Kelli Stanley - The Curse-Maker

I tried the second floor, found more success. An old man, his skin falling off in flakes, slept on a cot in the corner while his son-unemployed, just temporary-drank cheap wine, and hit his wife for spilling the chamber pot on the way out the door. No, can’t say I remember him. Try the third. The door slammed again.

I walked the narrow stairs, which groaned and creaked like an aging whore going for one last throw. My foot nearly poked through the fifth step, where the wood was black. A door was facing me, and I could hear snoring behind it. Someone was home.

I knocked, and a raspy voice with years of coughing answered me.

“Who is it?”

“A man with money.”

The answer was enough to get him out of bed. He was a paunchy man, past middle age, wearing a towel around his waist and nothing else. The room smelled like sweat and cabbage.

He looked me up and down. I tried not to look at him. His chest and back were furry with matted hair, and he stank. I held out three sestertii in my palm.

“You know Bibax?”

“He ain’t here no more. He’s dead.”

He reached under the towel to scratch himself. I’d try one more time, so no one could ever call me a coward.

“I know he’s dead. I know he lived in this building. I’d like to see where.”

He looked at me thoughtfully. “Add two more, an’ I’ll tell you.”

I’d pay five times the amount if he backed away. I reached in and pulled out the pouch again. I added two more sestertii. He licked his lips at the money and then belched.

“Who tol’ you he lived here?”

“One of the market sellers.”

“Well, they was wrong.” He said it with a triumphant leer, as if he’d just scored a point. “He useta live here-still kept a room down the hall, but he moved into a-a”-he belched again-“a bigger place, small house, down by the new spring. Go there, if you wanna see.”

He snatched up the money, and I felt his fingernails scratch my palm. I rubbed my hand down my tunic.

“Anyone in his old room up here?”

“No. Nobody. Three down, on the left.” He turned to shut the door.

“One more thing-”

“Yeah?”

“Who owns this building? Who do you pay rent to?”

He shrugged. “Bibax always collected it for everybody. Still did, even when he moved. I never seen the guy.”

“How do you pay it now?”

“I ain’t paid it.” His smile showed three teeth that were yellow and black. “If I did-Bibax said pay at the baths, if he ain’t here. And he ain’t.”

The door slammed this time and shook the walls. The baths again. Everything wound up at the baths. Except Furry Back.

I walked down the hall and opened the door. The room was small, empty, and clean. Someone had cleaned it. Not even a smell of Bibax remained.

I left the insula, careful to avoid the fifth step on the upper stairs. No one seemed to know Bibax, and no one seemed to care. I needed to find someone. Anyone. Someone to help me see.

I caught a glimpse of the other reservoir, even from here, and hurried to it. There was urgency in the sun, urgency in getting back to the main square so I could find Gwyna, make sure she was all right. Urgency in getting out of Aquae Sulis alive.

The spring was softer, less dramatic than the other one. But the same water. It danced and trembled, holding out the promise of something. I could see why Philo wanted to put another bath down here. It was a little bit of peace in a little corner of Aquae Sulis.

An old woman was limping down a dirt path from some woods up the small hill. She stopped at the spring and looked at me. Her eyes were sharp.

“Nothing here. It’s the other one, where you’ll find it.”

“How do you know what I’m looking for?”

She leaned on her stick, and set down the mushrooms she’d been picking.

“You’re not from here. Must be looking for the temple. That’s where they all go.”

In more ways than one.

I stared at her. “I’m looking for answers.”

Her cackly laugh braced me. “Everyone wants answers, boy. You need questions.”

“I’ve got those, too. I’m-I’m trying to help the goddess. Help the town.”

She tilted her head to the side, looking like an old thrush, and sighed, a deep sigh from the bottom of her wrinkled feet. Her blue eyes glinted.

“Help the goddess? What makes you think she needs help?”

“Maybe she doesn’t. I don’t know. There’s something wrong with this town. I’m trying to fix it.”

Her eyes pored over me. “So what are your questions?”

I stared at her. She was the first person to offer some help who didn’t have a motive for it. “They’re about Rufus Bibax. He used to-”

She spat on the ground. “I knew him. Knew all about him.”

I reached out a hand to her elbow and asked as humbly as I knew how.

“Could you-could you talk to me?”

We sat on the bank by the spring and watched the water bubble. Her eye and memory for detail amazed me. I felt like I’d met Bibax. Like I’d seen through him to the rot inside.

He knocked around the empire, traveling from Mauretania through Baetica in Hispania and past the Alps into Gaul. From there he’d crossed over into Britannia at some point, and, like the dead leaves and garbage from the marketplace, settled in a little corner called Aquae Sulis.

Bibax had a special gift. A memory. A memory so sharp, he could remember a face after years of wine or women or poverty or money corroded it into an unrecognizable mask. He’d play games with his memory for the people who lived here, recall a series of numbers or recite poetry he just heard. Bibax had a gift-and he used it.

Blackmail was part of how he traveled, part of how he thought. More profitable still when you could manufacture the crime. Supply death for a price-cover it up for a price. Everything, for Bibax, had a price.

Healing town to healing town, curing frustrated wives and wastrel nephews, freeing them, then holding them prisoner. Curse recoiled, mirrored back. Someone to help him-someone weak or desperate or greedy or wicked, someone who was all and more. Who it was she couldn’t say, but I knew Bibax now. He and Materna sharing one soul between them, animus maledictus.

Materna tried to use him, but nobody could use Bibax in the end. The Hydra heads sprouted wherever he traveled, and Bibax anchored them, kept them alive.

I was past ready to go. I thanked the old woman, tried to give her money, which insulted her, so I apologized, and thanked her again.

She stared at me. “So you have been given aid. You know the questions, and you will find the answers.”

I felt a strange sort of confidence, but looked at the sun and saw it was past the midpoint. The baths. “I will. But now-”

“Now you must hurry to your woman.”

I took her hand in mine and held it to my lips as if she were a senator’s wife. She picked up the mushrooms, watched me. I rushed up the path to the center of town.

About halfway up I realized I’d never mentioned Gwyna. I turned around.

“How did you-”

No one there. She moved quickly for an old lady. I shrugged and kept walking.

A strange dry wind blew warmth from the hills, kicking the brown-green leaves until they broke against a stone wall, spines cracked and flight ended. It was the kind of wind that made shopkeepers close early and children pay attention to their grammar lessons. There was force and threat and promise behind it, and no guarantees.

It suited Aquae Sulis.

A shrill murmur floated on the wind like everything else, held aloft until it sank in the dirt, perforated with shrieks. The baths.

I ran up the hill. Passersby that weren’t staring at me were looking toward the baths. Women poured out, helter-skelter. Some running, some clustered in tight little knots around the entrance.