The Golden Keeper

by Ian R. MacLeod

Illustration by Steve Cavallo

My grandmother once told me that she witnessed the last ritual murder to occur in Rome. A young Vestal who had broken her vows was forced to watch the flogging to death of her lover before she was buried alive.

I was only a child then, living in the high house that has been my family’s since the days of the Republic. Of course, I was curious. A few days later, I walked along Vicus Iugarius to the Forum. But what I found in the corner of the great square where my grandmother claimed to have stood hugging the folds of her nurse’s cloak were sightseers harangued by barking orators as they thronged amid the stalls of moneylenders, flower-vendors and trinket sellers. On that day, even the Temple of the Vestals resembled a building site, with fresh marble decorations being chiseled as a statue to a Head Vestal was prepared for erection.

Still, in my innocence, I pressed my ear to the paving, imagining that I might still hear the Vestal woman’s pleading screams as the newly turned soil filled her mouth above all the passing roar, perhaps even the flack of leather against her lover’s flesh. I only found out many years later that unchaste Vestals were in fact immured within niches of the temple and left with a small supply of bread and water, although that still seems a strange kind of mercy.

Knowing the time that has passed since such practices took place, I wonder now if the tale is not one that my grandmother herself heard in her own youth, and passed down to me as if it were her own memory. But I remain sure that she intended it as some sort of lesson; which is why the tale returns to me now, when the sweeter ones with which she comforted my nights are forgotten. For I know now that even gods themselves may crumble with the dust of those who had served them. It even seems to me that the sacred fire of the Vestals will one day go out, and that the grand monuments and porphyry busts that our Emperors erect to themselves and their patron deities in the Forum will become nothing but tumbled blocks of masonry, the meaning of which men in some lost future time will argue over.

Here, in this new posting after my long journey up the Nile, I am surrounded by dead gods, old stone, dispossessed memories. I made detours at Heliopolis and at Memphis and again at Thebes to see some of the so-called splendors about which Herodotus and many others have written. Perhaps seven hundred years ago the efforts of these decadent and barbarous people to maintain the remnants of their history were more successful. For the most part, all I found were lopsided blocks of stone more like mountains than any work of man, broken pot shards, giant sand-buried heads and a few soot-stained tunnels that roared with flies as you entered them, and reeked of ordure and piss. The guides were generally stooped, wall-eyed, jabbering on about Isis and Osiris as if they imagined that such things were still the fashion in Rome. Frankly, I regret paying them. I should have made my passage down the Nile with more speed, the sooner that my year’s work here might be ended.

The Colossi at Memnon were the only monuments that in any way lived up to their promise. I visited them at dawn by raft just as the spring floods were abating, and they truly rose huge from the shining marsh. As is the custom, I pressed my ear to the graffitied stone to hear the marvel of its groaning. The other sightseers I was with professed disappointment, yet I must record that I heard—or at least thought I heard—something. A sound that came not so much from the enormous statues themselves as from the earth beneath them. The sound of an agonized wind. Shrill, high-pitched, echoing with the blood howl of some distant, terrible memory.

Let me describe myself to you now in what I intend will long remain the privacy of this journal. Let me imagine that these loose scraps of papyrus will be gazed at on some distant day by civilized eyes—and then understood, for I know that I make a poor scribe despite the efforts of my teachers.

I am Lucius Fabius Maximus. I was born thirty-three years ago in that high house in Rome. I have trained, reluctantly and at the bidding of my father, as an accountant in the class of Germanicus, and have since practiced with even greater reluctance in the Province of Sicily—and, it must be said in these days of dubious currencies, to little financial gain. On my father’s recent death and with the slates of my family house falling, and our beloved villa above the sea at Naples becoming a ruin, I have been forced to volunteer for service overseas.

I must say that the thought of Egypt appealed to me, and I was surprised and flattered when, at the bidding of my patron Servilius Rufus, the Procurator agreed that I should go there instead of some damp bandit-raided fort in Gaul. I had imagined lush wheat fields, lakes filled with flamingos and tall reeds, bright flowers, sporting hippopotami, and tombs and temples filled with sacred treasure. But instead I have been posted here, up beyond Gebel Barkal and the cataracts, beyond the boundaries of our Empire. At the very rim of the world.

The sun here is a hot brand against your shoulder, and soon withers anything that attempts to grow. Yet even the lands of the delta that I passed through on my journey were less appealing to my sight than they had been in my mind. Upper Egypt may still be the grain basket of our Empire, yet it is also muddy, filled with insects, ugly savages, the stench of cattle. At least I can take comfort from the fact that, unlike my immediate predecessor, I have at least not come this far simply to be stricken by fever and sweat out the waters of my life. But I am sure that the bed in my quarters still stinks of him. I must ask, once again, to have it changed.

My dwelling here is a villa of sorts at Cul Holman, a place that once at tempted to become a town. It lies at the neck of a large valley, where the paths and gullies from the hills that form the last rampart against the desert finally join. I am responsible here for the counting houses, the weighing houses, fifty or so scribes, and upward of five hundred slaves. I am assisted in these duties by Taracus, a captain of the VII Cohort in command of two centurions who, whilst of pure blood, has never actually seen Rome. Otherwise, I must rely on Konchab, my slave foreman, and Alathn, my chief scribe. In my household, I also have Henrika, my treasured personal slave, a cook and perhaps a half score of slaves of both sexes; all of them local, and none in their prime.

The land here, east of the river, is heaped over itself in a way that gives the impression, as one first approaches, of soiled linen. The inclines are riddled with deep gorges, sudden drops, the caves of old workings set high on the face of sun-bloodied cliffs. You know even as you stumble across some new vista from the base of a dried-up rill that you will never find it again without the help of guides. Elsewhere, there are many deep pits and heaps of rubble; the remains of earlier delvings for the gold that also brings me here. In this confusing maze, the sun himself often becomes unanchored within the sky. Not only do shadows shift and change so rapidly that a valley may become a ridge as you approach it, but a standing, beckoning figure may turn to a pillar of stone, then a blackened demon, then a man again, before vanishing entirely. The colors are so varied as the hours of the day change—and then again under the moon— that even now I cannot say with any certainty what the true shade of this rock through which the slaves burrow is.

I have a lump of the stuff beside me now on this desk as I write these words. Held close to the lamp, the fresh-broken side has a gleam almost of fish scales. It contains, I imagine, some ore which perhaps contributes to whatever subterranean process it is that produces the gold.

At midday, these hills become molten. Now, close to midnight and the time when I make my final inspection of the counting houses and the breaking rooms, they have the appearance not of hills at all, but of piled bones. They look cold, yet the heat still swarms against my flesh through these open shutters in gritty waves.

This truly is a terrible place.

I had guests at my dinner tonight. The wine came from my private purse and was brought from the vineyards of Heptanomia. The food I also prided myself in choosing, and was dealt with reasonably well by the cook. There were dates and figs. Capons stuffed with rice flavored with caraway. Fish baked in the aromatic leaves. A side of pig done in a charcoal bed. Fresh if somewhat gritty corn bread. A round of green-veined cheese. Roasted wild duck garnished with lemon. Soured cream with herbs. Decently flavored honey cakes. Nuts and hot pomegranate.

For company, alas, I had to make do with my assistants Taracus, Konchab and Alathn, and also Kaliphus, the local pagarch, with his robes and his rings, his weak attempts to assume the manners of Rome, his disgusting habit, as he talks, of physically touching you. Those who abuse him, it is said, are speared alive on the giant reeds that grow in the silted canals around his palace.

Such is the balance of power here that none who were gathered this night could fully trust the other—nor yet act independently. Taracus knows that, despite his legionnaires, he relies on Kaliphus to collect the taxes that pay his and their salaries, whilst the wealth of Kaliphus and his fellow Egypto-Greeks would be nothing without the might of Rome. As local slave master, Konchab relies upon them both for the threat of force and the provision of his slaves: whilst Alathn, who supervises the counting and weighing, seeks their security in the tricky business of monitoring the traffic of the rock that will eventually yield gold. I, whilst supposedly in overall command, hold a post that is changed yearly so that its occupant may gain no upper hand. Thus, even in this empty place, are the calculations of power that assure the everlasting greatness of Rome.

The wind, for once, rose less strongly than usual, and at first we were able to eat with the shutters open and the doors drawn wide to the courtyard, where the pool had been cleared of its slime and refilled from the cisterns of a nearby slave village. My servants, well-briefed for once, laid out scented vials to keep the insects at bay, and the lanterns were well-filled with oil. The tapestries that I had had hung to disguise the peeling decay of these walls drifted and flowed, bringing life to scenes of cool forests, white pavilions, gods and animals. I would not have chosen my companions, yet for a while I could almost imagine that I was back amid the pines of Rome.

Alathn, the chief scribe, showed his lack of breeding by raising a matter of work; some small discrepancy in the records of the sweepings of the counting house floors. Almost a dwarf, foul-breathed and toothless, with his shoulders hunched sideways, Alathn has an obsessive proficiency with numbers, and seemingly no interest in the wealth they record. Taracus suggested that such problems were easily enough dealt with by the application of the brand or the bastinado by his soldiers.

The local pagarch Kaliphus at least provided me the favor of listening to my opinions when I tried to improve the conversation. I was speaking of gods by the fourth course when the hot night wind began to rise, and the doors and shutters were closed that they might cease their banging. I opined that there were so many gods now, so many faiths, that no sane man should be expected to honor them.

“Perhaps,” Kaliphus said in his high, poorly accented voice, “the universe truly is filled with many conflicting deities. Not simply those of Olympus, but also Baal-Hadad and the new- and old-style Jehovah and Ahura Mazda and Isis. Perhaps they all—and many others whom we have forgotten about or not yet learned to fear—exist in their different realms…” He smiled. “Would that not explain the chaos and conflict in this world? The fact that we are trapped between them in their fight for dominion…?”

Taracus, of course, disagreed. He is a plain soldier who doubtless makes his tribute to the Jupiter and dabbles his finger in a bowl of blood before he orders the slaughter of some local tribe. Yet I, who choose to worship no gods and view the world as a mere interaction of the elements, somehow found Kaliphus’s ideas persuasive.

“Romans such as you, Lucius Fabius,” Kaliphus continued, “have always portrayed your Gods in madness and conflict, and have added ever more—even your own Emperors—to their list.”

Full by now with the wine, we all ended up bidding the servants help us from the table to inspect the villa’s wooden cupboard-shrine, as if it might offer some proof. I confess that, in my days here, I had not even looked at the thing. Clearly old, and yet cheaply made, the dry leather hinges creaked with neglect as we opened them. Yet I admit I felt a small twinge of anticipation; the vague hope that a devout predecessor might have left some tribute of value behind. In that, I was disappointed. Yet, as the five of us breathed in the oddly sour air that seemed to emanate from inside, we all seemed to forget for a moment what argument it was that this inspection was supposed to settle.

The contents of the shrine were ordinary enough. A small statuette of a dancing boy, with his head broken off. A blue glass bowl that held the sticky residue of some kind of offering. A dried-up piece of salt-cake, a few mundane prayers on wax tablets, and a five-pointed star of greenish soapstone. The latter was new to me, and clearly of some age, chipped and worn, marked with odd dots and signs, yet well-made, almost warm. As I held it in my hand, Kaliphus backed away and seemed to mutter something, making an odd protective sign. I cannot imagine that the thing has any real value, but I will take it with me when I return to Rome.

As we reclined back on our couches, and on the pretext of continuing the discussion, I asked Kaliphus if he knew of any remains in this area from the great Egyptian dynasties. He replied that there was nothing more than a few carvings in dangerous and otherwise empty caves, and pillars and blocks that were more probably the work of the wind.

“After all,” he shrugged, “these hills have been empty in all the time of man. No one would ever come here but for the gold.”

There is little else to record of my evening. Now that the guests have left, I am glad of my solitude again. Even civilized company always leaves me feeling thus. Sometimes, a panic rises in me as I lie at a well-stocked table and realize that I am surrounded by the flesh of other bodies.

Still, the occasion went passably, and in Kaliphus I must seek an ally. “You have done a splendid job tonight, Fabius Maximus,” he said to me as his entourage rode up. “And with such servants—so old, I couldn’t help noticing. Yet in a man there are also other needs…Here, he made an unfamiliar yet disgustingly obvious gesture. “Perhaps I will send to the markets at Pathgris for you, and see what can be obtained.”

I took the offer without comment.

Now, the night draws long. The servants are abed. A few of Konchab’s dogs are howling, and the wind howls and screams with them. But for the lantern-lights of a few sleepy sentries, all of Cul Holman lies dark beneath me. Whilst I still have energy to hold back sleep, I must make my final inspections.

This afternoon, I mounted and rode alone but for Konchab to inspect the mines. In truth, I needed to escape Cul Holman after being required by the ever-punctilious Alathn to confirm that a few precious scraps of papyrus, ink, and a writing implement were missing from one of the scribe rooms, and to authorize the required punishment. Knowing that the four scribes in question had been chosen as an example rather than for any responsibility, I settled for the bastinado rather than the brand. I had never seen it used before, and had wrongly imagined that wounds to the soles of the feet, whilst scarring, would be less damaging than a hot iron applied to the face.

The mines are easy to find from the donkey tracks leading into the hills, the heaped dirt, and the sound, long before you reach a final turn, of hammering and shouting. Here, under the merciless sun, beneath the distant and skull-like gaze of the many worked-out pits and caves that pock-mark the hills beyond, near-naked slaves burrow and hammer. After I had inspected the grey-colored lumps that constitute the produce of these mines, Konchab drew me further up an arid slope and showed me a place where the hill had been swept away in the blackening wind to reveal a floor of rock that cannot have seen the sun in all recorded time.

Konchab is muscled, tanned, a mixed product of all the local breeds. He shaves his head in the manner of the natives and goes bare-chested most of the time. I had never imagined that he was burdened with much thought. Yet here he showed me an incredible thing. For on this bare rock there were markings, as if living remains had been worked into the stone. Some were strange to me, yet others were unmistakably in the likeness of seaweed and fanning arms of coral. Here, certainly, were the bones of an odd-looking fish. I noticed also the coiled shell of a giant snail, and a large creature somewhat between a squid and a woodlouse. Stranger still were the large triangular marks that bore all the appearance of footprints. I am no scholar, yet here seems to be evidence that this high arid land once lay, unimaginably long ago, deep beneath the sea. Either that, or I witnessed some folly of the gods that I profess not to believe in.

Now, as I write these words, the vision seems fanciful. I almost doubt my eyes, which feel tired, eroded as if from inside by the heat and the sand. As I rode back from my inspection, the sun seemed to shift and dance about the bottomless sky, haloed within a ring of swarming darkness. Such was my weariness that, looking up as I rode amid pillars of rock too high to be climbed, I was sure that I saw a figure, wind-wrapped in ragged black clothing, looking down at me. I once even thought to see its face beneath the hood as it turned toward me, yet revealed only the harsh flash of the reflected sun.

Back at Cul Holman, the late afternoon sky was yet hotter and darker, and there was word that one of the slave-scribes had already died from the effects of the bastinado. I wandered amid the block-buildings and the heaps of discarded rubble, and watched as the donkeys bore down their loaded panniers from the mines, guarded as always by Taracus’s soldiers and Konchab’s chained and growling dogs. There is much weighing and counting in the making of gold. There are scribes at the mouths of the pits and caves, and again here at Cul Holman, where all is checked and weighed even as the donkeys shed their panniers. At each process of the shifting and breaking, and forever closely supervised by Alathn, records are made and re-made. The penalty for any serious discrepancy is death—and the reward for those who report a culprit is freedom if a slave, or money for a freeman. As you, my reader, may imagine, false reporting is a greater problem than theft.

At the end of it all, in the final counting house sheds and after days of weighing, discarding, sifting, and breaking, the gritty rubble that remains still has none of the appearance of gold. Alathn tells me that this stuff, which is weighed and recorded yet again by two independent scribes, contains about one fiftieth of its weight in pure gold. Sometimes, of course, a small nugget is found, or a few glimmering grains may be glimpsed at this final stage, but for the most part it would be hard for any observer to understand what we were producing. It is certainly not as I expected before I came here. The final sifting of the residue requires much water—an element that is even scarcer here in these mountains than the gold—and takes place many leagues’ journey down beside the Nile in the beds and pans at Tarsil. I am reminded once again of how cleverly our Empire divides its power.

At nights here, I find myself dreaming of gold. Of beaten gold, caskets of gold, jeweled hinges made marvelous to contain yet more golden soft intricate nuggets. And my grandmother sits once again beside me on her drawn-up stool. She tells of Catechuan, who walked to the moon on its path across the ocean, and of Midas, whose touch transformed everything to gold. Hearing her voice, I feel the softness of gold against my teeth, its warm pure smoothness beneath my hands. I breathe a mist of gold and slip though gold-clad shafts into secret treasured lands where the stars shine differently and gold flows in shining rivers and its dust forms the glowing sand.

When my ship from Ostia first arrived at Alexandria on my way here, I spent the days wandering the streets and markets, seeing the sights, visiting the disappointingly decrepit lighthouse and library. Famously, the city is a greater hotbed for new sects, seers, prophets, and charlatans than even Jerusalem. Yet as a man who prides himself on his rationality, my interest lay in the oft-repeated claim that gold can be created from the combining of other elements. There was talk of a creature named Zosimus, almost fabled, so it seemed, and certainly shy of the public attention that most other so-called scientists and seers craved. Yet finally I tracked him down, or at least someone who claimed to be him, on the late afternoon of the last day before I set out on the long final leg of this journey.

Led by a guide, and clutching a knife beneath my toga, I plunged deeper and deeper into the dubious back streets that writhe around the low hills in the east of Alexandria. The rats, or whatever creatures scurried at the corner of my eyes, grew bigger, and the few people I glimpsed in dark doorways and alleys were even less well-favored than those I had grown used to. Although some way from the port, a predominantly fishy smell combined with all the usual reeks of humanity and decay. Finally, when I was thinking of running even though I had no idea of where to run to, I was led through a curtained doorway.

Here, my memory becomes vague. I suspect that the air was drugged by the smoke that writhed upward from the many glowing chalices hanging from the low ceiling. The man who called himself Zosimus was bulgeeyed, his skin beneath his voluminous shifting robes not so much black as blackened. He talked in a strange droning voice, the meaning of which seems to depart even as I think of it now. Suffice to say that I feared an ambush and did not detain myself long in his hovel. For once, I truly did thank the gods when my hurrying feet drew me back toward familiar squares.

Kaliphus has, just as he had undertaken, obliged me with a gift.

For these last few days, I have been possessed of two fresh slaves. She is named Alya. He is Dahib. They are young, fit, and, as far as I am ever able to tell these things, well-favored. They may be brother and sister, or in some other way related.

You, my reader, will not know that I am repulsed by the intimate pleasures of the flesh, and have been so all my life. These two creatures are thus of no use to me in the erotic ways that Kaliphus doubtless intended. The boy Dahib, in fact, has the habits of an animal. After Henrika’s efforts to teach him a few rudiments of house-craft failed, I had Konchab take him to work with the other able-bodied creatures up in the mines. Alya, though, I have kept for myself. She has a grace of manner, and speaks a comprehensible version of the Roman tongue. She has cleaned and re-ordered my private rooms, and bears flowers with thick purple petals each evening from some hidden place. Their scent brings some coolness to the hours of the night.

In taking Dahib to join one of his mining gangs, Konchab muttered that he and Alya were of a tribe of nomads from the desert beyond these hills, recently captured and thus far too close to their home and their freedom to be trusted. In truth, as I gaze at Alya as she stoops and works with her braided hair, her pure blue eyes, the sense that she brings of somewhere else, I truly wonder how she would have reacted if I had been a man of baser appetites.

Bad news comes to me this midday from my patron Servilius Rufus in Rome. Now that the accounts of my father’s wealth have been finalized and the full extent of penury can no longer be hidden, the creditors of my family are demanding full settlement.

For now, I can do no more than make vague but tantalizing promises about the fresh wealth that I had hoped to return with from here. It pains me to realize that I will have to sell off the villa and vineyard near Naples on my return—if I can find a buyer. It pains me yet more to know that even that will not be enough.

For all this, I have not been idle on the matter of discovering some valuable ancient relic since I raised the matter over dinner with Kaliphus. Some of the caves in which I have wandered with the slave guides bear traces of being not mine-delvings, but narrow tombs. I have excavated a line of them that look down over the spoil heaps of Cul Holman. Sometimes these narrow pits contain versions of Egyptian hieroglyphs, and I have also discovered a number of the star-shaped soapstones, dot-marked and with a central indentation, much like the one in the shrine. They are clearly ancient, yet of no seeming value or purpose. Otherwise, I have found nothing but dust and, once, and disastrously for one of the slaves, a nest of poisonous snakes.

What, I can’t help wondering, happened to all the supposedly great wealth of the Pharaohs? If the tales are to be believed, they buried their princes and kings in sarcophagi made of solid gold, which were decorated in turn with incredible jewels, and then laid in vast gilded subterranean vaults filled with amazing riches, the better that they might enjoy the next world without loosing all the fruits of this. In Memphis, Giza, and Thebes, I can well understand that nothing is left now after all the ages of digging and banditry. But here at Cul Holman, at the very place where much of the gold must once have been mined, might there still not be some forgotten remnant? All I ask for, truly, is one still-sealed door, a mere antechamber—a single relic, if the relics were truly as great as is rumored.

Yet even as I write this, hope fails me. I know what the digging of gold is like here. I know how little comes from all the efforts of Rome. To entomb a man, to gild a room, to form statues and vases and make vast ceremonial necklaces—all of this would take more gold than could ever have come from these hills even when the seams were richer, or from any other place on earth.

Often in the night, it now seems that my grandmother is beside me, telling tales that fill my sleep. Her familiar voice murmurs once again of King Midas; of how, once Bacchus released him from his gift, he came to hate all wealth and splendor and dwelt in the country as a worshipper of Pan. I smile at the thought of those cool forests and the quivering piping of the reeds, then half-awaken in the hot stirring darkness of Cul Holman and the stink of this bed. Yet it almost seems as if a dark figure within a robe’s brown shifting folds is still with me, and that there is a shrill piping, weird and unhuman—ungodly, even—as the wind screams in these hills.

Dreaming thus as I am each night, and with the grim prospect I face when I return to Rome, I find myself thinking much of the past, and of my father. After all the years when he deceived and squandered and borrowed against what I had fondly imagined was my own rightful wealth, I can see him as little more than a bloated monster. And what caprice was it that made him choose my calling in, of all possible professions, accountancy? I could, after all, have been a lawyer—a soldier, even—perhaps a legate. But instead, I am cursed to study these figures that speak of a richness I can never touch, trapped in a calling that, it seems now, has brought me by some unremitting logic to this terrible place.

My father had me summoned to him once when I was nine or ten years old. It was the morning of a summer’s day in our Naples villa when a pale sweet haze hung over the headlands. It was not a time of day, from the little I knew of my father’s habits, that he was likely to be up, and thus I was all the more surprised that he wanted to see me. Even in its decline, I still think of that villa as a place of shifting light, of the scent of orange groves mingled with sea air. Yet my father’s quarters were shuttered, curtained, still lamp-lit. I doubt if he even realized it was morning.

Everyone said that my father had grown in the years since my mother had died in giving me birth, but I saw the man so little that I had come to imagine he was some kind of giant. But he was little taller in stature than I, and had the same elongated chin, the same face that seems mournful even when it is smiling, the same large brown eyes, the same long nose. Every time I look in a mirror, I still see my father welling up before me. But my father’s face was framed in fat, puffed out as if by some internal pressure and patched by white and red blotches that drifted and changed like the clouds.

This world, he told me in a voice that was both high-pitched and rumbling, is a place of secrets. There is little you can expect to trust, although in youth you may strive to do so. But when you reach my age, you will realize that your actions are merely the performance of a ritual designed to appease powers of which you will never have any understanding. We are all, in everything we do in our lives, the acolytes and priests of nothingness.

Such was the sum total of the knowledge that my father chose to pass on to me. He had been raised in the bad years and spiraling prices of Gallienus’s worthless coinage, when the wealth of my family must largely have disappeared. Yet somehow he managed to borrow and confuse and keep at bay the creditors who now assail me. No wonder, surrounded by a charade of wealth that he used to fool all those around him, that he took a dark view of the world. Nor that he finally ended his life by casting himself down the well in the villa’s courtyard. Perhaps the only surprise is that the vast bulk of his body fitted.

On that morning that he summoned me, my father bade me eat with him. I had to watch the fruits and breads and cheeses disappear into his mouth, washed down by the wine that the pampered servants on whom he also sated his other needs brought to him. He bid me eat from the heaped plates, although I could barely pick at the stuff. When I hoped the process had come to an end, but more feared a gap between courses, he asked me if I would like to see some gold. Grateful for any diversion, I agreed.

He stood up from his couch with difficulty, and lumbered over to one of the many tall stone vessels that were half-set into the carpeted paving. He lifted the lid of one, and reached in. Looming over me with a small casket of scented wood, he turned the catch to open it and bid me look inside. It contained several leaves of a shining material, so thin that I feared they would disintegrate if I breathed too strongly. Closing the box, keeping it close to the huge folds of his belly, my father shuffled back toward his couch, and called the servants to bring yet more food—strawberries, for it was the time of year when the villa gardens filled with their scent.

The fruit were laid before us on a plate of bronze. My father reached into the scented wooden box and lifted out one of the fragments of leaf. He wrapped a strawberry in it, placed it in his mouth and chewed with his mouth set apart in a grin, flakes of metal dissolving with the pink fruit and threads of saliva. Then he selected another strawberry and folded it within the delicate leaf. His fingers as he held the thing out and commanded me to eat were coated in the remains of all the other things he had eaten, and his nails were coarse. I had never known it was so difficult to take something within my lips and swallow.

Thus, between us, my father and I got through a dozen leaves and a large plate of strawberries. The metal was almost tasteless, and grazed my teeth before it folded and dissolved within my mouth. At the end of the process, my father belched. When, with a single gesture of his hand, he waved both me and the foul air that he had made away, and I ran down from the villa into vineyards, to he gasping for air amid the droning insects and the lacy shadows of the hot sun. A little time later, I found myself bent double in the corner of the field as all that I had been forced to eat came back out of me. There was no sign, within the usual traces of the vomit, of anything resembling gold, and I was weak’ and feverish for days. To this day, I hate the taste of strawberries.

Enough, enough. How the wind howls and shrieks here at night! I must raise myself now and make my final inspections of the counting houses before the guards change. And hope for better dreams.

To the palace of Kaliphus this day, to return the favor of his visit to Cul Holman.

A longer journey than I imagined, but at least it took me out of these hills. Closer to the true waters of the Nile, there is at least some vegetation. Indeed, here are grown many of the crops that keep us. Once, the ditches and canals must have been filled with each spring inundation. But most now are dry or impossibly silted, and the villages are poor, stinking places.

Kaliphus’s palace lies at the center of what I suppose must once have been called a town. I was reminded of my wanderings in Alexandria as my entourage was forced to dismount to make our way through the narrow, disordered streets. Here, it almost seemed, were the same ill-made faces, the same filthy textures of shadow, the same darkly draped and shifting figures. The same fishy stink.

Rising out of these hovels, Kaliphus’s palace was larger than I’d imagined, and constructed in the main of stone. When I inspected the halls and columned entrances, I realized that most of it had been pillaged from ancient sites. The slabs were broken, lopsided, worked into different colors and ages, with all the usual hieroglyphs, the scarabs and the birds. Within the palace, beneath the bright but crudely dyed tapestries and rugs, I even glimpsed walls made of fine and more clearly blocklike sections, with markings that reminded me of the soapstone in my villa’s wooden alter.

Most of my conversation with Kaliphus was devoted to the tribute the boatmen of Rasind are demanding, or was too trivial to record. The food was poorer than that which I had given him, and ill-flavored with alien spices, but I finally thanked him over ale for the gift of the slaves.

Kaliphus explained that Alya and Dahib were members of a desert tribe who had been captured in some minor war, and thus brought to the markets at Pathgris. The remainder of her family still served in his palace.

“But there is some sport, is there not, in breaking a new horse?” he said when I mentioned Konchab’s doubts about such slaves. “And anyway, you have nothing to fear as long as I keep the rest of the family here. You need do no more than tell me of any, ah, refusal..

Sick at heart, I nodded.

“Their kind make interesting slaves,” he added. “Simply because they do not believe they are slaves. It is like keeping a wild bird, touching the fluttering brightness of its feathers, teaching it not to damage itself. Watching it sing…”

The chief scribe Alathn was waiting for me beside the counting houses when I finally got back this evening to Cul Holman. He was more than usually agitated, concerned about some tedious discrepancy in the accounts. Once again, it was the records of the sweepings of the counting house floors. Unlike most such things here, these are not kept in duplicate, and can only be checked approximately against the amounts that are inevitably lost as the refined dust is ladled in and out of the great scales.

Watching the weighing process as I often do, or visiting the counting houses in my nightly wanderings, I am reminded of the tale of the dogheaded Egyptian god Anubis, who once enjoyed a minor cult in Rome. He was often portrayed weighing the souls of the dead on similar scales. About Alathn, of course, there is no such poetry. He argues that, whilst the recorded weight of the sweepings of the floors has actually increased in the time since I have arrived here, the amount of gold that is eventually extracted from this mixture of desert dust, hair, foot-scrapings and an occasional fallen grain has dropped noticeably. I did my best to dismiss him with promises that I would take command of the matter myself. He refused, though, my direct request that he hand over the relevant scrolls on the excuse that they were not fully completed.

The man is odious. I know I cannot trust him.

Today, and the days before that, I have devoted myself to the pursuit of the relics that, since my visit to the palace of Kaliphus, I am once again certain must reside somewhere in these hills. Konchab has grudgingly released four of his better and younger slaves on the pretext of looking for new gold seams—but of course, if any such were found, they would belong not to me, but to the Empire.

It is dark, troublesome work. I do not fully trust the slaves to explore the many pits and caves as fully as they might, and I have sometimes had to delve beneath the ground myself. Inside the few sealed caves I have been able to find, the air still has the odd, faintly sweet smell of antiquity. Undisturbed for untold centuries, there comes a whispering, a faint muttering and crackling of echoing movement as the entombed bodies crumble to dust in the new air. Pushing on, coughing through this ancient decay, I am often forced to use the smaller of the tar-wrapped bodies as brands to light my way. Yet it is all to no avail. The only relics I have been able to find are a few more of the greenish star-shaped soapstones. I have now, in total, twenty-three of the things, which I keep in a pile beside my trunk in this room.

Once in my explorations, moving forward too hastily toward the back of a cave, the ground began to give beneath me, and my makeshift brand was extinguished. In a darkness of dust and bones, my mouth begin to fill. Luckily, I was soon dragged out and carried coughing into the harsh light outside the cave.

I cannot imagine a worse way to die.

Last night, I dreamed once again that my grandmother was sitting beside me. Each time, the tales she speaks of change and unfold. I am no longer sure whether I am witnessing a memory, a portent, or merely fantasy.

When I look straight at her, she appears black, wizened as an old date; even her eyes are a blood-threaded brown, giving way to the darkness of immense pupils. Her words are often hard to follow, they seem to fade in and out of my hearing and buzz like the rattle of a loose shutter or the droning of a trapped insect. The meaning also ebbs and flows. Sometimes it could be the Roman tongue, at others the mutterings of some crude local dialect, then again it becomes something else stranger and darker that sounds more in my head than in the hissing air.

When I look away at the hangings on the walls, I see stars and dots and cuneiform signs that may be decoration or some kind of lettering. And my grandmother seems to shift and change at the edges of my sight. It is almost as if she is folding in upon herself. Her limbs slide together like a bird preening its feathers, then her whole body diminishes and yet regrows within strange angles. It is, as her voice rises and falls and slips in and out of my comprehension, as if I am looking at her from some other place entirely.

Now, she speaks to me of the old Greek gods, and I witness their sport in ancient Thessaly where there was once a blue lake surrounded by mountains as high as the sky. In this luxuriant country of the dead, over which dark Pheraia reigned and the dead rose from cracks in the ground to flood the plains, Apollo himself was forced to slave for a Great Year, which is the time it takes for all the stars in the heavens to return to their original positions.

But here, my grandmother begins to tell of things of which my waking mind knows she had no knowledge. A Great Year, she tells me, lasts for twenty-six thousand of our earth years. And she speaks of how, before the Greeks, the Pharaohs also studied the stars. They, too, marked the slow progress of the Great Year, and little doubted that their dynasties would live through it. Indeed, such was the certainty of the Pharaohs that when their astronomers discovered a small miscalculation in the earth’s own short year, it was decreed that they wait some fifteen hundred years to make their amendment until the seasons had returned to their rightful place.

Yet even before the Pharaohs and their eventual fading, there were other powers, and even creatures that bore no resemblance to men. My grandmother speaks of bearded Assyrians who rode their chariots and built temples toward the skies. And yet before them there were lost kingdoms, now long-forgotten, who carried the last wisdom of another distant age when the Old Ones came down from the stars on incredible wings, fleeing some impossible darkness. The Old Ones, too, built cities gaudy and vast that are now lost beneath the oceans, although they thrived and prospered for many ages before man. But the darkness they finally fled was inescapable, for it lay outside even the vastest turnings of the universe and time. Mind-wrenching beasts that the Old Ones themselves had once tamed broke loose from their bounds, and for a numberless age, all space was riven by the incomprehensible horror of Azathoth and her minions…

Although by now I have little comprehension of what the buzzing voice of my dream-grandmother means, those last words seem to strike some special nerve, and I look up at her, pleading that she end this tale. At this point, my eyes did seem to open, and I was returned to Cul Holman, the distant howling of dogs and the screeching wind that caused the hangings of the room to sway. But my grandmother leaned closer over me and opened her mouth once again, as if to resume her tale. Nothing came out but a foul rushing blackness, and I saw, as it gaped wide above me like the maw of a great snake, that the mouth of the thing my grandmother had become had filled with stars.

I could not sleep the rest of the night. My throat was dry from the dust of those hidden graves, and from the screaming horror of my dreams. I summoned the slave girl Alya to bring me wine and keep me company, and I commanded as I drank that she tell me whatever tales she knew of daylight and some better place and age.

Alya’s tribe, it seems, are traders, people such as those who follow the salt road to Tripoli. They are proud and loyal, and move with horses and creatures named camels that in all my time here I have only glimpsed from afar. To them, the desert is like some ocean upon which they drift and fight and trade, in the way a mariner plies the seas. Like mariners, they love their chosen element, and know its dangers and moods as few who ever lived.

She spoke of frost in the desert at midnight, of the pure white blindness of midday, and the slow-turning roof of the stars. Sand can be hard and harsh, or smooth as silk, soft as water. The dunes may move overnight—drown you as you sleep like the rising of a storm-wave, or remain unchanged for centuries. Each wind carries a different taste, each day a different shade and substance to the horizon. There are deserts of sand, deserts of bare rock, deserts of smooth or jagged stones, deserts of ancient forests where dead trees stand in leafless perfection, sand-smoothed and polished to a different beauty, rising on their roots as if ready to walk in search of water. There are mountains and lowlands. Dream cities of spires, temples, colonnades and glorious fountains shimmering above the plains.

Alya and her people have always known of the Nile. There was once even a time when they were the true dwellers beside her shores, and when the desert was still a green wilderness of cedar and pine, and meadows and waterfalls scented even these hills. It was her people, Alya claims, who built the first great works that the Pharaohs were later to claim as their own. Amongst these, and although she can never have glimpsed them, she numbers the pyramids at Giza, some sand-buried work she calls the Great Sphinx, and the temples of Seti at Abydos. They were made, she says, with magics that are now lost to mankind.

By the time of the reign of the Thirty-One Dynasties many centuries after, her people had long been nomads. They traded and learned the new languages, and watched through the slow ages as other great civilizations rose and fell. They saw the coming of the Assyrians and the Minoans and the Greeks and the Phoenicians and the Romans, they wandered amid the ploughed and salted ruins of Carthage. When they learned that their own great relics had been appropriated and restored as tombs of the Pharaohs, they wondered how anyone could credit them as simply the works of man. But all of this her people accepted without regret—even the reworking into new forms of their treasures of gold…

I was half-sleepy by then, and the fears of the night had departed me now that Cul Holman’s few scrawny cocks were crowing. But at the last words Alya spoke, I was fully awake in a moment, although I did my best to hide my eagerness.

“These ruins that you speak of,” I said to her. “Surely they must exist in other places than the Lower Nile if the civilization you speak of was as great as you claim?”

She nodded at that, although there was suspicion in her eyes. It was as if, sensing that I was near to sleeping, she had been spinning her words to herself more than to me, and now regretted what she had spoken.

“In my own small way, I am something of a scholar,” I said. “I would be interested if you could tell me where you think such ruins might still be, or perhaps even show…

She stiffened again, and stared long at the ground.

“Of course,” I prompted, “someone in a position such as mine would have ways of expressing their gratitude.”

“You must give me freedom,” she said, looking back up at me with a sudden boldness that was not of a slave. “Freedom to myself and to Dahib, and also to my people who still suffer in Kaliphus’s stinking hive.”

I was taken aback; that someone of her kind should attempt to negotiate with me! Yet there was something about her talk of ancient gold and magic that rang true. Almost as if she had spoken not of the past, but of that which my dreams were already striving to foretell.

“If you do what you offer,” I said, “On my honor as a man of Rome, I agree to give you what you ask.”

“Then,” she said, blinking the light from her eyes as the first flash of the sun rising through these shutters cast the rest of her into deeper gloom, “I will show you.”

A day of wonders and disappointments.

Yes, there are tombs and ruins beyond the age of the Pharaohs within the far reaches of these hills—Alya has shown them to me—but they are wind-riddled, empty, almost unimaginably desolate. Yet there are other, deeper twists within this whole story.

On the assumption that Alya could ride, I had arranged for two sturdy ponies, but she assured me that they would be of little use on the route that we would be taking, to where these hills make their final rampart against the desert. Normally, I would never have set out on such a journey on foot, least of all in the dubious company of a single female slave— but you, my dear and honored reader, will understand by now my need for discretion and secrecy. And Alya was in no doubt about the instructions I had left with Taracus as to what should be done to Dahib and the rest of her people should I fail to return.

The heat was already rising, forming a haze over Cul Holman like some evil storm cloud. Following Alya’s quick heels into the shadow of the cliff and then along a hidden vale, I was glad to be away.

It was a long journey, keeping to secret routes. I know now where the places are that Alya collects her strange, dark-scented flowers. They grow like crystal in hidden profusion from the very rocks, in what seems like the total absence of water. Sometimes, in the distance, we heard the shouts and hammerings of the mines, yet along the narrow gullies which she led me, we never glimpsed them, nor yet were seen. As the sun finally rose above the shadowed rock walls, I knew that she had already led me far.

I remembered, as I paused to take the food and drink Alya had carried with her, that Konchab had warned me about these deep clefts that lay in places beyond the mines. We had already stepped over the antique bones of many unwary goats and jackals, and as we rested and the hot afternoon wind began to rise, the air pressing through the narrow walls began to whistle and scream.

The sound grew louder as we moved on, filling my ears, making speech almost impossible. These hills are burrowed and threaded as if with the airways of some vast musical instrument that I can still hear echoing across Cul Holman as I write these words. As we clambered our way through twists and turns and the wind’s wild shrieking grew yet louder and the maze more complex, I began to doubt whether Alya had any real idea of where we were going. What could she possibly know, anyway? Just some memory of the fables of her ancestors.

It was then, leaning against the rock to catch my breath, that I saw just how incredibly smooth the surface of these gullies had become. It was almost as if, through some unimaginable process, they had actually been constructed. I lifted a fallen flint and experimentally struck it against the smooth wall. The stone eventually shattered, leaving no mark whatever. Alya watched and twisted her hands as if, in this empty, shrieking place, she was somehow made anxious by the noise.

The gullies became still better formed as we moved on—and more elaborate, drawn in twists and turns as if by the pen of some insane architect. And with each turn, the harsh piping of the wind grew louder. There was still greater evidence, here, of the bodies of fallen animals, some so recent that they seethed with flies, and others piled into ancient heaps that Alya and I had to climb over. I was surprised at this, as I had always imagined these hills to contain little life. And would so many full-grown animals be as foolhardy as to lose their footing in this way? Unless, that is, they had been brought here, and then purposefully thrown in as some kind of tribute. Forcing myself to inspect one or two of the cleaner corpses, I saw that their skulls were often missing, the vertebrae torn almost as if they had been bitten off, and sometimes coated with the remnants of a blackish-green sticky substance that I was not able, and would not have wanted, to have named.

Above us now, the rocks piled in a greater impression of order, of huge squared blocks suggestive of buildings. Yet the wind-driven heat of afternoon was now so intense that they had only a loose sense of substance, like cities seen in a dream. I saw also, or thought I saw, a black-robed figure. I could only reason with myself that it appeared too often, in too many places at impossible angles of accessibility, to be human, or real. And I saw now as we finally began to climb upward from the gullies, that there were fallen pillars, walls truly made of giant blocks of stone, wind-rotted remains of shapes that might once have been statues.

We came then, as evening was settling, to the sloped walls of a fastness that rose high against the cliffs at the far edge of the mountains. It was a long climb to ascend the huge blocks of which it was constructed, and Alya often paused and waited for me, offering a hand, which in my weariness I was then forced to take. I had already resigned myself to the fact that we would have to make our way back to Cul Holman under the moon and stars, or else camp in some remote shelter. But despite this, despite the shortness of my breath, I was truly excited.

We stood in the last of the dusk at what seemed like the final edge of the world. Beyond these mountains and the great crumbling walls of the edifice over which we had climbed, reddened with the last of the sun to the color of drying blood, lay the shifting blue-grey immensity of the desert. Here it was possible, as I rubbed my scraped and bruised limbs, to believe the writings of such as Eratosthenes and Ptolemy—that the world is a globe floating in vast emptiness, and that we are all but ants upon it.

But the sight that drew me more was the single great block-pillared entrance set into the cliff-face above. With the light already passing, I was anxious to find my way inside before full darkness fell. But when we had scrambled up the last stone courses and stepped inside the vast portico, the sun, suffused in the whirlings and dust clouds of some far-distant storm, cast long rays of a thick grey light that were somehow regathered on the facings of granite. It was as if this was the precise moment that we were expected to enter.

Yet, after the initial thrill of discovery, my feelings became those of disappointment. I was slow, as we stepped into the glowing shadows of that great squared archway and saw a vast and well-made passage stretching ahead set with the dark outlines of many entrances and openings, to appreciate the most obvious fact of all. Alya made a sign that was like the one that Kaliphus had made beside the shrine at my villa, muttering to me that this place was filled with old magics, and that on no account should anything be taken. But, although clearly intact, this edifice was also open; unsealed, difficult to access, but certainly not hidden. It had long been emptied of all treasures.

Looking up at the roof, I saw the smoke tracks of lanterns, whilst in places the smooth faces of the walls were chipped and scrawled with crude Egyptian hieroglyphs. The protective eye of Horus was much repeated, although here it was gazing inward on both sides of the tunnel, instead of looking just to the left. There were even signs, marks in the dust that lay on the floor of the dragging and trailing of some pointed object, of recent habitation.

As we moved in and the light of the entrance began to fade, I put a spark to the torch that Alya had brought with us. Yet, despite the dark that had fallen outside, the place never grew entirely black. Within the tunnels and shafts, strangely shaped rooms and turns and alcoves, many narrow slits had been hewn, through some art that escapes me, rising far up through the stone to open out on the mountainside. Even now, they admitted enough of the moon and stars to give some light—and often the impression, as some new vista was revealed, of glowing heaps of precious objects, twisting amorphous forms or beckoning shadows that, as we grew closer, always turned out to be nothing but faint stirrings of air and dust.

It was clear to me from the fearful, watchful way that Alya looked about her, and her wariness as we turned each new corner, that the knowledge that had brought us this far had departed her. In fact, I doubted even then that this was truly the work of her ancestors. Yet at the same time, I observed her reverence as she touched the strange dots and carvings that began to appear on the walls, and the way she pursed her lips as if she, an illiterate, were attempting to read them.

I had, whilst I was there, the strong impression that the place was a vast and empty tomb, but now I wonder if there was not some other purpose. From the faint, malignant odor that pervaded the place, I expected at each turn to reach a mass of poorly mummified bodies or the bloody mess of some ancient sacrificial table. Yet the smell ebbed and flowed with the wind’s piping, which somehow penetrated the very furthest depths I was able to reach.

The only sign of recent human habitation was, in its way, fortunate. Just as the flames were starting to fade on my torch and I knew that I would have to turn back, I stumbled upon a larger and more roughly made brand that some other recent wanderer had dropped. It was only some passages later, when I was forced to put light to the thing, that I realized that the weight around the bottom, which I had imagined to be a handle, was in fact a human hand, severed at the wrist, and coated in the same ichor that I had noticed about the bones of the fallen animals in the gullies.

I gave a cry, then prized the thing off and flung it away. But the whole incident was too much for Alya. She turned and ran, sobbing, back the way we had come. I watched her go without attempting to call her back, but hoping for my own sake that the moonlight fanning from the narrow slits would be enough to guide her back to the surface, and that there she would wait for me. The severed hand, I noticed, shriveled and writhed through the process of some long-withheld contraction, moving briefly across the stone before finally collapsing in a twisted heap.

Fear is a strange thing. You, my reader, may well have imagined that it was with me at that moment as I stood alone in the depths of this strange, ancient palace, yet in truth, only now in reflection does a chill begin to gather, a sense of unease, almost as if a part of me was still there in that vast empty palace, forever lost and wandering.

Sadly, there is little else of interest in my explorations to relate. It occurs to me, though, that I should record some other of my impressions. In the absence of gold, perhaps I could keep at least a few of my creditors at bay by writing some fatuous history or novel about the place.

The tunnels are complex. I have almost the impression of an inwardly constructed fortress based around some central keep or core. The sudden turns, the many small alcoves and rooms into which a soldier or a priest might turn to lose or outwit an assailant, bear witness to that fact. The other point that would argue toward this are the shafts. There were many within the tunnels—and not of the narrow type that I have already described for the purposes of letting in light and air. These were wide and immensely deep, with narrow walkways at their sides, thankfully still sound, around which I was forced to make my way. The air that came up from these pits was shockingly foul. Much like the shallower versions of such shafts that I witnessed in the tombs at Thebes, I imagine that they were traps for the unwanted visitor. Either that, or they were used as the gullies were for the casting down of sacrifices.

But I remain, I confess, confused as to the essential purpose of these shafts. Now, weary as I am this night, it even strikes me that they were some vertical equivalent of the horizontal tunnels that I passed along, although their sides were so smooth, the depths so deep, that I cannot imagine what other use they could have been put to.

As to the passages themselves, I should record that the dots and carvings grew more intricate as I pressed further, although most were strange to me. I stopped, though, at a few places where somewhat newer slabs had been affixed to the walls, although these too were ancient, and many had fallen aside or cracked and crumbled. On these there was an almost Egyptian style of marking, although much changed. There were carved scenes too, that might once have been colorful when the gilt and the paint still held to them. I saw men and women with eyes much like Alya’s, gathering corn, drawing water, going about life’s unchanging tasks.

In other places, I saw what I can only take to be scenes from the construction of the great pyramids. Once again, many people were shown going about these tasks. There were supervisors too, and in places what I took to be the draped and oddly shifting forms of human figures—perhaps some kind of priesthood. I had passed several such slabs before I noticed another shape. Before that, I had taken it to be the destructive hacking of ancient graffiti. But the form recurred—if form it can be called—representing, I supposed, some feared chaotic deity whom the priests were supposed to keep at bay. Now, though, another explanation occurs to me. Certainly, if I am to turn my discoveries into a novel rather than a history, I would now say that the amorphous thing that the priests surrounded was the representation of an actual being.

Alya had spoken of the magics that her people had used to build the great pyramids and the other monoliths. Perhaps the truth is that they used this hideous shifting creature—for I can scarcely imagine that there is room in this universe for more than one—in the great labor of breaking and shifting the stones. I can well imagine that its escape from the priest’s control would have brought the downfall of a civilization, persistent rumors of ancient magic, and the many myths of some destructive flood or holocaust. It all makes a type of sense, although it strikes me now that night at Cul Holman is not the best place to dwell upon it.

Finally, I turned back within the tunnels, hoping that I would be able to find my way back out again. In fact, the choices were surprisingly easy. The foul shrieking wind that rose up, I was by now almost sure, from the pits themselves, seemed to push and lead me as I worked my way around them. When my borrowed brand finally died, I found that I was already near to the surface, and that the narrow upward shafts admitted threads of dawn. Thus my mood was calm as I walked back toward the square-set portals overlooking the desert. In this new brightness, I could almost glimpse the protective shadows of those long-dead priests standing guard around me, leading me on, murmuring prayers of protection.

In the last of the side-rooms into which I peered, drawn by a stronger glow of light, I saw a wider space than I had anticipated; a roof borne up by great squared pillars. The light shafts here were numerous, and angled in such a way that they crossed and threaded at a point near the hall’s—or temple’s, I might now call it—center, and threw its far reaches into flowing drifts of shadow. There, caught in the web of light, hung a central core that was ill-defined in shape. It was an illusion that I had become used to in my explorations, but still I felt drawn to cross the surprising vastness of the hall on the chance that I might at last have stumbled across some valuable relic.

As I drew close to the web of light, the ball of shadow it contained began to shrink, but, for once, it did not disappear entirely when I reached it. Lying as if recently discarded upon the floor, I found a lump of stone, black, multi-faceted, like some complex kind of dice. I have the thing beside me on the table now, and would record how many sides it has, if I were able to count them exactly. It is heavy for its size, and rubbed at my thigh in the pouch where I carried it. Even now, my flesh aches at that point, as if it were burned. The thing is too large to hide under the loose tiles beneath my bed where I hoard these notes and what little other wealth I have acquired here. To keep it from the prying eyes of my servants, I will bundle it up in my trunk that lies beside my valueless heap of starstones. If I spin it sufficiently well into the tale I plan to write, who knows? I may even be able to sell it.

What else is there to record?—little other than that Alya was indeed waiting for me beside the great blocks of the entrance way, sitting with her hands clasped around her knees and shivering even though she was in the full warmth of the rising sun. That same sun then led us back here to Cul Holman without confusion, although the way was long and weaiy, and it was the edge of another evening when we finally came into taste, sight, and hearing of its dust clouds and hammerings.

Alya called to me as I made to enter my private quarters.

“Lucius Fabius,” she said, raising her voice above the mad barking of Konchab’s dogs which had begun with our arrival. I started in surprise and turned back to her, that she dared to use my given names. “I call on you now to fulfill the bargain we made.”

I, of course, asked her what bargain she meant, and reminded her that I had expected her to lead me to hidden riches and gold. How, otherwise, could I buy the freedom of her entire family from Kaliphus—or even that of her and Dahib? At that, she looked at me. But she had the sense not to argue.

“At least, Lucius Fabius,” she said, casting off the goatskin and pack she had been carrying. “I ask you that you at least release Dahib from his work in the pits at Dylath, before he dies of it.”

To that, I agreed. Dahib will start menial work at the counting houses this morrow-morn.

And now I must to bed. I am far too weary to proceed with my usual late-night inspection.

They say that the seasons change but little in this place, and then only about the Nile. Yet, as what might otherwise be called autumn passes and we face the beginnings of winter, I am sure that Cul Holman has grown hotter. The sun blazes. Sour heat breathes from the rocks at night. I have the slaves bring water and fan me as I lie abed or try to set about my labors. My body sweats as I toss and turn.

I confess that I am grown irritable. Only yesterday, for no other reason than that he stumbled amid the rocks where he was working and I thus had to walk around him, I ordered the flogging of a slave. And news has reached me of the ill-fortune of my patron Servilius Rufus, and of the bewildering demands of my father’s bankers, creditors, and clients.

Everything is bad, and I am too weary to give the details. At least, though, I am now past a half year in this dreadful place. Were the days not still so many, and the prospects of my return to Rome so grim, I could almost begin to count them.

In my dreams, I find that I am still often wandering the strange catacombs to which Alya took me, which in turn become once more the stinking streets of Alexandria under leaden skies, which unfailingly lead, if I cannot awaken myself, toward the dark-draped room of the villa in Naples in which I slept as a child, and where something that is no longer my grandmother awaits me. And even when I cannot hear her words amid the swarming dimness, the shrieking of these mountains that somehow penetrates even the deepest of my dreams, I know that it is always speaking of gold.

Gold, which has traits far beyond the pliancy, glamour, and incorruptibility that men so innocently crave. Gold, which claims ascendancy in a rubric of elements vaster than anything Aristotle conceived, and lies close to the point beyond which this universe must dissolve. Gold, which gives onto other places, other times. A million unfolding doors. Gibbous lines of insanity.

At the worst moment, it seems that I am falling, pushed down and through and under by a stifling weight. Strong hands then reach up to rescue me, and I am lifted into the light of some vast place amid the strangest of buildings. There are angles and shapes that my eyes can hardly comprehend, a sky that has a texture and a color that can never have been of this earth. And I am surrounded by vast, ugly star-headed creatures, and I know that I am lost—unimaginably so.

Yet still I reach toward them.

Now that I am a little better, and although the weakness of the fever that I suffered is still upon me, I can look back on this last entry—and the odder suppositions with which I laced my record of my trip beyond the mountains—with a clearer perspective.

Perhaps the malady that killed my predecessor at last caught up with me. It could have been the foul vapors of those catacombs. Whatever, I am still sane and alive. After the terrible depths of the fever, I must do my best to be grateful. A full month has now passed since my last record, and already, my replacement will be setting out from Rome. For that, also, I must be grateful. Konchab and Taracus have proved themselves more than capable of running these mines without me, and even the miserly Alathn seems happy once again with the regularity of his accounts. I suspect they all welcomed the resumption of their independence. Alya, at the worst of my fever, closed and re-closed the shutters that flew open in the shrieking madness of the wind. Even Kaliphus has been to see me, and left fresh fruit and rose water, and a suggestion that I have the pile of starstones immediately disposed of—which hints well that they might have some small value.

I saw a dark, wind-flapping figure standing high on a rock above the pits at Dylath when I finally roused myself to make an inspection with Konchab this morning. Some of Taracus’s soldiers happened to be about, and I ordered that they attempt to capture whatever it was that I was seeing. Soon, I was face to face with an elderly shepherd, quivering with fear, stinking in his filthy robes. Such was my relief that I laughed and I bid him released back to his starving flock.

All would be better but for the return to Rome, and with it the final loss of the wealth of my family. Childless, and with no desire to correct that situation, my only sister enfeebled by her long ugly face and no prospect of a dowry, it almost seems that I must now contemplate the end of my family’s once-dignified name.

The days now drag interminably. There is the ordering of the new slaves, and much bargaining for tributes and fees with money I do not even control. Yet I throw myself into this work with a new passion, and do my best to demonstrate to Alathn the breadth of my expensively acquired education by ploughing through Cul Holman’s intricate accounts.

In the dust, in the very air here, hang fragments of gold. I sometimes think I see their glimmering when the sun falls in some new way, or shining on the limbs of the slaves as they emerge from the pits as if transformed into intricate gilded machines. In truth, I must have breathed in a little of the stuff along with all this foul air, so that it now infuses the humors of my body.

This last night, I was assailed by yet another foul dream. In it, I found that once more I lay beside the changing and sliding shape that was once my grandmother, although now I fear her form. In a ghastly, buzzing voice, it speaks to me only of darkness and atrocities. Times when the star-headed Old Ones had to flee their great cities from a timeless wind that flooded beyond the stars. As the tapestries billow around us and the wind shrieks, I sense the near-presence of shambling amorphous entities.

“There was once and is and always will be the three-lobed burning eye,” the creature begins. “It was named Nyarlathotep, by one who dared so to name it, and briefly called himself the Golden Keeper. But these are only sounds, and he was but the seed.…” At that, she cackled. Within a vast maw, teeth gleamed. “What it truly feasts upon is terror and debasement. It needs no meaning. It lurks forever beyond all comprehension, writhing at the back of everything…”

Behind the beating curtains and the thinning walls of the room that I must share with whatever my grandmother has become, I sense the scratching and sliding of something massive, bearing before it an insane stench. I know, then, that were I to even glimpse it, my mind would dissolve. But still I sense that this is all part of some ghastly ritual. That, somehow, I am being prepared.

I awoke, slimed with sweat, to the howl of the wind and the persistent barking of Konchab’s dogs. Even then, the curtains of the room still seemed to sway and flutter, and I sensed the fading of some terrible disturbance, and a crouching weight lay upon my head. All of this, as you my trusted reader may well imagine, left me in a poor mood for the meeting that Alathn had requested this morning.

As he talked at his usual tedious length about the intricate principles and procedures of his work, I glanced at Konchab and Taracus, my two other companions, and sensed that they were already pondering other duties. Perhaps, I mused, this ugly dwarf was always thus—and nothing will ever come of the discrepancies of which he speaks.

“Gold,” Alathn said, in what I hoped was his conclusion, “has a greater weight than stone or all other metals. It tends to sink and gather. Of course, this is the very principle upon which it is collected amid the pans, pools, and washing fleeces at Tarsil.”

Here, as if this was all of some especial relevance, he licked his thin lips and glanced boldly at me.

“For this same reason,” he continued, “there have been surprisingly rich finds made amid the sweepings of the counting house floors. Many small grains and even nuggets are thus recovered. And within this last year, the weight of these sweepings have gone up noticeably. Yet we have recovered barely any of the expected gold they can be expected to yield.”

At this point, I had opened my mouth to say that the records of such gathering would only be found by the washing beds in Tarsil. But Alathn then laid his hand upon the pale tube of a freshly copied papyrus, and I could guess what it was. I should have admonished him that he had ordered scribe-work done at Tarsil without my authority, but my mind was blurred.

“In truth,” he went on after he had explained all that these new figures meant, “I fear we have all taken too small a care of this particular matter. It needs, after all, little more than for a weighing pan to be nudged, or a sleeve to be brushed across the top of a loaded pannier. And each night, the sweepings are guarded by one…” Here Taracus bridled, although Alathn didn’t actually say sleepy. “…centurion. We are faced, I fear, with a small plot to deprive Rome of its rightful wealth. A minor conspiracy…”

I have, my trusted reader, no reason to lie to you—for the small bag containing what pitiful amount of gold I have been able to collect by the means that Alathn so carefully outlined lies hidden beneath the same paving bed as I keep these scraps of my writing. On the evidence of either, I would be condemned. Of course, the grains amount to a fraction of what I would need to regain the good name of my family. But if I were to shed my identity, to move cheaply into some minor but decently furnished place… you, knowing all that you know, will understand that it is the least I can do; to permit myself a small, hopeful dream after all the nightmares that have assailed me.

From there, the meeting proceeded along a predictable path. Alathn confessed that he could name no specific culprit, as is usually the case in these matters. But whilst he spoke, he fixed his gaze shamelessly upon me. As my junior and lesser, of impure and polluted blood, he knows that he cannot make the accusation that he longs to make alone. Of course, if Konchab and Taracus were also to take his view, things would be different. But their manner remained unchanged. If they suspected me also, they made the wise decision not to risk their careers over such a matter.

Logic thus compelled me to agree with Taracus when he suggested that, as this fraud follows on from a long trail of minor stupidities and disobediences, the time had come to make a proper example. With new slaves recently arrived and our quotas in all other respects well up, it would be an appropriate gesture. I mentioned, of course, the brand, the bastinado. But it was clear by then that stronger measures were required.

“It is sometimes necessary,” Taracus opined, “just as a gardener must prune and weed to ensure the best blooms, that a number of slaves must be put to death if the whole body of them are to thrive.”

I nodded, thinking of my beloved villa in Naples, and wondering what this brutal man had ever even known of the dewy sun-washed fragrance of a proper garden.

“I would suggest, Fabius Lucius,” he continued, “that ten is a simple number that brooks no argument, to be chosen equally from amid the counting house slaves. Of course, the manner of their death must also be an example, something that will stick well in their primitive minds. Mere spearing…”

Through all of this part of the discussion, Alathn remained silent. But I knew that he kept his eyes fixed on me. I understood his feeble tactic well enough: he imagined that I, a Roman, would weaken like his own retarded race at the prospect that was now laid before me. Of the suffering of others for a crime of which he knew I was guilty. But if this truly was his trap, I passed over it easily. Death amongst slaves is as natural as it is to the beasts of the farm—especially here at Cul Holman. If it were not the sweepings of the counting house floors that brought about these executions, it would soon be some other matter.

Thus determined, I took the lead, and the discussion proceeded apace. We agreed that, as crucifixion uses too much rare and valuable wood required for pit-props and hammers, the slaves should be immured; buried alive within some of the many openings in the ravaged hills that overlook Cul Holman, and left to die there.

As is my duty this following morning, I stood witness as the slaves were selected. They were then chained before they were dragged up the hillside, closely supervised near the precipices in case they should attempt to end their lives in an easier way. I stayed within the camp and watched as the figures dwindled in the hot grey light, thinking once again how we are mere ants upon the face of this world, and how little anything that we do matters.

The stone masons, still visible at the narrow pits that had been chosen, soon began their work, and the ring of struck stone and the cries of the slaves came distantly on the hot shrieking wind, to mingle with the moans and weepings of those who watched. Little enough work was done at Cul Holman this day despite the lashes of Konchab and his supervisors, and the threat that he would loose his already wildly excited dogs from their pens. Occasionally, for the greater good it fosters within our Empire, such prices must be paid.

I write now in the early part of the night, and all of Cul Holman seems strangely dark, strangely agitated. More than ever, the wind howls. The dogs will not quieten. But for that, I suspect I would also be able to hear the sleepless wailing of the slaves. Although those selected have been immured without the added mockery of food and water, it will still be necessary for the narrow pits in which they lie to be guarded for several days. Their deaths will not be quick—crushed together in the hot infinite darkness, flesh against flesh against unyielding stone, barely able to breathe, unable to move. But then who knows what finally kills any man, beyond thirst, hunger and lack of hope?

I write again after an unwarranted interruption. Without my calling or seeking Henrika’s permission, the slave girl Alya has come to my quarters. Sensing some presence in the room as I finished writing my previous words, I turned and saw her standing in the doorway. For a moment, I confess I almost felt a flood of relief that it was her and not something else, until irritation took over. Still, the girl has nerve. For that I must credit her.

“I have come to plead with you, Fabius Lucius,” she said.

“Well and good,” I said, remembering that we had bargained before, and wondering if there was perhaps still some knowledge that she held back from me. “What is it that you want?”

“Dahib.”

“Dahib?” I repeated, puzzled, before I remembered. “Indeed. He was brought here with you, and I recall that I was generous enough to have him relieved from his duties in the pits… and moved to sweeping the counting house floors.”

She gestured wildly then, and I saw as she stepped closer into the flickering and tonight oddly dim light that her eyes and face were shining with tears. “He’s buried—dying.”

I nodded, wondering that I hadn’t recognized him in the process of selection. But then, all slaves soon look alike when they labor here. “Understand, Alya, that the choice wasn’t mine.”

“What can I give you,” she interrupted, “to free him?”

I shrugged, easily keeping my composure. “I am a rich man already. But then I am also a collector. That place that you showed me. Is there perhaps another—somewhere that has not been emptied?”

She stepped back from me then, almost as if in horror, and shook her head. For a moment, her eyes traveled wildly about the room, like those of some trapped animal. I saw them widen and she gave a gasp as they settled on my grey-green collection of starstones piled in the room’s far corner. And I noted that, tonight, a special light seemed to be within the stones; like the phosphorescence that lies at the edge of the tide.

“Otherwise,” I continued, “there is nothing I can do. You must understand that I am not some flesh-hungry beast like Kaliphus. I—”

But that was an end to our bargaining. At that point, Alya turned and fled. I have since summoned Henrika and a half dozen centurions, but she has gone from the villa, and seemingly also Cul Holman. I suspect that in her folly she will try to climb the cliffs where Dahib is immured. But she will find the way guarded.

Before Henrika and the soldiers left me again to what I had hoped on this disturbed night would be my slumbers, I asked for him to bring more lamps, and to add oil to all the existing ones. Even then, I asked him if he also noticed an odd effect, doubtless from some coming storm, in the way that the light seemed to hang in close spheres around the flame without passing further. He agreed, of course, but I do not think that the truth had penetrated his pagan senses.

A dark closeness now lies upon all of Cul Holman. Konchab’s dogs are barking wildly, but for once the winds have ceased. The air hangs still, infused with this preternatural blackness, and there is a prickly sense of waiting that I associate with thunderstorms. Yet the only rumble comes from the beat of my heart.

Just this moment, as I reached toward the iron ink pot to replenish my nib, a greenish spark flew out from my hand. I have heard from mariners of just such an effect in storms; and also of the crawling of the skin, the rising of the hair, the suffocating sense of expectancy, although I have previously witnessed only the flash of clouds over the rain-swathed bay of Naples and the green hills of Rome.

No wind, and yet something within me seems to be blown wildly as if by a mad silent gale. In this itchy uncertainty, with the need always to look behind my back at the starstones and the lamps that withhold their suffocated light in the thick mass of darkness, there is clearly no prospect of sleep. This night, indeed, seems to me quite unlike any other, and yet ordained, much in the way that my presence here was—and, before that, the death of my father.

Much, it now seems to me, comes back to that. Now that we know each other well, trusted reader, and we seemingly have this night to share together, I will record a tale that will otherwise reach no eyes. Let me tell how, when I returned to Rome from the tedium of my duties as accountant in Sicily, little enriched and much in need of solace, I was greeted in the street outside my family’s high house by the sight of wagons and carts. Too weary to take notice, I pushed my way through, only to find myself restrained and led toward a small group that included my sister and a few of our more elderly servants, all of whom were sobbing.

Understand, reader, that until that moment I had imagined that the drudgery of my work as an accountant was but a preparation for my true responsibilities as head of my family. Such things, I had reasoned, were not uncommon. Even as I learnt of the repossession of the furnishing of my house and the sale of my best slaves, I did not assume this indicated the loss of my family’s wealth—but simple bad management of finances by my increasingly degenerate father.

Yet I was in a foul mood after I had made what arrangements I could from my own meager purse, and rode in haste toward Naples. In other moments, such a journey would have given the chance for cooler reflection. But anger only seemed to grow within me; and a sense of destiny.

As I dismounted at nightfall four days later and my feet clattered on loose mosaic through the villa’s moldering halls, I remembered the time when I had been summoned to eat leaf-gilded strawberries. And as my face was brushed by cobwebs and rotting hangings, I remembered also the sickness that had come upon me afterward—when gold is prized by apothecaries, and taken by those who can afford it for its powers of goodness and healing. It was then, even before I reached my father’s presence, that the first worm of doubt began to slide within me. How, for so long, could I have ignored this decay, when it could all be put down to the simplest of explanations?

The few servants that my father still kept about him were drunkenly abed, or had absconded entirely. Yet I knew as I threw open the last doors into that windowless inner chamber that he would be waiting for me.

He lay as always upon his great couch on the dais, and the place was filled with the sweet stench of rancid oil and perfume. He had grown yet more in the year since I had last seen him. His flesh shone coldly with sweat, and his vast stomach tumbled out in a slippery mass from his dank robes. His tiny eyes regarded me from his swollen face, whilst his chin sloped down, white-mottled and immense like a toad’s.

“So now you come to me,” he said in that voice that was broken into two pieces—both high and low.

“I came,” I began, “before it is too late—”

But here his wild, chilling laughter interrupted me.

“My son,” he shrieked, “it was too late long ago! It was too late before you were born!”

“We need money,” I said. “Money to pay off the creditors who have ransacked our house in Rome. We need gold.”

“Ah, gold…” His body quivered again at the word, as if he were about to recommence laughing. But—as far as I could tell—his face remained grave. Looking up at him, I felt as impotent as a child. “Go, then,” he whispered, leaning forward with a sound of sickly sliding, “go and look for your gold…”

Moving slowly around the dais, at first fearing some joke, I crossed to the line of great jars inset into the paving that he had opened for me long ago, and lifted the lid of the first, and placed my hand deep inside. It was empty. As was the next, and the next. As they all were. Dragging down rotting hangings, kicking over chests and boxes, I found nothing but dust and leaves. Admittedly there were a few coins; worthless radiati and fake aurei that I could bite through with my teeth.

Twisting his head this way and that, my father watched as I moved behind him, his tiny hands quivering at the ends of his immense arms. He made a breathless eager panting that soon became a high-pitched giggling, then a growling belch of laugher. His shining face grew livid.

In my anger, I raised one of the caskets and threw it toward him, but it seemed to slow in the thick dark air and broke on the paving in shards of thin wood and metal. He bellowed at that as though the laughter would break him, greasy beads of tears and sweat flowing down his face, and I realized then that he had long anticipated this moment, like the maturing of a sour wine.

I shouted at him that he was a degenerate, a disgrace to all the honor of Rome. At the mention of honor, his laughter only increased.

This, then, was the state to which I had been dragged—to face a future of meaningless penury. And I was filled by a new and even greater anger. I was a high-born Roman, yet my life seemed to have passed from my control. Understand, now, reader, how much against my nature it was to climb the dais to my father’s couch and strike him. Anyway, my efforts were useless, and only increased his laughter—it was like punching rotten dough. I had my small dagger about me, and I ploughed that into him, too, rending his clothes, slicing his thighs, his belly, his chest. But the blade cut nothing but white layers of fat, and did not even cause him to bleed. Enveloped in his stench, I seemed to be falling into him, the shrieking pit of his mouth, the quivering wounds I had opened.

At some point in all of this, the weight of our struggles caused the couch beneath us to break with a tearing of wood and the sparkling scatter of cheap glass beads and fake ornaments. My father began to slide from it—and I with him, although thankfully we separated as I tumbled from the steps of the dais, or I fear that I would have been crushed, suffocated, drowned.

As it was, I climbed to my feet, and looked down at him as he lay sprawled, my greasy dagger still in my hand. He was but a spill of flesh; scarcely human, more like some rotting sea-leviathan. Yet from the discordant whistle of his breathing, I knew that he was still alive.

He had fallen almost entirely upon one great carpet. Experimentally, I lifted a corner and tried to drag it. His weight was immense, but a power was upon me. Somehow, I hauled my father though the doorway and along the corridors which I had come, and thence out into the open courtyard that contains the villa’s well. There is no lip, and the aperture, once I had removed the iron grating, is wide and square. And deep also, so that I could never catch the glimmer of water when I peered down it as a child, nor be sure, when I cast a surreptitious stone, that the faint splash I finally heard wasn’t simply the chattering of birdsong in the near woods. Yet for all of that, I almost doubted that my father would fit into the well. His gross limbs sprawled out as I heaved him off the carpet, snagging on the topmost stones even as the rest of him slid into it. I was forced, like a midwife in reverse, to work and push at his slick flesh until the last part of him gave way. Even then, he was slow in his descent down the dank sides of mossy stone. There was even a moment, looking down, when I was sure I saw the pale glint of movement as he began to climb back out. But then there was a great sound of ripping and sliding, and a gust of foul air as the last of his body’s resistance gave way. That night, I truly did hear a thickly echoing splash as my father’s body finally struck water.

I dragged the carpet back to his quarters, and left the place otherwise as it was, in disarray, and with the well’s iron grating removed. In what remained of the darkness, and unseen by all but the creatures of the night, I rode off toward the hills.

That, my reader, almost marks the end of this bitter little story. I dwelt the next night at a roadside inn, and spoke loudly of how I was heading toward Naples from Rome. I arrived once again at the villa the next noon, to find much commotion. A day-woman’s efforts to draw water had already revealed my father’s presence, and local workmen were already laboring to extract him.

Too swollen to be recovered whole, my father was being hauled up in pieces. It was easy enough for me to display shock and surprise; and secretly to note as the glistening lumps of his body rose out on ropes how well the evidence of our struggles had been obliterated. As to the chaos of empty jars and broken caskets, I was able to offer an explanation that was all too easily borne out by a subsequent inspection of the family accounts: driven by penury and the thought of the loss of our family’s great name, my father had chosen to kill himself. Would, I thought in darker moments as I pondered my future, that he had followed the tradition of older time in such matters, and also killed me.

Once the initial labors and inquiries had finished and a show had been made of grieving, it seemed wise to seek a posting in some distant place before my creditors began to regather—which, by a long route, brings me back here to Cul Holman, to this night where the darkness still hangs, and there is a windless creaking tension. From somewhere, I sense a faint smell of burning, and my body seems to

What was that?

I saw a scorpion scuttle across the floor beside me, and then another. Several moths and gaudy insects have flown out from the window into the darkness instead of, as is their nature, toward the light. A rustling stream of cockroaches have made their way toward some crack in the wall that I do not remember seeing. And now there is silence. At last, even Konchab’s dogs have ceased their barking. In this stillness, the earth seems to hold her breath. From somewhere comes the smell of burning. Looking behind me for a poorly trimmed lamp, I see that all the flames hang still as amber beads—and give as little light. Yet upon the starstones, there lies an intricate pattern of fine silver lines. Oddest of all, clear and almost reassuring amid this blackness, a grey stream of smoke is rising from the sides of my trunk.

I must

* * *

There marks a fitting end to that night’s journal, and to the much that has happened since. I assure you, dear reader, that I am still alive and well. Indeed, I am well and wealthier than I could ever have expected.

I should have realized that the dense silence and other strange portents at Cul Holman signaled more than a mere storm. Indeed, I am somewhat angered that Konchab, Taracus, and Alathn, with their greater knowledge of this place, did not see fit to warn me. But they also professed innocence at the greatness of what was to occur, and I am currently in a mood to forgive them.

If, as Virgil contends, earthquakes truly are the restlessness of giants sleeping deep beneath the earth, then what has occurred here must have been caused by the greatest of them all. I can smile now at my unreasoning fear as the world shook loose from her anchors, as the walls that sheltered me moved and the villa’s roof rattled in a rain of tiles, whilst from the darkness beyond came a massive groaning and rumbling that deafened the ears and sickened the belly. A strange glow seemed to rise. The stifled flames of the lamps suddenly spat great tongues of spark. Veins of fire ran along the walls and floor—even through my hands as I looked down at them. After all the portents and horrors I have been subjected to, I truly believed that the universe was coming apart, to be replaced by—I know not what.

But, in echoes and groans, the rumbling slowly died, and then, for the first time that night, fading as if already from some long way off, came the piping and whistling of the wind, to be replaced as it, in turn, died, by the screams of the slaves, and the hiss and clatter of settling dust and masonry.

Dawn came then, as if the sun finally had shaken loose from the earth in the process, and never more grateful was I to see his light. I emerged, as did many others, into a broken and rearranged world. I can see now the dark silhouettes amid the drifting mist—but this journal is not the place to record the damage, and the work of reconstruction that has gone on in these recent days. I am preparing, in fact, a report that I propose to submit to the Senate upon my return to Rome, which will doubtless be copied into other libraries should you wish to refer to it.

For the purpose of this, my truer journal, let me say that the very crudeness of Cul Holman—the low stone dwellings, widely scattered— meant there was none of the vast loss of life that there might have been from an earthquake in a more civilized place. Still, there were numerous injuries amongst freemen and slaves—and in the buildings and workings of their trades.

It was only when I made my first inspection into the hills beyond this valley this morning that I realized the true enormity of what has taken place. Clouded by the risen dust, the light itself had changed, yet had a clarity it had lacked before. The hills seemed more solid. New fissures of rock had reared up, peaks had fallen, cliff-faces had broken.

Truly, the earthquake was the author of strange events, which would have been put down in more primitive times to the work of gods. One of the counting house sheds seems have been bodily moved; more amazing still, a small quantity of gold was found lying upon the scales when all the wreckage was removed. I myself have seen, in the dust around this villa, evidence of incredible stirrings that I could have taken to be dragging clawmarks were I a man of lesser knowledge. And, as far as it is possible to tell amid the new face of the hills that overlook us, the imprisoned slaves were shaken out from their graves by the movement of the earth, and thus released. Of them—and of Alya—there is no sign, although the soldiers who had been stationed to guard them, and also Konchab’s dogs (although I, for one, am glad to be rid of their ceaseless howling) were found strangely beheaded, their torn necks coated in a foul greenish-black ichor, which I can only presume rose up from some deep portion of the earth.

At some point in the afternoon after the earthquake, weary of issuing instructions and the cries of the wounded, deprived of an entire night’s sleep, I went back to this room in the villa that the servants had made some small effort to tidy, and laid myself clothed upon the bed.

I scarcely knew that I was asleep, yet it seemed to me that I saw once again, as if from afar, the vast, strangely angled cities of which I have sometimes found myself dreaming. They are built from huge blocks of stone set and faced with shining gems, and in truth I felt a sadness to know that what I saw lay so impossibly far in the past that all but the faintest renlnant has faded. For I recognized that they were made in the manner of the ruins to which Alya had taken me; and not by man, who was not even upon the face of the earth at this far time, but by great beings, star-headed and with many strange limbs, who moved on the pads of three triangular feet. Despite their ugliness, I felt a sense of kin; for I saw that, in their own alien way, they were wise and purposeful. These, I thought, are the Old Ones, whose wisdom trickled down through the eons in enough measure for Alya’s ancestors to use it in the building, puny to them, yet still vast by our human standards, of the great pyramids. My sense of distance was redoubled by the knowledge that these creatures would ultimately be obliterated by a mad darkness. But here, it seemed to me as they moved within their towering cities, they were at their prime. The whole earth was theirs, from the highest mountains to the deepest trenches of the sea. And they looked upon the hellish creatures, whom they bid do their work using only the power of their minds, with contempt. They ruled everything. They knew no doubt.

Such, then, was the vision that was presented to me—and I, a Roman, at last witnessed a race with whom I could converse as an equal, had these creatures but mouths and eyes and ears. I watched, charmed more than repelled, as the Old Ones went about the incomprehensible business of their lives beneath the strangely colored skies of a lost ancient earth. I saw on shining walls the dot-markings with which I have become familiar, and heard, or thought I heard, a sweeter version of the piping that carried so often on the wind. I saw, also, many of the starstones, less worn but otherwise exactly like those I have collected, and glowing with fine inscriptions. These, I noted, were passed between the creatures by their odd appendages, and I soon reached the conclusion that they were a coinage of sorts. But here the matter does not end, for I also saw several of the creatures bearing black, multi-sided stones like that which I found in the edifice at the edge of the mountains. They would place these at the center of a starstone, causing a strange transformation to take place. The starstone changed color, and the veins within it ceased to glow as it took on all the appearance of gold.

Reader, as you may imagine, I awoke with a start then. In the thin light of dusk, I hastened to my trunk, remembering as I opened it the smoke that I had seen coming from it on the previous night. Indeed, the whole contents were charred and soot-stained. As I reached through the ash of my ruined clothing and closed my hand around the many-sided black stone, the ground once more gave a faint growl. Masonry crackled, and again the slaves of Cul Holman began to weep and wail. But the tremor proved to be nothing—a mere settling back of the earth.

I gazed at the black stone, and picked up also one of the starstones, turning them both over. It seemed quite impossible that one thing thus angled should mate with the curved indent in the middle of the other, as I had seen in my vision. But the two artifacts fitted well when I tried them; so well that I could not separate them when they were joined. In fact, the lines within the starstone began to glow, and it became so hot that I dropped it to the floor. Within a moment, too quick to notice, the starstone changed color. It gained a smooth golden luster and—for I discovered that both objects were immediately cold, and could be separated easily—had increased greatly in weight. Then I placed the black-faceted stone within the center of another starstone, bringing about the same transformation.

Here, reader, you may imagine that I proceeded to transform all the starstones into what I could only conclude was gold. In fact, I performed the process only three times; and for the third, by way of an experiment, I used the most scratched and damaged of the stones, with two of its arms broken, although that also changed. But gold is a tricky substance to possess, especially here, and at that moment I still doubted the sense of what I was seeing. It was enough. Before light next day, when all was quiet, I summoned a smithy to one of the makeshift workshops. To allay my remaining doubts, I bid him work one of the changed starstones in ways that only the most precious of all metals can be. Despite the man’s protests, the stone was easily cut and beaten into twenty fat coin-like discs of roughly equal size. They are warm to the touch as I hold them now, and feel smooth upon the tongue, creamy yet with a faintly salty flavor; much as I imagine those who indulge such matters find the flesh of a loved one. Gold truly is the most human of metals, yet it also brings us closest to the gods. As for the smithy, I have had him beaten on the pretext of some minor offense. If he survives, his tale will be taken as mere raving.

I have less than a quarter of my given time left here at Cul Holman, and I am torn between a desire to return to Rome, and to remain for longer, gathering starstones. This afternoon, beginning my search, I went out to where the further mines are being reestablished, and sought the gullies along which the slave girl Alya had led me. But I could not find any, and I surmise that they were closed up by the great movements of the earth. That would also explain why the wind sounds differently now—although it blows as hot and fierce as ever. Gone is the weird piping: gone, too, I imagine, are those vast ruins to which Alya took me—or so buried as to be lost forever. For it became apparent as I wandered deeper into these hills that the greatest disturbance took place in the far reaches. If there truly are such things as Virgil’s sleeping giants, it is there that the greatest of them all must lie.

* * *

Long have I neglected these writings, and now that I begin again, it is upon a proper roll of papyrus, with better ink, and in a better place. Indeed, I have often toyed with the idea of destroying all that I have written, in view of the hazard it would present were it to fall into greedier hands.

You find me where all of this began; which was not Rome or even Cul Holman, it now seems to me, but at my beloved villa in Naples. Of course, I still think of Cul Holman. Yet the place seems darker than it does even within the wilder ramblings of my writings, and its memory tugs me in strange and uncomfortable ways.

Much of the remaining time since I deserted you there, patient reader, I spent in the pursuit of starstones. I confess I remained aloof from the harsh duties of reviving Cul Holman’s fortunes. I kept myself to myself, and ate and walked alone, and glanced but occasionally over my shoulder at the black figure that even here still sometimes seems to follow me. But at the end of it all, I found nothing—not one more stone. Any that remained must have been buried in the sliding and twisting of those hills.

Apart from this seemingly odd pursuit, I did nothing to arouse suspicion at Cul Holman, and changed no more of the stones to their true metal. Nor, save in one instance, did I use them for currency; the idea for which seemed to stay with me oddly. For I confess I went to Kaliphus’s palace to purchase the freedom of Alya’s family. Kaliphus was his usual self, inquiring about Cul Holman’s fate in the earthquake as if his spies had not already informed him. Still, he seemed almost reluctant to accept the excessive amount of gold I offered for the freedom of his slaves— though I had credited him as a man of business, if little else.

Eventually, even as he made the sign I had seen him make before, he took the six heavy discs I offered. And he accepted my explanation that they were but a little of the personal wealth I had brought with me from Rome. In fact, there was an odd gravity about our transaction, as if the exchange were necessary as one small notation in a complex scroll of accounts where some greater total was to be balanced.

As is the way with such arrangements, I left Cul Holman and began my long return journey down the Nile aboard the same craft that had borne my successor there. We barely had time to exchange greetings, and still less for me to pass on the little I have learned about mining for gold. Konchab and Taracus will soon also go to other duties—even Alathn, if he is wise, will seek a re-posting before he runs the fatal risk of becoming indispensable. The slaves and freemen, of course, will come and go. They live, they die, they breed. Soon, all that happened at Cul Holman in my time there will be but a rumor.

The great papyrus raft that bore me upon the spring flood of the Nile was readied to depart in the blue of evening. Henrika had come with me upon this journey—sadly, he paled and died soon after of a fever—but otherwise I traveled alone. I felt a curious calm as I watched my trunks and belongings being hauled onto the shadowed deck. I had made no attempt to hide my collection of unchanged starstones, and the gold was bound as a thick weight around my chest and belly beneath the folds of my toga. I would also have carried the black-faceted stone upon me, were it not that it caused my flesh to burn and ache. The workmen and mariners seemed mere shadows to me. I felt sure that I was protected.

We pulled out into the black waters as the stars began to shine, and a cool wind, so unlike that which I had long become used to, began to fill the vast red sail. All about me, glowing in the light of a huge rising moon, lay the plains and hills and pillared ruins of upper Egypt, and beyond that the beckoning edge of the desert, and the sense that pervades everything there that the present is but the trembling surface from which the currents of the bottomless past will always rise. I stayed on deck as the ropes wheezed and the sail crackled stiffly and we moved further into the smooth flow in which the whole world seemed upturned in reflection. The air was filled with a strange wailing, and when I looked to the shore, I saw that many of the dark-robed natives had gathered in lines and were making this wavering cry at the passage of my boat. And beyond the palm trees and the villages and the fresh-flooded ditches, where moon and starlight silvered the last edges of the hills before they faded into the desert, I thought I saw also a cluster of other figures. It seemed to me that they were mounted, leading those strange humped creatures called camels, and that they raised their arms in salute before turning toward the desert. Thus, so I imagine, I saw the passing of Alya, Dahib, and her tribe.

I broke my journey as before at Alexandria whilst passage to Ostia was arranged, and wandered the same streets. Despite the turn in my fortunes, I was curious to renew my brief acquaintance with the alchemist or charlatan known as Zosimus, for it seemed to me now that the walls of his dark room had been adorned with similar shapes and figures to those I had seen elsewhere. But my pursuit along the odd twists and turns of those shadowed and stinking alleys was fruitless, and I was ever afraid, as I looked behind me, that I was being pursued by some bandit. I also sought enlightenment in the moldering library; for it seemed that I recalled a glimpse of star-shapes and strange drawings on forgotten scrolls. There again, I was disappointed—if disappointment is the right word.

Here in my Naples villa, much work has been done in daylight, although time is wasted by the laborers’ refusal to dwell here, and I find it hard, even at inflated prices, to obtain and keep any decent quality of slave. Rumor of my wealth, of course, has spread as quickly as these things always do, and now I fear that I am probably the dupe of shoddy dealings. In view of my father’s penury, the gossip is that I returned from the far reaches of Empire with a cache of hidden gold, and the story is near enough the truth for it to be fruitless for me to attempt to deny it. There is also a malicious whisper that I stole gold from the mines I was supervising, and I have had to endure a visit from the Emperor’s auditors on the strength of it, although there was hardly any charge worth answering. Still, some shadow seems to hang over me, and I have found it harder than I might have imagined to clear my family’s name.

Even with the starstones, all is not quite as I had hoped. Although I regretted that I had not found more than the twenty-three I had with me, I had calculated that they would represent a wealth which is more than the equivalent of Cul Holman’s produce in a whole year. It was with the joy of a pleasant task long delayed that, at last alone in the privacy of my father’s old quarters, I set about transforming them all to gold. All went well to begin with, until I set to work on what would have been in total the tenth starstone. When the black-faceted stone would not even fit the indentation, I imagined some fault in the mechanism and moved onto the next. Yet I tried them all, and in each case it was the same. Thus, I must make do with a total of merely nine golden starstones, more than four of which I have already been forced to exhaust in repaying my father’s debts, of which I fear, much like the cracks and strange defects that the builders find here, there are still more to be uncovered. Of course, I would have readily accepted such an outcome when I first set out toward Egypt—by most normal standards I am wealthy—but the feeling remains at the back of my mind that I have somehow been cheated in a bargain I never intended to make.

At first, I made a great show of new riches to my neighbors, patrons, and acquaintances at great feasts at my refurbished high house in Rome. But I found poorer solace in their company than I had even in that of Alathn, Konchab, Taracus, and even Kaliphus. Often, I would gaze down the table at the odd geometries of plates and arms and bodies, breathing the jagged scent of all the food and the flowers that I had ordered, and wonder at the meaningless drone of their voices, and if this truly was eloquence, elegance, civilization.

Here in Naples after the first work on this villa had been done, I summoned my sister and a fair scattering of other guests, including men whom I deemed would make eager suitors now that our family’s wealth was no longer in doubt. In truth, though, when I saw her face, sad and long and flat, it seemed to me that the poor creature had grown more sullen than ever. The occasion went as all the others had done, which is to say pointlessly and expensively, as I lay at table and watched the people move and unfold like shadows and tried to catch the buzzing of their words. Like the other occasions, I knew that it would end early, with poor excuses, uneasy laughter, glances back from my departing guests. My sister, almost as bored with it all as I was, must have wandered off between one of the many courses, for suddenly the air from the unimproved passages beyond this villa’s newly lighted hall was torn by a blood-chilling shriek. To this day, I do not know what she imagined she saw upon the dais where my father had once sat, and it seems unlikely, in the gibbering incontinent state in which I found her and that to this day she remains in, that she will ever be able to explain what fancy has riven her mind. She dwells now in a place where, if you pay enough, her kind are looked after. There, she is changed and fed like an infant, and her hands are kept bound and bandaged to thwart the attempts she has made to take out her eyes.

Still, I am proud of the way that work has proceeded at this villa, even if it seems I am to be the last in my family’s line unless I take the step of adopting an heir. In the daytime, when the sun is brightest and there is less need for the lamps that I otherwise keep about me, I welcome the sounds and sights of people working, even if the refurbishing of this villa has been a matter of much argument and debate.

These last few days, in fact, following a protracted argument between myself and a foreman about a new window, all work has ceased. It was plain to me that his joinery was out of true, and that whole aspects of the room were finished shoddily at odd degrees. The man and his assistants still had the temerity to claim that all was as it should be; he even produced a rule and set it against the wood and plaster to prove his point, although the thing was clearly as crooked as he was. Thus, and with all my slaves and servants recently gone, I find myself alone.

Naples itself and this coast and countryside have declined in the time since my childhood. An ominous black pall hangs over Vesuvius. The air often stinks. The markets are full of cheap goods and sour produce; once fine streets have become rows of hovels and the harbor reeks of dead fish. I sometimes fear that all our Empire may be declining. There are risings of peasants and shepherds in Gaul, usurpations in Britain, German invasions along the Danube and Rhine. There is even talk that Rome may one day cease to be the capital of our Empire—although, despite the strange things I have heard of and seen, that is one outcome I will never believe.

Alone as I find myself in this villa with you, my reader, my last and trusted friend, it might be imagined that I am prey to robbers. Yet only two nights ago, after the leaving of my last few servants, a body was found not far away in the woods. It belonged to a notorious thief, and was roughly beheaded and coated in a foul slime. So it seems to me, my reader, that in some way, I am still protected, although as I wander the deep lanes whilst Vesuvius growls and rumbles and black flakes of its soot drift like snow upon the air, the people shun me and call in their children at my approach, and close the shutters of their homes.

It is near now to the height of another summer. I go out but little anyway, as the lanes are intolerably filled with the sharp stench of strawberries. In truth, now that I could afford to eat and drink whatever trifles I please to, I find that my taste in food has become bland. My previous cook, before he left, made me many loaves of unrisen cornbread which, stale though they are, I had been eating, and, since they ran out, have made do with the dough he left uncooked in his hurry to leave. Even on such poor rations, I fear that I may be gaining some of my father’s girth.

Each night, I light as many lanterns as I can—and try to restrain myself from drinking their oil. In the few times that sleep comes upon me, I wish that it had not, for I find myself within the presence of the thing that was once my grandmother again, although it seems to me now that she was always thus—a black assortment of angles—and that the things of which she speaks in that buzzing voice are all that she has ever told me. For I know now, although I would give much of my gold not to, of Nyarlathotep, of Great Cthulhu, and Shub-Niggurath, the black goat of the woods—of beings beyond all darkness.

Last night, I tried to break the spell by speaking back to her.

“What do you want?” I asked—then added a half-remembered phrase that came back to me. “Are you the Golden Keeper?”

She chuckled at that, and the sound thinned and faded into a thousand echoes. “What I keep is not gold. And it is not my task to keep it.”

“What can I do?”

“Nothing.”

“There must be something—”

“—I give that you may give,” she says before her voice trails off into inhuman buzzing. Then she lifts something from within the twisting folds of her robes, although it takes a long time for it to emerge, and her arms are like the tearing and stretching of something ancient and rotten. But I recognize it when she holds it out for me. For the thing is black. Multifaceted.

“Here,” she says, and, although the stone is already mine, I reach out to take it.

It shifts within my hand as it begins—segment on unfolding segment, as if from the workings of a hidden mechanism—to open. Something smooth and living slides out from it across my fingers. A shining worm of sorts, mucus-coated and somehow larger than the stone within which it was contained. It is truly ghastly to look at, and I watch in horror as it begins to burrow into my hand.

I opened my eyes then, and the room was filled with a sound that I imagined for a moment was nothing more than my own screaming. I stumbled out from my bed, drawn and repulsed by a mad endless piping as Odysseus must once have been by the sirens who lured sailors to the rocks on these very shores. I stumbled naked along dark swirling corridors, no longer knowing what I was escaping or seeking, until I found myself standing out in the well courtyard beneath a sky lit and blackened by Vesuvius’s fitful glow. It seemed to me that the piping here was strong enough to burst my ears, and that I knew at once where it came from. Still possessed by the logic of a dream, I drew back the grating of the well.

Perhaps I truly was dreaming, for there can be no rational meaning to what I saw when I looked down. For a moment, the well seemed truly bottomless, filled with stars. Then there came a liquid click, and a sense of something rising. If I could describe the thing at all, I would say that it was made of bubbling, shifting matter. As to its true shape, it had none— or many; for as it rose toward me with impossible speed, piping and shrieking, I imagined that it re-made itself into a mockery of many forms. I saw dog-headed Anubis, I saw Medusa, bearded Jove, a horned bull, and the livid, bloated face of my father. Then, I stumbled back, swooning in the terrible blast of air. And I remained that way for much of night, crouched shivering by the well as Vesuvius smoked and shook and glowing flakes of ash burned at my flesh, almost urging the thing that I had glimpsed to finish its ascent. Yet nothing happened, and as dawn grew, the piping slowly faded.

I am no longer sure what happened last night; and how much of what I saw was due to some fevered condition, or the effects of sleepwalking. This day, since I could summon no workmen to do the task for me, I have busied myself with laying the grate back over the well, and weighing it down with stone blocks and what pieces of furniture I could manage to drag unaided into the courtyard. It was harsh work, made more difficult by the problems I found in negotiating their shapes around the incredibly odd angles and openings of corridors and doors.

As I look out now, near to sunset as Vesuvius rumbles threateningly and brings early darkness across half the sky, it seems to me that the familiar and beloved landscape of my childhood memories formed by the intersections of sea and hills shifts and breaks like panes of ice upon a lake. But for the fact that they were moving, I would take the figures I can see crossing a distant field to be the limbs of twisted, blackened trees. And earlier, as I rested from the task of dragging a large and recently purchased mirror out into the well courtyard, I saw another odd effect. Leaning against the wall for support as the corridor ahead of me seemed to twist downward, I looked at myself in the polished brass. The mirror’s inner surface flared out, and my face, admittedly broader and paler now, became not so much that of my father, as of that terrible distortion of him which I saw coming up from the well. And then began the maddening piping that has been with me ever since.

Now that the sun has set on this dense and windless night, and with the mouth of the well surely covered by enough weight to muffle any sound, the piping grows louder still. Entwined within it is the muttering of some mad incantation that I recognize now comes from my own throat.

I hear it speak of the Great Gate of the Stars, and of the living seed that is and always was the Golden Keeper.

The shrieking now is incredibly loud—triumphant, even, as the ground shakes beneath me and the walls begin to shift. Perhaps, after all the years of threats and mutterings since the time of Herculaneum and Pompeii, Vesuvius is preparing to erupt. No doubt, if that is all this is, the women will be wailing, offering the blood of lambs on the hot smoking slopes above their dwellings. But to me, it all seems far closer than that. Closer even than the well or even the sliding walls of this room. I feel a stronger presence, as if the very ground beneath me were about to crack.

My head swirls so much with this chaos, dearest reader, that I fear you and I must soon part, for I can barely write these words. Stopping my ears does nothing but increase the terrible sound, this sense of something within me rising. I would also bind my eyes, were it not for what I see in the greater dark, which is now so vivid that I can scarcely bear to blink. I would but speak to you now, reader, but each breath is agony, and with the parting of my lips the piping grows yet wilder and guttural words spill out. I tried to call upon Vesta, protector of households, that strong and humble symbol of goodness and light. But the sound came out as mad shrieking, and I could barely close my jaw as my chin was jerked back and my throat widened on a stream of darkness and foul air. Even now, with my chin tightly bound and my mouth filled with the gold discs and papyrus that are all I now have about me, the sound grows in power.

I will wait for what this night brings me, and distract myself meanwhile by ordering these scraps of my writing before they are spoiled by the dark fluid that now bubbles from my lips. Perhaps my father was right, and I will never understand the meaning of the rituals I have been performing, nor yet the purpose of the Golden Keeper. Perhaps our lives really are without purpose. But, in that, at least, I fear that I may yet prove him wrong. Meanwhile go in peace, reader, and know that I am Fabius Lucius Maximus, a trained accountant of high Roman blood who has done service to the Empire in both Egypt and Sicily. Truly, I am a murderer also, and I fear that I have treated many of those I came across harshly. But all I ever wished for was decency and comfort. I trust that, after all we have shared, you will understand all of this, gentle reader, and strive not to condemn me.

Content

The Golden Keeper
by Ian R. MacLeod