“I would be happy to see you safely home, but I’m not alone. I have my mother with me. I left her at a safe distance when I heard the screaming.”
“Bring her too!” Propertius insisted. “Any woman who gave birth to such a hero is welcome under my roof. We’ll treat her with every courtesy, I assure you. Where is she? I want to congratulate her on her son.”
Horatrim hesitated. Here was an offer of shelter and protection for Vesi, but it was coming from one of the Romans. Yet was he not being led into the very heart of the Roman world anyway? The knowledge that mysteriously had been imparted to his muscles was of no help in this situation. He needed to confer with Vesi—or rather, with the gods who spoke through Vesi. But he dare not leave the Roman couple alone, not with the monster’s voice still reverberating across the hills.
“Come with me,” Horatrim said to Propertius and his wife. “I’ll take you to my mother.”
Night had fallen by this time; a humid, overcast night, an obsidian night in which unseen entities whispered and rustled. He was accustomed to a presence at his back that he assumed was that of the gods, the Ais. But there were other invisibles too, less benign ones. He could feel them, watching, waiting.
Horatrim was anxious to get back to Vesi.
When Horatrim had run off in the direction of the screams, Vesi had waited patiently where he left her. Waiting did not bother her. Nothing bothered her. The boulder on which she sat radiated residual warmth from the sun.
When the hooded figures slunk out of the night, she paid them no attention.
They had been trying to find a safe place where their injured comrade could be left to recover, if possible. They stumbled upon Vesi quite by accident It was one of the tenets of their religion that nothing ever happened by accident however. Finding the woman was surely part of the goddess’ plan. So while Vesi looked on mute and uncomprehending, the hooded beings addressed their deity and asked for guidance.
An answer came, very soon.
They were delighted to discover that Pythia was no longer displeased with them; in fact, she congratulated them for having done well indeed.
Then she took control of the situation.
Horatrim found Vesi just as he had left her, sitting on a boulder in the darkness with her fingers laced around her knees. Hurrying to her side, he put his fingers under her chin and turned her face up toward him. She did not speak but he liked to believe that she recognized him. He needed to believe.
“This is Vesi of the Silver People,” he told the two Romans.
The woman on the rock said nothing.
Propertius leaned forward to peer at her in the gloom. “Is she ill?”
“No, just … quiet. We were … attacked by brigands, and she was badly injured some time ago. As a result she stopped speaking.”
“Ah, that’s a pity. Have you had a physician look at her? We have several in Rome who might be able to help. I will arrange for the best of them for you.”
“Truly we have been led to you by the gods,” replied Horatrim.
He put his hand under Vesi’s elbow and lifted, and she came obediently to her feet. “We are going now, Mother. These kind people have offered us aid and shelter.”
“I am Propertius, dear lady,” the beaming Roman introduced himself. “And this is my wife, Delphia. I hope you will consider us your friends.”
“We are indebted to your son for our lives,” the woman added. “What he did was so wonderful; you should have seen him!”
Vesi said nothing.
Delphia turned to Horatius. “Does she never speak?”
“Rarely.”
“And you have been looking after her for how long?”
“Most of my adult life,” Horatrim replied with truth.
“You are indeed a hero,” declared Delphia. Her voice choked. “A son any mother should be proud of.”
TWENTY-SIX
Horatrim kept his arm around his mother, Propertius had his around Delphia. The road was deeply rutted with cart and chariot tracks and difficult to walk upon, and occasionally the Roman or one of the women stumbled. But Horatrim never stumbled.
The warm night air smelled of cedar and cypress.
At last Propertius exclaimed thankfully, “See there, ahead? The gates of Rome!”
By comparison with the spurae of Etruria, Rome was very crude. To anyone who had seen stately, symmetrical Veii, Rome was a confused jumble of ramshackle huts and half-built halls, its lack of planning all too obvious. But Horatrim had seen no Etruscan cities. He walked along open-mouthed, swiveling his head from side to side in astonishment at the size of the place, the crowds, the noise … .
At night the narrow streets were alight with flaring torches and bustling with people. “This is the city that never sleeps,” Propertius announced proudly.
Many of the buildings were constructed of timber and sods plastered with river mud, giving them the look of something thrown up in a hurry. Houses and shops and flat-roofed warehouses crowded together, clinging to the hillsides and to one another as if fearful they would slide down. Rome smelled of cooked food and rotting fruit and olive oil and animal dung and raw timber, of new construction and old midden heaps.
Hawkers thronged the streets in spite of the lateness of the hour, trying to persuade people to buy jellied eels and cheap trinkets. Garishly painted women stood outside the numerous tavernae, beckoning in a way Horatrim did not understand. A burst of profanity erupted from the open door of one taverna; a woman’s laugh gurgled merrily from another direction. Elsewhere someone was playing a pipe with a shrill, brassy tone that grated on the eardrum.
Suddenly Vesi’s feet slid out from under her and she almost fell. Horatrim caught her before she could hit the ground. Gathering her into his arms, he stroked her hair and murmured soothingly. Then, indicating the torrent of raw sewage flowing down the street and turning its mud into slime, he asked Propertius, “Why don’t they pave these streets and install gutters?” He did not know where the concept came from; it simply appeared in his mind.
Propertius paused in midstep. “Pavement? Here? Impossible, the streets are too steep and too crooked.”
As if he were listening to someone else, Horatrim heard himself say with explanatory gestures, “You could begin with a series of temporary timber supports laid at angles … like this … then dig out above them and set permanent stone slabs across like this … .”
The Roman was looking at him thoughtfully. “You are the most astonishing young man. I want my brother to meet you. Like myself, Severus is a member of the Senate, but he’s also the king’s chief builder. Tarquinius is constantly demanding new schemes to improve Rome—for his own greater glory, of course—and it’s Severus’s responsibility to find them. I think he will be very interested in what you have to say. But that is all for the morrow. First, however, we all need a bath and a good night’s rest.”
Propertius led the way up first one narrow street and then another, eventually reaching a hilltop overlooking the city. The summit was crowned with houses. He halted before a door let into a plastered wall and beat a tattoo with his fist. After a time, the door creaked open. A slave holding an oil lamp stood in the doorway, blinking uncertainly. “Master? Master!”
“Of course it’s me. Let us in, you fool. We’re exhausted and we want to go to bed.”
Guiding his mother by the elbow, Horatrim followed the Romans inside.
Pepan had never dreamed his hia would someday enter Rome. But where Horatrim and Vesi went, he followed. The nearer he got to the city, the more he disliked the sound that characterized Rome and Romans in the Otherworld, a brazen, strident staccato of muscle and might.
Viewed from the Otherworld, the house of Propertius was a mere translucent shell. Pepan easily penetrated the walls. Finding himself in the large, square room that formed the bulk of the dwelling, he surveyed his surroundings with distaste. No murals were painted on the walls, no tiled mosaics set in the floors. There were no flowers, no fountain
s, and only one statue, a crude clay representation of Mars in a small niche off to one side. Where was the household art? How could people survive without a clutter of beautiful things around them?
These people are pitifully unpolished, he thought with contempt. The few pleasing things they possess, like the jewelry the woman wears, are merely copies of Etruscan styles. Do Romans create nothing worthwhile of their own? Or do they steal it all?
As he mused, Pepan became aware of a swirling viscosity slowly filling the room. Like himself, other intangible beings had penetrated the walls. They were never far away, the denizens of the Otherworld. Lacking palpable bodies, they could have no physical effect on humankind. But that did not prevent their having influence.
Since joining their number, Pepan had witnessed demonstrations of their power. Disembodied spirits could fill a living human with elation or dread, could make the imagination soar or turn dreams into unrelenting nightmares. More to be feared than sword or spear, siu and corrupted hia could induce an insanity from which there was no returning.
And they were always vigilant, awaiting their chance. The bright lights of the physical world drew them like moths to a flame. So Pepan must be vigilant too. Never for a moment could he cease watching over Horatrim and Vesi, protecting them from all the things they could not see. He regretted that he was unable to protect them from physical dangers as well, but the gifts of the ancestors that surged through Horatrim’s body were doing a good enough job of that.
The invisible beings that invaded the Roman house in Horatrim’s wake had followed him from the northern verdant forests. Latium was not their natural home; the sunbaked hills were foreign to creatures of mist and mystery. But they were here now, prancing and gibbering and beckoning, flinging their snares, competing furiously with one another over the extraordinarily endowed spirit of Vesi’s son.
Someone else thought young Horatrim well endowed.
In spite of the lateness of the hour when Propertius and Delphia returned home, their older children thronged around them. When Propertius told them of the attack and rescue, all eyes turned toward Horatrim.
One pair of eyes belonged to a girl Propertius identified as his eldest daughter, Livia. Aside from a few coarse-featured girls hiding behind their glowering and suspicious mothers in a Teumetian village, Horatrim had never seen a young woman before. At sixteen years of age, with a well-developed figure and a generous mouth, Livia already had considerable experience of young men. But she had seen no one like Horatrim; no one whom her father glowingly described as a hero.
She sidled close to him and gazed up from under her dark lashes. “Did you really save my parents from a monster?” Her voice was soft and sweet, with a delicious little trill at the end. She spoke in such a soft whisper that Horatrim had to lean forward to hear her—a trick she had learned from her maid.
Horatrim was quite unprepared for the effect she had upon him. He had reached physical maturity in an astonishingly short time; his emotions had lagged behind. Now they were beginning to catch up. His throat closed; his mouth went dry. He was certain she could hear his heart pounding.
“I … uh … that is …” Where were those voices in his head when he needed them? Why had they no guidance to offer now? He cast a beseeching glance toward his mother, but Vesi was equally noncommittal. She stood where he had left her, just inside the door. Her blank gaze took in the entire room and saw nothing.
Delphia was at no loss for words however. She already had decided that a brave young Etruscan would be a fine catch for one of her daughters and bring a touch of ancient elegance to the family. Her friends would be so jealous; they were already envious of the Etruscan baubles Propertius brought back to her from his travels. “Horatrim not only saved us both,” she told Livia, “but has agreed to accept our hospitality so we can repay him properly. He—and his dear mother, of course—will be staying here with us for a while. We want you to make them feel welcome”
The girl smiled at Horatrim and dipped her head so that she could look at him through overlong lashes. “There is nothing I would like more,” she said for his ears alone.
The bedazzled Horatrim grinned back.
Pepan, watching, was filled with misgivings. He did not want Vesi and her son to be in this city or this house. Rome was too raw and too new, the Romans too hungry for conquest. His hia was made uncomfortable by the strident martial music that identified them in the Otherworld, drowning out all other sounds. Why, he wondered, had the ancestors been so determined to bring Horatrim here? What had Rome ever meant for anyone—but trouble? What Rome could not assimilate, it destroyed.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Livia liked to sleep late. Yet this morning she rose early, bathed carefully, and paid particular attention to her cosmetics, squinting at her reflection in the polished silver mirror. Having learned from one of the house slaves that Horatrim was in the garden, she managed “accidentally” to find him there. He was sitting on a bench in the sun at the side of the house tenderly feeding Vesi.
She observed him critically in the early morning light. His jaws were freshly shaven. A slave had attempted to perform the service for him, but Horatrim had refused. “I can do it myself; I know how to use knives.” He did not want any stranger close to his bare throat with a naked blade in his hand; Wulv would never have approved. Now his cheeks were bare of stubble although a plethora of cuts and nicks showed he still had to master the technique.
For clothing he wore a toga borrowed from Livia’s brother Quintus, a plump and petulant youth. A slave had folded the garment around Horatrim’s body in the precise pleats of current Roman fashion, which he thought a bit silly. What use were pleats, he wondered? He only tolerated the fashion because it was part of learning about Rome.
His heavily callused feet were strapped into leather sandals. He had never worn shoes before and disliked them intensely. From time to time he stopped feeding Vesi long enough to scratch his calves, which were irritated by the snug sandal thongs.
“Can’t your mother feed herself?” Livia asked as she watched him.
Horatrim shook his head. “She has no interest in food. If I don’t put it into her mouth, she doesn’t eat.” Using a round-bowled olivewood spoon he tipped some lentil porridge into Vesi’s mouth, then offered her a sunripened fig. She would not bite into the fruit; he had to tear off a tiny bit and place it on her tongue, but then she chewed and swallowed. Vesi was wearing one of Delphia’s old gowns. Neither of them knew that it was cut in the Etruscan fashion.
Watching him attend his mother, Livia raised her eyebrows. She found his attentions touching. “How very curious! I believe my father said that she doesn’t speak, either?”
“No, not really.”
The Roman girl’s eyes danced. “Well, I wager I can make her say something. Just watch me.” She spoke with the assurance of a pampered and petted child who had never been refused anything.
Throwing herself down at Vesi’s feet, Livia caught the woman’s hands between her own and gazed earnestly up into the impassive face. “How lovely you are,” she said. “At least you would be if you were tidied up a bit and had your hair curled. I have pots and pots of cosmetics, some from as far away as Crete and Aegypt. My father is a trader, you know; he imports all sorts of things. Would you like me to paint your face for you?”
Vesi’s vacant eyes stared through her.
Nonplused, Livia tried again. “Why were you wearing rags last night? I thought Etruscan women were always exquisitely dressed. I see Mother has loaned you one of her gowns, but mine are much nicer. You will have your choice of my best. Which would you prefer, my pleated yellow linen or my Aegyptian cotton with red embroidery around the hem?”
Something flickered at the back of Vesi’s eyes.
“Aha—I told you,” said Livia triumphantly.
Horatrim knelt in the dust beside Livia and took his mother’s free hand. Maybe this was what she needed; female company.
Vesi’s jaw sagged open and he
r features began softening like wax in the sun. An altered bone structure appeared beneath the flesh, subtly changing the shape of the face.
Livia dropped Vesi’s hand as if it were hot.
Vesi’s skin darkened and coarsened. Her throat muscles began to work, but the voice when it came was not Vesi’s. Nor was it any of the voices Horatrim had heard before. Slurred, sibilant, it rose and fell in an eerie cadence that raised the hackles on his neck.
In her tomb among the Campanians, your mother’s mother sleeps in a peplos of fine wool, with amber at her breast.
Livia gave a gasp. “What was that? Who spoke?”
Horatrim said honestly, “I don’t know. But it was not my mother.”
He would have been relieved that someone else heard the voices speaking to him through Vesi—had it not been for the fact that this was such a frightening voice.
He had walked away from fear once, but now it closed around his heart like an icy hand. Fear not for himself but for Vesi. Yet he could not have said just what he feared.
He said, “I’ve never heard my mother speak like that before.”
“But I made her talk,“Livia insisted shakily. “Didn’t I?”
“Yes. Yes, I suppose you did.”
Delighted with herself, Livia left Horatrim with his mother and rushed into the house to boast of her achievement.
But when she related the incident—and Vesi’s puzzling words—to Delphia, the Roman matron gave a shriek. Followed by her baffled daughter, she ran outside.
Delphia bent over Vesi. “How did you know?” she demanded, grabbing the other woman by the shoulders. “How did you learn my grandmother was entombed at Campania? I never told anyone she was not Roman. And what gave you the idea that her funeral dress was a woolen peplos? Or that she wore an amber brooch? Nobody knew that, not even my husband.”
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