Madman

by Tracy Groot

  A rustle drew his attention from the waters. The innkeeper’s daughter came up the path from the inn with what was surely an amphora of wine on her hip. She offered it to Tallis.

  He brushed the crumbs from his front and accepted the amphora with a nod. He drank long and wiped his mouth and handed back the amphora as naturally as if this occurred daily—as if he did not have to water himself with a ladle from the well, no wine about it. Any wine he had, he purchased in the common room of the inn.

  The girl rested the jug on her hip and looked under her hand at the fishermen. “Are you going to Hippos again?” she asked, eyes on a boat.

  “I am.”

  “Can you deliver a package for me?”

  Ah—the reason for the tasty meal. “Of course.”

  She hesitated. “He may not be there anymore. Leave the package on his doorstep if he’s not.”

  She turned to go back to the inn, and Tallis caught a glimpse of her face. It was clear and hopeful, a freshened look Tallis had not yet seen from her. It was the look a young woman should have, and her returning step to the inn was light and quick. She’d also just spoken more words to him in a minute than she had in an entire week.

  Are you going to Hippos again?

  “Yes, I am going to Hippos again,” Tallis muttered, and ended his meal by tossing the remnants to a waiting dog.

  He stood and shook out his toga, which was growing more dingy by the day. He would have to find a decent launderer, and Kursi did not have a launderer who cleaned togas. Surely he would find one in Hippos. He’d have to ask one of the occasional Roman soldiers he saw. If he had known this journey was to last so long, he’d have taken his entire wardrobe—which meant his other toga.

  Tallis scowled at the lake. Yes, I’m going to Hippos again. To find a school that has been defunct for three years, a school no one will talk about. To find out who stole the money Callimachus has been sending for the past three years, money to pay salaries and rent—money from his own pocket, and from Tallis’s pocket when funds were low. Cal, of course, didn’t know that.

  Callimachus of Athens was the sole patron of the school in Palestine, and Tallis was his servant, the one who saw him worry and fret if he didn’t send the money on time. The teachers have families, Tallis, they risked everything, they left their jobs for our school, and they trust us. What can we do this month? Can we take on another boarder?

  Callimachus was never good at managing his money. If he had it, he gave it, and forgot monthly commitments in favor of serving immediate needs. If it weren’t for the money, Tallis would be on his way back to Athens—desperately strange, the disappearance of the school, yes, but all he cared about was making someone pay for stealing from Cal.

  He smiled grimly. With interest, they would pay, and interest on the outskirts of the Roman Empire was high indeed. He had already made the calculations—to debtors’ prison they would go, roaringly cheered by Tallis, a thought nearly as satisfying as his Tiberius fancy: Callimachus was a great and revered Greek philosopher, in favor with the Roman emperor Tiberius. The thieves could be remanded to the emperor himself, where they would meet justice in its most unpleasant possibilities.

  When Tallis thought of Cal’s sacrifice, and his worry, and his depleted state of affairs, only to find someone had stolen from him—the fury made his eyes glow.

  “Never mind—if he’s not there, you can have it yourself.” The girl stood before him, holding a bundle. Her freshened look faltered when she saw his face. Instantly he smiled, smoothing away thoughts of dripping murder. He took the bundle, and by its fragrance knew it was one of the loaves he’d seen on the table that morning.

  He held it to his nose. “I hope he’s not there.”

  The girl smiled, the first real smile he’d seen in a week, and she skipped down the path to the inn.

  Tallis set out on the two-mile walk to Hippos. He was to deliver the bundle to a fellow named Demas, who lived on the other side of the city in the amphitheater housing, a building with a double tar smear on the side. The errand would take him away from his task, but no matter. Despite certain misgivings at losing the loaf, he hoped to find the fellow. He was curious about whoever rated a fragrant loaf from the enigmatic young mistress of the inn. That smile was the first real conversation he’d had since Egypt.

  The time he spent visiting the academy in Egypt with Cal’s colleague, the insufferable Aristarchus, didn’t count in the way of conversation. Aristarchus never once forgot that Tallis was a servant. It was Callimachus, Tallis’s master, who had trouble remembering, and Tallis himself who had to remind him. Nothing aggravated Cal more than to hear that reminder. The great gray brows would plunge, and he would snap, “If I didn’t want your opinion, I wouldn’t ask for it.”

  It worried Tallis to think of Cal receiving the dispatch without Tallis himself at his side. Cal was getting old, and the letter would be a tremendous shock. He hoped, by then, that Aristarchus had returned to Athens. Aristarchus would take care of him. And what would he think of the situation in Palestine? Tallis snorted—Aristarchus certainly wouldn’t trust its investigation to Tallis. A servant was better suited to run the backwater inn.

  The innkeeper’s establishment was tucked into a fold of landscape on the east side of the Galilee, on the Roman road running north and south. The inn was south of the little fishing village of Kursi, north of the much more cosmopolitan Hippos. It was situated on a rise that afforded a splendid view of the lake, and in a certain secluded place behind the inn, not far from the shore, Tallis had taken to eating his meals in blessed solitude. He couldn’t stand the darkened common room. He spent the first day or two there, looking for affable conversation, but soon learned he was a whitened stranger, that perhaps to folks around here a toga meant only higher taxes. He was asked his business in accents that pinched his fourth or fifth vertebra, and when he saw that only suspicion prompted the questions, he learned to make his answer this: that he was a traveling scholar from Athens. Scholars were generally left alone.

  He’d made the mistake, once, in an easy moment brought on by wine, of telling a local that in his spare time he was a playwright and an aspiring historian of Alexander of Macedon—called now “the Great,” an appellation courtesy of Augustus Caesar. Tallis also mentioned to his drinking companion, as a casual grand finale, that he was the head servant of the great philosopher Callimachus, and was here in Palestine on business for his master.

  And his companion had replied dully, “Who’s he?”

  “Who’s he,” Tallis now muttered as he approached the west side of Hippos. He sighed up at the city on the hill and began the long traversing walk to the top.

  “Callimachus is one of the finest scholars of Socrates short of Socrates himself, but you wouldn’t have heard of Socrates, you wine-soaked slophead. Callimachus is a greathearted old soulringer, his sum is wisdom and earnestness and passion for truth—more in his toenail than you possess in your entire being.” Tallis paused to blot sweat with his sleeve, and grimaced at the sleeve. Sweat became instant grime with all the dust around here.

  If everything in his life were going well, Tallis would have enjoyed discourse at the inn, even sullen and suspicious discourse. The people of Kursi who came to the inn were not exactly a cheerful lot: they had the look of people who expected to be cheated, and expected the cheater to be Tallis. Their look said a person had to work mighty hard to earn trust, and at one time Tallis would have enjoyed the challenge. He suspected beneath it all they were as good-natured as the fake-smiling innkeeper himself.

  He envied the way Jarek, the innkeeper, exchanged greetings with long-known friends. It made Tallis long for Athens. Keeping to the cliff made him feel like the outsider he was, but once he realized someone had stolen from Callimachus, it put him out of countenance with the world.

  He gained the top of the hill and paused, perhaps breathing harder than a thirty-seven-year-old man should. The weight of the loaf in his shoulder pack made him think of the innkeepe
r’s daughter, and he turned into the busy city of Hippos.

  So a fellow from the big city had captured the heart of the close-mouthed mistress of the inn. . . . Tallis didn’t think her capable of anything but dark and sizing glances. Had he only stayed a day or two, he would not have guessed it was the girl who ran things, not her father. Tallis watched her manage things in ways so subtle perhaps the innkeeper himself was fooled.

  Every other day she fixed a basket full of food and left it at the back door. Tallis never saw who came to pick it up. (He had first, foolishly, hoped the basket was for himself.) He once caught the father giving the basket a grim, inscrutable regard. The laden glance went from the basket to the daughter, who received it with an equally inscrutable evenness. Her father had dropped his eyes and shuffled away.

  One week under her roof and he still didn’t know her name. Tallis only called her “Excuse me.”

  Jarek seemed affable enough, as innkeepers should be, but his courteous ways seemed deliberate, and his smile was quick to disappear, replaced by a somberness that seemed more usual to him. Even so, it did not appear the girl had inherited her taciturn ways from Jarek. If she had gotten them from her mother, Tallis didn’t see such a woman around to compare.

  The daughter was about ten years younger than Tallis, maybe more. The fact that she wasn’t married did not surprise him, since this was Palestine, Palestine near the Parthian borders, and the ways here were often strange. Back home, even an ugly girl would have been married off at sixteen. If the innkeeper’s daughter was not beautiful, she was not plain.

  Maybe that explained why the people of Kursi seemed so morose—they lived at the eastern boundary of the Roman Empire. Tensions ran higher at the demarcation where countries met, and the Parthians were supposed to be barbarians, Persian blood crossed with wild nomad blood. Kursians would be the first to know if the Parthians had taken a fancy to win back lands lost by their ancestors to the Seleucids.

  Well, the Seleucids were no more. Their weakened dynasty had fizzled nearly a hundred years ago with Pompey’s campaigns. The Roman general had united local cities into a federation called the Decapolis, a league of ten cities banded together to keep Greco-Roman bloodlines Greco-Roman. Hippos was one of the chief cities of the Decapolis, an impressive metropolis situated on the top of a flat diamond-shaped mountain, and entirely walled. Parthians would think twice about taking Hippos.

  The innkeeper’s daughter told him to stay on the main street through the forum, go past the marketplace and the public baths and the temple of Athena, until he came to the amphitheater in the southeast corner of the city. Demas lived in the neighborhood behind the theater.

  “Look for the double tar smear,” Tallis murmured.

  He walked the main street to the forum, wove around shopkeepers who had laid their wares on blankets right in the flow of foot traffic, and stopped when he came to the portico of the temple of Athena on his right. He gazed at the columns and at the wide steps in front of them.

  There should have been clusters of students on those steps, each cluster with its own teacher. Instead, the entire north side of the portico was rented out to a multiware merchant who didn’t know the previous renter before him. Days earlier, the merchant had told Tallis to ask at the municipal building, and pointed to it on the north side of the forum.

  What do you mean, you’ve never heard of the Academy of Socrates? Tallis had said to the pie-faced magistrate. You collected their rent for years.

  Never heard of it.

  I am in Hippos, right?

  No answer.

  How long have you worked here?

  No answer.

  What about the Decaphiloi?

  (Interesting, the blink of the magistrate.)

  Never heard of it.

  Really. Mind if I look through your rental archives? They are public records and I, after all, am the public.

  You won’t find anything.

  (Interesting, the smirk.)

  Why don’t you try Scythopolis. Better yet, Jerusalem.

  The next day he had wandered the forum and its busy marketplace, questioning merchants in the vicinity of the temple, employing an instinctive caution, and his instinct was well-placed: A few were genuinely ignorant of the school that had rented the portico, but others did not appear happy at the questioning. Interestingly, the unhappy ones denied that the school and the Decaphiloi ever existed. The others simply said they didn’t know.

  The third day in Hippos he had merely walked the streets. There were nice wineshops and tawdry ones. There were bathhouses of the affluent and bathhouses of the not. Pleasant Greek statuary adorned certain places in the forum, and cheap miniature imitations were displayed on merchants’ cloths for souvenirs. Hippos was like any other Greco-Roman city in the Decapolis . . . except this one had swallowed whole an enclave of philosophers, teachers, and artisans calling themselves the Decaphiloi.

  On the fourth day in Hippos, he’d met Lysias.

  Tallis had been watching a gang of public slaves repair a portion of the eastern wall by the barracks, when he had an idea. Surely the forum and the temple of Athena were kept clean and in repair by such slaves, perhaps these very ones he watched. If he couldn’t get answers in high places, he would try low.

  Tallis spoke to the overseer, and here his decent toga and Greek manner stood him in good stead. He told the man he needed to conscript one of the slaves for a quick service to the agoranomos, the market controller of Hippos. He slipped the overseer a few coins and promised to have the slave back in an hour.

  By the smoldering look on the slave’s face, he had a different suspicion for his conscription. It occurred to Tallis such practices must have been commonplace, for the overseer to acquiesce so easily to losing one of his workforce for an hour. Either that or he had paid the man entirely too much.

  “I prefer women,” Tallis had cheerfully informed the young man as they walked the main street back to the forum.

  The man’s stiffness eased then, and he ventured, “Then where are we going? You’re not from around here.”

  “I need information. How long have you been in Hippos?”

  “Eleven years. I came with my master from Scythopolis.” His look soured. “I’d served him well and hoped for my manumission upon his death, but it turned out he owed a lot of money. The city confiscated all of his property.”

  They walked the streets of Hippos as Tallis questioned the man, whose name was Lysias.

  “Yes, I’ve heard of the school. They used to meet on the corner steps of the temple.”

  For the first time since he walked beneath the western archway of Hippos, Tallis gave a great sigh. “Can you tell me when they met last?”

  Lysias frowned, dodging a man carrying an armload of planks. “I don’t know. Three, maybe four years ago.”

  “Years ago? Three or four years ago, are you certain?”

  The slave shrugged. “Something like that. One of the teachers used to give me a tip if I cleaned the portico well.” He thought and nodded. “Yes, it was at least three years ago.”

  “What was his name? The one who gave you the tip?”

  “Polonus.”

  Polonus! At last, a name, a familiar name. Polonus ran the school. “What do you know of the other teachers?”

  Here the man must have sensed profit in the questions. He hesitated, with a glance at the purse strapped to Tallis’s waist. Tallis seized his arm and pulled him to the side of the street. “I paid one man today; I’m not about to pay you. I need information, and you can either spend a pleasant hour talking with me, or I’ll bring you back to the gates. What’s it going to be?”

  Lysias chose a toil-free hour, and Tallis learned more in that one hour than he had in days.

  The slave did not know the names of the teachers, only that there were nine or ten—two were women, he noted, one pretty and one plain. They met every day for hours in the northeast portico and were a fixed part of the forum—had been for several years. Then on
e day the teachers didn’t show up. For days the students had congregated on the steps, their bewildered state apparent as they asked questions in the forum. But the teachers never returned, and the students eventually dispersed.

  When he cleaned the portico Lysias would sometimes speak with Polonus, a man he called kind and smart. He knew the name of one other teacher, Antenor. In fact, Lysias was certain he had seen Antenor since those days, only he couldn’t remember where. He never saw anyone else.

  Tallis and Lysias had returned to the eastern gates at the end of the promised hour, and Tallis thanked the slave.

  Lysias turned to his work, then called Tallis back. “You know that wineshop we passed, the one where I said you’d find good imports?”

  Tallis nodded.

  “If you come again tomorrow and take me to that shop and buy me a meal and some wine, I’ll have more information for you.”

  “I thought you told me that was the most expensive wineshop in Hippos,” Tallis countered dryly.

  The man grinned. “My master had excellent taste.”

  The fifth day Tallis was in Hippos, the slave Lysias was again conscripted for service to the agoranomos. While they sat over expensive wine, and a meal bought only for Lysias, the slave offered more information. This time, despite the wine, the man was not as sociable as he was the previous day.

  “You’ve put your toe into some muddy water, my friend,” Lysias commented quietly, after sizing up the occupants of the wineshop. A few servants were making purchases for their masters; a few masters were enjoying cups of wine and platters of olives and cheeses in the sitting area near a small back garden.

  “How muddy?” Tallis asked. He sipped his wine, very nice indeed, glancing over the cup’s rim at the people around him.

  “We will not meet again,” Lysias said.

  Tallis studied the slave. What had changed? How far could he press him? By the stoic look on the sun-darkened face, not far. Tallis lowered his cup.