‘Kald has your word for it.’
The two men shook on it and exchanged embraces. The deal was concluded.
Fanina saw the Thracian coming towards her, rolling his shoulders. She wanted to run, but her legs would no longer carry her. She was hardly able to stand, almost fainting, eyes wide with terror and disgust, her mouth open to utter a cry which could not pass her dry throat; she backed away. Slowly, without any sign of impatience, sure of himself, the Thracian followed her step by step, wearing a wide, triumphant smile. ...
Finally Fanina was brought up against the front row of spectators.
Now she could no longer retreat. She was at the mercy of the gladiator, who took her by the shoulder and drew her to him.
‘A kiss!’ shouted someone in the crowd in the midst of laughter.
‘A kiss!’ took up the spectators in chorus.
‘Come on now, a kiss! ’ said the Thracian, tightening his grip.
He was crushing her to him. The strong smell of his sweaty tunic struck her, and the coarse hair of his short beard scratched her skin. His thick, wet lips drew nearer. Desperately, Fanina turned her head away and saw, a hundred paces off, standing on the garden wall, the massive shape of the dwarf in the russet leather cloak.
He too had managed to throw off the patrols; following close on her heels he had, like her, avoided all the road-blocks. He had never ceased to watch her, and there he was, as always when disaster was about to befall her.
She struggled wildly to escape from the Thracian, and saw the dwarf straighten up. Then she saw his incredibly long arm describe a large circle and unleash itself with extraordinary force.
Then she heard a buzzing sound, like the rapid vibration of a giant hornet’s wings, and then a sharp crack like a nut being crushed. The powerful hands that gripped her loosened, and with a grunt like that of a woodcutter felling a tree the gladiator collapsed at her feet, his skull shattered.
Shrieking with terror the whole crowd fled, even Kald the beast-fighter, whose red, green and blue tattoo-marks seemed to have grown brighter against the dirty white background of his skin, blanched with fear.
Still dazed, Fanina looked at the Thracian stretched at her feet, then at the spot from which the sling shot had been fired: the dwarf had vanished before the spectators of the brutal execution had had time to notice his presence.
It was then that Fanina realized that it was she, rather than the sudden death of the gladiator, that had triggered off this panic. It was at her that everyone was staring, their eyes dilated with fear.
Something was dragging her head back: her sumptuous hair had cascaded in a heavy golden stream right down her back as far as her ankles. The huge knot of hair resting on the nape of her neck had been unloosed as she had thrown herself to one side so as not to be dragged down as the Thracian fell to the ground, and had unwound itself like a snake of precious metal, knocking off her hood as it went.
Thousands of lanterns illuminated her face while the assembled company, massed at a respectful distance, kneeling, prostrate, petrified, repeated in muffled tones:
‘Fanina! Fanina! The dead vestal!’
Then close beside her, again she heard that voice, the first to have pronounced her name. It was the voice of a young woman dragging herself towards Fanina, dishevelled, naked, pitiful, her body spattered with blood, covered with black marks and scored with long purple gashes....
‘Fanina! Fanina! Little mistress!’
Melixo! It was Melixo! The slave’s green eyes burned with a strange fearsome flame, that Fanina had never before seen in them. She was twisting her arms and pointing to her, endlessly repeating in a strident, unbearable voice:
‘Little mistress! Little mistress!’
Dragging herself up on her torn knees, she took her head in her hands, then suddenly sprang towards a man who stood motionless on the edge of the platform.
‘The dead vestal, Brazen-beard! While we were making love, didn’t you tell me she was dying a lingering death in her tomb? Well, she’s come out of it, Brazen-beard! Pluto didn’t want her! He’s sent her back to earth to take her revenge!’
She clung to him twining herself about him.
‘You saw how the gods slew the man who held her in his arms! Look, Domitius, she’s here! She’s here!’
Brazen-beard staggered, his thick lower lip hanging, his blotchy red cheeks and nose standing out against the chalky whiteness of his degenerate face, while he clutched convulsively at his breast over his heart. He looked on the point of collapse. He was nearly dead with fear.
Fanina glanced round. Every face her eyes met reflected the same superstitious terror. They all saw in her the reincarnation or ghost of the vestal whose condemnation they had procured. She was mistress of the field, and as long as they retained their illusions, she would remain incredibly strong. She could flee, save herself and save Vindex.
Melixo and Brazen-beard were alone on the platform, in the midst of a large clearing that the crowd had made. Deliberately, head held high and arms straight at her sides, a living statue of the priestess she had once been, she walked towards them.
Brazen-beard kept opening and closing his mouth to moisten his dry palate as he watched Fanina approach. When she was a mere ten paces from the platform, he seemed to come to his senses. Striking Melixo violently in the face with his two fists to detach her from him, he leapt backwards, knocking over one of the vast copper bowls filled to the brim with Falernian wine, which spilled over the floor. Then he blundered into a post, which fell dragging with it a string of lanterns.
Immediately a huge blue flame shot up from the stage, and in an instant everything was ablaze.
Spreading wide her arms, as she had seen Vibidia the Supreme Vestal do, Fanina stood still and proclaimed in ringing tones:
‘Woe to thee, oh Rome, when thou dost not respect the holy will of the gods!’
A long-drawn-out wail from the crowd lent emphasis to her words, then the mob broke up in indescribable confusion.
The flames were advancing and had already begun to devour the flimsy wood and canvas structure of the arena, the triumphal arches and the adjoining side-shows. The sinister roar of the fire, fed by these inflammable materials, grew ever louder as did the shrieks of terror and vain cries for help from those who rushed blindly for the gate, pushing, tearing and trampling one another mercilessly underfoot.
In a whirl of sparks rising skywards, Fanina saw the two hundred beautiful slave girls who were to have been handed over to Domitius’s sordid followers rushing to escape.
And on the platform, her long brown hair burnt to nothing in a flash, Melixo danced and stamped, screeching with demoniacal laughter as she tipped over one by one the mixing-bowls that surrounded her.
Brazen-beard had vanished.
Her face set like marble, Fanina walked on down a long, sloping alley which led to a small door giving on to a quiet, narrow street, at the end of which, silhouetted in white by the moonlight, she could see the vast buildings on the top of the Palatine Hill against a star-spangled sky.
Instinctively she looked behind her. The dwarf with the russet leather cloak must be somewhere nearby, somewhere there in the darkness. She felt as if his eyes were on her.
When she had reached the top of Victory Rise, Fanina looked back. A huge sheet of flame glowed red at her feet, covered by a dense cloud of smoke. A dull roar rose from the doomed section of the town, while brass trumpets sent up their dismal calls for help. Down the Triumphal Way, the Via Sacra and across the Forum came the watchmen from every barracks in the town, at the double, armed with hatchets, dragging fire pumps, barrels of vinegar, ladders, buckets and grappling-irons.
Where she stood all was calm. It would have taken more to stir this venerable district of patrician dwellings and temples.
Fanina crossed the deserted Area Palatina, and reached the road in which stood the main facade of her parents’ house.
Here, she would find peace at last. She paused for a moment
. She did not want to attract the attention of any of the slaves, among whose ranks there might well be spies of Calvinus and Brazen-beard. But she could have complete confidence in Zotos, the aged porter. She must wake him gently and stop him crying out when he recognized his young mistress who he thought was buried in her grave on the Field of Evil-doers. She must also stop Niger, the watchdog, from barking.
She moved towards the lodge and scratched on the door with the tip of her nails. The door swung open quietly beneath her touch.
‘Zotos! Zotos!’ she murmured.
The lodge was deserted. Fanina turned towards the house entrance and saw that its heavy doors stood ajar. She pushed them aside and went in. There was a nightlight burning in the main gallery, and she crossed the atrium on tiptoe. Silence reigned everywhere. She came out into the peristyle that enclosed the garden. The moon shone silvery on the banks of roses and on the still water of the central fountain which had ceased to play.
With bated breath, her heart gripped by a nameless fear, Fanina examined the facade of the private rooms. Through the thick panes of the portrait gallery, she thought she saw a glimmer of light. She could bear it no longer and rushed in.
In front of the fresco that covered the walls of the enormous room, at the foot of the impressive effigy of the ‘divine’ Mastarna, side by side on a vast bronze bed, lay her parents, their eyes closed and all colour drained from their faces.
Their wrists bore deep slashes, and they were dead.
Chapter Five
‘The fever has left her, she should come round soon now.’
‘And about time too!’
‘For the past week, mistress, I thought she’d lose her mind.’
‘I wonder that no one heard her shrieks from outside!’
These walls are very thick, mistress. The master was wise to have put her to bed here ...’
Fanina half opened her eyes and the room she saw around her began to spin. Where was she? She had never before been into this huge, low-ceilinged room, which was windowless and lined with shelves arranged diagonally, on which were stacked thousands of rolls of parchment.
‘She’s waking up, mistress!’
Fanina raised herself a little. At the foot of the little bed on which she was lying, two women were standing watching her, one, a wizened little slave, and the other an imposing matron, whose features bore the stamp of profound nobility; over her stola she wore a long, fringed purple veil that hung to her feet.
‘How do you feel, Fanina?’ the matron inquired in a deep, almost masculine voice.
Painfully tense, Fanina tried to gather her thoughts together, to refresh her memory. This tall woman, whose bright, open gaze went right through her, was Paulla, the Flaminica Dialis, wife of the illustrious Cornelius Lentulus Malucinensis, the Flamen Dialis, one of the most important personages in the Roman religious hierarchy.
‘Don’t be frightened,’ said the Flaminica softly. ‘You are safe here.’
With puckered brow and heavy head, Fanina passed her hand slowly over her forehead.
‘What am I doing here?’ she asked haltingly.
‘You have been very ill, my child. We have looked after you as best we could. Now I think you are better.’
‘Who brought me here?’
Paulla seemed to hesitate. It was obvious that she could not reveal the truth and yet was reluctant to lie. At last she said:
‘It is impossible for me to reply to that. You were found unconscious beside your parents’ bed, and ...’
A painful sob shook Fanina. So it was not a nightmare that her fever had brought on. The terrible sight, every detail of which was etched in burning strokes on her mind was true.
She saw it all again as clear as in a dream and fell back white and shattered. She felt a rending sensation of bereavement, and wanted to die so that the host of sweet memories, which one vision, that last one, had made more unbearable than anything she had hitherto suffered, might die with her.
Paulla took her in her arms like a mother her child, and rocked her. When Fanina had grown calmer, she told her, very gently, and choosing her words, how wonderful her parents’ end had been, and how worthy in every way of the most glorious Romans of the old stock.
After freeing all his slaves and bequeathing to them the greater part of his worldly goods, Senator Faninus had called a surgeon who had spared Terentia overmuch suffering. Then, as their lives slowly ebbed away, the husband and wife had asked everyone to leave the house and to leave them alone with the images of their illustrious ancestors.
‘As the surgeon was crossing the threshold, your father said in a voice that was still very firm: “Do not weep, Andromachus. Thanks to you we shall precede our poor Fanina to the Kingdom of the Shades. There we shall ask the Gods of Darkness to cut short her sufferings. When at last she leaves this world, unworthy as it is of her, we shall welcome her and know eternal bliss....” ’ Then, clasping Terentia’s hand to his heart, he whispered: ‘Death is a haven ever ready to welcome us, an eternal refuge from suffering....’
Late that evening, the Flamen Dialis came to visit Fanina. Cornelius was a tall, heavily built man with a leonine head solidly balanced, unswervingly loyal and honourable, scrupulously respectful of the slightest obligations imposed on him by his priestly office, one of the rare men in the public eye in Rome against whom no one could find any ill to say. Dedicated for centuries to the service of the gods, his family had much in common with Fanina’s, and his father, himself a Flamen of Jupiter in his time, had been a close friend of Fanina’s grandfather.
Cornelius told Fanina how greatly disturbed Rome still was by her appearance, described as supernatural, in Brazen-beard’s garden. People were going round repeating, and enlarging on, the details of the combats in which thirteen men ‘had voluntarily given their lives to gratify her desire for vengeance’. The hair-raising story was being repeated how an impious Thracian gladiator who had tried to embrace Fanina’s ghost had been struck dead by the gods, and how the ‘fire from heaven’ had reduced over half the Subura district to ashes, while the shade of the ‘blonde vestal’ vanished in the flames after calling down a departing curse upon the city.
The day after this terrible night the report of the death of the Senator Faninus and his wife had come like a thunderclap.
Terrified at the prospect of the further disasters which this new tragedy befalling Fanina might bring down on the Empire, a vast crowd had laid siege to the Regia and forced Calvinus and most of the Pontiffs to fly from Rome. The Senate, terrified, had hurriedly decided to give a magnificent funeral to the vestal’s father and mother while, throughout all the temples, hundreds of white and black heifers were to be sacrificed to appease Fanina’s enraged spirit.
Sitting at the head of the bed on an uncomfortable stool, the Flamen let his eyes roam thoughtfully over the rows of archives stacked on the shelves around the huge room, deep below the ground in his vast house, then, coming back to Fanina again, he clasped her hands.
‘My poor child,’ he said softly, ‘here you are about to be deified by the most superstitious of populaces, and no one knows whether they will turn you into a good or a bad goddess. If you were to appear before the crowd at this moment, they would prostrate themselves at your feet, and anyone who claimed that you were flesh and blood would be mercilessly stoned.’
Shattered, bitter, shaking off her apathy, Fanina asked:
‘Why do you, illustrious Cornelius, fall in with this farce? Why did you take me in here?’
Cornelius looked her straight in the face, inscrutably, and replied.
‘It had to be.’
‘Why?’
‘I will not answer that.’
Then, as if to soften the harshness of his last sentence, he leaned towards her and his voice grew softer as he added:
‘It is not for me to judge you. You have undoubtedly sinned greatly, you have certainly committed sacrilege, but it is only fair to say that there never was anyone less suited to be a vestal.
’
He looked up at his wife, as if to call her to witness, then, with a trace of a smile lighting up his broad face, he went on:
‘There is something about you, Fanina, something both awesome and precious, which arouses in men the wildest of passions and drives them to surpass themselves to be worthy of you ... something all the rarer for the fact that everything you have learnt during these past years — that self-control, that power of concentration, that culture you have acquired, and also the tribulations you have undergone, from which I am certain you will soon recover — all these things have but strengthened your powers ...’
Paulla interrupted:
‘What do you suggest she do now?’
‘She has no choice,’ Flaminus replied briefly. ‘She must leave Rome.’
‘Do you think she will be able to come back one day?’
‘Why not?’
‘What about Calvinus? And Brazen-beard?’ Paulla insisted.
The Flamen was silent for a moment, then, looking first at his wife and then at Fanina, slowly enunciated:
‘They can do no more to Fanina, as Fanina.’
‘What do you mean, illustrious Cornelius?’ Fanina asked sharply.
‘Fanina the daughter of Faninus the Senator is dead and truly dead. Two days ago in the Senate, some of Brazen-beard’s friends claimed that you had been secretly removed from the tomb in which you had been enclosed.’
Fanina sat up with a start in her bed.
‘What then?’ she asked, her breath coming and going.
Flaminus’s face lighted up.
‘They sent two senators, chosen from amongst the least impressionable and the most resolutely atheistic, under conditions of the greatest secrecy to examine the land around the tomb. Stung to the quick, they did not scruple to unseal one of the stones. They returned in great haste, half-dead with fright...’
Fanina was watching him, her face white with fear. Cornelius went on quickly:
‘They had seen Fanina’s corpse in the tomb. The unfortunate girl had strangled herself with her shroud to put an end to her sufferings.’
Fanina, Child of Rome Page 6