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1.
Aemilia Secunda has always been a faithful soothsayer.
She was dedicated to the Temple of the Sybilline Oracles at the age of seven; the Sisterhood summoned her after the loss of her parents, the patrician P. Aemilius Augustus and his wife Tabita, and her aunt was pleased to yield to the will of the gods. Aemilia listened to the wisdom of the Reverend Mother; she breathed the vapors and prophesied; she warned her sisters of the return of the blue box.
She does not want to die in the Sybil’s service. It seems the gods do not agree.
She can barely hear her sisters’ wails over the sounds of the groaning earth and she feels no sting of prophecy, so the voice in her head must be her own. No one is coming to save you, she thinks.
The wall next to her fractures with a sharp retort; another part of the ceiling caves in. The crack leers at her, a crooked grin defiling what had once been her home.
She crawls towards it. She can see through to the other side, but it does not show the streets of Pompeii.
“Sisters!” she calls, choking on the dust and the heat that sucks the air from her lungs, but they cannot hear her over the new roaring that shakes her very bones.
You’ll have to save yourself, she thinks, and half-climbs, half-falls through the crack in the wall.
2.
The other side of the crack is a wasteland; fires burn beneath an orange sky, but all is still.
Frozen.
Silent.
It is worse than the death of Pompeii.
3.
The only thing that lets Aemilia know she has come home is the return of sound and the looming presence of Vesuvius, still belching smoke; this new wasteland looks much the same. The Pompeii she knew is gone, buried underneath acres and acres of steaming ash.
“You cut that pretty close,” someone says. It’s a man, a foreigner: his hair is parted like a woman’s, and he wears trousers and a long coat.
After a moment, she recognizes him. While following the disciples of the blue box, she had been forced to duck around the corner by the Lupanare to avoid detection; the man had winked at her, but fortunately said nothing before going back to the graffiti he was chipping into the wall.
“How did you know?” she asks, amazed. She had thought him a common rogue, not an augur.
He taps the large leather bracelet on his wrist. “You’re giving off all sorts of fun readings. A dimensional crack – now that’s clever. No chance of tipping anyone off with your transport. Dangerous if you miss your window, though.”
“I was fortunate,” she says. “How did you escape?”
“Popped into my ship during the initial chaos,” the man says. “Left my buyer swearing and running for his own.” He gives a short laugh, and anger flares in heart.
“Why did you come back, if you find this so amusing?” she asks.
The man shrugs, but some of the mirth leaves his face. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he says. “This was a nice town. The wine. The women. The men. The gladiators. Definitely the gladiators—”
Aemilia glares at him.
“You’ve got to take what you can, while you can,” says the man. “Nothing lasts forever.” He salutes the town and walks away.
Some of her people still live; she finds survivors who escaped across the harbor, or who had still been in the hills. She even finds one of the new soothsayers, Caecilia Evelina, who says her family was saved by the gods of the blue box.
No one had saved her. You survived anyway. She does not know why this should produce such a storm in her heart, a roil of jealousy, anger, and sadness. Surely all her grief should be for her lost sisterhood and city.
The Caecilii are a great help in organizing the refugees. They all scrounge up shelter, food, clothes against the fast-approaching winter. It is rumored that soon the Emperor himself will be coming to oversee their aid.
Looking for Evelina, she finds Caecilius instead. He lays a rough carving of the blue box among a few battered statues of their household gods, the ones they must have carried with them to safety.
“Surely you cannot thank them for all this destruction,” she says.
“Of course not, priestess,” says Caecilius. “But when I heard the sound of their box appearing before us, the only thing I felt in my heart was hope.” He frowns, as if trying to recapture a memory.
Aemilia returns outside, to the open sky and the clean breeze no longer tainted with ash. She looks to the roads and the sea and feels something stirring in her own heart.
Caecilius joins her after a moment. “I always wanted to travel when I was younger,” he says. “But I’m an old man now. I thought I would be stuck in Pompeii.”
“Everything ends,” says Aemilia. “But you have at least one journey left. You're going home.” She pauses, then says, “You and your family have been very kind. I wish you well on your travels.”
“As do I,” says Caecilius. “I think the days are coming that you’ll never forget.”
He waves as he she walks away.
“Where will you go?” asks Evelina as she gathers provisions.
One week ago, Aemilia would have been paralyzed at the thought of no companions, no Pompeii, no whispers of the future. But that Aemilia had not seen the destruction of another place even more profound than the destruction of her home.
“I want to see the living world,” she says.
4.
Traveling alone is easier than Aemilia thought. She's not sure how she fits into the Sybil's plans anymore, but she draws the sacred eyes on her hands and face anyway. No one questions a priestess, and most people respect her, if they don't fear her outright. The sense of purpose that drives her wandering unnerves them.
She still has nightmares about the fall of Pompeii, but they grow fewer. She rarely prophesies – maybe she can't do it anymore – but sometimes knowledge comes to her that has no place in her existence. She dreams of the silent wasteland, or of long white hallways and strange soldiers, with fleshy pale hands held up in an ominous salute.
When bandits do attack, no one is more surprised than she when she easily disarms one of them and uses her new gladius to send the dagger in his other hand flying. The second stabs at her with his sword, but she parries it with ease. She swings her gladius down smartly and the bandit's sword breaks near the hilt.
“How dare you attack a messenger of the gods,” she hisses, and the bandits' courage breaks. They scramble away, leaving behind their horse. Its saddlebags are filled with ill-gotten gains.
Aemilia looks at the sword in her hand and thinks, Not enough reach.
She goes to the blacksmith in the next town. He is a pious man, and so he listens carefully when she describes the sword she saw in her dream. He is also a master craftsman, and so her experiment is mostly successful. She gives him the stolen gladius and the loot to dispose of as he sees fit, but she keeps the horse.
Her longsword does not feel quite the same in her hand as in her memories, but when thieves accost her on the streets of Ravenna, it works well enough.
She takes a ship to Carthage, then works her way northward. When she is not granted hospitality, she earns her way by telling stories – the tales of the gods alongside her own accounts of the road, and descriptions of the strange visions, or memories, that still come to mind, defying all normal order.
In all the years she has traveled, her stories produce only appreciation in her audiences, not recognition. Sometimes it feels like she is the only one who really sees the world; other times, she's not even sure which world she sees.
In Aquae Sulis, though, someone recognizes her.
Britannia is at the the edge of the empire; it feels like it is practically at the edge of the world. It is still Roman, however – or at least, somewhat Roman – and Aquae Sulis is renowned for its baths. She is standing outside the temple of Sulis Minerva, contemplating if she should go in and be cleansed, when a centurion absorbed in whatever orders are written on his wax tablet trips over his own feet and runs into her.
She catches his tablet, but he drops most of his gear as his arms windmill. He drops the rest of it as he tries to free a hand and apologize at the same time. When he dares to look her in the face, his mouth gapes open, and she can't help but laugh.
“That's the first time I've laughed in twenty years,” she tells him.
“I'm sorry, it's just – I think I've seen you in my dreams!” he blurts out, which only makes her laugh harder. He's just so young.
“Tell me about your dreams,” she says, as she helps him gather up his belongings.
“Well, there's you, and me, and another man, and a blue box—”
Aemilia grips his arm; he stops talking immediately. “Explain,” she says.
The centurion, who has the unlikely name of Roranicus and is due to march southeast in two days, tells her about another life, where they grew up together in the shadow of Hadrian’s Wall and were swept away to adventures by the god in the blue box.
“I thought they were just dreams,” says Roranicus. “But how can you be in them?”
“I saw the blue box,” says Aemilia, “in the last days of Pompeii. It foretold our doom.”
Roranicus looks away. “Strife follows the Doctor wherever he goes.”
“Storms, and fire, and betrayal,” says Aemilia, remembering. The Doctor. The lost traveler of Gallifrey.
She is the one who travels now.
“But—” The centurion hesitates.
“What is it?” she asks.
“I dream of the great things we do, too,” says Roranicus.
The gods of the earth had lied to the Sybil, had lied to all of them about the end of Pompeii, heralded only by the appearance of the blue box and its inhabitants. They had saved Evelina and her family.
It is strange to think that Aemilia might not have been standing here, had she not seen that blue box.
“Perhaps,” concedes Aemilia. “Perhaps the box and the Doctor are a warning, of great and terrible things to come.”
“What does greatness have to do with me?” asks Roranicus.
“As long as you're not terrible,” says Aemilia. For some reason, it is hard to keep from smiling.
5.
One day Aemilia wakes up from a dream of the silent, burning world and finds her own world is wrong. The sun is different, and when night falls, there is nothing in the sky but the moon.
The worst part is that no one else remembers.
She leaves the first message outside of Byzantium. She's stopped for a rest by the side of the road, in the shade of an enormous rock. Others have carved into the rock – their names, prayers, curses – but one in particular catch her eye. Lupa mala, it says; in Latin, not Greek. The strange sun beats down around her.
For no reason, she thinks of the centurion in Aquae Sulis, and wonders if he, too, dreams of a different sky.
She scratches her own message into the rock beneath it. She knows the story of Rome’s founding and keeps her wits about when she travels: she has no fear of wolves.
She writes the same phrase in Athens, on a fallen cornice-stone from one of the temples, and on one of the massive stones in a wall in Gaul, and in hundreds of other places along her winding path. Rome has built an empire of roads and aqueducts and cities; she builds one of words. Sometimes she wonders which will endure longer, or if all their works are doomed to one day disappear into a dark and silent sky. She leaves the message anyway.
She returns to Britannia just before the winter storms, and manages to make it out to Stonehenge by Saturnalia. There's no camp there now, of course.
Most people would have missed the entrance-way to the underground temple, but Aemilia is used to seeing things that aren't really there.
She hears the faint scuff of a foot just in time, and brings her sword up to block the gladius that comes out of the shadows. She sweeps her torch around and hears someone yelp, “Sorry!”
“Roranicus?” she asks.
“Sorry,” he says again. “I didn't know it was you! What are you doing here?”
“The stars are gone,” she says. “What are you doing here?”
“You remember them?” he asks, astonished. Aemilia thinks of her message and feels an unfamiliar smile tugging at her lips.
He tells her a fantastic story of Cleopatra, of a lost century of automatons, of enemies that now have never existed, of that fateful blue box and a lonely god and a girl he will wait for forever.
She's not me, she thinks. Nobody waits for me.
But she doesn't need anyone to wait for her; she has her own story.
She sees the haunted look in Roranicus's eyes, and knows that while he is prepared to wait forever, he also knows that forever is so very far away.
“When the stars come back, she’ll write your name across them,” she says. “It will open again one day.”
“How do you know?” he asks.
“The last thing to come out of Pandora's box,” she says, “is hope.”
He smiles a little at that. “Where will you go next?” he asks.
“I've never been outside of the empire,” she says.
“I have. Well, I will have – I used to have – ”
She punches lightly him in the arm.
“When I come back,” she says. “I’ll tell you a story.”
1.
The book ends, “Raggedy Man, good night.” Rory closes it and stares at the back cover for a long time.
It was published in 1941 and the author was from Brooklyn, but her name is Amelia Williams and he picked it up in a moment of weakness. Now he wonders if The Man Who Stayed for Christmas is some kind of message, impossible and confusing but hopeful nevertheless.
It wouldn’t be the first time.
Rory's grown much better at spotting the words over the years – at historical landmarks, on the walls of ancient towns hidden in larger cities with new names, even on some of the pieces in the several museums he's worked in. The first time he saw them, he had been half-mad with boredom and loneliness (nearly a century alone will do that) and they had jumped out at him like someone had called his name and then slapped his face. It's like being greeted by an old friend each time he finds a new one – which, he supposes, it sort of is.
They're everywhere, one of history's greatest mysteries. For one person to have made them all, they must have spent their whole life traveling. Rory knows for a fact she did. He wonders if she put them in the places he would be on purpose.
Some of them are the work of copycats – dreamers and romantics and radicals – but Rory can almost always tell when they're genuine. He recognizes her handwriting.
Two words: ASTRA MEMINI.
I remember the stars.
He looks up at the sky. There are no stars there now, but he hopes that soon there will be.