She pointed the pen at the floor and she concentrated on being focused. She concentrated as hard as she could but nothing happened.
Because it wasn’t a real wand! The pen bounced off the wall when she threw it and an instant later a bag of rags bounced off the shelf and landed beside it. The muttering in the walls wasn’t muttering now. It was laughing. Laughing at her.
Her lip curled. She kicked the rags aside and snatched up the pen.
A copper colored spark gleamed on the pointy end. By the time she’d carefully spelled poltergeist in sparkling cursive script about an inch above the tiles, it wasn’t a pen anymore.
She didn’t have to wait very long.
The mops fell over first. Brianna covered her head with her arms as they clattered around the tiny room, biting back a shriek as they whacked against her shoulders. The paper towels flew off the shelf and unrolled. She batted them aside. The lids flew off two bottles of floor cleaner and the contents sprayed toward the ceiling. Cleaner couldn’t hurt her.
She felt it touch her pattern.
She gripped her wand, ducked a flying bar of soap, and smiled.
“There you are!” Ashley grabbed her sister’s arm and dragged her along the hall toward the front doors. “Mom’s going to be here in a minute and you know she throws a total fit when we’re late.” She glanced down at what Brianna had clutched in one hand. “Tell me you weren’t hunting for another bug.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Yay. Why do you smell like floor cleaner? Never mind. Don’t tell me.” She brushed at Brianna’s jacket as they walked. “You’ve got bits of paper towel all over you.”
Narrow shoulders rose and fall. “Some got shredded.”
“Were you fighting?” Ashley asked as they emerged out onto the broad stone steps. She stopped on the path and pulled Brianna around to face her. “You’d better tell me.”
“Sort of.”
“Did you win?”
“Totally.”
“Good. You know what Daddy always says . . .”
“. . . no point in fighting if you don’t win.” Brianna grinned up at her.
“I see you found your freak,” Sandra called from the lawn. “Maybe you should put a leash on it.”
“All right. That’s it.” Ashley began unbuttoning her jacket. “This school isn’t big enough for all three of us. I’m going to rip her hair out and stuff it in her bra with all those socks!”
Brianna’s hand on her arm stopped her. “It’s okay. Let it go.”
Ashley looked from the hand to her little sister. “She keeps calling you . . .”
“I know. But mom’s here.” As the car pulled up, Brianna pocketed the little gold jewelry box, the new copper clasp gleaming for an instant in the late afternoon sun. “We’ll deal with Sandra tomorrow.”
TITAN
Sarah A. Hoyt
Sarah A. Hoyt has sold over three dozen stories to places that include Asimov’s, Amazing and Analog. Her Shakespearean fantasy trilogy was published by Berkley Ace. She has a time-travel/ adventure novel (a collaboration with Eric Flint) forthcoming from Baen books, and a Three Musketeers mystery trilogy forthcoming from Berkley Prime Crime.
“LEONARDO, we will be burned,” I said. “If anyone finds out, the church’s tribunal will have us burned.”
He looked back at me and didn’t say anything, but his lip curled up in a sneer that looked like the expression his grandfather, Ser Antonio, made when someone made a mistake in household accounts.
At ten, Leonardo was a handsome boy—I knew this for a fact because Ser Antonio would put his age-gnarled hand on Leonardo’s head and say, “Such a handsome boy. Such a pity.”
I didn’t understand the pity part but I understood handsome. He was larger than most of us, the children of Vinci, at his age, and he had gold-red hair, like newly polished copper, in a frill of curls around his head and bright green eyes, like spring leaves. Those eyes glinted now by the light of the oil lamp I carried. It was covered almost all the way in a metal shade, to avoid showing the path of our walk through the fields. But I’d left the bottom just a little open so we could see the stones on the way and not fall on our faces.
“Fool,” Leonardo hissed at me, between clenched teeth. “Cover that lantern.”
“But it is dark,” I said
“It is darker where we’re going,” Leonardo said, his small voice acquiring a tone of great weight and thought.
“Leonardo,” I said, my voice trembling just a little at the thought of what we meant to do. “You know the priest says the old gods are truly demons and that—”
Leonardo shook his head, impatient. “He would say that, would he not? Come on, Antonio. Tonight we do magic.”
I trembled from head to foot, but I followed. I always followed Leonardo. It wasn’t just that he was the grandson of the weathy Ser Antonio or the son of Ser Piero—a notary with a big business in Pisa—while I was just the son of a local farmer with mud between his toes. No, it was much more than that. Leonardo had life in him, a vitality, a hunger, a need I couldn’t either understand or resist. I followed him, where he went. I did what he told me. His need was stronger than any of my smaller wants or thoughts. He needed to be noticed. He needed to be someone important.
I had realized why he had this need just a few months before. I was the same age as Leonardo and his play-mate since we were both about five, when my father, hired to help with the harvest at the great house of Vinci, had taken me along. I’d never given Leonardo’s birth or his position much thought.
I’d known that Leonardo’s family was wealthier than mine, because his grandfather’s kitchen had piped in water and he had servants and fields that other people tended. But I hadn’t thought much about it, or about their allowing their grandson to play with me, till my parents talked about it.
It was at the dinner table, as we sipped soup from our coarse clay bowls, and ate bread mother had bought from the baker in Vinci. I’d come in disheveled and sweaty from running in the fields with Leonardo. Leonard was ever like that, active, restless, climbing walls and running through the fields, exploring caves, riding horses—his grandfather’s and anyone else’s he could get on.
My father had grunted—not exactly reproaching me—as I pulled a wooden stool to the table, and sat down.
My mother, setting the steaming bowl of soup in front of me, gave my father a sharp glance. “It’s Ser Piero’s boy,” she said. “He’s wild and Antonio will follow him.”
Father grunted again. He ate a spoon full of soup, then tore at the bread with his broad, calloused hands. “I suppose,” he said at last. “He’ll be going to live with his father in Pisa soon? And be apprenticed into his father’s trade?”
Mother clicked her tongue on the roof of her mouth, as if Father spoke great foolishness. She shook her head slightly and threw me a sharp glance.
“What?” Father said. He sounded somewhat annoyed.
Mother sighed. It was clear to me she didn’t wish to talk about it and hoped he would understand her expression. But Father was never good at subtle signals. Instead, he got annoyed when she spoke in a way that he didn’t fully understand. “What, woman? What’s this foolishness? Mean you to say the boy won’t be apprenticed to his father’s trade?”
Mother sighed again. “He is not . . .” she said. “The son of his wife.” And then, as Father looked at her, she added, “The notaries will never accept him, his not being . . .” she threw me a glance. “Legitimate.”
Father looked as struck as I felt. Clearly the idea that Leonardo’s birth might have something to do with his future had never occurred to him. “What will they do with the boy, then?” he asked.
“None of the better guilds will take him,” my mother said. “He will have to learn some lower trade.”
“What?” Father asked. “Work the land? A boy raised as the son of his grandfather’s house as he has been?”
“A pity,” mother said. “And a great shame. He’s been taug
ht to want more than he can have.”
And that was when I understood what drove Leonardo—why he talked of commanding armies, or of conquering cities, of creating great buildings, of changing the world and everything around him. So that his being born outside marriage wouldn’t matter and he could have the great destiny he’d been taught to expect.
In our explorations of the region, some time back, we’d found a cave where the gods lived.
Listen, I know what the priests say, and what has been written by great learned men: that the ancient gods never existed, that they were people’s ways of explaining the wind and the sun and those other things for which they lacked a cause. I knew that back then, too. Like any other good Catholic boy I’d been taught there was only one God and he ruled all and the others were demons and monsters, ready to deceive and take one’s soul.
But Caterina, Leonardo’s mother, had a reputation in the villages around for being able to see the future. She had a bag of bones that she’d inherited from her mother, and which she could cast this way and that and tell you what lay in store for you in days not yet dawned.
Everyone knew it, in all the area. Probably even the priest knew it. But by tacit consent no one spoke of it. The girls would go to Caterina, now and then, when they were crossed in love. And sometimes wives went when they suspected their husbands played them false. Or old people would go to find out to which of their sons they should leave their fields and house. No one talked about it, but everyone knew there were supernatural powers beyond those of which the priest spoke in Mass.
Besides no boy, growing up in Tuscany, could doubt the existence of gods. Amid the steep hills, the precipitous crags, the low fields planted with sweet-fruited vines, who could doubt that some elemental power had thrown the rocks this way and that, and that some creature or other gave soul and heart to the twisted oak trees that projected the only shadow onto the soft, warm earth of the summer fields?
Leonardo and I walked along the beaten path around one of those fields—his grandfather’s—in the dark of a fall night, headed back to the cave we’d found.
“Do you really think there are gods in there, Leonardo?” I asked, half knowing what his answer would be, but needing his rebuke and certainty nonetheless.
He’d forced me to cover the lantern completely, and above the sky was dark, with only the merest pinpoints of stars showing, too distant and dim to give any light. Underfoot, my bare soles felt the pebbles and rocks smoothed by thousands of feet over the generations. A breeze blowing from the south brought with it the tang of ripening wine. To the North, the ground fell away precipitously in crags and chasms, from the terraced field to the depths of a ravine, from which it climbed again, to someone else’s terraced field.
“Of course they were gods,” Leonardo said. “What else would they be?”
I could hear the sneer in his voice and, indeed, how could I think those figures, carved and drawn in the rock were anything else? There were powerful men painted on the dark granite of Tuscany, their faces suddenly emerging from the living rock as if they slumbered beneath it and could push forward, at any moment, like a man tossing off his covers and wakening.
We’d found them one drowsy summer afternoon, when Leonardo had fallen through an opening to the cave below. I’d thought him lost, or hurt, but he’d emerged laughing and called me below, to see his discovery. We’d walked down long corridors seemingly carved by a giant’s hand into the rock. Down and down and down.
“As if we’re going to the womb of the Earth,” Leonardo muttered, at a point, down the corridor.
I’d followed in hushed silence, till we emerged into a vast cavern, echoing, with a domed ceiling like I imagined a Cathedral would look—having only heard one discussed and never having seen a larger church than Vinci’s tiny chapel. And like a Cathedral, it was peopled by statues and paintings, but such paintings had never been seen in the Christian churches.
A single ray of light coming in through a narrow shaft in the ceiling lit the interior and revealed . . . art.
At first I got an impression of men, muscular men—mostly naked or near naked, painted in poses of movement. They were so realistic looking that I jumped back, shocked. Before I realized that they were not alive, and were not in fact human—not as such—but creatures that resembled humans as a rock or a tree grown in the right shape might resemble a human. Humans with the vitality and the feel of immutable earth. And the scene painted on the wall was a dance.
Leonardo walked around the wall, fascinated, his fingers touching the paint which looked as fresh as if it had just been painted. “The gods, Antonio. It is the gods. They lived here.” He turned to me. “La Caterina said the ancient gods were worshiped in a cave, by initiates who found their way in and passed tests. And those who got to the cave could get anything they wanted. Anything, Antonio.”
His eyes glimmered with that nameless need of his, that need for more than his life could give him.
He walked around the cave, looking, besieging. His mouth formed words I could not decipher from their movement. His fingers traced the figures. He seemed to be begging, asking for something.
When nothing happened, he looked back at me. He looked like a blind man trying to discern someone’s face.
At the time I didn’t know what to tell him. But I knew he’d asked for something. And that it had not come true.
Our entire friendship, I’d been the follower and he the leader, but now he looked exactly like a small child who asks his mother for a treat and is refused.
I said the first thing I could think of. “You probably have to do something,” I said. “Some sort of ritual. To . . . Wake them up?”
Like that Leonardo’s eyes lit up. He punched his open palm with the closed fist of his other hand. “That’s it,” he said. “We’ll need to wake the gods. They’ve been sleeping too long.”
Two weeks after we’d found the cave, we had managed to slip away from Vinci and walk through the fields to see Leonardo’s mother in Campo Zeppi.
Leonardo never called Caterina mother. He called her la Caterina. When he was just a year old, she’d given him to his grandparents to raise. Then she’d got married and had a brood of brats.
When we got to her home—a small farmhouse amid verdant fields—she was sitting in the yard, in the sun, mending clothes while her three younger children, a toddling boy and two crawling girls, played around her.
She looked up as we approached and smiled at us. She looked much like Leonardo—same high cheek-bones, same straight nose, same leaf-green eyes and brassy red hair. But in Caterina the endless energy and ambition of her son became a placid certainty and self-contentment.
She smiled and returned to her sewing without a word.
Leonardo moved to sit at her feet. The toddlers neared to play around him, never quite touching him, but staying close by. They were never fully at home near Leonardo, and yet he fascinated them.
Caterina sewed with uneven, broad stitches and Leonardo sat at her feet. I sat in a low wall nearby that protected a flowerbed filled with late blooming roses.
One of the spiny branches worried at my back and I wondered how long it would take Caterina and Leonardo to talk. But their protocols moved in their own way, and in their own way were as prickly as the rites of any court.
After a long while, without seeming to take any more notice of us, Caterina reached over and lay her broad hand on Leonardo’s head.
He looked towards her and smiled. “Caterina, the gods,” he said at last. “The old gods you talked to me about . . . How were they worshiped? If they were asleep . . . how would you wake them?”
Caterina didn’t seem to hear. She removed her hand from his hair, and returned to her sewing. At length, she spoke, her voice slow and filled with the lilting accent my own mother’s voice had. “Well,” she said. “They’ve been sleeping a long time.” She sewed some more. “There are dates when it’s easier to wake them, but midsummer’s night is past. So you’d have to go
in late fall, when the time turns around to winter. The last day of October. You should go late at night, in reverence, expecting to be challenged, expecting to hear from them. You should fast beforehand.”
She went on, her voice even, as she gave him the instructions for waking the old ones.
It seemed to me as though it were all a lot of nonsense, and my mind fell into a drowsy half-dreaming. There was a twist to Caterina’s mouth, just at the corner, a placid smile that made me suspect that she was playing one of her practical jokes.
And I hoped I was wrong. Because I did not want to see the lost and confused look in Leonardo’s face ever again.
And thus we were on our way, through the darkened fields to the cave, once again.
As we neared the way got rougher. We left the fields behind altogether and went across an area of low scrub. Nimble-footed shepherds herded goats in this place, the goats climbing and jumping across the uneven ground. Past that, we started getting into deeper and deeper forest, the trees growing increasingly thicker all around.
Pasture I’d crossed unthinking hundreds of times in the day, forests where I played, now seemed a land of danger and fear.
A wolf howled in the distance, and I thought I heard a growl nearby. Was it a bear?
“You can uncover the lantern now, Antonio,” Leonardo said. “We’re far enough no one from my grandfather’s house will see us.”
Grateful, I pulled the tin cover up to allow the light to shine fully on the path underfoot. But the light only seemed to make the shadows more threatening and the trees leaning towards us looked like the outstretched arms of some monster come to collect us.
Was this a test? Were the trees the guardians that Leonardo’s mother had talked of, who protected the approach to the sacred cave? “Are you quite sure you can find the cave again? In the dark?”
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