“When any Roman town was founded, it seems to have been standard practice to dig a trench, called the mundus, and throw offerings into it in order to invite the gods to watch over the place and its inhabitants. The trench was then covered with a stone. This mundus apparently evolved into some sort of subterranean chamber dedicated in particular to underworld spirits. Three times a year (in August, October and November) the stone covering was raised so that, it is claimed, the spirits of the dead had access to the world of the living, or as Cumont and Frazier put it, the ‘door of hell was opened.’”
—R.C. Finucane, Appearances of the Dead: A Cultural History of Ghosts
Herculanaeum, August 24, A.D. 79—the ninth day before the Calends of September
When Marcilla wakes, at last, it’s with Gnaius Vespis shaking her, hard enough to bruise. “Barbarian,” he says. “Time to go, little wild girl; good enough time as any, anyhow. Now or never, like.”
She turns over, groaning, to scrub thick sleep from her eyes. Outside, there’s still the same steady patter of tiny black stones falling down through the clouds around Vesuvius’ crest, like some angry god’s spittle. Last she remembers, Dromio and the few remaining house-boys were going up top to scrape Villa Locusta’s roof clean, so it wouldn’t collapse under this strange deluge’s mounting weight; the yard itself was already carpeted thick and ankle-deep with them, grating beneath her sandals as Marcilla ran to the bath-house with her skirt looped up over her head, trying vainly to shield herself against harm from above. And now she reaches up to feel her scalp, only to find it still sticky in places from where the harder stones made her head bleed—while Gnaius watches, fair champing at the bit with impatience, like the half-mad war-stallion he still is.
“Is Chryse fit to travel, then?” Marcilla asks, voice hoarse with dust and heat.
“I’ll carry her, she’s not. Come on, barbarian—herself’s still down below, praying more ruin on us all. We’ve one chance only, this, and don’t think I’ll stay much longer to convince you.”
Again, the off-hand insult; great fool never has managed to learn even this meaningless name her captors forced on her, years before, in Rome’s own main slave-market. Yet Marcilla can’t fault him for it, somehow. He means well enough, in his clumsy way . . . like when he finally figured out how he’d got Chryse with a child neither of them could afford to keep, yet chose to stay by her nevertheless, instead of running off with the rest of Locusta’s household.
She yawns, jaw cracking; levers herself upright in the too-bright darkness, groping under her pallet for a rough bundle of clothes, bread, a broken bronze knife hoarded from the kitchen while the head cook wasn’t paying attention. Thinking at the same time, though never (of course) saying right out loud:
I had a son once too, Gnaius, ever hear tell of that? Oh, yes. ‘Til a man like you stamped on his sweet little skull while it was still soft, because he’d’ve been too much trouble to keep alive all the way back to Rome, not to mention too unsalable at the other end. Not a sufficiently justifiable . . . investment.
Because that’s what happens to babies bred from slaves, whether their fathers be cashed-out Legionnaires turned bodyguards, or brave young Icenii warriors so eager to die for their cause they don’t even stop to think over what might happen to their wives—or children—afterward. When they fight the Empire’s victorious hordes first-hand, and lose.
And why does Gnaius even want her along on this (no doubt) doomed venture? In case Chryse comes to time before they’re well away, out in the woods or fields, with no surgeon handy? If they’re caught, they’ll all be killed, that’s a foregone conclusion: Gnaius for stealing the Lady Locusta’s property, Marcilla and Chryse for “stealing” themselves, as an example to the others. Which is fairly funny, come to think, considering just how few of those others seem to’ve hung around since the cloud first went up, and are thus likely to benefit from such a paradoxical lesson . . .
But at least it’ll finally be out of her own hands, then. A sure and certain end, no matter how long they make it last before the climax; beyond her control, like so much else. And then the long sleep, forever—through Elysium’s dark gate and back to her own country, one way or another.
Where I come from, things were different, Marcilla tries devoutly to make herself believe, as ever. Though really, it’s been so long since she was last there that she finds it hard to recall exactly how, or even why.
Herculanaeum is no Rome, for all its pretensions. Yet Rome lies heavy on her still, like her first rapist did (and him not even Roman, or at least not so directly). It crushes out her every breath. She barely has enough strength to force herself through each day without turning the stolen kitchen knife on her own throat, her belly, the soft, scarred interior of her thigh, where a vein far too large and full of blood to staunch waits to be tapped, its very pulse like a rebuke. Hammering, with each fresh beat: Why are you alive yet, traitor, and so many others not—so many more deserving, braver, better? How do you dare live on at all?
But it takes so much effor
t to fight back, and so little not to; this is the one, the only real truth of her current condition. That simple. That dreadful.
So: “Let’s bloody go, then,” is all Marcilla says, finally. To which Gnaius looses a great gust of held breath, and grins his usual broke-toothed grin: Good barbarian! That’s the spirit, wild girl!
“Praise be to all gods, you’ve seen sense. Thought I was going to have to throw you both over my shoulders and march away whistling, like Hercules Jupiter-get himself with his Amazon bitches.”
“Wouldn’t’ve got too far at that rate, would you? Not with your bad leg.”
He claps her on the shoulders, fake-hearty. “Oh, never you mind that, little Pict. I’m surprising in a tight squeeze, me, often as not—just ask Chryse.”
“Pass, thanks.”
And out they set, together.
***
When Marcilla first came to the Lady Locusta’s service, a year or so ago, this domus was already more than halfway as it is now: Sombre, denuded, empty as city streets on Lemuria feast-day, when ghosts are said to possess the upper—as well as the underearth. Its halls filled with sadly pastoral murals, its rooms with dust and abandoned toys—and Dromio was quick enough to tell her the why of it, for all she hadn’t actually bothered to ask; she’d learned long before that curiosity is seldom a well-rewarded quality in slaves.
“It was her son, see. The young master. Struck down by a cart on the fifth cardo, just north of the Suburban Thermae.” He paused here, for effect. “And him only eight name-days old.”
Longer than my boy lived, and far happier, I’ve no doubt, Marcilla thought. But: “Sad,” she said, aloud. As she knew they expected.
“She wouldn’t even let his pyre be laid,” the head cook put in, here. “Just ordered him taken down to the mundus, and never brought him back up yet.”
Gnaius, from the corner, oiling his leather armor: “Well, might be he lives still, down there. Crippled, like. That might happen.”
Dromio shook his head. “I saw him brought home, held him up while she washed his face. He . . . could not have survived.”
The cook again, portentously: “They’ll come to stop her, you’ll see—his father’s kin won’t have it. Such blasphemy can’t go unpunished forever.”
And yet . . . it did. Still does.
Didn’t take long for the plain truth to out in day-to-day conversation either, no matter how many happy euphemisms Dromio might’ve originally tried to cloak it in. Widowed and childless as she is, plagued with debts on every hand, the Lady Locusta keeps her otherwise patrician head above water through a multitude of strange ventures, most having to do with the black arts: Necromancy, love potions, poisoning for hire, drawing horoscopes and casting the future, in defiance of all local temple strictures. For how can her servants think any different, really, seeing she’s down in her family’s private mundus at all hours, calling on infernal powers to work her clients’ will?
Many times in the night’s small hours, when no one else lies sleepless, Marcilla has pressed her ear to that cold stone lid. Beneath, her mistress’s usually-soft voice rises and falls in horrid ecstasy, worshipping at the ancestor-shrine those long-dead first Locustii crafted from a fissure sprung agape in the too-active Vesuvian earth—a steaming gash kept open ever since specifically so those of her gens can use it to practice their personal brand of witchcraft. Marcilla has listened, heart in throat, while the lady scratches curses on sheets of soft lead and throws them into the smoking crack itself, surrounded by the tombs of her mothers and fathers, whose inhabitants presumably lie ready either to carry the message further below, or simply do the job themselves.
Locusta, usually so polite and kind, if a trifle absent—each word or move deliberate, never a hair left out of place. Her downcast eyes the same dull blue washed with faintest rose as a river’s current made sluggish by sheer proximity, by merest implication, when it flows downstream from some ford choked by fresh corpses.
Since then, Marcilla is careful to keep her own eyes down whenever the lady of the house walks by, avoiding that empty gaze if she possibly can. But she can never quite make herself forget the last and latest thing her eavesdropping told her, that secret she will never tell Gnaius, Chryse or any of the others, not even if they think to ask: that she has heard another voice answer Locusta back, here and there, amongst the wailing. A lisping boy’s voice, small and cold and still, which answers only when asked directly—
Are they here yet? The others?
Yes.
Will it be soon?
Yes.
What must I do?
Only wait. Pray. And . . .
(be ready)
That awful voice, and then Locusta’s again, stone-muffled in deep darkness. Declaiming string after string of strange titles, pseudonyms Marcilla neither knows, nor wants to: You of the whispers. You, Empty One. You who sew things, each to each. You who wear us as robes. You, Render from Above. You who seed without regard. You, who harvest everything. Seasonless ones, timeless ones, faceless ones, nameless ones . . .
Let it all come down, now. Let it come to an end, and quickly. Quickly!
Let this world be remade at last, or destroyed utterly.
***
She keeps herself to herself, Marcilla, at the best of times—but these are not those, and haven’t been for quite some while. It began back when the month first turned, with a series of small signs: Springs and wells turned salt, dried up, a constant stench of sulphur on the summer air; little tremors shook the rim of the Bay, hills and gorges alike convulsed by Triton Earth-shaker’s wrath, splitting open here and there like a dying man’s lips under the strain.