A Mixture of Madness, Book II of The Bow - By Levkoff, Andrew Page 0,11

both serve. You may go.”

I never received either list, and to my discredit, I never asked for them again.

•••

After the incident with the pomegranate, a change came over our lady. She refused to keep to her room, dressing with desperate elegance after fretting over each detail of her makeup and attire. She threw frequent and elaborate dinner parties, arranged poetry readings and plays in the atrium; one night she amazed her guests by unveiling a caged tiger from Asia Minor for their inspection. Alone, though, those who knew her well would note she spent more time before our household gods, lighting incense, sprinkling salt over fresh barley cakes, murmuring prayers with an urgency she had never demonstrated before.

Crassus was courteous, soft-spoken and as solicitous as always. He never failed to take his wife’s hand as they walked through the house; he brought her little trinkets and made sure to compliment her on her hair or a menu she had prepared. But his voice was just a little too loud, her gaiety a little too forced. The genuine affection of decades, a vase of subtle and delicate craftsmanship, had cracked and chipped. We watched as our lord and lady toiled to glue each tiny fragment to the whole with kindhearted routine and time-worn habit. Every one of us prayed that they would succeed at their task, and that when their work was done, no one would be able to see the imperfections. We prayed, because we knew better than to hope.

In Junius, having been at home less than two months, we fled the city, a month earlier than most, taking refuge in our Baiaen villa to escape not only the heat, but the extravagant parties that preceded the aristocracy’s departure just after the elections were announced in Quintilis. So it was that my lord made himself unavailable to stand for consul as he had agreed with Caesar. Pompeius, too, was absent, having sailed for Sardinia, Sicily and Africa to negotiate the purchase of desperately needed grain to feed the 300,000 mouths of Romans citizens who depended on the state to sustain them.

We tarried in Baiae and did not return to the city until October. Livia stayed behind, asking and receiving permission from Crassus to remain in Rome over the summer. The city suffered its worst bouts of illness in the heat and humidity of the season; my brave healer would do what she could in our master’s clinic, opening its doors to all, with his blessing. Crassus left both guards and provisions to feed and heal the sick, and though his name was imprinted on every sack of grain and every ampulla of medicine, I cannot believe his sole motive was selfish.

Fate had just returned Livia to me and now, laughing, was dragging me away from her again. Oh, it must have been great fun for the immortals to play this foolish game of hide and seek, concealing Livia from me, then allowing me to find her, then pulling her away again. Thus it had been ever since we had met, she as a child, me newborn to the house of Crassus. I pined for her when we were apart, and wept when we were reunited. Since that first kiss under the statue of Apollo in the garden of Crassus, a memory twenty years old yet fresh as a new-picked flower, I was no longer master of the heart that beat inside my own breast, but slave to a desire postponed and never satisfied.

Oh, for the love of reason! Surely you who read these scrolls must agree this kind of hand-wringing whining is utter drivel. Can love and wisdom coexist? Do not think it for an instant. It is widely known that Aristotle defined love as “the composition of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.” First of all, he was talking about friendship, and second, I have it on good authority that at the time he uttered those words, he was falling down drunk.

One has to be at least as ancient as I am now to see that if you try to make sense of life, if you look for patterns and meaning, not only are you bound to be disappointed, you are likely to waste a good deal of precious time.

•••

As we neared the city late in the day, the tombs of the wealthy sprang up like mushrooms on either side of the Via Appia, each vying for prominence, crowding up against each other until the left side of the