I found it at the very bottom of the second chest, carefully wrapped in soft and supple, beautifully tanned leather. On first opening it, handling the package with great care, I regarded it with sheer horror, unable to bring myself to touch it. It was a human face, eyeless, but miraculously preserved and complete with full head and facial hair, and my flesh crawled at the visualization of how it had been achieved. It had apparently been removed intact from a living skull, then treated somehow, to maintain the colour and the texture of the skin, and lovingly wrapped in the leather covering.
Only after I had stared at it aghast for several endless moments did I begin to discern that it was not what I had taken it to be, and even then it took me a long time to gather up the strength I needed to be able to reach out and touch the thing. As soon as I did touch it, however, my fingertips informed my still-doubting mind that they were touching wax of some strange kind. It was a mask, and it was made up of two parts, but it was unlike any mask I had ever known.
The hair was real enough, but it had been applied with great artifice to a foundation of the finest, open-weave cloth, which I soon recognized as a precious, diaphanous stuff from Asia Minor much prized by my Aunt Luceiia. The mask itself had been made up of many tiny layers of this delicate material, obviously laid over a real human face and coated, piece by piece, with some kind of glue or fine paste. I could clearly see the outlines of the integrated parts when I held the thing with its back towards a bright light. Then, once the outlines of the face had been achieved, the outer surface had been coated with some kind of pliable yet hardened wax, and the magician who constructed the wonder had shaped and painted the outer coating to resemble life itself.
The upper piece fitted over the eyes and nose, completely covering the wearer's own features, and the attached wig, of long, coarse, dark-brown hair sown into a soft, thin cap of the same material as the mask itself, fell in ringlets to cover the wearer's own hair entirely. The upper edges of the eye holes were covered by thick, fierce brows, but the lower edges were so thin as to be almost insubstantial, fitting against the lower lids and sagging downwards into deep, utterly realistic bags of seeming flesh on either side of a thick, jutting, pock-marked nose. From visible pores in the skin of the cheeks, just below the pouches beneath the eyes, the hairs of a long, unkempt beard sprouted wildly, blending into a long, dark-stained moustache.
The second, lower part was similarly made, but fully bearded, fitting the bottom part of the face from just beneath the ears and covering the jaws and chin, ending just beneath the wearer's lips. I realized immediately that this part would have to be applied first, and the upper part must fit over it. I also realized that, wondrous as it was, the mask would be usable only by the person for whom it had been made, or by someone who very closely resembled him, facially. It was unyielding in its main structure, made to fit only the cheekbones on which it had been moulded. And naturally, having discovered that, I held it up to my own face.
Expecting to feel the hard edges of ridges that would not conform to my own bone structure, I felt instead a tenuous, quite unidentifiable comfort, which quickly flared into a surge of something approaching superstitious terror as I realized the thing had snugged completely and alarmingly onto the contours of my face, coating my features like a second, cool and omnipresent skin. It fit me perfectly, and on realizing that, I instinctively released my grip on the thing so that it should have fallen. Instead, it remained in place, its fabric warming to the feel of my own skin and nestling so thoroughly against it that the mask felt weightless and insubstantial.
The awareness of how unlikely such a fit must be set my heart hammering and raised the small hairs on my neck. My mind threw up a score of reasons for the impossibility of such a thing. How could this possibly have occurred? Of the hundreds of men I knew, none other, save my brother Ambrose, could have matched the facial contours of this mask so perfectly. Whose mask had it been? I knew immediately it could have belonged originally to neither Caspar nor Memnon, the two warlocks. Their faces had both been utterly different from mine and from this mask. Memnon was facially disfigured, with grossly protuberant eyes on different levels. My memory seemed to indicate that Caspar might, possibly, have been able to wear it. But it had not been made for Caspar's face. His cheeks had been too flat, his nose too long, his eyebrows too prominent and his chin too regressive. Whose face, then, could have been the model for its creation, and why should I, of all men, end up in possession of the thing? Did it possess some frightful portent? Had some god arranged for it to fall into my hands? Or might God Himself have meant me to possess it for some purpose of His own? It fit me perfectly, defying all the odds of probability, and the knowledge of that shook me to my depths, so that, flaring with excitement, I went searching for a mirror for the first time in my life.
I quickly found that the mask would not stay in place indefinitely without the pressure of my hand, and once I had accepted that I went back to the source—the tray in the chest—looking for whatever means Caspar had used to keep the thing in place on his face. There, in the bottom of the tray, I found a tiny flask of liquid that was astoundingly adhesive, sticking my fingertips together instantly, yet not so firmly that I could not pull them apart with a degree of ease. I also found several small, round boxes of waxed papyrus that contained pastes of varying colours, clearly cosmetics intended for use in the final preparation of the disguise.
I locked my door and amused myself for several hours in front of Aunt Luceiia's silver mirror, marvelling at the completeness and complexity of the changes I effected in myself. Then, irked by the painful tenderness caused by the adhesive, I packed everything carefully away, and made my way to the bathhouse.
SIXTEEN
Once again, the secrets of the warlocks' chests were driven from my mind by more pressing events that demanded my attention. I would think of that late autumn, forever after, as the Autumn of the Beasts.
First came the wolves, driven to descend on us, Lucanus believed, as the result of some sickness that had decimated their normal prey. It seemed to me he must be right, for there were very few deer around that year, and one could ride for an entire day through the forest without encountering any of the hares, rabbits or squirrels that normally abounded in the woodlands.
Wolves, like bears and other large animals in the wild, generally take pains to avoid contact with humans. That particular year, however, the wolves came closer to our fort at Mediobogdum, and in greater numbers, than they ever had before without the spur of winter starvation to impel them. The sound of their howling, just beyond our walls, became a nightly commonplace from the late summer onward, and after the loss of several of our animals, we were forced to move all our livestock into the safety of the fort each evening before the sun went down. We were completely unprepared, however, to be attacked and plundered in full daylight.
Shelagh had begun raising swine the first year after our arrival, and her herd had prospered. She had quickly acquired buyers for as many prime yearling pigs as she wished to sell, but from her father she had inherited a keen eye for healthy traits in beasts and she always managed to retain the best of each litter as future breeding stock. Because she now owned a dozen prime sows, she had constructed a large and spacious pen to hold them, close to the bathhouse and its plenteous water, but far enough removed so that the stink of the proliferating farrows would be bearable to people coming and going from the baths. At night the animals were brought inside the fort and penned again in another enclosure built against the north wall, as far away from our habitation as they could be.