Ego's Odyssey Chapter 2

Chapter 2: The Emperor of Maladies

That night, I had a strange dream.

I was in my sickbed, in the snake-temple. A woman approached my bedside. It was Anima, gloriously naked. A blood cross was carved in the smooth skin of her abdomen. She held a birch wand in her left hand, twined with serpents and tipped with a red stone. She touched the stone against my forehead, and I was flooded by torrents of rage and sorrow. Madness seized me. Tears streamed from my eyes. I rose from the bed, crying and screaming. My buboes popped in a painful black splash.

I woke again. It was day. A rectangle of sunlight lit up the bottom half of my bed.

I looked to my left.

Anima was sat on a stool, watching me with her cool green eyes. There was that ambiguous, condescending half-smile again. A huge white snake with black spots was sprawled across her broad shoulders and entwined around her right arm. It hissed at me.

‘Is it deadly?’

She looked down at the snake’s head, unconcerned.

‘Yes. But we have plenty of anti-venom.’

‘Where did you get that from?’

‘It’s made from the venom. The source of the sickness is the source of the cure.’

I pondered those words, which seemed allusive and strange. Then I winced.

‘Do you have any opium?’

‘You don’t need it.’

‘But my buboes – my back!’ I cried, panicking. The pain seared my spine like a hot poker.

‘Trust me,’ she said, placing her hand on my forehead and caressing my skin gently, as if I were a child with a fever.

She seemed totally unconcerned about catching plague from me. If he wasn’t already infected, Placebo wouldn’t have come near me without his ibis-beaked plague doctor’s mask, stuffed with garlic, cloves and other herbs said to ward off the malign spirits which caused the sickness. Her serene confidence was contagious. I calmed down.

‘But —’ I protested weakly.

‘Shhh. Don’t think about the pain,’ she said, pressing a cup of scented water to my cracked, blue lips.

I sipped. The water was fragrant, laced with herbs. Only then did I realise how thirsty I was, how parched my throat. I gulped down some more. She pulled the brown earthenware cup away – too soon for my liking.

‘Did you dream?’

‘Yes.’

‘Tell me your dream.’

‘Why? It’s nonsense and madness, like all dreams.’

‘The world is as much nonsense as it is meaning, and there is a difference between madness and divine madness.’

‘Well there was nothing divine about this dream, I assure you.’

‘But we are in the Snake-Temple of Esklepios. The god sends his patients dreams that they might be cured.’

That made me think. Such a notion was unutterably alien to me, for our physicians relied on bloodletting and dismissed dreams as a kind of mental dungheap.

‘Please. It is my duty as a sister here to interpret the dreams given you by the good god.’

Faintly embarrassed, I told her of my dream, though I substituted the goddess Melea for Anima.

She nodded, understanding perfectly.

‘That is a good dream.’

‘Good? It was frightening and painful and weird!’

‘Those are the best dreams!’

‘What does it mean?’ I asked.

‘It means your salvation lies in talking to me.’

Panic seized me, like a serpent crushing my ribs. I was in the care of a madwoman.

‘I enjoy speaking with you, but doing so is hardly going to cure me. I really think I ought to be bled. Doctor Placebo says—'

‘Tell me how you got here,’ she said, ignoring my protestations.

‘Well, surely you know? We were shipwrecked in a storm, in the Olearic sea.’

‘No. From the beginning.’

‘The beginning? Of the voyage?’

‘If you like.’

‘Well, I was persuaded to join the ship’s crew. I was bored. At home, on the farm with mother.’

‘Where was your father?’

‘He died. Ten years ago.’

‘How?’

‘Apoplexy.’

‘I am sorry to hear it,’ she said, with due sympathy, but her eyes flashed with morbid interest.

‘Yes, it was something of a relief when he finally died – for all of us,’ I said, gravely.

She nodded. Her eyes glistened redly. Were those tears? It was impossible to tell, with me all bathed in golden light from the window behind my bed, and she in purple shadow. Her beautiful face certainly had a mournful aspect. She grabbed my hand and squeezed, gently. I felt myself overcome by a sudden surge of sorrow, but held it back.

‘Anyway,’ I said, carrying on hastily, ‘since father died, we had to sell the fields and all of our livestock and could only keep the farmhouse. I was forced to work in the vineyards of our neighbour, picking grapes.’

‘Hard work.’

‘Bloody hard. And unpleasant. In the heat of summer.’

‘Continue.’

‘Well, I was slaving in the vineyards one day, when Nero, who worked with me – even then, the bastard always managed to steal some of my quota of grapes while my back was turned – Nero came up to me and tells me of an “opportunity.”’

‘Nero – he was one of the crew.’

‘Yes, the tall, handsome one with the smug grin.’

‘The one who looks like you?’

That gave me pause. I’d never thought of him like that.

‘I suppose he does. He survived, then?’

‘Oh yes. He’s another one of my patients. He is badly injured.’

‘Right. Well, if you hear what I have to say about him, maybe you’ll think twice before emptying his bedpan.’

She giggled at that.

‘Anyway, in those days, he was just as cocky, and he had a little dog, Rufus. Does he still have it, or did it die in the shipwreck?’

‘Oh, you mean the little black thing?’

‘Yes, the little yapping bastard.’

‘He survived without so much as a scrape. I’m surprised you haven’t heard him. He kept half the ward awake last night, so we moved him to the kennel.’

‘I’m too exhausted, thank the gods; I slept like the dead last night. Anyway, Rufus was barking away at me as usual, when Nero offered me a job aboard ship.’

‘Tell me exactly what each of you said, and describe the scene, to the best of your recollection.’

I thought this a strange request, but since there was nothing sensitive in our conversation, and she was beautiful, I decided to humour her.

‘Very well. Ah, let’s see. It was a bright sunny day in the vineyard. Afternoon. The earth was dry and dusty; we hadn’t had a good rainfall in weeks. Many grapes were withering on the vine. I wore my old mud-stained tunic, and Nero, who was always better dressed than me, wore his fancy black toga.

“It pays five drachmae a month,” he said, of the job aboard ship.

“And what do I have to do?”

“Loading and unloading cargo, maintaining the sails and ropes, cleaning the deck and scraping barnacles off the hull—"

“In other words, I’d be a deck hand.”

“Hey, do you really want to stay here all your life, picking grapes and listening to your mother gripe about the harridans at the well?”

“No, but —”

“It may not be any more prestigious than picking grapes, but working on a ship gives you a chance to see the wider world. Have you ever travelled beyond the borders of Aeonia?”

“No,” I admitted, grudgingly.

“Have you ever had a woman?” he said, a sleazy grin on his bronzed, handsome face.

I blushed. I had not.

“I knew it!” he cried, with some satisfaction. “Well look laddie, here’s your big chance to wipe the mother’s milk from your chops.”

I demurred.

“You know, I woke up today and felt a terrible sense of impending doom,” he said.

“What have you done this time?”

“Oh, nothing in particular. It’s just, the idea of going to work again. The same old boring routine. Six days a week. Maybe a carouse and a tumble with Tabitha at the tavern on a feast day, if I’m lucky. Aren’t you bored? I mean, really bored to death? Sick to the back teeth of it all, the smell, the backache, the ripe stench of the manure carts, the old neighbours and their complaints. I know I am.”

“Well, yes, I am bored. But things could be worse.”

“Things could be better! Riches are to be had on the high seas. Take my friend Alexius. He enlisted with a company of mercenaries, saved Princes Therosopore of Maleto – who apparently, was most grateful! – and my friend Papadopolous, who found buried treasure diving off the coast of Mesopoea! He now lives like a king, with a harem of Meso women hanging round his legs.”

“That must be cumbersome.”

He smiled at me.

“Look, these adventures all sound wonderful, but most men who take to the seas report bad food, squalid conditions, bilge rats, plague, fights among the crew, and getting lashed by their tyrant of a captain. It’s not perfect here, but I have enough food and a roof over my head.”

“Is that all you want from life? Because look at farmer Branso over there. Not a tooth left in his haggard old head. He was content with life here in the dung-fields of Aeonia. And he’s still here. He’s a greybeard, but he knows less of the world than a child. He is your future, if you stay here the rest of your life. Do you not want more out of life than that?”

“Of course I want more. But I have my mother to think about.”

“Your mother will be fine without you. I think you need her more than she needs you.”

“That’s not true!”

“Alright, then prove me wrong. Be a man! Join the crew! Look,” he said, “it’s only for six months, then you can come back to mummy.”

Seeing I was still on the fence, he went on:

“Besides, if you stick around here, there are no marriageable women except for your cousins, your mother will get old and sick and you’ll have to take care of her. Wouldn’t you rather be seducing beautiful nymphs on the salt isle of Thessalia? – which, by the way, is our first destination.”

He had me at nymphs, the bastard.’

She smiled.

‘Well, if you wanted nymphs, you have come to the right place. All of our nurses are nymphs: brood of the Goddess Aeola.’

My heart leapt. As a boy, nymphs had been the stuff of fairy-tale – and fantasy. Distant descendants of the gods, they were said to have magical powers of enchantment and, though they were mortal, to live longer than ordinary women.

‘Are you a nymph?’

‘No,’ she shook her head, as if amused at my naïvete. ‘Now please, go on.’

‘Alright. Well, fool that I am, I was seduced by Nero’s promises of riches and women, and I enlisted with him at the port. The captain, a gruff old salt named Piraeus, set me to work – and he was not shy about using the lash when I did a bad job, but that was to be expected. What I did not expect, was for Nero to turn on me like a viper the very instant we set sail. It was as if he was just waiting until it was too late for me to back out, before unleashing all of his malice upon me.’

‘How do you mean?’ She asked.

I frowned.

‘It started out with mockery. He called me “piss-swill” because amongst my many onerous duties I had to empty the bucket we used for a lavatory. Then he and the men started pissing on deck so I would have to clean it before the captain surfaced in the morning – when I rose late, it was the lash for me. I was their sacrificial lamb. In this way he won a band of hangers on. My suffering was the rope that bound them,’ I said, with bitterness.

‘That must have felt terrible.’

‘You think that’s bad?’ I shook my head. ‘Soon they were saddling me and riding me about the deck like a donkey, and when I went to bathe, they mocked my manhood and snapped my naked body with towels, leaving me covered in red welts the size of rosebuds – and once, they emptied the shit bucket over me in my sleep!’ I raved, indignant. ‘Then Nero started stealing from our small cargo of apples. When the captain counted them, he started a witch-hunt. Nero denounced me as the thief; his thugs, who had also eaten of the fruit, backed him up. My punishment was to be tied to the mast and pelted with the apples. More and more joined in the fun, until the whole crew, Captain Piraeus included, were hurling apples at my head. They didn’t mind that some apples flew overboard, and many were damaged, lowering the price they could fetch in the markets of Thessalia. “Tis to be expected with perishables,” the captain said, with an insouciant shrug, when I pointed this out to him. He didn’t care about the fruits, for the ones they threw were the crabbiest, and our main cargo was logs from the pine forests of Aeonia.

They called me scum, thief, goat-fucker, bastard, pervert – every name you can think of. The whole crew had nothing but contempt for me. In the face of such universal derision, I began to think there really was something to their claims. I came to see myself as scum, a bastard, a goat-fucker – even though I didn’t steal the apples and have never so much as touched a goat. Being thought a thief made me into one; I found a stray apple by the gunwale and ate it. I was getting the blame for a crime I did not commit; why not reap the rewards?’

She shook her head, but was unable to supress the ghost of a smile. ‘Did you not fight back?’

I grimaced and blushed with shame.

‘Well, at first it wasn’t so bad. It began as mere idle mockery and horseplay, and their attacks worsened slowly, so slowly that, like a frog in a pan of boiling water, I didn’t notice how terrible my lot had become until he had turned the whole crew against me – and by then, it was too late to jump out! When I confronted Nero about his behaviour, he wrote it off as pranks between friends, and implied I was making too much of it. He was always more or less respectful to me in private. We even joked together, sometimes. It was only when he was with the others that something came over him and he became a tyrant as bad as any tyrant in the history books, and no less terrible for the modest scope of his dominion. I honestly believe he would have been worse than Argo the Ripper, if Fate had but given him the opportunity to practise his depredations on the grand scale.’

‘And later, when things got out of hand, you still refused to fight back?’ she asked, unimpressed.

‘By then, it was too late. Or so it seemed. For Nero had a friend – or rather, a crony, for such men are incapable of true friendship and know only slaves or rivals – a man named Doloma, who put the fear of god into us all.’

‘Describe him to me. He may be among the patients here.’

‘He will be. That man is like a cockroach; he is the kind of insect-scum that survives even the harshest conditions. Doloma is of middling height and balding, yet otherwise extremely hairy and ape-like, with long arms and short legs. He is wiry and prematurely aged, for he is ravaged by a terrible anxiety. You will know him by the lines of care on his high forehead and, if he is awake, his habit of direst pessimism.’

‘Ah yes, I know the man of whom you speak. I had to muzzle him. He talked his bunkmates into killing themselves, after relating in great detail all the horrors of the plague, the awful painful death, the creeping buboes growing larger and more agonising every day, the bloody flux that awaited them all. I will repeat no more of what he said, for your sake. Merely to listen to him was a torment of lamentations worse than the fate he described – worse even than Nekriya, the darkest circle of the underworld, to any man possessed of an imagination.’

‘Yes, that is he,’ I said, grimly. ‘He was always worrying about storms, aboard our ship, the Olympias. “Storms are bad on these seas!” he would say to me. “Just last week two ships were lost to storms! We will probably go the same way. I wrote my will before heading out. Did you?”

I said no.

“That was a gross oversight,” he said. “A man should always be prepared to meet his end, because those who are not prepared are more likely to die.”’

‘That is quite the crew you found yourself amongst,’ she said, amazed at my misfortune.

I laughed, a short cynical bark.

‘I have ere been a lucky man.’

‘Carry on with the story, while I change your bandages,’ she said, peeling one off the weeping bubo on my right forearm. The once pristine white bandage was black as the hand of a leper.

‘Well, whenever I spoke of revenge, Doloma would chime in – he has an annoying and uncanny knack of being everywhere at once – and he warned me that if I tried anything of the sort, Nero’s band of thugs would weigh in on his side and I would find myself outnumbered.

“They will beat you to a pulp and throw you to the sharks,” he said, in his shrill, whining voice, the kind of voice that makes you want to cover your ears.’

‘Sounds like idle talk. As you say, such men are incapable of inspiring true friendship. What loyalty could they possibly owe to Nero?’

‘I do not know. He charmed them, as he charmed me into coming aboard the ship. Nero has a peculiar effect on people – he can be harsh and rude, but at other times he is personable and funny, his words are honeyed and well-chosen and there is a blind conviction to his every utterance, even his most blatant falsehoods, that is strangely compelling. The man once swayed a goatherd to give up his flock in exchange for a bag of rocks, by saying they were from the ruins of Thalamis’ palace, and worth a fortune in the antique markets of Aeos.’

‘I know the type,’ she said, lowering her eyes and grimacing in sympathy. I might have asked her to elaborate, but I was too wrapped up in my own sorrows to spare a thought for hers.

‘Anyway, I was glad I did not stand up to him. One man, the cook Mapiso, attacked him with the ladle, and it went as Doloma said; they beat him and cut him with knives – they dunked him headfirst in his bubbling cauldron and threw him overboard. He was never seen again.’

‘What did they tell the captain?’

‘That Mapiso was drunk last night – true enough – and must have fallen overboard in his stupor.’

‘And he was believed?’

‘Like I said, Nero is a good talker, and the very devil when it comes to slipping out of trouble or heaping the blame on some other fellow. If the captain harboured any suspicions, he kept them to himself. We were a crew of only fifty, and by then, Nero had sixteen followers – the sixteen toughest men aboard. I suppose Piraeus was scared, like the rest of us. A gang of murderous brutes had taken over his ship. And the most terrible of them all, the ringleader of this band of cutthroats, was my only friend; a man I had once regarded as a brother, for I have no natural brothers.’

‘An awful betrayal,’ she said, gravely. ‘But tell me – is that all Nero did to you?’

‘What do you mean?’

I had no idea what she was referring to.

She frowned. Her mouth squirmed with unease.

‘The scars on your back?’ she said, looking me straight in the eye.

My stomach lurched with dread. I became frantic, panicky, shrill.

‘How do you—’

‘When you washed up on the shore, you wore tattered rags. We stripped you and saw scars – healed, but recent.’

Then the memories came flooding back. Until then, I had honestly forgotten.

‘I don’t want to. I am ashamed. You will think less of me.’ My voice was small and breaking, like a pubescent.

‘My dear, I already know.’

‘Then what use is there in me telling you what you already know?’ I said, thinking she meant to humiliate me for her amusement.

‘You cannot heal until you hear yourself say it,’ she said, with considerable authority.

‘How—’

‘Just tell me.’

‘They came upon me at night, in my hammock. The others muzzled me and tied me with their dirty loincloths and Nero…’

‘Continue,’ she said, with considerable urgency, as if my very life depended on my next utterance.

‘Nero whipped me,’ I blurted.

She grabbed my hand.

I began to sob. It was not the cruelty of Nero that finally moved me to tears, tears that had long been dammed up: it was her show of sympathy.

‘The burns?’ she prompted, gently.

‘They poured scolding water from the kitchens on my back.’

‘And what of the other men in the galley?’

‘The others pretended to be asleep, but they heard. After that, Nero did not go down in their estimation; but I certainly did, for they had witnessed my weakness. I was every man’s whipping boy, and what shreds of dignity remained to me, vanished,’ I said, in a wavering voice, fragile as glass. ‘Ever since, I’ve felt dead inside.’

‘You must be furious.’

‘I want to kill him, I want to kill, kill, kill them all ­– I want to stab him in the gut and rip out his bowels! I want to slash his eyes, stab his throat and twist the knife and burn him alive!’ I said, seething.

I seemed to lose myself in the blood-reverie, and she was so damn easy to speak to, such a good listener, and you could tell she understood everything I said – not only with the mind, but with the heart. Aside from anything, I was ashamed at my cowardice, especially before a woman of such beauty, and this, more than anything, fuelled my paroxysm of loathing.

‘And how is your back?’ she asked.

I blinked. I hadn’t thought of my back in minutes, so engrossed was I in my story – in the burning intensity of my hatred for Nero.

‘Better – it doesn’t hurt so much.’

My spine, which had felt like a bag of broken glass, was now reduced to a dull ache.

She nodded, and smiled, smugly, as if this was all entirely foreseeable.

‘You asked what my healing method was. This is it.’

‘What? Talking? Ranting and raving?’

‘Reliving traumatic memories and releasing buried emotions.’

‘Nonsense! My ailments are of the body, not the mind! I came to you plaguey and crippled – not some lunatic who barks at the moon!’ I said, with strange vehemence.

‘Then how come your back is feeling better?’

I paused. She had me there.

‘You took my mind off the pain, that’s all. Distracted me from it.’

‘Pain, illness, injury – these are the real distractions. They distract you from your worst emotions, your worst memories, from everything you have not done but wish that you had and everything you have experienced but do not want to think of – this we call the Unknown Mind, and it is the root of all earthly woes: the Emperor of Maladies. Such dark, unpleasant thoughts and feelings are thrown out of our minds like slops from the bucket, where they fester and nourish vermin – but they are the key to our salvation. How else could merely telling your story reduce the pain?’

‘Well, even if your talking magic could alleviate my pain, my spine is still broken, and I’m riddled with plague!’ I cried, in the grip of a curious hysteria.

She raised her thick right eyebrow.

‘Take a look at your buboes.’

I leaned forward. The black blob on my stomach was no longer angry and taut; it had burst, and sagged, like a blister. I probed it with my fingers. Puss wept from the edges. It was a soft, squelchy, suppurating mass.

‘But – that’s impossible!’ I could not believe my eyes. It was as if a goddess had come down from her throne and unveiled herself before me, in all her radiant splendour.

‘You deny the evidence of your senses?’

I was speechless.

‘But,’ I stammered, thunderstruck, ‘there must be some rational explanation – the potion you gave me must have healing properties – if it is not some such elixir, why do you give it to us?'

She threw back her golden head and laughed.

‘The potion merely contains herbs to make you emotional and loosen your tongue. The same effect could be achieved with a bottle of wine, the only differences being that this sharpens your memory instead of dulling it, and there is no hangover afterwards.’

‘I do not believe you!’

‘And you do not believe!’ she cried, much amused. ‘The healing quickens, the more you believe. What care you how I work my miracles – you are delivered – is that not enough?’

‘To believe is not enough for me. I wish to know.’

She regarded me with newfound respect, and a sly smile of secret knowledge, as if to say: ‘We shall see.’

‘To know you must first believe. For what becomes manifest in the world is conditioned by our beliefs. This is what the prophets meant by the “leap of faith.”’

‘Perhaps I would believe more if I knew more.’

She looked at me, appraising my worth, like a heifer at the market.

‘You are the first man of the crew to make such a demand. Seekers of knowledge have ere been welcome on our isle.’ She sighed. ‘Ask what you will, and I shall answer what I can.’

I took a moment to formulate my question:

‘How is this possible? I mean, how does merely talking of the past work a miracle like that?’

‘There is inside every mind, a distinct personality, whose role it is to distract us from the Unknown and lead us into error. We call him The Deceiver. Pain, desire and fear are his weapons of choice, for nothing grabs our attention like suffering, sex and terror.’

‘He sounds like Doloma.’

She nodded, serenely.

‘As within, so without.’

I blinked. She remained silent, as if for dramatic effect, or to make a point.

‘Care to explain your maxim?’

‘Everything you see in the Material Realm, has a corresponding figure inside your mind: the source of the external manifestation.’

It was as if she had laid before me a banquet of the ripest fruits and choicest cuts in the land. I knew not where to begin. The truth was so profound I could not digest it all, before she had moved on:

‘The purpose of The Deceiver is to keep us focused on the Material Realm, root of all pleasure, pain, desire and fear. Peer behind the veil, into the Unknown, that festering refuse heap of memory, grief, rage, trauma and guilt hidden in the darkest corners of every mind – and, like a confidence trickster caught in a lie, The Deceiver is forced to beat a retreat, or at least change tack, for to persist in a swindle before a disbelieving audience is a fruitless endeavour.’

‘There is a certain logic to what you say. And it is hard to argue against such phenomenal results,’ as I said these words, and my conviction grew, the burning pain in my spine began to seep away, as if doused by some secret water.

‘This is nothing. I have seen men in worse condition than you recover from their ailments. I have healed scores of lepers. I have saved hundreds from the plague, the very old and the very young among them. I have banished malaria; conquered the pox; cleansed the blackest of lungs. I have mended broken necks and broken hearts; I have lifted the veil of darkness from the eyes of the blind; and I have shrunk cankers the size of hams,’ she said, in a baritone of frightening solemnity.

‘Incredible.’ I was going to ask if she was serious, but nothing about the woman was facetious. ‘Forgive me if I struggle to comprehend what you say, for it goes against everything I have ever been taught about medicine, philosophy – and life.’

‘Of course, you will need time; time to reflect on all I have said, to test my truths against the experience of your life. You have heard enough for one day.’ She turned to go.

‘But—’ I said, like an infant greedy for more milk.

She held up her hand.

‘For now, all you need to know is that illness, all illness, all injury, all strife, is a distraction from that great storehouse of everything you think you are not – namely, the Unknown Mind; and that belief in this great truth, the secret law of all life, and a willingness to examine the darkest parts of yourself, is all that is required to heal – to make a full and complete recovery.’

‘A full and complete recovery…’ I murmured to myself.

Then I cried. Some knot inside me had been cut loose. I wept like a babe for I knew in my heart she spoke the truth. It was such a great relief from the miserable anxiety that had held me in its grip ever since I awoke to discover my back broken, and my body ravaged by plague.

She returned to my side, leaned down and embraced me; I wrapped my arms around her soft, fragrant neck and continued to weep shamelessly, my tears rolling down her bare shoulder. Strange, how joy made me cry more than despair ever could. When I had finished, she wished me a good night, rose and departed, her day’s work complete.