Antiquities: Five Stories Set in Ancient Worlds Read online

  I stood in the flowing water with the sun shining on the crown of my head and hugged myself and the seed child inside, staring toward a sea I could smell but not see in the reed-wrack of the shimmering little islands around me.

  I turned to look upriver. I saw a group of copper-skinned, black-haired people staring at me. One had a javelin in his hand, poised point toward me, but at my glance, he dropped it into the river, which carried it away. I wondered if the god of this river was my friend.

  The people dropped to their knees before me and lowered their foreheads to touch the water. Only then did I realize they must have seen me change from heifer to human. Perhaps that would startle anyone, especially those not acquainted with the behavior of my gods.

  I felt a tide of something strange in my chest, the taste of delicious nourishment on my tongue, the best flavor in my mouth since my last visit to the city. Honey? No, better. This must be ambrosia, the food of the gods.

  I was the daughter of a water god and a naiad, but I had never been worshipped before. This was what fed me: the people's awe and wonder. It warmed me all through. Power glowed on the tips of my fingers, sang along my skin.

  No wonder Zeus got so excited.

  I realized I was a shapeshifter myself, whether I had effected the change or not.

  I took a step toward my new people. The rustle of power flowed over my skin, clothing me in gold, colored beads, and the feathers of a bird I had never seen. On my head, the weight of a domed crown settled. I smiled at my worshippers. I did not understand their muttered chants and prayers, but I felt the delicious power flowing into me. Oh, yes. I could get used to this.

  I would be a good god, I decided. They would be glad they had chosen me. I would help them, not hurt them.

  You know, you can tell yourself things like that before you know what you're getting into, and even believe it. This power is heady stuff, though. I'm not sure I'm going to wield it well.

  I can only hope.

  The Curse Tablet

  Lucius found the witch at one of the thermopolia near Ostia Harbor. She sat on a stone bench near the sale counter of the sidewalk restaurant, a pottery bowl of puls porridge in her lap and a wedge of bread in her hand. The restaurant was doing brisk business — many people stopped by for their breakfasts; the man behind the counter was hard-pressed to keep up with requests for round loaves of bread. A child darted in and pulled a loaf from the bottom of a stack so skillfully the shopkeeper never noticed it. Lucius remembered doing things like that before his mother sold him to Gaius Tullius Paulus.

  The spring air was soft, damp, and almost warm, heavy with scents of smoke and sewage, brine and fish. A lot of good-natured shouting and joking filled the air. Toward the water, someone played a flute, but Lucius could not catch the melody, only a sense of the music, which was melancholy and carried a thin thread of power. Lucius had his own flute tucked into his waistband under a fold of tunic. It was a memento of his childhood, when he had played for money and food in the marketplace with his mother, sister, and older brother. He rarely found time to play these days.

  Most people ate as they walked toward their work, but some squatted on the sidewalk to eat, or sat on benches under the overhanging arches of the shops that lined the street. The donkey-driven mills in the center of the building were grinding grain, adding to the cacophony. The smell of baking bread made Lucius hungry; he had had his own breakfast at dawn, a couple hours earlier.

  No one sat near the witch. She tossed crumbs into the street. Small birds landed to eat the crumbs, scattering every time someone came near.

  Lucius approached the witch, his gaze on the muddy paving stones. He did not want to meet the witch's eyes. One of the other slaves in Master Gaius's household, a strapping man named Deodatus, had been bewitched only last week, falling into frequent fits, and afraid, now, of water. Since Deodatus's bewitching, Lucius had been pressed into accompanying the master to the public baths and scraping the oil off his skin; Deodatus could no longer abide the sight of the pools.

  "Have you a task for me?" the witch asked Lucius. Her voice was warm, low, and pleasant.

  "Are you the one known as Cassia the Witch?" he asked. The cook had told him the witch had much shaggy red hair, and that she wore it loose instead of braided or dressed, and that the color of her tunic was usually blue, and that on cool mornings like this one, she wore an overrobe of paler blue. All of which she was and wore: he had seen as much, before he fixed his gaze on the ground.

  "I am called Cassia," she said.

  "My master wants to hire you."

  "I won't work for someone who won't look at me," said Cassia. She tossed crumbs toward his feet, and he was standing so still that the birds landed, pecking near his sandals.

  "Honored mistress, I don't want you to work for me," Lucius told the birds at his feet. "It is my master who needs your services."

  "I won't accept his commission unless you look at me," she said.

  He sighed and closed his hand around the bag of denarii tied at his waist, enough to hire the witch for ten curse tablets, if the cook was to be believed. The cook had told the master's personal servant about the witch's powers. The personal servant had gossiped to the master, and the master had decided this was the route he wanted to go. The master's marketplace rival had stolen and imprisoned the master's mistress, and such a deed could not go unavenged.

  Lucius touched the slave collar around his neck, with its inscription of ownership. Most of Master Gaius's slaves didn't wear collars, but Lucius had made one unwise attempt to run away when he was ten years old and new to the household, before he realized that life could be much worse. The collar was his penance; he had been wearing it for five years now. He had never done anything else to jeopardize his position in Master Gaius's household. He wasn't ready to start now.

  He had been charged to find and hire this witch. He looked into her eyes.

  They were as green as the glass tiles in a water mosaic. The witch did not blink. Lucius felt his will run out of him like sand.

  "You're a pretty boy," she said. "Hold out your hand."

  His arm lifted, though he did not direct it. The witch set her bread on top of her porridge bowl, reached into a wallet at her waist, pulled out a red string, and tied it around his wrist. He felt the magic in the knots as she laced the ends together. "There, now. You'll come when I call you, won't you, Lucius?"

  He swallowed. His Adam's apple bobbed against the collar, where his name was written for anyone who could read to see: "I am Lucius. Hold me so that I do not run away, and take me back to my master, the most illustrious man Gaius Tullius Paulus, who lives on the corner of Cardo Maximus and Via Di Diana." "Yes, mistress," Lucius said to the witch.

  "What does your master want?"

  "A curse tablet." His voice was steady. Now that the worst had happened and he had been bewitched, he was no longer afraid of her. Fear would come later, when she pulled the red thread and made him do her bidding.

  "Do you know the text of it?"

  "I've memorized the outline." He had scribed what his master wanted onto a wax tablet, smoothed it out, written it again twice more, each time erasing it, trusting his mind to hold it; he didn't want to carry a curse through the streets, where any citizen or freedman might claim authority over him and ask to see what he carried.

  "Do you have money to pay me? I charge by the word. Does he want many words?"

  "He does," said Lucius.

  "Do you have any personal thing from the one he is cursing? Hair? Nail clippings? Lost teeth, or something the accursed has touched often?"

  Lucius touched the other pouch at his waist. He had sneaked into Quintus Valerius Cato's house, with generous bribes to Master Quintus's slaves at a time when Master Quintus was in his shop and his wife and children had gone to visit relatives. The slaves, unhappy in their household and willing to take small risks, had let Lucius into Master Quintus's room, though they warned him Quintus was meticulous in burning any hair he
brushed and any nails he clipped. They had also let him see Prisca, Master Gaius's mistress, chained to a bed in one of the slave rooms near the back of the house. She had cried and begged for his help. All he had been able to do for her was give Master Quintus's slaves money and hope they spent at least a fraction of it on food for her.

  On a pillow of Master Quintus's sleeping couch, Lucius had found a single short and shining hair. He had pressed it into a ball of wax so he wouldn't lose it. "I have it," he told the witch.

  "Come to my workshop." She handed him her food, the bread still stacked atop the bowl, tossed a coin to the baker — "I'll bring the bowl back tomorrow," she said, and he nodded to her — and strode down the street toward a block of sagging tenements. Lucius, who had lived in worse places, followed her up a rickety staircase to a hallway on the third floor, which was built of wood. The ceiling was blackened from lamp smoke; one window at the far end of the hall let in a little light.

  The witch unlocked the third door to the right and let Lucius into a cramped apartment. A sturdy work table took up most of the room. Shelves to the left overflowed with filled glass and pottery jars and wooden boxes and some things that were dried and looked as though they had joints and bones. "Sit," said the witch, gesturing toward a square stool.

  Lucius sat while the witch went to a shelf and fetched a rolled papyrus scroll with many darkened finger marks on it, a stack of prepared lead sheets, and a stylus. She also brought a wax tablet. "Tell me," she said, opening the hinged wood backing of the tablet to reveal the waxed surfaces inside.

  "Since it is a matter of love, he thought the curse should be directed to Venus," Lucius said.

  The witch shook her head. "Venus is cruel, but she doesn't traffic in the kinds of curses I write. This is a curse to harm another unless restitution is made, correct?"

  "Yes."

  "Was something stolen?"

  "My master's mistress has been taken captive and imprisoned by his rival. She was a slave at the brothel down on the crossroads by the water, the House of the Three Gorgons. My master paid for her exclusive use, but his rival bought her from the proprietess and now has her imprisoned in his house."

  The witch tapped her lower lip with the tip of the stylus. Her eyes narrowed. "Interesting. Not a situation I've encountered before. Usually I work with stolen objects, not people." She straightened. "Make the appeal to Mars or Mercurius. They'll get this sort of work done for you."

  "All right," said Lucius. "You choose."

  The witch's green eyes gleamed as she stared at him. She bent, unrolled the scroll, consulted it, and wrote on the wax.

  Lucius watched the stylus trace elegant letters. He had learned to read and write along with Master Gaius's younger children, who were still being taught by a Greek slave at home. Master Gaius knew Lucius had a good mind, and hoped to make a secretary of him if he proved steady and reliable. Seven years in the slave collar, and then Lucius would be freed of it, with more trust to grow as he could earn it. The master also let him practice the flute and play for guests at dinner sometimes. Without the click of his sister's castanets and the strum of his brother's lyre, Lucius couldn't infuse the music with power, but he played songs he had learned from sailors and travelers and soldiers, anyone he had met as a child, and all those songs carried a power of memory from everyone who had sung them and passed them on. He wasn't sure he'd ever reclaim his music magic, which had died the day his brother died, killed by a drunken soldier for an imagined insult. Since that day he had played alone, for his mother sold him soon after, with his consent, so she would have enough money to protect his sister from becoming a slave until she was older. Maybe his price had given her enough of a dowry that she could marry. Lucius didn't know; his mother and sister had left Ostia, hoping Rome would be kinder to them.

  "Most holy Mercurius," wrote the witch, and then, "Your master's name?" she asked Lucius.

  Even though he knew the master's name was an important part of the invocation, Lucius hesitated. A name was power, and she was a witch. "Gaius Tullius Paulus," he said. He touched his collar, a nervous habit he had been trying to lose. Of course his master's name was right there, the etched letters dents under his fingertips.

  The witch wrote again. "Gaius Tullius Paulus salutes you, offers you the gift of this prayer and begs you act on his behalf. In return for your help he will give half the worth of the woman, when recovered, to your temple." She looked to Lucius, her eyebrows lifted in question.

  "We don't know what Master Quintus paid for her," he said.

  "How much does your master want the woman's freedom?"

  "I think he wishes he had thought to buy her himself," Lucius said, "but his wife would never have allowed him to have her in the house. I don't think he could have afforded her, either." Master Gaius had inherited money, but he was not the wisest trader, and had lately invested in several ventures that had failed.

  "What did he tell you to offer the god?" She smoothed the wax, erasing the words.

  "A hundred denarii."

  "Cheapskate."

  Lucius shrugged.

  "What does he want in return for this gift?" she asked.

  Lucius closed his eyes and recited the curse. "Let the thief, Quintus Valerius Cato, suffer in every part until he releases the stolen woman Prisca. Let him not eat nor drink nor sleep nor defecate until he has made restitution and freed her. Holy one, I give to you his heart and mind, his name, his reputation, his whole being to punish in the worst possible ways until he releases her. Blind his eyes and close up his ears. Dry up his speech and cripple his feet. Render him useless in bed. Make his hands feeble and his bones ache. For this aid I will give a gift of — " Lucius stopped, checked to see if she had written down everything he said.

  "Go on, go on," she said, irritated.

  "One hundred denarii to the temple of Venus," he said.

  "Yes. I'll change that to Mercurius."

  "My master said I was to ask you if all this were in the correct form."

  "Close enough. I can craft it to fit. This is going to take a big tablet, though, and I charge a sestertius a word. Also, one denarius for the ritual components, which I will do in secret, and another for the curse doll. Give me the hair."

  Lucius fetched the ball of wax from its pouch and set it before her, turning it so the hair showed on top.

  "Good," said the witch. "For the placement of the tablet and the curse doll in the appropriate well or temple with the right words and objects — hmm, that's where I'll take my payment from you, my boy."

  He gazed at her steadily. Light shimmered across her eyes from a source he could not see. She smiled.

  "If my master refuses to pay the last part of the price?" Lucius asked.

  "Tell him I won't take anything from you you can't spare." She leaned over her draft of the curse, added more words. He watched them flow in the trail of her stylus: a string of words in a language he did not understand, full of doubled vowels and strange combinations of consonants. She glanced up, saw him watching, and said, "I'll write the same thing at the top. It's an incantation to other forces, and will make the spell more binding still." She counted the words, counting the last words twice, then told him the total. "I want half of it now."

  He turned his back on her and counted out coins. She was charging him more than the cook had predicted, but less than he had in his purse.

  "Come back tonight. You can help me with the placement, and then I'll take the rest of my pay," she said.

  On the way back to his master's house, Lucius went through the market to pick up some fruit for the cook. He saw a pair of young musicians playing in front of the fish stall, which had sold its catch earlier and had closed its shutters for the day. The girl played the lyre and the boy played a double flute. There was enough similarity in their features and the pale gold of their hair that he suspected they were siblings. Their instruments sounded pure and pitch-perfect, but when they sang (Greek songs poorly translated into Latin), their voices w
ere rough. Few coins fell into the brass bowl at their feet.

  He leaned against a wall under a portico not far from them and took out his flute. As they began a new song, an old hymn to Apollo, Lucius lifted his flute to his lips and played a counter melody.

  For the first time since his brother's death the music pulsed through him like his own heartbeat. Power gathered as he played, lifted him on his own feet and brought him to the other musicians until they stood in a triangle, each facing the others, the music growing without regard to anyone or anything around them, a paean to Apollo, god of music and light. He felt the song arrow up into the air, rising to greet the god and surround him in golden light. He felt the blessing return, three golden arrows dropping from the sky, which struck them with warmth, a brief flare of fire on each of their foreheads, and a nimbus of light. For an age the music held them, every breath an element of the whole, all notes weaving together to sustain them outside of time, in the center of prayer.

  The slave collar tightened around Lucius's throat, narrowing his access to air. The red thread burned his wrist, and he lost the melody. The girl stilled her fingers on the strings. The boy, gasping, lowered the double flute. The three of them glittered with godlight a moment longer, and then it faded.

  "What — ?" said the boy, his accent heavy.

  "How — who are you?" the girl asked, her voice almost breathless.

  Lucius blinked, woke from a dream where he was back in the center of his family. He stood in the marketplace with strangers, surrounded by the noise of bargaining, arguments, and shopkeepers calling their wares, the shuffle of feet, the air alive with the smells of meat grilling, sweaty people, baking bread, heavy perfumes.

  He tugged at his collar, but it no longer choked him; it had loosened as soon as he stopped playing. "Thank you," he said to the boy, the girl, and the god. He turned and nearly tripped over the couple's brass offering bowl, now overflowing with brass and bronze coins. A few passersby who had stopped near them moved on. Lucius tucked his flute into his belt and plunged into the crowd. He didn't stop for fruit, too shaken by what had happened, but headed straight home.