The Eternal City

by Paula Morris

  “We shouldn’t wake them,” Maia whispered.

  “Morgan?” Laura tried again in a low voice, but still her friend didn’t stir. At least she knew the girls were alive, and not in any obvious distress. She lowered herself down onto the ground, this time knocking her sore ankle on yet another suitcase, and followed Maia toward the half-light of the hallway.

  “They have probably taken medication,” Maia speculated, and Laura closed the door behind them. “A doctor came yesterday, remember?”

  “I guess,” said Laura. She wanted to hide away in that dark room and go to sleep herself. Maybe everything that was happening was just a terrible dream.

  Maia tapped on the teachers’ door and turned the handle when there was no reply. But this room was locked.

  “We need Sofie’s keys,” Maia said. “There could be a master key on that chain for every room in the hostel.”

  “Should we go find her?” Laura whispered, annoyed that they hadn’t thought to take the keys in the first place. Her stomach twisted with hunger, and her ankle throbbed in sympathy.

  Before they could do anything, the door to the room opened, just a few inches—enough to reveal the gray face of Mrs. Johnson and her Riverside High Jumping Buffalos T-shirt. Her hair was disheveled and it looked as though she could barely keep her eyes open.

  “Girls,” she whispered, her voice groggy. “What are you doing down here? Is everything okay?”

  “There was an earthquake,” Maia told her, “but we’re all fine.”

  “An earthquake?” POTUS looked confused. “We must have slept through it. The doctor came by again this morning and gave us all shots. Really, you’re okay? I wish I could say I’m getting better, but all I seem to do is sleep.”

  “Do you have everything you need?” Maia asked her.

  “Well,” said POTUS, rubbing her eyes, “I went around with the doctor this morning and gave everyone water. Nobody feels much like eating, but the doctor had some minestrone soup delivered to us at some point. Maybe lunchtime, maybe later. I don’t know.”

  The teacher stifled a yawn, and Laura felt something between relieved and disheartened. Everyone was getting medical help, water, and food. But, she realized, she’d been secretly hoping that the teachers would be better by now, and ready to take charge, to make everything okay again. Clearly, that wasn’t going to happen.

  “What time is it now?” POTUS asked, her eyes bleary.

  “It’s a little after seven at night, I think,” Laura managed to say.

  “You need some money for dinner?” POTUS could barely speak for yawning. There was no point in worrying her, Laura realized. No point in saying that the earthquake had messed with the city so much that normal things like grocery stores and restaurants were probably closed, or all smashed up. No point mentioning that the old gods Minerva and Mercury were taking an overactive interest in their little group. In the state she was in, Mrs. Johnson couldn’t do anything to help them.

  “We have money,” Maia told her. “We’ll be fine.”

  “Stay close to the hostel, all right? And stick with the boys. Make sure they don’t starve. They’re not sick, are they?”

  “Oh, no,” Laura said quickly. They were bruised and cut and limping and beaten up, but there was nothing anybody could do about that. “They’re just hungry.”

  “Good,” said POTUS, her eyes drifting closed again. She was gripping the doorframe with one hand, as though she needed it to keep herself upright. “Wait one second.”

  She ducked into the room, and appeared again clutching a big thermos.

  “It’s some of that minestrone, in case one of you wants it. But if you go out to eat, don’t stay out too late, will you?”

  Laura managed to nod.

  “Hopefully tomorrow we’ll all be better, and this ash cloud will lift, and the airport will open, and we can …” POTUS couldn’t even finish her sentence.

  “You go back to bed, Mrs. Johnson,” Maia said. “Don’t worry about us. We’re fine.”

  Their teacher managed a grim half smile before she closed the door.

  “We’ll leave the minestrone with Jack,” Maia said to Laura in a low voice.

  “Where are we going?” Laura whispered back, but Maia didn’t reply. There was nothing Laura could do but follow her up the endless stairs to the boys’ room, and hope they could devise some kind of coherent plan—to eat, to hide, to get through the night.

  * * *

  The boys’ room resembled a very small, very orange ER waiting room, though it still smelled like socks rather than rubbing alcohol. Dan was sitting on the ground, his head resting back on a bed, a wet towel clamped over his black eye. Jack lay on the bed behind Dan with his bad leg raised on a suitcase topped with a pillow. When Maia handed Jack the thermos of minestrone, he looked disappointed.

  “It’s not really hot anymore,” Maia told him. “But there are no nuts in it.”

  “Thanks,” Jack said, unscrewing the cap and peering in. Whatever he saw mustn’t have been that appetizing, because he made a face.

  It was no surprise to see Sofie clucking around Kasper, who’d managed to put on a new T-shirt. He was sitting on another bed, dabbing at the gash on his leg with a washcloth. It didn’t look too bad, Laura thought, and it didn’t seem to be causing him much pain.

  “We were just thinking about coming to look for you,” Dan said, sounding annoyed. “We heard about you getting locked in.”

  “I rescued them,” said Sofie, manhandling the washcloth out of Kasper’s grip so she could take over the dabbing of his wound.

  “Where’s your bag?” Dan asked Laura. “You didn’t leave the stone things in your room, did you?”

  “I’m not that stupid,” she said. “One’s in my shoe and the bracelet is in my pocket.”

  “We have to get out of here,” Maia announced.

  “We have to get food, that’s for sure.” Dan threw the wet towel onto the floor and pushed himself up. His bad eye was almost completely shut, red and puffy, with a shadowy welt smudged along his cheekbone. “Did you see POTUS?”

  Laura nodded. “She’s still sick. They all are.”

  “They can’t help us,” Maia said. That was such an odd turn of phrase, Laura thought. Maia kept talking about who could and couldn’t “help” them.

  Kasper looked equally confused. “Do we need help?” he asked. “We can go out and find food ourselves.”

  “I can’t go anywhere,” groaned Jack, clutching the thermos to his chest.

  Kasper stood up. “We can bring you back something,” he told Jack.

  “One second.” Maia held up her hand, sounding so commanding that everyone looked at her. “We’re not coming back here. Not tonight, anyway.”

  There was silence in the room. Maia looked around at them all with that quizzical expression Laura had come to recognize as trademark Maia, somewhere between impatient and bemused.

  “Laura, tell them what happened to you today,” she said.

  “We know—she got attacked by stuff,” said Jack, leaning back on his pillow and wincing. “We all did. This is, like, the worst school trip ever.”

  Laura didn’t know what to say, or where to begin, so she gazed at Maia, hoping to be prompted.

  “The guy who let us out of the Internet place,” said Maia, nodding at her.

  “I didn’t see him,” said Kasper. “What did he do? Did he try to steal your bag, too?”

  Laura shook her head.

  “He talked to me,” she said, and hesitated. How much could she say? How much would they believe? “He talked to me about the star sapphires. He said that … that … they were the eyes of Minerva.”

  “So some weird guy says a weird thing.” Dan riffled through his duffel and pulled out a sweatshirt, as though the conversation wasn’t worthy of his full attention.

  “Not just a weird guy,” Maia continued. “It was Mercury.”

  No one said a word. The only sound was the patter of rain against the windo
w, and the distant, discordant wailing of fire engines and ambulances. Sofie smiled knowingly, but the boys just looked confused.

  “You mean, Mercury—the god?” Kasper asked in shock. “And Minerva—the goddess?”

  “He had wings on his heels,” Laura managed to say, barely believing the words herself. “And he talked about Minerva.”

  “Is that why you were asking about her this afternoon?” Dan asked. He still looked skeptical.

  “You all probably know that Minerva’s chief physical characteristic was—is—her gray eyes,” said Maia.

  Is? Laura thought. Did Maia really believe these gods were alive and well and living in—wherever Roman gods lived?

  “Huh. Gray like Laura’s,” Dan said. Her cheeks started to burn again, because he was looking at her so intently. “And like the stones,” he said. “The star sapphires.”

  “What else did this … this Mercury say?” Kasper asked.

  Laura turned to him. “That they were stolen, hundreds of years ago, by some emperor. He took them from Minerva’s sacred temple and put them somewhere else—I don’t know where. But the gods destroyed him, and destroyed that place, and the stones lay buried until …”

  “Until when?” Jack had propped himself up on his elbows.

  “Until my grandfather took one,” Laura said, her face still burning. She felt ashamed, though she was sure her grandfather didn’t know he was stealing, exactly—and certainly not that he was stealing something so important.

  “Can we see them again?” Kasper asked, and Laura nodded. She tugged off one shoe and tipped the stone onto the floor. The bracelet she pulled from her hoodie pocket and dangled by its thin broken chain; Dan took it from her and laid it on the floor. Her hands were shaking, she realized, but she didn’t know if it was from anxiety or just hunger.

  She moved the second stone closer to her bracelet, bumping heads with Dan when he leaned over to adjust their positions and scoot the chain out of the way.

  “Sorry,” they said at the same time.

  “Look,” Dan added, and everyone huddled around, staring down at the floor. “Imagine them as eyes on a statue.”

  “Maybe not a statue,” said Kasper. He nudged the stones with a fingertip. “Maybe some sort of artwork on a wall or a floor.”

  “A mosaic.” As soon as Laura said it, the image made sense to her. She could see the star sapphires as eyes, staring up from some grand, intricate, giant mosaic set into the floor of a long-lost temple—one eye a bluish tinge, the other green, both shot through with golden veins like the sparkling trails of fireworks. “A mosaic of Minerva. And these are her eyes.”

  No one said anything. The rain sounded heavier now, drumming against the window. Finally Kasper sighed and rocked back on his heels.

  “I don’t know if I can really believe that the boy you saw was Mercury,” he said. He looked up at Laura, a frown on his handsome face, and Laura understood. She wouldn’t believe it herself, if she hadn’t seen Mercury with her own eyes, and talked to him.

  “If Laura says it’s true, then it’s true.” Dan looked so stern that it was almost comical. She suspected that he didn’t entirely believe her, either, but he just couldn’t resist the chance to disagree with Kasper.

  “Okay,” said Kasper, holding himself steady with one hand, peering down at the stones. “Let’s say it’s all true. That Laura really did meet—a god. Okay. And he had a message for her from Minerva, and it was that these stones were taken, without permission. Well …”

  He trailed off.

  “What?” Sofie asked, gazing at him in her usual love-struck way. Kasper looked up, his blue eyes intent on Laura’s face.

  “Maybe,” he said, “I’m thinking that the right thing to do is to put them back.”

  Put them back where, exactly?” Dan asked. “The elephant church?”

  He had to then explain to Kasper that this was the name they’d given the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. They’d walked past the church their first day in Rome but hadn’t gone inside. They’d all seen the statue outside, though, of a small elephant carrying an obelisk on its back.

  Laura thought back to that day. The church was built hundreds of years ago over the ruins of a temple to Minerva, POTUS had mentioned as they walked past. Did that mean the remnants of a fresco to Minerva could be buried under the building? And, if so, how were they supposed to get to it?

  “There’s the Capitoline Triad temple thing,” Jack said. “POTUS was talking about it the other day.”

  “But that was built over hundreds of years ago,” Dan pointed out. “What are we supposed to do—tunnel our way in?”

  “You have no idea where your grandfather found the stone?” Kasper asked Laura, and she shook her head, still unable to speak. She couldn’t believe the boys were discussing this with so much enthusiasm and so little sense. Mercury had told her that the stones were stolen back in ancient times. And then, wherever they’d been moved to was destroyed, and they’d lain buried, underground, for centuries. Somehow her grandfather had found one during the war—maybe because the ruins had just been uncovered, or maybe because a fallen bomb had exposed it.

  And now Mercury and his army of crows had gotten ahold of the second stone, and—on the orders of Minerva herself, apparently—kept throwing it at Laura, so she’d have the pair. The eyes of Minerva. She didn’t want them; all she wanted was to keep her bracelet and get out of this city before it fell to pieces. But it seemed as though she didn’t have any choice.

  Sofie straightened up, sighing in a theatrical way and stretching her long, pale arms toward the ceiling. The sky was dark, and the rain kept falling. A soggy curve of ash piled up on the windowsill outside.

  “So there is no Temple of Minerva in Rome,” she said, as though that was the end to it. “Nowhere to put the stones back. We should go to find something to eat.”

  “Yes,” said Maia, and Laura realized that Maia had said nothing for some time—very unusual in a conversation about the ancient world. Maia usually liked to show off her knowledge and correct other people. “Good idea. We’re all hungry.”

  “Wait.” Kasper, crouched on the ground, tapped the scratched-up floor next to the two star sapphires. “Laura said they were taken from a temple and placed somewhere else. There they lay in peace, yes? Until her grandfather took one. So that’s the building we need to find. It could be an old villa or palace, a place where the person could afford mosaics on the walls and the floors and the ceiling …”

  The ceiling.

  Something dinged in Laura’s brain, a floating memory. She thought of the collage of pictures—photographs torn from magazines, illustrations, maps, drawings—on the wall above her desk. There was something she could half remember and almost see, ripped from a copy of National Geographic her father had brought home one day, because he knew she’d be interested in one of the stories.

  On one half of a page was a photograph of a vaulted ceiling above a vast empty space, everything the color of dusty clay apart from spots of faded mosaic fragments set into its soaring heights.

  The other half of the page was an artist’s impression of what the mosaic looked like originally, spreading its intricate net over the entire ceiling. The shape of a woman, a goddess, in a flowing robe, a shield in her hand. Minerva.

  “The Golden House,” said Laura. As soon as she said it, she knew this was the answer. She also wished she’d kept her mouth shut.

  “What’s the Golden House?” Dan asked. “Is it here in Rome?”

  “Nero’s palace,” said Maia, nodding. “The Domus Aurea.”

  “It’s closed,” Laura said quickly. “It keeps collapsing, and nobody’s been able to visit it for a couple years.”

  “Was it open when your grandfather was here?” Kasper asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Laura told him, trying to remember what she’d read. The belowground ruins had been discovered sometime in the Renaissance, when painters like Raphael would lower themselves down on a
rope, carrying a taper of light, so they could see the frescoes and mosaics. But it still remained romantic, vine-entangled, cavelike ruins until well into the twentieth century, and most of its hundreds of rooms were gone.

  “Maybe it wasn’t a museum your grandfather could tour,” said Dan, trying to open his bad eye. “But he and his buddies might have gone to kick through the ruins. He might have come across whatever was left of the mosaic and just picked up the stone.”

  “The Golden House,” Kasper mused, rocking back and forth on his haunches, his amber pendant swinging. “The emperor Nero stole the eyes of Minerva from her temple to make a big mosaic in his palace. And then the gods destroyed him as punishment.”

  “And the Golden House is closed,” Laura said again. “Like, with scaffolding and bars, to keep people out because it’s unsafe.”

  She didn’t know if this last part was entirely true, but she wanted to stop this discussion right now, before anyone got carried away and suggested trying to break in.

  “We could ask the girl at the desk downstairs if she knows,” said Kasper, standing up straight. “She found a way for us to see the closed church. Maybe she can get us into the Golden House.”

  “No.” Sofie shook her head at him, and Kasper wasn’t the only one in the room looking surprised: Sofie usually agreed with everything he said. “She’s not a good person. Probably she’s a harpy.”

  “A—what?” Laura blurted.

  “Sofie!” Maia exclaimed. This was the second time Laura had heard her reprimand Sofie, and it didn’t make any more sense now than it had earlier. She didn’t know why Maia cared what Sofie said, and why Sofie seemed to take it without complaint. Right now she looked completely unrepentant.

  “What?” she asked Maia, shrugging. “They should know. She might attack them. She already tries to lock us up in our room.”

  “What are you talking about now?” Dan sounded completely exasperated. “Serena locked you in your room?”

  “And then she fought the crow,” Sofie went on, ignoring Maia’s ferocious expression. “But the crow won. For now. This is why we have to go.”