Madman

by Tracy Groot

  Tallis chuckled, then moaned delicately and went to hold his ribs, but remembered the poultice and clenched his fist instead.

  Kes kept her sympathy hidden, something her mother taught her long ago—Do not cry for him, you little fool. Sympathy weakens. You will destroy everything I am trying to teach him—until she remembered she was no longer under that old veil. She had to do that often, consciously remember that Mother was no longer around. She learned it was normal not only to feel sympathy, but to show it. It simply felt awkward.

  Determined, she did what she wanted to and reached to brush Tallis’s damp hair from his forehead with her fingertips. She liked how that felt, didn’t mind so much the soft warmth in her cheeks, nor the flutter in her stomach. No, we are not very pleasant around here, but I’m glad you did not go to Hippos and pay for pleasant.

  “Do you think your nose is broken?” she asked.

  He gingerly touched it. “No. My eye took most of it.”

  “That little man did this to you?”

  He looked at her indignantly. “I didn’t see it coming. And he had another fellow with him.”

  Kes looked about and found a towel on the writing table. She tore it in two and scraped the rest of the mixture from the pot to the fabric. She bundled it up and eased it onto Tallis’s eye.

  “That feels good,” he said, and added, “Thank you, Kes.” He closed his other eye and sighed. “Cot feels good—room feels good. Feels safe. Safe makes me tired.”

  With his eyes closed she could watch him freely. His face was so pale, terribly pale. He was exhausted. He had lines near his eyes, as though he smiled a lot. She watched him guiltily—it felt uncomfortable, like prying. But she didn’t want to look away.

  He was not a man who could grow a thick beard; it was late in the day and there was barely a shadow on his cheeks. He had a little mole on his neck. Lines in his neck, with his chin tucked down like that. Blood at the corner of his mouth, inside his lip. She didn’t see it when she wiped his face. She started to rise to gather the tray.

  Tallis put his hand on her arm. “Which of us will talk first?” he slurred. He licked his lips.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Kardus.”

  She stilled, unsure what to do. He’d said he was here for her brother, but she had been taught never to speak of anything personal. Family matters were fiercely private. It was shameful to tell a thing from the interior. Shameful and weak.

  But she had just gazed upon a man. Gazing was as bad as telling, she’d been raised to believe. Nosing into someone else’s business was as shameful as telling your own, and looking at someone more than a few seconds, a disgrace.

  She smoothed her skirts and settled on the stool, stiff-backed. A strange exhilaration twitched inside, as she’d felt when she gazed upon him. She never talked about her brother to anyone, not her father, not anyone. Except Polonus. It had taken a long time for her to trust Polonus.

  “Did Polonus send for you?” she asked. “You don’t look like a shaman.”

  That woke him up. His eyes flew open, and suddenly he lunged, tumbling the poultice into her lap as he seized her wrists. He shoved her sleeves up and examined her arms, front and back. Not finding anything, he pushed the sleeves up farther. Her face burned, but she held still. He examined her upper arms carefully, and not finding what he looked for, searched her eyes dubiously. He eased back into the cot, wary as a cat.

  She picked up the dripping poultice from her lap. It made a dark stain on her skirts. She remolded the bag and settled it onto his wound. Her face still burned. “You were looking for those marks you told me about,” she said lightly, fussing with the poultice more than necessary. “The ones you thought the lady might have.”

  He wasn’t the way he usually was—open, his face was always open. Now it was closing with alarm, shutting away from her.

  “You told me you were here because of my brother. If you came to help him, I am on your side, because I am on his side.” Her voice softened. “I have always been on his side. In my heart.”

  He seemed to relax a little. “What about Polonus . . .”

  “He is the only friend I have.” She paused. “Besides Samir.”

  “Polonus wants to break my leg! His servant did this to me.”

  Her lips twitched.

  “I said something amusing?”

  “He’d laugh to hear he has a servant. And he’d sooner break his own leg than that of another.”

  Uncertainty came to his face. “What do you mean? He said I am to leave for Athens or he will personally deliver me to Portia.”

  “The man—he told you Polonus had sent him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you went with him because . . .”

  Tallis blinked, and his face eased. Then he said grimly, “Because I knew the name. He was the leader of the academy, the name I would know best.” He stared at the ceiling. “Then who came for me? Portia?”

  “You wouldn’t have gone to her?”

  “Not on a bet.”

  “Polonus lives in the hills, just east of the tombs of Kursi. He has devoted his life to . . . righting a wrong. I thought he was done with shamans. I thought you were another he didn’t tell me about.”

  “I’ve been mistaken for many things, never a shaman. A shaman for what?”

  “Why—for Kardus.”

  They regarded one another for a moment, until Kes suddenly said, “You are a scholar?”

  Tallis thought on it, then shrugged.

  “What does soma sema mean? I’ve asked Polonus, and he won’t tell me. I know he knows. I think it’s Latin, and he knows Latin.”

  Tallis hesitated. “Why do you ask?”

  “I’ve heard my brother say it in his fits.”

  “It means . . . ‘the body is a tomb.’”

  Silence. “Oh.”

  Gently, Tallis said, “Kes, what happened to your brother?”

  The body is a tomb. Kardus always had a way with words. Isn’t that what Mother despised about him, before the madness ever came? He had a way with many things.

  “You have a natural pleasantness about you, so much like my Kardus . . . the way he used to be. It makes me fear for you.” She plucked her skirt and smoothed it. Talk, Kes! Just talk. Tell him about Kardus. Mother isn’t here anymore. “For Kardus—”

  “There is a strange awareness of fear at this inn,” Tallis broke in musingly. “I’m tired of it. It’s beginning to rub off on me. I’m starting to dream in fear.”

  She clenched her hands to fists. Would he let her talk? “For Kardus, the way to the tombs started with fear. Other things too, but fear—”

  Talk, Kes!

  Tallis waited for her to continue, and not so patiently. “Before he what?”

  She snapped, “Will you—? Don’t you know I’ve never—” This stupid foreigner!

  Tallis took her hand. The surprise of it flushed her cheeks, and words tumbled out.

  “Nobody speaks truth around here. Nobody speaks.” What was this? Tears! Tears, because of the compassion in this stranger. She pulled her hand from his and brushed the tears away.

  Then the talk began to pour from her.

  “There are people who call down curses on our place every time they pass. They make signs against evil. They take different routes to Hippos or Damascus. It didn’t used to be that way. Jarek’s inn was the place folks went to. They came for talk, for good wine, good company. They came because my father was a pleasant man. Kardus took after my father. And . . . I took after my mother.

  “Shoshanna is an old woman who lives down the road. She knew my mother when she was a child. Recently, quite unexpectedly, Shoshanna told me something. She was teaching me how to stitch a wound, and said, ‘Your mother didn’t mean to be the way she was.’ I never heard such plainspeak. I was so grateful for it. Shoshanna has tried to teach me things over the years. Ordinary things.”

  Suddenly she looked at Tallis and said, “Are you thirsty?”

&nb
sp; Gazing at her, Tallis first shook his head, then nodded. She took a cup from the tray and filled it with water from the pitcher. He drank and handed back the cup.

  She had never talked with Demas. Nothing like this. He would not have heard her.

  “My mother thought it was wrong to be free with words. With expression. It was scandalous to her. That she had a child like Kardus was a joke straight from the gods. He was never meant for this inn. That’s the joke to me. He was born for the courts of a king, not a family who didn’t know how to handle a gifted child.”

  “I never thought Kardus would have come from around here,” Tallis mused—then realized what he said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  Kes shook her head eagerly, whisking hair behind her ear. “No, no—you are right, you speak the truth. That’s exactly the truth. He wasn’t born for this place. I had such . . . secret pride for him.” Her gaze drifted. “I adored my brother. When my father’s friends began to tell him, ‘Send Kardus to Hippos, educate him—he’s been blessed by the gods’ . . . my father ignored them, because he knew my mother. But all Kardus wanted was to learn. Some of the customers had taught him to read, which of course Mother tried to stop. My uncle brought him a few books, and how he devoured them. Writings of any kind. You couldn’t contain him, he was so . . . And talk? Could he talk. Question after question, used to drive me mad. Such an imagination. Such a bright, sweet nature. He said the funniest things. You never knew what was going to come out of his mouth. Everyone loved him.”

  She wiped her nose on her sleeve. She was silent for a time. “No matter how much Mother tried to press him down, he squeezed out somewhere else. He was wild, I’ll tell you that. You know—emotional. He’d get so angry with her, because he didn’t understand why she—He’d get so frustrated, helpless, to the point of rage. And how could you blame him? He fought what she tried to do to him, putting him in a cage. It wasn’t right and he knew it.” Pain passed over her face. “We all knew it.”

  She looked directly at Tallis. “Isn’t it funny how you know a thing?” She pressed her stomach with both hands. “You know it here. No matter what you’re taught to believe. You know here if it’s right or not.”

  “Getting down to that is what I suppose we’re all trying to do.”

  She didn’t continue for a while.

  “I betrayed him. All my life, I betrayed him.” She plucked the fabric of her skirt, only to smooth it down and pluck it again. “She made life miserable for us. I remember a time when I was very young, when she wasn’t that way. It seems like a dream. I remember once, crying into her apron. Her arms were around me, and I remember the smell of the apron. Smelled like cooking. I don’t know why I was crying, but she was holding me. I don’t know what changed. Maybe life was hard for her.”

  Kes’s tone had thinned.

  “If something displeased her, she made home a miserable place to be, for as long as she saw fit. When she thought it was time for it to be over, it was over. Nothing we could do would appease her, no apology, nothing. Lasted days sometimes. We had to wait until it was over, and she said when. We were happiest when she wasn’t around. She’d leave for market, and it relieved us for a time. Things got lighter—we all felt it. And when she returned, she returned fully. It came again, wrapped itself around the inn, and everything was back to normal. . . . We loved market days.” She smiled a little.

  “She hated noise. Everything had to be rigidly quiet. Today if I bang a pot, I look to see if she is angry. She’d rage at me, tell me the guests were sleeping, what an idiot I was, I probably woke them all up, even if it was a tiny little noise. Father did nothing. He saw everything, especially the way she treated Kardus. He knew it was wrong and he did nothing.”

  “How did she treat Kardus?”

  “She hated that he was who he was.”

  Had she ever spoken such truth before? It was exhausting her.

  “Hated he was different from her sisters’ children. They were all the same, just ordinary boys, and she hated that he wasn’t like them. He was . . . imaginative. He’d lie down by the sea and scoop up handfuls of shore and study what he found. Shells and muck and stones and tiny animals. Study it for hours. Everything delighted him and Mother hated it. She called it unnatural. She didn’t like it when he studied anthills. She thought it was unnatural to sit for so long and watch ants. It made her angry . . . gods, it made her angry. But he loved nature. He loved everything, and he was curious all the time. He’d ask Mother questions, and oh, she didn’t like that. As Kardus grew older, her rages began. Awful rages. She raged at him for everything, and he raged back because he was so furious that she didn’t understand him.

  “She didn’t do that to me. It made me superior to him. I didn’t cause her problems; I was . . . ordinary. And I was smug with it. I was two years older but acted like I was younger, the way I treated him. When she was angry with him, I was angry too—for the simple reason that he had made her angry, didn’t matter why. Isn’t that stupid? I don’t know why I did that. I began to wish he were like other boys too, so we could have some peace in the home. No matter what he did he made her angry, and I blamed him for it. And when he actually began to change . . . it hurt. He began to be mean, in small and petty ways that were not like him at all. He was mean to animals—he never used to be that way, he loved animals. Then one day I watched him strip a sapling of all its leaves. It horrified me, the sight of that bare sapling. Mother was winning.”

  Kes was silent for a time.

  “What happened to him?” Tallis finally asked. “Something must have happened for him to find his way into the Academy of Socrates. Do you know he was the youngest to be admitted for a teaching position? The youngest to be considered? I remember talking with him years ago in Athens . . . even then I marveled at his knowledge of Alexander, wondered how someone so young could have such an accurate grasp on his life.” He eyed Kes doubtfully. “He told me he was descended from Macedonian colonists. He showed me a trinket, a replica of Alexander’s horse, Bucephalas.”

  “He still had that? I gave it to him when we were children.”

  “He said his father gave it to him. Said it came from his own ancestor, who was a general and a close friend of Alexander’s—that Alexander gave it to him.”

  She shrugged. “Kardus fancied things up. We are indeed descended from Greek colonists, but many people around here are. We have Macedonian blood, but not from a general who was friends with Alexander. My father would have boasted of it.” She held a handful of her dark auburn hair. “The red in it means I have Macedonian in me. My freckles too.”

  Tallis frowned. “Kardus’s story evolved. I remember one report from the Decaphiloi. Kardus was telling his students that he was Alexander’s blood relation. He was taken to task by Antenor, who made him retract it to the students. Polonus thought it noteworthy enough to include in the report. Cal mentioned it to me because I plan to write a history of Alexander. He thought it was interesting, because many people claim to be descended from him—he didn’t expect one of his teachers to assert such a claim.”

  Kes smoothed the fabric on her skirt, plucked what she smoothed. “He changed a lot, in the end.”

  “What made him change?”

  She sighed. “We all did, I think. We all had a part in what he is today. If there is blame to be had, then—”

  “Kes. I didn’t ask about blame. Tell me how he came to join the Decaphiloi.”

  “Years ago, a man came here whenever he went to Damascus. He saw in Kardus the things that should have been seen. One day he brought a scroll, and it changed Kardus’s life. It ignited him. It was a fine thing, and a terrible thing because it infuriated my mother. She did not want Kardus to exceed the boundaries he was born to. But strangely, this time my father stood his ground and allowed Kardus to study with him.

  “Mother made us pay for it, of course. Father had humiliated her, and she saved face by becoming—to herself. She stopped talking completely. And the more quietly she
did something, the more of a triumph it was for her. It sounds crazy, but that’s the way it was. She began to lose weight, and she wasn’t plump to begin with. I hated her for it. But Kardus—he was so happy. I can see him sitting beside that man in the light by the window. Kicking his legs, twirling his hair, and he didn’t know he was doing it. He was so happy! He loved learning. He loved the man, and my father was happy too. So glad for his son. So proud of Kardus, I could see it. . . .”

  When she spoke again, her eyes were shining. “My father and I banded together. We two against Mother, for Kardus’s sake. We became—” she rolled her hand as she tried to find the right word—“secret partners in the education of Kardus, without saying a word to each other. And do you know to this day we have never spoken of it? Not then, not ever. I was twelve. Kardus was ten. For five years, the man visited. As Mother became more withdrawn, Kardus . . . he was like a ray of sun, shining out from thunderclouds. Everything Father and I did, we did for him. He loved us. . . .” Her cadence faltered. “I am sure he did—I’m sure he knew what we were doing. But . . . he forgot about us. We stood between him and Mother, we were a shield of protection about him . . . but I don’t know if he saw that. I don’t think he did. Doesn’t matter, I suppose.

  “He talked all the time about Alexander this, Odysseus that. Sophocles and Euripides and Plato, names I know only because he spoke them so much. He became a running stream of knowledge, and it began to wear away at me. He began to get smug with his knowledge. My father always listened to Kardus talk (in the barn, of course, because no one was allowed to talk around my mother), and Samir did, and at first I did too. I was glad to see something come of what Father and I did for him, taking his chores so he could study, distracting Mother when the scholar came. Putting up with all her misery.” She broke off to look at Tallis. “You know who the scholar was, of course.”

  “Guessing wildly, Polonus.” He grimaced. “Forgive me if the name is still unpleasant.”

  “Polonus taught Kardus everything. But—resentment began to form in my heart. When Kardus talked about Greek tragedies or comedies, it was like buzzing in my ears. When he spoke of the Roman Republic or . . . Spanish gold mines . . . I only wanted him to shut up, because he knew I couldn’t understand him, and that seemed to please him. I hated him for that. My father and I had tried our best to help him, but now I only wanted him to shut up.” She absently scratched her elbow. “I should have listened to him.”