Tales of Cthulhu Invictus

by Brian M Sammons

  “Well, at least it meant he was decently married, not passing his time in the company of drunkards and low women!”

  Plunging her face beneath the water, Lucilla came up with a mouthful and spouted it like a fountain at her sister.

  “Oh, this is your oratory?” taunted Galeria, hands on her hips. “This is your rhetoric, she who would be co-empress of Rome?”

  They had the baths to themselves, but for the attendant company of a few slaves of course. So, when Lucilla lunged for the side of the pool to seize Galeria by the knees, toppling her in drying-cloth and all with a tremendous splash, no one of consequence saw them acting importunely. They wrestled, they dunked each other under, and they turned the tepidarium into a turbulent sea. Squeals of indignation and shrieks of laughter rang from the domed ceiling and wall-tiles.

  At last, exhausted and gasping, they called truce, ceased their struggles and retreated to the edges.

  “He is old,” Galeria admitted of her future husband, by way of concession.

  “And I suppose,” said Lucilla, in like spirit, “that some of what they say about Lucius Verus could be true. Consider, though, sister…there’ve been rumors aplenty about our own mother.”

  Galeria nodded another concession as she emerged again from the pool, accepting a second drying-cloth.

  There had always been such talk, as long as she could remember. Senators who resented their mother’s influence whispered at her involvement in plots, conspiracies and poisonings. Even more vicious lies would cast Faustina as an adultress, cavorting with sailors and gladiators alike.

  Cruelest of all were those that tried to make sinister the ill health of her children, as if Faustina were in some way to blame for their sicknesses, their frailty, their tragic and untimely deaths.

  Galeria had only the vaguest memories of her brothers; that first set of twins whose birth had been announced across the Empire with coins stamped Fecunditati Augustae in celebration of the royal fertility.

  More babies had followed, another set of twins, Lucilla and a weak, tiny boy who had never been long for this world. There had been a sister, another brother…not twins, them, but singletons a year or so apart…and more sisters.

  Fecunditati Augustae.

  The coins, she remembered better than the babies themselves. She had several such still in her jewelry case, holes bored through them to let them be strung on cords and worn around her neck. Marcus Aurelius had given them to her. How solemn and noble he’d been, her father, presenting her with each new coin…telling her that she was an elder sister, a great honor, a great responsibility.

  But subsequent coins had marked sadder occasions. She remembered her mother, distraught, and her father, so sorrowful. Of nine children so far, only four of them—and girls all—yet lived.

  “I think she might be pregnant again,” said Galeria now. She gestured to a slave who stood waiting with a tray, upon which were cups and a pitcher of iced water with celery and mint.

  “Mother? Again? Are you sure?”

  “Not sure, but I think that she might.”

  “That’s hardly fair. You’re to be married soon, and I’m almost betrothed. It should be our turn.”

  “You say that as if she were ancient.”

  “She’s nearly forty!” Lucilla cried.

  “Not much older than your Lucius Verus!”

  “It isn’t the same for men as for women. And she just had another baby!”

  Galeria said nothing, sipping the cool and refreshing liquid, as her sister stomped up the steps from the pool to grab a drying-cloth of her own from the waiting slave.

  Her gaze roved the decorative murals of the tepidarium, then fixed upon a particular image that made her pause. She felt a brief, unaccountable chill despite the pleasant warmth of the room. The figure in the mural was ordinary enough, one she’d seen dozens if not hundreds of times before, yet this time, for no reason she could immediately grasp, it struck her as ominous.

  She went over to it and traced a fingertip along the curved swoop of tail, scales and fins picked out in blue-green. The tail was the lower half of its body; the upper half sported the cloven fore-hooves, horned head and shaggy pelt.

  Capricornus. A mythical creature, and one of the zodiacal constellations. Capricornus, the goat.

  The chill swept her again, making her shiver. Though the iced water was flavored with celery and mint, the taste in her mouth somehow seemed more of fruit juice and honey. She thought of her mother, the softness of her purple stola, the gentle caress of her many-ringed hand.

  Those should have been comforting.

  Why, then, did she find herself suddenly so frightened? Even terrified?

  ***

  She shivers. She is cold, and she shivers, despite the blanket that wraps her, despite her mother’s enfolding arms.

  It is not the fever, but the place.

  A place that feels…old.

  Old when Rome was young. Old when the she-wolf gave suckle to Romulus and Remus. Old…beyond old. Ancient, and wrong.

  It is the darkness, black and deep, with shadows closing in on all sides. A single candle serves only to give the shadows shapes, make them loom and waver.

  The flame flickers. The stranger’s hand cups around it, gnarled fingers shielding but blocking more of the light.

  The air moves steadily past them.

  Not as wind, not as breeze, but as a slow and constant draft. Never shifting, never changing direction, its voice a low whisper of endless breath gently blown over hollow jar-openings. It smells of wet stone and mortar, of damp soil and worms. Sometimes, there are drips, faint and far plinks that echo or near ones that catch quick glimmers in the thin, dim glow.

  “Tell me she will not be harmed,” says her mother. “I want your assurance.”

  “You want me to lie?”

  They proceed in silence, the familiar sway of her mother’s stride hampered to short, cautious steps. Perhaps feeling the way along a slick, unseen floor. Staying close behind the stranger, who leads the way.

  “Ah, here we are,” the stranger says.

  And pinches out the flame with a hiss, with a sputter of smoke.

  The shadows descend over them like a dark, chilling mist.

  She whimpers. Her mother shushes her, soothes her with a touch, a kiss on the brow. But then, even with the candle snuffed, it is better…her eyes widen, and blink as if waking, and she sees.

  High windows shaped like eyes ring the top of a round, narrow chamber. Through them, the sky shows almost as black as the shadows, more purple than the cloth of her mother’s stola, a pomegranate-red richer than wine, the blue of a goblet made from cobalt-infused glass. Here and there, the first stars glint tiny and pale.

  In one of the windows hangs a curve of shining white. It is a crescent, a cruel smile, a blade.

  “The horned moon,” her mother says.

  “The horned moon,” the stranger replies. “The horned moon has chased the sun from the sky. The goddess is at her strongest.”

  The moonlight does not so much banish the shadows as paint them, silver-gilt them. It makes her mother’s face into alabaster and sparkles on the jewels of her many rings. It shows the pallid chamber walls, not smooth marble and not rough stone but something of bumpy, knobby, irregular texture. Bones? Some sort of sun-bleached wood?

  Spaced at odd intervals are niches that gape like myriad mouths of varying sizes, and spaced at odder intervals around them are glossy, bulging, opaque orbs and protrusions, like staring eyes.

  Some of the niches hold stubs of wax and wicks in congealed puddles. Others hold drinking vessels, little pots and jars, clay figurines.

  “Strip the child,” says the stranger, “and bring her here.”

  “Must I undress her? It is cold down here, dank, and she has been ill.”

  “We’ve come all this way, Faustina.”

  At the chamber’s center, rising from it, is a…an object…not a table, not a statue, something neither and both…a s
culpture such as might be set in a fountain, though no fountain would be set with anything so…hideous.

  Seeing it as her mother turns, she begins to whimper again, and then to cry.

  “Hush, my pip, my darling, my sweet little lamb.”

  The blanket is unwound from her, freeing her arms to wave and her legs to kick as her mother continues on to removing garments.

  Or is it the tall stump of some knotted, blighted, dead tree? Bent limbs twist from its top in a crown of curls and stunted spirals. Thick, bark-like stuff covers its squat trunk, split by creases that glisten as if slick. Where the bark-like stuff is not, patches and tufts of dense, spongy, mossy growths seem to cling.

  She is naked, wriggling, no longer simply crying but screaming in tempestuous protest. Her howls should have resounded with deafening loudness but do not. They do not carry, do not echo, not at all. The very walls, the walls of that pallid, knobbly texture, seem to drink in the sounds, absorb them the way a dry cloth absorbs water.

  “Give her to me.”

  The unfamiliar hands take hold of her again. They are bunched and tough, strong. The stranger’s cloak and garments are gone, revealing a scrawny body and skin that is all sags and wrinkles and leathery folds. The stranger’s eyes squint out from holes in a hairy mask that reaches to the nose; beneath it, the nearly-toothless mouth grins, looking more whiskery than ever. The headdress is crooked brown horns, flanking a curve of hammered silver that mimics the shape of the moon.

  Her screams fade. Her struggling stops. Hot liquid floods her legs, pattering on the floor. She dangles in the stranger’s callused grasp, limp as a corpse.

  “What have you done to her?” demands her mother.

  “Nothing at all.”

  The object at the chamber’s center—the object that is not a fountain-sculpture, not a table, not the stump of a dead and blighted tree—has a concavity at its top, a kind of bowl-basin, framed by that crown of curls and stunted spirals. The stranger lowers her into this, placing her there.

  It is…warm. Not warm like a nice bath, not warm like a fire. But warm in a way that is…meaty and slippery and awful.

  She cannot move. She is once again the turned-over turtle, helpless on her back. Her mother is there, nearby, within arm’s reach, but her mother does not come for her, does not pick her up. Does not even look at her.

  “Taste of this girl-child, oh Black Queen of the Wood,” the stranger says. “Taste of her, and cast her fate! Spare her or save her, or take her as fodder for your Young!”

  Beneath her, surrounding her, the loathsome surface of the basin seems to move somehow. To undulate in pulsing ripples along her skin. It feels moist. She finds her voice, but her silent cries go ignored.

  The stranger utters terrible words, chanting in unspeakable languages. The stranger jerks in violent contortions, head snapping back and forth, joints bending in ways that should not be possible.

  The crown of curls and stunted spirals around the basin’s rim begin to move. They sway like twisted branches in a wild wind, they writhe like nests of disturbed snakes or worms.

  The moist warmth grows to a humid heat. Heat, but she shivers. It is unbearable. Inescapable.

  Then it ends in a wash and a rush and a stillness. She whimpers weakly.

  “It is done,” says the stranger. “The goddess spares this child, at least for now. But if you would ensure you will have others, we must conduct the other ritual. Disrobe yourself, Faustina, and take your place beneath the seventh window.”

  Her mother does so. Off slips the purple stola, off slips the gown beneath it. Unlike that of the stranger, her mother’s nakedness is firm and smooth and beautiful.

  The stranger selects from one of the niches a clay figurine, some squat and squatting semblance of a goatish monstrosity, dotted with leering eyes and gaping mouths, wreathed all about with fleshy-looking tendrils. This, the stranger puts into her mother’s hands, and her mother holds it aloft in the silver-yellow beam of the horned moon’s light.

  “Hear me further, heed me, Black Queen of the Wood!” bleats the stranger. “This woman begs your intercession!”

  Her mother stands motionless, chin lifted, arms upraised, lifting the idol in supplication.

  The stranger takes a pot from one of the wall-niches, an ugly pot set upon a base that might have been made out of an animal’s foot, a goat’s cloven hoof. Held to it with a loop of twine is some sort of tool or implement, bone-handled.

  “Make her womb a breeding-ground, oh goddess! Let it be spawned of a plentiful bounty!”

  Dunking one end of it into the pot, the stranger whirls in a frantic

  gyration, then slashes a cruel red moon-crescent across her mother’s unguarded white belly.

  “Ia!” they shriek together, the stranger and her mother. “Ia, Ia, Shub-Niggurath!”

  ***

  Galeria tied a robe around her waist and slipped from her room into the slumbering villa’s quiet hall.

  The tiles were cool beneath her feet. A breeze wafted in from the garden courtyard, stirring the drapes and hangings, carrying the scent of night-blooming flowers. From the slave-quarters, behind the kitchen, came the sounds of snoring.

  She’d left Lucilla peacefully asleep in the sisterly bed they still shared, and would share until Galeria’s wedding. She was glad that her own sudden waking hadn’t startled Lucilla. Glad that she hadn’t sprung up with a shout, clammy and shaking.

  The dream, she knew, had been no mere dream alone. It had been something more. Something true, drawn up from the deep well of her memory.

  A few men, on late-guard duty, moved about outside the house. A cat padded silently by, giving Galeria an inquisitive glance. An imperial bust of Antonius Pius, her grandfather, stared with aloof sightlessness from a funeral shrine adorned in mourning garlands and offerings of wine, olive oil and grain.

  As she approached her parents’ bedchamber, she heard low voices in conversation. One, she recognized as belonging to her mother; the other was that of her slave-woman handmaid. She paused behind a column to listen.

  “—no need to send for the physician or to disturb my husband,” Faustina said. “I’ll take the air for a bit, and I’m sure I’ll soon be back to bed.”

  “Shall I accompany you, mistress?”

  “If you must make yourself useful, I’d like some sliced pear. With bread and cheese.”

  Bowing, the slave-woman hurried off. Faustina watched her go, then tied her own robe around her waist much as Galeria had done herself only a short while before. The waist was thicker than once it had been, the hips broader, the breasts both lower and fuller, the form that of matron rather than maiden.

  “Mother?” she said, stepping into view.

  “Galeria? My pip, what are you doing up at this hour?”

  “I woke from a dream.”

  “Ah,” said Faustina, and a troubled look clouded her eyes. “So did I, a most unpleasant one.”

  “Did you? What was it?”

  She hesitated a moment, then smiled at her eldest daughter. It seemed a tense smile. “Come, let us go out and sit by the fishpond, where we might talk.”

  Galeria nodded. They went into the courtyard, which was shadowy but not gloomy, catching some light from the lanterns on the walls. Faustina settled onto a bench next to one of the sunken fishponds, where lilies dotted the still water’s surface and vines trailed like delicate green locks of nymph’s hair. She patted the seat beside her, and Galeria took it.

  “First,” said Faustina, “I should tell you the happy news.”

  “You’re pregnant again.”

  “I am, yes. How did you know?”

  “I’ve seen it often enough.”

  Her mother laughed softly, squeezing Galeria’s knee. “Yes, I suppose you have, haven’t you?”

  “Fecunditati Augustae,” she murmured. “But what was your dream?”

  Faustina’s laugh drifted into a sigh. “It was…unpleasant, as I said. I dreamt that…that two serpe
nts slithered from my womb. Both were large and strong, but one was fiercer than the other, and struck with fangs and poison.”

  “That cannot be a good omen.”

  “No.” She sighed again. “No, it cannot.”

  “Does it have anything to do with what happened when I was a baby?”

  “When you were a baby?”

  “When I was so sick. With that stranger, that old woman. Capra, I think her name was. The one who took us to the templum cornua lunae--”

  Her mother had gasped more than once as Galeria spoke, and at the last words clapped a hand to her lips as if to stifle a cry. “Who told you of that?” she demanded in a piercing whisper.

  “No one told me,” said Galeria. “I remembered. That was the dream that woke me tonight. What did you do there? What did you do to us…to me? Who was Capra? What was that place? The…the horned moon, what--”

  “Hush!” She cast a sharp glance about the courtyard.

  Yet Galeria, having come this far, would not hush but only lowered her voice. “A temple…a cult…one of the forbidden--”

  “You must speak of it to no one,” Faustina said, clutching her wrists. Her fingers felt like bands of ice and iron.

  “I saw her cut you.”

  “Not cut.” She parted the robe, showing a softened, drooping stomach traced with the lines of motherhood, but no crescent scar. Of course not; had there been one, Galeria surely would have noticed before, at the baths or elsewhere. “Painted me. Marked me with blood.”

  “And me? Did Capra mark me? I recall only…being put upon, or within, that…that dreadful thing. Surrounded by the eyes and the mouths in the walls.”

  “No. Marking you, that would have come later. If you so chose. If it proved needed.”

  “Mother, how could you?”

  Desperate tears gleamed in her eyes. “You do not understand. What I did…what I did was what I had to do. I had such trouble conceiving, such trouble carrying you. We both nearly died in your birthing. The physicians thought I might never bear another child. But we had you, our precious daughter. We had you, and we loved you, and your father claimed to care not at all you were only a girl. Has he not always showered you with affection?”