A Mixture of Madness, Book II of The Bow of Heaven

by Levkoff, Andrew

  In addition to the twelve cohorts now making camp on the Campus Martius, which Caesar had relinquished to insure my master sat for the second time in the curule chair of consul, Publius had arrived in Rome with one thousand Celtic horse; one thousand, can you imagine? A calculation I tried unsuccessfully to avoid making in my head was the total number of trophies, bereft of body, now dangling from their saddle horns.

  •••

  Tertulla was blindfolded and laughing, a hand to her mouth. Crassus stood behind her, his arms about her waist as they stood waiting before the tall cedar and iron double doors. From the interior of the atrium, I thought I saw Hanno peek briefly out from the shadows, but then whoever it was, was gone. We stopped at the circular fountain of Neptune, pounded by the crash of foaming marble surf, his painted green torso kept glistening by an invisible pipe hidden in the top of his head. The watery regurgitations from the mouths of twenty marble fish surrounding the god splashed into the basin below, masking the sounds of our approach. Publius held out the reins of his horse without taking his eyes off his parents, assuming with confidence that some lesser person would immediately obey the implicit command to take them. I did.

  Livia stepped up beside me, abandoning Publius’ cloak to the sole possession of lady Cornelia. As much as I loved the animals, I had a frantic urge to rid myself of my sweating, equine charge. I caught the eye of a stable boy and passed the reins to him. He led the beast away to be dried off, brushed, blanketed and fed. Here we stood, alive. When I was first forced into slavery, I had wished for death, but that was a far distant memory now. I had never been so glad to find myself taking one breath and then the next. I felt newborn and rash. I reached for Livia’s hand once more, and she did not resist the gentle intrusion.

  Members of the familia were emerging as quietly as they could from both sides of the house, some with tears in their eyes. Lucius stepped from the front entrance, beguiled by this scene of reunion. I caught his eye and our heads nodded; we smiled at each other in appreciation and understanding.

  The look in my lord’s eyes was childlike with excitement. He practically vibrated with giddy pride as he held Tertulla, as if he could barely keep himself from ruining the surprise of Publius’ return by shouting out or even dancing. It was as close as I had ever seen him come to losing his dignity altogether. Publius tip-toed closer, but his boots on the white gravel were intent on betraying him with each step.

  “I’m not a fool, you know,” my lady announced when he was within a dozen feet of the couple.

  “Whatever do you mean, columba?”

  “I mean,” she said, ripping off the blindfold, “I want to see my son!” Tertulla broke free from her husband and ran into Publius’ arms. He swept her up into the air and spun her round to shouts of joy and welcome so earnest you would think we were all cousins, nephews and nieces. The moment he set her down, domina grabbed Publius’ face in both hands and kissed his cheeks over and over. “You are safe! You are home!” she repeated until her energy was spent. Then, taking his hand in hers, she raised it on high and turned in a slow circle, the roses in her cheeks watered by happy tears. This was the remembered Tertulla of the twinkling eye and wise, carefree smile. It was the first time she had returned to herself, without effort or guile, since Luca.

  Dozens of the familia now present moved as close as they dared to their lords and masters, which was not so close that my lady did not now have to raise her voice. “Is not my son the most beautiful creature ever to descend from Mt. Olympus?” A heartfelt cheer. “Come, let us give Virtus deserved rest from his labors and summon Bacchus to quench the thirst of battle, victory, and the long road home!” A more raucous noise was stamped to silence by a single word.

  “HOLD!”

  Crassus stepped down onto the gravel, and though he was dressed in nothing more authoritative than his house tunic, his voice brought the stunned quiet that follows the thunderclap. The familia froze, including Tertulla and Publius. Then, more gently, he spoke above the clamor of the disobedient fountain. “May not a father greet his son?”

  Publius pressed his forehead against that of his mother, kissed her cheek and walked to stand before the paterfamilias. He was several inches taller than his father, but in force of presence they were equals.

  “Father.”

  “You look well.”

  Publius smiled. “I am fit.”

  “You are unwounded?”

  “No harm that won’t heal.” Tertulla approached to stand two paces behind Publius, but no closer. She would not enter that sacred space between a Roman father and his warrior son. The men stood facing each other, almost at attention. Not even a cough escaped the rest of the familia.

  “Did our letters reach you?”

  “Forgive me for not writing. Gaul is a reluctant mistress, and Caesar is an unrelenting conqueror.”

  An awkward silence, to none but dominus, domina and myself.

  Crassus looked down, recovered himself and again met his son’s eyes. “You have acquitted yourself well in Aquitania.”

  “I had hoped I would arrive before the general’s letters. I wanted to be the first to relate my adventures to you.”

  “I shall pry every detail from you at dinner.”

  “We will bore Mother.”

  Crassus' hands twitched at his sides. “That is extremely doubtful.” For several moments, their eyes did what formality forbade: they embraced each other in silence, the old, crafty grey holding the young, impetuous blue. Tightly, tenderly.

  “You look well,” Crassus said at last, then smiled at the redundancy. Publius grinned, and the spell of formality was broken.

  “My son,” dominus said hoarsely, reaching for Publius and gripping him with a strength that belied his sixty years. They held each other close, unmoving, Crassus substituting the pressure of his grasp for what he could not voice: ‘I was sick with worry for your safety’—‘I prayed for you twice each day’—‘When letters came from Gaul, your mother and I would only open them at the temple of Bellona after making sacrifice; one time I vomited at the foot of the altar and had to give the appalled priest a thousand sesterces for his trouble.’

  We watched in silence, many of us crying openly now. Publius cradled his father’s greying head against his shoulder. Dominus squeezed his eyes shut, but could not stop what nature and love demanded. They stood as statues, and we, barely breathing, completed the courtyard tableau.

  Chapter XIII

  56 - 55 BCE Winter, Rome

  Year of the consulship of

  Cn. Cornelius Lentulus Marcellinus and L. Marcius Philippus

  It was past the sixth hour of the night. The family had retired over an hour ago. Publius’ homecoming meal had been simple enough: bacon-wrapped chicken, steamed mullet and flat bread. By comparison, the feast to mark the celebration of his return to Rome was a Herculean task: 200 guests including senior senators, both optimates and populares, entertainments and a menu which must be provisioned and prepared in only five days, on the third day before the Ides of Ianuarius, between the festivals of the Agonalia and the Carmentalia. None of the preparation could be started until now, not even the invitations, for fear of spoiling the surprise of Publius’ return.

  I sat on a stool at one of the two long work tables in the kitchen, oil lamps casting slats of shadow and light through the pile of wax tablets on my left, one for each runner. Our six house scribes had their own work—in the morning I would have Curio send men throughout the city to wait while the invitations were printed by copyists-for-hire so that the scrolls could be delivered by mid-afternoon. Before me blurred a list Nicoteles had handed to me when I sent the bleary-eyed cook to bed. Nicoteles was talented, but I missed our old cook, Atticus, who had died at the venerable age of 59.

  I perused Nicoteles’ inventory of items not already in store which would be required for the celebration’s menu, and it was not funny in the least:

  500 dormice

  6 boars

  10 lambsr />
  300 wheels of bread

  10 gallons of garum (in addition to the three gallons of the fish sauce we always kept on hand)

  5 large amphorae of honey

  5 more of olive oil

  3 baskets of almonds and 8 of fresh figs

  All that and a veritable field of salad greens and vegetables.

  Enough! I could look upon the interminable list no longer. Taking the weights from the scroll I watched it curl upon itself like the capital of an Ionic column turned on its head. The short lines of the missing items, in itself a poem of excess, gulled my reluctant attention back to the rash and idiotic blunder I had committed only hours before in a moment of irretrievable optimism.

  After the servants had been fed, I had summoned Hanno to my tablinum. There I had instructed him, before he retired to the servants’ quarters, to deliver two scraps of parchment to the medical clinic at the front of the estate where Livia made her bed. The same bed where her mother, Sabina, had slept before her. He scooped them off my table with his customary technique of interlocking the remaining fingers of both hands to hold them securely. Then off he loped, may Hermes pluck the feather from his one good heel! I had changed my mind the moment he disappeared, but the hour would not allow me to call for him in a voice much louder than a whisper. He was gone, and with him, the middle ground above despair and below elation which I had so carefully constructed, then inhabited ever since Livia’s return to Rome.

  They were little poems, gods defend me! Insignificant scraps of nothing that would destroy the modicum of harmony I had gingerly pieced together after years of misgiving, awkwardness and distance. Yes, I had kissed her on the massage table, but two months had passed since that impulsive moment, and curse my ignorance and innocence, I was more flustered and unsure now than ever I was before. I did not know how to approach her without feeling ridiculous, and having a hundred household duties as excuses, I had employed virtually every single one to avoid her.

  Her rejection of me was imminent, of this I was certain. She would come to me with sad, green eyes, take my hand (this time in sympathy, not in fear), and tell me how much my friendship meant to her. Playing the scene in my head made me want to regurgitate.

  Who is the greatest poetess of love, beguiling hearts down through the centuries? Sappho, as any schoolboy knows. Any schoolboy, it would seem, could teach me more of this art of the interplay between the sexes than I have gleaned from my paltry experience. (Not that I would take the advice of a pimpled coagulation of base impulses.) All that I know of love came from Livia herself, but that was twenty years ago; we were barely more than children when Eros kindled the fire in our eyes. Here, I might as well share with you how I tightened the noose around my own unworthy neck. I sent her this:

  The sweet apple blushes on the end of the bough,

  At the very end of the bough which gatherers missed.

  Nay, missed not, but could not reach.

  If only I had tempered my ardor and left it at that, Livia might have taken the sentiment as a genteel compliment and nothing more. At that moment, alone with my wine and my misery, I was convinced that life was a string of “if only’s” leading from one self-inflicted bungle to the next, until at some point, that phrase became one’s final utterance, and one expired with regret on one’s lips.

  If the first lines did not mark me for a fool, then what followed surely would. There was a young poet who had been causing a stir around town with his frank and irreverent verse. His name was Valerius Catullus. My master was particularly fond of him because occasionally his caustic wit would nip at the heels of his nemesis:

  Caesar, I have no great desire

  To stand in your good graces,

  Nor can I bother to inquire

  How fair or dark your face is

  It was from one of Catullus’ other short poems that I stole the following fragment…

  Once, bright days shone for you,

  when you came often drawn to the girl

  loved as no other will be loved by you.

  Then there were many pleasures with her,

  that you wished, and the girl not unwilling,

  truly the bright days shone for you.

  … and sent it off to Livia.

  If one cup of honeyed wine steadies the hand that drinks it, then a second will surely calm them both. Pouring one, then another and downing them quickly, I filled a third and stared at it, wondering if I might not be straining the boundaries of this dispirited philosophy. What was I thinking? Earlier that day, when we believed the line drawn for the length of our lives had been abruptly shortened with alarmingly little notice, Livia took my hand. What of it? In such a moment of fear and stress, I might have clung to Malchus had he stood but a little closer. What foolery to misconstrue the reflexive grasp of a friend’s hand as a token of love.

  The unexpected fragrance of sweet rush and myrrh joined the cool breath of air that flowed from the peristyle, across the colonnade and into the kitchen. I looked up. Livia drew aside the heavy portiere and padded barefoot through the opening. “I’m cold,” she said, walking to the opposite side of the table where I sat. Without invitation, she picked up the untouched third cup of wine and drank its contents without pause for breath. “Better.” She threw off the thick, woolen shawl draping her shoulders, tossed a scrap of parchment toward me and leaned over the table, hands askew, elbows locked.

  Misery! She had thrown the poem back in my face. I could not bear to look at it. Instead, I stared wide-eyed at her transformation. She wore a skin-tight, ankle-length dress in the Egyptian style, of a fabric so sheer imagination became as superfluous as thought. The wide, beaded collar around her neck stopped just above the swell of her barely covered breasts. Her eyelids and lashes were darkened by galena, matched by wings of malachite that swept up from below her eyes to reach almost to her temples. Her hair was tied at the base of her neck but she had draped it over her right shoulder and bound its mass with a coiled, silver snake. There was heat in her eyes that outshone the glow of the lamps.

  “You have avoided me ever since that day in the balnea.”

  “You have been drinking,” I said.

  “And it’s working, too. I have almost forgotten the day’s events.”

  “Where are you going dressed like that?”

  Livia laughed. “Back to bed, if you’re not quick. I’ll have more wine.”

  I poured and as she drank, admitted, “I have been avoiding you.”

  “You’re afraid of me.”

  “I’m afraid of being spurned by you. Again.” I hope you’ll agree that I deserve some modicum of credit for confessing that one as intelligent and quick-witted as I might at the same time be as callow as a Vestal.

  “I’m here, aren’t I? Maybe you should read that,” she said, gesturing at the scrap of parchment before me.

  I took a breath, picked it up and found a different fragment by Sappho:

  The sinking moon has left the sky,

  The Pleiades have also gone.

  Midnight comes—and goes, the hours fly

  And solitary still, I lie.

  “Have I not made my feelings clear,” Livia said, “or was my kiss that day not up to your standards.”

  I shook my head and lowered my eyes to the table. “What standards? One needs to have a base of comparison…”

  “Stand up.”

  “Why? What are you going to do?” I rose, not as steadily as I had planned.

  “Be impetuous.” She leaned further across the table. “Now put your mouth on mine.”

  Her lips were glossy with the taste of honey and cassia. I disappeared into that kiss, and if thinking were a talent I still possessed, I would have wished that the soft mingling of breath and lips would never end. Breaking that embrace was a fall from timeless skies to a mundane present, and neither of us had a desire to remain earthbound.

  “Where can we go?” she asked.

  “Don’t move,” I said. I pushed the lamps and wax tablet
s aside and to the astonishment of us both climbed up and over the long worktable and into her arms. It was simply too far to go around. We held each other’s faces in our hands and for a moment let our eyes speak the language our mouths had just relearned.

  “Take me to your room,” she said.

  “We can’t. It’s just down the hall from dominus and domina. The clinic?”

  “Too far. I will wait no longer. What about there?” She pointed behind me to the locked door of the pantry. I fumbled in my tunic to pull out the chain holding the key. A second necklace, entangled in the first, glinted dully.

  “My scallop,” Livia said. “You’ve kept it all this time.” Her eyes had become brighter in the lamplight.

  “If that bracelet of shells had not come undone that day under the statue of Apollo…”

  “But it did, and we are here now. You were so clumsy trying to retie the string about my wrist you woke me from my nap. This is fine silverwork,” she said, untangling the two chains.

  “Not my doing. Dominus insisted his atriensis wear a chain worthy of the station. He meant it as a gift, but I prefer the string.”

  “Perhaps these links were made with metal mined from Laurion.” My smile crumpled. “How ironic if a gift from Crassus to you had something of my mother forged within it.”

  “Livia.”

  “Forgive me, that was a stupid thing to say. I cannot help but miss her, but you are not to blame. It is you that I want, Alexandros. Very much. It is my curse: my mouth will be speaking long before I even think to advise silence. You know,” she said, her eyes atwinkle, “perhaps I acquired this evil trait from you.”