A Traveler at the Gates of Wisdom

by John Boyne

  My father arrived home soon afterward and together they went from house to house in search of me, but with no success. My mother was inconsolable and when Jouni returned home that night, unaware that I had gone missing, he was thrashed soundly by Marek, a rare punishment, for my father had a weakness for his children and was rarely violent toward any of us.

  As my father was a member of the Roman Guards, there was a suspicion that I had been taken by a Cappadocian resident who had either suffered hardship at the hands of the protectorate or was seeking revenge for the conquest of his region. Known criminals were dragged from their beds and tortured in the streets in a quest for answers, but if any of them knew who had taken me, or why, or where I was being held, they did not say.

  The events of that week remain a mystery to me. I have no memory of the circumstances that brought me home again either, but family legend has it that, seven days later, Marek and Folami were woken in the middle of the night by a loud rapping on the door. When they opened it, they discovered me sitting in the dust outside, crying bitterly. Despite the number of questions my parents asked, I could tell them nothing, and whether this was because I had been threatened by my abductor or was simply too traumatized to speak, I do not know.

  The next evening, I was examined by a local physician, who found no signs of brutality anywhere upon my body. It seemed that during my absence I had been fed and well cared for. The only subsequent curiosity was that as we made our way home we passed a blind woman on the street and I did everything in my power to go to her, but having misplaced me once, my mother was loath to let go of me again. Despite my insistent weeping that I belonged with this stranger, I was taken back to the comfort of my family home while the blind woman, whose name was Teseria, continued on her way alone, uttering not a word but pointing toward the sky, where the stars had started to glimmer in the darkness.

  ROMANIA

  A.D. 105

  ON ANOTHER DARK NIGHT a few years later, my mother, Florina, gave birth to twin babies. Their screams of bewilderment as they entered the world echoed her own tortured cries of pain. For a child of my age, it was a brutal symphony and I felt sure that she would die. I sat trembling, my hands pressed against my ears, dreading what the future might hold for the motherless boy I was sure to become before the sun rose.

  It was her fifth pregnancy, but none of the children, other than I, had survived. Florina, who was much given to motherhood, was determined that these babies—a boy named Constantin and a girl called Natalia—would survive and to this end she began training my older brother, Juliu, to help with her small dairy business so she could devote more of her time to their care without causing our household income to suffer. At first, Juliu refused, believing this to be women’s work, but my father was equally committed to the survival of his offspring and ordered him to do exactly as he was told. Marius’s natural authority meant that none of us would have ever dared to disobey him, but my brother saw this as yet another reason to resent his stepmother. No matter what she did or how much kindness she showed him, he could not make his peace with her.

  We lived in the coastal town of Kallatis, on the banks of the Black Sea, across which Jason and the Argonauts had once sailed in their quest for the Golden Fleece. When he was not being dispatched by the King to fight the Roman armies who were threatening to invade our land, my father was a fisherman, operating a small boat with weathered sails that had been passed down from his grandfather to his father and now to him. Juliu preferred being on the sea with Marius, a more masculine pursuit than the one in which Florina was trying to engage him, and I didn’t blame him. On the rare occasions when my father brought me out on the boat, I found myself equally thrilled by the action of the waves and the shoals of fish that we caught over the course of a day. Most of the sons of the town fished with their fathers, bringing back sturgeon, eel, shad and even the occasional angel shark to sell in the marketplace, and it was assumed that these boys would, in the fullness of time, assume their fathers’ businesses when they were no longer young enough to take to the water. But while I enjoyed being at sea, I knew that this would not be the life for me. I wanted much more from the world than that.

  For as long as I could remember, I had been an intensely creative child, preferring to be left alone to play in the sand dunes or on the beach, where I would gather stones and pebbles, arranging them in shapes that were pleasing to the eye, pulling flowers from rushes and using them to create designs that would survive only until Juliu returned, always preferring to scorn my naïve efforts at art by scattering my hard work to the winds with a single kick. Even at home, I would spend hours drawing rough sketches in the dust of the floor with my hands, my mind already filled with images of strange worlds and people that I longed to know. I had a curious sense that these ideas would one day manifest themselves in the real world and that my destiny was not to remain isolated in our small town but to spend my days among tribes and cultures alien to my own.

  “An artist, not a warrior,” my mother remarked once, looking down at the images I had crafted in the ground. One showed a boat sailing down a river, the sailors carrying saws in their hands. Another a man and woman standing by a well while a beast faced them down. A third displayed the bars of a prison cell. My father examined them, shook his head and spat in the fire in disgust.

  “I’ll see that beaten out of him,” he grunted, but even then, even at such a young age, I knew that I would never allow that to happen.

  What fascinated me the most, however, were the stars. It thrilled me to lie outside when the sun had set, staring up at the constellations in the night sky, drawing imaginary lines between each shining instant and wondering who, if anyone, might live within those bright patterns. In my dreams, I floated among them, a traveler in the darkness, looking down at the world from an orbit that I was still too young to comprehend. And when I suggested to my parents that I would like to live among the stars someday, they simply laughed at my foolishness.

  From the day of their birth, I took an interest in the twins, who stared up at me from their blankets with expressions of curiosity upon their faces. Perhaps because Juliu showed no affection toward me I determined to be a good brother and it didn’t take long for me to become their protector. My sister Andreea resented this, and so jealous was she of my affection for the babies that she took great delight in tormenting them. Naturally, it pleased my mother to see her son so devoted to his siblings’ well-being and, while my father found my attentiveness to be unusual in a boy, he offered no protest. As the months passed and they put on weight, it became clear that the infants would survive the hazards of the first year and they soon became thriving, noisy members of our household.

  Florina, however, was not so lucky and in the wake of the twins’ birth she grew ill, taking to her bed. The sounds of her crying out in agony terrified me, reminding me of the night that she had given birth. I adored my mother and felt certain that she was close to death once again. My father, too, was fearful, summoning an apothecary who prepared foul-smelling potions concocted from various roots and nettles for her to drink and ordering that she remain prostrate until her body had had time to heal from the trauma of so many confinements. When he returned for a second visit a few days later, I overheard a conversation between them as they discussed how her fever had broken at last, but the pain was still so concentrated that her face was as gray as the walls of our small dwelling.

  “Be warned, Marius,” he said. “If she were to become heavy with child again, both she and the baby would die. There is no doubt of that. Do not lie with her unless you are content to risk her loss.”

  My father sat by the fire, a frown settling upon his face as he considered this. “She cannot be a wife to me anymore?” he asked, deeply upset, for he bore the unusual quality of loving Florina and a more uxorious man could not be found anywhere in our village.

  “She can,” said the doctor. “Just not in the marriage be
d. She is still capable of cooking, cleaning, mending clothes, the natural wifely duties, but you must restrain yourself if you want her to live. Her womb suffered too great an insult during the birth of these last two babies and will not stand any further affront. It will rupture, the poisons will enter the bloodstream and she will die a most agonizing death.”

  “Then I shall touch her no more,” declared my father, standing up and nodding decisively, as if forging a sacred covenant between himself and his creator. “I can live with having no more children, but I cannot live without Florina.”

  “You can have as many more children as you want,” said the doctor, correcting him. “Just not with your wife. There are others, of course. You must not deny yourself that which is natural to a man. Remember, the towns that surround us are filled with nubile young women, particularly since we’ve lost so many men fighting the Romans.”

  And at this, I observed a spark of interest ignite my father’s face, a light blush that made the scar on his left cheek inflame a little. Perhaps he would never have betrayed my mother under normal circumstances, but given permission by a man of medicine? Well, that changed matters considerably.

  * * *

  • • •

  Although he was at his happiest on his fishing boat, Marius was fiercely loyal to the King and had fought against the Roman dogs intermittently over the years, whenever the Emperor Trajan sent his legions into Dacia. Many of his childhood companions had laid down their lives during those wars and my father nursed such a grudge against the imperial powers that when our great King Decebalus broke the peace treaty, leading Trajan to dispatch even more troops into the region in retaliation with a plan to vanquish us for generations to come, he entrusted his fishing boat with Juliu and set off once again with the Dacian army for Sarmisegetusa.

  By now, my mother had recovered her health and returned to making soft cheese and nut butter to sell to our neighbors, but she wore her melancholy around her like a cloak. From time to time, I discovered her weeping silently on her bed, her hands pressed against her empty belly. It was not that she was still in pain but the fact she could no longer bear children that upset her so greatly. And perhaps she feared losing the affections of her beloved husband, an idea which he would have dismissed as impossible but which would, in time, prove painfully accurate.

  Around this time, another fisherman, Caturix, befriended my brother. He was older than Juliu, almost twenty, and a youngest son, which meant that he had no hope of inheriting his father’s boat. He made his living around the shores of Kallatis, helping those who were either too ill or too incapacitated to put in a full day’s work. In my father’s absence, he labored alongside Juliu, going out on the boat with him every morning and carrying the catch to the market at the end of each day. Occasionally, my brother would invite him back to our house to eat. Florina had no objection to feeding him—he was helping our family in a time of need, after all, albeit for a basic pay—but as young as I was, I could tell that Juliu’s new friend had more than food on his mind.

  Caturix was handsome, but in an entirely different way to my father. Where Marius wore his blond curls with narcissistic pride, Caturix tied his dark, straight hair into a knot at the back of his head. While my father was a broad, muscular man, Caturix was of slighter build but tall and strong with sinewy muscles that relaxed into noticeable blue veins along his upper arms. Like my father’s, his hands were the hands of a fisherman, scored with the markings of ropes and blades, the knuckles red with bruises and pockmarked from fishing hooks that had embedded themselves in his skin over the years. I found myself rather in awe of this engaging young man, and even though he barely registered my presence in the household, I envied Juliu the time he spent with him on the water, for here, I thought, was an older brother to whom I could give my allegiance.

  Had I known what it was to flirt with someone, I would have recognized that Caturix was flirting with my mother in a subtle fashion, complimenting her on her food, her dress, how neatly she maintained our home and, starved of attention since my father had gone away, it was obvious that she was flattered by the courtesy he displayed toward her. After a while, he began to bring small gifts with him when he visited. A colorful stone that had been washed in by the tide, perhaps. A velvet cushion he had purchased in the market. A dried flower. Now my admiration began to turn to annoyance and I started to resent his intrusion, for I knew that my father would not approve of these regular visits.

  Juliu, on the other hand, seemed to encourage the friendship, seeking any opportunity to throw Florina and his new friend together.

  “An extra portion for Caturix tonight, my father’s wife!” he shouted one evening, banging his fists on the table as we sat down to lean rations. It was Juliu’s custom to employ this formal term whenever he addressed Florina, trying to keep their relationship as distant as possible. “His heart is heavy.”

  “Why so?” asked Florina, placing some extra rice on his plate and passing it across with a piece of salted fish. I watched as Caturix glanced in her direction, a half-smile playing across his lips. When he caught her eyes, she blushed slightly.

  “The girl he loves does not love him in return,” continued Juliu with a melodramatic sigh, and Caturix threw him a reproachful look.

  “I can’t believe it,” said Florina. “What girl could say no to Caturix? She should be pleased to find such a good husband.”

  “It’s not marriage that he’s after,” said my brother, sniggering. “His ambitions are a lot earthier than that.”

  “Juliu!” said my mother, frowning deeply, for she did not care for vulgarity.

  “I only speak the truth,” replied my brother.

  “And have you spoken to the girl in question, Caturix?” asked Florina. “Have you expressed to her the stirrings of your heart?”

  “I have not dared.”

  “Why not?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I could not bear for her to refuse me. I would as soon slice off my ears than hear words of rejection.”

  “But you do not know what she might say until you ask,” Florina replied. “Perhaps she has feelings for you, too?”

  “There are complications.”

  “What sort of complications?”

  “She has a husband already.”

  “Ah,” said Florina, shaking her head. “Then you must look elsewhere. After all, any woman who would betray her husband would not be worthy of you. Forget her, Caturix, that’s my advice to you.”

  “Forget the most beautiful, the most tender, the most interesting woman I have ever met?” he replied. “You might as well ask me to forget my own name.”

  Florina looked around the table and smiled. I suppose she enjoyed the idea of a little gossip. “Will you not tell us who the girl is?” she asked, leaning forward, and Caturix shook his head.

  “I cannot,” he said.

  “Her husband, then? Is he old? If he is, then perhaps nature will free her sooner than you think.”

  “He’s not old,” replied Caturix. “But he is away, playing at war, so perhaps the gods will take my part and strike him down.”

  “You shouldn’t say such a thing!”

  “If it offends you, then I take it back. But he has been gone these three months now and his family have heard nothing from him. He fights the Roman dogs and might be locked in a cage being transported back to the Colosseum to tarry with the lions, for all we know. Or he could already be dead. Anything is possible.”

  Florina stared at him and then, to my surprise, her amused expression turned to a frown and then to anger, and she stood up, gathering the empty plates from the table noisily. I did not then understand what he had said to upset her so greatly but, a moment later, she declared that it was time for him to go home and that it would probably be a good idea if he dined separately from us from now on. Caturix simply nodded and left, his head hanging low, b
ut when my brother pushed his chair back to follow him, Florina grabbed him by the arm and held him tightly, her fingers digging deeply into his skin.

  “Is this your doing?” she asked. “Are you trying to cause mischief?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he replied innocently. “You don’t think he meant…?” He threw back his head and burst out laughing. “My father’s wife, have you looked in a mirror lately? Your face is gray, your hair is lank and your eyes have grown tired. Not to mention the fact that you’re as barren as an untilled field. You can’t imagine that a man like Caturix would—”

  “You’ve been a troublemaker from the start, Juliu,” she snapped. “I know this is your doing. If there’s any more of this scheming, then Marius will hear of it.”

  He pulled his arm free from her and his laughter turned to scorn. “You don’t get to tell me what to do in my father’s house,” he insisted. “While he is gone, I am master here and you and your brats live under my protection. You would do well to remember that.”

  Three nights later, I was lying on my mat next to Florina’s bed, the twins breathing heavily in the cot next to me, when I heard the door open and a shaft of light slunk deceitfully into the room. My mother was asleep but, alerted by the intrusion, she opened her eyes, sat up and looked toward the door to see who it was that disturbed us at such a late hour.

  To my astonishment, it was Caturix! Here he was, when darkness had fallen, walking in a disrobed state toward my mother’s bed, his feet as quiet upon the floor as the padded paws of a cat, his engorged member guiding him toward his prey.

  “What are you doing here?” hissed Florina, pulling at the rough hemp sheet she used to keep her warm about her body. “You can’t be—”

  “Juliu said that I might visit you. He passed on your message.”