Antiquities: Five Stories Set in Ancient Worlds

by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  Master Gaius took him into the library as soon as he returned and asked for an accounting, and Lucius repeated back his conversation with the witch almost word for word. He held out his wrist and showed Master Gaius the red thread, stood mute and waited to hear what his master would say to the witch's demands.

  "She won't take anything from you you can't spare, eh?" said Master Gaius.

  "So she said." Lucius stared at the mosaic on the library floor. It showed a troupe of actors in costume for a comedy. The scheming slave's face was stretched into a grotesque smile. Perhaps he did not know that he would suffer his downfall by the end of the play.

  "Was she pretty?"

  It hadn't occurred to Lucius to consider the witch's looks in that light. Her wild hair, her glowing eyes, their unnatural green; the power of her gaze, holding him helpless. His own fear and then resignation. "She was beautiful," he said.

  Gaius clapped Lucius's shoulder. "Then I say, enjoy your night with her. Time you had some seasoning, anyway. I only hope you don't acquire a taste for it. I have plans for you when the collar comes off. Say, what's that smudge on your forehead?"

  "Master?"

  Gaius leaned closer, peered at Lucius's forehead. Lucius smelled wine on his breath. "Odd," said Gaius. "I thought it was soot, but there's something else there. Sulia!"

  A flustered house slave arrived, a bucket of dirty water and wet rag in hand. She had been washing the floor in the atrium when Lucius returned.

  "There's a good girl. Loan me your rag."

  She held out the rag, and Gaius dipped it in the water, then pressed it to Lucius's forehead. When he lowered it, both he and Sulia stared at Lucius, speechless.

  Finally, Master Gaius said, "And where did you go after you left the witch?"

  "Only the marketplace, Master. For fruit." Lucius looked down at his empty hands.

  "Not some temple? You weren't hanging around with lackwits planning some slave rebellion?"

  "No, Master! Only the marketplace!"

  "How did you come by a mark of Apollo?"

  "I played my flute in the marketplace."

  Master Gaius took a step backward, his head shaking from side to side.

  "There was music, Master. You have not forbidden me music. I didn't disobey you, I swear it. I only stopped for a moment to play my flute with some children."

  "The mark came then?"

  "We played a hymn. It pleased the god, or so I thought. I never meant to disobey you."

  "I imagine you didn't." Master Gaius sighed and handed the rag back to Sulia. "Too late to do anything about it now, I suppose," he said. "Maybe the mark will give you some protection from the witch. I had better send a bonus with you when you go tonight, and I'd better make plans to get you more training on that flute. I don't want the god angry with me."

  "Master." A tension Lucius didn't know he was carrying eased from his shoulders.

  "Perhaps you can be useful to me in different ways. I could hire you out to religious festivals. I'll talk to some priests. Go have some lunch, and then take a nap. The gods only know what the witch wants with you; you should probably rest up for it."

  "Thank you, Master."

  Carrying the rest of the witch's payment, Lucius left the house just after dusk, one hand on his knife-sheath. Under cover of night, different kinds of criminals operated, more dangerous ones, and the witch didn't live in a good neighborhood.

  He passed a large house where torches in the holders outside signified a party. The sounds of laughter, talk, and music came through the vestibule, the scent of grilled meat and spilled wine, and the flicker of olive oil lamps. He walked through the orange light on the street, then froze as the music caught him. The mark on his forehead burned. His hand went to his flute. With an act of will he forced it away again and made himself walk past, as quickly as he could, to get away from the siren sound. It wasn't even a song he knew, he thought, and something else in him thought: The song no longer matters. All of music is mine.

  But my lord Apollo, not all of me is yours, Lucius thought. He clasped one hand around the red thread and ran through the streets from shadow to shadow, as he had done as a child, speeding faster whenever he heard any thread of music in the air.

  The witch's apartment was full of incense smoke. More burned in a small brazier in the center of her table. He coughed at first, and then found the powerful scent intriguing, even pleasant. She ushered him in and showed him the tablet and the doll on the table. The doll was a rough wax figure as long as a man's hand, dressed in a coarse linen tunic. Its head was made of the wax ball he had left for her, crude facial features picked out with some sharp implement. The tablet, oxidized lead, gleamed with fresh silver letters cut through its darkened surface. The text flowed, drawing his gaze along the twists and turns of strange words so that he almost repeated them aloud. She clapped a hand over his mouth. "This is an address to the chthonic gods," she said. "You don't want to draw their attention." Then she turned his head toward her and stared at his forehead. "What have you done?" she demanded, angry now.

  His master's wife's dresser had let him use the master's wife's mirror see the mark on his forehead. It was faint, a gold tracery in the outline of a lyre. He had never seen another like it on anyone. He couldn't remember whether the other two musicians in the marketplace had been marked.

  Lucius shrugged.

  "Stupid boy," she grumbled, and then said, "God-marked or not, I need your help to complete the ritual. Are you satisfied that the tablet reads as it should?"

  He read through the words. In her script, they took on an elegance that made them foreign and strange. He closed his eyes and compared what she had written to the curse he had in the tablets of his memory. A word changed here or there, but the meaning was the same, perhaps even clearer. He nodded.

  "Give me your hand. I need three drops of your blood to seal the curse."

  "My blood?"

  "Someone's blood. Anyone's blood. It tells the gods we're serious about this. Your blood; I don't care to use mine."

  "Is this the payment you wanted?"

  "No. It's for your master, though, so you'll do it, won't you?"

  He held out his hand. "Could you cut somewhere other than my fingers? I need them for my flute."

  "A flute, is it? You fool." She searched his wrist and made a tiny nick with a short curved golden knife. Blood welled up. She directed it to the tablet, where it dripped and sizzled. Then she stood with her thumb pressed against the wound she had made. She said words that lifted the hair on the back of his neck. The tablet glowed with dull silvery light. His blood vanished from its surface.

  "Sit," said the witch. "I need silence for the next part of this."

  He sat on a stool at her table, with his hands resting on his thighs. She crooned more words over the tablet, and gently rolled the soft metal into a scroll. She tied the doll to it with red thread, then pushed a nail through doll and scroll, chanting in some other language, her face fierce, her eyes mad. Finally she held her hands above the bundle of doll and scroll, spoke three words, and sagged back on her stool.

  "It is done," she said. "Fetch me water." She waved toward a blue glass pitcher on a nearby shelf. A squat sardonyx cup sat beside the pitcher. He poured water for her, and she drank.

  "Is this service my payment?" he asked.

  "You know it isn't." She fetched a length of bronze silk from the shelf and wrapped the tablet and doll in it, carefully so that her skin never touched the tablet. "Take this and follow me."

  She carried a lamp, but it did not light the way behind her. He followed at her heels, the tablet cradled in both hands. It was a cold hard lump in its silk shroud, and it did not warm in his hands; it weighed more than it seemed it should.

  She led him along many streets, some so twisty he got lost. People sometimes approached them along the streets, but something about the witch made them turn and run away. He wondered if she wore a different face.

  The witch stopped him in an a
lley. Finally he recognized where they were: near the northern end of the city, between rooming houses. A small temple to Mithras stood nearby, and the witch led him to the threshold.

  "Only the priest will be there at this time, and he is at his dinner. I sent someone with food that contains a sleeping powder," whispered the witch. "In the first room as you enter, there is a well. A curse tablet works best when it is sunk into dark, deep water where the sun has never shone. It will send your enemy's spirit into the depths. Drop the curse into the well and say, 'Mithras, I entreat you to aid this curse in its execution in this life and the next.'"

  Mithras was the god of soldiers. Lucius had feared soldiers and their god since his brother's death.

  "Go," said the witch. "No women are allowed inside. The priest may be sleepy, but he would smell me."

  Lucius stepped over the threshold into a dark room. A chill struck through him. The witch held out the lamp, and he reached back for it. The floor was covered with black and white tiles, diamonds and full moons in white, the spaces in between black. The well stood in the center of the room. He walked toward it. Each step grew harder to take, as if the air were solidifying around him, trapping him like an insect in amber. He pushed against it, but it brought him to a complete stop three steps away from the well. He looked back toward the witch. He could not see her. The air had darkened around him; only a small circle of light remained around his lamp, enough to light his forearm and hand and a circle of his tunic. "Mithras," he said, but his throat swallowed the word before it came out. He pushed again. The air was like stone. He could go neither forward nor back.

  "Apollo," he whispered.

  Play me there, murmured a voice.

  Lucius set the lamp and the swaddled curse tablet at his feet and took out his flute. He played the paean he and the siblings had played that afternoon. He expected nothing now: it had always taken at least three musicians to bring magic into the music. He played, his breath steadying, the song growing from a limping twitter to a strong string of melody, and then he felt huge hands on his shoulders, steadying him. He played, wondering if the priest would hear and come to curse him for being in this holy place where he did not belong.

  I am here, murmured the voice. Do your deed, if you must.

  Strengthened by the hands on his shoulders, Lucius lowered his flute. The air was soft again, no barrier. He stooped and lifted the curse tablet, took the last three steps to the well.

  He paused.

  Dropping the curse tablet into the well would set the curse in motion. Was he ready to aid in such a terrible undertaking? He remembered the words he had memorized, all the afflictions to be set upon Quintus Valerius Cato. How could he wish such ills on another man?

  Quintus had chained Prisca in a dark room. He did not feed her enough, and he misused her, too, showing his contempt for his rival by mistreating something Master Gaius loved. Quintus's other slaves had had plenty of complaints, and they were supposedly the lucky ones.

  Prisca was a slave, less than human, property. Her legal owner had the right to decide what to do with her.

  Lucius was a slave, and he had been ordered to do this duty.

  He could say he had failed. Only Apollo and Mithras would know the truth.

  Lucius held the lamp out over the lip of the well and looked down into darkness blacker than tar. No gleam of light came back to him, only a deep chill and a cascade of faint whispers.

  He tossed the tablet in. "Mithras, I entreat you to aid this curse in its execution in this life and the next." He did not hear a splash, but he felt a shift in the air, and spikes of frozen nails drove through his bones. His blood on the tablet. His hand in its initiation. It was part of him now, like all his other masters.

  The warm hands on his shoulders pressed once more against his knotted muscles, then vanished. Lucius turned and walked out of the temple. His stomach curdled. Lines of cold lay along his bones.

  The witch waited for him. She tucked her arm through his and they walked back to her apartment building. He stopped at the entrance to the stairs, though, and touched the red thread around his wrist. It unknotted itself and dropped off, the red fading from it until it was pale brown.

  "What? I haven't gotten my payment out of you yet," she said.

  He untied the purse with her fee from his belt and handed it to her.

  "That's not what I meant, and you know it."

  "You may not have gotten the payment you want, but it was payment, just the same," he said. "I did a piece of your work for you, and it hurt me." He didn't recognize his own voice: cold had lodged in it.

  She opened the pouch and looked inside, then up at him.

  "This is more than I asked for," she said.

  "The master thought my encounter with the god would make me less useful to you," he said. "He sent a bonus."

  She made the pouch disappear under her heavy shawl and took the lamp from him. "A wise man, your master," she said. "I'd be pleased to work for him again. Have him send me someone else next time."

  On the way home, Lucius stopped outside the house where the party had been. The lights were lower now, the talk quieted to murmurs, but somewhere a lyre strummed softly; someone blew across panpipes. He leaned against the wall and took out his flute, played a line of melody to match the one the hidden musicians played inside. At first he could not find the pitch nor the rhythm, but then heat kindled in the center of his forehead, and the music opened up to him again. His newest god had not rejected him, so he played himself inside a prayer and stayed there until the others stilled their instruments in sleep.

  By the time he reached home, the household was dark. He went to his pallet and lay listening to others breathing sleep around him. Deodatus cried out in his sleep, but they were used to that now, and no one else stirred.

  In the space of one day, Lucius had acquired three new masters and cast off one. The cold silver in his bones told him he was bound to Mithras still, by calling down the god to work the curse; the mark on his forehead, the new joy in his music, told him he was still tied to Apollo; but the witch had lost her hold. He touched the slave collar, the chafing sign of his first master, sighed, and slept.

  The curse took days to beat Quintus Valerius Cato down. Master Gaius set Lucius to watch the house and see what transpired. Lucius learned the outside of the house very well, and watched a procession of visitors and slaves enter and leave. He noticed when new graffiti was scratched into the bricks. He learned which narrow slit of window led into Prisca's cell, and sometimes he lingered outside it and played quietly on the flute. At those times, her soft sobs stopped.

  He met with Quintus's slaves in the marketplace or a tavern near the house and bought them food and drink in exchange for news from inside the house. The curse started slowly, but its effects grew, until Quintus could hardly leave his bed without pain, and what sleep he managed was haunted by nightmares, the slaves said. A physician was called in three times, and finally Quintus sent for a soothsayer.

  In the long, increasingly warm and humid afternoons, Lucius had time to contemplate. The cold Mithras needles in his bones pricked him sometimes; that was when he knew the curse was working. Times like that, he had no hunger for food; his stomach soured.

  Sometimes a thread of music called him from his post, drew him toward the river or the market, and at those times he gave himself up to the god, until his collar choked him back to the uncomfortable present.

  He was at his post, an alcove shaded by a potted tree, when the curse finally bore fruit. Prisca, frail, pale, and wrapped in a red robe, was led stumbling from the house by one of Quintus's German slaves, a big, light-haired man whose language Lucius did not know, though he had learned which drink the man liked best at the tavern. The German was half-carrying Prisca. Lucius followed them until they were beyond sight of the house's vestibule, then slipped up beside the German. The big man nodded, but continued on through the streets.

  "Prisca?" Lucius said softly. Her eyes were red with wee
ping.

  "Oh, Lucius!" she said. "Finally I am free of that place!"

  "Will you come home with me?" he said. Master Gaius would surely want to see to her safety; he could arrange lodging for her.

  "I cannot. Master Quintus sends me to the temple of Mercurius, so the soothsayer told him." She held out her chafed wrists. "Look, Lucius. I am free."

  "Free," he echoed, and fell back a step.

  "I am to be purified and released. He even gave me three denarii. I can go home to my mother and my sister now."

  Lucius stood where he was and watched the German coax Prisca down the street toward the temple. Soon they were lost amid the afternoon traffic. The curse had been worded that way: Quintus could only break it by freeing the girl.

  Already Lucius felt a faint warmth along his bones, though he still felt the pricking of a silvery needle in his neck. The god had looked toward him and might never turn entirely away.

  He went home to his first master to report.

  Hunger

  The seventh time my father sold me, things changed.

  My father was not an easy man to live with after the Goddess Demeter put a curse of insatiable hunger on him for desecrating her sacred grove. Groans came from him constantly, and he ate everything that looked like food, and, eventually, things that did not.

  He was once king of Thessaly, before the hunger came on him; but he spent all our gold on mountains of flatbread and black grapes, figs, plums, dates and pomegranates, eggs, feta, smoked fish and roast goat and slabs of bacon, onions and olives.

  Taste did not matter to him. At first the palace cooks made huge meals for him, but they could not cook fast enough to keep up with Father’s appetite. In the rage of his hunger, he went to the kitchens and ate uncooked bread dough and raw meat. He almost bit someone’s hand off because she was holding an onion and did not release it fast enough. After that, the cooks fled.