Authors: Alice Borchardt
She could still feel the stare.
I am imagining things
, the woman thought. The wolf demurred. She didn’t use words, but she knew how to say “no.” Her hackles rose. Regeane felt as if a trickle of cold rain ran down her spine.
The stare was malignant, icy, and somehow not … living.
She pulled the mantle down further over her face and hurried off in the same direction Silve had taken. She found Silve sitting in a mud puddle near a wineshop. She was cursing. In one hand, she held a large clay bottle, in the other her drawers and strophium. Her stockings were down around her ankles.
“Cool your ass in that, bitch,” the wineshop owner shouted.
“You faggot cocksucker,” Silve screamed. “What makes you think you ever warmed it?”
Regeane grabbed Silve by the arm. The tavern keeper seemed to be searching for a weapon. Regeane hustled the servant down the street. She found an empty alleyway and served as lookout while Silve put her underwear back on.
“What happened?” She peered down the empty street.
“I gave him the copper,” Silve answered, “and he told me if I gave him a little extra, he’d sell me something special—wine with syrup of opium and hemlock.”
Regeane was horrified. She had a very good education. She knew how Socrates died. “Hemlock?” she asked.
“It’s very good.” Silve had her dress up over her head and was tying her strophium. “It gives you a nice tingly feeling.”
“To be sure,” Regeane answered.
And if you get tingly enough, you die
.
“Anyway, we went in the shit room. We did it on the floor and then when he rolled off, he tried to take the wine jug back.” Silve’s voice was a yell of sheer outrage.
“So?” Regeane asked.
“I smeared shit on the bastard’s head.”
“Ah,” Regeane said.
Silve washed her hands in a rain puddle, then drank some of the wine. She thrust the jug at Regeane.
“No,” Regeane said. “What now?”
Neither of them wanted to return to the lodging house. Silve knew that if Gundabald had returned and was in a bad humor, he’d beat her. So might Hugo if—as she said—he’d had to sell himself to a sodomite for drink money.
At present, no one would lay a hand on Regeane. Hugo never would and Gundabald wouldn’t want to risk disfiguring her. She suspected a lot of beatings would come her way if she did not prove as saleable as Gundabald thought. This was only in the nature of a temporary respite. No, she wouldn’t be beaten, but she would be locked up and sent supperless to bed. Gundabald would be angry that she didn’t return when Hugo sneaked away.
The air was misty with rain. She could see it in the afternoon light sifting past the second-story windows of the houses. She felt the stare again. This time, it seemed closer. She scanned the street. The windows above were tightly shuttered. There were no doors, only blank walls made of the narrow terra-cotta brick the Romans favored. Ahead, the street curved away into the foggy distance.
“Let’s see if we can find a bread seller. Have you any more money?” Silve asked.
“A few coppers,” Regeane said. She and Silve both loved the flatbreads the Romans made, stuffed with olives, onions, garlic, and savory bits of pork. Regeane’s stomach was griping.
They wandered off together in search of a bread seller. In due time, they found one and got lost in the narrow twisting streets near the ruined Colosseum. Regeane spotted the tall cypresses
lining the Appian Way and they found themselves walking along the most famous of all roads to Rome.
They were looking down on the city. It was covered by lowering rain clouds. Swags of mist stretched like gauze curtains between earth and sky. The afternoon was wearing on toward night, the wind getting colder and colder.
“Let’s stop and finish the breads here,” Silve said. They’d each eaten one when they got it. Each had one left.
“There’s no place to sit,” Regeane said.
“Don’t be silly. If we take the bread home, Gundabald and Hugo will eat it.” Silve pointed to a ruined tomb down the road. “We can go in there.”
At the height of the Roman order and power, people had buried their dead here. Now, all the tombs were desecrated; robbed long ago.
This one must once have belonged to a great man, but now the building was empty. The sarcophagus rested at the roadside. Shepherds driving their flocks to market used it as a watering trough.
The tomb once looked like a small house with a pitched roof, but one wall was broken and the side of the structure opened to the elements. However, the overhanging roof and the low platform that once held the sarcophagus created a dry spot where they could sit, look out on the road, and finish their stuffed bread.
Regeane was ravenous. She felt a mild despair as she devoured the food. She could have eaten several more. Silve drank the wine with her loaf. She was soon replete and slightly glassy-eyed. She itched and started scratching herself everywhere.
Regeane finished the bread, licked her greasy fingers, and wondered if there was enough food in the world. She also understood why Silve and Hugo drank the noxious mixture of wine and drugs—they stilled the pangs of hunger. She was tempted by what remained in Silve’s jug, but resolutely resisted the temptation. The stuff was poison and, sooner or later—probably sooner—it would kill them.
Silve continued scratching vigorously.
“Silve,” Regeane snapped. “Are you taken with a plague of bugs?”
“No,” Silve said. “It’s the poppy gum. The stuff takes you that way sometimes.”
Regeane glanced around uneasily. The sky seemed to have grown even darker.
“Shit,” Silve said thickly. “It will rain all night. I’ve a good mind to find a warm taverna and spread my legs in the back room. Come one! Come all! A copper apiece! At least I’ll get to sleep half the night. The tavern keeper will want part of my take, but he’ll give me plenty of wine, and I won’t have that damn Hugo rubbing me raw while he sweats the drink out of his carcass. The bastard can get it up while he’s drunk, but the nasty little cocksucker can’t get it down.”
“Why don’t you leave him then?” Regeane asked.
Silve laughed. “Because, of the nearest two, I owe money to the owner of the first. The barmaid of the second told me if I took away any late night business from her, she’d cut my face.”
“Awkward,” Regeane said commiseratingly.
“Whatever,” Silve replied.
The Appian Way gleamed in the fading light like a narrow black ribbon. As Regeane watched, a few lights appeared in farmhouse windows along the road.
“We have to go,” Regeane said, some alarm in her voice. “It won’t be safe here after dark. As it is, I’ll be locked up and you’ll probably get a beating.”
“Noooooo,” Silve moaned. “It’s dry here. Waaaaarm. I want to stay,” she sniveled.
Again, Regeane felt the sensation of being watched. She glanced at Silve and saw a wasp crawling over her face. The insect was black, an iridescent blue-black. The tiny carapace shone like a dark rainbow. She looked more closely and saw the whole right side of Silve’s body was covered with them crawling everywhere. Dark antennae quivered on their heads; feet feeling, exploring. Their bulbous abdomens armed with the vicious stingers wavered above Silve’s skin.
Regeane reached out, snatched Silve’s dress at the shoulder, and pulled her out of the tomb. Silve saw the wasps. She screamed and began waving her arms, beating at them with her hands.
To Regeane’s momentary surprise, the wasps didn’t sting
Silve. They drew away and hovered near the entrance to the tomb like an evil black cloud. Silve, still half drunk, staggered. She was searching her face and body for possible lumps.
Regeane looked down the Appian Way and saw it coming.
“No,” she whispered. Then screamed, “Run, Silve! Run!”
“Run?” Silve said looking around. “Run where?”
The thing was approaching faster and faster, moving like the first rocks of an avalanche, but headed up the road toward Regeane. It gabbled and gibbered with a thousand voices, somehow one in madness and agony. It stank of burning cloth, burning wood, burning bone, burning flesh. Then, as it drew closer, of decomposition and death.
She could hear its voice, howling and shouting at her. “Where is she? You saw her. You can bring me to her.”
Then it was all around Regeane, and the anguish in the voice was almost beyond endurance. “They said I killed her—her and the child. I never—I never—” The thing moaned.
Regeane threw her mantle over her face, trying to escape the stinking cloud surrounding the apparition. She found herself alone in the dark with it. Its existence flowed with sorrow.
“I couldn’t feed them.” The desolation in the voice was pain compassed by the hoop of eternity. “I couldn’t stand to see their faces as they starved.” Sorrow, so heartwrenching it seemed to drown the whole world in grief. “I was mad with pain.”
“No,” Regeane heard herself shouting. “You were mad with pride.” She remembered the woman and the child in the church. “They had wanted to live,” she yelled at the damned and damnable thing around her. “They wanted to live! You killed them and you paid the forfeit.”
The air around her stank of putrescence. “They hanged me in chains!”
Regeane saw and smelled it. The rotting body swaying at the gallows. Leg only, bones trailing rags of flesh, dancing almost as if alive in the night wind. Falling and scattering in the grass. The torso coming apart at the belly; the hips falling to splatter against the earth dragging the lungs and the skin from the ribs. Last of all, the head and shoulders coming down; the fleshless skull striking the cobbles and bursting with an appalling stench.
The almost-liquid brain mass that had once been the man running off in puddles, congealing to be trampled in the road.
The wasps struck, sinking their stingers into her face through the mantle into her cheeks and tongue, through her dress into her arms and breast, and, worst of all, through her eyelids into her eyeballs.
She didn’t hear the wolf roar. Her own screams deafened her. She only knew she had four legs, not two. Her jaws opened with a shout of outrage and fire filled the air around her.
When she woke, she was lying on her side. One shoulder rested in a clean rain puddle. She opened her eyes and slowly got to her feet. One side of her dress was soaked. She explored her face and neck with trembling fingers. No swelling. No pain. Had the whole thing all been a dream?
She glanced down. Near the puddle a big patch of mud showed canine footprints. She remembered the wolf coming to her aid. Had she really been here? Somehow fought off the terror? Regeane was too stupefied by shock to consider the implications of this.
She looked around. Silve was gone. She had evidently found somewhere to run. Then she realized the tomb where they stopped to eat had vanished. It simply didn’t exist any longer.
Regeane picked up her skirts and ran.
She stopped running near the city. Not because she was winded. Her stamina was usually greater than most humans’. But because she passed some laborers working near the city. And was frightened by their stares. Respectable women alone were an uncommon sight. Prostitutes advertised their wares. So she wouldn’t be taken for one of them, but she might be mistaken for a married woman sneaking out to see her lover. As such, she left herself open to being accosted by some lecherous opportunist. She stopped, wrapped herself tightly in her mantle, pulled the veil down over her face, bowed her head, and walked on.
She didn’t dare pass through the ruined Forum so late. She started home through the narrow streets surrounding the Pantheon. These alleys were impassable except on foot. Flights of stone stairs surrounded the terra-cotta brick walls. Among them, it might as well have been night.
The sky above was a dim blue-gray pall. What little light remained showed only rain misting past high shuttered windows.
She was making her way home as quickly as possible when she met the funeral cortege. It was a poor one—the corpse wrapped in a winding sheet carried on an open bier. Torches flared in the hands of a few relatives and friends following the dead man. The flames sputtered in the wind, funnelled down the street, and burned blue from the damp.
Regeane flattened herself against the wall to let them pass.
Silve appeared from the darkness like a bat flying out of the mouth of a cave. “Witch!” she screamed as she pointed at Regeane. “Demoness! She is here to steal his soul. Kill her! Kill her! She will drag his soul to hell and sell it to the devil in place of her own!”
Regeane stood for a few seconds transfixed by both fear and sheer astonishment. Then she saw the dead man’s relatives believed Silve. The pain and sheer terror in her voice carried a dreadful certainty with them. Even Regeane could tell that whatever the truth or falsity of the servant’s outcries, Silve herself believed them—absolutely. Suddenly, the bier rested in the street and the burial party were groping for missiles in the shadows.
Regeane ran again. The only thing that saved her was the relative scarcity of stoning material. Yet even as she fled, she felt something hit her hard in the small of the back. A broken roof tile slashed past her arm, leaving a burning sensation behind. Then she was clear of the enclosing walls, running along a thoroughfare intended for more than foot traffic. The lodging house was just ahead.
She slowed, not wanting anyone to see how frightened she was. The sky was indigo blue twilight, not quite night. An outside stair on the side of the house led to their quarters.
She was climbing the stairs when she saw her arm was cut and her hand bloody. She wiped it on her dark mantle. The thick woolen mantle was almost black; she hoped the blood wouldn’t show. She flexed her arm, and the cut closed.
She was thinking only of warmth and safety when she entered the door. She knew she would be locked in for the night, but even the narrow room seemed a secure haven after what she’d been through today. She had no idea what awaited her.
FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MONTHS, THE ROOM WAS warm. Braziers glowed in each corner. A roaring fire burned on the hearth.
Regeane sank into a chair by the fire.