Roma.The novel of ancient Rome

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