THE ROMAN LADY, by H. B. Fyfe and John Gregory Betancourt

This story is original to this publication.

I caught my breath as Pete Muller skimmed the edge of the narrow mountain road. His decrepit Jeep barely made the turn. From my right-hand rear seat, I gazed two hundred feet straight down. No guard rails here. Not like we’d have in America.

I gripped the headrest in front of me. “You trying to end our trip in mid-air?”

“Relax, Mac. The Babemobile hasn’t missed a turn yet.”

Cooper Cartwright, up front beside Pete, turned and raised an eyebrow at Johan Jensen and me. Johan didn’t notice; he had both eyes squeezed shut. That was one way to deal with Pete’s driving.

“Let’s take a break, Pete,” Cooper said. He had lost his normal expression of quiet amusement. He ran fingers through his short black hair and gulped.

“Anyway, I need to take a leak,” I said. “Too much wine last night. Please?”

“And,” Cooper added, “if we’re going to stop, there’s no harm in having another look at that tire.”

“Ja, Pete,” said Johan, “and this time you get out with us.”

Yesterday, when we climbed out to look at the ruins of a medieval monastery, Pete drove off alone, laughing like a jackass. Cooper, Johan, and I spent the next hour wondering how we’d get back to Paris if he didn’t return.

Pete laughed again. He would think it funny; but he had bought this four-wheeled deathtrap in Paris, then talked Cooper and me into splitting the cost of gas money. We’d added Johan, a Swedish student who spoke nearly fluent English, our first night at a youth hostel. The jeep was cheaper than the bus, and we’d see more of Europe in a lot less time. Or so Pete claimed. Over the last few days, though, I’d started to wonder if we shouldn’t have stuck to backpacking and public transit.

Pete cut the Babemobile’s speed.

“All right, I’ll stop at the next wide spot,” he said.

Again I gazed down into the chasm beside us. The road hugged the flanks of the French Alps. Despite the brightness of the sun, a chill had crept into the air as we gained altitude.

Cooper, a history buff, had wowed us with tales of this region the night before. God only knew how many waves of conquest had swept through these mountains—Gauls, Romans, Goths, Huns, and Nazis, not to mention Hannibal and his army. Even with the mingling of foreign blood, you still saw faces that might have belonged to the original inhabitants—the short, slim, dark sort sometimes called the Mediterranean type. Their ancestors had held the land, farming and fishing and practicing pagan rites long before the coming of the “civilized world.”

Pete finally pulled over at a little plateau and cut the engine. I scrambled out and stretched stiff muscles, then walked off a dozen paces from the others and relieved myself.

When I returned to the Babemobile, I found everyone gathered around the right front tire. The side of the tire, where Pete had scraped a low stone wall yesterday, showed metal threads through the rubber. It bulged more than it had the last time we’d stopped, a couple of hours ago. At this rate, it wouldn’t last till nightfall.

“It’ll hold,” Pete said. “Not too bad yet.”

“Why take chances?” Johan poked it with the toe of his shoe. “If we have a blowup on a curve—”

“I said it’ll hold. And it’s a blowout, not a blowup.”

Cooper said, “You just don’t want to change it.”

I looked around the little plateau. It was about the size of a football field. At the far end stood some sort of stone shrine or monument. That interested me a lot more than bickering over a tire.

“Let us vote,” Johan said. He folded his arms. “I say ja to changing it. What say you, Pete?”

“Change it.”

“Mac?”

“Change the damn tire!” I said.

“It is three to one, Pete,” Johan said. “And for your stunt yesterday, you must do the changing. I think I saw a—how do you say it?—en domkraft? a lifter?—under the back seat.”

“It’s called a jack,” Pete said. “And why should I change it? I’ve been doing all the driving!”

Johan said, “This is because you let no one else do driving!”

“The insurance only covers me!”

I strolled toward the monument for a closer look. It was very old, that much was obvious. Hundreds if not thousands of years. Probably Roman. Weathered marble blocks had tumbled to a heap at the rear, though it looked more complete around the other side.

I circled it slowly, studying the way it had been put together. This was why I had come here, after all—for an up-close look at the way ancients Romans built things. Hopefully it would inspire me later in life. Would anything I designed stand this long?

When I rounded the far corner, I discovered it wasn’t a shrine after all, but a spring. Water dribbled from the open mouth of a grotesquely carved woman’s face high in the facade…she had snakes for hair. Medusa. Water pooled in a deep marble basin, then trickled into a shallow trough at calf level. According to one of the guidebooks I’d studied, upper basins were meant for humans and lower ones for animals.

I could just make out a faint inscription carved into the stone over Medusa’s face. Latin? I squinted, then traced a few of the letters with my finger. A - V - E…

Pulling out my phone, I punched in Google Translate. The little circular icon spun…and nothing happened. No signal. So much for that idea.

“Hey, Coop!” I called. He’d studied Latin, along with French and half a dozen other languages. “Come here a minute!”

He walked over, leaving Pete and Johan arguing over the tire. But at least they had the jack out now.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Some old Latin.”

“Don’t be rude!” he said in a low voice. “Maybe she understands English.”

I followed his gaze. A woman stood by the fountain. She was not really tall, but her ankle-length white dress, gathered in at the waist with a rope belt, helped give an impression of height. Her facial bones seemed too prominent, her skin too pallid, her eyes very large, very dark. She might have been thirty…or she might have been a lot older.

“No—I meant…

She looked at us, and hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Perhaps it was her brooding expression, or just the shock of finding I had not been alone. Where had she come from? Had she been watching us?

She held a large clay jar in her hands. Stepping forward, she dipped it into the upper basin.

Cooper smiled and said something to her in French. I couldn’t quite follow it, but I got the general idea—was there a town nearby? She smiled and shrugged, clearly not understanding.

Cooper said, “Maybe we’re closer to Italy or Switzerland.” His eyes never left the woman’s face. “Italiano?” he asked. She shook her head. “Deutsch? Espanol? English?” He tried Greek, Russian, Portuguese, and Swedish before exhausting his store of languages.

She said something quickly that I couldn’t follow. I looked at Cooper.

He frowned, fumbled out a few words. She shook her head and said something like, “Romana.”

“Romana?” he repeated.

“Etiam, domine,” she said.

He turned to me. “It’s some bastard form of Latin, near as I can gather. She’s got a weird accent.”

“Can you ask her where we are?” I said. The only Latin I knew was “semper ubi sub ubi,” which didn’t exactly seem appropriate.

“Maybe…if I can figure out the right words. I only had a couple years of Latin in high school. I can read it, some—but it doesn’t seem natural to speak it.”

She took two gliding steps from the fountain, raising the clay jar to her shoulder. Then she glanced at Cooper and smiled. It was a beautiful smile, almost hypnotic.

“Ask about the inscription,” I suggested. “As long as she knows Latin…

Cooper spoke in halting words. She set the jar down, then turned to stare at the dazzling blue sky between mountaintops. After a minute, she answered briefly. I didn’t understand any of it.

“Her name is Sybilla,” he said. “She’s offering to tell our fortunes, or something like that, as near as I can make out.”

Fortunes? Our guide at The Louvre, Jean-Paul, had warned us about gypsies. He’d said they were all pickpockets, thieves, and conmen. Could she be a gypsy?

“Remember what Jean-Paul told us,” I said. “Maybe this is some con game for tourists.”

“She didn’t ask for money.”

I heard the Babemobile roar to life and glanced at the road. Pete drove toward us, bumping over rocks and scrub grass.

“The spare’s flat,” he called, pulling up with a squeal of brakes. “You guys coming?”

“In a minute,” I said. “We were just looking at this fountain. Must be more than a thousand years old.”

“Yeah, and so is that babe you picked up. I’ve already seen enough ruins to last a lifetime!”

“Then how about having your fortune told?”

He snorted. “Yeah, right.”

I glanced toward Sybilla and found her staring at Pete with an icy expression. She might not understand English, but she sure picked up on his tone.

She said something to Cooper in a low, husky voice.

“She says nineteen and a half years for you, Pete,” he translated, “How’s that?”

“Uh…pretty close, all right,” said Pete, straightening up. “Did she guess, or did you tell her?”

“I didn’t say a word.”

Johan grinned. “What of me?”

Again she murmured a few words in Latin, voice musical.

“Twenty,” Cooper said.

“I am!” Johan said, smiling and nodding. “My birthday is just three days ago!”

…and the, ah, chariot is twenty-seven years old.”

“Only twenty-seven for the Babemobile?” said Pete. “I would have guessed at least fifty. Hey, offer her a ride! Maybe she knows some girls and we can have a party tonight.”

I said, “See what she says for you and me, Coop.”

He asked her, pointing to himself. This time, she dropped her gaze. She said something he clearly had trouble understanding. Head to one side, he said, “Repete?”

She said it again.

“Come on, snap it up!” said Pete. “Can she fix us up with dates or not?”

“That’s funny,” Cooper murmured. “How old do I look to you, Mac?”

“Why?” I asked.

“She say I’m seventy-eight.” He laughed. “Your turn. With those freckles and that baby face, I bet she says you’re twelve.”

“Screw you,” I said, grinning.

Pete raced the motor. I waved at him, and he countered by backing ten feet toward the road.

Cooper and Sybilla exchanged a few more words. I nudged Cooper, keeping one eye on Pete, but my friend shook me off and asked another question. Sybilla snapped something that had a note of finality, picked up her clay jar, and stalked away, sloshing water.

“Last chance!” Pete shouted.

“In a minute!” I said.

Cooper stood staring at Sybilla’s back. He rubbed his neck with one hand. Then he stiffened as if an idea had come to him, or a new understanding of something.

Pete backed up another ten feet, paused. Did he want us to chase him?

“Don’t you dare!” I shouted.

“Coming or not?”

“All right, all right!” I started after him. “Let’s go, Coop.”

Cooper grabbed my shoulder. “Johan,” he called, “why don’t you walk to the next village with us?”

“Are you nuts!” I said.

“I meet girls in the Babemobile!” Johan said, grinning. “Mountains, these I see every day at home.”

Pete honked twice. “Last call!”

I started forward, but Cooper grabbed my arm again.

“Go ahead,” Cooper told them. “We’ll see you in the next village. Just leave our backpacks.”

“No… I groaned. That was totally the wrong thing to say.

The Jeep kicked up a spray of dirt and pebbles as Pete floored the accelerator. Johan tossed our backpacks overboard. In a moment, the Babemobile had disappeared around the next curve. I heard two distant honks, then they were gone.

“Thanks a lot!” I said.

“Fresh air and exercise. How can you complain?” Cooper strolled over to his dark blue backpack and shrugged it on. “The next village can’t be more than a mile or two ahead. I’m sure we’ll find Pete and Johan sampling wines in the local tavern.”

“Maybe we can get a lift from Sybilla—” I looked around, but she had disappeared, too. “Hey Sybilla! Wait a minute!” I called. “I wanted my fortune told, too!”

Where had she gone? I looked around, but a rabbit couldn’t have hidden here, let alone a full-grown woman.

“Never mind her,” Cooper said as I trudged back to join him. He passed me my red backpack.

I asked, “Did she say something about me?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Probably something as far wrong as she was about me. Forgot about it.”

* * * *

After twenty minutes on foot, I began to wish I had taken a drink at the spring. Would Pete come back for us? Not much hope of that…

“Cheer up,” Cooper said. “It could be worse.”

“How?”

“It could be raining.”

That pissed me off, too. I said nothing.

“Or snowing.”

I ignored him.

“Or there could be a ninja attack.”

That got a snort. We trudged on.

After another five minutes, Cooper held out a peace offering—a stick of chewing gum. I took it. We chewed and walked in silence. You can’t stay mad at Cooper very long.

After five more minutes, he said, “Listen, Mac, if I repeated what I thought she said, it wouldn’t make any sense. Maybe it was her accent, or maybe I’m just not as smart as I thought.”

“I’m not mad because I didn’t get my fortune told. I’m mad because those jerks drove off without us. And you encouraged them.”

I heard the sound of an engine, and for a second I thought Pete had returned. But it came from the other direction.

We stepped off the road to make way for a battered pickup truck. It looked even older than the Babemobile.

I waved, and the truck stopped with a grinding of gears. A old man with wild white hair and a creased, weatherbeaten face perched behind the wheel. He might have been Sybilla’s great-grandfather. He nodded through the open passenger window, thick white mustache bobbing.

“Bonjour, monsieur,” I said. That pretty much exhausted my conversational French.

“Hello Yankees!” the old man said in a heavy accent. “You want a ride?”

“Thanks!” I said. We threw our backpacks in the rear bed, then opened the passenger door and scrambled in beside him.

“I am Claude Le Croix,” he announced, shaking hands. We introduced ourselves, then he shifted gears and the pickup rumbled forward. “My nephew, he lives in New York City. Perhaps you know him? Pierre Le Croix?”

We admitted we did not know his nephew.

“How far is the next town?” Cooper asked.

“Mont Seraffe? Maybe…trois kilomètres? Fifteen minutes?”

I mentioned the spring where we had met Sybilla, and the old man nodded. “I know it. It is from the old times,” he said. “Very old.” Then his eyes widened as Cooper described our talk with Sybilla.

“The Roman Lady?” he demanded. “You spoke to the Roman Lady? What did she tell you?”

“Do you know her?” asked Cooper.

“Not I!” Claude shrugged. “I am not so…misfortunate? Is that the word?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He raised bushy white eyebrows. “It is said the Roman Lady appears only every ten years. To those she meets, she will tell the future of their lives. This story is also from the ancient times. A…how do you say? Fairy story?”

“Huh!” I said. Was he making a joke at our expense? “She didn’t do so well with our fortunes.”

“I do not understand.” He looked at Cooper, who translated. Then at Claude’s insistence, Cooper repeated what she had told us.

Claude shook his head. “Votre amis…très triste,” he muttered and grew silent.

We must have been nearing Mont Seraffe; we began seeing houses built into the sides of the mountain, plus the occasional vineyard, or goat staked out to graze. Then we rounded a curve and the town came into sight—a jumble of whitewashed buildings with red tiled roofs huddled between two mountains. It bristled with dozens of tiny satellite dishes and television antennas, modern life intruding on the old. It couldn’t have been more than half a mile ahead.

As we rounded the final curve, we came upon a police car with flashing lights beside the road. Half a dozen men stood there, talking and gesturing. A haze of smoke drifted up from somewhere beyond. The policeman spoke into a walkie-talkie.

Claude stopped, shut off his engine, and climbed out. In the distance, I heard a siren.

I opened the door and leaped out, with Cooper right behind me. We ran to the edge of the road and gazed down—to where the Babemobile lay, a twisted, jumbled heap blazing far below. It was upside down. Two equally twisted bodies sprawled where they had been thrown.

I turned away, my stomach churning. That could have been us. If Cooper hadn’t wanted to walk—that would have been us.

Cooper was already speaking with the uniformed policeman. Telling him Pete and Johan’s names, giving him our names. The policeman nodded, wrote things down in a small notebook.

At last Cooper joined me by Claude’s truck. His face was pasty white.

“One of the men from Mont Seraffe saw them go off the road,” he said, voice flat. “Pete was driving too fast, and the tire blew out. They didn’t have a chance—it was over in a second. A rescue team is on its way from Ville de Sept Vierges, but he doesn’t think there’s any hope…

“How did you know?” I whispered, throat dry.

“I didn’t—didn’t know. But I wondered. Better safe than sorry… It would have sounded stupid…

And suddenly it all made sense. Sybilla. Our fortunes…or rather, our futures.

“She said Pete would be nineteen and a half, didn’t she? Not that he was!” I wet my lips with difficulty. “And Johan! He would be twenty…when…when… I swallowed hard.

“Maybe. I thought I misunderstood her. Latin tenses are confusing.”

“She told you you’d be seventy-eight,” I said. “Fine! Congrats! But…what did she say about me?”

He met my eyes at last, and I realized he wasn’t going to tell me.

* * * *

We argued all the way into Mont Seraffe, and for half the night in the room we rented, but he continued to claim she hadn’t said anything clear about me. Maybe he thought it was for my own good. I cursed and begged and lost my temper. Finally he just rolled over and went to sleep.

My first thought was to go back myself to see her. But then I realized how useless it would be. I didn’t understand Latin. And what had Claude told us? She only appeared every ten years.

If I couldn’t find her, would that prove anything?

* * * *

The second day after the accident, Cooper packed for the trip back to Paris. I’d given up on getting the truth from him.

“Aren’t you coming, Mac?” he asked. “Life is meant to be lived.”

“Not this time,” I said. I remembered the way he’d sent Pete and Johan to their deaths. “I don’t feel safe on the mountain roads.”

* * * *

After breakfast, he set out on foot for Paris, whistling happily. What did he have to worry about? Sybilla had promised him seventy-eight years, after all.

I went back to my room and flopped down on the bed, staring up at the cracks in the ancient plaster ceiling. There were worse places than the youth hostel in Mont Seraffe, after all. They had satellite TV, wi-fi, decent plumbing, better than average food and wine. A fellow could make a life for himself here. At least, until his money ran out.

I figured I could make mine last a month. If I had to.

Seventy-eight years for Cooper… It couldn’t possibly be that long for me, or he would have said so. Even ten or twenty years would have been reassuring. Hell, I would have taken six months!

Much as I tried, I couldn’t help but think, Maybe…maybe it wasn’t even a week—