The Far Time Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  “Ugh,” I said, covering my nose and backing off.

  “What is it, Julia?” Helen asked as I clambered back to the road.

  “Fish. Overcooked in a bonfire.”

  “Wineskins, locals in tunics, fish remains by the wayside.” Chief Kirkland took his gray fedora off, adjusted its brim, adjusted it again, then put the hat back on. “All right, so it looks likely that we’re not in California.”

  “No, my dear Chief Kirkland,” said Helen, “we’re not. That child was speaking Latin. I’m afraid we’re in far time.”

  11

  Given that we’d all pretty much suspected this already, Helen’s announcement that we were in far time landed without much of a splash.

  “Dr. Rojas made it seem like there would be many barriers for us to navigate,” Chief Kirkland said as we picked up our pace, a sense of urgency suddenly enveloping us, as if knowing where we were would somehow solve the problem of us being here. “Akin to a maze, he said. But the experience itself isn’t proving to be anything of the sort. Ms. Olsen seemed to have no problem engaging the boy in conversation.”

  “I don’t know about engaging him in conversation,” I said, wishing he would stop calling me Ms. Olsen already. “The boy poked my boots with a stick and said something I didn’t understand. You’re sure it was Latin, Helen?”

  “He said hi,” said Abigail, who had a working knowledge of that language.

  “That’s right. Salve. Hello, greetings, that kind of thing,” Helen explained as we hurried along. “Also that you looked strange. I had a bit of trouble understanding him. It wasn’t the scholarly kind of Latin. What’s been rather haughtily termed vulgar Latin.”

  “That term has always bothered me,” Abigail said.

  “What about the fact that Ms. Olsen interacted with the boy easily, even though he found her to be, uh, strange?” the chief asked.

  “It’s not good,” said Kamal.

  “If we had been dropped into a ghost zone, we’d be dead by now, Mr. Ahmad,” Helen said. “Chief Kirkland, interaction with youngsters is often easier than with adults when one is in a time period not one’s own. Children accept new and unusual things without thinking twice about them. Even if they do mention seeing something strange, not much notice is taken of it. Children, as everyone knows, have a very vivid imagination. Still…”

  We hurried on uphill, passing orchards, small fields, and row upon row of grapevines. Goats and sheep grazed about, dogs lounged in the shade, here and there a few figures could be seen hunched over, working in the midday heat against the song of the cicadas in the background. As the road took us higher up the slope of the mountain we had unexpectedly landed on, my boot heel got caught in a crack between two of the smooth-surfaced stones. Just barely managing to stay upright, I reminded myself of Dr. Rojas’s final rule—There’s always a way back. Perhaps Abigail was right and he had simply miscalculated—somewhat wildly, that was true—and needed some time to find us. Rescue would come. I wouldn’t mind a side trip to an exotic location as long as I got back to my office in time to ready the spring class catalog.

  Ahead of me, the chief was taking long strides along the road, Helen on his heels; behind me, Abigail and Kamal bickered as they tried to guess the latitude from the position of the sun.

  “I’m thinking forty degrees,” Abigail was saying.

  “I don’t know, that seems a little high for palm trees—”

  I picked up my pace to catch up with the chief and Helen. “So, Latin. Mens sana in corpore sano. A healthy mind in a healthy body. O tempora, o mores! Oh what times, oh what customs. Uh—well, I can’t think of any other ones.” That was the extent of the Latin I’d picked up from my education and from seeing copies of ancient texts in the Coffey Library. As several snow-white sheep turned their heads to look in our direction, then went back to grazing unconcernedly, I added, “Latin—Rome—just think, we might get to see it during a famous emperor’s reign—maybe one of the more unpleasant ones—Caligula, Nero—”

  An odd feeling had taken hold of me. I wasn’t a historian. But I suddenly understood the passion with which the TTE professors and students had committed themselves to the History Alive program. Even though I only worked a building or two away and had seen photos from successful runs, up until now it had all seemed quite—well, academic.

  “I don’t know how close we are to Rome itself,” Helen poured cold water on my enthusiasm as we left the road and entered a field. “Remember, Julia, that the Roman Empire lasted for centuries and at its height stretched from modern-day Scotland to Sudan and from Spain to Syria. We’re not in the north, obviously, but beyond that—”

  The grass under our feet was yellow and dry from the summer heat, unlike the clearly well-watered orchards and vineyards; but what really caught my attention was the color of the soil beneath—it was black, like we were walking on a bed of coal. But grass does not grow in coal.

  “It’s a hot day for scaling mountains,” Kamal called out from behind us. “I’m getting thirsty.”

  He had a point. Drops of sweat had broken out all across my forehead; Helen was fanning herself with a notebook she’d taken out of her orange purse; the chief had slung his jacket over one shoulder, unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt, and rolled up his sleeves; and everyone had complained about his or her shoes at least once, except for Abigail, whose sneakers and pink capris seemed ideal for the climate.

  The uphill hike took a lot out of us and we all came to a stop in the vicinity of a two-story, terra-cotta-roofed villa far grander than the farmhouse with the boy and the bonfire. Despite its obvious luxury, it was a working country house—an orchard and a garden lay to one side, and pigs snorted and jostled in an enclosure just outside the courtyard wall.

  I thought I’d take a look at the pigs, for no particular reason, really, but after a step or two I ground to a halt without much choice in the matter. My legs had lost all will to move, a reaction way too strong to be accounted for by all the uphill walking we had done in the heat of the day. It reminded me of the numbness you get after finishing the first snowshoe run of the season, when each step is a giant effort because of sore muscles, but without the pain. Before I could investigate this curious phenomenon further, Helen called out from by the courtyard wall. “We should take a peek over.”

  Wondering what, if anything, was so special about the pigs oinking and jostling in their pen (Was one of them destined to be tonight’s dinner? Would my presence have affected which one was chosen? Or was it some other, unfathomable quirk of History?), I turned away from the pigsty, somewhat reassured by this proof of at least one of Dr. Rojas’s rules. I joined the others at the courtyard wall, which stood well above our heads. Muffled voices could be heard from inside the house as the work of the day carried on.

  “Right. Give me a boost,” I said to the security chief.

  “What if they see us?” he asked.

  Helen waved the objection aside with the confidence of a seasoned time traveler. “If the courtyard is empty, we’ll be able to look over the wall. If it’s not, we’ll still be able to look over if it’s all right for us to be seen history-wise. And if it isn’t, then we won’t be able to do it.”

  The chief hesitated the merest moment, then leaned against the wall, cupping his hands. Abigail gave Kamal a pointed look. He said, “Oh,” made a show of wiping sweat off his brow with the sleeve of his T-shirt, then joined the chief by the wall.

  The chief lifted me up and I steadied myself on his shoulders, then took hold of the top of the wall and peered over. Next to me Abigail did the same.

  A storage area of some sort stood to one side of the courtyard—a dozen sunken earthenware jars, evenly spaced, their tops and lids just peeking above ground. To the other side, in the shade of the house, stood a donkey cart. Two-wheeled and smaller than the one we had seen on the road, it was still big enough to carry a couple of people and a light cargo. The chestnut-colored donkey placidly chewed on grass, while its partner
, its coat a patchwork of white and brown, fidgeted and hee-hawed occasionally, as if it preferred to be moving rather than hanging about in the shade.

  Their mistress, an older woman, was tilting a small glass bottle back and forth as if to mix its contents. Her long-sleeved dress and the shawl draped around her head and shoulders seemed too warm for the season. As Abigail and I watched, she threw a quick glance at the villa door, which was tightly shut. Satisfied, she set the bottle on the cart next to a pair of wicker baskets that were filled with dried herbs and such, then took down the ladle hanging by the house’s front door. She squatted near one of the terracotta jars in the storage area, a wince of old-age discomfort passing her face. The handle of the jar seemed to be giving her some trouble, so she pried the lid off with the nonscoop part of the ladle and, with another quick glance at the villa door, lowered the ladle inside. My knowledge of farming and grape growing was exceedingly limited—if you needed someone to organize a champagne-and-shrimp fundraiser or to order a grape-and-cheese basket as a thank-you for a donation to the school, I was the woman to call—but I rather thought I knew what was in the sunken pots and what she was doing, sampling the wine. She drained the ladle, wiped her mouth, then lowered the lid back in place. After returning the ladle to its spot on the wall, she went back to the cart.

  As she chose an herb, perhaps mint, and crumbled it into the glass vessel, I heard Kamal grunt softly and Abigail’s head disappeared back under the wall. I took a last glance around, searching for clues as to the time period and location, and was startled to see a pair of eyes watching me. Right below me, in the short shade of the courtyard wall, was a girl of maybe thirteen years of age. She had something in her hands and her hair fell in long, dark locks over strong shoulders under a plain, wheat-colored dress. I could have reached down and touched the top of her head. Curiosity, not alarm, registered on her features, as if I was a strange and novel thing to be investigated. I took a closer look at what she was holding—her steady hands gripped a wooden tablet whose long grooves were filled with beads.

  Without turning around, the old woman barked something out, and the girl grinned at me and hurried over to the cart. She carefully wedged the abacus between two of the wicker baskets and followed the old woman, who was vigorously swirling whatever was inside the glass jar, into the house.

  I heard the security chief grunt and hastened to get down.

  “What did you see?” he asked, blowing on his reddened hands.

  “Wine jars. Donkeys, a pair of them. An old woman and a young girl with an abacus, I think. I’m not sure any of it will help us figure out where we are, will it, Helen—Helen?”

  Helen was not there. Or rather she was, but she had silently walked into the garden. This was an elaborate affair, with a footpath leading between rose beds and under decorative arches to a marble sculpture in the garden’s center. Helen’s back was to us as she examined the sculpture, which, upon a closer look, turned out to be a large sundial. Kamal and Abigail immediately set about trying to interpret the clock face. “It’s past noon… two p.m., maybe…two thirty?” For a moment I thought that’s what Helen had been trying to do as well, but then I noticed that her eyes were focused not on the face of the sundial but on the inscription on its base.

  The letters were strange, backward E’s, N’s, S’s, and R’s. One looked like the number 8. Dots separated each clump of letters.

  Helen had fallen to her knees in front of the inscription and was almost—drinking it in was probably the right way to say it. She moved her fingers from right to left, as if the letters were meant to be read that way, gently touching the marks and grooves.

  “Helen?” I said.

  “Oscan,” she called out in wonder, “as I live and breathe, Oscan!”

  For a moment I thought the heat had gotten to her and she was imagining she had seen Oscar, the doorman to the TTE building back home.

  “Dr. Presnik, what’s on the sundial?” Chief Kirkland asked.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea, my dear chief. It seems to be some kind of dedication. But I recognize the alphabet—it’s Oscan. The language used to be spoken in the central and southern Italian Peninsula before the Romans moved in.”

  “So we’re somewhere in the south of Italy?” Abigail said.

  The sundial already looked old and chipped in places, I noticed, like it had been at the center of the well-tended rose garden for a long time.

  Helen had risen to her feet and was staring over my shoulder. Following suit, we all turned to look, for the first time, at the vista enjoyed daily by the villa’s inhabitants.

  Even though I had expected it, for a moment my mind tried to fight what I was seeing. Make it fit into a Lake Superior or Pacific view, perhaps. But it didn’t work.

  Nestled between a harbor and the foot of the mountain lay a small town encircled by a defensive wall. Wisps of smoke rose from the hearths of its terra-cotta-roofed houses. Marble temples gleamed white in the afternoon sun. A broad, mellow river beyond the town flowed into a half-moon bay where a bevy of colorful wooden ships and fishing boats bobbed in the azure, shimmering water. A mountain ridge just beyond the town jutted out into the sea.

  We all spoke at once.

  “I’ve—I’ve always wanted to go abroad,” I said.

  “What a lovely little town,” Abigail said.

  “This won’t fit into my research at all,” Kamal said.

  “The shape of that bay looks familiar,” said Helen. “Now where—?”

  “Who’s going to feed Wanda?” Chief Kirkland said, fedora in hand.

  12

  Bowing down to some kind of twenty-first-century reflex that an urban area was the place to go, we headed down the mountain in the direction of the town. Helen muttered to herself as we trudged along in the oppressive afternoon heat, her orange pumps clicking on the large cobblestones. “Oscan. Well, I can’t be sure about the date… That sundial looked like it has been here for ages and the child spoke Latin. The river beyond the town, could it be the Sarno? The fish on the bonfire by the roadside, that’s probably from the Vulcanalia festival—but that would mean—no, it can’t be…”

  We covered probably a good four miles before nearing the town. On the way, we passed the remnants of a second bonfire. Occasionally Helen would pull us out of the way of a passing cart (one of them carrying the old woman and the girl back into town)—“I’d rather not try to interact with locals just yet,” Helen said—but the sounds of activity had mostly ceased in the vineyards, orchards, and farmhouses adjoining the road. Probably everyone was taking an afternoon siesta. I could have used one myself. The parts of the road that were lined with trees provided some relief, but it was really starting to get scorchy. “Let’s not add dehydration to our problems,” the security chief said, and we discreetly helped ourselves to a smattering of figs and grapes from the greenery by the road. It didn’t help much—the unripe grapes, especially, were tart and very seedy.

  “We need to find another inscription to confirm—or, hopefully, disprove,” Helen whispered through parched lips as we passed from a shady part of the road into full sunlight.

  “We could go into one of those little buildings,” I suggested, pointing, “and see if someone will give us water and information.”

  We had left the cultivated farmland behind us. Here the road was lined with small stone buildings of varying heights and shapes, all the way down to the town gate. A couple of circular stone benches, which looked like they had been placed there for weary travelers such as us, were interspersed with the small buildings. At the end of the street, the gate gaped like an elongated mouth in the defensive wall, an unmanned observation tower rising to the right of it.

  “And ask what? Ubi sumus? Quid annus est? Where are we? What year is it?” Helen said. “It’s unlikely that the locals would know the year. Besides, those are tombs, dear Julia, not houses. But you are right, they are exactly what we need,” she added. “Tombs always have inscriptions.”

&
nbsp; We waited behind a square, squat tomb with a decorative column rising from its top as Helen translated the inscription. It had been built for one Septumia, daughter of Lucius, she said. No date was given. Two women who had been conversing in the shade of the town wall disappeared through the gate, and when they were out of sight we moved from Septumia’s tomb to where a stone tablet, rather like a modern tombstone, stood set into the ground. The letters looked familiar, but the text was illegible to me. Helen peered down at the inscription, then squatted and swept at the grass so that she could read the bottom line.

  “Oh, dear,” she said.

  “You’ve figured out where we are in far time, Dr. Presnik?” Chief Kirkland asked in the tone of one who was prepared for anything.

  Abigail had also read the inscription. “Yikes,” she said.

  Pallor had driven the pink tinge of exertion from Helen’s face. She moved aside as the rest of us huddled around the upright stone. “Abigail, why don’t you translate for us.”

  “Sure, Professor. It’s a proclamation, right? The tribune Titus Suedius Clemens…on the authority of emperor Augustus…has restored to the town some lands illegally taken by private individuals… The bottom lines are the interesting ones. The land was restored to the citizens of—Pompeii.”

  I stared at the stone. It read:

  EX AUCTORITATE

  IMP CAESARIS

  VESPASIANI AUG

  LOCA PUBLICA A PRIVATIS

  POSSESSA T SUEDIUS CLEMENS

  TRIBUNUS CAUSIS COGNITIS ET

  MENSURIS FACTIS REI

  PUBLICAE POMPEIANORUM

  RESTITUIT.

  “Pompeii?” the chief asked.

  Helen gave a small twitch. “That’s right, dears. The town just over that wall, I’m afraid”—she pointed at the pockmarked stone blocks of the wall that towered over us—“is Pompeii. And the cone-shaped mountain with the lovely vineyards and orchards on its slopes must be the Vesuvius volcano. I’m afraid, dears, that we are in a ghost zone.”