The Eternal City

by Paula Morris

  Maybe Woody was disoriented by the way the city looked now: washed out, as though they were walking into a black-and-white film. The familiar, warm shades of Roman buildings—earth colors like gold and orange and brown—were chalky and pale with dust; the water in every fountain they passed looked a brackish gray. Rome was still beautiful—even Laura, in her fretful state, could see that—but there was something chilly, even forbidding, about it.

  In the piazza outside the Pantheon, their group clustered around the fountain and gazed at the columns of the great temple. Laura’s school had already visited, but the sight was no less awe-inspiring this time around. Today, of course, the dome was dusty with ash, but the piazza was still crowded with tourists taking pictures, diners crowded around little tables, tour guides holding up sticks topped with fluorescent pennants, “gladiators” charging for photographs, a guy juggling tennis balls, and the usual wandering vendors selling novelty toys or wilted red roses.

  The dolphin faces in the fountain grimaced through bared teeth or spewed seaweed-colored water into the big basin. Laura bent over the fountain’s lip to wash her hands; they were dirty with semolina and pizza grease, and dusty with ash residue. Her sore wrist was definitely bruised, the red marks darkening, but the cool water against her skin seemed to help. Next to her, Maia leaned over the water, looking with curiosity at Laura’s injured wrist.

  “That was weird,” she said, addressing the dull coins scattered over the bottom rather than Laura.

  “What was?”

  “You know. That thing at the Mouth of Truth.”

  “I wasn’t pretending,” Laura said quickly, feeling her face redden. “Something really was pulling at me, I swear.”

  “I didn’t think you were pretending,” said Maia, as though such an idea had never crossed her mind.

  “Thanks.” Laura willed herself not to cry again. She should be grateful that Maia was so literal, she thought. Maia, who seemed to have no clue about being subtle and polite, had heard Laura scream, taken her at her word, and yanked her free.

  She wondered if it was okay to confide in Maia about some of the strange things going on. In the absence of Morgan, Maia was the closest thing to a friend she had. And she did know things, Laura supposed. Perhaps Mysterious Maia would have some idea about the mysterious stone in Laura’s bag.

  She looked up to make sure everyone else in their group was out of earshot. Kasper and Sofie were loping toward the Pantheon itself. Jack had wandered off somewhere, probably to buy a snack or a cold drink; he was constantly hungry or thirsty. Dan stood surveying the busy piazza as though he were the emperor of Rome, and Woody sat slumped on the fountain’s low step, fanning herself with her hat.

  “Okay,” Laura said, “what happened at the Mouth of Truth wasn’t the first weird thing that’s happened to me. I mean—here.”

  She shook water off her hands and pulled her backpack onto the fountain’s lip. The new stone was hidden in an inside pocket, along with its twin in the broken bracelet.

  “I found this in my bag yesterday,” Laura told Maia, cradling the star sapphire in her damp palm. “It’s exactly the same as the one in my bracelet—see?”

  Maia peered at it, gingerly turning the stone over and bending so close that Laura could feel the tickle of her breath.

  “It’s not exactly the same,” Maia pointed out. “It’s more green than the one you have.”

  “Maybe it’s still dusty,” Laura said. “Here.”

  She dipped the small stone into the cool water of the fountain, rubbing it between her thumb and forefinger to brush away any ash residue. When she lifted it out of the water, Laura held the stone aloft, hoping that it might glint the way her bracelet usually did. But there wasn’t enough sun to catch its feathered golden lines.

  Whoosh!

  A seagull swooped down out of nowhere, its black bead of an eye terrifyingly close. Laura could almost feel it more than see it—the jolt of its beak against her hand, the prick of its talons, a spray of water in her face, the suck of air that took her breath away. Afterward Laura couldn’t believe that she hadn’t even cried out. It all happened so quickly. The bird swooped and pecked at her hand; the star sapphire slipped from her grip and plopped into the water.

  Laura stood dazed, but Maia plunged her hand down before the seagull could circle.

  “Got it,” she said, and dropped the stone into Laura’s unzipped bag. “I guess that bird thought you were trying to feed it.”

  “I guess,” said Laura, rubbing her pecked hand. Now she had two injured hands, she thought. What next? A broken ankle?

  Woody had hauled herself up.

  “Gosh,” she said, one hand gripping the fountain’s rounded stone rim. “I really don’t feel very well. I hope I’m not coming down with this flu.”

  “Maybe you should go back to the hostel,” suggested Maia. “We’ll be fine.”

  She threw a wary glance in Laura’s direction, as though she was warning Laura to keep quiet about the new star sapphire and the swooping gull. Laura had no intention of saying anything to Woody, and didn’t care whether she stuck around or staggered off back to the hostel in her silver Birkenstocks. Their teacher had been no use at all back at the Mouth of Truth, when Laura was getting eaten alive by some monstrous, invisible force, and she’d been no use here at the fountain, when Laura was getting attacked by a bird. In fact, she hadn’t seen a thing.

  “I’ll make sure we get back to the hostel by six,” Dan told Woody in his most officious voice. He caught Laura’s eye and winked. Maybe he wasn’t so stuck up after all.

  Spray from the fountain splashed at Laura’s face, but when she moved away it didn’t stop: rain was falling, fat drops splattering the piazza.

  “Well,” said Woody, squinting up at the charcoal clouds, “I do really feel bad. If you’re sure you’ll be all right …”

  She lifted her voluminous bag above her head as a makeshift umbrella and began shuffling away, her sandals slapping against the wet ground.

  “Shelter from the storm?” Dan asked Maia and Laura, gesturing at the Pantheon. Everyone in the vicinity who wasn’t cowering under a café table umbrella or a shop awning seemed to be heading in that direction, the giant open portico already crowded with tourist groups.

  A seagull—the seagull?—cawed overhead, and Laura clasped her bag to her chest. At least inside the Pantheon she’d be safe from the claws and beaks of screeching birds.

  * * *

  Mrs. Johnson had told them on their first visit that nowadays, the Pantheon was a place of Christian worship, so they should be respectful and keep their voices down. But apparently nobody else’s teacher or tour guide had told them this. Inside, the Pantheon echoed with chatter in a dozen or more different languages. Every few minutes a droning prerecorded announcement, in Italian and then in English, asked everyone to be quiet, but it didn’t interrupt the buzz of talk for more than a few seconds.

  The Pantheon still looked kind of pagan to Laura’s eyes, despite the church altar and the ornate tombs around its perimeter. There was something about the soaring domed ceiling that made it easy to imagine ancient Romans looking up to the sky through the always-open hole in the Pantheon’s roof, the oculus.

  The other day when Laura was here, the oculus was a wide blue eye, light pouring through and hitting the colored marble floor in a dazzling sunny oval. Today the oculus was weeping a funnel of silver rain. Attendants were busy roping off a large circle of floor so people wouldn’t slip on a slab of wet marble. The falling rain looked otherworldly, a strange waterfall drumming onto the floor from on high, its noise a deep, sibilant note in the swirling babble of talk.

  Laura wriggled through the crowd to get a closer view until she felt the black velvet rope, damp against her bare knees. For a moment she closed her eyes, trying to pretend she was alone here—something she’d done at various ruins on this trip.

  With her eyes closed, Laura could blank out everyone taking cell phone pictures or passing aro
und chewing gum or posing in sweaty, exhausted groups for photographs. She could imagine she really was back in the ancient world, surrounded by cool marble and the wispy smoke of offertory candles, in the powerful presence of enigmatic ancient gods. The roof here was built of ancient concrete, which the Romans mixed with ash, she remembered. These days everyone ran from ash; the Romans had put it to good use.

  When Laura opened her eyes, she felt a little dizzy. It was hard to focus with nothing but the gray swell of rain in front of her. She looked up, blinking toward the dim light of the opening.

  Something seemed to be taking shape—something descending from the oculus like a body sinking underwater. It was a body, she saw. The shape was a person, formed from black and gray pieces beginning to make sense as dark hair, a long-sleeved gray T-shirt, long legs in black pants …

  It was a boy, about her age, dropping from the sky.

  The boy touched the ground, still deep within the funnel of falling rain. Then he stepped out of the water and over the low-slung rope, so close that Laura could have touched him. His gray-and-black clothes made him look like a hooded crow, she thought, and when he glanced at her, his eyes were as black and darting as a bird’s.

  He didn’t smile, this pale-faced, handsome boy, but there was something calm and knowing in his gaze. Laura felt her jaw drop, but he didn’t look surprised at all. Even stranger, he didn’t look wet. His clothes were as dry as hers—drier, probably, as hers were still damp from the rain in the piazza.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said to her in a low voice. He spoke English, but his accent didn’t sound Italian, or American, or anything in particular. “I am here now, to give you this message. You are watched over. You will be protected.”

  Laura gazed into the boy’s eyes, transfixed, unable to summon up a single word. He looked back at her, intense and serious, then strode away, heading for the huge main door of the Pantheon.

  Laura looked wildly from side to side: Really, had nobody else standing around this upside-down fountain seen him?

  But everyone around her was still pointing, talking, taking pictures, texting, just as they had been before she’d closed her eyes.

  She backed away from the rope and forged an awkward path through the crowd, hurrying to follow the boy. Someone bumped into her and Laura stumbled. She didn’t dare stick a hand out to break her fall; she’d done enough damage to her hands today. So she half slithered onto one knee, wincing as bone made contact with marble.

  And from here, low on the ground, the crowd surging around her, Laura noticed something about the boy marching away. There on the back of his feet were tiny wings, black feathers on his heels. Something Laura had seen in books, and in paintings, and on statues. Never, ever in person.

  Mercury, she tried to say, but nothing came out of her mouth but a bleat.

  Unseen hands were lifting Laura up from the Pantheon’s floor. She’d felt so surrounded by strangers there that she’d forgotten the rest of her group were all wandering around inside. The people helping her up, she realized, were Sofie and Kasper.

  “Are you all right?” Sofie asked, her face tight with impatience. “You are always in trouble! Are you feeling sick now?”

  Laura shook her head. She didn’t think she was coming down with the flu. Maybe if she hadn’t found the second star sapphire in her bag—and shown it to Maia—she might have thought all this business with birds and boys who fell from the sky was in her own head, possibly feverish hallucinations. But the star sapphire was real, so real that a marauding seagull pecked it from her hand. Also real: the bruises on her wrist from the Mouth of Truth.

  And the boy with wings on his heels. He had been real, too. She knew it.

  Kasper stood like a genial blond giant, holding Laura’s bag with one hand and supporting her elbow with the other. He didn’t look impatient at all.

  “I saw something … weird,” she managed to stammer. “And I guess I slipped. But I’m okay, really.”

  Dan appeared. “What’s up?” he demanded, frowning in Kasper’s direction, as though their new Danish friend had pushed Laura over.

  “Nothing is broken,” Kasper said to Laura. He turned her wrist over and gently rubbed it. His hand was very soft, she thought.

  “Dude, I think you’re hurting her,” said Dan.

  “It’s fine, really,” Laura said. It felt ticklish rather than soothing, but she didn’t want to hurt Kasper’s feelings. Plus the grim look on Sofie’s face was priceless.

  “Really.” Dan shook his head. “You know, I was all over First Aid in Eagle Scouts, so I’m pretty sure this isn’t standard medical procedure.”

  “Maybe we can go to a café and ask for some ice?” Kasper suggested. “It’s not raining too much now.”

  “Maybe Laura can go back to the hostel,” said Sofie. “She is hurt everywhere we go.”

  “We’ll all go back,” Maia said, popping up from nowhere.

  “I’m all right.” Laura tried not to sound snippy. “The floor must have been wet.”

  Kasper was still holding her wrist, and the whole situation was beginning to feel very awkward. Scowling Sofie, smiling Kasper, and embarrassed Laura, she thought. And somewhere out there, in the middle of Rome, a boy who may or may not have been the god Mercury. He’d had the winged feet, right? Laura shook her head.

  “Where’s Jack?” Dan demanded. “Look, I think it’s better if we all stick together.”

  “And you saw a strange thing, you said?” Kasper prompted Laura.

  “Oh—kind of weird, I guess,” Laura said. Jack walked up then, smiling as though this was all a great joke. She hoped he wasn’t going to blab this around school: Laura getting attacked by the Mouth of Truth, Laura collapsing in the Pantheon, Laura being a drama queen.

  How odd it was, to think that just a few days ago she was listening to Morgan complain that the older kids on the trip didn’t even know their names.

  “Laura falls over again,” Sofie said to Maia, as though they were some kind of dysfunctional team of detectives, sharing notes. “She is hurt in the hand and the leg.”

  “I didn’t fall over again,” said Laura, feeling her face sizzle, resisting the urge to rub her sore knee. “This is the first time I’ve fallen over today.”

  “Yes, that’s right.” Kasper nodded sagely. He turned to Sofie. “This morning the Mouth of Truth bit her, but she didn’t fall over.”

  “And that bird attacked you out by the fountain,” Jack added. She hadn’t even realized he’d seen that, Laura thought, almost choking in a rising tide of indignation.

  “You know, I think I will go back to the hostel,” said Laura. She must not, could not, start crying. Everything seemed to be conspiring against her—the drenching rain, the people she was stuck with, birds and statues—and she wanted nothing more than to be away from it all. Preferably on the screened-in porch at home, lying on the old camp bed, reading a book.

  That’s where she wanted to be right now: home, where there wasn’t any ash falling from the sky. The thought of returning to that shrill orange room in the hostel was dispiriting, but at least she could sob into her pillow without anyone else knowing about it.

  “Not by yourself,” Dan said. “I thought we’d all go get some gelato.”

  “I’ll walk with her,” offered Jack. He zipped up his sweatshirt and pulled on the hood.

  “And I will walk with her also,” said Sofie, with a melodramatic sigh. “To make sure she does not fall over. Again.”

  * * *

  Laura didn’t acknowledge Jack and Sofie as the three of them walked out onto the piazza. She was still fuming about what had happened inside. Everyone was ganging up on her and bossing her around and making her feel like an idiot. Make that more of an idiot. Maybe when they got back to the hostel she’d defy the quarantine and go seek out Morgan. She’d tell her everything, right up to what the winged-heeled boy had told her. Don’t be afraid. You are watched over. You will be protected.

  Morgan would b
elieve her. She wouldn’t make her feel bad or crazy. She would help Laura work out what Mercury, or whoever it was, meant by his “message.”

  Jack walked alongside her, his Converse sneakers slapping through puddles, hands deep in his pockets. Sofie fell behind, as though she didn’t want to be seen with them.

  “You don’t have to walk me back, you know,” Laura said to Jack, sounding meaner than she’d intended. Jack shrugged. A seagull flew, screeching, high above the narrow cobbled street, and Laura flinched. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing to be walking with someone after all.

  None of this was Jack’s fault anyway, Laura thought. He was just a boy bouncing through the day like a puppy, one minute all manic energy, the next lackadaisical and floppy. She was sure he’d much rather be going for gelato with the others.

  Her right hand stung where the seagull had pecked it and Laura rubbed at the red smear of angry skin. Back at the hostel she had some antiseptic cream, something her mother had insisted on her packing—luckily, as it turned out.

  “Is that where the bird got you?” Jack asked, as though being pecked by a seagull was a completely normal thing. “I was over by the other side of the fountain, so I couldn’t see everything. I was fishing some coins out of the water to give to the juggler.”

  “So, what did you see, exactly?” Laura asked as they crossed a street. She glanced over her shoulder. Sofie was still behind them, texting on her phone.

  “You were holding up something and then the seagull zoomed down to grab it,” Jack explained. “I wish I’d taken a movie of it. It looked awesome, like a circus trick.”

  “It wasn’t a trick.” Laura rubbed at the mark on her hand again.

  “Was it food? The thing you were holding up.”

  “No,” said Laura. “It was a stone. It’s called a star sapphire, like the one in my bracelet. Except it’s not that one—it’s … it’s …”

  She stopped walking so abruptly that the family behind them almost ran her over with their stroller, exclaiming in Italian and frowning at her as they passed.