“And how is it decided?”
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. Nothing about the rites can be revealed beforehand to the initiate. Are you having second thoughts about taking part?”
“Not at all,” I answered with as much conviction as I could muster. I took another oyster, but this time when I swallowed the muscles of my throat constricted so that for a moment it stuck and I was afraid I might choke. The taste of salt was so overpowering that I felt like I was drowning. Could it be that having saved me from drowning, jealous Poseidon was now claiming my life with an emissary from his realm? But then the oyster slipped the rest of the way down my throat. “You must forgive my curiosity,” I managed to say after a sip of wine. “It is the old habit of a chronicler, one that is hard to give up. I won’t ask any more questions about tomorrow’s rites. Instead, I shall compliment you on these oysters. I’ve never had better. Do you get them from Lake Lucrinus?”
I thought a shadow passed over her face, but it may have been merely a cloud passing across the sun as it sank into the sea. Indeed, the light suddenly took on a distinctly reddish hue, as though the terrace had been doused in blood. It made me shiver despite the heat.
“We’ll have to ask Iusta. She brought them back from town today. Iusta!”
I immediately regretted my comment about the oysters as she summoned the girl. Would she think I had revealed her secret? “It is not necessary to call the girl,” I said, perhaps a little too avidly because Calatoria looked at me strangely. “I am sure she needs to rest to preserve her strength,” I explained, “for the rites tomorrow.”
“Nonsense. I gave her the day off to rest and to visit some relatives of her late mother…. Here she is now. See, she looks perfectly rested.”
Indeed Iusta, wearing a saffron yellow dress, her hair newly washed and oiled, looked lovely. As she stepped onto the terrace, the light of the setting sun gave her gold skin a ruddy glow that only enhanced her beauty. The light fell in long strips over her bare arms and shoulders, looking like blood rising to the surface of the skin when the flesh is struck. I was reminded of the painting in the peristylium of the siren lashing the initiate with her whip.
“Iusta, our guest has a question for you.”
Iusta’s black eyes slid nervously in my direction and I realized she was indeed afraid I had betrayed her secrets. Oh, how I wanted to be a conjurer then, to send my thoughts into her thoughts and let her know that I had not betrayed her secret! “I only wanted to know where these delicious oysters came from,” I said.
“They are from Lake Lucrino,” Iusta answered. “That’s where the best oysters come from. Some say it’s because of the lake’s proximity to the entrance to the underworld. That pleasure sweetened by the approach of death—”
“Ugh, what a morbid thought! Begone, Iusta, before you ruin our guest’s appetite.”
Iusta lowered her eyes demurely and turned to go, but not before treating me to a secret smile. She knew I hadn’t betrayed her and she was promising me just what I had asked for in exchange: a glimpse of the inner workings of the mysteries of the house. I was glad not only on account of the promised pleasure, but because I needed to see her later to tell her about the stolen scrolls and enlist her help in recovering them. As she left, I realized that I had still not tested my hypothesis that Calatoria was the thief.
And so I turned to my hostess and said, “When I returned from my trip to the baths today I made an unfortunate discovery….” I allowed my voice to trail off to see if my hostess’s face revealed any sign of guilt.
“Oh?” she asked, her face as calm as the flat surface of the sea behind her. “I hope it wasn’t any fault of my slaves. I’ve purchased a few new ones who have given me trouble and I’m afraid that they may act badly when I’m not at home to supervise them.”
“Unavoidable, of course.”
She nodded and waited for me to say more. I felt sure I had caught her. Why else this long speech about untrustworthy slaves unless she thought I was about to reveal a theft? Still, I wanted to keep her in suspense a little longer to see if she might reveal, by nervousness, her own guilt. “I’m sure it’s been difficult managing the slaves since your husband’s death,” I said. She blushed and sat upright on her couch.
“Whatever my slaves have done amiss you can be sure they will be punished for it. Is something belonging to you missing?”
“Yes, when I came back to my room today I found that something was missing from my trunk,” I said. “Something I brought from the east that I thought might interest your husband…”
“I will call the slaves at once,” she said, jumping up from her couch. “This is unforgivable. I do apologize—”
“No, no, no,” I said, holding up my hands. “You misunderstand me. I realized when I looked in my trunk today that the scroll in question was in my other trunk. The one that was lost at sea.”
“Scroll? You’re missing one scroll?” she asked, looking at me oddly.
“As I just said, I’m not even missing that one,” I said smiling. I was sure now that she had stolen the scrolls—why else would she remark on my missing only one?
She sat back down, her expression a mixture of confusion and suspicion. She could say nothing, though, without casting blame on herself. As the next dish was brought out—a plate of pickled sea urchins—she reclined on her cushions. “Well, if you’re absolutely sure…it would be inconvenient to have the slaves tortured on the eve of the rites. And bad luck, too.”
“Exactly,” I agreed, eating an urchin. “Don’t give it another thought.”
But I could tell that she did continue to think about it. She must have wondered all through the rest of that dreadful meal—food without the benefit of fire is a dreary thing—whether I had truly forgotten the contents of my own trunk or I was playing a game with her. She plied me with barely diluted wine hoping, no doubt, that I would give myself away, and though I tried to moderate my consumption, I must admit I was drunk by the end of dinner. I had to excuse myself before I became too inebriated. I meant to stay awake until she retired, but I fell asleep as soon as I lay down on my bed.
I would have slept until morning if Iusta hadn’t awoken me in the middle of the night. The moon was already sinking below the western side of the courtyard when I opened the door to her; it shone through the folds of her saffron dress, turning it into a shower of gold like the one in which Zeus came to Danae.
“If you want to see where the mysteries will take place, you must come now,” she said.
“Yes, yes,” I whispered. “Only there is something else.” I pulled her into my room and closed the door.
As I pulled her toward the bed I thought I heard her sigh. “There isn’t time…” she began, but I quickly corrected her assumption.
“Here, look, my trunk…” I was finding it difficult to speak. The effect the girl had on me was strangely powerful, or perhaps it was the wine I had drunk at dinner. “It’s empty…. The scrolls are gone.”
“Gone?” Iusta asked. “Do you mean stolen? Did you tell Calatoria that they were missing?” Iusta asked, her eyes still on the empty trunk as if by looking at it longer she might discover the whereabouts of its missing contents.
“No. I knew she would blame the slaves and have them tortured. And you told me today that Calatoria especially wanted the book about the mysteries. I wondered if she might have stolen it.”
Iusta lifted her gaze from the empty trunk to my face. “Yes, you may be right. She may have decided that she needed it for the rites tomorrow. She’ll be sure to secure her role as head priestess if she produces such an illustrious and rare work and reads from it at the rites.”
“Why is it so important to her to be head priestess?” I asked. “Is she really that pious?”
Iusta smiled. “Hardly. But the women who follow the Rites of the Maiden pay tribute to the head priestess—gifts, food, clothing, jewelry, even money. Without those tributes, even my mother’s oyster beds won’t keep Calatoria
in the lavish lifestyle she has come to enjoy—and which had brought Gaius Petronius to the edge of penury before his death. I also believe she enjoys the power.”
“So she’ll never give the scroll back to me? Or pay me for it? But I depended on the sale price to set myself up in Rome in the necessary style. How can I get it back from her?”
“She’ll keep it close to her until tomorrow night. The only chance you’ll have to get it back will be during the rites themselves. I believe she’ll display the scroll and read from it just before she and the other women purify themselves by bathing in the sea. Then she’ll replace it in her hiding place in the grotto, which is where I believe she has hidden my diary, and then they will all swim out of the grotto and into the open sea, as though they had become the sirens whose carelessness allowed Persephone to be seized by Hades and carried to the underworld.”
“So you think I might take the scroll then?”
“Yes, but there’s one problem. Remember that you’re to take part in the rites. Your role is to represent the God and so you’ll be kept in an underground cell—the Chamber of the God—until it’s time for you to appear.”
Iusta blushed as she told me this, no doubt because of the role she was to play in the rites with me. If I were the God, then she could only be Persephone, and it would be my role to ravish her. No wonder the color rose to her cheeks as she spoke of it. I could feel the blood rushing under my own skin.
“And you?” I asked as gently as I could. “Where will you be?”
She looked up and I could see that she was struggling to master her fear.
“I am kept in another chamber—the Chamber of the Maiden—and I will be bound. After the women have purified themselves in the sea they come to me and bring me to…to you.” She had been about to say “to the god.” I was glad she was able to think of the creature in this drama as me. Perhaps it would enable her to control her fear.
“So we must act before you are brought to me, while the women are still in the sea. Is there any way out of the chamber where I will be kept?”
“Yes, there are secret passageways beneath the grottoes, many of them—like the labyrinth of King Minos—you’d never find your way through them, but perhaps…”
“Perhaps what?” I asked anxiously.
“The passageway between the Chamber of the God and the Chamber of the Maiden is short. I could show you the way and then, when you’ve unchained me, we could both go to the sirens’ grotto and retrieve the scroll—and my diary. We could hide them and then recover them after the rites.”
“But won’t Calatoria know something is wrong when she sees that the scroll is missing?”
“When the women come out of the sea, they drink a potion. It opens them up to the power of the god and makes them quite insensible, mad even.” Iusta shivered. “Calatoria won’t be thinking of the scroll. She’ll be focused on the god: on you. As long as you play your role she won’t have the wits to notice a missing scroll.”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak for the moment. My throat felt tight—as it had earlier tonight when the oyster was lodged in it—at the thought of the role I was to play. Iusta was looking at me closely. I had to maintain the appearance of calm to ease her fear.
“Very well. This is what we will do. Can you show me the Chamber of the God and the Chamber of the Maiden tonight? I will have to know how to get from one to another in order for our plan to work.”
She nodded. Although her face was solemn, I detected a faint smile. I had gained her confidence. “Come with me,” she said.
I followed Iusta down the stairs to the lower courtyard. The moon had set now and I could barely see her as she crossed the courtyard. She seemed to melt into a painted wall, but when I got closer I saw that she had only slipped inside a narrow gap in the wall. I could see nothing but blackness beyond, but I could feel a dank draft rising from the gap and smell the brackish odor of the sea rising from far below. I could also smell Iusta: the perfumed oil she wore on her hair and musk of her skin as she knelt by my feet. When she rose, she was holding a lamp that cast a weak yellow light on her face and arms.
“The passage is narrow,” she told me. “You’ll have to follow behind me and you must stay close to me or you won’t be able to see where I turn. There are many false turns that drop off steeply. If you fall into one I won’t be able to get you out.”
With that warning, she started down the stairs. The passage was indeed narrow—so narrow that my shoulders brushed against the stone walls and I had to crouch to keep from hitting my head against the ceiling. Iusta kept the lamp close to her body—to keep the flame from blowing out, I supposed. I only caught glimpses of the paintings on the walls as we descended: a flutter of wings, the curled tail of a serpent. Only when we reached level ground did the passage widen enough for me to stand beside her, and then I could clearly see the paintings on the walls.
I almost wished I couldn’t.
I’m not a prudish man by any means, but I admit that the scenes that decorated the underground passage shocked me. All the creatures of the sea and land were here and all were breeding with one another. Some of the scenes I recognized from myths: above us a great swan beat his wings between Leda’s legs, Pasiphae crouched inside her cow-disguise as she was mounted by the great bull of Crete, Oreithyia was ravished aloft by Boreas, the North Wind. But others came from no myth I recognized. Sea-nymphs writhed with dolphins and serpents sodomized satyrs…unspeakable couplings that I am too ashamed to record here. Up to all of this, the girl Iusta held her unwavering lamp. No wonder she was frightened by the coming rites.
I motioned for her to move on. Instead, she crouched on the ground and, passing me the lamp, lifted up a stone lid covering something that looked like a well. She unwrapped a rope from around her waist and secured it to a bolt in the wall.
“I’ll go down first,” she said, “and then you pass me the lamp and I’ll light the way for you.”
I did as she said, crouching at the edge of the pit, holding the lamp for her, but the light barely penetrated the darkness. I could feel, too, the darkness at my back—and all those leering figures ready to pounce on me. Then I saw Iusta’s upturned face and her hand reaching out for the lamp. What if I dropped it and plunged us into blackness? My hand shook as I passed the lamp to her. Her hand was steady.
“Now you,” she said. I did as she said. When I was once again on solid ground, I was amazed to find myself in a perfectly circular room, the walls and floor painted red, with many strange figures on the wall, but these I could not make out so well.
“A chamber fit for the God of the Underworld!” I said, turning around in a circle. “But I don’t see any way out except for the grate in the ceiling and that, I presume, will be locked.”
“That’s what you are meant to think so that when I appear it will be as if I had materialized out of thin air, but see here—” She removed from her robe a long flat piece of iron—a tool from the kitchen used to lift hot pots from the fire, I believe—and slid it into a crack in the wall. “I will leave this here for you so that you can open the door,” she said as the door swung open onto darkness. She held up her lamp and motioned for me to step through, into another tunnel that branched into three directions.
“Three! Like the faces of Hecate!” I exclaimed.
Ignoring my comment Iusta showed me which sign to follow to find her in the Chamber of the Maiden—
“He doesn’t tell us what the sign is?” Maria asks.
“No,” I answer, “the word he uses is signum.”
As I followed her I saw the path we took went downward. “Deeper yet!” I remarked. “How far underground does the villa go? We’ll be in Hades soon!”
I meant to lighten the mood with a joke, but when she looked over her shoulder at me she wasn’t smiling. “If Calatoria catches me showing you this, that’s where I will be. You must promise not to tell anyone what I’ve shown you tonight.”
“Of course,” I assured her.
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“You must not even write it down.”
I assured her again, although I already knew I wouldn’t be able to resist recording the experience, as I am doing right now. I have never been able to resist recording the wonders I have witnessed, even the secrets I was sworn never to reveal.
We descended through the tunnel to the chamber where she would be kept. As we crept along Iusta pointed out the false turnings I must avoid. She warned me that if I fell into them headfirst I would be trapped, my body wedged in between the stones. “Calatoria has had these caverns so shaped that a man would hang upside down in them for a long time before he died. It’s how she punishes slaves if they steal or disobey her.”
“How dreadful—to be buried alive!”
“Yes. She believes that she avoids the pollution of murder by letting them starve to death beneath the ground.”
“Don’t they suffocate first?”
“No, the rock is porous enough to let in air and even a few drops of fresh water from an underground spring so that the captive is kept alive for days, weeks even.”
I shuddered. “An ingenious punishment. I’ll be careful. When I’ve found your chamber, are you sure you’ll be able to find our way to the Sirens’ Grotto?”
“I’ve explored these caverns since I was a child. My mother showed them to me.”
We had come to the Chamber of the Maiden, as Iusta called it, a narrow cell hewn out of the rock, less lavish than the Chamber of the God. Then Iusta made me lead the way back to be sure I had memorized the path. I did so easily—I’ve always had an excellent memory—and then we climbed back though the grate and into the passageway. We ascended up to the lower courtyard without speaking, Iusta following me so quietly that for a moment on the stairs I grew afraid that I had lost her. When I turned to her she said, “If you were Orpheus and I were Euridice you would have sealed my fate right then.”
I started to laugh, but then I felt a tremor beneath my feet. It was only a small tremor, common to these parts, but enough to make me wary of joking about the gods. She, too, looked suddenly serious. “You must promise me that tomorrow night you will do exactly as I have told you to do and that you won’t breathe a word of this to anyone. My life is in your hands.”