Lady of the Light

by Donna Gillespie

  As Auriane hesitated but an instant, considering bringing down Lurio with her spear, murdering the fugitive sailor for what he knew—and deciding she couldn’t—Lurio’s sword-wielding comrade seized his moment. He lunged at Auriane, sword aloft in those stevedore’s arms for a single, prodigious blow to the head.

  “Mother, turn round!” The shriek was Avenahar’s, primal and blind.

  The swordsman staggered to a stop. They’d been tricked; the maid was no slave.

  Never taking his gaze from Auriane, the sailor with the soot-blackened face backed slowly toward Avenahar. He pushed his fellow sailor off the struggling maid and sat on Avenahar himself, putting a thick, scarred arm around her neck and pressing the keen edge of the blade to her throat.

  “Drop that spear and come along with us for ransom,” he said, spitting through broken brown teeth, “or your comely brat has seen the last of this world.”

  Had Auriane paused for even an instant, he might have had a chance to make good his threat. Her spear arm lashed out; her body was a whip. The throw was level and merciless as an executioner’s. The two men saw only the spear, ripping forth like a bolt from a catapult. It caught the sword-wielding sailor full in his chest, hurling him into the arms of his comrade. He convulsed for a short time as if his ghost struggled out of him in fits and starts, then sank in death. It was done with such precision and ease that the remaining sailor, finding himself with a corpse in his lap, wondered if this night-roaming woman might be no mortal at all but some evil-doing Nixe who wriggled her way here from the glimmering, sprite-ridden depths of the Rhenus. Eyes rounded with spirit-terror, he lurched to his feet and burst into a run, fleeing in the direction of the river.

  Auriane and Avenahar were alone with the dead man. The sudden silence was jarring. Auriane heard only her own breath, grabbing for air and life.

  Scattered silver coins winked in the starlight like bright drops of blood. Auriane cut the sail line that bound her daughter, slowed by her trembling hands. Then she embraced Avenahar with a gentle ferocity, letting the heat of their bodies bring them back to the living. The need to ward off the cold horror of the night fused them together for long moments. Bewilderment pooled in Avenahar’s eyes. Bruises covered her in angry blots; she was muted, indrawn, a candle burning low. Auriane supposed her daughter’s giddy dreams of glory bore as much resemblance to this first encounter with battle as a ride through rose-strewn streets in a triumphal chariot might to a romp through the town’s sewer.

  “Your fate is strong, Avenahar,” Auriane said firmly. “Had you obeyed me when I told you to flee off, I’d be greeting the ancestresses right now.”

  The praise worked as a quick balm, restoring Avenahar to reckless life. “I would never have left you,” she said hoarsely. “You spoke the words before—‘We help our kin. This is how we live.’”

  Auriane affectionately ruffled Avenahar’s mud-clotted hair.

  Mother and daughter rose together and, each taking a leg, dragged the dead sailor off the path.

  “I guess I’ve outdone you, then,” Avenahar said, eyes shining now.

  “And how is that?”

  “I’ve lived but thirteen years and I helped you win a victory. You were a decrepit sixteen when you slew your first man.”

  Auriane smiled wearily at this, while biting back the words she wanted to say—Do not speak so even in jest, I’ll never let you take the oath of a shield maiden—you’ll go back to our people as an herb woman or I’ll not let you go at all. “Just tie his laces together, quickly, and we’re off from here.” This was a custom of her people that prevented the man’s ghost from walking among the living.

  Auriane turned to wash her native spear in ditchwater. Avenahar caught at her cloak, eyes shining like lamps.

  “You slew a man tonight,” she whispered. “The Fates have made you a warrior again.”

  Auriane knelt beside her. “I did only what I had to do, no more. Avenahar, what passed on this night was a catastrophe. That Lurio creature. He knows.”

  “Let them all know! It’s time we warred in the open.”

  “You disappoint me. I need a steady companion now, not a rampaging hothead. If I cannot find some way to keep this Lurio silent, people will die. And our life at the villa will be—” Her throat tightened painfully. “Start gathering up coins. I’ll not leave them scattered about so those rogues can come back and enrich themselves more.”

  Auriane rose and, in a rapid monotone, spoke the words of a charm over the corpse. She felt like a shattered glass vessel.

  My peace is gone . . . a peace I nurtured for seven years. Lost in less time than it takes to plow one row of a barley field.

  A chastened Avenahar seemed to hear these thoughts. “That Lurio was a fugitive,” she offered. “He’ll never dare to show himself before a magistrate.”

  “Don’t be a fool, there are many ways it could be done. Through a second man, for example.”

  Auriane reached, then, for the sailor’s short sword, but her hand stopped as if caught in an invisible net. Because of a vow to a seeress, she hadn’t touched a sword of iron in the seven years she’d lived at Julianus’s villa. It beckoned, its blade liquid in the starlight. How she lusted to feel the weight, the grip. . . . The sword had been her lyre-string, her voice. But that seeress was the most fearsome and adept in all their lands, and might even be watching them now, through the eye of a swan, a lightflash on the river. She was called Ramis, and her oracles were sought even in Rome.

  “Avenahar? The sword—take it and throw it in the river.”

  Avenahar did not move. She regarded the sword with quiet solemnity, as if it were some door accidentally left open that would take her to a place she was born to be. The haunted determination in her face startled Auriane; it brought to mind maids of old tales who climbed walls or swam rivers at midnight to breach enemy lines in time of war. “No, you may not keep it,” Auriane said. “Now, Avenahar. At once!”

  Auriane regretted the harshness in her tone when she saw her daughter carefully disguising a limp as she bore the sword off.

  Auriane listened until she heard a splash. Then she waded through long grasses to catch her mare, grazing briskly by the river. Before they departed the place, she removed the blue cloth she’d tied round the low branch of the alder, replacing it with one dyed madder-red. This signed to her confederate, a Chattian slave called Grimo who rowed a wine boat, that something had gone gravely awry and he must not venture close; their enemies might well lay a trap for him here.

  Somewhere near the river, geese broke out in wild, harsh song, and Auriane started, thinking it the bleat of battle horns.

  I’ve lived through a time of tranquillity that’s lasted longer than some lives. Why shouldn’t it now be wrested from me violently?

  I go home to a different world. One in which I’m naked before a foreign country’s law.

  Lurio. He will pull down the center-beam of my house.

  Chapter 2

  Auriane believed the night’s misfortunes done. But the Fates’ final jest was still to come.

  Auriane and Avenahar had less than a mile left to journey before they came to the thorn hedges that ribboned about the main residence and outbuildings of the estate of Marcus Arrius Julianus. The grand villa lay just outside the walled Roman town of Confluentes, close by where the Mosella finished her wanderings and poured into the Rhenus. They trod the paved post road now. Auriane walked; Avenahar sat astride their remaining horse, for she’d sprained her foot while attempting to kick the fugitive sailor senseless. Their hands were stiff from cold; Auriane’s leather leggings were studded with brambles. Darkness yielded to a world etched in deep charcoal. Cocks were crowing. The modest fields of the great estate’s tenant farmers, necklaced with stone walls, unveiled themselves on either side of the road.

  Two hundred paces ahead, something cumbersome and formless swayed gently in elephantine fashion as it separated from the smoking ground mist, a dark living thing that seemed to h
over just above the road. For long, its only movement was a strange bellows-like contraction and expansion; it was faintly monstrous, as if the Wyrm that wrapped its serpent-body round the world wove its way inland to haunt men. Perplexed, Auriane studied the apparition through the predawn haze until it resolved itself into a densely packed, slow-moving mass of men and animals.

  “That’s a hunting expedition,” Auriane said. This was a common enough sight; because the well-loved Emperor Trajan enthusiastically pursued the hunt, every man of the province with any ambition to rise felt compelled to conspicuously pursue the sport. “Curses on Nemesis,” she added softly. “That’s the livery of Volusius Victorinus.”

  This was the more powerful of the two Roman magistrates at Confluentes. Victorinus was a small-town potentate who had buffed his importance by gifting the provincial town with its gymnasium, its baths, and a new courthouse, supplying each with a heroic statue of himself, sometimes alone, sometimes standing beside his grim-faced wife, Decimina. Relations between Victorinus and the aristocratic Julianus were fraught with distrust. When Julianus quite innocently built Confluentes’s theater, not knowing Victorinus had already engaged an architecturus to draw plans for a theater of his own, Victorinus saw it as a heinous attempt to supplant him as the “great man” of the district. And within a season, that new theater had mysteriously burned down.

  “His outriders have seen us, it’s no use turning about. Pull your hood forward. With a scrap of luck he’ll pass us by.” If Lurio did spill his tale into willing administrative ears, their presence on this road, at this hour, would corroborate the fugitive sailor’s story.

  “Hunting, is he?” Avenahar muttered. “His slaves will trap the beasts, while our Hercules reclines on down cushions and sloshes down chilled wine while he writes silly poetry on the subject of the hunt.”

  Auriane smiled in amusement, but the gloomy fury behind those words caused her a crawl of uneasiness.

  As the train of wagons drew near, the liveried horseman in the lead casually snapped a whip, ordering the women off the the road, blandly assuming that when Victorinus traveled, the road belonged to Victorinus.

  “Puffed-up provincial princeling.”

  “Avenahar—”

  “Should it surprise us that a people who’ve refined cruelty beyond all the known races of the earth should also be the rudest and the laziest?”

  “Avenahar!”

  “If Nemesis sends him a snorting maddened aurochs on this hunt, I’ll dedicate my life to Her worship.”

  “Avenahar!” Auriane drew the mare to a halt and forced her daughter to meet her gaze. “You will be quiet until we’re past them. Conserve that spirit of vengeance—you’re given only so much of it in a lifetime. Don’t waste it on swatting flies.”

  Avenahar mumbled something that sounded compliant. Auriane pulled the mare down into the muddy field.

  Provisions wagons began noisily clattering past; Auriane’s quick glance caught jars of pickled delicacies, heart-shaped jugs of pedigreed wines, thick-footed vessels for the finest fish sauce from Hispania. Apparently the magistrate meant not to let a day pass without tickling every culinary whim. Next came a wagon laden with coarser fare for the slaves, followed by four oxcarts bearing heaps of hunting nets, stacks of long spears, and boar spears. The tall Libyan slaves who walked alongside were the skilled hunters who would do the dangerous work of beating the game into nets. Finally came an unadorned litter bearing a freedman secretary, who would manage Victorinus’s correspondence during the hunt. And behind this came Victorinus himself, his litter hoisted high on the shoulders of eight blue-and-gold-liveried Cappadocian bearers. Auriane’s contempt matched Avenahar’s—what sort of man will not sit a horse, even at a hunt?

  That litter would have been laughably gaudy in Rome, but out here with only stunned provincials to take note, she supposed a man could get away with such gilded excess without finding himself ridiculed in vicious couplets scribbled over the town walls.

  In twenty heartbeats they were past him.

  An owl gusted up from the meadow, soundless as a moth. It swept past the mare’s muzzle, giving out its somber cry.

  The mare erupted into a series of frog-jumps, rippling sideways, ripping the reins from Auriane’s hands. Avenahar lost her knee-grip and hung precariously from the horse’s side. The mare crashed into a wagon; a collection of boar spears spilled over the side with a low thunder. The cart’s driver cursed and pulled his mules to an abrupt halt, which proved too much for the mules behind—mules and wagons collided. All of Victorinus’s Celt hounds started to bark.

  “Ho there! Has the world ended?” Victorinus’s voice boomed out into the country air—the footfalls of a testy giant. A hand that flashed green fire emerged from fringed curtains of citron-hued silk—an emerald large as a pea adorned the magistrate’s ring. With several cutting gestures, he signaled a general halt.

  “Have the Titans rained boulders down upon us?” A head was thrust through the curtains—the women saw pale, mottled flesh, smoothly bald but for a scraggly wreath of roan-colored hair. The magistrate was severely shortsighted, and as he turned his head aimlessly from side to side, looking for the cause of the trouble, it put Auriane in mind of the blind, questing head of a worm. A cloud of Oriental scent—sweet, acrid, debilitating—gusted out with him; to Auriane, it was the smell of lethargy. She’d never become accustomed to the fact that these people mixed flower essences with oils, called it perfume, and peddled it for indecent amounts of money, ignoring the fact the oils quickly became sour.

  He settled his bleary focus on Avenahar. “Calamitous wench. Collect up the mess you caused or be packed off in chains to await your trial.”

  Auriane gave her daughter a sharp nudge and Avenahar dropped to one knee, gathering up boar spears. Auriane could only guess at what thoughts passed through her daughter’s mind; surely they involved Victorinus’s feet roasting over a crackling fire.

  “Uncover yourself, woman,” he said to Auriane. “State your name and farm.”

  “I’m Auriane, your neighbor to the—”

  “Ah!” His manner softened at once. A festering hatred of Marcus Julianus hadn’t deterred the magistrate from petitioning tirelessly for a marriage-match between his son, Lucius, and Julianus’s nine-year-old daughter, Arria Juliana. Auriane and Julianus would have as soon betrothed their younger daughter to a goat, but planned a diplomatically-phrased refusal. “It’s the . . .” He groped for a word that would not offend: Wife was not correct; concubine too blunt for polite conversation; beloved of, too personal—so he abandoned relating her to Marcus Julianus at all. “. . . It’s our bold Aurinia, Chattian princess, and her chaste, clever daughter, out ransacking the countryside again.” He added amiably to Avenahar, “Leave those, my pretty periwinkle, the slaves will get them.”

  His eyes brimmed with the marriage question. The hopefulness Auriane saw there disturbed her.

  “Volusius Victorinus, do accept my earnest regrets—”

  “Come, Avenahar,” he said, “I have something for you.”

  A plague take him, Auriane thought.

  “My dear, but that’s an odd pattern on your tunica. . . . Here, take this, it’s a new volume on the origin of the ancient Libyan breed you admire so much, with the pedigrees of its most celebrated mares. It’s penned by my own scribes and specially illustrated.”

  Avenahar reached for the bookroll as if extending an arm into a bear’s cage—leaning close enough for Victorinus to see that her tunica was splattered with mud and blood.

  The look of paternal solicitude vanished. “I say, you two are about at an eccentric hour.” He looked penetratingly at Auriane. “Where’s your second horse? Where are your maidservants and attendants?”

  “Save your questions for those brought to your courtroom, magistrate. Our women are not like yours. When we need to, we travel swiftly, and alone.”

  “Hmm . . . well, you shouldn’t be on this road, not without a dozen armed slaves riding alo
ngside you. Just last eve four sailors from the naval trireme Concordia murdered their captain and deserted their vessel. They’re armed and it’s expected they’ll be attempting robberies hereabout. Until the local garrison has hunted them all down, you’d best stay safe inside.”

  Hunted them all down. Auriane managed with effort to maintain a demeanor that was neutral, proud. The fugitives were being actively sought.

  Lurio would soon be in their hands.

  Victorinus studied the two women for an oddly prolonged moment. Though not counted overly clever by anyone’s measure, the magistrate had a boar-hound’s senses when it came to discerning attempts to conceal the truth.

  “We trust you’ll do your duty, magistrate,” Auriane said tartly.

  “And my answer about the marriage, Aurinia . . .” On that sagging face the eager schoolboy smile looked ridiculous. “It will be soon?”

  Your boy will have our Arria in Hades, Auriane wanted to say, but was spared the annoyance of conjuring up a civilized reply because just then, the boy in question, Victorinus’s son Lucius, rode up from the back of the train amidst an aggressive hammering of hooves. He was astride a nervous Thracian stallion; its powerfully arched neck was streaked with foam. On its glossy black shoulder was a glistening cut from a whip. The stallion embodied its master’s mood; it was as though the same angry genius animated both. Lucius’s features at fourteen were a lean, elongated version of his father’s, revealing what Victorinus must have looked like before bony prominences became blurred by a comfortable padding of flesh, and empurpled from a lifetime of washing down oily meals with copious quantities of wine.

  “What’s all this delay, Father?” The boy was like struck flint, sharp-edged, sparking with anger. Lucius gave Avenahar a rancid smile. “I see—it’s the holy child, fathered by a god.”