Roma Page 3

  The choosing was done by lottery. It was important that everyone in the village could see that the numina of chance, not the scheming of any parent, dictated the outcome. While everyone in the village watched, the children stood in a line. A pot full of small pebbles, all white except for seven black ones, was passed before them. One by one, the children reached inside and took a pebble. When all of them were done, together they opened their palms to show the stone they had chosen. When it was seen which children had chosen the black pebbles, there was much weeping; but when Cacus’s claw of a hand opened to show a black pebble, even his mother seemed relieved.

  That winter was milder than the year before. Despite hunger and hardship, no one in the village died. It seemed that the rite of sacred spring had placated the numina and preserved the village. When spring came, and the first buds opened on the trees, it was decided that the children must set out.

  According to the ritual, an animal would guide the children to their new home. All the elders agreed on this, but none of them could quite remember how this animal was to be chosen. The eldest among them said that the animal would make itself known, and sure enough, the night before the children were to set out, several of the elders had a dream in which they saw a vulture.

  The next morning, the seven children were taken from their homes. The other children and all the women of the village were shut away; from the huts, their weeping could be heard all over the mountainside. The elder with the keenest eyes climbed up to the promontory and watched. At last he gave a shout and pointed to the southwest, where he saw a vulture circling just above the horizon.

  The men took up cudgels. Beating drums and shaking rattles, the elders led them in a chant meant to summon their courage and harden their hearts. The chant grew faster and faster, louder and louder. At last, screaming and brandishing their cudgels, they ran toward the seven children and drove them from the village.

  The days after that had been very hard. Each morning the children searched the sky for a vulture. If they saw one, they headed toward it. Sometimes the vulture led them to carrion that was still fit to eat; sometimes it led them to a carcass so foul that even the vulture would not touch it. Desperation taught them to hunt and fish and to sample every plant that might be edible; even so, on many days, the children went hungry. Cacus was too clumsy to be of much use as a hunter, and the others resented him because he needed more to eat. But he was the strongest by far, and when predators howled at night, it was to Cacus that the others looked for protection.

  The first to die was a girl. Faint from hunger, she fell from a high place and struck her head. The children debated what they should do with her body. It was not Cacus who suggested the unthinkable, but another boy. The rest agreed, and Cacus did as the others did. Was that when he began to become something that was not human, when he first ate human flesh?

  Little by little, their wanderings took them to the lower lands to the south and west of the mountains. Here the land offered more game and the rivers more fish, and the plants were more fit to eat. Still, they were hungry.

  The next child to die was a boy with an injured foot. When the children came upon a bear and scattered in panic, the boy lagged behind. The bear caught him and mauled him badly, then lumbered off when Cacus came running back, screaming and brandishing a branch. The boy was already dead.

  When the children ate that night, it seemed only proper that Cacus should have the largest portion.

  Summer passed, and still they found no home. One of the children died after eating a mushroom. Another died after several days of sickness and fever. Despite their hunger, the survivors feared to eat the bodies of those who had died of poison or fever, and so they buried them in shallow graves.

  Only Cacus and two others remained. That winter was unusually bitter and cold. Trees shivered naked in the wind. The earth turned as hard as stone. The animals vanished. Even the most skillful hunter would have found it impossible to survive without the desperate solution to which Cacus resorted.

  Was that when the change occurred in Cacus—when he decided not to wait for a fall or a bear, or some other chance event? Instead, he did it himself. He did what he had to do, and for the most basic reason: He needed to eat. But he did not act rashly. He did not kill them both at once. First he killed the stronger one, and let the weaker one live a little longer. More than once, that child, his final companion, tried to escape from him. Cacus waited as long as he could, until his hunger was so great that no man could have endured it. He waited because he knew, as soon as the other child was gone, that the only thing worse than hunger would follow: loneliness.

  Spring came. Cacus was alone. At night he could not sleep, but lay awake listening to the sounds of the wilderness, entering more and more into a world bereft of human reason.

  He continued to wander. Eventually he encountered travelers, and came upon villages, but no humans would have anything to do with him. They feared him, and rightly so; more than once, he stole a child and ate it. When that happened, the humans pursued Cacus. A few times they came close to capturing him, but always Cacus escaped and left the hunters behind, their bones picked clean. Surviving in the wild had taught him cunning and stealth. Physically, no man was his match; Cacus had grown bigger and stronger than any man he had ever seen.

  The wheel of the seasons passed again and again. Cacus survived the dry summers and the harsh winters, always alone, always wandering.

  One day, he saw a vulture cross the sky. The season was early spring. The green of the earth and the soft warmth of the air stirred in his mind a dim recollection of the beginning of his journey. He set about following the vulture.

  Eventually, he found himself on a path beside a river. Around a great bend in the river, he saw ahead of him a region of hills, and beyond one of the hills, a plume of smoke. He lost sight of the vulture, but decided that the path he was following was as good as any other. Paths led to villages; in villages, there was food to be stolen. This time, he told himself, he would stay hidden and go raiding only at night. The longer he could go without being seen, the longer it would be before the villagers ran him off.

  Suddenly, Cacus felt a great sadness. Once he had lived in a village himself. The others had sometimes teased and taunted him, but they had accepted him as one of their own, despite the fact that he was so different. Then they had driven him off. Why? Because the earth and the sky themselves demanded it; that was what his mother had told him. Before he left the village, he had never harmed anyone, yet the world and everything in it had become his enemy. The sadness he felt swelled inside him and turned into rage.

  He rounded a corner and saw ahead of him a young girl on the path. She was carrying a basket of clothes, heading to the river. Her hair was golden, and around her neck, suspended from a simple strip of leather, was a small amulet made of gold that flashed in the sunlight. The girl saw him and screamed. She dropped her basket and ran away.

  Furious, suddenly weeping, he ran after her, shouting his name: “Cacus! Cacus!”

  He followed her only a short distance, for up ahead, he saw the first signs of a settlement. Wishing he could disappear, he stepped off the path, into the brush. From the settlement, he could hear the girl still screaming, then the shouts of others as they ran to her side, asking what she had seen.

  What had the girl seen, when she looked at him? Not a human like herself, that was certain. And not an animal, either; no animal, except perhaps a snake, inspired such revulsion and fear. It was a monster she saw. Only a monster could wrench such a scream from the girl’s throat.

  He had become a monster. When had this happened? It seemed to Cacus that, once upon a time, he had been human….

  The settlement by the river started as a trading post. Traffic along the river path, and up and down the route used by the metal traders, had increased to such an extent that there always seemed to be people coming and going through the region of the Seven Hills. It was an enterprising descendent of Po and Lara who hit upon
the idea of settling permanently at the crossroads and setting up a marketplace for the exchange of goods. Why should the salt traders transport their salt all the way to the mountains, when they need bring it only as far as the trading post, exchange it there for the goods they wanted, then head back to the mouth of the river for more salt?

  A place that had been a crossroads became a destination and, for the handful of settlers at the trading post, a home. By acting as middlemen and providing accommodations for travelers, the settlers thrived.

  The settlement of twenty or so huts was located at the foot of a steep cliff, where a broad, flat meadow beside the river offered easy access to the path and provided plenty of space for setting up the market. A seasonal stream, called the Spinon, cut through the meadow and emptied into the river, which men now called the Tiber.

  The huts were round with a single large room, made of intertwined twigs and branches daubed with mud, with peaked roofs made of rushes and reeds. For a doorway, sturdy upright poles, in some cases elaborately carved, supported a wooden lintel; a flap of stitched animal skins provided a covering for the doorway. The huts, furnished with simple pallets for sitting or sleeping, were intended strictly for shelter from the elements or for privacy. All cooking and most social activities took place outside.

  The marketplace, on the other side of the Spinon and nearer the river, consisted of a few thatched sheds for storing salt, pens for livestock, and an open area where traders could park their wagons and carts and offer their goods for sale. The livestock included oxen, cattle, swine, sheep, and goats. On any given day, the various commodities might include dyed wool, fur rugs, hats made of straw or felt, bags made of leather, clay vessels, woven baskets, combs and clasps made from tortoiseshell or amber, bronze ornaments and buckles, and axes and ploughshares made of iron. There were pine nuts from the mountains, crayfish from the river, succulent frogs from the marshy lake, pots of honey, bowls of cheese, pitchers of fresh milk, and, in season, chestnuts, berries, grapes, apples, and figs. Some of the traders arrived at regular intervals and became old friends to the settlers and to each other, but new faces were always appearing, men from far away who had heard of the trading post and were eager to see for themselves the variety of goods to be found there.

  The trading post was also a place to exchange news and gossip, to hear stories from faraway places, and to listen to traveling singers. Men who knew magic passed through, offering their services. Some could cure the sick or make a barren woman fertile. Some could see the future. Some could commune with the numina that animated the nonhuman realm.

  By far the most exotic visitors to the settlement were the traders who arrived by boat, paddling upriver from the sea, where they arrived on larger ships, which they left moored at the mouth of the Tiber. Those huge, splendid ships—some of the settlers had once made a journey downriver to look at one—carried the traders up and down the coast and even, so they claimed, across the great sea. These seafarers called themselves Phoenicians. They spoke many languages, wore brightly colored clothes and finely wrought jewelry, and brought with them extraordinary things to barter, made in unimaginably distant lands, including small images of men, made of metal or clay. At first, misunderstanding, the settlers thought that numina lived in the images, just as numina lived inside trees and rocks, though the idea that a numen would reside in even the most splendid man-made object seemed to many of them far-fetched. The Phoenicians tried to explain that an idol did not house a numen, but stood as a representation of something called a god; but this concept was too abstract for the settlers to follow.

  The latest descendent in the line of Po and Lara was a girl called Potitia, daughter of Potitius. Growing up at the trading post, Potitia had been allowed from earliest childhood to roam the surrounding countryside. For a long distance upriver and down, she knew every steep embankment and muddy beach along the riverbank. She had waded across the Tiber when it was low, and had swum across when it was high.

  She had also explored the Spinon, which ran in front of the settlement, following it up through a little valley flanked by steep hillsides to its source, a marshy lake surrounded by hills. The marsh teemed with living creatures—frogs, lizards, dragonflies, spiders, snakes, and all sort of birds. It was exhilarating to see a flock of startled geese take flight from the reeds, or to watch the swans make circles in the sky before landing on the water with effortless grace.

  As she grew older, Potitia’s explorations had taken her farther and farther from the settlement. One day, venturing upriver, she had discovered the hot springs. Greatly excited, she had run all the way home to tell the others, and was chagrined to learn that her father already knew about the springs. Where did the bubbling water come from? Potitius said it flowed up from a fiery place deep underground. Curious, Potitia had searched all around the hot springs for an entrance to the underworld, but had never found one. On one occasion, the hot springs dried up, but then returned. Alarmed that such a thing might happen again, the settlers decided to build an altar at the springs, and to make offerings to appease the fiery numina in the earth. Potitius had built the altar himself, using oxen to drag a large stone to the spot, then chiseling the stone into a shape that seemed suitable to him. Once a year, an offering of salt was spread upon the altar, then scattered over the hot springs. So far, they had not run dry again.

  As her explorations took her outward from the village, so they also took her upward. The first of the Seven Hills which Potitia conquered was the one directly behind her family’s hut. On the side that faced the settlement, the hill presented a sheer cliff that was impossible for even the most determined child to climb, but on the far side of the hill, by trial and error, Potitia discovered a route that led all the way to the top. The view was astounding. Circling the crest of the summit she could look down on the marshy lake, on the settlement below, and on the region of the hot springs, which she now could see were situated at the edge of a large plain that lay in an elbow of the Tiber. Gazing beyond these familiar places, she realized that the world was much vaster than she had previously imagined. The river stretched on in either direction for as far as she could see. Wherever she looked, the impossibly distant horizon faded to a smudge of purple.

  One by one, Potitia conquered all the Seven Hills. Most of them were bigger than the one closest to home, but were easier to climb, once you knew the best place to begin the ascent and which route to take. Each hill had something to distinguish it. One was covered with a beech forest, another was crowned with a ring of ancient oaks, another was populated by osier trees, and so on. The hills had not yet been given individual names. Collectively, for longer than anyone could remember, men called them the Seven Hills. More recently, a visitor passing through had jokingly referred to the region as the ruma, which was the same word men used to refer to a woman’s breasts, or the teats of a cow, and now, as often as not, ruma was the word people used for the hilly region. To the settlers, it seemed perfectly natural to liken the features of the earth to the parts of a body.

  In a cliff directly across from the settlement, beyond the meadow on the far side of the Spinon, Potitia had discovered the cave. Situated in a cleft of the steep hill and concealed by scrubby bushes that clung tenaciously to the rocks, the mouth of the cave was hard to discern from the ground directly below; it might have been nothing more than a shadow cast by a lip of rock. Through trial and error, Potitia determined that it was impossible to climb down to the cave from above. Climbing up from the below would require considerable skill and daring. Her first few attempts over the course of a summer resulted in one nasty fall after another, and repeated scoldings from her mother, who disapproved of Potitia’s scraped hands, bloody knees, and torn tunics.

  Eventually, Potitia discovered a way to reach the cave. When she stepped inside for the first time, she knew that all her efforts had been worthwhile. To a child’s eyes, the space seemed enormous, almost as big as her family’s hut. She sat upon an outcropping of rock that formed a natural b
ench, and rested her arm on a ledge that provided a shelf. The cave was like a house made of stone, just waiting for her to claim it. Unlike the hot springs, the cave was unknown to the others at the settlement. Potitia was the first human being ever to set foot in it.

  The cave became her secret haven. On hot summer days she escaped there to take a nap. On wet winter days she sat inside, comfortable and dry, and listened to the rain.

  As Potitia grew older, roaming the woods and exploring the ruma grew less important to her. She became more interested in learning the skills her mother could teach her, such as cooking and weaving baskets from the reeds that grew around the marsh. Her mother told her that she should begin to consider which of the boys in the settlement she might wish to marry; by various signs, Potitia’s body had begun to manifest the advent of her womanhood.

  To celebrate her maturity, Potitia’s father gave her a precious gift. It was an amulet made of the yellow metal called gold.

  For ten generations, the lump of gold which Tarketios had given to Lara had been left in its natural state; nothing had been fashioned from it, for the metal seemed too soft to be properly worked. It was a visiting Phoenician who had shown Potitia’s grandfather that gold could be alloyed with another precious metal called silver, and for a great price the Phoenician smith had crafted the resulting ingot into a shape specified by Potitia’s grandfather. By the highest Phoenician standards, the workmanship of the amulet was crude, but to Potitia’s eyes, it was a thing of wonder. Made to be hung upon a leather necklace, the little amulet was in the shape of a winged phallus. Her father called it Fascinus—bringer of fertility, protector of women and infants in childbirth, guardian against the evil eye.