeared at our door every morning, proffering copper coins to purchase her loaves and pastries. She spent most of her days with her hands immersed in flour, dough, yeast, poppy, flax and sunflower seeds, giving her a distinctive scent that has always offered me a feeling of safety and comfort whenever I’ve stumbled across it.

  “New orders came through today,” said Marek, using the heel of his hand to wipe his face dry. He kissed me on the top of my head and I reached out to trace the scar that ran down his left cheek. It was only a couple of inches long, but its narrow gully, a perfect fit for my tiny fingers, fascinated me. “Issued by Quintus Veranius himself. It seems that a ship arrived in the port of Bartin yesterday, direct from Rome, carrying the most curious cargo.”

  “Oh yes?” replied Folami. The wives of the soldiers had their own collectives, of course, where they gossiped and exchanged the pieces of intelligence that their husbands had let slip across the table or between the sheets, but for the most part Cappadocia was a quiet place, far removed from the daily intrigues of our Imperial overlords.

  It had not always been so. Centuries before my birth, Alexander the Great had tried to conquer the region but been rebuffed by a people who loved their King, and it was only when the civil war began that the state lost its independence through its equivocation over who to support, Pompey, Caesar or Antony. It took the Emperor Tiberius to bring us to heel, turning a once-proud city into a Roman province. The citizenry accepted its defeat with good grace, life becoming peaceful afterward, the Roman Guards assimilating well and little enmity existing between the conquered and the conquerors.

  “More than one hundred stone heads,” continued my father. “They’re being transported south, even as we speak, to be attached to statues.”

  Folami paused in the mixing of her dough and turned to look at him, raising an eyebrow. “I don’t understand,” she said. “They’ve sent heads but no torsos?”

  “The torsos are already here,” he replied. “They’ve been here for decades. At the temples, at the courthouse, along the roads. Every statue in Cappadocia is to be decapitated and the new heads are to replace the old. The same thing is taking place all across the Empire.”

  “And let me guess,” said my mother. “They depict—”

  “The Emperor Caligula, of course. Jupiter on his throne will become Caligula. Neptune with his trident will become Caligula. Even the female deities—Juno, Minerva, Vesta, Ceres—they are all to become Caligula. O fortunate eyes that will be able to gaze upon his features wherever they turn!”

  My mother shook her head. “So, you are to turn yourself into a stonemason and defile the images of the gods?” she asked.

  “You know me,” he replied, setting me back down on the floor and walking over to embrace her. “Whatever Rome demands.”

  I watched, feeling comforted by the affection that existed between them, a warmth that was disturbed only by the arrival of my older brother, Jouni, who came in and observed their mutual affection in distaste. Jouni was about ten years old at the time, the son of my father’s second wife, and I was frightened of him, for he rarely acknowledged me, other than to commit some random act of violence, and when he spoke to our father, it was without fear, an attitude that Marek respected. His behavior stood in stark contrast to my sister, Azra, the daughter of his third, who treated me like an animate doll and could sometimes be suffocating in her jealous affections.

  “So, every statue is to look like Bootikins,” said my father, deferring to his first-born’s sensibilities and returning to his seat by the fire. “And I’ve been placed in charge of the project. An honorable task, don’t you agree?”

  “The Emperor is as vainglorious as he is ridicul
ous,” said Folami. “I’ve heard that he enjoys congress with his sister, wants to make a consul of his favorite horse and believes himself to be a god. Don’t be surprised, Marek, if the next news that reaches us is of his death. The knives will take him down if he continues to behave in such an excruciating fashion.”

  “Wife,” said my father quietly, a note of caution creeping into his tone, for humor was one thing but remarks such as these could be overheard by ambitious neighbors and reported back to the governor. My brother looked at her with disgust on his face. He was a true servant of the Empire, turning around and disappearing outside again without a word. I can recall the expression on his face as he left. Revulsion. Hatred. Anger. But then he had never got along with his stepmother and perhaps it was inevitable that their troubled relationship would one day reach an unhappy end.

  * * *

  • • •

  Of course, the statues were not the first heads to be separated from their shoulders by my father. When he met my mother two years earlier, she had been only seven days from an arranged marriage to one of the wealthiest merchants in central Anatolia, a man so corpulent that he was known to all as the Great Bear of Kayseri. Having been enchanted by her beauty, and then daring to speak to her in the marketplace, Marek learned of her upcoming nuptials and made his way to the groom’s home the following morning with an offering of gold, which he hoped would liberate Folami from the engagement.

  The Great Bear agreed to receive the young legionnaire but was unmoved by my father’s request. “My wife has been dead for almost a month and my bed has remained cold since then,” he told him, half amused and half insulted by the paltry amount of coin that Marek was offering in exchange for the girl. “A house needs a woman in it. And my children need a mother. Fusun is young, her hips are broad, and she can bear me many more. A man must procreate! If I were to—”

  “Folami,” said my father, correcting him.

  “What?”

  “Her name is Folami,” repeated my father. “With respect, sir, if you do not even know the girl’s name, you cannot be in love with her.”

  The Great Bear threw his head back and burst out laughing before reaching for a tray of candies that sat on the velvet cushion next to him. “Why are we speaking of love?” he asked, stuffing his mouth with a fistful of sweets before letting his tongue slowly lick the sugared residue from his fingertips. “I thought we were discussing marriage. Two very different things, my friend.”

  “But there are so many more girls in Cappadocia,” argued Marek. “Some even more beautiful than Folami. A man of your stature could have his pick of them.”

  “If you believed that, then you would not be here talking to me. You would be pursuing them yourself.”

  “Still, if you don’t care about her one way or the other—”

  “What makes you say such a thing?” asked the Great Bear, frowning.

  “You’ve said yourself that love and marriage are two very different things.”

  “Yes, but you want this girl. Therefore, she has become an item of value, to you at least. And I don’t walk away from items of value when they have already been promised to me. Regardless of your entreaties and your womanly talk of love, I’ve made an arrangement with the girl’s father and have no intention of turning my back on that. A man’s good name is all that he has and mine would be diminished if I canceled a brokered agreement. As for this pathetic offering”—and here he threw the pouch of gold back at my father, where it landed with an insolent jingle at his feet—“I wouldn’t sell you a dog for that, let alone a young beauty of child-bearing years. Have you looked around, Marek of Cappadocia? You must see how wealthy I am?”

  My father, a proud man, was stung by the humiliation but not ready to give up on Folami quite yet. If he could not win her through commerce, then he would claim her by force. His favorite kilij hung in a scabbard by his side, a saber that had been handed down through three generations of our family, and as he reached for it, the ruby jewel at the quillion catching the light, the Great Bear simply clicked his fingers in an uninterested fashion and four guards approached from each corner of the room, unsheathing their scimitars and pointing them toward Marek’s throat.

  “You were thinking of killing me?” asked the Great Bear, shaking his head more in pity than in anger. “Better men than you have tried, my friend. Better men will again. And perhaps, someday, one will succeed. But not you. And not today.”

  “If you will not give the girl up,” said Marek, “then at least fight me for her. We can use any weapon you choose. Or none at all. We could fight as men do, with our fists.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” replied the merchant. “Why would I enter into combat with you when I would most certainly lose? You’re young and strong. I am neither of those things.”

  “Then choose a champion, and either he will fall, or I will.”

  The Great Bear considered this and stroked his many chins. Finally, he nodded. “I suppose it will be an entertainment, if nothing else,” he conceded. “At present, the days are so warm that I cannot bear to leave the villa and I am in need of amusement. I accept your challenge, Marek of Cappadocia. But I choose four champions, not one. The four men who face you right now. If you defeat them all, you may take the girl. Do you accept my offer?”

  My father looked around. The men in question were healthy specimens, undoubtedly useful with their swords, but he was skillful, too, and had a prize worth fighting for, while they did not.

  “I accept,” he said, spinning around and, in a moment, using his kilij to lift the head from the first of his opponents, the man’s skull tumbling to the floor and rolling toward the Great Bear, who stopped it with the tip of his slipper, laughing in delight at how swiftly my father had acted, and clapping his sticky hands together as the three remaining guards gathered their wits. It was noted afterward by one of the servants that this had all happened so quickly that the head continued to live for a few seconds, its eyes darting back and forth in surprise at being trapped beneath the Great Bear’s foot, before blinking twice and remaining open in death. Marek was fast on his feet; for a large man, he had the nimble tread of a dancer, and in anticipation of this clash, he had sharpened the blade of his kilij to a fine edge the night before and it took the head from another guard easily before he turned his attentions to the two that remained. One, the younger of the pair, looked terrified and his sword-arm trembled noticeably as my father lunged at him. He stumbled backward with a defeated cry as the saber pierced his heart and Marek turned now to the final guard, who fought valiantly but was no match for his opponent and soon found himself pinned against the wall, the blade of my father’s sword pressed against his neck.

  “I have taken three of them,” said Marek, turning to the Great Bear, who had grown pale now, perhaps nervous that his own body might be lighter by the weight of a head in a few moments. He had removed his foot from his slipper and was massaging his toes through the hair of the first soldier’s skull. “Will you let me spare this boy’s life and take the girl, as promised?”

  “I am a man of my word,” said the Great Bear, dragging himself to his feet, no easy task for a man of his girth. “The girl is yours when you have defeated all my champions. That is the deal that we made and you must honor it, as I will.”

  My father did not waste a second, and before the boy could find a voice to cry out for mercy, his shoulders, too, had been relieved of their load.

  Without returning home to change his bloodied garments, Marek made his way to my grandfather’s house and claimed his bride.

  Several weeks after my father had decapitated every statue in Cappadocia and replaced the heads with carvings of the Emperor, two events of note took place.

  The first was that Folami was proven right, and Caligula was assassinated, and the second was that I went missing.

  Although I was too young to understand the impo
rtance of what they were discussing, I sat alongside my siblings while Marek recounted the gossip that was spreading across the Empire from Hispania to Judea and from Germania to Carthage.

  “He was attending a performance of some squalid play in the palace,” he told us. “And, in his usual charming way, he was mocking the actors and being scornful of the senators in attendance, each of whom was keeping one eye on the stage and one eye on their Emperor in case he laughed, so that they might laugh, too. During an interval between the acts, he announced that, depending on whether meat or fish was served for lunch, he would have half of them tossed into the Colosseum later in the day as a treat for the lions. All of you on my left, he said, you die if it’s fish. And all of you on my right, you die if it’s meat. Then, as he made his way toward his private dining room to discover what might lie beneath the cloches, he was approached by Cassius Chaerea, a member of the Praetorian Guard, who stabbed him in the shoulder. When he fell to the ground, Chaerea held him down and slowly carved his way through the Emperor’s neck with a rusty knife.”

  “So it’s not just the statues that have lost their heads,” remarked my mother with a shrug.

  * * *

  • • •

  A few days later, Folami brought some loaves to the marketplace, leaving me under the supervision of my brother, but Jouni, bored by the prospect of spending an afternoon indoors with an infant, and pleased by any opportunity to disobey his stepmother, went out to meet some friends, and when Folami returned a few hours later, I was nowhere to be found.