carried him outside, and threw him into the street, where the old king’s daughter, Tarquin’s wife, ran over her unfortunate dad with her chariot, splattering the wheels with his blood.
A lovely start to a lovely reign.
Now Tarquin wore his years heavily. He’d grown hunched and thick, as if all the building projects he’d forced on his people had actually been heaped on his own shoulders. He wore the hide of a wolf for a cloak. His robes were such a dark mottled pink, it was impossible to tell if they’d once been red and then spattered with bleach, or had once been white and spattered with blood.
Aside from the guards, the only person standing in the room was an old woman facing the throne. Her rose-colored hooded cloak, her hulking frame, and her stooped back made her look like a mocking reflection of the king himself: the Saturday Night Live version of Tarquin. In the crook of one arm she held a stack of six leather-bound volumes, each the size of a folded shirt and just as floppy.
The king scowled at her. “You’re back. Why?”
“To offer you the same deal as before.”
The woman’s voice was husky, as if she’d been shouting. When she pulled down her hood, her stringy gray hair and haggard face made her look even more like Tarquin’s twin sister. But she was not. She was the Cumaean Sibyl.
Seeing her again, my heart twisted. She had once been a lovely young woman—bright, strong-willed, passionate about her prophetic work. She had wanted to change the world. Then things between us soured…and I had changed her instead.
Her appearance was only the beginning of the curse I had set on her. It would get much, much worse as the centuries progressed. How had I put this out of mind? How could I have been so cruel? The guilt for what I’d done burned worse than any ghoul scratch.
Tarquin shifted on his throne. He tried for a laugh, but the sound came out more like a bark of alarm. “You must be insane, woman. Your original price would have bankrupted my kingdom, and that was when you had nine books. You burned three of them, and now you come back to offer me only six, for the same exorbitant sum?”
The woman held out the books, one hand on top as if preparing to say an oath. “Knowledge is expensive, King of Rome. The less there is, the more it is worth. Be glad I am not charging you double.”
“Oh, I see! I should be grateful, then.” The king looked at his captive audience of senators for support. That was their cue to laugh and jeer at the woman. None did. They looked more afraid of the Sibyl than of the king.
“I expect no gratitude from the likes of you,” the Sibyl rasped. “But you should act in your own self-interest, and in the interest of your kingdom. I offer knowledge of the future…how to avert disaster, how to summon the help of the gods, how to make Rome a great empire. All that knowledge is here. At least…six volumes of it remain.”
“Ridiculous!” snapped the king. “I should have you executed for your disrespect!”
“If only that were possible.” The Sibyl’s voice was as bitter and calm as an arctic morning. “Do you refuse my offer, then?”
“I am high priest as well as king!” cried Tarquin. “Only I decide how to appease the gods! I don’t need—”
The Sibyl took the top three books off the stack and casually threw them into the nearest brazier. The volumes blazed immediately, as if they’d been written in kerosene on sheets of rice paper. In a single great roar, they were gone.
The guards gripped their spears. The senators muttered and shifted on their seats. Perhaps they could feel what I could feel—a cosmic sigh of anguish, the exhale of destiny as so many volumes of prophetic knowledge vanished from the world, casting a shadow across the future, plunging generations into darkness.
How could the Sibyl do it? Why?
Perhaps it was her way of taking revenge on me. I’d criticized her for writing so many volumes, for not letting me oversee her work. But by the time she wrote the Sibylline Books, I had been angry at her for different reasons. My curse had already been set. Our relationship was beyond repair. By burning her own books, she was spitting on my criticism, on the prophetic gift I had given her, and on the too-high price she had paid