• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 500 0

sticks wound with ivy. He himself is dressed in Pentheus’s robes; like the boy, the actor has disappeared, and no one seems to know what happened to him. What Carolus really wants me for, I think, is to prompt the actors when he’s onstage. Philip at any rate is occupied with his latest guest, Olympias’s brother, Alexandros. He spent years as the king’s ward in Pella, while Philip waited for him to come of age. Now Philip has just had him kinged in Molossos, and this is his first state visit to the court he called home for so long. He’s coloured like his sister—rosy, rusty, dark eyes—and Philip likes him. From behind the flies I can see them drinking steadily, heads together in conversation, often laughing. I doubt they’ll give the play much attention.

I tuck the head under my arm and stand ready to hand the sticks to the chorus as they file past. My palms sparkle with excitement; I’ve been giddy all day. I love this vantage point, the play from behind, and seeing all that’s gone into it. I love to be on the inside, the backside, the underside of anything, and see the usually unseen.

“And.” Carolus raises a hand, then brings it down. The music starts.

I’m not sure when exactly the boy slips in beside me. I look over and he’s simply there, watching the stage, rapt as I am. He notices the movement of my head, looks at me, and we both smile. This is the real thing. He takes the head from beneath my arm, helping, and I nod, as much as to say I’ll give him the signal when it’s time to hand it to the actor.

“Look, she’s coming,” the actors playing the chorus say in unison. “Agave, his mother, running back home. Her eyes! Look at her eyes! They’re staring. She is possessed. Take her into our midst, she is full of the god and his ecstasy.”

I nod. The boy gives the head to the actor playing Agave, who rushes it onstage. Then, for a moment, silence. A faltering. Carolus, beside me, looks up sharply from the text and hisses, “Women of the east.”

I look at the boy. He tosses the rag head he took from me in the air, catches it, and looks deliberately at the stage.

“Women of the east,” Carolus hisses, louder.

“Women of the east—Bacchae,” Agave says.

I remember the actor playing Pentheus had straight hair but a curly beard, and a mole beneath the left eye. I remember because I’m looking at his head now, cradled in the arms of the actor who plays Agave.

“Do you know us?” one of the chorus says. The others, staring at the head, have forgotten to speak. “Do you know who you are? Our true nature?”

“Look. It is a lion cub. I caught it. I caught it without nets. Look,” Agave says. His voice has gone shrill and his eyes are glazed. He’s drugged with shock.

In the audience, Philip has stopped talking to his guest. His eyebrows are up, he’s watching the stage. He’s interested now.

Afterwards, Carolus can’t stop shaking his head. “That was the best fucking performance I have ever seen in my entire miserable fucking life.”

The head is gone; he’s had a stagehand wrap it back up in the cloth the boy brought it in and dispose of it somewhere.

“I cauterized it, like you said,” the boy tells me. “It worked.”

“Fucking monkey monster,” Carolus says.

“I thought they might not do it if they knew ahead of time,” the boy says. “I was thinking of what you said about things looking real enough, and how you were always complaining about them all being such bad actors. And I thought, what if they didn’t have to act? What if they just had to be themselves?”

The actors have long since fled. Backstage smells of piss and vomit: pity and fear. Carolus will have laundry ahead of him after all.

“He died last night,” the boy continues. “I told you he was sick. I think things happen for a reason, don’t you?” For the first time, he looks—not doubtful, maybe, but impatient. “What?” He looks from Carolus to me, back and forth. “You know it was perfect. What?”

THIS MORNING, before the performance, Philip had sent for me. I found him in a courtyard surrounded by assorted lengths of wood, tilting at a soldier who parried with a shield. I’d noticed the guards