In Numina: Urban Fantasy in Ancient Rome (Stories of Togas, Daggers, and Magic Book 2)

by Assaph Mehr

  Chapter VII

  The address of the man to whom we had the introduction was on the Clivi Inferior. It suited us to go there after we left Sosius, as it was on the way back to Aemilia’s residence, and at a time when the occupant was likely to be home.

  We walked first from the Basilica Antonia across the Forum and down the Via Recta, where my banker held his shop. Navigating the Forum is always a challenge, it being the stage to anything worth watching in Egretian public life.

  We passed a senator recently elected as one of next year’s aediles standing on a stool, proclaiming his manifesto for his term in office. Behind him, his slaves washed the chalked-on slogan of one of his opponents from a basilica wall. Further down, a tutor lectured a dozen children in the basics of grammar, making them chant verses of the Aeneid. Hawkers and peddlers of anything from food to trinkets for tourists accosted passersby, only lowering their voices next to a trial in progress held under the shade of a portico. The trial was not a grand affair, and a few people stopped to watch. The judge kept an impassive face, though his eyes darted to a dark corner where a prostitute wriggled inside her toga to flash her breasts at potential customers. Life in our city is carried out in the open, as a form of spectator sport.

  “I doubt anyone dealing with the kind of information we want would let us peruse his collection out of the kindness of his heart,” I said to Aemilia.

  “So, you would buy the scrolls from him?” she asked.

  “Doubtful — more like buy a few short hours to review them. Be ready to take quick notes.”

  “Ah, Felix!” cried Barbatus, my banker, when we entered his office. “Haven’t seen you in a while. Been away? Depositing some commission?”

  “Taking a loan, rather.”

  He peered at Aemilia and said, “My dear, you are far too good to be the kind he normally affords. I hope he promised you a proper marriage.”

  “Oh, shut up, Barbatus,” I retorted as Aemilia blushed. “I’m here on business for the lady’s uncle, and just need a quick advance.”

  “Keep a close eye on him.” Barbatus smiled, while we waited for his clerk to get us the coins. “I employ a special scribe just to keep up with dear Felix’s creative accounting.”

  From there we walked through the alleys behind the Collegium Incantatorum and up the Via Caeca a short way. This area was populated by Egretia’s middle class citizenry, its streets mostly clean and devoid of beggars.

  We found the house of Titus Fonteius Capito by the mark of the owl Sosius described to us. When the little slit in the door opened at our knock, I told the door-slave we had business with his master.

  “What’s your name?” he asked gruffly. “The master only sees the people on this list.”

  I pushed the letter from Sosius through the narrow slit, whereupon the slave closed it. We waited under a tall cypress tree, and got the chance to examine our surroundings — a stretch of private domiciles in between low insulae. Not the best street, but neither the worst. The area was notorious for the rapidly shifting environments, where one end of a street could be quite decent while the other was a veritable slum, riddled with dens of thieves. My inner cynic observed that it must make it easier for those seemingly respectable citizens to find their whorehouses.

  The door opened. “The master will see you now,” said the burly slave.

  We were shown to the tablinum, through a house that had seen better days, or, at least, better housekeepers. Titus Fonteius was seated at his desk, a grey man in his late fifties — grey hair, grey eyes, grey skin, grey expression.

  “I don’t normally see visitors,” he said as he indicated the guest chairs, “But Quintus Sosius wrote it will be worth my while.”

  “If you have the right information for us, I am sure I would be able to compensate you fairly for it. We are after a specific kind of knowledge, which Sosius indicated you would have. We are researching old practices that have fallen out of fashion amongst educated people but are still remembered and used amongst the more superstitious. I understand you might be in possession of scrolls detailing the ancient custom of inscribing charms on lead sheets.”

  “Charms? Curses you mean! There is only one thing you can inscribe on lead tablets — and that thing is very much frowned upon.”

  “You are, of course, correct. You’re most astute and observant — I see Sosius was right to speak so highly of you. We are trying to track down some weird occurrences surrounding this young lady’s uncle. Things no one can explain, putting the poor girl and her family at their wits’ end.” I gave Aemilia a gentle nudge with my foot, and she started to sniffle convincingly. “We are purely trying to research ways of breaking such enchantments to give a poor man some peace in his old age.”

  “And how would I know you are not after creating such ‘enchantments’, as you put it, yourself?”

  I took a fat purse of coins from the sinus of my toga and put it on his desk. “Perhaps this will convince you of our good intentions.”

  “I am still not convinced,” Titus Fonteius said. “I have heard that in recent times the rhones of the Collegium are cracking down on folk practitioners and paying well for information about them.”

  “Not in gold,” I said, and undid the purse’s strings. “And, besides, no one needs to hear about it.”

  The lustre of gold coins did the trick. “You are a fool, but it’s your money. As far as I know, all that remains today are mere charlatans, earning dishonest commissions from the superstitious. The true art, ahem, practice of tabulae defixiones died centuries ago. It is no business of mine if you want to chase wild geese.”

  Thus, establishing that all of us were merely scholars and not law breakers, Aemilia and I were soon sitting together in Capito’s library, poring over scrolls describing the less savoury folk practices in details beyond the ken of charlatans. As is often the case with any metaphysical knowledge, the language was oblique and overly flowery. Words and terms had been appropriated, given symbolical meaning, and used in a way that each line had several possible subtexts.

  In a way, having Aemilia there with her constant questions helped me. Being forced to take the role of pedagogue, introducing her to the art of interpretation of arcane writings, had also forced me to sharpen my own wits. Talking through things out loud with her helped me recall lessons from my past. Plus, her note-taking was far above my own, in a clear and neat hand.

  At last, in an obscure scroll by Iamblichus, I found what I was searching for. As with everything in life, and magia is no exception, there are several ways to achieve the same effect. Curses take many shapes. The lead tablets that Araxus’ hinted about are only one such mechanism. They involve calling on a god or numen and asking it to bring its wrath down upon the victim. The target can be named (“my sleazy neighbour, Gaius Appius, pox be on his head”), or just generally described (“whomever stole my mother’s horn comb from the baths”). A result is petitioned, (“may their food turn in their stomach, their bile rising and not giving them rest”), in exchange for a service by the petitioner for the god (“and for this I shall donate a silver denarius every week at the temple”).

  In essence, a contract.

  There were always rumours of ways to bind real magia to such tablets to achieve the effect, but they were never as precise as incantation. Graduates of the Collegium Incantatorum are usually more direct in their way of effecting desired results, and scoff at the idea that the numina have intelligence and will of their own. For the incantatores, the forces that shape our world are merely flowing energies. Whether to curb competition or from a desire to be on the safe side in case they’re wrong, the rhones ruling the Collegium routinely run any folk or foreign practitioners of magia — including the craftsmen who produce curse tablets — out of town, claiming foul magic and sacrilege. For the common people, though, these tablets are ways to get manifestations of divine direction, and some semblance of justice.


  The tabulae defixiones are therefore to be found dealing with humdrum matters. A lawyer, requesting that his opponent’s tongue seize, his step falter, and his prosecution fail. Or bathers at the public baths, cursing the unknown person who stole their tunics while they were getting clean. There are even love charms for any occasion, from unrequited love to ensuring a partner’s willing participation in certain erotic practices. The majority, perhaps due to the dark and heavy aspect of lead itself, are chthonic in nature. In other words, curses.

  All the gods can be petitioned, but those of the underworld are more often so. Men would call upon Dis Pater or Orcus and women upon Proserpina or Trivia. Sometimes, the god or goddess invoked depended on the target or the particular effect desired. Tablets could be folded, or nailed, or interred in a grave, or thrown down a deep source of water, or buried in a particular location dedicated to the god. Often, the magic would involve several of these at once, especially in case of lead tablets. When the tablets were made from clay, they might be smashed and mixed in cement, or disposed of in any of the many and varied ways people could think of, with the hopes that it would reach the right numen, but lead had proved the most efficacious and became the standard material.

  Almost invariably, these supplications were empty of power. Sometimes, simple folk would imitate the incantatores and would utter what they thought to be words of power. Without understanding the rules of voces mysticae, however, they would just end up speaking nonsensical gibberish. No wonder the simpletons could never reliably get power into the tablets, and supplications to strike the guilty party with ague and dysentery resulted in nothing worse diarrhoea, cramps, or nothing at all.

  Finally, it was in the writing of Iamblichus that I found mentions of the exact way to construct a functional tabula defixionis. He detailed with mathematical precision the ratio of lead to tin and other metals in the base alloy, the way to stretch and create the blank sheet, how to inscribe the curse-words, the various ceremonies and manipulations needed afterwards, and in general how to channel the magia into the tabulae and achieve desired effects. I explained all this to Aemilia, even as we were translating together Iamblichus’ scroll from its original language. Her Hellican was better than mine, though she got lost with the more esoteric and technical terms. No matter, our spheres of knowledge complemented one another’s perfectly.

  Armed with a firmer understanding of how the curse-tablets affect the flow of magia, I could devise a ritual to detect them more clearly in the affected insula, and — should Araxus prove right — contain the curses.

  ***

  By the time we left Titus Fonteius’ house it was after sundown.

  “There was a point I meant to ask you about,” Aemilia said. “In his writing, Iamblichus detailed quite explicitly the ceremonies one must perform over a tablet, and yet you said nothing would happen if I recite them out loud.”

  “That’s because his scroll is written in hexameter to conform to the rest of his text, but the chants have to be recited along different rules.”

  “But even Phaenias describes everything in hexameter, and he’s very specific about the performance of chants.”

  “No amount of reading will — or even could — give one an understanding of magia. The reason it takes so long to learn is that besides the theoretical understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of magia, one simply has to feel it. Awakening this kind of sensitivity can only be done under the guidance of a master. It has to be built up slowly over time.”

  I recounted for Aemilia some of my experiences with the tutors at the Collegium. The greatest achievement of the Collegium Incantatorum is setting up a standard learning path for aspirants. By carefully controlling the education process, we Egretians are able to both repeat it and ensure no one gets too much power too quickly. The results of that are all too often disastrous. In other nations and cultures, the training was more haphazard, with contents and scope controlled by the master himself. The Hellicans, with all their love for teaching and debates, were held back by the constant in-fighting and striving for personal glory. We Egretians managed to turn it to a kind of engineering, like bridge building and road laying. Well, almost like that.

  And Aemilia, with her sharp mind and quick grasp, picked up the ideas and concepts I was talking about easily. That’s how she understood where I was heading, even before I realised it myself.

  “So, to detect the magia you work off of the traces, but it’s always easier to witness the actual flow?”

  “That’s right,” I said, thinking about the right kind of animal for the blood sacrifice I would have to make.

  “And you can then devise a ceremony to enhance your acquired sensitivity and follow the flows to their source?”

  “Correct again,” I answered, trying to recall where else I’d seen some of the sigils in Fonteius’ scrolls, and what hints that might give me.

  “I hope mother is at home,” she said, “because you will be staying for dinner.”

  “Ah, what? Thank you kindly for the invitation, but I wouldn’t want to impose.”

  “Rubbish! First, I hardly think either you or my mother will find it an imposition. But more importantly,” she smirked at me, “you should know better than to expect I will let you go tonight. You’ve pretty much admitted that you need to carry out a ceremony in the presence of the magia, which means spending the night in one of my uncle’s cursed insulae. If you imagine for one minute I will let you send me to bed like a child while you have all the fun, you are crazier than a spinster with twenty cats! The agreement was that I get to watch and report to my uncle.”

  “The agreement, young lady, was that you may observe and that I would warn your mother if there was anything I deemed too dangerous. And if you think spending the night in an abandoned building waiting to observe what form of atrocities the curse will try and visit upon us is not dangerous, then you are more delusional than a galley-slave dreaming of being elected to the senate!”

  She opened her mouth to speak but I cut her off. “Anyway, that is not relevant for tonight. We have to make preparations ahead of time and I need to design the ceremony. You, my dear, will get to watch the preparations. But no more.”

  “You forget who’s paying whom. My uncle —”

  “Has hired me, for my knowledge.”

  “I will tell him you cheat him!” Aemilia snapped.

  “I will tell your mother that you are trying to learn incantation for yourself!” I snapped back.

  “Will the two of you shut up already? You are embarrassing me in front of my neighbours.” We were standing at the entrance to Aemilia’s house, and without our notice Cornelia had come to the door. She was glaring, clutching a shawl around her shoulders as her door-slave cringed behind her, trying to meld with the wall.

  “Now come inside,” Cornelia said, “and we can talk about this over dinner like civilised people.”

  ***

  I hardly noticed the food that evening. Aemilia and I glared at each other while Cornelia found the whole thing amusing. Icilia was there too, making incessant small-talk that grated on my nerves. It seemed like every time Aemilia or I would start to speak, we’d do so at the same moment. As soon as voices started to rise, Cornelia would clap her hands, shut us up, and order the next course or more wine. Icilia took the following silences as a challenge, filling them with inane gossip.

  Aemilia left right after the fruit baked in milk with candied nuts and black pepper was served. As she walked out, she said over her shoulder, “Make sure you keep him here tonight, mother.”

  Icilia did a poor job at concealing a snigger at that remark. After a last sip of wine, Icilia rose to leave, forgoing further entertainment. I got to my feet as well, but Cornelia stopped me from leaving. “I’d rather avoid another argument with Aemilia. You might as well stay the night and start together in the morning.”

  “You have t
o see my point, though. It is far too dangerous for her. You have heard the stories about mutilated corpses and dead children. We will stand right in the middle of the worst of it! And what if I’m wrong and this isn’t a curse? We may be completely unprepared to deal with whatever causes this.”

  Cornelia sighed. “All true, of course. I can’t let her go. It will be a hard day tomorrow when I tell her. There’s one way you can make it easy for me — find some research she can do, a scroll she can read — to keep her feeling like she’s still involved.” She paused, adding with half-lidded eyes, “Well, two ways you can make it easy for me. I need a good night’s sleep, and Icilia will have already spread the gossip.”

  Chapter VIII

  The next morning reaffirmed my life’s choice of not sharing my home with a woman. Even before leaving my sleeping cubicle, I could hear Cornelia and Aemilia arguing. I followed the yelling around the corner to the peristyle garden. A few of the house-slaves were pointedly keeping themselves busy with chores, away from the raging storm.

  As I got closer, I could make out the words.

  “I am not a child anymore! I will be married soon and —”

  “And I’d like you to live long enough to see that wedding! We agreed that we’ll let you indulge in a little fun this summer and in return you agreed to cooperate with marriage.”

  “Exactly! This will be a long life of boring duties as a senator’s wife. I wanted to experience real magia, the kind forbidden to women. You didn’t think for a moment I’d settle for a couple of third-hand stories to frighten children and a visit to some seedy scrolls dealer?”

  “But a haunted house? It is far too dangerous. These aren’t merely stories to frighten children, as you put it. You described to me the gruesome blood and gore you saw in those apartments. I can’t possibly agree to let you place yourself in such a risk.”

  “I will have Felix there to protect me. You certainly appreciate his ‘services,’ don’t you?”