Saturnalia(43)

There was no help for it. I had been in Rome for three days, being cautious, trying to cover myself, trying to restrict my investigation to talking to people. It just wasn’t natural. I couldn’t get my mind off those strigae and their fascinating rites outside the walls. Enough of safety and caution. It was time to do something stupid, dangerous, and self-destructive.

I got up, removed my sandals, and put on a pair of hunting boots that laced up tightly above the ankle. I changed my senator’s tunic for one of deep blue and threw on a dark cloak that had a hood and covered me to the knee. I wasn’t the helmet of invisibility, but it might do. I replaced my dagger and caestus and thought about belting on a sword. No, that would be overdoing it. My days of guerilla fighting in Spain had taught me that, for a spy on renonnaissance, a fast pair of feet are a surer defence than any weapon.

Minutes later I was back in the streets and hurrying, as fast as the uncertain light allowed, toward the river. From my home, the quickest way across was by skirting the northern end of the cattle market and crossing the river by the Aemilian Bridge. This access to the city was rarely closed off at night because throughout the night farmers from the countryside drove their carts in for the morning markets. The bridge gate was closed only in emergencies. According to legend it takes only one Roman hero to defend a bridge.

Once across the river, I was on the Via Aurelia and in country that was a part of ancient Tuscia. The noise of the creaking farm carts disturbed me, so I took a side lane to the north to get away from them. Soon all I could hear was the occasional hoot of an owl, for the weather was too cool for many insect sounds.

The Vatican field is very large, and I began to feel rather foolish in having followed my impulse. How was I going to find a few celebrating witches in this expanse of farmland? Still, it was peaceful and rather pleasant to be walking along so civilized a Roman road, paved even though it was just a farm lane, beneath the soft light of the moon. The air smelled pleasantly of new-turned earth, for it was time for the winter sowing. At intervals I saw herms set up, most of them of the old design: a square pillar topped with the bust of a benevolent, bearded man and, halfway down, an erect phallus to bestow fertility and ward off evil spirits. Fine family tombs were situated by the road, for the dead could not be interred within the old City walls.

This was the face of nature we Romans love, nature tamed and turned to the human purposes of production or religion. We have always preferred tilled fields to wasteland; flat, arable ground to hills and mountains; gardens to forests. Wild nature has no appeal for us. Pastoral poets sing the praises of nature, but their dreamy idylls are really about the tame sort, with nymphs and shepherds frolicking among wooly lambs and myrtle groves and stately poplars. Only Gauls and Germans love the real thing.

I decided to give up on my mission and simply enjoy the beautiful, fragrant night, so near the city, yet so far from its crowding and bustle. Then my spine turned to ice when I heard the unearthly cry of a screech owl and I remembered that the words for witch and screech owl were one and the same: striga.

Let Etruscans busy themselves with the guts of animals. We Romans know that the most powerful omens come from lightning, thunder, and birds. I am not superstitious, but my scepticism wanes at night and returns with daylight.

The sound had come from my left, and I walked until I found a path leading in that direction. It was not paved, but was a well-trodden dirt lane so old that much of it was sunken two or three feet beneath the surface of the surrounding fields. It takes many, many generations for the tread of bare or sandaled feet to wear a path so deep, for the lane was too narrow for farm carts. It must have been there long before Romulus, perhaps before even the Etruscans, when only the Aborigines inhabited Italy.

The lane led me through the plowed fields away from the road, away from tombs and herms. The ground grew rougher, with heaps of stones piled up where the plows had turned them up, only some of them seemed to have been piled with greater regularity than others, and here and there I saw single, daggerlike, standing stones such as you see in some of the islands and in the more remote parts of the Empire, where ancient peoples worshipped gods whose names we do not know. I had not thought that any such were to be found so near the City. But then, I thought, perhaps I was letting the moonlight and my imagination deceive me. Maybe they were just big stones, too large for the plowmen to haul away, and instead stood on end to take up less ground.

I came to a low hill topped by a dense copse of trees. At the uttermost limit of hearing, I thought I detected odd, rhythmic sounds, thumpings as of small drums, and perhaps a chanting of human voices. I thought that now would be an excellent time to return to the City. Instead, having determined upon a course of foolishness and danger, I took a deep breath and stepped away from the sunken lane. I began to walk toward the wooded hill.