A Mixture of Madness, Book II of The Bow - By Levkoff, Andrew Page 0,46
neck. “You are faithful and wise, good Alexandros.” (My birth name!) “Stay close to him. Speak your truths as no other dare. Know that both our minds and hearts are fixed on Parthia; do this for your love of me and the will of your lord. He has need of you now; his need will be greater once Brundisium has faded behind the wake of his ships.” The lips which, by those words, funneled the separate fates of thousands into a single destiny now moved lightly to kiss me on the cheek. In the next moment, she had reached for her lord’s outstretched hand, and was gone.
I looked for Livia before she left, but my lady’s appeal and the ebullient arrival of Betto and Malchus blocked both sight and chance of seeing her. In the end, it was just us three and Hanno left to clean up after the display and put the field back into pristine preparedness. Two hours later, as we were walking back down the hill Malchus said, “What other talents have you been hiding in that skinny frame of yours?”
Betto scratched his head. “Can’t think what more there is to teach you. Never seen anything like it. Did you see the look on the faces of those veterans? Alexander, you’re an artist with a blade.” He slapped me on the back with such force I missed a step. The harder the smack, the greater the affection.
Hanno rushed to my rescue. “Stop it!” he shouted. “Don’t hurt my master’s back. He doesn’t like—”
“…for you to call me master,” I finished for him.
Malchus stopped and squatted on his haunches before Hanno. “He has scars, Hannibal. We all know that. But you mustn’t be ashamed for him; you must be proud. Our friend Alexander is a brave man. Did you know he fought a Roman general to earn those stripes?”
“He did?”
“That’s right, boy,” Betto said. “And anyway, I was just trying to hand him a compliment. You know what a compliment is, don’t you.”
“I know. A compliment is a nice thing to say about a person.”
“That’s right!” Betto said, impressed.
“Malchus gets them all the time. You don’t.”
“Kid, have you ever heard the expression, ‘respect your elders?’”
“No. But once I heard Father Jupiter say to master, ‘respect your betters.’”
Malchus sputtered. “Give it up, Flavius. You’re outmatched. ”
•••
Later, as we acknowledged the guards and passed through the tall gates into the estate and home, the sight of the wealth and privilege that had swallowed me whole was depressing. I thought of domina; did revenge make her blind to the toll their plan would take on her husband? On herself? The rest of us were so far beneath their scheming and their plots, though I stood on the Palatine, a Roman Olympus, to them we served but one purpose, to be the expendable instruments of their designs. The memory of her extravagant scent returned, an insistent rippling of juniper and cypress lapping against my senses, no less seductive than Circe’s perfume was to Odysseus. Unlike the hero, I would never possess any holy herb of moly to defend myself against my lady’s wishes. She might ask, but there was no choice implicit in her perfumed entreaty.
I thought I had carved out a miniscule refuge of freedom within this life, but after years of hiding I could feel the crumbling slide into a deeper darkness, dragging me toward yet another fate I would never have chosen for myself. I looked at Betto and Malchus and poor Hanno, terrified that they, too, would slip and stumble into the abyss, all of us falling helplessly into the darkness. Something about my practice these past weeks, at once troubling but unformed, chose that moment to coalesce into evanescent thought, and recognizing it, I snatched it from the air. “It is not enough,” I said before we parted company at the atrium, each to our assigned tasks. “You say I am an artist, Flavius? If we stop here, then all my works must remain incomplete, for I possess but half my paints and brushes.”
“Has it occurred to you,” said Betto, “that while you were out looking for the next great lecture series, most of the rest of us were happy just to get laid without our pricks falling off.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“What in Cerberus’s two tongues are you talking about?”
“I need more skills.”
Betto looked dumbfounded. “Why couldn’t you just say that?” He turned to Malchus. “Why couldn’t he just say that?”