Bad news comes to me this midday from my patron Servilius Rufus in Rome. Now that the accounts of my father’s wealth have been finalized and the full extent of penury can no longer be hidden, the creditors of my family are demanding full settlement.
For now, I can do no more than make vague but tantalizing promises about the fresh wealth that I had hoped to return with from here. It pains me to realize that I will have to sell off the villa and vineyard near Naples on my return—if I can find a buyer. It pains me yet more to know that even that will not be enough.
For all this, I have not been idle on the matter of discovering some valuable ancient relic since I raised the matter over dinner with Kaliphus. Some of the caves in which I have wandered with the slave guides bear traces of being not mine-delvings, but narrow tombs. I have excavated a line of them that look down over the spoil heaps of Cul Holman. Sometimes these narrow pits contain versions of Egyptian hieroglyphs, and I have also discovered a number of the star-shaped soapstones, dot-marked and with a central indentation, much like the one in the shrine. They are clearly ancient, yet of no seeming value or purpose. Otherwise, I have found nothing but dust and, once, and disastrously for one of the slaves, a nest of poisonous snakes.
What, I can’t help wondering, happened to all the supposedly great wealth of the Pharaohs? If the tales are to be believed, they buried their princes and kings in sarcophagi made of solid gold, which were decorated in turn with incredible jewels, and then laid in vast gilded subterranean vaults filled with amazing riches, the better that they might enjoy the next world without loosing all the fruits of this. In Memphis, Giza, and Thebes, I can well understand that nothing is left now after all the ages of digging and banditry. But here at Cul Holman, at the very place where much of the gold must once have been mined, might there still not be some forgotten remnant? All I ask for, truly, is one still-sealed door, a mere antechamber—a single relic, if the relics were truly as great as is rumored.
Yet even as I write this, hope fails me. I know what the digging of gold is like here. I know how little comes from all the efforts of Rome. To entomb a man, to gild a room, to form statues and vases and make vast ceremonial necklaces—all of this would take more gold than could ever have come from these hills even when the seams were richer, or from any other place on earth.
Often in the night, it now seems that my grandmother is beside me, telling tales that fill my sleep. Her familiar voice murmurs once again of King Midas; of how, once Bacchus released him from his gift, he came to hate all wealth and splendor and dwelt in the country as a worshipper of Pan. I smile at the thought of those cool forests and the quivering piping of the reeds, then half-awaken in the hot stirring darkness of Cul Holman and the stink of this bed. Yet it almost seems as if a dark figure within a robe’s brown shifting folds is still with me, and that there is a shrill piping, weird and unhuman—ungodly, even—as the wind screams in these hills.
Dreaming thus as I am each night, and with the grim prospect I face when I return to Rome, I find myself thinking much of the past, and of my father. After all the years when he deceived and squandered and borrowed against what I had fondly imagined was my own rightful wealth, I can see him as little more than a bloated monster. And what caprice was it that made him choose my calling in, of all possible professions, accountancy? I could, after all, have been a lawyer—a soldier, even—perhaps a legate. But instead, I am cursed to study these figures that speak of a richness I can never touch, trapped in a calling that, it seems now, has brought me by some unremitting logic to this terrible place.
My father had me summoned to him once when I was nine or ten years old. It was the morning of a summer’s day in our Naples villa when a pale sweet haze hung over the headlands. It was not a time of day, from the little I knew of my father’s habits, that he was likely to be up, and thus I was all the more surprised that he wanted to see me. Even in its decline, I still think of that villa as a place of shifting light, of the scent of orange groves mingled with sea air. Yet my father’s quarters were shuttered, curtained, still lamp-lit. I doubt if he even realized it was morning.
Everyone said that my father had grown in the years since my mother had died in giving me birth, but I saw the man so little that I had come to imagine he was some kind of giant. But he was little taller in stature than I, and had the same elongated chin, the same face that seems mournful even when it is smiling, the same large brown eyes, the same long nose. Every time I look in a mirror, I still see my father welling up before me. But my father’s face was framed in fat, puffed out as if by some internal pressure and patched by white and red blotches that drifted and changed like the clouds.
This world, he told me in a voice that was both high-pitched and rumbling, is a place of secrets. There is little you can expect to trust, although in youth you may strive to do so. But when you reach my age, you will realize that your actions are merely the performance of a ritual designed to appease powers of which you will never have any understanding. We are all, in everything we do in our lives, the acolytes and priests of nothingness.
Such was the sum total of the knowledge that my father chose to pass on to me. He had been raised in the bad years and spiraling prices of Gallienus’s worthless coinage, when the wealth of my family must largely have disappeared. Yet somehow he managed to borrow and confuse and keep at bay the creditors who now assail me. No wonder, surrounded by a charade of wealth that he used to fool all those around him, that he took a dark view of the world. Nor that he finally ended his life by casting himself down the well in the villa’s courtyard. Perhaps the only surprise is that the vast bulk of his body fitted.
On that morning that he summoned me, my father bade me eat with him. I had to watch the fruits and breads and cheeses disappear into his mouth, washed down by the wine that the pampered servants on whom he also sated his other needs brought to him. He bid me eat from the heaped plates, although I could barely pick at the stuff. When I hoped the process had come to an end, but more feared a gap between courses, he asked me if I would like to see some gold. Grateful for any diversion, I agreed.
He stood up from his couch with difficulty, and lumbered over to one of the many tall stone vessels that were half-set into the carpeted paving. He lifted the lid of one, and reached in. Looming over me with a small casket of scented wood, he turned the catch to open it and bid me look inside. It contained several leaves of a shining material, so thin that I feared they would disintegrate if I breathed too strongly. Closing the box, keeping it close to the huge folds of his belly, my father shuffled back toward his couch, and called the servants to bring yet more food—strawberries, for it was the time of year when the villa gardens filled with their scent.
The fruit were laid before us on a plate of bronze. My father reached into the scented wooden box and lifted out one of the fragments of leaf. He wrapped a strawberry in it, placed it in his mouth and chewed with his mouth set apart in a grin, flakes of metal dissolving with the pink fruit and threads of saliva. Then he selected another strawberry and folded it within the delicate leaf. His fingers as he held the thing out and commanded me to eat were coated in the remains of all the other things he had eaten, and his nails were coarse. I had never known it was so difficult to take something within my lips and swallow.
Thus, between us, my father and I got through a dozen leaves and a large plate of strawberries. The metal was almost tasteless, and grazed my teeth before it folded and dissolved within my mouth. At the end of the process, my father belched. When, with a single gesture of his hand, he waved both me and the foul air that he had made away, and I ran down from the villa into vineyards, to he gasping for air amid the droning insects and the lacy shadows of the hot sun. A little time later, I found myself bent double in the corner of the field as all that I had been forced to eat came back out of me. There was no sign, within the usual traces of the vomit, of anything resembling gold, and I was weak’ and feverish for days. To this day, I hate the taste of strawberries.