But that was an end to our bargaining. At that point, Alya turned and fled. I have since summoned Henrika and a half dozen centurions, but she has gone from the villa, and seemingly also Cul Holman. I suspect that in her folly she will try to climb the cliffs where Dahib is immured. But she will find the way guarded.
Before Henrika and the soldiers left me again to what I had hoped on this disturbed night would be my slumbers, I asked for him to bring more lamps, and to add oil to all the existing ones. Even then, I asked him if he also noticed an odd effect, doubtless from some coming storm, in the way that the light seemed to hang in close spheres around the flame without passing further. He agreed, of course, but I do not think that the truth had penetrated his pagan senses.
A dark closeness now lies upon all of Cul Holman. Konchab’s dogs are barking wildly, but for once the winds have ceased. The air hangs still, infused with this preternatural blackness, and there is a prickly sense of waiting that I associate with thunderstorms. Yet the only rumble comes from the beat of my heart.
Just this moment, as I reached toward the iron ink pot to replenish my nib, a greenish spark flew out from my hand. I have heard from mariners of just such an effect in storms; and also of the crawling of the skin, the rising of the hair, the suffocating sense of expectancy, although I have previously witnessed only the flash of clouds over the rain-swathed bay of Naples and the green hills of Rome.
No wind, and yet something within me seems to be blown wildly as if by a mad silent gale. In this itchy uncertainty, with the need always to look behind my back at the starstones and the lamps that withhold their suffocated light in the thick mass of darkness, there is clearly no prospect of sleep. This night, indeed, seems to me quite unlike any other, and yet ordained, much in the way that my presence here was—and, before that, the death of my father.
Much, it now seems to me, comes back to that. Now that we know each other well, trusted reader, and we seemingly have this night to share together, I will record a tale that will otherwise reach no eyes. Let me tell how, when I returned to Rome from the tedium of my duties as accountant in Sicily, little enriched and much in need of solace, I was greeted in the street outside my family’s high house by the sight of wagons and carts. Too weary to take notice, I pushed my way through, only to find myself restrained and led toward a small group that included my sister and a few of our more elderly servants, all of whom were sobbing.
Understand, reader, that until that moment I had imagined that the drudgery of my work as an accountant was but a preparation for my true responsibilities as head of my family. Such things, I had reasoned, were not uncommon. Even as I learnt of the repossession of the furnishing of my house and the sale of my best slaves, I did not assume this indicated the loss of my family’s wealth—but simple bad management of finances by my increasingly degenerate father.
Yet I was in a foul mood after I had made what arrangements I could from my own meager purse, and rode in haste toward Naples. In other moments, such a journey would have given the chance for cooler reflection. But anger only seemed to grow within me; and a sense of destiny.
As I dismounted at nightfall four days later and my feet clattered on loose mosaic through the villa’s moldering halls, I remembered the time when I had been summoned to eat leaf-gilded strawberries. And as my face was brushed by cobwebs and rotting hangings, I remembered also the sickness that had come upon me afterward—when gold is prized by apothecaries, and taken by those who can afford it for its powers of goodness and healing. It was then, even before I reached my father’s presence, that the first worm of doubt began to slide within me. How, for so long, could I have ignored this decay, when it could all be put down to the simplest of explanations?
The few servants that my father still kept about him were drunkenly abed, or had absconded entirely. Yet I knew as I threw open the last doors into that windowless inner chamber that he would be waiting for me.
He lay as always upon his great couch on the dais, and the place was filled with the sweet stench of rancid oil and perfume. He had grown yet more in the year since I had last seen him. His flesh shone coldly with sweat, and his vast stomach tumbled out in a slippery mass from his dank robes. His tiny eyes regarded me from his swollen face, whilst his chin sloped down, white-mottled and immense like a toad’s.
“So now you come to me,” he said in that voice that was broken into two pieces—both high and low.
“I came,” I began, “before it is too late—”
But here his wild, chilling laughter interrupted me.
“My son,” he shrieked, “it was too late long ago! It was too late before you were born!”
“We need money,” I said. “Money to pay off the creditors who have ransacked our house in Rome. We need gold.”
“Ah, gold…” His body quivered again at the word, as if he were about to recommence laughing. But—as far as I could tell—his face remained grave. Looking up at him, I felt as impotent as a child. “Go, then,” he whispered, leaning forward with a sound of sickly sliding, “go and look for your gold…”
Moving slowly around the dais, at first fearing some joke, I crossed to the line of great jars inset into the paving that he had opened for me long ago, and lifted the lid of the first, and placed my hand deep inside. It was empty. As was the next, and the next. As they all were. Dragging down rotting hangings, kicking over chests and boxes, I found nothing but dust and leaves. Admittedly there were a few coins; worthless radiati and fake aurei that I could bite through with my teeth.
Twisting his head this way and that, my father watched as I moved behind him, his tiny hands quivering at the ends of his immense arms. He made a breathless eager panting that soon became a high-pitched giggling, then a growling belch of laugher. His shining face grew livid.
In my anger, I raised one of the caskets and threw it toward him, but it seemed to slow in the thick dark air and broke on the paving in shards of thin wood and metal. He bellowed at that as though the laughter would break him, greasy beads of tears and sweat flowing down his face, and I realized then that he had long anticipated this moment, like the maturing of a sour wine.
I shouted at him that he was a degenerate, a disgrace to all the honor of Rome. At the mention of honor, his laughter only increased.
This, then, was the state to which I had been dragged—to face a future of meaningless penury. And I was filled by a new and even greater anger. I was a high-born Roman, yet my life seemed to have passed from my control. Understand, now, reader, how much against my nature it was to climb the dais to my father’s couch and strike him. Anyway, my efforts were useless, and only increased his laughter—it was like punching rotten dough. I had my small dagger about me, and I ploughed that into him, too, rending his clothes, slicing his thighs, his belly, his chest. But the blade cut nothing but white layers of fat, and did not even cause him to bleed. Enveloped in his stench, I seemed to be falling into him, the shrieking pit of his mouth, the quivering wounds I had opened.
At some point in all of this, the weight of our struggles caused the couch beneath us to break with a tearing of wood and the sparkling scatter of cheap glass beads and fake ornaments. My father began to slide from it—and I with him, although thankfully we separated as I tumbled from the steps of the dais, or I fear that I would have been crushed, suffocated, drowned.
As it was, I climbed to my feet, and looked down at him as he lay sprawled, my greasy dagger still in my hand. He was but a spill of flesh; scarcely human, more like some rotting sea-leviathan. Yet from the discordant whistle of his breathing, I knew that he was still alive.