I had lost.
One morning not long after this encounter, I woke early feeling cold. Outside the wind stirred, wakeful like me. I could hear the dried, fallen leaves of the atrium’s vines and trees scudding along the stone.
It was almost Samhain by my reckoning, my people’s new year, the season of my birth, the time when boundaries between this world and the Other World shimmered and thinned. Soon the Pleiades would rise again in the night sky; wandering bards and bands of warriors would find a place to winter; the cattle would come down from the hills; the migrating flocks of birds would disappear. The thought of all this movement made my tiny, stale room unbearable. I took my mantle and coverlet and went down to the atrium where I sat in a corner and leaned my head back to see what I could of the sky. It was that dim indeterminate color that dawn watchers know goes on and on before the light quickens. I pulled my wraps around me and decided to wait for the sunrise. Olivia the cat found her way under my cloak and curled against my heart.
I must have gone into a light doze, halfway between sleeping and waking. I became aware of a low tuneless humming, a humming almost like human purring. Or maybe it was only Olivia. It went on and on, and a whispering rhythmic sound became part of it. The sound soothed me, like the sound of small waves on a pebble beach. Then I heard a song, or maybe I dreamed it.
I am the mother of the living
I am the lover of the dead
From the womb I knew my lover
Now I seek him in the riverbed.
The song rose and receded, rose and receded, the waters of a river, the river I had dreamed before, the dream of being tangled in the weeds. Now I drifted in a boat shaped like a crescent moon. In the shallows I would reach into the water and pull out a hand, a foot. I felt no horror at my finds. I was aware only of a diligent sorrow and the song going on and on until I knew the song was mine.
I am the mother of the living
I am the lover of the dead
From the womb I knew my lover
Now I seek him in the riverbed.
No! I wanted to speak. He is not dead. I saved him; I sent him away across the straits and raised the tide to protect him. But the song kept singing through me, and the boat kept drifting through the reeds, blown by a hot, malodorous wind.…
I opened my eyes to find an old woman’s face inches from my own. Her breath stank and whistled through the gaps in her teeth. She held a tiny glass vial, from which she pulled a stopper that proved to be a tiny blade. With it she delicately but firmly scraped my cheekbone, just below my eye. She held the blade poised for just a moment; it held a single, intact tear, which she carefully slid into the vial. Then, with the same precision, she harvested two more tears before she sealed the vial with the stopper.
I had been too astonished to speak, but now, as she drew back (and I could breathe again), I saw that old Nona the sweeper had accosted me. I had seen her only rarely; she swept while the whores slept, and went to bed around the time the house opened.
I managed a feeble, “What the fuck?”
“Whores’ tears.” She grinned, displaying all three teeth. “Cure anything. Couldn’t waste ‘em.”
“I’ve never heard that claim before,” I said with more resignation than indignation. My life had been riddled with crazy old crones. It was as much a relief as an irritation that one of them had caught up with me here.
“Old Nona’s the onliest one who knows,” she crooned, and then she cackled. “How do you think I live so long?”
She was speaking Latin but with an accent I couldn’t place—or it could have been the effect of her near toothlessness.
“Those are my tears.” I felt ornery.
“Not anymore.”
Nona slipped the vial, which she wore around her neck suspended on a string, inside her tunic where it rested between whatever was left of her breasts. Then she picked up her broom and began sweeping the fallen leaves into a crescent shape. She hummed while she worked, and I recognized the tunelessness. It was her voice that had threaded through my dreams.
“Who are you?” I demanded. I had met old women before who turned out to be goddesses or close relations. You couldn’t be too careful.
“Nona, Nona, Nona. No name Nona,” she replied unhelpfully. “That’s what everyone calls me. I don’t remember my other names.”
She started to sing.
I am the mother of the living
I am the lover of the dead
From the womb I knew my lover
Now I seek him in the riverbed.
“You sent me that dream,” I accused.
“What dream would that be, dearie?”
“The river, the boat, searching for my lover. You know!” I insisted.
My tears welled again, and I knuckled them back into the ducts before she could come and steal them with her tiny scalpel. She paused in her sweeping and eyed me intently, her eyes black, her head cocked like a bird’s. Then she laid her broom against the wall, crossed the atrium and prostrated herself before me. The next thing I knew, she was kissing my feet.
“Stop!” I protested. “Are you crazy?”
I hardly needed an answer, I thought. But she did stop, and when she got up again, she plucked my hand.
“Stand up, domina,” she urged. “Come.”
Domina? I was too confused and, I confess, curious to resist. Besides, this tiny old woman’s grip had the fierceness of a newborn’s, and the authority of a mother’s. Dislodging Olivia, I stood and followed where she led me. I was disappointed when we only went as far as the Lararium, a miniature temple, a sort of dollhouse for the gods. All Roman households had one on display, a locus for the care and feeding of the family’s personal gods. The Vine and Fig Tree’s Lararium, complete with miniature columns and a fresco depicting Mount Olympus, was tucked away in one of the smaller reception rooms. It was quite crowded both with such jolly well-known types as Venus and Bacchus as well as more obscure figures crudely fashioned by the whores and other house slaves to represent the gods they remembered from home. Bone’s many breasted—or, as he insisted, testicled—goddess was displayed prominently, and there was a Priapus, whose enormous prick was garlanded with single earrings that had lost their mates. Even the cats had a deity, a stately obsidian cat Dido had introduced as Bast.
I’d never had more than a nodding acquaintance with any of these figures and had not added to the population. My gods, untamed, shape-shifting gods, did not belong here. I would never insult them by giving them a fixed form and cramming them into a little box, as if they, too, could be confined and controlled, as if they, too, were slaves.
