The Ancient Curse

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Prada, immediately intrigued and not at all sleepy.

  ‘I’m . . . trying to read an inscription.’

  ‘Unpublished, right? Where did you find it?’

  The telephone call was turning into an uncomfortable interrogation.

  ‘It’s not the inscription from Volterra, is it? Isn’t that where you said you were going? I’ve heard about it, although no one has any details. I was talking to Sonia the other day and—’

  ‘Aldo, what I need is your help, not your questions. This thing I’m working on is important and urgent but I’m afraid I can’t explain.’

  ‘You’ll name me in the publication, though, right? Or we can publish it together. What do you say? You are going to publish it, right?’

  ‘No. I’m not going to publish it. It isn’t mine to publish.’

  ‘Ah,’ sighed his colleague in a tone both disappointed and suspicious.

  ‘Listen,’ said Fabrizio impatiently. ‘We’ve always been friends, haven’t we? That’s why I thought of you. If you think you can help me, say so, otherwise forget it. I’ll stumble through it on my own, as I have been doing.’

  ‘Don’t get angry. I was just curious . . . It’s not every day you hear about an unpublished inscription. Let’s start from scratch. If you’re calling me, it must mean you’re stuck – that is, the expressions you’re trying to translate are not in established sources.’

  ‘That’s it. You’re the only person who can help me right now. I’ll be eternally grateful and, as soon as this thing is over, I’ll tell you the whole story. I promise you that I’m not doing anything illegal. I’m just dead tired right now and I’m not connecting. If you don’t help me, I’m afraid I won’t work my way out of this. But if you can’t, that’s all right. I’ll survive, you know.’

  ‘All right, I get it. You don’t want to tell me anything, even though I’m an old friend. OK, don’t worry about it. Tell me what the problem is. Although without seeing what we’re talking about, I don’t know—’

  ‘Is your computer on? I’ll send the parts I’m having trouble with and give you a few minutes to look at them. Then I’ll call you back and we can go through them together. All right?’

  ‘Sure. Send it right away, then.’

  Fabrizio sent the file, waited nearly an hour and then called back.

  ‘Got it!’ said Prada.

  ‘Well? What do you think?’

  ‘Good God! This stuff is incredible.’

  ‘It is.’

  A few moments of silence, then his friend’s voice rang out: ‘Know something? You’re pretty close. It’s only that you haven’t considered . . .’

  What?’

  ‘Several variations in the formulation of diphthongs in the archaic form of the genitive, and a morpheme which I would classify as an apax because—’

  Aldo, please. I have no time for theory. Just correct whatever is wrong with my fucking translation before I faint or have a heart attack because I’m so exhausted I can’t think straight any more. Is that clear?’

  ‘Clear as can be. Hold on, though, yeah, I think I’m right about that, there’s a diphthong formulation here that . . .’

  Fabrizio let him run on because he knew that Aldo Prada’s mind was the most powerful machine in the world as far as phonetic and morphologic processing was concerned. If he couldn’t manage it, no one could. Even Balestra must have had a lot of problems, if he’d been holed up in his office so long without ever appealing to anyone for assistance or collaboration.

  ‘Give me a couple of hours,’ Prada said suddenly. ‘You’ve taken me by surprise here. I don’t want to make a mistake. No one’s ever seen a bilingual text before. What’s strange is that the Etruscan is so clear and the Latin is so fuzzy. It looks more like spots than letters. But better than nothing, that’s for sure. Good heavens, I can only imagine the clamour this will create when it’s announced. If only I knew a little more about the context . . .’

  ‘Don’t even think about it. I can’t tell you where it was found. You’ll have to manage with what you have. Do it as a favour to me. You won’t be sorry, I promise you.’

  ‘OK. I’ll call you as soon as I’ve finished.’

  Fabrizio closed the shutters and lay down on the couch to try to recover some lucidity. He was light-headed with hunger. The strain of working through the night, along with the pill he’d swallowed, made him feel wide awake but sluggish. He felt like he was moving in slow motion, and his muscles were cramping up, along with his stomach. The sounds of early morning wafted in from outside: the rumble of cars on the regional road and the chirping of sparrows. The roosters saluted the dim light of another dreary day from farmhouses scattered around the countryside.

  Fabrizio couldn’t have said how much time had passed since he’d concluded his conversation when the phone rang. He started and grabbed the receiver.

  ‘It’s an ará,’ said Aldo Prada on the other end of the line. His tone was a mix of irony and uneasy awe. ‘An imprecation . . . a curse that is . . . But that’s not all . . .’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I thought, but I wanted your verdict.’

  ‘I have no doubts. It involves the ritual of a Phersu if I’m interpreting correctly. Crazy stuff.’

  Deeply unnerved, Fabrizio fell silent.

  ‘You’re already on to this, aren’t you?’ insisted Prada.

  ‘Yeah, I am,’ admitted Fabrizio. ‘I excavated the tomb.’

  ‘Of a Phersu? Holy Christ. I can’t believe you’re telling me this.’

  ‘It’s complicated. Very complicated.’

  ‘If I weren’t so far away I would rush over there and force you to explain the whole story. If you let me read the entire inscription I could be of much more help to you. I give you my word of honour that I won’t tell a soul.’

  ‘I am sorry, Aldo, I can’t take any risks. Consider that Balestra has been locked up in his office for weeks. If it comes out that I’m working on the same stuff . . .’

  ‘Right. Got you. That’s what I thought.’

  ‘You’d end up confiding in someone you trust blindly, I know you – and then he would turn round and talk to someone he trusts blindly. In two days’ time, everyone and their mother would know about it and that would mean big trouble. Bigger trouble than you can even imagine. Please, just send me your conclusions and don’t ask me any more questions. You’ll understand why soon enough.’

  Prada stopped insisting and sent Fabrizio the passages that he had interpreted with the acumen and brilliance that made him one of the top scholars in his field.

  As Fabrizio began to insert the phrases interpreted by his colleague in the gaps still scattered throughout his translation, he realized that his energy levels were totally depleted. He knew he couldn’t stop yet and he swallowed another amphetamine to force his exhausted brain to bear up under the strain and get the job done. Thus, little by little, an hour at a time, a story began to emerge from the shadows of millennia. A cruel, delirious story that projected a desire for revenge so burning and intense that it could span the centuries. A story that cut him to the quick and filled him with fear and despair. He looked up from his work to contemplate the image of the lad of Volterra and it was like seeing him for the first time, as if, finally, he had met up with him on a deserted road after a long, strenuous journey, or as if he had recognized a son or a younger brother he never knew he had, and Fabrizio’s bloodshot eyes were dimmed with tears.

  He was certain of having concluded his work and he got to his feet with the intention of having a shower and then calling Lieutenant Reggiani or trying to locate him wherever he was. He took a few steps but his legs gave way and he slowly collapsed on to the mat that covered the floor. He couldn’t have known that evening was falling again, an early, chalky dusk shot through with shudders of wind.

  His body was completely motionless and the flickering reflection of the computer screen cast a spectral light on to his face. He would have looked like a
dead man, were it not for the continuous rapid movements behind his closed eyelids, as in the most intense, most visionary phase of a dream . . .

  The room was vast, rectangular in shape and adorned with frescoes that depicted scenes from a symposium, with guests laughing, drinking, leaning forward in conversation. A double row of candelabra with hanging lamps of bronze and translucent onyx lit up the room, so numerous that they filled the hall with an intense, golden light, like that of the sunset just passed. The dinner guests – men and women, young and old – were reclining on couches alongside tables filled with trays of food and cups brimming with wine, chatting amiably in low voices.

  In the middle of the room lithe maidens danced gracefully to the sound of flutes and string instruments played by a little group of musicians. The atmosphere spoke of pleasure and celebration, of the refined amusements of an aristocratic gathering, similar, perhaps, to an assembly of immortal divinities.

  Next to each one of the noble ladies participating in the banquet was an alabaster perfume jar hanging on a thin cord from the ceiling, filled with rare scents imported from the Orient. Every so often one of them dipped in her hand to spread the fragrance on her soft, white skin, her round shoulders, her breasts. The perfume saturated the air, along with the light, musky scent of the men’s sweat.

  At the head of the triclinium hall, at the centre of the short wall, against a curtain the colour of the night sky, reclined lauchme Lars Thyrrens, lord of Velathri, the red city of the huge gates and resplendent multi-hued temples. His full head of black hair, shining with bluish reflections, brushed the collar of golden plates adorning his neck and shoulders. He wore an embroidered chlamys open at the sides of his sculpted torso, covering only his groin. His massive build, wide shoulders and brawny arms were those of a mighty warrior, of a man accustomed to conquering by force anything that aroused his desire. Any woman would have yearned to lie in his arms and often, during a banquet, when the lights had burned low, one of the ladies present would go to stretch out beside him, covered by the same mantle, ignoring her fat and tolerant husband to become acquainted with his fierce, powerful virility. Many had done so, or perhaps all of them. Except one.

  It was for this reason that the eyes of the powerful lord rested avidly, insistently on Anait, the most stunning, desirable woman in the city. So intriguing that she would make even the wisest, most upright of men lose his mind, so beautiful that she had Lars Thyrrens, the most powerful of men, in her thrall. A man who had risen to power merely, or mainly, to satisfy his own desires, to satiate any craving for food or wine or rare, precious objects, any longing for a young man or maiden in the prime of youth and beauty.

  But she never returned his looks. She never tired of contemplating her own husband, Lars Turm Kaiknas, a man as handsome as a god, strong, yet as gentle and sweet as a young lad. She couldn’t stop caressing his hands, his arms, his face, because he had finally returned to her after a long absence, a war campaign beyond the northern mountains, in the vast valley crossed by a great river. There, at the head of the Rasna ranks, he had fought off the hordes of blond Celtic invaders. He led the army of the league of twelve cities to the walls of Felsina, driving them onward as far as the mudbanks of Spina, a city made of wood and straw but rich with gold and bronze, defended only by the wide swamps surrounding it.

  The party was in his honour and in his palace. Anait was impatiently awaiting the moment at which the guests would wander off, in which the lauchme would give the signal to end the festivities, so she could finally withdraw to the warm intimacy of their bedchamber and undress in front of her husband in the soft glow of the midnight lamp. She’d savoured the moment already in the ardour of his eyes. For Anait there was nothing else; no one else existed in the great festooned hall. The soft chatting of her dinner companions barely reached her ears, intent on listening only to the words of the man she loved, the man that she herself had chosen when, as a young girl, she had sent a servant with a message to his house, offering herself as his bride.

  But the ardent glances of the lauchme did not escape the guests. Many of them were aware of the rumours that Anait’s son, young Velies, had been conceived during one of the numerous absences of her husband; that he was the son of Lars Thyrrens. A lie that had surely originated in the palace of the king himself, to induce people to believe what he could only let himself dream of. In truth, Turm Kaiknas was the city’s greatest warrior and the head of its army, so that not even the lauchme could challenge him, much less try to seduce his wife. If he wanted to take her by force, he would have to kill her husband first, a difficult, if not impossible, endeavour. Everyone loved Turm Kaiknas, for his valour, his deeds, his heroism. He would be the king of Velathri if it were up to the people.

  Anait leaned close to her husband and whispered something in his ear, and this aroused Lars Thyrrens even more; he could only imagine how he would have felt with her lips so close to his face. He decided that the moment had come to carry out his plan, and he was in such a state that he never considered in the least the consequences of the evil deed he was about to enact. He nodded to one of the servant girls who stood at his side and she went off as if obeying a command. She waited until Anait was reposing again on her own kline, then she approached her and whispered something in the lady’s ear. Anait exchanged a few words with her husband, who nodded as she stood and followed the maidservant out of the room.

  Turm Kaiknas had more wine poured for himself and settled back to watch the jugglers and dancers who had disrobed and were now dancing naked in front of the dinner guests, especially those who had come unaccompanied. Meanwhile the lamps began to go out as the oil was consumed, a ruse that allowed even the most timid of them to pull one of the dancers over to his own couch, his sweetly scented kline.

  The guests arranged at the far side of the room noticed Lars Thyrrens getting up and disappearing behind the curtain, but he was only gone for a few moments; he had soon returned to recline at his place. Only those who were very close could see that it was not him but another, an actor who greatly resembled him, garbed and made up in the same way, but they had been forewarned and none of them showed the slightest reaction. The guest stretched out at the very corner of the triclinium who could thus spy the corridor that led away from the hall itself, could see both the true Lars Thyrrens, who was walking circumspectly through the shadows, and the false Lars Thyrrens, reclining comfortably, intent on drinking wine from a cup. But he said not a word, as he too had been instructed by the master of ceremony, who had been bribed by the lauchme.

  Anait soon reached the corridor which led out of the hall, preceded by the maidservant, who was still whispering, ‘The child was crying, my lady, we could not calm him . . .’ She could not see Lars Thyrrens waiting in the shadows, behind the door of the vestibule outside the bedroom. As soon as Anait entered he leapt upon her and threw her to the ground, covering her mouth with his hand. At that same instant, the musicians in the hall increased the volume of their instruments, adding tambourines and kettledrums, which covered the sounds of the struggle going on in the semi-darkness of the vestibule. Anait was a strong woman and she fought him off with great vehemence, but Lars Thyrrens was a monster of a man, tremendously powerful. He ripped off her clothing and tried violently to possess her.

  The maidservant had hurried off, even though her malicious nature would have urged her to stay and watch, and she had not noticed that little Velies had truly woken up and wandered from his room. He stood in the vestibule, rubbing his eyes as if he could not believe what he was seeing. Anait caught a glimpse of her son, his shadow against the wall, inordinately lengthened by the light of the single lamp. She feigned submission for a moment and, as her assailant softened his grip, she bit his hand as hard as she could. The boy realized what was happening and the cruel scene distorted his delicate features into a mask of horror. He opened his mouth to scream. Enraged by the pain in his hand, aware that the child’s cry would alert his father, Lars Thyrrens pulled his dagger fro
m his belt and hurled it at the boy.

  The child’s cry was cut short. His face turned white in the pallor of death as a copious stream of blood ran down his side from where the dagger had stuck hilt-deep. Then the lauchme squeezed his hands around the neck of Anait, who had seen it all, trying to stop her from crying out. He tightened his grip until he felt her body collapse beneath him. Then he got up, composed himself, slipped back down the corridor and occupied the shadowy place left free by the actor, just in time.

  Turm Kaiknas was no longer resting on his kline. His hearing had been honed by long hours of wakefulness at the head of his troops in the most remote, danger-filled places, where he had learned to pick up the slightest of noises. He had heard a suffocated cry coming from his apartments. His son, visited by a nightmare? And where was Anait? Why hadn’t she returned?

  An agonized howl burst out of the vestibule and Lars Thyrrens cried out himself in alarm. His guards rushed forward with lit torches in hand and many of the guests poured into the corridor after them. The scene they met with was horrifying. Turm Kaiknas was on his knees between the corpse of his wife and that of his son and he held a bloody dagger in his fist.

  ‘Take him!’ shouted Lars Thyrrens, and, before Turm Kaiknas could react or even speak, the guards were upon him. Although he fought off some of them with the very dagger he held in his hand and managed to twist free, others assailed him from every direction. Like a lion caught in a net, he finally succumbed, stunned by a blow to the nape of his neck from behind.

  Lars Thyrrens shouted, ‘You’ve seen it with your own eyes! Everyone knows that Turm Kaiknas has always despised his wife because she was unfaithful to him, because she bore him a bastard, the fruit of an illicit relationship!’

  ‘It’s true!’ shouted all the onlookers. Because they were all slaves of Lars Thyrrens, the powerful lauchme of Velathri, all ready to swear to whatever he declared. No one dared to contradict him.

  A single voice thundered out behind him, ‘You lie! My sister never betrayed her husband! She loved him more than life itself. And Turm Kaiknas adored his son. He would never have raised a hand except to caress him.’