Ages of Wonder Read online

  The witch tapped her lower lip with the tip of the stylus. Her eyes narrowed. “Interesting. Not a situation I’ve encountered before. Usually I work with stolen objects, not people.” She straightened. “Make the appeal to Mars or Mercurius. They’ll get this sort of work done for you.”

  “All right,” said Lucius. “You choose.”

  The witch’s green eyes gleamed as she stared at him. She bent, unrolled the scroll, consulted it, and wrote on the wax.

  Lucius watched the stylus trace elegant letters. He had learned to read and write along with Master Gaius’ younger children, who were still being taught by a Greek slave at home. Master Gaius knew Lucius had a good mind, and hoped to make a secretary of him if he proved steady and reliable. Seven years in the slave collar, and then Lucius would be freed of it, with more trust to grow as he could earn it. The master also let him practice the flute and play for guests at dinner sometimes. Without the click of his sister’s castanets and the strum of his brother’s lyre, Lucius couldn’t infuse the music with power, but he played songs he had learned from sailors and travelers and soldiers, anyone he had met as a child, and all those songs carried a power of memory from everyone who had sung them and passed them on. He wasn’t sure he’d ever reclaim his music magic, which had died the day his brother died, killed by a drunken soldier for an imagined insult. Since that day he had played alone, for his mother sold him soon after, with his consent, so she would have enough money to protect his sister from becoming a slave until she was older. Maybe his price had given her enough of a dowry that she could marry. Lucius didn’t know; his mother and sister had left Ostia, hoping Rome would be kinder to them.

  “Most holy Mercurius,” wrote the witch. “Your master’s name?” she asked Lucius.

  Even though he knew the master’s name was an important part of the invocation, Lucius hesitated. A name was power, and she was a witch. “Gaius Tullius Paulus,” he said. He touched his collar, a nervous habit he had been trying to lose. Of course his master’s name was right there, the etched letters dents under his fingertips.

  The witch wrote again. “Gaius Tullius Paulus salutes you, offers you the gift of this prayer, and begs you act on his behalf. In return for your help he will give half the worth of the woman, when recovered, to your temple.” She looked to Lucius, her eyebrows lifted in question.

  “We don’t know what Master Quintus paid for her,” he said.

  “How much does your master want the woman’s freedom?”

  “I think he wishes he had thought to buy her himself,” Lucius said, “but his wife would never have allowed him to have her in the house. I don’t think he could have afforded her, either.” Master Gaius had inherited money, but he was not the wisest trader, and had lately invested in several ventures that had failed.

  “What did he tell you to offer the god?” She smoothed the wax, erasing the words.

  “A hundred denarii.”

  “Cheapskate.”

  Lucius shrugged.

  “What does he want in return for this gift?” she asked.

  Lucius closed his eyes and recited the curse. “Let the thief, Quintus Valerius Cato, suffer in every part until he releases the stolen woman Prisca. Let him not eat nor drink nor sleep nor defecate until he has made restitution and freed her. Holy one, I give to you his heart and mind, his name, his reputation, his whole being to punish in the worst possible ways until he releases her. Bind him to justice or make him suffer. Blind his eyes and close up his ears. Dry up his speech and cripple his feet. Render him useless in bed. Make his hands feeble and his bones ache. For this aid I will give a gift of—” Lucius stopped, checked to see if she had written down everything he said.

  “Go on, go on,” she said, irritated.

  “One hundred denarii to the temple of Venus,” he said.

  “Yes. I’ll change that to Mercurius.”

  “My master said I was to ask you if all this were in the correct form.”

  “Close enough. I can craft it to fit. This is going to take a big tablet, though, and I charge a sestertius a word. Also, one denarius for the ritual components, which I will do in secret, and another for the curse doll. Give me the hair.”

  Lucius fetched the ball of wax from its pouch and set it before her, turning it so the hair showed on top.

  “Good,” said the witch. “For the placement of the tablet and the curse doll in the appropriate well or temple with the right words and objects—hmm, that’s where I’ll take my payment from you, my boy.”

  He gazed at her steadily. Light shimmered across her eyes from a source he could not see. She smiled.

  “If my master refuses to pay the last part of the price?” Lucius asked.

  “Tell him I won’t take anything from you you can’t spare.” She leaned over her draft of the curse, added more words. He watched them flow in the trail of her stylus: a string of words in a language he did not understand, full of doubled vowels and strange combinations of consonants. She glanced up, saw him watching, and said, “I’ll write the same thing at the top. It’s an incantation to other forces, and will make the spell more binding still.” She counted the words, counting the last words twice, then told him the total. “I want half of it now.”

  He turned his back on her and counted out coins. She was charging him more than the cook had predicted, but less than he had in his purse.

  “Come back tonight. You can help me with the placement, and then I’ll take the rest of my pay,” she said.

  On the way back to his master’s house, Lucius went through the market to pick up some fruit for the cook. He saw a pair of young musicians playing in front of the fish stall, which had sold its catch earlier and had closed its shutters for the day. The girl played the lyre and the boy played a double flute. There was enough similarity in their features and the pale gold of their hair that he suspected they were siblings. Their instruments sounded pure and pitch-perfect, but when they sang (Greek songs poorly translated into Latin), their voices were rough. Few coins fell into the brass bowl at their feet.

  He leaned against a wall under a portico not far from them and took out his flute. As they began a new song, an old hymn to Apollo, Lucius lifted his flute to his lips and played a counter melody.

  For the first time since his brother’s death the music pulsed through him like his own heartbeat. Power gathered as he played, lifted him on his own feet and brought him to the other musicians until they stood in a triangle, each facing the others, the music growing without regard to anyone or anything around them, a paean to Apollo, god of music and light. He felt the song arrow up into the air, rising to greet the god and surround him in golden light. He felt the blessing return, three golden arrows dropping from the sky, which struck them with warmth, a brief flare of fire on each of their foreheads, and a nimbus of light. For an age the music held them, every breath an element of the whole, all notes weaving together to sustain them outside of time, in the center of prayer.

  The slave collar tightened around Lucius’ throat, narrowing his access to air. The red thread burned his wrist, and he lost the melody. The girl stilled her fingers on the strings. The boy, gasping, lowered the double flute. The three of them glittered with godlight a moment longer, and then it faded.

  “What—?” said the boy, his accent heavy.

  “How—who are you?” the girl asked, her voice almost breathless.

  Lucius blinked, woke from a dream where he was back in the center of his family. He stood in the marketplace with strangers, surrounded by the noise of bargaining, arguments, and shopkeepers calling their wares, the shuffle of feet, the air alive with the smells of meat grilling, sweaty people, baking bread, heavy perfumes.

  He tugged at his collar, but it no longer choked him; it had loosened as soon as he stopped playing. “Thank you,” he said to the boy, the girl, and the god. He turned and nearly tripped over the couple’s brass offering bowl, now overflowing with brass and bronze coins. A few passersby who had stopped near them
moved on. Lucius tucked his flute into his belt and plunged into the crowd. He didn’t stop for fruit, too shaken by what had happened, but headed straight home.

  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 embrace 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’ 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’ 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’ 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 to you.” 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 spoke more words over the tablet, crooning them, 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 alley. 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.