Lady of the Light

by Donna Gillespie

  Avenahar gave Lucius a look that might have set water to boiling.

  But her hands began to shiver. A cruel shot, Auriane thought. To protect Avenahar from the shame surrounding her birth, Auriane hadn’t silenced those in their homeland who’d put it about that Avenahar was fathered by the god Wodan. In truth, Avenahar was sired by a Roman slave, a captured legionary soldier who’d labored in the fields of the Chattian farmstead on which Auriane was born.

  “Excuse the rough manners of a child,” Victorinus amended hurriedly. “He’s but a boy with much to learn.”

  A boy wounded in his pride, Auriane realized, certain then that the lonely, miserable Lucius had somehow intuited, or learned through the talk of household maids, the truth his filmy-eyed father hadn’t yet considered—he was not to be given Arria Juliana.

  To Auriane, Lucius said, “And if it isn’t the war-loving concubine of our own Marcus Julianus.”

  “Lucius, cease this at once!” came an impotent plea from the father.

  “It’s tempting to guess at just what the pair of you are doing out here,” Lucius spoke on, “as only famous prostitutes and thieves travel this road at night.”

  “Lucius, beware the Fates,” Auriane said, eyes steely, voice low. She gave Avenahar a commanding glance, warning her to silence.

  Lucius’s voice was a wounded whisper. “You’ve discarded me already—do you think I do not know?”

  “Lucius!” Victorinus tried again.

  “Arrange a palla round the shoulders of a barbarian savage and sit her in a fine villa, and all at once I’m not good enough for her half-breed offspring.”

  “Lucius, you’re not good enough for an ewe in rut,” Avenahar broke in.

  “Your name’s scribbled all over the town’s sewer wall,” Lucius responded casually.“‘Try it with a girl half god.’”

  “You burned our theater, you envious lout,” Avenahar shot back. “Do you think we do not know?”

  “Another word, Lucius,” Victorinus burst out hotly, “and you’ll get more than a whipping!” The magistrate turned to Auriane. “You’d best trim your daughter’s slanderous tongue, Aurinia. Rogues from out of town burned down Julianus’s theater—my investigations have proved it.”

  “I’m not afraid of them like you are, Father,” Lucius retorted. “Marcus Julianus’s day is done. No one of importance cares about philosophy in this age. This is a time for men of valor, not quibblers with a quill who speak against all that’s—”

  “Quiet, every one of you!” Auriane’s voice cut cleanly through the rising voices. “Lucius, I do not hear those words. I am sorry for this meeting. Know I bear you two no ill will. Come, Avenahar, we must go.”

  Victorinus frowned, then turned to his son.

  “Lucius?” He rolled so far out of the litter that the bearers had to nimbly shift it beneath him to prevent him from tumbling out. “No decision’s been made on the matter of that marriage. You spoke as if one had been.”

  “It’s true, Victorinus—”

  “Avenahar!” came Auriane’s vain plea.

  “—she’ll never cross your threshold.” Avenahar’s words were gleeful slashes of a knife. “I don’t know what would cause you to think my mother and father would give our Arria Juliana to such a coarse-bred lout as your son.”

  Victorinus looked like a man knocked senseless.

  “Aurinia? Can this be true?” the magistrate said. “Well, I’ve been ambushed most cruelly. And here I thought we’d formed a fine family alliance.”

  “It’s true, Victorinus, though I never meant to tell you this way,” Auriane replied wearily, striving to keep her voice mild. “Arria’s just a child. Among my people we don’t give children away in the cradle. And we think it right a girl have some hand in choosing the man she’s bound to marry. Don’t search for reasons other than this. I am not your enemy, Victorinus.”

  Lucius seethed like a bubbling pot with the lid bolted down.

  “The gods punish hubris, but maybe we won’t wait for the gods! Every one of you in that preposterous household had best watch his step. Julianus speaks treason in his lectures at the town academy. He even speaks against Trajan’s Great War to come, which will make Alexander’s battles look like skirmishes. Know it, you two, Father’s written letters to the Secretary in Rome,” he sputtered on; this was the Palace official who edited imperial correspondence from the provinces, “in which he’s detailed every word of Julianus’s infamy, and—”

  “Lucius!” Victorinus’s cheeks were the shade of ripe plums. “The boy lies!”

  “I think he tells the truth, Victorinus,” Auriane said softly, “but why your surprise that your boy has betrayed you, when you suckled him on poison? I won’t seek to harm you over this. It’s the custom of my people to choose our opponents only from the strongest.”

  Auriane was not certain herself what she was doing when she moved to within a hand’s breadth of Lucius’s powerful, unsettled horse; the boy was amazed that she showed no fear of his stallion. She placed a palm on its muzzle and the agitated animal dropped into stillness, lowering its beautiful head, nuzzling her. Lucius was convinced there was sorcery in that touch.

  “You were born on Cybele’s day while a mighty storm raged without,” she said to the boy. “You never forgave the mother who thought you ugly and frail and didn’t want you to live. You never forgot the edge of blackness, so close. It taught you to fear that which you should reverence and sleep when you should be awake. Leave that hall, Lucius, and walk into a greater one. Or you’ll be woefully crippled by a mischance of your own making, before this year is done.”

  Auriane might have thought her words randomly pulled from silence like some madwoman’s babble until she saw the deep dread in the boy’s eyes, the stupefied look in Victorinus’s.

  I must have spoken the truth. Gods below, I’ve no notion how I knew those things.

  Father and son regarded her as though she were some force of nature that was not containable, like a river known to regularly flood its banks. Lucius made the “fig” sign at Auriane—thumb projecting from fist—to ward off the evil eye. Then his stallion burst into a choppy gallop that bore him off to the head of the train.

  Victorinus finally found his voice. “You’ll not like me as an enemy, you necromancing whore.”

  The magistrate withdrew into the dark of the litter and snapped the curtains closed. Auriane flinched as if he’d slammed a door. Victorinus’s train clattered on amidst clouds of dust, torch smoke, and mule stink, until it vanished into the mysteries of the mist.

  “AVENAHAR, YOUR TONGUE is a menace! You brought us to open declaration of war. Victorinus was already suspicious of why we were abroad at this hour. If that fugitive sailor spills his tale, we’re done. At home, a hothead such as you would be counted a curse and driven out of the village!”

  Avenahar managed a muted, miserable, “I’m sorry, Mother.” Her words held an undertone of relief—at least her mother was speaking to her again. Auriane had walked beside her in silent fury for half the distance between milestones.

  “We’ve made enemies who will remain enemies,” Auriane said. “And it was not necessary. Would that you would learn, there are times to fight and times not to fight!”

  “I . . . you are right. But that loutish Lucius . . . he provoked me beyond reason.”

  “A wise woman is never provoked until she so chooses.”

  “Who was my father, then? If I could talk of his noble deeds, I’d have a weapon against such surly oafs.”

  Auriane felt a sharp stone lodged in her throat.

  He was a Roman thrall called Decius, Avenahar, who’s now giving battle advice to the chief of the invading Cheruscans, who’re overrunning our people and picking our bones . . .

  No. To tell her now would be a cruelty.

  “Your moon blood comes soon,” Auriane said gently, “which means we’ll soon be having your womanhood ceremony. When the elderwomen chant your lineage they’ll have to name him.” I wa
nt you to have more than one mother present when you learn it.

  “Well, he . . . he was good and brave, wasn’t he?” Avenahar ventured as if reaching into a fire. “He had many war companions . . . and a large hall? That Wodan tale—you didn’t concoct it to cover up something terrible?”

  Auriane felt a start of queasiness. It seemed that Avenahar, in spite of having hair black as the night sky, hadn’t considered the possibility her father might not be Chattian. “He was good and brave when I knew him, Avenahar, and would’ve given you all he had, had fortune not taken him away. You’re too quick to judge men, and quicker still to judge whole nations. Some day, you’ll be worthy of knowing your poor father.”

  They topped a rise. The sun and the estate of Marcus Arrius Julianus revealed themselves together.

  Beneath cloud-mountains gold-limned by the sun was a green kingdom by the river, placid and grand. The clusters of outbuildings with red-tiled roofs nestled among neatly combed meadows all yielded to one majestic form—the estate’s main house, a two-story brick structure with double rows of glazed windows, fronted by a marble veranda with a noble line of lean, austere Corinthian columns. Its single-storied wings formed an inner court, left open in back to afford a vista of the Mosella; within was a peristyle garden that was a maze of trimmed hedges, flowers chosen for scent, ornamental trees. Connected by a covered walkway was a monumental bathhouse with projecting apsidal rooms, its proud dome ghostly in the morning haze; because of the danger of fire, it had been built apart from the main house. Two rectangular pools surrounded by freestanding columns of Parian marble flanked the main house’s wide gravel approach. Within each, high fountains rained multiple cascades over tiers of sea scallops supporting cavorting Nereids twining about thick serpents. The estate’s gardens were a patchwork cloth laid over the meadows; here, cabbages, turnips, parsnips, lettuces, and medicinal herbs were grown; in their midst was an artificial pond for geese. Julianus’s estate was entirely independent, providing for its two hundred residents, slave and free. Where the forest began were stables for the fine horses raised here, noted for their endurance; the estate provided prized mounts for the Roman cavalry. Alongside the river was a meadow that served as a race course.

  Auriane and Avenahar halted at the wrought-iron gate, portal of this small city with its benign co-regents; a doorkeeper within the gatehouse depressed a lever that caused the gate to swing wide. They passed beneath a limestone arch with its keystone adorned with a bas-relief of Minerva, patron deity of the villa—and into another world, watched over by the grand and gentle spirits of this tranquil sovereign state. Packed gravel crunched beneath the mare’s hooves as they moved beneath the lyric shadows of hazel trees, used for hurdle-making, and chestnut trees, which provided the villa with charcoal for burning. At the columned entrance they gave their mare to a groom and entered the expensive silence of the vestibule, with its walls sheathed in rare Carystian marble banded in many hues of pale green. Beneath their feet was a mosaic of the Muses so finely wrought it might have been rendered with a paintbrush rather than thousands of minute tesserae. Columns of near-translucent Luna marble, which ringed a softly gurgling atrium fountain, glowed like lamps as they stored dawn light shed from the lightwell. Mother and daughter were met by the household steward Demaratos, who, Auriane knew, was sharply curious about the lateness of their return. The steward raised his brows but faintly, as though reluctant to distort cold, perfect Attic features.

  “Domina,” he greeted Auriane, inclining his head. “My Lord has asked to see you at once.” It was a mystery to Auriane how Demaratos managed to put so much contempt into Domina. She knew only that he gave a light, measured pause after the word, as if allowing the household gods time to laugh. Demaratos was of a ruined aristocratic family of Rhodes that had been reduced to one penniless, expensively Greek-educated son. And so he’d sold himself as a slave to a philosopher he admired, counting it a nobler fate to be an upper servant in a great man’s household than a poor-but-free creature forced into the indignities of scratching in dirt for his daily bread. To the Greek-born Demaratos, Rome itself was barbarous, and Auriane’s origins were so far beneath this, she was not even assigned a rung in his ladder of social grades. “Two tenant farmers in a boundary dispute await you in the Records Room,” Demaratos spoke on in his polished, precise syllables. “You shouldn’t see them; they’re disgracefully dressed. If they can’t even find clean tunics before they come here—”

  “I will see them. Have them served meat and drink while I have words with Julianus.” She wearied of this constant struggle of wills; the steward was like some small, steady current flowing against her. No single offense ever seemed great enough to prompt her to seek redress; it was more an indefinable cloud of offenses that entered and left a room with him.

  Demaratos’s bare shrug said: It’s not your good name you risk, it’s his. But he responded with flawless politeness. “He is in the library.”

  Auriane sent Avenahar off with the children’s nurse, so she could attend to the sprain. A comely Egyptian boy-servant pulled back a folding door, and Auriane entered the most secret parts of the house. She was sharply conscious of the thickness of the walls, the heating by hypocaust beneath the floor, the marvelous machinery to mark the hours, the servants for every small task, the tutors for the children, the stacks of ledgers in the Records Room listing the yield of estates scattered across five Roman provinces . . . She’d lived without these things before, and could easily do so again, but had she the right to wrest from her children what the Fates had given them? Stop this! All will be well.

  Hunted them all down, Victorinus had said. From far within the passages’ darkened mirrors, Lurio grinned at her with broken teeth.

  Night-shadows still pooled in the cavernous library. Pleasant cedar scents drifted out. Marcus Julianus was seated facing her, before a work table that was, she never tired of jesting, so much less orderly than his mind—documents and correspondence were haphazardly heaped on it, and beneath them were unrolled strip maps anchored in place with bronze hand lamps. When he was intently working, he never seemed to think of the danger of fire. He wore two tunics against the chill—old, worn ones, washed a hundred times. As he studied one of the maps, a young Greek secretary read aloud from a text that was familiar: “How, then, do we call anything ‘my own’? Merely as we call a bed in an inn ‘my own.’ If you do not find a bed then sleep on the ground, and do so with good courage, remembering that tragedies find a place among the rich, and among kings, and tyrants—” She recognized it as Epictetus, and knew something grievous must be pressing upon him, for he had this philosopher read to him as some might take a draught of wine—to calm the nerves. Behind him she saw an unmade lectus, where apparently, he’d briefly rested; he’d passed the night working in the library. She found something solemn and holy in the scene, as if she intruded on some mystery-rite in which he banished spirits of darkness by lifting the lamp of the mind.

  He looked up, not startled, instant pleasure showing in his face. It was as if some part of him constantly expected her, as though she never fully left him. He rose at once, and asked the secretary to leave. There was no beauty more compelling to her than the contours of that face, left leaner, more sharply defined by the years, but always emitting the same generosity of spirit. He pulled her close. She ran a hand through his dark, close-cropped hair, recently become flecked with iron gray. Then they held to each other in a comfortable, sustaining embrace that lingered, and she felt the bliss of a babe rocked in sleep as they drew nourishment from one another, pressed together in a way that was both passionate and maternal. In seven years even their most fleeting comings-together had not lost their rapture; between them, a single kind and knowing touch had the power to raise about them a temple of Eros.

  He held her at arm’s length, his hands on her shoulders, examining her with pride.

  “You’re a fine argument for having the roads repaired this year.”

  “Can’t I roll in the m
ud without everyone commenting?”

  “What hour is it?” He looked restlessly about, noting with mild surprise the pale glow at a glazed window high in the library’s wall. “You’re only now returning? Are you well? Was there trouble?”

  “We suffered a small accident, nothing at all, really—Avenahar lost her horse. We had to walk the whole distance.”

  “Did you put flowers on the Mothers’ shrine?”

  Wariness rose in her like a sap. She’d half forgotten the small fiction invented to cover the night journey, and now it seemed petty and mean to meet his kindness with a lie. She broke his gaze. “We did.”

  “Why isn’t Avenahar bounding right at your side? Something must be wrong.”

  “At that age, something’s always wrong. It’s that vile Lucius—he taunted her again.”

  “A base father produces a base son. I’ll send Victorinus a sharp reprimand.”

  “Marcus, she asked directly again about her real father . . . and my courage broke. Once again, I couldn’t tell her.”

  “Have you ever thought there might be more pain for her in not knowing? It only prompts a lively and inventive mind to imagine worse.”

  “How could it be worse? By her measure, Decius is a monster.”

  She heard a melodious cry muffled through the tapestried passages of the house—a footman, shouting for a reda—a travelling carriage—to be brought up. “You’re leaving?” The words carried a plaint of dismay.

  “It’s vexing to me as it is to you, but I’ve been called to the fortress on an urgent matter.” He sat her down upon a cross-legged chair. “Auriane. I need to ask you something before I leave. An odd request, perhaps, but of grave and singular importance.” Marcus Julianus was a member of Trajan’s Consilium, a council of forty men of various ranks and professions who served as the Emperor’s advisors. A panel drawn from it was to meet at the Fortress of Mogontiacum, a half-day’s journey south on the post road, to determine if the forts along the river Rhenus could withstand a withdrawal of troops for service in Trajan’s coming Dacian campaign. In these times the single nation in Europe able to stand against Rome was the barbarian kingdom of Dacia, far to the east, on the river Danuvius. Trajan had already conquered it once, but once was proving not enough.