“Well, what will you take for proof, then?” Herosilla said. She heard her voice rising with the frustration that she felt so often, an intelligent woman in a world of credulous fools.
She raised her clenched fist to the heavens. “You there! Gods!” she shouted. “If any of you really exist, I demand you strike me down this instant!”
A big drop of rain whacked the railing. The bronze rang in echo. The hair on Herosilla’s neck prickled.
The thunderbolt an instant later was all the light and noise in the universe, focused on a single point.
Herosilla’s vision pulsed. Her nostrils were full of the sulphurous stench of burned air. She didn’t think she’d lost consciousness but she wasn’t sure.
For a moment she wasn’t even sure she was alive.
The veils of throbbing color thinned slowly. The roar that filled her ears was her own blood; that began to subside also. Beneath Herosilla’s palms was dirt mixed with pebbles and coarse grass, not the smooth mosaic floor of Maternus’ balcony.
She was aware of figures or at least shadows that moved and gabbled words at her. There was a sudden consciousness of pain: burning sensations from her arms, ankles and around her throat where her gold filigree necklace hung.
Her jewelry was blisteringly hot. Now that the reek of the lightning had dissipated somewhat, she could smell her hair singeing around her jeweled diadem.
Herosilla shouted and jumped to her feet, shaking the anklets of gold chain away from her flesh. She stripped off her armlets: double-headed snakes with ruby eyes. All she could do about the necklace was bend forward to let as much of the metal as possible hang away from the white skin of her breast. She’d never be able to release the catch in a hurry. In fact she didn’t even remember how it worked; that was a task for her maids.
The world came into focus around Herosilla.
She stood on a hill. The oak tree beside her had been struck by lightning so recently that the stump still burned. Splinters of the upper trunk smoldered in a circle thirty feet in diameter. A dead sheep lay at the edge of the blasted area with its stiff legs in the air. Other sheep faced Herosilla, their jaws working in a sideways motion as regular as the drip of raindrops from a gutter.
Two muscular young shepherds flung themselves on the ground. They were grunting something at her.
By the stars! The shepherds were calling her, “Goddess,” in the most barbarous Latin Herosilla had ever heard in her life!
“Get up, you idiots,” Herosilla snapped. She was dizzy and completely disoriented. There were no buildings in any direction unless the beehive of rocks a little higher on the hill was a shelter of some land. “I’m not a goddess!”
Lightning flashed; Herosilla flinched involuntarily. The bolt struck one of the hills across the valley. Rain came in a rush, making the tree stump hiss and kick out clouds of steam.
Just a moment ago, Maternus’ slaves had been waiting with a furled rain canopy. Now they’d vanished along with every other aspect of the mansion. “Where on earth are we?” she said to the shepherds.
The taller, leaner man turned his head slightly so that he could look up at Herosilla without breaking his neck. He spoke a connected sentence. His stockier fellow watched Herosilla silently.
For a moment the sound was merely a series of grunts; then the syllables fell into focus in Herosilla’s mind. “Say that again,” she directed.
“We’re watching the king’s sheep in the north pastures,” the shepherd repeated obediently.
Their accent wasn’t barbarous, it was archaic! The lightning bolt had somehow flung her to the countryside so far from Rome that the peasants still spoke Old Latin. Herosilla couldn’t imagine how the flinging had been accomplished—much less how she’d survived it—but it was all perfectly natural. Like volcanos and earthquakes, excessive humors of one sort or another caused disruptions in the earth. There was no need to invent gods for the cause...
“Very well, my good men,” Herosilla said, shifting her speech as well as she could into the archaic dialect. “You may rise, now.”
She’d never expected that her studies of the ancient Laws of the Twelve Tables would help her communicate in the present day. Perhaps all peasants spoke Old Latin? Now that Herosilla thought about it, she didn’t recall ever before having spoken to a peasant.
The men got up hesitantly. They weren’t quite as young as Herosilla first thought, but she’d seen gladiators who weren’t so lithely muscular. Perhaps she should have visited the country earlier, and by more orthodox means.
“Goddess?” said the broader-built shepherd, though the stars knew neither man was wispy.
“Stop calling me a goddess,” Herosilla said firmly. Given her consistent failure to rid her wealthy peers of vain superstition, she choked off a lecture on the nonexistence of gods that these rural louts wouldn’t even be able to understand. “Now, take me to your supervisor.”
The men spoke to one another in voices too low for Herosilla to make out what they were saying. ‘King’ in their usage obviously meant the man who owned the land and perhaps owned the shepherds as well. Even if these louts were technically free, they were so unsophisticated that she felt it was better to deal with their immediate superior instead of demanding the shepherds lead her to the manor house themselves.
“We will take you to our father, goddess,” the stocky man said. He held himself straight, throwing out a chest that a sculptor could have used to model Apollo. Each shepherd wore a tunic of coarse wool and, in place of a cape, a whole fleece with the hind legs tied around his neck. Their legs were bare. For footgear they had crudely-shaped pieces of hide in which the soles and uppers were the same single thickness.
“Don’t call me goddess,” Herosilla repeated with a sigh. “You may call me lady or mistress. Either is proper. Now, let’s not delay further while the rain falls.”
The taller shepherd gave a penetrating whistle. The bellwether, a grizzled ram which might be as old as the man himself, blatted in reply and set off toward the south. Three baked clay rods hung around his neck. They clacked as he moved, guiding the remainder of the herd.
The shepherds bowed deferentially to Herosilla and walked to either side of her as they followed the ram. “It’s clear proof of my high station that the lady appeared to me,” the stocky man said to his brother as though Herosilla wasn’t between them.
“She appeared to both of us,” the taller brother replied. “And also to ten tens of sheep. They’re sheep of high station, belonging to the king as they do. Perhaps she was sent to them.”
The stocky brother snorted angrily. Conversation lapsed.
Herosilla started to shiver. The rain was cold on clothing that was never intended to be waterproof; and the walk also gave her time to think about what had happened to her… and how much worse it could easily have been.
The village was at least a dozen round huts with walls of woven twigs plastered with mud—wattle and daub. Brushwood laid on the roofs prevented high winds from blowing away the thatch. Among the outbuildings was an open-fronted shed in which women milked ewes from flocks whose herdsmen had returned before Herosilla’s pair.
Perhaps there were more dwellings; she couldn’t be sure because of darkness and the complete disorder of the village layout. Certainly there was nothing of any size or built of stone—unless you wanted to count the sheep pen made by laying rocks on top of one another without mortar.
The area between huts was a waste of mud and sheep dung except where the soil had been trampled down to bare rock. There were no proper streets.