The King's Gold (29 page)

“This has to be it—it has a bath; in her journal, she writes about how she held fire ceremonies here. Okay, here’s the riddle:

“CITY THREE’S INVISIBLE

WITHIN THIS ROCK, FIND A BATH

BURN LOVE’S APPLE, SEE THE CLEW

THEN TRY TO FLY FROM MY WRATH.”

“Okay. ‘
Within this Rock, find a Bath’—
there were mineral baths here, though I don’t know about the
‘Rock’
...it just must mean the stone buildings.”

He looked up from the guide, hoisting the green rucksack on his back. “It says they have a little museum on the premises. The next medal could be there.”

Upon paying a few euros, we were admitted into a gallery galactically less impressive than the ruins themselves. It did not take us long to pick through the displays. These were filled with dusty fractions of petroglyphs and reconstructed marble figures of naked athletes blessed with extraordinary musculature. They were also absolutely innocent of anything that could be remotely taken for Antonio Medici’s third clue.

After we exited the museum, however, Erik did find something.

Little mud roads networked through the ruins. They were marked with red-lettered modern signs. We had examined several of these, but Erik eventually stopped before one of the buildings, looking up to see the designation:

VIA DELLE TERME DEL MITRA

“The Road of the Baths of Mithras,” he said. “That’s the Persian god Sofia was writing about—the Bull-Killer, who created the world. This could be that mineral bath—where she performed that Rite of Naming for her coven.”

“Let’s go look.”

We moved down a pathway lined with grass; it led between two separate apartments made of that same rose stone. They had open-air, though steel-barred, doors cut into the walls, leading down to steps of more crumbling stones: curators had barred access to the ruins’ bottom levels.

Erik and I peered hungrily down between a door’s bars to the damp, mossy stairs on the other side. They descended into shadow. And there were no other tourists in sight.

“Let’s go in,” I said.

We slipped between the bars, Erik pushing and grunting past. We stumbled on the downward stone steps, which led into a half-shadowed network of destroyed rooms built of ancient, dusty brick. The ground was filmed with a layer of incandescent green moss growing up the pocked stone walls, blooming out into sprays of wild grass. Erik walked ahead of me, his rucksack-humped body now gloomed by the murky air, now awash in a strobe of white brilliance falling through sun windows cut into the ceiling. He turned around a corner, disappeared from sight.

I followed him. At the end of this corridor, Erik found a tall, ruined, marble statue of a young man. Half of the figure’s arm was missing, and before him lay the figure of a straining bull. The vanished part of the man’s arm had once been poised to slit the animal’s throat.

“Mithras,” I said.

Erik hovered before the figure. “‘
City Three’s Invisible / Within this Rock, find a Bath / Burn Love’s Apple, see the Clew / Then Try to Fly from my Wrath.’
This place is certainly
made
of
Rock
—bricks. But I don’t see a
Bath
.”

“No, let’s turn around.”

We backtracked, turned left, circled through black-shadowed passages that only increased our confusion. Ducking through a low-slung door that looked as if it might cave in at any moment, we found ourselves in another very dark, tumble-down space. A rounded arch of bricks formed the ceiling above us. To our left, a small window was half-barricaded by the earth, the level of which had risen since the Roman era; it was overgrown with vines. Leaf-green light flowed through the window, glinting on a small, black pool filling the hollow in the center of the room.

We crouched down, staring at the water.

Erik ran his hand through the wet. “Is this the
Rock
he was talking about? Is this even where we’re supposed to be?”

“I don’t know. And is this a bath—or just
flooding
? There’s no way to know if we’re in the right place.”

He slipped off his rucksack. Digging past Marco’s papers and the desiccating purple bouquet of love apples we’d picked earlier, he found a Maglite we’d taken from the Florentine Crypt. A blade of light moved through the shadows.

I took a breath. “All right, this is all we have. The riddle, the diary. We might as well start here.”

The Maglite’s beam skidded onto the skin of the ambiguous pond. We could spy only the blind vegetation fringing the water and toadstools palely shining. Some of the fallen ivy floated over the water that remained as obscure as black veils.

I stood up, slipped off my shoes, my pants, and my black sweater, which was still half-gnarled from the Duomo fire.

“What are you doing?”

“Going in.”

“Let me—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, Mark Spitz. No way you’re going into dark creepy pools where I don’t know
what
could be in there. Besides, I’m the better swimmer.”

As Erik reminded me of his dogpaddling skills, I stepped into the water, letting it close around my body.

It was a shock, like freezing. I plunged down, headfirst, to find the pool as fresh and clean as it was perfectly black. I surfaced, breathed, dove deeper.

But even after nearly an hour of roaming the water, I could not find anything like the gold medals we had found in the crypt or the alchemist’s lab.

I dragged myself back up the bank. Erik dried me with his shirt, gently rubbing my flanks, my stomach, my neck.

“None of this is any good.” I uselessly bounced on the balls of my feet for warmth. “But maybe that’s because we’re not following the instructions.”

“What—the riddle? That business about
love’s apples
. The flowers. Burning them.”

“Yes.”

“But how could setting flowers on fire help us find anything in here?”

“I can’t tell you. I’m out of ideas.”

“It sounds sneaky. Think about it: You
know
how witches were always concocting nice little drugs and poisons out of buttercups and wormwort and things like that.
‘Burn Love’s Apple, see the Clew’
? The whole thing’s too pharmaceutical for me. These flowers were probably supposed to kill Cosimo. What else would? And that means they’d kill
us.”

While I tugged my clothes back on, I gazed at the shadows, listening to the lapping of the water.

“We could just
try
it.”

He beamed the Maglite on the rucksack; the purple tips of the half-crushed flowers peeked from its mouth.

“Well...there is a window. That’s ventilation. And if something went wrong, we could just leave, I guess. Run out, do a nice, screaming, four-hundred-yard dash. But even just saying that, I can hear how
crazy
it sounds.”

Two minutes later, we piled the purple flowers by the bank.

A snap, then a match scraped against graphite. An aureole of gold flushed onto Erik’s cheeks. Troubled specters seemed to cast their shadows against the green-growing walls, awoken after centuries by our pantomime of Sofia’s Rite of Naming.

“Witchcraft,” I murmured into that spark of flame, as if to summon the third clue.

But I did not realize what spirits I called up.

It took a while for the flowers to burn, on account of the damp, but soon the series of struck matches began to crisp the petals black. Erik squatted before the twiggy blooms, blowing on the threads of flame as I beamed the Maglite.

“It’s catching,” he said.

A tendril of smoke lifted from the stems. It smelled of something sharp; I did not yet notice the red and raised patches of skin on my wrists and fingers, where I had touched the flowers while gathering them.

The black smoke continued to lift into the air. It filtered into the cave’s green light, disappeared over the black water.

“Can you see anything?” Erik asked.

“No.”

“I’m telling you, I don’t understand how this could
help.”

The air wavered in front of our eyes. And it was already too late.

A light, lovely, warm feeling enveloped me as the purple bells, one by one, caught fire. I looked over at Erik, and time curled in, just like the smoke. The emerald air covered us in a halo. The shadows seemed to splinter, then surround us like butterflies.

I opened my eyes; I had been dreaming. I was on the ground. My cheek rested on the moss, bathed in the cool water. I had dropped the flashlight; it shot an arrow of light over the floor. Across the kindling, Erik’s eyes were shut. He whispered something to me. My name.

“Lola.”

His voice was full of longing. And then, somehow, I wasn’t on the ground anymore. I lifted above the water and the burning flowers, and my body began circling the black pond. I was suspended in the air, laughing, as witches do. Fragments, mosaics, glittering scenes appeared in my mind, of Erik’s lovely body, and of his hands, from all angles, all sides. No, it was more than that.

I saw—
everything.

I saw Erik radiant, iridescent, out of time. I saw all the incarnations of him. I saw Erik as a baby, a snail-small fetus, as a boy. I saw him as an old man with scars and wrinkles on his face. I saw him choking with rage in the jungle at the same time as I saw him leaning over my naked body in a golden Long Beach morning. I saw him in knee socks, reading from a big book; I saw him floating in his mother’s womb, curled like a seahorse, with large alien eyes.

I saw him embittered, unkind. There were lines beneath his eyes; his hair was tangled; he was half-mad, bleeding from inexhaustible wounds. I saw him morph from the smiling countenance I had fallen in love with to the animal face I had seen him wear in the crypt when he killed Blasej. I saw this face, too, change into the red, nearly demonic expression that had flickered across his features in the Chiana valley. For a moment in that drug-time, I thought that these transmutations were particularly important...but then I saw others that were more beautiful, more beguiling. I saw his face become my face. I saw his face transform into Marco Moreno’s sly, sharp-boned face, and Yolanda’s, Manuel’s, my mother’s. I saw him straining during sex, with purple veins in his throat. I saw him lying peacefully in his coffin. And I saw him being born. I was dying from drugs as something holy and perfect was happening to me. I shouted out this terrible love I had for him, though it came out blitheringly.

From far off, I could hear Erik roaring. I heard myself coughing and gagging.

My feet jerked and fluttered as I continued to fly in my happiness across the room. But this was in fact my body convulsing within the black-blue pool into which I’d fallen.

Time passed.

I was dragged out into the daylight. A face flashed above me. It was beautiful and familiar and encircled by a black halo. A black hat. I saw Erik huddled on the grass outside, gasping for air. His face was ashen and his eyelids had swollen into plums.

A woman said my name now. My half-sister, Yolanda, was screaming it.

Then after that, for hours and hours that I couldn’t count, there was nothing.

A pallid wall and then only thoughts, fractions of thoughts. Images of my dark-eyed and lanky sister, the sounds of names; the images of letters written in deep black on a page, the ink-jet characters sinking into the depths of paper as pale as the hospital around me.

My dreams were made mostly of language. In my hallucinations I could sculpt words like clay. I conjured them, so their letters hung in the atmosphere of my imagination, and I made them combine, change shape, as a magician will marry a rose with a silk scarf and create from this alchemy a live dove.

Sam Soto-Relada.
The fence’s name floated to the top of my submerged mind.

But now someone was talking to me.

Today, I know why the color of the afterlife in hallucinations and movies is white—because that is the color of the hospital walls and the fluorescent bulbs jittering above you as you lie in your cold cot, in spirit flying into the shining paleness and then dipping back into your dark body like an ocean diver. White is the color of Heaven because that is the last color a great many of us will see.

So I was in the hospital for two days, fed intravenously for the first twenty-four hours while I pondered the mysterious transmutation of words and speculated on the interior design of the underworld.

And the entire time an angel sat beside me.

This angel wore a large, night-black Stetson tilted way back on her head. She had black glossy hair spilling over her shoulders and eyes so blackly dark that there was no differentiation between her pupils, which were dilated by fear, as they glared down on the shivering, drug-blasted form of yours truly.

I opened my eyes and saw her there. Wide cheeks, wide mouth, blue jade necklace, long pretty body.

“Love’s Apple is another name for belladonna, or deadly nightshade, you
absolute
ass,” the angel admonished me, at a rather violently high decibel despite her hysterical sobs and accompanying hiccups.

“That would explain it,” I whispered. “Belladonna. Pretty lady. He called me pretty lady.”

“You’re not making any sense. Look at you. You’re out of my sight not even a week and you nearly get yourself bone-dead.”

“Yolanda, where’s Erik?”

“I had to find you an apartment, then treat him there with castor oil and morphine I lifted from this place—and it was a real party, let me tell you. But he made out better than you did from that little experiment of yours, and I couldn’t let these docs see you together now that you’re so
famous
—”

“Oh. Right. The police—”

“Don’t worry, you look more like a dead dog than the little sketch they just started showing on TV. And I told the nurses here that you’re a semi-retarded Peruvian didgeridoo player named Maria Juarez, no papers, smoked the flowers by accident. They bought the story. For the time being. Though I really do recommend that you try to get out of here as soon as you can before they deport your
brainless
butt back to Cuzco...”

She began a litany of criticisms about the numbing weaknesses in my intelligence, ferociously pounding her knees and continuing to weep in between verbal abuses.