A Mixture of Madness, Book II of The Bow - By Levkoff, Andrew Page 0,12
road succumbed to the shadows of these tall and lavish castles of the dead. A bulwark of beggars, arms waving like undersea flora in the tide of our passing, hugged the curb on the opposite side, still awash in the warming sun. Only those few creatures too sluggish of thought or foot were left almost unseen in the gloom.
Riding at my place just behind dominus, I was applying needless energy with helpless gusto worrying over something over which I had no control. As you may imagine, this was a pastime I visited with zealous frequency. Presently, I was ticking off the preparations Curio would have had to oversee and complete within the hour to adequately, which is to say, perfectly prepare for our homecoming. Had the furniture been cleaned? Had the masks of the ancestors been dusted? Was the house warm enough? What about supper? Had the gardens been pruned? Were there fresh flowers in every room? Had the house gods received their offerings? The list went on and on until even I began to tire of my finikin disquiet. Why should I fret? Lucius was a younger version of myself; left to maintain our Roman residence while we sought the cooler breezes of Baiae, I knew I would find everything in pristine order. Which is precisely when a more insidious thought crept in to harass my better self. Wouldn’t I love to find just one small thing with which to find fault: a lamp wick untrimmed, a corner not swept, a pillow not plumped, something to chide the ever-flawless Lucius Calpurnius Curio? Of course I wouldn’t.
I diverted my mind’s energies to screwing tight the taps on my mind’s caustic, leaky faucet and concentrated instead on nothing at all. I had only a moment’s rest from myself when, from her raeda, lady Tertulla leaned out a window and called the procession to a halt. Being closest to her carriage, I leapt off Apollo, my dark brown bay, and inquired how I might assist her. “Follow me,” she said, opening the door and stepping down onto the road. Immediately surrounded by a troop of guards, she brushed them aside and headed for the shadowed curb. Only Crassus seemed unperturbed. He did not know what she was up to, but was not about to come between her will and her objective. His six senate-appointed lictors crowded about him, their eyes busy.
Tertulla approached a boy who looked no more than twelve (I later learned his small frame had suffered in this world for fifteen years). He was wrapped in rags, sitting on the curb with an empty begging bowl between his legs. His hair looked as if it had never been cut, or washed. Something about his eyes was off and unsettling—they were too far apart and their focus lagged behind whatever drew their attention. In addition, his head struck me as too large for his frail shoulders. These defects, however, faded to insignificance in the light of the boy’s startling, beatific expression. He was looking up at us with the most innocent, guileless smile I had ever seen upon man or woman. He positively beamed, as if he had been sitting there waiting for this precise moment his entire life. The effect was multiplied by his outstretched arms: they did not seem so much a supplication for alms as an urgent wish to be picked up and held.
Then I saw his hands.
What I beheld was the result of no accident. Someone had deliberately cut off the majority of the poor child’s fingers, leaving him with only the thumb and third finger of each hand. An involuntary shiver ran through me as I imagined the transformation in his trusting aspect when that mutilation was perpetrated. It had to have been deliberate—what kind of accident could leave such a perfect array of carnage?
Domina snapped me out of my morbid speculation. “That smile—I saw it from the carriage. I had to stop to behold this wonder.”
From deeper within the shadows behind the boy, one of the guards dragged an older man. He was dressed no better than the lad, but unlike the boy, his grey, whiskered face was made of a clay that had long ago set into a resentful scowl.
“Put your arms down, fool,” he growled at the child. The boy winced at the man’s voice, slowly lowering his arms in unison without unlocking his elbows, as if he were setting down an invisible basket.
“Can you speak?” domina asked. “What is your name, child?”