The Eternal City

by Paula Morris

  “Everyone okay?” That was Kasper’s voice, and Laura was relieved to hear the chorus of yeses. Gingerly Dan released his grip on the desk legs and shimmied out from under the desk.

  “Be careful,” he told Laura over his shoulder. “There’s glass everywhere.”

  When she emerged, banging her head on the desk on her way out, the room made no sense anymore. It was a mess of dust and puffs of whirling ash, gloomier than before because the lights had gone out. Two of the windows were broken and all but one of the computers had toppled over.

  The others were clambering to their feet, pointlessly dusting themselves off as more flecks of ash swirled in through the broken windows. They all looked at one another, their faces something between shocked and relieved, Laura thought. But they weren’t all okay, not really. Kasper’s arm was cut and bleeding, and Jack was holding his leg.

  “Something fell on it,” Jack explained, wincing.

  “Hostel,” said Maia, and nobody argued. They all picked their way toward the door, Dan clearing a path by pushing chairs out of the way. When Laura passed by Kasper, she noticed the blood on his arm again.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. He shrugged, as though it was no big deal. But his cut looked bad to Laura, so she pulled her pashmina out of her bag, taking care not to dislodge the star sapphires, and wrapped it around Kasper’s wound.

  “It needs to be tighter,” said Maia, climbing over the debris like a confident mountain goat while Dan stomped and stumbled his way around. When he started sliding on broken glass, Laura took his arm, steadying him. His hand grasped for hers, and they walked to the door together just like that, hand in hand, until it felt awkward and Laura pulled free.

  Maia had finished rewrapping Kasper’s arm, but there wasn’t much they could do for Jack, who was limping badly, grimacing every time he took a step.

  Sofie’s hair was speckled with pieces of plaster that stood up like white-chocolate shards decorating the top of a cake. She stood by the door—plate glass intact, the Aperto sign still turned to the street—and rattled the handle. Like the church door, it seemed to be stuck fast; unlike the church door, there was no other door to try instead.

  “We could always climb out the window back there,” Kasper pointed out, but nobody seemed too enthusiastic. The glass still in the frame was sharp and jagged, and Jack would have had a hard time making it over with his bad leg. Maia suggested they use a chair to break through the door’s glass; Dan argued that they might have more success knocking out the glass in one of the already-broken windows. Sofie started rattling the door handle again, pushing with her shoulder.

  “Let me try,” Laura said softly, though she suspected it was pointless. She wriggled the handle and tried pushing the door, then pulling, but the door wouldn’t budge at all. Kasper was clambering his way to the back of the room, surveying the other possibilities of escape, everyone else calling out opinions and warnings and advice.

  “Be careful,” she called to Kasper; he was surveying the shards of glass still in place in the window. “Let someone else help.”

  “I’m already cut,” he said, waving his bandaged arm.

  “Always the hero,” Dan muttered. Laura was about to mutter something back but then she felt something give: The handle she was gripping was moving! At last the door was giving way, opening fluidly!

  Someone outside was opening it, letting them out. It must be the counter guy who’d run into the street—stupidly, in Laura’s opinion—just as the earthquake began; he was returning to throw them out once and for all.

  “Hey!” she shouted, to get everyone’s attention. A gust of ash blew into her face, stinging her eyes, and she stepped back to brush her face clear. Sofie, with a squeal of relief, wriggled past her through the open door, followed by the limping Jack and then Maia.

  “Come on!” Dan said, gesturing to her to step outside, but she shook her head. The ash flakes felt like a cobweb stuck to her eyelashes, and she wanted them gone before she faced whatever ash-strewn landscape waited for them out on the street.

  “After you,” said Kasper when he finally reached the threshold, and Laura blinked one last time before stepping outside.

  The busy street they’d walked down looked almost unrecognizable, asphalt split and gaping, paving stones jutting up, cars abandoned at strange angles. The stoplights were dead. Store awnings had collapsed; windows were broken.

  A hydrant, jerked free from its moorings, spewed water. The front of one store, all brick, lay crumbled on the street like mashed-up cake. People were climbing through the wreckage, their faces blank with shock, so drenched in ash and dust that they looked like ghosts.

  “We have to stay close together, okay?” Laura heard Dan saying, and for the first time she realized how much danger they’d been in, and how lucky they all were to be standing in the street, shaken but more or less intact.

  She didn’t move for a minute, unsure whether the ground beneath her feet would start roiling and moiling again. A hand touched hers, cold and soft—Kasper, she thought, reassuring her, encouraging her on. Dan was right: They had to stick together, and somehow find their way back to the hostel.

  But the face she looked into wasn’t Kasper’s. And the guy who’d held the door open for them wasn’t the guy who’d cut off their computers and shouted at them to leave. The guy holding the door open was about Laura’s age, with sleek dark hair and eyes black as charcoal, boring into hers.

  It was the boy from the Pantheon, the one who’d swirled down from the sky. The Mercury boy. Laura instinctively glanced down at his heels, but his legs were half submerged in the street rubble. Still, she knew it was him.

  He brought his face close to hers, as close as Dan’s had been inside the Internet place, but he didn’t smell like Dan—like sweat and soap and muskiness. Mercury smelled the way the air smelled just after rain, fresh and clean.

  “Laura,” he whispered, in that accent she couldn’t place. She stared into his dark eyes, unable to speak. He knew her name? “You have the great goddess Minerva’s protection. She has sent us here to watch over you.”

  “What do you mean, us?” Laura managed to say, trying to make sense of his words. Minerva? Goddess? What was happening?

  His eyes bored deeper into hers. Laura felt as though she could barely breathe. He didn’t reply to her question; he just looked at her intently.

  “You have her eyes,” he said at last.

  “Whose eyes?” Laura didn’t understand.

  “The eyes of Minerva, stolen from her sacred temple and placed in a house of pleasure by an emperor, an emperor the gods punished for that crime,” he explained. “For many years the eyes lay buried in the ground, until your grandfather found one and gave it to you. We have been waiting for you to come to Rome to claim the other.”

  Laura felt her heart lurch. “But—but,” she spluttered. “I didn’t come here to claim it. I didn’t know anything about it.”

  Mercury bobbed his head; his movements were jerky, like a bird’s.

  “You are a girl of virtue and intelligence. When Minerva saw you here, she was satisfied. She has no desire to punish you. It is her wish that you have both eyes, and take them with you, away from Rome. Other gods disagree, and they now prepare for battle. But remember that you are protected, and be sure that we will watch over you always.”

  He jerked his head again and drew his hand away.

  “But I don’t …” Laura began. She didn’t know what to think or what to say. This guy—this Mercury!—knew her name. He knew about her grandfather. He was talking about Minerva, and other gods and … a battle? And what did that mean, We will watch over you always?

  It was all way, way too much.

  He stepped back—one, two, three paces. Then he was gone, as utterly invisible as, moments ago, he’d been real and present and there, holding the door open, touching her hand, talking to her.

  A lone crow flapped its wings and climbed into the sky, cawing its plaintive cry. Laura stoo
d still, transfixed as the bird circled and swooped and then disappeared into the hazy cloud of ash.

  Laura’s mind was whirling as they all walked down the avenue. They clambered over rubble and skirted broken glass, clustered together like lost children in a dark forest. Kasper and Dan each held one of Jack’s arms so he could limp along. Sofie and Maia walked on either side of Laura. A policeman in a white hat and ash-smutted gloves stood on an upturned chunk of asphalt, waving creeping cars off the main road and down a side street.

  Everywhere people were pouring out of shops and restaurants and offices, coughing and dusty, some of them bleeding or limping. The air was thick with smoke; maybe some drifting from the volcano or some from a building on fire.

  Laura took it all in, but she wasn’t listening to the conversation around her. All she could think about was what Mercury—if he really was Mercury—had said to her.

  So the two stone sapphires were the eyes of Minerva, whatever that meant—stolen from a sacred temple by some bad emperor. Her grandfather had found one buried in some ruins, and passed it along to her, and then she—unwittingly—had turned up in Rome with it. And because of that, chaos had erupted, pretty much.

  Laura gnawed on her ashy lip, trying to make sense of everything. The earthquake had begun when she held the two stones in her hand, and it stopped when she dropped them into her bag. If they really were Minerva’s “eyes,” then when she held them in her hands, were they too powerful? Was she, Laura, too powerful?

  She tried to think calmly, to call up all she knew about Roman mythology. Who controlled earthquakes? Neptune. Who controlled volcanic eruptions? Vulcan. So did that mean Vulcan and Neptune were working together, against Minerva? Against Laura?

  And how could she think about these gods and goddesses as if they were truly real, truly having influence over life in Rome?

  The policeman blew his whistle at them and jabbed a finger at a street leading south—not the direction they wanted to go, if Laura had her bearings straight, but they didn’t have a choice. The group carefully threaded their way past stopped cars and a toppled stoplight to the other side of the road.

  Minerva, Minerva … Laura tried to summon up everything she’d learned in class. Minerva was the Roman version of Athena, goddess of war and wisdom. Though how those two things went together, Laura couldn’t quite figure out.

  Minerva must be brave and brainy and the Mercury boy had said that Minerva was “satisfied” with her. Why? Laura didn’t feel particularly brave or brainy right now. Her head ached, and she was beyond jittery, uncertain of every step she took. A man walked by, slow as a zombie, bleeding from his forehead. A small boy wrapped in his mother’s arms wailed and kicked, and Laura knew just how he felt. Lost and confused, not brave at all.

  Am I causing this? Laura thought, looking at the scared faces of passersby. Would she cause this kind of trouble for the rest of her life? If she ever got out of Rome, would Bloomington be overtaken by earthquakes and statues that came to life?

  In a piazza, they came across a parked ambulance, its back doors flung open. Guys in red jumpsuits and yellow safety vests dispensed first aid to the walking wounded. Outside a café, a waiter was handing out plastic bottles of water. While Kasper and Jack waited in line to get their injuries checked—only at Sofie’s insistence, because they both kept saying they were fine—everyone else grabbed bottles and found places to sit.

  Laura realized how thirsty she was. She took her water to a doorway on the far side of the piazza and lowered herself onto the cool stone of the step. She needed to keep thinking.

  You have the great goddess Minerva’s protection. She has sent us here to watch over you. Who was this “us”? Mercury and his merry band of killer crows?

  There’d been something written about Minerva in Ovid, she was sure: They’d read passages of his work this spring. Goddess of a thousand things, Laura vaguely remembered reading: Was that Minerva? And what things, exactly?

  Laura took a big gulp of water and closed her eyes. Mrs. Johnson’s voice floated into her mind, but not from class. Laura remembered her talking just a few days ago, when they were touring the Forum, before everyone got sick and the volcano erupted. Had that really been just a few days ago?

  POTUS had been telling them something about the Capitoline Hill. They’d all been most interested in hearing how traitors were thrown off the Tarpeian Rock in ancient times; Dylan had suggested that modern-day Rome should install a bungee-jumping facility there, to re-create the experience. Mrs. Johnson had ignored him.

  But there was something else, she’d told them, about a temple that was once the star attraction on that particular hill, built by the last king of Rome, long before Julius Caesar or Mark Antony or any of the emperors. A temple was built in all Roman cities, she said, to honor Rome’s supreme deities: Jupiter, who was god of the sky; Juno, his wife and queen; and his favorite daughter, Minerva. They were known as the Capitoline Triad, which Jack said sounded like a bad hip-hop group. POTUS ignored that as well. These three gods, she said, were the protectors of all Romans.

  Well, Laura thought, swigging some more water, Minerva wasn’t doing a very good job of protecting Rome right now. First there was the erupting volcano and its ash cloud, then there were earthquakes—not to mention so many people getting sick. Ancient Romans wouldn’t be surprised, Laura supposed, by what was going on right now. They’d say that everyone was sick because they hadn’t prayed to Febris, the goddess who protected people from fevers. They’d say that nobody paid the correct tribute to any of the gods anymore. Nobody sacrificed bulls, or made sacred vows, beneath the big statues of the three deities. The statues were long gone, and so was the temple itself.

  Once upon a time it was the largest temple in the Roman world, Mrs. Johnson had told them. Every time it burned down, an emperor rebuilt it, even bigger and grander than before, until finally, two thousand years after the first temple was built, a palace was constructed on the site by some Renaissance-era rich guy. By that time, Rome was the center of the Catholic world; the Pope was in charge. Nobody believed in the old gods anymore.

  But the thing that stuck in Laura’s head from Mrs. Johnson’s talk that day wasn’t about Minerva, or about Jupiter and Juno. It was about another god she’d never heard of before, called Terminus—kind of like Termini, the main train station near their hostel. (Ryan Banana Pants had pointed this out in a loud voice, as though it were some brilliant insight.) On the site where they were building the first temple, back in 500-something BC, there was a small, even more ancient shrine to this god, Terminus. He was the deity who presided over boundaries.

  His boundary stone couldn’t be moved, according to the augurs—who were priests, experts in reading omens in things like the flight of birds, or the organs of a slaughtered animal. So the stone had to be built into this great temple on the Capitoline Hill, and this was taken as a sign that some things couldn’t be moved or changed or lost. Rome would last forever, POTUS said—that’s what those ancient kings and emperors believed. Like the stone of Terminus, it was immovable. There would be no end to its power. (“Wrong!” Ryan had chimed, and they’d walked on to the next point in their tour.)

  When she’d heard all this, Laura had thought about it the way she thought of most stories involving the ancient world, as sitting somewhere between history and myth. That old world was long gone—burnt, pillaged, built over. Over the centuries people had taken marble from the Forum to use in their houses. They’d built palaces and churches on top of temples. Some statues ended up in museums, many of them broken, and some lost forever. Now school groups like hers trailed around museums and ruins trying to make sense of things, to imagine how things used to look, what they used to mean. The world of the ancient Romans was like a faded, jumbled-up puzzle with lots of missing pieces.

  But the Mercury boy wasn’t a statue or a fresco: He looked and sounded like a real live person, albeit one with wings on his heels. Mercury, the messenger god. This message he’d give
n her, that the gods had been waiting for her to return to Rome with the star sapphire, and that Minerva’s decision to give her both stones had triggered all this chaos—well, it wasn’t just weird. It was terrifying.

  Laura and everyone else in this city walked around gazing at what seemed liked fragments of the past, but maybe they were all being watched by the gods. Maybe those fragments weren’t quite as broken as they’d all assumed.

  Laura finished her water and looked around for a trash can. Part of her hoped she was being fanciful, letting her imagination carry her away. But she couldn’t help wondering: What if the world of the ancients hadn’t gone away at all? What if it was still here, underground and beyond the sky and in the foundations of the city? What if those old gods were still lurking, in that separate and mysterious realm where gods lurked, feeling affronted and angry and jealous and vengeful?

  After all, lots of bad things had happened to Rome over the centuries. It had been burned to the ground, attacked, invaded, left to rot into poverty, bombed. When her grandfather was here, almost seventy years ago, he was part of an invading army that had been dropping bombs on the city and killing people. Maybe the gods had been taking their revenge. Maybe they were taking their revenge all over again, right now.

  “Laura!” Kasper was waving to her, his green shorts dusted with ash. His left arm was bandaged from elbow to wrist. He wandered over, holding out her pashmina, a rueful look on his face. “I tried to wash the blood out with water. I’m really sorry. I hope it won’t stain.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Laura told him. A stained scarf was the least of their problems.

  Jack limped toward them. “Not broken,” he announced, trying to manage a grin, though it looked more like a grimace. “Well, at least that’s what they think. They said I need an X-ray when I get home.”