This was the face of nature we Romans love, nature tamed and turned to the human purposes of production or religion. We have always preferred tilled fields to wasteland; flat, arable ground to hills and mountains; gardens to forests. Wild nature has no appeal for us. Pastoral poets sing the praises of nature, but their dreamy idylls are really about the tame sort, with nymphs and shepherds frolicking among wooly lambs and myrtle groves and stately poplars. Only Gauls and Germans love the real thing.
I decided to give up on my mission and simply enjoy the beautiful, fragrant night, so near the city, yet so far from its crowding and bustle. Then my spine turned to ice when I heard the unearthly cry of a screech owl and I remembered that the words for witch and screech owl were one and the same: striga.
Let Etruscans busy themselves with the guts of animals. We Romans know that the most powerful omens come from lightning, thunder, and birds. I am not superstitious, but my scepticism wanes at night and returns with daylight.
The sound had come from my left, and I walked until I found a path leading in that direction. It was not paved, but was a well-trodden dirt lane so old that much of it was sunken two or three feet beneath the surface of the surrounding fields. It takes many, many generations for the tread of bare or sandaled feet to wear a path so deep, for the lane was too narrow for farm carts. It must have been there long before Romulus, perhaps before even the Etruscans, when only the Aborigines inhabited Italy.
The lane led me through the plowed fields away from the road, away from tombs and herms. The ground grew rougher, with heaps of stones piled up where the plows had turned them up, only some of them seemed to have been piled with greater regularity than others, and here and there I saw single, daggerlike, standing stones such as you see in some of the islands and in the more remote parts of the Empire, where ancient peoples worshipped gods whose names we do not know. I had not thought that any such were to be found so near the City. But then, I thought, perhaps I was letting the moonlight and my imagination deceive me. Maybe they were just big stones, too large for the plowmen to haul away, and instead stood on end to take up less ground.
I came to a low hill topped by a dense copse of trees. At the uttermost limit of hearing, I thought I detected odd, rhythmic sounds, thumpings as of small drums, and perhaps a chanting of human voices. I thought that now would be an excellent time to return to the City. Instead, having determined upon a course of foolishness and danger, I took a deep breath and stepped away from the sunken lane. I began to walk toward the wooded hill.
The new-plowed earth was soft beneath my boots and soon I detected something else: Besides the regular furrows there were many other indentations there. I crouched to see what they might be and the moonlight revealed that lines of footprints other than my own led from the lane to converge upon the little hill. I straightened, checked that my dagger was loose in its sheath, and my caestus was handy, then I went on.
At the base of the hill the sounds were far more plain. The thumping of the drums was now mixed with the skirling of flutes and the rhythmic chants were punctuated by loud, seemingly spontaneous cries. If these formed words they were in a language I did not know. The beat of the music was something primitive and stirring, touching me on a level below my overlay of Roman culture, as the sight of the standing stones had touched me.
At the edge of the trees I could see a faint, ruddy glow from within the copse. These were not cultivated orchard trees; no apples or olives for this sacred spot. For the most part they were ancient, gnarled oaks, rough-barked, their trunks home to owls and their roots the abode of serpents. Beneath my boots the dry, crenellated leaves of the trees crunched faintly, like parchment or the flaking remnants of Egyptian mummies.
From the limbs of the trees I could see dangling strange objects made of feathers and ribbons and other materials I could only guess at. Wind harps made soft music that could scarcely be heard over the noise from the center of the grove.
Placing my feet with great care, barely daring to breathe, I walked through the trees, my eyes straining through the gloom for hidden sentries. The Spaniards had always been too lazy to set sentries, but Italian witches might be more careful. I thought of what Urgulus had said: that there was a mundus on the sacred ground of the witches. These passages to the underworld are rare and are greatly revered, for it is through them that we communicate with the dead and the gods below. There was one in Rome and others up and down the Italian peninsula. I had never heard of this one.
I began to see shadows, as of human forms passing between me and the source of the light. Now I moved even more cautiously, stepping from tree to tree, trying to work my way closer while remaining invisible myself. I could see that I was approaching a clearing, and that it was filled with people whirling, dancing, clapping, chanting to the rhythm of pipe and drum. The trees were beginning to thin, but I saw a dense clump of bay at the very edge of the clearing between two oaks and I made my way toward it.
My nerves were on edge as I sidled from tree to tree, even though the frenzied revelers seemed to be paying no slightest attention to anything outside the clearing. I could get no clear look at them beyond an occasional glimpse of shining flesh, but the voices I could hear seemed for the most part to be those of women.
At the clump of bay I lowered myself to a crouch. I was within a few feet of the clearing, but the branches and foliage of the bush were so thickset that I couldn’t see much. I lay down flat on my belly and began to creep forward. My weapons dug painfully into my belly, but that was the least of my worries. These people held their rites in remote secrecy specifically because they did not want to be observed by profane eyes. They would be inclined to punish anyone who spied on them. I was reminded of the stories of the Maenads, those wild female followers of Dionysus who were wont to tear apart and devour any man unfortunate enough to stumble upon their woodland rites. And these celebrants, whoever they were, seemed to be in a state of Maenadic frenzy.
When only a final low-hanging branch remained before my eyes, I very carefully moved it aside with my hand and had my first clear view of the revels within the glade.
In its center burned a massive bonfire that cast flame and sparks high into the black night overhead. Besides the blazing logs and faggots in its heart, I could see the shapes of what I hoped were sacrificial animals, and there was a heavy smell of scorching meat in the air. But the fire and its victims did not rivet my attention. The women did.
The only men I saw were those playing instruments and these, unlike the women, wore masks that completely concealed their faces. All the others were female, perhaps a hundred of them, all dancing with demented vigor. None of them wore proper clothing, although many were scantily draped in animal skins and all wore abundant vine wreaths and chaplets. There were no children, the youngest of them being at least nubile. There were a few aged hags, but the greater part of them were women of childbearing age. The greatest shock, though, was that not all were peasant women.
When the first patrician lady flashed before me, I doubted my senses. Then I began to pick out more of them. Some may have been of the noble plebeian families, but I recognized a few of them, and these were all of ancient patrician families. The first to whirl before my eyes was Fausta Cornelia, Sulla’s daughter and the betrothed of my friend Milo. Then I saw Fulvia, who seemed to be right in her element. And, as I might have guessed, Clodia was there, managing to appear cool and languid even in the midst of such festivities.
The contrast between the patrician ladies and the peasant women was far greater than I might have imagined. Far from being leveled by the removal of their clothing, the contrast was rendered even more vivid. The peasant women had unbound their hair to let it stream wildly as they danced. Even the palest of them were darker than the noble women, their arms and faces burned darker still by exposure to the sun. Hair lightly furred their arms and legs and grew in dense thatches beneath their arms and between their legs.
The elaborate coiffures of the patricians staye
d in place during their wildest gyrations. Their skins, protected from the sun all their lives, were whiter than pearl and they wore costly cosmetics. They were slender in contrast to the broad-hipped stockiness of most of the peasant woman. Most striking, though, was that except for their scalps, the patrician women had been divested of every trace of hair with tweezers, wax, and pumice stone. Next to the intense animality of the rural witches, these Circes of Rome looked like polished statues of Parian marble.
If I had not already been pressed solidly to the ground, my jaw would have dropped. They were like members of unlike species, as different as horses and deer, united only in their devotion to this orgiastic celebration. What was it Clodia had said to me only the night before? I indulge in religious practices not countenanced by the state. She had certainly been understating the matter.
I felt that I had no cause for surprise or shock. The state religion was just that: a public cult in which the gods could be propitiated and the community strengthened and united through collective participation. There were other religions and mystery cults all over the world. From time to time, usually when faced with a crisis, we consulted the Sibylline Books, and they sometimes directed us to import a foreign god, complete with cult and ritual. But this was only after lengthy discussion by the pontifexes, and it was never a degenerate Asiatic deity. Many religions were permitted in Rome, as long as they were seemly and did not involve forbidden sacrifices or colorful mutilations, as when the male worshippers of Cybele, in their religious frenzy, castrate themselves and fling their severed genitalia into the sanctuary of the goddess.
No, what made my spine crawl was not the nature of this celebration but the fact that it was native, not some exotic import from an Aegean island or the far fringes of the world. Its sacred grove was within an hour’s walk of Rome and had probably been going on there for countless centuries. Here was a religion as ancient as the worship of Jupiter, in Jupiter’s own land, yet unknown to the vast bulk of the Roman people, little more than a whispered rumor among the common people.
And there was the participation of the patrician women. That, at least, was not so astonishing. Wealthy, indulged, and pampered, but shut out from public life or any sort of meaningful activity, they were usually bored and were always the first to pick up any new foreign religious practice to appear in Rome. And the three I recognized were just the sort to seek out any strange cult, just so it was sufficiently exciting and degenerate.
A woman broke from the whirling rings of dancers and stood next to the fire, shouting something, repeating the cry until the others slowed and, finally, stilled. The noise of the instruments died away, and the woman chanted something in a language I did not understand, with a prayerlike cadence. Her face was so transformed by her ecstatic transport that I did not immediately understand that this was Furia. Her long hair was laced with leafy vines and over her shoulders was thrown the flayed skin of a recently sacrificed goat. Its blood liberally bespattered her body, as it had so recently been decorated by my own. In one hand she held a staff carved with a twining serpent, one end terminating in a pine cone, the other in a phallus.
I saw then that she stood between the fire and a ring of stones perhaps three feet across. This had to be the mundus through which the witches contacted their underworld gods.
Bowls were passing among the celebrants; ancient vessels decorated in a style that was vaguely familiar to me. Then I remembered the old bronze tray on which Furia had cast her miscellaneous prophetic objects. The wild-eyed, heavily sweating worshippers seemed to be unaffected by the chill of the December night. Whatever the brew was, the patrician ladies sucked it up as lustily as their rustic sisters.
The men did not partake. I noticed then that, besides their grotesque masks, the men wore cloths wrapped tightly about their lower bodies, as if to disguise the fact of their maleness, rendering them temporary eunuchs for this female rite.
Now a woman, one of the peasants and older than Furia, came forward. She wore a leopard pelt over her shoulders, and her arms had been painted or tattooed with coiling serpents. In one hand she held a leash and its other end was looped around the neck of a young man, who wore only garlands of flowers. He was a sturdy youth, handsome and well-proportioned. His skin was perfect, free from scars or birthmarks, and I was uneasily reminded of the perfect bull we had sacrificed earlier that evening. If he had an imperfection, it was in his blank gaze. He was either utterly fatalistic, half-witted, or drugged.
Two of the men came forward and seized the youth from behind by both arms. They marched him to the lip of the mundus and forced him to his knees beside it. Furia handed something to the woman in the spotted pelt. It was a knife, and it was as archaic as the ritual, almost as primeval as the women’s own bodies. It was even more ancient than the bronze dagger I used on my desk as a paperweight. Its grip was the age-blackened antler of a beast I had never beheld, one that certainly had not roamed the Italian peninsula since the days of the Aborigines. Its blade was broad and leaf-shaped, made of flint, its edges chipped in rippling facets, beautiful and cruelly sharp.
I knew that I should do something, but I was paralyzed with a sense of futility. These were not women who would run screaming at the sight of a lone man brandishing his dagger. The men might have weapons handy. And if the dazed boy was not inclined to run, it would be the height of folly to try to bear him off. Perhaps if it had been a small child I might have added to my night’s foolishness by attempting a rescue. I like to think so.
Furia held her hands out, palms downward, over the youth’s head. She began a slow, tuneless song. The others joined in, except for the men, who held their hands before their eyes and slowly backed away from the firelight into the obscurity of the trees. The song ended. The young man now was held only by the older priestess, whose left hand gripped his hair. He seemed perfectly ready to accept his fate. I wondered whether the sacrificial bull had been drugged. Furia clapped her hands three times and three times called out a name, which I will not try to reproduce. Some things must not be written.
With the tip of her wand Furia touched the side of the boy’s neck. Instantly, the other priestess plunged the flint knife into the indicated spot. It went in more easily than I would have imagined, up to the antler hilt. Then she withdrew it and a deep, collective sigh went up from the worshippers as the bright, arterial blood fountained into the mundus. It happened in eerie silence for there was no sound of splashing from the stones within. Perhaps it truly led all the way to the underworld. Or perhaps something was drinking it as fast as it poured in.
The blood seemed to gush from the boy’s neck for an impossibly long time, until his heart ceased to beat and he slumped forward, pale and already looking like a shade. Then a number of the women rushed forward, seized the corpse, and hurled it onto the blazing pyre with a strength that seemed unnatural.
I was cold and sweating at the same time, and I knew that I must look as pale as the unfortunate sacrifice. I had looked upon a great deal of death, but this was different. The commonplace slaughters of the street, the battlefield, and the arena entirely lack the unique horror of a human sacrifice. Rage and passion and cruelty, even cold-blooded calculation, are paltry things compared to murder when the gods are called upon to participate.
I was so transfixed by what was happening before me that I neglected to pay attention to what was going on behind.
I nearly fainted when something grabbed my ankles. For an insane moment I thought that one of the underworld deities, summoned by the blood offering, was going to drag me down beneath the earth. Then other hands were on me and I was twisting around, yanking out my dagger and thrusting. Bay leaves whipped my face as I was jerked upright, and I heard a deep, masculine voice cry out as my blade connected. Then both my arms were held in wrestler’s locks, and my dagger was snatched away from my grasp.
Like the boy, only struggling, I was frog-marched into the clearing, and women, amazed and outraged, drew back from my defiling presence. Then, scr
eeching, they attacked. I suffered a few nail scratches, but Furia beat them back with her wand and they quieted.
“Look what we found, Priestess!” said one of the men who held me, in the by now familiar Marsian accent.
“I think he wants to be sacrificed,” said another of the men. “Shall we take him to the mundus?” This one was Roman, and upper class to judge by his diction. Furia lashed him across his face mask with her wand and he yelped.
“Fool! This one is ugly and scarred like a gladiator! The gods would be mortally offended if we offered them such a one!”
I thought she was being a little rough on me. No artist had ever asked me to model for Apollo, but I had not judged myself to be truly repulsive. She was right about the scars, though. I had picked up a lot of them for a basically peaceable man. I was not going to argue with her, however. She tapped the tip of her wand against my cheek.
“I told you not to look into these matters, Roman, and my two attendants warned you as well. If you had listened, we would not have to kill you now.”
“You said I was going to live a long time!” I protested. “That makes you a pretty poor prophetess, if you ask me!”
She actually chuckled. “A man may always will his own destruction, even if the gods are kindly disposed. You have brought this upon yourself.” Her hair was a snarled mare’s nest, and her eyes were wild. She was bloody and sweaty and she stank abominably from the flayed goat’s skin, but at that instant I felt a powerful lust for her, far surpassing anything I could have felt for the immaculate noblewomen. Some things are entirely beyond reason.
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