An Echo in the Darkness(52)

“I will do anything you ask,” she said desperately.

He assessed her again. “It is very costly,” he said quietly.

“How much?” she said quickly. She saw his eyes move to her gold earrings. She removed them and handed them to him. He tucked them swiftly into the folds of his red silk girdle and looked pointedly at her gold pendant. She removed it as well and placed it in his outstretched hand. His thick fingers closed around it and pushed it hastily into the folds of his red girdle along with her earrings.

“Now will you take me inside?”

“Have you nothing else?”

She looked down at her shaking white hands. “All I have left is this lapis and gold ring my father gave me when I was child.”

He took her hand and looked at it. “I will have it,” he said, letting go of her.

Tears blurring her eyes, she twisted the ring until she was able to pull it from the little finger of her right hand. She watched him tuck it away with the earrings and pendant. “Follow me,” he said.

He left her in a purification chamber, where she was told to remove all her clothing. She had always been proud of her body. Now as this servant washed her, cleansing her body in preparation for entering the Sacred Well, she was ashamed and embarrassed. Revealed were the festering ulcers and strange purple-red bruises that were evidence of her mysterious, malignant disease. When the loose white garment was held out to her, she grasped it and drew it on quickly, covering herself from prying, curious eyes.

Julia entered the chamber that protected the Sacred Well and saw others waiting ahead of her. She looked away from a woman with mentagra, a terrible skin disorder. She fought a wave of repulsion at the ugly skin eruptions on the woman’s face and watched a man with swollen joints enter the sacred pool. He went into a spasm of violent coughing as the attendants began to lower him, and they had to wait for it to end.

The next to enter the pool was an obese woman who was trembling violently. Attendants sang ritual hymns and then repeated incantations as each applicant of the god’s favor went down the steps into the water. One after another, each with some disease or deformity, entered the pool.

When it came Julia’s turn, she couldn’t concentrate on the words being chanted or sung. All she could think about was the woman with mentagra entering the sacred waters just ahead of her. She had watched as the attendants lowered the woman until she was submerged in the murky pool. Now she was to enter the same water that had washed over those revolting eruptions.

The hands of the attendants took hold of hers firmly, helping her down the slippery steps. She fought panic as they leaned her back, the water cold against her back and creeping up around and over her, covering her face. She wanted to scream, but she held her panic inside, pressing her lips together, holding her breath. Down, down, she went into the cloudy water of the Sacred Well, sulfur burning her eyes even though they were closed.

She was lifted up again, and it took all her willpower not to shake free of the attendants and clamber frantically up the opposite steps and out of the polluted pool. She gave those helping her a false, tentative smile, but their attention was already focused on the man behind her, who was now entering the sacred waters.

Shivering, she entered the next chamber, where she discarded the sodden white smock and put on a loose white tunic. Another attendant led her down a long open corridor to the abaton, a sacred dormitory adjacent to the Asklepion, where she would be “incubated” for the night. In front of it was the sacred pit of snakes. Priests poured libations into the writhing mass of churning reptiles, chanting and praying aloud to the gods and spirits of the underworld.

Julia entered the abaton. Though she had no appetite, she ate the food and drank the wine they brought to her. Perhaps it had drugs in it that would bring on the healing dreams. She lay down upon the sleeping bench and prayed again. She knew if she dreamed that dogs licked her body or snakes crawled over her, it would be a sign that Asklepios had favored her and would heal her. So she prayed that the dogs and snakes would come to her, though the very thought of either terrified her.

Her eyelids felt heavy, her body weighted. She thought someone had entered the room, but was too tired to open her eyes and look. She heard a man’s voice, speaking softly, invoking the gods and spirits of the underworld to come to her, to heal her of her afflictions. Her body became heavier and heavier as she sank down into a dark pit. . . .

Snakes were beneath her, thousands of them in all sizes, squirming and twisting together in a terrifying mass. Boa constrictors and tiny asps, small harmless snakes she had seen in the villa garden in Rome, and poisonous cobras with their spreading capes. Their split tongues darted in and out, in and out, closer and closer, until they flicked against her flesh, each touch like fire until her body was being consumed by it.