A Mixture of Madness, Book II of The Bow - By Levkoff, Andrew Page 0,2
delay, the more shards of me fall away and shatter. Quiet! or they will hear. Look away, Tertulla, set me free to act, but she holds me fast with the saddest gaze in all the world.
Cold sweat pools around the hilt of my dagger till I feel it will slip from my fingers. Something new in this recurring nightmare! With immense effort, I can raise the blade till the iron comes between my lady’s eyes and mine. The spell is broken. Now to act! Quickly, choose one of three fates and end these night terrors. Slip it beneath my own breastbone or, if Tertulla be untrue, then this long knife should pass full through her slender throat. No, no blood shall stain her fair neck with crimson, not by my hand. It must be Caesar then, whose pulsing artery cries out for severing. The man I’d thought my friend is turned the other way; he cannot see me, his mind fixed as it always is, on conquest.
Tertulla makes a small, frantic gesture. She shakes her head in a clear imprecation for me to do nothing. Her eyes widen and only because of thirty years’ intimacy with that face, could I see she wants me to slip away, to depart—to continue to do what I have done since the moment I had come upon them—nothing.
So, there is to be no peace. Nothing changes. Does she save me, or spurn me? Knowing that my mind will now crack like an egg only makes the coming agony worse. In my chest, there lies a thick knot of rope where my heart had but a moment ago beat; now it tightens, tightens. I know I will obey her. Even in betrayal, it is a reflex of love I cannot abandon. And the core of me, already broken in two, finds it can shatter into even smaller pieces. I take one step back and let the curtain come between my eyes and hers, between a joyous past and an empty future.
When I am all alone again in the dark, I scream.
Prolog
19 BCE - Spring, Siphnos, Greece
Year of the consulship of
Quintus Lucretius Vespillo and Gaius Sentius Saturninus
I forgave him.
Perhaps that is my failing.
•••
My head jerks off the table and once more I take up my pen. Why must the old succumb to so many naps? We begin as babies and end the same; but the dreams of the very young are free from torment. I have lived too long and seen too much to be at peace. Sleep is not the refuge it once was.
I see a man on a skittish horse, but memories of dreams do not hold up well in the light—the fragment is frail and fleeting. I think of Crassus, and how I used to calm him from his recurring night terrors.
Melyaket pads quietly onto the patio, sits on the balustrade, one foot on the floor, the other dangling. His strange attire no longer startles: today he wears a pale green, belted shirt with a wide band of embroidery along the edges and the wrists of its odd, long sleeves; a plain leather vest and the sherwal of his land, baggy trousers tied at the ankles. I ignore him until a cloying, acrid smell wrinkles my nostrils. “Must you do that here? ” I ask him. He is waxing his bow with what smells like rancid goat fat. I glance up and notice for the first time that grey has begun to cajole a place in amongst the thick tangle of his short, black curls. He tells me he must leave, an announcement I have anticipated yet quietly disregarded. I think how sad his absence will make me. He laughs and I realize I have spoken my thought aloud. “I thought you'd be happy to be rid of me,” he says.
“Let us say your departure will give slightly more pain than your arrival. When will you go?”
“At sunrise.”
“Then waste no more time with an old man. Go, prepare yourself,” I say. Melyaket reminds me that there is real work yet to do; he cannot sit like me, day in and day out, doing nothing but admiring the sea.
A man of astonishingly fleet reflexes, which in my case are hilariously nonessential, Melyaket has taken a step backward before the thought to strike him has reached the muscles in my arm. Intention finally pairs with action, and my walking stick swings ineffectually past him. "You think this is nothing?!” I cry hoarsely, pointing a shaky