The Curse Tablet

Nina Kiriki Hoffman

 

 

 

 

 

Lucius found the witch at one of the termopolia near Ostia Harbor. She sat on a stone bench near the sale counter of the sidewalk restaurant, a pottery bowl of puls porridge in her lap and a wedge of bread in her hand. The restaurant was doing brisk business—many people stopped by for their breakfasts; the man behind the counter was hard-pressed to keep up with requests for round loaves of bread. A child darted in and pulled a loaf from the bottom of a stack so skillfully the shopkeeper never noticed it. Lucius remembered doing things like that before his mother sold him to Gaius Tullius Paulus.

The spring air was soft, damp, and almost warm, heavy with scents of smoke and sewage. A lot of good-natured shouting and joking filled the air. Toward the water, someone played a flute, but Lucius could not catch the melody, only a sense of the music, which was melancholy and carried a thin thread of power. Lucius had his own flute tucked into his waistband under a fold of tunic. It was a memento of his childhood, when he had played for money and food in the marketplace with his mother, sister, and older brother. He rarely found time to play these days.

Most people ate as they walked toward their work, but some squatted on the sidewalk to eat, or sat on benches under the overhanging arches of the shops that lined the street. The donkey-driven mills in the center of the building were grinding grain, adding to the cacophony. The smell of baking bread made Lucius hungry; he had had his own breakfast at dawn, a couple hours earlier.

No one sat near the witch. She tossed crumbs into the street. Small birds landed to eat the crumbs, scattering every time someone came near.

Lucius approached the witch, his gaze on the muddy paving stones. He did not want to meet the witch’s eyes. One of the other slaves in Master Gaius’ household, a strapping man named Deodatus, had been bewitched only last week, falling into frequent fits, and afraid, now, of water. Since Deodatus’ bewitching, Lucius had been pressed into accompanying their master to the public baths and then scraping the oil off his skin; Deodatus could no longer abide the sight of the pools.

“Have you a task for me?” the witch asked Lucius. Her voice was warm, low, and pleasant.

“Are you the one known as Cassia the Witch?” he asked. The cook had told him the witch had much shaggy red hair, and that she wore it loose instead of braided or dressed, and that the color of her tunic was usually blue, and that on cool mornings like this one, she wore an overrobe of paler blue. All of which she was and wore: he had seen as much, before he fixed his gaze on the ground.

“I am called Cassia,” she said.

“My master wants to hire you.”

“I won’t work for someone who won’t look at me,” said Cassia. She tossed crumbs toward his feet, and he was standing so still that the birds landed, pecking near his sandals.

“Honored mistress, I don’t want you to work for me,” Lucius told the birds at his feet. “It is my master who needs your services.”

“I won’t accept his commission unless you look at me,” she said.

He sighed and closed his hand around the bag of denarii tied at his waist, enough to hire the witch for ten curse tablets, if the cook was to be believed. The cook had told the master’s personal servant about the witch’s powers. The personal servant had gossiped to the master, and the master had decided this was the route he wanted to go. The master’s marketplace rival had stolen and imprisoned the master’s mistress, and such a deed could not go unavenged.

Lucius touched the slave collar around his neck, with its inscription of ownership. Most of Master Gaius’ slaves didn’t wear collars, but Lucius had made one unwise attempt to run away when he was ten years old and new to the household, before he realized that life could be much worse. The collar was his penance; he had been wearing it for five years now. He had never done anything else to jeopardize his position in Master Gaius’ household. He wasn’t ready to start now.

He had been charged to find and hire this witch. He looked into her eyes.

They were as green as the glass tiles in a water mosaic. The witch did not blink. Lucius felt his will run out of him like sand.

“You’re a pretty boy,” she said. “Hold out your hand.”

His arm lifted, though he did not direct it. The witch set her bread on top of her porridge bowl, reached into a wallet at her waist, pulled out a red string, and tied it around his wrist. He felt the magic in the knots as she laced the ends together. “There, now. You’ll come when I call you, won’t you, Lucius?”

He swallowed. His adam’s apple bobbed against the collar, where his name was written for anyone who could read to see: “I am Lucius. Hold me so that I do not run away, and take me back to my master, the most illustrious man Gaius Tullius Paulus, who lives on the corner of Cardo Maximus and Via Di Diana.” “Yes, mistress,” Lucius said to the witch.

“What does your master want?”

“A curse tablet.” His voice was steady. Now that the worst had happened and he had been bewitched, he was no longer afraid of her. Fear would come later, when she pulled the red thread and made him do her bidding.

“Do you know the text of it?”

“I’ve memorized the outline.” He had scribed what his master wanted onto a wax tablet, smoothed it out, written it again twice more, each time erasing it, trusting his mind to hold it; he didn’t want to carry a curse through the streets, where any citizen or freedman might claim authority over him and ask to see what he carried.

“Do you have money to pay me? I charge by the word. Does he want many words?”

“He does,” said Lucius.

“Do you have any personal thing from the one he is cursing? Hair? Nail clippings? Lost teeth, or something the accursed has touched often?”

Lucius touched the other pouch at his waist. He had sneaked into Quintus Valerius Cato’s house, with generous bribes to Master Quintus’ slaves at a time when Master Quintus was in his shop and his wife and children had gone to visit relatives. The slaves, unhappy in their household and willing to take small risks, had let Lucius into Master Quintus’ room, though they warned him Quintus was meticulous in burning any hair he brushed and any nails he clipped. They had also let him see Prisca, Master Gaius’ mistress, chained to a bed in one of the slave rooms near the back of the house. She had cried and begged for his help. All he had been able to do for her was give Master Quintus’ slaves money and hope they spent at least a fraction of it on food for her.

On a pillow of Master Quintus’ sleeping couch, Lucius had found a single short and shining hair. He had pressed it into a ball of wax so he wouldn’t lose it. “I have it,” he told the witch.

“Come to my workshop.” She handed him her food, the bread still stacked atop the bowl, tossed a coin to the baker—“I’ll bring the bowl back tomorrow,” she said, and he nodded to her—and strode down the street toward a block of sagging tenements. Lucius, who had lived in worse places, followed her up a rickety staircase to a hallway on the third floor, which was built of wood. The ceiling was blackened from lamp smoke; one window at the far end of the hall let in a little light.

The witch unlocked the third door to the right and let Lucius into a cramped apartment. A sturdy work table took up most of the room. Shelves to the left overflowed with filled glass and pottery jars and wooden boxes and some things that were dried and looked as though they had joints and bones. “Sit,” said the witch, gesturing toward a square stool.

Lucius sat while the witch went to a shelf and fetched a rolled papyrus scroll with many darkened finger marks on it, a stack of prepared lead sheets, and a stylus. She also brought a wax tablet. “Tell me,” she said, opening the hinged wood backing of the tablet to reveal the waxed surfaces inside.

“Since it is a matter of love, he thought the curse should be directed to Venus,” Lucius said.

The witch shook her head. “Venus is cruel, but she doesn’t traffic in the kinds of curses I write. This is a curse to harm another unless restitution is made, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Was something stolen?”

“My master’s mistress has been taken captive and imprisoned by his rival. She was a slave at the brothel down on the crossroads by the water, the House of the Three Gorgons. My master paid for her exclusive use, but his rival bought her from the proprietress and now has her imprisoned in his house.”

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.

“Apollo,” he whispered.

Play me there, murmured a voice.

Lucius set the lamp and the swaddled curse tablet at his feet and took out his flute. He played the paean he and the siblings had played that afternoon. He expected nothing now: it had always taken at least three musicians to bring magic into the music. He played, his breath steadying, the song growing from a limping twitter to a strong string of melody, and then he felt huge hands on his shoulders, steadying him. He played, wondering if the priest would hear and come to curse him for being in this holy place where he did not belong.

I am here, murmured the voice. Do your deed, if you must.

Strengthened by the hands on his shoulders, Lucius lowered his flute. The air was soft again, no barrier. He stooped and lifted the curse tablet, took the last three steps to the well.

He paused.

Dropping the curse tablet into the well would set the curse in motion. Was he ready to aid in such a terrible undertaking? He remembered the words he had memorized, all the afflictions to be set upon Quintus Valerius Cato. How could he wish such ills on another man?

Quintus had chained Prisca in a dark room. He did not feed her enough, and he misused her, too, showing his contempt for his rival by mistreating something Master Gaius loved. Quintus’ other slaves had had plenty of complaints, and they were supposedly the lucky ones.

Prisca was a slave, less than human, chattel. Her legal owner had the right to decide what to do with her.

Lucius was a slave, and he had been ordered to do this duty.

He could say he had failed. Only Apollo and Mithras would know the truth.

Lucius held the lamp out over the lip of the well and looked down into darkness blacker than tar. No gleam of light came back to him, only a deep chill and a cascade of faint whispers.

He tossed the tablet in. “Mithras, I entreat you to aid this curse in its execution in this life and the next.” He did not hear a splash, but he felt a shift in the air, and spikes of frozen nails drove through his bones. His blood on the tablet. His hand in its initiation. It was part of him now, like all his other masters.

The warm hands on his shoulders pressed once more against his knotted muscles, then vanished. Lucius turned and walked out of the temple. His stomach curdled. Lines of cold lay along his bones.

The witch waited for him. She tucked her arm through his and they walked back to her apartment building. He stopped at the entrance to the stairs, though, and touched the red thread around his wrist. It unknotted itself and dropped off, the red fading from it until it was pale brown.

“What? I haven’t gotten my payment out of you yet,” she said.

He untied the purse with her fee from his belt and handed it to her.

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

“You may not have gotten the payment you want, but it was payment, just the same,” he said. “I did a piece of your work for you, and it hurt me.” He didn’t recognize his own voice: cold had lodged in it.

She opened the pouch and looked inside, then up at him.

“This is more than I asked for,” she said.

“The master thought my encounter with the god would make me less useful to you,” he said. “He sent a bonus.”

She made the pouch disappear under her heavy shawl and took the lamp from him. “A wise man, your master,” she said. “I’d be pleased to work for him again. Have him send me someone else next time.”

On the way home, Lucius stopped outside the house where the party had been. The lights were lower now, the talk quieted to murmurs, but somewhere a lyre strummed softly; someone blew across Pan pipes. He leaned against the wall and took out his flute, played a line of melody to match the one the hidden musicians played inside. At first he could not find the pitch nor the rhythm, but then heat kindled in the center of his forehead, and the music opened up to him again. His newest god had not rejected him, so he played himself inside a prayer and stayed there until the others stilled their instruments in sleep.

 

By the time he reached home, the household was dark. He went to his pallet and lay listening to others breathing sleep around him. Deodatus cried out in his sleep, but they were used to that now, and no one else stirred.

In the space of one day, Lucius had acquired three new masters and cast off one. The cold silver in his bones told him he was bound to Mithras still, by calling down the god to work the curse; the mark on his forehead, the new joy in his music, told him he was still tied to Apollo; but the witch had lost her hold. He touched the slave collar, the chafing sign of his first master, sighed, and slept.

The curse took days to beat Quintus Valerius Cato down. Master Gaius set Lucius to watch the house and see what transpired. Lucius learned the outside of the house very well, and watched a procession of visitors and slaves enter and leave. He noticed when new graffiti was scratched into the bricks. He learned which narrow slit of window led into Prisca’s cell, and sometimes he lingered outside it and played quietly on the flute. At those times, her soft sobs stopped.

He met with Quintus’ slaves in the marketplace or a tavern near the house and bought them food and drink in exchange for news from inside the house. The curse started slowly, but its effects grew, until Quintus could hardly leave his bed without pain, and what sleep he managed was haunted by nightmares, the slaves said. A physician was called in three times, and finally Quintus sent for a soothsayer.

In the long, increasingly warm and humid afternoons, Lucius had time to contemplate. The cold Mithras needles in his bones pricked him sometimes; that was when he knew the curse was working. Times like that, he had no hunger for food; his stomach soured.

Sometimes a thread of music called him from his post, drew him toward the river or the market, and at those times he gave himself up to the god, until his collar choked him back to the uncomfortable present.

He was at his post, an alcove shaded by a potted tree, when the curse finally bore fruit. Prisca, frail, pale, and wrapped in a red robe, was led stumbling from the house by one of Quintus’ German slaves, a big, light-haired man whose language Lucius did not know, though he had learned which drink the man liked best at the tavern. The German was half-carrying Prisca. Lucius followed them until they were beyond sight of the house’s vestibule, then slipped up beside the German. The big man nodded, but continued on through the streets.

“Prisca?” Lucius said softly. Her eyes were red with weeping.

“Oh, Lucius!” she said. “Finally I am free of that place!”

“Will you come home with me?” he said. Master Gaius would surely want to see to her safety; he could arrange lodging for her.

“I cannot. Master Quintus sends me to the temple of Mercurius, so the soothsayer told him.” She held out her chafed wrists. “Look, Lucius. I am free.”

“Free,” he echoed, and fell back a step.

“I am to be purified and released. He even gave me three denarii. I can go home to my mother and my sister now.”

Lucius stood where he was and watched the German coax Prisca down the street toward the temple. Soon they were lost amid the afternoon traffic. The curse had been worded that way: Quintus could only break it by freeing the girl.

Already Lucius felt a faint warmth along his bones, though he still felt the pricking of a silvery needle in his neck. The god had looked toward him and might never turn entirely away.

He went home to his first master to report.