The Eternal City

by Paula Morris

  She looked up at the gray slice of sky visible through the fissure in the hillside. The tears dribbling down her face didn’t dismay her: It was a natural reaction, she told herself, to deciding to give the bracelet away. After all, it could have been stolen on Monday afternoon at the Trevi Fountain, or yesterday by the tortoise fountain. At least now she was making the decision herself.

  Next to her, Dan shifted, mumbling in his sleep.

  Really, Laura knew, deep down, that she could face the world without wearing the bracelet every day. She didn’t need a piece of jewelry—just a thing, a material possession—to remind her of her grandfather and their special relationship. Lots of people in the world lost everything they had—people who lost their homes to tornadoes and hurricanes, fires and floods and wars. Earthquakes. She thought of the destroyed shops in Rome yesterday. Things weren’t important: people were.

  Just looking around this cavelike room at her strange little group gave Laura all the proof she needed. The main thing was that they were all okay. If she gave Mercury the two star sapphires and he took them away from this world forever, then maybe the battle he’d talked about could be averted. There’d be no more earthquakes and fires. The ash cloud would lift, and they could all go home.

  Laura heard a flapping of wings, and there was the hooded crow, soaring in through the hole in the ground and landing inches from her feet. In the blink of an eye Mercury stood over her. His downy shirt glistened with dew.

  “I need to talk to you,” Laura whispered, and he knelt at her side. She sat up fully, feeling resolved. “I want to give the star sapphires back.”

  “What?” Mercury cocked his head to one side. He looked puzzled.

  “I want to give them to you, for you to take back to the other side.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “These are yours. It is decreed.”

  “I know, I know. And please know I’m very grateful and honored to be … to be chosen in this way. But not everyone wants me to have these. Isn’t that what you told me?”

  He gave one of his twitchy bows, still looking puzzled.

  “And because of that, all this is happening,” Laura went on.

  Dan was stirring now, and Laura wondered if Maia was awake, and Sofie, and Kasper.

  “But after the battle—” Mercury began.

  “I don’t want there to be a battle,” she told him. “I don’t want to go through my life afraid that there might be a volcanic eruption, or an earthquake. Or that everyone I know will be struck down with an illness, or that there might be some kind of battle taking place, just because of me having these two stones. I think they’re too powerful and too dangerous to be carried around on earth by a—well, by a mortal like me.” She swallowed, summoning up the nerve to continue. “They belong to Minerva, and I want you to take them back to her, where no one else can ever defile or steal or use them. Is that possible? For you to take them away, I mean? To the other side?”

  “Perhaps,” he said. “But you …”

  “I mean it,” she said, looking into the dark beads of Mercury’s eyes. “Wouldn’t Minerva think that’s the wise thing to do? To take them out of the hands of mortals and rival gods and whoever else is after them?”

  “You don’t want the power she offers?” Mercury cocked his head to one side again and squinted at her.

  “I don’t think that anyone here on earth should have the power of Minerva,” Laura replied.

  Mercury stood there silent, considering her words. Finally he spoke.

  “I will do as you ask,” he said, bowing his head. “But you must carry them for me until we reach the Pantheon. Minerva wishes no one on earth but you to have the stones.”

  “The Pantheon—that’s how you’ll get back? To your world, I mean?” Laura asked, and Mercury nodded.

  “It’s the only way,” he said. “But I must wait for Jupiter to send more rain.”

  “You can’t just fly there?” asked Laura. She was conscious of the others all awake now, everyone sitting up, everyone listening.

  “Birds can only fly so high,” he told her, with the hint of a smile. “Where I must go is beyond the sky. It is another world, another sphere. It’s impossible for you to understand, because no mortals will ever see it.”

  Dan stretched and leaned forward, pushing hair out of his eyes. His injured eye didn’t seem quite so swollen today.

  “Well, I guess we’re going back to the Pantheon,” he said, looking at the others. Everyone began getting up, stiff and awkward, still not speaking. Watching Mercury.

  “I will fly ahead, if I can,” Mercury said to Laura. “But there are many dangers, and you must be careful. The sisters will tell you what to do.”

  “The sisters?” said Laura and Dan at the same time. Mercury twitched his head, darting a glance over to the corner where Sofie and Maia were dusting themselves off.

  “You two are sisters?” This was Kasper, sounding incredulous. Laura was in shock, too.

  “There are seven of us,” said Sofie, looking smug. “We hardly ever see each other. We live in different places and we usually work alone.”

  “Which I prefer,” said Maia, flashing Mercury a hard look. “Especially when some of us keep changing our names all the time, and can’t keep our mouths shut.” Then she looked over at Sofie.

  “Electra is a stupid name,” Sofie complained. “Everyone would laugh at me at school. Germany is not Russia—everyone is much more fashionable.”

  Maia and Electra. Seven Sisters. Laura couldn’t believe she hadn’t realized before. So that was why Maia had asked Sofie what she called herself. Why they were always whispering and bickering.

  “The Pleiades,” Laura murmured to Dan. “They’re two of the Pleiades!”

  “I thought they lived in the sky,” he whispered. “And were, like, stars.”

  “These two live in Germany and Russia, apparently.”

  “So,” Dan said to Maia. “I’m confused. Are you coming to our school next semester or not?”

  Maia sighed.

  “Please,” said Mercury, backing toward the tree ladder in short, precise steps. “Listen to them. Do as they say. If Jupiter is willing, we will meet again at the Pantheon. Be aware of the danger outside.”

  “What kind of danger?” Kasper asked, his voice husky.

  “The battle we spoke of,” Mercury said, nodding at Laura.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “It’s already begun.”

  * * *

  From the hillside above their pit, all they could see was the roiling ash cloud, dark and angry today, and the smoke and flames of fires all over the city. The second earthquake, Laura thought. As the group made their way down the hill, she kept glancing at Maia and Sofie. They were sisters—and they’d been with her the whole time for a reason. To look out for her, to keep her safe. That’s why Maia had been so concerned with who else could “help.” Laura felt a rush of gratitude toward them.

  Before they’d climbed the tree ladder, they’d borrowed the penknife from an apologetic Kasper. Maia had cut a small slit in the outer layer of Laura’s waistband, and slid the bracelet in. Laura could feel it now, a little lump against her ribs. The other stone Maia wrapped in a ripped piece of tissue, and wriggled it to the other side of the waistband, so there was no chance of the stones bumping together. There was no way to close up the hole, they’d feared, until Sofie proffered a piece of chewing gum. Disgusting, Laura thought, but so far it seemed to be working.

  The sisters walked side by side, with a pensive Kasper following and Dan and Laura in the very back. Occasionally, Laura’s hand would brush against Dan’s, and they would exchange a kind of secret smile. Laura felt grateful to him, too.

  Before they reached the Colosseum, Maia turned to give them the briefest of warnings and explanations. Neptune was lined up against Minerva and her allies, she said; he controlled horses and creatures of the sea, so they had to be ready to fight them. Except for dolphins, apparently: they were part
of Apollo’s domain, so they could be trusted.

  “Dolphins?” Kasper asked, wide-eyed. “You’re saying we don’t have to worry about dolphins?”

  “They’ll be fighting,” Maia explained. “But they won’t attack us. Just keep out of their way.”

  “Snakes and wolves won’t attack us, either,” Sofie added. “Apollo commands them also.”

  “What about the snakes in the fresco in the church, when you were getting attacked?” Laura asked.

  “They were biting the leg of the man,” Sofie explained. “Did you think Kasper alone saved me with his big punch?”

  By the deflated look on Kasper’s face, it was clear that was exactly what he’d thought.

  “Remember that dogs and vultures are bad,” Maia went on. “They’re all under the command of Mars. And Juno commands lions and peacocks.”

  Laura nodded, trying to keep everything straight.

  “And watch out for the mermaids,” said Sofie, squeezing Kasper’s arm. “They are the worst. Really, I hate them. They are just spiteful show-offs, and they are all over Rome, in almost every fountain, with all this hair and tail and thinking they are something special. Be careful, Kasper.”

  “Kasper will be all right,” said Maia. “It’s Dan I’m more worried about.”

  Dan looked annoyed, and started blustering about how he was superfit, ready to fight, and not scared of anything.

  “I know all that.” Maia looked unimpressed. “But Kasper has the protection of Odin. Around his neck.”

  Laura spotted Kasper’s amber pendant, and another piece of the puzzle clicked into place. Kasper smiled, touching the animal with a kind of reverence.

  “Odin’s not a Roman god,” Dan complained, still sulky. “He’s, like, Norse. So now suddenly it’s a pan-ancients thing?”

  “Don’t worry—I will help you,” Sofie told Dan, and Laura wasn’t sure if she was being truly helpful or snide.

  “And don’t forget,” said Maia, “the seagulls. Some of them are harpies. And, no, I don’t know which ones. So fight anything that gets too close, okay?”

  “Jack was right,” Dan muttered to Laura. “This is the worst school trip ever. If our parents knew we’d be fighting random seagulls and statues, they’d sue the Department of Education.”

  By the time they got to the road encircling the Colosseum, Laura felt her stomach drop with horror. She realized neither Mercury nor Maia had been exaggerating. The streets of Rome were a battlefield.

  The long avenue that ran through the Forum, so quiet and dark last night, was thronged with people fighting. But not fighting each other—fighting the monuments. Fighting the fountains and statues of Rome. These creatures, apparently free from their stone moorings, were all roaming the streets, ferocious and alive.

  A giant stone horse galloped down the road, teeth bared: It knocked over two policemen who didn’t jump out of its way in time and then trampled a line of parked motorcycles, crushing the metal under its enormous hooves.

  Carved dolphins, their faces twisted in grotesque anger, squirmed along the ground, snapping at shins and ankles, taking out the tires of an abandoned ambulance with a swish of their heavy tails. They won’t hurt us, Laura reminded herself, even as she felt a swell of fear.

  Stone bees swarmed, hitting rather than stinging the scattering crowd, surging up and down the street like a tornado of hail. Four nymphs in draped robes, their faces as serene as ever, pushed a food vendor’s van over and chased its terrified owner down the road.

  A hooded crow—Mercury? Laura wondered—flew overhead, cawing at the group, doubling back to make sure they were following. Laura stumbled, distracted by a stone Cupid, perched on the back of a bucking horse. The statue was pulling arrows from a miniature quiver on his back and firing at any seagulls in close range.

  “Stay together, everyone!” Dan shouted, but Kasper had grabbed onto another stubby stone horse and was trying to jump on.

  “Horses bad!” Laura shouted at him, but maybe he thought he was invincible with his amber pendant.

  “I’ll clear a path,” he yelled, clinging to the stone ridges of the horse’s mane while it screeched and bucked in protest. “Follow me!”

  “Give me a break,” Dan said to Laura. “Seriously, this guy is delusional. He thinks he’s the Norse god.”

  “Would you stop obsessing?” shouted Laura, smacking bees away from her face. Real bees were bad enough, she decided; stone ones were monsters. “Watch out for that lion!”

  A stone lion, almost as big as Kasper’s horse, paced toward them, back low, a great roar erupting from its carved jaws.

  “I don’t know how to fight a real lion,” Dan said. “Let alone one made out of stone. Maybe these stupid bees will help.”

  He reached into the air and grabbed a handful of the bees, flinging them at the lion’s head. Laura followed his lead, pelting the lion with the stone bees buzzing around her ears; they vibrated in her hand, their sharp-edged wings scraping her palms. But at least they didn’t sting. The lion flinched and recoiled, and they swerved out of its path, scampering away before the great carved beast had a chance to recover.

  But their path ahead was blocked by a battalion of mermaids. Sofie was right: They looked evil. Balanced on curving tails, the mermaids spun around and around like whirling dervishes, the stone locks of their hair whipping anyone who ventured too close. Armed men in uniform, sprinting up the road in a line, fired at them, but all the bullets did was make dents in the stone torsos and tails.

  The mermaids kept spinning—all hair and tail, as Sofie had complained—with their line spreading until it formed a barrier across the entire expanse of the avenue. Kasper’s horse reared and bucked until Kasper slid to the ground, wincing with pain. The horse galloped off, and Laura wasn’t sure how any of them would get through this line.

  Sofie and Maia, the sisters, stood perilously close to the mermaids. Their heads—light and dark—bent together as they conferred, and then they both dropped to the ground, sitting on the asphalt of the road as though they were settling in for a protest. It took a moment or two for Laura to register what they were doing—using their feet to kick at two of the mermaids’ tails.

  Sofie seemed particularly adept at this, slamming her feet over and over where the tail curved, until her mermaid toppled, crashing to the ground and scattering shards of stone across the road. Maia’s mermaid took a little longer to fall; it collapsed so close to Maia that on the way down one of the stone strands of hair knocked Maia hard in the face.

  Maia fell back, clutching her jaw, and Kasper dove into the fray, groping around in the bouncing spray of stones until he emerged clutching something in his fist. When Dan pulled Maia clear of the debris, she was trying—and failing—to tell him something.

  “She has lost a tooth,” Sofie reported, barely able to keep the glee out of her voice. “This is why I do not like the mermaids.”

  Kasper held the bloody tooth aloft, and Maia grimaced. One of her bottom teeth was missing, and there was blood smeared across her face.

  “Are you all right?” Laura asked, but Maia nodded, waving them forward.

  “Come on,” said Dan, urging them all through the break in the mermaid line before the other mermaids—whirling even more furiously now—closed the gap. Kasper was already through, kicking at a strange-looking crocodile with long snapping jaws.

  “This way,” said a voice in Laura’s ear, and she was startled to see Mercury there in the street, steering her by the elbow.

  “Why aren’t you flying?” she asked him. Above the fray seemed a much better option than this wild obstacle course along the Via dei Fori Imperiali.

  “Now it is too dangerous,” he said, jerking his head toward the sky. Dozens of birds were circling—crows, seagulls, starlings, blackbirds; their squawks and cries were audible even over the screams and roars, amid crashes of stone and popping gunshots, down here on the street. A nymph hurled herself at Laura and tore the pocket off her dress. Laura stagge
red back, clutching her ripped dress in horror. Thankfully, the waistband—and its chewing-gum buckle—was still intact.

  “She’s looking for the star sapphires,” Maia told Laura, then shouted to the others. “Everyone, over here!”

  Maia, Sofie, Kasper, and Dan formed a protective circle around Laura, and Mercury stayed by her side. The group walked on, managing to keep together and to avoid any major incident, though Kasper’s legs were both bleeding from his encounter with the crocodile, and Dan was rubbing his arm: He’d been walloped in the elbow by another nymph trying to grab Laura’s dress. Progress was slow with so many of them limping, especially with the bees swarming them and, for one terrifying moment, Kasper’s abandoned horse charging toward them—stopped only by a police van reversing into its path.

  The huge marble monument on Piazza Venezia, usually as stately as an oversized wedding cake, was another field of battle today. Its statues of Winged Victories were hurling broken-off pieces of columns at anyone passing, and the bronze horses galloped headlong down the flights of stairs, chariots bouncing behind them. Laura was speechless, but also, somehow, entranced by the ludicrous spectacle of it all.

  Mercury directed their group down small streets, where lion-head doorknobs snapped at them. Sofie had to use a trash can to smash a persistent bull door knocker into smithereens, just as it was about to lunge at Kasper. It would be a miracle if they reached the Pantheon, Laura thought. It would be a miracle if the Pantheon was still intact.

  In the Piazza della Minerva, outside the “elephant church,” the elephant still stood on its plinth. But it was trumpeting and tossing its head, the obelisk on its back shaking from side to side. As they passed, the elephant gave an almighty bellow, and tossed the obelisk aside as though it were an annoying fly. The obelisk cracked and scattered over the ground, and they had to run to avoid getting hit by the debris. Laura could only hope the elephant wouldn’t come charging after them.