The Eternal City

by Paula Morris

  A harpy—Laura’s mind whirred. In mythology, harpies were monsters, women in the shape of birds; Mrs. Johnson had read Virgil aloud in class. Suddenly the harpies arrive, in a fearsome swoop from the hills, flapping their wings with a huge noise …

  If Serena was a harpy—and anything seemed possible now—maybe she had been recruited by those “other gods” Mercury had mentioned, the ones who didn’t want Laura to have the star sapphires. And maybe Serena wasn’t the only harpy in town. The seagull that was shot down in the cemetery; the one that swooped on her at the fountain outside the Pantheon. Maybe they were harpies as well.

  Laura felt sick with fear just thinking about it. It was bad enough when she’d thought they were just aggressive birds.

  And now there was one right downstairs, in this very building.

  At least, if Sofie’s theory proved right. And how did Sofie know that, anyway? And why did Maia seem to agree with her? Laura knew that there was still some piece of the puzzle she wasn’t seeing.

  “Okay,” said Dan, sounding tired and sarcastic. “First we have Mercury chatting up Laura, and then Minerva sending her messages, and now there are harpies working in the hostel.”

  “Just one,” Sofie corrected him. Maia’s mouth was a tight line of disapproval. “We think.”

  “You think,” said Dan. “Look, if we don’t get something to eat soon, I think we’ll all be hallucinating.”

  “Jack should stay here,” Maia said, “with his minestrone.”

  “Cold minestrone,” he said, looking miserable. “And a dangerous harpy at the reception desk. Thanks.”

  “And the rest of us will go out to eat and make some kind of plan,” said Dan. “We can discuss mythical creatures later. Let’s go.”

  “I don’t want to offend anyone,” Kasper said slowly, “but maybe, if people keep trying to steal the stones, Laura should not be the one to carry them. Or Sofie. Or Maia.”

  “You mean, any of the girls,” Laura said, annoyed.

  “I mean, if angry men attack us—or harpies,” he said, nodding in Sofie’s direction, “then perhaps it’s better if I’m the one fighting them off. I have two inside pockets in my jacket, here. The stones will be safer.”

  “He’s right,” Maia told Laura after a minute. “You can’t walk far with stones in your shoes, and carrying them in your hoodie pockets isn’t safe. If Kasper’s attacked, he could fight off someone more easily.”

  “I could take one,” Dan volunteered, but Maia looked unimpressed with that idea.

  “You can’t see properly,” she told him in her blunt way, and Laura knew she was right. Much as she’d rather hand the star sapphires—particularly her bracelet—to Dan to take care of, Laura wasn’t stupid: his black eye still looked swollen and angry. And if they did get jumped again—well, one black eye a day was enough. Dan looked offended, but he didn’t argue. His face had to be throbbing, Laura thought.

  “Fine,” she said. “Please be careful with the bracelet.”

  “I promise I will.” Kasper held out his hand, and Laura pooled the bracelet in his palm. After he zipped it away in an inner pocket of his light jacket, she handed him the second stone. This he stowed in another inner pocket. Then, after waving good-bye to a sour-looking Jack, the five of them trooped downstairs.

  Serena—the alleged harpy—was nowhere to be seen in reception. But they all still hurried out, Sofie splashing the set of keys on the counter as they raced by. Outside, the rain had stopped but the darkness felt deep and velvety, the moon hidden by the ash cloud and the streetlights in their lane not lit up, maybe because of the earthquake.

  “I could have taken the stones,” Dan whispered. “Europeans can’t fight anyone. That’s why they needed people like your grandfather to come here during the war and save their—”

  “Sssh!” Laura nudged him. It was too late for sniping, and she felt hungry and afraid and unsure whether she’d done the right thing. Should she have told everyone about Mercury and his message? Should she have handed over the star sapphires to Kasper for safekeeping?

  She looked at the battered little group around her. What if they really couldn’t return to the hostel tonight: Where would they go? What terrible thing would happen next?

  They had one mission now: food. But every restaurant they reached was closed or, in one case, blackened with fire, smoke still steaming from its second-story windows.

  All the handbag sellers and toy hawkers had disappeared, as though the earthquake had swept them all away, though there were a few other tourists out. Laura watched them taking pictures of damaged buildings until someone shouty and bad-tempered in a uniform ordered them away.

  With every step Laura felt hungrier and hungrier. At this point, anything would do: potato chips, a candy bar, a hunk of bread. The nearest convenience store, which they’d all visited earlier in the trip to buy a cold drink or a snack, was dark, its doors boarded up. The pizza place where they’d eaten on Sunday night had cracked windows, its sign upside down and smashed on the sidewalk.

  When Dan drifted up to suggest another route to Maia, Kasper fell in step with Laura.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, patting his jacket pocket. “Everything safe and good.”

  “Patting your pocket kind of gives it away,” she told him. “We had the big street-smart security talk at our school before we left.”

  “Did they mention volcanic eruptions and earthquakes?”

  Laura smiled. “Just pickpockets and con artists. You know, don’t stop when anyone asks you to sign a petition. Don’t fall for anyone’s hard-luck story. Don’t get sucked into street gambling games. Don’t let your bag dangle, or your wallet show.”

  “Don’t anger the gods.”

  “Something like that.”

  “You’re too smart to fall for petty thieves,” he told her. “It seems like you’ve traveled a lot. Not just in the US, I mean.”

  Laura wasn’t sure, but it kind of felt as though Kasper was flirting with her. She remembered how he’d stroked her wrist at the Pantheon.

  Or maybe hunger was making her light-headed.

  “Mexico once,” she told him. “And Montreal when I was little, so I don’t really remember it. I’ve never been to Europe before, though I’ve wanted to come to Rome, like, forever. I never thought any of this would happen, of course. Be careful what you wish for, right?”

  Kasper’s pace slowed, so Laura slowed down as well, a little space opening up between them and the rest of the group.

  “I want to say something,” he said, his tone more earnest. Laura’s arms prickled with cold, although the evening air was quite warm, and the city had that almost-fresh after-rain smell she usually liked. Now, of course, it reminded her of Mercury, and the way he smelled more like an element of nature than a person.

  “What?” She tried to keep her voice steady, but she was dreading whatever Kasper had to say. When boys started talking earnestly—well, it was almost always personal and embarrassing.

  “I know your bracelet has a lot of sentimental value,” he said. “I understand. This piece of amber I have?”

  He patted at the leather string around his neck, and its amber animal with the strange scratches.

  “You said it was your father’s,” said Laura. “He found it in a bog in Norway, right? When he was little.”

  “That’s right. But it’s very old, we think. Not just ancient—maybe from prehistoric times. Thousands and thousands of years ago, people wore things like this, little animals carved out of amber, as magical protection.”

  “Wow,” said Laura, wishing her bracelet offered protection. All it seemed to do was get her into trouble.

  “So I understand how you feel about your bracelet,” Kasper continued, and now Laura knew what he was trying to do: talk her into abandoning it. She kept her eyes fixed on the sidewalk, stepping over some broken glass and another upturned store sign. “With the stone your grandfather stole …”

  “I don’t think he stole anything,
” Laura said, her voice terse, though Kasper wasn’t entirely wrong. She remembered her grandfather saying that lots of soldiers came home from the war with “souvenirs” they’d picked up in bombed-out houses or abandoned stores. He and his pals were just teenagers, not much older than Dan and Kasper.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. But you know what I’m saying, yes? Maybe if we take both stones to the place he found one, we move the clock back. Then it’s no more bad luck for you, no more trouble, no more people attacking us. We all leave Rome, and everything is fine again. Otherwise …”

  “What?” Laura asked, looking up at him—Kasper with his golden hair and broad shoulders, like a god himself, come back to life.

  “Otherwise maybe we’ll never be able to leave.” He was dead serious, she could see. He almost looked upset. “Maybe there’ll be another earthquake, a worse one. Or something else—a tsunami, I don’t know. Maybe the volcano will erupt even bigger, and we’ll be buried like Pompeii. I know this sounds extreme, but we don’t know, do we? Yesterday we had no idea of what bad things were about to happen.”

  “But even if I agreed to give up the bracelet,” Laura said, trying not to get upset herself, “I don’t know how we’d go about making things right. Like I told you before—the Golden House is all boarded up. Even if we knew the right room to look for, and even if all this earthquake-and-ash stuff wasn’t going on, nobody’s allowed in there. It’s dangerous.”

  A hooded crow soared out of the shadows and settled on a striped awning on the other side of the street.

  “Hey!” Dan called. “That place looks open!” The others were crossing the road now, running to get out of the way of a fire truck rumbling by.

  “Food,” said Kasper, grinning at her. Laura was relieved he was letting the subject of returning the bracelet drop. “At last, something good today.”

  The crow took flight, sailing across the street and then looping back, just visible in the darkness. When Laura reached the restaurant door, it flapped away into the sky, disappearing into the ash and the clouds.

  * * *

  In the restaurant, where most of the chairs were already stacked on tables, the usual menu wasn’t available. They all had to have a strange salad with bits of corn in it, veal pounded thin and coated in breadcrumbs, and some soggy fried potatoes, but no one complained. They all started devouring everything, and it was the most delicious meal Laura could remember having in days.

  She made sure she sat at the opposite end of the wobbly table from Kasper. He hadn’t been rude to her, or insulting in any way; he was being very reasonable, not trying to bully her at all. She just didn’t want to get drawn into another conversation about “giving back” the stones. It wasn’t as though she could go and buy another one at a store when she got home. This one was special, because the star sapphire had been found—taken, whatever—by her grandfather, and it was the only thing of his that she had. To give it away would be worse than losing it, worse than having it stolen.

  Really, if she’d left it at home, would any of this have happened? Mercury had said that Minerva was “waiting” for her to come to Rome, but maybe what he meant was that the gods were just waiting for the missing stone to return. Laura had been in Rome two wonderful, carefree, eruption-free days. Nothing had happened until the third day, when a woman—maybe another harpy, if Sofie was right—tried to steal the first stone at the Trevi Fountain, and the crow in the cemetery dropped the second stone into her bag. That was the day the volcano erupted. That was the day everyone else got sick. What was it Mercury said? When Minerva saw you here, she was satisfied. What would have happened, Laura wondered, if Minerva hadn’t been satisfied? Maybe Laura would have been punished in some way for what her grandfather had done—a punishment even worse than what they’d gone through the past two days.

  Every so often she caught Kasper looking at her from the other end of the table. He wasn’t trying to get her attention. In fact, he seemed pensive, no big smile lighting up his handsome face. He barely engaged in conversation with Sofie and Maia, who were sitting closest to him.

  Dan sat opposite Laura, finishing off the burned potatoes she hadn’t eaten. Back at the hostel he’d changed into a red Vans 66 T-shirt, and it was pretty much the same color as the welt under his eye. He was feeling much better, he told her. He’d taken some kind of pain med that Maia had in her bag, and he insisted that his face wasn’t hurting that much anymore. Certainly, he gobbled down his dinner with gusto.

  “I’m sorry about before,” he said to Laura softly, picking up a charred potato.

  “What do you mean, before?” Laura had to bend her head toward his to hear what he was saying.

  “That stuff I said about Europeans and the war and all that.” Dan looked sheepish. “I guess I sounded like an ugly American. Anyway, you know what I’m saying. It’s just …”

  “Kasper. I know. You have to stop letting him get to you. He’s not that bad.” Although she disagreed with Kasper, Laura didn’t think he was a bad guy. Maybe Dan disliked him because Kasper was tall and blond and good-looking. He would have been top dog, no doubt, at their high school. Morgan would have been besotted with him. In other circumstances, Laura could see herself falling for Kasper as well—though back at school he would be totally out of her league. Boys like Kasper and Dan usually had nothing to do with nerdy girls like Laura, a girl who wore secondhand dresses, rode her aunt’s old bike to school every day, and only went to the mall when she had to work a shift as a camera elf in Winter Wonderland.

  With his fork, Dan toyed with the scraps left on his plate, drawing a pattern in the grease. He started to say something, then stopped.

  “What is it?” Laura prompted.

  “It’s … I mean, does he have to stare at you all the time?”

  Laura glanced down the table at Kasper, just long enough to register him gazing toward her, still with that pensive expression on his face. Now she didn’t know where to look—not at Kasper, and certainly not at Dan.

  “He’s just staring into space. You know, thinking,” she mumbled. “It’s nothing.”

  “I don’t just mean tonight,” Dan said, setting down his fork. “He does it all the time.”

  “I’ve never noticed,” Laura told him, and this was the truth. Kasper had always been perfectly friendly and maybe a little flirtatious. But she hadn’t detected anything more. Maybe she was dense about these things, because she wasn’t used to boys looking at her—unless they were staring at her “mutant” eyes, or trying to copy her work in class when they thought she didn’t notice.

  When Dan said nothing more, Laura didn’t, either, but inside she was fizzing and churning. Was Kasper staring at her all the time? Why did Dan care so much if he did? And what, exactly, was she supposed to do now—smile, argue, change the subject?

  “I’m just going to the bathroom,” she mumbled, scraping her chair away from the table. She followed the pointing hand of their flustered waiter and headed toward the back of the restaurant. Down a narrow corridor, Laura spotted a scrawled sign and followed its arrow outside, through a heavy metal door and into a small courtyard. The bathrooms seemed to be set into the next building, though in the dark it was hard to make out which door was which.

  Someone stepped out of the shadows and Laura gasped, staggering back until she bumped into the brick wall. It was a man, a dark man—no, a boy, around her age. It was Mercury, smelling like a fresh, cold breeze, a rain shower. He seemed as dark as the night itself: dark clothes, dark hair, dark eyes.

  “Laura,” he said, and she could barely breathe, her heart pounding. For the first time she noticed that the gray of his shirt was a feathery down rather than fabric.

  “The crow we saw outside just now,” she said, conscious that her voice was shaking, “was that you?”

  Mercury twitched his head.

  “You take the form of a bird?” Laura really wanted to get this straight, once and for all. Mercury twitched again, something between a bow and
a nod. “And that was you at the hostel, fighting the seagull? And at the fountain, attacking the guy who tried to mug me?”

  “No,” he said. “I do not fight: I am a messenger only. But Apollo commands the crows of Rome, and they carry out his wishes. And his wish now is to please his sister, the great goddess Minerva. The crows protect you, as you have seen. And they delivered the second stone to you, Minerva’s other eye.”

  Apollo, Minerva, Mercury. The crow flying in the cemetery, the crow tapping on her window, the crow attacking the mugger at the fountain. All of them watching Laura. She could barely breathe.

  A breeze wafted a drift of ash across the enclosed yard and she shivered, though it wasn’t really cold. Her hands scraped the brick of the wall behind her and she felt fixed to the spot, watching the ash swirl like mist, transfixed by Mercury’s dark eyes.

  “The creatures of this place still hear the gods,” Mercury said. “They do as we wish.”

  “Even—even creatures carved out of stone?” Laura managed to ask. “Even things painted on walls?”

  “We command them all,” he said, his head twitching forward again. He was so close that if she reached her hand out, she could stroke the gray feathers on his chest.

  “So the … the things that attacked me?”

  “Commanded by other gods.” Mercury bowed. “Minerva wishes to bestow on you a great honor, to be her representative on earth. Her handmaiden. But not everyone wishes it. You understand?”

  Laura felt miserable. Great honors were fine, but she’d rather win, say, a Pulitzer Prize one day than serve the rest of her life as the handmaiden—whatever that meant—of an ancient goddess. The old gods were notoriously vengeful, capricious, and touchy. And violent—they were superviolent. People who crossed them or let them down in some way ended up beheaded, buried alive, or condemned to some brutal eternal punishment.

  “The thing is,” she spoke, her voice still shaky, “I’m an American, not a Roman. No disrespect at all, but … but we don’t believe in the old gods. Nobody does anymore. Not even here in Rome.”