Page 79 of The Jewel of Corlivo

My pulse raced as the fragments came together in my mind. “So, what do we know? We have established that the Goddess was worshipped in a grotto on the site of what is now Corlivo, and that Arcadius’s own scribe, and likely Arcadius himself, was aware of this. From Brunus’s description, we might even guess that they saw the place. The language sounds like a firsthand description, although I suppose it could be something told to him. But let’s assume they saw it, that they actually visited the place.”

“Yes, all right, I’m following,” he said.

“Jump forward to the next thing we know. Five hundred years later, Straba travels the continent and claims to have found the lost caves. Once again, we have only his words set down by another. I think I remember. It was something like this—”

He cut me off and recited:

‘I have found the immense treasure that Arcadius set by in his cave city to keep it safe from those who would plunder it. Guided by the Mother and the full moon, I have found it.’

I paced the floor with furious excitement. “Here is the connection, the part that nobody else knows, other than you and me. The letter I found in the records room at Casa Caligine, Straba’s letter. It proves that he was in Corlivo. He had not just heard about its history from others; he was there.”

“Our crucial discovery.”

“Yes, but then he omitted reference to Corlivo in every subsequent copy of his manuscript. Why? It’s as though he doesn’t want others to know the history of the city. How strange.”

“I agree that it’s strange.” He shook his head as if to clear it.

“Anyway, Straba’s letter is only a love letter to a courtesan, but he mentions chasing her around a well. It’s the reference to the well that I have been thinking about. There’s another place at Caligine that a guest would not typically see. Do you know where the laundry is done there?”

“The laundry?” He looked puzzled. “No.”

“Of course not. It’s done in the very lowest level of the building, in a cellar that’s really just carved into the mountain itself. It’s a large space with a deep well in the middle.”

“So?”

“When I step back and picture it, with its hewn rock walls, I realize that it’s just like a cave. It is a cave. And what’s more, there’s a little shrine to the Goddess that Flavia, our laundress, kept. She said she inherited the care of it from the previous laundress, more than sixty years ago, and the previous laundress from the one before her. Who knows how old the shrine really is?”

He watched me intently. “You think it’s the original grotto.”

I nodded. “What if it is?”

“And you’re thinking, what if this grotto, this cave, is related to Arcadius’s lost cave city, because he was at that very spot.”

“Yes, yes, exactly.” I gripped the table with excitement. “What if that is what Straba realized when he was chasing poor Aemelia around that well?”

He stood up too. “And you have put these pieces together because you know something all the men who have searched for the lost caves over centuries don’t know: where the laundry is done at Casa Caligine.”

My body felt ablaze with excitement. “What if the lost cave city is right there, under Casa Caligine? The building is a thousand years old. It fits.”