by Ken Parejko
“Well then,” I breathed out. I turned to the servants. “I'll be back late morning.” I gathered some things, including some Virgil to read on the return trip.
As we left the house and made our way down the path toward the harbor, sand and seashells crunching under our feet, we walked into a breeze from the southwest. It would help us to Cumae. It was cool, a fresh morning coolness, and still dark, though Sirius had broken the eastern horizon.
We joined the ship's crew and settled next to each other onto benches forward on the deck. The men were still half-asleep, grumbled incoherently more than spoke. The hawser came aboard and the men set their backs to work, breaking the quiet of the predawn darkness with the creak of the oar-locks and the oars' quiet splash. We edged towards the mouth of the breakwater. I turned to look back. Through the darkness I could see a few men up along the seawall starting the day’s business. Once the ship slipped into the open sea small swells lifted and dropped it in a regular rhythm. I glanced at Drusilla. She smiled weakly back. The men rowed on, turned the ship to the west. The lighthouse on the point of the Cape came into view. We slipped past the nymphaeum, the small grotto at the Cape’s base dedicated to the deities of the sea. Though I didn't believe in these superstitions of nymphs, dryads and fauns, I’d become attached to the grotto. Like Drusilla I wasn't comfortable on the sea; returning from my journeys the little nymphaeum was a sign I was nearly home.
Drusilla, half-awake, watched the Cape pass by and the lighthouse at its top, soon joined by another, shining off the southern tip of the island of Prochida, and beyond it, another on Ischia. As admiral it was my responsibility that the lighthouses were manned and fired. I was pleased to see they were all in good order.
Once around the Cape the wind came up. The sails were hoisted and flapped ineffectually a moment, but as they caught the wind the ship accelerated. The oars were put aside and the rowers pulled out their breakfast breads.
We sailed smoothly northwards, past the military school and its beach, where most of the men were still asleep, not yet wakened by the morning reveille. Mare Morte, the estuary which connected to the harbor, slipped into view in the darkness, its shore lined with ships in various stages of repair and construction, then slowly slipped just as quietly behind as the promontory of Mount Prochida, rising sharply at the north end of Misenum, slowly blocked our view.
The stars shone brightly above, unhindered by even a wisp of cloud. The sky was like a sea, only vaster and deeper and even more uncharted than the one below. Sailing bravely between the two seas our boat seemed so utterly small and fragile we felt ourselves shrink almost to insignificance. We both felt a wave of vertigo, as though we were riding a leaf high through the night air and might drift that way endlessly, lost souls in a dark universe. I knew that to her that dark edge of vertigo was exciting. But I was uncomfortable when ungrounded. I felt as though I might dissolve completely and never come back. It took an act of will on my part to re-anchor myself in the boat again, with its sea-splashed wood and flackering sail.
To the east, where above the brooding bulk of Vesuvius Lucifer’s light dimmed slightly in deference to the sun, there began to appear a thin wash of light, a hopeful graying in the otherwise dark sky. I will go into the darkness, she had said, to find the light.
To the west the moon had already hidden itself behind the brooding lump of Ischia, whose presence we could sense in the darkness more than see. Past the dim lighthouses and surrounded by a darkness penetrated only by those tiny pinpoints of light by which the captain navigated we inched our way northward.
Looking down now and then we would catch a fleeting reflection of the brightest stars, as though they had fallen from the heavens and smeared themselves onto the swelling waters. And now and then dim, greenish, eerily-glowing globes passed beneath us, singly or in twos and threes, like living comets slowly traveling the depths. These small shining jellyfish glided gracefully past, ghostly and silent. We brooded separately on the same thoughts -- though less than thoughts really, only vague early-morning feelings -- and tried to imagine what life was like under the sea, in the warm dark of its flowing. We found, though, that we couldn't imagine the world from the viewpoint of the jellyfish, whose bodies and habitat we could only skim over, too foreign to enter. To local folk these common sea-animals were not really animals at all, but spirits; omens of good, or sometimes bad luck. The souls of ancestors, they said, fallen from the sky, caught in the watery depths. Come to help us, or harry us. And because they could never tell which they burned sacrifices, muttered quiet incantations against them, while with the other side of their mouths humbly implored their aid.
In the Natural History I’d said that the sea's fecundations, made of land and air whirled together by wind and wave, become marvelous life-forms -- sword-fishes, cucumber-fishes and even fishes that resemble horses. It was satisfying that the sea-creatures we were gliding over had made their way into my book. In fact in that book I'd ranged so widely over the natural world that no matter where I was I could find a bird, fish, plant, rock or heavenly body that I'd put into it.
Now north of the Cape we entered the River of Ocean, the narrow straits between tall Monte Prochida to the east and the small island of Procido to the west. Here, protected from the wind the ship settled into the water and the sails slackened. As the sea’s current carried us slowly forward the men again started rowing, their oars slipping quietly in and out of the water. The steady, easy rhythm allowed them to rest their backs as they pulled, while the ship cut cleanly and smoothly through the water.
Once through the straits the sea's swells grew again, the ship took on its steady rise and fall, and to the sounds of the oars and sails was added again the splash of the keel against the water. Drusilla had learned her fear of the sea long before. When sailing once with her father from Caesarea to Tyre they’d encountered a nasty storm. Now she sailed only when she had to; with Felix, to Rome and back, and again now, to Puteoli and Pompeii to visit her son. Sensing her discomfort, I reached out and touched her arm and she leaned closer to me. We watched ahead, together. In the slowly growing light we could just make out fishing boats coming our way, seaward from the coast, small boats bearing one or a few men. Yes, Campania, how I’d come to love my adopted land, for she took good care of her people; fed us with the richest grains, olives, fruits and vegetables, provided us with our most delicious wines, and even here in the sea, offered us her teeming fish and shellfish, the many and delicious fruits of the sea.
Now the land itself began to take on a subtle light and thin wash of color. And with the light the morning breezes, running from the still-hidden sun, brought with them the sweet, rich smell of the dark volcanic earth. And as always here, the slight but ever-present tang of sulfur: as though the gods in creating this heaven on earth, this loveliest Campania, found it necessary to remind us of the other side, the dark side of life, from which one could never completely escape. It will be with you always, the gods were saying; you may forget the dark side, but it does not forget you.
Here and there morning fires could be seen along the shore, from the houses and villas and courtyards where slaves and servants warmed their masters' breakfasts or priests or priestesses burned the morning sacrifices. A dog barked, it's sudden yap carrying across the water and bringing with it a certain plaintiff loneliness.
The many-limbed giant which was Rome, whose heart beat from the Forum of the glorious city itself but whose body sprawled across the entire continent and beyond to Britain, Africa and the East, mighty Rome, one by one in its pigs and chickens, its dogs, its dirty, crying urchins, its slaves, wives, freemen, senators and along with the Emperor Titus himself in his palace on the Quirinal, Rome was shaking itself awake.
I held her hand. She was half asleep, trying to ignore the rise and fall of the ship. When she turned to me I was muttering away as I had been for who knows how long. Lucius wasn't here to take dictation yet out of habit my mind and mouth still worked away. For so many years I'd ob
served, noted down, dictated, collated, read, recorded, tried to understand life in all its many glories, a habit which still clung to me like sea-weed to the legs of a sailor. In my hands I held my Aeneid, Virgil’s story of the founding of Rome. It always moved me, the story of my people, and took me deep into the recesses of our history. I’d brought Virgil with me into the swamps of Germania and the deserts of Hispanica, into Belgium, Judea and Cyrenaica. This morning I’d unrolled the papyrus and searched for the passage in which Aeneas traveled from Carthage to the very shores we now scudded past.
“These are the waters,” I was saying to myself as well as her, “the waters Odysseus sailed in search of Tiresias. Blind Tiresias who'd bargained with the gods for eternal life. They gave him instead nine full generations, but at each getting older and older, until when he died his body was like the cast skin of a beetle, an empty dry shell. Tiresias, who brought the Furies down on Oedipus, and who’d known life as both man and woman. Searching for him, Odysseus landed off there somewhere,” I pointed toward the shore, “in what Homer called the Bay of Perpetual Mist. He crossed the strand and through the willows found Persephone’s Grove, where each year she enters Hades. These waters are steeped in history,” I said. “Aeneas passed this way, too. Not long after Odysseus, the Trojan escaping from the war as did the Greek.”
“And on his boat, as he sailed past,” Drusilla spoke up quietly, “were carved two lions.”
“Lions?”
“Yes. Cybele's lions. She'd caught Hipponomes and Atalante, too hot-blooded for their own good, making love in her sanctuary. So she turned them into lions. They were carved onto Aeneas’ boat. It’s said the male lion can mate twenty times a day. For hours on end.” She waited for a response.
“Well,” I rejoined. “Mark Antony paid a price didn't he for yoking lions to his chariot.”
This didn't seem to interest her. “I hope we can at least agree, can’t we, that they are beautiful animals?”
“Yes, beautiful,” I agreed. “But most beautiful in the wild.” For an instant the eyes of the lion in the Puteoli amphitheater peered at me from out of the dim light.
There was enough light now to read. I opened Virgil to book six. Virgin Divine, I read quietly, nothing remains for me now, nothing can tire me or frighten me. I paused for a moment, looked out across the vast sea, emblem of my own life spread before me, from the battlefields of Germania and Judea to the halls of power in Rome, to the admiralty and here at this moment, caught on the horns of the heroics of the past and the quiet present. It was a part of myself I read in the Aeneid.
“And when he'd found her, what did the Cumaean oracle say?” she asked.
“To who?”
“Aeneas!”
“Ah. She said the first thing he had to do was bury his steersman, Misenus, whose grave is near my villa, marked by an oar stuck in the sand. And that he would found a great empire.”
I knew this was as much legend as fact, a way to attach the glory of Troy to that of Rome, as emperors claimed descent from Augustus, and so many others reached to claim descent from some emperor. It was a pretty legend which Virgil had dreamed; but a legend nevertheless. Rome was a great oak nourished by a soil rich with pretty lies. Vespasian, who reluctantly accepted the omens of his greatness because they were useful, knew that.
Though Vespasian was gone I still held hope for my country’s future. He had left me that, and now we'd see what Titus could do. But no matter what Rome’s future held, I was a Roman, in my own heart, a Roman damned with an excess of loyalty. I'd learned the secret of my success, which was to attach myself only to those who deserved my friendship, and to not make enemies of those who did not.
I was not so sure of the loyalty of the woman who sat beside me, still half asleep, softer now than when fully awake, not so much on a great, holy mission. Hers had been a hard life, much harder than mine. She'd made of it what she could. This was her pilgrimage, not mine, though somehow I was tied up in it. I lifted my cloak from my shoulder and drew it around us.
Just as I closed my eyes for a moment’s rest, the sun’s crown burst forth from the slope of Vesuvius and lit a fire in Lake Fusaro, whose color and brilliance amazed me. I allowed myself to slip into a brief sleep, the light off Fusaro fueling images of fire and falling flames, of Styx and Cerebrus, of the yapping hounds of regret, of a life nobly led but incomplete, never complete.
We dozed and were jarred awake when the boat bumped against the quay.
Cumae was an ancient town, settled by the Greeks centuries ago. At one time Naples was only a colony of Cumae, and the Greek harbors of Puteoli and Misenum only maritime stations of Cumae’s navy. The town itself lay, unseen, beyond the high ridge on which sat the military fort facing us; between the town and the fort was the acropolis with its temple and sacred precincts. Just beneath the fort and temple, now only a half mile to our east, was the grotto of the Cumaean Sibyl.
Cumae's harbor was in its early morning bustle, the docks piled high with goods both coming and going. The highest piles were those of spun flax. Cumaean flax was strong and supple and made the best nets for hunting. It was likely the lion I’d seen in Puteoli, long since sacrificed in the arena, had been caught with a Cumaean net. As I climbed out of the boat I left instructions for the men to wait for my return. "Meanwhile stay out of the brothels," I chided them. "There's a pox around, I'm told, which even the Sibyl can't cure."
“That may be, but who'll cure this?” one of the men responded, grabbing as though at an erection.
“What's the matter, your wife not enough for you?” someone shouted from the stern.
“No. Lend me yours!”
The lighthouse fire had been left to dwindle, and now its lens which only a half-hour ago seemed so bright paled in comparison to the sun. I followed Drusilla off the boat. Stevedores unloaded her bags but she wouldn’t let them carry the small basket in which lay Horus, carefully wrapped under the food I’d given her.
I wanted a litter to carry us up to the Sibyl’s cave but she said she should do this pilgrimage on foot. I looked up the many steps we faced, and decided the exercise was good. We followed the footpath along the harbor, past the moveable locks built to prevent the harbor from silting up and the temple of Isis, empty. We passed the temples of Apollo and Jove, the state-sanctioned gods, where the priests, finished with the morning sacrifices, were standing around gossiping and laughing.
The trail leading away from the harbor and up toward the town was flanked with huts and the refuse of squatters who'd made their way here from the back-country. I stayed out of the back-country, which ran wild with highwaymen and fevers. I realized with some surprise that this was my first trip to Cumae.
Quick little lizards scooted out of our way in front of us, then eyed us suspiciously from rocks and under shrubs. We arrived at the foot of the hill which rose abruptly from the coastal plain, looked up to the fort more than a hundred feet above us, then started the long, winding path to the top.
We had to stop often on the ascent, on my account. My heart ached, my breathing was wheezy, my legs sore. She tried to sound sympathetic but I could tell she was growing impatient. Halfway up my breathing now loud and labored we stopped to look back. The island of Ischia rose behind us from out of the sea, the island the ancient Greeks had called Pithekoussai, from the monkeys they found living there. But the monkeys were gone, replaced by humans; here too we'd over-run the natural world.
We started again, and at last the steps brought us to the ancient fort built by the Greeks centuries ago, beneath the crest of the ridge. Workmen were busily reinforcing the fort’s face with brickwork. On our right was the entrance to the sibyl’s grotto, on our left a long tunnel cutting through the crest of the ridge to the town of Cumae itself. We paused for a drink, tipped the porter who’d carried Drusilla’s bags. I handed a boy who was lounging at the entrance to the tunnel a small coin to watch the bags.
The grotto in which we'd meet the sibyl, our reason for this trip, was dee
p inside a long cavern which ran parallel to the side of the hill. We approached the entrance to the cavern, a tall triangular opening leading into a long dark and musty gallery. Drusilla stepped to the entrance and peered inside. Nothing stirred. She set down her basket, undid her hair and let it fall loosely down her shoulders. She took off her sandals and set them aside. Workmen went on their way around us carrying brick and mortar. She lifted Horus from the basket, muttered quiet prayers, and set him on a white cloth. She took from the basket a bottle of milk mixed with honey and set the bottle onto the cloth.
She lifted a small bag from the basket and opened it, carefully dumped its contents onto the cloth on which Horus lay. I could see fingernail clippings and some of her hair, by which she meant to attach the power of Horus and the milk to herself. Again muttering prayers she slowly drank the milk, then threw the empty jar against a stone where it smashed loudly into many pieces, symbolizing I guessed a break in time. She wrapped the cloth around Horus and her hair and nail clippings. I saw a deep self-absorption in her, and something very dark, as though she were driven by a deep neediness, the emblem of a lost soul. As though inside her beat an alien heart; as though she had given herself over to a blind mechanism she’d herself constructed but then named her destiny. I felt a wave of compassion pour out for her, but a compassion tinged with pity. I would have liked her to be different than she was; never had a woman so equally attracted and repelled me. Had she been different, had the repulsion not been there, I might have hoped for more between us. But she was who she was, and me, myself. She backed away from the entrance and slipped her sandals on.
“Well then,” she said bravely. “Are you coming with?”
I paused a moment, nodded.
Cool air flowed out from within the cave. The entrance-way was low and covered with cobwebs on which large brown spiders menacingly sat awaiting a meal. Rocks and small boulders lay in our path, cool with the earth's breath. Adders and vipers likely lay under the rocks, whose poisonous bite could turn our journey into a one-way journey into unending darkness. I recoiled. My home was in the sun, in the light of day. The dark side, the chthonic world below, was a world I did not know, or trust.
