It contained food along with a clay jar of water. She set the basket between her and Dwayne. She had to hold the food to his mouth so he could eat. They shared dried figs, salted fish flavored with, what else, garlic, and some kind of cheese that stank like hell, but they ate every crumb. They washed it all down with clean water that probably came from Jimbo’s spring.
All the while, the boy sat speaking softly to the old man, who remained silently studying the strangers. The old man rummaged in the woven hemp bag and pulled out an amber stone the size of a silver dollar. He held this stone up to his eye as though studying the captives through it and made clucking noises with his tongue.
“What’s his deal?” Dwayne asked, licking fruit pulp off his chin.
“I think he’s a seer or a soothsayer,” Caroline said. “He’s creeping me out. What’s he here for?”
“Sailors during this time didn’t sail from the sight of land without one of these guys around. They look at the portents and signs to divine whether or not the augments are favorable for the voyage.”
“So, what’s he doing down here with us?”
“The captain and crew have a lot of questions,” she said. “Are we real or phantoms? Are we witches or demons? Are we a danger to them or was finding us a good thing? Maybe we’re worth a ransom. Or maybe we’re favored by the gods.”
“And what he decides determines whether they kill us or not,” Dwayne said.
“Let’s hope we make the right impression.”
The old man removed a ball of string from the bag, and he unspooled a length. The string was made of strips of ragged cloth and twisted fibers knotted together. His fingers played over the knots. He muttered as he pulled another length from the ball. He stopped unraveling the ball. His fingers gently touched a hairy knot of the frayed material, and he cooed over it softly.
He turned to the boy and spoke in a reedy croak. The boy turned to Dwayne and Caroline and rattled off something that sounded like a question. Caroline shook her head in response, and the boy focused his attention on her. He repeated his question, but the words sounded different this time. The boy was trying to determine what language they understood. Caroline shook her head again. He spoke again, and this time it sounded almost familiar to Caroline’s ear. She nodded her head and beckoned with her fingers in a gesture she prayed he understood was a request for him to repeat that last phrase.
The boy’s brow wrinkled, and he leaned closer to whisper to the old man who replaced the looking stone in the bag and began to reel in the string. They were leaving.
“Look here! Here!” Caroline shouted, startling the boy. She traced a finger on the sand and wrote in ancient Greek script any word that she could recall that might be relevant.
STRANGERS
ISLAND
WATER
The boy moved closer on all fours to look at the letters traced in the sand. He looked up at Caroline with raised brows.
He said something to her that sounded like, “You speak Greek?” But the phrasing and pronunciation were barely similar in sound to what she had learned on her own. It was like the difference between Italian and Portuguese. So close and yet so far. It would take time to work out the differences—time they didn’t have.
“Speak me words!” she said, forcing herself to go slow and enunciate. She pointed at each word. “Strangers. Island. Water.”
The boy read the words aloud then wrote a word of his own on the sand.
WITCH
“No!” she said. “We visit. Far away land. Not witch. Not bad.”
The boy pursed his lips and turned to the old man, who was eyeing the exchange with interest. The boy pointed at Dwayne and then wrote a new word.
EAGLE
“Yes. An eagle.”
The boy wrote again.
Ρωμε
Rome. He thought the eagle in the NRA symbol on Dwayne’s shirt meant they were Romans.
“We are Romans!” Caroline said in rushed college Latin. The boy’s eyes widened. She took a breath and spoke again more slowly.
“We are from Rome. We are scholars seeking knowledge of the world. We mean you no harm.”
The boy’s eyes narrowed as he tried to follow what she was saying. Caroline knew her Latin pronunciation was probably as far off as her Greek. But her Latin vocabulary was a lot more extensive.
“Your Greek is terrible. We will talk in Latin,” the boy said, smirking, and spoke some phrases Caroline couldn’t follow entirely.
“Please speak slower. Your Latin is not much better than my Greek,” she said, turning the tables on the little snot.
He spoke slowly and told her that the old man was ordered by Ahinadab, whom Caroline figured was the captain or ship’s master, to find out the true nature of the captives. The captain thought they were spies from Hamilcar of Carthage sent to spy on him.
Caroline spat at that name, as she knew from her reading any good Roman would do. The old seer suspected they were witches. These were times of uncertainty. The gods were unhappy, and Ba’al was casting his eye upon the Earth from a rogue star. A reference to the comet.
The boy asked how they arrived at the island and where their boat was. Caroline explained that they had been robbed and marooned by the crew of a merchant ship that promised to carry them to Alexandria. This was a story she worked out before falling asleep but added the part where they were Romans on a whim. She told him that her name was Commodus
