The huts were round with a single large room, made of intertwined twigs and branches daubed with mud, with peaked roofs made of rushes and reeds. For a doorway, sturdy upright poles, in some cases elaborately carved, supported a wooden lintel; a flap of stitched animal skins provided a covering for the doorway. The huts, furnished with simple pallets for sitting or sleeping, were intended strictly for shelter from the elements or for privacy. All cooking and most social activities took place outside.
The marketplace, on the other side of the Spinon and nearer the river, consisted of a few thatched sheds for storing salt, pens for livestock, and an open area where traders could park their wagons and carts and offer their goods for sale. The livestock included oxen, cattle, swine, sheep, and goats. On any given day, the various commodities might include dyed wool, fur rugs, hats made of straw or felt, bags made of leather, clay vessels, woven baskets, combs and clasps made from tortoiseshell or amber, bronze ornaments and buckles, and axes and ploughshares made of iron. There were pine nuts from the mountains, crayfish from the river, succulent frogs from the marshy lake, pots of honey, bowls of cheese, pitchers of fresh milk, and, in season, chestnuts, berries, grapes, apples, and figs. Some of the traders arrived at regular intervals and became old friends to the settlers and to each other, but new faces were always appearing, men from far away who had heard of the trading post and were eager to see for themselves the variety of goods to be found there.
The trading post was also a place to exchange news and gossip, to hear stories from faraway places, and to listen to traveling singers. Men who knew magic passed through, offering their services. Some could cure the sick or make a barren woman fertile. Some could see the future. Some could commune with the numina that animated the nonhuman realm.
By far the most exotic visitors to the settlement were the traders who arrived by boat, paddling upriver from the sea, where they arrived on larger ships, which they left moored at the mouth of the Tiber. Those huge, splendid ships—some of the settlers had once made a journey downriver to look at one—carried the traders up and down the coast and even, so they claimed, across the great sea. These seafarers called themselves Phoenicians. They spoke many languages, wore brightly colored clothes and finely wrought jewelry, and brought with them extraordinary things to barter, made in unimaginably distant lands, including small images of men, made of metal or clay. At first, misunderstanding, the settlers thought that numina lived in the images, just as numina lived inside trees and rocks, though the idea that a numen would reside in even the most splendid man-made object seemed to many of them far-fetched. The Phoenicians tried to explain that an idol did not house a numen, but stood as a representation of something called a god; but this concept was too abstract for the settlers to follow.
The latest descendent in the line of Po and Lara was a girl called Potitia, daughter of Potitius. Growing up at the trading post, Potitia had been allowed from earliest childhood to roam the surrounding countryside. For a long distance upriver and down, she knew every steep embankment and muddy beach along the riverbank. She had waded across the Tiber when it was low, and had swum across when it was high.
She had also explored the Spinon, which ran in front of the settlement, following it up through a little valley flanked by steep hillsides to its source, a marshy lake surrounded by hills. The marsh teemed with living creatures—frogs, lizards, dragonflies, spiders, snakes, and all sort of birds. It was exhilarating to see a flock of startled geese take flight from the reeds, or to watch the swans make circles in the sky before landing on the water with effortless grace.
As she grew older, Potitia’s explorations had taken her farther and farther from the settlement. One day, venturing upriver, she had discovered the hot springs. Greatly excited, she had run all the way home to tell the others, and was chagrined to learn that her father already knew about the springs. Where did the bubbling water come from? Potitius said it flowed up from a fiery place deep underground. Curious, Potitia had searched all around the hot springs for an entrance to the underworld, but had never found one. On one occasion, the hot springs dried up, but then returned. Alarmed that such a thing might happen again, the settlers decided to build an altar at the springs, and to make offerings to appease the fiery numina in the earth. Potitius had built the altar himself, using oxen to drag a large stone to the spot, then chiseling the stone into a shape that seemed suitable to him. Once a year, an offering of salt was spread upon the altar, then scattered over the hot springs. So far, they had not run dry again.
As her explorations took her outward from the village, so they also took her upward. The first of the Seven Hills which Potitia conquered was the one directly behind her family’s hut. On the side that faced the settlement, the hill presented a sheer cliff that was impossible for even the most determined child to climb, but on the far side of the hill, by trial and error, Potitia discovered a route that led all the way to the top. The view was astounding. Circling the crest of the summit she could look down on the marshy lake, on the settlement below, and on the region of the hot springs, which she now could see were situated at the edge of a large plain that lay in an elbow of the Tiber. Gazing beyond these familiar places, she realized that the world was much vaster than she had previously imagined. The river stretched on in either direction for as far as she could see. Wherever she looked, the impossibly distant horizon faded to a smudge of purple.
One by one, Potitia conquered all the Seven Hills. Most of them were bigger than the one closest to home, but were easier to climb, once you knew the best place to begin the ascent and which route to take. Each hill had something to distinguish it. One was covered with a beech forest, another was crowned with a ring of ancient oaks, another was populated by osier trees, and so on. The hills had not yet been given individual names. Collectively, for longer than anyone could remember, men called them the Seven Hills. More recently, a visitor passing through had jokingly referred to the region as the ruma, which was the same word men used to refer to a woman’s breasts, or the teats of a cow, and now, as often as not, ruma was the word people used for the hilly region. To the settlers, it seemed perfectly natural to liken the features of the earth to the parts of a body.
In a cliff directly across from the settlement, beyond the meadow on the far side of the Spinon, Potitia had discovered the cave. Situated in a cleft of the steep hill and concealed by scrubby bushes that clung tenaciously to the rocks, the mouth of the cave was hard to discern from the ground directly below; it might have been nothing more than a shadow cast by a lip of rock. Through trial and error, Potitia determined that it was impossible to climb down to the cave from above. Climbing up from the below would require considerable skill and daring. Her first few attempts over the course of a summer resulted in one nasty fall after another, and repeated scoldings from her mother, who disapproved of Potitia’s scraped hands, bloody knees, and torn tunics.
Eventually, Potitia discovered a way to reach the cave. When she stepped inside for the first time, she knew that all her efforts had been worthwhile. To a child’s eyes, the space seemed enormous, almost as big as her family’s hut. She sat upon an outcropping of rock that formed a natural bench, and rested her arm on a ledge that provided a shelf. The cave was like a house made of stone, just waiting for her to claim it. Unlike the hot springs, the cave was unknown to the others at the settlement. Potitia was the first human being ever to set foot in it.
The cave became her secret haven. On hot summer days she escaped there to take a nap. On wet winter days she sat inside, comfortable and dry, and listened to the rain.
As Potitia grew older, roaming the woods and exploring the ruma grew less important to her. She became more interested in learning the skills her mother could teach her, such as cooking and weaving baskets from the reeds that grew around the marsh. Her mother told her that she should begin to consider which of the boys in the settlement she might wish to marry; by various signs, Potitia’s body had begun to manifest the advent of her womanhood.
To celebrate her maturity, Potitia’s father gave her a precious gift. It was an amulet made of the yellow metal called gold.
For ten generations, the lump of gold which Tarketios had given to Lara had been left in its natural state; nothing had been fashioned from it, for the metal seemed too soft to be properly worked. It was a visiting Phoenician who had shown Potitia’s grandfather that gold could be alloyed with another precious metal called silver, and for a great price the Phoenician smith had crafted the resulting ingot into a shape specified by Potitia’s grandfather. By the highest Phoenician standards, the workmanship of the amulet was crude, but to Potitia’s eyes, it was a thing of wonder. Made to be hung upon a leather necklace, the little amulet was in the shape of a winged phallus. Her father called it Fascinus—bringer of fertility, protector of women and infants in childbirth, guardian against the evil eye.
Although she had questioned her father on the subject and listened carefully to his answers, Potitia could not quite understand whether the amulet actually was Fascinus, or contained Fascinus, or only represented Fascinus, in the way that the idols of the Phoenicians were said to represent their gods. Despite her lack of clear understanding, Potitia nonetheless felt very grown-up when she wore the amulet. She was no longer the girl with skinned knees and muddy feet, the child who wandered carefree across the little world of the ruma. Even so, she carried within her a child’s sense of wonder and the sweet nostalgia of having grown up in a world where there was little to fear and much to discover.
Until very recently, that world had remained unchanged—a place where strangers met in good company and where Potitia might expect to raise her own children with little concern for their safety, allowing them to wander at will, as she had done. But now, all that had changed. The world had become dark and dangerous. Families kept their children always in sight. Even grown men did not dare to wander alone across the ruma.
The coming of the monster Cacus had changed everything.
It was Potitia who had seen him first, that day she headed down to the river to wash a basket of clothes. At the sight of him, she screamed, dropped the basket, and fled. The creature ran after her, making a hideous noise that made the hair rise on the back of Potitia’s neck: “Cacus! Cacus!”
Just when her energy flagged and he might have caught her, the monster gave up the chase. Potitia reached the settlement unharmed. She was convinced that Fascinus, and Fascinus alone, had saved her. All the way back to the village, she ran with one hand at her throat, grasping the amulet tightly, begging for Fascinus’s protection, whispering aloud, “Save me! Save me, Fascinus!” Afterward, trembling with relief, she whispered again to the amulet, giving it her thanks and pledging her devotion. It was a prayer that Potitia uttered, in just such a manner as the Phoenicians would have understood, made not to a nameless numen that inhabited a thing or place, but to a powerful, superhuman entity that possessed the intelligence to understand her words. She had not offered ritual propitiation to a numen, but had prayed directly to a god. In that moment, although Potitia acted with no idea of the significance of what she had done, Fascinus became the first native god to be worshiped in the land of the ruma.
For a long time, no one but Potitia had seen the monster, and there were those in the settlement, listening to her description of Cacus, who thought that she must have imagined the encounter on the path. Her family, after all, were known for their fanciful beliefs, showing off the amulet they called Fascinus and hinting that their line had sprung from the union of a numen and a woman—as if such a thing were possible!
Then, little by little, it became evident that some malicious creature was indeed among them. Bits of food went missing, along with small objects that no one had cause to steal. Now and again, objects of value were found broken—a spinning wheel, a clay pot, a toy wagon made of wood—as if some overgrown, immensely strong child smashed them out of spite. The troublemaker struck at night and left no trail; Cacus had grown skillful at covering his tracks.
The settlers were angry and frightened. Their fear of the monster was compounded by another: that the traders who came to the market would learn about Cacus and be frightened away. If traders stopped coming, the settlers would lose their livelihood, and the settlement might vanish altogether.
One morning, during the busiest cattle market of the year, everyone in the settlement was awakened by a lowing among the cattle. Outside the pen, a cow was found dead, its body torn open and much of the flesh missing. The cow could not have climbed over the fence, and the gate remained shut. What sort of man could possess the strength to lift a cow up and over the rough-hewn fence, and then to kill the beast and tear it open with his bare hands? A thrill of panic ran through the settlement. Some of the cattle-traders rounded up their herds and drove them homeward at once.
Armed with knives and spears, hunting in pairs, the settlers combed the Seven Hills. Two of the hunters must have found the monster. Their bodies were eventually discovered on the hill of the osier trees, broken and eviscerated, much as the cow’s body had been.
It did not take long for word to spread up and down the trails that led to the ruma: The monster that was stalking the trading post had an appetite for human flesh. Traders did not merely stop doing business at the settlement; they made great detours to avoid passing anywhere near it.
With most of the traders gone and traffic so greatly reduced on the trails, the monster grew even bolder. An infant went missing. Her remains were found only a short distance from the settlement, at the foot of the steep hill on the far side of the Spinon. One of the searchers, looking up to avert his eyes from the horrible sight, glimpsed a movement on the hillside above. From behind a bramble-covered lip of stone, a hideous face peered down for a moment, then disappeared. A moment later, a shower of rocks rained down on the searchers, who fled. Peering up at the hillside from a safe distance, they discerned what appeared to be a cave, its opening obscured by brambles. None of them could see a way to scale the hillside. Even if it could be scaled, none of them could imagine what would await them once they reached the mouth of the cave.
Back at the settlement, the searchers told what they had discovered. To her horror, Potitia realized that the monster had taken up residence in her secret cave, which was a secret no longer.
From his hole high up in the side of the hill, Cacus ventured out at night to terrorize the settlement. During the day, he stayed hidden in the cave.
More than once, the settlers attempted to scale the hillside and attack him in his lair. Bellowing his name, Cacus dropped stones on them. One settler fell and broke his neck. Another was struck in the eye and blinded. Another managed to draw closer to the mouth of the cave than anyone else, but was killed instantly by a stone that struck his forehead. Instead of falling, his limp body became caught on sharp rocks and brambles. No one dared to climb up and retrieve it. There it hung for several days and nights, a horrifying rebuke to those who had sought to destroy the monster. One morning, the body was no longer there. Cacus had claimed it. The man’s bones, picked clean, appeared one by one at the foot of the hill as Cacus tossed them out.
It was Potitius who suggested that the hillside be set afire. If the flames and smoke did not kill the monster outright, they might at least drive him from his lair. The brambles at the foot of the hill were set on fire. The flames spread upward, heading directly for the cave. Then a wind blew up from the Tiber and drove the flame this way and that. Embers spiraled high in the air, blew across the Spinon, and ignited the thatched roof of a hut. The flames spread from hut to hut. The settlers worked desperately to douse the flames with buckets of water from the river. When the fire at last burned itself out, the face of the hillside was scorched and black, but the cave was untouched and the monster unharmed.
It was decided that a watch should be set upon the cave, so that, if the monster descended, an alarm could be raised. Men and boys took turns throughout the day and night, training their eyes upon what little could be seen of the mouth of the cave from below.
One of Potitia’s cousins, a burly, hotheaded youth named Pinarius, boasted to her that he would put an end to Cacus once and for all. Caught up in his enthusiasm, Potitia confessed to her cousin that she had climbed to the cave many times. Scarcely believing her, Pinarius nonetheless accepted her explanation of how it could be done.
On the afternoon that it was his turn to keep watch on the cave, Pinarius decided to act. The day was hot and the air was heavy with sleep. The rest of the settlers dozed, except for Potitia, who knew of her cousin’s plan and gave him a kiss for luck before he began the climb.
From above, there came a faint noise that they took to be the sound of the monster snoring. Perhaps it was the buzzing of flies, drawn to the cave by blood and gore. Potitia remembered summer afternoons when she had dozed in the shadowy coolness of the cave. She could picture the monster asleep in that familiar, beloved place. The image made her shiver, yet it also pierced her with a sadness that she could not explain. For the first time she wondered where the monster came from. Were there others of his kind? Surely a mother had given birth to him. What fate had led him to the ruma, to become the most wretched of all living things?
Pinarius made the ascent quietly and quickly, but as he drew close to the cave he reached for a handhold that would have taken him in the wrong direction. Watching from below, Potitia corrected his course with a loud whisper.
The sound that might have been the monster’s snoring abruptly stopped. Potitia felt a shiver of dread.
Pinarius reached the mouth of the cave. He pulled himself onto the lip of stone, gained his balance, and grinned down at her. He pulled out his knife and showed her the blade, then disappeared into the cave.
The scream that followed was like nothing she had ever heard, so loud that it woke every sleeper in the village. A rending noise followed, then silence. A few moments later, Pinarius’s head came flying from the hole in the hillside. It landed with a thud in the grass just beyond Potitia, who fell to the ground in a faint. Dazed, with the sun in her eyes and swooning from the heat, she looked up and saw Cacus standing on the lip of stone high above, staring down at her. His hulking, misshapen body was covered with blood and gore. The sound that came from his throat—“Cacus? Cacus?”—had a low, urgent, questioning quality, as if he gazed at a thing which fascinated him, from which he desired a reply.
“Cacus?” he uttered again, cocking his head and staring down at her.
Potitia scrambled to her feet. Running blindly, she tripped over the head of Pinarius. She gave a shriek and staggered back to the settlement, weeping.
The death of Pinarius drove many of the settlers to the limit of their endurance. His father, also named Pinarius, argued that the time had come to abandon the settlement. The monster had inflicted great suffering, and against him they were powerless; but more than this, the arrival of the creature had unleashed a great evil in the land of the ruma. The numina all around them had turned against the settlers. The worst of the misfortunes had been the burning of the huts by treacherous winds and flames, but there had been many other, smaller misfortunes in recent days. The settlers must move on, argued the elder Pinarius. The only questions to be debated were when and to where, and whether they should stay together or go their separate ways.
“If we leave, cousin, what will keep the monster here?” asked Potitius. “I think he’ll follow us. He’ll stalk us on the trail. Our children will be his prey.”
“Maybe,” acknowledged Pinarius. “But in the open, away from his cave, we might at least have a chance to kill the thing.”
Potitius shook his head. “This creature is a far more skillful hunter than any of us. We’d have no chance against him in the wild. One by one, he would take us.”